Greenwald: Anatomy of a Stupidity

Glenn Greenwald brilliantly dissects the history to show how Obama's "lipstick on a pig" remark got turned into a Rovian attack against him, courtesy of the right-wing's buddies in the media:

http://feeds.salon.com/~r/salon/greenwald/~3/388580907/index.html

New heights of stupidity

(Updated below - Update II - Update III - Update IV)

We're fighting multiple wars; our oldest and most established financial institutions are on the verge of collapse; we've fundamentally transformed and then dismantled our constitutional framework over the last eight years, etc. etc. But the Right and their media partners are striving to ensure that our election this year is going to be dominated and determined by whether ... Barack Obama called Sarah Palin a "pig" when he invoked a meaningless cliché.

It isn't surprising that the McCain campaign wants this sort of tawdry, Freak Show/Reality Show vapidity to determine the outcome of the election. If you were them, wouldn't you want that, too? And though it's not news that establishment media outlets are so easily and happily manipulated by these tactics, tactics which enable them to cover "stories" which their empty-headed reporters can easily comprehend, it is still striking to watch the now-decades-old process unfold and observe how absolutely nothing has changed:

First, one of the mindless TV journalists gets convinced that it's a story -- in this case, Jake Tapper of ABC News, who wrote a whole article about the episode last night, claiming about Obama's "pig" comment that "the crowd rose and applauded, some of them no doubt thinking he may have been alluding to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's ad lib during her vice presidential nomination acceptance speech last week, 'What's the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.'" Tapper obviously has no idea what anyone in the crowd was thinking but, instead, was simply using the most frequent tool of journalistic deceit by projecting his own "thoughts" onto the voters on whose behalf he purports to speak.

...

<Much more at the link>

<Greenwald continued>

In developments that one could describe as not only highly related but also highly deserved, The Washington Post today reports:

An intelligence forecast being prepared for the next president on future global risks envisions a steady decline in U.S. dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy.

The report, previewed in a speech by Thomas Fingar, the U.S. intelligence community's top analyst, also concludes that the one key area of continued U.S. superiority -- military power -- will "be the least significant" asset in the increasingly competitive world of the future, because "nobody is going to attack us with massive conventional force." . . .

"The U.S. will remain the preeminent power, but that American dominance will be much diminished," Fingar said, according to a transcript of the Thursday speech. He saw U.S. leadership eroding "at an accelerating pace" in "political, economic and arguably, cultural arenas" . . . .

As described by Fingar, the intelligence community's long-term outlook has darkened somewhat since the last report in 2004, which also focused on the impact of globalization but was more upbeat about its consequences for the United States. The new view is in line with that of prominent economists and other global thinkers who have argued that America's influence is shrinking as economic powerhouses such as China assert themselves on the global stage.