Wednesday, October 05, 2022

No Fair Remembering Stuff: The Tale of James and Mary

    

A decade ago many of us disreputable-types were asking important questions about why the hell Mary Matalin still existed as a person of influence in the Beltway media.  

At the time no on-the-records were forthcoming.

During the intervening decade, Matalin has shed skins faster than a King Cobra in a skin shedding contest.  She has gone from being a bottom-feeding Republican hobgoblin ... to a Never Hillary/Provisionally-Pro-Trump libertarian ... to a "Done with Trump" libertarian ... to the co-chair of "Catholics for Trump" where as late as 2020 she was humping the legs of the likes of Brad Parscall and Matt and Mercedes Schlapp.  

In her spare time she and her husband James Carville apparently also do relationship-coaching for "cross-partisan couples", which is a thing that deserves its very own circle of Hell.

And a decade later there are still no on-the-record answers about why such creatures are still allowed to haunt our political culture.  Which happily continues to leave us free to speculate, as we did back in 2012.   (Spoiler:  It all comes down to money, access and the power to use an institution to advance ones agenda.)


Today on the Shoddiest Obit *



Like the rest of us, Charles P. Pierce of Esquire continues asking the right questions

And, like the rest of us, he continues to get no on-the-record answers:
... 
Before we examine matters in detail, however, we should ask ourselves the most fundamental question of all?

Why?

Why does any television network put Mary Matalin on the air any more? (The same, it should be noted, can be said about her husband, but at least he had a book to shill earlier this year.) She is not entertaining. She is not funny. She is not particularly bright. She certainly isn't in any way informative. She's just a nasty, bitter old piece of work who spent eight years supplying fresh earth for the coffin in which Dick Cheney sleeps during the daylight hours, Ann Coulter without the cocktail dress and the lunatic's performance skills. (Of course, some select people just love Matalin's act. Some people also believe Play-Doh is a food group. Put The Gateway Pundit — aka The Dumbest Man on the Internet — in front of a computer for 30 minutes and you get a guy sticking pencils in his ears for 30 minutes.) So, she gets on there and insinuates that Paul Krugman is a liar, and the whole panel erupts, not over that, but because Krugman intimated that the elite press corps had failed to call out Willard Romney for the truly remarkable liar he's become. After everybody agreed that Krugman was just wrong, wrong, wrong, about all those nice people with whom everybody has dinner in D.C., we really got down to it over the issue of zombie-eyed granny-starving and the Republican ticket...
If you are unfamiliar with the Carville/Matalin beast that stalks the political world, imagine Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff?", with all of that venomous contempt for all living things directed outward.

Legend has it that Carville wanted someone to raise him up a passel of snake-headed swamp babies just like him and Matalin wanted a career for herself that would survive both her face collapsing into a subduction zone between black-market Botox experiments and Jack Nicholson "Joker" cheek implants...and her skill set -- paralyzing small rodents with her voice and swallowing them whole -- losings its curb appeal.

And thus they struck a terrible bargain, and were betrothed (as befits their shared profession) on the grave of Lee Atwater at the stroke of midnight on Asa Earl Carter's birthday, each drinking the defiled blood of a mad dog from the skull of Edward R. Murrow and each offering up their souls to mighty Lucifer in exchange for prosperous careers in defiance of all logic and morality.  And since that day their conjoined carcasses have lurched through our political landscape like two drunks veering down the sidewalk, each remaining upright and mobile by leaning against each the other.

Or so legend has it.

On the other hand, a simpler explanation to Mr. Pierce's question may be the simpler explanation that hides behind many of life's mysteries.

Money.

Matalin understood early on that the hate racket is like any other racket, and that our media is so constructed as to let Conservatives get away with all kinds of murder.   Armed with these two facts and streamlined by a complete lack of conscience, she has exploited her meager talents and lengthy confidential contact list into a formidable media conglomerate which includes such diverse subsidiaries as flogging HVAC products and medium-priced hooch, sharing a radio microphone with fellow media mogul Arianna Huffington on Air-America-killer Mark Green's horrible, horrible show, and, most importantly getting her own Conservative imprint at Simon & Schuster:
Mary Matalin’s official title at Threshold Editions is editor-in-chief, but the Republican strategist prefers several others: conservative, book-lover, fixer.

It’s that last role where Matalin’s extensive network comes into play for Simon & Schuster’s 4-year-old conservative imprint, now slated to publish memoirs by both former Vice President Dick Cheney and Karl Rove. Matalin’s connections also played a part in a publishing-industry coup earlier this month, as Threshold simultaneously held the top spots on The New York Times best-seller list for hardcover and paperback nonfiction — Mark Levin’s “Liberty and Tyranny” and Glenn Beck’s “Common Sense,” respectively. 
...
Which puts her in the powerful position of being able to distribute wingnut welfare largess instead of just receiving it.
...
The Cheneys, for Matalin, are like family. Lynne Cheney and her daughter Mary are both Threshold authors. So it’s natural that Dick knocked around book ideas with Matalin in his McLean, Va., home before settling on a publisher. There, Matalin said the vice president offered up some “jaw-dropping” anecdotes for the book that she had never heard in the years she worked for him. Bob Barnett, the D.C. uber-lawyer who represents Rove, Matalin and countless media figures, said that while he can’t speak for the vice president in making a final decision, Matalin’s presence at Threshold “is very reassuring.”

And Rove, who’s turning in his manuscript to Simon & Schuster editor Priscilla Painton in the next few weeks, told POLITICO that Matalin has been helpful along the way by reading sections and offering comments. “Mary understands the audience and understands what goes into making a good book,” he said.

Threshold publisher Louise Burke, who runs the imprint from New York while Matalin pitches in from her New Orleans home, said the distinction between their imprint and others is that Threshold best understands the conservative book-buying audience — a key factor needed to keep the hits coming.

“This is an area where it really helps to be a believer,” said Burke, perhaps one of the few outspoken conservatives in Manhattan’s publishing scene. “I don’t feel you can be successful in this particular genre if you are opposed to the message.” 
...
And, in the end, a drowning man will grasp even the point of a sword:
Respectable publishing houses, the Upper West Side literati complained a few years back, were now turning their presses over to the Ann Coulters of the world, all in pursuit of profits. But these days, after layoffs and drops in sales, such criticism is less frequent.

* (Anagram for "Both Sides Do It")



I Am The Liberal Media



7 comments:

bowtiejack said...

Excellent. Just excellent.

Ian said...

Is that how you are supposed to sell your soul to lucifer? I have been doing it wrong all these years.

Anonymous said...

I can attest to the system-gaming and horseshit-shoveling publishing tactics you're describing. I've seen them at one remove.

There's a circle of libertarian sci-fi writers whose books you can find on Amazon, and as of recently, even in Barnes & Noble. I've only read a small amount of their fictional universe, one book. It wasn't the worst SF I've ever read, but it was far from the best, and it was overtly laden with antigovernment sentiment. Perhaps not all the authors have such overt(ly odious) threads woven into their novels; maybe this one author was a negative outlier.

But it doesn't matter.

His book, with all its flaws, sold well on Amazon, and he's now got (at least) a sequel out (maybe more than one).

Because of system gaming.

Being brutal, the book was schlock. It had mechs and zoomy-boomy space battles for teen nerds, but it really wasn't that good, leaving out the political acid.

But a bunch of that guy's friends, and all their friends, gamed the system by dropping positive reviews and probably buying copies in some cases, and BOOM, you have an Amazon hit.

System gaming.

The MSM is a thousand times worse in this same phenomenon. So much of it has little if anything to do with journalism and reporting any more. It's all about dolla dolla bills, y'all. (And if America burns to a cinder, what do they care - it's all a game.)

Something's got to give.

Robt said...

There has been countless of Frank the Luntz selected interviews groups of presented "RINO " republicans . They are always presented as moderates which is RINO today.

Frank always selects the topics/issues he wants to ask.

Frank would never ask one of these groups would they vote for someone who engaged in abortions themself but want to ban it for others because of their deeply held religious beliefs for other people to obey and allows them to violate it and be forgiven an to be elected.

They have many gripes and grievances and always stage a platform with straw men as Democrats. Easier to demonize a straw man than a actual person but it can still be done.

Long time question I wanted asked but never was,

" what is your qualification for a congressman" and name me 5 to 10 main items you expect them to work for"?

You see, many of the issues they seek may not be a single one their guy even thinks about or never addresses. And when they vote for them say because they want small government and they find their guy enlarging government like with Homeland Security.
It is all okay because republican?

Notice they zealotry over Abortion being punished and how evil anyone is for it. But when Candidate Herschel Walker is exposed from doing it. They Koch Brothers pay a right wing church to have a prayer session of forgiveness?

How is it they cannot forgive anyone else? Give others a chance to make the same choice of Walker so they can attain forgiveness?

Putting Newt on the TV to speak wonderful tidings and purity and sins to forgive of Herschel is not far from a sci fi movie where Satan forgives his demons for the deaths of those they possessed.

It is the celeb feeding of the zombies. By the networks.

Neo Tuxedo said...

James and Mary: sad, sad, sad.

Robt said...


Yep, I am more than ready to cast my ballot.

After having to listen to all these candidates telling me government is not there to solve problems while they accept lobby (bribe ) money to solve their highest donor's problems with government legislation.
Dictating to me what government is and is not.

yeah, my turn to speak with my ballot.

Sometimes a foolishly wish there is a time in space where, candidates are silenced and citizens get to speak out for the same length of time politicians got, as the politicians must listen to us. Then after that, voting begins and the citizens speak last.

Tom Sunday said...

Wow, when you bring it...