Mon - May 12, 2008
THE MESSENGER WHO UNDERSTOOD THE MESSAGE
or, when leonard heard
jeremiah...
I'm about a week late to this one -- got behind in
some of my reading and am only now getting caught up -- and the piece itself is
almost a week late in so (w)rightly lamenting and skewering its subject matter,
but...
...The Messenger Who Killed the Message is an outstanding title, metaphor, and dismissal of a series of performances that, as I have already noted, plenty of bloggers and commenters and commentators have tripped over themselves and their condescending best intentions to justify. The whole piece is required reading, but here, for my eye and ear, is the money passage:
If you condemn bigotry when it is turned against people like you, but tolerate it when people like you turn it against someone else, you forfeit all claim to the moral high ground. You are a hypocrite acting only from narrow self interest.
For all that, though, the thing about Wright's lost weekend that stands out most for me is his demeanor in the two speeches he gave: smug, mugging for the cameras, signifying, jive talking, acting the fool.
Did he really say an attack on him was an attack on the black church entire? Did he really make those faces and throw that silly salute? Why didn't he just slap his hands together, yell ''Dy-no-mite!'' and be done with it? Wright came across like drunken Uncle Buddy at the Thanksgiving table, the one who doesn't know he's not funny and won't shut up.
More to the point, he did not come across like a reverend. Or even a Christian.
In this season of political pandering and histrionics, truer words have rarely been written. That they were written by Leonard Pitts, Jr., Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist, makes them awfully hard to dismiss. That they were written by Leonard Pitts, Jr., African-American, makes them awfully hard to demonize.
But not, I'm sure, for lack of trying.
...The Messenger Who Killed the Message is an outstanding title, metaphor, and dismissal of a series of performances that, as I have already noted, plenty of bloggers and commenters and commentators have tripped over themselves and their condescending best intentions to justify. The whole piece is required reading, but here, for my eye and ear, is the money passage:
If you condemn bigotry when it is turned against people like you, but tolerate it when people like you turn it against someone else, you forfeit all claim to the moral high ground. You are a hypocrite acting only from narrow self interest.
For all that, though, the thing about Wright's lost weekend that stands out most for me is his demeanor in the two speeches he gave: smug, mugging for the cameras, signifying, jive talking, acting the fool.
Did he really say an attack on him was an attack on the black church entire? Did he really make those faces and throw that silly salute? Why didn't he just slap his hands together, yell ''Dy-no-mite!'' and be done with it? Wright came across like drunken Uncle Buddy at the Thanksgiving table, the one who doesn't know he's not funny and won't shut up.
More to the point, he did not come across like a reverend. Or even a Christian.
In this season of political pandering and histrionics, truer words have rarely been written. That they were written by Leonard Pitts, Jr., Pulitzer-Prize-winning columnist, makes them awfully hard to dismiss. That they were written by Leonard Pitts, Jr., African-American, makes them awfully hard to demonize.
But not, I'm sure, for lack of trying.
Posted at 10:19 AM
Sun - May 11, 2008
A DAY LATE AND A DOPPLER SHORT
or, the weathermen blow it
again.
It's been a while since I took our esteemed local
meteorologists to task for their sensationalism, their rank incompetence, or
their inability to know the difference. This is not, of course, for lack of
opportunity, but rather for excess of courtesy; after all, you can only hammer
these people so often before the point gets made, the joke gets old, and the
dead horse gets beaten to dust. But this weekend's performance was so abysmal,
so wholly and utterly and pathetically wrong, that I just can't resist a brief
chronicle of it.
On Friday, they said, the rain would end by noon. And it did. But then it started again at five. And continued, with varying degrees of intensity, until around seven o'clock Saturday morning.
Last night, they said that today's rain would arrive around four or five in the afternoon. This morning, they said the rain would arrive around noon. As I sit here writing, at 10:05am, I'm listening to the sound of a hard rain pelting off my skylight.
It sounds just like the tapping of my fingers before I post. And the ticking of my head before it explodes.
On Friday, they said, the rain would end by noon. And it did. But then it started again at five. And continued, with varying degrees of intensity, until around seven o'clock Saturday morning.
Last night, they said that today's rain would arrive around four or five in the afternoon. This morning, they said the rain would arrive around noon. As I sit here writing, at 10:05am, I'm listening to the sound of a hard rain pelting off my skylight.
It sounds just like the tapping of my fingers before I post. And the ticking of my head before it explodes.
Posted at 11:40 AM
Tue - May 6, 2008
THESE HUNGRY EDITORS WON'T BE DENIED
but the rest of us will.
Part me of thinks I should not disparage anyone who
wants to support the Penguins during this (or any) playoff run. But then
another part of me endures loutish, drunken fans at the Arena -- I went to a
Pens game two weeks ago, and a Steelers game broke out -- and silly, ignorant fans on talk radio and silly, awkward editorials in the morning paper,
and, well...
Spare us the wagers of cheesesteaks vs. Iron City.
Spare us the unfortunate mix of a little knowledge and a lot of cheek. If only because no one would ever wager cheesesteaks against Iron City. They'd wager cheesesteaks against Primanti's sandwiches. Or maybe pierogies. And Iron City against Yards. Or maybe Yuengling.
Any way you mix the two, hockey fans know it's going to come out bitter.
Oh, yes. Very bitter. Especially in Pennsylvania, where the masses cling to sports and sticks almost as much as they do to guns and religion.
Isn't that right, Barack Obama endorsers?
That's how it's always been with the NHL's Pennsylvania rivals, the Pittsburgh Penguins and Philadelphia Flyers, who will open a best-of-seven series here Friday night for the Eastern Conference title. For anyone not paying attention (and it's hard to understand how), this is the playoff round before the Stanley Cup finals.
If they're not paying attention, I doubt they're still reading. And if they really want to be informed about hockey playoff rounds, I doubt they'll be looking just below British shocker: Voters dump the Labor Party in local councils on your editorial page.
That's Stanley Cup as in championship.
That's repetitive as in redundant.
That's championship as in the kind the Penguins haven't copped since 1992, when star center Sidney Crosby was still shy of his fifth birthday.
That's awkward -- as in grating -- parallel structure. Please stop.
And another thing: Copped? Copped? Who are you, Raymond Chandler?
But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Too late.
The young Pens have come this far, capturing two rounds of playoffs in the remarkably short span of eight wins and one loss, just by doing that -- taking it one game at a time.
Did anyone proofread this thing? Or did they just decide that a couple of paragraphs so awkward in tone may as well be equally awkward in syntax?
They also have counted on every man to find his one shining moment, as newcomer Marian Hossa did in his overtime goal Sunday.
One shining moment? Who wrote this? Jim Nantz? James Brown? Verne Lundquist? In the middle of a PG editorial, a bad CBS Sports broadcast (yes, I know that's redundant) broke out.
Not that Friday night's face-off will be just another game. The Pens go up against their cross-state nemesis, who beat Pittsburgh in five of their eight meetings this season, including an 8-2 humiliation in December.
Whatever the Pens suffered in that loss, it was, I assure you, no more humiliating than the printing of this editorial.
Let's hope the Flyers had their fun. This is the series that counts.
And this is the editorial that hurts.
These hungry Penguins won't be denied.
Cramming two clichés into just six words. Impressive. If not necessarily creative. Or admirable.
Someone call Gene Collier. Quick.
Go ahead, bring it.
If you say so, Mr. President.
My God. If there's anything more desperate and pathetic than newspaper editorial boards trying to sound hip and cool by writing about a local sports team, it's newspaper editorial boards trying to sound hip and cool by writing about a local sports team in an arch, affected vernacular that even the team's players would not dream of employing.
Sidney Crosby: If you want a rivalry, there's one right there. As players, we know that the playoffs are always intense, but it throws some spice into it when it's Pittsburgh-Philadelphia.
Marian Hossa: We're going to enjoy this, have a day off, and then we're going back to work to get ready for the next opponent.
Ryan Malone: It's going to be a battle. We've worked hard to get where we are now. Why not play them and have this big rivalry? It's going to be great for the fans.
PG Editorial Board: Go ahead, bring it.
Whatever the Flyers bring, it is sure to be only marginally less dignified on the ice than the PG Editorial Board is here in print. For anyone not paying attention (and it's not hard to understand why), that's the final, and most lamentable, insult of all.
Spare us the wagers of cheesesteaks vs. Iron City.
Spare us the unfortunate mix of a little knowledge and a lot of cheek. If only because no one would ever wager cheesesteaks against Iron City. They'd wager cheesesteaks against Primanti's sandwiches. Or maybe pierogies. And Iron City against Yards. Or maybe Yuengling.
Any way you mix the two, hockey fans know it's going to come out bitter.
Oh, yes. Very bitter. Especially in Pennsylvania, where the masses cling to sports and sticks almost as much as they do to guns and religion.
Isn't that right, Barack Obama endorsers?
That's how it's always been with the NHL's Pennsylvania rivals, the Pittsburgh Penguins and Philadelphia Flyers, who will open a best-of-seven series here Friday night for the Eastern Conference title. For anyone not paying attention (and it's hard to understand how), this is the playoff round before the Stanley Cup finals.
If they're not paying attention, I doubt they're still reading. And if they really want to be informed about hockey playoff rounds, I doubt they'll be looking just below British shocker: Voters dump the Labor Party in local councils on your editorial page.
That's Stanley Cup as in championship.
That's repetitive as in redundant.
That's championship as in the kind the Penguins haven't copped since 1992, when star center Sidney Crosby was still shy of his fifth birthday.
That's awkward -- as in grating -- parallel structure. Please stop.
And another thing: Copped? Copped? Who are you, Raymond Chandler?
But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Too late.
The young Pens have come this far, capturing two rounds of playoffs in the remarkably short span of eight wins and one loss, just by doing that -- taking it one game at a time.
Did anyone proofread this thing? Or did they just decide that a couple of paragraphs so awkward in tone may as well be equally awkward in syntax?
They also have counted on every man to find his one shining moment, as newcomer Marian Hossa did in his overtime goal Sunday.
One shining moment? Who wrote this? Jim Nantz? James Brown? Verne Lundquist? In the middle of a PG editorial, a bad CBS Sports broadcast (yes, I know that's redundant) broke out.
Not that Friday night's face-off will be just another game. The Pens go up against their cross-state nemesis, who beat Pittsburgh in five of their eight meetings this season, including an 8-2 humiliation in December.
Whatever the Pens suffered in that loss, it was, I assure you, no more humiliating than the printing of this editorial.
Let's hope the Flyers had their fun. This is the series that counts.
And this is the editorial that hurts.
These hungry Penguins won't be denied.
Cramming two clichés into just six words. Impressive. If not necessarily creative. Or admirable.
Someone call Gene Collier. Quick.
Go ahead, bring it.
If you say so, Mr. President.
My God. If there's anything more desperate and pathetic than newspaper editorial boards trying to sound hip and cool by writing about a local sports team, it's newspaper editorial boards trying to sound hip and cool by writing about a local sports team in an arch, affected vernacular that even the team's players would not dream of employing.
Sidney Crosby: If you want a rivalry, there's one right there. As players, we know that the playoffs are always intense, but it throws some spice into it when it's Pittsburgh-Philadelphia.
Marian Hossa: We're going to enjoy this, have a day off, and then we're going back to work to get ready for the next opponent.
Ryan Malone: It's going to be a battle. We've worked hard to get where we are now. Why not play them and have this big rivalry? It's going to be great for the fans.
PG Editorial Board: Go ahead, bring it.
Whatever the Flyers bring, it is sure to be only marginally less dignified on the ice than the PG Editorial Board is here in print. For anyone not paying attention (and it's not hard to understand why), that's the final, and most lamentable, insult of all.
Posted at 11:13 AM
Sat - May 3, 2008
NOT THAT COMPLEX AFTER ALL
or, the uncritical joys of
renunciation
Just shy of four months ago, I was surprised to
discover that I agreed with whole, great swaths of a column by
Charles Krauthammer, a Washington Postie with whom I often disagree.
After reading his latest column reprinted in this morning's
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, I was almost as surprised to discover that
rhetorical lightning can indeed strike
twice.
This will, no doubt, be counted against me by my pro-Obama critics. On more than one occasion, I've been dissed or emailed or insulted by people who, closing their minds and opening their web browsers, decide they can happily dismiss and reflexively vilify me just because I, on occasion, happen to agree with a guy (or a gal) they can write off as a neocon kook. You know -- as if the world is divided into good and evil, as if they have the exclusive right to decide which is which, and as if that stance is not in direct violation of the ideals they, by supporting Senator Obama, claim to espouse.
And yet those sorts of do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do sorts of hypocrisies these days abound in Camp Obama, as Mr. Krauthammer -- who is, I think, wrong about many things but still right about these (see how easy that is, kids? just a simple, substantive, case-by-case judgment; that's a new kind of rhetorical politics you really ought to try sometime) -- neatly observes:
At a news conference in North Carolina, Mr. Obama explained why he finally decided to do the deed. Apparently, Mr. Wright's latest comments -- Mr. Obama cited three in particular -- were so shockingly "divisive and destructive" that he had to renounce the man, not just the words. What were Mr. Obama's three citations? Mr. Wright's claim that AIDS was invented by the U.S. government to commit genocide. His praise of Louis Farrakhan as a great man. And his blaming 9/11 on American "terrorism."
But these comments are not new. These were precisely the outrages that prompted the initial furor when the Wright tapes emerged seven weeks ago. Mr. Obama decided to cut off Mr. Wright not because the reverend's words or character or views had suddenly changed. The only thing that changed was the venue in which Mr. Wright chose to display them -- live on national TV at the National Press Club. That unfortunate choice destroyed Mr. Obama's Philadelphia pretense that this "endless loop" of sermon excerpts being shown on "television sets and YouTube" had been taken out of context.
This last part is not entirely true. Because one important thing changed: he had the (what's that word again?) audacity to insult Senator Obama. To question his sincerity. To suggest that he was just playing politics. In other words, as they say in those bad movie trailers: This time, it's personal.
I suspect that, as much as the National Press Clubbully loony pulpit, was the reason for
the change of heart. And the sudden willingness to disown someone he once said
he could no more disown than his own grandmother. Combine those two factors,
mix in a newly energized press corps that, in the middle of a surprising but
almost certainly inevitable course-correction, has finally decided to draw some
fresh blood from Senator Breath of Fresh Air, and you get what we saw and heard
but did not quite buy in North Carolina this week.
So much for unity. So much for a new kind of politics.
Mr. Obama's Philadelphia oration was an exercise in contextualization. In one particularly egregious play on white guilt, Mr. Obama had the audacity to suggest that whites should be ashamed they were ever surprised by Mr. Wright's remarks: "The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Rev. Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour of American life occurs on Sunday morning."
That was then. On Tuesday, Mr. Obama declared that he himself was surprised at Mr. Wright's outrages. But hadn't Mr. Obama told us that surprise about Mr. Wright is a result of white ignorance of black churches brought on by America's history of segregated services? How then to explain Mr. Obama's own presumed ignorance? Surely he too was not sitting in those segregated white churches on those fateful Sundays when he conveniently missed all of Mr. Wright's racist rants. Mr. Obama's turning surprise about Mr. Wright into something to be counted against whites -- one of the more clever devices in that shameful, brilliantly executed, 5,000-word intellectual fraud in Philadelphia -- now stands discredited by Mr. Obama's own admission of surprise. But Mr. Obama's liberal acolytes are not daunted. They were taken in by the first great statement on race: the Annunciation, the Chosen One comes to heal us in Philly. They now are taken in by the second: the Renunciation.
You almost have to pity them in a way: they've sunk so much faith and hope into this man and this campaign that they're left with two choices: renounce them both and admit the mistake, or keep plowing blindly and uncritically ahead, growing (dare I say?) more bitter by the day, reduced to demonizing or insulting or a priori dismissing anyone who dares question Senator Obama's credibility.
Which, again, just for the record, sounds an awful lot like the much-maligned old kind of politics to me.
This 20-year association with Mr. Wright calls into question everything about Mr. Obama: his truthfulness in his serially adjusted stories of what he knew and when he knew it; his judgment in choosing as his mentor, pastor and great friend a man he just now realizes is a purveyor of racial hatred; and the central premise of his campaign, that he is the bringer of a "new politics," rising above the old Washington ways of expediency.
It's hard to think of an act more blatantly expedient than renouncing Mr. Wright when his show, once done from the press club instead of the pulpit, could no longer be "contextualized" as something whites could not understand and only Mr. Obama could explain in all its complexity. Turns out it was not that complex after all. Everyone understands it now. Even Mr. Obama.
Just as he -- and plenty of other people -- did all along.
This will, no doubt, be counted against me by my pro-Obama critics. On more than one occasion, I've been dissed or emailed or insulted by people who, closing their minds and opening their web browsers, decide they can happily dismiss and reflexively vilify me just because I, on occasion, happen to agree with a guy (or a gal) they can write off as a neocon kook. You know -- as if the world is divided into good and evil, as if they have the exclusive right to decide which is which, and as if that stance is not in direct violation of the ideals they, by supporting Senator Obama, claim to espouse.
And yet those sorts of do-as-we-say-not-as-we-do sorts of hypocrisies these days abound in Camp Obama, as Mr. Krauthammer -- who is, I think, wrong about many things but still right about these (see how easy that is, kids? just a simple, substantive, case-by-case judgment; that's a new kind of rhetorical politics you really ought to try sometime) -- neatly observes:
At a news conference in North Carolina, Mr. Obama explained why he finally decided to do the deed. Apparently, Mr. Wright's latest comments -- Mr. Obama cited three in particular -- were so shockingly "divisive and destructive" that he had to renounce the man, not just the words. What were Mr. Obama's three citations? Mr. Wright's claim that AIDS was invented by the U.S. government to commit genocide. His praise of Louis Farrakhan as a great man. And his blaming 9/11 on American "terrorism."
But these comments are not new. These were precisely the outrages that prompted the initial furor when the Wright tapes emerged seven weeks ago. Mr. Obama decided to cut off Mr. Wright not because the reverend's words or character or views had suddenly changed. The only thing that changed was the venue in which Mr. Wright chose to display them -- live on national TV at the National Press Club. That unfortunate choice destroyed Mr. Obama's Philadelphia pretense that this "endless loop" of sermon excerpts being shown on "television sets and YouTube" had been taken out of context.
This last part is not entirely true. Because one important thing changed: he had the (what's that word again?) audacity to insult Senator Obama. To question his sincerity. To suggest that he was just playing politics. In other words, as they say in those bad movie trailers: This time, it's personal.
I suspect that, as much as the National Press Club
So much for unity. So much for a new kind of politics.
Mr. Obama's Philadelphia oration was an exercise in contextualization. In one particularly egregious play on white guilt, Mr. Obama had the audacity to suggest that whites should be ashamed they were ever surprised by Mr. Wright's remarks: "The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Rev. Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour of American life occurs on Sunday morning."
That was then. On Tuesday, Mr. Obama declared that he himself was surprised at Mr. Wright's outrages. But hadn't Mr. Obama told us that surprise about Mr. Wright is a result of white ignorance of black churches brought on by America's history of segregated services? How then to explain Mr. Obama's own presumed ignorance? Surely he too was not sitting in those segregated white churches on those fateful Sundays when he conveniently missed all of Mr. Wright's racist rants. Mr. Obama's turning surprise about Mr. Wright into something to be counted against whites -- one of the more clever devices in that shameful, brilliantly executed, 5,000-word intellectual fraud in Philadelphia -- now stands discredited by Mr. Obama's own admission of surprise. But Mr. Obama's liberal acolytes are not daunted. They were taken in by the first great statement on race: the Annunciation, the Chosen One comes to heal us in Philly. They now are taken in by the second: the Renunciation.
You almost have to pity them in a way: they've sunk so much faith and hope into this man and this campaign that they're left with two choices: renounce them both and admit the mistake, or keep plowing blindly and uncritically ahead, growing (dare I say?) more bitter by the day, reduced to demonizing or insulting or a priori dismissing anyone who dares question Senator Obama's credibility.
Which, again, just for the record, sounds an awful lot like the much-maligned old kind of politics to me.
This 20-year association with Mr. Wright calls into question everything about Mr. Obama: his truthfulness in his serially adjusted stories of what he knew and when he knew it; his judgment in choosing as his mentor, pastor and great friend a man he just now realizes is a purveyor of racial hatred; and the central premise of his campaign, that he is the bringer of a "new politics," rising above the old Washington ways of expediency.
It's hard to think of an act more blatantly expedient than renouncing Mr. Wright when his show, once done from the press club instead of the pulpit, could no longer be "contextualized" as something whites could not understand and only Mr. Obama could explain in all its complexity. Turns out it was not that complex after all. Everyone understands it now. Even Mr. Obama.
Just as he -- and plenty of other people -- did all along.
Posted at 02:12 PM
Thu - April 24, 2008
YOU ARE DUMB, AND YOU ARE PROBABLY A RACIST, IF YOU VOTED FOR HILLARY CLINTON
but not if you voted for barack obama. then you
are the wise and enlightened and open-minded, even if some numbers may suggest
otherwise.
Imagine my surprise this morning when I woke up,
opened the newspaper, and learned that people who voted for Hillary Clinton on
Tuesday did not actually bother to
think:
Pennsylvania could have put a stop to this civil war, but the voters were not inclined to think their votes through...
...With a Bush administration legacy of ill-advised war and economic woe, the Democrats would have to go out of their way to lose the general election -- and in Pennsylvania they unthinkingly went down that road.
You have to grudgingly admire, I suppose, an editorial that manages to analogize a woman who received 1.2 million votes in the Pennsylvania Primary and has to date received 13,917,009 votes nationwide as both the Bush Administration in the Iraq War and the Confederacy in the Civil War, as the candidate of the old, the stubborn, the foolish, and the unflinchingly stupid. The only missing accusation -- and it was surely whistling Dixie at the edges of the second analogy -- was the idea that she's the candidate of the irredeemably racist.
But the Post-Gazette editorial board -- methinks I spy the heavy hand, and the ham-handed metaphors, of Tony Norman -- doesn't have to regret the omission, because the New York Times, with a big assist from the Obama Campaign, handled it well enough for the both of them:
It is a question that has hung over Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign, and it loomed large on Tuesday night after his loss to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in Pennsylvania: Why has he been unable to win over enough working-class and white voters to wrap up the Democratic nomination?
In a front-page, homepage piece headlined Questions over Race and Electability, the answer remains unspoken, if not unheard: because so many of those people are racists, of course.
Just when it seemed that the Democratic Party was close to anointing Mr. Obama as its nominee, he lost yet again in a big general election state, dragged down by his weakness among blue-collar voters, older voters and white voters. The composition of Mrs. Clinton’s support — or, looked at another way, the makeup of voters who have proved reluctant to embrace Mr. Obama — has Democrats wondering, if not worrying, about what role race may be playing.
After acknowledging -- grudgingly -- that Senator Obama has ascended to his current front-runner status by winning big victories in very white states, and that crowds at his rallies are as white as any at Clinton rally, Adam Nagourney's piece turns to Andrew Kohut, the director of the Pew Research Center, to note that many of these people react negatively to people who are seen as different." In other words: to people whose skin color is different.
But the hack job doesn't stop there. Consider these passages:
For Mr. Obama, race presents two potential problems: Voters opposing him simply because he is black, and Democrats who will not support him because they do not think a black man can win a general election.
The results in Pennsylvania suggest that problems exist. A poll of Democratic voters conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for the television networks and The Associated Press found that Mrs. Clinton drew 63 percent of the white vote while Mr. Obama drew 90 percent of the black vote, mirroring a pattern in many other states. More strikingly, the poll found that 18 percent of Democrats said that race mattered to them in this contest — and just 63 percent of those voters said they would support Mr. Obama in a general election.
Funny -- if predictable -- the implications and conclusions to which these numbers inevitably lead. But let's look at them against the grain for a moment.
37 percent of Pennsylvania whites crossed racial lines and voted for Senator Obama. Only 10 percent of Pennsylvania blacks crossed racial lines and voted for Senator Clinton. Which means that whites were 370% more likely to vote for the black candidate than blacks were to vote for the white candidate. But Obama's the one with the race problem? He's the one suffering at the dirty hands and darkened minds of those awful, knee-jerk, working-class racists?
If you really wanted to make an argument based on these numbers -- and I don't, by the way, any more than I want to buy that first set of faulty assumptions -- you would have to argue that Senator Clinton is the one with the race problem. After all, she's the one who suffered (far) more from voters unwilling to cross racial lines. But I don't see any articles or editorials or think-tank hand-wringing about that phenomenon. Oh, no. All I see are the -- frankly, quite fucking offensive -- suggestions that people who voted for Hillary Clinton are (just to recap) old, stubborn, foolish, unflinchingly stupid, or irredeemably racist.
Now. Let's not kid ourselves. Are (lots of) people voting against Barack Obama because he's black? Of course. Are (lots of) stupid people voting for Hillary Clinton? You bet. But you'd have to be a dreamer, an elitist, or -- let's be honest -- an utter moron to suggest that there are not also (lots of) stupid people voting for Barack Obama, and (lots of) people voting for him because he's black.
But those sorts of prejudice and stupidity are acceptable, I suppose, as long as they're in service to the sanctified causes of Hope and Change and a More Pefect Union, as long as you're voting the right way for the right guy that the right reporters and editorialists and (who are we kidding) hypocritical condescenders want you to. What is not okay, apparently, is for you to take a good, long look at that candidate and, the color of his skin and the power of his punditry be damned, decide he is too out of touch, or too elitist, or too inexperienced, or too uncertain on the issues, or just too much of a blowharding, self-loving phony to be President. That is most certainly not okay.
Even if it was back in 2000.
Pennsylvania could have put a stop to this civil war, but the voters were not inclined to think their votes through...
...With a Bush administration legacy of ill-advised war and economic woe, the Democrats would have to go out of their way to lose the general election -- and in Pennsylvania they unthinkingly went down that road.
You have to grudgingly admire, I suppose, an editorial that manages to analogize a woman who received 1.2 million votes in the Pennsylvania Primary and has to date received 13,917,009 votes nationwide as both the Bush Administration in the Iraq War and the Confederacy in the Civil War, as the candidate of the old, the stubborn, the foolish, and the unflinchingly stupid. The only missing accusation -- and it was surely whistling Dixie at the edges of the second analogy -- was the idea that she's the candidate of the irredeemably racist.
But the Post-Gazette editorial board -- methinks I spy the heavy hand, and the ham-handed metaphors, of Tony Norman -- doesn't have to regret the omission, because the New York Times, with a big assist from the Obama Campaign, handled it well enough for the both of them:
It is a question that has hung over Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign, and it loomed large on Tuesday night after his loss to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in Pennsylvania: Why has he been unable to win over enough working-class and white voters to wrap up the Democratic nomination?
In a front-page, homepage piece headlined Questions over Race and Electability, the answer remains unspoken, if not unheard: because so many of those people are racists, of course.
Just when it seemed that the Democratic Party was close to anointing Mr. Obama as its nominee, he lost yet again in a big general election state, dragged down by his weakness among blue-collar voters, older voters and white voters. The composition of Mrs. Clinton’s support — or, looked at another way, the makeup of voters who have proved reluctant to embrace Mr. Obama — has Democrats wondering, if not worrying, about what role race may be playing.
After acknowledging -- grudgingly -- that Senator Obama has ascended to his current front-runner status by winning big victories in very white states, and that crowds at his rallies are as white as any at Clinton rally, Adam Nagourney's piece turns to Andrew Kohut, the director of the Pew Research Center, to note that many of these people react negatively to people who are seen as different." In other words: to people whose skin color is different.
But the hack job doesn't stop there. Consider these passages:
For Mr. Obama, race presents two potential problems: Voters opposing him simply because he is black, and Democrats who will not support him because they do not think a black man can win a general election.
The results in Pennsylvania suggest that problems exist. A poll of Democratic voters conducted by Edison/Mitofsky for the television networks and The Associated Press found that Mrs. Clinton drew 63 percent of the white vote while Mr. Obama drew 90 percent of the black vote, mirroring a pattern in many other states. More strikingly, the poll found that 18 percent of Democrats said that race mattered to them in this contest — and just 63 percent of those voters said they would support Mr. Obama in a general election.
Funny -- if predictable -- the implications and conclusions to which these numbers inevitably lead. But let's look at them against the grain for a moment.
37 percent of Pennsylvania whites crossed racial lines and voted for Senator Obama. Only 10 percent of Pennsylvania blacks crossed racial lines and voted for Senator Clinton. Which means that whites were 370% more likely to vote for the black candidate than blacks were to vote for the white candidate. But Obama's the one with the race problem? He's the one suffering at the dirty hands and darkened minds of those awful, knee-jerk, working-class racists?
If you really wanted to make an argument based on these numbers -- and I don't, by the way, any more than I want to buy that first set of faulty assumptions -- you would have to argue that Senator Clinton is the one with the race problem. After all, she's the one who suffered (far) more from voters unwilling to cross racial lines. But I don't see any articles or editorials or think-tank hand-wringing about that phenomenon. Oh, no. All I see are the -- frankly, quite fucking offensive -- suggestions that people who voted for Hillary Clinton are (just to recap) old, stubborn, foolish, unflinchingly stupid, or irredeemably racist.
Now. Let's not kid ourselves. Are (lots of) people voting against Barack Obama because he's black? Of course. Are (lots of) stupid people voting for Hillary Clinton? You bet. But you'd have to be a dreamer, an elitist, or -- let's be honest -- an utter moron to suggest that there are not also (lots of) stupid people voting for Barack Obama, and (lots of) people voting for him because he's black.
But those sorts of prejudice and stupidity are acceptable, I suppose, as long as they're in service to the sanctified causes of Hope and Change and a More Pefect Union, as long as you're voting the right way for the right guy that the right reporters and editorialists and (who are we kidding) hypocritical condescenders want you to. What is not okay, apparently, is for you to take a good, long look at that candidate and, the color of his skin and the power of his punditry be damned, decide he is too out of touch, or too elitist, or too inexperienced, or too uncertain on the issues, or just too much of a blowharding, self-loving phony to be President. That is most certainly not okay.
Even if it was back in 2000.
Posted at 01:48 PM
Wed - April 23, 2008
I READ THE NEWS AGAIN, OH MY
about an unlucky man who didn't make the
grade.
The Washington Post notes that Seantor Obama -- who built his
campaign on being different, took off the gloves in Pennsylvania, and
now may have to keep them off -- faces a tough quandry. Which
distinguishes his position, I suppose, from all of those easy quandries.
And which also seems to split hairs on a bald man's head. If only because, by already -- and repeatedly -- removing the gloves, he has, to anyone with eyes and mind open enough to see, already compromised that alleged electoral integrity. He's no longer different, no longer the Breath of Fresh Air, Different Kind of Politician he and his supporters have always professed him to be. (Not, of course, that he ever really was that anyway, but...)
He has, tough quandries and manufactured media dilemmas aside, long ago crossed over to the dark side, and no amount of smiling or moralizing or speechifying can change that.
And which also seems to split hairs on a bald man's head. If only because, by already -- and repeatedly -- removing the gloves, he has, to anyone with eyes and mind open enough to see, already compromised that alleged electoral integrity. He's no longer different, no longer the Breath of Fresh Air, Different Kind of Politician he and his supporters have always professed him to be. (Not, of course, that he ever really was that anyway, but...)
He has, tough quandries and manufactured media dilemmas aside, long ago crossed over to the dark side, and no amount of smiling or moralizing or speechifying can change that.
Posted at 10:34 AM
I READ THE NEWS AGAIN, OH BOY
and this time, it all made
sense.
Perhaps you will remember that after Senator Sniper
Fire had won in Ohio, Texas, and Rhode Island, I noted the -- let's be charitable here --
curious nature of the Post-Gazette's big, bold headline: Democratic
race goes on. Seven weeks later, I must give credit where it's due and
note that this morning, they got it absolutely right: Clinton wins, the
race goes on.
For the record, I also would have accepted: Clinton wins, the spin continues; Clinton wins, Obama packs up his toys and runs to Indiana; or You bitter, you better, you bet.
For the record, I also would have accepted: Clinton wins, the spin continues; Clinton wins, Obama packs up his toys and runs to Indiana; or You bitter, you better, you bet.
Posted at 08:53 AM
Mon - April 21, 2008
THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT
and they always have been.
I just heard some three-faced, jackass blowhard on
talk radio -- I would say who it was, but I wouldn't want to embarrass Marty
Griffin -- declare that tomorrow's primary in general, and Barack Obama in
particular, have been really great because they've excited so many young people.
Because teenagers who didn't even know there was a president are now
talking about politics. (That's verbatim. Really. I swear.) And because
middle schools and elementary schools are now holding mock elections for their
students.
Can someone who likes to play the whole investigative reporter on your side shuck-and-jive, someone who likes to pretend he's a savvy, straight-up man and voice of the little people, really be that much of a moron? Does he really believe there were teenagers anywhere who didn't even know there was a president? And that, even if there were -- which there weren't -- they're now suddenly debating the merits of universal health care or the missteps of American foreign policy? Does he really believe that middle schools and elementary schools have never before held mock presidential elections?
Note to Marty: not being able to name the president is not the same as not knowing there is one.
More notes to Marty: my 13-year-old voted for John Kerry (who beat George W. Bush) at Linden Elementary in 2004, and for Winnie the Pooh (who beat Al Gore and George W. Bush) at the Cyert Center in 2000; I voted for Ronald Reagan at Wyomissing Middle School in 1980, and for Jimmy Carter at Wyomissing Hills Elementary in 1976; somehow I doubt that we -- much less my parents, who also voted in mock elections when they were in elementary and middle school -- were merely foreshadowing the coming of the Pennsylvania Democratic Primary in 2008.
There is, of course, no doubt that children are engaged and engaging in this electoral season -- consider this cloying video, or this grassroots movement, for two recent examples -- but to suggest that it's never happened before, that it's going to change the face of politics forever, or that anything has changed besides the silly, sensational coverage that a bunch of kids with video cameras and internet connections are getting, is to succumb yet again to the kind of ahistorical narcissism that these days fuels both our old politics and our new media.
Can someone who likes to play the whole investigative reporter on your side shuck-and-jive, someone who likes to pretend he's a savvy, straight-up man and voice of the little people, really be that much of a moron? Does he really believe there were teenagers anywhere who didn't even know there was a president? And that, even if there were -- which there weren't -- they're now suddenly debating the merits of universal health care or the missteps of American foreign policy? Does he really believe that middle schools and elementary schools have never before held mock presidential elections?
Note to Marty: not being able to name the president is not the same as not knowing there is one.
More notes to Marty: my 13-year-old voted for John Kerry (who beat George W. Bush) at Linden Elementary in 2004, and for Winnie the Pooh (who beat Al Gore and George W. Bush) at the Cyert Center in 2000; I voted for Ronald Reagan at Wyomissing Middle School in 1980, and for Jimmy Carter at Wyomissing Hills Elementary in 1976; somehow I doubt that we -- much less my parents, who also voted in mock elections when they were in elementary and middle school -- were merely foreshadowing the coming of the Pennsylvania Democratic Primary in 2008.
There is, of course, no doubt that children are engaged and engaging in this electoral season -- consider this cloying video, or this grassroots movement, for two recent examples -- but to suggest that it's never happened before, that it's going to change the face of politics forever, or that anything has changed besides the silly, sensational coverage that a bunch of kids with video cameras and internet connections are getting, is to succumb yet again to the kind of ahistorical narcissism that these days fuels both our old politics and our new media.
Posted at 09:40 AM
Thu - March 27, 2008
HOW LIBERAL IS TOO LIBERAL?
how crappy is too crappy?
Interesting -- by which I mean stupid -- topic on
CNN TV
tonight:
I didn't know there was a point at which someone became too liberal to be President. I must have missed that section of the Constitution, or maybe fallen asleep during the day Mr. Rittle covered that limitation in my 8th grade civics class. Perhaps on the next episode of AC360, we can explore whether Anderson Cooper is "too craptastic" to be a journalist.
In the meantime, let's let voters decide what's too liberal, too conservative, or just too damned stupid to deserve their attention.
I didn't know there was a point at which someone became too liberal to be President. I must have missed that section of the Constitution, or maybe fallen asleep during the day Mr. Rittle covered that limitation in my 8th grade civics class. Perhaps on the next episode of AC360, we can explore whether Anderson Cooper is "too craptastic" to be a journalist.
In the meantime, let's let voters decide what's too liberal, too conservative, or just too damned stupid to deserve their attention.
Posted at 10:45 AM
Tue - March 25, 2008
AND GOES...
and goes...
So it wasn't his kids, but him as a (sort of) kid. Still pretty close.
Stay tuned in a few weeks for a cover story on his favorite childhood toy and how it always inspired him to be President.
Posted at 02:46 PM
Wed - March 5, 2008
I READ THE PRAISE TODAY, OH MY
and i have nothing but thanks.
At the end of a day in which I've taken a lot of
heat for (once again) suggesting that media types enjoy a loving, lingering
infatuation with Senator Breath of Fresh Air, in which several emailers and even
a fellow Pittsburgh blogger have criticized me for believing that media bias,
whether intentional or unintentional, is an issue worthy of close attention, and
in which the good senator himself possessed such a jaw-dropping mixture of irony
and audacity that he actually blamed his Texas and Ohio defeats on
media bias against him (!), this seems like a fine time to go against the grain,
and, for a change, note here the lone assenting view that happened upon my inbox
today:
This just underscores how naive some of your emailers are. I am sorry you are subjected to that sort of nonsense and thought it was nice of you to respond to them. THE big story of this election, as I see it, is the media's wet dream over Obama, the triumph of style over substance. The gist of what you do is point out that we're NOT focusing on the issues -- precisely because of this schoolgirl crush the media (and, I guess, people like your emailers) have on the nice talking senator. You were a pioneer in pointing it out. It's the most valuable service TWM provides.
I hope you always do TWM the way you want, without any interference, Chad. It's the best blog in Pittsburgh.
That last sentence is surely an exaggeration. But the rest of it, especially on a day like today, sounded pretty good to me.
This just underscores how naive some of your emailers are. I am sorry you are subjected to that sort of nonsense and thought it was nice of you to respond to them. THE big story of this election, as I see it, is the media's wet dream over Obama, the triumph of style over substance. The gist of what you do is point out that we're NOT focusing on the issues -- precisely because of this schoolgirl crush the media (and, I guess, people like your emailers) have on the nice talking senator. You were a pioneer in pointing it out. It's the most valuable service TWM provides.
I hope you always do TWM the way you want, without any interference, Chad. It's the best blog in Pittsburgh.
That last sentence is surely an exaggeration. But the rest of it, especially on a day like today, sounded pretty good to me.
Posted at 10:45 PM
I READ THE EMAILS TODAY, OH GOD
and I have a couple of answers.
The Obamans, no doubt depressed and more than a
little pissed off about what happened yesterday, have come out of the online
woodwork to attack me for having the temerity to suggest that this morning's
Post-Gazette headlines were an obvious -- if not necessarily conscious --
bit of bias. One emailer, whose sense of irony is obviously as impaired as his
judgment, suggested that I was biased against the media's very fair
coverage of Senator Hope and Change. Another, intimating either that I'm
surreptitiously supporting Hillary or that I'm secretly attracted to men, urged
me to come out of the closet
already.
So here, as a small dam against these babbling brooks of bitterness, are a few simple truths:
1) I am not secretly attracted to men (though I do think George Clooney and Viggo Mortensen are as hot and talented as any human beings on the planet).
2) I honestly don't know for whom I will vote on April 22nd. I may not vote for anyone. But I do know that the last thing our Democratic process (such as it is) needs is a double-standard-bearing mainstream media cheerleading for one candidate.
3) If Obama had won last night, his name absolutely would have been in the big, bold headline. As it SHOULD have been. Because HE would have been the story. Just as Hillary is -- or should be -- the story today. Just as her name should have been -- but was not -- in the big headline this morning. That PG headline buried the lede and the name, and so at least a little of its credibility.
I don't expect you to take my word on the first one -- after all, in these days of Ted Haggerty and Larry Craig, not even a wife, a couple of kids, and a profound profession of faith are enough to keep that door open -- but that's not really the point anyway.
The point is that by any objective standard, the observations I make in #s 2 & 3 here, and so in the previous post, are clear and reasonable and pretty damned hard to disagree with. In fact, I would suggest that the only reason you would even think to disagree with the notion that we don't need a double-standard-bearing mainstream media cheerleading for one candidate would be if most media outlets and pundits just happened to be cheerleading for your candidate.
So here, as a small dam against these babbling brooks of bitterness, are a few simple truths:
1) I am not secretly attracted to men (though I do think George Clooney and Viggo Mortensen are as hot and talented as any human beings on the planet).
2) I honestly don't know for whom I will vote on April 22nd. I may not vote for anyone. But I do know that the last thing our Democratic process (such as it is) needs is a double-standard-bearing mainstream media cheerleading for one candidate.
3) If Obama had won last night, his name absolutely would have been in the big, bold headline. As it SHOULD have been. Because HE would have been the story. Just as Hillary is -- or should be -- the story today. Just as her name should have been -- but was not -- in the big headline this morning. That PG headline buried the lede and the name, and so at least a little of its credibility.
I don't expect you to take my word on the first one -- after all, in these days of Ted Haggerty and Larry Craig, not even a wife, a couple of kids, and a profound profession of faith are enough to keep that door open -- but that's not really the point anyway.
The point is that by any objective standard, the observations I make in #s 2 & 3 here, and so in the previous post, are clear and reasonable and pretty damned hard to disagree with. In fact, I would suggest that the only reason you would even think to disagree with the notion that we don't need a double-standard-bearing mainstream media cheerleading for one candidate would be if most media outlets and pundits just happened to be cheerleading for your candidate.
Posted at 11:50 AM
I READ THE NEWS TODAY, OH BOY
and i had a couple of
questions.
The big, bold headline on the front page of this
morning's Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reads: Democratic race goes
on. The subhead, in normal type less than half the size of the
header, reads: Resurgent Clinton triumphs in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island.
What do you think the chances are, had Senator Breath of Fresh Air won by four points in Texas, by ten points in Ohio, and by eighteen points in Rhode Island, that the big, bold headline would have read: Democratic race likely over? Or that his name -- cue the chorus of Hosanna in the highest! -- would have been relegated to a subhead dwarfed and sandwiched between the words Democratic and McCain?
Yeah. That's what I thought too.
What do you think the chances are, had Senator Breath of Fresh Air won by four points in Texas, by ten points in Ohio, and by eighteen points in Rhode Island, that the big, bold headline would have read: Democratic race likely over? Or that his name -- cue the chorus of Hosanna in the highest! -- would have been relegated to a subhead dwarfed and sandwiched between the words Democratic and McCain?
Yeah. That's what I thought too.
Posted at 08:38 AM
Tue - February 19, 2008
AND SO IT GOES...
and so it goes.
In a couple of weeks, we'll probably see his kids on the cover.
Posted at 02:07 PM
Mon - February 18, 2008
JUST WORDS
that aren't his.
Imagine, if you will, that someone discovered a key
refrain from one of Hillary Clinton's big weekend speeches had been lifted
wholesale from a speech delivered almost two years ago by a governor she knew,
and with whom she had stood while the words were first being delivered. Do you
think you might be hearing a little something about that on the news? Reading
more than a little about it on the news sites? Think the pundits might have a
little fun with that one?
Now imagine, if you will, that someone discovered a key refrain from one of Barack Obama's big weekend speeches had been lifted wholesale from a speech delivered almost two years ago by a governor he knew, and with whom he had stood while the words were first being delivered. Do you think -- especially given everyone's love affair with this guy's (vastly overrated) oratory and rhetoric -- that might be worth hearing a little something about on the news? Maybe reading about on the news sites?
The New York Times has a story -- twelfth one down on the politics page, nowhere to be found on the home page -- that soft-pedals the story, gives an awful lot of time to Obama camp rationalization, and practically telegraphs its indifference in the headline: An Obama Refrain Bears Echoes of a Governor's Speeches.
For the record: that's not echoing; that's copying. If a student in one of my OralComm classes had delivered a passage in a speech lifted straight out of the speech of one of his friends -- and no matter whether they (ahem) often riff off one another -- I'd have failed the kid for plagiarism. Straight up. And then I would have investigated to find out if the friend knew he was gonna do it. But, hey, what are ethical standards in politics, right? I mean, it's not like the guy is basing his entire campaign on being a rhetorically original, politically and ethically refreshing kinda guy, right?
The Washington Post: nothing on the home page, nothing on the politics page.
MSNBC: nothing on the home page, nothing on the politics page.
CNN: nothing on the home page, nothing on the politics page.
ABC News home page: nothing.
ABC News politics page: bingo. The top story -- as of 9:15 this morning:
Obama's Inspiring Words... Plagiarism?
The link goes to Senior National Correspondent Jake Tapper's Political Punch blog, a site to which I have directed you before and will certainly be directing you again. It's nice to see that some major news organization and some major national journalist -- bravo, Mr. Tapper -- thinks this is a story worth mentioning. And maybe even worth more than a cursory, well-buried mention that will be sure to spare the Golden Boy of the Media even the slightest bit of tarnish.
Also for the record: Mr. Tapper's piece is the very definition of fair-and-balanced: offering views (and sources, and supporting links) from both sides and giving this revelation the open, reasoned, objective airing it deserves.
You can decide for yourself what this means or whether it bothers you at all. But you can't in good conscience suggest -- as so many of our allegedly unbiased media outlets seem to be -- that it's not worth covering at all.
Update 1:15pm: Making my point all the more? The Obama camp's response to this story -- in which they claim that Hillary Clinton has borrowed rhetoric too because she one said we are fired up and we are ready to go," a sentence that surely no one in the history of the world had ever used before Senator Breath of Fresh Air began saying it -- is the #2 Latest News headline on the CNN home page: Ticker: Obama camp: Clinton copied too.
It would be unbelievable, were it not so predictable.
Now imagine, if you will, that someone discovered a key refrain from one of Barack Obama's big weekend speeches had been lifted wholesale from a speech delivered almost two years ago by a governor he knew, and with whom he had stood while the words were first being delivered. Do you think -- especially given everyone's love affair with this guy's (vastly overrated) oratory and rhetoric -- that might be worth hearing a little something about on the news? Maybe reading about on the news sites?
The New York Times has a story -- twelfth one down on the politics page, nowhere to be found on the home page -- that soft-pedals the story, gives an awful lot of time to Obama camp rationalization, and practically telegraphs its indifference in the headline: An Obama Refrain Bears Echoes of a Governor's Speeches.
For the record: that's not echoing; that's copying. If a student in one of my OralComm classes had delivered a passage in a speech lifted straight out of the speech of one of his friends -- and no matter whether they (ahem) often riff off one another -- I'd have failed the kid for plagiarism. Straight up. And then I would have investigated to find out if the friend knew he was gonna do it. But, hey, what are ethical standards in politics, right? I mean, it's not like the guy is basing his entire campaign on being a rhetorically original, politically and ethically refreshing kinda guy, right?
The Washington Post: nothing on the home page, nothing on the politics page.
MSNBC: nothing on the home page, nothing on the politics page.
CNN: nothing on the home page, nothing on the politics page.
ABC News home page: nothing.
ABC News politics page: bingo. The top story -- as of 9:15 this morning:
Obama's Inspiring Words... Plagiarism?
The link goes to Senior National Correspondent Jake Tapper's Political Punch blog, a site to which I have directed you before and will certainly be directing you again. It's nice to see that some major news organization and some major national journalist -- bravo, Mr. Tapper -- thinks this is a story worth mentioning. And maybe even worth more than a cursory, well-buried mention that will be sure to spare the Golden Boy of the Media even the slightest bit of tarnish.
Also for the record: Mr. Tapper's piece is the very definition of fair-and-balanced: offering views (and sources, and supporting links) from both sides and giving this revelation the open, reasoned, objective airing it deserves.
You can decide for yourself what this means or whether it bothers you at all. But you can't in good conscience suggest -- as so many of our allegedly unbiased media outlets seem to be -- that it's not worth covering at all.
Update 1:15pm: Making my point all the more? The Obama camp's response to this story -- in which they claim that Hillary Clinton has borrowed rhetoric too because she one said we are fired up and we are ready to go," a sentence that surely no one in the history of the world had ever used before Senator Breath of Fresh Air began saying it -- is the #2 Latest News headline on the CNN home page: Ticker: Obama camp: Clinton copied too.
It would be unbelievable, were it not so predictable.
Posted at 09:15 AM
Tue - February 12, 2008
ANOTHER QUICK QUESTION FOR A SNOWY TUESDAY MORNING
because i saw something else on
tv.
When did we become such wimps -- and our local
media such hysterics -- that a whopping two inches of snow (more on the
way!) in Pittsburgh necessitated non-stop field reports, multiple
meteorologists, and the pre-emption of national television
broadcasting?
If we get six inches, WTAE may try to take over the Emergency Broadcast System. If we get eight, KDKA anchors may start eating the interns.
If we get six inches, WTAE may try to take over the Emergency Broadcast System. If we get eight, KDKA anchors may start eating the interns.
Posted at 08:13 AM
Sun - February 3, 2008
TAKING A LAP IN THE PITTSBURGH 250
from mt. washington to grant street. and back
again.
When I first came to Pittsburgh in August of 1987,
the city was just 229 years old. The Pirates were rebuilding, the Penguins had
a young star and team on the rise, a high-profile, the downtown skyline would
soon see another high-profile skyscraper, the South Side was the hot place to
be, the city had just been named America’s most livable, and the
mayor’s office, about to be emptied by untimely death, would soon be
filled by a surprising and unconventional city council president. Sound
familiar?
I love the city even more now than I did then. So much of what's so wonderful about this place -- the people; the natural beauty; the arts, the sports, the history; the big-city advantages in the small-town packaging -- has stayed the same. One thing that hasn't is its leadership. To my eye, and especially to my heart, it's gotten much, much worse.
These thoughts came to mind when Pittsburgh Post-Gazette OpEd/Forum Editor Greg Victor invited me -- after last week, you'd think he'd have learned -- to take the next lap in the paper's extensive Pittsburgh 250 coverage. I ran with them. And I'm only now looking back, both to thank him for the turn and to tell you that, today on G-1, you'll find The View From on High written by a guy from down low, someone who lives and loves and believes in Pittsburgh. Someone who, to paraphrase David L. Lawrence, knows its leaders will not be infallible and without human error, yet urges them always to work, and to do the best that is in them.
I love the city even more now than I did then. So much of what's so wonderful about this place -- the people; the natural beauty; the arts, the sports, the history; the big-city advantages in the small-town packaging -- has stayed the same. One thing that hasn't is its leadership. To my eye, and especially to my heart, it's gotten much, much worse.
These thoughts came to mind when Pittsburgh Post-Gazette OpEd/Forum Editor Greg Victor invited me -- after last week, you'd think he'd have learned -- to take the next lap in the paper's extensive Pittsburgh 250 coverage. I ran with them. And I'm only now looking back, both to thank him for the turn and to tell you that, today on G-1, you'll find The View From on High written by a guy from down low, someone who lives and loves and believes in Pittsburgh. Someone who, to paraphrase David L. Lawrence, knows its leaders will not be infallible and without human error, yet urges them always to work, and to do the best that is in them.
Posted at 05:00 AM
Thu - January 31, 2008
THE ABRAMS RETORT
dan speaks truth to media
power.
With a great big tip o' the hat to my favorite
Hollywood-on-the-Mon insider -- we'll call her Ms. D. -- I direct you to this
long but essential segment of last night's edition of The Abrams
Report, in which host and MSNBC General Manager Dan Abrams bemoans, exposes,
and lambasts the often dramatic differences in the way political reporters and
pundits have covered, and continue to cover, the Obama and Clinton campaigns.
He cites poll numbers and statistics and specific examples, then arrives at a
simple and long-obvious conclusion:
I just can't think of any explanation, apart from the media enamored with Obama, to explain the coverage.
If, by some odd and unreasonable stretch of your imagination you think he does not have a case, I urge you to listen to the answers -- by which I mean evasions, rationalizations, and apologies -- of his three panelists, Lawrence O'Donnell, Rachel Maddow, and Roy Sekoff. All three of them may as well be wearing Obama '08 buttons right over the political hearts on their allegedly objective sleeves.
I'm not often, and not lately, a fan of Dan Abrams. But this time, speaking truth to -- and about -- media power, he hits the biased nail right on its disingenuous head.
I just can't think of any explanation, apart from the media enamored with Obama, to explain the coverage.
If, by some odd and unreasonable stretch of your imagination you think he does not have a case, I urge you to listen to the answers -- by which I mean evasions, rationalizations, and apologies -- of his three panelists, Lawrence O'Donnell, Rachel Maddow, and Roy Sekoff. All three of them may as well be wearing Obama '08 buttons right over the political hearts on their allegedly objective sleeves.
I'm not often, and not lately, a fan of Dan Abrams. But this time, speaking truth to -- and about -- media power, he hits the biased nail right on its disingenuous head.
Posted at 08:15 PM
Tue - January 29, 2008
THEY LOVE THE 80s
and themselves. and, well, you
know...
After reading all the buzzing news sites yesterday,
seeing all the State of the Union cutaways last night, and flipping through all
the fawning news shows this morning, I just can't shake a single, nagging
question: When was the last time anyone in the mainstream media paid any
attention to what Ted Kennedy said?
Posted at 07:55 AM
Sun - January 27, 2008
ERIC THE GREAT
allie allie obama free.
While perusing one of my favorite web sites -- Daryl Cagle's
Professional Cartoonists Index -- I was recently compelled to add to my list of
favorite political cartoonists a tremendously talented artist named Eric Allie,
who works out of Chicago, publishes his cartoons through the Cybercast News
Service, and archives his work, complete with RSS feed, here. The man is a major talent, wielding a
sharp pen and even sharper wit to skewer the left, the right, and the mainstream
media with equal, and equally savage, aplomb. But especially endeared himself
to me with a series of that most-rare species of political cartoon: the
Dare-to-Question-Saint-Obama bit.
Here are two of my favorites, in which Mr. Allie's genius speaks clearly and eloquently for itself...
...even as it reminds Lady McBama of all those nasty naysayers at the front of the editorial bus.
Here are two of my favorites, in which Mr. Allie's genius speaks clearly and eloquently for itself...
...even as it reminds Lady McBama of all those nasty naysayers at the front of the editorial bus.
Posted at 03:10 PM
ON THE CUTTING EDGE
in the pg.
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Sunday Forum
section today debuts a new weekly feature: The Cutting Edge, a compendium
of new ideas and sharp opinions from publications, think tanks,
blogs, and just about anywhere else OpEd/Forum Editor Greg Victor finds
something to flip his rhetorical futon. I knew it was coming, thought it was a
great idea, and looked forward to reading it.
The first installment gets things off to a rousing -- and somewhat surprising -- start, with a passage from TWM favorite 2 Political Junkies, a local item about negligent Oakland landlording, a couple of interesting national pieces, a tease for an upcoming, no doubt fascinating look at the campus rape myth (watch for an upcoming post on that subject here, too), and, wrapping it all up, a choice excerpt from the Hometown Temperature post you read right here last Saturday. I didn't know it was coming, hope it was a good idea, and look forward to seeing whether such a promising addition to the Sunday paper can overcome the marginal taste and questionable judgment of including me in its inaugural edition.
We'll all check back next Sunday, to see if the Forum section survives...
The first installment gets things off to a rousing -- and somewhat surprising -- start, with a passage from TWM favorite 2 Political Junkies, a local item about negligent Oakland landlording, a couple of interesting national pieces, a tease for an upcoming, no doubt fascinating look at the campus rape myth (watch for an upcoming post on that subject here, too), and, wrapping it all up, a choice excerpt from the Hometown Temperature post you read right here last Saturday. I didn't know it was coming, hope it was a good idea, and look forward to seeing whether such a promising addition to the Sunday paper can overcome the marginal taste and questionable judgment of including me in its inaugural edition.
We'll all check back next Sunday, to see if the Forum section survives...
Posted at 10:37 AM
Mon - January 21, 2008
TALKIN' 'BOUT HIS GENERATION
and at least a couple of
others.
I just heard Tom Brokaw, interviewing former
President Clinton, suggest that Bill should be able to respect and appreciate
the support that young black voters are giving to Barack Obama, because
they see someone of their generation running for president and trying to
make a difference in their
country.
Someone of their generation?! The man's 46 years old, Tom.
That may be young for a presidential candidate, and it may be young by your sixty-seven-year-old standards, but it's not exactly of one generation with today's twenty-something (or thirty-something) black (or white, or brown, or yellow) voters. You're just showing your age or your bias (or both) by pretending otherwise.
Someone of their generation?! The man's 46 years old, Tom.
That may be young for a presidential candidate, and it may be young by your sixty-seven-year-old standards, but it's not exactly of one generation with today's twenty-something (or thirty-something) black (or white, or brown, or yellow) voters. You're just showing your age or your bias (or both) by pretending otherwise.
Posted at 08:36 AM
Sat - January 19, 2008
THE HOMETOWN TEMPERATURE
from hooter to doodyville.
Of the many great sillinesses that infect local
weather reports, perhaps the silliest is the damn dogged insistence with which
meteorologists pluck four or five towns, neighborhoods, burbs, burgs,
municipalities, or trailer parks from the region and tell us the temperatures in
each spot.
Yeah, I know it's a harmless little shout-out to those communities, and I suppose it does capture the lovely local flavor of the hometown meteorological advantage, and I imagine the good people in Blawnox get all a-twitter when they see their very own temperature up there on the screen. But come on, people. A two-degree variation across Allegheny County -- it's 32 in Sharpsburg, but it's 34 in Mt. Lebanon! -- isn't exactly a revelation. If it's ever 32 in Aspinwall and 63 in Robinson, then by all means let me know. (Hell, feel free to lead off with team coverage, because that would be a story.) But until then, just lose that goofy graphic, tell us what the temperature is in Pittsburgh -- which, for official record-keeping purposes, is actually the temperature some 16 miles west at the Pittsburgh International Airport anyway -- and we'll all be close enough to know which coat and hat to wear outside.
That said, I must admit there is one way to make this stupid convention at least mildly entertaining: the choice of an especially unique or euphonic or just downright odd little assembly of locations. This past Tuesday night, TWM-approved meteorologist Jeff Verszyla took to the Pittsburgh CW airwaves and unleashed the single greatest collection of local temperatures in the history of the practice: Slickville, Wampum, Hickory, and Smock. (I kid you not.) I can't remember what the temperatures were, and I don't really give a damn, because those four names were so much fun to say, to repeat, to just roll around in my mouth and spit back out again, that I had to write them down, save them, and repeat them here.
If Jeff (or anyone else) can consistently produce a mad-cap collection of municipalities like that -- it sounds like the leading law firm in Doodyville -- then I may have to re-evaluate my position. But until then, I think we can all sleep soundly at night without the solemn reassurance that Squirrel Hill, Shadyside, and Sheraden are all the exact same temperature.
Yeah, I know it's a harmless little shout-out to those communities, and I suppose it does capture the lovely local flavor of the hometown meteorological advantage, and I imagine the good people in Blawnox get all a-twitter when they see their very own temperature up there on the screen. But come on, people. A two-degree variation across Allegheny County -- it's 32 in Sharpsburg, but it's 34 in Mt. Lebanon! -- isn't exactly a revelation. If it's ever 32 in Aspinwall and 63 in Robinson, then by all means let me know. (Hell, feel free to lead off with team coverage, because that would be a story.) But until then, just lose that goofy graphic, tell us what the temperature is in Pittsburgh -- which, for official record-keeping purposes, is actually the temperature some 16 miles west at the Pittsburgh International Airport anyway -- and we'll all be close enough to know which coat and hat to wear outside.
That said, I must admit there is one way to make this stupid convention at least mildly entertaining: the choice of an especially unique or euphonic or just downright odd little assembly of locations. This past Tuesday night, TWM-approved meteorologist Jeff Verszyla took to the Pittsburgh CW airwaves and unleashed the single greatest collection of local temperatures in the history of the practice: Slickville, Wampum, Hickory, and Smock. (I kid you not.) I can't remember what the temperatures were, and I don't really give a damn, because those four names were so much fun to say, to repeat, to just roll around in my mouth and spit back out again, that I had to write them down, save them, and repeat them here.
If Jeff (or anyone else) can consistently produce a mad-cap collection of municipalities like that -- it sounds like the leading law firm in Doodyville -- then I may have to re-evaluate my position. But until then, I think we can all sleep soundly at night without the solemn reassurance that Squirrel Hill, Shadyside, and Sheraden are all the exact same temperature.
Posted at 09:59 AM
Wed - January 16, 2008
FLY PATTERN
into triple coverage.
For what is at least the third, but what now feels
like the fifty-third, day in a row, I've clicked my way to the CNN homepage and
discovered that the top story of the day is some sort of update -- he's still
on the run! they found his car! he may be in Mexico! -- on the manhunt for
that Marine corporal who may (or may not) have killed another, pregnant marine
who'd accused him of
rape.
I can't be the only one who thinks this isn't the top story in the country, much less the world. Or that the cable news channels have become, with occasional detours into Crossfire and Access Hollywood territory, little more than 24-hour episodes of America's Most Wanted. Or that, once they find Corporal Laurean, the FBI should try to find someone who dropped off the face of the earth a long time ago.
Like Osama bin Laden. Or Rudy Giuliani.
I can't be the only one who thinks this isn't the top story in the country, much less the world. Or that the cable news channels have become, with occasional detours into Crossfire and Access Hollywood territory, little more than 24-hour episodes of America's Most Wanted. Or that, once they find Corporal Laurean, the FBI should try to find someone who dropped off the face of the earth a long time ago.
Like Osama bin Laden. Or Rudy Giuliani.
Posted at 02:48 PM
Tue - January 15, 2008
BEHIND THE CURTAIN
charles in charge.
One week after the God Wants You to Vote for Obama
Newsweek cover, on the same day that a few more pro-Barack, or at least anti-Hillary, pieces poke their uncritical heads
into the Senator's Breath of Fresh Air, it is reassuring, at least, to report
that a few more pundits and columnists have begun to take a peek behind the
curtain and consider that the Wizard may not be all that he seems. Or likes to
pretend.
One of the best of those pieces arrived last Friday, when the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer took a leer at the good Senator's sneer and decided there may be more than meets the star-struck eye:
This "Hillary cried, Obama died" story line is satisfying, but it overlooks an earlier moment played to a national television audience of 9 million that was even more revealing.
It showed a side of Barack Obama not seen before or since. And it wasn't pretty. Asked in the Saturday Democratic debate about her dearth of "likability," Mrs. Clinton offered an answer both artful and sweet -- first, demurely saying her feelings were hurt and mock-heroically adding that she would try to carry on regardless, then generously conceding that Mr. Obama is very likable and "I don't think I'm that bad."
At which point, Mr. Obama, yielding to some inexplicable impulse, gave the other memorable unscripted moment of the New Hampshire campaign -- the gratuitous self-indicting aside: "You're likable enough, Hillary." He said it looking down and with not a smile but a smirk.
If you doubt his characterization of either Senator Obama's or Senator Clinton's responses, you can see them both here, in their entireties. They seem pretty clear to me. And to Mr. Krauthammer:
Rising rock star puts down struggling diva -- an unkind cut, deeply ungracious, almost cruel, from a candidate who had the country in a swoon over his campaign of grace and uplift. The media gave that moment little play, but millions saw it live, and I could surely not have been the only one who found it jarring.
And he wasn't, of course. Even if the people who saw what he say and thought what he thought were far more rare, and silent, than they should have been. But for anyone who was paying attention -- whether or not they admitted it -- this is yet another moment not just to look beneath Obama's veneer, but to look also beyond his horizon, to the possibility of a general election campaign in which he would doubtless be the target of a revved-up, rip-roaring, Republican Party slime-and-awe campaign right out of the gate. If he is what he says he is -- or at least as long as he professes so -- then he won't fight back, and he won't get down and dirty; he'll just sit back, take the high rhetorical road, and trust in the fair-minded intellect of the American electorate. That's great in theory, and maybe even in principle, but we all know how that strategy turned out the last time.
The other option, of course, is that Obama isn't what he says he is and is, in fact, what I've been saying he is: a breath of stale air phony who persists in playing a part that, so far, much of the public and most of the media have lapped up like their favorite flavor of snake oil:
One does not have to be sympathetic to the Clintons to understand their bewilderment at Mr. Obama's pre-New Hampshire canonization. The man comes from nowhere with a track record as thin as Chauncey Gardiner's. Yet, as Bill Clinton correctly, if clumsily, complained, Mr. Obama gets a free pass from the press.
It's not just that NBC admitted that "it's hard to stay objective covering this guy." Or that Newsweek had a cover article so adoring that one wonders what is left for coverage of the Second Coming.
And if it is that option, if Obama betrays the part and succumbs both to his nature and to his ambition and decides to fight back, well, then he'll prove himself quite clearly to be what I and a few others have said he was all along. This emergence will make him a much better general election campaigner. And a much lesser candidate for everyone who now goes all a-schoolgirl-twitter at the thought of his uniting, redeeming, resurrecting political possibilities.
Of course, there's already been plenty of evidence -- some of it chronicled here, almost one year ago to the day (remember the the man who famously lamented that Politics has become...so gummed up by money? he has, as of the last campaign finance report, spent more money than anyone but Mitt Romney) -- to suggest that is the case:
The freest of all passes to Mr. Obama is the general neglect of the obvious central contradiction of his candidacy -- the bipartisan uniter who would bring us together by transcending ideology is at every turn on every policy an unwavering, down-the-line, unreconstructed, uninteresting, liberal Democrat. He doesn't even offer a modest deviation from orthodoxy.
Special interests? Mr. Obama is a champion of the Davis-Bacon Act, an egregious gift to Big Labor that makes every federal public-works project more costly. He not only vows to defend it, but proposes extending it to artificially raise wages for any guest worker program.
On Iraq, of course he denigrates the surge. That's required of Democratic candidates. But he further claims that the Sunnis turned against al-Qaida and joined us -- get this -- because of the Democratic victory in the 2006 midterm elections. Mr. Obama has yet to have it pointed out to him by a mainstream interviewer that the Anbar Salvation Council was founded by Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha two months earlier. Mr. Obama has yet to be asked why any Sunni would choose to join up with the American invaders at precisely the time when Democrats would have them leaving -- and be left like the pro-American Vietnamese or the pro-French Algerians to be hunted and killed when their patrons were gone. That's suicide.
You can argue some of these political points. You can dispute Krauthammer's conclusions. But you can not dispute that there is a lot -- an awful lot -- that Senator Obama has yet to be asked by a press corps so smitten it is likely to ask him to the prom, or at least to the White House Correspondents' Dinner, before it asks him a truly tough or probing question.
Even if you believe that a Clinton restoration would be a disaster, you should still be grateful for New Hampshire. National swoons, like national hysterias, obliterate thought.
A great line. And an especially important thought for anyone still myopic enough to be proffering Obama as the anti-Bush.
The New Hampshire surprise has at least temporarily broken the spell. Maybe now someone will lift the curtain and subject our newest man from hope to the scrutiny that every candidate deserves.
This is a nice start, Chuck. But don't bet on it. After all, look how long it took them to start scrutinizing President Bush -- a guy to whom they gave a pass and a wink and a nudge, and even a Start-a-War-Free card, but whose candidacies never once gave them a case of the messianic vapors.
One of the best of those pieces arrived last Friday, when the Washington Post's Charles Krauthammer took a leer at the good Senator's sneer and decided there may be more than meets the star-struck eye:
This "Hillary cried, Obama died" story line is satisfying, but it overlooks an earlier moment played to a national television audience of 9 million that was even more revealing.
It showed a side of Barack Obama not seen before or since. And it wasn't pretty. Asked in the Saturday Democratic debate about her dearth of "likability," Mrs. Clinton offered an answer both artful and sweet -- first, demurely saying her feelings were hurt and mock-heroically adding that she would try to carry on regardless, then generously conceding that Mr. Obama is very likable and "I don't think I'm that bad."
At which point, Mr. Obama, yielding to some inexplicable impulse, gave the other memorable unscripted moment of the New Hampshire campaign -- the gratuitous self-indicting aside: "You're likable enough, Hillary." He said it looking down and with not a smile but a smirk.
If you doubt his characterization of either Senator Obama's or Senator Clinton's responses, you can see them both here, in their entireties. They seem pretty clear to me. And to Mr. Krauthammer:
Rising rock star puts down struggling diva -- an unkind cut, deeply ungracious, almost cruel, from a candidate who had the country in a swoon over his campaign of grace and uplift. The media gave that moment little play, but millions saw it live, and I could surely not have been the only one who found it jarring.
And he wasn't, of course. Even if the people who saw what he say and thought what he thought were far more rare, and silent, than they should have been. But for anyone who was paying attention -- whether or not they admitted it -- this is yet another moment not just to look beneath Obama's veneer, but to look also beyond his horizon, to the possibility of a general election campaign in which he would doubtless be the target of a revved-up, rip-roaring, Republican Party slime-and-awe campaign right out of the gate. If he is what he says he is -- or at least as long as he professes so -- then he won't fight back, and he won't get down and dirty; he'll just sit back, take the high rhetorical road, and trust in the fair-minded intellect of the American electorate. That's great in theory, and maybe even in principle, but we all know how that strategy turned out the last time.
The other option, of course, is that Obama isn't what he says he is and is, in fact, what I've been saying he is: a breath of stale air phony who persists in playing a part that, so far, much of the public and most of the media have lapped up like their favorite flavor of snake oil:
One does not have to be sympathetic to the Clintons to understand their bewilderment at Mr. Obama's pre-New Hampshire canonization. The man comes from nowhere with a track record as thin as Chauncey Gardiner's. Yet, as Bill Clinton correctly, if clumsily, complained, Mr. Obama gets a free pass from the press.
It's not just that NBC admitted that "it's hard to stay objective covering this guy." Or that Newsweek had a cover article so adoring that one wonders what is left for coverage of the Second Coming.
And if it is that option, if Obama betrays the part and succumbs both to his nature and to his ambition and decides to fight back, well, then he'll prove himself quite clearly to be what I and a few others have said he was all along. This emergence will make him a much better general election campaigner. And a much lesser candidate for everyone who now goes all a-schoolgirl-twitter at the thought of his uniting, redeeming, resurrecting political possibilities.
Of course, there's already been plenty of evidence -- some of it chronicled here, almost one year ago to the day (remember the the man who famously lamented that Politics has become...so gummed up by money? he has, as of the last campaign finance report, spent more money than anyone but Mitt Romney) -- to suggest that is the case:
The freest of all passes to Mr. Obama is the general neglect of the obvious central contradiction of his candidacy -- the bipartisan uniter who would bring us together by transcending ideology is at every turn on every policy an unwavering, down-the-line, unreconstructed, uninteresting, liberal Democrat. He doesn't even offer a modest deviation from orthodoxy.
Special interests? Mr. Obama is a champion of the Davis-Bacon Act, an egregious gift to Big Labor that makes every federal public-works project more costly. He not only vows to defend it, but proposes extending it to artificially raise wages for any guest worker program.
On Iraq, of course he denigrates the surge. That's required of Democratic candidates. But he further claims that the Sunnis turned against al-Qaida and joined us -- get this -- because of the Democratic victory in the 2006 midterm elections. Mr. Obama has yet to have it pointed out to him by a mainstream interviewer that the Anbar Salvation Council was founded by Sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha two months earlier. Mr. Obama has yet to be asked why any Sunni would choose to join up with the American invaders at precisely the time when Democrats would have them leaving -- and be left like the pro-American Vietnamese or the pro-French Algerians to be hunted and killed when their patrons were gone. That's suicide.
You can argue some of these political points. You can dispute Krauthammer's conclusions. But you can not dispute that there is a lot -- an awful lot -- that Senator Obama has yet to be asked by a press corps so smitten it is likely to ask him to the prom, or at least to the White House Correspondents' Dinner, before it asks him a truly tough or probing question.
Even if you believe that a Clinton restoration would be a disaster, you should still be grateful for New Hampshire. National swoons, like national hysterias, obliterate thought.
A great line. And an especially important thought for anyone still myopic enough to be proffering Obama as the anti-Bush.
The New Hampshire surprise has at least temporarily broken the spell. Maybe now someone will lift the curtain and subject our newest man from hope to the scrutiny that every candidate deserves.
This is a nice start, Chuck. But don't bet on it. After all, look how long it took them to start scrutinizing President Bush -- a guy to whom they gave a pass and a wink and a nudge, and even a Start-a-War-Free card, but whose candidacies never once gave them a case of the messianic vapors.
Posted at 02:08 PM
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Published On: May 12, 2008 10:19 AM
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Published On: May 12, 2008 10:19 AM