Thursday, December 29, 2005
Blogs, Taxes, and Wiretapping
Few journalists deserve to be as critically eviscerated as Kathleen Parker, the syndicated columnist out of Florida who wavers between mindless right-of-center political commentary and insipid cultural writing. Today she levels her guns at blogs.
I love it when a journalist gets frustrated with blogs. What they are really getting frustrated with is the fact that a factual mistake or ignorant opinion of theirs can be exposed within the same hours it’s uttered, which drives them nuts. Most journalists are normal people who don’t have a neurosis about being corrected, but Kathleen just don’t likey when they “catch some weary wage earner in a mistake or oversight.”
Waaaah! Waaaah! This puerile prose is typical Parker. It amazes me that this “weary wage earner” gets paid for this stuff, but journalists speak to different audiences, and I have found that there is a large audience of drooling idiots in this country.
Parker, while maintaining that she’s been a “blog fan” from the beginning, nevertheless unloads on “most” blogs as being “spoiled,” “undisciplined,” “lacking in wisdom,” etc.
What does it matter, though, if there are a lot of blogs out there that she doesn’t like? Because, she maintains, they enjoy a mysterious and unexplained “power untempered by restraint and accountability.”
They possess the “power of a forum.”
Most bloggers don’t have a forum because very few people read their blogs. I’ve visited a lot of blogs big and small in my time. The big blogs, who have many hits and an actual forum, are all on a par of quality with much larger newsmagazines. Take a look at Thinkprogress or Crooks and Liars on the toolbar to the left: they are the internet equivalents of The Nation. If you check out Powerline Blog you will find the same arguments and writing as in The Weekly Standard or the Wall Street Journal.
I tire of beating around the bush. When people level criticisms at something that don’t entirely make sense it’s because they aren’t being honest. Kathleen doesn’t like blogs because they compete with her in her profession and offer an alternative to her tired writing with “snark, sass, and destruction.” That’s the best thing about blogs.
Tax Cuts…More Tax Cuts…
After getting whipped like mules over Social Security reform, the Hurricane Katrina response, and the Terry Schiavo affair, the Republican Machine has figured out that their mandate is pretty thin. They have been reduced to throwing money to the masses as a governing strategy. Darth Cheney cast the tie-breaking vote to trim Medicaid programs, because Gawd knows that’s where are the pork is, with all those lazy poor people and their lobbyists suckling at the teat of government spending. Krugman says it as well as I could here.
Remember all those tax cuts that were supposed to “stimulate” the economy? After three years of them, our economy is doing as well as usual, but profligate spending has created massive deficits. So what do we cut? Medicaid.
This is Republican Strategy #1. Cut taxes mostly for the wealthy, cut programs for the poor. It is Robin Hood in reverse, justified by classist theologies about the inherent lesser worth of people with less money.
More Wiretapping Stuff
Don’t think the President’s wiretapping was abusive? How about if he targeted his warrantless listening on PETA and Greenpeace? Molly Ivins mentioned it in her column today and CNN had the story eight days ago.
I have mentioned before that the Preznit has recycled the same scurvy band of convicts that helped Reagan carry out the Iran-Contra Affair. This current wiretapping scandal is an outgrowth of the data mining project headed by Poindexter that congress quashed last year, only to see it rise from the dead like a flesh-eating zombie at the will of its White House Lords. Read the CBS story here.
This administration has gone back to the Deep Well of republican felons to carry out their most degenerate programs. They wheeled out the mangled corpse of John Poindexter, propped him up in front of the cameras, and put him in charge of developing a program to rampantly spy on Americans in the name of “security.” Elliot Abrams is the current deputy national security advisor.
The gang leaders from the Iran-Contra Affair had a soft landing in the warm arms of the right-wing hegemony compact. Caspar Weinberger became the publisher and chairman of Forbes magazine. Robert McFarlane is a member of the advisory council of Aegis Defense Services, currently providing security in Iraq. Ollie North, is, as I mentioned yesterday, a big FOX News correspondent and one of Sean Hannity’s favorite guests on his TV and radio show.
I also tire of Reagan’s former attorneys jumping to conclude anything that absolves the current preznit of anything. Victoria Toensing, former Reagan legal thug, has argued vociferously that Valerie Plame wasn’t really undercover and that nepotism got Wilson his job, as per her instructions from the Republican National Committee’s talking points. Read Media Matters disassemble her feeble arguments here. Lately she has (surprise!) concluded that the wiretapping of the President is not illegal. In the New York Times another pair of former Reagan legal gunmen, David B. Rivkin and Lee A. Casey, wrote a defense of the wiretaps on Wednesday using the same tired logic I have countered twice in the last week.
The Reagan Administration was a stinking fecal bomb detonated in the well of public discourse and politics of this country that continues to poison the water to this day. It was an egg sac of carnivorous insects jammed in democracy’s heart and encouraged to grow and eat their way out by the loving attention of corporate overlords, as well as knee-jerk patriots and cowardly moderates who paid so little attention to what they were doing that they actually looked astonished when the monsters erupted from their chest, spewing blood and entrails, and skittered away to write op-eds for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
# posted by BitterHarvest @ 12:33 PM 
