Letters to the Editor
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You think we could shorthand that...
It is a portrait of a highly insular White House obsessively focused on expanding presidential power and loathe to consult with Congress, a White House that frequently made up its mind about a course of action before consulting with experts, a White House that sidelined Congress in its policymaking and willfully pursued a “go-it-alone approach” based on “minimal deliberation, unilateral action, and legalistic defense.”
-- Retired Military Patriot
as macho shit-heads?
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The unbearable predictability of the pundit class
the thing to realize is that these pundits don't really think, they mostly react to those around them, turn like weather vanes with each prevailing wind, react to the zeitgeist and so on. To some degree, this is what we want them to do, I mean having the particular skill of being able to sense what the current thinking is among those in government and in the rest of the country, this is part of why we tune in. It's just that it seems to have taken over completely to the point where even the most glaringly obvious falsehoods will be passed along without a blink if it seems to fall into that magical category of sentences preceded by "everyone is saying". Few ever dare to buck the trend and say "Wait a minute. I don't care what others are saying, this seems nuts!" Can you even imagine one of the stars if punditry saying anything like that?
It must be almost an occupational hazard in a way, that having this sense of emphathy at all means that soon you start doing no original thinking of your own whatsoever. Of course, the whole corporate setup favors it being this way, since so-called commentators like that are so easily manipulated, so there's that. It must be a sort of unnatural selection, with the pundits becoming more and more gullible themselves so as to aid in passing quasi-propaganda along to an equally gullible audience. The more they lose independent thought, the higher the salary rises, until they rise to that exalted level of super-pundit, who would never dare utter anything everyone isn't thinking already because to do so would be to be seen as not "serious".
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the pony plan
For those who have not yet seen (click my sig):
http://ok-cleek.com/blogs/?p=1899
Ponies for everybody! happy Friday, all!!!!!
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I don't think they're gullible.
"'Republicans sex scandals are getting to be like Iraqi car bombings. By the time you hear about one, there's been another. Ted Haggard, Mark Foley, Bob Allen, Vitter, Craig... It's like "Clue" only the answer is always "A Republican... in the washroom... with his cock.'
As a good liberal, I would complain about your stereotype... except it doesn't seem to be so much a stereotype as the way these authoritarians seem to act. Not sure why. Was it covered in Bob Altemeyer's book?"
The cock quote is from Bill Maher over at HuffPo.
Glenn's exposure of journalists' mendacity never fails to shock. I have to wonder what kinds of rationalizations they use when they so brazenly contradict themselves. Timelagged, I don't think it's gullibility. It takes skill to write the way these journalists do. (No, seriously.) To make something horrific seem like a rational choice, to give a gloss of professionalism and authority to the words on the page, to give the appearance of well-researched erudition, and to imitate an even-handed impartiality--all of these things require skill and a careful consideration of rhetorical choices. These people are not stupid, which is why it is all the more dismaying that they use their skills in the service of a lawless, corrupt regime.
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Republican sex crimes: the hourly update
Weekly gave way to daily a while back, but even that doesn't cut it anymore. Time for a 24 hour channel?
"Bride Wed at 14 Testifies in Jeffs Trial"
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0914jeffs0914.html
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Presumptuous Insect
Yeah, what I wrote really applies to certain ones, the Cokies of the profession, and so on.
I was thinking the same after I posted that, that there are some who know exactly what they're doing. I don't think you can say that's true of all of them though, I think for some, the Stephanopouluses (Stephanopouli?) of the world, what I described definitely applies. The soul vanishes in steps.
I don't follow Hiatt (the subject of the piece) so don't know where he falls.
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Its really strange
but the last few years have made crystal clear to me that most republicans, most democrats, and most of the mainstream media are simply one huge group with the same agenda: and they put on a good show of having differences that matter to confuse us poor souls who want to think we live in a free society with a free press, etc. etc., because it is so very scary to face up to what the actual situation is. And the final straw or nail in the coffin of my hopes was the democrats being voted into a majority by people disgusted with this war and then to have them make so clear by their actions that they are simply another wing of the same group (the actions being the truth and not the words, of course). And what has happened to the Iraqi people is so damn sad and terrible and heart rending; such a horror perpetrated on those people by my country; and then the collateral damage, so to speak, the dead and wounded American soldiers (odd, isn't it: the American troop casualties we carry on about, which are horrible, are really the collateral damage, because the main suffering is on the innocent civilians in Irag). And the only ones not getting hurt are the leaders on all sides: the terrorist Islamic leaders who sent out their suicide bombers to die for them and the political leaders both democrat and republican who send the soldiers off to fight and die for them and the media that spins, spins, spins for the leaders so they can eat and drink with them and profit by their association. And the only thing that has relieved the gloom at all has been to read stuff like Glenn Greenwald writes, and to read what most of you here have written: really some incredibly heartfelt and eloquent comments here that give the me the small bit of light that there are others who see all this too. I want to thank you Mr. Greenwald for writing here, and for all you fellow thinkers in the face of this horror who have posted: thank you as well. It is truly a thing of despair and yet there is the hope of fellow human beings who think and speak out. Jacques Ellul wrote in one of his last books (his sequel to The Technological Society) something to the effect that the harsh wind of corporate technocracy was not something you could simply overturn through some simple act of violence or policy; but that nontheless we could look for spaces of freedom to be human in, and exercise that freedom, "trembling in the cracks", as he put it, not abandoning hope, realizing our humanity in our trembling freedom. I heard Elie Wiesel once say something to the effect that finally you speak out the truth so as not to let yourself down, so as not to let yourself become less than human: that even if no one listens it is still better to speak up: that you will then avoid the despair of losing your humanity. To all who have spoken so clearly on the this thread I give my thanks, because it seems it has not yet come to the point where I am seeing and speaking alone, and that is something to be grateful for, one small thing in these sad times.