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Rip out yer heart and stomp that sucker flat
Themanwhocreatedmoseswine&pjmedia shares his pain:
When I read this morning on the Drudge Report that the New York Times had rejected John McCain’s op-ed, I think I knew how he was feeling. I too have been rejected by the paper.
In my case it came after having written for them successfully several times, notably a couple of humorous essays I did for the New York Times Book Review about my travels to the Soviet Union and Spain with International Association of Crime Writers, so I was particularly hurt by their rejection of an article the magazine section had commissioned from me in early 2003.
The subject of that article? The burgeoning interest in political blogs. I took the position that such bloggers as Glenn Reynolds and Mickey Kaus were becoming more influential with readers than newspaper columnists and would soon be a serious alternative to (though not a full replacement for) mainstream media. The Times turned it down. As with McCain, they asked me to “try again” and I did – but I soon realized I had a message they didn’t want to hear or promote.
I remember when my "Michael Bay: The Truffaut of Exploding Things" essay was turned down by Cahiers du cinéma and how devastated I was at the time. At first I blamed a poor translation ("M. Bay: L’auteur des choses de boom-boom") but later I came to acknowledge that I had failed to adequately document his technical growth in the years between Bad Boys and Bad Boys II so, overall, it was probably a blessing in disguise…
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Who knew that editors actually, you know, edit?
They hired him to write humorous essays?
And he wrote an essay saying mainstream journalists are dinosaurs on the slow road to marginal relevance (if not outright extinction)?
And they rejected it?
I’m with Simon — what’s not hilarious about that?
I wanna read this! This sounds like a full belly laugh from Alternative Universe #34.
Honestly, what has Mickey Kaus done that has been influential (before or since 2003)? Will we learn years from now that
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct goat blower. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some blower of goats of a few years back.
“They hired Roger L. Simon to write humorous essays…” really tells you all you need to know about the editorial process at the NYT, doesn’t it. Like small furry rodents on LSD: unpredictable, screechy and really irrelevant to most good things in life.
Oh, and can we *please* stop hearing from all the wingtards about how someone pissed on their parade once, too? It’s right up there with their “I feel your pain” when a family looses a loved one who actually, you know, bothered to serve in the great war to resubjugate the brown people, as opposed to blogging about it from the little cubicle behind the furnace in mommy’s basement.
The Right reveals much about itself in its outrage over the NYT’s rejection of McCain’s dreary piece of campaign boilerplate. “Ya’ got to take him seriously, seriously, seriously, because he’s John McCain, dammit!” It would never occur to them to ask why McCain’s offering was so lackluster, shallow, and absolutely bereft of “the vision thing.” Apparently, they just can’t get enough of intellectual underachievers.
Is that the same Mickey Kaus who blows goats?
More breaking news from Fatt Grudge! Read more. http://www.tagg-lines.com/2008…..usive.html
So what’s their excuse for publishing Kristol, Brooks, Dowd, Friedman, etc.?
“…de boom-boom’ indeed.
heh.
I took the position that such bloggers as Glenn Reynolds and Mickey Kaus were becoming more influential with readers than newspaper columnists and would soon be a serious alternative to (though not a full replacement for) mainstream media.
In 2003 he wrote this? While Molly fucking Ivins was still alive? That’s some impressive delusionality.
While I personally find bloggers–certain bloggers, among whom those do not count–more influential than newspaper columnists, I daresay the rest of the country spends more time with Mark Morford and Carl Hiaasen and, yes, even Maureen Dowd and Thomas Friedman, than they do with blogs. The statement reveals an upper-middle-class can’t-imagine-anybody-doesn’t-live-like-I-do, time-on-your-hands mentality. It is, in this day and age, elitist. Maybe it shouldn’t be, maybe bloggers should be available to all freely, even if you can’t afford a dead tree paper, but that’s not how the free market seems to be working.
Meanwhile, while I find the thought that the Times has editorial standards heartening if not also improbable, I have to agree with No More Mr Nice Blog, among others, who feels that they damned well should have just printed the stupid thing. It seems like it’s worth hearing the genuinely stupid ideas our would-be president has to offer, and hearing them couched in, let’s face it, the *best possible way*. The fact that even that, presumably written by his smarter staffers, was too pathetic to print, says something, and that something should have been available to us all when making our choice. You might as well flip the steak over so the maggots don’t show and then tell us you’re protecting us from poor quality food while you sell it to us anyway. Standards or no, this is stuff we need to see so we can decide if we want to take it home with us for the next four years.
I dare him to post it.