Fact-esque

Is Jake Tapper That Stoopid? Nope, Just Unintentionally Honest

Avedon Carol links to a Media Matters post in which Eric Boehlert quotes ABC's Jake Tapper as being "completely baffled by the White House designation of Fox as a non-news propaganda channel. Which, of course, it is and has been for years as we all have reason to know. Avedon's jaw dropped - figuratively, natch.

I can find no better example of how right-wing our "mainstream" media is than the fact that they are so upset that the White House acknowledged that Fox News is Republican propaganda, not news. I mean, just look at Jake Tapper.

Boehlert himself seems confused by Tapper's confusion.

Oh my, Tapper has no idea how Fox News is different than ABC News, and he works there. Tapper can't tell what Fox News does differently that his own network. And Tapper was clearly irked that the White House had offered up an opinion that one of the Village's "sister organizations" wasn't professional. "Why is that appropriate for the White House to say?" Tapper demanded to know. (Hint: As a Beltway rule, Democratic White Houses are forbidden from calling out the press by name.)

Boehlert then in essence puts himself in the position of defending ABC - a daunting task which I personally wouldn't care to take on - by listing a number of the ways by example. They're worth going through with your little clicker for sure, very educational, but doing so doesn't really get at Tapper's point. It's not that Eric is wrong exactly about the superficial differences, it's that he isn't exactly right, either. And he isn't exactly right because he's looking at today instead of next year or the year after. Jake is talking about where "journalism" in the MSM is going, and it ain't toward Robert R Murrow.

Ross Douchehat: The NYT Hired Him...Why, Exactly?

If David Brooks was a dumb move, what do you call the NYT's scooping up the worst conservative columnist this side of Jonah G? Inspired? Or suicidal?

Douthat, in that patented, barely acknowledged aside that smirks, "Everybody knows that", announced in his column today that the problem with Bush was that he was a - hold onto your braces - "crypto-liberal" president.

Red Sonia: If She Ain't Wonder Woman, She's No Damn Good

You know, the right-wing obsession with comic books and Robert Heinlein novels has gone so far that next week I expect to see Peggy Noonan wandering around on the tarmac at the DC airport with his arms outstretched trying to find Wonder Woman's invisible plane. I get this from the list of right-wing grievances against the next Supreme Court Justice wherein if she can't fly a jet while reciting the Book of Genesis verbatim and dancing Swan Lake in a suit of armour, she shoudn't be on the court.

The latest bitch is that she sometimes interrupts lawyers, especially when they try to defend torture. Go figure.

David Brooks Is an Increasing Embarrassment

In the same way that a competent adult doesn't allow a child to play with matches because he might hurt himself, the NYT needs to protect David Brooks from playing with economics. Mr Brooks' column today is so remarkably simple and child-like that it's clear he doesn't have a clue. Writing like a 6-yr-old attempting to explain nuclear physics to other 6-yr-olds, Brooks would be embarrassing if his column was in The Weekly Reader. That drivel like this is in a major American newspaper is a disgrace.

Markets tend toward efficiency. People respond in pretty straightforward ways to incentives. The invisible hand forms a spontaneous, dynamic order. Economic behavior can be accurately predicted through elegant models.

This view explains a lot, but not the current financial crisis — how so many people could be so stupid, incompetent and self-destructive all at once.

No kidding, Dave? Really? Gosh. This guy is so naive he probably doesn't have enough economic horse sense to be up and around.

Please. Save him. And us. Take his PC away from him before he hurts himself.

WaPo Notices Biased Judges 5 Yrs After Everyone Else; Obama's Opportunity

For years a major charge against Bush has been his packing of the Federal courts with conservative GOP flunkies and ideological robots. Liberal blogs were covering this long before newspapers thought there was anything the least bit hinky about Bush's picks despite their records of racism, political hackery, and statements by nearly all of them that the Constitution was, you know, just a piece of paper. An odd stance for a Federal judicial nominee whose job it will be to interpret that "piece of paper" you might think, but few newspaper editors thought that issue was worth covering. During Bush's whole first term, about the only good thing the Dems did was keep Bush from packing the benches with the worst of his neocon hacks, a valiant and fairly successful effort that was all but ignored by the nation's media.

Well, now that it's way too late to matter the Washington Post has finally looked around and noticed that, gee, there are a lot of Bush appointees on our Federal courts who ignore the law and replace it with Republican dogma just to embarrass Democrats. Jeffrey Smith writes that GOP judges seem to go out of their way to reverse  decisions made by Democratic judges on appellate courts.

"Liberal" NPR and Brennan's Resignation

Glenn Greenwald has become one of the foremost media critics in the blogosphere that media figures actually pay attention to and this week he turned his attention to NPR. In his Salon podcast interview with NPR's Tom Gjelten, Greenwald's questioning about Gjelten's handling of bloggers' criticisms clearly shows up yet another facet of media reporter's gullibility and laziness.

Greenwald asks Gjelten where he got the idea that liberal bloggers were objecting to Brennan's appointment as CIA Director simply because he happened to be at the Agency when renditions and torture were going on, approved by the Bush Admin?

Tales of Old Dartmoor

David Horsey discovers the source of GM's difficulties.

Meanwhile, Tom Friedman discovers the cause of the current Depression after suffering some, um, liquidity problems of his own. You don't suppose there's a connection between those two things, do you?

From now on I'm re-defining a Friedman Unit as the amount of time it takes Tommy to realize what the rest of us have known right along. It will probably be measured in decades to make the numbers easier to handle.

Stop the Madness!

Would somebody please go find that one guy who's still listening to Bush and tell him to quit it so Georgie will shut up?

What? You Don't Like "Kill Obama" As A Campaign Theme?

If you're the Goebbels & Braun of the NYT, Adam Nagourney & Liz Bumiller, the best possible spin you can put on the crumbling McC campaign is that "John's message isn't getting across". So here's what they wrote. Together. (It took both of them.)

Again and again, [GOP] leaders said in interviews that while they still believed that Mr. McCain could win over voters in the next 30 days, they were concerned that he and his advisers seemed to be adrift in dealing with an extraordinarily challenging political battleground and a crisis on Wall Street.

The expressions of concern came after a particularly difficult week for Mr. McCain. On Friday night, new questions arose about his choice of Ms. Palin as his running mate after an investigation by the Alaska Legislature concluded that she had abused her power in trying to orchestrate the firing of her former brother-in-law, a state trooper.

“I think you’re seeing a turning point,” said Saul Anuzis, the Republican chairman in Michigan, where Mr. McCain has decided to stop campaigning. “You’re starting to feel real frustration because we are running out of time. Our message, the campaign’s message, isn’t connecting.”

Of course it's connecting. It's just that "Kill the Terrorist Traitor Obama!" is more a comic book than a political message and, like, nobody is on board with it except the 23% who think Bush is Batman and Obama is The Joker.

If McC has a message other than that, then yes, it's not connecting and maybe he ought to spend more time talking about whatever it is than accusing Barack of murdering Bambi and raping Orphan Annie.

The McCain Narrative, Brought to You By...The NYT

Not that I should probably pick on them more than anyone else. Even the usually reliable Boston Globe had a set-piece about how Saint John was going to be a "maverick" again and how "moving" his speech was.

McCain spoke movingly about his years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, and how it changed him from a selfish and brash young man to a mature "servant" of his country. "I've never lived a day, in good times or in bad, that I don't thank God for that privilege," he said.

It's just that the ever-predictable Adam Nagourney outdid himself praising McC's manliness. He was "firm", he "pledged", he's "an iconoclast", a locution I don't mind him using because it's so esoteric very few people know what it means, even educated people. But it sounds positive (if it isn't, you know, dirty). You don't find out about the less attractive aspects of St John's evening until well down in the article, stuff like protesters and an unresponsive audience sitting on its hands.

it was often offered in a monotone as he stood before a solid-color backdrop that flicked from green to blue. The reaction was far more subdued than it was the night before for his running mate, Ms. Palin. There were stretches in which he drew only a smattering of applause.

***

One of the livelier moments of the evening came when Mr. McCain was interrupted by several antiwar protestors who had infiltrated the hall. Their signs were quickly ripped from their hands, and they were carried out of the arena as the crowd shouted, “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”

Mr. McCain, who by now has become accustomed to these kinds of interruptions, responded with a smile. “Please don’t be diverted by the ground noise and the static,” Mr. McCain said, before adding “Americans want us to stop yelling at each other.”

Then why did Sarah Palin spend half her speech last night yelling at Obama and liberals?