Here and There

I’ve been following Jonathan Turley for a few years now, since I first saw Turley and Bruce Fein appear before Congress to discuss surveillance. He impressed me with his intelligence and articulation, in addition to coming down on the right side of things.

Just now, I saw him on Rachel Maddow, and it struck me for the first time what a great pick Turley would be for the Supreme Court.

Agree? Don’t agree? Am I totally full of it? Let me know!

PS I’m a straight guy with a crush on a lesbian. Maddow just announced that infrastructure is one of her favorite subjects. I know it would never work out, but not because of the obvious reasons — Maddow also declared her love for PBS supreme douche David Brancaccio. And now, she made the pirate “arrrrhhh” sound. Boo, Rachel!

Taking a page from Kottke, I’d like to offer my own little nugget of Muppetry:

She’s really getting on my nerves. It’s style and substance. Today, it was “calling out” Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell for saying Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano has “no life” and is therefore “perfect for the job.” So? It’s kind of true. Napolitano is single. She’s not saddle-strapped with a family. She’ll never have to leave the post to say, “I’m going to spend more time with my family.”

Brown’s tone, her cadence, her delivery, frankly, sucks. It’s so boilerplate and broadcasting school, it sounds (and tastes) like shit. But, this is CNN.

I’m really starting to get sick and tired of cable news. And I only signed up for service a week before the election.

I’m not Michelle Obama, so I have impunity in saying it: I am ashamed of my country.

I mean, what do I have to be proud of? Our record on international relations? Our economy? Our entertainment industry? Our environmental record? Schools? Banks?

I used to be okay with the United States. The 1990s were, taken as a whole, pretty great. There were plenty of bumps in the road, but income disparity shrank, innovation exploded, and we were well-liked the world ’round. Work was easy to find, and Seinfeld was on.

Now, what?

Anyway, the way I’m feeling about the upcoming election hinges on this question of pride and shame. If Obama-Biden pull it off (or, more accurately put, if the American voting public pulls it off for Obama-Biden), pride will be restored. It would be a mea culpa, a rejection of the bad policies and divisiveness of the last eight years.

But for McSame-HockeyMilf to win would serve as a stamp of approval for the dismal job Bush-Cheney have done. I cannot be proud of that, and instead, my shame will only harden. It may become permanent.

Watching The Daily Show and I see a commercial for what I assume, incorrectly, is a new Comedy Central show. But it slowly sinks in that this is no joke.

Black Gold, on a station called tru TV, which I’ve never heard of, actually glorifies the (mostly white, and definitely all male) crew who, yes, work in the fields extracting oil from the ground.

Really? Really?

A whopping 94 degrees here in San Francisco today. Which reminds me:

No, but seriously, on shameful day that started with news out of Israel of our (yes, sadly, still) president disgracing that body politic and this entire nation, let alone Barack Obama, and soon enough got wind of a group of Hillary Clinton supporters so incensed by NARAL’s endorsement of Obama that they’ve threatened to undermine his candidacy (and what, elect John McCain?), I feel that it’s only appropriate for a much-needed lolbreak (NSFW):

Warning: You are about to watch astoundingly ignorant comments:

Vintage Colbert:

Everyone and their mother is flipping out about Barack Obama going on Fox for an interview with Chris Wallace. Liberal bloggers from Kos to TPM’s Greg Sargent are excoriating Obama for “caving in.”

What does this liberal blogger think? They all need to chill.

I watched the interview, and you can call me naïve, call me an Obama apologist, but I don’t see what the big deal is. I actually appreciated that he answered the questions politely, intelligently, and straight-forwardly. He seemed totally at ease with Wallace, even joking at times.

How on earth did I come to this conclusion, given my well-documented hatred of Fox?

Well, I did this thing that seems to come with no small amount of impossibility for these netroots people: I imagined myself in someone else’s shoes.

We on the left, we of the so-called blogosphere (barf), can keep railing against Fox, and we will. But there are people we’ll never reach, no matter how sensible and persuasive we think we’re being, sitting in our comfort zones, spouting our “knowledge.”

Going on Fox in a noncombative way gains support from otherwise untapped resources, whereas going on in and adapting a combative matter would’ve sealed the deal for many who already don’t view Obama in a favorable light. Not going on at all reinforces “elitist” prejudices in the minds of Fox viewers. Good or bad, to those people, a refusal to talk with Fox amounts to snobbery.

Plus, keeping up this “us” versus “them” rhetoric alive is anathema to Obama’s campaign. He talks constantly of breaking down these manufactured divisions and looking toward common interests.

It’s funny because he was vilified by the right (and defended by the core left that considers itself his base) for suggesting that the U.S. talk to its enemies. Sitting down to talk with Fox is no different than agreeing to negotiate with Cuba or Iran or North Korea. At the end of the day, I think most liberal bloggers can agree with that.

But when are liberal bloggers going to set aside their myopia and see things from others’ perspectives? Already today I heard of instances of Fox viewers (yes, they’re out there) who saw Obama on the network and it was the first chance for them to experience him as calm, collected, and level-headed, with potentially good ideas. For them, it was validating in perhaps the same way it would be for us if John McCain sat down and spoke with Kos or Huffington or whoever.

Perhaps it all boils down to philosophy, the fight-fire-with-fire camp versus the kill-’em-with-kindness camp. I think I know which side I’m on.

I could do a search of my blog, and see if I’ve ever written my views about Fox “News.” (My views could be summed up by those two little punctuation marks around the word news.) But I feel it necessary to rearticulate them here. Now.

It’s a sham, to put it simply.

By an overwhelming margin, journalistic media these days are for-profit machines, driven in large part by advertising revenue. As readers/viewers drop, they develop schtick, be it condensed reporting, the introduction of opinion masquerading as news, or a newfound fascination with entertainment, allowing it to trump the first aim of responsible journalism: civic life.

Modern media have become this way, they’ve evolved in the face of so-called market pressures. They had to stay relevant in today’s cutthroat news industry.

But Fox is different. Fox was born well after The New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS, NBC, CNN. Fox was created, in part, with the mandate of countering what it perceived to be a liberal bias in the existing society and its media.

In other words, Fox founded itself on a lie. But it didn’t leave it at that. No, that wouldn’t generate a single Neilsen viewer.

What it did, instead, was to mold this lie in the most deceptive of dies. It claimed that it was “Fair and Balanced.”

Its aim was not simply to bring journalism back to some mystical center. No, it set out to pull a pretty balanced press (when taken as a cumulative total) and turn it into a right-wing message machine.

This is no more clearly evidenced than by contrasting Fox’s “coverage” (read: attempted destruction) of Bill Clinton with its “coverage” (read: unending praise) of George W. Bush.

It is because of this that I do my best never to link to Fox or Fox clips that happened to live on You Tube or some video-hosting site.

Why am I bringing this up now?

Two things. I watched a pretty hilarious and awesome segment on The Daily Show yesterday. John Oliver took Fox to task in a funny, yet striking, way:

Part One

Part Two

Good stuff. Then, this morning, I was treated to this segment-o-hate, courtesy Andrew Sullivan. (Again, I’m linking to Sullivan rather than Fox or You Tube because I’d rather not be responsible for even a single click toward their content.)

There’s so much more to say, but I think I’d rather go live my life. The weather is amazing here in San Francisco today.

60 Minutes ran companion pieces on Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton that aired tonight on CBS.

The segment on Obama, narrated and interviewed by Steve Kroft, told me things I pretty much already knew. One thing that was striking was that the candidate did seem a little cocky. I haven’t watched him in moving form enough at this point to know whether that’s a new affectation. But it struck me nonetheless.

Katie Couric’s story on HIllary Clinton, however, did really drive home a couple of things. One is that I think she’d make a more than apt president. She’s got the right stances on almost every issue. It’s just a matter of how she may go about getting things done that keeps me a little worried. Which leads me to …

The other point I felt watching Clinton tonight was the impossibility of her ever becoming president. I started to see her through the eyes of people who, for whatever reason, simply do not like her (some are in my mostly Democratic family). I just don’t see how she can overcome her high unfavorable ratings, especially when you’ve got a figure like Obama with such a large margin of favorability.

So, that’s my assessment of tonight’s airing of 60 Minutes: She’d be a really good president, if only she could win.

The one and only.