I guess campaign season’s started in earnest now. Congress has returned from its summer hiatus. (If you think they have too long a holiday, come to the UK. Parliament’s out July, August and September, the last month being the bunfest where they go off to the seaside to have their annual conventions.)
You know there’s an election coming up, because Fox News froths at the mouth that much more, the President’s out and about on his town halls again, and the two former Democratic Presidents are taken out of mothballs, dusted off and sent out and about as well.
It does my heart good to see Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter again, not because I prefer them to the present Democratic incumbent – I’m very satisfied with him, thank you very much – but it warms the cockles of my heart to see the rousing rounds of applause their appearances evoke, as if people recognise in a hindsight that’s too late exactly either what the former President achieved or could have achieved, or how much better off they were under a particular Administration.
I voted for both Carter and Clinton twice, and I hope to vote twice for Obama, if he decides to run again in 2012; but I’m doubting that at the moment, and I wouldn’t really blame him if he didn’t – in fact, I’d say the country would deserve its fate if he didn’t.
I remember 1980, and Ted Kennedy’s wild moment of hubris, taking his ego-enhanced campaign right to the floor of the convention and then acting like a drunken and petulant child when the delegates chose Carter. It sent out waves of impressions about how divided and vapid the Democratic Party was; it showed just how much they appeared to be unfit to govern.
1980, if you haven’t fathomed, gave us the Reagan Democrats (many of whom didn’t see fit to return to the party until 2008), Morning in America with the laughing Gipper, trickledown, the First Gulf War, Saddam Hussein, and 12 years of Republican rule that set us on the Road to Hell down which we’re still careening and off which Barack Obama is trying to steer a particularly recalcitrant ship of state.
Hell, I’m even old enough to remember 1968, when I was just a freshman in high school, and what that Democratic Primary yieled us. 1968 saw a country in the throes of VietNam, with a President from the Deep South, who’d alienated his geographic demographic by enacting the most Progressive pieces of legislation since the New Deal – the Civil Rights Act and Medicaid – suddenly become truly, madly, and deeply unpopular, thanks to the advances of television at the time, with the VietNamese War brought nightly into our houses in living color. From the Midwestern Progressive state of Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy challenged LBJ.
For anyone thinking Obama is too professorial, McCarthy would have made Obama look like a lawyer. McCarthy was a real professor, a cerebralist, a poet, a true idealist and and ex-novitiate priest, who’d thought about a monastical career. He ran as the peace candidate, paved the way for Robert Kennedy’s candidacy and LBJ’s retirement, and continued along the primary path to dog Kennedy and, after Kennedy’s assassination, to worry his fellow Minnesotan, Huberty Humphrey, right up until the primary.
Another divided Democratic party, along with a few Republican dirty tricks against their own, yielded Nixon, Watergate, Roger Ailes, Donald Segretti, and a young college student activist from Texas name of Karl Rove.
Only the Lord in whom I don’t believe knows what a primary challenge to Obama would entail in 2012, but I’d bet money I didn’t have that you wouldn’t see another Democrat in the White House until all of the current generation who’s just voted are no longer alive to remember Obama.
Think about that. And whilst you’re thinking about it, think about the direction in which the Republican Party is moving.
Think about the fact that Mitt Romney, whose father was briefly the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 1968, panders shamelessly to the Teabaggers who are increasingly gaining control of the GOP. Mitt’s dad, George, was the Eugene McCarthy of the Republican Party – a social liberal, personal friend of Martin Luther King, and a campaigner for Civil Rights. Nixon’s dirty tricks machine, controlled by the late Lee Atwater and the then wunderkind Roger Ailes, put about rumours of drinking to excess (Romney was a teetotaler) and a preference for polygamy (the old fear factor of Romney as a Mormon), and thus, scuppered Romney’s title bid.
Think about the fact that Newt Gingrich, another ex-college professor, was once considered the intellectual of the Republican Party, the thinker, and remember that, only recently, Gingrich echoed Dinesh D’Souza’s unusual bit of lateral thinking and developed a curious new euphemistic reference to the n-word as to why Obama was different to any previous occupant of the Oval Office.
Now think about the fact that Arianna Huffington, the current self-proclaimed doyenne of the Progressive “journalists”, was and still is an extremely close friend of Newt’s – close enough to be photographed tree-hugging the Newt whilst on vacation in Amalfi. (Sorry, I don’t buy the obvious lie that the two “ran into” each other by coincidence. Amalfi is an old playground of the very rich and very aristocratic Eurotrash remnants. You don’t travel there by coincidence. )
One doesn’t allow oneself to be photographed on holiday cosying up to one’s adverse political opposite, no matter how close the association in the past, and still regard oneself as believeably progressive.
But in this day of short-term memory loss, I suppose that’s acceptable.
Still, many of the people with whom I speak, online and otherwise, seem to think as I do – that Huffington never was the Progressive she claimed to be – from November 3, 2004, to be precise – that the Damascene conversion in the wake of John Kerry’s defeat was never the 21st Century equivalent of what happened to St Paul on the road to Damascus.
Sorry, folks, that was all a fake. Her aggregate was founded and developed (by herself and her erstwhile protoge’, Andrew Breitbart) as a money-making venture. Like Rupert Murdoch, another man whom Arianna admires, she saw a niche on the internet for a liberal answer to Drudge and pounced on it – with Drudge’s encouragement and blessing.
That the so-called liberal media believed the conversion to be in earnest only reveals the extent of their shallowness and stupidity.
During the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen the President traipse countrywide on the campaign trail for candidates, many of whom totally undeserving from the lack of support they give him, in November’s mid-terms. Again and again, he’s hammering home the message that the Democratic Party is on the side of the middle and working classes, that giving the balance of power back to the Republicans would be like taking the country back to the Dark Ages, or at least back to the mid-Nineteenth Century.
In his wake, we have President Clinton, getting out a starker message: if you don’t vote, says Clinton, you may as well just join the GOP right now, because not voting enables them to take power.
And bringing up the rear, President Carter, on a book tour, easily pontificating that Obama’s problems today are down completely to the 24/7 cable news cycle and that Fox News is no news organisation, that it flies the banner of the Republican Party and seeks to manipulate people, who would benefit from voting Democratic, into believing that the current serving President is not a legitimate holder of the office and should, therefore, be removed.
Well, Arianna’s on a bit of a mission, herself. Like President Carter, she’s on a book tour – a snake oil hawking tour, actually, a bit of akin to the sort of gypsies, tramps and thieves variety crossed with Dr Love’s Travelling Salvation Show.
Arianna’s new book is all about the middle class, of which Arianna is completely and totally an expert (not). Really, she knows all about the middle class. She’s got enough middle class people working for her for free for her to know enough about their suffering. But Arianna has a problem. You see, Arianna’s ghostwritten books, unlike the ghostwritten books of Glenn Beck or Ann Coulter, don’t sell. So, in addition to showing up in the usual places – Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room, Keith Olbermann’s Countdown, Good Morning America – she’s going out and about amongst the little people with her message.
What’s her message?
Well, she’s hawked it enough in the past two years on Huffington Post. It’s simply that Obama isn’t that into the middle class, that he’s done nothing for them, that he doesn’t like them, that he was all for bailing out Wall Street (sorry, but wasn’t that George Bush and Hank Paulsen?- ne’mind, it still sounds good), that he’s a Nowhere Man, and – now the latest – that because the Democrats ahve punted on voting on the tax cuts until after the election, they aren’t fit to rule.
Now that HP’s take on the Uriah Heep of political journalism, the craven Howard Fineman, Arianna’s finally broken through the portal of the one MSNBC political opinion show which shut her out, in memory of the late Tim Russert, who hated her less than cordially. There she was, alongside her latest lapdog Fineman, who doubles as a political consultant of sorts in Chris Matthews’s echo chamber, on Chris’s show. This was a first. During the last few months of Russert’s life and tenure as news supremo, she was banned from the station entirely. In deference, Chris kept up the ban; but now she’s there with the boys – probably she forbade Howie from appearing himself, unless Mommy went along to chaperone. Two nights later, she was on another favourite mommy’s boy, Olbermann, her greasy perma-fixed smile in place as she declaimed the Democrats unfit to rule.
Connecting the dots back to the Republican fold isn’t difficult when you consider that Huffington has remained curiously silent throughout the summer over the Shirley Sherrod fiasco and Andrew Breitbart’s part in that; in fact, she kept an extremely low profile when commentators on her site pointed out that she and Breitbart share a long history and that he co-founded the aggregate with her. Nor has nary a word been uttered from her permanently smiling lips regarding Newt Gingrich’s quasi-racist remarks regarding the President as a Luo tribesman in mind and attitude.
There’s plenty of column space for Sarah Palin, however, and Christine O’Donnell, cleverly disguised as pejorative articles, they’re articles nonetheless. Palin and her new girl, O’Donnell, are media savvy, if intellectually challenged. Arianna’s own pet imp, Bill Maher, proudly takes credit for introducing O’Donnell to the American viewing public and enabling her to gain a foothold on a national platform. These gals know that any publicity is publicity, itself, and they’re both adept at turning a negative experience into a sympathetic victim stature for their own agendae.
On Friday night, Bill Maher, Arianna operative, was doing her bidding in his opening comments. After a couple of pejorative jokes about the Republicans’ stature at the moment, in particular their latest Pledge to America, he turned his attention to the Democrats and, literally verbatim, echoed Arianna’s meme about the tax cuts, finishing with a pronouncement that the Democrats were “unfit to govern.” There you have it: the Democrats are unfit to govern, but the Republicans have offered the country a less than salubrious “pledge”. Judge for yourself, Bill implies – nudge, nudge, wink, wink – but one party is explicitly unfit to rule.
His discussion panel was weighed to the Right, with the talking points puppet, Amy Holmes, and Bill’s Huffington litter mate, Breitbart, who – halfway through the program – revealed that he and Bill had organised a pact for the evening: Breitbart would “behave himself” if Bill promised not to bring up race on the program. Nice arrangement. Breitbart was thrust into the national domain this past summer precisely because of the question of race and his concocted efforts to show how an NAACP operative held racist views towards whites. Bill was on hiatus at that time. The question of race still resonates throughout the GOP and their off-shoot, the Tea Party movement, to this day, and is relevant to this election cycle, no matter how much one might want to shove it under the already rank carpet. It was well within Bill’s duty as a political commentator to bring this question up to Breitbart. It was imperative, but he didn’t. He’d entered into a pact with the political devil and tanked on it. Just as the week before, when he brought his satellite interview with Michael Moore to an abrupt close, when Moore started to rant about how the Democratic Party should speak out against the racist comments and innuendo perpetrated by Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich, calling them the imams of the American Taliban.
Was that Bill being circumspect, or was his surrogate political mother pulling his strings?
We’re seeing a lot of demagoguery on the rise in America at the moment. It’s easily recogniseable, and it’s encouraged, from sections of the Right. We’re all familiar with Rush, and how he recently brought no less than Karl Rove to his knees, we watch Beck do a teary and indignant Elmer Gantry routine in the pretence of restoring honor, and we have Palin shoved in our faces, now going out of her way to refer to the President as “Barack Hussein Obama (something Ann Coulter has been doing forever).
These are easily condemnable, especially in the sway they hold over manipulating people’s opinions.
But we have the same on the Left. Huffington and her operative Maher have long put out the deliberate misinformation that theh Obama Administration has accomplished nothing. After beginning his 2009 season with an earnest plea for the public to work with the President, reminding them that it would take a long time for the Administration to rectify the fuck-ups left by Bushco, six months later, Maher rants that the only think Obama accomplished in his first 100 days was to choose a dog. He wanted Obama to be more like Bush, and then when he perceived him to be, he criticized him for it. He ended the first part of this season’s shows with repeated pejorative references to the President’s race. A Maher apologist reminded me that he did as much with Bush, referring to Bush as President “Shit for Brains”, whilst his latest name for Obama is President “PoopyPants.” The Bush epithet referred to Dubya’s perceived lack of intelligence; the Obama epithet implies weakness, which has a very sinister relation to white men’s perception of African American soldiers in the face of adversity.
Bush’s ignorance was not only willful, it was contrived. Obama is anything but weak in resolve, and people are born into their race.
What’s worrying is that these particular pundits and their satellites hold sway over the opinions of a vast amount of people. Just log onto Huffington Post after madam blogs to see how many of the faithful are promising not to go to the polls. Just look at Bill’s Facebook page to see how many people, many of whom are old enough to know better, claiming that Bill speaks only the truth, that Bill’s word is like the word of the God in whom he sometimes doesn’t believe.
Like their counterparts on the Right, they’re seeking to manipulate the opinions of those people either incapable of or too lazy to think for themselves – the people who view news as infotainment, who seek gurus and thought processors, and who, once these charlatans are revealed and reviled, rise up in indignation, the type of which you’d expect to hear in defence of a relative or loved one insulted.
Someone once said, opinions are like assholes. Everybody has one. Well, there sure are a lot of assholes floating amidst the flotsam and jetsam of the 24/7 news and entertainment cycle. I’m just wondering who the pundit’s going to be who suggests the change in the wording of the Constitution to read “We the sheeple …?”
Get out and vote. Democratic. Please. The change is coming. I promise you. Remember: incremental change is often the sort that lasts.
Speaking Truth to the Power of the Lying Liars of the US Media, Right AND Left.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Sunday, September 19, 2010
It Pays to Police Your Word Power
Words are amazing things, aren’t they? They’re our basic means of communication. They can make or break us, whether they’re true or not. The common law in the political real, since Nixon burst on the national scene in post-World War II Washington, has been simply if you repeat something enough times, even if it’s a blatant lie, people will come to believe it. White Houses are won and lost on lies – “nothing to fear but fear itself” … ” no whitewash at the White House” … ” Read my lips, no more taxes” … ” I did not have sexual relations with that woman” …
Words lost a political career and reputation last week for a man who was arguably one of the last of the dying breed of moderate Republican, something which is increasingly becoming extinct, as the Republican Party bends over to accommodate the extremist Teabaggers. Mike Castle’s last-gasp bid for the US Senate was eviscerated by the angel-faced, little-girl voiced fundamentalist Christian, Christine O’Donnell, who flutters feminine lashes and believeably plays the victim card, but who wasn’t above promulgating a lie regarding the sexual preferences and voting practices of a man who’d served the state of Delaware for more than 40 years.
However, it seems the worm might have turned on Christine, and – in turning – might have turned on the turner too, if you get my drift.
Bill Maher returned from a three-month hiatus on Friday night and spent far too much time talking about O’Donnell and her nomination triumph – and in a way he shouldn’t have done.
Narcissist that he is, Bill wasted no time in pointing out that it was he, who had introduced Christine O’Donnell to America back in the Nineties on his Politically Incorrect show. In fact, O’Donnell, a virulent Christian and celibacy advocate, had appeared on his program 22 times, one of the more frequent and regular guests. Apart from examining her recent Senate nomination campaign, Maher constantly referred to what a nice person she was, what a good friend she was and then appealed directly to her to appear as a guest on a future edition of Real Time. Not only did he appeal to her, he literally blackmailed her, with an embarrassing clip from PI from 1999, wherein O’Donnell confessed to having practiced witchcraft … and something else:-
Within 24 hours of that clip being broadcast, O’Donnell had summarily cancelled her scheduled Sunday appearances on CBS’s Face the Nation, as well as on Chris Wallace’s Fox News program. On the face of a silly clip from 11 years ago, she’d decided to forego interviews as the highest profiled Teabagger winner of the moment, a chance to be on national television for some pretty softball questions. But listen to what she says in the clip. That O’Donnell is reasonably intelligent is in no doubt. Unlike Palin, her would-be mentor, she’s able to communicate in whole sentences which contain a subject and a predicate which agree grammatically, something which Jan Brewer can’t manage. That O’Donnell’s brain is one step behind her mouth is also obvious.
In the clip, O’Donnell enthuses about not only having dabbled in witchcraft, but also having dated a witch. Got that? She dated a witch. A witch.
The couple went to a movie and then repaired to a Satanic altar for a midnight picnic and a bit of something else. O’Donnell and a witch. A witch.
Nothing unusual about that. College kids do some silly things on dates. I often went haunted house hunting with a particular beau, who was interested in the occult; and whilst he certainly wasn’t a witch, I can’t say that he didn’t fancy himself a warlock – because a male witch is a warlock.
Now, maybe O’Donnell didn’t know that, but if you’ve ever had anything to do with the occult or witchcraft in general, or even if you’ve only ever watched Sabrina the Teenaged Witch, you certainly know the difference between a witch and a warlock.
So … maybe O’Donnell’s mouth got ahead of herself and only now, eleven years later after being apprised of the clip’s existence and of Bill’s showing it, she realised what she said: that the anti-gay, ueber-Christian O’Donnell had actually admitted to going on a date with a woman, of attending a film and then sloping off to a remote spot where there was a Satanic altar, for a picnic and a bit of whatever followed.
Even more ironic was the inadvertant slip of the tongue Benefactor Bill made in the course of the program, himself, when he accidentally opened a closet door of a different type. Here’s the clip. Pay close attention to two parts, one which occurs at the 5;30 mark, which is another quasi-racist swipe at Obama as a “half-assed President” and the most important one at the 9:59 mark. Listen to the latter one carefully.
The discussion which begins about five-and-a-half minutes into the clip is about Obama’s performance and achievements as President thus far. Bill Maher, herd follower of the social-climbing neocon shepherdess, Arianna Huffington, is under express instructions not to give the President any credit for any achievement whatsoever. In point of fact, between Huffington and Maher, they’ve managed to inculcate their following, consisting of youngish voters, frustrated at being denied the fruits of immediate gratification upon which they’ve been raised, and the general lower gene pool hoi-polloi which is equally dispersed between the Left and Right fringes, into believing that Obama bailed the banks out first (when actually TARP was Bush’s puppy) and that Obama doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the middle class. In fact, Bill’s spiritual mommy, Arianna, has arranged to have her unpaid interns research and write a whole book for her to hawk about the United States in an effort, immediately before the mid-Terms, to persuade the people that – hey – Obama’s not really that into you.
At the 5:30 point in the clip, Bill pushes out his opinion that Obama’s been a half-assed President, and – mindful of the particularly rancid racism he directed towards the President earlier in the year, cloaked as bad humour, he takes a swipe from the other side now, reckoning that Obama’s been such a half-assed President, because he’s half-white, that the white man in Obama had been holding him back. If Obama had been all black (and, according to Bill’s earlier definition of that, a ghetto guy from the ‘hood, complete with a gun he’d not hesitate to use, an “undercover brother” being his latest jargon to use in describing our President), he’d have been a better leader. Notice the audience’s non-reaction to that less-than-astute assessment, which was a pretty puerile observation, to say the least.
But the remark made almost ten minutes into the clip needs attention. This is when Bill is discussing with Republican strategist, Mark McKinnon, the fact that Republicans are threatening to repeal healthcare if they gain control of the House. He wonders why they never attempted to repeal the Civil Rights Amendment, or why they didn’t attempt to do so with Medicare. And then he reveals himself: “Why can’t we just say, ‘You won,’ and move on?”
We.
The inclusive first person plural.
Bill included himself in the Republican tent.
The Bill Maher,who formerly was at pains to reiterate to all and sundry that he was an independent, that he was not a Democrat and certainly wasn’t a Republican, would have asked the rhetorical question thus:
“Why can’t THEY just say, ‘You won?’”
One small word can change the complexion of a statement. A virulently anti-gay politician admits she went on a date, followed by a kiss and a cuddle in a secluded place with someone who may or may not have been the same sex as she. A quasi-respected political pundit-cum-satirist/bad comedian, lets his mouth run ahead of his brain and includes himself in the GOP’s ever-diminishing tent.
I don’t have any problem believing either slip-up was an inadvertant admission of something that is true. O’Donnell’s campaign was filled with rumour and innuendo directed at her opponent Mike Castle’s private life. It’s a common domain of the closeted gay to utter anti-gay rhetoric or even to support anti-gay legislative measures. Just think of Ken Mehlman and Larry Craig.
And as for Bill, his voting record speaks for itself: Reagan in 1984, Dole in 1996, supporting Schwartzenegger after Mommy Huffington dropped out, voting for McCain in the California primary in 2000 … Independent, he may be, but leaning more to the Right than the Left he professes to follow and endeavours to lead. It’s interesting to note that Bill, like most of his ilk in that part of punditry, is in a win-win situation, politically. If the Democrats win big this November and in 2012, he can go on presenting himself as the bastion of Left-leaning free thought; if the Right win and the GOP are returned to power, he has a plethora of new material with which to convince his dittoes that he’s speaking even more truth and words of wisdom … plus he gets to keep his Bush tax cuts and continue to exchange tweets with Karl Rove.
Bill twitters wittery with Rove, whilst Huffington tree-hugs Newt Gingrich on vacation, and their Progressive disciples look the other way, whilst a woman Bill foisted on America wraps herself in a flag with a cross in hopes of inflicting her party’s agenda on the American people as the true way of the Constitution.
Reality has, indeed, become an illusion.
Words lost a political career and reputation last week for a man who was arguably one of the last of the dying breed of moderate Republican, something which is increasingly becoming extinct, as the Republican Party bends over to accommodate the extremist Teabaggers. Mike Castle’s last-gasp bid for the US Senate was eviscerated by the angel-faced, little-girl voiced fundamentalist Christian, Christine O’Donnell, who flutters feminine lashes and believeably plays the victim card, but who wasn’t above promulgating a lie regarding the sexual preferences and voting practices of a man who’d served the state of Delaware for more than 40 years.
However, it seems the worm might have turned on Christine, and – in turning – might have turned on the turner too, if you get my drift.
Bill Maher returned from a three-month hiatus on Friday night and spent far too much time talking about O’Donnell and her nomination triumph – and in a way he shouldn’t have done.
Narcissist that he is, Bill wasted no time in pointing out that it was he, who had introduced Christine O’Donnell to America back in the Nineties on his Politically Incorrect show. In fact, O’Donnell, a virulent Christian and celibacy advocate, had appeared on his program 22 times, one of the more frequent and regular guests. Apart from examining her recent Senate nomination campaign, Maher constantly referred to what a nice person she was, what a good friend she was and then appealed directly to her to appear as a guest on a future edition of Real Time. Not only did he appeal to her, he literally blackmailed her, with an embarrassing clip from PI from 1999, wherein O’Donnell confessed to having practiced witchcraft … and something else:-
Within 24 hours of that clip being broadcast, O’Donnell had summarily cancelled her scheduled Sunday appearances on CBS’s Face the Nation, as well as on Chris Wallace’s Fox News program. On the face of a silly clip from 11 years ago, she’d decided to forego interviews as the highest profiled Teabagger winner of the moment, a chance to be on national television for some pretty softball questions. But listen to what she says in the clip. That O’Donnell is reasonably intelligent is in no doubt. Unlike Palin, her would-be mentor, she’s able to communicate in whole sentences which contain a subject and a predicate which agree grammatically, something which Jan Brewer can’t manage. That O’Donnell’s brain is one step behind her mouth is also obvious.
In the clip, O’Donnell enthuses about not only having dabbled in witchcraft, but also having dated a witch. Got that? She dated a witch. A witch.
The couple went to a movie and then repaired to a Satanic altar for a midnight picnic and a bit of something else. O’Donnell and a witch. A witch.
Nothing unusual about that. College kids do some silly things on dates. I often went haunted house hunting with a particular beau, who was interested in the occult; and whilst he certainly wasn’t a witch, I can’t say that he didn’t fancy himself a warlock – because a male witch is a warlock.
Now, maybe O’Donnell didn’t know that, but if you’ve ever had anything to do with the occult or witchcraft in general, or even if you’ve only ever watched Sabrina the Teenaged Witch, you certainly know the difference between a witch and a warlock.
So … maybe O’Donnell’s mouth got ahead of herself and only now, eleven years later after being apprised of the clip’s existence and of Bill’s showing it, she realised what she said: that the anti-gay, ueber-Christian O’Donnell had actually admitted to going on a date with a woman, of attending a film and then sloping off to a remote spot where there was a Satanic altar, for a picnic and a bit of whatever followed.
Even more ironic was the inadvertant slip of the tongue Benefactor Bill made in the course of the program, himself, when he accidentally opened a closet door of a different type. Here’s the clip. Pay close attention to two parts, one which occurs at the 5;30 mark, which is another quasi-racist swipe at Obama as a “half-assed President” and the most important one at the 9:59 mark. Listen to the latter one carefully.
The discussion which begins about five-and-a-half minutes into the clip is about Obama’s performance and achievements as President thus far. Bill Maher, herd follower of the social-climbing neocon shepherdess, Arianna Huffington, is under express instructions not to give the President any credit for any achievement whatsoever. In point of fact, between Huffington and Maher, they’ve managed to inculcate their following, consisting of youngish voters, frustrated at being denied the fruits of immediate gratification upon which they’ve been raised, and the general lower gene pool hoi-polloi which is equally dispersed between the Left and Right fringes, into believing that Obama bailed the banks out first (when actually TARP was Bush’s puppy) and that Obama doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the middle class. In fact, Bill’s spiritual mommy, Arianna, has arranged to have her unpaid interns research and write a whole book for her to hawk about the United States in an effort, immediately before the mid-Terms, to persuade the people that – hey – Obama’s not really that into you.
At the 5:30 point in the clip, Bill pushes out his opinion that Obama’s been a half-assed President, and – mindful of the particularly rancid racism he directed towards the President earlier in the year, cloaked as bad humour, he takes a swipe from the other side now, reckoning that Obama’s been such a half-assed President, because he’s half-white, that the white man in Obama had been holding him back. If Obama had been all black (and, according to Bill’s earlier definition of that, a ghetto guy from the ‘hood, complete with a gun he’d not hesitate to use, an “undercover brother” being his latest jargon to use in describing our President), he’d have been a better leader. Notice the audience’s non-reaction to that less-than-astute assessment, which was a pretty puerile observation, to say the least.
But the remark made almost ten minutes into the clip needs attention. This is when Bill is discussing with Republican strategist, Mark McKinnon, the fact that Republicans are threatening to repeal healthcare if they gain control of the House. He wonders why they never attempted to repeal the Civil Rights Amendment, or why they didn’t attempt to do so with Medicare. And then he reveals himself: “Why can’t we just say, ‘You won,’ and move on?”
We.
The inclusive first person plural.
Bill included himself in the Republican tent.
The Bill Maher,who formerly was at pains to reiterate to all and sundry that he was an independent, that he was not a Democrat and certainly wasn’t a Republican, would have asked the rhetorical question thus:
“Why can’t THEY just say, ‘You won?’”
One small word can change the complexion of a statement. A virulently anti-gay politician admits she went on a date, followed by a kiss and a cuddle in a secluded place with someone who may or may not have been the same sex as she. A quasi-respected political pundit-cum-satirist/bad comedian, lets his mouth run ahead of his brain and includes himself in the GOP’s ever-diminishing tent.
I don’t have any problem believing either slip-up was an inadvertant admission of something that is true. O’Donnell’s campaign was filled with rumour and innuendo directed at her opponent Mike Castle’s private life. It’s a common domain of the closeted gay to utter anti-gay rhetoric or even to support anti-gay legislative measures. Just think of Ken Mehlman and Larry Craig.
And as for Bill, his voting record speaks for itself: Reagan in 1984, Dole in 1996, supporting Schwartzenegger after Mommy Huffington dropped out, voting for McCain in the California primary in 2000 … Independent, he may be, but leaning more to the Right than the Left he professes to follow and endeavours to lead. It’s interesting to note that Bill, like most of his ilk in that part of punditry, is in a win-win situation, politically. If the Democrats win big this November and in 2012, he can go on presenting himself as the bastion of Left-leaning free thought; if the Right win and the GOP are returned to power, he has a plethora of new material with which to convince his dittoes that he’s speaking even more truth and words of wisdom … plus he gets to keep his Bush tax cuts and continue to exchange tweets with Karl Rove.
Bill twitters wittery with Rove, whilst Huffington tree-hugs Newt Gingrich on vacation, and their Progressive disciples look the other way, whilst a woman Bill foisted on America wraps herself in a flag with a cross in hopes of inflicting her party’s agenda on the American people as the true way of the Constitution.
Reality has, indeed, become an illusion.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Some of Us on the Left Are Being Royally Ratfucked
All ye who failed to believe my last blog concerning the REAL political leanings of Arianna Huffington, please take a look at the picture she recently tweeted below.
She’s on holiday in Italy, and whilst in Amalfi, just “happened” to run into an old friend and his wife. Guess who? Click on the link:-
What’s the old Rod Stewart song say – every picture tells a story? She’s even asked him to blog. Huffington Post takes a sharp turn to the Right, with the man who likens Muslims to Nazis.
I feel vindicated.
She’s on holiday in Italy, and whilst in Amalfi, just “happened” to run into an old friend and his wife. Guess who? Click on the link:-
What’s the old Rod Stewart song say – every picture tells a story? She’s even asked him to blog. Huffington Post takes a sharp turn to the Right, with the man who likens Muslims to Nazis.
I feel vindicated.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
The White Wings of Icarus Fall Silent
Arianna Huffington is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post. She fancies herself a powerful voice in the world of American Progressive politics, and I suppose she is, although I’ve always doubted the liberal credentials of someone who was closely-knit, literally and figuratively, into the framework of Newt Gingrich’s political philosophy throughout the 1990s. People change, yes, but lasting, believeable and genuine change is often of the calibre which occurs slowly, almost imperceptibly, throughout a number of years – much in the way the conservative former Supreme Court Justice, John Paul Stevens, evolved from a conservative jurist into the liberal conscience of the Court.
So pardon me, a natural secularist, if I found Huffington’s Damascene conversion from hardcore neocon and Gingrich neophyte into a fully paid-up member of the Progressive Populist club, practically overnight, more than a bit difficult to swallow.
Even harder to accept was the ease with which the liberal media readily accepted her within their fold. More than Mitch McConnell “taking the President’s word” that he’s a Christian, the media elite embraced this woman as one of their own.
She certainly has been making the rounds – from Morning Joe to various appearances on CNN, with stops in between on Ed Schultz’s and Keith Olbermann’s echo chambers, as well as a quasi-regular stint on ABC’s This Week – especially when there’s an opportunity to criticize whatever the President has said or hasn’t said, has done or hasn’t done, which hasn’t met her personal standard of excellence. And then, there’s always the opportunity for her particular brand of argumentum ad hominem. I believe her favourite reference to the President is “Nowhere Man.”
Don’t get me wrong. Politicians were made to be criticized, their feet being fashioned to be held to the fire by the people who elect them; but – Lordy! – according to Arianna Huffington’s political perspective, it’s amazing that the President is able to walk down the street and chew gum without tripping up. There’s criticism, there’s nitpicking … and there’s cherry-picking.
However, I’ve noticed, during yet another summer of discontent, that Madame’s been curiously quiet of late, starting right about the time of the Shirley Sherrod/Andrew Breibart incident.
In an interview printed earlier in the year in Wired magazine, Breitbart amply credited Huffington as being his mentor, saying she’d taught him everything he knew about his particular type of journalism – which is, at best, described as “press hackery” and, at worst, as a variety of ratfucking: shady, oblique quotes from anonymous sources, phrases and sentences taken out of context and spun with a view to imparting a message completely different from the original, and loads of nuanced criticism, which never offers any alternative suggestions, but always ends with a sneer and more than a dollop of condescension.
Needless to say, the interview went viral in the age of the internet, and more than a few of the many people who comment regularly on Huffington Post were quick to point out, not only the association between Huffington and Breitbart, but also the fact that Breitbart was the co-founder of HuffPo, himself.
This guilt by association was just enough to jog some memories of Huffington the virulent neocon of the Nineties – neophyte of Newt and the founder of a website dedicated entirely to securing the impeachment of one President William Jefferson Clinton, Democrat. It was also enough, for awhile, for several commentators to slam accusations of “Breitbart journalism” against certain of her regular reporters, each time their “reporting” proved to be shoddy and inaccurate – which was quite a lot.
The dots were connected.
Huffington never referenced Breitbart, and, although her site offered many and varied articles concerning Shirley Sherrod, Fox News and the Obama Administration, with most of the blame being heaped heavily onto the President’s shoulders, she never offered up a word, distancing herself from this man and his shady practices, never reassured her adoring gaggle of fans that she totally condemned what he’d tried to do. She simply ignored the name Breitbart altogether, as if he didn’t exist in her fragrant world of expensive facials, debutant balls and speaking up for the “small people.”
It seemed as though Arianna, for once, had lost her mighty voice.
And now, with all the kerfuffle surrounding the Park51 incident in New York, all the not-too-cleverly disguised innuendo insinuating that Muslims, as a whole, are to be feared, vilified and persecuted, we’ve yet to hear Mrs Huffington expound upon this. The verbal attack on a construction worker, trying to thread his way through the New York mob, who appeared to “look Muslim” didn’t raise a whimper of protest from Arianna’s throat. Nor did the fact that recent polls reveal an increasing number of people seem to suspect our President is a Muslim. These are ordinary people who believe this, the sort of people for whom Arianna claims to speak, especially in her recent book, which has yet to climb onto the New York Times best-seller list.
Arianna, who always speaks the truth (according to her dittoes), should be guiding and enlightening these people to the contrary.
Instead, she’s uncharacteristically silent.
Sometimes silence reverberates more astoundingly than a plethora of loud and gratuitous criticism, and sometimes silence can be interpreted as tacit assent.
In days of yore, in the Nineties when the budget was balanced and everyone believed they had money in their pockets, Arianna was the First Disciple in the Church of Newt Gingrich. Now that Newt’s likening the Muslims to Nazis, one wonders if the sheets Arianna might be thinking of donning are made of designer-labelled white linen.
So pardon me, a natural secularist, if I found Huffington’s Damascene conversion from hardcore neocon and Gingrich neophyte into a fully paid-up member of the Progressive Populist club, practically overnight, more than a bit difficult to swallow.
Even harder to accept was the ease with which the liberal media readily accepted her within their fold. More than Mitch McConnell “taking the President’s word” that he’s a Christian, the media elite embraced this woman as one of their own.
She certainly has been making the rounds – from Morning Joe to various appearances on CNN, with stops in between on Ed Schultz’s and Keith Olbermann’s echo chambers, as well as a quasi-regular stint on ABC’s This Week – especially when there’s an opportunity to criticize whatever the President has said or hasn’t said, has done or hasn’t done, which hasn’t met her personal standard of excellence. And then, there’s always the opportunity for her particular brand of argumentum ad hominem. I believe her favourite reference to the President is “Nowhere Man.”
Don’t get me wrong. Politicians were made to be criticized, their feet being fashioned to be held to the fire by the people who elect them; but – Lordy! – according to Arianna Huffington’s political perspective, it’s amazing that the President is able to walk down the street and chew gum without tripping up. There’s criticism, there’s nitpicking … and there’s cherry-picking.
However, I’ve noticed, during yet another summer of discontent, that Madame’s been curiously quiet of late, starting right about the time of the Shirley Sherrod/Andrew Breibart incident.
In an interview printed earlier in the year in Wired magazine, Breitbart amply credited Huffington as being his mentor, saying she’d taught him everything he knew about his particular type of journalism – which is, at best, described as “press hackery” and, at worst, as a variety of ratfucking: shady, oblique quotes from anonymous sources, phrases and sentences taken out of context and spun with a view to imparting a message completely different from the original, and loads of nuanced criticism, which never offers any alternative suggestions, but always ends with a sneer and more than a dollop of condescension.
Needless to say, the interview went viral in the age of the internet, and more than a few of the many people who comment regularly on Huffington Post were quick to point out, not only the association between Huffington and Breitbart, but also the fact that Breitbart was the co-founder of HuffPo, himself.
This guilt by association was just enough to jog some memories of Huffington the virulent neocon of the Nineties – neophyte of Newt and the founder of a website dedicated entirely to securing the impeachment of one President William Jefferson Clinton, Democrat. It was also enough, for awhile, for several commentators to slam accusations of “Breitbart journalism” against certain of her regular reporters, each time their “reporting” proved to be shoddy and inaccurate – which was quite a lot.
The dots were connected.
Huffington never referenced Breitbart, and, although her site offered many and varied articles concerning Shirley Sherrod, Fox News and the Obama Administration, with most of the blame being heaped heavily onto the President’s shoulders, she never offered up a word, distancing herself from this man and his shady practices, never reassured her adoring gaggle of fans that she totally condemned what he’d tried to do. She simply ignored the name Breitbart altogether, as if he didn’t exist in her fragrant world of expensive facials, debutant balls and speaking up for the “small people.”
It seemed as though Arianna, for once, had lost her mighty voice.
And now, with all the kerfuffle surrounding the Park51 incident in New York, all the not-too-cleverly disguised innuendo insinuating that Muslims, as a whole, are to be feared, vilified and persecuted, we’ve yet to hear Mrs Huffington expound upon this. The verbal attack on a construction worker, trying to thread his way through the New York mob, who appeared to “look Muslim” didn’t raise a whimper of protest from Arianna’s throat. Nor did the fact that recent polls reveal an increasing number of people seem to suspect our President is a Muslim. These are ordinary people who believe this, the sort of people for whom Arianna claims to speak, especially in her recent book, which has yet to climb onto the New York Times best-seller list.
Arianna, who always speaks the truth (according to her dittoes), should be guiding and enlightening these people to the contrary.
Instead, she’s uncharacteristically silent.
Sometimes silence reverberates more astoundingly than a plethora of loud and gratuitous criticism, and sometimes silence can be interpreted as tacit assent.
In days of yore, in the Nineties when the budget was balanced and everyone believed they had money in their pockets, Arianna was the First Disciple in the Church of Newt Gingrich. Now that Newt’s likening the Muslims to Nazis, one wonders if the sheets Arianna might be thinking of donning are made of designer-labelled white linen.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Just a Final Word about Robert Gibbs
I think he was right.
He may not be the most naturally popular person in Washington or even in the Administration, but part of his brief is to keep an eye on the media for the White House and to report back to his boss about what’s being said as such.
I guess Gibbs is a company man as much as anyone who works for an establishment, having to listen, day in and day out, to various and sundry spin spun your way about your company or your brand. It’s never a good company man who turns tail and agrees with the person making the insinuations.
The media tries this all the time. How many politicians have you seen sit in front of a pundit-cum-interviewer and how many times have you seen them try every trick in the book for a gotcha moment?
It’s been well over a year since the first of the Obama-criticisms emanated from the Left, or that part of the media which considers itself Left. Bill Maher, a real Leftie – a Progressive who believes in the Death Penalty, who’s anti-Union and believes in stringent gun control whilst admitting to owning a gun, himself – bragged all of the second part of last year about how he started the real criticism of the President, by saying he’d done nothing after 6 months of holding office. He ended the year with a series of tweets, calling the President “Barry” and likening him to George Bush.
For all of the past 8 months, Gibbs has heard the Professional Left nitpick, parse, second guess, misinterpret and deride everything this Administration has achieved, and – admit it or not – the Administration has achieved a lot – a significant lot. Each time these thought manipulators were proven wrong, they blithely ignored their mistakes and, instead, parsed about the Presidents comments, actions, what-have-you for something else about which to criticize, carp and complain.
They took purism to a new level and, in doing so, became as guilty of deliberate misinformation and delusion as anything for which they ever derided Fox News. In fact, they descended to the level of Fox News in sensationalism, obsession and sheer tripe.
They have become blatant to the point that when they are genuinely challenged, by a colleague or even a politician, they are adamant in righteous indignation, as if they can only be the ones who are right about what a President should say or do, and everyone else is wrong. They willfully take advantage of viewers who, in their own way, are as incapable of critical thought and interpretation as any of their counterparts who populate the Teabagging Rightwing hanging on every word of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh.
I read the words of a Spanish-born naturalised resident of Washington state, desperate to be considered a member of the Progressive Left, assuring members of a like-minded forum that she gets her news from Ed Schultz and Keith Olbermann and reads Huffington Post as her “daily newspaper.” Rachel Maddow blithely admits to David Letterman that people watch opinionators’ shows to find out the opinion of the person whose name is on the billing.
Why? What happened to people digesting facts and forming their own opinion.
The saddest thing about all of this, is that the people who buy into this deliberate misinformation, from Rush’s dittoes to theh people who swear by Keith Olbermann and Bill Maher as gurus, political aspirants and saviours of the country, bristle and bite back with belligerance against anyone who dares to criticize these imperfect demagogues’ interpretation of how the President is getting it wrong. They defend these corporate media whores with the same ferocity as a religious fanatic defends his faith, never mind their obvious contradictions. Bill Maher praises the public option all season long on Real Time, then – at the season’s end – discloses to Bill Frist, in an unguarded moment, that he doesn’t trust government-administered healthcare. Ed Schultz berates listeners on his radio broadcast last week to boycott voting in the Mid-Terms to SHOW the White House what they think of them, in reaction to Gibbs’s venting, then praises the White House, smilingly on his television program the following day.
The faithful public don’t bat an eyelid, and the demagogues laugh all the way to the banks which contain their off-shore accounts.
Gibbs was right. He hit back and gave the pundits of the Professional Left a taste of their own bitter medicine, and the ones at which he aimed, showed that they couldn’t take the dosage.
And I applaud Gibbs’s non-apology too. At the beginning of the Obama administration, in the wake of Rush Limbaugh’s announcement that he wanted the President to fail, several ranking Republicans, including Michael Steele, made disparaging remarks about Rush in public statements. Almost immediately they said these things, they rushed to apologise, in an act akin to scores of mafiosi kissing the hand of the reigning don. More than anything this confirmed the fact that Rush Limbaugh, media figure, is the de facto head of the Republican party.
For Gibbs to have attempted any modicum of apology would have been tantamount to admitting that the likes of Olbermann, Schultz, Chris Matthews, Bill Maher and Arianna Huffington controlled the Democratic party and pulled the Presidential strings.
Imagine a country polarised by and controlled by the likes of Rush and Beck on one side and their counterparts Schultz, Olbermann and co on the other. It doesn’t bear imagining.
What’s saddest of all is that two elected Congressmen, both facing stiff competition in the Mid-Terms, should call for Gibbs’s resignation. Keith Ellison was the first, who did so in an interview with Huffington Post, then later tried to wriggle out of that in an interview with his local paper, intimating that Huffington Post lied. While I’m first on the list to question the veracity of HuffPo, with their murky anonymous sources purporting to know the minds of public figures, even they wouldn’t risk a libel charge of actually saying someone said something he didn’t without printing a retraction. No retraction is forthcoming, so one is left to assume that Ellison thought better of his remarks, thinking that perhaps he might need some campaign help from the White House.
I would think that Ellison, the only Muslim member of Congress, might have been better off directing his comments elsewhere, like at the growing Islamaphobia being not-so-subtly encouraged by the Republicans throughout the country, rather than taking time to make petty comments about the President’s Press Secretary which have nothing to do with him at all.
Ditto Alan Grayson, a man I actually admire very deeply for his political passion, courage and conviction; but Grayson’s on television – and specifically on certain programs on MSNBC – a lot lately, and I fear he’s in danger of believing his own hype. To call for Gibbs’s resignation, when Gibbs was directing none of his remarks to Grayson is one thing, but to infer that “a lot of people he knows” refer to Gibbs as “Bozo the Secretary,” was conduct unbecoming a member of Congress. Had Gibbs made comments about Congress in particular, spleen could be explained; but the media serve Grayson and Ellison at their whim, and they’d be well advised to remember that today’s hero is tomorrow’s villain.
Fifty-two years ago, in a speech given to a media convention in Chicago, the great Edward R Murrow, a giant to whom Keith Olbermann dares compare himself in action and mannerism, offered prescient warnings about the state of television, and the danger of it being used, in all spheres as an instrument to entertain, amuse and insulate. Those qualities have entered into the news sphere in a particularly pejorative way, and Murrow is probably spinning in his grave at some of the political hackery practiced by the man who considers himself Murrow’s spiritual son, amongst others of his ilk today.
Let’s take stock of Murrow’s speech, herein recreated by the actor David Strathorne from the film, “Good Night and Good Luck”:-
For those of you who are unfamiliar, it might be a good idea to read about Murrow’s media fight against Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist pogroms against innocent citizens. Throughout it all, Murrow offered little opinion in the way of Special Comments. Instead, he showed the McCarthy proceedings and interviews on film and let the public – a public considerably more innocent and less educated than the public today – decide for themselves.
I would love it if Americans could find their own opinions again, without the help of media bullies like Limbaugh, Schultz and others.
He may not be the most naturally popular person in Washington or even in the Administration, but part of his brief is to keep an eye on the media for the White House and to report back to his boss about what’s being said as such.
I guess Gibbs is a company man as much as anyone who works for an establishment, having to listen, day in and day out, to various and sundry spin spun your way about your company or your brand. It’s never a good company man who turns tail and agrees with the person making the insinuations.
The media tries this all the time. How many politicians have you seen sit in front of a pundit-cum-interviewer and how many times have you seen them try every trick in the book for a gotcha moment?
It’s been well over a year since the first of the Obama-criticisms emanated from the Left, or that part of the media which considers itself Left. Bill Maher, a real Leftie – a Progressive who believes in the Death Penalty, who’s anti-Union and believes in stringent gun control whilst admitting to owning a gun, himself – bragged all of the second part of last year about how he started the real criticism of the President, by saying he’d done nothing after 6 months of holding office. He ended the year with a series of tweets, calling the President “Barry” and likening him to George Bush.
For all of the past 8 months, Gibbs has heard the Professional Left nitpick, parse, second guess, misinterpret and deride everything this Administration has achieved, and – admit it or not – the Administration has achieved a lot – a significant lot. Each time these thought manipulators were proven wrong, they blithely ignored their mistakes and, instead, parsed about the Presidents comments, actions, what-have-you for something else about which to criticize, carp and complain.
They took purism to a new level and, in doing so, became as guilty of deliberate misinformation and delusion as anything for which they ever derided Fox News. In fact, they descended to the level of Fox News in sensationalism, obsession and sheer tripe.
They have become blatant to the point that when they are genuinely challenged, by a colleague or even a politician, they are adamant in righteous indignation, as if they can only be the ones who are right about what a President should say or do, and everyone else is wrong. They willfully take advantage of viewers who, in their own way, are as incapable of critical thought and interpretation as any of their counterparts who populate the Teabagging Rightwing hanging on every word of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh.
I read the words of a Spanish-born naturalised resident of Washington state, desperate to be considered a member of the Progressive Left, assuring members of a like-minded forum that she gets her news from Ed Schultz and Keith Olbermann and reads Huffington Post as her “daily newspaper.” Rachel Maddow blithely admits to David Letterman that people watch opinionators’ shows to find out the opinion of the person whose name is on the billing.
Why? What happened to people digesting facts and forming their own opinion.
The saddest thing about all of this, is that the people who buy into this deliberate misinformation, from Rush’s dittoes to theh people who swear by Keith Olbermann and Bill Maher as gurus, political aspirants and saviours of the country, bristle and bite back with belligerance against anyone who dares to criticize these imperfect demagogues’ interpretation of how the President is getting it wrong. They defend these corporate media whores with the same ferocity as a religious fanatic defends his faith, never mind their obvious contradictions. Bill Maher praises the public option all season long on Real Time, then – at the season’s end – discloses to Bill Frist, in an unguarded moment, that he doesn’t trust government-administered healthcare. Ed Schultz berates listeners on his radio broadcast last week to boycott voting in the Mid-Terms to SHOW the White House what they think of them, in reaction to Gibbs’s venting, then praises the White House, smilingly on his television program the following day.
The faithful public don’t bat an eyelid, and the demagogues laugh all the way to the banks which contain their off-shore accounts.
Gibbs was right. He hit back and gave the pundits of the Professional Left a taste of their own bitter medicine, and the ones at which he aimed, showed that they couldn’t take the dosage.
And I applaud Gibbs’s non-apology too. At the beginning of the Obama administration, in the wake of Rush Limbaugh’s announcement that he wanted the President to fail, several ranking Republicans, including Michael Steele, made disparaging remarks about Rush in public statements. Almost immediately they said these things, they rushed to apologise, in an act akin to scores of mafiosi kissing the hand of the reigning don. More than anything this confirmed the fact that Rush Limbaugh, media figure, is the de facto head of the Republican party.
For Gibbs to have attempted any modicum of apology would have been tantamount to admitting that the likes of Olbermann, Schultz, Chris Matthews, Bill Maher and Arianna Huffington controlled the Democratic party and pulled the Presidential strings.
Imagine a country polarised by and controlled by the likes of Rush and Beck on one side and their counterparts Schultz, Olbermann and co on the other. It doesn’t bear imagining.
What’s saddest of all is that two elected Congressmen, both facing stiff competition in the Mid-Terms, should call for Gibbs’s resignation. Keith Ellison was the first, who did so in an interview with Huffington Post, then later tried to wriggle out of that in an interview with his local paper, intimating that Huffington Post lied. While I’m first on the list to question the veracity of HuffPo, with their murky anonymous sources purporting to know the minds of public figures, even they wouldn’t risk a libel charge of actually saying someone said something he didn’t without printing a retraction. No retraction is forthcoming, so one is left to assume that Ellison thought better of his remarks, thinking that perhaps he might need some campaign help from the White House.
I would think that Ellison, the only Muslim member of Congress, might have been better off directing his comments elsewhere, like at the growing Islamaphobia being not-so-subtly encouraged by the Republicans throughout the country, rather than taking time to make petty comments about the President’s Press Secretary which have nothing to do with him at all.
Ditto Alan Grayson, a man I actually admire very deeply for his political passion, courage and conviction; but Grayson’s on television – and specifically on certain programs on MSNBC – a lot lately, and I fear he’s in danger of believing his own hype. To call for Gibbs’s resignation, when Gibbs was directing none of his remarks to Grayson is one thing, but to infer that “a lot of people he knows” refer to Gibbs as “Bozo the Secretary,” was conduct unbecoming a member of Congress. Had Gibbs made comments about Congress in particular, spleen could be explained; but the media serve Grayson and Ellison at their whim, and they’d be well advised to remember that today’s hero is tomorrow’s villain.
Fifty-two years ago, in a speech given to a media convention in Chicago, the great Edward R Murrow, a giant to whom Keith Olbermann dares compare himself in action and mannerism, offered prescient warnings about the state of television, and the danger of it being used, in all spheres as an instrument to entertain, amuse and insulate. Those qualities have entered into the news sphere in a particularly pejorative way, and Murrow is probably spinning in his grave at some of the political hackery practiced by the man who considers himself Murrow’s spiritual son, amongst others of his ilk today.
Let’s take stock of Murrow’s speech, herein recreated by the actor David Strathorne from the film, “Good Night and Good Luck”:-
For those of you who are unfamiliar, it might be a good idea to read about Murrow’s media fight against Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist pogroms against innocent citizens. Throughout it all, Murrow offered little opinion in the way of Special Comments. Instead, he showed the McCarthy proceedings and interviews on film and let the public – a public considerably more innocent and less educated than the public today – decide for themselves.
I would love it if Americans could find their own opinions again, without the help of media bullies like Limbaugh, Schultz and others.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Robert Gibbs, Ratfucking and The Professional Left
I’ve been thinking a lot about Watergate lately.
Watergate, as much as it was a political coming-of-age for America, coincided with my own personal coming-of-age. The actual break-in occurred just weeks after I’d graduated from high school and the initial furore continued throughout the summer as I prepared to leave for my first year at college. The repercussions, investigations and hearings continued throughout my first two years at college and culminated with Richard Nixon’s resignation, when I was in summer school in Spain in August 1974. I watched his resignation speech on a flickering black-and-white television set in the living room of my host family at 2AM in the morning, European time.
It’s not unusual at all that the current political climate in the US should make me think about the definitive political scandal of the late 20th Century. After all, the media has been looking for another Watergate since the last one was resolved (as much as it could ever be). Every newspaper reporter, every media journalist fancies himself this decade’s Woodward or Bernstein, never mind the fact that they happened upon their golden egg purely by chance. One of Watergate’s many legacies is the intense desire on the part of the media to discover some socio-political scandal latent in every subsequent Administration, and so almost every official in every subsequent Administration has been subjected to the scrutiny, for better or for worse, by the Fourth Estate.
And the Fourth estate has mutated rampantly since the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine under President Reagan.
But the name which keeps popping up in my mind more often than not, lately, isn’t one of the bigger guns from Watergate – not Haldeman or Erlichmann or John Dean – but a lesser-known character called Donald Segretti.
Segretti was a young lawyer, who, during the early 1970s, was engaged by the Committee to Re-elect the President (aptly anagrammed CReeP). He specialised in a particular brand of practical joke, or dirty trick, designed to make the victim look particularly bad. The aim of CReeP wasn’t only to insure that Nixon was elected to a second term; the principal aim was to insure that the Democratic party fielded the weakest candidate possible in 1972, one that would virtually guarantee Nixon a Presidential victory.
Of course, Nixon’s chief political strategists at the time, the late Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes (yep, that Roger Ailes), were busy formulating a tactic which they would call The Southern Strategy – convincing all those Southern Democrats who were less than lukewarm about the idea of Civil Rights, that their natural political party was none other than the GOP, considering the fact that George Wallace’s reincarnation of the Dixiecrats – the American Independence Party – had disbanded after its third party attempt in the 1968 election. But to really secure a second term, Nixon and Co would have to be absolutely certain that the Democratic candidate was loser material.
It was practically a foregone conclusion that the Democratic candidate for 1972 would be Maine Senator and former Vice-Presidential candidate Edmund Muskie. Muskie was impressive as a speaker during the campaign, and the Democrats, rightfully, thought that he would stand a good chance in challenging Nixon. After all, America wouldn’t wash 8 years of Dick Nixon.
Right before the silly season started, North Dakota Senator, George McGovern, a very Leftwing and very progressive politician, announced that he, too, would seek the nomination.
CReeP’s aim was to discredit Muskie to the point that Muskie would drop out of the race. With no other Democrat on the horizon at that point, and the Democratic Party in a weakened state, generally, McGovern would run and lose heavily.
This is where Segretti stepped in. Financed by funds from CReeP – laundered money, really – Segretti did his stuff. Segretti engaged hundreds of young Republican volunteers – mostly college students and recent graduates. Their mission was to imbed themselves in various Democratic offices and campaigns as volunteers, walk the walk and talk the talk of Democrats, get close to staffers and other genuine volunteers, even to the candidates themselves, get the gossip, sow discontent and be subtly, but brilliantly divisive.
The strategy was amazing. Someone managed to steal some sheets of Muskie’s Senate stationery, along with some samples of his handwriting, fished from rubbish bins in his office. The result was two, seemingly original notes, penned by “Muskie” on official notepaper, trashing Canadians in objectionable terms. Someone else started rumours of Muskie’s wife having a drinking problem and mouthing off about another Democratic politician in a lewd way. Mores forged notes emerged, depicting Muskie as speculating about another Democratic Senator, Henry Jackson of Washington, having a lovechild by a 17 year-old girl, and passing hints alluding to Hubert Humphrey’s sexlife as well.
The end result was Muskie, who’d denied all these allegations, giving an impassioned defence of his wife’s honour, so impassioned that he ended up in tears, a fact which, effectively, ended his Presidential aspirations, and paved the way for George McGovern’s nomination.
A few years later, in the course of the Watergate investigations and trials, Donald Segretti’s part in all of this was revealed. Segretti told Bob Woodward that such practices, which he’d perfected to art form, were known to him and his circle as “ratfucking.”
Ratfucking was only in its rudimentary form as developed by Segretti. There was plenty of room for development and improvement.
Oh … and one of the many of those earnest, young Republican volunteers who infiltrated the Democratic party, undercover, for Segretti was a Texas college senior named Karl Rove.
Rove took ratfucking to another level in his work for George Bush. At first, he developed the doctrine of “continuous campaign,” of never allowing the Bush Administration to get comfortable with its success, of operating every day with the aim in mind of securing a second term. 9/11 handed them their modus operandi on a plate: keep the public scared and use fear to keep the usually liberal media on side too. After all, when the country’s under attack, no one wants to be labelled “leftist and unpatriotic” (which had almost come to be synonymous).
Rove’s ultimate aim was an unbroken hegemony of Republican Administrations – something akin to Hitler’s vision of the Fourth Reich lasting 1000 years – which meant that whatever had to be done to secure that aim, was sanctioned. This time the Ratfucker-in-Chief was operating inside the White House and on the public payroll.
When the Republicans lost the White House in 2008, Rove moved to Fox News as a political commentator – a natural move, considering Fox’s CEO was none other than that same Roger Ailes, the Nixon strategist from the years Rove was a lowly ratfucking operative under the tutelage of Donald Segretti.
A couple of months ago, Rove, rather disingenuously announced that he’d had a strategy in place for awhile that would result, not only in delivering substantial gains to the Republican party in this year’s Mid-Terms, but it would also insure that Barack Obama served one term and one term only, that the Republican Party would regain the White House in 2012. Rove admitted that, as he spoke, he’d had “operatives” working the length and breadth of the country for the past couple of years, dedicated to dividing and conquering the Democratic Party and its ambitions.
Empty rhetoric and bragging?
Maybe, but Rove’s never one to brag without substance to his bragging.
Rove, if he knows nothing else, knows the American people. He certainly knows the base of the Right, and he’s probably made it his business to know the base of the Left. He’s also astute enough to capitalise on the similarities between the two, and the basic similarity amongst the two ends of the political spectrum is the overwhelming ailment affecting the American public as a whole – the singular inability to think for oneself and to think critically.
Both ends of the spectrum are television addicts. They read little, comprehend less and live for entertainment and instant gratification. Unable to digest and bored by news bulletins, their information must be delivered with panache and passion – thus, they need to be “infotained.” More than being infotained, they need to hear the opinions voiced of various and sundry paid talking heads on television – people who voice and articulate that which the average person from the extreme end of the Rightwing and the average person from the extreme end of the Leftwing are thinking. If the opinionator is likeable and amusing, he or she will gain not only a fanbase, but a disciple.
And, as television is an illusion, what if the people voicing opinion on the box, are just selling the brand of what their network is supposed to be? What if the opinionators are merely … salesmen?
The lack of critical thinking in all this never ceases to amaze me, as I watch various and sundry opinionators from both the Left and the Right.
That the social-climbing ex-wife of a former Republican Congressman and oilman, a woman who’s never been anything else in her adult life spent in two countries, than the most conservative of conservatives, a woman who led a virulent and strident campaign for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, a woman who taught Andrew Breitbart all the fine points of blatant press hackery (another form of ratfucking), should decide – the day after the 2004 defeat of John Kerry – that the Left needed an internet aggregate to challenge Matt Drudge and could result in being a nice little earner for her, that in the space of 24 hours, Arianna Huffington could go from being a neocon’s neocon (and devotee of Newt Gingrich) to being a fully paid-up Progressive, without ANYONE in the media batting an eyelid, is pure shallowness in and of itself.
I never bought the original Damascene conversion, and I never bought this one, especially not during the 2008 campaign season when Huffington’s attacks on Hillary Clinton became increasingly nasty and personal.
The only thing I do know is that, of all the Presidents I remember, and I remember a lot, this President is the only one whom I’ve known to be criticized, second-guessed, ridiculed, name-called and parsed by the Rightwing media and equally so, by the media on the Left, the so-called “Professional Left.”
It’s important to remember that the Professional Left is, more than likely, on the payroll of the Corporate Right, who are also bosom buddies with Rove, who writes for their bible, the Wall Street Journal.
When the Shirley Sherrod incident saw light, not only Fox, but also MSNBC, ran with the story that Breitbart propagated that very first day. It took CNN and The Atlanta Journal Constitution to get the real facts out and amongst the people. Fox then, promptly, apologised. MSNBC pulled all evidence of their hysteria from their website. No one … no one blamed Breitbart in this. He got scant mention; the emphasis was all on the Administration’s preciptous reaction. It was all how quick to jump the gun Tom Vilsack (and by extension, the President) had been, how weak the Administration was, how frightened of Fox News they were perceived to bel. Ed Schultz, in his usual bullying way, intimated that this Administration were pussies. Later, during his appearance at the Netroots convention, big Ed let slip that the real reason he was throwing a strop was because the President wouldn’t appear on his hour-long MSNBC program to be shouted at and hectored; instead, he preferred to be interviewed and interrupted by Bret Baier of Fox News.
At the end of the day, the Rightwing media treats this President like an escaped slave who needs lynching, and the so-called Professional Left treat him like the natural child of a token Affirmative Action appointment and Prissy from Gone With the Wind.
And either way, that boils down to one, singular, unmentionable thing.
When Robert Gibbs vented his frustration in that infamous interview last week, it came on the heels of having watched Dylan Ratigan, another sudden convert from corporatism to Progressivism and a thug who pretends to be a journalist, slate the recently passed States’ Aid Bill as a “bailout for the teachers’ unions,” Gibbs had had enough. And rightly so.
The allusion to the “Obama is like Bush” meme comes right from the whining mouth of Bill Maher. He’s been preaching that sermon for over a year, even alluding to the President as “Barry,” a name commonly used by the disaffected, old white men of the Teabagging Party, but then, earlier this season in an attempt at satire, Bill donned a Teabagger’s hat, and if it fits …
The Professional Left has done its fair share of deliberately misinforming, spinning and ratcheting up discontent amongst its base and convincing them why they should be disaffected with the President. The plain truth is simply that the base of the Left, as well as the base of the Right, for some reason either doesn’t read or doesn’t read widely enough and can’t for some reason think for themselves enough to form opinion without cravenly depending on people who get paid the corporate penny to spin for the network they serve.
Sometimes they, like the broken clock which is right twice a day, reveal their real intentions, which sometimes seem to be the opposite to the posture they effect:- Bill O’Reilly lets slip he favours a public option in Health Care Reform, Chris Matthews admits racism in admitting that sometimes he forgets Obama is a black man, Bill Maher admits to being in favour of the death penalty, something no real Progressive would admit.
Maybe some of the Professional Left are really Rove’s operatives – this generation of refined ratfuckers. After all, Bill Maher follows Rove on Twitter and Rove follows Bill. Rove and Huffington go way back in association. Last week on his syndicated radio program, in the wake of Gibbs’s outburst, Ed Schultz urged Progressive listeners NOT to vote in the Mid-Terms, to stay home. (Ed, by the way, is an ex-neocon, himself, who once ran for Congress as a Republican, and not too long ago.)
Yet if anyone challenges any devotee of a media opinionator, from Beck to Bill Maher, from Hannity to Olbermann and Schultz, the challenger is meant with a stream of invective as strong as if one had insulted a personal friend, a relative or a loved one. In fact, insulting one of these people is as though you’ve issued a personal affront to the disciple’s own opinion and mindset.
Here is a news flash: The Professional Left is the same as the Professional Right – bought and fully paid-up members of the corporate club, be that club Murdoch, ComCast of TimeWarner. They don’t give a rat’s ass about their devoted fans. Their aim is to generate ratings/clicks etc which generate profits, which mean fatter wallets for them which will accommodate their even fatter wallets. That Arianna Huffington attempts to speak for the middle class whilst her daughters attend debutante balls and hobnob with titled gentry from Europe makes her Progressivism as much of a joke as John Kerry’s multimillion dollar yacht.
What happened last week was simply this: Gibbs got frustrated and gave the Professional Left a dose of its own medicine which it had been hurling at the President for months, and the Professional Left couldn’t take it, after dishing it out. Big Ed Schultz, the biggest mouth and the biggest bully of the lot, even cravenly attempted to convince his regular viewers that this criticism wasn’t about him, really, it was directed at them. (It wasn’t; Gibbs clarified precisely whom he was criticizing). That was crass. Even crasser was his exhortation for the Democratic base NOT to vote – in short, to enable the Republicans to come in and undo every incremental thing upon which real progress and real change could be built. But hey, Big Ed would still have his Bush tax cuts, right?
This whole ordeal, this whole new level of ratfuckery – because that’s what it is – was foreseen by the writer Paddy Chayefsky, in his screenplay Network, a brilliant film made in 1976. It’s worth a watch again these days, because everything alluded to in that film has come to pass, regarding the television industry. And so I leave you, with the prescient words of the film’s hero, the iconic Howard Beale, juxtaposed with some contemporary images which enhance the prescience of a film made 34 years ago:-
Maybe it’s time for those of us who consider ourselves to be Democrat and progressive, to turn off the television, and learn to think for ourselves and to think critically.
Watergate, as much as it was a political coming-of-age for America, coincided with my own personal coming-of-age. The actual break-in occurred just weeks after I’d graduated from high school and the initial furore continued throughout the summer as I prepared to leave for my first year at college. The repercussions, investigations and hearings continued throughout my first two years at college and culminated with Richard Nixon’s resignation, when I was in summer school in Spain in August 1974. I watched his resignation speech on a flickering black-and-white television set in the living room of my host family at 2AM in the morning, European time.
It’s not unusual at all that the current political climate in the US should make me think about the definitive political scandal of the late 20th Century. After all, the media has been looking for another Watergate since the last one was resolved (as much as it could ever be). Every newspaper reporter, every media journalist fancies himself this decade’s Woodward or Bernstein, never mind the fact that they happened upon their golden egg purely by chance. One of Watergate’s many legacies is the intense desire on the part of the media to discover some socio-political scandal latent in every subsequent Administration, and so almost every official in every subsequent Administration has been subjected to the scrutiny, for better or for worse, by the Fourth Estate.
And the Fourth estate has mutated rampantly since the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine under President Reagan.
But the name which keeps popping up in my mind more often than not, lately, isn’t one of the bigger guns from Watergate – not Haldeman or Erlichmann or John Dean – but a lesser-known character called Donald Segretti.
Segretti was a young lawyer, who, during the early 1970s, was engaged by the Committee to Re-elect the President (aptly anagrammed CReeP). He specialised in a particular brand of practical joke, or dirty trick, designed to make the victim look particularly bad. The aim of CReeP wasn’t only to insure that Nixon was elected to a second term; the principal aim was to insure that the Democratic party fielded the weakest candidate possible in 1972, one that would virtually guarantee Nixon a Presidential victory.
Of course, Nixon’s chief political strategists at the time, the late Lee Atwater and Roger Ailes (yep, that Roger Ailes), were busy formulating a tactic which they would call The Southern Strategy – convincing all those Southern Democrats who were less than lukewarm about the idea of Civil Rights, that their natural political party was none other than the GOP, considering the fact that George Wallace’s reincarnation of the Dixiecrats – the American Independence Party – had disbanded after its third party attempt in the 1968 election. But to really secure a second term, Nixon and Co would have to be absolutely certain that the Democratic candidate was loser material.
It was practically a foregone conclusion that the Democratic candidate for 1972 would be Maine Senator and former Vice-Presidential candidate Edmund Muskie. Muskie was impressive as a speaker during the campaign, and the Democrats, rightfully, thought that he would stand a good chance in challenging Nixon. After all, America wouldn’t wash 8 years of Dick Nixon.
Right before the silly season started, North Dakota Senator, George McGovern, a very Leftwing and very progressive politician, announced that he, too, would seek the nomination.
CReeP’s aim was to discredit Muskie to the point that Muskie would drop out of the race. With no other Democrat on the horizon at that point, and the Democratic Party in a weakened state, generally, McGovern would run and lose heavily.
This is where Segretti stepped in. Financed by funds from CReeP – laundered money, really – Segretti did his stuff. Segretti engaged hundreds of young Republican volunteers – mostly college students and recent graduates. Their mission was to imbed themselves in various Democratic offices and campaigns as volunteers, walk the walk and talk the talk of Democrats, get close to staffers and other genuine volunteers, even to the candidates themselves, get the gossip, sow discontent and be subtly, but brilliantly divisive.
The strategy was amazing. Someone managed to steal some sheets of Muskie’s Senate stationery, along with some samples of his handwriting, fished from rubbish bins in his office. The result was two, seemingly original notes, penned by “Muskie” on official notepaper, trashing Canadians in objectionable terms. Someone else started rumours of Muskie’s wife having a drinking problem and mouthing off about another Democratic politician in a lewd way. Mores forged notes emerged, depicting Muskie as speculating about another Democratic Senator, Henry Jackson of Washington, having a lovechild by a 17 year-old girl, and passing hints alluding to Hubert Humphrey’s sexlife as well.
The end result was Muskie, who’d denied all these allegations, giving an impassioned defence of his wife’s honour, so impassioned that he ended up in tears, a fact which, effectively, ended his Presidential aspirations, and paved the way for George McGovern’s nomination.
A few years later, in the course of the Watergate investigations and trials, Donald Segretti’s part in all of this was revealed. Segretti told Bob Woodward that such practices, which he’d perfected to art form, were known to him and his circle as “ratfucking.”
Ratfucking was only in its rudimentary form as developed by Segretti. There was plenty of room for development and improvement.
Oh … and one of the many of those earnest, young Republican volunteers who infiltrated the Democratic party, undercover, for Segretti was a Texas college senior named Karl Rove.
Rove took ratfucking to another level in his work for George Bush. At first, he developed the doctrine of “continuous campaign,” of never allowing the Bush Administration to get comfortable with its success, of operating every day with the aim in mind of securing a second term. 9/11 handed them their modus operandi on a plate: keep the public scared and use fear to keep the usually liberal media on side too. After all, when the country’s under attack, no one wants to be labelled “leftist and unpatriotic” (which had almost come to be synonymous).
Rove’s ultimate aim was an unbroken hegemony of Republican Administrations – something akin to Hitler’s vision of the Fourth Reich lasting 1000 years – which meant that whatever had to be done to secure that aim, was sanctioned. This time the Ratfucker-in-Chief was operating inside the White House and on the public payroll.
When the Republicans lost the White House in 2008, Rove moved to Fox News as a political commentator – a natural move, considering Fox’s CEO was none other than that same Roger Ailes, the Nixon strategist from the years Rove was a lowly ratfucking operative under the tutelage of Donald Segretti.
A couple of months ago, Rove, rather disingenuously announced that he’d had a strategy in place for awhile that would result, not only in delivering substantial gains to the Republican party in this year’s Mid-Terms, but it would also insure that Barack Obama served one term and one term only, that the Republican Party would regain the White House in 2012. Rove admitted that, as he spoke, he’d had “operatives” working the length and breadth of the country for the past couple of years, dedicated to dividing and conquering the Democratic Party and its ambitions.
Empty rhetoric and bragging?
Maybe, but Rove’s never one to brag without substance to his bragging.
Rove, if he knows nothing else, knows the American people. He certainly knows the base of the Right, and he’s probably made it his business to know the base of the Left. He’s also astute enough to capitalise on the similarities between the two, and the basic similarity amongst the two ends of the political spectrum is the overwhelming ailment affecting the American public as a whole – the singular inability to think for oneself and to think critically.
Both ends of the spectrum are television addicts. They read little, comprehend less and live for entertainment and instant gratification. Unable to digest and bored by news bulletins, their information must be delivered with panache and passion – thus, they need to be “infotained.” More than being infotained, they need to hear the opinions voiced of various and sundry paid talking heads on television – people who voice and articulate that which the average person from the extreme end of the Rightwing and the average person from the extreme end of the Leftwing are thinking. If the opinionator is likeable and amusing, he or she will gain not only a fanbase, but a disciple.
And, as television is an illusion, what if the people voicing opinion on the box, are just selling the brand of what their network is supposed to be? What if the opinionators are merely … salesmen?
The lack of critical thinking in all this never ceases to amaze me, as I watch various and sundry opinionators from both the Left and the Right.
That the social-climbing ex-wife of a former Republican Congressman and oilman, a woman who’s never been anything else in her adult life spent in two countries, than the most conservative of conservatives, a woman who led a virulent and strident campaign for Bill Clinton’s impeachment, a woman who taught Andrew Breitbart all the fine points of blatant press hackery (another form of ratfucking), should decide – the day after the 2004 defeat of John Kerry – that the Left needed an internet aggregate to challenge Matt Drudge and could result in being a nice little earner for her, that in the space of 24 hours, Arianna Huffington could go from being a neocon’s neocon (and devotee of Newt Gingrich) to being a fully paid-up Progressive, without ANYONE in the media batting an eyelid, is pure shallowness in and of itself.
I never bought the original Damascene conversion, and I never bought this one, especially not during the 2008 campaign season when Huffington’s attacks on Hillary Clinton became increasingly nasty and personal.
The only thing I do know is that, of all the Presidents I remember, and I remember a lot, this President is the only one whom I’ve known to be criticized, second-guessed, ridiculed, name-called and parsed by the Rightwing media and equally so, by the media on the Left, the so-called “Professional Left.”
It’s important to remember that the Professional Left is, more than likely, on the payroll of the Corporate Right, who are also bosom buddies with Rove, who writes for their bible, the Wall Street Journal.
When the Shirley Sherrod incident saw light, not only Fox, but also MSNBC, ran with the story that Breitbart propagated that very first day. It took CNN and The Atlanta Journal Constitution to get the real facts out and amongst the people. Fox then, promptly, apologised. MSNBC pulled all evidence of their hysteria from their website. No one … no one blamed Breitbart in this. He got scant mention; the emphasis was all on the Administration’s preciptous reaction. It was all how quick to jump the gun Tom Vilsack (and by extension, the President) had been, how weak the Administration was, how frightened of Fox News they were perceived to bel. Ed Schultz, in his usual bullying way, intimated that this Administration were pussies. Later, during his appearance at the Netroots convention, big Ed let slip that the real reason he was throwing a strop was because the President wouldn’t appear on his hour-long MSNBC program to be shouted at and hectored; instead, he preferred to be interviewed and interrupted by Bret Baier of Fox News.
At the end of the day, the Rightwing media treats this President like an escaped slave who needs lynching, and the so-called Professional Left treat him like the natural child of a token Affirmative Action appointment and Prissy from Gone With the Wind.
And either way, that boils down to one, singular, unmentionable thing.
When Robert Gibbs vented his frustration in that infamous interview last week, it came on the heels of having watched Dylan Ratigan, another sudden convert from corporatism to Progressivism and a thug who pretends to be a journalist, slate the recently passed States’ Aid Bill as a “bailout for the teachers’ unions,” Gibbs had had enough. And rightly so.
The allusion to the “Obama is like Bush” meme comes right from the whining mouth of Bill Maher. He’s been preaching that sermon for over a year, even alluding to the President as “Barry,” a name commonly used by the disaffected, old white men of the Teabagging Party, but then, earlier this season in an attempt at satire, Bill donned a Teabagger’s hat, and if it fits …
The Professional Left has done its fair share of deliberately misinforming, spinning and ratcheting up discontent amongst its base and convincing them why they should be disaffected with the President. The plain truth is simply that the base of the Left, as well as the base of the Right, for some reason either doesn’t read or doesn’t read widely enough and can’t for some reason think for themselves enough to form opinion without cravenly depending on people who get paid the corporate penny to spin for the network they serve.
Sometimes they, like the broken clock which is right twice a day, reveal their real intentions, which sometimes seem to be the opposite to the posture they effect:- Bill O’Reilly lets slip he favours a public option in Health Care Reform, Chris Matthews admits racism in admitting that sometimes he forgets Obama is a black man, Bill Maher admits to being in favour of the death penalty, something no real Progressive would admit.
Maybe some of the Professional Left are really Rove’s operatives – this generation of refined ratfuckers. After all, Bill Maher follows Rove on Twitter and Rove follows Bill. Rove and Huffington go way back in association. Last week on his syndicated radio program, in the wake of Gibbs’s outburst, Ed Schultz urged Progressive listeners NOT to vote in the Mid-Terms, to stay home. (Ed, by the way, is an ex-neocon, himself, who once ran for Congress as a Republican, and not too long ago.)
Yet if anyone challenges any devotee of a media opinionator, from Beck to Bill Maher, from Hannity to Olbermann and Schultz, the challenger is meant with a stream of invective as strong as if one had insulted a personal friend, a relative or a loved one. In fact, insulting one of these people is as though you’ve issued a personal affront to the disciple’s own opinion and mindset.
Here is a news flash: The Professional Left is the same as the Professional Right – bought and fully paid-up members of the corporate club, be that club Murdoch, ComCast of TimeWarner. They don’t give a rat’s ass about their devoted fans. Their aim is to generate ratings/clicks etc which generate profits, which mean fatter wallets for them which will accommodate their even fatter wallets. That Arianna Huffington attempts to speak for the middle class whilst her daughters attend debutante balls and hobnob with titled gentry from Europe makes her Progressivism as much of a joke as John Kerry’s multimillion dollar yacht.
What happened last week was simply this: Gibbs got frustrated and gave the Professional Left a dose of its own medicine which it had been hurling at the President for months, and the Professional Left couldn’t take it, after dishing it out. Big Ed Schultz, the biggest mouth and the biggest bully of the lot, even cravenly attempted to convince his regular viewers that this criticism wasn’t about him, really, it was directed at them. (It wasn’t; Gibbs clarified precisely whom he was criticizing). That was crass. Even crasser was his exhortation for the Democratic base NOT to vote – in short, to enable the Republicans to come in and undo every incremental thing upon which real progress and real change could be built. But hey, Big Ed would still have his Bush tax cuts, right?
This whole ordeal, this whole new level of ratfuckery – because that’s what it is – was foreseen by the writer Paddy Chayefsky, in his screenplay Network, a brilliant film made in 1976. It’s worth a watch again these days, because everything alluded to in that film has come to pass, regarding the television industry. And so I leave you, with the prescient words of the film’s hero, the iconic Howard Beale, juxtaposed with some contemporary images which enhance the prescience of a film made 34 years ago:-
Maybe it’s time for those of us who consider ourselves to be Democrat and progressive, to turn off the television, and learn to think for ourselves and to think critically.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)