I keep getting Warning! notes from New York Magazine -- if I don't pay up, I might Stop Receiving The Magazine! Alas, they never follow through. Wimps.
But then, I don't remember subscribing in the first place. And it took some doing to get those pictures -- the cats were much more interested in hiding under the backdrop. Even when I pretended to read the article. When has any cat ever not gotten between their person and their reading material? Maybe they knew I was faking it.
Anyway, the reason I staged that photo is that tonight's guest is NYMag writer John Heilemann, who's got that cover story -- an excerpt from his Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime.His co-author, of course, is Time's Mark Halperin, whose Media Matters page turned out to be a great resource (Heilemann's got one too, though not as prominent) . Here's today's entry:
The reviews are in: Game Change is "a 450-page version of Page Six."
If there's a silver lining to the dark cloud that is Game Change, it's that the nastiest campaign gossip book in years has inspired several amusing and creative denunciations of the both book and its authors, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann.
Don Imus, for example, referred to it as "a 450-page version of Page Six," according to Halperin.
The Huffington Post's Jason Linkins -- who notes of the authors' sourcing rules: "It's too charitable to simply call this shady" -- adds:
What you will get from this tome is the experience of being dragged through a great, teeming, gossipy Superfund-sized pile of shit, lovingly accumulated by two authors who have basically allowed anyone willing to offer nasty hearsay, trash-talk, or score-settling to dump away.
There's lots more, including Memo to media: Statement attributed to Clinton in Game Change is not a direct quote and Halperin and Heilemann admit they don't know what Bill Clinton actually said.
The book, of course, is the gossip 'anonymous quotefest' (a.k.a 'poli-porn,' a.k.a. potential HBO movie) that started the kerfluffle about Harry Reid's, um, ossified mentality which has been entertaining the eminently superior (mostly) white folks on the TeeVee these past few days (discussion in these parts has, ahem, varied, but some has been worthwhile). The NYTimes has a review, if you're interested, but this fragment from an Amazon customer review says enough for me:
Reading "Game Change" is like reliving the campaign all over again
Dear god, no.
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