"'I couldn’t be a woman,' Steve Martin once joked, 'because I’d play with my breasts all day.'"

"Now he has written a novel about a young woman, but nearly the only thing he can imagine about her is wanting to play with her breasts. The Object of Beauty is a nasty exercise in narcissism, particularly in the narcissism of the famous."

A nasty review that considers a book nasty because it seems only to say look at my breasts begins with 2 sentences that say look at my breasts.

"So, yes, I wonder whether I need honor these people and pretend that they are worthy of the privileges of the First Amendment which I have in my gut the sense that they will abuse."

Marty Peretz, The New Republic's owner, opines about Muslims.

The New Republic illustrates a serious piece about the Tea Party movement with a gross photograph that's meant to evoke the pejorative "teabagger."

Here's the article. Quite apart from the childishness of evoking the term "teabagger" and creating a image to convey the term (to those in the know), it's quite an offense to Mark Skoda, whose name appears next to the image. Since there is no caption, it creates the impression that that is a picture of Mark Skoda! I'm surprised TNR isn't more careful about provoking lawsuits. Basically, TNR is flaunting its stupidity here.

Maybe they don't want us to take the serious article seriously.

Ironically, that's a reason to read it.

... I couldn’t help but watch Skoda as he sat in a huge ballroom on the convention’s second night, listening to Joseph Farah, the mustachioed editor of the far-right-wing website WorldNetDaily, work the crowd of 600 into a frenzy. “If Barack Obama even seeks reelection as president in 2012, he won’t be able to go to any city, any hamlet in America without seeing signs that ask, ‘Where’s the birth certificate?’” Farah crowed from the podium.

Mustachioed? Now, we're left wondering if that's Farah in the photograph.

[Skoda] couldn’t have been pleased. Skoda and convention mastermind Judson Phillips have ambitious goals for the Tea Party movement. They aim to build their respective groups (Skoda is founding a Tea Party PAC; Phillips heads an organization called Tea Party Nation) into political players that can influence votes and tug candidates in their direction. But their quandary is as plain as the expression on Skoda’s face during Farah’s paranoid Friday night monologue: How can a movement whose base detests mainstream politics--not to mention, has a few screws loose--possibly build political clout?...

Skoda rationalizes some of the Tea Party’s rough edges as a necessity of movement-building. “I think it’s always useful to get people excited,” he says. “Part of this movement is visceral. It’s perfectly okay.” But he is much more interested in practical politics than in bombast....

Political realism, however, isn’t what the Tea Party base wants to hear....

To the sidelined activists, Skoda’s approach and the Nashville convention are the antithesis of what the movement should be about....

Whether the tea partiers will prove too busy fighting among themselves to fight the Republicans, the Democrats, and the system writ large is anyone’s guess. But Skoda is pragmatic enough to know that he can’t cut the non-pragmatists out of the coalition altogether. 

Ironically, the author of this article — Lydia DePillis — is a Mark Skoda type, sensible, moderate, and analytical. And whoever put that photograph on the article is a Joseph Farah, stirring up the readers, getting people excited and visceral.

UPDATE: TNR has swapped in a different photograph, so it's good that I got the screen capture. The "teabagger" picture also went out in TNR's email alert titled "The New Republic Politics Weekly Newsletter: The Tea Party's frustrated moderates."

ADDED: Ace links here and says: "They only do that one story, eh? The 'moderates' are always so close to ditching the party over the wignuts; we're almost in a state of civil war. It's always that way in the GOP. Now it's that way in the Tea Party, too. Meanwhile, no wingnuttery or frustrated moderates in the Democratic Party, eh?"

The New Republic redesigned its webpage to make things look nicer...

... and wrecked all the old links to it!

"Although I thought Ann's Rush apologism was unseemly and unfounded, I have to say I basically agree with Jon Chait..."

Eve Fairbanks reflects on our Bloggingheads encounter and displays the high regard TNR folk have for other TNR folk.

And what exactly is Apologism? (Homophone fans see "Apollo jism.") Wikipedia says:

Apologism is the metaphysical philosophy that argues that it is wrong for humans to attempt to alter the conditions of life in the mortal sphere of influence. It is opposed to the idea that absolute "progress" is a desirable goal for the pursuit of human endeavors...

Apologism stands solidly in opposition to the metaphysics of meliorism, which states that absolute "progress" is the desirable goal of all human endeavors. Apologism is not to be confused with apologetics.

Oh, I'm sure it all makes sense over at TNR as explained by Jonathan Chait or some other genius. Over here, we will quaff the nectar of the gods and allow the unseemliness to rage on.

Stodgy old TNR whines about how cool Politco is.

That's how I read this. You have to win readers, you losers. Up your game.