And This Weekend a Hollywood Studio Released A Movie With Little Artistic Merit!
By Shorter Verbatim Tom Maguire: “I am not sure I grasp the news value of this Times piece describing the summer homes of Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld…I remain dubious of the timing.” Yes, if there’s anything that sets my alarm bells off, it’s the Sunday Travel section publishing a story…with little news value! And not only that, the Sunday Styles section published a story about the trivial hangups of the Manhattan upper class that was abjectly stupid! It’s all part of the great Islamofascist conspiracy!!!!!111!1ONE!!!!11!
The attempt to turn a puff piece written with the full permission of the people whose privacy and safety were allegedly being treasonously threatened into a scandal really is some new frontier of crackpottery. And, the thing is, it’s perfectly logical that they would be entirely impervious to the evidence that this is an embarrassing non-story. After all, to believe this was an issue in the first place you have to believe that 1)there is no difference between the privacy considerations of an ordinary person (on which, of course, many of the people spewing incoherent outrage place no value in any case) and some of the most powerful public figures in the world, and 2)that a terrorist group would be sophisticated enough to break through the best security money can buy, find out exactly when Cheney and Rumsfeld were home, etc., but would be thwarted because they couldn’t find the location of their houses, although they could have easily found this information in puff pieces published by the conservative media. Given that the attempts to gin up a scandal started at the absolute ground zero of idiocy and paranoia, additional evidence of the idiocy of the non-story is beside the point. And from the likes of Malkin and Assrocket and Goldstein, what else is new, but I seem to recall Maguire having at least some connection to rationality. Apparently, the Times has beaten it out of him. Sad.