I'm With Pierce, Vol. MMMCMLVII

ITEM One:

But, for the moment, and from a distance, I will tell you what this looks as much to me as it does to anything else.

It looks like Columbine.

That portion of the morning I didn't spend vacuuming water in my basement was spent open-mouthed, watching Charley "Journamalism" Rose attempt, repeatedly, to get the message across to a skeptical nation that the two Boston bombing suspects were foreigners. Which, of course, leads to the inescapable conclusion that the bombing was part of a global anti-American terror campaign.

Further proof, where none was actually needed, was the incredible military precision of the attacks, the execution of MIT security officer Sean Collier, and the running gun battle with police, all indicative of some no doubt foreign training.

Except for, y'know, the fact that they were caught on every security camera in the Back Bay, were still in Boston three days later, made a break for it once their pictures were plastered all over creation, and tried to rob a 7-11 and/or an ATM for some getaway cash. I believe we can rule out any Mossad connections at this point.

For relief I switched over to NBC, and counted how many times Richard Engle could say "possible al-Qaeda affiliate" in sixty seconds.

ITEM Two:

I'd like to point out that, given the performance of cable teevee news this week, I'd like an offer of proof about that guy's really being their uncle.

A-fucking-men. Everytime these guys go wall-to-wall I hope to find some evidence of a slight improvement. Some tiny flicker of evidence that they've tried to learn from what is charitably described as past mistakes. Some small sense that, when everyone's covering the same story, a "scoop" is much less important than accuracy. Maybe a hint that national reporters have learned the difference between being arrested and being taken into custody.

And, y'know, not only am I disappointed every single time. It fucking just gets worse. Television news is the mutant rainforest amphibian of our national dialogue.

Tales Of Newsroom Diversity

ACTUAL quote from actual human being Lisa Green concerning two convictions for rape where charges, let alone convictions, might not have obtained but for the posting of cellphone images:

But y'know in the end, a cautionary tale for teenagers and their parents: memorializing your every move and then sharing it with people on the web can be a tragic mistake for everyone involved."

"A reminder tonight for parents and sexually-active teenagers: condoms do more than just protect against unwanted pregnancy." 

"But y'know in the end, a cautionary tale about choosing a study limb before tying someone to it."

"It can't be stressed enough: the modern garbage disposal is not powerful enough for human remains."

Hey, maybe we could get the two perps to make a PSA! "Don't rape. But if you do rape, don't spread pictures all around your school. I learned my lesson the hard way."

Jeez Louise, this follows CNN's Candy Crowley, Fredricka Whitfield, and Poppy Harlow all expressing sorrow at the damage to two promising football careers. Crowley:

You know, Paul, a 16-year-old now just sobbing in court, regardless of what big football players they are, still sound like 16 year olds. The other one, 17. A 16-year-old victim. 

The thing is, when you listen to it and you realize that they could stay until they're 21, they are going to get credit for time served. What's the lasting effect, though, on two young men being found guilty in juvenile court of rape, essentially?

Rape essentially. Not really rape. But rapey-ness. 

Oh, I'm sure none of them was condoning rape! Just explain to me how those words come out of someone's mouth. Green had hours to prepare for a one-minute segment supposedly discussing the "social media" angle, because that sorta thing is big with the coveted 18-25 demo. In fairness, much of that time must have gone into figuring how to avoid any suggestion that charges might not've been brought at all if it weren't for outside agitation; in the end they just had Lester announce it.

While we're at it: CNN repeatedly referred to the victim as "drunk" or "drunken", rather than the more accurate "out cold." The defense of Steubenville LE has conveniently omitted its complete disinterest in the illegal use, procurement, or provision of alcoholic beverages, as well as a goddam crowd's disinterest in the girl's parlous physical condition; threatened prosecution of either might have loosened some tongues. I was also amused by the recurring theme that Steubenville's "tough economic times" encouraged people to rally 'round the hopeful symbol of high school football. Y'know, they're riding out the downturn pretty well in Carmel, Indiana, which didn't seem to stop them from treating forceable sodomy by object on a basketball team bus as just a right of passage, and no one else's bidness. Essentially.

News In A Nutshell. Appropriately.

SO this morning, before I could hit the Off button, I heard Matt Lauer--or somebody; they all look alike--asking whether the Secret Service scandal would affect the Columbian summit.

"You mean the one you wouldn't have bothered covering beyond two lines and video of a wave from Air Force One otherwise?" I asked.

Why Everything Sucks, Vol. CDXXI

John Dickerson, "The Deepest Darkest Fantasies of Democrats and Republicans: Both parties are using the contraception debate to paint the other side as scary radicals. In others words, politics as usual." February 17

David Weigel, "A Kinder, Gentler Rick Santorum: Now that the man in the vest is surging in the polls, he’s toning down his talk on homosexuality, gay marriage, and abortion. Meet Santorum 2.0. " February 17

LEAVE us return, at least momentarily, to a recurring theme: Suckiness is a product of the 70s, a fact which is evidently lost on the 1.75 generations of adult Americans who didn't really live through them, or who only recall them through the unquenchable thirst for Oompa Loompa references.

Look, I'd never be so cavalier as to blame 70s Suck on people who had nothing to do with it. It's what we might call the Sha Na Na Effect, which every generation must confront anew: what seems like a hoot when you're a Columbia undergrad will pall long before it finds itself seated between the Landers sisters and Lee Horsley on The New Hollywood Squares. The march is inevitable, and the modern era has only made it worse. Still, the Reader is reminded--or perhaps informed for the first time--that the fact that he can automatically perform the break when he reads the words "Bohemian Rhapsody" is entirely due to some fucker who thought it would be funny to bring it back.

As I've mentioned here before, it took just two men to wreck the German Mark in the 1920s, and it took just two men--Gene Roddenberry and Roone Arledge--to sink American postwar culture. (Yes, Star Trek was a product of the Sixties--where it fucking bombed--but its popularity as a cultural touchstone for people who missed the televised morality lessons of the half-hour "Western", and wished they could somehow be updated for the Punch-Card Age, dates to its revival on the rerun circuit in, yes, the Decade of Disco.

The Seventies--the decade when America ran screaming from the previous fifteen years of social progress and personal freedom--were the breeding ground for the self-absorbed, libertarian-valueless, facile anti-intellectualism we're mired in today. The 70s gave us the Instantaneous Rewrite of Vietnam to Assuage Our Hurt Self-Image, introducing us, in the process, to the Spat-upon Returning War Veteran and Old Glory as a simplistic political press-on statement, to Reverse Discrimination, Allan Bakke, and the But We Solved Racism in the Sixties argument, and the Tax Revolt, that spiffy updating of anti-fluoridationism. The 70s replaced the gentle, agrarian and communal joys of marihuana with the secretive, exclusive, and criminal joys of cocaine. The 70s gave us Yuppies, gave American Food pretensions it never earned, and granted Camille Paglia a Ph.D.

If Ronald Reagan was the horrible, untested, human-paraquat enema America tried as a cure for its Sixties hangover, the 70s were the unspeakable rash that drove it to quack medicine in the first place.

Oh, and, a generation-and-a-half which imagines that this is how Journalism sounds:

We know that this election will be about taxes, the size of government, and America's place in the world. We know there will be energy, education, and defense policy speeches. We see all of that coming in slow steady steps. But what quickens the pace of presidential campaigns and sends it into crazy corners is the secret reveal: the moment where one candidate or party slips and gives us a window into their entire world-view. With the contraception debate, both parties are exposed.

Yeah, Heaven forfend that arguments about taxes, or America's place in the world tell us anything about a party's worldview. Since that might require our army of faux-balancers to comment on something serious, and dull.

I'm sorry, did I say serious? I retract. Contraception and reproductive rights are as serious as anything; the fight over the Republican desire that the wealthy pay no taxes is temporary mud-slinging by comparison. The reason the punditocracy can treat it as small potatoes is the reason behind so much "news" coverage: it doesn't matter to the average reporter, who is in no danger of becoming a single mother, and who believes the Republican party is really only there to cut his personal taxes. (Compare the price of gasoline; a significant rise--the result of typical market forces the "news" celebrates as a perfect system run by perfect men--is treated as a personal affront to all Americans. My goddam local news treats air travel inconveniences more seriously than contraception. And gives it more airtime. )

That's before we get to the faux-balance shit:

For Republicans, the original Obama contraception policy—which required Catholic hospitals to cover their employees who used it—is an example of what they've been complaining about all along. The White House will pass policies in the dead of night that infringe on your most sacred beliefs. They were caught this time, but there are hundreds of other secret offenses in the works, plots yet to hatch that will trample on our rights as citizens. You don't need to think that Barack Obama is evil to worry about these plots. He thinks he's actually trying to "help." As Sen. Scott Brown put it, "Basically the government is saying, 'Just do what you're told, and leave the moral questions to us.' "

is equated to:

The Democratic mind has even more kindling to fire the imagination. This week House Republicans held a hearing on contraception but invited no women to testify. Foster Freiss, Rick Santorum's key financial backer, joked that women used to prevent pregnancy by putting an aspirin between their knees. Santorum has promised that as president he will use the bully pulpit to speak out against sex for purposes other than procreation. "One of the things I will talk about that no president has talked about before is … the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea ...[Contraception’s] not OK, because it’s a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be." In response, Democratic Sen. Patty Murray wrote in a fundraising appeal: "I feel like I woke up this morning on the set of Mad Men. ... Republicans have set their time machine for the 1950s."

So, in whose world is the opposition claim of a Republican War on Contraception equal to the opposition claim that Democrats are trying to outlaw religion in the dead of night?

I dunno. Faux-contrarian-libertarian-leaning reporters who Got Theirs, Jack? "Moderate" faux-contrarian-libertarian-leaning Republicans who really wish the Base would turn out to vote, then shut up for 700 days or so and quit embarrassing them? It's okay, so long as we can claim that people are only saying shit to get elected?

Whoever paints the darker fantasy has the political advantage.

I'm sorry, Mr. Dickerson, but you were alive and sentient through the last decade, right?

The wax gets softer the hotter the politics. An independent voter—who wants to see progress and not ideological fights—can easily imagine that a future President Romney would compromise at the first sign of controversy.

As opposed to "cave to the extreme Right, which he's been doing since 2007"?

Tell me, John: what does "compromise" on contraception look like?

That is not true of Rick Santorum. He is far more likely to stick to policies that match his socially conservative views. That is the liberal caricature—but also the fervent belief of Santorum’s own supporters.

Wait, Rick Santorum's social conservatism is a liberal caricature?

Santorum's views on social issues are not the sum total of the Santorum campaign. As Dave Weigel points out, Santorum is working hard to show he has appeal beyond the social issues.

Well, loc. cit., as we say in the footnote game:

The Rick Santorum who’s soaring in primary polls looks a lot like the Santorum who lost his 2006 re-election bid by 18 points. Here is a difference: His culture war talk is softer, more implied. He talks up his welfare reform role and his doom-saying about Iran far more than he talks up his stances on homosexuality or Prop 8. He doesn’t need to emphasize it, because the people who acid-test Republicans on social issues know they can trust him. He rallied for Terri Schiavo once; he doesn’t have much else to prove.

So the Rick Santorum who finds himself, by default, the standard-bearer for Really Lunatic Religious Republicanism--simply because the Possibly Even Bigger Lunatics got run out of town--the Rick Santorum who couldn't get any traction with Republican lunatic voters so long as there was a Rick Perry or Herman Cain in the race, that Rick Santorum is now trying to de-emphasize his religious lunacy? Trying to change the subject when Mr. Foster Freeze makes a bad joke, where the old Rick Santorum would have read it into the Congressional Record?

So President Santorum wouldn't just be the Anti-Contraception President? He'd also bomb Iran and require people on welfare to abstain from sex? He's got serious policy proposals, in other words? Well, let's see the liberals try to caricature that.

Funny Pages

ITEM: Bring Back Bill Clinton to stop Newt Gingrich! says guy in newspaper which sluiced Ken Starr's flaccid and leaky member and batted 1.000 while doing so. If by "batted a thousand" you mean "whiffed on everything, but gave Congressional Republicans enough cover to keep the investigation going 36 months longer than it should have, legally."

By the way, I love how the same Press which has faux-balanced every crackpot Republican scheme for the last forty years into One Side of the Coin gets all nervous an' shit when Republican figures "reveal" themselves as babbling anchorites.

ITEM: Speaking of which, the race to be the next Dean Broder continues unabated; Dan Balz explores the subtle nuances between the Official Beltway Script

In some respects, the contest between Romney and Gingrich falls into a familiar construct of Establishment vs. Insurgents, and yet neither candidate is the ideal to play his assigned role

and the grudging sort-of facts (Romney is an Establishment figure, but a moderate; Gingrich is a loon; The "Insurgents" are, in point of fact, the actual Republican party minus its rich-guy corporate wing) which is the fiery forge where Beltway Vulcans temper the Conventional Wisdom and pronounce it Indestructible.

ITEM: Meanwhile, loc. cit., let's allow Catholic organizations to claim religious exemptions, provided they choose to make a stink about it. Meaning, of course, Conception in all its various pathologies; they'll still be withhold employee taxes aimed at enriching the Rich, frequently executing the frequently Poor, and the ongoing $ trillion/year plowshare-sword conversion operation.

The reader's, if not the Post's editorial staff's, attention is directed towards the state of Utah, and its banning of polygamy just in time for Statehood, or the strictures placed on the Native American church.

Okay, it's been a rough few decades for Catholicism, especially its Likudnik USA faction. By the way, it's interesting to note how closely the Papacy parallels US post-war politics. You've got the Don't Ask Questions about Franco, Dr. von Braun Is On Line One, era, during which (previous) Fascist sympathies were judged as slightly less abhorrent than Communism. Followed by the miraculous appearance of Mr. Charisma, who turned out to be something of a Pink, followed by Nixon, followed by Reagan, followed, now, by Dick Cheney. The Catholic church has spoken very clearly about the enormity of contraception, wanton killer of theoretical souls, vs. the in-house PR difficulty presented by an ecclesiastical hierarchy with the collective morals of a troop of baboons. I'd like to think it's time now to use your Vow of Silence voice. Reproductive freedom is every American's Constitutional right. I know you don't like it. If you feel aggrieved about your tax money being appropriated for things you don't approve of, kindly find your place in line with the rest of us taxpayers.

ITEM: If you union teachers would give up your unreasonable demands to belong to a union we'll get this education reform nonsense dreamt up by your sworn enemies in high gear.

Y'know, far be it from me to point out that D.C. fucking schools are the ones which were reformed by the brilliant Michelle Rhee, before she took her snake oil wagon off in search of greener pastures. When's the evidence start pouring in about the unmistakeable benefits of giving each and every child a wonderful, caring, nurturing teacher who'll be here any minute, just as soon as that Right to Work thing is settled?

Okay. I don't care. Same fucking bullshit, same disastrous results for poor students, same pocket-lining opportunities for the next Neil Bush. Really, I just wanted to add this:

In recent remarks commemorating the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. Cuomo spoke of his increasing intolerance for a school system that regularly fails so many of its students. “Our schools are not an employment program,” he said, according to a report in the New York Times.

Right. They're an employment training program. For imaginary jobs. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by how well they did on some one-shot, high-pressure math questions in third grade!

I have a dream today. But, dammit, I keep waking up.

Har Har Har

John Dickerson, "The Great Republican Humor Crisis of 2012: Why is this crop of presidential candidates so incredibly unfunny?" January 8

Ouch.
-St. Stephen, noted first century ad-libber

TEST your psychic abilities! Here's the fourth line from the third paragraph of Dickerson's piece:

Great presidents who faced trying times were known for their humor.

See if you can guess divine the subject of the seventh and last line. If you come up with the quote into the bargain you're Psychic Hotline material.

Did you guess intuit "Ronald Reagan" and "Mommy, I forgot to duck," after he was shot? Ooooh, so close. It was Reagan and "I hope you're all Republicans," to his doctors after he was shot.

I don't think the Press cares for that Mommy stuff. Because the Press has no sense of humor about itself.

Okay, so it's usually reported as Honey. Maybe he called Nancy something different in public (even with a couple of slugs in him) than he did in private. Either way, that one's a funnier line than the doctor quip, which I'm guessing he may have used in some form or another a few hundred times.

Don't get me wrong; just because I think Ronald Reagan was more caustic substance than caustic wit it doesn't mean I object to anyone characterizing him as funny. Sure, I wasn't amused, and I think there's a real debate to be had over whether Reagan was genuinely funny or just a trained seal It's the fact that once I saw the sign which read "Presidential Humor Litany Next 3 mi." I fucking knew, not only that Reagan would be on the list, but that he'd bring up the rear, like movie credits where a half-day's work by De Niro or Brando netted him the screen-filling "and So-and-So" slot at the end of the actors' scroll.

Because, say you're John Dickerson, and you're writing a piece focusing on the humor deficiencies, as opposed to the charm deficiencies, the intellectual deficiencies, or the complete absence of personal honor among the current crop of Republican Presidential hopefuls. Say you need to fill up a few column inches with historical comparisons. Okay, you have two Presidents who were paragons of wit and humor: Lincoln and FDR. You have one who was funny enough to've been a standup if he hadn't been born six or seven decades too early; dollars to doughnuts says "Silent Cal" would be on NBC's lineup these days.

But if you use Coolidge you're up to three, and you haven't named any Presidents much of the Slate readership will be familiar with. (There's not much else; Grant once remarked that he knew only two songs, that one was "Yankee Doodle" and the other wasn't. But we aren't writing an anthology here. I understand John Tyler did a withering impression of Henry Clay once he was on his third sherry, and there was something funny about James Buchanan, but that's it; the modern Slate writer has got to go modern.)

George W. Bush was funny, in the same way that setting plastic Army men ablaze with a magnifying glass or obliterating prairie dogs with high-powered rifles are, but reminding your fellow Slatesters how they lined up behind that bozo in Aught One probably gets your tray tipped in the employee cafeteria.

Besides, imagine writing a piece these days on Presidential humor and leaving out Reagan. It would be like naming The 100 Greatest Rock Guitarists and leaving out Eddie Van Halen. How much email do you want to have to answer, anyway?

So the obvious solution is to include Reagan, and put him at the end, following Kennedy. The cultured Brahmin and the trained performer. And the twin fonts of horrible Oval Office decisions of the last half-century.

The point is that whether you've actually mistaken John McCain's "Chelsea Clinton, the White House dog" jocularity for wit, or are just dong the standard Beltway insider genuflection toward the Reagan Ranch, you're going to miss the obvious answer to your question. Why are the current crop of Republican Presidential hopefuls (not to mention the rest of the party) so unfunny?

Because while a blind pig can find a joke as easy as an acorn, real humor requires honesty.

And not personal honesty, necessarily; honesty of purpose. The only way most of those guys could have a standup act would be as insult comics. They've got the nasty down, but not the speed of wit (Gingrich has the speed of wit, but not the quality of wit; like all Republican would-be quippers he's never worked a house that didn't applaud louder the worse he got). And there's no way in Hell any of 'em will admit that that's their natural line. Are there Christian insult comics? Some deadpan Mormon wiseass who just hasn't yet broken out of the burgeoning Provo scene?

This isn't necessarily any less true of Democrats. But let's be honest about it, huh? What've we got to lose? Republicans aren't funny because they're all either True Believers or pretending to be True Believers, and neither group is permitted any levity. It's not a matter of "convincing" Mitt Romney he should lighten up. What we see out there is Mitt Romney lightened up. Consider what passes for humor from Newt Gingrich, and imagine Rick Santorum swinging for the fences sometime. Even those of us who'd appreciate a Santorum candidacy in the opposite sense that George Eff Will will don't want to see that.

Mr. Dickerson, the reason you guys want to see some human traits on that Republican dais is just so you'd have something to dwell on besides the truth. But if you'll just report honestly, the jokes'll take care of themselves.

Saturday Olio: In Fairness To Lawyers, Shakespeare Didn't Really Know Any Journalists Edition

• Binyamin Appelbaum "A Hidden Cost of Military Cuts Could Be Invention and its Industries".

One thousand, five hundred three words, of which one thousand fifty six have been excreted before we get this:

Military spending does not compare well economically with many other forms of government spending, some experts say. Professor [Robert] Pollin [an economist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst] calculated in a recent analysis that $1 billion in spending on health care produced an economic benefit about 14 percent larger than spending on defense. The impact of spending on transportation, education and energy were even larger.

A recent study of federal spending since World War II by Alan Auerbach and Yuriy Gorodnichenko, both economists at the University of California, Berkeley, found that the economic benefits from nonmilitary spending were at least 50 percent larger than those from defense spending during periods of normal growth.

Although I have to admit that those who like their news served up with a bit of comedy won't want to miss

“The central thing that distinguishes them from other agencies is that they are the customer,” Professor [Daniel] Sarewitz [ director of the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University] said. “You can’t pull the wool over their eyes.”

We'll just ignore the track record of pretty much every major weapons system since Eisenhower, and ask whether the reader--or Professor Sarewitz, for that matter--has ever gone camping wearing what the Pentagon does with actual wool.

• Shorter Lisa Miller, "The new evangelical vote":

"The incredible transformation of Evangelical Christian voters into open-minded cosmopolitans over the past twenty years can be seen in the fact that many of them voted for Romney in Iowa".

• Shorter David Weigel, "Newt Gingrich and the NAACP" :

"Gingrich's comments about the NAACP and food stamps have been widely misconstrued as racist by everyone who doesn't pay as much attention to Newt Gingrich as I do, because he's been calling Barack Obama the 'food stamp President' for months now without once mentioning his race."

It's A Long Hard Climb, Boys, But I Swear To Ya: The Sea Of Mediocrity Is Just Over Those Mountains.

Doyle McManus, "Is the tea party over?" January 5

LEMME ask you: do you look around at US America and see anything real? It's a goddam landslide of crappy merchandise, crappy values, greed, shit-for-brains, guns n' penises, 19th century backwoods religious mania which was already theologically out of touch in the Age of Steam, and food unfit for mammalian consumption. And the whole thing is driven by the utterly nonsensical idea that technology moves us eternally forward and solves every Problem before it becomes Troubling, so we can just do whatever th' fuck makes us money. (Exempting, of course, the 80% of our fellow citizens who think a Magic Jewish carpenter tells them they're right about everything.)

"Well, by golly, I believe that America is exceptional, and I'm not apologizing for it!" is Mitt Romney's campaign. And he's the electable one.

Y'know, I look at the fucking parade of non-entities on cable "news", and on the remedial teleprompter-reading class the local stations begin every night at five, and I find it hard to forgive the twenty-something professional hairdos, but I do understand that an utterly self-fixated, disposable, money-is-all-that-matters culture is all they've ever known. It's not an excuse for living your life in professional vapidity; I have no idea why any of these people wanted to go into "journalism" as opposed to any other outlet for egomania. But the blame for the condition of their industry belongs back in the 70s; they inherited it.

But how th' fuck can you wake up in the morning and find yourself Wolf Blitzer? How th' fuck do you get to be 71 years old and Tom Brokaw, still donning a prop trench coat to add your profound speech impediment to the coverage of the Iowa Fucking Caucuses? (Because The Battle for Twelve Delegates in the Search for a Presidential Candidate Under a Steaming Pile of Brain-Dead Grifters just wouldn't have the same gravitas if it didn't pull Tom in from, I'm guessing, a book tour.) How do you not simply go on air some night and howl like an ill wind from the Kingdom of Tortured Souls?

How much better can ya eat?

What possesses a man gone to gray in the coverage of politics to write this:

A year ago, the tea party movement looked like an irresistible wave sweeping through the Republican Party. Anyone who hoped to win this year's GOP presidential nomination, it seemed, would need to embrace tea party activists' stringent demands for smaller government, lower taxes and deep cuts in spending.

I know we've been over this before , but 1) like the Teabaggers weren't Republicans in the first place, and 2) a known astroturf operation from the get-go to boot, which 3) echoed the Republican party's stringent demands for smaller government, lower taxes and deep cuts in spending for the past thirty years, leading to 4) a decidedly mixed bag of election results resulting in the installation of a couple of wingnuts in the US Congress, instead of the wingnuts who would have won in those districts otherwise, and 5) the addition of Joe Miller and Christine O'Donnell to a national pantheon already full to brimming with the likes of Sarah Palin, Joe the Plummer, and Chuck Norris.

It is only in the Press in which those ideas are granted the status of Grand Philosophical Concept, and not Deceptive Sales Practice.

The tea party has changed the political landscape in ways that are likely to last for a while. Every Republican candidate, for example, at least claims now to be a fiscal conservative.

Yeah, its a Jim Rockford 180 from John McCain's "I'm A Wild-Eyed Tax and Spender" campaign of four years ago.

And it's not really the tea party's fault that its favorite candidates, Bachmann and Perry, stumbled. Bachmann, who founded the Tea Party Caucus in the House, never found a way to turn that into a qualification to be president. Perry, whose resume was strong on paper, proved so inept in televised debates that he couldn't remember which Cabinet agencies he wanted to abolish.

This is like saying you can't blame Jehovah's Witnesses when the people who knock on your door have no understanding of primate evolution.

According to the "entrance poll" sponsored by news organizations, about a third of those who voted in the GOP caucus pronounced themselves "strong supporters" of the tea party; of those, 30% said they voted for Santorum, 17% for Gingrich and 16% for Paul.

But then, you can't blame the Teabaggers just because Teabaggers don't seem to understand what they stand for, right?

Romney tied with Perry for fourth place among strong tea party adherents. In fact, it was Romney's first-place showing among non-tea partyers that made him the statewide winner — by just eight votes.

Sure, he won, but only because other people voted for him.

That divide mirrors the fragmentation of the tea party itself. It's always included a mix of libertarians (Paul voters), social conservatives (Santorum voters) and older Reagan conservatives (many of whom were Gingrich voters).

In other words, a wholly-unexpected, new phenomenon in Republican politics. Whose agenda was sweeping the party just one year ago, minus the libertarian and social "conservative" parts.

That's the biggest reason, when real votes were being counted, that Romney came out on top of the Republican field: His opponents split the remaining votes so many ways.

By the way, for those of you keeping score, it took McManus exactly 80 words to go from "30% identified themselves as Teabaggers" to suggesting that the 75% of the vote Romney didn't get consisted of Teabaggers, 47% of whom voted for Santorum or Gingrich, apparently for the same reason that people in a Baskin-Robins order "Double Maple Peanut Butter Swirl" when they really wanted plain vanilla and are in fact allergic to peanuts. Too many choices.

How 'bout we put it another way? How 'bout we note that the modern flavor of the Republican party brand has been trading on an ugly negativity since the 1950s: Red baiting, anti-Civil Rights, anti-labor, anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-immigrant, anti-sex, anti-science, ahistorical, Xenophobic, and wrapped in international paranoia. All of this, of course, cover for the same old Republican Money party we've had since the Gilded Age. It's worked, to the extent is has, to get Republicans elected. The only other thing it's accomplished--going back six Revolutions--is to convince what was once the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt to run screaming from social spending, tax increases, and Defense Dept. cuts. That, and packing the Supreme Court with more religious sinecures than the Vatican.

So, yeah. Revolt on, you Teabaggers! Iowa's done your whittlin' for you. Now find yourself a True Small Government "Conservative" out of what's left, and get back to the business of doing Businesses' business.

Are There Really People In America Whose Political Outlook Is Informed By David Weigel?

ROY Edroso has a has a blog. . David Weigel has a job with the Washington Post Corporation. Go on, see which one speaks plainly and reasonably about the Paul newsletters (we in no way mean to diminish the accomplishment), and which one spends forty-eight hours trying to absolve libertoonianism (and himself).

(By the way, who, exactly, wrote the memo that told Slate columnists to step up the twitterpace of their output to Swoony Preteen level? I keep waitin' for Yglesias to post his dry-cleaning bills.)

Now, two things here, right off the bat. One: Weigel's the guy who earned the eternal admiration of Huffington Post liberals by bravely saying "Rush Limbaugh is a racist" everywhere except in print. And "resigning" over it, after one of those rare outbreaks of "conservative" outrage, when it did become public, before--Fortune smiles on the saintly--emerging 48 hours later with a gig at the Post-owned Slate, where everyone is expected to be a libertarian who sneers at Republican racism and backwoods rabidity, the better to excuse his own Republicanism.

I did not understand then, and do not now, why calling the Republican party "partly racist" is the mark of anything other than 1) having paid a minimal amount of attention to politics sometime during the last hundred years, and 2) the ability to type. The only cause of Weigel's célèbre in liberal circles was that the Right was outraged. It apparently never occurred to anyone to consider that it was outraged not by what he wrote, but by what he thought and didn't write.

Second: it's fucking Iowa. Paul is roundly, and pointedly, ignored by the Press until he becomes the latest piece of flotsam to wash ashore from that shipwreck of trainwrecks known as the Republican Presidential Pre-primaries. Then someone in the Press decides to take a look at, not so much the crackpot shit that Paul actually espouses, but the signifier of crackpot shit which was exposed about him the last time he ran for national office.

Sure, sure: it's too much to ask that the Press treat this stuff to the level of respect and attention it actually deserves; they've got to print something, after all, and please don't ask that it be real news. But why is it too much to ask that the obvious trend in Republican primary preference, the remarkable elevation and rapid descent of the Not Romney Lunatic of the Month that's been going on since last January, be reported as though the stenographer has eyes? "Ron Paul latest piece of rotting junk unearthed in furious Republican tunneling to the bottom"?

That's not Weigel's fault, he's just a part of it. But tell me, where are the brave anti-racist stands now that they're well known? Answer: right where they always were, in the easy dismissal of ugly traits most sane people dismiss out of hand.

Somehow the story--possibly the major one of our times--of how the Reagan party gets away with pandering to racists while maintaining the support of hundreds of pundits who abhor racism is perpetually lost under the noses of the Press. But Weigel compounds this--or obscures it--by letting the polls decide whether the "old news" of Paul's newsletters is important. Republicans say no! Liberals being joined by conservatives! Gay liberal bellwether Dan Savage doesn't care!

By itself this would merely amount to yet another example of the mass-market press defending the script, rooting for the horserace, and avoiding heavy lifting. But Weigel decides, simultaneously, to get miffed that the Times story on those newsletters--written, of course, after the Paul surge--ignored the contribution he and Julian Sanchez made to the story four years ago at Reason.

Last week, I quietly harrumphed about this big New York Times take-out on Ron Paul's old extremist ties, reminding readers that Julian Sanchez and I reported a lot of this stuff first. Sanchez, who's now at the Cato Institute, hits the Grey Lady a little harder. He has a good reason.

The implication [of the NYT story] is that even though the newsletters were a focus of national attention four years ago, Paul’s fellow travelers were content to gloss over this ugly history—quietly complicit in this pandering to racism—until the bold bloodhounds at the Times sniffed out the scoop. It looks rather different if the Times is just rehashing the highlights of what a libertarian magazine explored in greater details years ago.

Now, I don't know what the bold bloodhounds at the Times are doing, or implying, about the story. I don't care enough to know. Or, to rephrase that, it doesn't make one bit of difference to the real story. If Libertoonians were aghast at Paul's racist, homophobic, Xenophobic, and anti-Semitic newsletters four years ago, or fifteen years ago, then they've done precious little to show it. You can't simultaneously denounce racism and pretend it has no consequence unless your poll numbers plummet. You can't crab that the Times has no sense of history, then write as if the last 23 1-/2 hours have settled all issues for all time. You can't rely on Dan Savage to tell you whether you should be outraged by blatant homophobia in one particular national candidate, but not another.

Unless you're a libertarian, I mean. Then anything but self-awareness is permitted.

Dear God: Mike Allen As Cosmic Retribution For Everything Since The 3/5 Compromise Is Brilliant, But It's Over The Head Of The Intended Audience

Mike Allen, "Why Newt's surge is for real". December 7

TO begin with, as modern practice has it, there's nary a word here (in 1300) about "why" Newt's "surge" is "for real". That's meant to summarize the Script, not the piece.

So, let's answer it: Why is Newt's "surge" for realz? Because Beltway bungholes like the Politico gang--Ross Douthat without the religious trappings--have decided it's more exciting that way.

Oh, but isn't he atop the polls? Yes, brushing aside former future nominee Donald Trump. Fer chrissakes, Republicans do not like Mitt Romney. It's the only thing they've gotten right in the past five decades, unless you think winning an election makes you "right", so can't we give them a little credit? Newton Leroy is the only man left standing, apart from Santorum, and here's a little secret Beltway insiders will never reveal: Republicans don't like real religious nuts knocking on the door any more than you or I do, and certainly no more than the Beltway Boys do. Because they're liable to do something out of conviction, or ethics, or just the desire to look like they have some, which is the last thing Republicans want. (Not that anyone took a Bachmann candidacy seriously--except Dave Weigel--but she had the clear and comforting mark of the obvious religious scammer all over her, and her life partner. Like Palin, Bachmann isn't smart enough to be a fundamentalist, or anything else requiring philosophical conviction.) You think they hate Romney because he's a panderer, or because he supported public health care? Bosh. There's nothing the Right likes more than a panderer, and if Romney manages to win the nomination you'll hear the sort of lowing from the faithful that "Compassionate Conservatism" got in its day. No, Romney's disliked because he gives the impression of a man who might break out in morals, or vainglory, or, god help 'em, concern at some critical juncture, and fail to double down. Consider the trail of nominees since Reagan: Bush I, hated; Dole, hated; McCain, hated; all political men, all of whom had made political compromises and were hated for it. George W. Bush? Simple, greedy, built-in distraction with his Daddy issues, established track record of bilking taxpayers and private contacts? Second coming of Reagan.

Now, granted, Gingrich is as mooring-free as any cannon could be; but he's also demonstrated a venality and a cupidity that apparently know no lower boundary.

Okay, any time left on the clock. Let's have some laughs be enlightened by one of America's premier punditasters:

Top Republican and Democratic strategists say they greatly underestimated the potential for a Newt Gingrich comeback and now calculate that he could upset Mitt Romney to become the Republican presidential nominee.

By the way, which is worse: the track record of Top Republican and Democratic strategists, or the track record of the corrections of Top Republican and Democratic strategists? We could throw in America's Respected Political Commentators, but Republican and Democratic strategists have the built-in advantage that one of them gets to claim victory by default every two years.

It’s the clearest sign yet that Washington is waking up to a prospect that a week ago seemed far-fetched and even now seems hard to buy — Newt Gingrich vs. Barack Obama in 2012.

The clearest sign is anonymous collective noun use?

President Obama’s advisers, long convinced that Romney would be their opponent, now think he has a realistic chance of facing Gingrich, and are frantically rewriting a playbook that has been three years in the making.

Let's stop for a minute. There's practically no amount of tone-deafness, fumble-proneness, or simple goddamned Centrist cluelessness I won't believe about the President and his advisors, but "three years assuming Mitt Romney would be the nominee" leading to "frantic" rewriting of the playbook? Am I supposed to believe these guys still imagine the Republican party, and the Republican electorate, is moderately sane? I won't, if only because if I did I really wouldn't care if Newt Gingrich became President.

The advisers, especially David Axelrod – who has led the campaign’s frontal assault on Romney – are finally coming around to the possibility that Gingrich might actually be the GOP nominee.

1) How does David Axelrod come to have a job? 2) That, whatever th' fuck it was, was a "frontal assault" on Romney? 'Cause it sorta resembled the aftermath of the sort of frontal assault my 91-year-old father makes when he goes to take a leak.

Some Obama aides are exultant about running against a candidate with so much baggage and bad history. They generally view Romney as a stronger, more dangerous opponent, even if the former House speaker is likely to shine in debates. The feeling — or hope — among the campaign’s upper echelon is that the Romney-Gingrich fight just might last until June, as long as Obama-Clinton in 2008, with deeply unpredictable results.

It's always interesting to note that no one in Inside Washington has a memory that goes back farther than the reporter he talks to.

“It would be a nastier, more intense campaign,” said the Democrat close to the White House. “Newt has a history of getting people to rise to his bait. The president would have to stay mellow, steady Eddie.”

Right. Also, with any luck, the statue of Lincoln will remain seated.

Republicans, at the same time, find themselves both appalled and in admiration of Gingrich’s ability to channel the base’s anger and capture the anti-establishment moment in a way that Romney never could.

For fuck's sake. Not that I'd blame them if they didn't, but do the sort of "Republicans" who're on Mike Allen's rolodex ever bother looking at the base? Or listening to Mitt Romney? And Gingrich is in his fifth decade of scamming the Republican base, although, in fairness, since he got run out of elective office it's been a higher class of Republican idiot whose pockets he picked.

Gingrich, after a spring mutiny by his original staff, quietly built momentum with little money and virtually no organization, by relying on his wife, Callista, and a few diehard aides. By necessity, his stripped-down machine was fueled by ideas and the Internet rather than the usual lifelines of a modern run for the presidency – ads and cash.

Well, "Callista", "ideas", "the Internet", plus "the fact that everyone in front of him not named Romney has proved to be too big an idiot even for the party which took Herman Fucking Cain seriously". Including Herman Fucking Cain.

It’s a gravity-defying comeback for the once disgraced former House speaker – a potential political reincarnation rivaled in recent U.S. history only by Richard Nixon.

Hope.

Romney may get nightmare flashbacks to 2008, when Mike Huckabee came from far back to win Iowa, and John McCain survived a staff implosion and won the nomination.

Or perhaps he'll remember 1992, when…nah, nobody remembers that far back.

Romney campaign has “a pretty good oppo package” on Gingrich and is prepared to go nuclear, said a top GOP consultant familiar with the campaign.

“The question is: Does all that unloading help or hurt?” the consultant added. “I don’t know. People have weighed [Gingrich’s past], and they’re OK with most of it.”

Right. Because if history--all the way back to 2004, even--tells us anything, it's that people who tell pollsters they're going to vote in Republican primaries clearly weigh all the evidence before making up their minds.

Social conservatives, an essential ingredient of the GOP base, don’t trust Romney.

“He would be my top choice at the moment in terms of the full package – ideas and positions and ability to beat Obama in 2012,” said a top Christian organizer. “Gingrich might not be as conservative as we like on every issue, and he may have had different opinions over the decade. But he still doesn’t attain the level of Romney in seeming lack of sincerity and authenticity.”

Anyone ever heard a "top Christian organizer" talk like this?

Many who know him best remain skeptical that Gingrich will have the discipline to avoid self-immolation.

“He’s a little bit like charcoal briquettes in the backyard,” said Rich Galen, who was an aide to Gingrich on and off between 1982 and 1998. “When you first light them, there’s a lot of smoke and fire and a lot of stuff going on. But you can’t cook a steak on that.”

Y'know, I love this "Look out, Newt might immolate himself" routine. It's like the reverse of Pascal's Wager: "We're going to take Gingrich seriously, but only while noting that something he says in the future may prove more damaging than the Top 7000 Incredibly Stupid Things He's Said Previously, which we aren't bothering to report." Once again, this is the same bunch which thought Michele Bachmann sounded Presidential in that first debate, and who stood by as she, Rick Perry, and Herman Cain demonstrated, time after time, a lack of intelligence staggering in a president of a trade group, let alone a Texas governor, without saying anything more censorious than "gaffe". Hell, the question now is what Gingrich howler would even get mentioned, let alone excused on the grounds that he was just throwing out more ideas from that fecund academic brain. This comes, mind you, at the end of a piece which attributed part of his comeback to the work of that platinum-helmeted collector of shiny objects he's married to, in the eyes of the Church. I ask you.

That Settles It; We Don't Really Need Anything More Illuminating Than Six-Watt Incandescents

Emma Carmichael, "Bob Costas gasbags about showboating". November 28

After I'd slammed Bob Costas' participation in that Jerry Sandusky photo op, it came as no surprise to me--or no more than the revelation that "gasbag" is now a verb--to find Costas being universally praised for it, not that I'm suggesting the two might be related. "He didn't let up!" I heard, over and over, as though the expectation was that Costas would shift gears and ask Sandusky about the BCS, or Friday Night Lights, or which latex-friendly lubricants held up best in a hot shower.

And it's not that I don't understand the basis for the expectation; an entire generation has grown up where that sort of crap is what passes for television coverage. But go watch the thing, if you wish. Costas looks and sounds for all the world like a man who inexplicably and without warning finds himself on a tightrope, and who has the presence of mind--long training, possibly Pavlovian--to recognize that the one thing he must not do is fall into the front row of the stands and land on a sponsor.

What should Bob Costas have done? Well, projectile vomiting comes immediately to mind.

And without warning seems to be an accurate description, since Costas had been scheduled to interview Sandusky's lawyer, and the disembodied voice of Sandusky himself was offered up at fifteen minutes to air. In other words, with plenty of time to say No, let him come into a studio and show his face to America if he wants some free publicity. Which, of course, was not about to happen, since the question wasn't journalism, it was free publicity for the Brian Williams Variety Hour. The next morning the whole planet--meaning all the other networks--would be talking about Bob Costas' scoop. As in kitty litter.

The question assuredly was not whether justice, rough or otherwise, would be served; in the event it was Sandusky's risible pause before--even more risibly--defending himself, not Costas' tough questioning, which would be the story. What would not be the story is how Sandusky was given the opportunity few accused boy buggerers would receive: the right to try to sell his story on prime-time teevee. At whatever cost to his victims. Sandusky wasn't there in the interests of justice. He wasn't there because a phone conversation with Bob Costas was going to illuminate the story. He was there because of prurience. Incisive questioning wasn't going to salvage that.

How th' hell does this get turned upside down? Well, for starters, there's Carmichael, who usually writes for Deadspin, the Gawker of pro sports.

Hours after Stevie Johnson mocked shooting himself in the leg, and just a few hours before Plaxico Burress publicly laughed it off and told Johnson that it was "all love," Bob Costas used a portion of Sunday Night Football's halftime show to do some excessive moralizing about excessive celebration in the NFL. He called players like Johnson "knuckleheads" and admonished us, the American public, for being "too busy keeping up with the Kardashians to notice [that] we live in a culture that in many ways grows more stupid and graceless by the moment."

Somewhere, on a La-Z-Boy in rural New England, a senile 80-year-old pumped his fist in agreement and wondered who the hell the Kardashians are.

Let's go no further before we diagram that last sentiment: a woman whose livelihood depends on turning pro athletes into tabloid fodder imagines that the only public moralists in the country are a) old; b) La-Z; and c) Out of It, out of it being defined as "not knowing who the Kardashians are", as though this is not a condition the sane portion of the country would pay any price to learn the secret of.

I don't care what you think of Costas' point; the league has considered incontinent fist-pumping, back-flipping, and biceps-voguing to be a marketing problem for some time. But, y'know, if you want to slam Costas, or his network, for hypocrisy, then maybe instead of figuring out how to use "excessive" three times in one sentence, or cunningly attributing opinion opposing yours to octogenarian, recliner-bound screamers at their teepees (lo-def, black and white, rabbit-eared in the bargain), maybe you could note that in 2000, with millions of Nike money on the line, Costas dutifully scooched over on his Olympic hosting couch, the better to help the gold-medal winning American 4x400 relay team explain away its disgusting, preening victory lap that included using the American flag like a bath towel in a Zestfully Clean! spot. That's hypocrisy, lady. Costas' opinions are at the service of his employer (which includes the NFL); if his own get in it's at the margins, or simply to the extent he's internalized NBC's wishes.

Is there something out there that says you wouldn't be five times the hypocrite for the chance to sit in Costas' chair? 'Cause if there is I've missed it. Must've been watching the Kardashians.

"Analysis" and "Paralysis" Share The Same Root. Example Follows.

Matt Bai, "The Other Problem With Perry's 'Oops' Moment". November 10

OR, Ya Don't Need a Brain To Suffer Brain-Freeze.

Is there any explanation--any at all--for why we suffer through this time after time after time? There are so many godawful components to our godawful mass-market media political coverage--the superficiality, the venality, the faux-balance, the careerism, the cynicism, the herd mentality--that you'd imagine that somewhere a seam would just blow, and the whole thing spill out like a crap piñata. Instead, all the friction between the endless reporting of the same script in use since Nixon cowed today's journalists' grandfathers and what really happens in really America just gives you and me rug burns.

Pierce shows how it's done. Roy shows how it's done. Bai shows how you make the big bucks:

There’s really no arguing with the consensus view that, after repeatedly courting calamity in prior debates, Rick Perry did grave damage to his presidential campaign Wednesday night. First the guy says that anyone who disagrees with him on illegal immigration must not have a heart, then he gets all twisted up while trying to attack Mitt Romney, and finally comes this new gaffe about … um … hang on a second … wait, it’ll come to me.

Oops.

Opening with a gag is a time-honored practice. Look into it.

I'm sorry, but how does "he said people who disagree with him on immigration have no heart" come to lead off a list of gaffes? That's the one thing Rick Perry's done that belonged in a debate. If characterizing your political opponents is rhetorically beyond the pale, throw everybody off that stage, and shutter the Republican party.

The question I’ve been pondering today, though, is why, exactly, this latest Perry moment strikes all of us as so consequential. Sure, the obvious answer is that Mr. Perry looked, again, like maybe he wasn’t the sharpest butter knife at the tea party. Fair enough.

No, the obvious answer is that being a dolt--which Rick Perry was, and was known to be, unequivocally, before he ever entered the race--won't get you called out unless you slip on a banana peel and fall face-first into a custard pie while your pants fall down and your Texas-sized belt buckle accidentally sets off a nearby seltzer bottle. Repeatedly. And because in Republican circles that still might get you applauded, which won't get mentioned, either.

But let’s be clear: tongue-twisting and mind-lapsing aren’t necessarily deal-breakers. If they were, former Presidents Dukakis and Gore would be out playing golf together and boring their caddy to tears.

Well, let us just thank our Maker, whomever or whatever we imagine Him/Her/No Gender Preference to be, that none of these people is boring. Excepting Jon "The Semi-Sane One" Huntsman and Mitt "The Eventuality" Romney.

People wrote entire books about the dumb things George W. Bush said (“Is our children learning?” and so forth), and sold them briskly at checkout counters, and still the man tormented his detractors for eight years.

Tormented his detractors? I guess "people with an abiding belief in America's bright promise and moral leadership" found him thought provoking.

Look: those are back-to-back fucking sentences. Michael Dukakis was boring! (and, oh, he was defeated by George Herbert Walker Prescott Bush, who was a comparative one-man Mardi Gras, I suppose). George W. Bush was an imbecile, but he was President!

On what planet does this stuff resonate? Let me put it another way: no wonder 98% of movies made in this enlightened age are one long festival of computer-generated shit blowing up, loudly, to the delight of the fourteen-year-old boy in all a few of us.

If being inarticulate or at a loss for facts were disqualifying traits, Sarah Palin would not remain one of the most formidable Republican presidential candidates who isn’t running for president.

And if "being inarticulate or at a loss for facts" were traits that were regularly pointed out by the mass-market media when plainly encountered it might not be so easy for Republicans to ignore them.

No, there’s another level to Mr. Perry’s self-inflicted wound, and it has to do with the most powerful commodity in American politics: authenticity.

Once you can fake that, you're in, so long as you apologize to Jean Giraudoux.

The problem is that he didn’t seem to know the basic details of his own proposal. Here he was calling for what would be a truly radical restructuring of the federal government — involving many thousands of jobs and many billions of dollars in federal expenditures — and he didn’t have a grasp on which sprawling departments he would shutter. It seemed the idea was not his own, but rather something he had tried and failed to memorize.

Now for cryin' fuckin' out loud, this in a piece explaining how there was more than just that Oops! at work.

Please explain to me what reason anyone ever had to believe that Rick Perry was a thoughtful politician espousing what are largely his own ideas. If you can, please move on to Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, and Mitt Romney; save Gingrich for last, because that involves the biggest sucker list since Charles Ponzi drew breath. Perhaps, for extra credit, you can explain why every goddam Republican Presidential candidate for the last thirty-five years has sounded like this. It's a fucking party of panderers. If it's a sin to sound like you tried and failed to memorize something, how big an accomplishment is it to have successfully memorized something that is entirely designed to please the ignorant?

Th' fuck?

And in this way, Mr. Perry violated one of the core tenets of modern politics, which is that you have to at least sustain the artifice of ownership. We know, of course, that presidential candidates don’t actually write their own speeches or stay up late at night tinkering with their own proposals to overhaul Medicare. We get all that.

And we express this nuanced understanding by insisting that they make us believe the opposite if they want our support. CGI politics.

[Y'know, now I think of it, some Presidents do write their own speeches (with help) and do stay up all night tinkering with proposals and studying issues. Over the past fifty years we've called those "Democrats". Or "boring". ]

But we do expect them to really believe in the things they propose — to have the requisite conviction to know and recite with passion the basic policies that someone on their team stayed up nights to craft. Say what you want about Mr. Bush, but no one ever doubted his deep well of resolve on tax cuts or education reform. He had command of his own plan, if not all the underlying data.

Honestly, Matt, just what runs through your mind when you look down at your razor each morning? Pat Robertson sounds committed to his plan. Adolf Hitler sounded committed to his plan. Larry Craig had a story and stuck with it. That means ab-so-fucking-lutely nothing whatsoever. If your plan is flat wrong, simply ridiculous, doomed to failure and disastrous consequences, your enthusiasm for it is worse than indifference.

There’s nothing more central to Mr. Perry’s campaign than the idea of scaling back the government in Washington — that’s pretty much the whole tamale right there — and what he proved last night, in 60 or so agonizing seconds, is that he hasn’t thought deeply enough about it to even master the basics of his own agenda.

And this proves, once again, that so long as someone has good hair, a place to stand, and manages to spit out those lines without kicking over the podium, the Matt Bais of the world promise never to question the underlying assumptions.

That's All I Can Stand, Vol. CCXLVI

Peter Lattman, "A Stunning Fall From Grace for a Star Executive". October 26

Diana B. Henriques, "Ruth Madoff Says Couple Tried Suicide in 2008". October 26

Susan Saulny, "As Cain Promotes His Management Skills, Ex-Aides Tell of Campaign in Chaos". October 26

FUCKING Hell. If there's anything I want to say about Ruth Madoff, unfairly unincarcerated Dowager Queen of East Ponzistan, trying to kill herself it's this: Next time, consult a professional. On the dosage.

I heard at the time how Poor Ruth Madoff was trapped inside her luxury condo. That was one time too many. I'm a humanitarian. I believe in redemption, but I believe in sincere atonement, too. Madam, kindly crawl back to wherever it is society is kind enough to let you keep living, and pull it in over you. For about the next three lifetimes. Then we can hear what you have to say.

Had you been unfairly, demonstrably unfairly, imprisoned, that would make you American #268,438 whose story deserves to be told. Barring that you're Human Being #6 billion 750-some million anyone should give a shit about. Have the decency to shut th' fuck up.

There oughta be a hole now where CBS News once stood. I mean a literal one, not just the figurative one that's been in place for years.

What can you say about someone who trumpets this stuff, except that he obviously believes there's no shit Americans won't eat? That his only reality is his own reality, one where Bernie Madoff is a "story", one where Bernie Madoff formerly was "a winner".

Regardless of the case’s outcome, the charges punctuate a stunning fall from grace for Mr. Gupta, whose personal story reads like a caricature of a Horatio Alger tale.

Nobody reads Horatio Alger. Plenty of people read True Crime.

So let's start here: Horatio Alger heroes rose from being street urchins or bootblacks to productive, respected members of the community. They did not climb the ladder to the corporate board room penthouse so they could piss on the next generation of newsies.

Orphaned at 18! Something tells me this doesn't qualify as tough luck for Josie from Accounting. In fact something tells me this doesn't qualify as a tough luck story except for people who automatically add "and the Trust Fund doesn't kick in until twenty-one" when they hear it.

At any rate, fuck you. The difference between Rajat Gupta and a sleazy pornographer is that the latter earns an honest living. Simple self-respect and basic human decency are all that was required to ashcan that Brown Skin to Riches story in the first place. There's no reason today to suggest that anything about Gupta's career ever amounted to anything beyond a swindle. He clawed his way to the top so he could steal a bigger pile. If that's not 100% accurate the fractional difference is too small to matter any more. It shouldn't make anyone nostalgic for a time when he hadn't been found out.

And, for fuck's sake, if we can't stop talking about Herman Cain altogether--yet--can't we at least stop talking about Herman Cain as though he's ever uttered an honest or sensible word on the campaign trail? No, there is no mystery that "despite Herman Cain's claims to managerial expertise" he turns out to be a crappy manager. Despite Herman Cain's claims, everything he's ever said is a load of crap. Despite the White Star Line's claims, the Titanic is at the bottom of the Atlantic. This does not mean the actual truth is swimming around at 1900 meters.

And, while we're at it, "ex-Herman Cain volunteer" ranks right up there in credibility with "former Goldman Sachs director".

I Smell Pulitzer. With A Soupçon Of Dirty Hippie.

Anne Applebaum, "What the Occupy protests tell us about the limits of democracy". October 17

FIRST, that was a "fiery" debate last night? A "fierce clash"? How 'bout "a group of privileged, unruly, and particularly unattractive grammar-school students shoving in the lunch line"? Christ, it's the barely articulate vs the marginally literate for the championship of the Greater Ottumwa Financial Institutions Slo-Pitch League. Mitt Romney strikes back! Like that's ever meant anything other than having some underling's assistant craft a strongly-worded letter, or leaving something less than his customary 10% tip. (I love the idea, by the way, that Mitt Romney personally spoke with his landscaper about employing illegals. Sure he did. Through a surgical mask.)

If Matt Bai was right accurate, and Republican insiders really are feeling confident that a Romney candidacy, coupled with an Obama candidacy, is enough to put them back in the White House, then either a) they aren't watching (which I highly recommend), or b) we need a new word to replace "cynical".

Yes, it's early, and yes, none of this really has anything to do with the actual campaign. But that's going to start when the Republicans choose one of those colorless idiots as their standard-bearer, and no amount of time is going to make any of 'em look any better. Sure, there's a built-in Republican electoral advantage, and, sure, the President is plenty unpopular himself. But nobody in America can possibly like any of these people. There aren't even any ideas on that stage. Just slogans. The only suits that aren't empty are filled with something that, if you stepped in it, you'd just throw the shoes away and be done with it. And it's not like the Republican party suddenly finds itself thus trapped; this is what 2008 was, but with more, and less charming, Huckabee Wanabees. It's a semi-ruling and non-governing coalition of Bronze Age superstitionists, Ayn Rand acolytes, and itinerant hucksters, and we desperately need a better media to call them on it, not the one we have now, trying to fluff enough air into the thing to make Twinkie filling.


Cue the clown car:

Of course these international protests do have a few things in common, both with one another and with the anti-globalization movement that preceded them. They are similar in their lack of focus, in their inchoate nature, and above all in their refusal to engage with existing democratic institutions. In New York, marchers chanted, “This is what democracy looks like,” but actually, this isn’t what democracy looks like. This is what freedom of speech looks like. Democracy looks a lot more boring. Democracy requires institutions, elections, political parties, rules, laws, a judiciary and many unglamorous, time-consuming activities, none of which are nearly as much fun as camping out in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral or chanting slogans on the Rue Saint-Martin in Paris.

I hate to detract from the originality of that statement, but, y'know, it tends to ring a little hollow coming from the pages of the Washington Post, the goddam poster child for the last thirty years of expense-account, Golden Rolodex, "insider" journalism, multi-mega mergers-and-acquisitions information empires, and ruling-class apologetics as a way of "balancing" "liberal" "bias" when your major local competitor is the Moonie Times. This is the paper of Sally Fucking Quinn, fer chrissakes. The birthplace of Vandalgate, conveniently at a time when the grubby little details of democracy pointed to a stolen election. Had the Post had the foresight to hire away Judy Miller it could have cornered the market in Iraq warflogging. It's the sordid sheet Politico was born on. So leave us not talk about people who'd rather chant than do grunt work when the Watchdog of Democracy has been hand-fed on filet mignon and vintage port while everything went to shit.

Check the log in your own eye. That'd be an original approach.

I'm guessing that, for a lot of people in Zuccotti Park and elsewhere, 2008 was a time when they imagined they did address the institutions of Democracy on their own terms. In this they were deceived, some naively, some willingly, and perhaps nearly all with the same lazy, self-absorbed, easy reach for easy answers as the rest of the American electorate. So what? The Teabaggers insist that the national debt can be eliminated while taxes are reduced, by targeting 20% of the budget. That's not inattention to the niceties of the democratic process (which they ignore, into the bargain). That's innumeracy. Yet the Teabaggers are the vital, grassroots, driving force behind the reenergized Republican party. Or were, until the quadrennial elections got close enough that it became inconvenient to hold any Republicans to an obligation to actually do anything about it.

Yet in one sense, the international Occupy movement’s failure to produce sound legislative proposals is understandable:

In every other sense, as well.

Both the sources of the global economic crisis and the solutions to it lie, by definition, outside the competence of local and national politicians.

Both the sources and solutions lie by definition, period.

If you’re upset about the austerity program being imposed on your country by indebted banks on the other side of the world, it doesn’t seem logical to complain to the mayor of Seville.

Correct. If he lied to you about it while stuffing his own pockets, and now presents you with a bill you have to pay, because "it's a global thing", complaining is futile. Plus, stringing him up by his necktie is so much more satisfying.

Unlike the Egyptians in Tahrir Square, to whom the London and New York protesters openly (and ridiculously) compare themselves, we have democratic institutions in the Western world. They are designed to reflect, at least crudely, the desire for political change within a given nation. But they cannot cope with the desire for global political change, nor can they control things that happen outside their borders. Although I still believe in globalization’s economic and spiritual benefits — along with open borders, freedom of movement and free trade — globalization has clearly begun to undermine the legitimacy of Western democracies.

“Global” activists, if they are not careful, will accelerate that decline. Protesters in London shout,“We need to have a process!” Well, they already have a process: It’s called the British political system. And if they don’t figure out how to use it, they’ll simply weaken it further.

And if they work within The System, generate serious, equitable, workable proposals, present them as part of The Process (lest they weaken it further), and give back 2/3 of their gains in the name of democratic "compromise", this time, with luck, someone in power will take the time to grease the Garden Implements of Democracy before shoving them unceremoniously up the Public Fundament.

Leave us say this plainly: you people had the opportunity to ensure fairness, to hold the Corporate Feeding Frenzy in check, to give some thought to, to spend some small fraction of your energies in aiding the poor, helping the helpless, and protecting the great Middle. And instead you gorged yourselves. You paid lip service to that rising tide lifting all boats, then you cut everyone else adrift. After Reaganomics crashed and burned in 1987 you set about reclaiming your own, not making things right; you saw to it the '88 election was about Willie Horton and tank rides, not the S & L lootings. You saw to it that the Clinton presidency was about blow jobs, and pushy, scheming wives, not solving the health care crisis. You've been whistling past this graveyard for almost four decades now; maybe you can convince some younger people this mess is of more recent, unavoidable, way-of-the-modern-world vintage, but the rest of us know where the stench is coming from. You fucks expect the Little People to praise God for their crude democracy, while you spend Sunday mornings at the counting house. And then you shit yourself every time it looks like the Great Unwashed might get wise, get angry, or stop buying nicknacks. You've had all this time to think about this, and think you did, but not in any way remotely resembling altruism (though I will grant you never tried all that hard to camouflage it). So let's start with you taking responsibility. Let's can the global claptrap excuse-mongering for the rich to get even richer, and set things to rights. My mayor can't solve global problems, but my Congressman, and Senator, and others can make it prohibitively expensive to rake in profits in this country while treating its population like ciphers. Well, not my Senator; I'm from Indiana, but you know what I mean. I've stood by for thirty years or more while democracy was expressly co-opted by sloganeering and dirty money, and heard that called Wise, and True, and Adult, and never once heard anybody ask where the reasonable, workable proposals were. And now it's reached the point, or damned near close, when large numbers of our fellow citizens will have precious little to lose because of it. They're not really going to give a shit about the niceties of The Process when it tells them it's time to starve. Or much care how you came by the gold in your parachute.

And whose fault is that?

I Give Up

Spot the errors

Glenn "Thrash" Thrush, "Obama sparks middle-of-road rage". September 21

ONE: thinking up a headline, then concocting a story to fit it? I know times are tough, but maybe you should shop your resumé around to major advertising firms on your own time. TWO: Just because the headlines say Liberals now heart Barack Obama like it's 2004 again doesn't make it so. For the life of me I can't understand how a supposedly literate Press corps views things this way. And by that I do not mean "personally believes it", since I'm convinced that practically to the last man the Press believes in nothing whatsoever; I mean how it believes that such storylines convince anyone of anything (though, again, "convince" is undoubtedly the wrong word here. "Deflect" is more like it). It is, of course, about a hundred times worse once election season rolls 'round, and the open bar starts pouring premium liquor. "Romney Says Cheney Would Make Excellent Running Mate", or "Michele Bachmann Demonstrates Her Competence in First Debate" for example. You wouldn't let somebody who really tried to convince you of something like that cut your hair, would you? Or sell you a fedora?

THREE, and MOST TELLINGLY: Your Middle-of-the-Road Ragers--please return your seat-back and folding tray to the upright position!--are David Brooks, Ben Nelson, and Mark Fucking Penn, one of whom wrote a column, while the other two commented. See you at the Revolution!

Like this ain't bad enough--y'know, you could've held on to that headline until Gallup confirmed that moderates were leaving the President in droves because he'd turned into FDR, but then that isn't going to happen, is it?--we get this:

Then there was Brooks, Obama’s highest-profile centrist champion in the mainstream press, who sounded downright distraught in his Tuesday column — a lot like the progressive hand-wringers who once accused Obama of colluding with moderates like, well, Brooks.

“Being a sap, I still believe that the president’s soul would like to do something about the country’s structural problems. I keep thinking he’s a few weeks away from proposing serious tax reform and entitlement reform. But each time he gets close, he rips the football away,” he wrote.

Okay, I thought about blogging that Brooks column the other day, and then I figured there were only so many ways to call the man a fucking coward and an even bigger fraud, and I'd done 'em all in my sleep. Brooks owes his sinecure at the Times precisely to this sort of nonsense. He hasn't "championed" Obama, except for the two-week period in early January 2008 when it began to look like the man was the great Republican hope for defeating Hilary. Brooks occasionally allows as how if it were up to him he'd be willing to compromise and take only 95% of his Friedmaniac agenda, even though that 5% deficit would prevent it from working its pleophoric miracles. This is known as Protecting the Franchise. It's not to be confused with imagining David Brooks is some sort of thinker, moderate or otherwise.

This shit doesn't even stand up if we take the man at his word. Brooks reacts to a single--albeit major and campaign-theme test-marketing--speech; "Liberals" were supposed to have championed the man from day one, despite the repeated, even constant, application of wet-mackerel facials. No one familiar with Brooks' work--hell, no one who's seen one of his sniveling performance pieces on News Hour--could believe any of this.

And, okay, I'm not the most objective observer of the American political scene to be found on the internets. But Lonesome Barack Obama gives one speech in which he suggests that, perhaps, the wealthiest 2% of Americans might be asked to do a little something to show their appreciation for the government of the United States ceding control of its economy to them for the last thirty years, without bothering to ask the other 98% first--a position, by the way, which Obama advanced for all of thirty minutes at the beginning of the Debt Ceiling Crisis--and suddenly the Ghost of Saul Alinsky is loose upon the land (again)? And poor David Brooks barely made it to the fainting couch in time. Sure.

Y'know, for the life of me, I'm starting to think that the solution to the Educational Crisis in this country is to drop all the pretense and just quit trying.

The Plumb Bob Of Stupidity

FOR some reason this morning, after the standard subjecting myself to the local inane weather blithering, I switched over to CNN. Readers over fifty may remember CNN, which stood for Considered a News Network (it's now just CNN, like Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC when they stopped using real chickens), and be surprised to learn it survived into the holographic news era. I know I was.

The program was American Morning, one of several programs sprinkled throughout the airwaves which began because some producer thought he had a chance with Paula Zahn. And which continues because Dead Air is apparently not an option.

The show is currently hosted by two teleprompter-readers with hairdos and a Frank DeCaro impersonator. They were discussing the impending demise of the US Postal Service. Ad lib.

Now let's reiterate: if it weren't for Barbara Walters, and Roone Arledge, the worst thing that ever happened to "Journalism" would be the debut, in 1975, of ABC's Good Morning America, which not only appropriated a perfectly good Steve Goodman song in that special way only tone-deaf Republicans can (see Reagan, Ronald Wilson, "the words of New Jersey's own Bruce Springsteen"), but completed the Nixonization of its news division a full year after his resignation and full pre-pardon. (This, by the way, before it turned over control of its newscasts to a sports producer.) GMA, as it is known to people who need to talk about it but don't have much time, eventually connected with its intended audience: people who enjoyed inane chit-chat, but were made uncomfortable when it came from people who gave the impression of having read something other than magazines at some point.

No such problem here, of course. The general attitude at American Morning was "Who needs the Postal Service when there's email?" This was not intended as a rhetorical flourish. It was evidence of real puzzlement.

But the segment closer was the real treat; one of the hairdos had gotten "pensions guaranteed for seventy-five years" stuck in her head, and kept repeating it so it would sink in and the rest of us could share in the outrage. The other pointed to "no-layoff clauses in some of these union contracts." As though an employer ought to be able to abrogate a contract if he discovers later he's losing money on the deal. I'm not sure how many union contracts she imagines postal workers have. Maybe one for each location.

Look on my works, ye Mighty! Two extremely well-compensated union-represented contract employees whose job it is to read the news gave this no more thought than they would the details of some boring policy debate. Like most questions this one can be solved by applying playground math and the homespun wit of Michele Bachmann. Simple working peons shouldn't have guaranteed pensions! Mailmen shouldn't be allowed to trade dedication to a job for a guarantee it will be there next week!

Good Lord, times are tough! Don't the little people realize this?

Is This Supposed To Be Fooling Someone?

I WOKE up about an hour early this morning. My Poor Wife hadn't stirred, so I turned on the local news downstairs. You'd think I'd know better by now.

The Top Story--after Weather and Traffic, I mean--is a local spin on The Budget Crisis: the President was supposed to come to town to do some photo-op at Allison Transmission today, but he cancelled. This is the local FOX affiliate, which in recent years has toned down its old Morning Zoo approach, winnowing the zany crew of drunken revelers down to the present two middle-aged reformed drunks with a slightly monogamous air. It's probably not fair to say this about the male anchor--he probably, but not certainly, was off in some other market being zany during that period--but the female half now sits and soberly reads the same teleprompter which used to direct her tosses to The Booty Cam, which would then swoop in on someone's ass. I am not making this up. These days she humanizes the incessant weather chat with anecdotes from last night's soccer practice. I'm not making that up, either.

In other words, the past decade of news packaging at 59 has recapitulated young adulthood moving into middle age: the viewer has gone from being surrounded by undisciplined, ungovernable know-nothings who never seemed to realize they were shouting, and couldn't be trusted with furniture, to being stuck with the one know-nothing still in town, the one who decided to sober up only after she realized it was affecting her looks, and who now gives Mommy advice as though no one else can remember how much she used to sleep around, either. Sorta like Jenna Bush on Good Morning America, or wherever th' fuck she is.

And they toss the President Cancels Trip story to the Nordic blond reporter, who's standing in front of Allison, in the dark and in the rain and in her cute hooded slicker with just the right percentage of blond sticking out. And she brings us all up to date, that is, she reiterates that the Prez has cancelled his visit, because Budget Crisis. And then she brings us up to date on what that means--to the limits of the popular imagining, of course--that is, Government Shut Down Unless Agreement, which is incongruously papered over with video of Mr. Obama's previous visit to Allison. She finished that section with one of those generalizations about what the Little People are thinking which are sprinkled on local news so our celebrity teleprompter readers can feel good about themselves, something like "This has Hoosiers wondering how a government shutdown might affect their own households". Which led to…

a clip of Mike Pence on the big FOX, blaming "liberals in the Senate"?

Okay, and that's not the head scratcher, believe it or not, or not the biggest one; that came after, when the Choirboy stopped chanting, and Inga, standing in the dark, in the rain, in her mac, because the President's visit to the building behind her had been cancelled due to the Budget Crisis thing took up reading again, and informed us that Republicans were criticizing Mr. Obama's trip to Indianapolis, saying that he should remain in Washington.

I hit the record button to make sure I could relay this accurately, and that it wasn't just another acid flashback. Part of it was cleared up, or "cleared up" twenty minutes later, when we tossed to Heidi again, and she went through the same spiel, with the same old video of Obama's previous trip, and the same Make A Difference line about Hoosier households, which was followed by…

a clip of Ray LaHood talking about gas prices?

Which led to Ilsa reporting that Republicans had been criticizing the President for his plans to come to Indianapolis, but the issue had been mooted in the previous twenty minutes.

Look, I understand this is like criticizing a bunch of clowns for not ducking when the pie was thrown. But consider that the President's visit was cancelled yesterday, then consider that a professional news-gathering operation couldn't adjust to the news by dawn the next day; that raindrops bouncing off her head wasn't enough to remind the reporter that the visit she was supposed to cover had already been cancelled, and that their one nod to the business was to leave a partisan video hole--which presumably was originally pencilled in as Mike Pence Criticizes President's Trip--then couldn't be bothered to find relevant clips or write a coherent intro by the next morning. (The LaHood clip was on hand because the President was supposed to announce some sort of domestic drilling initiative while he was here, evidently to counterbalance any potential criticism of his photo op with a new Green technology. We are well and truly fucked.)

The second report was followed by Yet Another Clip of Mike "Your Next Governor" Pence, fauxbalanced by a static graphic of Andre Carson with a quote of his blaming Republicans for the impasse. So you could add "Potential Budget Crisis Covered Without Ever Mentioning Actual Budget", although I know you had no more expectation of any serious discussion of that than I.

Which brings us to Weigel Watch; Mr. How Dare Anyone Imagine I'm Other Than An Unbiased Journalist Covering The Completely Spontaneous Grassroots Teabagging Industry has decided--after telling us last week that Teabaggers, and their Republican Not Puppets, were not responsible for any potential government shutdown, as proven by Professor Dr. Gingrich, Ph.B--has now decided that the Pugs are gonna get blamed. In an effort to either explain or deflect this--the two operations are frequently indistinguishable--he has provided us with a handy scorecard of how Republicans and Democrats are spinning the potential shutdown, based on how people who would like to cover it like any other horse race hope they are.

Now, let's be fair: Weigel's gig doesn't require him to do any in-depth analysis. (Neither does mine.) And as such, maybe he ought to avoid saying things like this:

Democrats are increasingly convinced—depending on how much something can "increase" in a day—that the launch of Wisconsin Republican Rep. Paul Ryan's budget is adding more helpful noise to the shutdown debate. Voters who are not closely following the difference between 2011 fiscal year outlays and 2012 budget projections are hearing about a document that does all sorts of unpopular things, like means-testing and privatizing Medicare and broadening the tax code while cutting the top tax rates. They won't say this. But when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid talks like he did this morning and says that "the Tea Party is screaming so loudly" at the Republican Party "that it can't hear what the country demands," he's taking advantage of an electorate that doesn't completely understand what's happening.

Especially when 1) it's 2003 dollars to doughnuts that Weigel doesn't know what's in the budget, either, since no one does; 2) there are plenty of individual items, such as "privatized health insurance scam", "preventing the EPA from enforcing environmental laws", "the continued insistence that lowered tax rates increase revenues, thoroughly discredited in 1983, now extended as our only lifeline", or "long-range economic assumptions which are beyond the realm of fantasy even for politicians" which are, in and of themselves, reasons for opposition to the House budget (as if "it's proposed by Republicans" isn't enough); and 3) Harry Reid could fabricate evidence from now to the return of Zombie Ronald Reagan and he's not gonna come close to the sort of distortions, half-truths, and pure baby diarrhea which the Republican party has been feeding its uncomprehending electorate for thirty years.

I understand, I do, the difficulties faced by the accommodating child who grew up in an era when adults were telling him he could make any stupid-ass argument he wished, so long as it was right wing, and never be questioned. I would simply point out that, in the event that someone told him there would never be any consequences for behaving this way, they may have overstated. And that once you believe everyone else is an idiot, it can be awfully difficult to reverse course.

The 5:02, Right On Schedule

ON the heels of yesterday's rant, La Palin turns up for her third visit to Indiana, which is to say her third book-hawking in Hamilton County, Indianapolis' restricted country club, and the local news hairdos treat the thing like an Erik Estrada sighting. In contradistinction to the President's visit last week, which was turned over to the political reporters, Palin was covered by the news crews (8 sent one of its six anchors, coincidentally, I'm sure, the same one who lobbed puffballs at the corpse of Fred Thompson in her '08 exclusive).

Which is to say that they sent reporters to cover the grand spectacle of a couple hundred white people lining up to buy a book. And held out microphones so a select few--one with "Palin 4 Prez" written on his forehead--could let us know whether or not they liked her.

8 did eventually bring on Jim "The Dean Broder of Local Pundity" Shella, who offered the stunning insight that Presidential politics is often about celebrity. (No, really; that's as close to a political analysis as he dared come.)

And lemme just say this: I'm not really too fond of this Dueling Media Bias stuff. It's awfully easy to see what you believe; in fact it's damned near impossible not to. The point isn't that there's a conscious personal bias, though there certainly is some. The point is that there's no seeming awareness of the solid reasons, as well as the ethical obligation, for simply being fair. This is greatly magnified on the local level, and, of course, it's made much worse by news management and self-congratulatory appeals to ratings. Jim Shella is a comfortable white suburbanite. His employer is licensed to use the public airwaves to serve the population of the city of Indianapolis, not the Ultima Thule and The Woods of the Ultima Thule subdivisions where its white population fled. The city of Indianapolis is 25% African-American; furthermore, that community has a long and storied history: the third-oldest African-American newspaper in the country, the Klan takeover of state and local government in the 20s, de jure segregation in the schools and de facto segregation everywhere else, a lively history in the Arts, and the dilution of the inner-city vote, and the near-abandonment of its schools, by the Dick Lugar-led unification of local government in the late 60s. Shella displays no knowledge of this. Neither do the other stations' political reporters. It is, instead, just another special interest group after tax dollars. There's precisely one African-American reporter on local teevee with career longevity who gets to do political stories. The rest of the "minority" presence on air is basically talent hired from elsewhere.

And that includes the woman who tossed it to Shella two weeks ago when Al Sharpton came to town as part of an ongoing effort in response to the police beating of a fifteen-year-old kid last May. She got to hear Sharpton described, repeatedly, as "controversial" (assuming she bothers to pay attention.) Another anchor would later remark that Sharpton had some "surprisingly conciliatory" comments about the police. Or Da Police.

This is the world these people inhabit: not just one where Al Sharpton's middle name is Controversial, and Sarah Palin is a celebrity, freed from responsibility for the things she says, but one where there's no apparent awareness that anyone could possibly see it any differently.

And I have no idea what prodigies of cancer of the bowels an African-American woman feels while she reads off a teleprompter under such conditions. I only know that it isn't supposed to work that way, and that we're much the worse because of it.