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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Friday, September 12, 2008

Actually, They Really MAY Be Mad 

...at the Mahablog earlier today, Maha noted the stunning sight of Howie Kurtz of the Washington Post, usually a reliable fellow traveler to all things winger actually spending almost all of a column talking about how the MSM seems to be tiring of its role as John McCain's adoring lap dog. That they would be suddenly less entranced by all that powerful 'Right Stuff' maverickyness and supremely elegant cool - not to mention the Sedona barbeques - in the face of the disturbingly filthy campaign that Huggy Bear has decided to run shouldn't be all that surprising; the objection to the free pass that he has been given by big names in the allegedly liberal side of the punditocracy has been piling up objections from the DFH left like the storm surge pounding the Gulf Coast as I write this...

One of the real complaints directed toward the MSM has been aimed at the straight-up news side of the enterprise, primarily because of its general refusal to include the straight-up news that many of the McCain campaign ad's and assertions and expressions of outrage have been at best factually challenged. As Howie notes in the column to which Maha linked, there even seems to be a strange unstable shifting of the ground there, too. This article by Beth Fouhy of AP actually performs the sort of journalistic service that a democratic society should have always expected out of the fourth estate, but hasn't seen since the fading post-Watergate sunset that cast it's last glimmering light over the wrecked landscape of journalistic integrity in the late 1970's...

It's still a long way to the finish line and there are miles of sewage and offal to wade through before we get there, if the last few weeks of offerings by Huggy Bear's campaign are any judge. There is, however, a subtle shift in the tone of reportage and commentary about the campaign that is starting to be seen, despite the gene-deep reflexive charges by the ol' Maverick's campaign that it was being attacked by the So-Called Liberal Media (all by itself a pretty good way to self-invite the press off the Strange Talk Express). It may be impossibly bold to make such an assertion given the craven obsequiousness that the MSM has displayed in the face of Republican power over the last decade or more, but it could just be that the media has finally grown tired of being Huggy Bear's lap dog and has decided that tolerating and covering up the abuse and the lying by the McCain campaign just isn't worth the occasional barbeque...
Posted by: Jack K. / 6:43 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Headlines That Crack Me Up 

...today has simply chewed me up and split me out, and I don't - even more so than usual - have anything original to say. The headline to this story, though, made me laugh out loud:
Obama: McCain-Palin change mantra is 'lipstick on a pig'

There has been a lot of what could best be described as hand-wringing about whether Obama is fighting back hard enough and whether he is going to get swift-boated by the same sort of half-bright hacks who have infected the White House for the last nearly eight years. Whether is giving as good as he is getting isn't the issue; it's whether the structural foundation of what has become the Main Stream Media is capable of understanding and reliably reporting on what a Democrat fighting back looks like. A lot of evidence indicates that the MSM isn't capable of either of those things, for a host of reasons that anyone who has been paying attention already understands (and those who haven't won't ever get it in any case, so in my burned-out turned-off tuned-out state tonight I wonder why the hell anyone would bother with them in any case)...

But there it is; the abdication of the MSM's role as The Fourth Estate is a reality that is hard to come to terms with when you always had a perhaps naive hope that the Better Angels would somehow win out someday when even it's most craven members understood that the deal had gone so horribly bad. There are many bridges left to burn and whole schools of fish left to fry before this whole deal goes down on 11/4, but the thematic trend that much of the MSM is offering after the end of the RNC suggests the coming of a day that future generations may look back on with the sort of grim reverence that many Americans now associate with 9/11 as one of those benchmark moments where it all went wrong...

OK, so I'm in a foul mood and tomorrow isn't going to be any better , so I'll quit now...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:44 PM 0 comments

Monday, September 08, 2008

The Possible End Of An Era (A Certified Palin-Free© Post) 

...for just shy of half a century, the humble, overshadowed city of Vancouver USA (WA) - just across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon, has staged a truly impressive Fourth of July fireworks celebration. It has over the years billed itself as the biggest fireworks display west of the Missippippi; while I am not sufficiently well-traveled to address this claim one way or another, the fact remains that - during the decade during which I lived in the greater Portland/Vancouver Metropolitan Area - it was a truly spectacular show that ran for the better part of an hour and attracted tens of thousands of spectators on both sides of the river...

The fireworks display has been staged at or offshore near the Fort Vancouver National Historic Site, a place whose history dates back to the earliest days of the European invasion of the Pacific Northwest. After all these years, though, the Fort Vancouver fireworks display may fall prey to the same economic turmoil thas is roiling the rest of our lives; last week the Vancouver National Historic Reserve Trust, which runs the show these days, informed the City of Vancouver that it may not be able to raise the funds necessary to put on the show again next year...

I haven't been to the Fort Vancouver Fourth celebration for twenty years, but it does have a certain fond place in my heart from those long-lost days when I and my friends were young giants striding heroically across a devastated volcanic landscape by day and engaging in all sorts of behaviors and...er...social interactions that we probably won't EVER tell our children about by night. It's sad, in a remote "loss of youthful memories" fashion, to think that this Fort Vancouver fireworks show might be no more. The possible demise of this event speaks volumes about the dire economic circumstances in which we find ourselves these days, because it has persisted through a host of disparate good and bad economic times for 45 years. It just might be that the bad times that some people understand we are in these days are worse than some other people understand. Regardless of all that, the possible end of the Fort Vancouver fireworks show would certainly herald the end of an era...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:33 PM 0 comments

Sunday, September 07, 2008

Things Change. Things Remain The Same. 

...I didn't see the original, live airing of today's Meet the Press, since I choose every Sunday to engage in group behaviors that many progressives consider to be simple-minded superstitious tribal spiritual rituals, but I did see a replay this afternoon. What I learned in today's interview of Joe Biden by Tom Brokaw is that, while Tim Russert may be gone, his legacy of performing hatchet jobs on Democrats while generally coddling Republicans seems at least half way toward being fully redeemed. It also demonstrates that 'Seldom-Seen Elder Pundit-World Statesman" was a legacy that Brokaw should have stuck with...

The rebroadcast is here (watch it on the computer of someone you don't like all that much; no reason to hurl your own stuff out the window)...

The transcript is here (the above suggestion applies in this case, too)...

The interview was a tour de force of fully explored Republican opposition research themes, from Teh Success Of Teh Surge (bottom of the page) through who his Yale-graduate son has the right to work for in the state in which that son grew up (and what salary is appropriate salary for a Yale-graduated lawyer, and whether campaign donations to dear ol' dad by that company are appropriate - again at the bottom of the page) to that old favorite standby about 'how DARE' a Roman Catholic support a woman's right to make her own reproductive choices (middle of the page this time)...

While I think that Biden provided forceful replies to the bizarre array of questions - despite a somewhat stammering speaking style that is pretty standard for him in these sorts of settings but that will probably be played up the punditocracy that feels more comfortable with the idea of their old perceived 'friend' Huggy Bear in the White House - the fact remains that this was an easily understandable warning shot that has been sent across the Democrats' bow. There has been an almost gleeful hand-clapping by the MSM about their own polls "showing" that a Republican presidential ticket that has set new standards in the area of being "Before It Before They Were Against It" has pulled even with Obama/Biden. What passes for the modern devolution of journalism hungers for the blood-scent of conflict for its own sake, divorced from any particular framing of that conflict's actual impact on the lives of all the rest of us. That modern devolution is anchored to the self-fulfilled idea that Republicans are tough and hard-nosed while Democrats are soft and vacillating, and said devolution will do whatever necessary to maintain that meme...

Later this week, ABC's Charles Gibson will have what is likely to be a glowing and oh-so-respectful interview with Sarah Palin in her first actual real-live exposure to the MSM. If Gibson knuckles under to the McCain campaign and offers no aggressive questions addressing her claims about the 'Bridge to Nowhere' or her cuts to services for special needs children or her views on climate change or her well-established taste for the sort of Congressional earmarks - both as mayor and governor - that her suddenly diminished running mate so abhors, we will then be able to understand the road map that has been planned for the journey we all innocently thought we were willingly and willfully taking down the path toward the next presidency...

Today's performance on Meet The Press lacked only Joe Biden grabbing Brokaw's turkey-wattled neck in his own two hands to make it a true episode of "Must-See TV". That won't ever happen, though, because regardless of how some things may change, so many other things remain the same...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:26 PM 0 comments

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