Letters to the Editor
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Glenn...
Love your blog.
But if you're going to take on the issue of "argument by anecdote," charity begins at home.
Please start with Salon's own Camille "Rush" Paglia, and Debra Dickerson, two "writers" (we're using the term loosely) who clearly don't believe in research, and whose sole claim to fame is offering their own coupla-glasses-of-wine-too-many obnoxious dinner-party opinions, unencumbered by fact, and who seem dedicated to the destruction of Democrats, and in particular, Barack Obama...
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tiny nitpick
I think you meant "impute" rather than "impugn."
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Ancient Assyrian
But if you're going to take on the issue of "argument by anecdote," charity begins at home.
Please start with Salon's own Camille "Rush" Paglia, and Debra Dickerson . . . .
I've never read anything by Debra Dickerson (that I can recall), but I did try to read the two columns published on Salon by Camille Pagila since I moved my blog here, and I just can't get through them. They are so boring and predictable and they seem like archived columms from 1987 -- she traffics in ideas and issues and images that are so empty and obsolete -- like things that would have generated some controversy 15 years ago but now are just almost caricatures of themselves.
I have no involvement with any Salon decisions beyond my blog, so I can only speculate why Salon brought her back. It almost certainly has something to do with the fact that her articles receive a ton of attention. Drudge loves her and links to everything she writes, which generates enormous traffic for Salon -- I doubt there is a more powerful traffic-generating link than one from Drudge -- and lots of large right-wing sites promote her articles, too.
In principle, I don't have a problem with magazines publishing a diverse range of writers and using attention-generating considerations to make decisions, but to the extent she is anything other than completely boring, she is just lazy and cliched and I can't imagine that she's going to generate attention for much longer churning out stuff like what I've seen in the parts of the last two columns of hers that I read.
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choosing a subject header is sometimes annoying (and this is one such time)
It is a manipulative and slothful -- though highly effective -- means of assigning attributes to a large political movement based on nothing other than cherry-picked and highly unrepresentative examples.
It's not just assiging attributes, it's also inventing an entire movement. There is no liberal movement, there is no progressive movement. There are peole who oppose Iraq, or various measures taken by President Bush, but this does not comprise an organized, funded, large political movement with specific goals and an infrastructure to achieve those goals.
There is only one significant movement in this country, and that is the conservative movement, which umbrellas a coalition of smaller movements.
Calling everyone outside of the conservative movement a political movement is another propaganda tactic of the noise machine.
That's why it's so ridiculous everytime some hack like Bill O'Reilly starts to pontificate about the evil machinations of George Soros while never ever mentioning the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Richard Mellon-Scaife, the Coors family, the Koch family, Rev. Sun Yung-Moon, Henry Regnery etc who are all ideologues of the most strident sort and who have funded/created and entire parallel world to shadow the real one.
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I'm glad...
I'm glad you delineated this phenomenon with clear prose. This can be applied to any "they" group that conservative pundits would like us to believe is stabbing America in the back: atheists, homosexuals, black people, immigrants, etc. (Catholics were on the list until the social conservatives realized that Catholics voted.)
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MoveOn
The other perfect example of this is the "proof" that MoveOn is a radical leftist tool of propaganda. The "Bush as Hitler" film is often mentioned as evidence of how "they" spew irrational hatred of our president, when in reality the short film - which was quickly pulled and condemned by MoveOn - is equivalent to a random comment on a blog.
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Common among wingers
Coulter pulls that shit all the time. She has, by my count, accused roughly 125 million American citizens of treason, yet can never seem to present a case as to why so much as one single person among them ought to be actually charged, tried, and convicted. In fact, when asked to name one specific person, she completely waffled.
But it could be said about a lot of Americans, especially highly educated Americans, today.
This part is really laughable. "If we just get rid of all the smart people, we'll have it made". Sounds like a great idea you've got there.
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m.b.f.
From "Alice's Restaurant"--Arlo Guthrie
"And the only reason I'm singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if your in a
situation like that there's only one thing you can do and that's walk into the shrink wherever you are ,just walk in say "Shrink, You can get anything you want, at Alice's restaurant.". And walk out...
And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said
fifty people a day walking in singin a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out. And friends they may thinks it's a movement.
And that's what it is , the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massacree Movement, and all you got to do to join is sing it the next time it come's around on the guitar. With feeling."
If they're not careful, they may start the movement that they are claiming already exists.
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i know it sounds forced
but, seriously, the amount of attention that the huffington post 'scandal' received does nothing as well as point out the chance, even, that ANYBODY with an internet connection on the right, trying to score points, posted those. something that kurtz probably didn't even consider, let alone contemplate prior to writing his initial piece.
basically a move out of karl rove's playbook, back in his texas days, where he's installing hidden cameras in his clients office a few days before elections and then finding them, and so forth.
i'm not actually saying that it's the most likely scenario, because we all know there are people on the left who are capable of saying they wished cheney would have been taken out by that bombing, just as there are (probably a lot more) people on the right expressing contempt that carter wasn't 'taken out'.
in reality, it's politics, and that doesn't necessarily mean that if any of these people actually had their fingers on the button that literally controlled whether the lives of carter or cheney would be taken, they'd actually press it (although, again, percentages on the right and left on that matter would probably be off balance).
but whatever.