tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post6565701842446454807..comments2023-11-22T01:14:54.298-08:00Comments on amor mundi: Republicans in Total Disarray, Republicans AS Total DisarrayDale Carricohttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-23383428070764724122008-08-31T20:42:00.000-07:002008-08-31T20:42:00.000-07:00I'm not sure that we're watching the same media. D...<I>I'm not sure that we're watching the same media. Did you see the appraisal of the Obama speech by the pundits on MSNBC, including Olbermann, Maddow[,] who is exceptionally intelligent and erudite as a political commentator, make no mistake about it</I><BR/><BR/>Indeed, I make no mistake in the least about that, nor will I make the absurd mistake of pretending she is remotely representative of the corporate media.<BR/><BR/><I>Yep, [Palin]'s there to energize the evalengical base while superficially and almost patronizingly appealing to women.</I><BR/><BR/>I love that sweet little "almost," there.<BR/><BR/><I>Again, we must be following two different medias.</I> <BR/><BR/>I don't doubt it.<BR/><BR/><I>But here you admit that the media hasn't been delivering the White House for McCain,</I> <BR/><BR/>What is interesting is that he expected it to do so, and with good reason. See, <A HREF="http://mediamattersaction.org/freeride/myths/" REL="nofollow">Free Ride: John McCain and the Media</A>.<BR/><BR/><I>and has been friendly to Obama,</I> <BR/><BR/>I actually didn't "admit" this point, nor do I accept it. While Obama's historic campaign has indeed attracted an enormous amount of attention and Obama has indeed been breathtakingly deft at deflating the many hairballs of pseudo-scandal (the Wright nontroversy, the "bitter" flap, the "whitey" tapes, the terrorist fist-jab, the endless PUMA parade, and on and on and on) that the corporate media have coughed up to trouble his path, the bottom line is that Obama's coverage has been more negative than not overall for all its abundant attention-share. The poor pundits protest that people turn the channel whenever Grumpy McSame appears on the screen to justify their neglect of him, and what free marketeer has a leg to stand on to complain about that? According to an <A HREF="http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-onthemedia27-2008jul27,0,712999.story" REL="nofollow">LATimes Story</A> my sense that extra attention need not mean positive attention in the least was supported by Pew at least in the first six weeks of the campaign. No doubt Obama's comsummate Convention skewed things a bit, just as McCain's Convention would by rights go one to do (and, heck, still may) as well if the Republicans weren't the gang that can't shoot straight these days.<BR/><BR/><I>which contradicts your earlier hypothetical about the two Parties in reverse roles.</I><BR/><BR/>Well, no, I don't think it does. I think Obama has been so amazingly good and McCain so appallingly bad that the media's bias toward McCain has been a difficult thing to pull off in full for pundits who see the writing on the wall, however much they disdain it. I think the facile faux concern trolling and handwringing one hears about Obama's campaign is ridiculous, while the pretense that McCain's rank opportunistic flip-flops and ugly traitor-baiting of Obama and dangerously inappropriate bellicosity on the campaign trail are all perfectly hunky-dory both bespeak a grotesque bias in the media, which McCain has cultivated throughout his career as everybody knows. That hypothetical inversion of parties with which I began the post still seems to me perfectly seemly. <BR/><BR/>If the campaigns were reversed the corporate mediots would have declared Obama's campaign dead on arrival. Instead they endlessly offer earnest advice about his "tone" and the way he "plays" to "average Americans" they pretend to know about or care about despite the fact that their vanishingly small inbred inside the Beltway clatch might just as well be reporting from the asteroid belt by a species of sentient lichen ventriloquizing through the animated corpse-bodies of Katie Couric and Cokie Roberts for all their actual acquaintance with these Americans for whom they seem to imagine themsevles the spokesmodels. <BR/><BR/>It's true, some voices of sanity are beginning to break through here and there and, meanwhile, the reality of the climate catastrophes and military debacles and privatization disasters is just so palpable that no amount of corporatist fluffing has managed yet to sell the country on another Republican scoundrel and enabler. <BR/><BR/>To suggest that this is a sign of inevitable bias from the other direction is too likely to indulge the usual boo-hoo crying of the crook who feels harassed by the just law that snags him, the liar who feels persecuted by an obvious truth that exposes him, or by the smug cynic who sees an opportunistic hypocrite behind ever earnest reform. <BR/><BR/><I>Whether or not this gambit will lead to success in November is an open question, but it is, in the view of many people who have been following politics for a long time, the most audacious political gambit in modern political history.</I><BR/><BR/>Barring his literally dropping trou and taking a dump on the podium in front of the cameras by way of making his announcement, which, no doubt, would have been even more "audacious" to them. In six months it will be considered not audacious but idiotic and insulting on the verge of criminally insane and one more well-deserved nail in the coffin of Movement Conservatism.<BR/><BR/><I>"Americans really must either stop buying it or stop complaining when they get exactly what they keep paying for."<BR/><BR/>Amen.</I><BR/><BR/>Let me be clear, Movement Conservatism, driven by divisive racist and cultural politics of resentment since Nixon, all in the service of catastrophic wealth-consolidation via infrastructure looting and risk-dispersal via "financialization" all sold as "free trade" and "personal liberty" since Reagan have resulted in a corporate-militarist regime on the brink of outright authoritarian dictatorship. This result is not a violation but a structural consequence of the Movement Conservative worldview. Read David Harvey's <I>Neoliberalism: A Brief History</I> for some of the reasons why I think this is so (I have quibbles about the book, but it's short and sweet). The people bought it and they have paid for it -- in literal blood, in bottomless debt, in under-recompensed toil, in untreated but treatable illness, in uneducated but intelligent citizens, in divisive hostility among people who share problems and the capacity to solve them together, and so much more. Unless you mean what I mean by what is bought and what is paid for here, you'll understand if I can't eagerly accept your "Amen" just yet.Dale Carricohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02811055279887722298noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5956838.post-87168966193153315442008-08-31T19:27:00.000-07:002008-08-31T19:27:00.000-07:00were the Republican candidate to run a seamless ca...<EM>were the Republican candidate to run a seamless campaign... you can be just as sure that the Village Gatekeepers of the corporate media would not be warning that very Republican campaign that they were navigating a horrific mine-field of potentially game-ending mis-steps and gaffes</EM> [etc...]<BR/><BR/>This implies that they ARE warning the Democrats of exactly the same. I'm not sure that we're watching the same media. Did you see the appraisal of the Obama speech by the pundits on MSNBC, including Olbermann, Maddow (who is exceptionally intelligent and erudite as a political commentator, make no mistake about it), and even the "gushing" Pat Buchanan? Your assessement of the way the media have been treating Obama and McCain seems to be exactly the opposite of what I've experienced.<BR/><BR/><EM>The simple fact is that the McCain campaign is indeed in total disarray. His choice of Palin as his running-mate was a desperate bid to shake up the conspicuously Presidential trajectory of the charismatic competent Change candidate Obama...</EM><BR/><BR/>No doubt, and it seems to have worked, at least momentarily. On Friday, everybody was talking about McCain rather than Obama's "historic" speech. Whether or not this gambit will lead to success in November is an open question, but it is, in the view of many people who have been following politics for a long time, the most audacious political gambit in modern political history.<BR/><BR/><EM>McCain may indeed have been just clueless enough to imagine that the Palin choice would garner some support from disaffected Hillary supporters (who supported Hillary for positions diametrically opposed to nearly everything Palin claims to stand for after all), but it is far more likely that he chose her to whomp up some kind of a heartbeat of support from the shrinking minority of End-Time anti-science death-cult "Christianist" wingnuts who constitute the actual Republican base at this point</EM><BR/><BR/>Yep, she's there to energize the evalengical base while superficially and almost patronizingly appealing to women.<BR/><BR/><EM>McCain seems to have been counting on his own long-cultivated True Base -- the corporate Media -- to deliver him the White House despite... the undeniably compelling tug of Obama's own media-friendly Historic counter-narrative</EM><BR/><BR/>Again, we must be following two different medias. But here you admit that the media <EM>hasn't</EM> been delivering the White House for McCain, and has been friendly to Obama, which contradicts your earlier hypothetical about the two Parties in reverse roles.<BR/><BR/><EM>Americans really must either stop buying it or stop complaining when they get exactly what they keep paying for.</EM><BR/><BR/>Amen.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com