Time Magazine is facing a rash of canceled subscriptions and being raked over hot coals both by harsh critics and "close friends" after publishing its cover story/love letter on Ann Coulter. This is all good fun, of course (especially the Daily Howler's demolition job), and certainly, any venue that gives Coulter a platform for her thrice-chewed McCarthyite cud deserves to be shunned. But there's something passing strange about this brouhaha -- namely:
Why on God's green earth would anyone consider Time Magazine a serious, credible news journal in the first place?
Given the magazine's half-century of pandering to power and tediously regurgitating the "conventional wisdom" of the day, getting all het up at Time for whoring around with Bushists is like denouncing Wal-Mart for selling cheap goods. That's what they do, that's what they're there for. What else do you expect?
The real mystery here is not why Time would run an article sucking up to neo-fascist bile merchants with powerful connections; it's why anyone would have a subscription to the rag -- or even read it -- in the first place.
