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Thursday, July 21, 2011

That Cenking Feeling

What BooMan says of Cenk Uygur seems to me an apt description for a rather large, or at any rate rather loud, number of the harbors across the left blogipelago:
The problem with Uygur's analysis is that it always ascribes bad faith to the president and it never takes an honest accounting of the limitations Congress puts on the president's ability to act. He's just smart enough to understand the issues and the political landscape, and to realize that being outraged is a sensible reaction to the deficiencies and greed in our system. But he's not smart enough to figure out how to properly apportion blame. He reminds me of a bright 16-year old who thinks he's got everything figured out but who really doesn't know shit about how the world works.
I'm not sure this is always a matter of not being smart enough, exactly, rather than simply not yet traveling high enough along the learning curve still to have useful things to say when your own side is in rather than out of power, or the craven commonplace craving for the emotional charge and clubhouse atmosphere of quick and easy accusations.

I'll also admit that Uygur in particular sometimes seemed to me to exhibit the sort of uneven unsettled not always exactly trustworthy progressivism of many loud ex-Republican converts to the left (John Aravosis is another one of those, Kos may be the exception that proves the rule), who are often really good on a single issue like gay rights or climate change but then revert to a rather flabbergasting misogyny or market triumphalism or hawkishness when you least expect it once you stray from the specific issues that nudged their ideological conversion.

Whatever my reservations about Reverend Al (can somebody please turn down the man's damn mic a smidge?) he has devoted his life to fighting for the poor and disenfranchised in this country, which is much more than Cenk Uygur can say for himself in between his bouts of unqualified unaccountable Obama bashing.

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