When even sarcasm won’t make a difference.
Depressing
This post is in: Torture, DC Press Corpse, Our Failed Media Experiment
This post is in: Torture, DC Press Corpse, Our Failed Media Experiment
by John Cole| 56 Comments
This post is in: Politics, Our Failed Media Experiment
There is significant overlap between Americans who identify as supporters of the Tea Party movement and those who identify as conservative Republicans. Their similar ideological makeup and views suggest that the Tea Party movement is more a rebranding of core Republicanism than a new or distinct entity on the American political scene.
No shit. That won’t stop our media from pretending this is some new and emergent force in politics. No one could have predicted a movement funded by the Koch brothers and initiated by Dick Armey was actually just another Republican effort.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 54 Comments
This post is in: I Smell a Pulitzer!, Our Failed Media Experiment, WTF?
Kathleen Parker shows us why she deserved that Pulitzer:
No, I’m not calling Obama a girlie president. But . . . he may be suffering a rhetorical-testosterone deficit when it comes to dealing with crises, with which he has been richly endowed.
[…] Obama is a chatterbox who makes Alan Alda look like Genghis Khan. […] Obama may prove to be our first male president who pays a political price for acting too much like a woman.
I’m not a DC columnist, so I’m not qualified to judge testosterone levels from speeches and policy statements. Even so, I don’t see a hell of a lot of robust masculinity in politicians of either party. If Parker (and MoDo) are looking for wimps, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell and Joe Lieberman, just to name three of many, seem like better targets than Obama.
(via)
by John Cole| 56 Comments
This post is in: Clown Shoes, Our Failed Media Experiment
Just got around to reading the Gerson piece DougJ linked to earlier, and I want to repost the part DougJ highlighted plus a little:
But the Internet is also a permanent record, as Weigel found. His reaction to exposure was honest and admirable. He admitted to being “cocky” and “needlessly mean” — the kind of introspection that promises future contribution. But when members of the Ugly Party are exposed, generally they respond differently. Obscenity? The real obscenity is an unjust war, or imposing socialism or devotion to Israel. It is an argument that makes any deep policy disagreement an excuse for verbal violence. Or an offense against taste and judgment is dismissed as humor and satire.
The alternative to the Ugly Party is the Grown-Up Party — less edgy and less hip. It is sometimes depicted on the left and on the right as an all-powerful media establishment, stifling creativity, freedom and dissent. The Grown-Up Party, in my experience, is more like a seminar at the Aspen Institute — presentation by David Broder, responses from E.J. Dionne Jr. and David Brooks — on the electoral implications of the energy debate. I am more comfortable in this party for a few reasons: because it is more responsible, more reliable and less likely to wish its opponents would die.
I think my analysis of Gerson and the rest of the village the other day summarizes this warped viewpoint rather succinctly:
The rules still hold true- all sorts of disgusting and bizarre worldviews are acceptable among the “toilet-trained” Beltway elites (Krauthammer, Will, Thiessen, Kristol, and many others still write for the WaPo), but don’t drink out of the finger bowl or use a four letter word or your ass is history.
Sincere panels about the appropriateness of crushing a child’s testicles are acceptable and serious op-eds about the necessity for torture are welcome, but dropping an f-bomb on a private listserv is simply inexcusable and cause for a serious case of the vapors.
This post is in: Blogospheric Navel-Gazing, Our Failed Media Experiment
Yesterday, Glenn Greenwald responded to Jeffrey Goldberg’s ridiculous “think about the Kurds” post hoc justification for the war in Iraq (which itself was Goldberg changing the topic from the accuracy of his pre-war reporting, which then led to the ridiculous spectacle of Eli Lake guest-posting for him to continue to attempt to make the Al Qaeda/Hussein link case- I can only assume Goldberg couldn’t get a Weekly Standard intern to fill in), and noted that throughout history, whenever any country is invaded, there is always some group within the invading country who was pleased:
It’s difficult to find an invasion in history that wasn’t supported by at least some faction of the invaded population and where that same self-justifying script wasn’t used. That’s true even of the most heinous aggressors. Many Czech and Austrian citizens of Germanic descent, viewing themselves as a repressed minority, welcomed Hitler’s invasion of their countries, while leaders of the independence-seeking Sudeten parties in those countries actively conspired to bring it about. Did that make those German invasions justifiable?
This has sent Time’s Joe Klein into one of his usual frothing rages (which seem reserved for Greenwald or anyone who dares attack the village):
Greenwald also disagreed with Goldberg, but used the opportunity to launch another of his litigious, ambulance-chasing forays–in Greenwald’s case, it is “hits” he’s trying to collect, not fees–in which he posited Jeff as an arch-villain, practicing a form of dishonest journalism that Greenwald believes is corrupting the Republic. To be sure, lazy, corrupt journalism happens; always has, always will. But Goldberg’s work is quite the opposite: rigorously reported, beautifully written and fiercely honest. Indeed, Jeff’s willingness to be candid about lessons he learned along the way created a book that Greenwald rarely, if ever, mentions: Prisoners, a memoir of Jeff’s time as a member of the Israel Defense Forces when he served as a prison guard and developed a close, difficult and unresolved friendship with one of his Palestinian prisoners. This is the sort of work that Greenwald, locked in the sterile prison of his ideology, is completely incompetent to understand.
And now, Greenwald–who, so far as I can tell, only regards the United States as a force for evil in the world–has laid out the incredible notion that the liberation of the Kurds, which Jeff celebrates (and so do I, and so do civilized people everywhere) as a happy byproduct of George W. Bush’s dreadful war in Iraq, can be compared to the Nazi seizure of the Sudetenland:
Actually Joe, you’ve completely missed the point.
Let’s put this in words Joe can understand- If Israel were to be attacked, occupied, and have millions of her citizens murdered or killed in an invasion by Egypt, six years from now, it would not be ok to point to that immoral invasion and say “But look how happy the Palestinians are!” Which is precisely what Goldberg was doing, and exactly what Greenwald was pointing out. Even worse, Klein needed a reader to point out the very fact that Greenwald himself insisted the invasion of Iraq and the Nazi invasions are not the same. Now that’s some close reading of something that really upset you!
Joe noted that he was interrupting his vacation for this outburst- for his sake, I hope it was written from the hotel bar, because he completely missed the point. And for the record- I really like reading Joe Klein- most of the time.
*** Update ***
We’ve now got the spectacle of two prominent journalists, one for Time, one for the Atlantic, willfully misinterpreting someone’s remarks and screaming that person is a Nazi lover and hates America. Godwin wept.
by $8 blue check mistermix| 340 Comments
This post is in: Our Failed Media Experiment
The whole thing is spot-on, here’s a taste:
As to this whole “unspoken agreement” business: the reason Lara Logan thinks this is because she’s like pretty much every other “reputable” journalist in this country, in that she suffers from a profound confusion about who she’s supposed to be working for. I know this from my years covering presidential campaigns, where the same dynamic applies. Hey, assholes: you do not work for the people you’re covering! Jesus, is this concept that fucking hard? On the campaign trail, I watch reporters nod solemnly as they hear about the hundreds of millions of dollars candidates X and Y and Z collect from the likes of Citigroup and Raytheon and Archer Daniels Midland, and it blows my mind that they never seem to connect the dots and grasp where all that money is going. The answer, you idiots, is that it’s buying advertising! People like George Bush, John McCain, Barack Obama, and General McChrystal for that matter, they can afford to buy their own P.R. — and they do, in ways both honest and dishonest, visible and invisible.
They don’t need your help, and you’re giving it to them anyway, because you just want to be part of the club so so badly. Disgustingly, that’s really what it comes down to. Most of these reporters just want to be inside the ropeline so badly, they want to be able to say they had that beer with Hillary Clinton in a bowling alley in Scranton or whatever, that it colors their whole worldview. God forbid some important person think you’re not playing for the right team!
This is via a tweet and re-tweet from a couple of local reporters who aren’t interested in being a part of some slimy little club, unlike Ms Logan.
by John Cole| 24 Comments
This post is in: Our Failed Media Experiment
Adam Serwer on Jeffrey Goldberg’s anonymous WaPo sources:
I remember a time when there was nothing more vile than those nasty bloggers with their anonymous comment sections. Behind veils of anonymity, the cowardly hordes of the Internet would spew rivers of bile and the real journalists would clutch their pearls and lament the decline of public discourse. Now that the bloggers have moved into the newsroom, some of these “traditional” reporters have joined the cesspool of anonymous flaming they once used as examples of why blogging couldn’t be taken seriously as a journalistic medium.
How’s that for a bit of irony?
I’m still waiting for the Glenzilla to drink Goldberg’s milkshake for his preposterous “Won’t you think of the Kurds” bit yesterday.