April 2008: Business As Usual

Business being: the ongoing
debasement of our political
process and news media, with
Republicans in control of both.



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Glenn Greenwald's new book on the subject is released. The focus is on

...the deceitful electoral tactics and manipulative personality-based myths the Right has perfected and continuously deploys to win elections, and the ways in which our slothful, vapid and complicit establishment press propagates those myths.

Which has been the key to the radical Republican power grab, since there is no real public support for their policies.

As always, Greenwald uses his blog to cover daily examples, such as, "The harmony between the Right and the media", describing the April 16 Obama-Clinton "debate" of "substance-free 'issues'"—which boils down to idiotic sound-bites like who does or does not wear a flag pin.

Driftglass does a brilliant post on the subject, updating William Jennings Bryant for an era when Flag Pin has become the currency of our politics:

You shall not crucify us upon a Cross of Bling.

With his ongoing takedowns of media pundits, driftgass in in fine form this month. On William Kristol's use of "hatespeech-as-genre":

Kristol’s writing fails in its first duty because he shows us nothing.

He risks nothing.

He illuminates nothing.

Instead he has built himself a toasty little sniper's nest on the roof of the New York Times and merrily pot-shots anything to the left of Mussolini.

Except now that his Conservative Movement has been shown to be the blood-drunk fascist whorehouse that the Dirty Fucking Hippies have been warning us all about, the word "Liberal" has lost its pejorative currency.

So, late to the party as usual, Kristol now does what the rest of the Pig People Peerage have been doing for five years: switching from screaming "Liberal!" at 100 decibels to screaming "Commie!" at 150.

John Stosell—

...unlike a thousand other shrieking pinheads calling into talk radio or falling off of skinhead tavern barstools across this great land of ours, Stossel collects a very juicy paycheck spreading his depraved world view over our airwaves.

He is a man who carves himself out a fine, fat living heroically and ferociously defending the predations of billion-dollar corporations against unarmed citizens, so I really can’t bring myself to feel too bad in making my small contribution in the direction of moving him towards a more hair-net-and-fry-vat-based career.

As to Thomas "Suck on this" Friedman, driftglass writes of Friedman's speaking appearance at Brown, where a pie is thrown by environmental activists—

And what we have learned these last seven years...was that the Miserably Incompetent Punditocracy bubble is a fundamental threat to our open society because there is no teevee network sane enough, no newspaper honorable enough, no bullshit scrubber efficient enough, to protect an open society from the Miserably Incompetent Punditocracy.

And what we needed to do was to go over to that part of the media, I'm afraid, and burst that bubble.

We needed to go over here basically and take out a very big pie right in the heart of that feculent fiefdom and burst that bubble.

And there was only one way to do it. Because part of that bubble said: "We've got you. We control the fucking media and you will open wide and swallow out adolescent, Beltway-centric, Right-slanted drivel because you have no other choice. Quit whining about the truth. Nobody gives a shit about the truth at the Big Boy Table. Fuck the truth; all we care about are our seven-figure salaries, power-whoring and our sweet speaking-and-book deals."

...Well. Suck. On. This.

OK? That was what this pieing was about.