I’m watching John’s show here—CBS Sunday Morning—and they’re talking to Chris Hitchens and Jon Meacham. Is nothing sacred?

Watching Forbidden Kingdom on Showtime, another cheesy Jackie Chan vehicle, and I must just be a sucker for these things, but I’m having a lot of fun. At any rate, it features the drunken fist style, and that reminded me of one of the classics:

The drunken master style was the most fun of the styles in Jade Empire, too. Wonder why it was never made into a sequel.

I’m rambling.

Over at the Atlantic, Andrew Cohen has an anti-mass media screed that I very much enjoyed reading but also think is completely wrong. Here’s a sample:

“Democracy demands wisdom” sounds great as a slogan but no has any relevance in a world where even the highly educated don’t take the time to sort sizzle from steak. It’s no wonder most of our politicians are vacuous and venal. They are being elected by people who are too busy or too bored or too lazy to do anything other than cup an ear for the loudest, cleverest, most dramatic sounds emitting from their televisions, computers or PDAs. Industry insiders often call this “noise” and imply that it’s the “white” kind, on in the background but harmless to the health and welfare of everyday life. It is not. It is a deafening roar, America is listening to it (but only half of it, remember) and it is harming, not strengthening, our national interest.

Indeed, sadly, we have both the government and the news industry we deserve. Tens of millions of people now form their dogged (unfounded, hysterical, self-defeating, etc.) opinions about politics (and law and governance and history and science) based upon the sly words and dramatic performances of modern-day carnival barkers, false prophets and snake-oil salesmen like Glenn Beck and Lou Dobbs and Bill O’Reilly and Nancy Grace. Like Sinclair Lewis’ irrepressible Elmer Gantry, these charlatans all share the same cynical inside joke: The louder you scream, the more people will watch; the bigger the conspiracy you allege, the more people will believe it; the more outrage you offer up, the more passionate and prolonged will be the response. It’s about entertainment, not news, and these people and many more are laughing at us all the way to the bank; the latest generation in a long line of American demagogues.

[....]

Intellectual honesty and rigor, or reasoned, dispassionate analysis, is for wimps, public television and the occasional unscripted moment on the Sunday shows. This paradigm wouldn’t have been tolerated by news executives even ten years ago. The media’s wall separating Church (editorial) from State (corporate) was weakening back then. But it’s virtually gone today. News executives embrace the theatrical without apparent shame. No wonder that reality-show-wannabes are doing all sorts of idiotic things these days to get on the news. They realize that everything now is in play; that the networks and cable outlets will cover stories that aren’t news, so long as they get a rise out of their audiences.

As much as I like the general spirit here, I don’t like it when people talk about what “we deserve” because I don’t know who “we” is. Perhaps a Glenn Beck-watching American deserves an awful economy and a screwed-up government but why does a Frontline-watching American deserve it?

Also, it’s fundamentally wrong to say that the media of ten years ago was that much better than today’s media’s or that Beckism is the underlying problem here. It was the New York Times, not Fox, that played the biggest role in pimping bogus pre-war Iraq intel, it was the crazed proclamations of Bob Woodward’s maestro Alan Greenspan that fueled the real estate bubble, not Glenn Beck’s goldbug hysteria, and respected Washington insiders led the impeachment witch hunt as much as Fox News did.

The failures of the last ten years were failures of elites.

I still recommend reading Cohen’s piece. I like how shrill it is. And I honestly believe that if establishment journalists became more blunt and shrill, our public discourse would improve.

I realize this is probably childish and nihilistic, but I consider Stephen Colbert’s routine at the at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner to be the political highlight of the past decade. I was surprised to learn that Colbert thought about taking it even farther and that Tony Snow and Antonin Scalia were complimentary about it:

Colbert disclosed that he did substantial self-editing upon looking at the president and discerning that he wasn’t ecstatic. He had planned to play off Medal of Freedom awards Bush had given former CIA Director George (“It’s a slam dunk”) Tenet and former Iraq administrator L. Paul Bremer; joshing about how Bush was clearly giving awards to everybody in sight.

“’But nobody gives this man an award,’” Colbert recalled as the thrust of the riff he scrapped. “’That ends tonight. I’m going to give the highest honor I can give….a certificate of presidency.’”

It would be akin to “something you get from The Learning Annex for taking a course. ‘I, Stephen Colbert, acknowledge…’” Colbert looked at Bush and said to himself, “I’m going nowhere near this.”

When the dinner was over, “I don’t think I’m dying. I go to sit down and nobody’s meeting my eye. Only [the late journalist-turned-White House spokesman] Tony Snow comes over and says I’m doing a great job.” Then Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia came his way and told him he was brilliant.

Granted David Ignatius is even more of an idiot about economic matters than most Villagers, but Matt Yglesias (via Atrios) poses a very good question:

We have in this country one political party that doesn’t care at all about the budget deficit. And we have another political party that gets crapped on by the establishment every time it attempts to deal with deficits. Under the circumstances, how long can it possibly be until we have two parties that evince Bush/Reagan-esque levels of concern for the deficit?

I’m sitting here watching a 2 hour special on Biography about the making of Star Wars, and I am wondering how musical scores like what Williams made for the movie will be looked at in the future. Will someone in 2110 be driving to work in their hovercraft listening to Interglobal Public Radio listening to the Star Wars soundtrack the way we listen to the work of 17th and 18th century composers? Will it hold up over time?

I often wonder how the things we do will be viewed in the future- will people a hundred years from now look back on the way we treat homosexuals (DOMA, DADT, etc.) the same way that you and I look back on women’s suffrage- sort of a stunned disbelief at the way women were treated (and still are in some countries).

The Clinton recession, I guess:

There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent. Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s as well.

Middle-income households made less in 2008, when adjusted for inflation, than they did in 1999—and the number is sure to have declined further during a difficult 2009. The Aughts were the first decade of falling median incomes since figures were first compiled in the 1960s.

And the net worth of American households—the value of their houses, retirement funds and other assets minus debts—has also declined when adjusted for inflation, compared with sharp gains in every previous decade since data were initially collected in the 1950s.

The facts about net worth may be slightly misleading, as the article points out, since late 1999 was near the top of various investment markets and 2009 was near the bottom of the markets.

But it also strikes me that these figures themselves don’t tell the full story of how bad the decade was economically. As various others have pointed out, the real estate bubble—unlike the tech boom, for example—didn’t generate much in the way of useful new infrastructure of any kind. And, remarkably, this ten years of economic stagnation happened during a time of huge deficits generated by tax cuts that were supposed to stimulate the economy.

What a disaster.

God, this is depressing:

There’s room to criticize the administration’s response to the crisis, most notably DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano’s idiotic insistence that “the system worked.” But the idea that the president was somehow supposed to stop the underwear bomber based on vague intelligence of an increased terrorism risk over the holidays is unreasonable.

Here is Janet Napolitano’s exact quote:

Once this incident occurred, everything went according to clockwork, not only sharing throughout the air industry, but also sharing with state and local law enforcement. Products were going out on Christmas Day, they went out yesterday, and also to the industry to make sure that the traveling public remains safe. I would leave you with that message. The traveling public is safe. We have instituted some additional screening and security measures, in light of this incident, but, again, everyone reacted as they should. The system, once the incident occurred, the system worked.

Tell me howanything she said there is controversial or wrong or “idiotic.” She isn’t in charge of the CIA. Or the FBI. Or Schiphol airport. Or the NCTC.

Napolitano’s only mistake is giving the GOP an easily repeated lie/talking point, not for saying anything wrong. And for the record, you don’t even need to do anything to let the GOP’s bullshit factory come up with an easily repeated lie or talking point- these are the folks who have managed to turn ACORN into SPECTRE and end of life counseling into death panels.

Yes, I know she walked it back a few days later. But that is a commentary on the effectiveness of the wurlitzer and the GOP puke funnel and the willingness of our village media to ask how high when the Republicans say jump. Not on the accuracy of Napolitano’s original comment.

Apparently I have decided to ring in the New Year with a head cold and some chest congestion. Awesome.

In one of the more interesting end-of-the-decade pieces, E. J. Dionne writes:

I’m afraid that the past 10 years will be seen as a time when the United States badly lost its way by using our military power carelessly, misunderstanding the real challenges to our long-term security, and pursuing domestic policies that constrained our options for the future while needlessly threatening our prosperity.

[....]

Bush’s defenders know that Obama’s election represented a popular reaction against the consequences of the 43rd president’s time in office. Because Obama is both the anti-Bush and the leader of the post-Bush cleanup squad, his success would complete the rebuke. So the Bush camp—Karl Rove’s regular contributions to The Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages are emblematic—must stay on the attack.

I think this is exactly right, that it’s important for conservatives to make sure that it doesn’t become settled law that Bush was a failure. So I think we will see come kind of concerted effort to rehab Dubya fairly soon, possibly even this year. It will take the usual pattern—a Rasmussen poll showing that Bush is viewed more favorably than Obama, which will then be trumpeted by the Andrew Malcolms of the world, some catchty phrase that Gerson and Krauthammer and Brooks can repeat in unison.

It will be interesting to see how the effort goes. It’s possible that this year is too soon for it to succeed.

This made me laugh out loud:

And then you read the article, and the Democrats calling for her resignation are some state Senator somewhere and former Lieberman aide Dan Gerstein. This is not a news organization, it is the propaganda wing of the GOP.

In related news, Steve Benen notes that Breitbart’s clowns at Big Government dropped the ball again, and wonders why they don’t have a better fact checking system and states “they never learn.”

The answer, of course, is simple. They don’t care about facts. They care about narratives and spreading propaganda. It doesn’t matter if they have completely made things up, it will be conventional “wisdom” with wingnuts that Bertha Lewis was at the White House. And crazy as that sounds, they are remarkably successful at spreading bullshit and making people believe it- see the ACORN nonsense from this summer, which has now turned out to be absolutely nothing. The last I checked, the beltway stenographers were all upset that they didn’t investigate harder.

Breitbart and Big Government learned, all right. They learned that it doesn’t matter what you make up, if you can get enough people repeating it, you can convince our investigative journalists that it is true. It’s a huge joke and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn every political reporter in the country has been taken by a Nigerian email scam.

What is the general consensus on Babylon A.D.?

Also, here is a new sports thread for you. Both my teams managed to lose today, although I like that Bowden got to go out on top.

I see John’s Broder and I raise him a Bobo. This is so shrill it could have been written by someone in pajamas. He does everything but call people bedwetters. It is genuinely good.

This is from my iPhone so apologies if it is even more screwed up than usual.

I was kind of shocked when I read this:

It came as no surprise to anyone who knows her that Napolitano handled the incident and its aftermath with aplomb. In the years I have known her, she has managed every challenge that has come her way with the same calm command that she showed in this instance. If there is anyone in the administration who embodies President Obama’s preference for quiet competence with “no drama,” it is Janet Napolitano.

I watched as she made the rounds of the morning interview programs on Sunday, laying out what she knew about the would-be terrorist and carefully refusing to speculate about the many matters that were still being investigated. She is being criticized for saying “the system worked,” but her part of the response system did work.

The whole column is little more than a mash note to Janet, but I was shocked to see the portion about the system. Broder is usually more concerned with appearances, and the bipartisan thing to do for him is usually to agree with Republican criticisms of Democrats.

I haven’t been following this too closely, but is anyone else shocked at how unprofessional Craig James has been- he quite clearly leveraged his celebrity at ESPN into forcing Leach out at Tech. Now granted, Leach’s stubbornness most certainly was a factor, but James just seems all over this. Am I misreading this?