JONATHAN CHAIT APRIL 18, 2011
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Gawker's story on Fox News president Roger Ailes has to be read to be believed. The basic story is that Ailes purchased the little newspaper of the small town in upstate New York where he planned to live. He then cleaned out its editor and hand-picked Joe Lindsley, a young editorial assistant from the Weekly Standard, to run it is a Fox News-style propaganda organ and took a strangely intense interest in its operation.
Then the story gets really weird:
Ailes confronted the three staffers and accused them of badmouthing him and Elizabeth during their lunch breaks. Small towns being what they are, Lindsley, Haley, and Panny frequently drove several miles north of the News and Recorder's Cold Spring, N.Y., office to privately have lunch in another town. When Ailes accused them, he knew which restaurant they frequented, leading the three to believe that Ailes wasn't merely bluffing and that he'd actually had them followed.
After Lindsley quit for good, things got weirder. He was driving to a deli in Cold Spring for lunch earlier this month when he noticed a black Lincoln Navigator that seemed to be following him, according to several sources familiar with the incident. Lindsley drove aimlessly for a while to make sure he was being followed, and the Navigator stayed on him. Then he got a look at the driver, who was a News Corporation security staffer that Lindsley happened to know socially. Lindsley continued on his way and later called the driver to ask if he was following him. The answer was yes, at Ailes' direction. ...
Last winter, not long before Lindsley tendered his resignation, the burglar alarm in the Ailes' Garrison estate went off while Roger and Elizabeth were away. Roger's first call after the police was to Lindsley, several sources say. Ailes asked him to rush to the home to let the police into the gate that blocking driveway, but when Lindsley arrived before the police, Ailes ordered him to enter the home in an effort to scare off the intruder. Speaking to Lindsley on his cell phone, Ailes led him around the darkened house, telling him which rooms to check and which lights to turn on to startle the burglar. It turned out to be a false alarm.
I actually think a surprisingly large number of people with prominent roles in public life are totally bonkers, not merely in their public philosophy but even in practical ways that people who agree with their ideology can recognize. Look at, I don't know, Newt Gingrich. He doesn't just have a different estimation of the efficacy of Keynesian multipliers than I do, or even merely different values than I do. He's clearly a nut. Michelle Bachmann hires chiefs of staff who agree with her ideology, but she runs through them like tissues, and they seem to come away thinking she would be a dangerous character as president. I think this holds true of every field.
I suspect, but I could never prove, that this is true on both right and left but more the former than the latter. In any case, it's not primarily a problem for liberals. There are powerful people everywhere, and a great many of them are out of their gourds.
11 comments
It's not fair to make a theory that everyone is crazy based on a sample size that only includes crazy people.
- Nusholtz
April 18, 2011 at 4:52pm
everyone is crazy is a completely different proposition than crazy people are everywhere.
- miceelf
April 18, 2011 at 4:56pm
"I suspect, but could not prove, this is true of the Right and the Left"? What kind of pseudo-journalism crap is this? You do an expose opinion piece on nutty behavior on the Right, then try to "balance" it with some off-the-cuff generality? Very bogus. The big difference is that nuts on the Left, if any, don't tend to indulge in the kinds of political and financial power-plays and venal "gotchas" that are starting to characterize the new Right. Nobody but the Right would out a CIA agent to attack her husband. Nobody but the Right would invade a sovereign country because they made his dad look bad. Nobody but the right would send Federal Cops after State senators because they bugged out. To equate with a toss-off line the abuses of the Right and the Left is to do the truth a grave disservice.
- AllanL5
April 18, 2011 at 4:57pm
All sane people are similar, but each crazy person is crazy in his own way. People, this post was written with a lot of tongue-planted-firmly-in-cheek. What a crock, Allan: Let's see, no Democratic president would run a Murder Inc. (LBJ's phrase) in the Caribbean - wait, JFK did. There is epistemic closure on the left, too, not just the right, though it is much worse there. And I can prove both aspects of this proposition.
- liberalref
April 18, 2011 at 5:47pm
Is it just me or does he look like one of those old toothless geezers you saw sitting on the bench on Main Street in "Mississippi Burning", watching the Feds come in?
- NR409654
April 18, 2011 at 5:48pm
Is having the staff tailed like this by a non-law enforcement entity even legal?
- tmmats
April 18, 2011 at 5:51pm
I can see why Ailes gravitated to old Dick Nixon.
- Pnaut
April 18, 2011 at 10:00pm
Lib, more recent examples of this level of craziness on the left, please. In general, when you accuse the left of epistemic closure in these pages, it would be more relevant to the discussion if you quoted recent examples rather than things that happened a few decades ago. The left went nuts during W's presidency, but it was the far left, not the mainstream. There isn't much equivalence between how mainstream liberals acted during the last republican presidency and the way the right (all of it, mainstream or otherwise) has acted during Clinton's and Obama's presidencies.
- NR409654
April 19, 2011 at 7:26am
Again we are treated to an exercise in moral relativism which involves reaching back to the 60s. To a time where the modern Democratic party would basically be unrecognizable, to say nothing of the modern Republican party. To do so appears to assume that Kennedy is actually held in high esteem for his actions and behavior as opposed to being remembered fondly mostly due to his untimely demise (see Irwin, Steve, posthumous beatification of by the Aust. & UK media, for a similar example). In short, going back that far is about as germane as concluding that Democrats today are the real racists because Lincoln freed the slaves.
- Nari224
April 19, 2011 at 7:28am
- 'Crazy People Are Everywhere' was news to me so I was disappointed there was only one confirmed sighting in New York. A more fitting hook would have been 'Crazy Or Fox?' but that would shift the debate to Crazy V. Clever. Yeah, the crazy guy Jonathan discovered is running a "Fox News-style propaganda organ" (not to be confused with Fox News). But Ailes and his gang like these stories, they have people to follow you and the police defer to their security so consider yourself forewarned. It isn't Blackwater crazy but Jonathan may be correct, Ailes is planting his brand of crazy everywhere. Keep an eye out for black SUV's.
- michaelg
April 19, 2011 at 9:19am
In the late 1950s, after the Cuban revolution, there arose an overlap of interests between the U.S. government, in the shape of the CIA, and the Mob regarding the desirability of rolling back Castro's regime. The one was thinking of Cold War national security interests, the other was thinking of lost income. Certainly the operational side of this, straddling both the Eisenhower and JFK administrations, saw some unpleasant and dirty cooperation between U.S. intelligence and organized crime. That does not mean, however, that "Kennedy ran a Murder Inc. in the Caribbean."
- ironyroad
April 19, 2011 at 11:13am