Todd Purdum’s VF piece on Sarah Palin contains lovely little tidbits like this one:
By the time Election Day rolled around, the staff had been serially pummeled by unflattering press reports about the gaps in Palin’s knowledge, her stubborn resistance to direction, and the post-selection spending spree in which she ran up bills of $150,000 on clothes for herself and her family at high-end stores. The top McCain aides who had tried hard to work with Palin—Steve Schmidt, the chief strategist; Nicolle Wallace, the communications ace; and Tucker Eskew, her traveling counselor—were barely on speaking terms with her, and news organizations were reporting that anonymous McCain aides saw Palin as a “diva” and a “whack job.”
And this is even better:
More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—“a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy”—and thought it fit her perfectly. When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.”
And, happily, Purdum seems to have touched off yet another internal squabble inside the distressed and befuddled Republican Party. From Politico:
William Kristol, the editor of The Weekly Standard and at times an informal adviser to Sen. John McCain, touched off the latest back-and-forth Tuesday morning with a post on his magazine’s blog criticizing the Todd Purdum-authored Palin story and pointing a finger at Steve Schmidt, McCain’s campaign manager.
Kristol cited a passage in Purdum’s piece in which “some top aides” were said to worry about the Alaska governor’s “mental state” and the prospect that the Alaska governor may be suffering from post-partum depression following the birth of her son Trig. “In fact, one aide who raised this possibility in the course of trashing Palin’s mental state to others in the McCain-Palin campaign was Steve Schmidt,” Kristol wrote.
Asked about the accusation, Schmidt fired back in an e-mail: “I’m sure John McCain would be president today if only Bill Kristol had been in charge of the campaign.”
“After all, his management of [former Vice President] Dan Quayle’s public image as his chief of staff is still something that takes your breath away,” Schmidt continued. “His attack on me is categorically false.”
This time it comes from the tax-evading, prostitute-frequenting gasbag Dick Morris. Obama has already been accused of being Hitler, of hoping to institute Sharia law in America, of wanting to build concentration camps for children, of attempting to nationalize the whole American economy, and of generally being a terrorist’s best friend. Now, the revolting Morris tells us that Obama has effectively repealed the Declaration of Independence. I hesitated to post this video, as it is a particularly transparent and disgusting attempt to sell books. But it is also important to confront this sort of nonsense.
It seems he’s at it once again (remember this time? And this one?) Pat Buchanan - who regularly appears in the big commerical media and is generally accepted as a mainstream (if idiosyncratic) pundit - appears to think that Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination is worse than segregation, slavery, etc. In other words, he likes the old-school racism better than affirmative action. Check it out:
Though the Obama media have been ballyhooing her brilliance — No. 1 in high school, No. 1 at Princeton, editor of Yale Law Review — her academic career appears to have been a fraud from beginning to end, a testament to Ivy League corruption.
…
…Sotomayor got into Princeton, got her No. 1 ranking, was whisked into Yale Law School and made editor of the Yale Law Review — all because she was a Hispanic woman. And those two Ivy League institutions cheated more deserving students of what they had worked a lifetime to achieve, for reasons of race, gender or ethnicity.
This is bigotry pure and simple. To salve their consciences for past societal sins, the Ivy League is deep into discrimination again, this time with white males as victims rather than as beneficiaries.
One prefers the old bigotry. At least it was honest, and not, as Abraham Lincoln observed, adulterated “with the base alloy of hypocrisy” [bold added].
Lots of people have problems with affirmative action. I know. But this is beyond insane. The “old bigotry,” it seems to me, involved slavery, the slave trade and middle passage, segregation, beatings, lynchings, cross-burnings, and a host of other brutalities. The “bigotry” that Buchanan really hates, however, is that which helps people from traditionally oppressed groups get opportunities to go to college and such.
Today, as global geopolitics is shaken to its core by events in Iran, I turned on cable news this morning, and saw endless ads for a Larry King Jonas Brothers “interview”, Morning Joe yukking it up discussing Kuwaiti massage therapists, a video of a tomato throwing contest on CNN, talk radio blowhard Bill Bennett…and occasionally a phone call from Christiane Amanpour in Tehran. I can’t even bring myself to turn on the network morning programs, I might vomit.
Fox has done a great service to the American polity — single-handedly breaking up the intellectual and ideological monopoly that for decades exerted hegemony (to use a favorite lefty cliché) over the broadcast media.
[. . .]
What Fox did is not just create a venue for alternative opinion. It created an alternate reality.
If you’re concerned with net neutrality and the threats posed by telecoms to our freedoms online, I heartily recommend this article by Cory Doctorow. Money quote:
Telcoms companies argue that their responsibility is to their shareholders, not the public interest, and that they are only taking the course of maximum profitability. It’s not their business to ensure that the Googles of tomorrow attain liftoff from the garages in which they are born.
But telcoms firms are all recipients of invaluable public subsidy in the form of rights of way and other grants that allow them to string their wires over and under our streets and through our homes. You and I can’t go spelunking in the sewers with a spool of cable to wire up our own alternative network. And if the phone companies had to negotiate for every pole, every sewer, every punch-down, every junction box, every road they get to tear up, they’d go broke. All the money in the world couldn’t pay for the access they get for free every day.
If they don’t like it, they don’t have to do it. But we don’t have to give them our sewers and streets and walls, either. Governments and regulators are in a position to demand that these recipients of public subsidy adhere to a minimum standard of public interest. If they don’t like it, let them get into another line of work – give them 60 days to get their wires out of our dirt and then sell the franchise to provide network services to a competitor who will promise to give us a solid digital future in exchange for our generosity.
At last night’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, the AP’s Jennifer Loven looked like the hooker you find passed out in a seedy hotel stairwell. The wench-hook earrings, gale-force coiffure and seaweed eveningwear will be tough to top next year.
And except for a pretty tasteless joke about Dick Cheney’s interrogation program — which reminded me of Bush’s “where’s the WMD” routine — I thought the president was pretty hilarious.
From former W speechwriter Jay Nordlinger at NRO comes one of the strangest and most pathetic-sounding statements of partisanship and power-worship I can ever remember reading:
In my experience — and I’m just generalizing here — the better the person, the more positive he is about George W. Bush. Certainly the less snarky and narrow. Most of the people I admire most, admire the 43rd president.
I am proud to be one of the worst people Nordlinger has never met.
And I find it preposterous that anyone - except maybe W’s mother - would suggest that one’s character is linked to one’s appreciation for our 43rd president. In many ways, Bush vividly represents what is worst about America. Coddled by privilege, he was handed everything he ever got in life. He spent much of his life underachieving and wasting the privileges he had been handed. A self-professed patriot, he used his connections to hide when duty called during Vietnam, allowing others to fight a war that he supported. And eventually, because of his name, and because of the many advantages that he didn’t earn, he rose to the highest office in America. Once in office, he enacted policies that would help protect the privileges of the few and reward his friends in coprorate America, in both cases at the expense of the health of the nation. He also started a war under false pretenses, ordered the United States to engage in torture, held prisoners (many of whom insiders now say were innocent) indefinitely without charge, ordered illegal wiretapping, governed in an excessively partisan way, and alienated our allies.
There’s more. But I think I’ve made my point. There are many things I admire about America. But Bush represents those things I like least about my country - the arrogance and entitlement of privilege, phony and hypocritcal patriotism, greed, militarism, and a willingness to sacrifice freedom and decency in the name of “security.”
From the “It Turns out that People are Even Dumber than We Thought” Department here at IHWYJS comes an intriguing new story: apparently conservatives don’t know that Stephen Colbert is joking. A study at the Ohio State University suggests that conservative viewers are more likely to assume that Colbert “only pretends to be joking and genuinely meant what he said” while liberals recognize Colbert’s satire and do not assume that he holds the political opinions he offers on his show.
I am going to resist the temptation to write all of the things that are now swirling around in my head. But I urge you to draw as many conclusions as you like from the Ohio State study. Go nuts.
(UPDATE: OK - I realize now that conservatives who participated in this study must have been engaging in their own form of performance art, right? They were “in character” when they responded to the study, weren’t they? So it was all just another level of satire - the whole thing is a meta-joke, right? Because people can’t be that stupid, can they? I mean it has to be a gag - like that whole elaborate joke about how Sarah Palin was going to be the V.P. nominee for the Republicans. That was hilarious, and for a little while, I actually thought it was real. In retrospect, I now realize it was a little far-fetched, but they had me for a minute there. Ooops. Looks like those funny right-wingers got us again).
Brian Kilmeade of Fox News says that John McCain “should not be allowed to talk on torture” because “he was tortured.” This means, in Kilmeade’s logic, that his views are “skewed,” and Kilmeade rhetorically asks “whaddya think - he’s going to be pro-torture after he’s been through it?”
I suppose that by Kilmeade’s logic, unemployed workers should not talk about the economy, rape victims should not express an opinion about sexual assault, and for god’s sake Holocaust victims should stop giving us their damn thoughts on the Nazis! Their views are skewed!
You’d think that there would be no way to find a fill-in host for Rush Limbaugh who would say things as offensive or ridiculous as Rush, right? Wouldn’t you? Well, you’d be wrong!
Mark Davis, filling in for the King of All Media Drug Addicts recently discussed the prevalence of white people at the asinine “tea parties.” He then posed the question “why aren’t black people more attracted by liberty?”
Over at The American Prospect, Paul Waldman surveys the landscape of paranoid rhetoric coming from the right as of late. Since Obama’s inauguration, we have been treated to quite a mixed bag of insanity, including:
-Obama is a communist
-Obama is a fascist
-Obama is planning to build concentration camps
-Obama wants to send our children to re-education camps
-Obama is so bad that Texas might just secede from the union
-Obama is planning to take your guns away (an old favorite!)
-Obama is making plans for the one-world currency
-Obama is planning to declare martial law
And so forth. That such things might emanate from the tin-foil-hat set is understandable; there are always fringe elements (across the political spectrum) who embrace wild conspiracy theories and engage in paranoid rants. But the lunacy and fear mongering that has bubbled up in recent weeks and months has come, for example, from members of congress, a governor, and well-known figures at major media outlets. Disturbing.
Noted TV jackass and supporter of discredited economic theories Larry Kudlow recently took objection to what he saw as a “Boyz N the Hood handshake” between President Obama and Hugo Chavez:
I’m guessing Fucktard. George F. Will wrote an entire column today ranting about how much he hates jeans. Denim, that “ubiquitous fabric,” is “symptomatic of deep disorders in the national psyche”:
Denim is the clerical vestment for the priesthood of all believers in democracy’s catechism of leveling — thou shalt not dress better than society’s most slovenly. To do so would be to commit the sin of lookism — of believing that appearance matters. That heresy leads to denying the universal appropriateness of everything, and then to the elitist assertion that there is good and bad taste.
Denim is the carefully calculated costume of people eager to communicate indifference to appearances. But the appearances that people choose to present in public are cues from which we make inferences about their maturity and respect for those to whom they are presenting themselves.
Do not blame Levi Strauss for the misuse of Levi’s. When the Gold Rush began, Strauss moved to San Francisco planning to sell strong fabric for the 49ers’ tents and wagon covers. Eventually, however, he made tough pants, reinforced by copper rivets, for the tough men who knelt on the muddy, stony banks of Northern California creeks, panning for gold. Today it is silly for Americans whose closest approximation of physical labor consists of loading their bags of clubs into golf carts to go around in public dressed for driving steers up the Chisholm Trail to the railhead in Abilene.
This is not complicated. For men, sartorial good taste can be reduced to one rule: If Fred Astaire would not have worn it, don’t wear it. For women, substitute Grace Kelly.
In the interest of serious journalism, Fox News is hosting a “virtual tea party” on tax day. I am not kidding. They are not merely “covering” what they call the “tea party movement;” Fox News is essentially promoting it. The Fox newsbot in the clip below actually says “can’t get to a tea party? Fox nation hosts a virtual tea party - you can check it out on [the Fox News website].”
If, during the Bush years, a liberal organization had organized a movement with historically revolutionary overtones, like this one, and it was being “hosted” online by a network, the right would be screaming “treason.”
Watch this and gag:
I can’t wait for the virtual John Birch Society meetings, virtual NRA outings, and other such virtually journalistic services that Fox News will undoubtedly be providing sometime soon.
…discuss global climate change in good faith, it seems. His attempt to portray concerned scientists and environmentally-conscious citizens as deluded alarmists (”Dark Green Doomsayers”) is being met, however, with significant opposition. And some of that opposition is coming from his own colleagues at WaPo. TPM Muckrakerreports that there have been “three separate efforts, from three separate sections of the paper, to push back against the bow-tied columnist’s well-chronicleddeceptions on global warming. ” For example, this piece, by Andrew Freedman, examines Will’s attempt to engage in global warming denial by cherry-picking data. And in the video below, WaPo columnist Eugene Robinson accuses Will of making a climate change report sound as if it said “the exact opposite of what it actually said” and of crossing a journalistic line.
I’m not saying that Obama, the Treasury, and the unions are Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler; I’m just saying that I see the history of Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler about to repeat itself.
Michele Bachmann may be a complete lunatic. She may just be dumber than a bag of hammers. One thing is for sure - she’s ready to lead the revolution! Check it out:
Hannity and Bachmann - that’s quite a tag team.
If you can’t bear to listen to Sean Hannity interview Michele Bachmann, well, I don’t blame you. So here are some of Michele’s highlights:
To the barricades! -
At this point the American people - it’s like Thomas Jefferson said, a revolution every now and then is a good thing. We are at the point, Sean, of revolution. And by that, what I mean, an orderly revolution — where the people of this country wake up get up and make a decision that this is not going to happen on their watch…we can’t let the Democrats achieve their ends any longer.
This bit is really dramatic -
Economics works equally in any country. Where freedom is tried, the people rejoice. But where tyranny is enforced upon the people, as Barack Obama is doing, the people suffer and mourn.
Obama is elected, and the people suffer and mourn. Spectacular.
Here’s some more paranoid rambling -
Right now I’m a member of Congress. And I believe that my job here is to be a foreign correspondent, reporting from enemy lines. And people need to understand, this isn’t a game. this isn’t just a political talk show that’s happening right now. This is our very freedom, and we have 230 years, a continuous link of freedom that every generation has ceded to the next generation. This may be the time when that link breaks. And I’m going to do everything I can, I know you are, to make sure that we keep that link secure. We cannot allow that link to break, because as Reagan said, America is the last great hope of mankind. where do we go–
“But it’s fun to gamble and like any good quarterback (though I was never athletic enough to actually play the position), I decided to call an audible.”
– Ed Henry
You don’t say, Ed. Nice call.
Read Ed’s sad-sack description of his preparation for the press conference with president Obama and weep over the condition of our Fourth Estate.
So much for the ol’ “World-Wide Web.” In keeping with a long-standing tradition of censorship, the government of the People’s Republic of China has blocked access to youtube.
Google said Tuesday that its YouTube video-sharing Web site had been blocked in China.
Google said it did not know why the site had been blocked, but a report by the official Xinhua news agency of China on Tuesday said that supporters of the Dalai Lama had fabricated a video that appeared to show Chinese police officers brutally beating Tibetans after riots last year in Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.
…
“The instant speculation is that YouTube is being blocked because the Tibetan government in exile released a particular video,” said Xiao Qiang, adjunct professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and editor of China Digital Times, a news Web site that chronicles political and economic changes in China.
Mr. Xiao said that the blocking of YouTube fit with what appeared to be an effort by China to step up its censorship of the Internet in recent months. Mr. Xiao said he was not surprised that YouTube was a target. It also hosts videos about the Tiananmen Square protests and many other subjects that Chinese authorities find objectionable.
On the bright side, Chinese President and Communist Party General Secretary Hu Jintao has apparently not blocked access to Brylcreem.
Rush isn’t happy with the questions the press asked Obama last night. In particular, he is troubled by a question that made reference to a recent report that claims that one in fifty American children will experience homelessness. Limbaugh calls this statistic “bogus.” His evidence? A different report? Some government statistics, maybe? Nah. He counters the report and the statistic with this: “would somebody tell me the last time you saw a kid sleeping under a bridge?”
Limbaugh creates his own tailor-made reality for his listeners. He appears to feel perfectly entitled to declare things to be true or not true just by his own proclamation, without evidence or context. And his listeners appear quite comfortable in Rush’s reality (they call themselves “Ditto Heads,” after all; so I guess we can’t expect a lot of ciritical pushback from his audience). And this man, sadly, is taken very seriously by many people in this country.
(And by the way - what are you doing under those bridges anyway, Rush? Shopping, maybe?)
[T]he worst thing that could happen would be for the Iranian government to respond favorably and positively and want to engage in a discussion – and then we would be on a track like that which will lead nowhere.
Allow me to tell you a true story. Last election, a nonprofit group known as ACORN helped register American citizens to vote. ACORN hired individuals to sign up voters and paid them a fee per signature. Some unscrupulous employees made up fake voters in an attempt to defraud ACORN. However, since it is illegal to destroy any voter registration forms, ACORN was required by law to submit any and all forms to local election commissions. ACORN dutifully passed the forms on to election commissions and even helpfully flagged the forms that appeared suspicious. At this stage, election commissions checked their registration forms against state and local records and the illegitimate ones were eliminated from the system. There is no evidence of any fraudulent voting as a result of ACORN’s voter registration efforts. Period.
However, our friends at FOX News tried to make it seem as if ACORN and hordes of unwashed black people were trying to steal the election for Barack Obama. (If FOX News learned anything from Bush v. Gore it was a deep concern and reverence for the integrity of elections and the will of the people).
Today the story is back since ACORN has been asked to help with the upcoming national census. Since ACORN is clearly a criminal enterprise whose sole purpose is transforming America into a socialist pleasure dome led by an unholy alliance of Mexicans, crack dealers, and fruits, FOX must sound the alarm.
Watch as Megyn Kelly of FOX News gives viewers a clinic on how to perform professional interviews that delicately probe the issues, exposing the facts and enriching public discourse:
Playing the baby-rapist card is a nice touch. So fair. So balanced.
While George Bush ordered people tortured and Dick Cheney operated his own personal “executive assassination” team, Glenn Beck felt all was right with the world. But now that Obama is in charge, he “fears for his country” and experiences multiple emotional meltdowns on national television calling for a return to our values and principles.
Here’s the culmination of the John Stewart takedown of the preposterous (and possibly criminal?) gasbag Jim Cramer. I’ve been enjoying this for its comeuppance value, and for pure entertainment. But this little affair also shows why the Daily Show and John Stewart have legitimately become and important part of our media culture - because they do the work. The Daily Show actually asks difficult questions, and digs up evidence. As Stewart often points out, the show is meant to be entertainment first. But I feel better knowing that Stewart is out there, in many cases doing the work and asking the questions that our sad excuse for a mainstream news media won’t. And as an added bonus, Stewart’s show is pretty funny, too.
