This morning's fishwrap contains a couple of positively negative reviews. Take that of Neocomradess M. Gallagher , for instance:
| What do you do when you're a lightly accomplished one-term senator, a former state legislator from Illinois, a Harvard law graduate who has no substantive record of accomplishments, and you are running against a war hero whom polls show that Americans overwhelmingly view as far more fit to be commander in chief? Pose, of course. What else can a guy like Obama do? So the man who would be president of the United States of America flies around the world in the middle of a political campaign, enlisting the U.S. military and the Berlin Wall as free campaign commercial backdrops, to lend him the emotional weight and substance -- the aura as a commander -- that he hasn't yet earned on his own. |
Now of course if BHO had even a single shred of decency to him, he'd join former Gov. Dukakis on a Cape Cod beach to read about ... about town planning in Scandinavia, I believe it was. Unfortunately for the Big Managerial classes, BHO is no more interested in that sort of tedium than they are themselves, he'd much prefer to pull a Dubya and fly around the world enlistin’ this-’n’-that in his own little cause. Also unfortunate for the MBA Folk is the fact that their Cap’n M’Cain happens to look a little silly left on the beach exhibitin’ his full "emotional weight and substance" (also for campaign-commercial purposes) as if he were a Coriolanus who had changed his mind and decided to be more flexible and cash in on his war wounds a little. [1] Ah, Mr. Bones, how "Life is unfair!"!
The neocomradess is fightin’ in, or very near, the Big Management Party's last ditch when she can deploy no more effective agitprop than to declaim that Cap’n M’Cain deserves to be acclaimed POTUS ob cives servatos, whereas Barack the Bogus has earned maybe a couple of guest appearances at comedy clubs. [2] Here in the sewer of Romulus, all it takes to deserve an office of public trust is to have campaigned for it successfully. Other qualifications can be nice, but Success is the only one that is absolutely indispensable. [3]
It follows at once that what this neocomradess is really grumpin’ about is that Barry gets away with it. So, how does he do it? She borrows her explanation from outside the ranks of the Big Party:
| NBC's Andrea Mitchell was the one journalist with the courage to name what she was actually seeing happen: Obama faking even being interviewed by the press. "Let me say something about the message management. He didn't have reporters with him, he didn't have a press pool, he didn't do a press conference," either in Afghanistan or Iraq, noted Mitchell on the air. Instead Obama manufactured "what some would call ‘fake interviews,’ because they are not interviews from a journalist," Mitchell went on. Mitchell understands very well that this contrived image management is powerfully all to Obama's political advantage. He's shameless when it comes to managing his own image. "Politically it's as smart as can be," she conceded before noting the big obvious truth nobody else in the media was bothering to expose: "We've not seen a presidential candidate do this, in my recollection, ever before." |
Neocomradess M. Gallagher is not the extremist GOP’s best and brightest bulb. The real bearing of Ms. Mitchell’s remark was quite different. She meant to inculcate the conveniently self-servicing dogma that a ‘real’ interview is one conducted by a pro journalist like herself; amateurs and blogghists (and network anchors) who attempt to cross-question the fiendish politicians are never going to accomplish anything worth attending to. Ordinarily Neocomradess M. Gallagher would have seized on that absurd analysis as additional ammo against the drive-bys. Only the accident that A. Mitchell's self-aggrandizement happened to be directed at BHO could lead M. Gallagher to take such a product seriously and even undertake to distribute it free of charge. [4]
Neocomradess M. Gallagher has entirely forgotten her lessons in Imperial Postreality Basin’. Or maybe she was sick that day?
| McCain's approach is all so, well, cognitive. McCain thinks that reality is something that really exists, that has to be dealt with, instead of recognizing that we live in a Brave New World where highly paid symbolic analysts construct reality by manipulating symbols. [5] |
She has also forgotten, or perhaps does not credit, the happy news announced by Dr. Limbaugh, namely that drive-bys like Andrea Mitchell simply don’t matter any more.
Finally, Neocomradess M. Gallagher makes a very poor showin’ as amateur MacLuhanite. What Bogus Barry has been retorting upon the Atwaterites could have been done back before we had fire and the wheel. "Highly paid symbolic analysts ... manipulating symbols" is two-hundred-proof tripe and baloney, as well as pleonastic.
__
Neocomrade C. Page is less fun than Mizz Maggie, but probably more important:
| Obama gets more media attention than John McCain because, as we have heard over and over again, he is the rock star of today's political scene. McCain, by contrast, is an attractive candidate and war hero who is less intriguing precisely because, in a political world where fresh and new has become the highest virtue, we know him so well. Even liberals who disagree with him politically have a lot of affection for the Arizona senator as a man and a maverick, even when he's been talking a lot less maverick lately. But, running against Obama, he often brings to mind grumpy ol' Mr. Wilson chasing Dennis the Menace off his lawn. |
Master Clarence sets out to goldwaterize preëmptively for Cap’n M’Cain: "In your hearts, you liberal fiends know he's nice." Setting aside that thee and me, at least, have no affection for dumb Mugwumps whatever, notice, Mr. Bones, that this neocomrade is behavin’ like one of those "highly paid symbolic analyst" fellas, settin’ up an Antithesis of Ike and Elvis. [6]
On the bright side, C. Page, like M. Gallagher, is not much into Imperial Postreality Basin’:
| Besides, in McCain's case the under-coverage could be a blessing. Obama's trip took attention away from the Friday resignation of former Texas Sen. Phil Gramm as McCain's economic adviser. The old friend became a liability over his comments that we have become "nation of whiners" about the sluggish economy. It's not good to have an economic advisor who shows the bedside manner of Dr. Jack Kevorkian. And as the world watched and waited for any slips by Obama, the first gaffe of his trip went to ... John McCain! In an ABC interview he referred to the rough "situation on the Iraq-Pakistan border." Since the two countries don't share a border, McCain's foreign affairs expertise suddenly didn't sound so good. |
Evidently Ike is so extremely likeable that a touch or two from Dr. Altzheimer does not matter. Well, we shall see. And God knows best.
___
[0] Neocomrades Gallagher and Page stand to Senatorino Obama exactly as the rigorously nonsectarian pro-Sunninterní folks over at Mu’ámara Junction stand to poor M. al-Málikí. Accordingly I recycle the cartoon / idol / icon.
[1] Speaking of emotional weight and substance, Mr. Bones, would thee happen to know the rest of the words to that song that begins "Bomb, bomb, bomb / Bomb, bomb Iran!"?
[2] The last notable success for the bad guys was their triumphant hushin’ up of Wesley Clark, who had shown questionable taste by pointing out that there do not, as a mere matter of fact, exist any cives servati obliged to J. Sidney Coriolanus for their preservation. Naturally there would not be, considering that the flyboy hero managed to get himself shot down whilst prosecutin’ a war that was eventually lost.
On that occasion, "Life is unfair" sided with the GOP geniuses pretty brazenly. What more could they want?
Not a hard question. Militant extremist Republicans want "Life is unfair" to be on their side always and invariably. From their own rather specialised perspective, they may well feel that they deserve to be on the receivin’ end of all unfairnesses whatsoever. Is it not they, after all, who champion the Unfairness Principle, that gallant Hamiltonian banner that doves and donkeys (plus Rum and Romanism and rebellion, most likely) are forever attempting to snatch from their hands and trample in the mire? Is it fair, sir, that the sworn enemies of Fairness should ever be the victims of Inequity and not the perpetrators thereof? (Explain your answer.)
In any case, Neocomradess M. Gallagher would be sincerely shocked to hear it said that Cap’n M’Cain is only posin’ as Patton-cum-Clausewitz. Let us therefore hope somebody says it to her early and often every day for the next four months.
[3] I am uncertain whether the Friends of Unfairness ought to find the Success Principle congenial as a matter of logic and abstraction. Any general principle whatsoever is tainted with fairness to the extent that it fails to have lots and lots of probative exceptions and lawyerly loopholes. On the other hand, Success scarcely exists except by contrast with circumambient Failure, and may thus be considered to have unfairness built into it conceptually. But then on the third paw, the MBA Folk tend to want their own success, if nobody else's, put down as well-deserved and not merely a lottery win.
Perhaps if their Master Lee Atwater had lived longer, he might have become the Freddy von Hayek of these questions. To bark and bellow "Life is unfair!" does not strictly entail that Death can never poach on the unfairness preserve a little.
[4] It is a very shoddy product, considered in isolation. Ms. Mitchell's knowledge of American history must be indistinguishable from zero if she seriously supposes that the idea of dodging hard questions was invented by or for B. Hussein Obama sometime last Friday afternoon.
Neocomradess M. Gallagher, for her part, belongs to the Party of HistoryIsBunk, and is certainly not goin’ to object on historical grounds. She might relish the antidemocratic implications of the Mitchell Doctrine, were it not that it privileges entirely the wrong sort of OnePercenters, graduates of journalism schools (which are little better than barber colleges, let’s face it!) rather than Big Managerial gentry properly equipped with MBA degrees from the Harvard Victory School.
[5] Compare and contrast with the following key Crawfordological text:
| In the summer of 2002, after I [Mr. Ron Suskind] had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes. I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. [Neocomrade K. Rove?] He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency. The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." |
To be sure, the notion of B. Hussein Obáma also getting to play at We’re-An-Empire-Now could be made to seem a bit alarming. But obviously no such advanced norion as that has transited the brainpan of Neocomradess M. Gallagher.
[6] C. Page actually says "Madonna" instead of "Elvis," but it would be a remote detour indeed to go into his misogyny tactics at this point.
No comments:
Post a Comment