They can watch the presidential debates on NBC - Paul has been on quite a few of them, or on the Tonight Show which was a guest on,

Yeah, that's the ticket. Watch Jay Leno to see how entertaining a candidate is, and then decide how to vote. pffft (Never mind that my son and his wife are in bed by 9 p.m. on weeknights.)

The debates are controlled, and no sane person simply takes the statements at a campaign website as definitive of the candidate. People in the blogosphere often know when a politician has been pwned, debunked, or shown to not really believe what s/he spews in public. But this is not the norm for consumers of primarily network and cable news, where haircuts, cleavage and runaway brides are the crucial issues.

BOTTOM LINE: Most people are going to form their political opinions via the least demanding sources, and that means the easy-to-tune-in Establishment media. Most people do not know who Glenn Greenwald, Kos, or Power Line are; but they all recognize NBC. Hence the value of Glenn's continually focusing on the journalistic sins of the MSM.

You said your son simply wanted to know what Ron Paul was about.

Never did I write that (and it is not so; he wished to learn my opinion about all the candidates), but YOU said he could learn Paul's views by watching freakin' Jay Leno. I'd say that about sums up your gravitas.

That has happened many times before, usually, tho not invariably, coming from right-wingers. (And the geniuses seem to always think this is an original play on my name.) It usually inspires me to put the simpleton on ignore, and -- CONGRATS! -- you are now there.

You contribute little or nothing to the discussion here, as such puerile antics demonstrate.

Of course Rove and Bush did this to McCain, as you quoted, but I will offer one correction to the italicized part:

Rove invented a uniquely injurious fiction for his operatives to circulate via a phony poll. Voters were asked, "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain...if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?" This was no random slur. McCain was at the time campaigning with his dark-skinned daughter, Bridget, adopted from Bangladesh.

This was not a strategy Karl invented -- he learned such foul antics from his teacher, Lee Atwater, who spilled the beans on that kind of GOP, filthy race-baiting tactic before dying of brain cancer:

[Lee] Atwater was a mentor to Karl Rove, the current President Bush’s longtime adviser, and the kinds of tough campaign tactics that have become common today are a key part of the late [GOP] strategist’s legacy.

[…]

In one 1980 congressional race in South Carolina, a Democratic candidate named Tom Turnipseed later recalled, “Atwater’s antics included phony polls by ‘independent pollsters’ to ‘inform’ white suburbanites that I was a member of the NAACP, because my congressman opponent was afraid to publicly say so.”Turnipseed was one of those to whom Atwater eventually apologized, as part of his outpouring of contrition (and embrace of religion) as his cancer spread.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060519/news_1c19fixin.html

I read it, and all the comments up to p. 32, and he did exactly what he set out to do. Mike Huckabee's Xian ravings don't bother me, as long as they are defeated. Neither do Obama's. I profoundly disagree with both -- altho not totally with either -- as to how they think Xian positions should translate into state policy.

Yet, that isn't even Glenn's point. I'll award a pony to the person who figures out what it really is, which he patently made clear. (And oh, I'm tending toward Obama on November.)

Ah, yes, I understand the sentiment. However, it is easy to get caught up in the current apoplexy-inducing times while failing to realize there have been others.

I find that biographies and historical treatments of 20th century America are a good cure for that.

http://welcomeconsumer.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/lucha_pony.jpg

does this post mean the revolution is canceled, or at least on hold?

I'd be willing to bet all ten of my ponies that Glenn is not the entity/mechanism assigning those things.

My opinion, FWIW -- ignore him. We have all read now -- many times -- that PW considers Glenn's prose wholly deficient in oh-so-many ways at the level of form. I think we all understand that PW thinks Glenn's style sucks.

I don't share that critique, but I'm not here to merely savor (or disdain) the wordsmithing. I'm here for the substance, and when PW wishes to respond to Glenn's point -- and follow his many links in his post -- I may engage PW.

Until then, he is succeeding in diverting discussion with snark about Glenn's alleged composition sins, and your punctuation mistakes. (As if many of us don't make illiterate errors in our unedited comments all the time.)

So, I strongly suggest ignoring him, and thus rendering his tactics not successful.