In a sane world, this would be the death of Sally Quinn’s Kaplan column:
I’m going to discuss a drama unfolding in our family, and I’m discussing it only because others have made it public and messy. It’s a conflict that I hope readers can understand — and avoid in their own lives.
Our son Quinn Bradlee is marrying Pary Williamson in Washington on April 10. My husband’s granddaughter Greta Bradlee is getting married the same day in California. In the past few days there have been a spate of negative stories, both online and in print, about the “dueling weddings.” It’s been hurtful to all four of these wonderful young people. This “dueling” characterization couldn’t be further from the truth.
Wonkette breaks out the Drudge siren for this news; Michael Calderone gauges the newsroom’s reaction:
Former Post reporter Tim Page described Quinn’s column in the comments section on the Post’s website as “the worst piece ever printed in Style,” while inside the Post, one staffer summed up what the newsroom consensus of the piece: “total joke.”
I found it fun to juxtapose Quinn’s piece with Bobo’s Straussian cri de couer on the perils of meritocracy:
Moreover, we’ve changed the criteria for success. It is less necessary to be clubbable. It is more important to be smart and hard-working.
Yet here’s the funny thing. As we’ve made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has plummeted. We’ve increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower.
That’s right, folks, people distrust our institutions because there aren’t enough people like Sally Quinn (and George W. Bush and Cokie Roberts and Evan Bayh) at the top anymore.
Mike Kay
Why won’t Sally Quinn die?
Bobzim
I was crying laughing at this discussion about it at The Awl that someone in the WaPo comments linked to.
c u n d gulag
It’ll all be ok.
Fred will move her from “Styles” to the Op-ed any day now.
And as bad as MoDo can sometimes be (and sometimes great, too) in the NY Times, Sally will be far worse on her best day.
Sally, maybe we should all chip in and give you a gift. How about a silver spoon you can shove up your ass!
A Mom Anon
Fuck all of them sideways with anything rusty that’s handy. I wish that was my only fucking problem. Hell,I’d bet I could pay off all my family’s debt and have money left over with just what’s being spent on these two weddings.
I’m seriously considering camping out in front of either one of my senators homes or my reps house with a sign asking them what’s for dinner since my husband is unemployed and we have no income now. Except for the insane joke that is GA’s unemployment benefits. The max is 330 a week. Husband won’t qualify for that much. Explain to me how you pay bills AND eat on that. This is truly fucking depressing.
DougJ
@A Mom Anon:
You ought to do that.
Mike Kay
If sally wasn’t a home wrecker who fucked the boss to get a column, she’ be playing checkers in miami.
Cat Lady
It’s all just fucking retarded. Her son looks inbred. Sally Quinn: DIAF. Bobo: DIAF. Reading these people makes you stupider, and reading what other people say after reading these people make you suicidal.
If Obama were smart, he’d call in air strikes for both weddings. It would give the courtiers a little taste of what it’s like in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it would save the country from their insipid self-absorbed crap. Why do they hate America?
soonergrunt
@Mike Kay:
Because she feeds on the blood of virgins to keep healthy and vigorous.
SATSQ.
A Mom Anon
@DougJ: I gotta find out where they live first,lol.
Paul
Between this and Leon Wieseltier’s mash letter to himself and his kind, I think we’re reaching Peak Villager.
debit
@A Mom Anon: Go to their office.
Didn’t Sally Quinn write some awful little book where she, I mean, her main character was the love object of everyone and did clever things like embedding a cheating lover’s Oscars in a tub full of cement? Or was that all just a bad dream I had back in the 80’s?
mai naem
Sorry Sally, between Tiger’s affair apology,Heather Montaig’s surgery andPrincess Sarah’s retard blow up I didn’t know you were having such a huge problem with your his and her’s kids’ weddings.
Brick Oven Bill
Re: “We’ve increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society.”
Christ DougJ, I’m trying to work with you here, but come on.
Here is Barack’s understanding of the economy. Barack was in Las Vegas yesterday talking about Global Warming.
Barack thought about it and after a prolonged ‘uuuuuhhhh’ told us that he had been to 57 states and would be to the 58th soon.
Janet, a couple of days ago, after a plane at full throttle, made a direct hit on the IRS offices, in a building isolated from all others, told us:
“There is no indication of terrorism or criminal activity.”
This was the government line for hours after the event. We behold, of course, the natural human cycle. Plato teaches us:
“Because in the oligarchical State they are disqualified and driven from office, and therefore they cannot train or gather strength; whereas in a democracy they are almost the entire ruling power, and while the keener sort speak and act, the rest keep buzzing about the bema and do not suffer a word to be said on the other side; hence in democracies almost everything is managed by the drones.”
Ash Can
The entire WaPo op-ed section needs to DIAFF. What’s its lucidity-to-bullshit ratio these days anyway? Robinson and Dionne can go to some other oulet that won’t take huge steaming dumps on their reputations on a daily basis, and the remaining eyesore can be bulldozed.
Derelict
I’m sure Bobo’s meritocracy column was properly vetted by Rosenthal’s spawn before it was published in the Times.
Yep, Americans sure don’t trust them people who clawed their way to the top by being semen first-class in the only race they actual won on their own.
soonergrunt
@soonergrunt:
@Brick Oven Bill:
Bill, Sally Quinn would like a few minutes with you in private.
Comrade Javamanphil
I get enough of this crap in newsletters from relatives I can’t remember every Christmas. Thanks Wapo! (And, fwiw, the newsletters are generally more interesting to read.)
Violet
Money quote:
Bwahahahaha! “Existing tensions” indeed. Translation: her husband’s first wife still thinks she’s a witch.
All the money and influence in the world can’t make you a nice person. Sally Quinn is not a nice person.
El Cid
If only all our major news media could hew to the high standards of smartness and hard work as Fred Hiatt.
Mike Kay
I have to say, I saw a photo of sally when she was young, and she had a great pair of tits.
as you might know, she was a secretary at WaPo in the early 70s, until she became Bradlee’s personal “Deep Throat” — oh, the irony.
SiubhanDuinne
One of the nicest touches in this whole tedious-beyond-belief-yet-strangely-compelling saga is that MoDo actually introduced young Quinn Bradley to his yoga-instructor fiancée, Pary Williamson. In a perfect world, her NYT column tomorrow would give us her profound and clever views on the dueling Brinn-Quadlee nuptials.
Mike Kay
@SiubhanDuinne:
I can’t believe MoDo does yoga, considering all the botox in her system.
SiubhanDuinne
O/T
Alexander Haig is dead.
Tom Hilton
The only thing that could be more hurtful would be if those trailer-trash Clintons crashed the weddings and trashed the place.
MattF
Tim Page is much more than a ‘former reporter’ for the Post. He won a Pulitzer Prize as the Post’s music critic– and was one of the Post’s brightest stars, back in the days when it was worth reading.
To give some flavor of his character, one of the things he was known for was a standing offer– call him at his office, hum a few notes from any piece of music, and he’d identify it on the spot.
Mike Kay
@SiubhanDuinne:
and they said old soldiers never die….
Mike Kay
@SiubhanDuinne:
God to Haig: “No, I’m in charge!”
cat48
Gee, I see now why Obama has used good judgement and not associated with this idiot. She’s not allowed to give him advice and demand he fire folks anymore, right? She should retire and should hide in shame the rest of her life. Tsk, tsk, Miss Sally.
Keith
I had to read every link to figure out what was going on – a testament to how absurd and pointlesss Quinn’s work is. It initially read like she was telling a story of her family torn between two weddings – one hetero and one not, with me assuming “Pary” was a guy.
Talk about a WTF moment when I realized this was just her broadcasting a family squabble – including Posties – that had nothing to do with any topical news story…just the same narcissistic “here’s what’s going on with my family” that I get every day from my own office manager.
Mike Kay
@cat48:
sally quinn = slightly older version of Jane Hamsher.
Tom Hilton
@Mike Kay: I’m still disappointed that when Gerald Ford died, nobody ran the headline “God to Ford: Drop Dead”.
Brian J
Without reading the rest of that Bobo piece, I can tell it’s horseshit. I’d say the reason that our institutions are viewed so poorly is that nothing gets done. (Well, not enough, anyway.) Last night, on Bill Maher’s show, Elliot Spitzer said that the U.S. congress hasn’t done much of anything in about three decades. That might be extreme, but the fact that nobody disagreed with him says he’s on to something. And as bad as the Republicans are, the Democrats are also bad, although in a different way, because they should be screaming at the top of their lungs about what the Republicans are doing. They should be forcing them to own their obstructionism. Instead, they are letting them get off easily.
By the way, are things really more meritocratic than than were in the past? I doubt that’s the case.
Violet
I met Alexander Haig once. It was at some fancy charity event I got invited to for some reason. I was introduced to him, shook his hand, and was trying to figure out why I knew his name before it registered who he was. He was looking doddering and that was quite a few years ago now.
SiubhanDuinne
@Mike Kay #23, #27, #28: LOL
Violet
@Brian J:
Well, you don’t have to be born to the ruling class to be president. Obama is a pretty good example of that. But it always helps to have connections. People who are born into families with money and connections have a serious head start. What kind of life would Quinn Bradlee have if he’d been born to a poor family? No boarding school for special needs kids for him.
SiubhanDuinne
Also: @Tom Hilton #25, #32: LOL
bkny
from the getgo she was a narcissistic selfish witch:
In “The Party,” her 1997 book on entertaining, she wrote that after marrying Ben in a judge’s chamber in 1978, the newlyweds planned a celebratory dinner at their home for 30 or 40 friends. Trouble was, half of them had already committed to dining with the British ambassador, Peter Jay, and his wife Margaret. Ben and Sally were also invited, she makes clear, but had begged off. …
“When I called everyone to invite them to ‘dinner,’ they all declined, and I had to coerce them into coming without revealing why….What I did tell them in my sternest voice [was] that I was calling in my chits, that this was extremely important and I wanted them to get out of the Jays’ party and come to mine. They must have heard the resolve in my voice because they did it. We had to contend with a number of grudging guests at the beginning of the evening, but once they saw the wedding cake and the white lilies everywhere, heard a few mushy toasts, and drank several glasses of champagne, they were mollified, and it turned out to be a wonderful evening.” Quinn makes no mention of whether the jilted Brits were equally amused.
PurpleGirl
Sally Quin ain’t no Perle Mesta. That she thinks she is must have Mrs. Mesta spinning in her grave. (Use teh Google.)
So, let’s see (my reading of the WaPo column): Son Quinn Bradlee and lady friend pick a date in October 2010 for a wedding party. Granddaughter Greta picks a date in April and sends “save the Date” cards. There are already existing familial tensions so it is decided that the East coast DC Bradlees won’t go to the West coast wedding. Fine. No problem there it seems. Then son Quinn’s lady friend finds out she’s pregnant and they move up the date to April for various reasons but that’s the same date as the Granddaughter’s wedding (which they weren’t going to anyway!). So where’s the problem… where’s the angst… who began the gossip mill? Could it be Sally herself? Dog, she’s a hopeless human being.
dmsilev
@Violet: No kidding. How tense do things have to be before a grandfather and his second wife is forcefully disinvited from his grandson’s wedding?
You get the feeling that the planning for the California wedding included snipers on the roof just in case Quinn decided to grace them with her presence.
-dms
Cerberus
@Brian J:
More? Yes.
Enough? No.
It’s more meritocratic in that one is no longer explicitly required to be a member of the ruling class and be explicitly white and male and marry solely for connections. People like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi can rise in politics off their hard work rather than being automatically blocked by the various machines.
But class mobility has been mostly an illusion for a good long time now. It’s pretty much lower here today than any other first world nation and our major institutions such as media, business, and politics is still flooded with the privileged sons of former millionaires and leaders in their field. So, the idea that we’ve even scratched the surface of meritocracy in this country is a cruel joke.
Of course to Bobo, that’s not really the point or matters to him. This is all about reinforcing the casual racism of those invested in the status quo and telling them its ok to be freaked out over one of “them” sneaking through the ranks and becoming head of state and to worry about that happening to them and reassuring them it’d be a bad thing if they ever allowed someone competent to take their jobs because wink wink, nudge, nudge “loss of faith, all I’m saying”.
In short, man is a racist weasel.
Mike Kay
OH SHIT – IT JUST FUCKING HIT ME
sally named her son after herself.
Quinn Bradlee. Oh, the poor, poor, kid.
gil mann
They say Raid only works on the insect type of wasp as opposed to the acronym, but I say we just need to use more Raid.
Yeah, they’re both women whose writing I frequently disagree with. It’s eerie!
Cerberus
On Sally Quinn.
God I hate privileged assholes. And what the hell triggered her off. Was she in the middle of jerking off to her google search of her own name and caught some third rate gossip site making a casual mention of the two wedding deal and got all bent out of shape because the California family hurt her feefees and this dredged it up? So she thought, what a great opportunity to passive-aggressively air my petty grievances and blame the petty grievances of others?
People like her and the petty, small-minded way they take affront to basic life makes me want them to experience real pain, real suffering, real hardship.
I want her to go through the mental horror of gender dissonance, to stare down losing your home, to try and make a packet of spaghetti, some seasoning and some garlic cloves last the whole week, to survive a day on the streets as a black male, to be uninsured and injured or sick.
Basically to live in a world where being disinvited to one relative’s wedding and facing two weddings on the same day isn’t some worst thing that ever happened to you thing.
Sadly, we live in a world where such people will never ever face such hardships and the broken meritocracy will ensure that our media and governments will be filled with Sally Quinn’s who have no frame of reference and think slights, mockery, and personal politics are bigger deals than the lives and deaths of thousands.
And I think I can back that up with the last year of congress. We had purported Democrats enjoying an entire year airing their grievances and petty “getting back” motions against perceived slights blocking the majority’s attempts to actually get something done meaningful for the American people. And even after the long tantrum, people like Bayh still end up running away because now the people who elected him were even hurting his feefees.
Fuck them all.
Will
Note that I am saying this as someone who likes Obama, but I’m not 100 percent sure that I’d put him down as a victory of meritocracy.
He was a scholarship student to a posh private school, which served as a feeder into the Ivy League. He did well, he worked hard and he has become Leader of the Free World. Can’t take anything from that.
But without being one of the small handful of poor kids allowed into that posh private school, he could have worked just as hard, gone to a state school and be the head of a town council, somewhere.
He is not an example of hard work triumphs over all. He did not rise through meritocracy. The elite let him in at an early age to make themselves feel better, and he has remained one of them ever since.
You’ll find similar stories from the Italian City States, Court of Versailles and Victorian England of talented common born who rise due to latching on to the right patrons. Doesn’t make those times and places any more of a meritocracy.
Wake me when some poor kids rises through the public schools, earns their way through state college and then becomes president. Or not, as Clinton counts but wasn’t exactly friend to the poor and working man.
Will
As for the “Quinn” thing, that’s pretty common in well-healed Southern and New England clans. Two big houses come together in marriage, and the first male child gets the honor of being named after the mother’s clan as kind of a billboard announcing the alliance of the two great families.
If it works out, the grandkids, great-grandkids and so on get to keep the name with a II, III, IV and such attached.
Scott
@Cerberus: What Cerberus said.
I hate the idea of any newspaper running a social column beyond a “Here’s some pictures of people who went to fancy dress parties this weekend” photo page, and even then, only for decent charity benefits.
If anyone has to run “I’m rich, and here are the parties I go to because I’m rich” columns, I’d just as soon Paris Hilton wrote it. Maybe it’d cover more interesting/important people than Quinn’s.
Come to think of it, the people who do the “Hot Chicks with Douchebag” blog could probably do a hell of a DC society column…
CatStaff
Sally’s apparently channeling George Bush:
Which would be fine, if Greta were marrying another woman, but this appears not to be the case:
Did Sally get into Althouse’s box wine?
cmorenc
BETTER QUESTION: Why are you bothering to read Sally Quinn’s column in the first place? It is in the “Arts & Living: Styles” section, not the “news” or “editorial” sections.
As any sort of national supposed-to-be newsworthy commentary on anything, it would indeed be brain-rottingly insipid. It’s a valid, tricky problem of family politics to wade through, but then again so are lots of other tricky, but utterly mundane sorts of issues that are as exciting and informative to read about as one about her toenail-clipping habits.
I’m more worried about the utter crap that DOES make the editorial and news pages of the Washington Post: the uncritical scribing of political talking points, for just one f’rexample. It would almost be better if the Post let a hundred Sally Quinns bloom, if it would crowd the really toxic idiots out of the paper.
Warren Terra
Al Haig can rot. That would-be dictator has spent the last couple of decades flacking for actual dictators. I’m an Atheist, but the concept of a punitive afterlife was invented for people like Haig.
PurpleGirl
@Will: Besides Ben Bradlee already had named a son from his first marriage Ben Bradlee Jr. (That’s the father of the granddaughter who’s getting married.)
Mike Kay
@Will:
clinton doesn’t count, he went to Georgetown University, were he hooked up with the powerful chairman of the foreign relations committee, William J. Fullbright.
Mike Kay
@Will:
oops. shame on me. LBJ fits your criteria. Someone who worked his way up through the public school system and care for the poor. Alas, he killed alot of people in Vietnam.
Mike in NC
Yes, Bobo goes with the dreaded “e” word. No doubt every wingnut imbecile speaking at CPAC this week railed against those elites, you know, anybody who isn’t a high school dropout.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Except for DC Villager families – how could anybody be happy when related to such a prissy bunch of entitled fucking retarded morans.
HRA
You can choose your friends. You can’t choose your family.
So somewhere out there in space is a reference to the subject Quinn has addressed. Personally I would have handled it privately. Drama is what should be inserted for every family wedding and funeral. It’s normal. Move on.
CatStaff
I did not know that Sally apparently owns Grey Gardens (from the HBO movie of the same name): http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/15/AR2009041500959.html
You can just see her racing around, tossing Ben’s money in the air, while he stands there wondering what hit him.
It’s always sunny, apparently, in Sally’s world.
Kevin Phillips Bong
@Will: Not President, but Sotomayor?
Warren Terra
HRA has a point; picking on any family’s dynamics, or even on the narrative Quinn concocts, is unseemly.
OTOH, her narcissism in putting it all in her column in a national newpaper is fair game.
Silver
Gets better:
Read this:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article5992801.ece
Jesus Fucking Christ…
BB
I went to my dad’s house for his birthday in the beginning of November last year, and found myself unusually exhausted by all the travel it involved. When I finally got to the house, I sat down on his bed and flipped on C-Span while I went through some mail he asked me to look at.
Well, don’t you know I pass out right there. When I woke up about two hours later, C-Span will still on but the program had changed. It was an interview with Sally Quinn from the 1990’s and she is sitting there discussing something called finger bowls. Sally is going on and on about how they are to be used at dinner parties. Apparently, they’re placed atop a doily prior to dessert and one is to dip one’s fingers in the be-flower petaled water ever so softly.
So there I am, groggier than fuck, in a strange bed surrounded by water bills and NRA magazines, hearing a white lady on the TV talk about doilies and bowls of water with flower petals for finger rinsing.
That’s my Sally Quinn story.
gypsy howell
@Silver:
OMFG.
It’s hard to know what’s worse — Sally’s insane over-reaction to Quinn’s hooker experience, the fact that he felt compelled to write about it … or that the Times printed it.
Svensker
@Silver:
O. M. G.
The poor, poor kid.
Vico
I also noticed the “we” when Quinn wrote about paying for the wedding gown. She not-so-subtly lets us know that the bride-to-be’s parents aren’t affluent to perform their traditional bankrolling functions. What a loser.
Will
The most amusing detail to me is that the church she was having so much trouble booking was the National Cathedral.
PurpleGirl
The comments at the WaPo column are quite funny. If I were Sally Quinn I’d retire, then she’s been like this forever and still does not understand how awful she is.
licensed to kill time
@Silver:
Oh God that was beyond pathetic and waaaaaaaaay too much fucking information. Pun intended.
Warren Terra
@PurpleGirl:
I suspect you’re wrong: if you were Quinn you might resign (or be more drastic), but becoming Quinn requires such narcissism that you’d do no such thing.
jl
Are we more of a meritocracy than in ye goode olde dayes when you had to be a WASP blue blood with a long distinguished pedigree and a requisite capital tp join the ruling club. Sure, absolutely. Look at Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton.
I am very sure a bastard egghead from the Caribbean who couldn’t keep his fly zipped for a pretty woman (and maybe a beloved beautiful manly companion), and little money could be confirmed as Secretary of the Treasury today.
It would be a snap.
Adams married quite a ways up to get Abigail. Maybe he founded a blue blood WASP aristocracy, but he was not one himself.
Of course, as Juvenal pointed out, look into the aristocracy and it was founded by scum at some point in time. Who will found our future aristocracies if not scums like the Clintons and Obamas?
Brooks started writing some halfway decent columns a few months ago, or maybe that was one of his interns going off script. Now he is back to most hilarious and abject hack social opinion engineering for the GOP. He is back well into total intellectual fraud territory.
Redshift
You know, someone who wasn’t a complete hack might look at the “trend” (if it exists, which I’m dubious about) that replacement of the ruling class with more of a meritocracy is linked with greater distrust of elites, and notice that the line connecting them is a decades-long barrage from conservatives to undermine “those people” and the more recent pushing of the idea that a brown person cannot possibly be a legitimately elected leader, so they can constantly make demands that the president abase himself before them and still consider themselves “patriotic.”
I realize that any populism us just a cover, and the most fundamental tenet of conservatism the world over is to be pro-aristocracy, but if a major newspaper is going to pay a salary to a hack, I’d like to see him earn it by at least dressing it up a little.
Redshift
I guess Bobo did dress it up slightly, in that he had the gall to lament the demise of the ruling class, while still referring to our leaders with the wingnut boilerplate “elites.”
danimal
I’m scared, because the Beltway party circuit runs the town, and these folks are bonkers.
And Another Thing...
Holy Shit ! that column is a masterpiece of bitchitude. She strafes everybody and then immolates. Sally Quinn should be driven out of “polite” society, instead she writes “on faith.” The WaPo is a disgrace. Kudos to Martha Raddatz for keeping the Alph Bitch away from her daughter Greta’s wedding. Can you imagine having Sally Quinn for a mother-in-law?
Mouse Tolliver
@BB:
I love that scene in Scarface when Tony Montana is given a finger bowl, and he eats the lemon because he thinks it’s one of the courses.
freelancer
@Silver:
Relieved? Srsly?! The girl you lost it to gets dragged in to be shamed by your mom, and you’re fucking relieved?! I’d be so livid with embarrassment that I would immediately set out on a hunt for the nearest spiky object to impale myself on, but I guess this is just another Tuesday in the Bradlee household.
You poor son of a bitch. Even Buster Bluth feels pity for you.
PurpleGirl
@Warren Terra: True that. She is such a piece of work.
HRA
@Silver:
“http://entertainment.timesonli…..992801.ece”
You have to feel sorry for him. There are no other words.
DougJ
@BB:
I like it.
Silver
I wouldn’t be surprised if the yoga instructor ends up with her head in a freezer somewhere when she decides to leave in 2 years…and the poor guy will be rocking back and forth in a chair asking for mommy when the cops come to get him.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@Will: Technically, Obama first went to Occidental College before he transferred to Columbia. I’m not sure if his high school was or was not a significant factor in him getting into Columbia, though.
gwangung
Well, if you’re an Iolani kid, obviously not. (Sorry, know way too many island kids to think of Punahoe as a posh private school).
gravie
We subscribe to the WaPo, and when I read this little piece of self-serving bs — or at least the first paragraph, after which I bailed out — I was once again wondering why.
SarahLoving
Well shoot. We could go a long way to restoring faith in our institutions if everyone had Inmate Dog Washing Services, like they do in South Carolina.
MS
I AM NOT making this up. From the Wash Post engagement announcement…
“Engaged: Quinn Bradlee, 27, to Pary Williamson, 32, after four months of dating. The son of journalists Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn was introduced to the Georgetown yoga instructor by Maureen Dowd; popped the question over the phone Sunday night after a lovers’ spat. First marriage for him; second for her. “…
amazing