We all need to brace ourselves for what’s about to come. If you thought it was bad now when people only get to attack the things that Sarahpalin says, just wait until they have 24,000 emails to take wildly out of context and nitpick. This is going to be painful beyond reckoning.
If I were governor, I would communicate using only disappearing ink, on that self-destructing paper that Chief Quimby used to give instructions to Inspector Gadget, hand-delivered by Carthusian monks.
Apollo posted this at 2:50 PM HKT on Thursday, June 9th, 2011 as Journalism, The Passion of St. Sarah of Wasilla
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So stupid that even when she’s right, it’s only because she’s “lucky,” and we should presume the the way in which she was correct probably wasn’t “what Mrs. Palin was referring to.” Fortunately, we have the Massachusetts Democratic Party, which doesn’t let the fact that Sarahpalin was “correct” stop them from making fun of her. Because that’s what you do to stupid people, right? You make fun of them for being stupid whether they’re “right” or wrong, because in reality, they’re always wrong.
Added: See also, Althouse, who notes that excreable Dr. S. must constantly remind himself of what a farce Sarahpalin is. If one were to venture onto his page (I don’t recommend it – I just did it (3:04) to see if he had altered any of his notions of how stupid Sarahpalin is in response to the subtle fact that she’s right; needless to say, he’s using the fact that rightwingers are pointing out that Sarahpalin was right as evidence that rightwingers are a bunch of hyperdefensive types who ignore reality), one would need no other reminders that he is a hack, and no longer a terribly entertaining one at that.
Apollo posted this at 7:43 AM HKT on Monday, June 6th, 2011 as Journalism, The Passion of St. Sarah of Wasilla, What Ever Happened to Andrew Sullivan?
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You will after reading this story.
I categorically refuse to believe negative things said about Sarahpalin in the media; they completely blew their credibility some years ago. But maybe her bus is running red lights and, horror of horrors, SPEEDING!!! I refuse to believe Politico, but I accept that it may well be true.
But theses journalists who are running red lights and engaging in erratic behavior just to follow her and report on gossipy stories – they are bad people. They are risking other people’s lives (I don’t care about them risking their own lives; that’s between them, their families, and their God) in order to … what? Be the first to report on what sort of motorcycle Sarapalin rides in the Rolling Thunder rally? They hate Sarahpalin, they cover her like she’s an idiot who has nothing worthwhile to say; yet they are willing to risk the lives of others just so they can keep up with her completely non-substantive bus tour. These are affirmatively bad people.
P.S. I like the whiny tidbit about the poor poor paparazzi who had to take a leak on the side of the road. Somewhere, the world’s smallest violin-maker is crafting the appropriate instrument to play the lead instrumental of the dirge that will be sung at this point when this man’s life is turned into an opera.
Apollo posted this at 10:44 AM HKT on Sunday, June 5th, 2011 as Journalism, The Passion of St. Sarah of Wasilla
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If numerous people link to a news story to highlight a specific quote, and then that quote goes missing from the story – without any notation that the original story has been changed – the onus is on bloggers to ask the mighty New York Times where the quote went. Lest you get a snippy email, suggesting that you’re lazy. What, did you forget that you’re the idiot?
Pretty much every time we get an insight into the minds of journalists at mainstream publications, it reveals nothing more than a sense of pompous entitlement. That – not curiosity – is the defining characteristic of the modern journalist, I believe.
Apollo posted this at 11:12 PM HKT on Friday, June 3rd, 2011 as Journalism
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Ezra, sigh.
Let’s ignore the fact that EPI is a liberal think tank (we all know how eager Liberals are to accept Hoover or Mercatus studies). Let’s see who can spot the real problem with Ezra’s analysis of this graph:
Apparently “Economic Recovery Measures” that don’t work, shouldn’t really be a factor when considering how to deal with our massive deficits. Nevermind that “Porkulus” amounts to nothing more than a giveaway to favorite Democrat constituencies.
What a joke.
Jamie posted this at 9:34 AM HKT on Friday, May 20th, 2011 as It's Economics - Stupid!, Journalism
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Here is an example of why it is impossible to take Ezra Klein seriously as a “moderate” liberal:
The Pay for War Act: War costs money. When we don’t pay for it, it costs even more money, because we have to pay interest on the debt we rack up and the absence of fiscal discipline keeps us from making hard choices.
That’s why Sen. Al Franken’s Pay for War Act should be such an easy sell. The resolution says nothing about the legitimacy or desirability of armed intervention. It just says that we, rather than our grandchildren, should bear the cost of the conflicts we start.
As Franken said in an eloquent speech on the floor of the Senate, “The idea that we should pay for our wars is not a Democratic idea, and it’s not a Republican idea. It’s not left or right. It’s not antiwar, it’s not pro-war. It’s just common sense.” Or, to put it slightly differently, it’s just a No-Brainer.
His blog post is ostensibly a list of bills that are non-partisan. Well, no Ezra, they aren’t. It may seem that way to a closeted coastal liberal like yourself, but its not quite that clear to us rubes in the rest of the country. How about this, oh purveyor of Journo-list, support a bill that requires us to pay for EVERYTHING. Like say a balanced budget amendment. Apparently paying for fuzzy liberal wealth redistribution programs on credit is fine and dandy, but freeing millions from oppression is not.
Masking rank partisanship as pragmatic bipartisanship is why most american’s are fed up with both liberals and conservatives, Republican’s and Democrats.
Time to grow up.
Jamie posted this at 10:58 AM HKT on Wednesday, May 11th, 2011 as Dirty Hippies, Journalism
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Aaron Worthing over at Paterico discusses the media coverage of a small Muslim riot in Dearborn provoked by some guy who burned a Koran. The double standards, obviously, abound. I love his conclusion: “Would it be too much to ask the media to treat these guys as badly as Tea Partiers, or conversely, to treat Tea Partiers as good as rioting radical Muslims?”
Apollo posted this at 5:55 PM HKT on Saturday, April 30th, 2011 as Journalism
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On journalists, writing about Obama, in San Francisco! In an age where you can’t even expect bought-lawyers to stand up to political correctness, it’s bracing to see a newspaper editor brazenly state that something from this most-politically-correct White House is “not a truthful response.”
Apollo posted this at 12:49 AM HKT on Saturday, April 30th, 2011 as Journalism
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So “U.S. officials” are “alarmed” at how the Japanese are handling the nuclear situation. Let me ask a question:
Has our federal government done a single thing in the last 10 years that would lead you to believe our “officials” are more competent than the Japanese?
If the Japanese say they’re getting things under control, and one of our trillion dollar nitwits, looking at the situation from 10,000 miles away, says they aren’t, I know who I’m believing. I hope our experts are providing whatever genuine assistance they can to the Japanese, but the boobs providing anonymous scaremongering to already ill-informed journalists need to STFU.
Apollo posted this at 5:58 PM HKT on Wednesday, March 16th, 2011 as Journalism, Those Wacky Foreigners
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I was in a coffee shop today where they had a muted TV tuned to MSNBC. I have no clue who was talking or what they said, but their conversation lasted a couple of minutes and, according to the text box at the bottom, the subject was “Does Sarah Palin Have a Secret Facebook Page?”
Apollo posted this at 3:45 PM HKT on Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011 as Journalism, The Passion of St. Sarah of Wasilla
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Ann Althouse, on birthers, makes a worthwhile comparison:
It’s perfectly rational to take as your working theory that evidence that isn’t produced would run counter to the interest of the party who could produce it and does not. In legal cases, if a party fails to produce a document requested in discovery, the judge can deem that the fact is established to be what the party seeking discovery is trying to prove. (See Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 37(b)2)(A)(i)).
At this point, I think there are only three possibilities:
- There’s a birth certificate, and Obama refuses to produce it because he thinks it’s to his political advantage to paint all of his opponents as nutters.
- There’s no birth certificate because it’s somehow been lost, and rather than explaining this to us like we’re all adults, Obama would prefer to continue painting his opponents as nutters.
- There’s no birth certificate because there never was one.
I can’t think of a possibility that doesn’t reflect poorly on Obama. Either he’s willfully dragging out this issue for callous political gain, or else there are legitimate legal questions regarding the legality of the office he holds and he’s stonewalling rather than addressing those questions.
At any rate, we can tell when Obama is at his weakest – whether it was back when he was trying to explain Obamacare, or now that he’s telling us that not decreasing the deficit now is fine because someone else will decrease the deficit in seven or eight years – by watching when his friends in the media drag out the birthers. I think it’s become more of a meta issue now than a real issue.
Apollo posted this at 1:44 PM HKT on Wednesday, February 16th, 2011 as Barack Obama Couldn't Persuade a Bear to Crap in the Woods, CHANGE!, Journalism
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Back in the day, before MSNBC decided to be all left-wing all-the-time, I thought Chris Matthews ran a pretty good show. He was always a liberal, but he wasn’t far to the left, he wasn’t a partisan hack for the Democrats, and he seemed to believe that there were multiple good-faith answers to the question “What is best for America?”
If you would have told me that in a decade he would turn into a shrill, left-wing Democrat hack, I might not have believed it. But if I had believed it, I would have thought that he was smart enough to be a good shrill, left-wing Democrat hack. That doesn’t seem to be the case.
Apollo posted this at 3:46 PM HKT on Sunday, January 30th, 2011 as Journalism
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I’m a couple of days late to this, but I think Ross Douthat here is excellent in pointing out what is, ultimately, so creepy about coverage of Sarahpalin:
. . . Palin’s “very positive” numbers, while high, are not staggeringly so: Using this (admittedly) crude metric, she inspires slightly less devotion than George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton, and slightly more than Mike Huckabee and Mitt Romney. It’s her negative numbers that are off the charts: No politician, from Bush to Barack Obama to Nancy Pelosi, is hated so intensely by so many Americans.
And this is what’s so problematic, to my mind, about much of the Palin coverage: The media often acts as though they’re covering her because her conservative fan base is so large (hence the endless talk about her 2012 prospects), when they’re really covering her because so many liberals are eager to hear about, read about and then freak about whatever that awful, terrifying woman is up to now.
If Sarahpalin didn’t exist, it would be necessary for the left to invent her.
Apollo posted this at 8:16 AM HKT on Monday, January 24th, 2011 as Journalism, The Passion of St. Sarah of Wasilla
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I think the right-wing gloating over the demise of Keith Olberman’s show is a little tacky (see, e.g., here). From everything I read, it seems that Olberman was a jerk who made O’Reilly look subtle and balanced. But I never watched Olberman, I never considered watching Olberman, and I didn’t care what Olberman said on his show that I didn’t watch.
I think in situations like this one, where an ideological enemy has suffered some sort of downfall, consistent and genuine apathy comes across much better than petty antagonism. Human diversity being what it is, there’s a market for most any point of view on television and the radio (my local talk station is the flagship station for Alex Jones). It’s simply not worthwhile to get worked up about the fact that people you disagree with have shows. Conversely, it’s not worth celebrating when those shows collapse for non-ideological reasons.*
*That is, I’d be slightly happy if Olberman quit his show after announcing that he’d realized he’d always been wrong, was now a conservative, and wanted to take time off to reflect on all this. But Olberman quit his show over money, and I do not care about the financial affairs of people I do not care about.
Apollo posted this at 12:42 AM HKT on Sunday, January 23rd, 2011 as Excruciatingly Correct Behavior, Journalism
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I’m not at all sure how I will react, how I want to react, or how I should react to this.
Since the day John McCain picked her, every single story written about Sarahpalin has been mostly about journalists specifically and the American left in general. Sarahpalin, in the media, is not a real person but is, in fact, a tool journalists use to write about themselves and their friends. Their hidden hatreds and prejudices, their cultural preferences masquerading as morality, and their intellectual insecurities that materialize as snobbery. After more than two years of daily news coverage of Sarapalin, I don’t know more about Sarahpalin, but I have a much better understanding of those who write about her.
In that sense, Milbank’s decision to write about boycotting Sarahpalin is exactly as informative as a real story written about Sarahpalin. We learn that Milbank doesn’t, and hasn’t for a while, regarded Sarahpalin as a legitimate story, but he has continued to write about her. We learn that Milbank would rather loudly trumpet his decision to do the right thing than to actually do the right thing. And we learn that Milbank, like me, seems to view Sarahpalin as a means of analyzing the souls of journalists (note how he labels people who will continue to write about Sarahpalin as “less scrupulous” than him), but he’s self-centered enough to only use Sarahpalin as a goodness test after he himself has loudly proclaimed his decision to give up Sarahpalin. He’s like a drunk who, before stumbling out of the bar and attempting to drunkenly drive home, loudly proclaims that anyone who doesn’t join him at tomorrow’s AA meeting is an unredeemable sot.
So since I’m writing about Sarahpalin now, I guess I should reveal something about myself. Here goes: I’ve been boycotting Dana Milbank for years. Well, not really boycotting. I no more “boycott” Milbank than I “boycott” newspapers written in languages I can’t read, or bridal magazines. I just don’t read him because I find him boring, but rather than loudly proclaim my decision to give up on the boring, I simply did it. There are any number of boring things I don’t do that I don’t tell others about.
The comparison here is worthwhile. I don’t think even Milbank would write a column detailing the legitimately unnewsworthy things he doesn’t cover. His rashes, his relationship with his mother, his ruminations over what brand of coffee to drink – there’s no need to loudly proclaim that he won’t be writing about these things for February. But he has to announce that he won’t write about Sarahpalin. And that tells us everything we need to know about Milbank.
Apollo posted this at 11:15 AM HKT on Saturday, January 22nd, 2011 as Journalism, The Passion of St. Sarah of Wasilla
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