Sam Smith: Sycophants To Sociopaths

Few things get the conventional media more riled up than one of its own who doesn't play by the rules, such as the requirement demanding sycophancy towards whatever sociopaths currently lead the country and, coincidentally, provide the propaganda that the media passes on as news.

Thus it is that Kitty Kelly is under full fire these days: unreliable, sensational, lack of facts and so forth. So just for fun, we've been reading these attacks to learn some facts about Kitty Kelly and all we've found is the unreliable, sensational and a lack of facts. Kelly, who has never been successfully sued, apparently does her mischief so cleverly that the uptight media toadies power can only allude to it without actual citation. A typical example from the NY Times' Michiko Kakutani

"Though Doubleday is promoting Ms. Kelley as 'a master investigative biographer,' she lavishes all too much of her admirable energy on trying to ferret out personal peccadilloes, ranging from drug and alcohol binges to temper tantrums, from weight problems to bad taste in gift-giving. Certainly family members (particularly George W. Bush, running in the aftermath of the Bill Clinton scandals) have to some degree invited this sort of scrutiny by selling themselves as a close, wholesome, all-American clan, but Ms. Kelley's relentless concentration on these matters, often to the exclusion of far more serious issues, makes for a tacky, voyeuristic and petty-seeming narrative."

This from a paper that consistently misled its readers on the far more serious issue of what was going on in Iraq.

The preferred alternative to the Kitty Kellys of the world is someone like columnist Jonathan Yoder who in his new memoir writes of having dinner with George Will and the Washington Post's Meg Greenfield: "I would have said at the time that there had been no more stellar gathering of journalistic stylists since Walter Lippmann dined alone."

Age has encouraged little modesty for later Yoder complains about the treatment of his efforts by editor Greenfield: "I had no doubts about the standard of craftsmanship; only George Will's seemed to me, so far as I could judge, consistently higher."

This, gentle reader, is how people in Washington actually talk. As Isaiah Berlin noted way back in 1943: "No town has ever taken itself so seriously with so little reason." And when you take yourself that seriously, intimations that those up to whom one sucks might be sleazeballs, coke addicts, or just plain crooks is just too much to bear.

Go for it, Kitty.

© Scoop Media