Wednesday, July 23, 2003

The new New York Times bestseller list has been e-mailed to subscribers, and these folks will be happy to learn that Hillery Clinton's Living History is no longer the #1 nonfiction hardcover. However, they will probably be unhappy to learn that Hillary has been replaced at the top not by one of their heroes, Ann Coulter, but by a well-educated atheist homewrecker whose mother hung out with Margaret Sanger: Katharine Hepburn, the subject of Scott Berg's Kate Remembered. (Coulter drops to #6.)

Meanwhile, this Hillary-hater grasps at straws, noting that her book is being sold at 40% off list price at Amazon. As some of the people who respond to this person point out, Amazon discounts a lot of big bestsellers that much, precisely because they're bestsellers (and, as such, are deeply discounted at the bricks-and-mortar stores that are Amazon's competitors).

This is what I don't get: These people are conservatives, which means that, by definition, they have the utmost admiration for capitalism -- and yet they don't seem to have a clue how businesses actually operate. They don't understand deep discounting of new, hot-selling products, even though it's common in the book and CD businesses. And they were shocked, shocked, that the publisher of the Clinton book may have manufactured a pre-publication leak -- even though this practice is also commonplace in media businesses. Do these people actually know anything about capitalism that doesn't come from the heavy-breathing pages of Ayn Rand? Have any of these people ever even had jobs?

(Oh -- this is unrelated, but please note that at least one of the Hillary-haters in the first link above doesn't know how to use, or refrain from using, an apostrophe. Thanks to Dack at Rational Enquirer for spotting this. The spelling in the second link isn't so hot, either.)

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