Scrapbook
Scrapbook Upton Sinclair's Ethics We missed this over the Christmas break, but it's the best 75-year-old breaking news story of 2005: The Los Angeles Times reported on December 24 that an Orange...
...As Jonah Goldberg aptly noted in a column last week, the two Italian immigrants became, thanks in large part to skilled propagandists like Sinclair, "props in a passion play about the evils of the U.S...
...But before completing his book on the left-wing martyrs, a novel called Boston, Sinclair met with the pair's defense attorney, Fred Moore...
...The aides, speaking anonymously because the meeting was private . . . " (Emphasis added...
...Nice...
...Scrapbook Upton Sinclair's Ethics We missed this over the Christmas break, but it's the best 75-year-old breaking news story of 2005: The Los Angeles Times reported on December 24 that an Orange County lawyer and collector, looking through a box of papers at an auction house, stumbled across a 1929 letter from famed muck-raker Upton Sinclair to his attorney...
...Washington, D.C., city council member Marion Barry got held up January 2 by two men who had offered to help him "carry groceries" into his Southeast Washington apartment...
...Now THE SCRAPBOOK can't vouch for Matthews or Frist, but we happen to know Tucker Carlson, a former colleague...
...On the one hand, he could write the truth...
...You get the picture...
...Fresh off last year's episode, in which he charmingly called Contessa Brewer, the newsreader on his MSNBC simulcast, "a pig . . . dumber than dirt...
...now she seems to be making her way in the private sector...
...Give yourself up...
...On second thought, maybe he's just a paleocriminal...
...I was a little hurt that this betrayal did happen...
...What Moore told him sent Sinclair "into a panic...
...Call us dense, but we don't see a "difficult ethical problem" here Imus's Vanity Thinking back to the mid-'90s, the last time most Americans thought about Don Imus, THE SCRAPBOOK can't quite remember why it started to revile the radio talker...
...First we heard from "two of Judge Alito's supporters who participated in the murder boards, speaking about the confidential sessions on condition of anonymity for fear of White House reprisals . . ." Farther down the page we read of "two Democratic aides briefed on his meeting with Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York...
...Imus seems to have an unhealthy obsession with Carlson's manhood...
...that's why they have those big double-doors there at MSNBC, you know, so they can get her fat ass in makeup," Imus proves to be in similarly fine form with the Vanity Fair interviewer...
...Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth," Sinclair wrote to his attorney...
...Vice Verso In publishing news, The Scrapbook has just received the April-August 2006 catalogue of lefty publisher Verso, in which can be found a promo for Karen Finley's new novel George & Martha, "an outrageous political satire by America's most daring performance artist and writer...
...In the letter, Sinclair describes "the most difficult ethical problem of my life at that point...
...As usual, George numbs his pain over waging perpetual war with cocaine and the promise of kinky sex...
...Call the police...
...Reprisals, by the way, is a loaded word in the Times lexicon...
...in the 1920s...
...Here are some of the other parties meting out reprisals in the paper's news columns over the course of the last month: the Communist Chinese government, Iraqi insurgents, New Jersey gang members, French police, and the Islamist murderer of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh...
...He then told me that the men were guilty, and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them...
...Another lefty legend bites the dust...
...Barry also confessed to hurt feelings...
...Last year, he threatened to "whip his ass"—this, mind you, after Carlson had gone on Imus's show and defended Brewer (she of pig/dumber-than-dirt fame) and after a petulant Imus had therefore dumped Carlson in the middle of the segment, reminding us of the "tough guys" we knew in school who'd tell you on the bus what they would've done to their schoolyard nemesis had they not had to go home to Mom...
...Republican Reprisals, Democratic Manners There was an amusing divergence in how David Kirkpatrick treated the anonymous sources in his walk-up to the Alito hearings in the New York Times last week...
...Martha is forced to take a long view of her life as she suffers the public humiliation of corporate scandal, on the brink of going to prison...
...It goes on: "George and Martha meet in a seedy motel room on the night before the Republican National Convention...
...On the other, he could lie so his fans would keep buying his books...
...Who says there's no progress...
...Over the course of a week-long hangout with the writer, Imus barks at his limo driver when the ride isn't smooth enough, obsesses over whether he looks handsome in his cowboy costume, throws a schoolgirl tantrum when MSNBC preempts his radio show for hurricane coverage, calls Chris Matthews "that idiot," calls fellow MSNBCer Tucker Carlson "a pussy," calls Bill Frist "a f—ing criminal," all while holding himself up as "an American icon" and asking, "Do you know how absolutely powerful I am...
...Was it his Brokeback Mountain cowboy outfit, his toadying child bride, his fancying himself a rebel while sucking up to rich and powerful Washington pundits...
...Thanks, Graydon Carter...
...Marion Barry, Neoliberal...
...on the other hand, it may be hard to strike a clean blow, given how far Imus keeps his head lodged up the posteriors of frequent guests like Frank Rich, Tim Russert, and Howard Fineman...
...Hmmm...
...As Sinclair confessed to his lawyer, "I had come to Boston with the announcement that I was going to write the truth about the case...
...A couple of years before, he had gone to Boston to cover the trial and execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti...
...I will do all I can to advocate non-prosecution...
...I love you...
...We're not one to dwell on the past...
...I don't even want you prosecuted, really...
...We can't remember exactly...
...Let's examine the horns of this dilemma...
...We're no fight handicappers, but if Imus persists, we think Carlson could make short work of him, and not just because of the 70-year age difference...
...There is a sort of an unwritten code in Washington, among the underworld and the hustlers and these other guys, that I am their friend...
...But after a refresher course in the February Vanity Fair, we now recall why we can't stand Imus: because he's a megalomaniacal git...
...Was it because he had all of Howard Stern's arrogance, and none of his talent...
...I have no animosities," Barry said...
...Their affair goes way back, before George stole the election, before Martha built an empire on fascist domesticity...
...But the story made "much better copy as a naive defense of Sacco and Vanzetti because this is what all my foreign readers expect, and they are 90% of my public...
...The former crack-smoking mayor's press conference the next day made us wonder whether he was familiar with Irving Kristol's observation that a neoconservative is a liberal mugged by reality and its corollary— formulated by Michael Scully—that a neo-liberal is a liberal mugged by reality who then refuses to press charges...
...Finley used to be a National Endowment for the Arts grantee...
...In so many words, then, the Republicans are thugs, the Democrats gentlemen...
...Was it because he'd turned into a bore who slurred on endlessly about his excruciating obsessions, like his brother's tortilla chips and the collected works of Doris Kearns Goodwin...
Vol. 11 • January 2006 • No. 17
