Michael Kelly (editor)
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Michael Kelly (March 17, 1957 – April 3, 2003) was an editor-at-large of the Atlantic Monthly and a columnist for the Washington Post. He died in 2003 covering the invasion of Iraq.
Prior to his employment at Atlantic, he was the editor of The New Republic, from 1996 to 1997. Considering that the fraudulent writer, Stephen Glass, was a major contributor under his editorship, Kelly later felt ashamed that he was fooled by Glass's false stories. Kelly was portrayed by actor Hank Azaria in the 2003 film about Glass's downfall, Shattered Glass.
Kelly was known as a neoconservative critic of anti-war movements on both the left and right.[citation needed] He coined the term "fusion paranoia" to refer to a political convergence of left-wing and right-wing activists around anti-war issues and civil liberties, which he claimed were motivated by a shared belief in conspiracism or anti-government views. Kelly was a supporter of U.S. military interventionism during both the Clinton Administration and the Bush Administration.
Kelly reported on the Persian Gulf War in 1991 for The New Republic, which served as the basis for his book Martyrs' Day: Chronicles of a Small War (1993).
[edit] Killed in Iraq
On April 3, 2003, just a few weeks following the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Kelly was travelling in a Humvee with a soldier from the 3rd U.S. Infantry Division when the vehicle was fired upon by Iraqi rebel forces and swerved into a canal, killing him.
[edit] Quotes
"Tyranny truly is a horror: an immense, endlessly bloody, endlessly painful, endlessly varied, endless crime against not humanity in the abstract but a lot of humans in the flesh. It is, as Orwell wrote, a jackboot forever stomping on a human face. I understand why some dislike the idea, and fear the ramifications of, America as a liberator. But I do not understand why they do not see that anything is better than life with your face under the boot. And that any rescue of a people under the boot (be they Afghan, Kuwaiti or Iraqi) is something to be desired. Even if the rescue is less than perfectly realized. Even if the rescuer is a great, overmuscled, bossy, selfish oaf. Or would you, for yourself, choose the boot?" (February 26, 2003)
[edit] Portrayal
Kelly was portrayed by Hank Azaria in the film Shattered Glass, which was released a few months after his death. The film is about Stephen Glass, a New Republic reporter who worked under Kelly, and who was discovered to have invented the majority of his stories. The relationship between Glass and Kelly is an important plot element of the film.
