Amidst the multi-year media onslaught that our presidential election process has become, I’ve had to adjust my critical thinking filter to an even finer sieve than before. Sometimes it occurs to me that at least the news media is flooding the landscape with an issue that matters to people’s lives. At other times, though, the campaign overkill reaches such a level of absurdity that I wonder if perhaps these press hacks aren’t qualified to tell us about anything more important than Anna Nicole’s baby daddy, so maybe they should stick with that.
Consider for example this AP/Yahoo News poll and writeup published yesterday, which concludes that John McCain is the candidate of choice among pet owners.
So I was goofing off and taking silly quizzes on the web when suddenly I came across a question that wasn’t so silly. It went a little something like this:
If you had to make an important decision about something that would affect others, which of these factors would you consider most strongly?
Justice
Compassion
Practicality
Self-interest
I sat here for about 5 whole minutes mentally kicking this one around. I immediately eliminated Self-interest - it’s a perfectly worthwhile answer, but given that my judgment is going to carry repercussions for many others it automatically feels least important to me. In the broader scheme of things I’m not sure that this tendency is such a plus; it’s often been suggested to me that I am by nature too unselfish for my own good… but I digress.
After another minute or two I eliminated Practicality. A course of action, I reasoned, shouldn’t be considered more right because it’s the easiest or most practical way to go. Here again, I like my decision but readily admit it as evidence that I’m a lousy capitalist.
I finally settled on Compassion, mainly because I’m a big fan of it. If you’re surprised, hear me out.
Justice seems like the obvious answer. Everyone loves Justice, me included, but the problem is that no two people’s notions of Justice are quite the same. For only one example, If you’re deciding what to do with a confessed murderer, the victim’s family is most likely going to have a different idea of justice than the murderer’s mother would have. This, of course, is a single specific example, not necessarily correlative to the hypothetical decision I’d be making. Read the rest of this entry »
About a year ago I wrote that punditry was dead. It seemed pretty final at the time, and it was. Punditry is still dead - in fact, it’s getting deader all the time.
How dead? I don’t mean to set off a panic, but I feel duty-bound to report that punditry have made a terrifying transition. No longer is it merely dead, it is more than that: Punditry is undead. Hollow-headed pundits roam our airwaves even now preying upon the uninformed, the ignorant, and the credulous. These unsuspecting targets are guilty of nothing more than having lost track of the remote, and for this they are damned to a netherworld of petty, bloviating irrelevance.
Think I’m nuts? Consider Exhibit A, a clip of the show that someone funnier than I aptly nicknamed The Oh-Really Factor, in which Papa Were-bear lobs a smear at The Daily Kos by way of the Hillary Clinton campaign:
I love how he literally ends up sounding like a parrot at the end. “Bill, The Daily Kos is one of the most heavily-trafficked sites on the web.”
“Squawk! Hate site! Squawk!”
The problem with having an insatiable thirst for ignorance is that you are what you eat. It’s one thing to be a little out of touch… but to still somehow be unaware that there are a lot of random nutjubs and lowlifes on the internet? That level of inattention is just plain freaky. To say that it’s inhuman doesn’t cover it - I mean, even my dog knows about internet trolls.
Compounding the indignity of getting served by Hillary Clinton’s campaign spokesman, our Faux News friend was subsequently undercut by his own legions. AMERICAblog’s John Aravosis pointed out comment threads on Mr. OhReally’s own blog that contained hateful rantings and death threats against Sen. Clinton. Well, knock me over with a feather. The essential detail:
…while O’Reilly holds others responsible for the words strangers leave on their Web sites, on O’Reilly’s Web site, he’s not responsible at all for the hate and threats his readers leave behind… and I quote:
“BillOReilly.com will not be held liable for any user activity on the message boards. We do not actively monitor user-submitted content.”
I’d wager that Bill O’Reilly himself doesn’t even passively monitor user-submitted content. Having demonstrated a knowledge of the internet roughly equivalent to Sen. Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens (R-AK), it’s safe to assume that he scarcely, if ever, has monitored any part of the site that bears his name. Not that there’s anything wrong with that - most famous people hire lackeys to run their web sites. The difference is that most of them are sensible enough to readily admit doing so, and don’t claim to understand much about their sites. In other words, they can afford to pay someone else to be accountable for this part of their public presence, allowing themselves to remain blissfully ignorant.
For the pundit undead (or “pundead”), though, ignorance is not blissful. At least, not in any lasting way Ignorance is the virus that they exist in order to spread. And spread it they do - a quick flip through the TV or AM radio dials shows what a contagious little bastard it is. The good news is that you can defend yourself from the pundead and their orgy of ignorance. In a post (or maybe two) that will appear here at C&B in the next few days, I will provide practical information about how to identify the pundead when you see them, and about how to repel their attempts to ignoramucize you or others. Until then, just try to avoid televised news and AM talk radio.
This clip of the next, um, Welsh IdolWales’s Got Talent was just too delightful not to post. Check out the reaction from an auditorium full of kids who showed up hoping to hear the next Kelly Clarkson:
(Via Andrew Sullivan, whose blog is, I swear to you, not the only other one I ever read)
As we used to say back in the undergrad Fine Arts dorm, “SANG, boy!”
O’REILLY: Now Brian Ross of ABC said — reported the CIA waterboarded [Khalid Sheik] Mohammed. That is dunked him in water, tied him down and then that broke him. Is that true?
BUSH: We don’t talk about techniques. And the reason we don’t talk about techniques is because we don’t want the enemy to be able to adjust. We’re in a war.
O’REILLY: Is waterboarding torture?
BUSH: I don’t want to talk about techniques. And — but I do share the American people that we were within the law. And we don’t torture. We — I’ve said all along to the American people we won’t torture, but we need to be in a position where we can interrogate these people.
O’REILLY: But if the public doesn’t know what torture is or is not, as defined by the Bush administration, how can the public make a decision on whether your policy is right or wrong?
BUSH: Well, one thing is that you can rest assured we’re not going to talk about the techniques we use in a public forum. No matter how hard you try because I don’t want the enemy to be able to adjust their tactics if we capture them on the battlefield.
But what the American people need to know is we’ve got a program in place that is able to get intelligence from these people. And we’ve used it to stop attacks.
Before we begin scanning the skies for flying pigs, it should be known that the tough questioning in this excerpt is not necessarily typical of the interview as a whole. Nevertheless, O’Reilly deserves credit for putting the waterboarding question directly to Mr. Bush - it was more than anyone else had done.
Bush’s ham-fisted evasion, “We’re not going to talk about techniques… because we don’t want the enemy to be able to adjust” is ludicrous on several levels. First, it’s such an obvious smoke screen that it practically begs for a Colbert-esque “I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ ” The absurdity is dialed up further with the notion that Bush’s answering the question would enable the enemy to “adjust.” This assumes that the preceding several weeks of public controversy over such interrogation methods somehow escaped the terrorists’ notice. To top it off, the president apparently believes that our foes are capable of turning themselves into amphibians in order to resist being waterboarded. This just in: Aqua-Man has defected to Al Qaeda.
George W. Bush is not just a bad president - he’s an embarrassment to the office. The loftiest hope I can summon for the next two years is that he does as little further damage as possible. The toll his policies have taken on the American citizenry is severe, and the stain he is leaving on the good name of our country will take years to scrub away.
If you’re like me, you may be wondering “who the hell is this dude?” Well, I’ve got a page that’s meant to address that very question: check my About out, and without a doubt, give me a shout and tell me what you think about About.
If you’re like me, you may be wondering “who the hell is this dude?” Well, I’ve got a page that’s meant to address that very question: check my 
