"If I just kill Scaife, then liberalism will WIN, and everything will be fine..!!!"
Posted on 07/02/2017 6:59:58 PM PDT by LS
One Friday afternoon last July, Wladyslaw Pleszczynski, the No. 2 man at The American Spectator for twenty years, from its time as a small-circulation conservative intellectual review through its run as the shouting voice of anti-Clintonism, rummaged through the magazine's shut-down office in Arlington, Virginia, cleaning out his desk before movers arrived, on Monday, to cart everything away. The Spectator had been sold nearly a year earlier to the high-tech guru George Gilder, who, in changing the magazine to a journal of the New Economy, decided to fire the staff and move the operation to his headquarters, in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Now it was time for the old office to be shut down, and Pleszczynski was getting ready to go. Dressed in shorts and sandals, he stopped every now and then to answer the phone; friends wanted to know if Wlady, as everyone called him, was okay. (I was a writer for the magazine from 1996 to 2000, and had dropped by that day for the same reason.) Never much of an optimist even in good times, Pleszczynski answered that he was fine, considering the circumstances.
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(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
You know..?
TAS used to be my FAVORITE magazine.
At first it was to be dubbed The American Alternative, but people thought that was LEFT wing, which the staff of TAS was certainly not.
Just breaks my heart.
Funny you mention that. I used to open my history classes by reading “The Continuing Crisis,” which I just found hysterical. It went over some students’ heads.
Scratchin my head...I read the whole thing twice.
I just don’t see the similarities.
AM was eerily right on the money for a long time.
What am I missing ?
Remember “Kultursmog”
Ridiculous, theopposition of TAS to The Bent One made them almost UNIQUE at the time. There was the early WND, then some Brit publications, Chris Ruddy, then a few other trailblazers.
They were the ones who managed to grab the much-coveted "Vast Right Wing Electronic Conspiracy" monicker (or very nearly that) that the poisonous Hillary originated, way back then.
Then there was the deranged guy who almost KILLED Scaife --made it into his HQ with a Ruger P94. The kook stopped to gather himself in the bathroom just ONE floor beneath Scaife's personal office.
For reasons unknown the man shot himself through the head at the very last minute.
I’m missing the kulture smog.
It’s Golden Era was when Gilder took over!!!!
It didn’t last. The neocons took it over and raped it. That was a dark age that the conservative movement is struggling to emerge from.
It was my favorite, too, Gaijin! I discovered some old, bundled issues in the basement of the Scripps College basement and was instantly hooked. I allowed my National Review subscription to lapse and never looked back. I read every issue of AS from cover to cover, skipping nothing. I haven’t picked up an issue in years . . . Maybe it’s no longer in print?
Limbaugh routinely lifted jokes from The Continuing Crisis including Tyrell’s “assumed room temperature” gag. Never any credit given but since no one from TAS seemed to object I guess it was ok with them.
I liked The American Spectator best when they were based in Indiana. When they moved to DC they began trashing nationalists and featuring fools like David Frum.
Tom Bethell and “The Hive”, that metaphor for the Left that he and Sobran invented.
They killed themselves going after non-existent Clinton crimes.
CNN NYT going to do the same over Trump.
Yep.
“Then there was the deranged guy who almost KILLED Scaife “
Steve Kangas. His Scaife assassination plot was kind of a precursor for James Hodgkinson going after Scalise.
Kangas ran a leftwing website that was kind of oriented towards economic issues. I had a brief debate with him over some of his claims. He came across as typical leftist. I think you’re letting him and the hater left off by calling him deranged- they aren’t deranged, they are criminals.
I agree. In IN they had a great connection to the common people.
Frum is a dolt.
Not sure the Clinton crimes were non-existent, but I get it. I don’t see it happening but I get it.
EXCELLENT parallel.
Yes, right after recalling that and typing it, the parallel suddenly struck me, too.
At the time, almost the ONLY media opposition to Clinton was his Pittsburgh Tribune-Gazette, and the Clintons would constantly whine stuff like, “Everything in the US would now be ROSES, with our wonderful agenda fully implemented, if not for that DASTARDLY SCAIFE..!!!”
They really, really kept it up, too, really personalized it, just as Saul Alinksy advised.
And it seems at any time there absolutely out there IS some tiny sliver of society that IS listening and WILL pick up the cudgel, and do The Bidding.
Great catch, yes. It’s basically the ZACT SAME THING now, all these years later.
"If I just kill Scaife, then liberalism will WIN, and everything will be fine..!!!"
“In IN they had a great connection to the common people.”
And that’s really what it was. When they were in... Bloomington?..... they were kind of like Trump. They were in tune with the real concerns of everyday Americans.
But Tyrell wanted to be a player in DC. And when he took the magazine there you could see it change. It became a creature of Republican party politics. Immigration? They took the Bush “who cares?” line. All those Californians fighting to pass Prop 187 were just so many nativist xenophobes.
And unfortunately around the same time WFB was handing over the once invaluable National Review the fools who ruined it. I dumped TAS and NR. Chronicles was the one that still seemed worthwhile.
So, their excellent exposés on Cloward and Piven were for naught??!
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