The Gist of It: February 22nd, 2013
I sleep fitfully these days, pained, as I am, by the twin buffets of ignorance and caprice so commonly constitutive of my many foes. If measured against the yardstick of an old aphorism - that a truly enterprising muckraker’s funeral should draw no more than two mourners - then I am well on my way to the depths of greatness. But if ignominy and revilement are to be my bailiwick – my promising military career ended on dark terms in Kosovo – then I must publicize those palpable hits I do inflict. As I wrote in this column three weeks ago, the rebadged, “Lean Forward”-era New Republic, as edited by start-up lottery winner Chris Hughes, has sought to mark itself as a “muckraking dynamo,” a “Washington magazine that would do nitty-gritty long-form journalism.” Ergo: after commissioning from Steven Brill a highly praised and heavily sourced twenty-four thousand word inaugural cover story on usurious healthcare costs, TNR ignominiously killed the hard-hitting exposé. And for what? Soft-focus canoodling with the Drone King himself.
Quelle surprise! Sometimes my powers of cognition frighten even myself. Brill, who then sold the story to Time, has taken to calling Hughes a “liar,” even demeaning the twenty-nine year-old as a “drunk” running roughshod over the college paper. In the mannered world of print journalism, where freelancers would sooner eat a discarded hypodermic than piss off an editor, this is the equivalent of taking a shit on a first-class dessert service (Related: would TNR be interested in a feature on that burgeoning trend? I should be able to bust it out to their standards on my lunch break). Yes, these are timorous times for journalists, so pusillanimous in standing up to the powers-that-be; somebody really must reward them for their periodic efforts serving the public.
Just ask Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL), or as I like to call him, “The Bad Congressman.” Junior just pled guilty in federal court to spending seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars in campaign funds on elk heads, Build-A-Bears, and Michael Jackson’s discarded fedoras – despicable crimes, and rightly damned as such by the fourth estate. It takes courage to dress down an incontrovertibly guilty black politician in America, especially when their behavior despoils the largely sterling reputation of our more respectable legislators. I say, bully! The cancer has been excised from the rotten bowels of the Republic, scraped out. The sickness is contained.
Yes, with the wicked Jackson the Younger dispatched to a jail cell, the Beltway circuit has returned to its placid state as the home of America's finest citizens. Like the Daily Beast’s Eli Lake. Lake, who holds the unique distinction of being both the walrus and the egg man, knows the way of the world, as only a hard-bitten lamplighter could. See, Eli is, like, totally copacetic with the revelation that broad swathes of the Israeli Defense Forces are sociopathic lowlifes Instagram-ing war crimes: in the Bard of Avon’s words, the IDF “works hard and plays hard.” Do you mistrust the ability of this paragon of journalistic integrity to lead the public astray? After all, what tales could be told out of school by a truth lover who defended Iraqi “aluminum tubes” soothsayer Khidir Hamza as “an example of a defector who definitely got it right," shortly before the Iraqi hero was fired by Paul Bremer?
These wintry months have been some of the proudest for watchdog journalists since the Scopes Monkey verdict was announced. Vietnamese orphanage blade runner Chuck Hagel was irrefutably exposed as a “ Friend of Hamas.” Peerless pressman David Gregory was rehired as America’s “grand inquisitor,” for another few years of subhuman dance and on-air gun crime. Soledad O’Brien, that mean CNN lady known for asking all those harsh questions far too acrid for my delicate disposition, has been relegated to the b-side.
Yet it is a glorious time to be an American. Just look at our national playground, Las Vegas, where one minute you could be beating the house, and the next, shotgunned from your Maserati into a tank of potable water! Even the depredations of sin are cartoonish and fun!
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