Is Roger Ailes a few fries short of a Happy Meal?

Paul Krugman, via Jonathan Chait, points us to a Gawker article about Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News, and his third wife, Elizabeth Ailes.

Let's start with the Gawker story:

The small-town newspapers in New York's Hudson Valley that Fox News chief Roger Ailes owns with his wife Elizabeth are in a staff revolt after employees caught Ailes spying on them with News Corp. security goons.

That lede just scratches the surface. The "staff revolt" involves serious "weirdness":

Ailes—who installed Elizabeth as the day-to-day manager of the papers while he finishes his tenure at Fox News Channel—has run the papers with the singularly paranoid and abusive management style he brings to all his projects, resulting in the defection of his hand-picked editor and two top reporters earlier this month after Ailes told them he'd had them followed, and their private conversations surveilled, to catch them saying mean things about him. The spying followed years of intense weirdness between the editor and the Aileses, who once asked him to personally stop a break-in at their home and who implied that, after Roger's death, he'd be expected to replace him in their marriage.

The editor in question is Joe Lindsley, the "27-year-old combative former Weekly Standard editorial assistant that Ailes had hired in 2009 to revitalize the papers and yank them firmly rightward." Seventy-something Roger, fifty-something Elizabeth, and twenty-something Joe can be seen in this picture. And yes, the "weirdness" that the Gawker story details has all the overtones suggested by my previous sentence.

While no one suggested any romantic entanglements, several sources familiar with the relationship say Lindsley was alternately—and confusingly—treated like a member of the Ailes’ family and a member of their household staff. He was so close to Elizabeth that he regularly attended church with her on Sundays in Roger’s absence. Indeed, in what associates describe as an exceedingly awkward moment for Lindsley, Elizabeth once joked to him that she was grooming him to replace her husband: ‘When Roger dies, you’re going to have some special responsibilities around here.’

Add to that Ailes' signature blend of paranoia, control, and obsessive spying. Think "Big Brother" style portraits of the Aileses in the paper's only bathroom. Is Roger Ailes crazy? Read the story and decide for yourself.

In fairness, the Gawker story is sourced anonymously to "numerous former employees" of the Putnam County paper, and Elizabeth has issued a denial to the article's authors, which reads, in part:

These rambling allegations are untrue and in fact not even reality based. The paper hoped for Joe's success in spite of his personal habits and lack of performance[.]

This is a fun, gossipy story to be sure, but making the rounds, including at The New Republic, where Jonathan Chait comments:

I actually think a surprisingly large number of people with prominent roles in public life are totally bonkers, not merely in their public philosophy but even in practical ways that people who agree with their ideology can recognize. Look at, I don't know, Newt Gingrich. He doesn't just have a different estimation of the efficacy of Keynesian multipliers than I do, or even merely different values than I do. He's clearly a nut. Michelle Bachmann hires chiefs of staff who agree with her ideology, but she runs through them like tissues, and they seem to come away thinking she would be a dangerous character as president. I think this holds true of every field.

I suspect, but I could never prove, that this is true on both right and left but more the former than the latter.

And here's where the problem gets serious. Some people really are crazy, and some of the really crazy are also really powerful. I've read many times about Michele Bachmann's trouble keeping staff. She's on her fifth, or possibly sixth, chief of staff, and one former chief has denounced her publicly as not fit for the presidency. Others intimate the same, including members of her own party:

After [former chief of staff Michelle] Marston's departure [in 2010], one GOP congressman told Politico ... "When your captain's crazy, it's time to find a new ship"[.]

Look at Howard Ahmanson, Jr. Apparently driven mad by his multi-million dollar inheritance, he emerged into something resembling balance with the help of R.J. Rushdoony, the Christian Reconstructionist, and has been on a mission ever since. Max Blumenthal:

And the reason that I was interested in him is because he embodies the sensibility of the movement that I’m writing about in my book, Republican Gomorrah, that controls the Republican Party. At age eighteen, Howard F. Ahmanson, Jr. inherited $300 million from his father, who had just dropped dead. His mother died soon after. And he basically went crazy. He literally went crazy and wound up in a mental institution. When he came out of the mental institution, he found, as so many people do who have had a personal crisis and are seeking some kind of means of transcending it, evangelical religion.

And he found R.J. Rushdoony, who I talked about earlier. He became Rushdoony’s financial angel, and Rushdoony became his surrogate father.

Chait says, in true New Republic fashion, that both sides do it; that there's nutjobs everywhere.

Well, yes; but also, no. If the left has a special obsession, it's with Truth. If the right has an obsession, it's with Power. Obsession with Truth seems to interfere with the acquisition of Power. And certainly, obsession with Power interferes with the acquisition of Truth.

Roger Ailes appears to be one of those power-obsessed people that so populate the Right, in all times and climes. I often think that dealing with the power-obsessed is our primary cross to bear as a species. It certainly is our problem as Americans in this century. God help us, literally; we need it.

GP