No. 18: Tina Brown
Newsweek's new editor just ran into someone impossibly fabulous at a dinner last month ...
Tina Brown While it’s obviously fun to focus on Tina Brown the larger-than-life media character — launcher of overhyped money-losing media properties, employer of close friends, big-spending fleecer of publishers, clueless throwback with no clue how the Internet works — her output as an author and pundit is bad enough without getting into her plans to cannibalize Newsweek, her latest editorial toy.
Because Tina the columnist is the one who writes things like “Why America Needed Chelsea’s Wedding” (it was “a happy throwback to the carefree 1990s,” natch). A paragraph begins: “When I saw Bill Clinton at a dinner a month or two ago …” While her comically shallow columns on actual current events resemble real editorials, they tend to lack a point, besides reassuring the reader that Tina’s been keeping up with the news out of Wall Street and Washington.
Her book on Princess Di was really a book about Tina. Her never-to-be-finished book on Hillary was probably shaping up the same way. (It really killed that book’s dramatic arc when Hillary didn’t actually become president.)
And she’s the one who publishes Meghan McCain’s self-absorbed ramblings, which is enough reason to make the list.
Repeat offenses: Inability to escape the ’90s, conviction that people care about the royals, name-dropping, self-parody.
Representative quote:
Excoriating Fergie has been a British national sport for years. But I’ve always found her a sympathetic figure, with her mad bulging blue eyes and appalling taste in men, business partners, and just about everything. She’s generous and instinctively friendly, and you had to admire the way she ate the indignity of having to become an “ambassador” for Weight Watchers to pay the bills. When she comes to town, we usually meet in a fancy hotel suite where she tells me with absolute self-confidence about some preposterous new plan for a TV talk show or a “franchise deal” or a “soon to be announced” Hollywood contract.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.
The War Room Hack Thirty
Our complete list of America's worst pundits
The War Room Hack Thirty is a list of our least favorite political commentators, newspaper columnists and constant cable news presences, ranked roughly (but only roughly) in order of awfulness and then described rudely. Criteria for inclusion included writing the same column every week for 30 years, warmongering, joyless repetition of conventional wisdom, and making bad puns.
The full list can be found here. Pass it along, argue about it, and print it out and glue each pundit’s photo into your scrapbook!
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.
No. 1: Richard Cohen
The looooongtime Washington Post columnist is the hackiest pundit in America
Richard Cohen The Washington Post’s Richard Cohen has been a columnist since 1976. He’s good friends with Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn. He works one day a week. At a certain point, in that exceptionally privileged and cushy position, his brain disintegrated. He’s not so much an old liberal who grew conservative as he is a simplistic old hack who believes his common prejudices to be politically incorrect truths and his Beltway conventional wisdom to be bracing political insight.
That’s how we get work like “leave Roman Polanski alone!” and sending me mean e-mails is “digital lynching” and affirmative action punishes all white people and you stupid snot-nosed bloggers don’t get that Cheney was probably right to torture people and Barack Obama should read a newspaper instead of a BlackBerry because a BlackBerry is full of lies. All in the singularly smug, grating prose style of a man who knows he’s an immovable object in one of the most comfortable positions in all of journalism.
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Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.
No. 2: Mark Halperin
The Drudge-loving political analyst who gets everything wrong
Mark Halperin I thought we were all done talking about former Bob Dole speechwriter former ABC News political director Mark Halperin, whose star had seemed to stop rising toward the end of the Bush years — but then he attached himself, leechlike, to reporter John Heilemann, to co-write “Game Change,” a lengthy catalog of the 2008 presidential campaign’s moments of least import.
Halperin used to write this thing called the Note, which was an e-mail newsletter that various Washingtonians whom Halperin referred to as “The Gang of 500″ used to read to find out what they themselves thought about the news of the day. It was written as privileged wisdom from Beltway insiders — cryptic references, obscure jokes, endless name-dropping, constant inexplicable plugs for the Palm restaurant — when it was in fact just “whatever a professional political operative recently told Mark Halperin, along with links to political stories in the major papers.”
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Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.
No. 3: Thomas Friedman
The flat-earther and metaphor-mangler pollutes the minds of our CEOs
Thomas Friedman Thomas Friedman is an environmentalist, now. When he’s not jetting around the world on the literally unlimited expense account his money-bleeding newspaper provides him, pondering KFC billboards he spots outside the windows of gleaming office towers in Delhi — or when he’s not lounging beside the pool at his absurd home — the second-most-influential business thinker in the country is worrying about carbon emissions. Which is, I freely admit, a nice change of pace from back when he was telling the world that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would lead to a glorious new dawn of freedom/democracy/whiskey/iPods/Old Navy in the Middle East as a whole.
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Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.
No. 4: David Broder
"The Dean" never met a problem that couldn't be solved by more serious calls for bipartisanship
David Broder The dean of the Washington Press Corps, David Broder has also been What’s Wrong With the Washington Press Corp ever since he stepped off the campaign bus and began applying his wisdom toward the great problems plaguing the country.
He has a simplistic understanding of politics and no understanding of the electorate except as an abstract concept. His hatred of partisanship is actually a thinly veiled disdain for popular rule itself. He defines extremism as principled adherence to any sort of ideology. When he wants to understand what The Voters are thinking, he asks a think tank academic. Despite his disdain for the fiery populists that the idiot voters repeatedly send to our sadly broken Congress, he remains convinced that The American People are a wise and noble breed who long for sensible, bipartisan moderation in all things.
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Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.
Page 1 of 6 in War Room's Hack Thirty