Interview at Edged In Blue

Jim Winter (or, as he's sometimes known eviljwinter) interviews your Humble Blogger over at Edged in Blue. Jim has an e-book coming out of his rollicking chase thriller Road Rules, which I did a brief intro for. Watch for it. It's a lot of fun.

Doghouse Riley on the Crazy Eyes Cover and the Myth Of "Liberal Media"

Bats Left/Throws Right:

....whatever's wrong about that Newsweek Bachmann cover--and, somehow, no one to my knowledge has mentioned "being the sort of country where a religiously mazed Bible saleswoman rates any sort of national news coverage"--it's not an example of Librul Media bias which makes FOX look good. Liberal Media? It's fucking Tina Brown. It's marketing. It's the reduction of everything to celebrity gossip as perpetrated by the Roone Arledge of Literacy...

...We heard this crap about Sarah Palin. We heard it about George W. Bush, more to the point, and look where that got us. Nobody said it was unethical to make fun of John Kerry, or Al Gore, or Mike Dukakis. It's just well past time for forty-something male commenters to acknowledge that this is no one-sided game, that this sort of thing is the Right's great stock in trade--the bumper-sticker witticism, the Messiah caricature--and demanding unilateral disarmament from the Left, let alone from "The Left", is ridiculous.

Doghouse Riley's become one of my daily must-reads. Check him out.

And while you're at it, check out this compilation showing both conservatives and liberals being dinged by sensationalistic covers.

So spare us the whining, Bachmanniacs. We'd all be better served if both parties were going after the press for perpetrating this shallow, "optics"-obsessed, narrative-driven bullshit that they call journalism rather than whining about how they're "in the tank" for the other side. The mainstream  media just generally  sucks all around. Claiming that they're taking sides just gives these idiots the cover of saying "well, both sides are saying we're being unfair to them, so we must be balanced."

Crazy Eyes and the Right Wing Cult of Victimhood

Latest Newspaper Column:

This past week, those on the American right stopped patting themselves on the back for nearly causing America to default long enough to engage in another of their favorite pastimes: whining that they’re being picked on.

This time, the source of the injury to their delicate feelings was the cover of Newsweek, featuring the visage of Michele Bachmann.

The cover photo, over a headline dubbing her “The Queen of Rage,” showed Bachmann looking pretty much like she’s looked in a lot of pictures and videos, including her much-parodied response to the State of the Union address: staring off into space, wide-eyed, as if she’s watching a troupe of fairies dancing in a mystic circle only she can see.

Republican fairies, naturally. Non-gay ones.

Of course, to the right, running an accurate photograph of their current icon is like quoting her past statements accurately: proof of a vast left-wing conspiracy in the media.

“Can anyone really say with a straight face that the mainstream media is not totally biased against conservatives?” a conservative blogger at a site called “Freedom’s Lighthouse” complained.

Gee, I don’t know, dude. Maybe you should ask Anthony Weiner how the media go easy on liberals. Or you could ask Bill Clinton, who was once shown on a Time magazine cover with his face printed as a frightening-looking photo negative, over the headline “Why People Don’t Trust Bill Clinton.”

Actually, Bachmann’s supporters should  be ecstatic about the Newsweek cover, because once they begin their customary temper tantrum, it’s like throwing a switch that sends the talking heads and chattering pundits of the allegedly “liberal” media into their own customary fits of blather about their favorite subject: themselves. Was the picture unfair? Are we sexist? Would anyone in the media distort appearances to try to make a male Democratic front runner look unhinged for the sake of a story?

Maybe you should direct that last question to Howard Dean.

Meanwhile, something a lot more substantive that can and should be more closely examined about Bachmann gets pushed to the back burner: the fact that the woman who’s so given to railing about government spending and programs isn’t shy about benefiting from them herself.

She’s been a vocal critic of federal home loan programs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, even while she and her husband were taking out a $417,000 home loan backed by those agencies. The Bachmann family farm received $251,000 in federal farm payments between 1995 and 2006, and Michele took $50,000 in profit out of the place in 2008.

The clinic run by Bachmann’s husband received money from Medicaid, a program she decries for “swelling the welfare rolls,” until her hubby got caught taking it. At that point, according to a Bachmann spokesman, Medicaid became “a valuable form of insurance for many Americans.”

Then, as a congresswoman, Bachmann frequently appealed to agencies like the EPA (which she’s suggested she’d eliminate if she were president), the Agriculture Department, and the Department of Transportation for funds from the very stimulus programs she once dubbed “fantasy economics.”

She also praised Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack for using government money to help prop up the struggling pork industry in her state and urged him to continue to “stabilize prices through direct government purchasing.”

The website Politico has referred to this sort of behavior as “selective socialism.” It’s the sort of thing we’ve gotten used to from the right, which, as I’ve said before, often reminds me of a teenager screaming at her parents “I hate you, you ruined my life, I wish you were dead!” then demanding a ride to the mall.

Maybe, like the tea partiers who want to “keep the government’s hands off Medicare,” Michele Bachmann is actually so unhinged that she truly doesn’t regard it as government spending if it’s spent on her. Or maybe she’s just another grifter assuring the rubes that she’s the only one who’s looking after their interests while she pockets government cash with both hands.

In any case, those are bigger questions about Bachmann than the superficial one of whether or not the Newsweek cover made her look bad.

Modern media types, however, are ­notorious these days for concentrating on style (or “optics,” to use the new buzzword) rather than substance. They’re more ­interested in fretting about whether they’re “balanced” than in whether they’re ­reporting the truth.

That’s not because they’re liberal. It’s because they’re lousy at their jobs.

You Cannot Make This Stuff Up

Wonkette:

Arizona Teahadists show up at a John McCain town party rally to demand he apologize for calling them "hobbits."

I give up. Satire is dead. There's no way I could write anything more insane than that.

Twitrage Times Two

Latest Newspaper Column:


A couple of weeks ago, I used the term "Twitrage" to characterize the sort of ill-informed online indignation that's spread by sites like Twitter and Facebook and has become part of the common currency of our national discourse. A couple of recent events demonstrate Twitrage at its finest.


First there was the kerfluffle over "Black Latino Gay Spiderman." I know the very idea of such a thing both boggles the mind and raises the hackles of comic geeks and wingnuts alike, which is probably what the right-wing website The Drudge Report had in mind when it blared "MARVEL Kills Off SPIDER-MAN, Replaces with Half-Black, Half-Hispanic Reincarnation. ... 'Miles Morales' ... could be gay."

 
A news item in England's newspaper The Daily Mail was similarly lurid. "Marvel Comics Reveals the New Spider Man Is Black - and He Could Be Gay in the Future," the headline said, and went on: "Spider-Man has been given a makeover - as a half-black, half-Latino teen. Miles Morales has replaced Peter Parker as the face behind the famous webbed mask."


The results were predictable. Shock! Horror! Outrage! "When will this PC crap stop?" moaned one typical Twitrager who goes by the online handle of "NoMoreObama2012." "We will never accept the new spidey-gay boy!!!" one Facebooker fumed.


Even Glenn Beck got into the act, blaming, of course, Michelle Obama. (What, you expect sense from Glenn Beck?)


So, was it true? Well, yes. But also no. The reason lies in one of the weirder things about the world of comic books, so please forgive me a moment of nerdiness.


See, Marvel Comics (which publishes Spider-Man, X-Men, etc) also publishes series called "Ultimate Spider-Man," "Ultimate X-Men," etc. The "Ultimate" series portray alternate versions and storylines - another fictional universe entirely, really. The writers seem to delight in "what would happen if" speculation.


Oh, as it turns out, the "Miles Morales" character isn't actually gay either. That came from an offhand comment by one of the book's artists: "Maybe sooner or later a black or gay - or both - hero will be considered something absolutely normal."


So fear not. In the "main" Marvel Universe, Peter Parker is still Spider-Man, and vice versa. Still alive, still white, and as far as anyone knows, still straight. And if that explanation has caused you to have an irresistible desire to consume family-size bags of Cheetos in one sitting and live in your parents' basement while engaging in endless online debates about pop-culture trivia like whether the Starship Enterprise could beat the Death Star, I'm sorry.


Our next example of misplaced Twitrage comes from The Huffington Post, which reported the tale of Alison Capo of Virginia and her 11-year-old daughter Skylar. Young Skylar found a wounded baby woodpecker being stalked by a cat. Being a tenderhearted youth, Skylar rescued the woodpecker from the voracious feline and, when she was unable to locate the bird's mother, took it home.


Then Skylar and her mom carried the bird with them, for some unexplained reason, on an errand to a "local home improvement store." An alert fellow shopper, who happened to be an officer of the Fish and Wildlife Service, informed them that little Woody was a member of an endangered species and "transporting" him was illegal.


The officious officer later showed up at Casa Capo with a citation announcing a $535 fine and, HuffPo reported breathlessly, "possible jail time."


Shock! Horror! Outrage! The story of the little girl whose merciful act was deemed criminal by the big bad unfeeling bureaucracy made the online rounds, with the usual results. The big bad government made the little girl cry! Her mom might go to jail for saving a baby bird!


Except for the fact that the Fish and Wildlife Service immediately dropped the citation, stated that the local office had tried to cancel it before it was served, and apologized to Ms. Capo before the story even hit the Internet.This part, of course, was buried three-quarters of the way through the HuffPo story and isn't mentioned anywhere in the outraged tweets and online postings on the subject. Because "government bureau immediately catching its mistake, fixing it, and apologizing" just doesn't fit the narrative. Where's the outrage potential in that?


It used to be said that "a lie can travel a thousand miles before the truth gets its boots on." In the era of Facebook and Twitter, misplaced outrage moves at the speed of light. My advice: Take a deep breath, look up the facts, read the whole story - and think before you tweet.

New Look For the Blog....

I'd stuck with the original turn of the century Blogger template too long. I'll probably be tweaking the changes a bit as we go, but I'd love your input on the new look. Note the new "reaction" buttons below, and the Facebook "like" button.