Was The Weekly Standard Advertising Itself for Purchase by Leftist Billionaires?

ITEM: The Weekly Standard's corporate owner, MediaDC, told it that it was not interested in continuing the magazine but permitted it to find another buyer "months" ago.

The magazine's precarious position comes after its leadership spent months searching for a buyer, the people told CNN.

The people explained that The Weekly Standard's leadership had butted heads with MediaDC, the current publisher of the magazine, and that the two parties had agreed to allow Hayes to search for a new owner.

However, MediaDC recently informed The Weekly Standard's leadership that the company was no longer interested in a sale, the people said.

That sounds like spin to me-- spin from the Weekly Standard partisans, looking to damage MediaDC for finally getting sick of floating their layabout, endlessly subsidized asses.

What MediaDC probably said was We are no longer interested in funding you while you futilely look for a buyer.

I'm sure MediaDC would unload this piece of shit if someone actually wanted to buy it. But MediaDC has been forced to pay for this failure while they're looking for a suitor. What they're not looking to do is continue flushing money into the toilet while Senorita Hayes searches for a Spanish Suitor in Barthelona.

ITEM: The Standard routinely rejects pieces that are not explicitly anti-Trump. Even pieces that simply point out media bias are rejected because they could be construed as, indirectly supporting Trump given that the media is Trump's partisan enemy.

Even pieces pushing normal orthodox conservatism are unwanted, because, I believe the thinking goes, Trump mostly supports orthodox conservatism so a piece that supports orthodox conservatism could be construed as indirectly supporting Trump.

Presenting a piece that attacks Fusion GPS can even get you fired.

ITEM: The Weekly Standard has taken a harder and harder left turn as their deadline to sell approached. For example, in July, the Weekly Standard ran a cover story hit piece on Devin Nunes by... a Democrat staffer on the Intelligence Committee. (By the way, they identified her as "minority counsel on the Intelligence Committee" instead of "Democrat counsel" because... well, it seems obvious they wanted to avoid that word, no? Maybe some people wouldn't notice.)

That's a strange career trajectory, isn't it? Partisan Democrat legislative counsel to... cover story writer for an allegedly conservative magazine?

POSSIBLE CONCLUSION: The Weekly Standard first sought out a rich moderate Republican to buy the magazine, then maybe an alleged "independent," and then, in the last few months, began trying to make the magazine 100% friendly to a full-on leftist purchaser like Pierre Omidyar or Tom Steyer or Michael Bloomberg.

Or who knows: Maybe even George Soros.

All I know is that that it became "antisemitic" to note that George Soros funds the left as George Soros began funding more and more of the former right.

These bad-faith charges of antisemitism were promulgated by Weekly Standard personnel.

As they grew more desperate, they scrambled to make the magazine more and more friendly to the left, scrubbing out anything that could even be construed as vaguely supportive of standard conservatism -- except where a clear attack line on the left's enemy Trump presented itself.

But they failed. Not even a leftist wanted to buy a tainted, failing magazine, even just to continue demoralizing the conservative movement (as the Weekly Standard has been doing for several years running).

Possibility? The revelation that Pierre Omidyar was funding Kristol & Co., and the bad press both sides got out of that revelation, spooked the intended White Knight buyer Omidyar from bailing the piece of shit out.

Speculation, obviously.

posted by Ace of Spades at 12:30 PM

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