Deranged conservative windbag Rachel Marsden is back in the news again, and this time around the recipient of her kiss of death is Wikipedia bigshot Jimmy Wales. Marsden claims he dumped her too unceremoniously, and is therefore deserving of public humiliation. She’s got that part right, but he deserves humiliation only for having had anything to do with her in the first place.
What the hell was he thinking? Only a few weeks ago, Marsden was facing criminal harassment charges after she falsely accused another doofus, an Ontario cop, with leaking anti-terrorism secrets to her.
And how stupid does CNN think the American people are? Only a few weeks ago, Marsden was getting serious CNN facetime, long after security guards had to escort her out of New York’s Fox News television studios - where she’d just got fired - for erratic behaviour.
But Fox News had hired Marsden long after it was public knowledge that her curriculum vitae was bogus. She’d never been a writer for Maclean’s magazine or the National Post, and she was never an assistant to ABC anchorperson Connie Chung, and she was never in on “strategy meetings with members of the Bush administration.” The closest she’d ever got to that was once being in a big room that Karl Rove was also in, and working out on an exercise bike in a Florida resort and noticing the guy on the next bike over was Kenneth Starr.
That’s it. That, and a court record for criminally harassing a Vancouver radio talk show host, and years earlier, playing the central role in one of the most outrageous trumped up stories in Canadian history which destroyed the career and the reputation of a university swimming coach (before the truth came out), caused a university president to resign, and cost a university hundreds of thousands of dollars in payouts.
That’s how easy it is to be an expert conservative opinion-maker on national television. Just cultivate a sex kitten image, say what’s expected of you, and we’ll pretend nothing else matters.
the problem with today’s pallid political discourse — cliché, not plagiarism…
It is cliché, not plagiarism, that is the problem with our stilted, room-temperature political discourse. It used to be that thinking people would say, with at least a shred of pride, that their own convictions would not shrink to fit on a label or on a bumper sticker. But now it seems that the more vapid and vacuous the logo, the more charm (or should that be “charisma”?) it exerts. Take “Yes We Can,” for example. It’s the sort of thing parents might chant encouragingly to a child slow on the potty-training uptake.
The audience first disappointed Hitchens when few raised their hands after he asked who had heard of the 1968 debate between Gore Vidal and the late William F. Buckley. We assumed he meant the one in which leftist Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi” and the conservative called Gore a “queer,” but we were afraid we’d get called upon if we raised our hand.
Despite the pedigree of the panelists, Hitchens dominated the discussion, and his habit of interrupting the panelists or admonishing them to “keep it terse” and if at all possible “witty”– and also talking over comments by audience members — led a few grumblers in the crowd to head for the bar before the discussion ended. Hitchens fielded many of the questions himself, at one point joking that th MTV panelist was “too young” and Filkins and Junger were “too pretty” to answer….
Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, and the producer of “Chicago 10,” introduced the panelists, drawing the comparison himself between two “unpopular wars” in an election year. The panel included bestselling author and Vanity Fair contributing editor Sebastian Junger, New York Times Middle East correspondent Dexter Filkins, Vanity Fair international correspondent William Langwiesche and MTV VJ Suchin Pak. Vanity Fair contributing editor Christopher Hitchens moderated.
Hitchens, opened the night describing what he remembered of 1968 a year when “every time you turned on your transistor radio” you would hear bad news: the American Embassy being surrounded in Saigon, Martin Luther King Jr. or Bobby Kennedy being assassinated. “It was the year when people stopped taking the government’s info for granted and started paying attention to journalists who might know better,” he said.
The often heated conversation was fueled in part by Hitchens’ antagonistic comments such as “I would have believed we would have gotten more applause for an anti-al Qaida remark, but this is liberal America.”
