John Podhoretz

From Free net encyclopedia

John Podhoretz (born April 18, 1961) is a commentator for a variety of conservative and neo-conservative media sources, including National Review, the Weekly Standard and ReganBooks. He has a regular column at the New York Post, is a political commentator on Fox News, and regularly appears on CNN's Reliable Sources. He has also worked at Time, the Washington Times, Insight and U.S. News & World Report.

The son of Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter, John Podhoretz has also served as speechwriter to former U.S. President Ronald Reagan and to former White House Drug Czar William Bennett. He was co-founder as well of the White House Writers Group, a corporate speechwriting and public-relations firm in Washington, D.C.

Podhoretz is a contributor to The Corner, a group blog run by the National Review. He is also a five-time Jeopardy champion.

He is the author of:

  • Bush Country: How George W. Bush Became the First Great Leader of the 21st Century---While Driving Liberals Insane, St. Martin's Griffin, ISBN 0312324731

Contents

[edit]

Marriage

Podhoretz is married to Ayala Cohen, a co-producer of Saturday Night Live. Podhoretz and Cohen met through an internet dating service. [1]

[edit]

Nicknames

On NRO's The Corner, he frequently posts under the name "JPod."

According to conservative author Andrew Sullivan, when Podhoretz worked at the Washington Times, he was nicknamed "J. P. Normanson."[2]

[edit]

Jill Carroll comments

On March 30, 2006, Podhoretz was criticized by liberal [3] and conservative[4] bloggers for posting the following comment on National Review Online approximately three hours after hostage Jill Carroll's release from her captors:

"It's wonderful that she's free, but after watching someone who was a hostage for three months say on television she was well-treated because she wasn't beaten or killed -- while being dressed in the garb of a modest Muslim woman rather than the non-Muslim woman she actually is -- I expect there will be some Stockholm Syndrome talk in the coming days."[5]

Within days of Carroll's release, a video of Carroll slamming the "occupation" of Iraq and praising the insurgents as "good people fighting an honorable fight" appeared on an Islamist website. While counterterrorism expert Laura Mansfield, (who had neither met nor interviewed Carroll), posited on CNN that Carroll's actions "may indicate she was experiencing a touch of Stockholm syndrome,"[6] The Christian Science Monitor, Carroll's paper, reported:

"The night before journalist Jill Carroll's release, her captors said they had one final demand as the price of her freedom: She would have to make a video praising her captors and attacking the United States, according to Jim Carroll.
In a long phone conversation with his daughter on Friday, Mr. Carroll says that Jill was 'under her captor's control.'
Ms. Carroll had been their captive for three months and even the smallest details of her life - what she ate and when, what she wore, when she could speak - were at her captors' whim. They had murdered her friend and colleague Allan Enwiya, "she had been taught to fear them," he says. And before making one last video the day before her release, she was told that they had already killed another American hostage.
That video appeared Thursday on a jihadist website that carries videos of beheadings and attacks on American forces. In it, Carroll told her father she felt compelled to make statements strongly critical of President Bush and his policy in Iraq.
Her remarks are now making the rounds of the Internet, attracting heavy criticism from conservative bloggers and commentators." [7]

On April 1, 2006, Carroll released a statement through the Christian Science Monitor's website that severely undermined any "Stockholm Syndrome" theories about her. In the statement, Carroll stated that she participated in the video critical of the United States and praiseworthy of her abductors only because she feared for her life and because her captors said they would let her go if she participated to their satisfaction.[8] Carroll called her captors "criminals, at best" and said she remained "deeply angry" with them.

[edit]

External links

Retrieved from "http://www.netipedia.com/index.php/John_Podhoretz"