driftglass: The Roar of the Grease Fire

Friday, October 11, 2013

The Roar of the Grease Fire – The Smell of the Crowd

Ted Cruz: "The Democrats are feeling the heat!" And if we keep setting ourselves on fire, they'll feel even more heat!
— Michael Grunwald (@MikeGrunwald) October 11, 2013

The 27%, Redux: Part Two

Now that the drowning GOP has once again attempted to save itself by grabbing the Biggest Anchor Available, I'm enjoying a little schadenfreude with my coffee, remembering the last time the Batshit Centrifuge was spun up to 11 and some non-trivial portion of the media briefly noticed that, hey, once you scrub off their thin veneer of David Brooksian respectability greasepaint, these guys are actually crazy!*

From May, 2007:

The 27% Problem.

Part Two of Three.

While the lies and half-truths provide some kind of parasitic sustenance for the half-wits that prop up this President [George W. Bush, now lost to living memory], his War and his Party, this firehose of unabashed McCarthyesque propaganda has also flattened most of “legitimate journalism”

No wonder they have always been so baffling, smugly at ease supporting a President who lied the nation into war and disaster: This is a Party that always, always, always fixes the facts around its bigotries.

Because no one with a Big Voice will challenge them. No one with Big Ink will push back on them even slightly.

These droolers are allowed to decide deep in the reptilian pylons of its Unitary brain who it will hate, who it will fear, who it will scapegoat and to which Dear Leader it will swear its eternal fucktard fealty unchallanged by the press. And then cherry-pick history, philosophy and the Bible for snips and sentence fragments that support its deranged ideology. Romp across the headlines for seven years, screeching for Bill Clinton’s blood like macaques going through heroin withdrawal, because no one in the MSM will make it their business to report on this as a story.

This Party of God who fall alternately and obediently into cheering ranks and leaden, smirking silence as their Dear Leader runs through everything of value in this nation like a junkie going through a fistful of stolen credit cards, and not a single soul in all of Punditville has balls hairy enough to stand up and say: “These people are what is wrong with America”.

It is as if a nuclear reactor were melting down in the apse of the National Cathedral and the press corps had decided to take a collective pass on it and focus on the pretty cherry blossoms.

For, y’know, “balance”.

And in doing so, willfully abandon the work of reporting on the most important story of our generation to latter day pamphleteers. To bloggers, who bang away at the perimeter of this vast and tragic darkness with little more than a handful of thoughtful readers, a second cuppa coffee and some occasionally pungent language.

Instead of journalism, we get Captain Obvious …

Op-Ed Columnist

The Hail Mary Pass

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

On Thursday there will be a regional conference in Egypt to discuss stabilizing Iraq, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will represent the U.S. President Bush should go instead and give this speech:

I want to take this opportunity to speak to the Arab and Muslim nations gathered here today and to the world at large. I begin with a simple message: I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I rushed into the invasion of Iraq. I honestly believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. I was wrong, and I now realize that in unilaterally launching the war the way I did, you all feel that I breached a bond of trust between America and the world. Not only did that alienate you from us, it made us less effective in Iraq. We had too few allies and too little legitimacy. I apologize — sincerely.

I’m most sorry, though, because my bungling of the war has prompted all of us to take our eye off the ball. I messed up the treatment so badly that people have forgotten the patient really does have a disease. Now that I’ve apologized, I hope you will stop fixating on me and look closely at what is happening in your backyard: the forces and pathologies that brought us 9/11 are still there and multiplying.
…
If a writing student turned this in I’d give him or her a “D”. If they were fragile I’d bolster that with something nice about their use of punctuation, but the “D” would stand because it is such a grand example of irrelevant, lazy, incompetent “If I Wuz Preznit” twaddling.

And yet Captain Obvious has made a fucking career out of this.

This little man who just ain’t that bright and yet for reasons that passeth all understanding bestrides the Opineoverse like Zeus. This little man yipping out stupid, trifling advice to people who will never listen.

Who keeps acting as though those in power are some how merely missing his Vital Messages. As if they are actually reachable by reason and can coaxed away from their funky habits by his piffling banter. Who still refuses to face the reality that these are beasts who must be pried from the throat of Democracy with a crowbar, and that he has aided and abetted their crimes for years.

(And like the waxwork consultant who comes perking into your workspace, listens absently to whatever it is the worker bees have been saying for years, drafts it up in zoomy font and lovely graphics, presents it to upper management as a startling work of rare genius and then walks out with a wheelbarrow full of cashy money, the honest question first and foremeost on the mind of the working writer has to be “How in the Hell do I snag a gig like that?”)
Instead of journalism, we get trivial, creative typing at its worst.

In the recent edition of "Wired", Supreme Commander Markos takes this on directly:

…
David: So, why is it that sites are granted more--oh, I don't know--freedom, less assumption of responsibility, so that they are able to run a wider range of opinion than the equivalent in a mainstream medium that has op-eds, but feels it has to maintain tighter control and is held more accountable for that narrower range of opinion?

Markos: I would dispute that. Accountability is completely nonexistent from punditry in traditional media. Otherwise, you wouldn't have these people that were so wrong about the war in Iraq still writing about the war in Iraq. To me, it's mind numbingly crazy that people like Tom Friedman can still sit there and be taken credibly writing about Iraq or any other issue, when they've been proven so, so wrong.

So, I don't think there is accountability. I think they can escape that because they have this official, establishment imprimatur that says they're respectable and serious, and thus have to be taken seriously no matter what stupid insanity that they spout. Now a site like Daily Kos, on the other hand, had we been wrong about the war in Iraq, you'd never hear the end it. It would have been: "How can you take these crazies seriously when, look, Iraq was a huge success, and they warned us about what a disaster it was going to be?"
…
End Part Two