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February 23, 2010 CNN
Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) today asked the Obama administration to investigate what he called “the greatest scientific scandal of our generation” — the actions of climate scientists revealed by the Climategate files, and the subsequent admissions by the editors of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4).
Senator Inhofe also called for former Vice President Al Gore to be called back to the Senate to testify.
“In [Gore's] science fiction movie, every assertion has been rebutted,” Inhofe said. He believes Vice President Gore should defend himself and his movie before Congress.
Is it just being at CPAC or speaking that brings out the lies? Mitt Romney opened up by making the most ludicrous statement I've heard in a long time. Am I missing something or were there ever 60 Democratic Senators in the 2009 Congress? Joe Lieberman is an Independent and he campaigned for John McCain, who wanted him for his VP, so what was Romney talking about?
Romney: The new president himself promised a change of biblical proportion. And of course given the filibuster-proof Senate he got and the lopsided House vote...
And then he also lied about Al Gore.
Romney: President Obama's self-proclaimed B+ will go down in history as the biggest exaggeration since Al Gore's invention of the Internet.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) became the first speaker at CPAC to utter the words "President Bush" on Thursday when he offered a forceful defense of the previous administration.
Speaking to throngs of conservative onlookers, the likely 2012 presidential candidate accused the Obama White House of using its predecessor as a crutch and scapegoat. More to the point, he declared that the Bush record wasn't all that bad compared to the current president's.
"When it comes to shifting responsibility for failure, however, no one is a more frequent object of President Obama's reproach than President Bush," said Romney. "It's wearing so thin that even the late night shows make fun of it. I am convinced that history will judge President Bush far more kindly -- he pulled us from a deepening recession following the attack of 9-11, he overcame teachers unions to test school children and evaluate schools, he took down the Taliban, waged a war against the jihadists and was not afraid to call it what it is -- a war. And he kept us safe."
The crowd was quite pleased with the Bush defense and even more so when Romney praised former vice president Dick Cheney.
Conservative love for Dick Cheney borders on the insane, but what can you expect? Anyway, Romney is doing his best to preserve his 2012 presidential nomination. I guess he feels telling lies goes a long way to ensure it. It's a rite of passage for conservatives.
It's not just the hair that makes him look foolish, but the words he utters from his mouth. Here's his latest buffoonery.
Donald Trump is not a big believer in global warming. "With the coldest winter ever recorded, with snow setting record levels up and down the coast, the Nobel committee should take the Nobel Prize back from Al Gore," the tycoon told members of his Trump National Golf Club in Westchester in a recent speech. "Gore wants us to clean up our factories and plants in order to protect us from global warming, when China and other countries couldn't care less. It would make us totally noncompetitive in the manufacturing world, and China, Japan and India are laughing at America's stupidity." The crowd of 500 stood up and cheered.
Is this supposed to be taken seriously? Isn't it winter on the East Coast and doesn't it usually snow there? Is this his proof?
Please Lord, help us all.
"The Donald" did not include Vancouver's unseasonably warm temperatures and lack of snow in his weather observations. After last week's record-breaking storms, many scientists wenttogreat lengths to explain that the storms do not disprove climate change. Some even believe that climate change contributed to the storms.
Beck's teaser called it "the biggest scam of the generation," and wondered: "Anybody seen Al Gore?"
Beck himself claimed that Jones suggested that another warming period recorded in Europe during the Middle Ages was as deep as the current period, but that there was no consensus on whether the warming was global:
Phil Jones admits, yes, no real consensus on this one. Too much debate on whether an event known as the medieval warming period, yes, was global in nature and hotter than it is like right now.
So, to quote, obviously, the late 20th century was not unprecedented. Oh, good.
Beck also argues that the Jones interview should cause every government in the world to halt their efforts toward curbing greenhouse gases: "If this were about science, wouldn't science matter just a little bit?"
Hannity repeated all of Beck's claims. Hannity sneered that Al Gore should be happy that he doesn't have to feel guilty about "hopping on that private jet anymore."
Most of the points they cite are distorted: Jones, for instance says that the Middle Age cooling is only significant it could be shown to have been global in nature.
Moreover, he also says that the cause of previous warming periods differs from "recent warming," which is "predominantly manmade":
During his Q&A with BBC, Jones stated that "the warming rates" of previous warming periods after 1860 are "similar and not statistically significantly different" from the most recent warming period. Jones was later asked, "If you agree that there were similar periods of warming since 1850 to the current period, and that the WMP is under debate, what factors convince you that recent warming has been largely man-made?" Jones responded, "The fact that we can't explain the warming from the 1950s by solar and volcanic forcing." He further stated that it would not be reasonable to conclude that "recent warming is not predominately manmade" from the evidence that there have been previous periods of warming since 1850.
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We know that folks on the East Coast -- especially in New York and D.C. -- tend to think the world revolves around them, but this is ridiculous.
The Fox News anchors were having a field day yesterday, promoting their coverage of the East Coast snowstorms, mostly as a way of springboarding into their claim that the storms somehow prove that global warming is not happening -- a fixture in the Fox narrative.
The theme on Fox: Because it's colder in New York and D.C., it must be colder all around the rest of the world!
Eric Bolling taunted Al Gore, as did Glenn Beck, who then went on to laugh at the reports noting that in fact this is evidence of global-warming theory, claiming that we were now using an upside-down thermometer, then darkly proclaimed that this was all about the "progressive agenda", which has no use for "the truth." And on Hannity's show, he trotted out the "blizzards debunk global warming" line, and Greg Gutfeld proclaimed that this meant the demise of the "global warming industry."
But here in Seattle, we understand that what happens to us locally doesn't mean the same thing is happening globally. We're not only more honest about it, we're more reality-based.
And the reality, as the New York Times explained this morning, is that the heavy snowstorms on the East Coast in fact perfectly fit into the model of climate change being predicated by scientists:
Jeff Masters, a meteorologist who writes on the Weather Underground blog, said that the recent snows do not, by themselves, demonstrate anything about the long-term trajectory of the planet. Climate is, by definition, a measure of decades and centuries, not months or years.
But Dr. Masters also said that government and academic studies had consistently predicted an increasing frequency of just these kinds of record-setting storms, because warmer air carries more moisture.
“Of course,” he wrote on his blog Wednesday as new snows produced white-out conditions in much of the Eastern half of the country, “both climate-change contrarians and climate-change scientists agree that no single weather event can be blamed on climate change.
“However,” he continued, “one can ‘load the dice’ in favor of events that used to be rare — or unheard of — if the climate is changing to a new state.”
A federal government report issued last year, intended to be the authoritative statement of known climate trends in the United States, pointed to the likelihood of more frequent snowstorms in the Northeast and less frequent snow in the South and Southeast as a result of long-term temperature and precipitation patterns. The Climate Impacts report, from the multiagency United States Global Change Research Program, also projected more intense drought in the Southwest and more powerful Gulf Coast hurricanes because of warming.
In other words, if the government scientists are correct, look for more snow.
Fox's Jane Skinner featured a report this morning discussing this Brenda Ekwurzel of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who laid out in more detail how the heavier snows are likely a product of the heavier amounts of moisture in the atmosphere from global warming.
Want to bet that this bit of reportage goes completely ignored by the "opinion" anchors?
If you don't think there's a media double standard that favors Republicans over Democrats, then let's play a game of what-if.
What if, in 2006, at Yearly Kos, the first annual convention of liberal bloggers and their readers, organizers shelled out $100,000 for former Vice President Al Gore to address attendees? And what if the same organizers booked as an opening-night speaker a fringe, radical-left conspiracy theorist who'd spent the previous year pushing the thoroughly debunked claim that some Bush White administration insiders played a role in, and even planned, the 9-11 attacks. What if the speaker (also proudly anti-Semitic) received a standing ovation from the liberal Yearly Kos crowd?
Given that backdrop, and given the fact that the 9-11 Truther nut had for weeks bragged about his chance to share the stage with Gore, do you think the press would have demanded that Gore justify his association with a hateful conference that embraced a 9-11 Truther? Do you think pundits would have universally mocked and ridiculed Gore's judgment while condemning the Yearly Kos convention as being a hothouse of left-wing hate? Do you think Gore's appearance would have become a thing?
I sure do.
Gore and liberal bloggers would have been crucified by the press and the D.C. chattering class if the scenario I described ever unfolded in real life. (FYI, it goes without saying that organizers for Yearly Kos, now known as Netroots Nation, would never dream of mainstreaming an anti-Semitic 9-11 Truther via a prime-time speaking gig.)
But this past weekend in Nashville, at the first National Tea Party Convention, the Beltway press did just the opposite with regard to Sarah Palin's keynote address, which did follow a prime-time speech by "birther" nut Joseph Farah, who over the years has carved out a uniquely hateful and demented corner of the right-wing blogosphere. Because, yes, at the Tea Party convention, Farah, a proud Muslim-hater and gay-hater, did receive a standing ovation from the conservative crowd after he unfurled his thoroughly debunked birther garbage. (i.e. Obama "doesn't have a birth certificate.") And Farah did brag in the weeks leading up to the event about his chance to share the stage with Palin, to associate with Palin. ("Sold out! Palin-Farah ticket rocks tea-party convention," read the headline at Farah's discredited right-wing site, WorldNetDaily.com.)
Worst of all, though, the press played dumb about the whole thing.
Fact: Virtually nobody in the corporate media said boo about Palin helping to legitimize Farah by sharing the same stage with him. She was given a total free ride.
And I mean nobody. According to Nexis, there were more than 150 newspaper articles and columns published in the U.S. last week that mentioned both Palin and the Tea Party. (Combined, The New York Times and The Washington Post published 18 of them.) Yet out of all those articles and columns, exactly two also mentioned Joseph Farah by name. (Congrats to the Philadelphia Daily Newsand New Hampshire'sConcord Monitor.)
When MoveOn held a video contest called Bush in 30 seconds and a Bush-Hitler video showed up and slipped through, the RNC and the media went ballistic.
Six months ago, MoveOn.org held a contest to find the best amateur ad against President Bush. The group invited people to make ads and submit them to its Web site. Some idiot spliced images of Bush together with images of Adolf Hitler, evidently trying to make Bush look like a warmonger. His submissions, which arrived with 1,500 others—too many to be screened quickly—were posted on the contest Web site. As soon as MoveOn.org leaders realized what was in the ad, they removed and denounced it.
We've seen hundreds of signs at Tea Party events that are racist and violent, but there never was an outcry from the media over them like there was over Move On, who didn't even produce it. FOX News and others in the media ripped every Democratic politician who went to Yearly Kos back in 2006. And when many of the Democratic presidential nominees went to the same event in 2007 instead of the DLC convention, the criticism was abundant. Why didn't Kristol rip his Quayle project (Sarah Palin) over making over 100K and speaking at the Tea Party convention? Well, that would never happen because conservatives can do no wrong. Even if she did appear with the likes of a birther like Joseph Farah because he serves a purpose for the GOP.
Digby writes:
I don't think there's any doubt. In fact, the first Yearly Kos got a lot of media attention and it featured some big names like Howard Dean and Harry Reid. But the organizers didn't pay for any of them and there were no extremist cranks invited, so there was nothing to compel the huge hue and cry that would have been raised if they had done so. It was, all in all, a pretty staid affair, with the only controversy surrounding the fact that Mark Warner paid 50k for a party --- which was roundly criticized by the participants as gilding the lily.
Considering what would have been a feeding frenzy if the netroots had done something similar, Boehlert goes on to wonder why the mainstream press didn't bother to report the fact that Sarah Palin, whose speech was broadcast live on television, followed a prime time speech by "birther" fruitcake Joseph Farah.
I know there is a lot of frustration in the blogosphere right now because President Obama has not been kind to liberals and progressives. And I understand the frustration of it all too well. I still can't figure out why Axelrod and the President don't seem to understand how important their base is. But as C&L and many other sites wrote during the primary, Obama was never a progressive, but a moderate Democratic politician. I've been blogging for five years non-stop to move this country away from conservatism that has been the great destroyer of our society. Chris Hayes at The Nation has a great article up describing the mess that is our political system and what we face as progressives:
The corporatism on display in Washington is itself a symptom of a broader social illness that I noted above, a democracy that is pitched precariously on the tipping point of oligarchy. In an oligarchy, the only way to get change is to convince the oligarchs that it is in their interest--and increasingly, that's the only kind of change we can get.
In 1911 the German democratic socialist Robert Michels faced a similar problem, and it was the impetus for his classic book Political Parties. He was motivated by a simple question: why were parties of the left, those most ideologically committed to democracy and participation, as oligarchical in their functioning as the self-consciously elitist and aristocratic parties of the right?
Michels's answer was what he called "The Iron Law of Oligarchy." In order for any kind of party or, indeed, any institution with a democratic base to exist, it must have an organization that delegates tasks. As this bureaucratic structure develops, it invests a small group of people with enough power that they can then subvert the very mechanisms by which they can be held to account: the party press, party conventions and delegate votes. "It is organization which gives birth to the domination of the elected over the electors," he wrote, "of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization, says oligarchy."
Michels recognized the challenge his work presented to his comrades on the left and viewed the task of democratic socialists as a kind of noble, endless, Sisyphean endeavor, which he described by invoking a German fable. In it, a dying peasant tells his sons that he has buried a treasure in their fields. "After the old man's death the sons dig everywhere in order to discover the treasure. They do not find it. But their indefatigable labor improves the soil and secures for them a comparative well-being."
"The treasure in the fable may well symbolize democracy," Michels wrote. "Democracy is a treasure which no one will ever discover by deliberate search. But in continuing our search, in laboring indefatigably to discover the undiscoverable, we shall perform a work which will have fertile results in the democratic sense."
It's indisputably true that the political system is run by wealthy plutocrats and much of what passes for democracy is kabuki. Same as it ever was, I'm afraid. But that's not exactly the point. It's still worth participating, doing what you can, containing the damage, stopping the bleeding, fighting the fight --- for its own sake. After all, history shows that humans have managed, somehow, to actually make progress over time. You just can't know what will make the difference.
There's an impulse to say screw it all and not show up anymore because "they're all the same," but I can't do that. For the most part, politicians will let us down because they are...well, politicians, but they aren't all the same. There have been plenty of books written about Florida in 2000. If ballots had been properly labeled so that voters who wanted Gore instead of Pat Buchanan could have done so, we might have had a more fair election. And then the Supreme Court would have been left to watch election night like the rest of us and Bush wouldn't have entered the White House in 2000.
Think of what that would have meant for the country:
The Bush tax cuts for the wealthy would never have been a reality.
I doubt we would have had the attacks of 9/11 because President Clinton warned that the greatest threat America would face was terrorism and Gore would have not ignored him like Bush did. But if we did get attacked, then you can bet that Gore would have handled it as an adult. He wouldn't sought "revenge" against Saddam Hussein and prioritized control of all that oil. Gore wouldn't have let Osama Bin Laden get away and the world would still be sympathetic to us.
Our efforts to put Afghanistan back together would be finished by now, assuming we even would have tried nation-building there.
More troops and people would be alive and we would have exited the Middle East with our heads held high.
America would never have invaded and occupied Iraq and over 4,000 troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians (if not millions) would be alive today.
Abu Ghraib would never have happened.
Terrorist recruitment would have stalled.
Torture would not be part of the American lexicon and the likes of Dick Cheney and John Yoo would never have descended upon the offices of the VP and OLC.
John Roberts and Sam Alito would not be on the Supreme Court and the makeup would probably be 6-3 against the radical Scalia-conservative agenda. A ruling on Citizens United is coming soon. Would the court ever have accepted that case? Not a chance and soon corporations will have a stranglehold on our election system much more than they have now.
George Bush would have been back home in Texas leading the state into secession along with his pal Alberto Gonzalez.
Nobody would have ever heard of Terry Schiavo.
A much swifter and more effective response to Hurricane Katrina would have been implemented.
You get my point. These are but a few things that would have been different if conservatives didn't get their hands on the White House. Many of us are fighting for liberal and progressive values everyday and will continue to do so. But when our party fails us, I need to work harder to make sure the party stays on a liberal course, not throw up my hands and dismiss them as all the same.
And in the spirit of that though we need to hold the party establishment accountable. As Digby says there are a number of great progressive challengers already taking on DLC incumbents and we're going to send them a message that's loud and clear. Blue America PAC is already taking on this challenge.
Blue America has helpfully set up an Act Blue page with all the progressive challengers who have announced and we'll add to it as more come forward. We're calling it "Send The Democrats A Message They Can Understand."
If you want a Democratic scalp, these candidates are out there offering to do the work to get it done. And you won't be giving Adam Nagourney or Cokie Roberts or Glenn Beck what they want in the process. It's a win that even the villagers and the party establishment can't spin as good news for Republicans.
We'll be having on many progressive challengers in the coming months on C&L and they will be explaining why progressives need to be elected if we want things to change for the better. The new Blue America PAC Act Blue page is called:
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It's pretty much getting to the point where, if you heard it on Fox, you can pretty much be assured it's a lie. Especially when the subject is global warming.
It's not just Sean Hannity, though he's bad enough. It's pretty much every single anchor and reporter they have. On the subject of global warming, they seem incapable of reporting a single straight fact.
Take Neil Cavuto yesterday. He opened the segment by talking about how cold temperatures are right now. This is a big surprise, since we're in the dead of winter.
But this is part of the larger theme: It's colder than crap here in America, so that must mean there's no global warming! We're hearing it constantly.
Fairly typical of this approach was the e-mail we got yesterday from a reader who wanted to defend Hannity:
Sean Hannity may be many things, but your claim his statement about 2009 being colder is a lie doesn't hold water. In fact, Accuweather.com says this winter may be the worst and coldest since 1985.
Cavuto and his guest also plop out the polar-bear canard -- that polar-bear populations are actually at new heights. This, too, is just a flat-out falsehood:
First, it's important to note that scientists lack historical data on polar bear numbers—they only have rough estimates. What we do know, though, is that in the 1960s, polar bear populations dropped precipitously due to over-hunting. When restrictions on polar bear harvests were put in place in the early 1970s, populations rebounded. That situation was a conservation success story ... but the current threat to polar bears is entirely different, and more dire.
Today's polar bears are facing the rapid loss of the sea-ice habitat that they rely on to hunt, breed, and, in some cases, to den. Last summer alone, the melt-off in the Arctic was equal to the size of Alaska, Texas, and the state of Washington combined—a shrinkage that was not predicted to happen until 2040. The loss of Arctic sea ice has resulted in a shorter hunting season for the bears, which has led to a scientifically documented decline in the best-studied population, Western Hudson Bay, and predictions of decline in the second best-studied population, the Southern Beaufort Sea.
... At the most recent meeting of the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (Copenhagen, 2009), scientists reported that of the 19 subpopulations of polar bears, eight are declining, three are stable, one is increasing, and seven have insufficient data on which to base a decision. (The number of declining populations has increased from five at the group's 2005 meeting.)
Warming deniers like Hannity and Cavuto lie with impunity, and the worst part is, no one will ever hold them accountable. In 10 years, when they are proven catastrophically wrong, they'll find ways to claim they were actually right.
Anyway, Gore asks the question that a Sarah Palin could never answer logically: Why are the polar ice caps disappearing? The batshit crazy deniers like Palin don't know the caps exist maybe because she can't see them from her house...
MITCHELL: Congratulations on the book. You write in your new book, "Our Choice," "The global warming deniers' arguments are fraudulent and often nonsensical." Yet even today, one of the best-known voices in the Republican Party, Sarah Palin, has an op-ed in the Washington Post, and she is escalating a major attack against Copenhagen and against -- against the summit. Palin calls it "junk science." She says, "The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won't change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worst."
What's your response to that?
GORE: Well, you know, the -- the global warming deniers persist in this air of unreality. After all, the entire north polar icecap, which has been there for most of the last 3 million years, is disappearing before our eyes. Forty percent is already gone. The rest is expected to go completely within the next decade. What do they think is causing this?
The mountain glaciers in every region of the world are melting, many of them at an accelerated rate, threatening drinking supplies -- drinking water supplies and agricultural water supplies. We have these record storms, drought, floods, fires, three deaths (ph) in the American West, climate refugees beginning now, expected to rise to the hundreds of millions unless we take action.
These effects are taking place all over the world exactly as predicted by the scientists, who have warned for years that, if we continue putting 90 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every day, the accumulation -- that's going to trap lots more heat, raise temperatures, and cause all of these consequences that are already beginning.
MITCHELL: Well, one of the things that she has written recently on Facebook is that this is doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood that makes the public feel like owning an SUV is a sin against the planet.
GORE: Well, the scientific community has worked very intensively for 20 years within this international process, and they now say the evidence is unequivocal. A hundred and fifty years ago this year was the discovery that CO-2 traps heat. That is a -- a principle in physics. It's not a question of debate. It's like gravity; it exists.
Like gravity it exists. You see, there's the proven. In the mind of conservatives, it doesn't matter what's provable -- only what can be denied. And as we've come to expect from Fred Hiatt and the Washington Post, they reprinted a Sarah Palin op-ed that is littered with so much false information on climate change that it boggles the mind. They have turned the news paper op-ed section into a celebrity rag that could care less about truth and accuracy. I'm shocked the op-ed didn't come with Sarah Palin celebrity photos.
Amid the Copenhagen climate summit, Fred Hiatt has chosen to descend the paper to a new low, seeming to prove that there is somehow a balance between outright falsehoods and ignorance, on the one side, and scientific knowledge and honest discourse on the other.
And here's a response to Dean Baker at the dubious Politico:
Dean Baker: It’s amazing that the Post feels the need to print a column that is chock full of distortions and misinformation just because it was written by a celebrity (Sarah Palin’s pro-global warming diatribe).
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From C-SPAN's Washington Journal, the Carlson twins (not really) Margaret and Tucker showed up to give us some of their Villager insight on the news of the day. When asked about how people feel about quitter Sarah-Barracuda, Tucker pulled out the tired old McCain campaign rhetoric about how President Obama is "less experienced" than Palin even though he thinks there should be "more respect for the office" than to want to elect either one of them. Tucker added that he believes Palin is smarter than Al Gore, and just thinks its "weird" that anyone would be terrified of her and afraid that she might actually have a chance of being elected President.
Margaret played nice and just followed up by saying that Sarah didn't strike her as much of a reader. She reads alright Margaret--Newsmax and The John Birch Society.
Tucker gave me an excuse to to post this exchange where Jon Stewart treated Carlson with the disdain he deserves for his hackery. No more bow tie these days, but no less idiotic.
The new winner of the Nobel Peace Prize walked out of his house just after 11 a.m., dressed handsomely in a dark suit and a classic blue tie. He descended a marble staircase into a manicured garden, flowers in full bloom, and stepped up to a podium on a perfect autumn day. After making a joke about the lightheartedness of children, he said he was "surprised and humbled" by the award. Then he asked the world to unite by providing all people with opportunity, dignity and freedom from violence and disease.
All told, Barack Obama spoke for six minutes Friday. He said little concrete, nothing controversial, nothing contentious. And yet, once he walked back into his house, contention dominated the day.
This is how it has always gone with Obama: His latest coronation, this time as Nobel Peace Prize winner, inspired a dozen different reactions that were similar only in their intensity.
It's very odd, that a person can win the Nobel Peace Prize and set off a public opinion war. We saw something similar a few years back when Al Gore won and the right-wing machine kicked into high gear. It was easier to dismiss the uproar back then, because Gore has so clearly devoted decades to environmental activism.
But Obama has actually done a few things that give me, yes, hope. One is that he is is reducing nuclear stockpiles and pulling other nations along. The other is that he's taking a distinctly different direction in Israel policy by opposing the expansion of West Bank settlements. So an Obama presidency will eventually have its good points.
I was thinking about how vehement and relentless the attacks against him are (again, keeping in mind my own objections to his policies). And what I've concluded is that much of America is caught up in a giant stadium "wave" of media manipulation. As soon as one wave completes itself, the media creates another one.
And of course, we're supporting different home teams.
God knows how many of us there are, but there's a substantial percentage of the public who are, for lack of a better word, hyper-informed. (I hate to use the word "informed" because it indicates actual understanding, and I mean it more in the sense of over-consumption of information.)
We over-consume via 24-hour news channels, talk radio, print media and blogs, in something akin to the binge-and-purge cycle of bulimics.
The thing is, media manipulation is ultimately about selling soap. The soap might be dish detergent, a candidate or an economic philosophy, but someone's trying to sell something. And the more media we consume, the more we're willing to buy.
Media manipulation is so pervasive, so insidious that even people like me who identify it for a living are occasionally distracted from the real point.
All these emotional highs and lows are the results of hypervigilance, brought on by media overconsumption. (Look at your typical Beck fan. I rest my case.) Yes, there really are bad things happening - but probably not as many as you think.
Unfortunately for bloggers, it's our lot in life to play political Paul Revere. In order to protect and warn the village, we must constantly scan the horizon. But you? You don't have to.
The more life experience you have, the more diversity of people and places, the less susceptible you are to media hypnosis. So do step away from the computer occasionally.
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(h/t David N.)
When news came that Obama had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, I looked at my husband and said, "just watch, the wingnuts will lose it over this." And sureenough, Iwasright. But what threw me for a loop was how nakedly partisan CBS's Chip Reid was in attacking Obama for having the audacity to win the Nobel Prize, something even the great St. Ronnie didn't do:
REID: I mean, most Democrats have praised it, and most Republicans have said, you have got to be kidding me -- Ronald Reagan didn't get one, but Barack Obama, nominated 12 days after he was sworn in, gets a Nobel Peace Prize. And the fear among some, even some Democrats, is that this is going to widen the partisan divide and make things even more difficult to accomplish on every front.
Really? Even more difficult than reflexively fighting *every* *single* Obama agenda item now? How is that possible?
It's touching, isn't it, to hear Chip Reid's concern that this will widen the partisan divide? After all, past winners have included Al Gore and Jimmy Carter...obviously the Nobel committee loves them some Democrats.
But here's the thing that all these insulated Beltway Villagers continually forget: Outside of DC, life is more than Republican vs. Democrat, something that Gibbs gently tries to suggest to Reid:
GIBBS: I'll leave the pundicizing to the pundits. The notion that somehow this is going to more greatly divide America, you know, I think it should be mandatory that pundits spend a certain amount of their days each year outside of the friendly confines of the viewership of the Washington, D.C., media market.
Of course, that goes right over Reid's head. For Reid, this is all about dismissing the Nobel committee -- in Norway, mind you, and not subject to the mind-numbing partisan reduction that Reid seems to breathe as oxygen -- as some liberal organization. He just can't get his head wrapped around the fact the Ronald Reagan -- the man who ended the Cold War! -- was never awarded the Peace Prize. As my friend, Steve Benen says:
A few thoughts here. First, when White House correspondents from major news outlets start sounding like members of Grover Norquist's "We Love Reagan" fan club, it's not a positive development.
Second, the notion that Reagan "helped bring the Cold War to an end" is, at best, a dubious proposition.
But think about it: if the Nobel Peace Prize only supports liberal causes, isn't Chip Reid admitting that peace is liberal? Then we need never look to conservatives again, because they will never bring peace. Right, Chip?
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During the Meet the Press panel discussion on the return of Laura Ling and Euna Lee, for some reason, Jon Meacham felt the need to compare a hug between Al Gore and Bill Clinton after the journalists were returned home to Brokeback Mountain. WTF Jon?
He actually went on to make some good points about jailed journalists in other countries that we should care about being freed as well, but his statement about Gore and Clinton frankly left me scratching my head as to why he felt it necessary to blurt something like that out.
GREGORY: Well, I, I would be remiss if we didn't spend a little bit of time on one of the images of the week, and it's such a great political story, and here it was in Burbank, California. You had a former president and a former vice president, Clinton and Gore, with the two journalists from North Korea coming home. And there was the much commented on lingering hug between the two.
Jon Meacham, a fascinating political story.
MEACHAM: Oh.
GREGORY: They were together in the '90s, after the 2000 race they were estranged for a while. They seem to be back together again.
MEACHAM: Yeah. It, it's the new--it's like the Bush-Clinton "Brokeback Mountain." You know, we're back, we're back to that. I, I think the--what's so terrific, in a way, is Clinton was able to get these reporters out. That's a very serious matter. We are--North Korea is a, a, a foe of almost epic--possibly epic dimensions, and anything that gets us in there to get a sense of who these people really are is a good thing. Sending the--sending Bill Clinton, whose emotional intelligence is off the charts, was really lucky for us. If anyone can come back and paint a character sketch of what's going on with those people, it'll be Bill Clinton. And I just want to say, if, if it's all right...
GREGORY: Sure.
MEACHAM: ...there are two places where this is going on right now. Newsweek has a correspondent, Maziar Bahari, who is being held in custody without access to a lawyer and without a formal charge in Iran. There are a number of show trials going on in Iran as that regime, like the North Korean regime, tries to hold onto power. And would urge all of us to pay attention to the situation in Iran, in that we have people who are being held without due process, which is personally tragic but also a significant political story, because it's about a regime trying to fight history.
