Liberals: Stop waving fingers at right-wing gargoyles
I have a dear conservative friend with whom I have lively conversations. He’s well-read (informed) and listens to others. But every now and then, I get a call from him in which his voice is raised to a near-hysterical pitch, and I can hear Fox News droning in the background. I give him my ground rule: Never call me until Fox has been turned off for at least 30 minutes.
Now, I can understand Dana Milbank’s concern that the gargoyles of the right are sending their paranoids off on violent rampages. But that column, following E.J. Dionne’s on the smearing of Shirley Sherrod, points to an unfortunate trend in which some liberal pundits seem to be regarding the right-wing hustlers as serious news people. (Dionne does makes excellent points on the “respectable media’s” timidity in handling the lies.)
I occasionally watch Fox to check in on the carnival but never worry excessively about its power. Sure it attracts many gawkers. So do car wrecks. Recall that Fox was in full flower in November 2008, when the American people elected a Democratic House, Democratic Senate and Democratic president.
As for the Sherrod case, I don’t blame Andrew Breitbart. He is what he is — a publicity hound dishing right-wing fantasy for money and fame. Discussing his “journalistic standards” is ludicrous.
Waving fingers at Glenn Beck and his like is pointless. Organizing a boycott of their advertisers would be a far more effective approach. Note what happened to Don Imus when he shot his mouth off in a beyond-the-pale way.
Blame for the Sherrod scandal belongs strictly on the shoulders of the Obama administration. That its smart boys bought into that propaganda without triple-checking the facts is what scares me.
BTW, if some nutbag goes off and kills a bunch of people on the basis of a report on Fox, that’s going to be very bad politically for the right wing. Americans, whatever their politics, are generally decent people.
Tags: conservatives, liberals, media, politics
I get it, Rush Limbaugh doesn’t like me
There are too many things to do on this glorious Sunday for me to linger on a response to an exchange on Friday’s Rush Limbaugh Show that questioned my honesty and work ethic, not to mention my intelligence.
To country boy, all I can say is, “Aw shucks.”
Anyone wanting to know what I wrote can read it here.
BTW, 2000 is not a great year to assess the revenues raised off the dot-com bubble. The dot-com market crashed that March.
Tags: media, Rush Limbaugh, taxes
Hitch is not that great
Jennifer Senior perfectly captured the baloney side of Christopher Hitchens in yesterday’s New York Times. Reviewing his new memoir, Hitch-22, she damned both man and book with faint praise.
Hitchens is one of those Brits with all the answers. His opinions, though sometimes wrong on facts, are always delivered with unswerving righteous anger.
I used to admire Hitchens for his cleverness, independence and willingness to beat up on silly paleo-liberals. But the provocateur act grew less entertaining with time. Finding the point often required first wading through a string of brutal and witless ad hominen attacks.
I officially dropped out of the Christopher Hitchens Fan Club in 2008, when Hitchens called presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, “an aging and resentful female.”
The comment seemed another campaign in his sloppy war against Bill Clinton. Hitchens wasn’t so much a sexist jerk as just a jerk.
In his book, Hitchens speaks of his discomfort in hearing fellow leftists oppose military intervention to stop the genocide in Bosnia. Their “moral arithmetic” just didn’t add up, he said.
But Senior takes him down a notch or three:
it was Bill Clinton, a center-left president Hitchens detested for his opportunism and slipperiness, who finally ordered the troops in, and he did so over a squall of conservative objection, with 29 Republican senators voting against the intervention, versus only one Democrat. (How’s that arithmetic?)
Speaking of arithmetic, do note that Mitt Romney is several months older than Hillary Clinton.
Tags: Bill Clinton, books, Hillary Clinton, media, sexism, the left
Helen Thomas, Rest in Silence
Helen Thomas had quite a day, “retiring” from her job as a fix of Washington journalism, getting dropped by her speaker’s bureau and condemned by the White House press secretary.
The precipitating event was an insulting reference to Jews in Palestine, but the underlying cause was a loss of brain connections after too many years in the White House press corps.
I’m not hitting on her age, a couple of months shy of 90. I know an 108-year-old with intact intellectual faculties. Only her hearing is gone.
But when you lose it, you lose it.
Tags: media, Mideast, politics, Washington
Andrew Breitbart still not interesting
I spent about a quarter hour reading The New Yorker profile of Andrew Breitbart in the hope of learning why I should find him interesting. Breitbart is another gargoyle of the right — perhaps less coherent and more exhibitionist than average.
Alas, the mystery of his significance endures.
That was 15 minutes that I’ll never get back.
Tags: media, politics, right wing
