Via Think Progress we see that Megan McArdle is not the only one feeling the jackboot of Katherine Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, pressing down on his or her face, forever.
[NEWT] GINGRICH: When Secretary Sebelius said the other day she would punish insurance companies that told the truth about the cost of Obamacare, she was behaving exactly in the spirit of the Soviet tyranny. And if she’s going to represent left-wing thought police about Obamacare, she should be forced to resign by the new Congress.
This idea that we the people have to tolerate some bureaucrat being paid with our taxes to dictate free speech to us should end in January by the Republican Congress zeroing out her office and explaining that they would be glad to pay for it when someone is there who recognizes the rights of the American people.
What a shame that McArdle was forced to acknowledge that she had just made everything up about Sebelius. She could have provided support for the right's campaign to hound yet another innocent woman out of public office. Gingrich does so enjoy getting rid of inconvenient women, doesn't he?
McArdle might want to consider working for Gingrich, like Jonah Goldberg's wife did in the past. McArdle could probably make more money working for a right-wing think tank anyway. Sure, she'd lose some of her media gigs and her hanging-on-by-the-skin-of-its-whitened-teeth-reputation as a real journalist. But she'd gain so much more glorious, glorious money in return!
11 comments:
Gingrich probably fancies himself a canny operator, savvy in the ways of saying anything, regardless of how untrue or lunatic, to further his strategic ends. He also probably believes that you're not a hypocrite if your hypocrisy is deliberate.
As for Megan, here's my riveting insight: she's not a journalist, and doesn't much pretend to be one. She's a blogger, which means she's paid, not to get facts or even explain anything, but to give her opinion. Period.
Hence the consumer tips, the recipes, and all the rest of the dreck. And hence the total indifference to facts, documentation, or clarity.
If this were on display on an actual private blog--which it is, by the million, every day--it wouldn't matter. McMegs would be just one more glibertarian loudmouth dancing the hoochie-coochie for the punters.
What's galling is that it's under the rubric of the Atlantic, which DOES present itself as a journalistic endeavor. So she appropriates its institutional authority and reputation, in the service of her narcissistic self-display. That's why so many people read her, and that's why she deserves to be pilloried and mocked at every possible opportunity.
Sibelius was Kansas Insurance Commissioner, and in that role was known as "business-friendly". During her tenure, insurance companies were always favored in contests between insurers and insureds/claimants.
Whatever McCain says about her: irrelevant.
What Sibelius actually does and has done: entirely relevant.
She seems to have worked everything out in her mind; she is a blogger when she is being held to journalism standards, and she's a journalist when someone questions her blogging authority. It's win-win!
It's amazing to me that the Atlantic and WaPo can survive the scandal of their "salons." I guess selling access to your stable of reporters isn't a big deal anymore. When did having conflicts of interest suddenly become okay?
That's true, Charles F. Oxtrot, Sebelius' actions are much more important than McArdle, but the latter is not entirely irrelevent. She does have some influence, and she is the centerpiece of my examination of seemingly reputable media figures, after all.
As for Megan, here's my riveting insight: she's not a journalist, and doesn't much pretend to be one. She's a blogger, which means she's paid, not to get facts or even explain anything, but to give her opinion. Period.
Well, she's not a reporter. But all the bloggers I read--some who get paid to give their opinions and some who are not--do feel responsible to take care over facts. Perhaps if we didn't believe that there exist some professions that are allowed to make up its own facts our media would not be in the condition it is in today.
The question that puzzles and irritates me is Who on earth would marry Newt Gingrich, and why?
Facts have a strong Liberal Bias, so obviously Megan can't use those lying liberal facts!
It's Word Salad with a Homemade dressing of (from the Romanian Alps!) Hypocrisy blended with Virgin-1st-pressed smugness and flavored with her very own kitchen-sill-grown lies.
Ummmm... The full text of the letter is available on the "internet".
You are a mongoloid. A mongoloid that got clever and learned how to lie.
Shame on you for using mongoloid, a synonym for Down Syndrome, to call someone retarded. Why do you hate Trig Palin, mister? Why?
As for the letter, I presume you've read it and know that it is totally unconnected to the totally fictional gag order. So what we have here is (1)a letter from a regulator telling the regulatees that they must follow the law or suffer legal penalties and (2)the second-hand, utterly unsubstantiated rumor of an undetermined type of "gag order" that may or may not have been applied to a group of insurers. In case that was confusing, note that McArdle's source said the rumor was fake, the insurers wrote McArdle and said the rumor was fake, and McArdle admitted the rumor was fake and apologized for spreading that rumor to the world and inaccurately and unfairly casting aspersions on Ms. Sebelius, based on personal feelings regarding a letter than had absolutely nothing to do the fictional gag order.
Megan gets an article in about 2 out of 3 print editions. In July August, she got to push drugs - http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/no-refills/8133
That's good stuff. I'm working on a post about her stock market article. It seems that she and P. Suderman are pushing the latest wingnut attack--that reitrement is a decades long vacation that those lazy, spoiled old people think they deserve.
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