Devolution

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/07/30/andrea-mitchell-debunks-mccains-attack-ads-on-obamas-european-trip/

May Andrea Mitchell drink the blood of every Iraqi man, woman, and child!

Just kidding. But she's on point, and to me, seeing this kind of journalistic courage and integrity is wonderful. And she's right to do it. The debate in this country has devolved into a contest where no one's even trying to hide the mudslinging. Remember Bush and Kerry? At least Bush attacked Kerry's record.

McCain's strategy seems to involve surrounding the public image of Obama with hundreds of straw men and systematically pointing at each and every one of them, as if he's preaching the fucking gospel. He's too popular? He didn't visit the troops in the hospital? The newest McCain ad tries to suggest that Obama blew off a visit to wounded soldiers in order to play basketball and go to the gym -- except the clip McCain used was of Obama playing basketball with the troops. The footage was even provided by the Department of Defense. Somewhere, Karl Rove is laughing his ass off.

The reason I'm kissing Mitchell's ass (for the moment) is that she's doing what so few reporters are willing to do these days, because it gets them marginalized and ridiculed by the mainstream: she's saying what she really thinks and sticking up for a man who she knows is being wronged. Matt Taibbi, the greatest reporter you've never heard of unless you read Rolling Stone or watch Real Time with Bill Maher, shot the bull right between the eyes when he said in an interview,

"That's the thing that really annoys me about the media, you know, McCain gets a bus and he paints "Straight Talk Express" on the side of it, and five minutes later every reporter in the country is like, 'He's a straight talker!' You know? I mean, you can send any shit up the flagpole and all these reporters will fucking salute."

And that really is the problem, plain and simple. We have a culture of saluting, of conformity, just like America under McCarthyism. The Murrows, Rathers, and Brokaws are missing, and in their place we have a culture of punditry. While it serves mainly to entertain, the sheer amount of pundits on the air today, no matter how noble or scummy they might be, tend to (by their simple existence) blur the lines between real, objective journalism and casual, opinionated conversation. The standard-bearers have fallen.

But this is not to say that all pundits are trash. The message here is that we used to have anchors who the vast majority of Americans would turn to in order to give them the facts. When Woodward and Bernstein exposed the systematic corruption of the Nixon Administration, there wasn't a debate about whether or not it was significant. Nixon resigned.

But now our President has taken on the status of a made man, an untouchable. In terms of the sort of information it revealed, the outing of Valerie Plame was much the same as Watergate - the crime was perpetrated by a collaborative effort of nearly every key member of the Administration, and all were complicit in its execution. Yet somehow, once the story passed through the machine of punditry, it came out on the other side as a non-issue.

Where are the Howard Beales of our society? Where is the passion for holding this country to the standards that made it so great? According to almost every metric that exists, America is falling.

Welcome to the monkey house, folks. We're mad as hell, and based on recent polling data, we're prepared to take it.


"It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is first, you have to get mad!"
- Howard Beale as portrayed by Peter Finch in Network