Phony Hate Crimes (cont.)
Scrapbook Phony Hate Crimes (cont.) THE SCRAPBOOK has a confession to make. We haven’t paid much attention to Air America—the hapless attempt to create a successful left-wing talk-radio...
...No wonder Air America now flies below the radar...
...Written by the 19 members of the paper’s editorial board, who produce the short, unsigned opinion pieces that grace the paper’s editorial page, the blog cleverly offers even more short, unsigned pieces of opinion writing...
...A taste: Expansive and yet vacuous is the prose of Kahlil Gibran, And weary grows the mind doomed to read it...
...More of the Same, Piled Higher & Deeper Everyone who’s been sadly putting down the New York Times editorial page thinking, “That was great, but one page just isn’t enough for me,” must be in clover now...
...This does not appear to me to be a standard grab-the-money-and-run mugging,” said Elliott, clearly distraught...
...But the sad truth is that the story for the past three years has been one of incompetence, managerial musical chairs, Chapter 11, and an evershrinking audience...
...to obsessing about torture...
...our younger readers may ask...
...to insisting that Rudy “Giuliani has no right to take sole credit for New York’s revival...
...Excellent questions...
...Even Al Franken jumped ship...
...Is this an attempt by the right-wing hate machine to silence one of our own...
...They’re almost mutually exclusive...
...to urging reporters to follow “the Karl Rove Connection” to the firing of several U.S...
...Except for one thing: As Ms...
...I don’t know if someone hit me from behind, or if I fainted because I hadn’t eaten all day...
...Or as Ms...
...And for each of them Kahlil Gibran has prepared Another ornamental phrase, Another faux-Biblical cadence, Another affirmation proverbial in its intent But alas...
...Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf...
...In its first week, the topics on The Board ranged from calling on voters to lobby their representatives to override the president’s S-chip veto...
...Each board member has to write but one editorial per week...
...Of course, to be popular, one doesn’t have to be good...
...Or as less gallant observers have suggested, maybe she toppled onto the pavement for other reasons—reasons well known to those of us in the pubfrequentingafter-not-eating-all-day community...
...Where can I sign up for this job...
...Dr...
...How Randi Rhodes came face-toface with a New York sidewalk is no concern of ours, and, in the spirit of compassionate conservatism, we wish her a speedy recovery...
...Are they afraid that we’re winning...
...Alan Jacobs Does Kahlil Gibran Kahlil who...
...Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup...
...But older readers will remember, as THE SCRAPBOOK shudders to remember, what it was like to go to a certain kind of wedding in the 1970s, where the only thing wider than the lapels on the groom’s powder-blue tux were his exuberant sideburns, and where either just before or just after the flute soloist played “Color My World” came the reading from Kahlil Gibran...
...attorneys this past summer...
...Only in New York, Garbanzo, only in New York...
...Rhodes herself explained on Air America, “I was watching football in an Irish pub...
...Oh, wait, there is one difference: The Board hosts a comments section, leading to gems like this one from “Garbanzo”: “Not to question your collective work ethic, but 19 board members = 2 editorials per day x 7 days per week...
...Rhodes’s lawyer announced the following day, his client had not been mugged by anyone but was injured in a fall while “walking her dog...
...Hie thee to a newsstand and get the latest First Things...
...Oh, they brought up Larry Craig, too...
...to making fun of Condoleezza Rice...
...Martin Luther King Jr...
...The key word here is hapless...
...And before you know it, the left-wing blogosphere was off and running, lamenting the unprovoked attack on Randi Rhodes and pointing out that this “hate crime” had all the earmarks of Karl Rove, or Halliburton, or the Ku Klux Klan, or the folks who gave you Abu Ghraib—and so on and on...
...According to Jon Elliott, host of “This is America with Jon Elliott,” a fellow Air America gabmeister named Randi Rhodes had been mugged and seriously injured one evening last week outside her Manhattan residence...
...Are they trying to silence—intimidate — us...
...The New York Times may have featured its gestation on the front page for months, and Air America might have featured the talents of Al Franken for hours on end...
...The hours of my penance lengthen, The penance established for me by the editor of this magazine, And those hours may be numbered as the sands of the desert...
...Invariably it was the passage from The Prophet, his most popular book, which purported to be about marriage while actually green-lighting infidelity (no doubt explaining why the hippies revived this minor literary figure from the 1920s): “Love one another, but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls...
...We haven’t paid much attention to Air America—the hapless attempt to create a successful left-wing talk-radio network from scratch—since its debut in 2004...
...But it tells us something a little startling—maybe even a little pathetic—about the leftwing blogosphere that it clings to such pathological views of our country, and reacts with instant paranoia to political dissent...
...We like to think that had they actually published the historic photo shown here, the Times editors would have caught the error before going to press...
...As they say, you’ll want to read the whole thing...
...But you never can be sure...
...I went out to smoke a cigarette and the next thing I knew I was down on the cement, face down, bleeding...
...So we were startled to see Air America in the news last week, and doubly startled when we learned the reason...
...Is this a full-time gig...
...It was B.B...
...King, They Presumed A classic correction from the October 18 New York Times: “Because of an editing error, an obituary yesterday about the photographer Ernest C. Withers, who documented life in the segregated South in the 1950s and ’60s, from the civil rights movement to the Memphis blues scene, misidentified the person he photographed arm in arm with Elvis Presley at a Memphis club in 1956...
...It’s difficult to see how The Board differs from, say, the New York Times editorial page...
...King, not the Rev...
...The Times unveiled a new blog last week called The Board (theboard.blogs.nytimes.com...
...This reminiscence is occasioned by the appearance of a brilliant parody in the new issue of First Things by Alan Jacobs...
...lacking the moral substance, The peasant shrewdness, of the true proverb...
...Are we threatening them...
...If your taste runs to “Go Vegan with Bob Linden,” the conspiracy theories of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and rapper Chuck D (formerly of Public Enemy), then Air America is your network...
...When a Gibran memorial was built in Washington a few years ago, the late poet Anthony Hecht spoke for many of us: “He writes sentimental, corny, sloppy, semi-erotic, tasteless but popular stuff...
Vol. 13 • October 2007 • No. 7
