May 17, 2004
Casualties and Causality
Posted by nerdling | May 17, 2004 01:18 PM
Our lives are haunted by sound-bite visions of the infuriating morons who run our lives.
Thumbing through a back issue of Rolling Stone on my lunch break, I found an article by Matt Taibbi, writer for the New York Press, on being in the press corps on the Kerry campaign trail, generally dressed for work as a viking. Aside from the outright hatred he has inspired in many people—based primarily on charges that he is too flippant and too biased, unlike all other journalists—his writing is witty and interesting, and I wanted to post the conclusion of his piece because I think it summarizes the candy-coated happy train that is coverage of the presidential election:
If large numbers of Americans are turned off by politics, it's in no small part because they are sick of consuming that singular process the campaign represents: a bunch of rich people talking to one another in front of the help.
Being intrigued by his writing, I naturally hunted up some other articles. Outside of some Onion-style practical joking at the Buffalo Beast and an incident at his paper in Russia, called The eXile, Taibbi now sticks mostly to political and sports reporting at the NY Press and The Nation. (The incident at The eXile was one in which journalists were pitted against one another to determine the worst writer among them; the "winner" of the competition—a reporter from the NY Times—then got a pie in the face. The pie, unfortunately, was filled with horse semen.) Recently, and more seriously, he wrote a piece about the Iraq-Vietnam comparison made by Ted Kennedy. Though he obviously has no great love for politicians of any persuasion, I thought his assessment of our involvement in both wars is the most reasonable I've seen.
And, to continue on my glut of Matt Taibbi stories today, here's a fun quote on the Dean phenomenon from an article in The Nation:
It is probably already possible to speak of the existence of a "Howard Dean problem" in liberal America. The outlines of the problem are as follows: Vast numbers of people, horrified by George Bush and desperate for a positive change, have geared up this election season to throw their weight behind anything resembling a human being. Along comes Howard Dean, a well-spoken, obviously intelligent man who opposes the war in Iraq before it is politically expedient to do so, bluntly calls George Bush by all the names he deserves and quickly builds an impressive insurgent candidacy largely on his own, through the strength of a remarkable Internet version of a word-of-mouth campaign. To many, the choice seems obvious.
But thirsty people can have faulty vision, and when your eyes have burned you enough times, you begin to fear the mirage more than the thirst. And therein, for Howard Dean, lies the problem.
They may have been overzealous and a bit misguided, but at least the Deaniacs didn't fill anyone's face with stallion milk.
