Marty In His Pants

Marty Peretz's marbles continue to clatter loudly on the floor in the virtual pages of The New Republic.

In this edition of The Spine, Peretz takes his arch-enemy, imaginary Nazi collaborator George Soros, to task over JetBlue's failure to deplane passengers during an ice storm:

I don't mean to be picking on George Soros. Particularly because it's not exactly his fault. But it's his money behind Jet Blue, and he must have had some say in the management....

The worst was a flight scheduled to take off for Aruba at 8:10 am. Let's say most of them boarded at 7:45. They were finally taken off the plane at 6:30 pm. In captivity: 10 1/2 hours. Passengers on other flights that had arrived but didn't disembark prisoners for eight to nine and a half hours [sic/wtF?].

They were also starving. The only "refreshments" served on Jet Blue are water, soda and crackers.

For the last few days I've been counseling Soros to get out of the foreign policy business. Maybe he'd due [sic] well to get out of the airplane business, as well. Jet Blue is not good for his reputation. Actually, pretty much like foreign policy.

Soros is a minority shareholder (9.7 percent) in JetBlue, not an operational manager or executive. He has nothing to do with the daily operation of the airline; nor do the owners of the other 91.3 percent (except for employees receiving stock as compensation). Only a lunatic would imagine that's how any airline is run.

Using the same analogy, you could make a (much better) case that Marty is personally responsible for every piece of crap in TNR written or edited by Andrew Sullivan, Lee Siegel, Fred Barnes, Stephen Glass and Ruth Shalit. Perhaps Peretz would dew/deux/dü well to get out of the magazine business, if TNR's former readers don't make that decision for him first.

But you've got to hand it to Marty for his use of rhetoric: "prisoners," "captivity" and "starving." Not subtle, but it gets his message across.

Meanwhile, what the hell is up with this post? Peretz wrote a piece for the McCarthyite Wall Street Journal in which he used the term "Democrat Party" to slander Dems. After he was called on it, he claimed that the phrase "crept" its way into his piece and "It was clearly not my intention for this construction to appear in the article." What Spinnin' Marty doesn't say is that he didn't write the words, or that someone at the WSJ changed his words. The only way for the words to creep in was for the creep to write them. Or maybe Marty could blame his stenographer.

(And you've got to love the sensible progressives who subscribe to TNR and thus have the keys to Marty's chat room: "Michelle Malkin is wrong to describe Joe McCarthy as some sort of saint. At best, he was a very flawed man who dared to take the Democrat(ic) Party traitors to task.")