52 Comments

1. Syl:

Damn straight!

Tedious isn’t the half of it. The world didn’t change on 9/11, only our perception of it did. But the world started transforming in March 2003 and has been changing so fast ever since that it’s hard to keep up.

All the old complaints are just that, old. They were answered on Nov 2. Where was he.

Mar 13, 2005 - 8:40 pm 2. triticale:

Note, however, that Moon Unit was herself quoting what was already a cliche. As a middleaged midwesterner I was already aware of gag me with a spoon, ferr sherr, before her sendup/glorification of Valspeak was recorded.

Oddly enough, “ferr sherr” was a common affectation around Iowa City back in 1971.

Mar 13, 2005 - 9:01 pm 3. David Thomson:

ìWe don’t have any political point of view that we are trying to advance. We don’t represent any political parties. We are not tied to any political movementî

The sad thing is that Phillip Bennett truly believes his own bovine excrement. Everybody has a point of view. There is nothing wrong with admitting this fact. And God help us when it is denied. Such a person not only lies to himself—they will inevitably lie to the rest of us.

Mar 13, 2005 - 9:36 pm 4. chuck:

This from the editor of the paper where Dana Milbank is a staff writer. Lord, I see Dana’s name and just skip the article. OK, maybe I should read his stuff for balance, maybe I should have read Pravda, but life is short and all that. Bennett has *way* too high an opinion of his, and his paper’s, virtue.

Mar 13, 2005 - 9:54 pm 5. zeke:

“Everybody has a point of view. There is nothing wrong with admitting this fact. And God help us when it is denied. Such a person not only lies to himself—they will inevitably lie to the rest of us.”

They want to pass their propaganda off as straight news to do otherwise would undermine their attempt to manipulate their readers. That why they keep that pretense.

I’m going off on a tangent here.

Back when Dan Quayle was VP the wapo printed an article in the Outlook section of the paper on Quayle’s kids. The article spoke of how they(Dan’s two sons and one daughter) were elitists because they played elitist sports like soccer and lacrosse(no joke) not regular sports like softball and baseball. Dan’s kids had gone to public school when they live in Northern Virginia when Quayle was in the Senate. They went to private school when he was VP although one of his sons transfered back to his public school he went to when they lived in VA.

Jump forward now to when Al was VP frontpage of the Style section profile of Al’s kids fawning over how his daughters played sports like lacrosse and soccer (how progressive they Al and Tipper must be that their daughters play sports) Al’s kids went to private school their whole lives. That article was printed in 1996 I believe.

Well at the time I was reading that I had remembered the article they did on Quayle’s kids like I had read it the day before. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one. I don’t read letters to the editors so I don’t know.

Well anyways jump to 1999 when for some reason out of the blue I remembered they had done that so I went searching for those two articles in their archives. I searched high and low and I’ve done two or three searches since and no luck.

I would bet my life on the reason I can’t find either one is because they never put those two incriminating articles in their archives.

Mar 13, 2005 - 11:04 pm 6. richard mcenroe:

C’mon Roger, where’s the discrepancy here? He gave his interview, then they took to him to lunch at a nice little place off Tianmen Square…

Mar 13, 2005 - 11:18 pm 7. Major John:

Give it to ‘em Roger! I would dearly love to hear Bennett explain this steaming pile of “Progressivism”. But I don’t know if he’ll even be asked to do so…

Mar 14, 2005 - 12:23 am 8. mythusmage:

Roger, if you weren’t so forgiving.

Mar 14, 2005 - 1:15 am 9. yama-arashi:

An American living abroad, if one isn’t pushing the same meme as this Bennett, soon realizes the greatest cause of misunderstanding and anti-Americanism is America’s media and university elite. This Bennett interview was mild, almost welcome, and not nearly enough to even begin to get me angry having heard so much worse from other representatives of the Post and the NYT and worst of all the LAT, having heard so much worse from the professors and experts who are always the go to guys and gals for any question about the U.S., and having heard so much worse from Democratic members of Congress. Thankfully the people aren’t as stupid as this Bennett and even in China, heck even in France, and in much greater numbers in places like Australia and Japan many, and sometimes enough of a majority, get what Roger gets.

What this Bennett doesn’t understand and never will is that to many foreigners he is the stereotypical “ugly American” and the more he criticizes Bush and the U.S. the more friends they gain. It is a very strange dynamic, different in different countries no doubt, but in Japan for the past four years the elites have never been more stridently anti-American and at the same time the parties they support, the socialists and communists, have had stunning electoral losses and Japan and the U.S. have never had better relations. I don’t know what to do anymore: continue to get angry at the thousands of Bennetts I am always confronted with, or smile and thank them, and give them more rope to hang themselves with.

Mar 14, 2005 - 1:21 am 10. Duke:

Just like the clown at the LA Times. These people with all the right degrees from all the right places simply live in a hall of mirrors where all they see is themselves. The really good news is that none of us believe anything in the MSM anymore without checking on what they allege. An interesting sub-note here is that it is now the policy of my company not to rely on any degrees from anywhere as validation of a person’s ability. This is really significant because we are the highest of high tech and almost alone in our field. We have had some supposedly highly qualified people who simply couldn’t cut it. Now that we let everyone know that they will be tested regardless of what their Ivy profs have to say, I hear that a lot of the “best and brightest” are not applying. This may have something to do with the fact that one of our best people over the past ten years has only a high school education.

Mar 14, 2005 - 4:25 am 11. erp:

A bit off topic, but I wonder if anyone else has noticed that leftwing blogs and the MSM often don’t provide for reader feedback?

Case in point is an article similar to the one described above in today’s NYT, “Liberal Bloggers Reaching Out to Major Media” By JONATHAN D. GLATER. The NYT doesn’t provide for comments nor does it provide the author’s email address, so I went to Bob Fertik’s website at http://democrats.com/ to leave a comment and, true to form, there’s no email address or comments section there either.

The left is becoming so clueless it’s become almost impossible to satirize them. Every article sounds like a send up in “The Onion.”

Mar 14, 2005 - 5:46 am 12. Lola:

Guys, a bit off topic, but check out Publius Pundit’s roundup of the Lebanese revolution . . .

http://www.publiuspundit.com/?p=658

They’re staging a pro-Lebanese demonstration, and estimates has it that about 1.1 mil people turned out. Some people even came on their boats because of traffic on the road.

And check out the pictures of the human flag . . .

Mar 14, 2005 - 6:17 am 13. Hovig:

The MSM doesn’t know how stupid they sound.

It’s as if the L.A. Times had written editorials a few years ago that Shaq and Kobe were too dominant, that they didn’t want to bear the shame of the Lakers winning again.

Or the Boston Globe writing the same about the Patriots.

“I don’t think the Patriots should be the champions of the NFL.”

Can you imagine?

Mar 14, 2005 - 6:33 am 14. Ed Poinsett:

“Why they hate us?”

Yama-arashi’s point that if they read the NYT, WaPo, LAT, and see any of our network programming, how can they not hate us? If I only had the MSM version of America to relate to, I’d hate us too!

Mar 14, 2005 - 6:46 am 15. Oyster:

“We don’t have any political point of view that we are trying to advance. We don’t represent any political parties. We are not tied to any political movement”

October 24, 2004, Washington Post endorses John Kerry

Mar 14, 2005 - 6:46 am 16. richard mcenroe:

Yama-Arashi ó (moshi-moshi!) Bennett sounded mild because the chattering classes consider their insular little world view so well established as the popular wisdom that they don’t even need to get excited about it anymore. That’s why something like Dan Rather’s or Ward Churchill’s humiliation rattles them so badly.

I wonder if Bennett noticed his civilized friends the Chinese just passed legislation authorizing war against Taiwan today?

Mar 14, 2005 - 6:49 am 17. Old Dad:

Bennett is a hack in a suit–an executive for a smallish large business. His talent might be managing media profitably. It’s certainly not writing or thinking.

And now for the mystery question. We’re supposed to care about what he thinks why?

Now I know about the residual mysterium that clusters around the WaPo brand–deep throat and all that, but seriously folks, I would have thought that the Post’s PR operation was smarter than to let this gas bag out in public.

“Blah, blah, blah, blah, in the great journalistic tradition, blah, blah, blah, blah, objective, blah, blah, blah, blah, our beloved First Amendment, blah, blah.”

Columbia makes big money with this schtick.

Mar 14, 2005 - 6:56 am 18. markytom:

Scrappleface has more information on this subject. Funny stuff.

http://www.scrappleface.com/MT/archives/002112.html

Mar 14, 2005 - 7:03 am 19. Ben:

The really disturbing thing about many Leftists these days is that they are so insular that they seems to believe that George Bush is a bigger enemy than OBL, the Communist Chinese, etc. People like Bennett are the post-Cold War version of “useful idiots.”

Mar 14, 2005 - 7:09 am 20. thibaud:

Eason Jordan redux. A US media figure panders to a non-US audience in hopes of winning favor from them and preferential market access from their listeners’ dictatorial regime.

I doubt Bennett would pull such a stunt for a US audience; the game here is market access and market share. We can expect to see more of this forked-tongue approach from any US media or political figure who aspires to “global citizen” status. Note how Clinton pulled the same stunt recently by telling his overseas audience how pleased he was with the mullahs’ democratic ways, and then turned around and trashed Assad for a US audience. Two audiences, two messages.

For media companies and their top officers, the stakes are of course even higher. Clinton’s game is about his vanity; WaPo and CNN’s game is driven by money. Note that WaPo Editor Bennett’s overseas hacks, excuse me, “Foreign Service [officers?]“, have a great deal to gain in terms of access and leads from governments such as China’s if they posture as enemies of yankee colonialism. Also, to the extent WaPo’s growth strategy depends on overseas expansion– if they haven’t already, those bogus audit circulation figures will reach US advertisers eventually– bashing BusHitler is a superb market penetration tactic. It’s the logical outcome of a globalized marketing strategy: one product for the US market, another product for the anti-US overseas markets.

Expect much, much more of this. sigh

Mar 14, 2005 - 8:13 am 21. Briney Eye:

I’ve been in the national security “business” for twenty-four years, and for most of that time we’ve been generating analyses that pointed to the danger from “non-state actors”. 9/11 was the vindication of our analyses in spades.

Nuclear weapons are ancient technology. Your cell phone is orders of magnitude more complex than a nuke. You can’t keep this djinn in the bottle.

For years, on my more pessimistic days I had believed that it was going to take a major city being nuked to wake people up to the danger. Nowadays, on my more optimistic days I hope that 9/11 was enough to make people see the necessity of action. When Bennett says that we’re making “decisions in foreign affairs that respond only to US interests” he demonstrates a depth of willful stupidity, political prejudice and ideological bias that makes my head spin (and stomach churn).

Arab Islamic terror has plagued the world for my entire adult life. That culture has to be “enlightened” fast, before they get their hands on tabletop genetic engineering technology, let alone a nuke.

Mar 14, 2005 - 8:24 am 22. thibaud:

The two audiences/two messages approach applies not just to foreign policy issues. Note how Hillary will one day tell a moderate, religious audience about her qualms on abortion and then tell a Manhattan audience of NYC teachers and UN employees about her diehard support for all the UN’s preferred forms of birth control, including abortion.

Triangulation is dead. Forked tongue’s all the rage.

Mar 14, 2005 - 8:32 am 23. jerry:

Self proclaimed Progressives have been looking for the next great nation/ideology to cut the US down to size since WWII like Captain Ahab hunting down the great white whale. First, it was the Communist USSR. Remember, the theory of convergence pushed by people like John Kenneth Galbraith then it was Japan Inc, then the EU. Today it’s China and India. China is looked upon more favorably because it still has the adjective communist affixed to it and India has become an American/Israeli ally.

Mar 14, 2005 - 8:43 am 24. Bostonian:

erp: “I wonder if anyone else has noticed that leftwing blogs and the MSM often don’t provide for reader feedback?”

YES. I have been wondering how much of a pattern that is.

I saw one telling detail a month ago or so… on some blog I frequent, a leftist showed up and argued a bit… and commented that he was “impressed” that the blog actually provided a comment section.

Mar 14, 2005 - 9:04 am 25. Mr. Davis:

This guy makes Lynndie England look smart.

Mar 14, 2005 - 9:04 am 26. Knucklehead:

I tried to read the interview, I really did. I can’t spend that much time on that much mindless drivel.

I’m with Thibaud. What we’re seeing from the likes of CNN and the WaPo is simply evidence the these “international” media outlets are not selling news, they are selling entertainment. They are seeking access to new markets and fully prepared to give their new customers what they want. The situation they face in the US market is headed for rock bottom – ad revenue is bound to follow their subscription and reputations right down the drain.

One small disagreement with your analysis, Thibaud, is that I don’t believe they are adapting their product to the international audience. They are taking exactly what they’ve been selling for decades to where it can still sell. It is surely easier for them, as businesses, to bring the same old product to those who still wish to buy it than it is to alter their product to fit the changing marketplace here in the US. They’d rather take flight than switch.

Mar 14, 2005 - 9:07 am 27. Bostonian:

thibaud: “It’s the logical outcome of a globalized marketing strategy: one product for the US market, another product for the anti-US overseas markets.”

Well, they can try that, but these guys can’t hide what they’re doing any more. It did not take long for E. Jordan’s remarks to reach US ears.

Mar 14, 2005 - 9:08 am 28. vegetius:

Well, well well………I wonder how Howie Kurtz is going to handle this?? First Eason at CNN now his editor at the Post. How long do you think he’ll sit on this?? Or,will he spike it??

Mar 14, 2005 - 9:09 am 29. leni:

As I reading the interview I began to wonder if WaPo editor was interviewing for a job.

Mar 14, 2005 - 9:25 am 30. Rick Ballard:

Jerry,

Where will they turn when the China bubble pops? Will we be regaled with stories of the wondrous literacy rate and free medical care in Cuba again (with sidebars on how clever the Cubans are at keeping ‘55 Chevys running)? Or will it be the economic miracle wrought in Vietnam, where two oxen for every peasant family will be haled as as a wondrous advancement – even though they had to shoot half the peasants to achieve it.

I’d mention Chavez but I don’t think he’ll be around that long.

Mar 14, 2005 - 9:37 am 31. thibaud:

Bostonian –

Well, they can try that, but these guys can’t hide what they’re doing any more. It did not take long for E. Jordan’s remarks to reach US ears.

True– it’s a very dangerous game that EasonJ and Bennett are playing, one which makes me question their business savvy. I’d think the NYT’s Bill Keller, who at least acknowledges the power of blogs, would be a lot more circumspect than his peers at CNN and WaPo. Others will learn from EasonJ’s demise.

knuck–

One small disagreement with your analysis, Thibaud, is that I don’t believe they are adapting their product to the international audience. They are taking exactly what they’ve been selling for decades to where it can still sell. It is surely easier for them, as businesses, to bring the same old product to those who still wish to buy it than it is to alter their product to fit the changing marketplace here in the US

Interesting point, k. Are you talking about the format, or the content? In the case of CNN and WaPo I’d guess that there’s no desire to adjust the format but certainly a willingness to Al-Jazeerify their overseas content in order to grab market share abroad (btw I would not be surprised if CNN were to take a large, controlling stake in Al-J). One can certainly imagine a CNN China that more or less parrots the nonsense that Bennett spouted in WaPo: this would be a huge financial success for TimeWarnerAOLTurnerandwhathaveyou, one that could subsidize CNN’s flailing operations in the west.

OTOH the NYT is looking at changing format as well as content. They bought up About.com, which was an early prototype of blog aggregation, for an absurd sum of $450M or so, and IIRC have some kind of co-branding TV production affiliate.

But even with the NYT’s forays into new media, they also are following the niche approach to their own paper o’ record, which is now primarily the US metrosexual lifestyle guide of choice. Look at their “most e-mailed articles” list each day and you’ll see that overseas reporting is a loss leader; what really sells Times subscriptions is the Bush-bashing OpEd and News Analysis that caters to the blue/metro faithful.

Bottom line: suit the medium to the message that the target market wishes to hear. It’s not about telling truth to power; it’s about gaining market power by conforming to the truths held dear by large, discrete market segments.

Mar 14, 2005 - 9:39 am 32. Knucklehead:

Thibaud,

I was thinking in terms of content but your subsequent points are persuasive. For decades the product outlets like CNN, WaPo, NYT, etc. have been selling is left-leaning, internationalist, and anti-American (wait, is that redundant?).

As they increasingly forsake the domestic US market for the international market they don’t have to put a thin veneer of “impartiality” on the product anymore, do they? They can come right out and admit they don’t give a rat’s patoot for the US and even become openly hostile.

I admit that I’m not enough of a marketeer to judge whether the change is primarily tweaks to the product (content) of the packaging (format)

Mar 14, 2005 - 9:52 am 33. thibaud:

Rick B -

Where will they turn when the China bubble pops? Will we be regaled with stories of the wondrous literacy rate and free medical care in Cuba again (with sidebars on how clever the Cubans are at keeping ‘55 Chevys running)?

More like Emily Litello time again.

Remember all the sound and fury in the late 80’s/early 90’s about the juggernaut called Japan Inc.? Oops.

Actually, this is unfair. Asian banks and related lending exposures are notoriously opaque. No one could have known that Japan was sitting on a real estate bubble or that its banks were rotten.

However, one can at least apply more caution regarding Chinese growth numbers, which are almost certainly inflated on the high end, and Chinese banks, which are almost certainly over-exposed to non-performing loans, and Chinese industry, which is all about adding capacity rather than innovating. The one thing we can be sure of is that our incompetent media betters will miss the real story.

Mar 14, 2005 - 9:53 am 34. thibaud:

Knuck – think wine and bottles. Easy enough to get rid of the tannins and boost the sweetness; no need to change the color, size, materials etc of the vessel. The NYT is the only really forward-looking media organization in this regard; all the others are mainly fat and happy family-owned collections of local oligarchies that have yet to figure out the threat that blogs, craigslist.org and other new media pose to their classified revenues, which IIRC is a $20B market nationwide. The only thing propping this up is the failure of bloggers and new media to develop targeted ad capabilities that can appeal to local car dealers, realtors, employers etc. This will come.

When it does, then you will see media fragment into purely local outlets– which will rely heavily on a new format combining bloggerish features and craigslist-style trusted communities– and international brands dependent on separately-branded, high-growth overseas outlets.

Where will the overseas growth come from? Certainly not Europe. Dailies and weeklies across the continent, especially but not only in France, are struggling with falling circulation and ad revenues. Obviously, the huge growth opportunities are in the middle east and in China. Bennett was indeed engaged in a job interview.

Mar 14, 2005 - 10:05 am 35. Knucklehead:

Thibaud,

I always enjoy your take on things “new media”. This is one of those areas where I can’t make any reasonable judgement about whether I am “typical” or some hopeless “outlier”. Take advertisements as an example. I just don’t see them in either newsprint or the internet. I mean, really, they may as well be whitespace for all they draw my attention (well, OK, there are certain, ummm…, bodies of advertising work which will avert mine eyes, but only for a moment or fifty).

In the case of newspapers and news weekly type publications I just find they are non-informative. I lived with the NYT and its bigotries for many years. I felt I’d learned to “read through” the bigotries. Eventually, however, the shallowness of the coverage of even things that interest whittled away whatever value I found there. I can find more and better info by simply looking elsewhere. Once that happened the bigotry shifted, in my mind, from an inconvenience to an annoyance. Once they started failing to keep their bigotries out of the Science Times and Sports sections it became perposterous and I finally cancelled. But I can’t recall ever reading an ad in the NYT and certainly never bought anything based upon an ad there.

The same applies to news weeklies. Too shallow to bother with. I’ll pick up a Time or Newsweek while waiting somewhere and invariably find the coverage of whatever I chose to read completely unsatisfying. And I never read the ads, never. Even ads in the local rag might as well be whitespace. I keep the local rag coming so I can have some idea of local happenings, but I don’t use it for purchasing purposes.

I suppose I’m just an oddball.

Mar 14, 2005 - 10:38 am 36. thibaud:

Not odd at all, knuck. The vast majority of adults still view the windows web interface and its barrage of dumb, irrelevant, non-targeted, above all non-personalized advertisements as major irritants. At some point this dumb, clumsy interface will be replaced by one that’s more like that in a video game, with 3-D “avatars” that are personalized and with powerful personal databases that can be used to serve you content and ads that actually mean something to you.

Ditto for the sh*tty search engine called Google, which, at least as regards anything opinion related, ranks crap, noise and conspiracy sites higher than anything I might be remotely interested in consulting. This too will pass.

“Take advertisements as an example. I just don’t see them in either newsprint or the internet”

Would you pay attention if you knew the products advertised were vetted and trusted by people whom you trusted? e.g., the gang at Roger’s Place?

Mar 14, 2005 - 11:02 am 37. Vik Rubenfeld:

Bennett slams America and GWB repeatedly throughout the interview, and then thinks he can get away with an absurd claim of having no political views. Bennett should be broadly ridiculed for this.

Mar 14, 2005 - 11:18 am 38. Terrye:

The truth is guys like Jordan and Bennett have more in common with the people at the BBC and Le Monde than they do with the rest of us. They are a club. Fat, rich, privileged and self obsessed.

They think their anti Americanism is proletariat when in fact it is the opposite. The nonsense about how we should not encourage democracy anywhere in the world unless we can make it happen everywhere is ridiculous. Anything people do, including humanitarian aid has limitations. This should be obvious to someone has sophisticated as this man wants us to believe he is.

But for the WaPo to say they have no political leanings insults the intelligence of the reader.

Mar 14, 2005 - 11:54 am 39. Knucklehead:

Would you pay attention if you knew the products advertised were vetted and trusted by people whom you trusted? e.g., the gang at Roger’s Place?

On the one hand, yes. That’s how I go about figuring out what I’m gonna buy and from whom. I aks aroun’ to folks who’s opinion I respect, do a little research on my own if its a big ticket item, and then react to how the seller behaves.

On the other hand, however, Idunno. Ads, even if they were vetted, strike me as only interesting on a need to know basis. So, for example, I’ll be looking to buy a simple little digital camera in the not too distant future so I might notice and pay attention to ads and opinions here, but if I ain’t in the market for sumpin’ I ain’t likely to pay attention to ads or opinions even though they may be well vetted.

I guess its a cart and horse kinda thing. If I don’t kneed a cart I ain’t paying attention to what the horse has to say.

So, yes, targetted ads from trusted sources would play well with me but I don’t see how they could be targetted properly to make it economically feasible to get the eyeballs of nutballs like me. Fortunately I’m probably an outlier when it comes to this sort of stuff. If advertising was a non-effective on most people as it is on me, there wouldn’t be much advertising going on. Clearly it must work or folks wouldn’t spend so much money on it. I just don’t get it though – its wasted on me.

Mar 14, 2005 - 11:55 am 40. dougf:

Is it just me(well proabably it is),but I have this ‘feeling’ that convenient as it was for the ‘People’s Daily’,to interview this twit and publish his ramblings,the rulers in China would consider him at best a ‘useful idiot’,and more likely as simply an effete moron.

The current Communists in China strike me as hard-headed pragmatists who would have no use for this clown or for his anti-nationalist tirades.

Sure it amuses them to quote an anti-american american,but I am confident that they despise him on many,many levels.And rightly so,I might add.

Mar 14, 2005 - 2:50 pm 41. Katherine:

Thibaud,

ìHowever, one can at least apply more caution regarding Chinese growth numbers, which are almost certainly inflated on the highî

Oh thank you, my good sir. For years, the 8% growth that China reports annually was a source of great merriment to me, especially, when it is taken with all seriousness by ìthe analystsî (I know how such numbers are generated). Nobody ever seems to question that while the rest of the world goes through booms and recession Chinaís growth is steady ñ at 8%. After the fiasco of predicting the miracle of command economy everywhere else, one would hope that at least financial people would be a tad suspicious about numbers coming from the Chinese.

Mar 14, 2005 - 4:35 pm 42. Katherine:

Knuck,

ìSo, yes, targetted ads from trusted sources would play well with me but I don’t see how they could be targetted properly to make it economically feasible to get the eyeballs of nutballs like me.î

It is extremely difficult to make people to pay attention to ads in any medium. What initially brought Internet advertising down was the marketers just could not believe that people could completely ignore the ad banners. The low click-trough ratio that they started quoting as an excuse to kill so many sites that depended on advertising was actually unbelievable boon to them i.e. somebody actually was interested in their products.

Tell me, how many of you pay any attention at all to ads in magazines that you read? I have a feeling that if you need something, you do a search and research on the subject. In fact, Internet advertising model is paying off for at least one business around here i.e. Craigslist. I have a great satisfaction watching SF Chronicle going down the tubes due to fewer and fewer listings. Internet will bury those idiots one day and I will dance on the roof of empty Chronicle building, just before it is torn down to make room for something useful ñ perhaps a site for a nice software company or a bank or a hotel.

Mar 14, 2005 - 4:50 pm 43. JimT:

Im a little late getting into the conversation, but the earliest use of “Gag me with a spoon” I know of was at the end of Heinlein’s “Podkayne of Mars.” Podkayne is in a hospital, and is about to speak when, she said, the nurse “Gagged me with a spoon.”

“Podkayne of Mars” was published in 1963.

Mar 14, 2005 - 5:55 pm 44. richard mcenroe:

Katherine ó Do I sense some history atwixt you and Andy Porter?

Mar 14, 2005 - 7:35 pm 45. Katherine:

Richard,

No. Neither the designer, not the professor, nor the entrepreneur, nor the soccer player

Mar 14, 2005 - 10:23 pm 46. Steve J.:

ZEKE: “I would bet my life on the reason I can’t find either one is because they never put those two incriminating articles in their archives.”

OK, you owe me!

The only negative WAPO article I found among 5 that mentioned both Quayle and soccer is below:

Quayle Drew on Energy, Affability in Political Rise; [FINAL Edition]

George Lardner Jr., Dan Morgan. The Washington Post (pre-1997 Fulltext). Washington, D.C.: Oct 2, 1988. pg. a.01

Despite precautions designed to showcase Quayle’s talents as a campaigner, the results have sometimes been embarrassing. Tossing away a prepared text to show his expertise in defense, Quayle misquoted a basketball coach as an expert on strategic defense and left his audience in confusion. Trying to explain a controversial Senate vote he cast the previous month, he blamed it on “youthful indiscretion.” Speaking to tired, grimy-faced factory workers at the end of a long day in Ohio’s Rust Belt, he noted that his children enjoy lacrosse, soccer and horseback riding.

Mar 15, 2005 - 2:43 am 47. Steve J.:

ERP:”The NYT doesn’t provide for comments”

Yes it does.

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Mar 15, 2005 - 2:51 am 48. Steve J.:

THIBAUD:”Note how Clinton pulled the same stunt recently by telling his overseas audience how pleased he was with the mullahs’ democratic ways,”

That is a lie. Clinton had praise for the liberal elements in Iran, like the university students.

Mar 15, 2005 - 2:54 am 49. Steve J.:

TERRYE:”Fat, rich, privileged and self obsessed.”

LIMBAUGH

Mar 15, 2005 - 3:01 am 50. thibaud:

Steve J – nice try, but Clinton was unambiguous in his praise for the mullahs.

Come back to Roger’s when you’ve had some sleep– and a healthy dose of reality.

Mar 15, 2005 - 8:52 am 51. richard mcenroe:

Katherine ÔøΩ Ohhh… San Francisco Chronicle… *thump*thump*thump*

Mar 15, 2005 - 5:28 pm 52. Katherine:

Sorry for the misunderstanding, Richard. Is the other SF Chronicle something to be avoided? I am a big SF fan.

Mar 15, 2005 - 9:23 pm

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