Marjorie Williams and Tucker Carlson
The Spirit of Teddy Roosevelt
By Marjorie Williams
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2000, at 1:16 PM ETDear Tucker,
I sensed in your reply to David Franklin the exasperation of one who has had his own share of mail from strangers who have made instantaneous and severe judgments of his character after watching him on television. I almost never go on television for the simple reason that I think very slowly (and also that I look like a deer caught in the headlights). And when I do, I am reminded of all the reasons not to. I just finished reading the mail that got sent to the Post after I was on Brian Lamb's C-SPAN show. (I love this show. You get up at 6 a.m. to wash your hair in time to get downtown by 7:45, and then when you get there, Brian Lamb asks you on live TV what you thought of this morning's lead story in the Kansas City Star. As if!) Anyway, the mail was mostly about how the [fill in ugly epithets for gays and lesbians here] have taken over the Democratic Party and if I had a single molecule of honesty in my pathetic being I would be pointing this out. No undecided voters in the mailbag.
Anyway, I need to know the size of the pot that Franklin decided to preserve before I can mediate this dispute. I'm mostly just relieved that the woman bet big.
Let's make a pact not to go anywhere near politics today. (I almost went back to bed when I found the Times' nth dispatch from Lansing: "Such is life in a tossup city in a swing district in a battleground state." But my husband and I had to meet with an architect so he could laugh at the idea of finishing our basement by the beginning of next summer. He told us that we would have to wait four months even to see his face again, never mind the contractor's.)
The must-read story in this morning's news is the Wall Street Journal's long, dishy lede treatment of Rupert Murdoch's mysterious wife, 31-year-old Wendi Deng Murdoch. It's the kind of story that makes the Journal's front page such an occasional feast. The nominal, business-y excuse for the story (strangely missing a byline) is that Deng, who was employed by a News Corp. subsidiary when she snagged the 69-year-old chairman, has become a major player in the company's expansion into the Internet and media industries in China.
But of course the delight is in its account of her rise from birth in China ("A good student and a champion volleyball player. ...") to Yale Business School graduate and femme fatale. We learn about her first marriage to one Mr. Cherry, an American she met when he was working in China. Cherry and his then-wife sponsored her move at 19 to the United States and put her up so she could attend college in California; before long, Deng was Mrs. Cherry--for just long enough, the story suggests, to secure her green card. (Definitely the spirit of Teddy Roosevelt here.) "She told me I was a father concept to her, but it would never be anything else. ... I loved that girl," Cherry obligingly told the Journal.
The best part of all is the way she has transformed Murdoch from a pin-striped denizen of the Upper East Side to a SoHo resident who "suddenly started sporting black turtlenecks on some social occasions" and pumps iron with a trainer at 6 a.m.
(Here's a fun fact to know and share: When you type "SoHo" on Microsoft Word, your spell-checker offers up "Coho" as an alternative. Isn't that too, too Seattle of it?)
Apolitically,
Marjorie
The Spirit of Teddy Roosevelt
By Marjorie Williams
Posted Wednesday, Nov. 1, 2000, at 1:16 PM ETMarjorie Williams is the author of a weekly opinion column for the Washington Post
, a contributing writer at Talk
magazine, and a member of Slate's "Book Club." Tucker Carlson writes for the Weekly Standard and Talk
magazine. Reader Comments from The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: The first two posts below comment on different Breakfast Table topics, but we can't help sensing a connection, and a rather cruel blow at the BT participants.
The other important topic is of course Jeopardy. David Franklin's post is here. Kevin Bertsch gives a detailed analysis (we feature the conclusion below) and says "Tucker you still don't understand"--though it seems to us at The Fray that Mr Carlson's words "Blow yourself up before you let yourself squeak by" make it clear he doesn't need to understand strategy. Meriadoc points out that "knowing the answer" doesn't seem to feature in any of this discussion, and there are other comments throughout The Fray.
Elsewhere, Lisa Hancock-Jasie generously gives Tucker Carlson two reasons not to like Rupert Murdoch, and then another two later on.]
I'm aghast at what Carlson and Williams say about their college days. My years at Brown, in physics and then computer science, were the most intensive periods of sustained learning of my life. I guess it's true, very few people go into quantum physics because they can't make it as journalism majors.
--Bob Munck
(To reply, click
here.)
Sure, space colonization isn't getting as much attention as, say, Al Gore's earth tones, or the latest Oprah appearance. No surprise. Columbus' voyage wasn't thought of as important at the time either. That's because the chattering classes, then and now, are more interested in gossip than news. They like to talk about each other, and about the people they fondly imagine they're like, or will be like some day, or at least will have influence over some day.
In all of this, of course, they're mostly wrong. But a close connection to reality has never been the strength of the chattering classes. That's for the boring geeky types who actually change the world.
--A.G.Android
(To reply, click
here.)
[Reaction to
Wednesday's entry:]
In third place, sometimes the right move is to bet everything, sometimes it's to bet nothing, and sometimes you bet part of what you have. David's strategy was perfectly rational, and to have bet everything to avoid appearing 'wimpy' would have been to substitute macho stupidity for brains, which is generally not a winning move on Jeopardy.
--Kevin Bertsch
(To reply, click
here.)
[Reaction to
Tuesday's entry:]
Why do issues like a kiss or Oprah dominate? The answer is because the press, and by this I mean the working press not the pundits, have been reduced to recycling AP wire stories churned out by the same five writers for the same five major papers every day. Facts that don't fit preordained story lines are jettisoned. Al Gore is a liar, that's the story, run with it. George Bush doesn't lie, he's stupid, and his misstatements are just good natured mistakes. This is what passes for journalism. The punditocracy, by which I mean those highly paid folks like your own Tucker and Marjorie who take it upon themselves not to be journalists, but to provide their opinion on everything, whether they are qualified in the subject matter or not, have completely punted in this election. It is they who declared that going on Oprah was a good idea. It is they who decided Bush was a frontrunner before the first vote was cast in Iowa. It is they who have declared Clinton-fatigue a factor. It is they who refuse to delve in any depth into the issues of the day.
Ask not for whom Al Gore kisses, he kisses for thee.
--John Burns
(To reply, click
here.)
[Reaction to
Monday's
entry:]
One key sign that it doesn't look good for Gore is Joe Lieberman's decision to remain in the Senate race in Connecticut. Based on that decision, I suspect that the Dem's internal polling numbers look worse than the public tracking polls. If Lieberman either loses the Vice Presidency or withdraws from the Senate race, the seat would be a shoe-in for the Democrats, while if Gore/Lieberman win, it will be assured for the Republicans. If it looked like Lieberman might be the next Vice President, there would be a lot of pressure on him to withdraw from the Senate race.
--J.Travers
(To reply, click
here.)
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Reader Comments from The Fray:
[Notes from the Fray Editor: The first two posts below comment on different Breakfast Table topics, but we can't help sensing a connection, and a rather cruel blow at the BT participants.
The other important topic is of course Jeopardy. David Franklin's post is here. Kevin Bertsch gives a detailed analysis (we feature the conclusion below) and says "Tucker you still don't understand"--though it seems to us at The Fray that Mr Carlson's words "Blow yourself up before you let yourself squeak by" make it clear he doesn't need to understand strategy. Meriadoc points out that "knowing the answer" doesn't seem to feature in any of this discussion, and there are other comments throughout The Fray.
Elsewhere, Lisa Hancock-Jasie generously gives Tucker Carlson two reasons not to like Rupert Murdoch, and then another two later on.]
I'm aghast at what Carlson and Williams say about their college days. My years at Brown, in physics and then computer science, were the most intensive periods of sustained learning of my life. I guess it's true, very few people go into quantum physics because they can't make it as journalism majors.
--Bob Munck
(To reply, click here.)
Sure, space colonization isn't getting as much attention as, say, Al Gore's earth tones, or the latest Oprah appearance. No surprise. Columbus' voyage wasn't thought of as important at the time either. That's because the chattering classes, then and now, are more interested in gossip than news. They like to talk about each other, and about the people they fondly imagine they're like, or will be like some day, or at least will have influence over some day.
In all of this, of course, they're mostly wrong. But a close connection to reality has never been the strength of the chattering classes. That's for the boring geeky types who actually change the world.
--A.G.Android
(To reply, click here.)
[Reaction to Wednesday's entry:]
In third place, sometimes the right move is to bet everything, sometimes it's to bet nothing, and sometimes you bet part of what you have. David's strategy was perfectly rational, and to have bet everything to avoid appearing 'wimpy' would have been to substitute macho stupidity for brains, which is generally not a winning move on Jeopardy.
--Kevin Bertsch
(To reply, click here.)
[Reaction to Tuesday's entry:]
Why do issues like a kiss or Oprah dominate? The answer is because the press, and by this I mean the working press not the pundits, have been reduced to recycling AP wire stories churned out by the same five writers for the same five major papers every day. Facts that don't fit preordained story lines are jettisoned. Al Gore is a liar, that's the story, run with it. George Bush doesn't lie, he's stupid, and his misstatements are just good natured mistakes. This is what passes for journalism. The punditocracy, by which I mean those highly paid folks like your own Tucker and Marjorie who take it upon themselves not to be journalists, but to provide their opinion on everything, whether they are qualified in the subject matter or not, have completely punted in this election. It is they who declared that going on Oprah was a good idea. It is they who decided Bush was a frontrunner before the first vote was cast in Iowa. It is they who have declared Clinton-fatigue a factor. It is they who refuse to delve in any depth into the issues of the day.
Ask not for whom Al Gore kisses, he kisses for thee.
--John Burns
(To reply, click here.)
[Reaction to Monday's entry:]
One key sign that it doesn't look good for Gore is Joe Lieberman's decision to remain in the Senate race in Connecticut. Based on that decision, I suspect that the Dem's internal polling numbers look worse than the public tracking polls. If Lieberman either loses the Vice Presidency or withdraws from the Senate race, the seat would be a shoe-in for the Democrats, while if Gore/Lieberman win, it will be assured for the Republicans. If it looked like Lieberman might be the next Vice President, there would be a lot of pressure on him to withdraw from the Senate race.
--J.Travers
(To reply, click here.)