The Slow-Witted Beast

Jon Stewart lectures reporters on coverage (CNN)

As Comedy Central's "Daily Show" descends on Denver for four days of coverage, Jon Stewart took after the "established" media for getting too cozy with candidates and regurgitating campaign spin when it comes to political coverage.

In a breakfast with reporters, Stewart directed most of his ire at the 24-hour cable news networks, which he called "gerbil wheels," and said the media at-large had "abdicated" to what he called the "slow-witted beast."

He said the never-ending television news cycle creates a "false sense of urgency" and forces reporters to "follow the veins that have been mined," instead of pursuing serious and in-depth reporting.

Stewart said politicians in recent campaigns are "animatronic" because all of the "humanity has been managed out of campaigns." He referenced the back-and-forth during the Pennsylvania Democratic primary over Obama's lack of bowling skills.

"It's stunning what this election is going to be decided on," he said. "Or what we allow it to be decided on."

No Joke: Jon Stewart Takes Aim At 24-Hour Cable News 'Beast (Washington Post)

Jon Stewart ripped the cable news networks Monday as a "brutish, slow-witted beast" and castigated Fox News in particular as "an appendage of the Republican Party."

The "Daily Show" host told reporters at a University of Denver breakfast that Fox's "fair and balanced" slogan is an insult "to people with brains" and that only "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace "saves that network from slapping on a bumper sticker. . . . Barack Obama could cure cancer and they'd figure out a way to frame it as an economic disaster." "I'm stunned to see Karl Rove on a news network as an analyst," he said of the Bush White House aide turned Fox commentator.

Stewart included CNN and MSNBC in a far-ranging indictment of what he called "that false sense of urgency they create, the sense that everything is breaking news. . . . The 24-hour networks are now driving the narratives and everyone else is playing catch-up."

The Comedy Central funnyman touched a nerve when he criticized journalists for having off-the-record dinners with politicians, such as a barbecue in March at John McCain's Arizona ranch. "That colors your vision of them so clearly and so profoundly," he said.

When New York Times columnist David Brooks and others protested that there was value in getting to know candidates privately, Stewart stood his ground: "I don't say access is useless. But the more you get sucked into it, the more you become part of that machinery." And when another reporter accused him of courting the press at the breakfast as skillfully as any officeholder, Stewart called the comparison "crazy."

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a good example of the "gerbil wheels" at work:

Hillary Clinton speaks at convention. The press concocts a story

by Eric Boehlert
MediaMatters.org
http://mediamatters.org/columns/200808260005

Writing at his Atlantic blog, Marc Ambinder, who seems to enjoy regular access to Obama sources, noted that "reports of strife between negotiators for Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama are exaggerated" and that "multiple sources in both campaigns have described the negotiations as relatively free of acrimony."

The next day, Ambinder returned to the topic perplexed, wondering why so many members of the press were pushing the clearly inaccurate story line that the Obama and Clinton camps were practically at war over the convention schedule.

Ambinder was either being naïve or playing nice with his Beltway colleagues. (My guess is the latter.) Because it was obvious the press didn't care whether the rift about Clinton's speech was real or imagined. The story helped journalists advance their beloved narrative that Clinton is a political-party wrecking ball and that Obama is too weak to control her. So even if the evidence ran counter to that, the press was sticking with its story line.

This newly manufactured media attack on Clinton is just the latest in a long line of press grenades thrown her way this year. But this time, she's not the only victim, because the media's concocted story line is being used to unfairly skewer Barack Obama, too.

Consider New York magazine: "Obama Agrees to Roll-Call Vote for Clinton. Does That Make Him a Sissy?"

What's so startling in watching the coverage of the Clinton convention-speech story has been the complete ignorance displayed about how previous Democratic conventions have dealt with runners-up like Clinton. It's either complete ignorance or the media's strong desire to painstakingly avoid any historical context, which, in turn, allows the press to mislead news consumers into thinking Clinton's appearance (as well as the gracious invitation extended by Obama) represents something unique and unusual. Something newsworthy.

Based on previous conventions, if a candidate had accumulated as many delegates and votes as Clinton did during the primaries and then did not have her name placed into nomination, that would represent a radical departure from the convention norm.

But, boy, in 2008, an awful lot of media outlets have played dumb. When covering the August 14 announcement about Clinton's role in Denver, they miraculously forgot to make any historical reference to similar names-placed-in-nomination at previous conventions.

Instead, readers and viewers were left with the obvious impression that what was scheduled to happen in Denver was remarkable, an anomaly. And I suppose if you look at the events through a soda straw, it does look unusual. But if you include the slightest bit of context, the story changes into something normal and routine.

But that's not the story the press wants to tell (the Clintons are not normal!), so the press simply erased the context and stuck to its preferred story line that Clinton's appearance in Denver and the placing of her name in nomination are one for the record books.

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Weakness and American Culture

The Art of Growing Up

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: June 6, 2008
(c) New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/06/opinion/06brooks.html?hp

In January 1841, Abraham Lincoln seems to have at least vaguely thought of suicide. His friend Joshua Speed found him one day thrashing about in his room. “Lincoln went Crazy,” Speed wrote. “I had to remove razors from his room — take away all Knives and other such dangerous things — it was terrible.”

Lincoln was taking three mercury pills a day, the remedy in those days for people who either suffered from syphilis or feared contracting it. “Lincoln could not eat or sleep,” Daniel Mark Epstein writes in his new book, “The Lincolns.” “He appeared at the statehouse irregularly, hollow-eyed, unshaven, emaciated — an object of pity to his friends and of derision to others.”

Later, Lincoln wrote of that period with shame, saying that he had lost the “gem of my character.” He would withdraw morosely from the world into a sort of catatonic state. Early in his marriage, Epstein writes, “Lincoln had night terrors. He woke in the middle of the night trembling, talking gibberish.”

He would, of course, climb out of it. He would come to terms with his weaknesses, control his passions and achieve what we now call maturity.

The concept of maturity has undergone several mutations over the course of American history. In Lincoln’s day, to achieve maturity was to succeed in the conquest of the self. Human beings were born with sin, infected with dark passions and satanic temptations. The transition to adulthood consisted of achieving mastery over them.

You can read commencement addresses from the 19th and early 20th centuries in which the speakers would talk about the beast within and the need for iron character to subdue it. Schoolhouse readers emphasized self-discipline. The whole character-building model was sin-centric. So the young Lincoln had been encouraged by the culture around him to identify his own flaws — and, in any case, he had no trouble finding them. He knew he was ferociously ambitious and blessed with superior talents — the sort of person who could easily turn into a dictator or monster.

Over the course of his young adulthood, Lincoln built structures around his inner nature. He joined a traditional bourgeois marriage. He called his wife “mother” and lived in a genteel middle-class home. He engaged in feverish bouts of self-improvement, studying Euclid and grammar at all hours. He distrusted passionate politics. In the Lyceum speech that he delivered as a young man, he attacked emotionalism in politics and talked about the need for law, order and cool reason.

This concept of maturity as self-conquest didn’t survive long into the 20th century. Progressive educators emphasized students’ inner goodness and curiosity, not inner depravity. More emphasis was put on individual freedom, authenticity and values clarification. Self-discovery replaced self-mastery as the primary path to maturity, and we got a thousand novels and memoirs about young peoples’ search for identity.

In the last few years, we may be shifting toward another vision of maturity, one that is impatient with boomer narcissism. Young people today put service at the center of young adulthood. A child is served, but maturity means serving others.

And yet, though we’re never going back to the 19th-century, sin-centric character-building model, for breeding leaders, it has its uses. Over the past decades, we’ve seen president after president confident of his own talents but then undone by underappreciated flaws. It’s as if they get elected for their virtues and then get defined in office by the vices — Clinton’s narcissism, Bush’s intellectual insecurity — they’ve never really faced.

It would be nice to have a president who had gone to school on his own failings. It would be comforting to see a president who’d looked into the abyss, or suffered some sort of ordeal that put him on a first-name basis with his own gravest weaknesses, and who had found ways to combat them.

Obviously, it’s not fair to compare anybody to Lincoln, but he does illustrate the repertoire of skills we look for in a leader. The central illusion of modern politics is that if only people as virtuous as “us” had power, then things would be better. Candidates get elected by telling people what they want to hear, leading them by using the sugar of their own fantasies.

Somehow a leader conversant with his own failings wouldn’t be as affected by the moral self-approval that afflicts most political movements. He’d be detached from his most fervid followers and merciful and understanding toward foes. He’d have a sense of his own smallness in the sweep of events. He or she would contravene Lord Acton’s dictum and grow sadder and wiser with more power.

All this suggests a maxim for us voters: Don’t only look to see which candidate has the most talent. Look for the one most emotionally gripped by his own failings.

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To provide an example, here, courtesy of NPR's All Things Considered, is an interview with Obama following a debate in which Obama, Edwards and Clinton were asked about their greatest weakness. Not that Obama's answer is all that great by any means, because it's not, but his response to the other candidate's b.s. is pretty funny.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=18186247

MS. BLOCK: You did say the other night in the debate, when you were asked about your greatest weakness, you confessed to a certain lack of organization. You said your desk and your office are not pretty things and you need good staff around you, and that you can't do everything alone. Do you think that may be the wrong message to be sending to voters?

SEN. OBAMA: It was interesting. I guess I should have listened to the answers that Senator Edwards and Senator Clinton provided. I think John Edwards said that his biggest weakness was he was too passionate about helping poor people and Senator Clinton indicated she was too impatient to move the country forward. So I thought the question was what’s your biggest weakness as opposed to what your greatest strength is, disguised as a weakness. I should have said that I like to help old ladies across the street.

MS. BLOCK: You want a redo on that?

SEN. OBAMA: No, I don’t actually. You know, I think one of the hallmarks of our campaign is that I actually answer questions honestly and try not to engage in too much spin.

The mind balks.

I'm not voting for her, but seriously, are you kidding me? Who are you people that are listening to these liars and giving them a role to play? Bruce should have been accosted right then and there by the host if she had so much as a shred of integrity. I hate these news networks and their damn info-tainment.

Boy those glasses sure do make her look real smart. I bet she was top of her class back at Bob Jones Psychiatric.

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"During the April 7 edition of Fox News' America's Election HQ, radio host Tammy Bruce joined the growing list of media figures who have purported to diagnose Sen. Hillary Clinton with a mental disorder, asserting of Clinton, "Well, there's an actual psychiatric term called mythomania, and it's part of a larger psychiatric scheme of people who make up fantastic stories to bolster their own image." As supposed evidence of Clinton "literally making up things out of whole cloth," Bruce claimed that Clinton had discussed "Chelsea being at the World Trade Center on September 11th." In fact, Hillary Clinton did not claim that her daughter, Chelsea Clinton, was "at the World Trade Center on September 11th"; rather, as Media Matters for America has documented, Hillary Clinton said that her daughter had "gone, what she thought would be just a great jog. She was going to go down to Battery Park, she was going to go around the towers. She went to get a cup of coffee and -- and that's when the plane hit."

As Media Matters noted, in a February 25 National Review Online blog post, CNBC host Lawrence Kudlow wrote, "Now I'm no psychiatrist, far from it, but I think a simple answer is that Senator Clinton could be depressed." In a February 27 New York Times column, Maureen Dowd wrote that Clinton "has turned into Sybil," an apparent reference to a book and movie about a woman who developed multiple personality disorder after being severely abused as a child. On the February 26 edition of CNN's The Situation Room, commentator Jack Cafferty claimed Clinton "[r]esembl[ed] someone with multiple personality disorder." And on the February 25 edition of MSNBC's Hardball, Chicago Tribune reporter Jill Zuckman asserted that Clinton's behavior "comes across as a little schizophrenic." As Media Matters further documented, in her book The Extreme Makeover of Hillary (Rodham) Clinton (Regnery Publishing, 2007), Republican strategist Bay Buchanan suggested that Clinton may have a disorder "involving narcissistic personality style," and was quoted in an article about the book as saying, "[W]e are talking about a clinical condition that could make her [Clinton] dangerously ill-suited to become President and Commander in Chief."

Additionally, as Media Matters documented in 2004, following a speech in which former Vice President Al Gore called for the resignation of six top Bush administration officials, pundits claimed that Gore "has gone off his lithium again"; that "half the country thinks he's a mental patient"; that he "is insane" and "needs medication"; and that "if he is already on medication, his doctors need to adjust it or change it entirely."

[taken from Media Matters]

Bad News for Hilldog

New polls show Hillary at her lowest point. Obama on top nationally and McCain behind Obama. She appears to be only left with what is being called the "Tonya Harding" option. (Barry, watch your knees!) Though this new video could give her some war-torn street cred.

Two New York Times Opinion Columnists decry the end...

The Long Defeat

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: March 25, 2008

"Hillary Clinton may not realize it yet, but she’s just endured one of the worst weeks of her campaign... [full story]

..For three more months, Clinton is likely to hurt Obama even more against McCain, without hurting him against herself. And all this is happening so she can preserve that 5 percent chance.

When you step back and think about it, she is amazing. She possesses the audacity of hopelessness.

Why does she go on like this? Does Clinton privately believe that Obama is so incompetent that only she can deliver the policies they both support? Is she simply selfish, and willing to put her party through agony for the sake of her slender chance? Are leading Democrats so narcissistic that they would create bitter stagnation even if they were granted one-party rule?

The better answer is that Clinton’s long rear-guard action is the logical extension of her relentlessly political life.

For nearly 20 years, she has been encased in the apparatus of political celebrity. Look at her schedule as first lady and ever since. Think of the thousands of staged events, the tens of thousands of times she has pretended to be delighted to see someone she doesn’t know, the hundreds of thousands times she has recited empty clichés and exhortatory banalities, the millions of photos she has posed for in which she is supposed to appear empathetic or tough, the billions of politically opportune half-truths that have bounced around her head.

No wonder the Clinton campaign feels impersonal. It’s like a machine for the production of politics. It plows ahead from event to event following its own iron logic. The only question is whether Clinton herself can step outside the apparatus long enough to turn it off and withdraw voluntarily or whether she will force the rest of her party to intervene and jam the gears.

If she does the former, she would surprise everybody with a display of self-sacrifice. Her campaign would cruise along at a lower register until North Carolina, then use that as an occasion to withdraw. If she does not, she would soldier on doggedly, taking down as many allies as necessary." [full story]

Hillary or Nobody?

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: March 26, 2008

"Even some Clinton loyalists are wondering aloud if the win-at-all-costs strategy of Hillary and Bill — which continued Tuesday when Hillary tried to drag Rev. Wright back into the spotlight — is designed to rough up Obama so badly and leave the party so riven that Obama will lose in November to John McCain.

If McCain only served one term, Hillary would have one last shot. On Election Day in 2012, she’d be 65.

Some top Democrats are increasingly worried that the Clintons’ divide-and-conquer strategy is nihilistic: Hillary or no democrat."
[full story]

She who smelt it, dealt it.

Hillary Plagiarizes John Edwards, Bill Clinton

Do you like the “who repeated a two-sentence thing from some other liberal speech” scandal? Then you will love this latest Solid Proof that sometimes Hillary Clinton also cheats by using words spoken in the past by others. Watch how she did it twice tonight.

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