Proof that MSNBC is not a business

Say what you will about the pro-Republican bias of Fox News, the network is at least profitable, its commerical success evidence that there is a market for conservative news. MSNBC's ratings suck, chiefly because its programming decisions are transparently political rather than commercial.

In June, MSNBC debuted a mid-day medical show featuring Dr. Nancy Snyderman, who relentlessly shilled on behalf of the Democrats' health-care legislation (including taxpayer-funded abortion). "Dr. Nancy" got cancelled yesterday, and Ken Shepherd of Newsbusters remarks:

I can't help but thinking that Snyderman's program outlived its usefulness for MSNBC. Why else did Snyderman get to anchor an hour-long program but to push ObamaCare, supposedly with the gravitas that an M.D. can lend to the health care issue by virtue of profession alone.
Now that the bill is set to pass the Senate, Snyderman's program is of little marginal benefit to pushing the network's political agenda, particularly since she's a proven ratings loser.

Perfect proof that MSNBC's programming decisions are strictly a function of the Democratic Party's political agenda. And when the agenda focus shifts? Hasta la vista, Dr. Nancy!

A friendly note to James Wolcott

Jeff Goldstein could kill you with his bare hands. And probably should, but I doubt he will. However, it would be unfortunate if I were to log on one day and see this top headline at Memeorandum:

MANHUNT FOR GOLDSTEIN
Police Seek Blogger in Columnist's
Brutal Dismemberment Slaying

Don't hate the player, hate the game. The viciousness of online discourse has been pondered from many perspectives, but it really comes down to the fact that people think they can say anything they want and never get their asses kicked for it.

Remember the Sparkman case? Sully was wetting his pants over "Southern populist terrorism" and Rick Ungar was screaming "Send the Body to Glenn Beck." In that atmosphere of fear-mongering pundit panic, I decided one Saturday night to try to do some actual reporting and, after a couple of calls, managed to get a law-enforcement official in Kentucky on the phone:

"You'd be surprised what some of these morons write on the Internet . . . that they wouldn't say to somebody's face," the official said in a brief telephone interview.

Exactly. I guarantee that under no circumstances would you, James Wolcott, taunt Jeff to his face. But you have no compunction about sitting there at your computer, on Conde Nast's dime, making fun of a guy you've never met and whom most of your readers never heard of.

Pretty, Popular and Vicious
This "Mean Girls" vibe is an unexpected consequence of online discourse. When I was a kid in school, I used to marvel at the way girls were always doing that evil gossip-clique thing: "You can't be her friend because she said such-and-such to so-and-so and I hate her."

Girl culture is so much more vicious than boy culture because boys are naturally prone to settle matters with their fists. The biggest boy in third grade may be an obnoxious jerk, but his superior potential for violence means that other boys are faced with a choice:

• Stay out of his way;
• Try to be his friend; or
• Form an alliance with other pipsqueaks so that if the big kid gets mad at you, he'll have to fight more than one of you.

Because girls don't routinely risk violence in their conflicts, their viciousness toward each other is unrestrained, and the clique mentality reigns in girl culture -- back-biting gossip, secret rivalries and all the rest.

Girl culture can also be described as the "culture of niceness," because popularity among girls is so largely a function of who is superficially "nice," in terms of appearance and comportment. This is why girls are so keen on fashion and grooming, whereas boys don't care about that crap. If you score the winning touchdown, nobody cares about your hairstyle.

Mean Girls in the Intelligentsia
Now, to bring this back to the blogosphere, you see an extreme example of a problem that is ubiquitous in intellectual life and more generally in "civilized" white-collar environments, where physical violence is considered an impossibility.

When a policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation gets upset with a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, the one outcome that can be ruled out in advance is that the Heritage guy will jump in his car, drive over to Cato, storm into the office of his antagonist and invite him out to the parking lot to settle their argument like men.

This is all for the good except that, absent the possibility of an occasional ass-kicking, denizens of the think-tank world start behaving like girls on the third-grade playground, constantly backstabbing each other and forming snobby little cliques.

Steiner's Law -- "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog" -- expresses the essential bogusness of virtual discourse, where a flame-war between rival bloggers passes for a Titanic Struggle for the Soul of America, even though it's merely a collection of words posted online and read by a few thousand people in a nation of 300 million.

People don't like to be insulted and, in a real-world setting, civilized people refrain from insulting others directly -- especially if the person they're insulting is someone who might kick their ass. In the real world, Jeff Goldstein is not accustomed to being insulted and if you, James Wolcott, had ever met Goldstein, you sure as hell wouldn't be taunting him with lyrics from a Village People song.

It's extremely unlikely that Goldstein will show up on your doorstep, brandishing a blood-spattered arm -- torn from the corpse of a California Jew-hater, prior to driving cross-country to confront you -- and bellowing in murderous rage: "Wolcott, you cowardly bastard, come out here and meet your doom, or I'll kick down your door!"

Extremely unlikely, I say. But crazier things have happened.

UPDATE: Moe Lane's Quote of the Day. Moe is an easygoing, mild-mannered guy. Most people don't realize that Moe's day job is ninja warrior.

Meanwhile, one of the glories of the post-racial Obama Age is that it's once again safe for guys named "Schultz" to suggest violence against guys named "Lieberman":

What is the feeling towards Joe Lieberman? I mean how do you, you know, go into a room without punching the guy out after what he’s done to the progressive movement in this country?

Ed Schultz is speaking on behalf of the progressive movement, so he can't be held responsible if somebody actually does a beatdown on the Jew. I'm sure Joe will be deeply moved when he and Hadassah get a Happy Hannukah card from their progressive friends at MSNBC.

UPDATE II: Little Miss Attila is upset that I haven't linked her. Donald Douglas at American Power links with some vintage punk rock, and Jimmie Bise at Sundries Shack also links (but without punk rock).

Jackie Seal, American hero

Grilled by MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell at a Palin book signing, where 17-year-old Jackie was wearing a T-shirt that said: "The US government handed out $700 billion in Wall Street bailouts and all I got was this lousy T-shirt."

And you've got to love Jackie's description of the core principles: "The Constitution was written so that government would be limited and so that it didn't become out-of-control and was in the hands of the people."

You can bet she didn't learn that in public school.

UPDATE: Wow, I just discovered that Jackie is one of my Twitter friends. I had no idea who she was, but it turns out my hunch was right: She didn't learn that in public school. She attends a Christian academy and has already signed a soccer scholarship for a Christian college.

Oh, yeah, and "progressive" blog-trolls hate her. It's only a matter of time before she's denounced by Rachel Maddow. She may even make Keith Olbermann's "Worst Person In The World" list, which is every young conservative's life-goal nowadays.

UPDATE II: Dude! She's got a blog! (Listen, Jackie, my twin sons are also 17 years old. Both Christian home-schooled kids. They're probably unworthy of you, but just keep them in mind, OK?)

When I dreamed long ago of appearing some day on 'Meet the Press' . . .

. . . this wasn't quite what I had in mind (7:40 mark):

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Rachel Maddow has got several facts wrong, and you know what? I'm going to let her try to figure out which facts she's got wrong. She gets paid by MSNBC to report the facts, and as she goes about the process of proving she couldn't find her own ass with both hands, I'll be content to watch and laugh.

How many times have I said that it's a long story, and that I'm not going to tell the whole thing until somebody pays me for the story? There are very good reasons I've kept calm, and resisted the temptation to confirm or deny this, that or the other specific point in their "Ransom Note Method" indictment. In such a situation, it's important to keep in mind your rights under Miranda v. Arizona. I don't have to explain myself or prove a negative.

Let Rachel Maddow find out for herself that, for example, Donkey Cons wasn't Lynn Vincent's most recent book. Or let her get in touch with novelist Tito Perdue or Stogie at Saberpoint and ask them to explain some of this. There is no obligation for me to speak a word in my own defense.

When the Left first came after me with this stuff eight years ago, I was under orders not to respond. Difficult, but it gave me a lot of time to contemplate, to watch how they do this to people (like they did to George Allen in 2006) and I think this painful education has taught me a thing or two about dealing with crap like this.

Remember: Being notorious isn't the same as being famous, but it's better than being anonymous.

(Hat-tip: Professor Donald Douglas, who still needs to apologize to Attila and Cassandra, if he wants to regain his "known associate" credentials.)

UPDATE (Smitty): Cythia Yockey musters the artillery for some solid counter-battery fire.

UPDATE II (RSM): Stogie at Saberpoint brings the cavalry. You can read the "Meet the Press" transcript, as I'm sure Sarah Palin and Lynn Vincent's lawyers will be doing quite carefully . . .

UPDATE III (Smitty):Fishersville Mike plays a heavy guilt-by-association card. Wow.

UPDATE IV (Smitty): Picks himself up after being knocked over by the Most Powerful 'Ahem' Ever Recorded. Thank you, Little Miss Attila.

Media Matters attacks . . . MSNBC?

Why would one crooked left-wing smear operation attack another crooked left-wing smear operation?

Two words: Pat Buchanan. (That's a post at the personal blog of Media Matters employee Oliver Willis, who spent hours Twittering his attacks on Buchanan.)

Notice that the Left was OK with Pat being on MSNBC as an anti-war Republican during the Bush years. But now that Buchanan is criticizing Obama . . . eh, not so much.

Buchanan's views about the subjects for which Media Matters now denounces him haven't changed at all. All that has changed is the tactical objectives of the Left, whose No. 1 goal now is to silence all critics of Obama.

The Left has always been more dangerous to its "friends" than to its enemies. Trotsky was a comrade-in-good-standing until he began to became a threat to Stalin's leadership. Try to make friends with the Left, and next thing you know, somebody puts an ice-ax through your skull.

Of course, I'll defend Buchanan against these leftist vermin, but there is a lesson to be learned here, and that lesson is this:

When you're a Jet,
You're a Jet all the way,
From your first cigarette
'Til your last dyin' day.

No conservative should ever believe that there is anything to be gained by making friends with the Left.

Chris Matthews worries Palin 'talkinglanguage of far right . . of paranoia'

Via Newsbusters, which has transcript:

Wonder who gave him this idea? Joan Walsh or David Letterman?

DijonGate: What have we learned?

"I'm going to have a basic cheddar cheese burger, medium well, with mustard. . . . You got a spicy mustard or something like that, or a Dijon mustard, something like that?"
-- Barack Obama, May 5, 2009

"The reaction proved one thing I already knew: The cult of personality surrounding Obama is real. And many of the cultists are demented, dangerous or both."
-- William Jacobson, May 8, 2009

Congratulations to Professor Jacobson. Traffic at his Legal Insurrection blog, which was about 37,000 visits in February, surged to more than 107,000 in just two days Thursday and Friday, because he dared to point out how dishonest news coverage has become.

The point was not that Obama likes Dijon mustard -- I do, too, as does the man who named it "DijonGate" -- but rather that MSNBC and other major media are no longer in the news business. They're doing public relations for the Obama administration and the Democratic Party.

What was the purpose of Obama and Joe Biden going to Ray's Hell-Burger in Arlington, Va.? It was a photo-op, to show O and Joe bein' Regular Guys, standin' in line, eatin' some burgers.

Obviously, reporters didn't think "Dijon mustard" fit the narrative the White House wanted, and so they fudged the quote -- and NBC even edited its own video -- to omit the offensive French phrase. Jacobson pointed this out, and it was like showing a Rorshach inkblot to Charles Manson.

Obama Mustard Attack Becomes Full-Blown Right-Wing Talking Point
-- Huffington Post

Ivy League Professor Wingnut Pens Masterpiece About Dijon Mustard
-- Wonkette

Dijon Derangement Syndrome: Conservative media attack Obama for burger order
-- Media Matters

Why was the reaction so hideously overblown? Gateway Pundit, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham and others were just doing the same thing they did with John Kerry's ill-fated wind-surfing vacation or any number of other incidents in which prominent Democrats act in ways that conflict with their populist rhetoric.

A burger at Ray's Hell-Burger costs $6.95, so lunch at the Arlington restaurant isn't exactly the value menu at Mickey D's. If the White House believed they could show Obama as a Regular Guy by having him eat at a place where the burgers are seven bucks, maybe they need to work on their definition of populism.

Jacobson's posts, however, pointed out how news organizations were actively involved in the image-shaping function of the Obama P.R. machine. It would be like learning that Fox News provided the "Mission Accomplished" banner at Bush's famous 2003 aircraft-carrier event.

Exposure of the media role in the Obama phenomenon is what the Left fears most because, at some level, they understand that if the press were ever to report honestly on what the Democrats are doing, the game would change. So the Obama cultists, accustomed to only fawning coverage of their Leader, react with fury when the fawning coverage is demonstrated to be dishonest.

Obama's high level of public support is largely a product of his positive image the media have crafted. "DijonGate" exposed how this image-making role is played. And therefore William Jacobson is denounced as a "wing-nut" pushing "right-wing talking points."

Of course, there are no "left-wing talking points," and if you dare suggest that Media Matters and Huffington Post are participating in an orchestrated propaganda effort -- perhaps organized by Astroturf king David Axelrod -- this only proves you are a "wing nut."

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! My second 'Lanche this weekend. I suspect Professor Reynolds was watching what I was watching -- Ross Douthat doing "Q&A" on C-SPAN -- and thought to himself, "If I don't hit him now, there'll be another raving manic e-mail at 4 a.m."

Damned callow pretentious Harvard boy prattling on about Chesterton and Christopher Lasch and skinny-dipping with Buckley . . . well, never mind all that now. The raven's calling your name, Douthat!

UPDATE II: Paco quotes . . . Lionel Trilling? What the hell? Has everybody gone all Douthat on me? "As Jeanne Kirkpatrick once said to Daniel Patrick Moynihan . . . ."

Barack Obama dildo. And what would Jeanne Kirkpatrick have to say about that, huh?

UPDATE III: Hey, remember when John Edwards was the liberal media's idol?

UPDATE IV: The Left won't let it go, will they?

Chris Matthews sucks bad

Turned on the TV in my home office, hoping to watch Michelle Malkin on the Glenn Beck show, but the old portable TV my kids hooked up doesn't get Fox News.

So I switched over to MSNBC just to try to get an update on the non-Carrie Prejean nude news -- just in time for "Hardball" with Chris Matthews.

He completely sucks, doesn't he? I remember for years how the liberal bloggers were always ranting about the wretched awfulness of "Tweetie" Matthews. I didn't get it, because I never watched his show. (I'm not a big TV watcher, period.)

I'd occasionally be switching channels, catch small doses of Matthews and not really think about it But . . . OMG!

To try to sit in a room where the TV is tuned to "Hardball" for a full freaking hour! Now I get what the liberal bloggers were complaining about. The man seems congenitally incapable of framing any argument except in the most superficially stereotypical terms.

Chris Matthews is to coherent discourse what Johnny Rotten is to fine jazz -- which is to say, he's never even attempted it. What is so annoying about Matthews is his utter lack of curiosity. He doesn't ask questions in search of information, and he routinely mischaracterizes the scope of any controversy.

Matthews begins an interview with an antagonist -- a guest who represents the "other side" -- by expressing the most ludicrously pejorative caricature of the antagonist's position. So, before the guest can begin to engage, he must first clear away this misleading distortion. Then, predictably, while the guest is attempting to clarify his own position, Matthews interrupts with some sarcastic idiocy.

He's a much worse TV interviewer than either Sean Hannity or Bill O'Reilly, and I'm not a great admirer of either of those guys. The whole point of having a guest do a TV interview is to hear what the guest has to say, but Matthews is infinitely more interested in hearing his own voice than in letting the audience hear his guests.

At least when Hannity starts the bully-boy routine on a liberal guest -- hectoring and interrupting -- it's entertaining in a pro-wrestling sort of way. O'Reilly has his own trademark brand of obnoxiousness, but it is arguably entertaining obnoxious.

What's the difference? Hannity comes out of a talk-radio background, and O'Reilly has been doing TV all his life. Both of them are professional broadcasters, who have some basic concept that they are on TV to attract and engage an audience.

Matthews, by contrast, is a lifelong Democratic Party hack, who got hired for TV as a "political analyst" and parlayed that (via the DC schmooze circuit) into his anchor role. But because he was hired for his politics, he didn't have to be any good at the audience-attraction part of the job, and never bothered to learn it.

Before anyone can yell "hypocrite" at me, I am well aware of my own bad rhetorical habits. But I do this in writing. The written word and broadcasting are very different media. You can skim through the written word and turn the page any time you want, so an article you disagree with doesn't have the intrusive feeling that you get being stuck in a room with Chris Matthews on your TV. (This old 13-inch portable TV doesn't have a remote.)

With TV, however, you can't "skim." There is a temporal linearity to the TV-viewing experience, from which the viewer can only escape by changing the channel. And the ability of Chris Matthews to inspire viewers to change the channel is the most obvious explanation for MSNBC's persistently low ratings over the years.

It's not about Matthews' politics. Ed Schultz comes on right after "Hardball," and Ed rivals Keith Olbermann for obnoxious liberalism. But Ed is entertaining. He's a good interviewer who brings on the guest, asks questions, and lets the guest answer.

Matthews has been on MSNBC forever and has never attracted an audience. There is no evidence that he even has the capacity to learn how to be good on TV. If the executives at MSNBC cared anything about building an audience, they'd cancel "Hardball" immediately and negotiate a buyout of Matthews' contract.

Somewhere out there in America is a good TV newsman -- liberal in his politics, but skilled at his craft -- who is being deprived of a career opportunity because the stupid suits at MSNBC can't see what anyone with two eyes and a brain can see: Chris Matthews sucks beyond hope of redemption, and he's clogging up a perfectly good hour of cable TV time.

UPDATE: A mystery has been cleared up.

Not Awesome, Ace

by Smitty

AoS has the title "Awesome: Crowd Cheers as GE Shareholder Rips MSNBC". A questioner inquires if the Janine Garofalo clip is "hate speech", and the crowd cheers and the suit waffles, and the crowd boos.
Pay attention class: why was Napoleon successful, until Wellington picked up the same baton and flogged Napoleon therewith? Among other reasons, both generals understood the ground.
In noticing JG, in bothering to attach "hate speech" to her pitiful remarks, you're conceding the ground to the minions of Cthulhu. The Great Old One doesn't care about JG or Sean Penn or the contents of their blather. All the minions want of you is to support the perversion of the First Amendment, and the need/capacity for government to regulate this new legislative product.
There is a place in the bowels of Cthulhu for JG when, to her sanity-shredding horror, her reign of useful idiocy is at an end. The means of avoiding joining her there is to not concede the ground to artful liars peddling nebulous goods: "fairness", "hate speech", and "spreading the wealth" are all markers on bad ground for battle.
Rather than engage the enemy head on, simply ask questions. Let the lack of any foundation in thought, fact, and history make the tower of babble collapse on Old Cthulhu.
Ace may think the MSNBC situation funny, and some sort of win. It was, but not for those concerned with freedom, truth, and the future. Do not concede the ground to the foe.

Update:This cover from the Economist makes the point graphically. The lure is the symbol "hate speech", the school on the port side is anyone buying into its existence, with Cthulhu "smiling" to starboard.

MSNBC omits facts on AIG protests

Turned on MSNBC this morning and watched Alex Witt anchor a story about the protests at the homes of AIG executives (which turned out to be a pathetic farce, with more media than protesters).

What struck me was that Witt never mentioned who organized the protests. In fact, the organizers were The Connecticut Working Families Party, an ACORN front group. An uniformed MSNBC viewer would not have learned that from Alex Witt, who said nothing -- zero, zilch, nada -- about who organized the protests.

How many other news organizations reported the anti-AIG protests without reporting who the organizers were? And how many people understand the propaganda purpose of this omission? To explain briefly: The point of the protests is to make AIG execs the scapegoats for the idiocies of the bailout bill that ACORN's Democratic allies supported. Blaming the AIG execs takes the heat off the politicians. But in order to convey that propaganda message effectively, media must pretend that there is no political ulterior motive to the protest, and thus no politically-connected organizing force behind it. To have mentioned CWFP or ACORN -- and especially to have identifed those as left-wing groups allied with Democrats -- would have destroyed the propaganda value of the story.

Meanhile, as scads of media turned out to cover one busload of anti-AIG protesters in Connecticut, some 300 turned out for a Tea Party demonstration in Ridgefield, Conn., that the major media ignored, just as they are trying to ignore the Tea Party movement nationwide. Try this: Switch off Fox News sometime and turn on NBC, ABC, CBS or CNN to see how much coverage they're devoting to the Tea Party protests. The answer is, almost zero.

It's almost as if there were a list or something . . .

UPDATE: Gahrie's Grumbles also notes the glaring disparity of coverage between the AIG protests and the Tea Party movement. (Full disclosure: Gahrie is a first-time Rule 5 Sunday participant, which is a different kind of list.)

Ari: Thank You

by Smitty
I can't stomach MSNBC in general, or Matthews in particular. Ari, your capacity to speak truth to jackass far exceeds my meager powers.



May fortune smile upon you, sir.

CWCID: Protein Wisdom

'Morning Joe' vs. 'Fox & Friends'

This morning, I happened to be awake at 6 a.m. -- did I mention I love my wife? -- and while Mrs. Other McCain was in the shower getting ready for work, I relaxed contentedly by toggling back and forth between "Fox & Friends" and MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

Fox fans can crucify me for saying this, but "Morning Joe" is the better program, and the superiority of the MSNBC show was blindingly evident today. While "Fox & Friends" had on Geraldo Rivera to talk about Rhianna (allegedly) getting beat up by her boyfriend, Joe Scarborough, Mike Barnicle, Pat Buchanan and Mika Brzrzbuyavowelski were talking about real news -- especially the economic meltdown and the inability of Congress or the Obama administration to do anything to stop it.

Excuse me for thinking that gotterdammerung on Wall Street is more important than a domestic-violence case involving two second-rate pop stars that no one over 30 ever heard of until Chris Brown (allegedly) beat Rhianna to a bloody pulp.

OK, there may be some kind of "counterprogramming" rationale behind Fox producers going with celebrity tabloid news at 6 a.m., but there is a word for that rationale: Wrong. Most of those who get up at 6 a.m. and switch to the early news are essentially serious people. They're in a hurry, getting ready to go to work, and they want to hear about news that makes a difference in their lives, which doesn't include the obnoxious Geraldo sharing gossip about two pop singers.

Furthermore -- and Steve Doocy's my Facebook friend, so I want to be careful how I say this -- the "Fox & Friends" crew seems too lightweight. The "Morning Joe" crew is anchored by a former congressman and features a veteran political adviser in Buchanan. Barnicle doesn't impress me much, but Brzrzbuyavowelski, though hopelessly liberal, is at least a smart, serious liberal.

To employ an overused word, the implicit gravitas of the MSNBC crew gives them more leeway to joke around amiably like a bunch of buddies just talkin' news, whereas Gretchen Carlson and Brian Kilmeade lack that sort of heft (Doocy wasn't on the show this morning). My impression is that Kilmeade is a hometown favorite in the New York market, so Fox isn't going to pull him from the show, and I wouldn't want them to pull my buddy Doocy, which makes Carlson the prime candidate for replacement, if the executives want to tinker with the formula.

Bay Buchanan? Kate Obenshain? I don't know. They need somebody with a credible government/politics background. They need to change something. The whole mood of the Fox show is wrong for the current economic and political climate.

Any serious news junkie toggling back and forth between Fox and MSNBC in the mornings -- and this isn't the first time I've done this in recent weeks -- can't help but notice the difference. "Fox & Friends" feels too fake perky-cheery like "Good Morning, Orlando" or something, whereas "Morning Joe" exudes a vibe that is simultaneously confident, smart, and relaxed.

Roger Ailes needs to be paying attention, because whatever the total Nielsen numbers, he's losing "the eyes of the influentials," to borrow a phrase from Jon Henke.

UPDATE: I'm getting some push-back in the comments, which is OK, but Hyscience agrees with me. To those who only watch Fox, you should try toggling between "F&F" and "MJ" some mornings. Maybe it's me, but the Joe show is less show-biz, more laidback, and I like that -- even if Barnicle and Brzrzbuyavowelski aren't to my taste.

Bias? What bias?

John McCain to obscure cable-TV host: "I know you're a supporter of Senator Obama."

In fact, Mika Brzezinski is the daughter of former Carter administration foreign-policy bungler Zbigniew Brzezinski, who is now bungling foreign policy for the Obama campaign.

(Cross-posted at AmSpecBlog.)

Most awkward MSNBC segment ever

(Greetings, AOSHQ Morons!)

Somehow, I don't think this anchorette babe knew what she was getting herself into when her producers booked Marty Beckerman on the show:


I first found out about Marty several years ago through his book, "Generation S.L.U.T.," a novel-with-essays that -- despite its bizarre title and even more bizarre content -- offers a fundamentally thoughtful and critical perspective on contemporary youth culture. It's a graphic depiction of the dehumanizing effects of growing up in a hypersexualized society without norms or proper adult supervision.

Being an inverterate bibliophile, I spotted "Generation S.L.U.T." on the discard table at the office where the book review section dumps the extra books it's not planning to review. When I began reading the book, I was stunned. Space does not permit a complete description of the book, but it culminates with a booze-and-drugs-and-sex party -- at an upscale home where the self-absorbed parents are obliviously AWOL -- when a teenage girl is sadistically gang-raped and the crime captured on video for Internet distribution.

It's a tragedy of degradation, and the perceptive reader recognizes that Marty is portraying (from an obverse perspective) exactly what such cultural conservatives as Wendy Shalit, Diana West, Danielle Crittenden, Dr. Miriam Grossman, Kay S. Hymowitz, Robert H. Knight and Dana Mack have been trying to warn America about for years: In the post-"liberation" era, adolescence has become a toxic playground of depraved sexuality characterized by selfish cruelty and conducive to disease, personality disorders, and crime.

Here's my Amazon review of "Generation S.L.U.T.":

Beckerman is completely insane -- and that's a good thing. What he has done is to throw back the curtain to show us the horrible moral decay that has afflicted the children of the Woodstock Generation. The graphic language and sexual content may shock adults, but this is how young people talk and what young people do. Just when you think to yourself, "That's too far-fetched to ever happen," you turn on the TV or pick up a paper and see that it already HAS happened: Teenagers posting self-porn on the 'Net, the Duke gang-rape case, etc. Despite its pornographic content, Generation S.L.U.T. is fundamentally a socially conservative book, and Beckerman's a Robert Bork for the MTV era. Marty shows us the emotional and physical wreckage wrought by the serial betrayals of the "hook-up" age among kids with too much privilege and not enough supervision.

The phrase "a Robert Bork for the MTV era" is, of course, a reference to Bork's classic "Slouching Toward Gomorrah" -- although I doubt Beckerman appreciated the intended compliment, and obviously no president would ever think of nominating him to the Supreme Court.

After reading "Generation S.L.U.T.," I was able to locate Marty online and began an e-mail correspondence that eventually became an actual friendship, based on the fact that he's one of the few people I know who's crazier than I am. I enjoy making friends with crazy people because, as I explained to Marty, it's such a relief occasionally to be the second-craziest guy in the room.

Marty is very much a cynic, but he clearly realizes that the culture in which he has been raised -- he's still only 25 -- is profoundly abnormal and unhealthy. This is a conservative realization, even though he's hardly a conservative in a political sense. (He has described himself as a libertarian, and has written rather viciously about his contempt for what he sees as the illogic and hypocrisy of typical specimens of both major parties.)

Marty is also funny as hell. A lot of people don't "get" Marty's deadpan absurdism, his purposeful affronts to good taste, or his self-deprecating penchant for embarrassing revelations. In person, he seems quiet, serious and (usually) polite, which is why inviting Marty to a party is always a risky proposition.

Thus with the MSNBC anchorette babe who finds herself at a loss to react when Marty puts John McCain's habit of using the phrase "my friends" into the context of the Hanoi Hilton. Offensive, tasteless, insulting -- I dare even say such a joke is un-American.

But that's Marty. He is an intrinsically flawed human being -- and he knows it. That self-awareness amounts to an approximation of the Calvinist conception of Original Sin, which was why, in one of our first e-mail exchanges, I suggested he investigate the dynamic young evangelist Joshua Harris, whose theology is essentially Calvinist.

Marty's Facebook page describes his religion as "Jewish - Self-Hating," and he's a contributing editor at the Jewish humor site Jewcy.com. Despite his youth and precocious success, he's already gone through one of those soul-scorching nightmares that makes the book business so traumatic, with a two-year drought caused by a major publisher canceling his contract after he'd already completed the manuscript of a time-sensitive non-fiction book about politics. (Offhand, I'll guess the marketing department was to blame. A good rule of thumb about the book biz: When in doubt, always blame marketing.)

Marty says the experience nearly made him an alcoholic. Having undergone some tribulations of my own, I spent a lot of time commiserating with Marty by phone and e-mail, and occasionally in person. But now he's emerged into the sunlit uplands of success and sobriety, with a new publisher and a steady gig in New York.

So I'm happy for Marty. And even if his jokes about Crazy Cousin John were tasteless to the point of being unpatriotic, I'm sure Mitt Romney appreciated that expression of support -- and maybe that Supreme Court nomination isn't as far-fetched as I thought.

P.S.: Marty took a cheap shot at Michelle Malkin; I replied. (And in case you don't get the reference to "self-abuse," you can read Marty's tale of woe here, although I must add VERY STRONG CONTENT WARNING.)