Random Memory

the day Reagan died, I saw the Violent Femmes play.
To my eternal delight, they played this;

Hypocrisy

McMegan wrote a piece about journalistic fraud.

It's essentially impossible to prevent journalistic fraud--if I tell you that I saw someone doing something, there's rarely a videotape of the event. If I'm doing an interview on the cell phone, there isn't a recording, either. And so our readers have to trust us.

We don't.

I'll leave it to Susan to find examples of the countless times McMegan relied on unnamed sources and vague "my liberal friends say..." attributions. There was a "local" (meaning black) woman on a bus who happened to love McMegan's gentrifying presence and echoed all her views of the neighborhood in an extremely Friedmanesque column which I'm too lazy to find, as well. She only really names sources if she's actually interviewing them, or maybe if it's a name she can drop. I think this column was basically her trolling for links from her critics and a backlash traffic spike, and she knows how full of shit she is to even glance in the direction of this topic. Or maybe I'm giving her too much credit. But I'm not worried that she'll see a big spike in traffic from us.
Her work is so truly awful she really shouldn't be paid for it by anyone, anywhere, and thus this blog still has some purpose. Joy.

Axes Ground

So. If you still give a hoot about Megan McArdle, who seems to be increasing her output at what is an excellent fit for her, the Daily Beast-Newsweek publishing powerhouse, here is The eXiled w/ a recap of her resume & her other offenses against decency.

McArdle should be very familiar to eXiled readers. Many of you probably first learned of McArdle’s existence more than three years ago, when she led a smear campaign from her perch at the Atlantic to discredit the first media investigative piece exposing the Tea Party as an Astroturf campaign funded by the Kochs and FreedomWorks, written by eXiled editors Mark Ames and Yasha Levine and published in Playboy in February, 2009. That’s when we first got to know the McArdle name too, and we were wondering then why someone who called herself a “journalist” would work so hard to discredit other journalists’ investigative work while defending powerful rightwing oligarchs, rather than the other way around. The S.H.A.M.E. profile on Megan McArdle clears up the air on McArdle’s long, deep undisclosed ties to the Koch brothers’ libertarian influence-peddling machine, and to the GOP activist community. Read the profile on the S.H.A.M.E. site or check it out below — we’re sure Ms. McArdle will appreciate it if you do.

Le bain on pour

Edit: And another thing:

Clem

She's Back!

And true to form.

Lebanon, Libya, Liberia, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg. Embassy, consulate. What. Ever.

Perhaps her atlas (or Google Maps) has gastritis.

Napalm in the Morning....

it's far too late to gloat, if indeed she was fired, as seems the case. The Atlantic is long dead, and while Fallows and TNC remain, what happens to its corpse is really only worth noting with morbid curiosity.
But Megan McArdle no longer works for The Atlantic, and her star seems to have been slowed some in its rising.
This is a good thing.

And Also

this wide ranging piece in The Baffler on what's become of The Atlantic and David Bradley's background is highly worth a read if you haven't already been pointed to it.

Military intelligence professionals, the mind-cure faith, and a changeling, domineering father—it was the sort of upbringing that suffused [David] Bradley’s young life with a sort of spooky dullness. After watching Richard Nixon’s resignation catch so many family friends financially unawares—and experiencing no small amount of personal disillusionment as a gung-ho intern in the Nixon White House—he decided to work on his war chest before going into politics, his first love. (Bradley’s latter-day interest in politics, by the way, should not be taken to mean he harbors any definite political convictions; on the contrary, one of the professed sources of his admiration for writerly “talent” is his own inability to form an opinion on most political issues: “I define the middle,” he has said.) Upon completing Swarthmore, Harvard Business School, and a Fulbright scholarship in the Philippines (devoted to researching the mindset of the colonial Marxist guerillas), David returned to Washington to enroll in law school and to help Gene found a think tank called the International Management and Development Institute. When it came time for David to found his own business in 1979, he visualized a firm with all the affectations of a Washington think tank—down to the drab name, Research Council of Washington— but structured to turn a profit. He later renamed it the Advisory Board Company, which spun off the Corporate Executive Board, and those two generated a multitude of generic-sounding subsidiary Councils, Boards, and Forums. One of Research Council’s first hires assumed from the classified ad that Bradley was operating a “front for a right-wing organization.” It’s still hard to say, at this late date, whether the joke was on that fledgling knowledge worker.

His father, btw, was, among other things, a CIA agent who worked in anti-Marxist counter-propaganda techniques. There's also an inside account of one of The Atlantic's Ideas Forums. Read it.

In the meantime

there's this;

Cleaning Up

since it seems there's a few of you still watching this corpse, now and then, and I'm getting tempted to do the occasional post, I'm going to clean this place up a bit over the next few weeks. Mostly via basic organizing with tags, so feel free to suggest some to be added. The obvious tags are by author and to mark our unrelated posts, something to do with McMegan's lack of math skills (I was thinking "girls aren't bad at math, but McMegan is"), gift guides, bad opinions, fake journalism, memorable McMeganisms, nutpicking. Just enough to make the archives here more navigable.

And plz forgive the following navel-gazing; I'm going to refer to her as McMegan from now on instead of Megan. As anyone reading this would probably know, that's the handle she's chosen to comment with in the threads at her place. I called her Megan because I read so goddamn many words by her and because to call her McArdle would have been too formal and borderline academic for the dismissive way we viewed her work here. But calling her by her first name when I've never met her or, aside from one very brief spurt of emails, interacted directly with her could be read as overly familiar and dismissive in gendered ways which I have no interest in including with the ways in which I'm dismissive of her work. So, McMegan. Way more than 'nuff said.

And now, a little bit of Radiohead from last month for the fuck of it;