This David Brooks column has been making the rounds for this thing he said.
I sometimes wonder if the Republican Party has become the receding roar of white America as it pines for a way of life that will never return.
I don’t know when he started covering politics, but his sentiment would have been true since at least Nixon and probably further back. This, as I say, has been well covered in the blogs the last few days. But what struck me most when reading it was this:
The other pleasure of covering campaigns is getting to play American Idol judge, evaluating the political performances.
Look, I’m someone who tries to make politics fun. And on the one hand, if that’s what you like about politics, well fine.
But on the other hand, go fuck yourself David Brooks. How in God’s name can anyone find pleasure in judging — what — the theater aspects of stump speeches and town halls? To actually get pleasure from complaining that George HW Bush looked at his watch, or that Al Gore sighed, or that Kerry was stilted, or Hillary Clinton whatever the press made up about her crying before NH?
That’s a pleasure? Pleasure. Not a chore. Not something you feel you should do to give voters an insight into whatever made up bullshit about why that’s more important to cover than actual issues. A pleasure. Like good sex or good food? The most awful, the shittiest what-the-fuck-are-they-doingist part of political coverage brings David Brooks pleasure? I guess what I’m saying is it’s bad enough when journalists do this sort of coverage, but can’t they at least pretend it’s their job, and not say how fun it is.
I mean I always thought it was laziness: It’s easier to say this or that candidate talks funny (or elegantly) than to report on what foreign policy will look like if they’re president. But to say it’s pleasurable is even worse.
Moral Hazard, the Irish setter who sits by the chair reserved for David Brooks in the club room of the Premature Fogies Club, sometimes gets pleasured by BoBo.
(h/t Charles P. Pierce)
He’s finally figuring this out? But, it’s more a myth of a life that was than an actual life that will never return.
It is laziness, but they can’t come out and say that.
Politics is about as much fun as a spinal tap.
OTOH, politics can be very entertaining at times:
Perry’s out, Gingrich asked his wife for an open marriage, Iowa GOPers can’t run an election, and Romney sat on Marriott’s board of directors playing with himself while the company demanded kickbacks from its franchisees.
Quite a motley crew, if you ask me.
Either God loves Obama something fierce, or he’s unbelievably lucky (pick one).
Wisconsin Update
Gov. Scott Walker announced his “education reform” legislative initiative the same day Milwaukee Public Schools announced it will lay off 354 teachers due to loss of state funding.
(Source: WTMJ-4 TV)
The news media has been caught in the dynamics of the campaign minutia for decades now. For the MSM, in the 1960’s and 70’s, it was a frustrating by-product of the fairness doctrine. They pretty much had to give equal time to each candidate, without offering an opinion on whether either one was right or wrong. It COULD do a long investigative piece, but time contraits limited those forays into policy. So if it just reported on what it said and heard on the campain bus, or quoted from pollsters and pundits, it was safe.
Of course, Reagan’s abolition of the fairness doctrine did away with those constraints. But the MSM was rooted in long tradition and it’s journalists/reporters had been trained and acquired habits in the long road to the top of network news, so it still tries to maintain a “neutral” process of delivering the news. But right-wing attacks have made it so afraid of receiving fatal wounds to it’s credibility, it shys away from anything approaching calling the Republicans out for being the liars that they are, even while Fox News dosen’t make the slightest effort at neutrality. It’s like a pacifist trying to reason with an armed drunk – it usually doesn’t end well for the pacifist.
One of the things I do miss about the heydays of broadcast journalism is that we, as a nation, have no common frame of reference. The right wing has been told for years to not tune in to any news source other than Fox News. The left wing isn’t going to tune into Fox News either – some radio hosts even make it a regular joke routine that “we listen to Fox News so you don’t have to”, when reporting on the craziness being reported on Fox News.
The end result is that nobody meets in the middle, and the two sides keep drifting further apart. Gone are the “centrist” policy discussions like those found in the Nixon/Kennedy debate, where they both agreed in the beginning that the wanted what was best for America, and that the only issue was some disagreements on the best way to achieve that result. Now the name-calling and disparagement has reached such proportions (even within the Republican Party primaries) that the policy discussions don’t even begin.
How do you have a rational discussion on tax rates when the other side calls you a “socialist” and a “traitor” at every opportunity?
@7 Unless the armed drunk is drunk enough to shoot himself in the ass.
By rhp’s reckoning, broadcast journalism had its finest hour when Ed Murrow stuck it to the McCarthyites, and it’s been all downhill from there.
I think there’s room for argument (and I know some of my African American friends might not agree) that what we’re seeing now is a decoupling of America’s particularly ugly brand of racism from the larger realm of class warfare. The reaction of the right (and the “powers that be”) to the OWS movement (whose participants have been mostly white) have been quite similar to that of the white South to the civil rights movement.
The “one percenters” don’t give a rat’s ass whether you’re white or black or purple or pink or plaid–all they know is that if you’re not one of them, your money’s green, your sweat is wet, your blood is red–and that if they don’t get all of numbers One and Two out of you, they’re going to spill a lot of number Three.
Cliff Mass has been doing yeoman’s work on the Snowpocalypse. I check him out pretty regularly.
http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/
Economics 101
Okay kiddies, gather ’round, cuz we’re gonna straighten out a few misconceptions. (Wow, that’s a BIG word!)
“First, is there any urgency (to reduce the deficit or debt)? No. The government can borrow short term at negative real interest rates, and long-term at about zero. The world is paying us to hold their money. That is anything but a debt crisis. The Fed is out of bullets, he said … [s]o we need more fiscal stimulus, preferably spending that focuses on actually creating jobs. Amen.
“Second, should we focus on the next decade? No, he said, and noted that … budget deficit projections over the next decade are about 3.6% of GDP, which is not much to get agitated about. …
“Third, is government spending the problem? No, he said, it’s … the rising price of healthcare (that is, not the ageing of the population). …
“Fourth, is the public really up in arms about the deficit? No, actually, they care more about the economy and jobs.”
http://www.truth-out.org/econo.....1326840060
Roger Rabbit Commentary: Btw Douglas Holtz-Eakin, mentioned in the article, was Dubya’s Congressional Budget Office director and presidential candidate McCain’s economic policy adviser, which automatically means he has his head stuck too far up a sheep’s ass to know what he’s talking about.
Score another al Qaeda kill for Obama. Bush had 8 years to catch this guy and couldn’t. When you need a real job done, hire a real man to do it, not a girly-man like Chimpface.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46.....-pakistan/