"Fast Barry" and other media idiocy

As always, Digby nails it:

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/

I've watched a lot of campaigns unfold in the media and I thought 2000 was a low point for sheer trivia and misdirection. But this one is shaping up to be even worse. There are real problems in this country and around the world and yet we have spent the last four months reading and listening to an ever expanding list of celebrity blowhards pontificate for hours about braindead pop psychology and calling it political analysis. And in a new twist, the media have now openly declared themselves to be kingmakers and final arbiters of our election process. It's mind boggling.

If you ever want to know which way the wind is blowing among the gasbag pundits and village scribes, look no further than the poison pen of Maureen Dowd:

Raspberry for Barry

In grim times, a bitter Hillary clings to bitter voters who in grim times supposedly cling to guns, religion and antipathy to people who aren’t like them.Mining that antipathy, the New York senator has been working hard to get the hard-working white voters of hardscrabble Appalachia so she can show that a black man can’t yet be elected president.

Obama breezed through West Virginia, the state he couldn’t charm even wearing a flag pin and promising to invest in “clean coal.” Fast Barry shot some pool Monday afternoon at Schultzie’s Billiards in South Charleston, including prophetically sinking an eight-ball in the pocket, and then fled from Hillary territory to pursue white, blue-collar workers in battleground states and convince them not to vote for John McBush.

Obama is acting the diffident debutante, pretending not to care that he was given a raspberry by a state he will need in the fall.

"Bitter Hillary," "Fast Barry," "diffident debutante" --- this is what the Village dinner parties are tittering about these days. The old hag, the new fag, the same old shit.

And there is nothing much more substantial going on anywhere else. The endless obsession with process, the horse race, the "math," what they're eating, what they're wearing, what they're playing, runs on and on as if it tells us something truly important about what the citizens want and whether these candidates are giving it to them. Meanwhile we have a war, an energy crisis, global warming, economic dislocation, crumbling infrastructure, fifty million uninsured and huge debt both personal and public among many other things that government must tackle in the next four years due mostly to the massive failure of conservative governance.

Apparently, the press feels that whether they wear lapel pins or misremember some event from a decade ago are the best means of finding out what the candidates do about those things. Or maybe they just don't give a damn and are entertaining themselves with high school story lines.

These amusing Dowdian character portraits have infected our politics like a toxic chemical spill, turning candidates into fun house mirror versions of normal human beings and treating the voters like spectators in a game for which the media decides the rules and determines the outcome.

Dowd always says she's speaking truth to power. Not so. She speaks truthiness to power and doesn't even know the difference. In her world there isn't any. And since her world is journalism it's a problem for any democracy that relies on a free press to inform the public. No wonder people so often end up throwing up their hands and refusing to participate. Let's hope all these new voters don't read papers or watch TV or they'll quickly become disgusted and apathetic too.