Salon Hack List 2011

All that’s left, really, is to proudly announce his ascension to the throne as worst hack in America.

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
Halperin’s worst low of the last year actually happened in 2010, but it occurred after the Hack 30 was finished, and is thus eligible for inclusion here. Immediately after it was announced that Elizabeth Edwards had died, MSNBC had Halperin on to eulogize her. Halperin did not mention his integral role in the national smearing of Edwards as a harridan (“an abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending crazy-woman,” in the eyes of unnamed “insiders,” according to Halperin’s last book).
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)

Jonah Goldberg (Last year: Number 7.)

In March Jonah Goldberg literally wrote “meh” instead of rebutting an argument, in his nationally syndicated political column.

Thomas Friedman (Last year: Number 3.)

Thomas Friedman continued to, domestically, demand a centrist third party that acted exactly like our current centrist Democratic party. But his best work, as always, concerned foreign lands. What other columnist would have the balls to go to the scene of a popular revolution and “quote” a native pleading with the wise American columnist to explain what he thinks is going on in her country?

Marty Peretz (Last year: Number 5.)

Poor Marty lost his New Republic blog and “editor” title, but the magazine still lets him go on at length about middle eastern affairs, despite his lengthy and well-documented history of being an unrepentant anti-Arab racist.

George Will (Last year: Number 11.)

Will got an early start on his traditional election year conflict of interest, trashing Romney and Gingrich on television and in print before being forced to disclose that his wife is a paid Rick Perry advisor. Also, he’s still lying all the time about climate change.

Marc Thiessen (Last year: Number 6.)

The lying torture-defender still has a Post column, and even got to ask questions at a presidential debate! It’s not as morally repulsive as his other work, but the single silliest thing he wrote this year was this bit claiming that “Occupy Wall Street” was to blame for the inevitable failure of the supercommittee.

Bill Kristol (Last year: Number 17.)

Kristol’s Weekly Standard belatedly and bizarrely hopped on the Gingrich bandwagon as the year drew to a close. And why not? Kristol wouldn’t be Kristol if he didn’t endorse and prop up toxic, unelectable Republicans.

Mickey Kaus Number 25.)

The inventor of annoying political blogging moved his blog to the Daily Caller, where I assume he is still complaining about immigrants. His hackiest moment: I’ll say, picking more or less at random, this post, expressing dismay that Arizona nutcase politician Russell Pearce was recalled, because it sent the message that Arizona voters may be going soft on fanatical hatred of immigrants.

Tucker Carlson (Last year: Number 22.)

Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller news site is as inessential as ever. His hackiest moment of the year: Hiring a professional Berman and Company liar to edit the Caller, then printing a rather blatantly untrue story about the EPA.

Tina Brown (Last year: Number 18.)

Tina may be working incredibly hard at salvaging a dying newsweekly, with a clueless boss holding the purse strings, but on the other hand, that Princess Di fanfic cover was unacceptable. (Her actual hackiest moment, though, might be doing a phone interview and a conference call from the Acela’s quiet car.)

So, good work, Washington Post editors, you have finally provided some “balance” for your newspaper’s many left-wing Palestinian voices, like … Mary Worth?

Rubin’s a very good blogger, in a quantitative sense, able to produce several hundred words several times a day. And she sparks a lot of “debate,” by posting incendiary and outrageous things regularly. What she isn’t is a good writer, or human being. Her prose is overwrought, her tone apocalyptic, her constant bile exhausting. I’m not sure Avigdor Lieberman could read her daily without soon wishing she’d dial it back a bit.

Here’s a brief list of greatest hits: Her legendarily dumb column “wondering” why American Jews were largely repulsed by Sarah Palin, which concluded that it was because, as we all know, American Jews are rootless cosmopolitan elites who spend their time sneering at real Americans like hardscrabble blue-collar working mom Sarah Palin. Repeatedly accusing President Obama — the one with all the targeted assassinations and expanded use of secret executive surveillance and counterterrorism powers — of being soft on terrorism because he doesn’t intentionally antagonize the Arab world with inflammatory language. Endorsing the absurd New Black Panthers Party conspiracy theory. Frequently endorsing and retweeting the blatantly racist and occasionally eliminationist anti-Arab writings of her friend Rachel Abrams. Regularly getting things wrong and quoting things out of context and never apologizing. Being awful.

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
“This is a sobering reminder for those who think it’s too expensive to wage a war against jihadists.” That’s Rubin on the July mass shooting in Oslo, which the world soon learned had been carried out by a white right-wing anti-Islam zealot. The post was not corrected for a full 24 hours (while Rubin observed the sabbath) and was never apologized for. In her follow-up post she reiterated her claim that this shooting showed the necessity of large-scale military action against … Islamic jihadists.
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)

BHL the intrepid reporter writes a book on the killing of Daniel Pearl, and it’s rife with errors and prejudice.

He’s prospered in intellectual circles despite his tragic inability to button a shirt in part because he’s a successful businessman, born into wealth and friends with the French corporate elite. He writes with the self-assuredness of someone quite convinced of his brilliance, and that self-assurance perhaps explains why he so regularly makes shit up and gets shit wrong.

Like, for example, claiming that Himmler, who killed himself, stood trial at Nuremberg. And citing a well-known fake satirical philosopher in a book.

For a taste of the sort of hackneyed, half-assed work he produces on the major issues of the day, try this item on the eurozone crisis. It’s the sort of inane nonsense that gives claptrap a bad name. BHL noticed that the crisis involved Greece and Italy and that made him excited because he could then write about how civilization was invented in those places. To understand the European debt crisis, apparently, “we should be rereading Gibbon, Humboldt, or even Polybius — these theoreticians of the fate and the fall of the Athenian paradigm or the Roman road — rather than Friedman or Keynes.” Actually I think in this particular instance Friedman or Keynes would be a bit more helpful?

As if being pompous, self-serious, self-important and lazy weren’t enough, he’s also the public face of not one but two campaigns dedicated to defending powerful men against rape accusations. He organized a petition decrying Roman Polanski’s extradition to the United States to face prison for jumping bail after being convicted of raping a child years ago. Polanski didn’t deserve to go to jail, according to BHL, because he is a very good filmmaker.

Then BHL’s dear friend Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested for raping a hotel maid, and BHL wrote a truly astounding column defending his friend by attacking the victim and decrying the American justice system for not providing adequate special treatment to a man as rarefied and well-respected as Strauss-Kahn.

“What I do know is that nothing in the world can justify a man being thus thrown to the dogs,” BHL said of the totally standard treatment of Strauss-Kahn following his arrest for rape.

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
After the charges against Strauss-Kahn were dropped due to unknown inconsistencies in the accuser’s story, BHL declared victory and claimed that Strauss-Kahn was the victim of “torture” due to his class, and his being French.

I must state, to be clear, that I don’t think it has much to do with this worldwide religion and delirium that is anti-Semitism. But what I do believe is that this is the appearance of a new variation on Maurice Barrès’s phrase that has become, “That X—in this case Dominique Strauss-Kahn—is guilty, I deduce not from his race, but from his class.”

Hm, yes, Americans, always throwing rich powerful white men in jail. Our rich white male prison population is truly our national disgrace.
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)

Burnett, despite her youth, is a relic of a bygone age. She embodies ’90s “market populism,” to use Thomas Frank’s phrase, now still surviving on our airwaves as a zombie idea. The idea of America as a mass “shareholder society” is a sick joke in a nation currently sharply divided between struggling debtors and bailed-out creditors, but the dream is popular enough among the well-off professionals in charge of our news networks that CNN pinned its prime-time hopes on Burnett appealing to a mass audience. (If ratings are any indication, it’s not working.)

CNN, the network that refuses to take a side on anything, naturally assumes that being objectively pro-finance is the same thing as being objective. Hence her parroting the Wall Street party line that “everybody” (meaning “everybody” in the sense of American citizens and not financial professionals) was “responsible” for the massive financial crisis that plunged us unto a recession. This came after her revisionist claim, on Bill Maher’s show, that “everyone in this country knew there was a housing bubble,” an attempt to excuse the blinkered cheerleading of pre-crash CNBC. (She followed up with a line treating a hypothetical “soak the rich” tax as an objectively bad idea, asserting that Wall Street had already lost too much in the crisis to require such a draconian measure.)

And there was her amazing response to Donny Deutsch’s 2009 suggestion that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs give some minuscule percentage of their obscene profits to Haiti. “Hold on, Donny,” she shouted. “What would they do with all that money down there in Haiti?” I’m sure they could think of something.

Finally, I have no problem with professional entertainers playing make-believe on Donald Trump’s asinine “reality” show, but it’s embarrassing for a supposed journalist to pretend to be the fake-billionaire’s “advisor,” a part Burnett played on “The Apprentice” before she left the NBC family.

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
Clearly, her confused, confrontational response to Occupy Wall Street. She saw “bongos” and “a clown,” but these stupid fools didn’t know how wonderful Wall Street was, and how much it helps all of us, every day! One person didn’t even realize that TARP was an unalloyed positive thing for the nation as a whole! Burnett’s refusal or inability to understand what could possibly outrage people about the extraordinary actions involved in rescuing Wall Street from its colossal mistakes as the rest of us muddle through a protracted non-recovery was only improved by her hostile and dismissive treatment of regular people actually endeavoring to make the country a slightly fairer place. If you want snide, condescending apologism for powerful people you should rightfully worship as your betters, CNN’s got the show for you!
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)

Some mostly harmless memoirs, one novel and one well-reviewed study of literary marriages later, Roiphe is back in the headlines, again for being a reliable source of controversial-sounding contrarian anti-feminist bullshit. (Seriously, if you’re a struggling woman writer with no soul, consider rape victim-blaming! It’s lucrative!)

This time, Roiphe is saying that what Herman Cain is accused of doing to multiple women is no biggie, because blah blah blah there is no such thing as sexual harassment, just men being men and feminists being too shrill and fragile to handle that.

Obviously there is a line, which if the allegations against Mr. Cain are true, he has crossed, but there are many behaviors loosely included under the creative, capacious rubric of sexual harassment that do not cross that line.

In other words, the news event that led to my writing this column pretty much directly contradicts my point about sexual harassment being the criminalization of perfectly acceptable behavior but on the other hand feminists want to make dirty jokes illegal.

Roiphe is not just a one-note anti-feminist hack, no! She also writes very badly about the Internet and people on the Internet who are mean to Katie Roiphe. At the beginning of this month, Roiphe broke the news that there are Internet commenters who are mean. They accuse Katie Roiphe of being rich, just because she went to Princeton and Harvard and wrote about her nice house in rich people magazine New York and was photographed for that article holding a very expensive-looking handbag. Roiphe basically adopts the “haters gonna hate” line beloved by people serene in their refusal to acknowledge what they’ve done to inspire the hatred. This is a line most utilized by teenagers, because it requires a slightly sociopathic narcissism to imagine that literally everyone who criticizes you is jealous of your wonderfulness.

When people who troll for a living act surprised to discover that their intentionally obnoxious work had the desired effect of annoying a great deal of people, you can generally write that off as more trolling.

Continuing her tour through the most popular hacky Internet trend essay tropes of 2007, Roiphe wrote a piece on how Gawker is stupid, because Gawker made fun of her. The Gawker post that inspired her piece was three years old. Seriously. It was a three-year-old post with three paragraphs and a block quote. Because poor Emily Gould asked Roiphe for a book blurb Roiphe wrote, in October of 2011, a lengthy Slate column in response to three paragraphs Gould wrote making fun of her in May of 2007. “I did not find the piece very wounding,” Roiphe writes, in case you’re worried that she is letting the haters get to her. She totally isn’t! She just devoted a column to how much she didn’t care about the mean thing someone said about her, three years ago, to show how much she is over it.

Though I imagine that with the sheer volume of critical things people have written about Roiphe, because she’s awful, it might simply have taken her three years to work through the backlog. I imagine she’ll respond to this (“Isn’t it interesting that Salon hates me so much, not that I care” by Katie Roiphe) in 2014.

HACKIEST 2011 MOMENT:
A truly wretched and self-parodic Slate column about how the popularity of the book “Go the Fuck to Sleep” — the joke is that it’s like “Goodnight, Moon” with swear words, and that is the full extent of the joke — “means” that dumb yuppie liberal parents are full of bleak existential rage because they aren’t as good at sex-having as Katie Roiphe, because feminist yuppie women have castrated their good yuppie liberal husbands, and Katie Roiphe is operating on a plane you yuppie liberal sex-hating feminists can’t even understand, maaaannn.
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(Read the introduction here. Read the 2010 Salon Hack 30 List here.)