December 08, 2003

LEADER OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIBERAL LUMINARIES

Run for your life, George W. Bush! Somebody named Graydon Carter -- works in publishing, apparently -- is coming after you:

Famous throughout America for his A-list Oscar parties, Carter has picked up the challenge of leading America's intellectual liberal luminaries in a battle against Bush when the race for next November's election gets seriously under way with the primaries after Christmas.

'I feel like a lone voice in the wilderness. But there is a large, seething majority out there against what Bush is doing to this country. This administration is as fundamentalist as the Islamics,' Carter said.

And then he was dragged away and shot. Carter is currently being tormented by another fundamentalist administration:

The mere presence in his elegant office of a clean empty ashtray has ignited a fiery row between the editor of Vanity Fair and New York's rabidly anti-smoking mayor, Michael Bloomberg.

Graydon Carter has accused Mr Bloomberg of harassment after the mayor's tobacco stormtroopers - inspectors from the city's health department - raided the magazine's Times Square building three times, trying to catch Mr Carter smoking.

After next year’s presidential election, they’ll be able to catch him fuming.

Posted by Tim Blair at December 8, 2003 10:49 AM
Comments

One half of the US is searching for WMDs in Iraq while the other half is searching for ash trays in NYC.

Can't we swap halves?

Posted by: ilibcc at December 8, 2003 at 11:44 AM

This administration is as fundamentalist as the Islamics,' Carter said.

Sigh. I wonder if Graydon would like to explain that to Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens and his chum Salman Rushdie. And I wonder if this month's cover, celebrating "TV's Gay Wave" is on sale in Iran or Cuba.

Posted by: Craig Ranapia at December 8, 2003 at 12:27 PM

Graydon Carter, as everybody knows, is the creme de la creme, culturally stratospheric, the very neon of the joint. He bids fair to score goals in all quadrants of competitive achievement in a single campaign:

\ \ \ \ \ \ \/ / / / / / / /
\ power · || · glamour /
› = = = = || = = = = ‹
/ wealth· || ·guruhood\
/ / / / / / /\ \ \ \ \ \ \ \

What is Graydon Carter? He is the vain editor of a successful glossy magazine.

Posted by: ForNow at December 8, 2003 at 01:01 PM

Ashton Kutcher smokes pot with the Bush girls. There are more pot offenders in Texas prisons than all foreign countries combined. Bush is a hypocrite fascist.

Posted by: Rate My Body at December 8, 2003 at 01:09 PM

Okay, then.

Posted by: Dylan at December 8, 2003 at 01:13 PM

Last week a Hollywood bash for the cream of wealthy intellectual society figures in Beverly Hills was starkly themed as a 'Hate Bush' evening.

An all-star, invite only bash for the society elite. I hate people like this, 99.99% of the population does. Nothing could make Bush look better than the condemnation of such people, most of us would vote conservative just to spite them.

And the beauty of it is that they are utterly unaware of how much they are helping Dubya.

Posted by: Amos at December 8, 2003 at 01:34 PM

The Guardian is so deluded it's kind of touching. They take as axiomatic of a number of things which are clearly false.

- The US press is fawning over Bush. (In fact the US newspapers are further to the left than most British ones)

- That what the US left needs is more "intellectual liberal luminaries "

- That criticisng Bush is brave. ( Seriously it must be fucking impossible to move in the US right now due to the great mass of 'voices in the wilderness' which the Guardian regularly discovers.)

- That there is a great mass of people who will be swayed by the editors letter in Vanity Fair.

- That when the Republicans are popular, democracy is 'under threat'.

I duly wait for a US newspaper to start writing twittering articles about how Tony Blair is under serious threat by British intellectual luminaries led by the editor of the Radio Times.

Posted by: Ross at December 8, 2003 at 01:49 PM

LOL Ross. (The "impossible to move" comment in particular.)

Carter's fame peaked after 9/11 when he presciently announced the death of irony (though "gone underground" would have been more apt).

Unfortunately he seems to have replaced irony with a wild-eyed earnestness out of all proportion to its target. We're seeing a lot of that, actually.

Did he really say "The Islamics"?

Posted by: Joe Geoghegan at December 8, 2003 at 02:04 PM

"Ashton Kutcher smokes pot with the Bush girls."

Nothing says "I have absolutely no valid argument" better than changing the subject.

Posted by: Dave S. at December 8, 2003 at 02:19 PM

But there is a large, seething majority

It's stopped whining?

Posted by: Andjam at December 8, 2003 at 02:19 PM

"I feel like a lone voice in the wilderness. But there is a large, seething majority out there against what Bush is doing to this country."

A lone voice that is part of the majority? By Carter's logic, the population of the US is 1.

This guy is an editor?

Posted by: Dave S. at December 8, 2003 at 02:24 PM

Graydon Carter may be the most pompous man the 21st Century has heard from.

Posted by: ForNow at December 8, 2003 at 02:39 PM

"Graydon"? - Says it all...

Posted by: Sean at December 8, 2003 at 02:58 PM

seethe, seethe - only conjures Graydon dribbling down his chin.

Posted by: d at December 8, 2003 at 02:59 PM

Who the hell is Graydon Carter? Is he related to Spalding Gray? Or maybe Gray Davis? How about Nell Carter?

Speaking as someone who lives east of Manhattan, which means I don't really exist to most Manhattanites, Mr. Carter's political influence is a figment of his bloviating imagination.

I'm sure he believes a majority of Americans are mad at Dubya because everyone he talks to is mad at the president. The day after the election, he's going to wonder how G.W. was re-elected; after all he didn't know a soul who voted for him.

Posted by: Polly at December 8, 2003 at 03:02 PM

Every year I sit alone in front of my tv on Oscar night. As I sit munching on pork rinds and swigging wine from a box I think, (like I'm sure millions of Americans do) "Gee, I wonder what's on the menu at Graydon Carter's A-list Oscar party? I just bet they're chowing down pate and that there wine that comes with a cork"!

Posted by: Kelly at December 8, 2003 at 03:03 PM

Or should I say WEST of Manhattan. (I even previewed the damn thing.) Oh well, it's been a long weekend.

Posted by: Polly at December 8, 2003 at 03:05 PM

If so, then Graydon Carter is the most pompous man the Third Millennium has heard from.

Posted by: ForNow at December 8, 2003 at 03:06 PM

Graydon Carter is Canadian.

Posted by: Geoff Honnor at December 8, 2003 at 03:35 PM

I might say that Graydon Carter is the most pompous ass but that’s to assume that he has one.

Posted by: ForNow at December 8, 2003 at 03:36 PM

Strange, it would seem that if there was a "large, seething majority," it would be somewhere other than in Hollywood cocktail parties, Stalinist anti-American protests, and Democratic presidential debates.

Posted by: Big Dog at December 8, 2003 at 03:53 PM

Rate My Body: That's totally off-topic and, even though I agree that marijuana should be legalized, calling the enforcement of drug laws fascism is a dangerous dilution of the word. When the left throws out words like "fascist" and "nazi" at everyone they disagree with those words lose all meaning.

More importantly, how can you complain about guys commenting on your rack when you post that picture of yourself? It's an overhead view and that blouse is cut pretty low. And if you don't like guys commenting on your body, why would you post anything on a site called Rate My Body. I'm sorry if this offends you, but you really do have a lovely rack.

Posted by: Xavier at December 8, 2003 at 04:24 PM

Whoops. I apologize for that last post. I just realized that the link she gave went to a random picture and profile so the one I was commenting on probably wasn't hers.

Posted by: Xavier at December 8, 2003 at 04:27 PM

Graydon Carter used to be editor of Spy magazine before Vanity Fair. He is a Canadian. Kind of like like Brett Easton Ellis lite.

Posted by: alcuith at December 8, 2003 at 04:42 PM

Will the terrorists allow Carter to smoke a last cigarette before they execute him?

Posted by: Perfectsense at December 8, 2003 at 06:14 PM

ForNow,

Carter must have an ass because his head is undoubtedly stuck in it.

And Kelly is right, who the hell reads Vanity Fair or gives a shit about its Oscar party? Sheesh.

Graydon Carter is one of those wealthly leftist with servants who thinks he knows what's best for everyone else in America. You know, the one's those on the left say don't exsist in the people's party the Democratic party.

And lastly this statement, "I feel like a lone voice in the wilderness. But there is a large, seething majority out there against what Bush is doing to this country. This administration is as fundamentalist as the Islamics," is empirical proof that Graydon Carter is a uninformed moron.

Posted by: Harry at December 8, 2003 at 07:43 PM

If he's "famous throughout Americur" how is it that hardly a soul ever heard of him?

Posted by: Joe at December 8, 2003 at 11:08 PM

Graydon Carter? Who?
I'll call him the next time I need a party catered.

Posted by: ed at December 8, 2003 at 11:13 PM

I loved Spy magazine, so it hurts to realize that Graydon either has become, or always has been, such an ass.

When I look through my old issues of Spy (I have every issue from '89 through '93 or so), I see that Republicans were bashed thoroughly - but so were Democrats. ANYone with power/money/prestige who was a cheeseball got bashed. Spy was both very funny and very even-handed, much in the way the current Onion is.

Sad to see that Graydon has become, in fact, what he once used to attack. Once, Spy launched a sassy, rude article on Tina Brown when SHE was the vain, megalomaniacal head of Vanity Fair. Now that Graydon's there, he's forgotten what's it's like not to have his head in the celebrity-infested clouds.

Fitting justice that the blogosphere is serving the purpose that Spy once did.

Posted by: Kimberly at December 9, 2003 at 07:25 AM

Yes well we may call Graydon Carter an ass but the fact of the matter remains that very few assumptions should be made about Graydon Carter anatomically. He should just return to Mars.

I never read Spy & it’s indeed interesting to think that he has become the very type of his erstwhile objects of scorn—& now stands (or prances) revealed as such under a thousand points of blogospheric light!

Tim is quite unpompous though he may deny it. He was an editor at a successful glossy, Time. Maybe what saved him was that he wasn’t the chief editor, not that I knew or know who the chief editor is. The Atlantic’s Michael Kelly was not pompous. But it seems to me that pomposity is statistically overrepresented among heads of successful glossies. A kind of smugly expansive attitude of having influence &/or of reflecting the world entire. Norman Cousins was pompous sometimes. Hugh Hefner absolutely. But ecce Graydon Carter!—he’s, well, he’s superpompous!

Posted by: ForNow at December 9, 2003 at 08:32 AM