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Friday, June 08, 2007

American Idiocy
Posted by Jill | 6:46 AM
This morning I woke up and THE LEAD STORY -- not one of the stories, but THE LEAD STORY on WINS was how Paris Hilton may be going back to jail.

Yesterday, Captain Codpeice's much-vaunted Legalized Slavery act didn't get through the Senate, North Korea did more missile tests, and the G-8 Summit went on quite nicely without George W. Bush, who became conveniently "ill."

But Paris Hilton was the lead story.

This kind of moronitude has already found its way into the Presidential race, promising a replay of all the worst aspects of recent presidential elections. Roger Simon of Politico is in manlove with Mitt Romney, he of the Paulie Walnuts hair, because he has "shoulders you could land a 737 on. Roger, I think you may have to have a catfight with Chris Matthews over who gets to make sweet, sweet love to the Mittster. Two new Hillary books promise that if you loved the microscope into the Clintons' lives in the 1990's, you'll LOVE a return to it in the 'oughts. John Edwards' haircut is still the only thing the Wingnut Idiocracy cares about. Barack Obama's remarks about a "quiet riot" brewing in America's cities have had Wingnuttia whipped into a frenzy about the "presidential candidate advocating racial violence."

If anyone believed that this presidential election was going to be about substance, it's time to put that pipedream away. Because 2008 is going to make us long for the good old days of the Swift Boat Liars.

Krugman weighs in:

In Tuesday’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan’s birthday.

Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the “gaffe of the night”?

Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven’t changed a bit.

You may not remember the presidential debate of Oct. 3, 2000, or how it was covered, but you should. It was one of the worst moments in an election marked by news media failure as serious, in its way, as the later failure to question Bush administration claims about Iraq.

Throughout that debate, George W. Bush made blatantly misleading statements, including some outright lies — for example, when he declared of his tax cut that “the vast majority of the help goes to the people at the bottom end of the economic ladder.” That should have told us, right then and there, that he was not a man to be trusted.

But few news reports pointed out the lie. Instead, many news analysts chose to critique the candidates’ acting skills. Al Gore was declared the loser because he sighed and rolled his eyes — failing to conceal his justified disgust at Mr. Bush’s dishonesty. And that’s how Mr. Bush got within chad-and-butterfly range of the presidency.

Now fast forward to last Tuesday. Asked whether we should have invaded Iraq, Mr. Romney said that war could only have been avoided if Saddam “had opened up his country to I.A.E.A. inspectors, and they’d come in and they’d found that there were no weapons of mass destruction.” He dismissed this as an “unreasonable hypothetical.”

Except that Saddam did, in fact, allow inspectors in. Remember Hans Blix? When those inspectors failed to find nonexistent W.M.D., Mr. Bush ordered them out so that he could invade. Mr. Romney’s remark should have been the central story in news reports about Tuesday’s debate. But it wasn’t.

There wasn’t anything comparable to Mr. Romney’s rewritten history in the Democratic debate two days earlier, which was altogether on a higher plane. Still, someone should have called Hillary Clinton on her declaration that on health care, “we’re all talking pretty much about the same things.” While the other two leading candidates have come out with plans for universal (John Edwards) or near-universal (Barack Obama) health coverage, Mrs. Clinton has so far evaded the issue. But again, this went unmentioned in most reports.

By the way, one reason I want health care specifics from Mrs. Clinton is that she’s received large contributions from the pharmaceutical and insurance industries. Will that deter her from taking those industries on?

Back to the debate coverage: as far as I can tell, no major news organization did any fact-checking of either debate. And post-debate analyses tended to be horse-race stuff mingled with theater criticism: assessments not of what the candidates said, but of how they “came across.”

Thus most analysts declared Mrs. Clinton the winner in her debate, because she did the best job of delivering sound bites — including her Bush-talking-point declaration that we’re safer now than we were on 9/11, a claim her advisers later tried to explain away as not meaning what it seemed to mean.

Similarly, many analysts gave the G.O.P. debate to Rudy Giuliani not because he made sense — he didn’t — but because he sounded tough saying things like, “It’s unthinkable that you would leave Saddam Hussein in charge of Iraq and be able to fight the war on terror.” (Why?)

Look, debates involving 10 people are, inevitably, short on extended discussion. But news organizations should fight the shallowness of the format by providing the facts — not embrace it by reporting on a presidential race as if it were a high-school popularity contest.


But after all, why should we expect any different from a press that has acted for the last fourteen years as if the nation was a high school in which only the press and Washington insiders were allowed into the Kool Kids Klub. From Sally Quinn's judgment of the Clintons as white trash to Maureen Dowd's "kneecapping of Al Gore", as Scott Lemieux so accurately puts it, to the media's blind acceptance of the claims of the Swift Boat Liars, to Chris Matthews transferring his manlove of George W. Bush's codpiece to the new guy with leather and whips, Rudy Giuliani; to their craving for punishment and discipline by Big Daddy Fred Thompson, to their disgraceful performance over the last six years as mouthpieces for the Administration, the talking heads of the media have made it very clear that not only are they just fine with a one-party (Republican) country and that they will do whatever is necessary to ensure it, but that substance has no part in the national discourse.

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