PC madness

PC madness
: Gawd, the Village Voice can make anything as boring as Al Gore. Cynthia Cotts attended last week’s lunch for The Week Opinion Awards and the story she comes away with is Tom Friedman’s mention that he’s starting a synagogue with William Safire (reported in many places earlier). But she has to find that PC angle:

In this country, everyone’s entitled to freedom of worship. But there is something especially freighted about giving journalism award money to a religious library.

How absurd. Then I guess contributing his journalism salary is also freighted?

Well, I sense the Voice’s criticism is quite freighted as well.

: Andrew Sullivan is appalled.

: Steven I Weiss tries to ask Cotts questions. She won’t answer.

: I sat at the same table at Cotts. As soon as she sat down, she harumphed that there weren’t enough women there or women among the winners.

What a predictable cliche: the Voice caricature. :

9 responses to “PC madness”

  1. Mike G Avatar

    “there is something especially freighted about giving journalism award money to a religious library”
    Only if you see it as taking something sacred and using it for something profane.

  2. button Avatar

    I don’t read or follow either columnist: Friedman or Safire. I took it as a joke, a kind of oxymoron, meaning that he and Safire don’t agree on anything, so you can rest assured your money couldn’t be going to such an impossible cause.
    The Cynthia Cotts article was interesting, but she does not disclose whether Safire IS in fact a member of Friedman’s synagogue, so she begs the question she supposedly started out with.
    I see that some people really get heated up about the BBC or Hilary Clinton, or Tom Friedman, etc., but personally I don’t care very much about Friedman. Just don’t. Right now, FYI, I am actually much more concerned about what is going to happen with the JPost. I am anxiously following the events inre Hollinger Holding Corp and Lord Black. And I am concerned.
    When I first picked up a copy of the JPost, it was just a weekly shopper publication that listed movie timetables or somesuch. That was in the sixties. I notice that under Black it is a “real” newspaper– and that’s a helluva lot better than a throwaway shopper you’d put on the bottom of yr parakeet cage. Regardless of whether or not you agree with its pov, I hope we don’t lose the publication.

  3. KMK Avatar

    On an upnote “Page Six called the crowd a “cadre of left-wing media heavies.” Let your blog critics chew on that for a while. Heh.
    On the downside I think Mrs Cotts wrote her article around Jonathan Maltzman and the word freighted.

  4. Steven I. Weiss Avatar

    Yeah, why are Tom Friedman and AM Rosenthal exception to the lefty crowd, but you’re not? I can imagine a number of the other folks present weren’t either, by that standard.

  5. Allison Avatar

    And it’s not like they were STARTING a congregation tommorow, they were part of a group of people who STARTED a congregation a long time ago (I had a friend who taught Hebrew school there, she said it was a bit intimidating teaching about Israel to a class that included Tom Friedman’s and Dennis Ross’s kids.)
    I want to know why it is more “freighted” to give the money to the synagogue library than to a prep school library?
    As for Button’s comment, we’re all holding our breath regarding the Post (I wrote for the paper for 12 years) Rumors of potential buyers names are all over the place.

  6. John Edwards Avatar
    John Edwards

    Cotts’s problem is that she’s really, really bad at journalism. She should go into another line of work.

  7. Yehudit Avatar

    I still want to know which synagogue it is. Is it in NYC? In Israel? What?

  8. button Avatar

    Yehudit:
    How strange you just showed up! I had been thinking that YOU would know all the background on this.
    Here’s the url, I think: *http://kolshalom.com*
    Daniel Radosh gave an extensive response to the Cotts article:

  9. Allison Avatar

    It’s in Bethesda, Maryland, outside DC