At the beginning of 2009, while it was still owned by the Washington Post, Newsweek told the reader (I’m using the singular deliberately, since the Post offloaded their rapidly sinking magazine the following year for a dollar), “We Are All Socialists Now.”
In 2011, Newsweek, now published online under the imprimatur of Tina Brown’s Daily Beast brand name, informed the reader of President Obama’s call for what they described as the “New Era of Civility.” So how’s that working out for all the socialists at the Daily Beast?
The day after Christmas of 2011, author and former Lehman Brothers general partner Michael Thomas wrote there:
When the great day comes, Wall Street will pray for another Pecora, because compared with the rough beast now beginning to strain at the leash, Pecora will look like Phil Gramm. Humiliation and ridicule, even financial penalties, will be the least of the Street’s tribulations. There will be prosecutions and show trials. There will be violence, mark my words. Houses burnt, property defaced. I just hope that this time the mob targets the right people in Wall Street and in Washington. (How does a right-thinking Christian go about asking Santa for Mitch McConnell’s head under the Christmas tree?)
Presumably, it follows after something like this:
“We were all out by the pool,” Michael’s son William—from his first marriage, to Brooke Hayward—was telling me over the phone from his home in Sag Harbor. It was one of those Southampton summers in the late ’60s/early ’70s; dad was with his second wife, Wendell Adams, then. Her attractive younger sister Jane was always around, looking for a wealthy husband.
“Jane was kind of uptight and a little bit prudish, but she had her bikini on and she was kind of showing off her bikini, and my father, right in front of me and my teenage friends and all these other people having the usual cocktail party out by the pool, got up and grabbed her and stripped her bikini off her and threw her in the pool, in front of his wife, too. I’m standing there and I’m holding the Polaroid land camera in my hand but I’m so stunned that I can’t take a picture.”
In March, a Daily Beast writer essentially called for Dick Cheney’s death after Cheney’s heart transplant, complete with a phallic slur worthy of a 12 year old schoolboy:
How did this happen? No, not the Florida recount, but how could someone so old and frail be a candidate for that most precious commodity, the human organ? Did Dick do a dick thing and leapfrog a bunch of other worthies, people who aren’t viewed by some as war criminals and evildoers but rather are decent folk decades younger, likelier to contribute to society and to provide a better return on investment for our taxpayer health-care dollars?
And as Bob Owens reports today at PJM, “Daily Beast Columnist Politely Calls for George Zimmerman’s Lynching.” The Beast’s Mansfield Frazier begins his column by first asking “As George Zimmerman faces murder charges for shooting Trayvon Martin, it’s worth asking if America is in danger of facing Rodney King, Part II?”
But the Daily Beast columnist is just getting warmed up and won’t let facts stand in his way:
Look what’s already festering on the streets of Sanford, Florida. On the one hand we’ve got the three stooges of the New Black Panther Party running around Sanford, spouting off crazy ideas and becoming a total embarrassment to more thoughtful and reasoning blacks who simply want justice. On the other we’ve got the equally clownish neo-Nazis, goose-stepping around on their self-appointed mission to protect the white race.
The only problem with statement is that it patently isn’t true. There are no neo-Nazi patrols, and never were. The claim was based on an unsubstantiated phone call from out of state, published by another lazy journalist with shoddy editorial oversight.
Frazier then goes for Zimmerman’s lynching — but at least he does so politely:
We don’t want to go back there. Fortunately Zimmerman’s new attorney, Mark O’Mara, appears to comprehend the broader implications and potential danger of the situation, and seems well qualified to negotiate a fair outcome for his client, and indeed for the rest of us. He has the calm demeanor of a law professor, and speaks in measured, but not calculating, terms. His first comments seemed designed not to convince anyone of his client’s innocence, but rather to take the heated rhetoric down a few notches. He cautioned that everyone should allow the justice system to work.
So what would a fair outcome look like? To my mind, the government offers Zimmerman a plea deal that has him back on the street within this decade, and he accepts it quietly. That seems like a conclusion most reasonable Americans could live with. Of course, no matter how long or short any sentence may be, there will be those who disagree, some vehemently.
If O’Mara were successful in brokering such a resolution, he should be viewed as nothing less than a savior. A protracted murder trial of George Zimmerman is the last thing this country needs right now. America can only dodge so many racial bullets, and a not-guilty verdict in this case could very easily turn the racial cold war into a very hot one.
The language is soft, but the threat is implicit: Zimmerman should be pressured to take a plea deal … or else my people will tear this country apart.
Mr. Frazier’s comment is both a veiled threat and a sad commentary of what he expects from the black community. Similar sentiments are shared in his other articles about the case. Perhaps as a former newspaper editor and current Daily Beast columnist he’s simply come to the point where he expects little of substance from his fellow man.
We can deduce what’s expected of Frazier from his publisher Tina Brown, who makes a backhanded argumentum ad Hitlerum to deride the recently deceased Andrew Breitbart:
During Hitler’s Germany, there were 50 foreign correspondents in Berlin, which is an incredible index of the golden era of journalism. What we have, of course, in the era of today with Andrew Breitbart – the blogger, the right-wing radical blogger who just recently dropped dead in the early 40s – was, of course, the absolute opposite. It’s really the degradation, in a sense, of the journalistic ideals of a William Shirer.
(Of course, Tina also once blamed the “neo-cons of the ’30s [who] bitterly reviled FDR as ‘that man.'” So much for the distaff second coming of William L. Shirer.)
As Glenn Reynolds wrote at the start of the year, linking to Thomas’s column, “So much for that new civility bullshit.” And from Obama on, for the left, that’s all it’s ever been.
Related: “Trayvon Martin and the murder of America’s Fourth Estate.”
Join the conversation as a VIP Member