punditiots

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Iran: Real Winners Don’t Blame

June 18, 2009 | Permalink

Day six of Iran’s post-election uprising, and all we can do is watch. Or at least, all we will — and indeed should do is watch.  Not until Tuesday, four days after the Ahmadinejad government released its incredible tally pronouncing its own reelection by a 63-34 margin, did President Obama comment on the situation. And very measured comments they were, with an emphasis on honoring the will of Iranian voters rather than condemning the ruling faction.

Even these mild pronouncements were immediately seized upon by the beleaguered Iranian incumbents, accusing the U.S. of fomenting the massive unrest they now face.
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Sunday Seven: Late-Night Talk Show Hosts

March 1, 2009 | 4 comments

Earlier today I came across a blogger with a weekly feature called The Sunday Seven, wherein each Sunday he posts a question for which there can be up to seven answers. He invites people to leave their answers in his comments field, or post them on their own blogs with a link back to him. I always intend to post more often here at C&B, so I say a random guy named Patrick’s Sunday Seven is as good a reason as any to do so. :)

THIS WEEK’S QUESTION:
Name your seven favorite late-night talk show hosts.

Heh heh… not exactly a matter of earth-shattering importance, is it? Of course, there are plenty of earth-shattering things going on in the news right now without me bringing down the room even more. So here we go: Read the rest of this entry »


The Blagojevich Pile-on: Missing the Pile

December 10, 2008 | 2 comments

You gotta hand it to Rod Blagojevich. Here we all were thinking Sarah Palin was surely the dumbest state governor in the U.S., when all of a sudden… well, you know.

The Illinois governor’s arrest has been a slow softball down the middle for the news media. No, scratch that – it’s been more like TWO softballs down the middle. The first was the revelation of his corruption itself; the second and more shocking was how much he sucked at being corrupt. The guy just has no gift for graft.

Yet even with this fat pitch lobbed at them, a few conservative commentators have merely fouled it off. Read the rest of this entry »


C&B Smackdown: Justice vs. Compassion

June 11, 2008 | 5 comments

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.

justice vs. compassion fight posterAfter 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.
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Punditry is Undead

July 28, 2007 | Permalink

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.

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.


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