Rumble, Young Man, Rumble: Muhammad Ali defeats the dreaded Sonny Liston
Just five more days ’till we shake up the world…
Category: Grave
Categories
Jim Rutenberg is Dumb
There has been a recent rash of pieces by journalists bemoaning the nasty tone of the letters they’ve been receiving from their readers. Personally, I think the real issue here is not that the tone of discourse of people who have traditionally written to journalists has taken a turn for the worse, but rather the convergence of two issues:
- The Internet makes it very easy to send feedback to journalists.
- The issues of the day have made many more people than usual take an interest in public affairs.
Now, I’ll be the first to admit that telling Adam Nagourney that you hope his son gets killed in a Republican war is a pretty nasty thing to say, although I would counter that Adam is a semi-public figure who gets to go on the Charlie Rose Show, and the unfortunate downside of being a semi-public figure is that people might write you really nasty e-mails. But I really have to take issue with today’s piece in the New York Times on the same topic:
“Most of us now realize that this is a constant conversation, and I think that largely that part of it is good,” said Howard Fineman, chief political correspondent for Newsweek. “Some of the stuff includes very personal and nasty things about people – they go after people’s physical characteristics, they’ll say somebody’s ugly – and you just have to ignore that.”
Still, he said, “I would be lying if I didn’t say it could be hurtful.”
[…]
Bob Somerby, a comedian who runs a Web site called The Daily Howler that often accuses the news media of being shallow, lazy, bullied by Republicans and unfairly critical of Democrats, said a more genteel approach would not be effective. (He has referred to this reporter on his Web site as “dumb” and in “over his head” for being blind or turning a blind eye to Republican spin.)
It’s certainly infantile to call people ugly and dumb when you disagree with their reportage, but I think it’s equally (if not more) infantile to use your privileged position in the paper of record to whine about it. How thin-skinned are these people? Do they go to their mamas and cry whenever the mean bloggers call them names?
‘Cause we’ve heard a few things about their mamas, too.
RELATED: MISSOURI POLL: Missouri reflects tight race, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 26, 2004: “A new poll for the Post-Dispatch shows the race in Missouri tightening. President George W. Bush’s earlier lead has slipped among the state’s voters. But the Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, has so far been unable to close the gap, in part because the poll shows a growing number of Missouri voters view him unfavorably.”
ALSO RELATED: Red-Faced: Boston wraps up sweep, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 26, 2004
Old Friends: Indicted and not yet indicted (r. to l.)
Click to see larger version
April 14, 1997
Dear Ken:
One of the sad things about old friends is that they seem to be getting older – just like you!
55 years old. Wow! That’s really old.
Thank goodness you have such a young, beautiful wife.
Laura and I value our friendship with you. Best wishes to Linda, your family, and friends.
Your younger friend,
George W. Bush
When you go to the polls, don’t forget Grandma Millie.
Categories
Col Allen’s Show of Restraint
I guess the editors couldn’t include “LOL!!!” and a bunch of smileys in the headline like they wanted to.
ANSWER: Iraq, specifically Fallujah!
ANSWER: Palestine, specifically Gaza!
Be sure to check in again a few days from now when we have our next round of Super Fun Military-Incursion Home Destructions with which to work!
Golly gee. Who’d have ever thought that a few hundred tons of weapons gone missing in some Middle Eastern nation-state would have such an effect on the waning days of the race for the White House? Certainly not the American military unit that apparently wasn’t told to search the weapons-storage facility from which these munitions were presumably taken. Realistically, if their bosses had known there were weapons floating around Iraq, they’d have been on high alert over this sort of thing, right?
From “Spokesman: Unit Didn’t Search Al-Qaqaa”, Associated Press, October 27, 2004:
The Kerry campaign called the disappearance the latest in a “tragic series of blunders” by the Bush administration in Iraq.
Vice President Dick Cheney raised the possibility the explosives disappeared before U.S. soldiers could secure the site, and he complained that Kerry does not mention the “400,000 tons of weapons and explosives that our troops have captured.”
OK, there you go. This is how war works, and politics, too. It’s that classic Cheney tactic: accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative. To wit, regarding the administration’s now-very-clearly-fucked-up invasion of Iraq, the Vice President said in June:
“After decades of rule by a brutal dictator, Iraq has been returned to its rightful owners, the people of Iraq,” Cheney said in a speech in New Orleans, which made the case that Bush had reversed a terrorist threat that grew unchecked before he came to office. “America is safer, and the world is more secure, because Iraq and Afghanistan are now partners in the struggle against terror, instead of sanctuaries for terrorist networks.”
You see how that works? He plays up the good things that have come from the invasion and overthrow of Iraq and Afghanistan, and doesn’t act like a certain senator from a certain state in the Northeast might, by focusing on, say, the fact that 3,000 Americans died three years ago, or that well more than a thousand American soldiers have died in military action since then, or that much more than ten thousand Iraqis and Afghans have perished at the hands of American weaponry in that interim…see, that’s meaningless, folks.
Because at the end of the day, those hundreds of millions of Americans who don’t fall into those “irrelevant” categories of deaths detailed above are, of course, safer. It’s about positivity. Optimism. And that’s the Cheney way.
At least I think that’s how it works. Though I’m probably overlooking something. I can just feel it…
Oh, shit, I’ve got it! This, right here!
“The biggest threat we face now as a nation,” he said, “is the possibility of terrorists’ ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us – biological agents or a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon of some kind – to be able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.”
“You have to get your mind around that concept,” he added.
You go, Dick! For a few fleeting moments up there I’d somehow managed to convince myself that you’d gone all Disney, all “hakuna matata” and “circle of life” and shit, but thanks for grounding us in the bare necessities: Vote or die.