{"id":189924,"date":"2010-01-29T14:21:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-29T19:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/01\/29\/seriously-this-is-what-is-wrong-with-america\/"},"modified":"2010-01-29T14:21:00","modified_gmt":"2010-01-29T19:21:00","slug":"seriously-this-is-what-is-wrong-with-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2010\/01\/29\/seriously-this-is-what-is-wrong-with-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Seriously, This is What is Wrong with America"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ben Bradley&#8217;s wife, otherwise known as Sally Quinn, is a fixture in Washington, and <a href=\"http:\/\/mediamatters.org\/columns\/201001280053\">Jamison Foser has a good rundown on just what exactly she is<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>You cannot caricature Sally Quinn. Don&#8217;t even try. It simply can&#8217;t be done. No matter how hard you try to exaggerate her preening self-regard and utter frivolity, she comes right along and shows herself to be worse than you could possibly imagine.<\/p>\n<p>Quinn &#8212; who gained fame when The Washington Post was forced to retract her false claim that Jimmy Carter&#8217;s national security adviser unzipped his fly during an interview &#8212; makes the extraordinary claim in her January 26 column that Carter lost his re-election campaign due to his failure to attend Washington dinner parties. Not only that &#8212; according to Quinn, Ted Kennedy ran against Carter because of it:\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>She is a failed newspaper reporter (see above), a failed TV reporter, I saw her on the <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">CBS Morning News<\/span> in the 1970s, and a failed novelist, and is now a serial party girl and hostess.<\/p>\n<p>As was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.salon.com\/media\/1998\/03\/09media.html\">noted some years back in <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Salon Magazine<\/span><\/a>, &#8220;She would go to the opening of an envelope.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Basically, she married into Washington, DC royalty, in the person of former <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Post<\/span> Editor-in-Chief Ben Bradlee, and then did her best to become the queen bee of the Washington social circle.<\/p>\n<p>So, what does this mean?  It means that when she writes about why things happen in Washington, DC, it&#8217;s because they don&#8217;t kiss the ass of the party crowd:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Carter lost his bid for reelection, and got a primary challenge from Ted Kennedy, because he and  Rosalynn didn&#8217;t <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">go to the the Washington parties.<\/span><\/li>\n<li>Watergate took down Nixon because he didn&#8217;t <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">go to the the Washington parties,<\/span> so he had no support from people like Sally Quinn.<\/li>\n<li>The Republicans attempted coup masquerading as an impeachment investigation against Bill Clinton because he and Hillary <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">didn&#8217;t go to the the Washington parties<\/span>.<\/li>\n<li>George W. Bush was bad, because, &#8220;The Bushes almost never went out and the president was in bed by 9:30, even when they entertained, which was rare,&#8221; so they did not<span style=\"font-style: italic;\"> go to the the Washington parties<\/span>. <\/li>\n<li>That Barack Obama is icky, because he&#8217;s making people work so hard that they do not have time to <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">go to the the Washington parties<\/span>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Beginning to see a pattern?<\/p>\n<p>I am beginning to pine for Madame la Guillotine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ben Bradley&#8217;s wife, otherwise known as Sally Quinn, is a fixture in Washington, and Jamison Foser has a good rundown on just what exactly she is: You cannot caricature Sally Quinn. Don&#8217;t even try. It simply can&#8217;t be done. No matter how hard you try to exaggerate her preening self-regard and utter frivolity, she comes &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1092,969,982,979],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-189924","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-evil","category-stupid","category-wanker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189924"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189924\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}