Gore Vidal is… Gore Vidal
Holy flaming hell, tell us what you really think.
His voice strengthens. “One thing I have hated all my life are LIARS [he says that with bristling anger] and I live in a nation of them. It was not always the case. I don’t demand honour, that can be lies too. I don’t say there was a golden age, but there was an age of general intelligence. We had a watchdog, the media.” The media is too supine? “Would that it was. They’re busy preparing us for an Iranian war.” He retains some optimism about Obama “because he doesn’t lie. We know the fool from Arizona [as he calls John McCain] is a liar. We never got the real story of how McCain crashed his plane [in 1967 near Hanoi, North Vietnam] and was held captive.”
Vidal originally became pro-Obama because he grew up in “a black city” (meaning Washington), as well as being impressed by Obama’s intelligence. “But he believes the generals. Even Bush knew the way to win a general was to give him another star. Obama believes the Republican Party is a party when in fact it’s a mindset, like Hitler Youth, based on hatred — religious hatred, racial hatred. When you foreigners hear the word ‘conservative’ you think of kindly old men hunting foxes. They’re not, they’re fascists.”
Fox Makes the News — Literally
From Steve Benen:
Fox News spent months promoting last weekend’s right-wing protests in Washington, encouraging viewers to go register their outrage. And during the event itself, the Republican news network went a step further, encouraging the crowd to get louder once the cameras were on.
As Danny Shea reported this morning, Fox News producer Heidi Noonan rallied the crowd during an on-air segment in which Glenn Beck chatted with activist Griff Jenkins. Viewers at home, of course, were not told that a Fox News producer was encouraging the protestors to make some noise for the cameras.
A network spokesperson told the Huffington Post, “The employee is a young, relatively inexperienced associate producer who realizes she made a mistake and has been disciplined.”
Sure she has. I’m sure Fox News is all broken up about this.
Here’s the video that viewers saw at home. The cheerleading producer, obviously, is out of camera range.
Torture Architect John Yoo Gets Monthly Column in Philly Inquirer
John Yoo has written freelance commentaries for The Inquirer since 2005, however he entered into a contract to write a monthly column in late 2008. I won’t discuss the compensation of anyone who writes for us. Of course, we know more about Mr. Yoo’s actions in the Justice Department now than we did at the time we contracted him. But we did not blindly enter into our agreement. He’s a Philadelphian, and very knowledgeable about the legal subjects he discusses in his commentaries. Our readers have been able to get directly from Mr. Yoo his thoughts on a number of subjects concerning law and the courts, including measures taken by the White House post-9/11. That has promoted further discourse, which is the objective of newspaper commentary.
“I know you’re into this transparency thing, but I don’t need to see your nipples!”
Ok, after watching her razor-sharp performance last night at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, I’m now firmly convinced that Obama should totally dump Joe Biden at the local Amtrak station and bring aboard Wanda Sykes as running mate for his 2012 reelection bid–if only to FURTHER encourage brisk firearms sales in Real America (and stimulate teh Heartland’s moribund economy without direct government intervention!)
What?
Oh, come on — as if having a NEGRO LESBIAN FEMINIST in the White House (along with a dijon-loving Marxist) wouldn’t send the hyperparanoid teabagger set completely over the border into black helicopter/camouflage pajama country.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Find Out What It Means to Cheney.
At today’s White House presser, Robert Gibbs was asked to respond to Dick Cheney’s CNN interview in which he told John King that Pres. Obama was putting the country at risk of another terrorist attack by announcing his intention to close Guantanamo and to end former Pres. Bush’s pro-torture policy, as well as his regime’s policy of detaining suspected terrorists indefinitely with no legal protections or rights.
Dear LA Times: Are you kidding me?
The LA Times glowingly extolling about the anti-stimulus “tea parties” and their connection to social media pisses me off more than you can imagine. Let’s see what’s wrong with the first sentence and a haf of this crappy article:
In the latest example of how user-produced media can capture so-called “massively-shared” events in a way mainstream media can’t, a wave of images, blog posts and videos from a nationwide protest has been washing across the Web. The protests, dubbed “tea parties”…
Ahhh, “massively-shared” — really now, LA Times! Nationwide how many people have this protests against a popular president churned out? A thousand people, perhaps? Maybe two thousand? I’m willing to bet they’ve brought out a lot less.
These “tea parties” are like slumber parties compared to protests from the left — which you ignored.
Shorter Rick Santelli: “My wife feels you’re glib, Matt.”
Carrying GOP water?
First impressions mean a lot. In that vein, here’s the first paragraph from the front page story in today’s New York Times about Obama’s budget proposal, to be revealed later today:
President Obama will propose further tax increases on the affluent to help pay for his promise to make health care more accessible and affordable, calling for stricter limits on the benefits of itemized deductions taken by the wealthiest households, administration officials said Wednesday.
Now what NYT could have said is that Obama is reversing the massive tax cuts that former President Bush gave to “the affluent”, tax cuts which ran in excess of a trillion dollars that did absolutely nothing to help our economy and we can no longer afford anyway. I realize that’s biased, but A) It’s true; and B) Is it anymore biased then this crap NYT wrote which basically mouths the GOP talking point of class war?
Maybe something inbetween these two views would work. Perhaps the phrase “tax adjustment” would be more objective? It would, at least, veer more towards accuracy — which is what I thought the news media was supposed to do anyways.
The media’s inept coverage of all issues related to race.
The thing about the dead monkey cartoon that really stuck with me — is the fact that I was not surprised.
I kind of expected it. I certainly expected the reaction from the right wing, who automatically began denying it had anything at all to do with race, was just another example of Rev. Al Sharpton playing the race card and was just more liberal whining. I certainly expected that. That’s what they do. They deny, ignore and trivialize dissent.
Quick Prime Time Press Conference Reflection
Before I abandon the internet to fight the homework beast slouching towards my desk to be born, I have a few passing thoughts about President Obama’s presser I want to put out into the open:
- President Obama did a great job diffusing the onslaught of Republican revisionism in the past couple of weeks surrounding this impending stimulus package in the course of about two hours. Even though the news media continue to glut themselves on low-cost Rethug Rum Punch, nothing demands more press time than the President taking time to address the public and his colleagues on a serious national matter. So good job in engaging the press head-on and redirecting the narrative. Read more
Bipartisanship, Nonexistent CBO Reports, and Misattributed Quotes
Commentary’s Jennifer Rubin tsk-tsks that “bipartisanship didn’t make it to the weekend“:
The problem is not just the Democrats’ high-handed process that shuts out Republicans. The issue is that the bill itself is objectively awful. If you think tax cuts and defense spending are better ways to “jump start” the economy, there is precious little to like. But even if you accept the Democrats’ premise that we should have a bunch of “shovel ready” projects and immediate infusions of spending into the economy, the bill doesn’t do that either. The Congressional Budget Office tells us: “For example, of $30 billion in highway spending, less than $4 billion would occur over the next two years. Of $18.5 billion proposed for renewable energy, less than $3 billion would be spent by 2011. And of $14 billion for school construction, less than $7 billion would be spent in the first two years.”
Forbes Lists “25 Most Influential Liberals” in U.S. Media
- Paul Krugman
- Arianna Huffington
- Fred Hiatt
- Thomas Friedman
- Jon Stewart
- Oprah Winfrey
- Rachel Maddow
- Josh Marshall
- David Shipley
- Markos Moulitsas Zuniga (Kos)
- Fareed Zakaria
- Chris Matthews
- Bill Moyers
- Christopher Hitchens
- Maureen Dowd
- Matthew Yglesias
- Hendrick Hertzberg
- Glenn Greenwald
- Andrew Sullivan
- Gerald Seib
- James Fallows
- Ezra Klein
- Kevin Drum
- Kurt Andersen
- Michael Pollan
About half of these belong on the list. The rest, either I don’t enough about them to say one way or the other, or they clearly don’t belong on the list, and someone put something funny in the Forbes editors’ coffee.
Dear Politico
Is it really a ’slam’ if the new administration (new administration!) has simply offered an honest account of how the previous administration (previous administration!) conducted itself during Katrina?
Rick Sanchez Pwns Joe the Plumber
Oooo–that’s gonna leave a mark.
Transcript @ Crooks & Liars, h/t Chet Scoville.
*facepalm*
There’s so much wrong here that I don’t know where to begin. So I’ll just point out that while working for a supposed media organization as a reporter to comment on the war in Gaza, Joe the Plumber has said that the media shouldn’t be allowed to report about wars.
I think we all know what this kind of quality wingnut reporting deserves…
Wingnut Freak of the Week Award
Mary Katharine Ham in The Weekly Standard, writing about the video (which LGF deemed, after much painstaking and exacting anaysis, to be fake), filmed by a freelance Palestinian journalist showing efforts to save the life of his 12-year-old brother, who died after being hit by shrapnel, which the boy’s family said happened as the result of an explosion from a rocket attack by an unmanned Israeli drone:
Coming to Grips with a Likable President
All throughout the 2008 campaign season one of the most enduring themes was of Obama’s “celebrity”. Used by both Hillary and McCain this label was an attempt to paint Obama as a superficial and unqualified candidate, to make him seem like an empty suit.
These attacks, ultimately, backfired and they did so for one reason: people like Obama. He comes from the same background so many of us come from while showing just how much someone with drive can accomplish, is extremely intelligent, physically fit, photogenic, and not afraid to argue progressive ideals in a way that draws support of people left, right, and center. What it basically boils down to is that people like Obama, and he’s become a celebrity, because he’s earned it. Even McCain’s “Celeb”-spot ad guru, Fred Davis, thinks Obama’s earned his status.
“He is the new president of the United States,” Davis says. “He did raise about a billion dollars, he did revolutionize politics with African-Americans and the young, and he did win by a healthy margin in the electoral vote. Guess I think he’s earned some degree of celebrity.”
This is, of course, driving the right wing blogosphere nuts. But then, what could one expect after 8 years of cheerleading for one of the least liked, and most ruinous, administrations in American history?
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