Tuesday, August 16, 2011

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.

Monday, August 15, 2011

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."


Sunday, August 14, 2011

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.