Kanadesaga

No shit! It didn't take you 7 years and 3 months to figure that out!? Bush is a stooge, a patsy, a beard. Dickie is point man, but the real power we may never know.

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al Asaad

Yes, in that we also had "commentators" (The Rush type) back then.
Remeber Walter Winchell; Heda Hopper; H.B. Kaltenborn?
Today, "Media" has been distorted to mean "...anyone with a mike/BLOG/webpage".

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Long live President Obama

serum114

The US Establishment Media in a Nutshell
by Glenn Greenwald
In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to “domestic military operations” within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

“Yoo and torture” - 102
“Mukasey and 9/11″ — 73
“Yoo and Fourth Amendment” — 16
“Obama and bowling” — 1,043
“Obama and Wright” — More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
“Obama and patriotism” - 1,607
“Clinton and Lewinsky” — 1,079

And as Eric Boehlert documents, even Iraq — that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight — has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced above. “The Clintons are Rich!!!!” will undoubtedly soon be at the top of this heap within a matter of a day or two.

“Media critic” Howie Kurtz in the Washington Post today devoted pages of his column to Obama’s bowling and eating habits and how that shows he’s not a regular guy but an Arrogant Elitist, compiling an endless string of similar chatter about this from Karl Rove, Maureen Dowd, Walter Shapiro and Ann Althouse. Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson devoted her whole column this week to arguing that, along with Wright, Obama’s bowling was his biggest mistake, a “real doozy.”
Obama’s bowling has provided almost a full week of programming on MSNBC. Gail Collins, in The New York Times, today observed that Obama went bowling “with disastrous consequences.” And, as always, they take their personality-based fixations from the Right, who have been promoting the Obama is an Arrogant, Exotic, Elitist Freak narrative for some time. In a typically cliched and slimy article, Time’s Joe Klein this week explored what the headline called Obama’s “Patriotism Problem,” where we learn that “this is a chronic disease among Democrats, who tend to talk more about what’s wrong with America than what’s right.” He trotted it all out — the bowling, the lapel pin, Obama’s angry, America-hating wife, “his Islamic-sounding name.”

Needless to say, these serious and accomplished political journalists are only focusing on these stupid and trivial matters because this is what the Regular Folk care about. They speak for the Regular People, and what the Regular People care about is not Iraq or the looming recession or health care or lobbyist control of our government or anything that would strain the brain of these reporters. What those nice little Regular Folk care about is whether Obama is Regular Folk just like them, whether he can bowl and wants to gorge himself with junk food.

Our nation’s coddled, insulated journalist class reaches these conclusions about what Regular Folk think using the most self-referential, self-absorbed thought process imaginable. The proof that the Regular People are interested in these things is that . . . the journalists themselves chatter about it endlessly. In Great American Hypocrites, I described the process as follows in the context of examining the three-week-long media obsession with John Edwards’ haircut (to the exclusion of a whole array of revelations about what the government was doing or planning to do) and how they justified that coverage:

Most certainly, the press will pretend to be above it all (”this is not something that we, the sophisticated political journalists, care about, of course”). But they yammer about Drudge-promoted gossip endlessly, and then insist that their own chattering is proof that it is an important story that people care about. And because they conclude that “people” (i.e., them) are concerned with the story, they keep chirping about it, which in turn fuels their belief that the story is important. It is an endless loop of self-referential narcissism — whatever they endlessly sputter is what “the people” care about, and therefore they must keep harping on it, because their chatter is proof of its importance.

They don’t need Drudge to rule their world any longer because they are Matt Drudge now.

Every day, it becomes more difficult to blame George Bush, Dick Cheney and comrades for their seven years (and counting) of crimes, corruption and destruction of our political values. Think about it this way: if you were a high government official and watched as — all in a couple of weeks time — it is revealed, right out in the open, that you suspended the Fourth Amendment, authorized torture, proclaimed yourself empowered to break the law, and sent the nation’s top law enforcement officer to lie blatantly about how and why the 9/11 attacks happened so that you could acquire still more unchecked spying power and get rid of lawsuits that would expose what you did, and the political press in this country basically ignored all of that and blathered on about Obama’s bowling score and how he eats chocolate, wouldn’t you also conclude that you could do anything you want, without limits, and know there will be no consequences? What would be the incentive to stop doing all of that?

UPDATE: One other point to note about all of this is that these fixations are as skewed as they are vapid. Barack Obama is an exotic elitist freak because he went to Harvard Law School and made $1 million from his book. Hillary Clinton can’t possibly have any connection to the Regular Folk because her husband, who grew up dirt poor, became quite wealthy after being President. John Kerry was completely removed from the concerns of the Regular People because his second wife was rich.

By contrast, George W. Bush was a down-home, salt-of-the-earth Man of the People despite being the grandson of a U.S. Senator, the son of a President (who greatly magnified his riches in his post-presidency), and the by-product of an extremely wealthy, coddled life. Ronald Reagan was pure Americana despite spending most of his adult life as a very wealthy Hollywood actor (and converting his post-presidency into far greater riches still). And John McCain is as Regular a Guy as it gets, even though he dumped his first wife (the mother of his three children) after she was disfigured and disabled by a near-fatal car accident so that he could marry his much younger, much prettier, and extremely wealthy heiress-mistress, whose family riches then launched his political career and sustained a life of luxury for almost three decades (that’s how McCain’s rustic “Sedona cabin” — i.e., his sprawling compound — came to be).

It would be bad enough if our political press were obsessed with such trivialities. The fact that they do so in such a Republican-leader-worshiping manner makes it only that much worse, particularly given that it’s this dynamic, more than anything else, that determines the outcome of our elections.

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The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.
Hunter S. Thompson

"The bad news is, the aliens have landed. The good news is, they eat Mormons and piss gasoline!"
Utah Phillips

BillCosby

I stepped in it a while ago......................

I think "dickie" is the puppeteer & bush2 the puppet........ That would make bush2 the front man-stooge.............

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Preventive war is not war!!!!Counter-terror is not terror

Ptech

In the last month or so, during the time the documents generated by John Yoo were released to the public, there were about 70 stories about it in the various media. At the same time, regarding Obama's bowling fiasco, there were more than a thousand stories written about that.

Nah, the public cognizance is not manipulated in THIS country.

Heretic

The media's first and foremost severe problem is being "for profit." The exception has been the Wry FOX, which has no redeeming qualities whatsoever and should be treated as a propaganda outlet as bad as Pravda.

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"In space no one can hear you scream. in D.C. it won't matter..." -Clinton Resurrection: The Alien Queen lives!

BillCosby

Yep a sin of omission.....

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Preventive war is not war!!!!Counter-terror is not terror

ibex

The MSM is owned and operated by mega corporations who also own our government and military. The annual Washington Press Corps dinner is nothing more than a shameless display of war mongers and their obsequious journalist lap dogs getting together, getting smashed and wallowing in their own power, the ultimate circle jerk if you will. Looking for the truth in American media is like trying to find five silver dollars in a giant pile of shit. The apathy and stupidity of an American public more concerned with celebrity gossip and other trivia doesn't help either. Now if you'll excuse me i'm going to read People, Us Weekly and Star magazine to find out if Brangelina will tie the knot, Owen Wilson's latest suicide attempt undoubtedly brought on by his last film roll and Lindsay Lohan's eighteenth stint in rehab. LEAVE BRITNEY ALONE!

Rollerball

Obviously if Obama can't bowl how can we expect him to answer a phone at 3am!? This clearly shows he's not ready to lead America. Do you want a man that can only bowl a 37 going up against the likes of Osama bin Ladin in a tournament?!

I think NOT!





...used to be kill the lawyers first, but I think now days we need to kill the media first. Like Bush, they have way too much power for a bunch of airheads.

BillCosby

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Preventive war is not war!!!!Counter-terror is not terror