An she writes editorials... (0.00 / 0)

in the Washington Post.  Ruth Marcus represents the Washington consensus -- cosmopolitan, comfortable and terrified about being accused of bias toward anything vaiguely progressive.  Fair and balanced is thier motto! It would have been great fun if you would have asked what she was smoking.  She would have assured you that the Post supported the smoking ban in DC restaurants.  

The Post does get it right sometimes, such as thier support for Donna Edwards over All Wynn.

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by: howardpark @ Thu Mar 13, 2008 at 20:29:15 PM CDT

Republicans Don't Flail (0.00 / 0)

There is a perverse logic here that can actually make sense of this one aspect of all the above.

Flailing, you see, comes from trying to do something.  The GOP is perfectly content with the Iraq disaster.  No need to do anything at all. Like McSame says, they could stay there 100 years, heck, 1000.

So, no flailing.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

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by: Paul Rosenberg @ Thu Mar 13, 2008 at 23:01:39 PM CDT

The basic problem with her analysis... (0.00 / 0)

is the ahistorical conflation of "republicans" with "conservative" and "Democrats" with "liberal," as if these are static things.  As many people have pointed out in this blog, In point of fact, none of these terms are fixed and operate within a range of positions on any particular issue (e.g. here, social security).  And additionally their capacity to change thins is conditioned by how much power they're able to effectively utilize for their agendas.

So, while the Democrats have increasingly acknowledged that the Republicans have won the ideological battle over the past two decades by moving further and further right (in order to gain power), the Republicans too have moved further and further right but consequently are very close to losing power (because they're as far outside the mainstream as Black equality was in 1964...but with far worse intentions in mind).

Personally, I'm curious how long it will take for this tripe to disappear...maybe it will last forever and its only historians and political scientists that will wake up to it.  I find it intensely irritation, particularly when it's used (as here) to paint an entirely false picture of how American politics is and how it works.  because...you know...the  McCain Kennedy immigration bill was "liberal." ;)

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by: dr anonymous @ Fri Mar 14, 2008 at 01:45:26 AM CDT

[ Parent ]

indoctrinated elites (4.00 / 1)

As Noam Chomsky says:

In our society, intellectual elites are deeply indoctrinated, a point that Orwell noted in his (unpublished) introduction to Animal Farm on how self-censorship works in free societies.

Not being a beltway insider, I don't know the nuts and bolts of how it works, but I would expect there to be an unstated but easily discernible system of punishments and rewards that function quite well to properly "educate" the elite opinion makers. The social and economic ecosystem inside the beltway has clearly turned most of the beltway opinion leaders into well-paid morons.

miasmo.com

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by: miasmo @ Fri Mar 14, 2008 at 02:51:41 AM CDT

This is what you get when the RWNM (0.00 / 0)

effectively browbeats the SCLM into compliant submission after 30 years of steady flogging over being too liberal. The message has been thoroughly internalized, and you can see it every time one of these "thoughtful" automatons goes out of their way to treat RW goons, loonies and liars with undeserved respect, and run as far away as they can from anyone from the left who expresses even the slightest bit of anger or annoyance at what they right has been doing, just to prove that they don't have liberal bias and are fair and balanced.

You can see their bodies and faces tighten up whenever a Katrina vanden Heuvel or Paul Krugman dares to suggest that Bush and his GOP buddies aren't acting in perfectly good faith, and that if they've failed, it's not merely because they're incompetent, but because they're deliberately malevolent and dishonest. In their world, that's bad manners and simply not done, because each side simply has its own ideas, and name-calling is just mean and shrill and yet further proof that the left is deranged and just needs to grow up.

This is what happens when you check your character and honesty at the door, in order to avoid conflict and controversy. Because we just can't have any of that in the Village. I bet that after years of going belly up for the right these people don't even realize how idiotic and shameless they are in carrying on this charade, pretending that Bill Kristol and David Brooks equal Frank Rich and Bob Herbert, and that only crazies are against the war or warrantless wiretaps. There is surely a place in journalism hell for smart and well-educated people who willfully sell their souls in order to have a seat at the table and be patted on the head and taken seriously by the Very Very Serious People who run the Village.

And I'd love to know who and what Marcus considers to be "crazy" on the left, who in any way hold a position of respect and authority that's comparable to the actual crazies who are worshipped by the right. Who is the left's equivalent of Coulter, Malkim, O'Reilly, Hannity and Rush? Who, Olbermann, one of the few voices of sanity and honesty in the establishment media these days? Alterman? Greenwald? Digby? Hersh? Feingold? Kucinich? Franken? Seriously, I'd love to know. Oh, she's probably referring to Code Pink, those inconveniently annoying women who just want to end the war and stop the lying.

I give up.

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything...Mankind are forever destined to be the dupes of bold & cunning imposture" -- Alexander Hamilton

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by: kovie @ Fri Mar 14, 2008 at 06:44:26 AM CDT

It's very hard to be polite (0.00 / 0)

in the face of such cluelessness.  I listened to the panel spout the CW on all the topics besides SS and wondered if there was something in the water in DC that blinds them to reality.  Why are they unable to see or say what is blindingly obvious to people who spend just a few minutes a day looking at things other than the MSM?  I understand that if you only read or watch the MSM you can be terribly misinformed or underinformed, but as you say, given where they are, they have no excuse to be this ignorant. It's a constant amazement that they can live in the global capital and yet be as narrow as any provincial villager.  It's criminally negligent on their part to simply repeat what they've heard without going out, getting much more information, really trying to understand it, and explaining it honestly to the public.  Luckily for us some of them (although damn few) do their jobs right.

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by: Joe Scordato @ Fri Mar 14, 2008 at 07:23:41 AM CDT

Great line (0.00 / 0)

Wow. It's like mocking firefighters for trying to put out a burning building. Like mocking an E.R. surgeon for their attempts to save a motorcyclist who crashed into an overpass without their gear.

They really are a contemporary Versailles royal court.  Tittering and gossiping over King Louis' edicts to the masses, whom they only notice when their horses run one down on the way to a ball.

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by: Daniel De Groot @ Fri Mar 14, 2008 at 08:53:31 AM CDT

What is the "not thrown out of the room" equivalent (0.00 / 0)

of "What the hell are you smoking?" Because as impolite and impolitic as it may be it is the right answer to the question of how to deal with this.

They are part of the problem, the news media's compliance and willful blindness took the US into Iraq just as much as if the troops were embedded in the news teams. Unquestioning acceptance of the administration's obvious lies about the reasons for war, angry denouncements of dissent, stirring chauvinistic jingoism and censorship of contrary facts drove the occupation.

"What are you smoking" may be too flip, but the shocked surprise and rejoinder, the stuttering disbelief upon hearing the shear fecal nature of pronouncements, is the only sane way to deal it.

So what can be said? Come on folks whats the cleverest, sanest, 'polite enough' way to say, "you are either lying or bat shit crazy." I don't mean polite enough for the person lying, I mean polite enough that the public can feel the outrage.

Y.A.E.L.O.B.S.C.

Submit your suggestions here.

Change
"We must break up the banks and never again let them get so big that they distort our politics and take down the economy.

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by: HousesofProgress @ Fri Mar 14, 2008 at 09:04:59 AM CDT

A Suggestion (4.00 / 1)

"Excuse me, but you really should read more and talk to more people. Out here in the reality-based world, Republicans have been repeatedly lying and constantly taking positions far, far to the right of the American public. Social Security is fine as it is and the vast majority of Americans want to keep it. The Iraq war was sold to us through endless lies repeated over and over by the mainstream media. In most of the rest of the world, the United States is not seen as a bastion of freedom and democracy, but as a big bully that pushes everyone around to get its way and which tortures people who get  in the way. Don't you understand what nonsense you are spouting? Why should anyone take you seriously?"

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by: RandomNonviolence @ Fri Mar 14, 2008 at 17:29:58 PM CDT

[ Parent ]