Aimai on the Atlantc Monthly
Aimai:
Gastritis Broke My Calculator: Megan [McArdle]’s whole shtick is some sort of personal girl’s bio of privatizing wealth and socializing loss. Megan’s work doesn’t take place in a vacuum--her posts, essays, tweets and even her god damned marriage are entirely functions of her job as an apologist for Republican politics and economics. When she is writing she writes for them--her conclusions are fixed and only the method of getting there shifts. When she’s right, I presume (I’ve never seen it) she and her philosophy take all the credit. When she’s wrong, and she’s caught out in a lie, a total misstatement, a deceptive sleight of graph suddenly its all just a little, tiny, personal mistake that we should put down to dodgy tummy, food poisoning, asthma, wedding jitters, veganism, or whatever else she can summon up as an excuse.
The fact that she said what she said because she was paid to say it simply drops out of the picture. Indeed, the very notion that her writing matters drops out of the discussion (check out her pro side commenters who routinely attack readers for reading her seriously as “crazy” and “stalkers” who “can’t let go” of a “little blog post” that happened “years ago.”
