Letters to the Editor
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U S attorneys matter
Glenn,
I ask that you consider whether there is anything to the idea that the US attorney in Nevada was fired not because there was anything wrong with him, but rather because Rove et al., wanted to place someone reliable there to come up with prosecutorial headaches for Senator Reid. And, with Griffin in Arkansas, wouldn't Rove be well-positioned to cause yet more grief to Senator Clinton re: whatever skullduggery he could devise in Arkansas, just in time for her presidential run ?
Day-after-day, for years, my worst and most paranoid fears about the Bush government turn out to be well-founded. So it is no longer beyond the pale to think conspiratorial thoughts about these people. They daily prove our worst, most paranoid suspicions to be true.
Please keep up the good work, you and your work are indispensable.
Regards,
Frank
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DCLaw1: persuasive explanation
“The less-attractive student government kids surrounding themselves with the jocks and Barbies that they then stab in the back the moment they leave the room. . . .If anything, ‘reporting’ the John Edwards hair ‘story’ is a pretty tremendous act of projection on the part of these people.” Yes. Some psychological projection seems to be at work here. I think it’s the same process that has led some “journalists” and bloggers to criticize the “soft” VT students, allowing them to project themselves into heroic roles, taking out the gunman through their video game skills & sheer machismo.
Godfrey: I’ll happily ignore the hair opinions of anyone who advocates “collecting voiceprint data of Moslems resident in the USA” (as nabatroll did). It’s a sound general policy. (Did I just violate it?)
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Re: Update
When I first saw Colbert's performance last year, I couldn't believe my eyes/ears. It was easily the most amazing, true, and exquisitely brutal thing I'd witnessed in a long, long time.
A modern-day Mark Twain. Just giving it straight to people raw and without a shred of equivocation or fear.
As some said at the time, the room's awkward silence was abundant evidence of the magnanimous success of his performance.
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A millionaire but still an airhead
An "airhead" lawyer who made tens of millions of dollars thinking on his feet. That's a good one!
Being a vacuous airhead doesn't necessarily preclude one from being a cunning sleazeball who exploits our insane torte system to his advantage via blackmail and extortion. It falls far short of the intellect and character we expect from our Commander in Chief.
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nabalzfjiefijl;s
Being a vacuous airhead doesn't necessarily preclude one from being a cunning sleazeball who exploits our insane torte system to his advantage via blackmail and extortion. It falls far short of the intellect and character we expect from our Commander in Chief.
Comedy gold!
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DCLaw1
When I first saw Colbert's performance last year, I couldn't believe my eyes/ears. It was easily the most amazing, true, and exquisitely brutal thing I'd witnessed in a long, long time.
Exactly - it was so unrelenting and unsparing, and he never backtracked or diluted for even one minute, so none of them could read into it a "just kidding" or some other good-natured indication that he really didn't mean any of it.
And, as you say, the reactions it provoked were as revealing as the speech itself.
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The media in America? He wrote the book.
http://journalism.nyu.edu/portfolio/books/book53.html
David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (Knopf, 1979)
Reissued in paperback by University of Illinois Press in 2000Twenty-one years after the release of Pulitzer Prize-winner David Halberstam's best-selling backstage glimpse into a formidable American media industry, The Powers That Be was reissued in paperback, and the world it celebrates is gone. The book dances with the characters at CBS, Time, the LA Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post - a hegemony of powerful players, still juiced-up on Watergate and driven by unsullied tenets of print journalism. Their dialogue - rife with the challenges of Vietnam War coverage, the Nixon scandal, and encroaching corporate pressures - paints a picture of a profession at its high-water mark, obsessed with balancing what its audience wants with what it needs.
No one is sadder than Halberstam to watch those waters recede. His introduction to the new 2000 edition is a bleak summary of what he considers to be the media's rapid descent into service and celebrity-centered journalism, ledes that bleed, and a new generation of editors and producers who bite their nails over ratings instead of accuracy.
If we are to believe him, and there is certainly enough new media criticism that corroborates his perspective (see Robert W. McChesney's Rich Media, Poor Democracy), Halberstam's chronicle of the rise of the American media has become the wistful memoirs of a faded endeavor.
But the sheer devotion and fervor of the characters who guided journalism to its climax remains inspiring. With rich, concise strokes, Halberstam flits between what he has deemed to be television and print's most prestigious institutions, letting news figures and breaking stories point the way through the behind-the-scenes decisions that turned the media into such a viable force after Watergate. He fills the stage with an entire cast of news world players who lend this work a dimensionality and voice that has allowed it to endure.
- - website of NYU's Dept. of Journalism
In memoriam, David Halberstam 1934-2007.
A reporter's reporter.
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Huh
our insane torte system to his advantage via blackmail and extortion.
-- nabalzbbfr
Dagnabit, that "torte" system is just way out of control. We must reign it in before one more American gets diabetes.
(I'm sorry - I find it beyond impossible to take this particular troll seriously.)
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"our insane torte system"
Unless this is some reactionary screed against pastry, one can only assume that nazalbbbwtf wants us all to live in a land where children are disemboweled by pool pumps and patients suffer brain damage from doctors overprescribing powerful drugs.
The sad part about it is that nazabrfmxyzptlk is probably not one of the plutocrats who came up with the whole "tort reform" canard - he/she is probably an ordinary Joe like the rest of us, but who got sucked into the right's stern vision of a self-reliant citizenry, too proud to go to lawyers when they have a problem needs solvin'.
However, it's just a myth... they want rights for them, and responsibilities for everyone else.
Like I say, sad.