Tête-à-Tête-Tête

Exactly what makes one say that Time magazine, which just named Tina Fey more influential than the sitting Republican president, a sell out to the right?

I don’t know nothing about no Tina Fey. I do know Time is more given in recent years to puff pieces on Ann Coulter than on anyone to the left of Joe Lieberman. I know they let Newt Gingrich do the write-up on Nancy Pelosi in the time 100. I know they feature

Joe Klein, Charles Krauthammer, and the Princess. And, as that link will remind you, even if Sully has gone soft in his Bush-Man-Love lately, he is the same fellow that said Gore voters couldn’t be trusted after 9/11.

I don’t know. Maybe they aren’t “right-wing”… maybe they are more CNN in their approach, pro-war, anti-tax, anti-regulation, but culturally liberal.

Most things are purely disagreements based on perspective, but….

. I do know Time is more given in recent years to puff pieces on Ann Coulter than on anyone to the left of Joe Lieberman.

Since when does an article that includes the line “To be sure, Coulter’s historical efforts can be highly amateurish” equate to being a puff-piece? By comparison, stories on Al Gore, Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter don’t even go that far. Should every story on Al Gore include his (massive amount of) underlying baggage? Or could a story be about one aspect of the person (Gore’s interest in the environment or Coulter’s personal life vs. her public personna) instead of what we always see? Lord knows I’ve seen plenty of stories on John Lewis and few focus on the rhetoric he uses about people like me - and he officially has power - but rather reflect on him as an iconic figure, above ridicule.

I know they let Newt Gingrich do the write-up on Nancy Pelosi in the time 100.

Yeah, and it was a pretty positive write-up. The most famous speaker-of-the-house of our generation writing an article on the newest speaker doesn’t seem all that out of line if it’s being written from the point of view of a historian, which is what Gingrich taught in college & was before he went into politics. Jimmy Carter can build houses and Newt can write from a historical point of view.

And, as that link will remind you,

Yeah, it did remind me….that Eric Alterman pines for the days when “Time had a relatively balanced set of political contributors, boasting pundits Michael Kinsley and Barbara Ehrenreich in its back pages, Margaret Carlson with a chatty reported column inside and Roger Rosenblatt all over the place.” In other words, a partisan liberal, a partisan liberal, a partisan liberal and someone who sometimes wrote about politics but more often penned prose about life. THAT is balance in Eric Alterman’s world, which could be why his book sold on par with K-Fed’s CD. And I’m befuddled at the criticism pointed in his direction since I can’t forget that Joe Klein is an unrepentant partisan Democrat. Apparently, he isn’t the right-kind of Democrat.

if Sully has gone soft in his Bush-Man-Love lately,

It ain’t Bush. He hates anything to do with the GOP. He endorsed Kerry and endorsed Democrat win in both houses in ‘06. And I speak as an apparent bigoted-Chrisitianist, albeit one who sometimes has trouble keeping up with the many changing ideologies of St. Andrew of the ‘hell hath no fury like’ church of Sullivan.

So, in summation, I see *A STORY* (one) that didn’t come right out and go along with the netroots crowd and call Ann Coulter a transvestite, a Republican (one) writing a non-partisan article on a Democrat that actually was rather endearing and favorable to Sp. Pelosi, the publishing of a pulitzer prize winning columnist (one) who happens to be an open conservative and someone who hates the GOP and last endorsed a Republican in ‘00. And that qualifies, apparently, as selling out to the right.

If you folks wonder why many of us on the right are dead-set against the fairness doctrine, it’s because it is quite apparent that many proponents of it really want to live in their own never-ending echo chamber. And that, my friend, is Eric Alterman’s address. Time magazine is, and has been for much of my lifetime, left friendly. Occasionally presenting a story without the term “Bush sucks” doesn’t make it any less so. Case in point, as noted earlier, their top 100 most influential people in the world includes Leo Dicaprio, Brian Williams, Tina Fey, Angelina Jolie and Al Gore…..but, to Time, George W. Bush isn’t as influential. To many that was a painstakingly apparent “we’re going to publicly diss you, dubya” moment that is illustrative of it’s left-of-center leanings.

And that’s where I, speaking for the right, go “what? Time is right wing? Are you kidding?”. It seems as though anything that deviates one scintilla from the approved left-wing orthodoxy is unacceptable.