« Weakness | Main | Polling The Economy » Crack Versus Powder25 May 2007 02:47 pm Ana Marie Cox is a priceless national resource: Our editor says that polls are the "crack of political reporting," but they're more like powdered cocaine: hard to get, expensive, a quality high that gets spread around the whole party. The real crack of political reporting are political catfights: cheap, fast, generally leading to poor decision making and lost teeth. Indeed. Comments (38)
Yeah, not really. Cocaine does not really get shared, mostly it gets hoarded and it's owners guard it with a violent paranoia. The only people it gets shared with are ditsy, usually white, females who repay the gift with sexual favors... *remembers Ana Marie Cox made the original comment* Oh, makes sense, ignore this post. 
She's clocking in at number 16, right after "Amber Waves of Grain".
I was all set to pitch in and claim that polls were more like marijuana than cocaine, because after the polls get passed around political journalists tend to quickly lose interest in doing any further work and wander off in search of doritos. But Twan wins the thread hands down.
Aren't you worried about getting into some sort of drawn out vituperation-fest, complete with anonymously sources gossip items and irate letters from significant others, ala Eric Alterman?
didn't GWB once call Limbaugh a "National Treasure" ? quality and value are in the eye of the beholder, i suppose. it's Zen And The Art Of Rhetorical Relevance.
It's a good gauge of whether someone takes this shit too seriously, if they think Ana Marie Cox is a scourge on the republic.
I guess that makes "an anonymous White House source" the LSD of political reporting.
Richard Roper called National Treasure "...so bad on so many levels." Perhaps that is the new meaning of the phrase.
National Treasure was bad on lots of levels, but it was still more fun than The Da Vinci Code.
I guess hit pieces are the roofies of political reporting?
Well in my not-terribly-extensive experience, powder cocaine isn't very hard to get or all that expensive. But then, I'm the guy who thinks there's nothing strange about Also from personal experience, I can tell you that Chris Lehmann, AMC's husband, is a grade-A prick. Don't get him mad unless you want another Peretz-level feud on your hands ... which, come to think of it, you probably do.
I'm ashamed of myself for loving her so.
Good, let's turn her into a natural resource and bury her.
For the record, Twan's comment is pretty vile. Matt's blog is usually a sanctuary from he casual misogyny endemic to blog comments threads. Let's keep it that way.
I'm with David. Anna's comments don't seem particularly insightful to me (the point of Matt's post, her implication in the Cosmo-ization of print media, etc); however, that's no excuse for sexist ad hominems. It reflects poorly on you, and us.
Oh. Come. On. Someone with the reputation as the undisputed emissarius of congressional assfucking can take a few coke-favor jokes in stride, no? I wouldn't post it everywhere, but still ... this kind of thing used to be her stock in trade. Indeed, at Wonkette, it still is.
Not a fan of AMC especially, but I am so f-ing tired of comments like Sangfroid. Listen to yourself: "hey, she's a young woman who writes about sex, so of course everyone is going to assume she slept her way to success. What does she expect?" I agree, pretty vile. Besides, you're wrong. First, AMC doesn't write for Wonkette anymore. Second, the whole ass-f**king thing started out as a way of mocking the Bush administration's fear of gays and gay marriage. It's kind of ironic that it's used by folks like Twan and sangfroid as an excuse for their misogyny; they're the people it was intended to make fun of in the first place.
What sangfroid said.
Besides which, her response to the Don Imus thing was quite exceptional in its honesty and self-awareness. I wouldn't call her a national treasure, but as far as big media is concerned she's definitely better than average.
Lemuel Pitkin, What was Cox's response to L'affaire Imus?
Fred,
Seriously, I get as angry about misogynist blog comments as anyone. But I believe even more strongly that what goes around comes around.
"What goes around comes around"? So making ass-fucking jokes means it's ok to call her a coke whore?
I doesn't really matter how bad or good Cox is. Malkin is loathsome, but ping pong jokes demeans all women, and all asians.
Never thought I would see people so prudish at an Ana Marie Cox joke.
1) Regarding misogyny, I think the criticism was about Twan's comment, not the post. I'm not aware of misogyny in the post, and Twan's comment about ditsy white promiscuous women was disrespectful and not especially relevant. 2) I read and enjoyed Wonkette back when Ana Marie Cox ran it (and haven't since, which is not a criticism of its current proprietor). I think she did a really good job as a foulmouthed political gossip blogger. I suspect she is at least as knowledgeable about politics as any other habitue of political blogs, and likely more so. 3) That said, the idea that she (rather than someone with more extensive reporting and writing experience, or someone with more of a reputation as a wonky, informed, serious commenter) was made a columnist for Time and the Washington editor of Time.com seemed to be evidence that Time was not taking the left seriously. The third point is most prominently seen in the dispute that Cox (and her husband and former colleagues) had with Eric Alterman, to which I referred above. This came about because Alterman pointed out that Time's columnists, published in the actual dead-tree editions of perhaps the most important (if least informative) newsmagazine in the country, were mostly eminent conservatives, balanced only by moderates, neutrals, liberal-haters such as Joe Klein, and one liberal, a person known only for her sexually explicit blog posts, i.e. Ana Marie Cox (Kinsley was added later). Alterman was derided (memorably by Cox's husband in a creepy letter) as being obsessed with the more graphic elements of Cox's previous work and of failing to properly assess Cox' work at Time. Alterman's point, as I took it, was that Cox, who had previously specialized in sexually explicit gossip (and published a failed first novel), did not have the resume or the prestige that would make her a reasonable choice to represent the left as a counterpoint to Time's established conservative columnists. Certainly there were better choices than Cox available, with more experience as columnists and more credentials as exponents of liberalism.
"Certainly there were better choices than Cox available, with more experience as columnists and more credentials as exponents of liberalism." Yes, but are they better writers? Are they more enjoyable to read, especially for the non-political-dorks in the audience? Time is probably concerned more with those things than whether she represents "the left" well enough.
Too Many Steves -- I'm not just talking about the ass jokes. Did you ever read Wonkette? That girl was vicious. Funny, but vicious. Look, I took Twan's comment to be hoisting Ana on her own petard. Looked at from a different angle, it's an example of crass and sexist humor that shouldn't be encouraged. It's Matt's blog, not mine, so I probably shouldn't have touched the subject with a 10 foot pole.
Alterman's point, as I took it, was that ... there were better choices than Cox available, with more experience as columnists and more credentials as exponents of liberalism. Doesn't anyone get the sense that all of Alterman's media criticism basically boils down to "why the media should hire me"?
Too Many Steves: I agree she was a good writer on Wonkette. I don't read Time, and haven't read her work there, but even if I assume it's wonderful work, Cox has a column in some extremely valuable space, and the left got as their only advocate in Time a person lacking the innate credibility of the more recognizeable people on the conservative side. It's like when the cable news shows have some second rate movie star debate a denizen of a Washington think tank; even if the movie star is right on the issues, their viewpoint is disadvantaged in the debate because its advocate is comparatively undercredentialed. Because the left's advocate does not have a background that demands they be taken seriously, it is easier to dismiss their viewpoint. Lemuel Pitkin: While I wouldn't dispute that Eric Alterman seems excessively well-supplied with self-regard, his criticism of Time as lacking liberal columnists is longstanding and provides context for his irate comments when they finally added a liberal columnist but it was someone he perceived as lacking a reputation for seriousness. With some quick Googling, I found one of his pre-Cox (I think) comments, from April 2005; I don't know exactly what he wrote afte Cox was named. The passage indulges in some name-dropping, but it isn't obviously about his own candidacy: Time, meanwhile, has no one at all to balance right-wingers Charles Krauthammer and Andrew Sullivan save Joe Klein; a “liberal” of the Nick Kristof/"Even-the-liberal-New-Republic…" variety. This is no accident. Time used to publish Barbara Ehrenreich and it fired my friend Margaret Carlson, who is only just a little bit liberal, but apparently too much. It’s not as if there are not plenty of people available. Just off the top of my head, E.J. Dionne or Josh Marshall could give Jon a run for his money on a regular basis and my sometimes nemesis Katha Pollitt could be Time’s Anna Quindlen. And hey, wouldn’t getting the currently under-employed Bill Moyers to do a regular column be a coup for any publication? (Speaking of which, whatever happened to Mike Kinsley’s Time column?)
Mocking Ana Marie Cox for trivializing important policy issues and being superficial: good. Mocking a colorful sexual history that one jokingly attributes to Ana Marie Cox, and generally mocking women with colorful sexual histories: not good.
Polls are like perfume. They are nice to smell, but dangerous to swallow. -- Shimon Peres.
Remember Gentlmen, you can say anything thing you want here, but you can't say anything remotely insensitive about women. They quite literally melt and die a little inside when you do that, and we have to protect them from that fate. Protecting women from men: good.
the point has been missed in this thread. matt is obviously kissing up to ms. cox in order to be made a rotating panelist in her upcoming hbo show. http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2007/01/do-you-like-meet-the.php this has to be the case, no?
the point has been missed in this thread. matt is obviously kissing up to ms. cox in order to be made a rotating panelist in her upcoming hbo show. http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2007/01/do-you-like-meet-the.php this has to be the case, no? think about the upside, matt... you'd probably meet bubbles.
Matthew Yglesias is playin' Omar in this blog game. Much respect to AMC if she has actually hit the pipe.
Coke and assfucking. Sounds pretty good (and All-American) to me!
Comments closed June 08, 2007. |
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Heads in the Sand
"Ana Marie Cox is a priceless national resource"
This is snark, right?
RIGHT?
Please?
Posted by felix | May 25, 2007 3:03 PM