I believe the protocol would be for me to buy you shots of tequila or something else of similar stoutness. I'm at a bar at the moment indulging in some myself. Yes, I will keep all of our communications confidential. You may publish whatever you like, and I suspect that some years down the road you might be rightfully inclined to do so. Or perhaps not. If you do, though, I merely request you give me your word as a gentlemen that anything published will be published in its entirety.
1. This is not really true. You don't know what I've been doing in recent months aside from a fraction of what is publicly known.
2. Certainly. But I'm not after further VF bylines. I will not write the magazine ever again, nor will I be writing for many others, if any. The reason for this will become apparent at some point in the next year.
3. Well, I'm not going to be participating in any other group blogs anyway. I did so for reasons that differ from the reasons that others generally have for doing so and have ended that phase, obviously, under circumstances that quite characteristically differ from those of others.
4. That is always an option. There are several reasons that I will not be taking that option. And I don't know how you view me exactly, but the fact is that I do not approve of the "horse race" stuff. Stacy, this sort of thing is destroying our country. It is not just unseemly, or "one of those things," or a necessary evil. It is destroying the country. And it is not destroying it in a good way, in the sense of bringing down the current regime. It is destroying it in a manner that leaves the lives of our military men - and the women and children who inevitably suffer in any war - at the mercy of Thomas Friedman, William Kristol, and whoever else is provided with a fucking megaphone by virtue of the flaws of our system. In the past, I made my money through that system, even if I tried to throw in some vitamins in doing so. I will not do it again. I am a criminal at heart and by genetics and environment and, in the past, by action, but I will not participate in that process. If we're going to have a constitutional republic with the most powerful military in history and our finger in every pie, we need an informed electorate, and that electorate needs to be informed on the fundamentals, not the process, and for the purpose of informing them, not for the purpose of our own well-being. As it is, I think the American people have lost the right to make such determinations by virtue of their vices, and I disagree that any man has ever had any "right" to relieve others of their own rights, even if a large number of other men agree that such rights must be seized.
All in all, I understand the gist of what you are telling me. I am wasting time by engaging in silly blog-o-battles. I can absolutely understand how someone can come to that conclusion, and I appreciate you taking the time to advise me in that context. But there is more going on here than meets the eye, as is always the case. In regards to Project PM, the blog network is not the actual purpose. That is a means to an end. The end I can't tell you - I literally cannot tell you because I don't know yet what will this lead to, but suffice to say that I am doing something and if you are interested, you can get a sense by putting some pieces together. I will also answer any direct questions you ask me. Incidentally, I will not be including the chapter on you in the book when it goes to press with the new publisher - I have broken off with the original publisher, which has been fucking me over since I was 23, and Barry Eisler has gotten me an agent - and I made that decision after our most recent conflict, as it would not be ethical for me to attack you without also referencing every bit of full disclosure that I would be forced by ethics to note, and I wouldn't even know where to begin going into that without boring those who are not you and me. There are also some practical reasons, but I ignored those until now.
At any rate, I believe I sent you the manuscript months ago so that you would have a chance to challenge anything written about you therein in advance of publication. Donald Douglas tells me you didn't receive it. If that is the case, let me know, and I will send it to you for you to read and thus better understand why although I appreciate you taking the time to give me advice, I cannot take most of it. Whatever you think of me - and much of the criticism is accurate - I am just as dedicated to what I think is right as were my brother, uncle, grandfathers, cousins, and friends who joined the military to fight for a better future. I couldn't join because I was arrested on my 18th birthday and spent much of the time since, up until a few months ago, as a heroin addict. I would have been thrown out in short order even if it were otherwise. At any rate, it is my opinion that I have the same natural right to fight against every form of tyranny as do those who do so with the approval of that government which is itself the greatest source of tyranny under which the American people have suffered, to various extents, for several generations now, under the misguided concept of "majority rule."
May you be blessed by any and all things that are capable of bestowing blessings, and may you continue honestly on your own path to the truth, and may all of us seek to correct our own sins even as we attempt to correct the sins of others.
On Sun, Dec 19, 2010 at 6:51 PM, Robert McCain <r.s.mccain@att.net> wrote:
It's not my place to advise you, BUT . . .
1. A byline in Vanity Fair (even the online version) is a helluva lot more valuable to you, career-wise, than anything else you've been doing in recent months.
2. You could probably get a lot more VF bylines by writing stuff that was more general-interest current-events/politics than by chasing after your own pet peeves and doing "inside the blogsphere" stories.
3. Rather than trying to bigfoot it in someone else's group blog, why not focus on building your brand with your own individual blog? Starting with a big fat "zero" on the Sitemeter might seem like a step down, but lots of people do it every day. And assuming you could build traffic -- I imagine you'd get occasional links from Sullivan, Greenwald and others of the atypical Left -- it would enhance your value as a freelancer, since you would be able to deliver a ready-made readership. Using your personal blog as a repository/outlet for your *idiosyncratic* work would sort of free you up to do more mundane reportorial journalism without feeling that you were losing your voice.
4. In case you haven't noticed, 2012 is an election year. About a dozen Republicans are seeking the nomination to challenge Obama. You've got an agent. You're a contributor to Vanity Fair and other publications. Uncompensated travel expenses are tax deductible. Do I have to add up that equation for you?
If you could suppress your intellectual disdain for *mere politics* -- and also suppress your appetite for playing "gotcha" -- there is a helluva lot of fun to be had in covering campaigns from the horse-race perspective. "Punch a hat-pin through your frontal lobes," as HST put it.
Such a course of action, it would seem to me, would be more fruitful as a professional endeavor for a young writer than the speculative project of building some kind of super-aggregator. Of course, schlepping around to Rotary luncheons in Iowa and New Hampshire might not be your dream job, but the mismatched quality of the assignment would in itself have a certain novelty appeal, don't you think? It would be a challenge, an experience and a potential growth experience: How does someone with your background go about doing deadline reporting in a competitive news environment?
Of course, if there is to be a truce, you'll have the common decency not to mention that I ever made any such suggestion. This e-mail never existed. And if I see you at CPAC -- or in Des Moines or Manchester -- you owe me beers.
Under the ever-shifting and wacky circumstances, I will not be filing a libel suit against you next week as originally planned as I obviously have a shiny new conflict to play with and anyway I hate courts. Suffice to say that Johnson is getting my full attention; you once compared me to a Maoist interrogator, but you never went so far as to claim that I might actually be worked for the state that Mao founded, for fuck's sake. And as of last night several commenters there were discussing the possibility of alerting the FBI to the allegedly illegal activities that they have concocted for me through the traditional deductive process of the circlus jerklus, which is fancy Latin speak that you Southerners would not understand.
Regarding your latest post, Charles never ended up getting very involved in Project PM, largely because I recruited several experienced programmers who were interested enough to develop the software component on a voluntary basis, rather than for pay as would have been the setup with Johnson.