Graydon Carter is one of the biggest names in US magazines. Now Vanity Fair's editor is gunning for George Bush

He has been hailed as the King Of New York. With his charming manners and ability to make or break celebrities, Graydon Carter is to the magazine world what Jay Leno is to the American talk show - powerbroker to the formerly, currently and would-be famous. Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, was portrayed by some as a lightweight when he took over from Tina Brown almost a decade ago. He once worked as a telegraph man in Saskatchewan before powering his way through American journalism and going on to become a celebrity in his own right. Now, however, he is no longer content with damning the reputation of Hollywood's finest: Carter has emerged as the cheerleader of a movement to change the face of America by having George Bush thrown out as president.

Famous throughout America for his A-list Oscar parties, Carter has picked up the challenge of leading America's intellectual liberal luminaries in a battle against Bush when the race for next November's election gets seriously under way with the primaries after Christmas.

An influential institution at the grand Condé Nast monthly that, from its huge building on a corner of New York's Times Square, rules on what is hot in A-list celebrity culture and style, Carter has turned his normally innocuous monthly Editor's Letter into a campaign for 'regime change'.

His January 2004 letter will blast Bush's 'wrongheaded' state visit to Britain, ridicule Tony Blair as having a schoolboy's crush on the President and slam 'deceptions' in the run-up to a war in Iraq that is 'out of control'.

In previous columns he has accused Bush of lying over weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and shaming the country by allowing members of the Saudi royal family to fly out of the US without questioning two days after the 11 September terrorist attacks. He has slammed healthcare gaps, security, the burgeoning deficit, tax cuts for the rich, the US reputation abroad and corruption.

This has proved surprising given his magazine's even-handed coverage of the war on Iraq, compared with the supine, pro-Bush stance of much of the American press.

Denouncing Bush has made his Editor's Letter one of the best-read parts of the magazine, with advertisers clamouring to pay top rates for the page opposite the column.

Carter is now turning to Hillary Clinton as America's saviour. He believes she is the only Democrat with the 'X' factor - charisma, toughness and a certain je ne sais quoi that makes her a natural leader.

This weekend it emerged that he is also writing an anti-Bush book and, he told The Observer, has been campaigning behind the scenes to get Hillary to run for president 'right now'.

'I feel like a lone voice in the wilderness. But there is a large, seething majority out there against what Bush is doing to this country. This administration is as fundamentalist as the Islamics,' Carter said.

His book, What We Have Lost, which will examine the failings of Bush in office, is to be published late next summer as the election campaign approaches its climax.

'It is about the fragile state of US democracy, looking at what this administration has done to the environment, the judiciary and civil liberties. This is a very dangerous time in America,' he said.

He promised it will not be 'hysterical' or a rant, but fact-based - researched by him and a small team and written himself: 'It is different from the other books out there. I am not a liberal ideologue; I am very much a libertarian. I never got invited to the Clinton White House.

'If Hillary announced right now that she was running for President she could beat Bush. She is no less qualified than he was when he got it and has been a good Senator.'

Carter moved to the US from Canada 25 years ago. He admires his birth country's progress on legalising soft drugs, passing gay marriage rights and opposition to the war in Iraq.

Last week a Hollywood bash for the cream of wealthy intellectual society figures in Beverly Hills was starkly themed as a 'Hate Bush' evening. Liberals are fighting back after years of flinching at the constant, populist right-wing vilification of Bill Clinton and ruing his self-destruction over Monica Lewinsky.

Some commentators now believe Bush's new status as hate figure surpasses even the intense loathing by the Left of Richard Nixon. Anti-Bush books feature heavily on the New York Times best-sellers list, such as Michael Moore's Dude, Where's My Country?, Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and Bushwacked by Molly Ivins and Lou Dubose.

George Soros, the billionaire financier, recently gave £8.6 million to a liberal group because, he said, removing Bush had become 'the central focus of my life'.

Meanwhile, 90 per cent of party Republicans support Bush, despite Carter identifying signs of the start of a moderate Republican backlash. And Bush's national approval rating went back above 60 per cent from less than 50 after he swaggered about for the cameras in Baghdad with a decorative Thanksgiving turkey that wasn't even eaten.

Time magazine has dubbed Bush the Great Polariser - love him or hate him. Joe Conason, author of Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda Machine and How It Distorts the Truth, said: 'In terms of level of vitriol, left-wing rhetoric is every bit as strong now as it has been from the Right.'

And liberal forces are striving to launch a radio network next year after a broadcasting company, Progress Media, bought radio stations in New York, Los Angeles and several other cities. Franken is likely to host a show, taking a stand against the massed ranks of right-wing 'shock jock' radio talk-show hosts.

Carter has been mocked by some for using frivolous, glossy Vanity Fair as his platform. Yet he is determined to drag the liberal masses out of their meekness to keep Bush from a second term: 'Everything I love about America is fragile. I used to be an angry young man, but I suppose I got complacent. Now strangers stop me in the street to talk about Bush.'

In case anyone in this thread needs to be reminded as to what an utter and complete imbecile - and liar - Graydon Carter is:

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November 13, 2003, 10:10 a.m.

Graydon “Quadrillion” Carter

Vanity Fair's editor is so bad he makes Krugman look good.

Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, may be the all-powerful arbiter of what's hot and what's not in celebrity culture. But having declared Paul Krugman a "national treasure," Carter is now trying to reinvent himself as an angry liberal, devoting his monthly editor's letter to relentless Bush-bashing in a style that is unabashedly School of Krugman.

He should have stuck with schmoozing teen idols and British royalty. Just check out his letter in the December 2003 issue (unfortunately, there's no link for this). Carter's so bad at this he makes Krugman look good. His entire two-page letter is a bullet-point list of President Bush's failures. He writes, "There's a lot of ground to cover here, so let's do it scorecard style." By that he means shamelessly plagiarizing the famous "Harper's Index," in which pseudo-statistics are ironically juxtaposed with blasé one-liners.

Let's sample some of Carter's "scorecard," focusing on Bush's performance on the economy. (Throughout the following, indented and bulleted text is quoted directly and fully from Carter, including emphasis; I have dispensed with quotation marks for convenience.) We'll start with an absolute oh-my-God-what-was-I-thinking howler. Surely by now someone has told Carter of the utterly astounding error he (and his fact checker, if he has one) has made here: He seems not know the difference between a trillion and a quadrillion. He'll never live this one down:

· $6.84 quadrillion (yes, quadrillion) — Current national debt.
· $9.3 quadrillion — Estimated national debt by 2008.

This puts Carter off by a factor of 1,000. The Office of Management and Budget's Midterm Update for 2004 confirms that it's actually trillion (yes, trillion), which is 1,000 times smaller than quadrillion (yes, quadrillion). Quadrillion (yes, quadrillion) means one followed by fifteen zeros, while trillion (yes, trillion) means one followed by only twelve zeros.

· $1.58 billion — Amount on average the national debt increases each day.

If the current national debt really were $6.84 quadrillion (yes, quadrillion), then at $1.58 billion each day the debt would take 4,266 years to grow to $9.3 quadrillion (yes, quadrillion).

· $23,396 — Amount of each U.S. citizen's share of the national debt as of October 12, 2003.

Again, if the current national debt really were $6.84 quadrillion (yes, quadrillion), that means the population of the United States would be 292 billion (yes, billion). That's 46 times the entire world population of only 6.3 billion (yes, billion).

· #1 — This year's deficit will be the biggest in U.S. history.

How many times are we going to have to hear this lie repeated? It's only true — if you can call it that — if you don't adjust for inflation, and if you don't adjust for the size of the overall economy. According to OMB statistics, at only 2.8 percent of gross domestic product, current deficits are lower than they've been in 20 of the last 30 years. Even if we think in terms of the dollar value of deficits, adjusting them for inflation puts them lower now than in 7 of the last 21 years.

· 2.4 million — Number of Americans who lost their jobs during the first two and a half years of the Bush administration.

Lie. That's just the decline in the number of big-business and government payrolls — not the number of people who lost their jobs. If you count the self-employed, according to the latest statistics from the Department of Labor, there are more people working (as of October) than at any time in U.S. history. And 168 thousand more people are working than when President Bush took office.

· #1 — The administration is well on its way to being the first since Herbert Hoover's to preside over an overall loss of jobs during its complete term in office. For Bush to avoid this fate, the economy would have to create jobs over the next 13 months at a rate unprecedented outside of World War II.

Again, Carter is counting payrolls, not jobs. He probably doesn't know the difference — any more than he knows the difference between a trillion and a quadrillion — but they are not the same thing. But let's let that pass, and instead examine the frequently heard liberal lie that payrolls would have to grow at "a rate unprecedented" for there to be net payroll gains at the end of Bush's first term.

First of all, starting with the September payroll loss of 2.4 million that Carter cites, Bush has 16 months to right the labor ship, not 13 (but hey, 16 ... 13 ... trillion ... quadrillion ... same difference). To add 2.4 million jobs in a civilian labor force that totals 146.5 million people, we need a job-creation rate of 1.65 percent. Is that "a rate unprecedented"? No — that's another flat-out lie. Since January 1948 (when consistent records became available), there have been 654 overlapping 16-month periods. Of those, 423 — or 65 percent of the total — have seen job growth in excess of the required 1.65 percent.

In other words, it's not only not "unprecedented" to have that kind of growth — it's downright typical. And after the last couple of payroll reports from the Department of Labor, it looks like Bush is going to make it without breaking a sweat.

· #1 — Set record for biggest two-year point drop in the history of the stock market during the first half of a presidential term.

This may be technically true, but the way it is presented makes it essentially a lie. Point drops in the market are not comparable across periods of time, because the level of the market changes so much (so the importance of a point is always changing). The Dow Jones Industrial Average can easily move 100 points in a single day now — but when Franklin D. Roosevelt first took office in 1933, the level of the whole darn thing was only 60.9! What counts are percentage moves.

Yes, the Dow fell 26.0 percent in George W. Bush's first two years, and that's not good. But it's not the worst (the worst was the first two years of Richard Nixon's second term — partially shared with Gerald Ford — in which the Dow fell 29.6 percent). And the first two Bush years are not that far off from the first two years of FDR's second term, when the market dropped 22.1 percent.

Carter is quick to compare President Bush's current deficit numbers to those of the first President Bush, but he fails to mention whose first two years had the all-time best stock market performance: Ronald Reagan's. In the first two years of his second term the market climbed 67.7 percent. The runners up are FDR's first term with 67.0 percent, Eisenhower's first term with 41.1 percent, and Truman's first elected term with 38.9 percent. Clinton's halcyon second term can only boast a tepid-by-comparison 37.4 percent.

· 1.6 — Percentage increase in economic growth since Bush took office, the slowest rate of increase over an equivalent period for any administration in 50 years.

Carter mangles his terms here: he means simply "economic growth," not literally "increase in economic growth" (his cited number of 1.6 percent makes sense no other way). But even forgiving that lapse of technical terminology, his claim about that 1.6 percent rate is a flat-out lie. Growth has been lower than 1.6 percent over an equivalent period many times over the last 50 years, in administrations both Republican and Democratic. In fact growth was negative when Jimmy Carter handed the White House keys to Ronald Reagan in the first quarter of 1981.

Carter's list goes on and on, covering every conceivable domain in which Bush can be seen as having done something Carter thinks is wrong, or failed to do something he thinks is right, all framed in this "Harper's Index" pseudo-statistical style which is designed to give opinions the ring of fact. A lot of his editor's letter centers on how rich everyone in the Bush administration is, but I can't figure out why Carter is complaining about that. Somebody's got to buy all the luxury goods — the Bulgari watches, the Guess leather, the Belvedere vodka, the Dior underwear — that are advertised in full-color in the pages surrounding Carter's letter.

And of course, Carter offers a great deal about the war. A particular favorite:

· 0 — Number of trips taken to Afghanistan before waging war against that country.
· 0 — Number of trips to Iraq before waging war against that country.

Observers more charitable than Carter might want to cut President Bush some slack on this one. Taking a quick jaunt to Afghanistan in the days between 9/11 and the U.S. invasion might not have been the best use of his time.

And besides, there's no tradition among American presidents of first visiting countries against whom a president later wages war. I'm hard pressed to think of a single example. Raymond Teichman, supervisory archivist at the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, N.Y., tells me that liberal icon FDR never set foot in Germany, Italy, or Japan before waging war on them. Well, FDR did visit Germany as a child. Teichman says, "It was fashionable in the post-Civil War period to go to Germany. His father took the waters at Baden-Baden."

Carter, on the other hand, drinks the Kool-Aid. As both editor and columnist, he gets to make up reality in the little Jonestown that is Vanity Fair. Consider these representative lines from the adoring letters about himself that he chose to publish this month:

Thank you, Graydon Carter, for being brave enough to tell the truth about this dangerous administration ... Those of us who have no money and no influence feel intimidated and don't speak out against the Bush regime.

* * *

In my small East Texas community, we have started a political group which is growing daily. We meet once a month, and the first thing I do is read the editorial by Mr. Carter.

Carter's flirtation with Bush-bashing may be comically incompetent and self-aggrandizing, but it's not without wider meaning. Carter is a reliable compass that always points true north in the realm of celebrity culture. For this poseur to be striking this particular pose tells us that visceral loathing of the Bush administration in the media is a wave that has yet to crest. I'll feel a lot more comfortable when Carter goes back to what he's really good at — analyzing such things as the deep cultural significance of Madonna kissing Britney Spears.

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Graydon “Quadrillion” Carter

Vanity Fair's editor is so bad he makes Krugman look good.

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This is the Mainstream Media Shenanigans ping list. Please freepmail me to be added or dropped.
Please note this is a medium- to high-volume list.
Please feel free to ping me if you come across a thread you would think worthy of this ping list. I can't catch them all!