Graydon Carter's Unfair Vanity
Something has driven Vanity Fair Magazine editor Graydon Carter crazy – although in his case this isn’t a very long drive.
According to Nikki Finke in the February 18-24 LA Weekly, Carter has been ranting to friends and colleagues that “Hollywood is filled with nothing but scumbags,” naming among these his friends Jeffrey Katzenberg and Brian Grazer.
Carter appears particularly lacking in gratitude to Grazer, who channeled to him $100,000 from Universal Studios merely for suggesting that the book A Beautiful Mind might make a good movie. Carter has become a journalistic embarassment, writes Finke, by using “his show-biz friendships to benefit himself financially.”
Finke mentions only in passing that “Carter would even join Grazer’s mogul gang on vacations to Cuba….”
As documented at frontpagemagazine.com, Carter in 2001 feasted with Fidel in Havana in the company of MTV CEO Tom Freston and CBS President Les Moonves, the guy who greenlighted the Republican-bashing CBS miniseries The Reagans and supported the partisan pseudo-journalism of Dan Rather. One of these American media giants rhapsodized after spending time with caudillo Fidel that this Communist island prison was “the most romantic, soulful and sexy country I’ve ever been to in my life.”
Following their intimate 2001 liaison with Castro, as documented by discoverthenetwork.org, both Freston and Moonves were rewarded with promotions to more powerful positions as Viacommies by the giant media conglomerate Viacom.
Carter’s 2004 book bashing President George W. Bush, What We’ve Lost, was a dismal “critical and commercial failure,” wrote Finke, “despite the help of half a dozen…staffers” from Vanity Fair, a dragooned Christopher Hitchens among them, exploited by Graydon Carter to give him a measure of credibility Carter does not merit.
Somehow he reminds one of Charlie the Tuna in the old TV ads -- the chicken of the sea who confused tasting good with having "good taste."
By embracing a Marxist dictator in Cuba, and filling his magazine with leftwing twattle, Carter has pretended to endorse a "classless" society -- while stuffing his own pockets with Hollywood gold in exchange for doing almost no work. Instead of being an example of fashionable classlessness, Graydon Carter has become a living symbol of having no class.
9 Comments:
Something is wrong with the link to the LA Weekly article. I'm using MS Internet Explorer 6.0.
Here's a working link to the article for those with the same problem:
http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/13/deadline-finke.php
When I click on the Moonbat Central link to the article, here’s the URL fed to my browser (IE 6.0):
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/moonbatcentral/”http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/13/deadline-finke.php”
And that's how it appears in my browser address window, though each slanted double-quote mark is replaced with a thin black rectangle. Copying and pasting that elsewhere restores the double-quote marks, so the rectangles are just an appearance. Anyway, my browser ends up telling me that the page cannot be found. (So I deleted the extra stuff in the URL and got to the LAWeekly article.)
I see that when I included the URL as fed to my browser, in this comment page's column, the URL doesn't line break but gets partly hidden behind the "Leave your comment" rectangle. You'll have to copy and paste it in order to see it whole. I'll give it one more try here, though, since maybe it will appear BELOW the "Leave your comment" rectangle.
Okay, it'll work. (Also I forgot to include the URL as promised!)
When I click on the Moonbat Central link to the article, here’s the URL fed to my browser (IE 6.0):
http://www.discoverthenetwork.org/moonbatcentral/”http://www.laweekly.com/ink/05/13/deadline-finke.php”
Noooo, it didn't work, part of it still gets hidden.
I really like your site and all, but this stuff with rigid widths and disappearing strings of characters really could be improved.
Oh, NOW I see. It looked cut off while I was still on the page with the "Leave your comment" rectangle. I thought that that WAS the comments page. Anyway, five posts in a row is enough for me!
I saw Graydon Carter on a Book TV (CSPAN-2) event a month or two ago, after the election anyway, teamed with Maureen Dowd, I think it was at the Miami Book Fair. He was pushing a couple ideas that were pretty wacky.
First, he wants a receipt "like an ATM receipt" from electronic voting machines.
1. If he's one of these moonbats who thinks the voting machines are rigged to cheat, wouldn't the next step in his paranoid progression be to realize the machines could be rigged to give him a receipt showing he voted for the person he picked, but then still secretly tally his vote as for the other candidate? The unimaginativeness of his moonbatitude is actually disappointing. A receipt would only satisfy the paranoia of the most naive of the moonbats.
2. The real reason for wanting the "receipt" from the voting machine is so that they can either be used to prove to union bosses, fellow teachers in public schools, etc., that you're a "team player" and voted the "right way," or else outright sold to the local Democrat precinct boss: if you want the cash for your vote, just bring back the receipt proving you voted the right way. It makes vote buying easy, and it makes enforcing union/workplace discipline on voting the party line easy. Great Democrat strategy.
The other thing he was hyped up on was hybrid cars. He not only wanted some anti-free-market intervention to force car manufacturers to make more hybrid models available. He also had the gall to chastise American manufacturers for being behind in the hybrid race. The guy either knows nothing about the history of this issue, or doesn't realize there is a history of it. It's like Ann Coulter's quote about liberals wake up every day thinking the world began that morning.
In the early 1990's, the American car companies were wondering which way to direct their research, whether on hybrids, or on zero-emission vehicles (zero CO2 from tailpipe). From an engineering perspective, hybrid was the obvious way to go, and the Japanese companies chose to go that way. The Clinton-Gore administration (Gore especially) made the call for the American companies: only zero-emission research had a hope of getting fed funding, and future EPA/DOT regs (such as CAFE fleet economy rules) would be going in the direction of zero-emission under future Democratic leadership.
This was back when the Congress (Dems running both houses) in 1994 was pressing legislation that would have federally mandated carpooling in areas the EPA claimed didn't meet their air-quality goals, to be enforced by aircraft counting cars in parking lots of workplaces. We actually had to fill out forms where I worked, saying where we lived, routes we took, times we traveled, they were counting cars in the parking lots, getting ready to make sure we complied with all this malarky. Don't forget that the '93-'94 Congress was pushing a lot of flaky legislation full blast, not just "healthcare" and Clinton's "assault weapon" ban, but a whole smorgasbord of weird stuff.
So that was the background, how the American car companies were driven down the (dead end) path of pursuing zero-emission vehicles instead of devoting their R&D efforts to hybrids. It was a case of a theoretical ideal being the enemy of the practical improvement. And it was completely a Clinton-Gore administration call. And now Graydon Carter has the gall or memory-loss to go on national TV and blabber that the American car companies "should have" pursued hybrid engines sooner.
Earth to Graydon: We knew that 10 years ago, and it was your Democrat bozos who led America in exactly the wrong direction.
But the people in the audience clapped and ate it up. Absolutely clueless. Where do these people come from? As Will Rogers would have said, God must love moonbats, he made so many of them.
By the way, thanks to Newt Gingrich putting the Repubs back in power in the '94 election, we never had to follow through on the carpooling. But those same areas the EPA has a bug up itself about our supposed low air quality (smells great to me) are now the places where we have to use the boutique reformulated gas. Which means constantly having to dump Techron or other fuel injector cleaners into our tanks, or else having the injectors clog up and then having to get them flushed at the dealer for around $100 a pop. Reformulated gas still sucks.Does anybody else remember back, when government didn't fantasize that it was the ultimate expert on everything under the sun, and places that actually did stuff, like refine oil into gasoline, were allowed to do it right? And you could buy gas that wasn't some Lite, Low-Carb, Decaf, overpriced, injector-clogging, swill version of gas?
Tech note, I hope this DTN site really does well, it's needed. But the white text on dark background is not very easy on the eye. There was a good reason why we switched over to black text on white backgrounds after the bad old days of dark backgrounds with DOS. It's the same reason why books are written in black ink on white paper instead of white ink on black paper. It's because it's easier to read that way.
By the way, "zero emission" was always a canard anyway. Claiming a car (such as actor Ed Begley's electric car) is "zero emission" really just means that the emissions were made somewhere else, namely the electrical utility plant (coal, gas, etc.) that made the electricity that Mr. Begley used to charge up his batteries. These would be more accurately called "zero improvement" vehicles.
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