Teh Awesome!

I could put this here or here It would work either way.
Atrios

One constant refrain during the Free Press’s National Conference on Media Reform was that they were a nonpartisan entity and they could not endorse candidates in federal elections. This was meant to prevent speakers and panelists from doing the same.
Due to the various constraints from tax and campaign finance law, you have a lot of organizations that are unable to take the step of linking outcomes to politics. They can’t say “vote for Obama, so we’ll get media reform.” While in isolation it isn’t that big of a deal, I think it’s another thing which contributes to the lack of issues and policy in politics. A lot of people doing good stuff on policy just can’t intertwine the policy with the politics, even though unless the right people get elected none of the good stuff is going to happen.

My Trade: A Short History of British Journalism. Marr calls himself a “hack” and journalism a “trade” and comments on the professionalization of the american press. Atrios has called himself a hack, or at least he used to. We need a return to a vulgar political press, and Fox started that. I’m saying this all the time these days: If the political press treated GWB the way the entertainment press granted Britney Spears we’d be much better off. The only thing that bugged me about all the shit Clinton had to put up with what that the liberal press refused to dive into the mud against Bush. The liberal press is made up of holier than thou reformers catering to the educated middle class. The Nation doesn’t even try to be a popular magazine. If we had some left wing tabloids it would be the sign of a healthier political culture. Instead we have, or have had for a long time an elitist intellectual left. But that’s changing. Daily Kos among other things functions as a Tabloid. I was always disgusted by self-important Clinton defenders, as if the jackass deserved some sort of respect, but actually I should have shrugged, since they helped too. But not for the reasons they imagine.

Republican forms of government are vulgar. and cleanliness is next to Platonism. “Enlightened” conversation should be able to withstand mockery even if that mockery is petty and adolescent, because as often as not that enlightened conversation is a circle jerk of self-important dimwits. More than redstate I really can’t stand The Daily Howler. Bob Somerby drives me nuts.
Moral hazard is a risk for everything, so everything needs a counterforce: the market, the academy, the government, and anyone who calls himself an expert. My standard defense of law over philosophy is based on the fact that law in practice is incredibly low and vulgar and yet everyone understands that it’s at the moral center of our culture, as intellectual activity and subject of art. Lawyers are ubiquitous in fiction, movies and TV but at the same time they’re marginal. Law professors and legal philosophers don’t count. Talk to someone in criminal defense.

I’m with Max Sawicky who was one of the few people to admit losing patience with Kos and other teenagers unburdened by history (or historical memory) but the Daily Kos marked an important change in the politics of this country. I don’t have to take him seriously as a thinker or political philosopher to understand that.

You think the nastiness is the result of them trying to sell their services to the same patrons? I suppose it’s possible, but look at the actual results, Clinton vs. Bush: Bush’s dollar is half the value of Clinton’s; energy prices 5-fold up; no major trade agreements under Bush; ‘defense’ budget doubled. Results are so different that they can’t possibly satisfy the same group of patrons. Seems to me that the financial services (especially international) have taken a hit, while the energy and arms sectors are making out like bandits.

I don’t know that stronger partisan conflict necessarily means there’s any deeper underlying conflict. Historically, the opposite is often the case—the parties compete most intensely when their constituencies are most overlapping. And indeed, the decline of unions (on the Dem side) and manufacturers (on the R side) has brought the economic bases of the parties closer.

Look at the incredibly partisan elections around 1900, another period where the basic consensus around economic issues was very strong.

Is sincere loyalty better than insincere neutrality? I suppose it is, at least it brings the conflict to the surface.

I think something changed in American economics in the 1980s (probably something to do with globalization) and it split previously more/less monolithic establishment into two antagonistic factions with mutually exclusive interests. And at that point, one way or another, ‘neutrality’ had to go.

And finally Marshall’s intellectual life like that of most journalist/policy wonks is founded in loyalty to a country.
I can accept the importance of that choice in popular discourse and even understand its necessity in Machiavellian terms, but I can’t take it seriously as a form of idealism. And in America left and right that’s just what it is: Nationalism is Reason. And we’re back at the social construction of reality again.

I’m sure it has been, nevertheless it’s a partisan Democratic operation.

And it’s quite understandable: it’s difficult to resist the pressure. Marshall has been a partisan Democrat for as long as I can remember, but, say, someone like Matthew Yglesias – a quintessential American liberal – he wouldn’t want to be labeled ‘enemy of the people’ by the Kossacks and various other red guards, so he seems to be moving closer and closer to the official party line too. It’s a natural process; there’s nothing you can do.

A Sharia butt pat.

TPM is not liberal, Fox is not conservative. One is an arm of the Republican propaganda machine, the other Democratic. Had a Democratic administration invaded and occupied Iraq, we would’ve listened to Fox complaining that the occupation is too expensive and doesn’t serve American interests and read TMP explaining how democracy-promotion in the middle east is absolutely vital for America.

Talk about a storm in a teacup. What will the right-wing rumour machine decide to pick up on next ?