Nye-Nye Takes a Fall

The Nye-Nye is exposed when
His crimes are brought to the light of day
Won't be feeling sorry, sorry, sorry
On the judgement day
Wasn't it me who said
There'd be a price to pay
And I won't feel bad at all
When the Nye-Nye takes the fall
When the Nye-Nye takes the fall

Something about the good news of the week and a laughably stupid post by Nye-Nye had us reaching for the Bangles (the above lyric substitues "Nye-Nye" for "Hero" -- "Hero Takes The Fall" written by Susanna Hoffs and Vicki Peterson, off the Bangles' All Over The Place and many compilations). It seems like only yesterday we were writing of the slip-shod techniques of Nye-Nye and his co-horts in "Insanity: How Little Centrists Get Ahead and Destroy America" (actually it was the July 23, 2006 edition).

So Nye-Nye was shoved and wants to say he leaped. We're so busy laughing and filing the whole thing under "Good News" we almost missed his laughable commentary. Striving hard for a Bette Davis' All About Eve quality, but coming off like Joan Crawford in a historical melodram, Nye-Nye does camp like no one living today.

Brendan Nyhan started off a creep so becoming a self-caricature is actually a step up for him.
Why is the nation in such a bad place? Because of little liars like Nye-Nye (as we noted in June 23rd).

His camp post appears at Time (edited by the equally laughable and uninformed Ana Marie Cox who generates much less heat today -- either because the hint of nipple doesn't play as well at stuffy Time or because America woke up to the fact that her Britney Spears impersonation should be left to women -- or rather "girls" -- half her age).

A few comments on the camp post.

1) Eric Alterman isn't someone we enjoy (as is obvious to our readers). Had Nye-Nye the bitchiness to pull off his parting shot to Alterman (for now, Nye-Nye is the Ultimate Cat Fighter), we would have chuckled. But like everything else Nye-Nye does, it pleases only the politically-muddled and socially-clueless. So, for the record, despite Nye-Nye's presentation of Alterman as a "blogger," Alterman is a journalist (regardless of what you think of the journalism turned out), a media critic, a professor and an author of many books. The "blogger"? Nye-Nye.
(Hint to Nye-Nye, an "author" doesn't generally have co-authors. Patti Davis is actually several steps above Nye-Nye because she only required one co-author.)

2) Nye-Nye cites Alexa.com and doesn't tell readers that the site is a joke. It attempts to be a Nielsen rating. It's not. It doesn't measure traffic and it doesn't even get the facts right (for instance, one of us participating in the writing of this did not start a site in 1999 -- despite Alexa claiming otherwise). He uses Alexa to measure the success of The American Prospect and finds TAP severely lacking, the equivalent of UPN. A better, though still problematic rating, is Google Rank which gives TAP "7/10" in terms of popularity. (Daily Kos has an "8/10" rank, Atrios an "8/10.") By not telling his readers what Alexa's pool is (Amazon.com), Nye-Nye again practices the slip-shod journalism he rode to almost-fame, about a decade ago. The bloom is off the rose, Nye-Nye, the toast has gone flat.

3) Nye-Nye uses Alexa ratings (or 'ratings') to argue that he was . . . well he doesn't use the word "fired." Power's important to Nye-Nye so he says he terminated it. Nye-Nye: The Terminator -- somehow the world seems more at risk than in any Ahnuld incarnation.

4) Nye-Nye claims that the left can't critize the left. What he really means is that TAP was uncomfortable with him going to town on the left the way he did at Spinsanity where, as we noted in July, he 'corrected' Robert Scheer by citing a right-winger when, pay attention Nye-Nye, Scheer needed no correction because the 'discovered wisdom' that Nye-Nye noted was in Scheer's original column. Even the right-winger Nye-Nye linked to noted that. It was only Nye-Nye that was lie-lying or else hopelessly stupid. (Disclosure, C.I. won a bet -- but is still awaiting payment! -- from a friend at TAP over the predicition that Nye-Nye wouldn't last a month.) The left gets criticized all the time (especially the non-center-left). Alexander Cockburn has not been fired from The Nation. (In fact Christopher Hitchens just penned a book review for the magazine.) Some outlets do shy from it, but the criticism wasn't really the reason for the parting of the ways.

5) The issue wasn't the criticism. The issue was bad writing. Bad writing in terms of facts, bad writing in terms of thought (or lack of it). Nye-Nye is a bad writer. Has been for years.

6) Nye-Nye was not hired to write for TAP the magazine. He was hired to write for the blog. As even the former Wonketta should have been able to tell him, when you're getting paid for writing a blog, you need to provide the traffic. (Wonketta earned those nickles with her smutty smirks.) Nye-Nye's problems stemmed from the fact that he was taking a check but alienating the web audience. Writing as though you're smack dab to the right-of-center -- for a Democratic Party magazine (TAP might dispute that, some at the magazine though not all, but that's our call on it) -- with lazy attempts at attention getting by distortion doesn't serve the purpose of the website and hurts the magazine. Not because of a fear of lost links, but because online is free, it's a sample. If people are gagging and asking "What is that shit?" -- they aren't very likely to see the magazine in a store and pick it up. Nye-Nye was driving away potential readers of the print magazine, not potential links.

7) Nye-Nye remains a bad writer. On a blog, we overlook typos (we have them ourselves) but we assume that if someone's writing something at a corporate magazine (on their blog or in their magazine), they're going to take a little care. Nye-Nye badly goes where few would dare with this paragraph:

Opinion magazines lose money -- a lot of money -- and are vulnerable to further financial losses. Atrios, Kos, and other liberal bloggers have attacked The New Republic for years, helping to undermine the center-left magazine's lagging popularity among liberals.

The sentence makes no sense at all. If you lose money, "a lot of money," what exactly is "further financial loss"? Logically, that aspect makes no sense. Yes, opinion journals lose money. Yes, it often is "a lot of money" (The Nation is in the black currently) but if you're losing money and it's "a lot of money" there's really no need for the claim "are vulnerable to further finanical losses." If you bleeding "a lot," then you're bleeding "a lot." Period.

But check this section: "Atrios, Kos and other liberal bloggers have attacked The New Republic for years, helping to undermine the center-left magazine's lagging popularity among liberals." What Nye-Nye means to say is that the attack undermines the magazine, not that the attacks undermine the magazine's "lagging popularity." Undermining the "lagging popularity" would mean increasing its (practically nil) popularity. Logic has always been a problem for Mr. Insansity.

And it's that kind of bad writing (an inability to say what you're attempting to say) that destroyed Nye-Nye. It's the same sort of writing that left readers of the Time blog and Nye-Nye's own blog confused. Is he saying he was fired? On his blog he insists he's as clear as can be. Poor muddled Nye-Nye. As one commentator points out, even his defender-in-arms Big Andy Sullivan thinks Nye-Nye's saying he was fired. Muddled writing, not bloggers, not TAP. Nye-Nye did himself in. (Are we surprised that Ana Marie Cox can't edit worth shit? No, we read her 'novel' and realized that even "page-turner" was beyond her grasp.)


As the Bangles sing, "Every story's got an ending, here it comes, here it comes". Nye-Nye's ending? As Rod Stewart once sang, "The morning sun when it's in your eyes really shows your age." Your age is showing Nye-Nye, or at least your sell-by date and your pathetic attemps to bend to the right, bend to the right, bend to the right have left you curdeled.

CORRECTION: This feature originally included an extra "when" in the lyrics to "Hero Takes The Fall." We've corrected that.