Sad. And The Atlantic, former home of the late-great Michael Kelley, has fallen far in recent times.

She is a bundle of contradictions in terms of politics, and I think you are correct that her views seem to be influenced to a great degree by classism and a desire to be liked by the right sort of people. Oddly enough Her husband works (worked?) at a conservative thinktank. People (a writer at Playboy, IIRC, oddly enough) have raised a stink over that related to the Tea Party movement, impling that he was secretly influencing her blogposts that were at least not uniformly critical of them.

She used to be far more libertarian, even verging on conservative at times but as she has moved into NY-DC media circles (Business Week, I think, then the Atlantic) she’s adopted conventional liberal attitudes about most topics while remaining fairly conservative in economics. She’s had Sullivan-like drift to an anti-Bush stance though I think the influence for her was more the Iraq war.

She was a strong opponent of HCR and got a lot of grief from her liberal readers for it. Her acceptance of liberal memes really comes out when she dashes off a quick post about an emerging story or blogs about a topic outside economic. She uncritically accepted the ‘they were bugging Landrieu’s office’ story about James O’Keefe, and was clearly happy to see him (supposedly) taken down a peg or two. She’s also had a hard time admitting that the revelations about the CRU have pretty much proven theories of AGW to be a fraud.

I’ll take your word for it and admit that I have never regularly read either magazine. Perhaps I was too hasty in my previous comment. I was a casual reader of Sullivan’s pre-Atlantic blog for awhile, never realizing that he self-identified as a conservative. If Sullivan is a conservative then I’m an Eskimo. I thought of him as an entertaining liberal blogger, but left off when he contracted Bush Derangement Syndrome. I sent him an email telling him why and received an email back which was of the “good riddance” variety. I’m sure I was not missed.

I read McArdle on-line because she manages to write fluently about economics — an area in which I need to be educated. I have found most writers on economic issues to be poor writers. She seems to be a nice, caring person who purports to be a libertarian but who is(as far as I can tell) actually a liberal with libertarian economic traits. She seems to buy into most of the Progressive political memes. She voted for Obama because she was afraid that McCain would have started a war with Iran — or so she has implied. My guess is that she simply could not identify psychologically with the McCain/Palin duo, they being too far afield of the class and intellectual milieu she aspires to and probably has big problems with social conservatism — an attitude with which I can emphathize. On foreign policy she seems to be Progressive but it’s not a subject that she writes about very often so that too is a guess on my part.

Hitchens has long been a favorite of mine. He’s partially sane, having a good viewpoint on certain aspects of foreign policy, but other than that I find little with which to agree. No matter, he is a consummate writer and debater — always worth reading and I love it when he demolishes anti-war types on TV.

Atlantic is, of course, liberal but still a decent magazine. Harper’s has plumb lost its mind.

Sigh. I used to subscribe.

Leaving my biases aside, I must say that most of the slicks and Sunday supplements have lost ground in terms of general readability.

Again and again, I find myself reading articles in which the author overwhelms me with dutiful details and anecdotes, as if to prove to the editor that the expenses of the article were well-spent and the writer has mastered complex cumulative sentences, but I have no idea what the point of the article is.

It’s very frustrating.

And then if you subject, say, a James Fallow article (a mainstay in The Atlantic) to close reading you find that that logic doesn’t hold up any better than an Obama speech. It just takes you longer to parse the darn thing and find the holes.

If Palin were a man Sullivan would heart Palin.

😛