Letters to the Editor
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Refried Boogie
Coming late to the thread after a hard day's night, only to belatedly cross-post a comment I made at Media Matters in response to another commenter who characterized Scarborough's critique of Obama's bowling as "good natured ribbing".
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"[G]ood natured ribbing"? I have to disagree. Maybe if Maverick of the Living Dead was the bowler-- Scarborough and his fellow corporate media infotainwhores would've spun the lame showing with smarmy affection-- Maverick's Got Game! Attaboy! For he's a jolly good fellow!
From the ginned-up derision about Gore's "earth tones" (and the abominable Dowd sneering that he was practically "lactating") through Kerry's windsurfing and asking for an uncool kind of cheese (Swiss) on his cheese steak, there is a settled practice in the US corporate media of emasculating (male) Democratic candidates.
Whether Scarborough consciously and deliberately joins the chorus, or just drifts into it by absorbing the infotainment elite meme, it's hardly an isolated or anomalous reaction. The rule is to "humorously" or "facetiously" demean any promising (male) Democratic candidate, by reinforcing the message that the candidate is a big pussy who runs/throws like a girl. (Not to mention closet queen Tweety Matthews, who adds his own idiosyncratic psychosexual spin in defining Manly Men-- he's probably more interested in how Obama's bowling shoes smell.)
The purpose of this superficially "good natured" derision is to diminish and undermine the candidate's appeal and attractiveness using a "death of a thousand cuts" approach. It's unfortunate that this transparent subliminal seduction is rationalized or blown off as insignificant. And it's probably effective beyond the 25% or so of the Amerikan population who are more or less wingnuts, mired in primitive, lizard-brain proto-thought.
BTW, I'm not an Obama supporter, although to me it's obvious that his intellect and character is of a far higher caliber than the competition.
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Tae Kwon Do
Glenn wants a pink belt for being a new student of Tae Kwon Do.
I bet he doesn't quote the Ten Commandments every day for bad luck.
He probably enjoys Ch'ing Dong Duck Rice soup. Thou shall NOT shoot ducks?
Or fellow human people.
When people say the old commands ~ leave out the NOT? Say, thou shall ` shoo.
Thou shall lie. Steal. Thou shall Kill. huh. okay. Thou shall (no-say-not) surly covet?
This is getting stooped.
Thou shall go to supper.
The right-wing is nuts.
The GOPS shout Hollow.
How did a Holocaust start?
Ask lovers of blood and DoJ Yoo.
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Bull. Shit.
What did John Yoo have to do with Lynndie England, or Charles Graner? What did John Yoo have to do with that picture? What did John Yoo have to do with any of the Abu Ghraib photos?
This is such rank bullshit, and I'm callling Glenn Greenwald and his minions on it. You're such a fact-free bunch of liars and yellow journalists.
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@GG
I like it in theory -- there are no time limits, no need to condense things into 30 seconds -- but somewhere, sitting there unable to move, staring at a webcam, with the other person's voice in your ear but nobody to moderate, ends up producing a stilted, somewhat annoying product. I can't put my finger on exactly why it is.
I think the lack of moderation can be helped by preparation. Perhaps I'm just misreading reactions, but some questions seemed to take the other party by surprise. If there at least was a loose agenda agreed upon beforehand with some suggested time limits, this might change the style from a stream of consciousness to more of a real debate format. The fact that neither of you were "running" the discussion unfortunately meant neither of you felt you had the authority to change the course of the discussion.
I listen to sports radio, which runs into the same pitfalls all the time. They just sort of wait for callers, tread water on one or two topics for an inordinate amount of time, when it's really time to move on.
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Awareness of facts
Just admit that you weren't aware of these facts.
Glenn, to these people, the things you're saying above aren't facts, they're opinions. And the correctness of the opinion is predicated on who says it the loudest, and whether Rush et al say it, too. In their world, there are no "facts" except that a) Islamofascists want to kill us all for no understandable reason; and b) their idea of America is "good", everyone else's is bad.
TPM has a fascinating tidbit on Doug Feith's comment that anyone who's against torture is "siding with the assholes" (by which, one presumes, he means those people who want to uphold Geneva, etc.).
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/04/
feith_only_assholes_fret_about.php
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@ Glenn
I agree, the format is a bit strange. I didnt mean to take you specifically to task for posting it, and I wasnt familiar with Bloggingheads before today. It seems as though whoever curated this thing thought you would have some kind of serendipitous moment where her "expertise" as a reporter and your critiques from some remove would mesh in a unique analysis. Instead, I saw someone confronted by reality and unable to acknowledge it out of a deference to the name at the top of her masthead. The idea that our government systematically uses language for ill rather than good is the kind of thing an establishment venue like Time just cant lend any credence to. Its truly impossible that she "never considered" that McCain might be intentionally conflating Al Qaeda and Iran.
The debate about how much friendliness between press and their subjects is allowable seems to me a bit of a distraction. I'm with you in that I'd rather the NYT not be attending press dinners, but it seems like a secondary concern to the idea that journalists should simply report the facts, and to have those facts checked and balanced, so to speak, within a larger community of people also interested in those facts. This would have made this whole McCain flap easily explained. A few simple questions: Why would McCain mis-speak? Has he done this before? What is the substance of his recent statements on the region? What was his explanation of the statement before and after it was discovered? Cox seemed especially content to let McCain's public statement stand on its own, an idea seemingly at odds with the reporter's compulsion to dig deeper.
I agree with the poster a few pages back who pointed out that the MSM has never been truly objective. Objectivity, without getting too philosophical, most likely cant exist, and it certainly cant be consciously attained. What we should work for is that the journalistic establishment lose this obsession with neutrality and return to a rigorous investigation of facts. This wont happen as long as we have a media driven by corporate conglomerates more interested in advancing a brand and promoting personalities over substantial adversarial investigation.