Dick Armey, Everyman

Buried deep in the Washington Post’s saga of how Republican Dede Scozzafava came to endorse Democrat Bill Owens in New York’s 23rd, an extremely peculiar image:

“There is a great song called ‘Coca Cola Cowboy’ and I believe that’s what we have here. She was a Republican as long as it enhanced her electability,” said Armey, reached while petting a goat at his Texas ranch. “My guess is she made a deal with Chuck Schumer or the White House that will eventually show itself to us.”

Petting a goat? Did he tell the reporter that? “I’m petting a goat on my ranch right now, but sure, I’ll chat.”

There’s no Beer like Andechs Beer

I consider myself unbelievably lucky that four years ago, while touring Europe before a term abroad in Rome, my German aunt and uncle brought me (and Natalee!) to Andechs, a brewery and monastery located about 45 minutes from Munich.  On top of that, I got to visit again, two years later.

Reading this Atlantic Food piece about Andechs is sort of tortuous, because I’m not sure when I’ll be able to make it back there, but it’s also make me feel humble and happy that I’ve been able to experience Andechs twice.

 

Why Obstructionism is, Unfortunately, a Fine Political Strategy

A friend of James Fallows makes a spectacular point, one that should be repeated by liberals as often as possible:

“How can the MSM (what’s left of it) not “get” that disappointment in Obama over “lack of change” is precisely the object of the GOP in blocking change?  Does no one remember Newt Gingrich and the GOP strategy from 1992 to 1994, which actually worked?  How can the GOP steal second and third in one play AGAIN and not get nailed this time?  I want to scream.  In any sensible society, instead of disappointment in Obama there would be intense anger at the GOP, and they’d be forced to knock it off.”

Watching the Ed Show on MSNBC last night made me want to pull my hair out.  Ed and Roy Sekoff (HuffPo editor), both of whom I generally agree with, were going on and on about Obama’s broken promises.  I’m willing to admit that Obama has been less forceful in pushing some of the issues I care a lot about (notably the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell), and I believe it’s extremely important that we have folks like Ed Schultz and the Arianna Huffington-editorial express out there continuing to press the administration further left.

But you simply cannot discuss what Obama has “failed to accomplish,” without understanding how much that failure has been dependent on the ability of congressional Republicans to stall small parts of the Democratic agenda.  Those small stalls add up — to something far larger.  Obama promised a more efficient, better run bureaucracy than Bush. Hard to accomplish that when Senate Republicans put anonymous holds on administration appointees for bogus reasons.  Obama promised healthcare reform by the August recess.  Republicans kept promising they would work with Democrats to create a bipartisan bill.  No dice.  The bill gets postponed.   Obama promises a crazy good climate change bill.  Some Republicans in the Senate hop on and promise to vote for it, thus assuring it will clear the 60 votes necessary for cloture, but only if it’s substantially weakened. Republicans, in general, say no to everything Obama wants, pulling a few centrist Dems along with them, undermining any and every policy initiative at the risk of looking like naysayers.

There are many, many more examples.  The Senate is primed to stymie change, to let the minority make the best of the majority they must work with.  That in and of itself is bad enough.  But when the members of the minority are hell-bent on doing everything they can to not work with the majority, indeed to take down all of its policy proposals, it’s kind of hard to look as if you’re fulfilling any of the presidential campaign promises you made.  And it’s easy for the Republicans to run two years later on a platform of “Obama didn’t do anything,” aided by the media’s continued assertions that he failed to come through on any of this big ticket items.

If it were simply a matter of Obama and Democrats in Congress having the willpower, we would all be living in a larger version of Norway.  But we’ve got the GOP wielding a ridiculous degree of structural power, assisted all the way there by very-centrist Democrats and the so-called liberal media.

A Stab at Social Commentary

Leon Wieseltier does not rank as a must read for me.  I suppose it’s because he helped push Andrew Sullivan out at the New Republic, and I imagine that he has some of the Marty Peretz Jewish neo-con hawkish qualities that I totally disagree with.  But this little takedown of New York Times Magazine editor Gerald Marzorati is so good I had to share.

Marzorati blogged the following about the essence and ideology of the NYTM:

Call it Urban Modern. That is, I think it reflects not a left-or-right POLITICAL ideology but a geographical one, the mentality of the place [sic] it is created: 21st Century Manhattan. So: the Magazine reflects a place where women have professional ambition, where immigrants are welcome, and where gays and lesbians can be themselves (if not marry, yet). The Magazine also reflects a place where being rich is not a bad thing, where fashion is not a sign of superficiality, and where individualism is embraced. Here, arguing is not bad manners. Here, a chief way of loving your hometown is criticizing it: For, say, not doing enough for those (children, the poor, the homeless) who are most vulnerable. Here, art is never spoken of in moral terms, and most aspects of everyday life–food and drink and bathroom fixtures–are mostly spoken of in aesthetic terms. And here, as E.B. White famously wrote, it tends to be those who come from elsewhere full of longing who make the place what it is. More generally, we reflect a place where change is not a threat, where doubt and complexity are more TRUE than certainty, and where most everything non-criminal is tolerated–except a bad haircut.

Weiseltier does a fine job of calling out all of the idiocy in that description.  There’s no ideology there, no real call to disagree and fight back against the world.  Just this happy-go-lucky idea of 21st century Manhattan, bathed in ethereal light.  I won’t repeat all of those apt criticisms; read them for yourself.

What struck about Marzorati’s concept was how very, very boring it is.  Listen, I have no problem with Manhattan per se.  I’ve got loads of friends and family who grew up there or are living their currently.  I’m grateful for having spent so much time there, eating a wonderful restaurants, seeing shows, enjoying the landscape, etc.  But I would never, in a million years, want to spend a lifetime in New York City.  And that is said knowing full well that my intellectual brethren live there, at least more than they live in rural Ohio.  I would be thrilled to eat lox, great Italian, and Chinese everyday for the rest of my life — I would be even more thrilled to know that I never had to deal with another ignorant, redneck, right-wing conservative again.

But I wouldn’t do it, even for those benefits.  Because New York is insufferable.  It’s full of people who feel compelled to say things like this:

where women have professional ambition, where immigrants are welcome, and where gays and lesbians can be themselves (if not marry, yet). The Magazine also reflects a place where being rich is not a bad thing, where fashion is not a sign of superficiality, and where individualism is embraced. Here, arguing is not bad manners. Here, a chief way of loving your hometown is criticizing it…

Oh please.  As if Manhattan is the only place in the world where women have professional ambition and gays and lesbians can be themselves.  Is being rich a bad thing elsewhere (or, as Wiestelier pointed out, is being poor a bad thing in New York City)?  Everywhere but New York City?

The tone is so irritatingly cliche I could kill myself.  You are so unique, New Yorkers! You charming folks who understand fashion and wealth and individualism — even while being boiled down to little more than a collective mass of folks who understand fashion, wealth and individualism.  It sure is a good thing you have the NYTM to read every Sunday, speaking to your sensibilities and needs.

I get that Marzorati was being tongue-in-cheek.  His final line about New Yorkers tolerating everything but a bad haircut proves it.  But he nonetheless manages to encapsulate everything I disdain about the New York attitude, right down to that holier-than-thou mindset.  Maybe it’s the new-Midwesterner in me.  I don’t know.  But I was glad to see a little comeuppance thrown his way.

Those Were Not the Days

Ugh.  Makes me sick to think that conservatives forget (willingly, or not) about how gross the Bush-adoration was back in the day.

Remember those awful George W. Bush — Still the President! stickers that popped up right after his re-election?  As if he was, not the president of the United States, but someone who had twice won American Idol?

They were updates on this, equally irritating, bumper sticker.

What’s even more horrible is thinking about how soon after November 2004 people started to regret voting for him again.  And you’d be sitting there asking what had changed, and they simply could not tell you.  Of course there was Katrina and Social Security and all of that — but people really were blind to their own blindness.  That I knew what they didn’t, as a high schooler, is sometimes beyond belief.  God help us if the Bush Personality Cult ever swells back to Reagan level — we’ll be batting off attempts to get his face on Mt. Rushmore.

Together Again

I am hardly qualified to say much about Ted Kennedy.  It should suffice to write that Dave are the political spirits that we are thanks, in no small part, to being inspired by what the Kennedy’s stood for.  There’s been a lot of tearing up around the house this week, but this, from a story in the Independent about Ted’s last days, just really did me in:

“This is someone who had a fierce determination to live, but who was not afraid to die,” Bill Delahunt, a Democrat Congressman elected from the Hyannis district, told The New York Times. “And he was not afraid to have a lot of laughs until he got there.”

Once there, Mr Delahunt said, Mr Kennedy was looking forward to being reunited with the slain brothers to tell them: “I did it; I carried the torch. I carried it all the way.” As he did.

Emphasis mine. I’m not one prone to thinking about heaven.  I barely believe in god.  But it makes a lovely image, Ted Kennedy greeting his three brothers, after all these years — telling them that, even though they couldn’t do it, he did.  For them.  And for us.  Just the thought brings tears to my eyes.

SPF (Sun Protection Fearmongering)

Here’s a question I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: what sort of deal do fashion and beauty magazine have with the sunscreen and/or dermatology industry that drives them to fanatically hawk SPF 50 products and angrily bemoan the effects of the sun?

On a trip to the beach a few weeks ago I ended up reading more issues of In Style than I really care to admit, which not only rotted my brain and made me feel bad about my body, but also brought this issue of sun damage to center stage.  I don’t often read fashion and beauty magazines, so the recurring “sun is so bad for you” meme mildly surprised me.  Of course I recognize, like most folks do, that spending ungodly hours in the sun is going to have an adverse effect on your skin over the years, but the degree to which that’s reinforced, at least on In Style’s pages, is surprising.

I’m not kidding when I say (and you may know what Im talking about) that In Style is dripping with enthusiasm for self-tanners and disdain for real tans.  Whether in ads or articles, the magazine makes no bones about how you should not be getting a drop of sun exposure.  They quote dermatologists, make fun of “real tans,” suggest self-tanners of all kinds — even their interviews with celebrities are sun-kosher.

I recall a quick Q&A with Kate Winslet, in which she mentioned that she had recently gone on vacation with her husband and children and had managed to get a little bit of a tan: “with SPF 30 – of course!.” Winslet may very well have said/e-mailed that quote.  But given the obscene amount of sun protection evident across In Style, I found it sort of dubious.

As I began to feel conditioned to abhor all sun exposure, in a separate interview, Queen Latifah mentioned an SPF 15 body oil that’s a must-have part of her beauty routine.  I almost jumped out of my chaise lounge to call foul.  The editors at In Style must have been freaking out that someone would — horrors — recommend a body oil that was less than sun protection body armor.

All of this made me think about a conversation I had with a friend last summer about sun damage.  Keep in mind that this is a friend from college, with whom I used to go to tanning beds (something I don’t do anymore, and haven’t done since college; I’m not sure about her, but I’m pretty confident she has similarly stopped going to the fake-and-bake).

A short time before I saw this friend, I had read online an abstract for a study that questioned the degree to which people today are slathering themselves in sunscreen and avoiding direct sunlight.  The study found that, as a result, we were sorely lacking in collective vitamin D.  The researchers suggested anywhere from 10 to 60 minutes in the sun without protection, depending on your skin tone, and warned that for those who live above Atlanta, such exposure would only do you any good during the late spring and early summer.  Before April, UVA/UVB rays can’t penetrate the atmosphere.

I took this study as good news.  While I wear a lotion with SPF 15 on my face everyday, I was glad to know that the sun — the lifeblood of our planet, for goodness sake! — had some benefits to bestow upon us.  That sun exposure, in moderation, is good for us, was very good news.  And quite sensible.

Somehow or another this subject came up with my friend.  She quickly chastened me: “Cosmo says that you can get vitamin D from sources other than the sun!”

Cosmo, of all places! A fashion and beauty magazine.  But it fits so well into the In Style theme I picked up while on vacation.  Somewhere along the line fashion magazines became part of the anti-sun sqaud.  I have to wonder what sort of kickbacks they get for that arrangement.  It just seems too crazy that my friend believed what she read in Cosmo, more than what I told her came from a scientific study.  That, en masse, fashion and beauty magazine decided that sun exposure was way to harmful, even in natural doses — even to the point of denying recent research on the topic (this year, again, I read an article pointing to the same benefits of vitamin D, and warning that children are at risk for deficiency if they are covered in sunscreen all the time and playing indoors so much).

It’s probably little more than my own irritation at the sun-scare crowd.  But there are some weird coincidences there.  I’ll continue to be mindful of my sun-exposure, where my SPF face lotion, and sunscreen as necessary when I’m laying outside.  But I’m not going to become a crazy person about it.

The Game is Up, Baby Carrot!

My childhood is officially over.  (A little late?)  An old episode of Unwrapped has revealed that baby carrots are actually just regular carrots, peeled, and cut in the baby-style. I suppose it’s obvious, in retrospect.  I hadn’t really thought about it before.

Those baby carrots are great.

Bonus reveal: baby carrots weren’t invented until 1989.  I guess their role in my childhood was pretty well-timed.

The Kleptocracy is Still Winning

Last year I read a paper by a fellow grad student — not a very good one, but interesting nonetheless — about Mobutu Sese Seko, the late dictator of Zaire (now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo). With the backing of the CIA Mobutu came to power through a coup, and held onto it for over thirty years, before he was deposed by a group of revolutionaries.  He was a pretty terrible fellow, who squirreled millions away for himself and his family while the country he ran suffered famine, poverty, and the like.  If I recall an anecdote from the grad paper, he had something like twenty homes all over the world and loved to take his humongous family to Disney World and other vacation destinations.  Very weird, and very sad.

In a distressing turn of events, it looks like millions of dollars Mobutu smuggled/stole/obtained by illegitimate means may be returned to members of his family, unfrozen now from Mobutu’s Swiss accounts — apparently the Swiss statuate of limitations for such things (bank accounts of criminals, in the simplest terms) is ten years, and no sustainable law suit has been filed by the Democratic Republic of Congo.  This is largely because members of Mobutu’s family are powerful politicians/leaders in the DRC and have prevented such law suits from being filed and holding water.  So, through the cycle of corruption, they may finally get the dirty money.

That is a terrible shame. We spend so much time in this country discussing liberty and tyranny, completely unaware that such horrible abuses of power take place just around the globe.

Bad Comparison of the Day

So Niall Ferguson had the bad sense to write the following about Obama in his Financial Times’ column:

President Barack Obama reminds me of Felix the Cat. One of the best-loved cartoon characters of the 1920s, Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky.

Unsurprisingly, the bloggers I read are shocked/astounded/angry that Ferguson thought it was appropriate, and that his editors didn’t cut it from the piece when they had the chance.  It’s a stupid comparison, but I’m trying to guess how Ferguson failed to understand why the comparison was so inappropriate – perhaps because he’s not American, he doesn’t grasp our delicate way of discussing (some would say ignoring) race.

I can see him saying, “But Barack Obama is black! And so is Felix the Cat!  And both are lucky! It’s so simple!”  But the fact is there are hundreds of cartoon characters that are white or black or whatever that one would ever be inspired to draw a comparison with.  No chance, say, of the “Popeye is white! And he’s a sailor! He’s just like John McCain, who is also white and was in the Navy in his youth!” meme taking hold any time soon.  And god forbid anyone tries to say Bill Richardson is like Speedy Gonzales.  That’s about as taboo a comparison as you could make in America.

Barack Obama being lucky, which he may well be, has nothing to do with his also happening to be black — just as John McCain having been a sailor back in the day has nothing to with being white.  Further, there’s nothing about Obama’s blackness that is remotely like the black-and-white cartoon coloring that made Felix the cat black.  Sylvester also had black fur, just like Pepe le Pew.  Daffy Duck has black feathers! And he’s a blathering idiot! Does that make him Alan Keyes?

There’s no reason to bring that sort of word play or whatever it is into the conversation.  Ferguson could have gotten away with an Obama is lucky and that’s like Felix the Cat, just like folks got away during the campaign last fall with comparing Sarah Palin to Tracy Flick, Reese Witherspoon’s character in Election.  Character traits are one thing.  Skin color (or fur!) is just completely irrelevant.

Max <3 Barack

I guess it’s big news that the president wants Senate Democrats to keep up the hard work on health care reform.  Good to know that they’re not just going to sit down and let the crazy town hall ladies take over the world.  But I think it’s more important that Max Baucus apparently sounds like he wants to get  Michelle out of the way and marry Barack Obama himself:

The chairman of the Finance Committee, Senator Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, described the luncheon as “an enthusiastic, comforting, warm reaffirmation, reconfirmation, that health care reform is necessary for the American people.”

[Snip.]

But Mr. Baucus was ebullient as he left the White House.

“It was, really, a wonderful meeting, led by a terrific man, our president, Barack Obama,” Senator Baucus said. “One of the senators was saying to me as we walked out, ‘You know, it’s just so wonderful to hear him speak.’ You know, it’s like a symphony. It’s like just a great meal. It’s just all – - he is so good. He just has it together. He has all the right reasons.”

He’s no Shakespeare, but what a lovely ode.  Let’s hope Baucus turns that lust into a proper bill soon enough.

In Defense of the Recess

There’s been a lot of chatter of late about the efficacy of the August recess.  I don’t think it’s anything really new (recall that House Republicans were griping last summer about not wanting to go on recess so they could vote on offshore drilling; Nancy Pelosi told them to be quiet and go home), though I feel inclined to bolster the congressional break from Washington, DC.

Over at Newsweek Katie Connolly thinks the recess is a bad idea, and contrary to other forms of work ethic:

Many moons ago I worked in a consulting firm. We worked against strict deadlines. Some days we just couldn’t work fast enough. On those days we didn’t get to go home at 8 p.m., have dinner with our loved ones, and get a good night’s sleep. We just kept working. Sometimes till 3 a.m., sometimes all night. We simply weren’t allowed to miss a deadline. We couldn’t tell clients that our discussions had taken too long. They were paying us to produce, and produce we would. If you had a vacation planned but your work wasn’t done, forget about it.

[Snip.]

Generally, I think it is important for members of Congress to take some time outside the Beltway, reconnect with their constituents, and brush up on policy ideas. I believe they mostly work very hard and deserve some time off. And I’d prefer a refreshed senator to a tired, crabby one. But here’s my point: the August deadline for passing health reform hasn’t been a secret. The president couldn’t have been clearer about his time frame for health-care reform.

Ezra Klein thinks is a “smart take” and writes that it’s silly “to be so close to a finished product and a mark-up and a vote and then, for no actual reason, abruptly stop. . .

It means a cessation to discussions, negotiations, relationships, hearings, to the work of legislating. It means that the hard work of creating this policy will stop for a month and give way to the politics of fighting over it. That’s not healthy.

I was really holding out hope that health care reform bills would pass the Senate and the House by this point.  As Connolly said, Obama was pretty clear about his deadline.  And it’s not as if reform hasn’t been on the minds of American legislators for sixty years.  But I’m not really all that cut up about the decision to maintain an August recess.

I must feel that way because the person I live with and love has spent a month planning a part of his bosses’ schedule during the August recess, and I understand fully that the month away from Washington isn’t really close to any of the things Connolly says it is.  Sure congresspeople get to be closer to home, spend some time with the spouse and the kiddos — but it’s not as if they’ve got 4 whole weeks to lounge by the beach and drink cocktails.  And I’m not even talking about the time they’ll spend a fundraisers.

A recess is scheduled far ahead of time for a reason: so state and district staff can plan and plan and schedule and schedule and constituents and supporters and business-owners and CEOs and mayors and other folks can make time in their busy day to meet with Senator A or Representative B.  If, at the last minute, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi said “Oh wait! Can you all stick around an extra few days, maybe a week?” it would be catastrophic in my house.  It would be days of replanning and rescheduling — probably at the expense of my vacation.  And I imagine it would be the same for a lot of other homes around the country — and we’re not talking about homes that rake in a whole lot doing this public service thing, either.  Not to mention the people that are planning to meet with Senator A and Representative B — they’d understand that the meeting has been pushed back or canceled, but they won’t be happy about it.

So when people start complaining that Congress isn’t meeting a deadline, I would ask that they consider what other deadlines and obligations they would be breaking in order to take the next flight home.  It’s a huge part of their job, something that the Beltway commentariet seems completely out of touch with.

(As a post script I should add that I’m sure there are some vacations tucked into the recess schedules of all of these elected representatives.  But it’s well deserved. Trust me.)

Healthcare Chillout Session

Nate Silver gives us all a much-needed calming-down.  I’m inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt when he wades into a debate, given his proven track record over the course of last year’s presidential campaign.  He starts off by making an excellent point about the latest media furor:

Firstly, the media environment has become very treacherous. There’s been all sorts of piling on, for instance, about last night’s satisfactory press conference — this is almost certainly the most sustained stretch of bad coverage for Obama since back when Jeremiah Wright became a household name after the Ohio primary.

I don’t think the media has a liberal bias or a conservative bias so much as it has a bias toward overreacting to short-term trends and a tendency toward groupthink.

When it comes down to it, I think that’s the point that Charles Pierce was trying to make last night on Countdown.  The media has a tendency to parrot what they think is conventional wisdom — usually at the expense of good reasoned debate and consideration.  And when you think about how CNN, Fox News, Headline News, and MSNBC have 24 hours to fill everyday, it’s no wonder they spent a lot of that time discussing talking points and conventional wisdom.  What else are they going to do? When David Shuster and Tamron Hall have three hours to kill each afternoon, in between the actual news and the human interest stories, they shoot the shit — and it turns out that a lot of what they say is just chatter.  You and I do it all the time.  Fortunately for us, that chatter doesn’t end up determining how a new conference is interpreted or how a congressional committee’s progress is going.

Silver goes on to say that the media has a way of getting worked up about things that don’t matter, of taking a phrase out of context and running with it, and of making Obama out to be something more powerful and paradigm-shifting than he ever was.  He doesn’t think it’s such a bad thing that the Democrats are going to break on healthcare until the fall:

They’re at, what I believe, may be something of a ‘trough’ or ‘bottom’ as far as this media-induced momentum goes. By some point in August, the media will at least have tired of the present storyline and may in fact be looking for excuses to declare a shift in momentum and report that some relatively ordinary moment is in fact the “game changer” that the Democrats needed. This is not to say that the real, underlying momentum on health care has especially good — and the Democrats’ selling of the measure certianly hasn’t been. But it hasn’t been especially poor either . As I’ve said before, the health care process has played out just about how an intelligent observer might have expected it to beforehand.

In addition, Silver believes the economy, and what sort of quarterly reports and what the stock market does over the next few months, will have something to do with how health care is defined after the August recess.  I’ve got some thoughts about the economy, but that can wait.

For now I’m glad to have been talked down a bit by Nate Silver.  Healthcare reform, I do believe, is going to pass, just like I believed Obama was going to prevail over Hillary and then McCain/Palin.  We just have to keep level heads about it.

Boehner Loves the Beach

Well, this blog delivers on something.  Because while I for the most part sit here and rant to you about things going on so far away that I have nothing to do with, today at least I bring to you a subject I have at least some personal experience with: happy hour!

It seems that John Boehner is under fire today for supposedly putting a halt to House business last night while he went down to the marina in Washington, DC to host a swanky and expensive fundraiser at 6pm.  The fundraiser was held at what I consider one of the city’s little secrets, at least from the crowd that won’t leave Northwest (except for baseball games), the Cantina Marina.

The invite matches Boehner's skin color

Sure you’ve got your harbor in Georgetown, but the harbor down in SW is really very nice.  Turns out the Omni hotel is down there, in a non-descript building, and the presidential boat is docked right next door to the Cantina Marina, so it’s not as if the rich and important folks don’t know about the area.  Nonetheless, the Cantina isn’t anything too exciting.  It’s a pretty shacky-looking building.  But I think a nice change of pace from the city; there are a lot of apartment buildings in the neighborhood that look surprisingly like on-the-less-expensive side beach condos.

For all I know, now that the Nationals play in SW, people are flocking in droves to the Cantina Marina in heretofore unknown numbers.  Whatever the case, it does seem a little fishy that “Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) insisted that the clerk read an unusually long 55-page motion to recommit aloud — a process that took an excruciating 40 minutes, halting House business” right at the time Boehner would have been rubbing elbows and collecting campaign contributions down at the marina.

Boehner’s entitled to his fundraisers, as are other members of Congress.  But it’s sort of sad to see them coinciding with key votes and other business said congresspeople were elected to be dealing with.

Media Mania

Charles Pierce gets the Friday hallelujah.  I missed Countdown last night — went on a bike ride — so I’m just getting to this now:

Shuster get’s mad at him, but Pierce is the for the most part right.  She’s not been on Countdown, but she’s been on MSNBC a bunch, as well as CNN. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle, about everything that happens in politics, from the president on down.  The big daily newspapers and the big cable networks decide what something means, and they present that point of view.  Thus, it doesn’t matter what Obama actually said at the press conference on Wednesday, but what the talking heads decided he said in the hour or so after the press conference ended.

What authority does Liz Cheney have to be cited as an expert or a leader on television?  She served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs in the early years of Bush’s State Department with an “economic portfolio.”  Name for me one other Deputy Assistant Secretary from the State Department with any kind of portfolio, you see sitting on TV talking about national security. . . and bashing the president in the name of her very famous father?

Truth be told we shouldn’t limit this discussion to Dick Cheney and his daughter.  Meghan McCain — who I tend to agree with on a lot of subjects — isn’t really qualified to be making wide pronouncements on the state of the American political system and be taken seriously by pundits and reporters.  She’s got a famous parent.  She’s got her soapbox because of someone else, not because she’s proved that she’s got a keen eye for policy or even a way with words.

I’m glad to see Charles Pierce making that point, blaming the mainstream media for creating the beast.  I’m sorry that he didn’t hew to the meme Shuster anticipated for the segment, because I tend to appreciate Shuster these days, but what he said was more true that another silly segment on the future of the GOP.

(Via.)