Barracuda Bite: Mass Cancellations of Subscriptions to Obama Celebrity Magazine Us Weekly
And Andrew Sullivan Finds Palin's Private Life "Colorful, to Say the Least"

Sarah Palin: Chickens

Us Magazine: Roost

Jann Wenner, a no-talent ass-clown best known for running bong ads in a magazine featuring interviews with barely coherent sub-morons finds his second-rate People magazine (think on that) in even more trouble.

“I’m hearing it’s 5,000, maybe more,” says one well-placed source in the industry. Another source claimed that as many as 10,000 readers have already cancelled their subscriptions. A spokesperson for Wenner Media, which publishes Us, says “it is completely false that we are losing 10,000 subscribers.” As for the 5,000 estimate, the spokesperson only said “that is false, too,” but wouldn’t comment further.

The magazine was mailed out Monday, and will not be received by many until Friday or Saturday. So many of these cancellations come from those who haven't even received the magazines yet. They know what the story is.

“When Us went to print Monday night, it looked like the ticket was falling apart," says one magazine editor. “They went to print thinking Palin was dead in the water, and their mistake was thinking everyone who reads Us is a Democrat, when they’re not. Readers are loyal, but the base of a political party is more loyal. They don’t need to read the magazine when there’s so much press around it to know to be upset.”

Upset might be an understatement: One Us advertiser has admitted that they’ve received calls from angry former subscribers threatening to boycott their products. “(Us publisher) Jann Wenner supports Obama, Wenner media decided to follow the buzz around Palin before her speech, and now subscribers feel like a vote has been cast on their behalf," says another magazine editor. “It’s going to be tough to bounce back from this one. Especially if the advertisers get involved. If they get nervous, that can hurt all of us.”

Awww, that sucks.

Gee, I guess now we know why Us Magazine sent out its nitwit writer to go out there and claim she was voting for McCain, huh? And that the article must therefore not be the product of bias, because, of course, a staff writer has full freedom to write whatever cover story she likes irrespective of the editor's and pubisher's demands.

Damage control.

"Hey, I'm one of you, really. I'm a big fan of Palin's, that's why I smeared her!"

KTHNXBAI.

Note they trotted her out to make this claim just hours before news of the mass cancellations hit.

Thanks to Rob.

By the way, my girlfriend -- and I don't know why I always hide this stuff; I just don't think it's appropriate, but it gets cumbersome to keep saying "this other person I was talking with" -- anyway, my girlfriend picked up the issue.

After two pages of ads, you know what it features?

A two-page spread on how chic (their word) Michelle Obama is. Lots off glamor shots of her with her daughters and husband -- See! Look! Here's a solid marriage, as opposed to that dysfunctional white-trash train-wreck on the cover!

GF: "Gee, what are they trying to tell me here?"

Some sample text for your enjoyment. Quotes are quoted in the magazine, coming from designers and fashionistas, but of course reflect the editorial opinion of Jann Wenner.

Michelle's Campaign Style

Mrs. Obama kept it simple and chic...

"Her style can best be described as timeless"...

"Mrs. Obama possesses a natural and unpretentious sophistication...."

Michelle has "the grace and beauty of a dancer..."

Yes, and the forehead ridges of a Klingon bat'leth warrior.

And, of course, Governor Palin takes a bad picture once in a blue moon. Us Weekly just happened to find one to slap on its cover making her look a bit like a vampiric Barbra Streisand. And now that the left is absolutely terrified of her, what a shock, every other picture of her is a bad one.

Jann Wenner should stick to what he knows, and just keep paying college students to claim that Bjork's new album is "Five Stars -- Brilliant" even though no one believes them or cares, actually, either way.

That, or he should pursue his true area of expertise and begin publishing Bisexual Douchebag Star-Fucker Quarterly.

Obama's Fingerprints Are All Over It: The publisher? Huge Obama supporter. The executive that sent out "helpful" emails that this wonderful article might "guide" us through the Palin news? A former Clinton White House operative. His Florida chairman and MoveOn.org, which of course endorsed him, are furiously emailing libelous claims insinuating that Palin is a Nazi sympathizer.

And yet Obama says he doesn't want any of this sort of attack on Palin's family, and that he practices a new, better politics generally.

So how come the Idiot Messiah's cultists don't listen?

If Obama presumes to lead a nation, shouldn't he be able to lead his most loyal followers first and foremost?

BTW, the Idiot Messiah has thusfar refused to release his college transcripts to the public. I guess I'm supposed to assume his grades were so scary-high I'd be threatened by his incandescent brilliance.

No sale, dummy. And it's astonishing that after the Daily Kos Media has made college grades and SAT scores such an important matter in presidential politics in recent years, they don't even bother to ask the Idiot Messiah for his.

Power Glutes: Defending his viciously insane Trig Trutherism:

Because Palin is a total unknown and because her past is so colorful, to say the least, and because there are only two months before the election, the media has jumped all over it. That's our job. They have compressed in five or six days what was raised about Obama over twelve months. Of course it seems tougher right now. But I don't believe it is. If Obama's family were as colorful as Palin's, you can bet the press would have been all over it.

Um, what's "colorful, to say the least" about her life?

Do you consider heterosexual procreative sex that exotic? Are you that provinicial?

The "colorful" aspect of her life, I imagine, is the pregnancy she faked while her daughter carried her grandson Trig to term, and then took that baby on as her own.

That's what this brain-deteriorated X-dosing freak is referring to. As previous emails indicated, he still believed in the viability of this grotesque baby-swapping conspiracy as of yesterday.

And this steroid-addled lunatic fancies himself an expert on what constitutes a "colorful" life.

And the once-respectable Atlantic magazine keeps this gibbering left-wing Bircher on the payroll because, um, I have no idea. I guess because like many they've bought into Andrew Sullivan not for his talent (rather modest) but for his exotic self-invented identity of "Gay Catholic Conservative Contrarian."

Well, he's not Cathoic anymore, by his own proclamation, he's not conservative, despite his increasingly laughable (and increasingly insulting) claims to the contrary, and he's hardly contrarian, given that half of his writings are standard-issue liberal pap of the sort one could find at DKos or other hyperpartisan leftist sites (indeed, that's where he finds this pap in the first place) and the other half consists of conspiracy theories of such exquisitely baroque derangement that even Hermann Goering's cheeks would blush in embarrassment.

Contrarian? Or simply crank?

And, of course, he finds even those bizarre fantasias on left-wing websites, too. He's not even an imaginative self-starter of a conspiracy loon.

Oh, and increasingly, he's given to expressing that sort of casually thoughtless form of plummy anti-Semitism that only educated Britons still seem to believe is charming.

So what's left?

He's gay.

And that's it. Anything else I'm missing?

Frankly, if you want a gay hyperpartisan reflexive brain-dead liberal with dubious skills and declining psychological stability, why not just cut out the middleman and hire one of the anonymous diarists on Daily Kos to do write for the Atlantic?

Why pay Andrew Sullivan a salary when a finder's fee would suffice?

And why not pay a good, solid American to provide this sort of deranged gutter-running for you? Based on what I can see, there are tens of thousands of writers of Sullivan's dubious quality and limited appeal, born and bred right here in the USA (alas).

"Colorful:" I just remembered why that word was sticking in my head.

It's because it's the word Sullivan used to wink-wink call Fred Thompson a queer (yet another salacious, unsourced rumor he found on far-left web-site's comments sections and immediately trotted out, without the most basic attempts at fact-checking or comment-seeking in The Atlantic magazine).

Remember?

Outside the extremist, activist base, regular GOP voters turn out to be relatively tolerant when it comes to sexual minorities and private sex lives. They’re not well represented by their party leaders, as far as policy is concerned. This is good news for Fred Thompson. The man has had a colorful and wide-ranging sex life, as I’m sure we will soon find out.

Wonkette, which never heard a gay rumor it wouldn't print, immediately translated:

Translated: COUGH COUGH GAY COUGH COUGH FRED THOMPSON IS GAY GAY GAY COUGH COUGH

But that’s not all.

Sullivan is not even close to the first person we’ve heard float this particular rumor, not that that says anything as to its truth.

And, indeed, a quick google search confirmed that lefties were in fact chumming the water with this rumor...

Is Fred Thompson on the Downlow? Posted by Susie in The Regime, Politics As Usual, Theocracy (July 5, 2007 at 8:02 am)

Why are all his ex-girlfriends so eager to come to the defense of his manliness?

Why did James Dobson say he was “un-Christian”?

Why is Rush Limbaugh complaining about the coverage of Thompson as sex symbol, saying, “There’s something wrong here”?

Lots and lots of rumors. I’ve heard them myself - I’ve even talked to someone who has witnessed some interesting behavior. I noticed when the Washington Post recently profiled him, several of the local commenters reacted along the lines of “I thought he was gay?”

Andrew Sullivan, preposterously, claimed he meant nothing of the sort, and hadn't heard a thing about this gay rumor circulating on left-wing sites (the sort of sites that he reads, and even if he doesn't read them, gets tipped about them), and that he merely meant that he heard Fred Thompson was a good kisser from some Southern woman.

Funny, he hadn't bothered to clarify that while getting hits from Wonkette asserting that his statement was code for "faggot."

It was my theory then, as it is now, that Sullivan lied because he knew his publisher would go ape-shit if he learned his magazine was being turned into a gay-gossip site by Sullivan.

And now? I believe Sullivan has been told to stop floating vicious rumors about Palin by his bosses, and so instead resorts to the wink-wink subterfuges of Page 6 and other gossip columns, employing code whose meaning everyone understands but, crucially, will not convict in a libel case.

I wonder if his publisher is aware of the "colorful" rumors he's still peddling, though.

If Sullivan wants to be the Michael Musto of the internet, he should own that. If he aspires to be the next Perez Hilton (and I'm sure they exchange emails!), then he should live that fantasy.

But this insane bullshit at The Atlantic? Where solid writers are attempting to discuss policy soberly, and yet share a masthead with Sullivan, busily pumping out every gay rumor or, erm, every fake-pregnancy-changeling-baby-fat-suited-governor rumor, that floats into his addled transom?

I would think they'd be a bit upset by the diminishment of their brand.

Which, incidententally, they are. Here's Douthat:

All Class

...

But given his primary-season insistence on his own credentials as a feminist, you'd think that Andrew would confine his attacks on Palin to critiquing her record and mocking her lack of experience, rather than, say, posting emails accusing her of being a bad mother for accepting the nomination, snickering over her children's names, and razzing her as a bimbo and a "trophy candidate."

Another post referred to "colleagues I once respected" peddling unhinged filth about Palin. Gee, I wonder whom he might have had in mind.

I'm calling my shot: He's gone by the end of September.

posted by Ace at 02:09 AM

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