The ABC Murders

Milhouse: Why don’t we put it on the internet?

Bart: No, we need to reach people whose opinions really matter.

Re: Berube – when I was at Penn they used to wear t-shirts that said “Not Penn State.” Rude, but there it is. (The other credential is the important one anyway.)

watching the daily show last night, I suddenly wondered if the whole thing had been orchestrated just to get those clips of Obama stuttering incoherently – a kind of reverse interrogation technique, if you will, where you bore the victim with trivia for an hour before hitting him with something that initially seems more substantive, but is actually just as slippery on the mind.

Do any of the undersigned ever wear a flag pin? I think not! So how are we supposed to take them seriously?

Why don’t they open the debates up to the public?? Why not give Americans two hours to submit questions and then air those questions for the candidates to answer?

I don’t live in the U.S. so I don’t know if this already goes on down there, but this system works well in Canada…we only have to deal periodically with air-head journalist questions.

Why not put the League of Women Voters in charge of the presidential debates again?

Things have been going steadily downhill since the two major parties insisted on running their own general election debates in 1988.

Some might say there is a word for folk who regularly repeat the same action and expect a different outcome, and others might say there is some wisdom in the chorus of Spanish Pipedream…

I should declare first that I haven’t seen the debate or even read a full transcript. But while I applaud the sentiments expressed above, and wish you luck, is the air of surprise genuine, or a (legitimate) tactic? In the UK what is described here is exactly what I would expect: even apparently substantive policy questions, even on ‘serious’ programmes, are almost always fairly obviously motivated by a desire to produce a certain effect (‘u-turn’, ‘gaffe’, or just confusion or hesitation or apparent evasion) rather than an answer. Depressing, but hardly worthy of special comment. As I say, I haven’t seen it – perhaps it was truly egregious.

As per commenter no. 11 noted, instead of discussing why tabloid journalism maximizes the expected audience, the commentators complain about how ABC did not pander to the elite without self awareness.

I’m with #15. If this letter were honest it would have been sent a number of debates ago.

This debate had the largest audience of any of them so far. ABC is feasting on your outrage. For a change, let’s try a discussion of what can realistically be done to make future debates more interesting and substantive, and to keep our elections in general from becoming these money sucking black holes.

Oh, and try to find a few more women to sign will you? It would look better.

Stop whining! You sound like spoiled brats, which is what most lefties are, anyway. As John Harris and Jim Vandehei put it in Politico (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0408/9718.html): “In fact, the balance of political questions (15) to policy questions (13) was more substantive than other debates this year that prompted no deluge of protests. The difference is that this time there were more hard questions for Obama than for Clinton.”

when I was at Penn they used to wear t-shirts that said “Not Penn State.”

Yes, let’s see what that paragon of “truth to power” the Annenberg Public Policy Center at Penn had to say on the debate. Well, Factcheck did have its usual little nitpicky deconstruction of the candidates’ responses, “Taking Liberties in Philadelphia: Truth is not always self-evident in the latest Clinton-Obama debate.” and the main product that Annenberg has produced is a running track of voters’ perceptions of those bugaboos of media narrative, “trustworthiness”, “judgment” etc. So they are doing there usual job of missing the forest for the trees* and being useful idiots for the right and the media in their decontextualized game of “gotcha”.

So yeah, “Not Penn State”.

*I am of course being a trifle unfair, in a world with the Hoover Institute at Stanford, the Annenberg is a relatively minor blot on its parent institution, but given the incredible dynamics in evidence in the media in the last 15 years, they have basically just sat there with their thumb up their ass.

Stop whining! You sound like spoiled brats

Yes, we need to learn from the opposition, steady quite confidence in the rightness of our people and positions*. Whining is for losers, winners go out and fuck the prom queen poor.

*Many examples to choose from on the other side, like their stoic reticence in the face of what they perceived as attacks on General Petraeus last year.

This just went through… So here is the previous one:

What you people at the Nation, Am Prospect and CT don’t seem to understand is that socialist ideas, much as they appear beautifully coherent and ethically uplifting to you, hold no appeal to the American people.

Over this background, you are shocked, shocked, I say, when Obama is getting the media treatment that he was spared from so far.

Candidates were being unfairly roughed up by pompous asses in the media (“the only profession without professional standards” as George Soros put it once at a conversation in Berkeley), yet you didn’t care when the target was a Republican. You only care when the Socialist icon’s honeymoon is over.

Wake up babies, and don’t cry.

PS Open letters from “concerned intellectuals” are soooo funny (in a Popular Front kind of way).

What you people at the Nation, Am Prospect and CT don’t seem to understand is that socialist ideas, much as they appear beautifully coherent and ethically uplifting to you, hold no appeal to the American people.

Quite true. We people have consistently failed to understand why The People have not risen as one to endorse Obama’s proposal to abolish private property and form autonomous worker’s collectives.

yet you didn’t care when the target was a Republican.

Not true! We deplore the media’s treatment of McCain.

By the way I am also an academic, I know about “academic freedom” so you are doing nothing new. And yet, this is so far from the ideals you ostensibly espouse.

Whenever a blog comment is held in moderation, John Dewey cries.

when I was at Penn they used to wear t-shirts that said “Not Penn State.”

From Michael Bérubé’s website:

I teach American literature and cultural studies at Penn State University.

Somebody get Michael Bérubé a T-shirt.