Tag: church of the savvy

Sherroditus

So, we’re entering week two of an event that, thanks to quick thinking, White House officials nipped in the bud and transformed into a one day story.

On the plus side: this OpEd from EJ Dionne is superlative. I don’t share his optimism, but he points out what strikes me as the key facet linking the Sherrod narrative to a much larger issue:

The Obama team did not question, let alone challenge, the video. Instead, it assumed that whatever narrative Fox News might create mattered more than anything else, including the possible innocence of a human being outside the president’s inner circle.

The Facts Do Not Matter. While still folding like a cheap suit, at least the administration seems to have internalized (and fumblingly tried to act upon) this basic tenet of today’s media complex. And that’s the thing that really differentiates the Sherrod dust-up: the fairly counter-intuitive notion that the true facts of the story not only emerged but were covered and became the ongoing core storyline employed by the MSM. This rarely happens.
I’d argue that this is because the truth was suitably damaging to the administration while the “lie” in the matter rather inconveniently put on display the deeply dysfunctional brand of “news” that FOXnews peddles and furthermore highlights a larger media establishment that not only ignores but frequently rushes to defend such behavior.
A truly agile administration would have used this rare opening. Indeed, they should be waiting for such an opportunity, with tightly produced packages ready to drop at the first sign of FOXnews’ exposed flank. Instead, they fired Sherrod. This is why they fail.
But, getting back to the novelty of having a truth emerge from the fiction and actually manage to become the narrative, for how long have we lived with other convenient lies like:

  • Al Gore says he invented the internet
  • Unlike Americans, Al Gore wears four-button suits
  • Al Gore said he discovered Love Canal
  • Al Gore says he was the basis of Love Story
  • Al Gore wore earth tones because a woman told him to

That the first of these is actually mentioned by Dionne is as shocking as it is unusual. Polite people never mention these facts.
Admittedly, these examples are merely a smattering from the Al Gore section of the Convenient Media Storybook. There are many more, and innumerable sections; Social Security is soon to be insolvent, tax cuts have always paid for themselves, and etc… Al Gore makes an interesting case because the man has been out of Presidential politics since he was elected President back in Campaign 2000. These and other lies about him still appear on a daily basis in the mainstream press. But, of course, these things cut both ways. The Church of the Savvy tells us that both houses are always equally flawed. False equivalency is the stock and trade of the business. So let’s give equal time and run down all the manifold lies that are repeated daily about disgraced former Speaker Newt Gingrich:

  • –

The typical evolution of stories like Sherrod’s goes something like this:

  1. Wrong but convenient and story-making non-fact is put “out there.”
  2. Serious people like Cokie Roberts and Juan Williams pick it up and uncritically repeat it
  3. Truth of matter emerges on A19. Is ignored. Derided as too complicated, booooo-ring, or “old news.”
  4. When directly challenged with (3), serious people like Cokie will haltingly agree with its ultimate veracity, but continue to treat (1) as fact because it’s “Out there.” And then proceed to recall (1). Forever.

The Sherrod case is playing out very differently. Not only did the reality emerge, it was accepted and propagated. Dionne continues:

The traditional media are so petrified of being called “liberal” that they are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment editors. Mainstream journalists regularly criticize themselves for not jumping fast enough or high enough when the Fox crowd demands coverage of one of their attack lines.

This is true to a point, however he’s either forgetting or just avoiding the key lie. The key myth that makes it all possible: that the MSM is, in and of itself, liberal. A false attribution, but one that is (surprise, surprise) frequently repeated. This is what movtivates the fear of being called liberal. It’s the frame that drives NPR to run stories worrying over three hours of clearly differentiated msnbc editorial programming alongside 21 hours of straight news (three of which are dominated by a former Conservative member of Congress) whilst merrily whistling past the fact that FOXnews runs a 24/7 propaganda mill, complete with “serious” stories like the entirely false notion that the Obama Justice Department categorically refuses to prosecute black men; it would be one thing if this nonsense was limited to FOXnews, but it is not. Dionne picks up this thread:

Thus did Post ombudsman Andrew Alexander ask this month why the [Washington Post] had been slow to report on “the Justice Department’s decision to scale down a voter-intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party.” Never mind that this is a story about a tiny group of crackpots who stopped no one from voting. It was aimed at doing what the doctored video Breitbart posted set out to do: convince Americans that the Obama administration favors blacks over whites.

[…]

Now, [Bush Justice Department official J. Christian] Adams is accusing the Obama Justice Department of being “motivated by a lawless hostility toward equal enforcement of the law.” This is racially inflammatory, politically motivated nonsense – and it’s nonsense even if Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh talk about it a thousand times a day. When an outlandish charge for which there is no evidence is treated as an on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other-hand issue, the liars win.

Again, Dionne soft-pedals it. It’s not just Hannity saying this during “editorial” hour; it’s the entire “news” operation on FOXnews doing it. Presenting it as fact. Repeatedly. Which, for unclear reasons, positively compels the rest of the MSM to do likewise and ponder why they didn’t report on this falsity more aggressively and sooner without ever pausing to consider that the story is baseless and more often than not invented out of whole cloth. Thus do people like Drudge, Limbaugh, Beck, and O’Reilly become the assignment editors for the MSM. Many say the world is round. Others say it is flat. Opinions differ.

Thus does the nation die at the hands of invincible ignorance.

Jupiter Too

And so it’s come to this. Mighty Jupiter is reacting negatively to the radical socialist agenda that Obama has been forcing on an unsuspecting ‘Merica:

Jupiter has lost one of its prominent stripes, leaving its southern half looking unusually blank. […] Jupiter’s appearance is usually dominated by two dark bands in its atmosphere – one in the northern hemisphere and one in the southern hemisphere.

But recent images taken by amateur astronomers show that the southern band – called the south equatorial belt – has disappeared.

Naturally, the last time this happened was when Jupiter reacted to warn Our Country of the coming Carter presidency. Failing to heed mighty Jupiter, America went on to elect history’s greatest monster, Jimmy Carter. And we all know how that turned out.

Let’s review the evidence. Jupiter before Obama:

and the tragically denuded, post-Obama Jupiter:

As per usual, the administration’s response to Jupiter is slow; sources in the White House confirm that response, when it finally comes, will be largely centered around temporarily adding an Islamic crescent to Jupiter’s mighty countenance in the hopes of appeasing Obama’s sharia task-masters.

No matter how it plays out now, though, this celestial incident is definitely shaping up to be Obama’s Shoemaker-Levy 9, and his lack of an effective response or even any apparent planning for this event will doom him just as surely as that comet doomed both the Clinton presidency and the then nascent Gore campaign, which took a notably earth-toned, four-buttoned position on the bands of Jupiter, one which the American public wasn’t ready for.

On a recent Friday night, a couple hundred [MSM media] influentials gathered for a Mardi Gras-themed birthday party for Betsy Fischer, the executive producer of “Meet the Press.” Held at the Washington home of the lobbyist Jack Quinn, the party was a classic Suck-Up City affair in which everyone seemed to be congratulating one another on some recent story, book deal, show or haircut (and, by the way, your boss is doing a swell job, and maybe we could do an interview).

Mark Leibovich, for the NYT, explaining (without trying to) why our Church of the Savvy is so irretrievably fucked up. This is why we invaded Iraq. This is why W. Bush was “elected” the first time. This is why brazen lies are treated as fact, and Meet The Press still refuses even a cursory, days-later and little noted review of the spew that emanates from its own festering maw. This is why they like shit like this and this, and hail it as the very paragon of their output. This is why Sally Quinn is merely the Mike Allen of the ‘90s, just like the execrable Mark Halperin was the Mike Allen of the Aughts. This is why the MSM just loves to write adoring articles about their own Kewl Kids, especially if same just look to the Drudge Report as their assignment editor whilst publically moping about the Liberal Bias in their industry. This is why.

STARTing to sink in

I suppose this qualifies as PAM; Spencer Ackerman over to the Washington Independent has finally noted that even if you manage to keep Dick Lugar aboard the START train, you still have to find seven other GOPers willing to vote with the President on anything:

that acrimonious tenor is likely to flip some of the [relatively few GOP] yes votes [on arms reduction under W Bush for fuck’s sake] to either no votes or abstentions, however striking the hypocrisy.

Indeed it is. Now, of course, this isn’t considered to be the result of faulty logic or lousy governance on the part of the GOP, mind you. Oh no, definitely not that. They’re just playing the game and trying to win the day, politically. All that matters is what happened five minutes ago, and that’s only for the next 15. What we have here is plainly, plainly a failure on the part of The Democrat:

It’s just not clear yet [if the GOP votes will be there]. If not, it won’t just be an indictment of the Obama administration’s legislative acumen.

I guess we’re supposed to celebrate the “won’t just be” part of that. Strikingly bad construction. Rest assured that we shall never, ever see an article that systematically attacks the GOP’s stunning and repeated hypocrisy and categorizes the brazen lies, all of which is made worse by being lies and hypocrisy in service of nothing; they have no policy ideas to offer that go beyond a four word, rhyming phrase, and they never do. Because they aren’t required to. Nihilism works because it’s allowed to work by the Washington media establishment. At least it is when it’s coming from the GOP. And, in this case, it’s a brazen hypocrisy that threatens us all, directly and existentially. This ain’t kids with dirtbikes, these are actual fucking hydrogen bombs. And it’s a brazen violation of what was supposed to be a long-respected construct that “politics ends at the waters edge” when it comes to granting the President reasonably wide leeway on foreign policy, and especially when it comes to nuclear foreign policy.

START is a dead letter under a Democrat. Period. May not even get out of committee. That’s what the MSM should be looking at, day after day, 24/7: how can the country’s governance be this fundamentally broken? Instead, we’ll get plucky dogs and Clinton’s penis.
The Democrat should be hollering today and every day about the thousands, thousands of potentially loose nukes that are now going to be sitting around, just waiting to find a use. And putting it all on the GOP’s doorstep. We’ll see none of that. Instead, Obama will just stroll into the messaging buzz-saw. Again.