Re: McClellan's Publisher a Liberal: Advances Soros & Slams Limbaugh

We ought to thoroughly investigate everybody who writes everything. In
fact, we should put cameras in their houses and interview their
spouses to find evidence of any possible deviant behavior. Then we
could hire private detectives to follow them around all day. Or,
better yet require them to wear a microphone hooked to a radio
transmitter. It might be a good idea to force them to wear a global
position system device also.

There is absolutely no reason whatsoever, that citizens of this great
country, who mostly don't read very well anyway, should be forced to
judge an author based on their ideas. This type of behavior could
eventually lead to the destruction of America.

Incidentally, who is this fellow named "Brent Baker", by the way?


On May 29, 9:28 am, Sordo <sordo @ privacy.net > wrote:
McClellan's Publisher a Liberal: Advances Soros & Slams Limbaugh

By Brent Baker | May 29, 2008 - 02:35 EThttp://newsbusters.org

Peter Osnos, who wrote Wednesday that he “worked very closely” with
Scott McClellan on McClellan's new book published by PublicAffairs which
Osnos founded, is a liberal whose publishing house is affiliated with
the far-left The Nation magazine and the publisher of The Prosecution of
George W. Bush for Murder. PublicAffairs has a roster of authors who are
nearly all liberals and/or liberal-leaning mainstream media figures,
including six books by far-left bank-roller George Soros. On Wednesday's
CBS Evening News, Ari Fleischer related that “Scott told me that his
editor did 'tweak,' in Scott's word, a lot of the writing, especially in
the last few months.” In an “Eat the Press” blog entry Wednesday, Rachel
Sklar asked Osnos: “Did you work directly on the book with McClellan?
(Who was his editor?)” Osnos replied: “The editor was Lisa Kaufman and
yes, I worked very closely with them.”

A reporter and editor at the Washington Post during the 1970s and 1980s
before going into book publishing, Osnos pens a weekly column for the
left of center The Century Foundation. In a March column he denounced
Rush Limbaugh as “bombastic, aggressive, and mean,” bemoaning how the
late William F. Buckley Jr. left behind “a right-wing culture that tends
to be as coarse and leaden as his demeanor could be buoyant,” charging
Buckley provided “unfortunate cover to others who followed with a spirit
that was distinctly and consistently malevolent.”

In contrast, he hailed the late left-wing columnist Molly Ivins and
wished she had more impact: “In the contest for power in America, Molly
Ivins had a good perch in her column, nearly perfect pitch, and, alas,
too little influence.” Ruminating this week about the Kennedy family's
legacy in the wake of Senator Ted Kennedy's cancer diagnosis, Osnos
asserted that “we are a distinctly better country for the message” which
“Ted conveyed about our priorities as a people.”

Amongst the authors Osnos has worked with at PublicAffairs and
previously at Random House: Wesley Clark, Vernon Jordan, Robert
McNamara, Andy Rooney, George Soros, Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, Rosalyn
Carter, Nancy Reagan, Sam Donaldson, Morley Safer, Molly Ivins and
William Greider. Hard to find more than a few conservative names in the
PublicAffairs list of authors.

At the moment, a George Soros book is displayed alongside the McClellan
tome at the top of the PublicAffairs home page.

PublicAffairs is part of the Perseus Books Group, which also owns Nation
Books, “a project of The Nation Institute” which publishes the magazine
of the same name, and Vanguard Press, whose home page now features The
Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, a new book by Vincent Bugliosi
that “presents a tight, meticulously researched legal case that puts
George W. Bush on trial in an American courtroom for the murder of
nearly 4,000 American soldiers fighting the war in Iraq.”

The PublicAffairs bio for Osnos:

FOUNDER AND EDITOR-AT-LARGE

Peter Osnos was a correspondent around the world for The Washington
Post and the newspaper's foreign and national editor. He was Associate
Publisher and senior editor at Random House and publisher of Random
House's Times Books division. In 1997, he founded PublicAffairs, an
independent publishing company specializing in books of journalism,
history, biography and social criticism. Among the authors he published
at PublicAffairs are, Wesley Clark, Dorothy Height, Vernon Jordan, Wendy
Kopp, Robert McNamara, Andy Rooney, Natan Sharansky, George Soros, Boris
Yeltsin, and Muhammad Yunus, and journalists from America's leading
publications and prominent scholars.

He is executive director of The Caravan Project, funded by the
MacArthur Foundation, which is developing a plan for multi-platform
publishing of books. He is Vice Chairman of the Columbia Journalism
Review and is active in a number of other journalism and human rights
organizations. He writes a regular media column that is distributed by
the Century Foundation (www.TCF.org). He is a graduate of Brandeis and
Columbia Universities. He lives in Greenwich CT with his wife Susan, a
consultant to human rights organizations.

The Century Foundation's bio:

Senior Fellow for Media Program

Peter Osnos is the Founder and Editor-at-Large of PublicAffairs
books. Previously, he was Publisher of Random House's Times Books
Division from 1991 to 1996 and before that was a Vice President and
Associate Publisher of the Random House imprint. Authors he has worked
with include President Bill Clinton, former President Jimmy Carter,
Rosalyn Carter, Nancy Reagan, former Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill,
Boris Yeltsin, Paul Volcker, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Donald Trump, Clark
Clifford, Sam Donaldson, Morley Safer, Peggy Noonan, Molly Ivins,
Stanley Karnow, Jim Lehrer, William Novak, Vassily Aksyonov, and
journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los
Angeles Times, Newsweek, and The Economist.

Before entering book publishing, Osnos spent nearly twenty years at
The Washington Post, where he was variously Indochina Bureau Chief,
Moscow Correspondent, Foreign Editor, National Editor, and London Bureau
Chief. He has been a commentator and host for National Public Radio and
a contributor to publications including Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic,
and The New Republic. He served as Chair of the Trade Division of the
Association of American Publishers, Chair of Human Rights Watch Europe
and Central Asia Committee and was a member of the Board of Directors of
Human Rights Watch. He is currently the Vice-Chairman of The Columbia
Journalism Review and Executive Director of The Caravan Project, funded
by the MacArthur Foundation and based at TCF. A graduate of Brandeis
University and the Columbia University School of Journalism, he lives in
Greenwich, Connecticut with his wife, Susan Osnos, who is a consultant
for nonprofit organizations.

An excerpt from Osnos' May 28 column, as posted by The Century
Foundation:

....The Kennedy saga is so rich a tale of melodrama and pain that it
tends to overwhelm the real meaning of what it has meant to our politics
and national spirit. We are a distinctly better country for the
messages, each in their own way and time that JFK, RFK, and Ted conveyed
about our priorities as a people. Regularly over the presidential
cycles, "the next Kennedy" has been anointed, invariably ending with
disappointment. There was Ted himself in 1980, Gary Hart in 1984 and
1988, and aspects of Clinton in 1992 and John Kerry (another JFK, after
all) in 2004. It has happened again this year with Barack Obama, and
this time the comparison may be genuinely valid....

Obama definitely has elements of JFK's style and eloquence as well
as RFK's appeal to blacks and younger people. Ted Kennedy clearly feels
a strong bond with Obama, as does his niece, Caroline, given their
endorsement and the campaigning they have done on his behalf. Senator
Kennedy has been the only member of his clan able to fulfill the
potential of early promise (his son Patrick, in Congress; his nephew
Joe, a former congressmen; his niece Kathleen, who ran and lost for a
Senate seat, have had small impact so far). It is possible that with the
Obama candidacy, as Ted Sorensen once wrote (or as, he insists, helped
to write), "the torch has been passed to a new generation."

From his March 4 column:

....But the dominant voices of the Buckley succession are bombastic,
aggressive, and mean -- O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, and Ann Coulter, among
many others. They are despisers, whose vituperative name-calling regards
alternative viewpoints as stupid, venal, or treasonous. The #1
bestseller on the New York Times bestseller list for March 9 is a
quintessential example of the genre: Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism:
The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics
of Meaning. It has sold about 50,000 copies in its first two months.
Among his chapter headings are "Adolph Hitler: Man of the Left"; and
"Brave New Village: Hillary Clinton and the Meaning of Liberal Fascism."
His argument, as summarized in the Washington Post's review is that
"fascists and liberals seek to use the state to solve the problems of
modern society." Goldberg is an editor at the National Review Online.
His mother, Lucianne Goldberg, made her name (and gave his a career
boost) as the literary agent who urged Linda Tripp to tape her
conversations with Monica Lewinsky. As vice-president of his mother's
agency, Goldberg once wrote, he did his time "in the trenches of
Clinton's trousers."

William F. Buckley is getting a splendid send-off as befits a long
life of creative activity, discernible impact on the world around, him
and extensive personal outreach. But in passing judgment on his
influence, it is also fair to single out the sour side of what he leaves
behind: a right-wing culture that tends to be as coarse and leaden as
his demeanor could be buoyant. Buckley was excellent at what he did,
giving unfortunate cover to others who followed with a spirit that was
distinctly and consistently malevolent.

His September 18 column:

....We could sure use Molly Ivins's impeccable instincts about these
expert opinions. Maybe this time, we'd listen. Molly was a populist in a
splendid American tradition. One of her best columns opposing the
invasion (the one in which she predicted civil war) was on the occasion
of Martin Luther King Day in 2003.

"The war is not inevitable," she wrote "and the person who can stop
it is you. Monday Jan. 20 is Dr. King's holiday. People all over the
country will be rallying and marching in his honor, celebrating not only
his eloquent opposition to racism and poverty, but his equally
passionate protests against militarism. You get more than a vote in this
country. You ...

read more »

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