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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Bill E Pilgrim
Published Letters: 498 Editor's Choice: 4
Salon led the charge for months, weeks, years, publishing concern troll articles with the thesis that "Obama can't win", and "Why Obama can't win" and so on.
And then, Obama gets the nomination and within what, a few weeks? Right away? Salon is at the forefront braying with the rest of the right wing corporate media about "Why isn't Obama way ahead in the polls?
Sigh.
With all of the potential answers to that nonsensical premise following: "Are people tired of him? Is he "arrogant"?"
I swear, some days I feel like I'm just reading Bill Kristol disguised as a concern troll from San Francisco.
Joan Walsh writes:
"And yet I still believe Hillary Clinton is the best running mate for Barack Obama -- but I also know Bill Clinton is why Obama can't pick her. "
And:
"I can't shake the feeling that if you want to fret about why the Democratic Party isn't coming back together entirely, just yet, all that mess would be a good place to start cleaning up."
There's so much to unpack in these two statements alone that even trying boggles the mind.
Since we've all lived in a constant state of bogglement for at least eight years now, however, what else is new.
The second one in particular is crafted with so many qualifications inside of equivocations that it's really quite amazing. The basic translation is:
If you accept that there's any significant schism in the Democratic party ("if you want to fret about that". Not her, you) then this racism issue would be ("would be," i.e. only if you bought that assumption, AND wanted to do something about it) a place to start. Not a place to fix it, just a place to start.
Well, yes. If I read only Salon I would, in fact, believe that this "schism" existed, despite the fact that all polling shows that it doesn't. In fact, reading here alone, I'd believe it was quite a problem for Democrats.
What's amazing is how the editor here straddles this whole thing, on the one hand fanning the flames of this whole issue more than anywhere outside of the really hard-core Hillary die-hard sites, while keeping one firm foot in, well, what I can only describe as reality. I mean the place where this really isn't an issue.
I mean anywhere else on the "progressive" blogosphere or media this is a non-non-non issue, meaning that its mass is so small as to be neglible. Here at Salon however, this issue has an enormous mass, far beyond its size,
collapsing into a black hole that sucks everything else into its insatianle void.
Restated: Yeah it's a tiny issue but geez, get a grip. The weird part is that Hillary herself is on Obama's side. Polls show that statistically pretty much all of the Democrats are going to vote for the Democrat, and those who aren't, who knows who they would have voted for. There's simply nothing empirical to say that the PUMA vote is anything but a small amount of very vocal people. And a few very vocal online zines.
"That said, the latest AP poll had Barack Obama 6 points over McCain, and if Barack Obama wins a 6-point election come November, that would be one of the biggest election margins of victory we've seen in the last few presidential cycles."
There we have it. In the midst of answering and giving legitimacy to this completely bogus premise, the pundit casually tosses in the caveat that in fact it's a completely bogus premise.
Then, everyone moves on, continuing to discuss it.
Salon spent months on articles laying out in great detail why Obama couldn't possibly win if he became the nominee. Then he became the nominee, and Salon immediately began asking why he wasn't leading polls by a landslide.
The fact that no one at Salon actually seems to understand how absurd, disingenuous, and mind-bogglingly biased this is astounds me.
Anyone interested in an actual unbiased or god forbid progressive view of this, don't look for it here at Salon. This is concern trolling at its worst. That means that a supposedly progressive zine basically puts forth all of the talking points of the right under the banner of "Oh, we don't think this, but they will".
The real question:
Why isn't Salon crushing McCain?
I don't have enough letters on my keyboard to "hear hear!" that comment enough times.
I haven't read the book this is excerpted from but it sounds like a fairly interesting angle on a cultural comparison between two countries.
At the same time, the result of the romantic quest is fairly easy to predict. The clues are in this article near the start, with New Yorkers sitting around bemoaning how there are "no men" out there, a dialog which even by the author's own description contains lots of lines like this:
"What about him?"
"Eww!".
Just a perusal of the online dating world will show that there are people from each gender (all of them) out there looking. What the author describes is a certain kind of over-developed choosiness meeting itself in the mirror, and blaming the mirror. I'm almost tempted to read the book to find out how someone in this mindset fares when plunged into a world that doesn't pander to that kind of hyperselectivity-masquerading-as-victim attitude, moreover one that by all accounts simply removes the choice. Or at least that was one of the writer's stated hopes, that it would.
By the author's own description of her and her friends, there was really no shortage of choices floating by for each of them, compared to other cultures these women are meeting men left and right.
The issue here is one of a heightened sense of entitlement, to be able to sift through and find a certain and predefined ideal mate, and going to a place where that kind of choice is neither as admired or even allowed was probably mostly an extremely rude awakening.
Those can be good.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
