For an insight into the phenomenon, check out the comments at Right Girl. (Language warning).
“Witch”, “bitch”, “c*nt”. “You need to get laid.”
The explanation is pretty simple, really – scratch a progressive, and you’ll find a misogynist. For all their faux support for a woman’s right to self-determination , they have zero tolerance for those “bitches” who refuse to think and behave precisely as they’re expected to.
Last year, the distaff candidates on both sides of the aisle in the 2008 presidential election were singled out for some remarkably vicious abuse from the left, as I wrote in June:
As we saw last year with Hillary, the left has made it very clear that there is nothing off-limits so long as it targets what’s perceived to be to the right of them, as Olbermann’s assassination fantasies of first Hillary Clinton — and only later Sarah Palin — highlight. There was also Randi Rhodes referring to Hillary as a “big f***ing whore” and Geraldine Ferraro as “David Duke in drag” (both within the same rant). And author, screenwriter and director Nora Ephron writing at the HuffPo that the Pennsylvania Democratic primary “is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women.”There’s little doubt that had Hillary ultimately won both her primary fight and the election in November, she would have dragged the country almost as hard to the left as President Obama already has. But she was perceived by Obama backers on the left during the primaries as being to his right, and hence deserving of the full hyperbolic ad hominem dehumanizing treatment the far left normally reserves only for those with an (R) after their name.
Flash-forward to today, where Bonnie Erbe of U.S. News & World Report, possibly inspired by “blue on blue” complaints by NOW, a long-favored organization in liberal newsrooms, writes, “Obama Not Comfortable With Women in Basketball, Golf … or Anywhere Else”:
President Obama drew heat last week for a story that surfaced outing his private White House male-only b-ball games. The story was that even though two female members of his cabinet were members of their college basketball
teams, they were excluded, as were all women, from this most private of male-only clubs. The story became a metaphor for how the president views women generally and threatened to reveal some inconvenient truths about the man.
Now we see reports that gender-insensitivity charges have resonated with the Obama White House. According to Politics Daily, the president dragged chief domestic policy adviser Melody Barnes to the golf course on Sunday, and she became the first female to join his golf foursome since he took office. The event produced a photo op of global proportions.
President Obama could invite Chamique Holdsclaw to the private White House basketball court and Billie Jean King to play tennis with him. I still wouldn’t believe he’s any more comfortable dealing with women or concerned about “women’s” issues than the dearly departed former Sen. Jesse Helms. [Strom Thurmond could not be reached for his opinion on bridging the gender gap -- Ed] President Obama talks the talk a lot better and a lot louder than Helms. But Jesse Helms was so rooted in his atavist traditions, he chose to remain true to his misogyny rather than pose for cameras with faux female golfing partners. President Obama must hide the side of his personality that is clearly uncomfortable with women because he needs their votes much more than Helms ever did.
Whether it was his treatment of Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail (as in his condescending remark that she was “likeable enough”) or his clearly career-oriented mate who has been toned down and remorphed into a Stepford Wife, I just don’t get the impression this man is comfortable with women. Nor do I believe he cares about them beyond needing women’s votes. It’s an act and a thoroughly see-through, amateur one at that.
It’s common knowledge that the comedy writing business is still a boys’ club, but a woman’s uphill climb in the writers’ room is more steep than you might realize. A new article in Vanity Fair, written by former ‘Letterman‘ staffer Nell Scovell, points out: “At this moment, there are more females serving on the United States Supreme Court than there are writing for ‘Late Show with David Letterman,’ ‘The Jay Leno Show,’ and ‘The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien.’ Out of the 50 or so comedy writers working on these programs, exactly zero are women.”
Though many have dismissed Letterman’s conduct – namely, his admitted workplace affair with another former staffer – to be largely harmless on a professional level, Scovell remembers a sexually-charged environment further marred by discrimination and demeaning situations.
Scovell writes, “Was I aware of rumors that Dave was having sexual relationships with female staffers? Yes. Was I aware that other high-level male employees were having sexual relationships with female staffers? Yes. Did these female staffers have access to information and wield power disproportionate to their job titles? Yes. … Did I believe these female staffers were benefiting professionally from their personal relationships? Yes. Did that make me feel demeaned? Completely. Did I say anything at the time? Sadly, no.”
As much as I love Mad Men, the hypocrisy of the entertainment industry lecturing the rest of America on interoffice interpersonal relations is pretty staggering. But as far as DC, Erbe’s MSM got the president they wanted — and having pronounced him the second coming of FDR, JFK and Lincoln, it seems a bit late to get cold feet now.’
Update: In “Obama and His Good Ol’ Boys”, her new essay at PJM HQ,Dr. Helen wonders why America’s most famous Community Organizer isn’t living up to his mentor’s Rules for Radicals.
Glenn Reynolds interviews musician John Ondrasik of Five For Fighting, who looks back on performing at the Concert for New York City immediately after September 11th, 2001, and how our increasingly fragmented culture is shaping America.
Bill Whittle of PJTV interviews Noah Shachtman, contributing editor of Wired magazine, who explores what happens “When Unmanned Drones Attack” in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
PJTV’s Allen Barton interviews James Kirchick of the New Republic, who ponders, “Is America the New Rome?”
Of course, the “spitballs” tossed by a liberal late night host in 2009 means something very different than the relatively benign, centrist humor Johnny Carson served up.
Fortunately, riding to Letterman’s defense (along with the Washington Post’s Tom Shales) is Maureen Dowd, who’s eager to give Letterman a Clintonesque pass, and compares him to the days of Don Draper and Roger Sterling trolling the Sterling-Cooper intern pool. But I thought the point of a fiercely moral show such as Mad Men was that (a) how wrong that is and (b) how far society has come since Boomers such as Dowd made the Long March through Culture, as Roger Kimball would say.
Meanwhile, Roger L. Simon notes that Letterman has comitted another sin — he’s become sclerotic and boring:
My problem with Letterman is this: I don’t find him funny. For all the Letterman writers composing those lists of ten and the fancy guest like the president, etc., I’d much rather watch “Red Eye,” which probably doesn’t have much of a writing staff and so far hasn’t had any administration guests, to my knowledge, but has a much cleverer host and funny sidekicks. Letterman’s predictable comedy (with its pathetic and inaccurate nastiness about other people’s private lives, i. e. Palin) is an indication of how square liberals have become. Greg Gutfeld, the putative conservative, is considerably more hip – and more decent.
Newsbusters catches Tom Shales, the Washington Post’s veteranliberal TV critic, shooting himself in the foot twice in his recent missives regarding embattled show business icons. First up, Tim Graham writes:
Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales assembled all of his excuses for David Letterman’s sexual relations with staff subordinates in Tuesday’s paper. The website headline: “A Clown, Not a Congressman: David Letterman is going to be lumped in with other misbehaving celebrities. Is that fair?” Shales feels that comedians who makes jokes about sexually reckless politicians like Bill Clinton should not be mocked when they act exactly like Clinton. He began:
One of many sad things about recent stanzas in the ballad of David Letterman is that now, in all media, Dave will be lumped in with other sexually misbehaving celebrities, even though he stands head and heart above most of them.
The echoes of Roman Polanski swirl in the Shales piece – the keenest comic minds should be allowed to think with their traveling pants. Shales can’t grasp the elementary-school rules of mockery: a fat kid can’t exactly laugh at another kid for being fat. An old man having sex with much younger women in the office can’t make fun of Bill Clinton very effectively, either. But Shales think clowns and jesters should be free of the charge of hypocrisy:
Some of those who’ve seen the current Letterman mess as a golden opportunity to trash and attack him claim that it’s fit retribution for the jokes Dave has made about naughty-boy politicians and their sexual high jinks. Letterman can continue to lampoon sleazy political figures with no real fear of hypocrisy, however, because a TV comic is not an elected official responsible for the well-being of the nation or its citizenry.
Letterman’s monologue is not a nightly sermon full of moral lessons preached to politicians or the public. His stance is that of the proverbial court jester, a clownish figure with a mandate to prick the powerful — not set himself up as a model of virtue.
Did Shales – and his editors – really miss the idea that “prick the powerful” is probably not a good choice of words at this juncture? Shales made it clear that Letterman was more victimized than victimizer in the current scandal.
But then, Shales thinks much the same of Roman Polanski, as Mark Finkelstein notes:
WaPo TV critic Tom Shales [file photo] has come up with a creative new defense of Roman Polanski: Hollywood thirteen-year olds aren’t really thirteen.
NB reader FT pointed us to an online exchange between a reader and Shales today that included this [emphasis added]:
Tom Shales: Hello, Dunn Loring, I didn’t want to sign off without trying to answer your question. I didn’t realize I had written a column defending Roman Polanski and minimized his crime – are you sure it was me? I mean, I? There is, apparently, more to this crime than it would seem, and it may sound like a hollow defense, but in Hollywood I am not sure a 13-year-old is really a 13-year-old.
As reader FT observed: “So according to Shales, it’s OK to rape a 13 year-old if she’s from California, apparently because they grow up faster there.”
For that matter, judging by the victim’s grand jury testimony, what Polanski did might well have been “rape-rape” even by Whoopi Goldberg’s standards, and regardless of the victim’s age.
But leave it to Shales to join the liberal wagon-circling around one of their own.
Note: this isn’t the first time Shales has risen to Polanski’s defense. Last year he wrote a sympathetic review of a movie that characterized the prosecution of Polanski as a “perversion of justice.”
And now for some comic relief: In the same response in which he made his suggestion that Polanski should be let off the hook because Hollywood 13-year olds are different, Shales wrote [emphasis added]:
I am a critic, I don’t have to be “fair and balanced” and critize every faction equally. I swear to you I do not do it on ideological or political grounds, not consciously.
In now a famous “You Tube” moment, Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel, went on Letterman to be the recipient of the host’s rude and sophomoric antics. As the segment shifted into high gear, O’Reilly asked Letterman a pointed and direct question: “Do you want the United States to win in Iraq?”To the surprise of no one but his sycophants, Letterman could not or would not answer the question. When pressed by O’Reilly to answer, the best he could do was to play to his mostly left-leaning audience for cheap debating points and say, “It’s not easy for me because I’m thoughtful.”
As I wrote last year:
How thoughtful do you need to be? it’s an A or B question: do you want the US to win, or Al Qaeda, the Baathists, and Iran? Letterman, who, 20 years ago, was once the master of postmodern irony, became its unintentional victim as he unwittingly echoed Jack Benny’s classic gag when he retorted to a fictional mugger shouting “Your money or life, pal!” on his old radio show: “I’m thinking it over!”
Radar.com notes this incident in the midst of Dave’s mea culpa last week:
Audience member Tracy Frye, of Dallas, Texas told RadarOnline.com: “David apologized to his wife and his colleagues at Worldwide Pants. He said he didn’t really think through what he said on-air last week and how it would affect his co-workers.”
Speaking of blog commenters defending Hollywood philanderer, found in the comments to one of my recent posts on David Letterman was this, from Paul at “pcu@iwon.com”:
Letterman is fine; he never was the “Family Values” type. Yes, he probably cheated on his girlfriend now wife. But at least he does go around claiming he is Mr. “Family Values” like some of our politicians (can you just see the grin on all “Fake News” reporters/commentators). This has been a tough summer, for Dave, for our economy but at least he did not end up on the “Republican 2009 Summer of Love” list: Assemblyman, Michael D. Duvall (CA), Senator John Ensign (NV), Senator Paul Stanley (TN), Governor Mark Stanford (SC), Board of Ed Chair, and Kristin Maguire AKA Bridget Keeney (SC).
Then I noticed the same comment under a Letterman post on Kyle Smith’s blog. As Jim Treacher responded, “I think what Paul is saying is that you can’t be a hypocrite if you don’t have any standards.”
A quick search of Google finds the same comment from “Paul” at numerous other blogs and Websites; which seems fair, he’s taken to posting his tu quoques worldwide to defend the problems emanating from Dave’s Worldwide Pants.
Similar to the early days of RatherGate, CBS is in major damage control mode, scrubbing Dave’s video confession from YouTube*. (You can still watch it here; I’ve downloaded a copy in case it completely vanishes from the Web.)
As with RatherGate, CBS’s heavy-handed efforts will likely backfire, as more and people go in search of this samizdat video.
And I can’t help but wonder, Is Paul part of CBS’s efforts, or merely offering freelance assistance? (Likely the latter, but the ubiquity of the cut-and-paste response is certainly curious.)
Bush messed up the war beyond repair. You can hear the hint of this excuse/reason in this comment from an administration official: “In eight months, it is impossible to reverse eight years of neglect.” Counter-factuals are great. What if Bush had adopted a true counter-insurgency/population-protection strategy in Iraq sooner, so we could have both stabilized Iraq and turned to Afghanistan more quickly? But that’s the stuff of punditry. Obama is commander-in-chief now and his hand-picked general is telling him a properly resourced war can succeed. Pointing fingers at Bush is an evasion.
Carl Levin has been on the floor of the Senate this afternoon, reiterating his case against sending the additional combat troops to Afghanistan that General McChrystal says are needed to execute a properly-resourced counterinsurgency strategy. Instead, Levin argues, the U.S. should focus narrowly on building up the Afghan National Security Forces.
Bolstering his case, Levin has repeatedly cited a letter he sent to the president earlier this year urging an immediate expansion of the Afghan army and police — which Levin proudly boasts was signed by a bipartisan majority of members of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
There’s one major problem with Levin’s position, however, which no one yet seems to have realized. Namely, he and his staff apparently forgot to reread the first paragraph of that famous letter to the President he keeps waving around — a copy of which THE WEEKLY STANDARD has got hold of. It reads:
“We support your decision to set a new course for U.S. policy in Afghanistan. We agree that the United States has a vital national interest in ensuring that Afghanistan never again becomes a safe haven from which al Qaeda can plot attacks against our homeland, and that achieving this objective requires that we put in place a well-resourced, comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy.”
Whoops.
Perhaps Carl Levin is taking a page from the John Kerry school of foreign policy: he was for “a well-resourced comprehensive counterinsurgency strategy,” before he was against it.
For it before they were against it does seem to be the left’s theme of the decade, huh?
Incidentally, kudos to President Obama for meeting with General Stanley McChrystal for about 25 minutes Friday morning in Copenhagen, “after McChrystal flew to Denmark from London to meet with the commander-in-chief”, in between the rest of Mr. Obama’s photo-ops, Stephen Hayes writes. Hey, it’s not easy being The Biggest Celebrity In The World.
Kyle Smith writes points out the “Striking things about David Letterman’s confession last night that he had slept with women staffers, plural, on his show:”
1) He didn’t accuse the extortionist of lying or even distorting or exaggerating the truth. He implicitly acknowledged that all of the “creepy things” he was accused of are true. That means the extortionist’s story is pretty valuable, doesn’t it? 2) “Slept with staffers”? Of course he slept with staffers. That’s how he met his wife and longtime girlfriend Regina Lasko, who worked for him at NBC; before that, he was in a relationship for years with his show’s head writer Merrill Markoe. I had thought his relationship with Lasko was pretty stable, though. If she doesn’t mind his having affairs with other staffers, I suppose the whole thing is none of our business. One does wonder what all of the other “creepy things” are, though. (Jim Treacher has some fun at Dave’s expense.)
Living in the New York media world, you realize what a strange guy Letterman is simply by how often you don’t see him. The guy never pops up in Page Six, never appears at premieres or parties. I’ve never seen him at a screening, which means he must arrange private ones. He never even appears on Page Six having a cute exchange with a waiter or something. I went to his show once, and during the commercial breaks he looks miserable. I mean, seriously depressed. Comedy and his show and, apparently, his women are all he has.
I don’t think this scandal will break Letterman. The media world will rally around him. (Jay and Conan will not have any jokes to make about this, unless the premise of the joke is that we should support Letterman.) The only real problem it will cause him is a lot of tabloid coverage, which is going to annoy him and make him even crankier than he naturally is. As Glenn Reynolds points out, what if all of this happened and Glenn Beck was at the center of it? The reaction would not be sympathetic.
Where does Dave find himself in 2009? Even Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, and the Associated Press, both typically see-no-evil sources when it comes to their fellow liberals, are pondering Dave’s hypocrisy in constantly mocking the sexual peccadilloes of politicians while sleeping with the staff.
Back in 2005, Howard Dean told another talker, the late Tim Russert, that “I will use whatever position I have in order to root out hypocrisy.” Given the amount of the intense moralizing that’s at the heart of Letterman’s anti-Palin material (just to name one example of Dave’s many and sundry targets), Dave might want to seriously reassess his shtick.
Letterman’s conduct with female staffers is a century-old showbiz standard. Personally, I certainly find it creepy; but not quite shocking. Especially after living and working in L.A. since the mid-1990s.
As for a CBS News producer being charged with blackmail, let’s not forget CBS News is the institution that gave us Mary Mapes and Dan Rather. Is there any room for shock after “Fake but Accurate”? Dan Rather, after all, was at the time CBS News’s main man. A fish rots from the head. Mapes and Rather’s conduct didn’t rise to the level of criminal, but it was equally perverse.
And no, I’m not saying everyone at CBS News is a crook. I know for a fact that’s not true. I’m just saying – as I often do – that there’s something rotten in TV News; and all of a sudden it stinks a little worse than it did before. But it was already smelling pretty bad.
Or as Steve Green writes, “An extortionist working for CBS News? Meh. It’s not like he tried to rig a presidential election.”
10. Get to find out “Worldwide Pants” refers to his breathing 9. Whenever he has trouble performing, he can always count on Paul 8. Stupid Prostate Tricks 7. Pillow talk includes fond remembrances of working with Calvert DeForest 6. “Can Jay do this? Huh? Can Jay do this?” 5. Share in wistful late-life transition from “My girlfriend doesn’t understand me” to “My wife doesn’t understand me” 4. Will It Rise? 3. Tries to be nice about it when he passes you off to Biff Henderson 2. “Whoops, looks like Cheney isn’t the only one who shoots people in the face” 1. After the sex, he lets you keep the Palin wig
Regarding the other Hollywood sex scandal this week, Jonah Goldberg writes:
That brings us to the even more refreshing aspect of this controversy: It is not a Left-Right issue. I’m not normally one to celebrate bipartisan unity, but it’s nice to know there are some things political or ideological opponents can agree on. Some of the most ardent and clear voices on the Polanski issue have been on the Left.
Go into a bar or union hall and ask whether fat-cat directors should get special treatment when they rape 13-year-old girls and you’ll discover that on this issue, the differences between “blue America” and “red America” are vanishingly small.
And yet, there is a controversy. Many of the international community’s leading lights are rallying to the Free Polanski movement. A petition is circulating with such names as Harvey Weinstein, Martin Scorsese, and Woody Allen on it. (No surprise that Woody’s on board, given that he married his adopted daughter.) The arguments in Polanski’s defense range from lawyerly red herrings to intellectual piffle to horrendous affronts to human decency. Whoopi Goldberg (no relation) dismissed the allegations because she was sure whatever Polanski did, it didn’t amount to “rape rape.”
It all boils down to the fact that Polanski is famous and talented and an Olympian artist, living above the world of mortals. Indeed, if he didn’t rape that girl — and he did — Polanski would still be considered a pig in most normal communities. This is the man who, after all, started dating Nastassja Kinski when she was only 15 and he was in his 40s. His taste for teenage girls is an established fact.
His defenders don’t care. They are above and beyond bourgeois notions of morality, even legality.
And that’s the main reason I am grateful for this controversy. It is a dye marker, “lighting up” a whole archipelago of morally wretched people. With their time, their money, and their craft, these very people routinely lecture America about what is right and wrong. It’s good to know that at the most fundamental level, they have no idea what they’re talking about.
But of course, that won’t stop their endless hectoring about how the rest of America should live, no matter how hypocritical it looks.
In an uncharacteristically personal revelation for David Letterman, the host took to his “Late Show” stage Thursday to admit that he was the victim of an extortion attempt — and acknowledge that he has had sexual relations with more than one staff member.
According to a press release sent by Letterman’s PR reps, the host first received a package three weeks ago from someone who claimed to have information about alleged sexual relations he has had with female employees of the “Late Show.”
The individual threatened to go public with the allegations unless Letterman paid him $2 million.
Letterman told his audience on Thursday that he contacted the Manhattan District Attorney’s Special Prosecution Bureau. That led to a sting operation, in which Letterman met with the individual and handed the person a fake $2 million check. That person was arrested on Thursday.
“This morning, I did something I’ve never done in my life,” Letterman said on Thursday’s edition of CBS’ “Late Show.” “I had to go downtown and testify before a grand jury.”
As part of the testimony, Letterman admitted that he had engaged in sexual relationships with staff members.
“My response to that is, yes I have. Would it be embarrassing if it were made public? Perhaps it would,” Letterman said. “I feel like I need to protect these people — I need to certainly protect my family.”
Update: Greg Pollowitz quips, “This certainly gives new meaning to the name of Dave’s production company, ‘Worldwide Pants.’” Glenn Reynolds adds, “Upside for Letterman: Compared to Polanski, he doesn’t look as bad. . . .”
The Atlantic Wire is a new service that is a bit like The Week in that it attempts to summarize what left and right are saying about a given topic. They’re doing an excellent job puzzling over the politics of the nation’s reigning President of Comedy Jay Leno at the moment, comparing his interview with Michael Moore (favorable to fawning) with the tough one he did with Rush Limbaugh. Various commentators try to read the Leno leaves to figure out whether he’s liberal or conservative. Liberals seem to assume he’s a Republican solely because he does what all comics did until this decade –- make fun of left and right in more or less equal portion. (Though he is a bit more likely to make fun of the left, it seems to me.) John Nolte quipped that Jay could improve his critical reception by removing the American flag pin from his lapel.
I have always assumed he’s a liberal (come on people, he’s from Boston, he’s in show business, he’s lived in LA for the last few decades) who is canny enough to know that liberal humor often comes across as snarky and elitist. Leno himself backs this up when he talks about playing the road to gauge national sentiment — and to learn that what people love on the coasts falls flat in Indianapolis.
Jay Leno says, “I’m not conservative. I’ve never voted that way in my life.” He “really worries” what a Dubya victory in November will do to the makeup of the Supreme Court. He believes “the wool was pulled over our eyes” with the Iraq war. He thinks the White House began using terrorism “as a crutch” after 9/11. He feels that during the campaign Kerry should “make Bush look as stupid as possible.” He believes “the media is in the pocket of the government, and they don’t do their job” so “you have people like Michael Moore who do it for them.” He has on his joke-writing staff a number of former professional speechwriters for Democratic candidates. “No Republicans.” When it comes to Bush, he doesn’t think his politics are much different from Letterman’s. “Does he show his dislike maybe a little more than I do? Probably.”
While Letterman’s show was originally produced under Johnny Carson’s aegis, and Letterman was touted by Carson as his logical successor, it’s Leno who, given the job by NBC’s brass, has since made the smarter move of adopting Carson’s on-air stance of political neutrality and unlike Letterman, dialed back his politics. As Kyle notes above, such an apolitical tone hasn’t helped Leno with the critics, but clearly, he’s laughing all the way to the bank by not alienating his audiences.
One of the “2Blowhards” spots a serious case of Kennedy-worship at Vanity Fair (Jackie’s on the cover of the October issue) and writes:
[My wife] tells me the Jackie article has to do with the trials William Manchester endured trying to write and get published a book about John Kennedy requested by Jackie. I imagine there’s drama involved, but the matter is surely little more than a footnote to the Kennedy saga.
Despite such barrel-scraping, editor Graydon Carter continues to include articles about the clan year after year.
I suppose all those number-crunching folks at Condé Nast have reams of findings supporting the notion that Kennedys on the cover equal great news stand sales. Still, I have the oddball notion that the Kennedys are pretty passé from the newsmaking standpoint, especially since Teddy has gone on to whatever reward he merits.
Furthermore, Americans who have even a borderline adult personal memory of JFK’s Camelot administration are Carter’s age and older (he turned 60 this past summer). In the TV biz, audiences older than 50 tend to be disregarded; so what’s Carter up to? Reliving the passions of his adolescence? Obeying rock-solid market research findings?
Beats me. Moreover [assumes jaded expression, flicks dandruff speck off shoulder] I can’t quite bring myself to care.
Carter made his bones in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a co-founder of Spy magazine, which endlessly, viciously — and often quite humorously — mocked such naked power-worship amongst New York elites. But like David Letterman, as he aged, he slowly morphed the very thing that he savaged as a younger man.
On the other hand, after eight years of easy-pickin’s reflexively bashing Bush, both men have to find something to fill their otherwise blank media.
At Big Hollywood, Christian Toto spots another comedic institution in danger of an equally sclerotic future.
Last year around this time, John McCain released an amusing YouTube ad highlighting just how in the tank — and in love — the media were with their dream candidate:
And one year later is that love still being reciprocated by their man? Well, to paraphrase an old riff by David Letterman, himself a highly visible Obama supporter, they do, and they do, and do for you kids, and this is the thanks they get:
Obama’s Political Operation Escalates Attack On Media; Raises Money Off Failure To Debunk “Lies”
This has to be the Obama camp’s most direct and premeditated shot at the media yet: His outside political operation just blasted an email to supporters directly faulting the press for falling down on the job of debunking health care “lies.”
The email from Organizing for America, which was forwarded by a reader, is obviously not addressed to the media and explicitly focuses blames on the press for the traction that reform foes have gained. Hitting the media riles the base, and the email also asks for donations to fund OFA, because “stepping in where the media fails is a daunting challenge.”
“Our opponents will create and spread outrageous lies to try to stop President Obama from creating real change,” reads the email from OFA chief Mitch Stewart. “We just can’t count on the media to debunk them.”
Add the above to this little bon mot from an Obama advisor, and the perpetual Obama campaign dubbing the loyal opposition, “Right-Wing Domestic Terrorists”, (nice effort at bipartisanship, fellas!) and it seems pretty obvious that leftwing paranoia? They’re soaking in it.
Johnny Carson’s distant coolness and ironic pluck made him seem almost ageless; Dave got too close to what the rest of the Hollywood-Manhattan-DC crowd perceived as the ninth circle of the Bushitler hell and rapidly withered into a crotchety old man.
That’s the message from the Washington Post. To put this in language a conservative would understand, the fourth estate has been alarmed once again by the Burkean proclivities of our nation’s citizens. The Post is in a panic about (to use its own descriptive terms) “birthers,” “anti-tax tea-partiers,” and “town hall hecklers.”
If, last Sunday, you spent a profitless hour reading the Washington Post (itself not too profitable), you noticed the loud yapping and desperate nipping at those who disagree with liberal orthodoxy. It was as if top management were a toy schnauzer accidentally mistaken for a duster and traumatized by being run back and forth through the venetian blinds. The wise and prestigious broadsheet institution was so barking mad that it sent three (Three! In these times of hardship for the print media! When reporters are being laid off right and left–well, mostly right–and stories are going uncovered from rapidly warming pole to pole! Three!) journalists to do battle with “The Return of Right-Wing Rage.”
That was the subtitle of Rick Perlstein’s section B leader. The title was “In America, Crazy Is a Preexisting Condition.” Perlstein wrote the book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus so you can intuit (or “grok” as Perlstein might put it, given his prose style) the contents of his article. Yes, Rick, right-wing rage has returned. It was up at my place for the weekend. But it’s back, and it’s not like right-wing rage ever really went away. It didn’t, as you would say, Rick, “move on.”
Accompanying the Perlstein screed was a sidebar by Alec MacGillis explaining how “health care reform is not that hard to understand, and those who tell you otherwise most likely have an ulterior motive.”
All you town hall hecklers, calm down and go home. Never mind that Alec MacGillis is a rat, something that’s evident by the sixth sentence of his piece: “Fixing [health care] could be very simple: a single-payer system.” And never mind that his writing is more than uninformative, it is informationally subtractive. Read him and you’ll know less than you know now about what the government is going to do to you and your doctor. Read him carefully and you’ll know nothing.
Because the health care protesters actually are an organic bottom-up grass-roots movement, this has left old media, including both TV hosts and whole newspapers utterly confused. Even former Obama-supporting economist Megan McCardle recently wrote, “the liberal rage at right-wing loonies is starting to sound, well, a little loonie”.
Last week, James Taranto and Andrew Breitbart hit upon the problem the legacy media faces. Breitbart wrote:
A grass-roots movement of average Americans has stood up, making it extremely difficult to isolate and demonize an individual.
Mr. Alinsky noted in “Rule 12″ that it is difficult to go after “institutions.” And attacking “tea baggers” and “mobs” has only created more resistance and drawn attention to the left’s limited playbook. Even Americans expressing their constitutionally protected right to free speech are open game.
Now that many people are Googling the Alinsky rule book and catching up with the way Chicago thugs play their political games, Mr. Obama and the Fighting Illini are going to be forced to create new rules–or double down on the old ones.
And as Taranto summarized, “It’s a lot easier to ridicule a powerful individual than a variegated group of citizens.” And conversely, without a central figure to demonize, suddenly a political and media class who in the late ’60s and ’70s chanted “power to the people” and “taking it to the streets” (apologies for going all Michael McDonald on you there) find themselves having to attack whole swatches of potential readers and viewers.
Since the rapid growth of first broadband Internet access and then the Blogosphere and other social media at the start of the decade, Mass media were already shedding viewers and readers in a Red Queen’s Race to the bottom. Accelerating the process doesn’t seem like a wise move to me, but having thrown their lot in with their president and messianic savior, what other options did they have?
Update: Pointing out the excesses the MSM’s boilerplate coverage — including a report from his own network — John Stossel, ABC’s lone libertarian iconoclast, questions “reporting” that makes “Every Critic a Racist.”
On Tuesday we sliced through the budget cutting at Condé Nast, home of Vanity Fair and numerous other magazines, and James Lileks condensed the news of Reader’s Digest declaring Chapter 11. (”Or, as the final documents read after their editors finished with them, Chapter 5″, the Bard of Jasperwood quipped.)
Found via Kyle Smith, Serena French, his colleague at the New York Post, profiles The September Issue, a new documentary on Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue magazine, shot in 2007 and just being released now.
Given the Red Queen’s Race the legacy media finds itself in, the timing of the film’s release makes it akin to, as French writes, “a snapshot of Paris before the Revolution, before the bottom fell out of the Park Avenue parquet, the world Wintour courted and documented so finely in the pages of her magazine”:
That the most powerful and protected woman in fashion does so now — in this film, on “60 Minutes” earlier this spring, on “Letterman” next week — is a mystery. Except that after 20 years, with fashion in economic crisis, management consultants turning Condé Nast inside out, vulture critics circling and speculating about her own exit strategy, she must be thinking in terms of legacy.
For the documentary, which opens Aug. 28, the magazine — which is to say Wintour — allowed Cutler an extraordinary level of access for the closing of the most important issue of the year in 2007, which at 840 pages was the magazine’s biggest ever. Cutler followed Wintour and her team from the shows in February — when fall clothes are shown on world stages — from planning with editors and photographers, fashion shoots, meetings with retailers and designers, to closing in July, interspersed with interviews at her homes in Greenwich Village and Long Island.
This peek inside the star chamber is juicy viewing on a number of levels. It’s a psychological portrait of Anna, powerful female executive, mother, daughter, perfectionist. It’s a front-row seat at how the albeit-impeccably-turned-out-but-sausage-nonetheless gets made at Vogue.
And perhaps most interestingly, it’s a snapshot of Paris before the Revolution, before the bottom fell out of the Park Avenue parquet, the world Wintour courted and documented so finely in the pages of her magazine.
Cut to the $2 million-a-year editor sipping her Starbucks in the back of a chaffeur-driven limousine that is her daily commute as the examples of a soon-to-be bygone era unfold.
As the pressure of producing a blockbuster issue mounts, Wintour jettisons $50,000 worth of photos from a shoot. One minute a designer dress is on a rack in the halls of Vogue, the next it is on her back. Heraldic assistants sounding the alarm of her arrival contrast nicely with viewers’ knowledge that, in real life, Condé Nast receptionists were all recently laid off.
Even if you don’t give a fig for fashion, it’s rare that you get to see Nero tuning up his fiddle as Rome is about to spontaneously combust.
As Kyle Smith writes, “that’s the magic of [documentary] cinema: Convince somebody that you’re going to make them a big-screen star, then let them hang themselves.” (A technique that’s certainly worked to devastating results in the music world with such documentaries as the Maysles Brothers’ Gimme Shelter and Taylor Hackford’s Hail! Hail! Rock & Roll.)
I haven’t seen The September Issue, but given the Hindenburg-sized egos of many of the legacy media’s key players, even amidst the contractions of their industry, reading the above review, it could be something we’ll look back on as the New York magazine world’s equivalent of Sunset Boulevard. You can almost picture Wintour saying, “I am big! It’s the magazines that got small.”
Mister, we could use a man like Eric Blair again. In the meantime, Shikha Dalmia of Forbes does an excellent job outlining the Orwellian aspects of “The Godzilla Solution — The sci-fi economics of clunker-crushing”:
So, to recap, the Cash for Clunkers plan involves restoring the economy by destroying wealth and healing the environment by destroying resources. By this logic, we should use the stimulus money to fund a new Godzilla brigade to mow down the country and rebuild it in a more environmentally friendly way. Imagine how much richer and cleaner the planet would be.
Test-drive the whole article.
Found via Steve Green, who also links to a Letterman-esque Top Ten List variation on the Cash For Clunkers theme:
At the Huffington Post, Michael Likosky and Josh Ishimatsu make no bones about exactly what they want: a Federal bailout for the formerly-golden state. They even came up with ten whole reasons, one of which even uses the phrase “moral hazard.”
I do not think that phrase means what they think it means.
As one of Steve’s commenters writes about the third item on the HuffPo-Meets-Letterman list, “With Joe Biden overseeing the Cali bailout, what could go wrong?”
Carl Levin has been on the floor of the Senate this afternoon, reiterating his case against sending the additional combat troops to Afghanistan that General McChrystal says are needed to execute a properly-resourced counterinsurgency strategy. Instead, Levin argues, the U.S. should focus narrowly on building up the Afghan National Security Forces.
1) He didn’t accuse the extortionist of lying or even distorting or exaggerating the truth. He implicitly acknowledged that all of the “creepy things” he was accused of are true. That means the extortionist’s story is pretty valuable, doesn’t it? 2) “Slept with staffers”? Of course he slept with staffers. That’s how he met his wife and longtime girlfriend Regina Lasko, who worked for him at NBC; before that, he was in a relationship for years with his show’s head writer Merrill Markoe. I had thought his relationship with Lasko was pretty stable, though. If she doesn’t mind his having affairs with other staffers, I suppose the whole thing is none of our business. One does wonder what all of the other “creepy things” are, though. (Jim Treacher 
