Of gossip as journalism, Andrew SULLIVAN, Betsy McCAUGHEY, & lies

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Isn't "Gawker" a gossip site? Why are so many journalistic truths emanating from there? And in the wanning years of the Shrub Regime, there were quite a few apologists here at this very DU site, apologists for Andrew SULLIVAN, who, they claimed, had seen the truth about Shrub, albeit belatedly after his full throated support for Shrub---WHEN IT COUNTED, I would submit. Well, lookee here, here is some more old news about SULLIVAN that cements my mind closed on him as much as on Tweety. But all this is really about this McCAUGHEY character I had never heard of.


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http://gawker.com/5337724/betsy-mccaughey-liar

Betsy McCaughey, Liar

Betsy McCaughey is a professional liar. She lies. The things she writes are untrue. They are not even "distortions." They are made-up. Everyone has known this for years and yet she was still allowed to derail the nation this month.

McCaughey's schtick, as described by James Fallows, is to pose as a disinterested, objective researcher who is just shocked and dismayed to find something insane and evil in a piece of legislation supported by a Democratic president.

And then she sits down to write a very serious and nonpartisan and concerned piece of analysis of this evil thing in the legislation that she made up. And then some respectable outlet publishes her serious analysis. And then, within minutes, partisan Republican columnists, talk radio hosts, politicians, and operatives are disseminating talking points taken directly from that serious piece of entirely made-up bullshit analysis. ....

And, thus, "death panels." From Betsy to Rush to Sarah Palin to Chuck Grassley to your own old relatives forwarding you crazy shit, probably.

Of course, she's been at this forever. In 1994, McCaughey worked for the Manhattan Institute, a right-wing think tank. And then she wrote a piece for The New Republic about how the Clinton health care plan would not allow people to buy health care coverage outside the government-run plan. This, obviously, was false. George Will picked up on it, adding nonsense about jail terms.

(Andrew Sullivan edited The New Republic from 1991 through 1996. In 1994, Sullivan was on a role(sic), publishing both the objectively racist pseudoscience of The Bell Curve and Betsy McCaughey's No Exit. This was all before Ruth Shalit and Stephen Glass. Current editor Franklin Foer apologized for the McCaughey piece shortly after assuming his position. Sullivan never really has. McCaughey's story was really more the fault of owner/"editor-in-chief" Marty Peretz, of course, because he had a psychotic hatred of Bill Clinton.)

So. After that one lying story full of lies made her famous, Al D'Amato told George Pataki to make her Lietenant Governor of New York. She did not get along with Pataki, and she famously, weirdly, stood up for the entirety of Pataki's 1996 State of the State address. In 1997, Pataki dropped her from the ticket with a nasty public letter and she decided to become a Democrat in order to run against him. She ended up on the Liberal Party ticket, and lost, obviously, and then she moved to DC to work for the Hudson Institute, another right-wing think tank. ....

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1. Her Wiki entry

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betsy_McCaughey

Early life, education, and family

McCaughey and her twin brother William, were born on October 20, 1948 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the daughter and son of Albert Peterken, a maintenance man in a fingernail-clipper factory, and his wife, Ramona.<1> The family moved around the Northeast before settling in Westport, Connecticut when she was six years old, where she attended public schools through the 10th grade. For 11th and 12th grades, she attended the Mary A. Burnham School, a college preparatory boarding school in Northampton, Massachusetts ninety miles away from home, on a scholarship, graduating in 1966.

McCaughey then went on another scholarship to Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she majored in history, wrote her senior thesis on Karl Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville, won Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Lehman Fellowships, and graduated with a B.A. with distinction in 1970.<2> McCaughey's father, Albert, died at age 60 in August 1970, and her mother, Ramona, an alcoholic, died at age 42 a few months later of liver disease. McCaughey went on to graduate school at Columbia University in New York City to study history, earning a M.A. in 1972 and a Ph.D. in U.S. constitutional history in 1976.<2> Her Ph.D. dissertation on William Samuel Johnson was awarded the Columbia University Graduate School of Arts & Sciences Bancroft Dissertation Award for outstanding dissertation in American History (including biography), diplomacy, or international affairs, in 1976.<3> It was published as a book, From Loyalist to Founding Father: The Political Odyssey of William Samuel Johnson, by Columbia University Press in 1980.

In 1972, she married Thomas K. McCaughey, a Yale graduate she had met in college and who was then moving up as an investment banker.<4> While completing her Ph.D., McCaughey trained in the corporate banking department at Chase Manhattan Bank, and served as a lending officer in the Food, Beverage, and Tobacco Division.<5> In 1977, the McCaugheys, who had been living in a rental apartment in the Upper West Side of Manhattan, purchased and moved into an apartment on Park Avenue in the Upper East Side; they later added a country home in New Canaan, Connecticut.<4>

In the 1980s, with her husband enjoying a successful career at Salomon Brothers, McCaughey also entertained her husband's clients, decorated their Park Avenue apartment and country house in New Canaan, Connecticut, and volunteered at her daughters' private school.<4>

The McCaugheys separated in 1992 and divorced in 1994 with McCaughey granted custody of their three daughters. She married businessman Wilbur Ross, Jr. in December 1995,<6> and divorce papers were filed in November 1998.7

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