Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, may be the all-powerful arbiter of what’s hot and what’s not in celebrity culture. But now, having declared Paul Krugman a “national treasure,” Carter is trying to reinvent himself as an angry liberal, devoting his monthly Editor’s Letter to relentless Bush-bashing in a style that is unabashedly School of Krugman. He should have stuck with schmoozing teen idols and British royalty. Just check out the Editor’s Letter in the December, 2003 issue (unfortunately, there’s no online link for it). Carter’s so bad at this that he makes Krugman look good.
Carter’s entire two-page Letter is a bullet-point list of President Bush’s failures. He says, “There’s a lot of ground to cover here, so let’s do it scorecard style.” By that he means shamelessly plagiarizing the style of the famous “Harper’s Index,” in which pseudo-statistics are ironically juxtaposed with blas
