The cover of the latest edition of TIME magazine shows the noseless face of an 18 year-old Afghan girl, who was disfigured as a result of running away from a forced marriage. The cover suggested that this is what would happen when the US left Afghanistan.
Like many on the Left side of the political equation, I vehemently oppose the continuation of this war. Like many on the Left side of the politcal equation, I knew from the getgo that Iraq was a lie. Like many on the Left side of the political equation, I am a woman, who came of age during the decade of the 70s, that era in which great strides of gender equality were achieved.
Many on the Left side of the political equation cry out that this heart-rending picture is nothing less than blatant emotional blackmail. It may be; I don’t know, but it makes me uneasy.
I have a friend from my college years, a lifelong Republican and conservative, an educated man and a lawyer, who’s served several hitches in Iraq and Afghanistan as a JAG lawyer. We often disagree politically, but I appreciate his insight and respect his opinion. Even before the TIME cover became a topic of conversation this week, he made my conscience squirm.
"You were always at the forefront of feminism in college," he remarked once in an online exchange. "Yet I wonder at how you and your fellow Lefties can just turn a blind eye to the mistreatment of women in Afghanistan. I mean, that’s supposed to be your thing, isn’t it?"
I suppose it is, and it makes me uncomfortable. The picture of Aisha on the cover of TIME made me more uncomfortable, but the reaction to some people, who purport to be from the Progressive Left, made me downright shameful. A woman, who is a regular commentator on Huffington Post flatly stated that she didn’t give a rat’s ass about the women in Afghanistan, that if they didn’t stand up to the men controlling for their rights, they, basically got what they deserved.
Charming. And oh-so-au courant-liberal. Actually, that attitude positively reeks of the attitude promoted by the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan during the Eighties – the meme of "I’m all right, Jack; fuck you." I know that Ronald Reagan’s supposed to be to the Left of the current crop of retrograde Republicanism, but since when did Progressives morph into exponents of Ronald Reagan’s philosophy?
Other than that woman’s reaction, the rest of the commentary was filled with people one could visualise squirming in their chairs as they typed painfully constructed rigamaroles of sound bites gleaned from the latest fashionable infotainment pundit, trying to justify that Aisha’s punishment was everything to do with the way her culture was intended to be and simply wasn’t worth our effort and expenditure in lives and money.
But Aisha’s treatment has everything to do with us, because we enabled the Taliban. Once we decided to look the other way, in the wake of Russia withdrawing from Afghanistan, leaving a trail of chaos, as the warlords battled to outdo one another, we allowed the Taliban to rise from the rubble, and we condemned a whole generation of women and girls to the darkness of ignorance and brutality.
And now the Left are looking away again.
Look, I’m not advocating staying in Afghanistan any longer than is necessary. I’d have the troops home tomorrow if I could. I’m not even sure what can be done to help women like Aisha, but the attitude I found from the Left towards this – and especially the crass comment made by the woman on HuffPo, amazes me that there’s an attitude towards women here that ranges from abject indifference to callous cruelty.
Last Sunday night, Bill Maher finished a three-night stint through the Midwest, ending up in Madison, Wisconsin. The next day, Bill posted a raving review of the Madison gig on his Facebook page. The reviewer, clearly a fan, literally bent over for Bill in praise. One of the funniest aspects of the evening, the writer gushed, was Bill’s take on Sarah Palin (a staple for Bill Maher – more than any other commentator or fundit he goes out of his way to bring the subject of Palin into the discussion, even when she hasn’t been in the news.)
The reviewer thought it an absolute riot that Bill managed to call Palin a c*nt no less than six times in a minute – in a New York minute, knowing Maher’s delivery.
I thought it appalling.
I am not a Palin fan. I loathe the woman. I despair that this willfully ignorant woman, someone disdains quality higher education as exclusive and elitist, blaming the latter for all that’s wrong in the country, whilst elevating the mundane and ordinary to new heights of misconceived excellence. I find her divisive, hateful, and extremely derisive and disrespectful of our President. This is a would-be politician who begins by criticizing policy and ends with a full-on personal attack. She is unfamiliar with government and government processes, poorly eductated, inarticulate, quasi-illiterate, sly, untrustworthy, nepotistic, and blatantly untruthful. In short, she is a narcissistic liar.
But she is not, nor does she deserve to be called a c*nt – and certainly not six times in one minute in front of an audience in a public venue.
No woman does.
Yes, you’ll say, Palin is certainly capable of being just as vile, without resorting to crude, guttersnipe language (unless you want to count her pathetic and misspelled attempt at bilingualism – always better to say "balls" if you can’t spell cojones. And she certainly does deserve to be hit hard verbally and discredited.
But any man who resorts to calling a woman a c*nt in public is certainly less of a man, in himself, and shows a singular lack of intelligence in doing so.
Congratulations, Bill ... you’ve just joined the ranks of celebrated men whom you’ve previously criticized as their moral equals:-
*John McCain, who famously referred to his wife by the c-word in 1992, and
Mel Gibson, whom you recently flayed in a tweet, referring to his very ugly verbal abuse of the mother of his younger child, whom he called – yes – a cnt.
To your credit, Bill, you’re nothing, if not genuinely fair and balanced, because in February 2008, you famously referred to Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton, by the c-word on Real Time, in frustration at her refusal to give up the ghost in favour of your candidate of the moment; so maybe there’s a place for you on Fox News after all.
When I objected to this on Facebook, I was met with a torrent of criticism - some rational, most blindly loyal to Bill to the point that people began to sound like blithering and blathering followers of a religious cult.
Some of those arguing actually called the word "quite beautiful" and pointed out that Shakespeare used it regularly. Wrong. Shakespeare used it alliteratively in allusion and as a clever play on words, never actually saying the word directly. Bill deals in directness. He called Palin and Clinton the actual word.
Others maintained that it’s used in quite normal conversation both in Australia and in Europe. Again, mostly wrong. I can’t speak for the Australians, but the British have the filthiset mouths in Europe when it comes to swearing. Even then, it’s a word used in the extremest and ugliest cases and by the lower gene pool of society (which seems to be expanding rapidly). And it’s understood that a man who refers to a woman as that word is living at the extreme of society at best. It’s something that’s never heard in polite company on the Continent.
Worse than the rational arguments, were the reckoning, by men and also by women, that Palin deserved this epithet, for all the reasons I listed above. One mature woman with grown children purported to use the word all the time, and saw noting wrong with it.
But would she like to be called a c*nt?
No reply to my question. When she carried on in a wild fervour about how Bill was the ultimate purveyor of truth in the United States, I asked her the question again: would she mind if someone called her a c*nt?
She finally said she’d rather be called a c*nt than a Republican.
I then replied, "Consider it done. You’re a c*nt, and by the way, you’re more than halfway to being a Repuiblican, with your attitude to fellow women and your narrow-mindedness intact." And then I blocked her.
But the one question no one deigned to answer was this: If they’re OK with Bill calling Palin a c*nt, does that mean they were OK with him calling Hillary the same?
Budding politicians came to the fore, mouthing words which said nothing. Not even sentences made sense. Waffle. I sensed the disciples of the man who purports to speak power to truth suffered a singular Aisha moment.
What a quandry! How could Bill be wrong about calling Hillary a c*nt and right about calling Palin the same? For people on the Right, surely Hillary is just as fearsome, just as divisive, an Ivy League elitist who encompasses everything that is wrong with this country (in their eyes). One side’s c*nt is another side’s Queen Mother, only Bill didn't differentiate.
Bill is the only political satirist-cum-pundit, other than Glenn Beck, who consitently brings Obama’s race into the fray; but not in a positive manner. Thus far this year, Obama’s been "President Sanford and Son", the "tanner of two evils" and the ineffectual, professorial President who needs to "black it up a little" with some stereotypical ghetto culture. His disciples decry criticism of such things as harmless, considering Bill’s "only a comedian." Yet if Beck or O’Reilly had said the same things, they’d be all over their asses like a duck on a june bug. It seems one man’s perceived racism is another man’s comedy, depending on which side of the political coin on which you be found.
Because we on the Left are never racist, are we? And we can never be accused of being sexit either, can we? Or even homophobic, now that Prop 8’s on its way to being ruled unconstitutional.
And if we are, we can laugh it off, can’t we, as comedy. After all, we on the Left, who occupy themoral high ground, we kknow, don’t we, who really puts c*ntry first and who puts the c*nt in country.
Speaking Truth to the Power of the Lying Liars of the US Media, Right AND Left.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
The Shark's Been Jumped
Did everybody miss it, or am I imagining things?
In the wake of the historic 2008 election, a debate arose over the role of the internet in influencing the ultimate result, as well as the roll of internet news agregates and blog sites as being the natural successors – indeed, the usurpers, of traditional print journalism. Over the past two years, it’s almost become de rigueur for various commentators within the blogosphere to make pretty disparaging remarks about the mainstream media, recently re-dubbed the lamestream media by one who simultaneously suffers and benefits from its attention.
The 24/7 cable news talking heads, from both sides of the political spectrum, and their soulmates riding the waves of internet news reporting rule supreme and unduly influence both the critical thinking processes and opinions of a lot of folk who would do just as well as to open a book entitled Civics 101 before they open their mouths.
This is no longer a world of hard, substantiated fact, or even a world of opinion backe by undisputable fact. It has become, however, a world of opinion, presented as fact and lightly laced with the unsubstantiated variety.
We live for the sound bite of the moment, for the slightest change in a politco’s body language, in order to have this mercilessly parsed and reinterpreted again and again by an unrelenting and irresponsible media. The trivial and mundane have been so far elevated into the world of the sublime that major news stories regarding legislation which may affect us all as a whole are lost in a welter of the confused and often conflicting banter of people who love to speak only to hear the sound of their own voices and whose first allegiance is to their own self-promotion.
That countless testimonies to these icons’ veracity is documented daily on a plethora of internet sites in homage to the services rendered by these dubious souls is frightening.
The internet has offered an opportunity for people who, for some reason, otherwise have been unable to succeed in the world of bona fide print journalism, the chance to shine – never mind, the sort of tactics employed by said “journalist” would be held up to close scrutiny and then discarded highly irregular by more traditional professionals.
Just as we shouldn’t trust the stewardess to land an Airbus with the pilot passed out drunk, or Al Qaeda’s iontentions if it happens upon the Pakastani nuclear arsenal, so we should always view the “citizen journalist” with a janudiced eye.
Until recently, internet journalism’s apogee was reached during the Obama campaign, when Mayhill Fowler, a retired schoolteacher and failed writer attended a private fund-raising event, closed to the press. In simple parlance, “closed” meant “closed.” No reporters. A chance for the candidate to unwind and charm. The fact that a private citizen attended, armed with a small recording device and reported off-the-record remarks made by a political candidate was considered unscrupulous to the nth degree. That sort of thing would have cost a seasoned reporter his job and his reputation.
But this is the new era of “face-in-the-crowd” reporting, and quite often, these sort of eye-witness accounts wouldn’t be admissable in a court of law, because they – like the talking-heads, who subsequently parrot and publicize them – are skewed and coloured to fit the agenda of whatever internet aggregate is pushing the issue at hand.
The order of the day is cherry-picking, and not outside in the fresh air and the orchard. It’s cut-and-paste and hope for the best. Band-aid journalism that spins like a top.
Yesterday, Rightwing blogger Andrew Breitbart, writing in Tucker Carlson’s DailyCaller, highlighted a video clip of USDA official, Shirley Sherrod, addressing a meeting of a local branch of the NAACP, wherein she appeared to admit having shown racism toward an individual case regarding a white farmer and his wife, in Georgia. Ms Sherrod is African American.
Immediately, the meme was picked up and pushed by Fox News, as well as the other media suspects, resulting in a severe condemnation of Ms Sherrod’s remarks by NAACP President, Benjamin Jealous, and Ms Sherrod literally being sacked on the spot from her position within the USDA.
All on the evidence of a couple of minutes gleaned from a speech which lasted much longer. Noone bothered to listen to what was said before the fated line was spoken; no one bothered to listen to any dialogue spoken afterward. In dact, as Ms Sherrod said later, no one was interested in listening to her explanation at all.
They just reacted.
Twenty-four hours later, and the video of Ms Sherrod’s entire speech has surfaced, and in the context of that discourse, it’s been found that her remarks were anything but racist, that she helped the supplicants mentioned and that she and the white couple became firm friends. At this moment, Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, is contemplating reinstating Ms Sherrod.
And so he should. With a big apology, a promotion and a raise in pay.
Last Friday, a “reporter” for the Huffington Post, Shahien Nasiripour, posted an article, which stated categorically that Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, had effectively blocked the appoinment of Elizabeth Warren to head the new consumer protection agency to be established under the new financial regulation laws. Nasiripour cited some suitably ghostly anonymous source, said to be “familiar with Geithner’s mind, ” although he didn’t offer any direct quotations from said Mr Anonymous.
Familiar with Geithner’s mind? Granted, on Monday, after the media had picked up on this story and ran it like the favourite at the Preakness, it behooved Talking Points Memo to do some actual investigating. And so, they contacted some viable sources – peple with names and faces and voices … like David Axelrod.
Ax reported that no decision had yet been made as regards the person heading this new agency, that the decision was a Presidential one and, really, nothing to do with Secretary Geithner, and that, yes, Mrs Warrenwas a firm candidate. This, I might add, came after a weekend where Warren was put in the singularly embarrassing position of having to disclaim any knowledge of any of her supporters actively promoting her as a candidate to the White House.
In other words, Talking Points Memo proved the Huffington Post article to be a tissue of lies.
By yesterday, Nasiripour followed up his article, again quoting Mr Anonymous – or maybe it was another Mr Anonymous, because this one claimed to be familiar, only with Geithner’s opinions. This article, in no way, distanced itself from the original one. It sure as hell didn’t apologise for any error or lax reporting. Instead, it accompanied a couple of other blogs, one purporting to know why Obama “feared” Elizabeth Warren. The other was simply a veiled threat of the direst of circumstances that would befall this Administration, if Warren were not appointed.
And so it goes.
The entire purpose of this fabricated article, presented as fact, but not substantiated, yet still reported in the mecia as a whole, is twofold: first, it means to thoroughly discredit Tim Geithner, a Cabinet official for whom Arianna Huffington has an almost pathological dislike. Second, it’s meant to box the President into a lose-lose situation.
If he appoints Warren, after all the publicity the media have been giving this, the Republicans in Congress will simply batten down the hatches and fight to the death to eliminate her from the proceedings. All well and good; he could just then wait until the next lengthy recess and appoint her there and then. But it would be an appointment with a stench attached. And if he appoints someone else, he risks being pilloried mercilessly by Huffington, who revels, at the moment, in referring to him as a Nowhre Man.
I think he should appoint Warren. She’s the best candidate for the position by a mile. But he should also announce at the time of this appointment, that he made the decision based on the candidate’s impeccable qualifications and not onany pressur from the media or otherwise … and, oh by the way, the White House Press Association will be revoking the credentials of The Huffington Post, forthwith, effective immediately.
We used to have a media that was the envy of the world. Our media exposed Joe McCarthy, laid open Watergate and Irangate. now it bends over to propagate the whims and agendae of a failed Republican operative and a neocon neophyte failed journalist, a parvenue and an intellectual lightweight, both of whom are feted as serious political journalists.
I only hope, that in the one-eyed, purist world which purports to be internet journalism, that this shark has been jumped, and some professional regulations applied to future ventures. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be averse to seeing that shark take a chunk out of someone’s feta cheesed ass.
In the wake of the historic 2008 election, a debate arose over the role of the internet in influencing the ultimate result, as well as the roll of internet news agregates and blog sites as being the natural successors – indeed, the usurpers, of traditional print journalism. Over the past two years, it’s almost become de rigueur for various commentators within the blogosphere to make pretty disparaging remarks about the mainstream media, recently re-dubbed the lamestream media by one who simultaneously suffers and benefits from its attention.
The 24/7 cable news talking heads, from both sides of the political spectrum, and their soulmates riding the waves of internet news reporting rule supreme and unduly influence both the critical thinking processes and opinions of a lot of folk who would do just as well as to open a book entitled Civics 101 before they open their mouths.
This is no longer a world of hard, substantiated fact, or even a world of opinion backe by undisputable fact. It has become, however, a world of opinion, presented as fact and lightly laced with the unsubstantiated variety.
We live for the sound bite of the moment, for the slightest change in a politco’s body language, in order to have this mercilessly parsed and reinterpreted again and again by an unrelenting and irresponsible media. The trivial and mundane have been so far elevated into the world of the sublime that major news stories regarding legislation which may affect us all as a whole are lost in a welter of the confused and often conflicting banter of people who love to speak only to hear the sound of their own voices and whose first allegiance is to their own self-promotion.
That countless testimonies to these icons’ veracity is documented daily on a plethora of internet sites in homage to the services rendered by these dubious souls is frightening.
The internet has offered an opportunity for people who, for some reason, otherwise have been unable to succeed in the world of bona fide print journalism, the chance to shine – never mind, the sort of tactics employed by said “journalist” would be held up to close scrutiny and then discarded highly irregular by more traditional professionals.
Just as we shouldn’t trust the stewardess to land an Airbus with the pilot passed out drunk, or Al Qaeda’s iontentions if it happens upon the Pakastani nuclear arsenal, so we should always view the “citizen journalist” with a janudiced eye.
Until recently, internet journalism’s apogee was reached during the Obama campaign, when Mayhill Fowler, a retired schoolteacher and failed writer attended a private fund-raising event, closed to the press. In simple parlance, “closed” meant “closed.” No reporters. A chance for the candidate to unwind and charm. The fact that a private citizen attended, armed with a small recording device and reported off-the-record remarks made by a political candidate was considered unscrupulous to the nth degree. That sort of thing would have cost a seasoned reporter his job and his reputation.
But this is the new era of “face-in-the-crowd” reporting, and quite often, these sort of eye-witness accounts wouldn’t be admissable in a court of law, because they – like the talking-heads, who subsequently parrot and publicize them – are skewed and coloured to fit the agenda of whatever internet aggregate is pushing the issue at hand.
The order of the day is cherry-picking, and not outside in the fresh air and the orchard. It’s cut-and-paste and hope for the best. Band-aid journalism that spins like a top.
Yesterday, Rightwing blogger Andrew Breitbart, writing in Tucker Carlson’s DailyCaller, highlighted a video clip of USDA official, Shirley Sherrod, addressing a meeting of a local branch of the NAACP, wherein she appeared to admit having shown racism toward an individual case regarding a white farmer and his wife, in Georgia. Ms Sherrod is African American.
Immediately, the meme was picked up and pushed by Fox News, as well as the other media suspects, resulting in a severe condemnation of Ms Sherrod’s remarks by NAACP President, Benjamin Jealous, and Ms Sherrod literally being sacked on the spot from her position within the USDA.
All on the evidence of a couple of minutes gleaned from a speech which lasted much longer. Noone bothered to listen to what was said before the fated line was spoken; no one bothered to listen to any dialogue spoken afterward. In dact, as Ms Sherrod said later, no one was interested in listening to her explanation at all.
They just reacted.
Twenty-four hours later, and the video of Ms Sherrod’s entire speech has surfaced, and in the context of that discourse, it’s been found that her remarks were anything but racist, that she helped the supplicants mentioned and that she and the white couple became firm friends. At this moment, Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, is contemplating reinstating Ms Sherrod.
And so he should. With a big apology, a promotion and a raise in pay.
Last Friday, a “reporter” for the Huffington Post, Shahien Nasiripour, posted an article, which stated categorically that Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, had effectively blocked the appoinment of Elizabeth Warren to head the new consumer protection agency to be established under the new financial regulation laws. Nasiripour cited some suitably ghostly anonymous source, said to be “familiar with Geithner’s mind, ” although he didn’t offer any direct quotations from said Mr Anonymous.
Familiar with Geithner’s mind? Granted, on Monday, after the media had picked up on this story and ran it like the favourite at the Preakness, it behooved Talking Points Memo to do some actual investigating. And so, they contacted some viable sources – peple with names and faces and voices … like David Axelrod.
Ax reported that no decision had yet been made as regards the person heading this new agency, that the decision was a Presidential one and, really, nothing to do with Secretary Geithner, and that, yes, Mrs Warrenwas a firm candidate. This, I might add, came after a weekend where Warren was put in the singularly embarrassing position of having to disclaim any knowledge of any of her supporters actively promoting her as a candidate to the White House.
In other words, Talking Points Memo proved the Huffington Post article to be a tissue of lies.
By yesterday, Nasiripour followed up his article, again quoting Mr Anonymous – or maybe it was another Mr Anonymous, because this one claimed to be familiar, only with Geithner’s opinions. This article, in no way, distanced itself from the original one. It sure as hell didn’t apologise for any error or lax reporting. Instead, it accompanied a couple of other blogs, one purporting to know why Obama “feared” Elizabeth Warren. The other was simply a veiled threat of the direst of circumstances that would befall this Administration, if Warren were not appointed.
And so it goes.
The entire purpose of this fabricated article, presented as fact, but not substantiated, yet still reported in the mecia as a whole, is twofold: first, it means to thoroughly discredit Tim Geithner, a Cabinet official for whom Arianna Huffington has an almost pathological dislike. Second, it’s meant to box the President into a lose-lose situation.
If he appoints Warren, after all the publicity the media have been giving this, the Republicans in Congress will simply batten down the hatches and fight to the death to eliminate her from the proceedings. All well and good; he could just then wait until the next lengthy recess and appoint her there and then. But it would be an appointment with a stench attached. And if he appoints someone else, he risks being pilloried mercilessly by Huffington, who revels, at the moment, in referring to him as a Nowhre Man.
I think he should appoint Warren. She’s the best candidate for the position by a mile. But he should also announce at the time of this appointment, that he made the decision based on the candidate’s impeccable qualifications and not onany pressur from the media or otherwise … and, oh by the way, the White House Press Association will be revoking the credentials of The Huffington Post, forthwith, effective immediately.
We used to have a media that was the envy of the world. Our media exposed Joe McCarthy, laid open Watergate and Irangate. now it bends over to propagate the whims and agendae of a failed Republican operative and a neocon neophyte failed journalist, a parvenue and an intellectual lightweight, both of whom are feted as serious political journalists.
I only hope, that in the one-eyed, purist world which purports to be internet journalism, that this shark has been jumped, and some professional regulations applied to future ventures. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be averse to seeing that shark take a chunk out of someone’s feta cheesed ass.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Tango'd from the Tanning Bed
Yesterday morning, I opened my copy of The Guardian to learn that various tranches and services of the British National Health Service were being outsourced to private providers and, leading the fray for tenders, was none other than our old friend, Humana – AKA Bill Frist Inc.
I was drinking my coffee at the time. I didn’t have a Pepsi moment, and I didn’t vomit in my mouth. I simply smiled wryly, because I’d seen this coming.
The NHS has been an albatross around the neck of the Conservative Party in Britain since Maggie Thatcher chopped dental and optical services from its auspices back in the 1980s, and Cameron wanted to take this further. Last summer, there were stories abounding here of how the Tories intended on reforming the NHS, how it was working at a loss – things everyone had known as truisms for a long time, but things no one would think of addressing because, well, because the NHS here is the Third Rail of Third Rails.
And when the GOP started airing pejorative commercials in the US, railing against rationed medical treatments and long waiting lists, basically presenting the NHS and all like her in a pretty crass light, Cameron flip-flopped and came out fighting for the NHS. Well he should do, because his oldest child, who had recently died, was born with severe birth defects and had depended on the NHS for care and treatment. Then and there, Cameron vouchsafed the safety of the NHS under any potential Tory regime.
Well, the Tory regime is a reality – albeit, officially it’s a coalition with the Liberal Democrats; but more and more, instead of the pundits referring to a ConLib pact, they’re calling the coalition “ConDem” in a clever jeu des mots.
Because, under the guise of austerity moves, this government – cleverly caricatured by the resident Guardian cartoonist as consisting of Cameron as a louche and depraved version of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy wickedly enticing Nick Clegg, depicted as a rosy-cheeked and cheerfully ignorant version of Pinocchio, to come and play in his termite-infested sawmill – is systematically dismantling any and all entitlement schemes from the government.
This is Thatcherism Mach II: Trickledown – the Sequel.
When the coalition took control of things, once again Cameron reiterated that the NHS would suffer no cutback in services. Then, in the special emergency budget, Camerons Treasury wonk, George Osborne, an independently wealthy trust fund child who’s never worked a day in his life, blithely announced that all government departments must cut budgetary spending from between 25% and 40% – except the Defense Department, which would only suffer cutbacks of 10%. Of course.
And, of course, this would mean immense numbers of civil service and outsourced contractors being laid off prematurely – some permanently – in this age of recession.
Now, it’s not rocket science and I’m no economist, but saying that the NHS wouldn’t suffer any cutback in services, and then saying that that same department has to cut its budget by between 25 and 40% … doesn’t that kinda sorta mean that somewhere along the way, services are going to be cut? You can make as many paper-pushers redundant as you want in the NHS, it still stands to reason that x amount of nurses or doctors or some sort of specialist personnel won’t be being hired, that various forms of surgery/treatments/drug therapies won’t be implemented because of lack of funding.
As painful as it is for me to say it, and as many times as Progressives who don’t know have accused me of lying, the GOP’s commercials last summer did have a bare ring of truth about them; because here in the UK, in some areas, healthcare is rationed, there are waiting lists for surgeries and treatments. It’s simply a postcode lottery, and your quality of service reflects how well your health authority has managed its budget. My primary healthcare trust is a pretty good one, but a pregnant woman still has to have her labour monitered up to a certain point in one hospital, before she’s transferred, at breakneck speed, fourteen miles to another hospital in order, actually, to give birth.
The announcement that Humana were entrenching themselves in the tendering process confirmed suspicions I’d been having for the past few months, when every night on commercial television here, you see no less than five different advertisements for private health insurance, and when – out of the blue – commercials for Viagra have started to appear. (Contrary to life in the United States, prescription drug remedies aren’t advertised on television in the UK or in Europe.)
The NHS wouldn’t actually cut services to the public; instead, they would outsource them to private entities, probably for a fee. That would, at least, justify the increase in NHS contributions we’ve now had inflicted on us – yes, America, the NHS is NOT free; we pay an additional tax called the National Insurance to cover this – but the public was surreptitiously being edged and manipulated into buying into private health insurance schemes.
I’d love to give the clever ConDems the benefit of the doubt and say they’re gently edging us into a more French-like, hybrid system, but knowing Thatcher’s children as well as I do, I know this is nothing more or less than what it actually is … a CON. It’s incremental change that will inch along until one day someone will blink and realise that the good old NHS just ceased to exist somewhere in the first five-year fixed term (nudge-nudge-wink-wink) of Blueboy Cameron and Pinocchio Clegg.
The British public had been had. They had been, in local parlance, tango’d.
Last Sunday on Meet the Press (a venerable national treasure of a program which has managed to go from the sublime to the ridiculous in the two years since the late Tim Russert’s death), Robert Gibbs, the President’s Press Secretary sounded a codified clarion call to Democrats, grassroots, elected and electable: there was a very real possibility that the Democratic Party could lose control of the House.
NUDGE. NUDGE. WINK. WINK … HELLOOOOOOO?
Immediately, he said that, the cable news boys and girls went into meltdown, along with the Wicked Witch of the West’s lovechild, Arianna Huffington. Like Chicken Littles rolling about in orgasmic frenzy, they all screeched simultaneously that Gibbs admitted weakness, he admitted weakness, there he goes, I heard him, he said it … You get the picture, illustrated with a myriad of nameless, anonymous sources, all offering different insight, opinion and second guesses.
The Fox minions affected the smug smirk of “I told you so”, intimating that this was all the more reason straight-thinking people should vote Republican in November. The MSNBC contingent and Mother Huffington huffed and puffed and clicked their teeth, not saying, but clearly intimating that it really wasn’t worth the bother at all to vote for such losers.
People still able to think for themselves (and to read Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post) got the message loud and clear, coming – not coincidentally – on the back of the President’s campaign trips to Missouri and Nevada in support of Robin Carnahan and Harry Reid, and the message is this: Nobody’s guaranteed a win, and the Democrats aren’t entitled to even assume they’ll retain control of the House. Just like on a sports team, intimating that players have to fight for a place in the starting eleven, makes them keen, hungry to attain it. So, the Democrats hoping to retain their House seats should go on the offensive. So, the Democrats hoping to win a House seat should drive that offensive home. So the grassroots supporters should turn OFF the cable guys, stop listening to the rhetoric of a Keith Olbermann who doesn’t vote, stop reckoning that Bill Maher always speaks the truth when he admits Obama’s achieved more legislatively than FDR at this point, but in the next breath says he’s done nothing and endorses Romney, and stop listening to Arianna Huffington’s purrings and subtle ad hominem musings about Barack Obama, mindful of the fact that she is, was and always will be a Republican at heart. (Listen, the original Damascene conversion was hearsay handed down at best; at least hers, which took place on November 3, 2004, was, first and foremost, a money-making venture to fill a niche against Matt Drudge). Voters have to think for themselves, and listen to the candidates.
It’s nerve-wracking that Nancy Pelosi allowed herself to fall prey to her own hubris in reacting to this message personally. It’s as though she didn’t see the forest for the trees.
The ammunititon is all there for the Democrats – the GOP’s refutation of Wall Street Reform, their determination to repeal that and the healthcare reform, their embracement, through Congressman Barton’s apology, of BP and big oil, the overt ambition of the Queen Mother of snake oil salesmen, Darrell Issa, to bring articles of impeachment against Obama.
But most of all, the big bazoomba is this: the Republicans are running without any iota of an alternative plan to put this country back together. They are running on NO and that’s running on empty. They are running on lies and innuendo and hate and something one drop short of out-and-out racism. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the people. It’s the power they want.
John Boehner can sip from a styrofoam cup and demand to know, “Where are the jobs?” But what is his answer? As a politician who questions, he should be questioned too. If he’s as dissatisfied with the jobs situation, as an elected official, he must have some inkling of an alternative, workable plan. It would be too much to believe in a conspiracy of dunces, to believe that private enterprise is holding off hiring and potentially restoring the economy a smidgeon, just to ensure that there might be a GOP victory in the House after November, thus making it look like a trump card held up the collective Republican sleeve … would it? And yet, how many of us remember the coincidence of Iran releasing hostages days after the inauguration of that Republican saint, Ronald Reagan.
As the Brits would say, pull the other one. It’s got bells.
So bells ought to be ringing, and the Democrats and their supporters should come out swinging. We have ample enough ammunition at our disposal – and also enough to shoot ourselves in the foot.
We can’t be had like the Brits were had in May by their sinister, yet cackhanded coalition. The big tent of the Democratic Party has to buck up, suck up and sure as hell not fuck up … or risk being tango’d from the tanning bed of John Boehner.
I was drinking my coffee at the time. I didn’t have a Pepsi moment, and I didn’t vomit in my mouth. I simply smiled wryly, because I’d seen this coming.
The NHS has been an albatross around the neck of the Conservative Party in Britain since Maggie Thatcher chopped dental and optical services from its auspices back in the 1980s, and Cameron wanted to take this further. Last summer, there were stories abounding here of how the Tories intended on reforming the NHS, how it was working at a loss – things everyone had known as truisms for a long time, but things no one would think of addressing because, well, because the NHS here is the Third Rail of Third Rails.
And when the GOP started airing pejorative commercials in the US, railing against rationed medical treatments and long waiting lists, basically presenting the NHS and all like her in a pretty crass light, Cameron flip-flopped and came out fighting for the NHS. Well he should do, because his oldest child, who had recently died, was born with severe birth defects and had depended on the NHS for care and treatment. Then and there, Cameron vouchsafed the safety of the NHS under any potential Tory regime.
Well, the Tory regime is a reality – albeit, officially it’s a coalition with the Liberal Democrats; but more and more, instead of the pundits referring to a ConLib pact, they’re calling the coalition “ConDem” in a clever jeu des mots.
Because, under the guise of austerity moves, this government – cleverly caricatured by the resident Guardian cartoonist as consisting of Cameron as a louche and depraved version of Gainsborough’s Blue Boy wickedly enticing Nick Clegg, depicted as a rosy-cheeked and cheerfully ignorant version of Pinocchio, to come and play in his termite-infested sawmill – is systematically dismantling any and all entitlement schemes from the government.
This is Thatcherism Mach II: Trickledown – the Sequel.
When the coalition took control of things, once again Cameron reiterated that the NHS would suffer no cutback in services. Then, in the special emergency budget, Camerons Treasury wonk, George Osborne, an independently wealthy trust fund child who’s never worked a day in his life, blithely announced that all government departments must cut budgetary spending from between 25% and 40% – except the Defense Department, which would only suffer cutbacks of 10%. Of course.
And, of course, this would mean immense numbers of civil service and outsourced contractors being laid off prematurely – some permanently – in this age of recession.
Now, it’s not rocket science and I’m no economist, but saying that the NHS wouldn’t suffer any cutback in services, and then saying that that same department has to cut its budget by between 25 and 40% … doesn’t that kinda sorta mean that somewhere along the way, services are going to be cut? You can make as many paper-pushers redundant as you want in the NHS, it still stands to reason that x amount of nurses or doctors or some sort of specialist personnel won’t be being hired, that various forms of surgery/treatments/drug therapies won’t be implemented because of lack of funding.
As painful as it is for me to say it, and as many times as Progressives who don’t know have accused me of lying, the GOP’s commercials last summer did have a bare ring of truth about them; because here in the UK, in some areas, healthcare is rationed, there are waiting lists for surgeries and treatments. It’s simply a postcode lottery, and your quality of service reflects how well your health authority has managed its budget. My primary healthcare trust is a pretty good one, but a pregnant woman still has to have her labour monitered up to a certain point in one hospital, before she’s transferred, at breakneck speed, fourteen miles to another hospital in order, actually, to give birth.
The announcement that Humana were entrenching themselves in the tendering process confirmed suspicions I’d been having for the past few months, when every night on commercial television here, you see no less than five different advertisements for private health insurance, and when – out of the blue – commercials for Viagra have started to appear. (Contrary to life in the United States, prescription drug remedies aren’t advertised on television in the UK or in Europe.)
The NHS wouldn’t actually cut services to the public; instead, they would outsource them to private entities, probably for a fee. That would, at least, justify the increase in NHS contributions we’ve now had inflicted on us – yes, America, the NHS is NOT free; we pay an additional tax called the National Insurance to cover this – but the public was surreptitiously being edged and manipulated into buying into private health insurance schemes.
I’d love to give the clever ConDems the benefit of the doubt and say they’re gently edging us into a more French-like, hybrid system, but knowing Thatcher’s children as well as I do, I know this is nothing more or less than what it actually is … a CON. It’s incremental change that will inch along until one day someone will blink and realise that the good old NHS just ceased to exist somewhere in the first five-year fixed term (nudge-nudge-wink-wink) of Blueboy Cameron and Pinocchio Clegg.
The British public had been had. They had been, in local parlance, tango’d.
Last Sunday on Meet the Press (a venerable national treasure of a program which has managed to go from the sublime to the ridiculous in the two years since the late Tim Russert’s death), Robert Gibbs, the President’s Press Secretary sounded a codified clarion call to Democrats, grassroots, elected and electable: there was a very real possibility that the Democratic Party could lose control of the House.
NUDGE. NUDGE. WINK. WINK … HELLOOOOOOO?
Immediately, he said that, the cable news boys and girls went into meltdown, along with the Wicked Witch of the West’s lovechild, Arianna Huffington. Like Chicken Littles rolling about in orgasmic frenzy, they all screeched simultaneously that Gibbs admitted weakness, he admitted weakness, there he goes, I heard him, he said it … You get the picture, illustrated with a myriad of nameless, anonymous sources, all offering different insight, opinion and second guesses.
The Fox minions affected the smug smirk of “I told you so”, intimating that this was all the more reason straight-thinking people should vote Republican in November. The MSNBC contingent and Mother Huffington huffed and puffed and clicked their teeth, not saying, but clearly intimating that it really wasn’t worth the bother at all to vote for such losers.
People still able to think for themselves (and to read Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post) got the message loud and clear, coming – not coincidentally – on the back of the President’s campaign trips to Missouri and Nevada in support of Robin Carnahan and Harry Reid, and the message is this: Nobody’s guaranteed a win, and the Democrats aren’t entitled to even assume they’ll retain control of the House. Just like on a sports team, intimating that players have to fight for a place in the starting eleven, makes them keen, hungry to attain it. So, the Democrats hoping to retain their House seats should go on the offensive. So, the Democrats hoping to win a House seat should drive that offensive home. So the grassroots supporters should turn OFF the cable guys, stop listening to the rhetoric of a Keith Olbermann who doesn’t vote, stop reckoning that Bill Maher always speaks the truth when he admits Obama’s achieved more legislatively than FDR at this point, but in the next breath says he’s done nothing and endorses Romney, and stop listening to Arianna Huffington’s purrings and subtle ad hominem musings about Barack Obama, mindful of the fact that she is, was and always will be a Republican at heart. (Listen, the original Damascene conversion was hearsay handed down at best; at least hers, which took place on November 3, 2004, was, first and foremost, a money-making venture to fill a niche against Matt Drudge). Voters have to think for themselves, and listen to the candidates.
It’s nerve-wracking that Nancy Pelosi allowed herself to fall prey to her own hubris in reacting to this message personally. It’s as though she didn’t see the forest for the trees.
The ammunititon is all there for the Democrats – the GOP’s refutation of Wall Street Reform, their determination to repeal that and the healthcare reform, their embracement, through Congressman Barton’s apology, of BP and big oil, the overt ambition of the Queen Mother of snake oil salesmen, Darrell Issa, to bring articles of impeachment against Obama.
But most of all, the big bazoomba is this: the Republicans are running without any iota of an alternative plan to put this country back together. They are running on NO and that’s running on empty. They are running on lies and innuendo and hate and something one drop short of out-and-out racism. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the people. It’s the power they want.
John Boehner can sip from a styrofoam cup and demand to know, “Where are the jobs?” But what is his answer? As a politician who questions, he should be questioned too. If he’s as dissatisfied with the jobs situation, as an elected official, he must have some inkling of an alternative, workable plan. It would be too much to believe in a conspiracy of dunces, to believe that private enterprise is holding off hiring and potentially restoring the economy a smidgeon, just to ensure that there might be a GOP victory in the House after November, thus making it look like a trump card held up the collective Republican sleeve … would it? And yet, how many of us remember the coincidence of Iran releasing hostages days after the inauguration of that Republican saint, Ronald Reagan.
As the Brits would say, pull the other one. It’s got bells.
So bells ought to be ringing, and the Democrats and their supporters should come out swinging. We have ample enough ammunition at our disposal – and also enough to shoot ourselves in the foot.
We can’t be had like the Brits were had in May by their sinister, yet cackhanded coalition. The big tent of the Democratic Party has to buck up, suck up and sure as hell not fuck up … or risk being tango’d from the tanning bed of John Boehner.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Mute Points
No shit, Sherlock. With the latest in the continuing soap opera that the media have created around the Obama Administration, the latest instalment concerns a rogue general getting wasted with his aides and a reporter from a Left-leaning rock publication and pissing on, not only the President, but also the Vice President, the Ambassador to Afghanistan, the highest-ranking civilian envoy and two serving United States Senators, both decorated war heroes and former Presidential candidates and one a Republican.
And here it comes again … a plethora of pundits weighing in on what the President should do, should say, yadda yadda … As much as the way Stanley McChrystal’s words have questioned the legitimacy of this White House, so, too, do all the talking heads from …the LEFT as well as the RIGHT, in their opining of how the President should behave.
It seems as though we’ve just got through last week’s brouhaha of MSNBC in meltdown, than we’re gearing up for another round of political pundits pontificating on what the President SHOULD do or what he MUST say in these circumstances. Bad enough, that the Right demonise him as alien, who doesn’t look like them; worse, that the Left not-so-subtly excoriate him, because he doesn’t act in the way they think such an “alien” should act.
The Left’s cognitive dissonance is a euphemism for something openly uglier for which they criticize the Right. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet … or not, as the case may be.
As for the pundits, I’m sick of people whining about this talking head or that one “speaking for me” or “speaking for the Left” … Pardon me, unless we’re all struck mute, we have voices. And if we need people to speak in public for us, that’s the duty of our ELECTED representatives; and if they aren’t doing them, they need reminding. The day Americans have to have corporate talking heads on television “speaking for them” is the day when the end isn’t far off. These people speak for themselves, their networks and their wallets.
McChrystal’s from the military; the pundits are from the infotainment industry. I’m sure neither Roosevelt, whose third administration gave infamous birth to the military industrial complex, nor Eisenhower, who warned us against the complex’s evil potential, ever had this sort of unholy, if untintentional and indirect, association in mind.
And here it comes again … a plethora of pundits weighing in on what the President should do, should say, yadda yadda … As much as the way Stanley McChrystal’s words have questioned the legitimacy of this White House, so, too, do all the talking heads from …the LEFT as well as the RIGHT, in their opining of how the President should behave.
It seems as though we’ve just got through last week’s brouhaha of MSNBC in meltdown, than we’re gearing up for another round of political pundits pontificating on what the President SHOULD do or what he MUST say in these circumstances. Bad enough, that the Right demonise him as alien, who doesn’t look like them; worse, that the Left not-so-subtly excoriate him, because he doesn’t act in the way they think such an “alien” should act.
The Left’s cognitive dissonance is a euphemism for something openly uglier for which they criticize the Right. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet … or not, as the case may be.
As for the pundits, I’m sick of people whining about this talking head or that one “speaking for me” or “speaking for the Left” … Pardon me, unless we’re all struck mute, we have voices. And if we need people to speak in public for us, that’s the duty of our ELECTED representatives; and if they aren’t doing them, they need reminding. The day Americans have to have corporate talking heads on television “speaking for them” is the day when the end isn’t far off. These people speak for themselves, their networks and their wallets.
McChrystal’s from the military; the pundits are from the infotainment industry. I’m sure neither Roosevelt, whose third administration gave infamous birth to the military industrial complex, nor Eisenhower, who warned us against the complex’s evil potential, ever had this sort of unholy, if untintentional and indirect, association in mind.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Liar Liar Pants on Fire: Manipulative Media Types - Part II
Keith Olbermann doesn't vote.
True dat. He confessed as much in a post-electoral episode to the ladies of The View in November 2008.
A political commentator who doesn’t vote? Unheard of. OK, there’s no law – in fact, there’s tact – which says a commentator doesn’t have to disclose his or her political persuasion. Some had no need to do so – example: we always knew Bill Buckley was a Republican and Gore Vidal a liberal of the Democratic persuasion.
But then, until recently, we only had a few bona fide political commentators amongst us. Ed Murrow, Huntley-Brinkley, even Wise Uncle Walter, would shudder, rather than admit that they were commentators. Rather, they were newsmen, challenged with the duty of reporting news as fact and showing truth to their viewers, allowing them the respect and licence to make up their own minds about the subjects presented.
Today, everyone and his dog is a political commentator – or strives to be, until they’re caught in an intellectually compromising position, and then they protest that they’re only comedians or entertainers.
And that’s the crime of the 24/7 cable media today: news has got to have an entertainment aspect in order to hold the increasingly immature public’s short attention span.
Thus, Olbermann, a pompous and pedantic man, seeks to emulate Ed Murrow, and succeeds in becoming a narcissistic clown with no respect for his audience.
In the wake of last week’s Presidential Oval Office address, Olbermann resorted, nearly, to visceral carpet-chewing in his over-the-top critique of a speech, to which, it was clear, he didn’t listen in any way.
Olbermann and his colleagues, Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman, spent their analysis period, vicariously, criticising Obama’s message to his constituents – and, specifically, to his constituents directly affected by the Gulf oil spill – on the content of what THEY wanted the President to say to THEM.
It was the height of disrespect, both to the President and to the people in the Gulf. It was tantamount to telling these people that they were patently too stupid to realise what the President was saying was wrong – in the pundits’ opinions – and that they should be displeased and demand that he should have delivered their message.
It doesn’t surprise me that Olbermann should feel this way about his listening public. The French have a saying about people with an inflated opinion of themselves. Roughly translated, the French would say Keith Olbermann “farts above his nose” - meaning, he’s above smelling the whiff of his own bullshit.
I caught his Friday show online, which was being hosted by Laurence O’Donnell, except for the final bit, a Friday feature wherein Olbermann, seated in a comfortable chair, effects to READ a story from the works of James Thurber to his viewing audience. That’s right – a book at bedtime with creepy Uncle Keith.
What more proof that a commentator has absolutely no respect for the acumen of his audience than to have him read them a bedtime story?! What’s next? An invitation to climb into Uncle Keith’s ample virtual lap for a cuddle and a lullabye?
And isn’t this proof positive that, not only the neocon Right – who effected to keep their constituency reduced to the level of frightened children – but also the ueber Left, seek to keep the hoi-polloi in a distinctly puerile state of mind?
Olbermann’s show, at any rate, is like an echo chamber. For the most part, it’s a countdown of his five news items of the day, including someone who ranks as being his “worst person in the world” (again, childish hyperbole), along with the occasional “special comment” – Keith’s special message imparting to his fans his own iconic opinion about a particular incident or agenda. If there be any guests at all, they reflect Keith’s opinion and no divergence. Who said the Rightwing march in lockstep?
Last week, however, Keith made a major mis-step in his gratuitous critique of the President’s speech. Apparently, he received a plethora of messages left on his Facebook page and his Twitter account, in addition to the messages which melted down NBC’s switchboard, that his loyal viewing public were more than just mildly pissed off with Keith’s behaviour.
To say that Keith was mildly put out with the criticism received on the part of his adoring fans would be an understatement. Suffice it to say that he can dish it with the best of them, but – like his fellow Cornell alumnus and fellow narcissist, Bill Maher – he can’t take criticism. He issued a nine-part tweet, following it up with a special comment on his program, essentially bidding his recalcitrant viewers a cold good-bye, reiterating that perhaps they’d been watching his program for the wrong reasons.
Well, I’d like him to clarify what the right reasons are; because, quite frankly, I have a bit of a problem with anyone telling me or manipulating me into any point of view – much less, I have a problem with anyone who doesn’t vote seeking to influence my opinion on any political figure.
We all know the non-voters. We hear them enough in our daily lives – people who always have an opinion about a politician or government, but don’t vote because “all political parties are the same” or “all politicians are crooks” or whatever. Keith says he doesn’t vote because he feels he has to remain impartial. That’s bullshit.
Keith doesn’t vote because he’s simply afraid of commitment to one political philosophy. He’s ueber liberal – one can never imagine him adopting support of any Rightwing politician; but the fact that he doesn’t vote at all, precludes any right he has to criticize a politician from any side of the political coin.
My father had a name for such people. He called them “Pot Luck Peters,” saying that, like people at a pot luck dinner, they had to take the government on offer and lump it; because the act of voting gave a person a voice.
As a “Pot Luck Peter,” Keith takes Obama as he is, just as he had to take Bush; and his complaints, his whinges, his whines and all his special comments, should fall on deaf ears, simply because Keith doesn’t vote.
One should be wary of being influenced by someone who seeks to get others to vote vicariously in his manner, while he sits back and watches his own opinion get propagated as fact. I’m glad a lot of people said they’d turn off Keith. I hope they do.
Keith’s entitled to his opinions as much as he’s entitled to take the corporate penny from MSNBC who pay him for his particular brand of infotainment. But he should make his listeners aware that he doesn’t vote.
Inability to commit is a sign of social immaturity; basically giving your viewing public a polite eff-off because they dared to criticize your behaviour is another childish gesture too.
Time to turn off Uncle Keith and his sinister bedtime stories. Time to think for yourselves.
True dat. He confessed as much in a post-electoral episode to the ladies of The View in November 2008.
A political commentator who doesn’t vote? Unheard of. OK, there’s no law – in fact, there’s tact – which says a commentator doesn’t have to disclose his or her political persuasion. Some had no need to do so – example: we always knew Bill Buckley was a Republican and Gore Vidal a liberal of the Democratic persuasion.
But then, until recently, we only had a few bona fide political commentators amongst us. Ed Murrow, Huntley-Brinkley, even Wise Uncle Walter, would shudder, rather than admit that they were commentators. Rather, they were newsmen, challenged with the duty of reporting news as fact and showing truth to their viewers, allowing them the respect and licence to make up their own minds about the subjects presented.
Today, everyone and his dog is a political commentator – or strives to be, until they’re caught in an intellectually compromising position, and then they protest that they’re only comedians or entertainers.
And that’s the crime of the 24/7 cable media today: news has got to have an entertainment aspect in order to hold the increasingly immature public’s short attention span.
Thus, Olbermann, a pompous and pedantic man, seeks to emulate Ed Murrow, and succeeds in becoming a narcissistic clown with no respect for his audience.
In the wake of last week’s Presidential Oval Office address, Olbermann resorted, nearly, to visceral carpet-chewing in his over-the-top critique of a speech, to which, it was clear, he didn’t listen in any way.
Olbermann and his colleagues, Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman, spent their analysis period, vicariously, criticising Obama’s message to his constituents – and, specifically, to his constituents directly affected by the Gulf oil spill – on the content of what THEY wanted the President to say to THEM.
It was the height of disrespect, both to the President and to the people in the Gulf. It was tantamount to telling these people that they were patently too stupid to realise what the President was saying was wrong – in the pundits’ opinions – and that they should be displeased and demand that he should have delivered their message.
It doesn’t surprise me that Olbermann should feel this way about his listening public. The French have a saying about people with an inflated opinion of themselves. Roughly translated, the French would say Keith Olbermann “farts above his nose” - meaning, he’s above smelling the whiff of his own bullshit.
I caught his Friday show online, which was being hosted by Laurence O’Donnell, except for the final bit, a Friday feature wherein Olbermann, seated in a comfortable chair, effects to READ a story from the works of James Thurber to his viewing audience. That’s right – a book at bedtime with creepy Uncle Keith.
What more proof that a commentator has absolutely no respect for the acumen of his audience than to have him read them a bedtime story?! What’s next? An invitation to climb into Uncle Keith’s ample virtual lap for a cuddle and a lullabye?
And isn’t this proof positive that, not only the neocon Right – who effected to keep their constituency reduced to the level of frightened children – but also the ueber Left, seek to keep the hoi-polloi in a distinctly puerile state of mind?
Olbermann’s show, at any rate, is like an echo chamber. For the most part, it’s a countdown of his five news items of the day, including someone who ranks as being his “worst person in the world” (again, childish hyperbole), along with the occasional “special comment” – Keith’s special message imparting to his fans his own iconic opinion about a particular incident or agenda. If there be any guests at all, they reflect Keith’s opinion and no divergence. Who said the Rightwing march in lockstep?
Last week, however, Keith made a major mis-step in his gratuitous critique of the President’s speech. Apparently, he received a plethora of messages left on his Facebook page and his Twitter account, in addition to the messages which melted down NBC’s switchboard, that his loyal viewing public were more than just mildly pissed off with Keith’s behaviour.
To say that Keith was mildly put out with the criticism received on the part of his adoring fans would be an understatement. Suffice it to say that he can dish it with the best of them, but – like his fellow Cornell alumnus and fellow narcissist, Bill Maher – he can’t take criticism. He issued a nine-part tweet, following it up with a special comment on his program, essentially bidding his recalcitrant viewers a cold good-bye, reiterating that perhaps they’d been watching his program for the wrong reasons.
Well, I’d like him to clarify what the right reasons are; because, quite frankly, I have a bit of a problem with anyone telling me or manipulating me into any point of view – much less, I have a problem with anyone who doesn’t vote seeking to influence my opinion on any political figure.
We all know the non-voters. We hear them enough in our daily lives – people who always have an opinion about a politician or government, but don’t vote because “all political parties are the same” or “all politicians are crooks” or whatever. Keith says he doesn’t vote because he feels he has to remain impartial. That’s bullshit.
Keith doesn’t vote because he’s simply afraid of commitment to one political philosophy. He’s ueber liberal – one can never imagine him adopting support of any Rightwing politician; but the fact that he doesn’t vote at all, precludes any right he has to criticize a politician from any side of the political coin.
My father had a name for such people. He called them “Pot Luck Peters,” saying that, like people at a pot luck dinner, they had to take the government on offer and lump it; because the act of voting gave a person a voice.
As a “Pot Luck Peter,” Keith takes Obama as he is, just as he had to take Bush; and his complaints, his whinges, his whines and all his special comments, should fall on deaf ears, simply because Keith doesn’t vote.
One should be wary of being influenced by someone who seeks to get others to vote vicariously in his manner, while he sits back and watches his own opinion get propagated as fact. I’m glad a lot of people said they’d turn off Keith. I hope they do.
Keith’s entitled to his opinions as much as he’s entitled to take the corporate penny from MSNBC who pay him for his particular brand of infotainment. But he should make his listeners aware that he doesn’t vote.
Inability to commit is a sign of social immaturity; basically giving your viewing public a polite eff-off because they dared to criticize your behaviour is another childish gesture too.
Time to turn off Uncle Keith and his sinister bedtime stories. Time to think for yourselves.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire: A Trilogy of Manipulative Media Types - Part I
Liar:
On Thursday, according to The Huffington Post, President Obama hosted a small lunch for a select group of Progressive media types.
Amongst the guests were Susan Collins of the New York Times, Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. I wonder if Rachel’s main course included a healthy serving of crow, considering the luncheon took place 24 hours after the President effected the establishment of a $20 billion escrow account, as well as $100 million from BP for clean-up expenses in the Gulf as well as a cover for wages lost on the part of those people whose livelihoods were affected by BP’s negligence/incompetence, and 48 hours after her celebrated attempt at biting satire by establishing herself as “Fake President Obama” in a mock-up Oval Office, for the purpose of instructing the President (and the nation) on what, precisely, Rachel had wanted the President to say in his Oval Office address.
Suffice it to say, that, in Dr Maddow’s opinion, the President’s address was distinctively below par, and what she had wanted him to say, was infinitely better.
Yes, I know it was meant as satire, but Rachel’s forays into satire lately have fallen a bit flat.
Still, she was invited to this luncheon, which had probably been planned a long time before the Oval Office speech, and the President is good-natured and thick-skinned enough probably to have ribbed her about her effort, with good grace, and maybe even gave her a tour of the real Oval Office, itself. He seems to be that sort of soul.
But I hope she did have to swallow a bit of crow that afternoon and that a little bit of egg stuck to her face, especially considering that, 24 hours after her attempt, the President had shown, without a shadow of a doubt, that however vague and directionless his Oval Office speech appeared to be on Tuesday evening, by Wednesday afternoon, we were given no doubt that there was intended and well-planned action behind the narrative.
Sometimes, it doesn’t pay to second-guess a President, just as sometimes it’s necessary for a President, the gambler-in-chief, to play his cards close to his chest, especially regarding the 24/7 cable news media.
Rachel is young, clever, ueber-intelligent and with a high level of political acumen. She’ll learn from this, and she should. In fact, she’s probably the only person, certainly the only woman, in that cable news equivalent of Animal House with any kind of either personal of professional integrity, and she deserves better.
In fact, near the end of what I hope will be the President’s second term, perhaps he and Rachel will meet for an interview and share a laugh in the real Oval Office about her attempted foray into the fake one.
One noticeable absentee from the luncheon was the self-styled Queen Mother of the Progressive Movement, herself. In fact, near the end of what was really a very short, concise article (by HuffPo standards, anyway), was a pithy sentence, which simply stated, “Huffington Post founder and editor-in-chief, Arianna Huffington, was invited to the luncheon, but could not attend due to scheduling commitments.”
Really?
Who, in their right mind, turns down an invitation for lunch with the President at the White House? Certainly not someone who had righteously railed against the too-big-to-fail financial CEO’s who let it be known earlier this year that they were too important to travel to Washington for any sort of negotiation with the President. Huffington, rightly, called them out for being distinctly disrespectful – not that she hasn’t, on many occasions, herself, been openly and scathingly disrespectful of Obama as President of the United States.
Her recent assessment of the President was that he was a “Nowhere Man”, in a low, sarcastic and inaccurate criticism of the fact that, in her estimation, the President paid far too much attention to honouring Paul McCartney at the White House, when he should have removed all White House operations, physically, to the Gulf for the foreseeable future.
If she were, indeed, too busy to lunch with the President, not only was that the height of disrespect, it was also amazingly hypocritical, considering her slating of the financal fat cats.
But I don’t think she was too busy or double-booked for this event. I don’t think she was even invited.
A media whore like Huffington would kill for the opportunity of sitting down at a table to eat with the President and monopolise the event. Her site would be filled, for days thereafter, with a plethora of photographs:-
- Here’s Arianna being greeted by the President, upon her arrival at the White House. See how he bows from the waist.
- Here’s Arianna at the table, seated at the right hand of the President.
- Here’s Arianna on the sofa with the President. See how her hand lingers on his knee.
You get the picture (pun intended).
After days of photos, there would be an infinity of blogs, replete with Presidential name-droppings:-
“I told the President, over lunch on Thursday …”
“I’m pleased that he President appears to have listened to what I said …”
“The President told me …”
“As I was saying to the President …”
But, no … Arianna had a conflict of schedules, and couldn’t attend, even after making continuous and gratuitous Obama-bashing part and parcel of her meme, almost since the President assumed office in early 2009.
Seen from that angle, his reeks of disrespect. The action speaks volumes in saying that this President is such a disappointment as to be totally insignificant and unworthy of this grande dame’s attentions; and, subtly, by extension, he should be singularly unworthy of her dittoes’ attentions too. It was a dismissal.
Yet, it seems, a worm of deceit is turning, because many of the people commentating on the article, regular readers of her aggregate, saw through the deception.
Arianna wasn’t invited. She never had been.
It was a lie.
Thursday evening, I received an e-mail from a close friend, who lives and works amongst the great and the not-so-good in Washington. Considering the fact that, living in England, I’m five hours ahead of the East Coast, it would have been about 3pm when he sent the correspondence.
Knowing I’m not the greatest Arianna fan, he thought he’d rib me by saying he’d seen her that afternoon. Arianna, on Thursday, was indeed in Washington, DC – eating lunch in The Palms, an ueber-posh, ueber-expensive steakhouse on 19th Street … alone.
Maybe she does consider him an irrelevance, and maybe she did decline the invitation; but maybe, in view of the fact that a lot of her criticism and shilling has bordered almost on a point of sedition, it was the White House, who thought she was irrelevant. Maybe the “Nowhere Man” saw fit to remind her that exactly what the word “nowhere” means, in terms of influence, or perceived influence.
On Thursday, according to The Huffington Post, President Obama hosted a small lunch for a select group of Progressive media types.
Amongst the guests were Susan Collins of the New York Times, Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post, and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. I wonder if Rachel’s main course included a healthy serving of crow, considering the luncheon took place 24 hours after the President effected the establishment of a $20 billion escrow account, as well as $100 million from BP for clean-up expenses in the Gulf as well as a cover for wages lost on the part of those people whose livelihoods were affected by BP’s negligence/incompetence, and 48 hours after her celebrated attempt at biting satire by establishing herself as “Fake President Obama” in a mock-up Oval Office, for the purpose of instructing the President (and the nation) on what, precisely, Rachel had wanted the President to say in his Oval Office address.
Suffice it to say, that, in Dr Maddow’s opinion, the President’s address was distinctively below par, and what she had wanted him to say, was infinitely better.
Yes, I know it was meant as satire, but Rachel’s forays into satire lately have fallen a bit flat.
Still, she was invited to this luncheon, which had probably been planned a long time before the Oval Office speech, and the President is good-natured and thick-skinned enough probably to have ribbed her about her effort, with good grace, and maybe even gave her a tour of the real Oval Office, itself. He seems to be that sort of soul.
But I hope she did have to swallow a bit of crow that afternoon and that a little bit of egg stuck to her face, especially considering that, 24 hours after her attempt, the President had shown, without a shadow of a doubt, that however vague and directionless his Oval Office speech appeared to be on Tuesday evening, by Wednesday afternoon, we were given no doubt that there was intended and well-planned action behind the narrative.
Sometimes, it doesn’t pay to second-guess a President, just as sometimes it’s necessary for a President, the gambler-in-chief, to play his cards close to his chest, especially regarding the 24/7 cable news media.
Rachel is young, clever, ueber-intelligent and with a high level of political acumen. She’ll learn from this, and she should. In fact, she’s probably the only person, certainly the only woman, in that cable news equivalent of Animal House with any kind of either personal of professional integrity, and she deserves better.
In fact, near the end of what I hope will be the President’s second term, perhaps he and Rachel will meet for an interview and share a laugh in the real Oval Office about her attempted foray into the fake one.
One noticeable absentee from the luncheon was the self-styled Queen Mother of the Progressive Movement, herself. In fact, near the end of what was really a very short, concise article (by HuffPo standards, anyway), was a pithy sentence, which simply stated, “Huffington Post founder and editor-in-chief, Arianna Huffington, was invited to the luncheon, but could not attend due to scheduling commitments.”
Really?
Who, in their right mind, turns down an invitation for lunch with the President at the White House? Certainly not someone who had righteously railed against the too-big-to-fail financial CEO’s who let it be known earlier this year that they were too important to travel to Washington for any sort of negotiation with the President. Huffington, rightly, called them out for being distinctly disrespectful – not that she hasn’t, on many occasions, herself, been openly and scathingly disrespectful of Obama as President of the United States.
Her recent assessment of the President was that he was a “Nowhere Man”, in a low, sarcastic and inaccurate criticism of the fact that, in her estimation, the President paid far too much attention to honouring Paul McCartney at the White House, when he should have removed all White House operations, physically, to the Gulf for the foreseeable future.
If she were, indeed, too busy to lunch with the President, not only was that the height of disrespect, it was also amazingly hypocritical, considering her slating of the financal fat cats.
But I don’t think she was too busy or double-booked for this event. I don’t think she was even invited.
A media whore like Huffington would kill for the opportunity of sitting down at a table to eat with the President and monopolise the event. Her site would be filled, for days thereafter, with a plethora of photographs:-
- Here’s Arianna being greeted by the President, upon her arrival at the White House. See how he bows from the waist.
- Here’s Arianna at the table, seated at the right hand of the President.
- Here’s Arianna on the sofa with the President. See how her hand lingers on his knee.
You get the picture (pun intended).
After days of photos, there would be an infinity of blogs, replete with Presidential name-droppings:-
“I told the President, over lunch on Thursday …”
“I’m pleased that he President appears to have listened to what I said …”
“The President told me …”
“As I was saying to the President …”
But, no … Arianna had a conflict of schedules, and couldn’t attend, even after making continuous and gratuitous Obama-bashing part and parcel of her meme, almost since the President assumed office in early 2009.
Seen from that angle, his reeks of disrespect. The action speaks volumes in saying that this President is such a disappointment as to be totally insignificant and unworthy of this grande dame’s attentions; and, subtly, by extension, he should be singularly unworthy of her dittoes’ attentions too. It was a dismissal.
Yet, it seems, a worm of deceit is turning, because many of the people commentating on the article, regular readers of her aggregate, saw through the deception.
Arianna wasn’t invited. She never had been.
It was a lie.
Thursday evening, I received an e-mail from a close friend, who lives and works amongst the great and the not-so-good in Washington. Considering the fact that, living in England, I’m five hours ahead of the East Coast, it would have been about 3pm when he sent the correspondence.
Knowing I’m not the greatest Arianna fan, he thought he’d rib me by saying he’d seen her that afternoon. Arianna, on Thursday, was indeed in Washington, DC – eating lunch in The Palms, an ueber-posh, ueber-expensive steakhouse on 19th Street … alone.
Maybe she does consider him an irrelevance, and maybe she did decline the invitation; but maybe, in view of the fact that a lot of her criticism and shilling has bordered almost on a point of sedition, it was the White House, who thought she was irrelevant. Maybe the “Nowhere Man” saw fit to remind her that exactly what the word “nowhere” means, in terms of influence, or perceived influence.
Monday, June 7, 2010
Make Mine a Double Standard
Early in 2009, shortly after the President’s Inauguration, Glenn Beck took to the airwaves to warn people that soon the President would be coming for their guns; yes, indeedy, he’d be sending the police after people’s beloved guns. So urgent and heated was Beck’s warning that one poor, deluded man took his precious guns, went to the local copshop and blew away five policemen, before turning the gun on himself.
Immediately, cries arose from the Left that Beck, or his employer, Fox News, should be prosecuted. Although Freedom of Speech contains strictures against incitement to crime or riot, Beck’s diatribe did nothing of that sort, directly. In this regard, Beck is the master of the soupcon of suggestion. That’s his schtick. He didn’t tell the victim to take his guns and defend the Second Amendment, he planted a suggestion, and the fellow acted upon it.
Later, we witnessed the killing of a security guard at the Holocaust Museum by a white supremacist, and people, rightly, reckoned that this was a Rightwing reaction to a black man in the White House.
Still later on, we were introduced to the rather ludicrous Tea Party, with their “Don’t Tread on Me” peculiar interpretation of Jeffersonian democracy and their misunderstanding that their cries against perceived socialism might incorporate their Medicare, Social Security or disability allowances. When they appeared with their mis-spelled signs and pictures of Obama as Hitler or an African chieftan, we knew exactly what they meant to say when they cloaked their racism in terms like “socialist,” “communist,” or “Nazi.” And we were rightly offended.
So offended, that when Glenn Beck actually turned the tables and declared Obama a racist with a deep-seeded hatred of white people, no less an intellectual powerhouse (not) than Arianna Huffington, with her intense and expert knowledge of the Constitution, demanded that Beck be denied his First Amendment rights, irrespective of the fact that those same rights that allow Beck to declare the President of the United States a racist, also allowed this faux neocon disguised as a Progressive-for-Profit the right to demand that the Vice President of the United States resign in protest of the President’s as yet (then) undisclosed plan for the war in Afghanistan and lead a protest movement – something just about an inch short of sedition.
Such were the outcries, as the fundits from the Right got more and more outrageous, culminating in Glenn Beck’s disgusting parody of the President’s daughter a few weeks ago.
As stated, quite rightly, people vehemently protested against such behaviour from the Right.
But, what happens when someone not identified with the Right makes an incongruent statement?
Imagine several scenarios.
Imagine Rush Limbaugh in a broadcast, referring to President Obama as “President Sanford and Son.”
There would be hell to pay from the depths of the sofas of the sedentary Left. Blogspaces would implode. The cable news network – most likely CNN and MSNBC, for Fox would strategically ignore it – would obsess about it for weeks. Limbaugh, for the umpteenth time, would be Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World.” There would be calls for Limbaugh, at most, to be taken off the air, at least, to apologise. Of course, neither result would occur, but the Left, quite correctly, would never let Limbaugh forget about that verbal faux pas.
Or, imagine Beck opining that when he knew there was a black President elected, he wanted to see a black President in action, watch him swagger into the boardroom of some corporate CEO, with a gun on his hip, ready to kick ass and demand if this mothafucka didn’t wise up, he’d get shot in the leg. In other words, present a white person’s grossly exaggerated stereotype of a ghetto justice-dispenser and market that as how the President should behave as a black executive.
Once again, the infotainment media would be rife with protest from all sections and factions of the Left, from the moderates to the loonies. And, again, they’d be right to be offended. Such a stereotypical depiction by Beck would be as offensive as the Tea Party’s mock-up post card of the White House watermelon patch.
But, although both of these aforementioned incidences occurred, it was neither Rush nor Beck who uttered the words, and this, perhaps, is the reason why you’ve heard no comments, no protests, no outrage from the Left.
They were spoken by Bill Maher.
Three weeks ago, in a meltdown episode of Real Time, when Bill’s faux atheism was revealed by quirky conservative atheist, S E Cupp, he ended the program with his signature editorial, this time criticizing the President as a backward-looking, underachieving, bumbling black man, out of his depth in governing a country. By pointedly referring to Obama as “President Sanford and Son,” Bill channeled the ultimat 70s image of a man so laid back and incompetent, he couldn’t even manage a junkyard.
Instead, Bill called for corporate mogul, Steve Jobs, to govern America, the same way he managed Apple, and thus, move the country foreward. Never mind that the editorial had been based on a commencement speech the President had made or that one sentence from that speech had been removed and spun centrifugally by Bill and his writers in order to obtain a totally different meaning than originally intended, the “Sanford and Son” reference drew a gasp from the audience, but nothing from anyone else on the Left.
Huffington strategically left this part of the editorial off her aggregate. Olbermann said nothing. Bill’s icon, Chris Matthews, a man who sometimes admits that he “forgets Obama is black”, was curiously mute.
Silence.
In the program which aired on May 28th, Bill admitted in his opening monologue the real reason why he was disappointed in Obama. Obama, he said, was too professorial. When Bill voted for a black President, he wanted a black President delivered. An articulate rapper, with a ghetto mind and sense of justice, who kicked ass at the point of a gun worn on his hip. That’s the man he voted for.
Well, sorry, Bill. I didn’t vote for a stereotype, I voted for the person best qualified to do the job.
I was actually grateful that Bill as much as admitted his cognitive dissonance in this regard, because I think this has been a disconnect with a great many so-called Progressives with regard to Obama and his cool, calm, demeanor. They voted for John Shaft and, instead, they got a cross between Carlton from The Fresh Prince and Dr Cliff Huxtable. And, so, like Bill, they didn’t get the man whom Bill referred to in his post-Electoral editorial as a “kickass black ninja.”
Stereotyping is a form of racism too.
This time, various fans of Maher made protest about this remark, but from the mouthpieces of the Left … crickets. Lots of excuses, mind you, from his dittoes … Bill’s a comedian … it’s supposed to be funny.
Sorry, Bill’s a comedian only when his mouth doesn’t engage with his brain and he says something that backs his ass against a wall. That’s when he reverts to “I’m a comedian” mode.
Witness: “If u get a flu shot, u r stupid.” (But that’s a joke, funny ha-ah.) Sorry, not even close.
And, sorry, again, but stereotyping isn’t funny. Not for African Americans, not for women and not for any ethnic minority.
Which leads me to another anecdotal incident.
Imagine, if you will, Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh attending a public function, during Jewish Heritage Week. Imagine a Jewish broadcast unit with camcorder and microphone, calling one of them over and asking for some thoughts or message to the Jewish community during this week. Imagine either man saying his message would be for the “Jews” to get out of Palestine. Get out of Palestine and “go home.” When asked to qualify where, exactly, “home” was, imagine either Beck or Limbaugh, replying, “Germany. Poland.”
There would be a shitstorm of protest from the Left. Beck’s remaining sponsors would fold up their merchandise tents and slope away. Limbaugh would be vilified.
Helen Thomas, octagenarian doyenne of the Left, knew very well what she was saying when she uttered the above sentiment, and she knew how it would play. The new babes of the ueber Left would associate “Palestine-Left Bank-Gaza” and have her back. But this has nothing to do with either the Left Bank or Gaza, and it happened a few days before the initial Gaza flotilla incident.
Thomas would have been 28 when the UN created the State of Israel from a territory heretofore known, loosely, as Palestine. Prior to that official act, the British government, big guns in the Middle East, during their raj, set the wheels in motion for the establishment of a Jewish state with their British Mandate for Palestine in the 1930s. She certainly would have remembered that, also.
Thomas, a professional wordsmith, was honing her art at its best, using the utmost double entendre to convey subtly that she really didn’t approve of Jews being in the area formerly known as Palestine at all and that the few elderly who’d made the actual transition from holocaust to Haifa, as well as any of their descendents, and various other assorted immigrants, should just go back from whence they came – even if that meant going back to places where they were labelled personae non gratae, tortured, imprisoned and displaced.
We on the Left freely label people in Arizona “Nazis”. Some of the people still alive who remember the formation of Israel had first-hand experience with real Nazis.
Within the past week, and many times before during the Netanyahu government, Israel has done a fair enough job touting herself as her own worst enemy in the eyes of the world. Criticizing that would have been justifiable, but being clever and inching across a message that the country doesn’t deserve to exist at all, not good. Just as Pat Buchanan’s suggestion that the status quo prior to the Civil Rights amendment was preferable to the present day.
Bill Maher is as constant in his unwavering support of Israel as he is in his equally unwavering support of the death penalty, both ideals giving the lie to his touted Progressivism. It will be interesting to see if he touches upon this incident with Thomas in his show this week, and to see how it plays against his own much-stated belief in freedom of speech, which is about as valid as his Progressive politics … not.
Immediately, cries arose from the Left that Beck, or his employer, Fox News, should be prosecuted. Although Freedom of Speech contains strictures against incitement to crime or riot, Beck’s diatribe did nothing of that sort, directly. In this regard, Beck is the master of the soupcon of suggestion. That’s his schtick. He didn’t tell the victim to take his guns and defend the Second Amendment, he planted a suggestion, and the fellow acted upon it.
Later, we witnessed the killing of a security guard at the Holocaust Museum by a white supremacist, and people, rightly, reckoned that this was a Rightwing reaction to a black man in the White House.
Still later on, we were introduced to the rather ludicrous Tea Party, with their “Don’t Tread on Me” peculiar interpretation of Jeffersonian democracy and their misunderstanding that their cries against perceived socialism might incorporate their Medicare, Social Security or disability allowances. When they appeared with their mis-spelled signs and pictures of Obama as Hitler or an African chieftan, we knew exactly what they meant to say when they cloaked their racism in terms like “socialist,” “communist,” or “Nazi.” And we were rightly offended.
So offended, that when Glenn Beck actually turned the tables and declared Obama a racist with a deep-seeded hatred of white people, no less an intellectual powerhouse (not) than Arianna Huffington, with her intense and expert knowledge of the Constitution, demanded that Beck be denied his First Amendment rights, irrespective of the fact that those same rights that allow Beck to declare the President of the United States a racist, also allowed this faux neocon disguised as a Progressive-for-Profit the right to demand that the Vice President of the United States resign in protest of the President’s as yet (then) undisclosed plan for the war in Afghanistan and lead a protest movement – something just about an inch short of sedition.
Such were the outcries, as the fundits from the Right got more and more outrageous, culminating in Glenn Beck’s disgusting parody of the President’s daughter a few weeks ago.
As stated, quite rightly, people vehemently protested against such behaviour from the Right.
But, what happens when someone not identified with the Right makes an incongruent statement?
Imagine several scenarios.
Imagine Rush Limbaugh in a broadcast, referring to President Obama as “President Sanford and Son.”
There would be hell to pay from the depths of the sofas of the sedentary Left. Blogspaces would implode. The cable news network – most likely CNN and MSNBC, for Fox would strategically ignore it – would obsess about it for weeks. Limbaugh, for the umpteenth time, would be Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World.” There would be calls for Limbaugh, at most, to be taken off the air, at least, to apologise. Of course, neither result would occur, but the Left, quite correctly, would never let Limbaugh forget about that verbal faux pas.
Or, imagine Beck opining that when he knew there was a black President elected, he wanted to see a black President in action, watch him swagger into the boardroom of some corporate CEO, with a gun on his hip, ready to kick ass and demand if this mothafucka didn’t wise up, he’d get shot in the leg. In other words, present a white person’s grossly exaggerated stereotype of a ghetto justice-dispenser and market that as how the President should behave as a black executive.
Once again, the infotainment media would be rife with protest from all sections and factions of the Left, from the moderates to the loonies. And, again, they’d be right to be offended. Such a stereotypical depiction by Beck would be as offensive as the Tea Party’s mock-up post card of the White House watermelon patch.
But, although both of these aforementioned incidences occurred, it was neither Rush nor Beck who uttered the words, and this, perhaps, is the reason why you’ve heard no comments, no protests, no outrage from the Left.
They were spoken by Bill Maher.
Three weeks ago, in a meltdown episode of Real Time, when Bill’s faux atheism was revealed by quirky conservative atheist, S E Cupp, he ended the program with his signature editorial, this time criticizing the President as a backward-looking, underachieving, bumbling black man, out of his depth in governing a country. By pointedly referring to Obama as “President Sanford and Son,” Bill channeled the ultimat 70s image of a man so laid back and incompetent, he couldn’t even manage a junkyard.
Instead, Bill called for corporate mogul, Steve Jobs, to govern America, the same way he managed Apple, and thus, move the country foreward. Never mind that the editorial had been based on a commencement speech the President had made or that one sentence from that speech had been removed and spun centrifugally by Bill and his writers in order to obtain a totally different meaning than originally intended, the “Sanford and Son” reference drew a gasp from the audience, but nothing from anyone else on the Left.
Huffington strategically left this part of the editorial off her aggregate. Olbermann said nothing. Bill’s icon, Chris Matthews, a man who sometimes admits that he “forgets Obama is black”, was curiously mute.
Silence.
In the program which aired on May 28th, Bill admitted in his opening monologue the real reason why he was disappointed in Obama. Obama, he said, was too professorial. When Bill voted for a black President, he wanted a black President delivered. An articulate rapper, with a ghetto mind and sense of justice, who kicked ass at the point of a gun worn on his hip. That’s the man he voted for.
Well, sorry, Bill. I didn’t vote for a stereotype, I voted for the person best qualified to do the job.
I was actually grateful that Bill as much as admitted his cognitive dissonance in this regard, because I think this has been a disconnect with a great many so-called Progressives with regard to Obama and his cool, calm, demeanor. They voted for John Shaft and, instead, they got a cross between Carlton from The Fresh Prince and Dr Cliff Huxtable. And, so, like Bill, they didn’t get the man whom Bill referred to in his post-Electoral editorial as a “kickass black ninja.”
Stereotyping is a form of racism too.
This time, various fans of Maher made protest about this remark, but from the mouthpieces of the Left … crickets. Lots of excuses, mind you, from his dittoes … Bill’s a comedian … it’s supposed to be funny.
Sorry, Bill’s a comedian only when his mouth doesn’t engage with his brain and he says something that backs his ass against a wall. That’s when he reverts to “I’m a comedian” mode.
Witness: “If u get a flu shot, u r stupid.” (But that’s a joke, funny ha-ah.) Sorry, not even close.
And, sorry, again, but stereotyping isn’t funny. Not for African Americans, not for women and not for any ethnic minority.
Which leads me to another anecdotal incident.
Imagine, if you will, Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh attending a public function, during Jewish Heritage Week. Imagine a Jewish broadcast unit with camcorder and microphone, calling one of them over and asking for some thoughts or message to the Jewish community during this week. Imagine either man saying his message would be for the “Jews” to get out of Palestine. Get out of Palestine and “go home.” When asked to qualify where, exactly, “home” was, imagine either Beck or Limbaugh, replying, “Germany. Poland.”
There would be a shitstorm of protest from the Left. Beck’s remaining sponsors would fold up their merchandise tents and slope away. Limbaugh would be vilified.
Helen Thomas, octagenarian doyenne of the Left, knew very well what she was saying when she uttered the above sentiment, and she knew how it would play. The new babes of the ueber Left would associate “Palestine-Left Bank-Gaza” and have her back. But this has nothing to do with either the Left Bank or Gaza, and it happened a few days before the initial Gaza flotilla incident.
Thomas would have been 28 when the UN created the State of Israel from a territory heretofore known, loosely, as Palestine. Prior to that official act, the British government, big guns in the Middle East, during their raj, set the wheels in motion for the establishment of a Jewish state with their British Mandate for Palestine in the 1930s. She certainly would have remembered that, also.
Thomas, a professional wordsmith, was honing her art at its best, using the utmost double entendre to convey subtly that she really didn’t approve of Jews being in the area formerly known as Palestine at all and that the few elderly who’d made the actual transition from holocaust to Haifa, as well as any of their descendents, and various other assorted immigrants, should just go back from whence they came – even if that meant going back to places where they were labelled personae non gratae, tortured, imprisoned and displaced.
We on the Left freely label people in Arizona “Nazis”. Some of the people still alive who remember the formation of Israel had first-hand experience with real Nazis.
Within the past week, and many times before during the Netanyahu government, Israel has done a fair enough job touting herself as her own worst enemy in the eyes of the world. Criticizing that would have been justifiable, but being clever and inching across a message that the country doesn’t deserve to exist at all, not good. Just as Pat Buchanan’s suggestion that the status quo prior to the Civil Rights amendment was preferable to the present day.
Bill Maher is as constant in his unwavering support of Israel as he is in his equally unwavering support of the death penalty, both ideals giving the lie to his touted Progressivism. It will be interesting to see if he touches upon this incident with Thomas in his show this week, and to see how it plays against his own much-stated belief in freedom of speech, which is about as valid as his Progressive politics … not.
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