Good column on primary coverage in the news (via Digby).
Now the field has been narrowed down to Obama/Clinton on one side, and McCain and the trailing Huckabee on the other, the saturation coverage has morphed into some surreal, verging-on-fantastic soap opera, maybe closer to Twin Peaks than As the World Turns, but a soap all the same.
The male lead is, of course, the poised, handsome Barack Obama, with his elegant mannerisms and even more elegant suits, but who, according to the portion of the script written by the attack dogs of the right, is a secret Muslim fifth-columnist, a one-man terror cell, who, if elected, will sell us out to Al Qaeda within hours of his inauguration. (And if his middle name and picture of him in turban aren’t sufficient proof, his refusal to wear an enamel pin of the flag in his lapel clearly brands him as un-American.)
Pitted against the devious Obama, of course, is the ruthless and power hungry Hillary Clinton, with her equally devious repertoire of cunningly faked emotions who will rail, pout, and posture as the moment or circumstance dictates. According to this twisted plot, Hillary is really motivated by a psychotic will to power after being globally humiliated by her husband Bill, who is not only a serial philanderer, but the Tony Soprano of the Democratic Party, with Ted Kennedy snapping at his heels like a jealous Paulie Walnuts – the twin hit-men of the left.
<snip>
The one area that doesn’t seem to figure in the daily drama is the White House. George Bush hardly rates a cameo in the 2008 political soap. The war drags on with the only end seemingly in Bush’s imagination and speeches, while the mounting stack of corruption charges, the torture debate, and the efforts to immunize the telecom giants against class action suits for domestic spying are hardly mentioned by anyone but Keith Olbermann.
The real question is, do I believe a word of these endless theatrics? The truth is maybe in there, but it’s become so bent out of shape that belief can only be suspended as we wait for the next day’s installment, and maybe the plot device of the evil twin.
http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/as_the_world_churns/6763/I loathe the coverage in the American news media. And though I am not pulling for her, I detest it when the media play into the narrative above regarding Clinton, because I resent feeling a need to defend her to friends and co-workers who casually parrot the most absurd storylines that they've picked up on TV.
Just the other day a co-worker started talking earnestly about Vince Fucking Foster. I could not believe my ears. I showed him a globe and told him the earth is actually round, and he played with it for the rest of the day, not quite getting how you wouldn't fall off of the bottom.
And my boss is not much better, going around saying Barack Hussein Osama and giggling about it. I gave him the ugliest look I can muster (which is pretty fucking ugly), and told him he knew better than that shit. And of course he does. But he's jubilant because he knows this crap will play to a wide audience in the months ahead.
And while I'm on my soapbox: two special raspberries for Maureen Dowd and Nedra Fucking Pickler. Dowd for her warped high-school-social soap opera phantasms, and Pickler for shamelessly laundering the Obama-is-a-terrorist meme into "respectable" discourse. I know that the enemy is not all of you who are voting for that other person: it's the damned despicable excuse that passes for news media in this corporate media country. It's very difficult at times to strip away the hyperbole and get to the heart of the matter.
Here's to you and your candidate, whoever that may be. At least it's exciting, eh?
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