Monday, December 02, 2002

TAPPED misunderstands Katha Pollitt's point in her Nation column in which she says that Hitchens should be arguing with people like Kushner, Williams, Cooper, and Willis instead of Cockburn and Vidal . The discussion was not about who was representative of the politics and ideas of the "serious left" as Eric Alterman discussed in his column, but rather which writers for the Nation should be representative of The Nation's politics.

As Katha says:


As Nation readers know only too well, I am always complaining about the magazine. It isn't perfect. Still, why single out as representative of our politics Alexander Cockburn, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer (who, a search of our archives reveals, has never appeared in our pages) and not, oh, I don't know, Tony Kushner, Patricia Williams, Marc Cooper or Ellen Willis?