A day after allowing Charlotte Allen to pen a lengthy and inane screed about how women are stupid and should cuddle up to their own stupidity and do some housework, Outlook editor John Pomfret is frantically backtracking, insisting that the whole thing was meant as some sort of joke, telling the Politico that the story was pitched as "a riff on women fainting at Obama rallies, and similarities with the Beatles." Which is why, I guess, the Beatles were mentioned precisely one time, and the rest of the piece is given over to bashing Patti Solis Doyle and passing off nineteenth century phrenology as "neuroscience."
"Perhaps it wasn't packaged well enough to make it clear that it was tongue-in-cheek," says Pomfret, agilely repackaging the piece as head-up-ass. "It's not the first time in opinion journalism that something has fallen flat." Yes, if only there were, say, editors, who could evaluate just how badly a piece pitched as a comparison between Obama and the Beatles had gone off the rails.
But such hollow excuses should expected. After all, this is your craptocracy at work, and the piece has served it's purpose: as a provocative turd published to mine outrage and drive online traffic. If Pomfret really wanted to prove his contrition, he could return to me the ad revenue he gained by publishing this inane piece, and in return I can promise to make some change, so that the next time Charlotte Allen wants to stagger up my block with her hurdy-gurdy and her hilarity, I can throw some quarters at her.
One could go on and on, but I'll cede that responsibility to Moe Tkacik and Megan Carpentier of Jezebel - who give Allen's piece the thorough fisking it deserves - and our own Rachel Sklar, whose mind has not been tainted by Grey's Anatomy. And, Mr. Pomfret? Theirs are pieces that I'd call "humorous," fair-minded, and with a soupcon of "controversy." A sample: "It would be less embarrassing if more of us got into this whole school shooting racket." Should you be in the market for ladies better suited to this whole "writing" thing, I'd start there.