The Seattle Times editorial board has strong words for the Glorious Leader:
NORTH KOREA, which apparently relishes its oddball, unpredictable behavior on the world stage, has another opportunity to zig when everyone expects it to zag. Release two American journalists held without formal charges, and send them home.
Yeah, sure, but… and? I mean, it’s not like even most Seattleites routinely scan the Times’ op-ed page, let alone Kim Jong-il, so what exactly is the point?
I suppose if the Times had used the incident as a springboard to critique the Obama administration’s policies toward North Korea, to argue pro or con on further engagement with the communist dictatorship, or even, in a controversial twist, to berate the two journalists for carelessly sparking an international incident, well, that might have made for an interesting and/or relevant editorial. But why waste precious op-ed space merely stating the obvious?
What’s next? A bold, sharply worded editorial arguing that puppies are cute?
As proprietors of Seattle’s only remaining daily newspaper opinion page, the Times’ editors have an awesome platform from which to drive and shape our state’s public debate, and with it, a special civic obligation to do so—a platform, I’m not ashamed to admit, bloggers like me envy. And yet, too often, there’s nary an opinion of any consequence to be found. For example, from today’s two unsigned editorials, the combined 558 words can essentially be summed up in seven: North Korea bad, Husky women’s softball good.
I can’t argue with the sentiment, but I mean, really, was there nothing more pressing to write about? No important public policy issue on which to educate readers, no compelling controversy on which to opine? That’s it… a glorified sports column and a current events blurb about as challenging as one might find in the Weekly Reader?
All of which makes the Times’ closing sentence a touch ironic, for while it does in fact hit the nail on the head, it’s not exactly the nail they were thinking of:
Mindless, pointless acts of obfuscating petulance serve no purpose and make no point.
Get it? “Pointless acts … make no point.” In both form and content, it’s like they’re writing about themselves.
Hey Steve!
How come you stopped posting Obama’s Rasmussen #’s….hmmmmmmmmmmm?
Could it be that he is DOWN 80% since you started poppin’ off??
From today’s Rasmussen:
Thursday, June 04, 2009
Let’s see, Obama was +10 a week ago.
He was +32 2 days after Inauguration.
I’d say folks are starting to figure this Marxist out!
Goldy, you underestimate the value of the Seattle Times’ pointless editorials. You don’t really want them commenting on something of consequence, do you? They’re one of those cases where busy work is worth its weight in gold.
@1 They figured him out — and your ilk out — last November, KlyniKalKlown. The rest is history, and so is your party.
Retail sales are down and the stock market is up — a sure sign that stocks are still deeply undervalued. It’s not even noon yet and I’ve already made $1,200 today — about $300 an hour for doing absolutely nothing. All I did this morning was sleep until 9:30 AM, then sit on my fat rabbit ass in front of a computer posting liberal propaganda on HorsesAss, and I not only get paid $300 an hour for this but get a 2/3rds discount on my taxes, too! Thank you Republican tax writers!
GOP tax breaks for the Idle Class, of which I’m a part, are immoral but I’ll take ’em anyway. After all, Republicans do, so why shouldn’t I cash in on that gravy train, too? As long as Congress screws workers and rewards lazy, unproductive, freeloaders like me, and the skies rain money, why not pick it up?? Sure beats working! No commute, no boss, no taxes … I don’t see why anyone bothers to work.
Being productive doesn’t make any sense when working is punished and sloth is rewarded, which is the system that Reaganism and Bushism created in our country. Yes I know it’s crazy; but I’m only one little rabbit, I can’t fight it, so I just go with the flow.
I think that, as the local paper of record, it’s critical that the ST settle this cuteness of puppies question once and for all!
1 Cyn
Oh Cyn, you’re such a maroon. You and your Rasmussen.
If you look at the bigger poicture, and I know it’s hard for you, Obama’s numbers in a straight-up-or-down poll are remarkably stable, and the Approval numbers are trending upward right now.
From pollingreport.com
I’ll only go back a month…
AP-GfK
Approve 64%
Disapprove 32%
DIfference +32 5/28 – 6/1/09
USA Today/Gallup
Approve 61%
Disapprove 34%
DIfference +27 5/29-31/09
CNN/ORC
Approve 62%
Disapprove 35%
DIfference +27 5/14-17/09
FOX/OD RV
Approve 60%
Disapprove 30%
DIfference +30 5/12-13/09
CBS
Approve 63%
Disapprove 26%
DIfference +37 5/6-12/09
USA Today/Gallup
Approve 58%
Disapprove 35%
DIfference +32 58 35 23 5/7-10/09
Ipsos/McClatchy *
Approve 65%
Disapprove 31%
DIfference +34 4/30 – 5/3/09
Now that the Seattle Time’s existence is partly due to special new tax breaks from Olympia, their editorials will continue to be without substance. It is not a free press.
When it comes to their fishwrapper, The Blethen family seems to specialize in being substance-free.
Anti-abortion groups are spineless pussies who are lying in order to manipulate the rubes into being their shock troops. And I’ll tell you how I know this.
Consider: if you REALLY believe that abortion is mass murder and the moral equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust — just like Operation Rescue, the National Right to Life Committee, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family and dozens of other evangelical groups say it is, then the adherents of these groups are not merely justified, but obligated to take up arms against abortionists, and to encourage others to do the same.
If you’re confronted with an evil equal in magnitude to that of Adolf Hitler — as all these groups insist IS the case — then surely one is obliged to do more than vote Republican every four years in the hopes of one day appointing enough judges to change the law of the land. Confronted with what all of these groups assured him was the Holocaust, Roeder decided to become Claus von Stauffenberg.
Yet now that Roeder has lived out the reality of the conclusion that these groups have thrust upon him and that he now fervently believes, these groups are all recoiling. They all claim to share Roeder’s premise, but not to share his conclusion. That won’t work. Roeder’s violent conclusion arose logically from that shared premise. If he is a madman to be condemned — as all those groups suddenly insist he is — it is because of the madness of that premise.
So how is it possible they can repudiate him now without also repudiating THEIR rhetoric that compelled him to act?
Actually, I thought the Husky softball team was the most compelling sports story in our town in years (okay, not much competition for that, I admit,) and one of the better public interst storeis of the year. I was riveted to the TV or radio 1150, and watched the games over the end of the week and the weekend. I even plopped into a Ballard Pub and made them turn the channel on a TV so I could watch last two innings of the second Georgia game on Sunday, because I could not wait to get home. (They thought I was weird.)
This team is the personification of all that was once good about sports and could be again.
@1: Actually cyniclown, or whomever, I subscribe to Rasmussen, and I don’t know where you get your numbers, but you are making them up. They never had Obama, even at his highest number in early December, at better than 44%strongly approve, 28% strongly disapprove. Since late January these numbers have slid to about where they are now and are barely moving. Those high nmbers were happening while Shrub the Younger Idiot was still prez and Obama had not taken office.
Rasmussemn has two methodologies- one for serious election purposes where they are pretty good, and one style for the daily upchucks where they try to lload questions and get partisan answers. There tracking on Obama tracks strongly approve and strongly disapprove. It is no more than a partisan impression from day to day.
Serious job performance polls and likeability polls by every pollster in western civilization have radically different numbers than what Rasmussen tests. You are doing real apples to oranges by a partisan hack.
@9 “Confronted with what all of these groups assured him was the Holocaust, Roeder decided to become Claus von Stauffenberg.”
Nah. Von Stauffenberg was shot. Roeder wants to be Tom Cruise.
@9 (continued) Personally, I think someone should have strangled Baby Adolf in his crib.
This drivel has Ryan Blethen’s stylistic fingerprints all over it.