Apparently Ann Romney forgot to mention to Willard that moms who don’t work outside the home do THE MOST IMPORTANT JOB IN THE WORLD!!!1 and already have ample dignity, thankyouverymuchyousupersexistsoand…
oh, wait — Mittens meant those moms — y’know, the ones who can’t afford dignity.
Sorry. They gotsta earn their Caddies (if not teh car elevators).
Related: Pay no attention to the ongoing war on women voting.
by matttbastard
Regular readers know that I rarely pay much attention to the more wing-nutty residents of the blogosphere, much less the Canuckosphere. I leave that to stout-hearted compatriots with stronger constitutions for regular bullshit consumption than yours truly. Still, occasionally something from the outer fringe will catch my attention that immediately triggers my ‘dude, WTF?!’ nerve.
In this instance, the flying monkeys are circling over Teresa Wright.
I know, at this point most of you are asking: Who’s Teresa Wright? Well, dear readers, Wright is a reporter with the Charlottetown Guardian who wrote about a recent speech given by Conservative Senator (and, formerly, CTV’s longtime top Tory sycophant) Mike Duffy.
Ok, with me so far?
Good.
Anyway, the headline to Wright’s piece:
‘Duffy’s speech hints at looming federal election.’
Pretty innocuous, right?
Well, for whatever reason, Duffy decided to break out Grandma’s pearls, clutch away, and, in an interview with talk radio blowhard/columnist Michael Harris, stir up a teapot tempest over what Duffy contends is a gross mischaracterization of the speech:
I gave a speech yesterday to the Rotary Club of Charlottetown, in which I never used the word election, and frankly, never mentioned the Prime Minister, I gave a very dry, because as you know, Rotary is a non-political body, I gave a very dry report card on the more than 200 million additional dollars this government has poured into Prince Edward Island.
[…]
I was never asked about an election. I never used the word election. I never mentioned the Prime Minister by name in my speech or by his office. And yet the headline comes out this morning, Duffy refuses to dampen speculation of an election and sings the praises of the Prime Minister in a speech laden with rhetoric.
[…]
I didn’t mention the Prime Minister. I didn’t ever use the word
election or make any reference to it because I didn’t want to hurt the neutral ears of the Rotarians, who do so much great work. And I thought, don’t drag that dirty political thing in here.
Those poor, delicate, Rotarians–why, the mere mention of anything as jejune as *gasp* politics might cause their pacemakers to short out! Kee-rist. The faux-grievance and feigned innocence is so thick that ol’ Iron Ass himself, Dick Nixon, must be enjoying an appreciative, jowly cackle from the bowels of Hell.
But wait — it gets even better:
[T]he newspaper reporter never asked me about an election or about anything else related to the Prime Minister. She had no, repeat, no questions, so, at least not of the national scene. She asked something about a local community college. But that was it. And then I wake up this morning and here they’ve got me singing the praises, great rhetoric. Well, let me tell you, as much as I like to think that every speech is a good one, they’ve obviously never heard me when I’ve gotten going as we have. And so, they put it, all this great rhetoric. I was reading a grocery list of, of projects for the island. So anyway, this whole thing is manufactured. And I was thinking so much about you today as I read the paper and the brilliant column you wrote in last week’s Sun about wafergate in New Brunswick, where the editors made it up. It had nothing to do with what the reporter said. And so, I’m saying to myself, my God, this is like the virus or something. It’s creeping across provincial borders. Now all of a sudden the Charlottetown paper can’t just report the news. They’ve got to make it up.
[…]
I saw [Wright] yesterday. And, well, in fact I was at an event this morning. And by the time it was finished and I went over, she had jumped in her car and fled. So, I didn’t get a chance. But you know, never get in a fight with people who buy ink by the, by the barrel. I mean, it’s another example. Here it is in the quiet summertime and everybody’s bound and determined to try and create something.
So, Duffy disingenuously blows the ‘Wafergate‘ dogwhistle as a means to deflect legitimate speculation generated by what anyone with any sense (even the hothouse flowers of the Charlottetown Rotary Club) could reasonably interpret as a fairly partisan speech that, indeed, does nothing to stem election speculation (who exactly is “we”, Duff?)
Yeah, there’s definitely something that’s been manufactured here, and it ain’t a headline.
That’s right, kiddies: cue the slack-beaked vultures of the far-right, hungry as always to gorge on ‘liberal’ media carrion, as they swoop down with typically measured reserve and sharp insight (snerk):
Yes, am sure the socialist-statists at CanWest, TorStar and CTVGlobemedia are positively quaking in their wingtips at the sudden imposition of such cold, hard reality (as always, irony is a leftist plot).
Kady O’Malley bends the laws of physics as only a lion(ess) with issues can:
There’s nothing remotely wrong with a senator delivering a partisan speech, notwithstanding the response it incites in certain PEI Liberals. That said, there is also nothing wrong with the Guardian having described it as such, no matter how vociferously the senator in question might dispute that interpretation. What is, frankly, ridiculous is to suggest that this is in any way similar to what may or may not have gone on behind the scenes at the Telegraph Journal, which, as far as ITQ can see, is a rather shameless attempt to feed the “biased media” meme that launched a thousand Finley-penned fundraising letters — not that there’s anything particularly wrong with that, either.
Apples, oranges — hey, it’s all fruit right?
Low. Hanging. Fruit.
Look, it seems obvious to anyone with half a brain (ie, those who don’t hang out in comments at SDA) that the leading luminaries of the partisan Canuckistanian right graduated with honours from the Humpty Dumpty School of Fallacious Argumentation (in this instance, showing off their degrees in false dichotomy). Yes, it may come as a surprise to the residents of KKKate’s bizzaro world, but some of us deluded consumers of MSM ‘bias’ (BIAS!!!1) actually demand something slightly more convincing than boisterous online agit-prop or half-baked assertions based on disingenuous denials from someone who, as a former journalist, knows what bullshit smells like. That Duffy now gleefully shovels it (and the base rewards him and his Conservative cronies with fauxtrage and hefty cheques) proves that Prime Minister Stephen Harper knew what he was doing when he called The Duff up to the big leagues.
The fact remains that the primary goal of these erstwhile right-wing media critics isn’t to improve the reporting of professional journalists. Rather, it’s to silence and, ultimately, destroy them — by any means necessary. In other words, the end game isn’t to garner a retraction or correct the record; they simply want another MSM head on a pike to (temporarily) satiate their collective blood lust (while the Conservative Party of Canada reaps the subsequent financial windfall).
But hey, if Duff wants to play footsie with a crowd that thinks his constituents “have the energy of an old sloth” and are “lazy from years of Alberta’s transfers and welfare” more power to him. It’s not like he has any actual accountability to the “ungrateful” people of Prince Edward Island, what being an unelected Senator and all (hey, remember when the Harpercons wanted to reform the ‘undemocratic’ Senate? Good times.)
See, that’s the difference between the so-called ‘liberal media’ and the knuckle-dragging, junior-league propagandists of the wingnutosphere: accountability. Sure, sometimes it takes some poking, but if Teresa Wright and her editors believe an error was made, they will duly issue a correction. Imagine that.
Oh, wait, I forgot: ethics are a Liberal plot, too — likely imported from overseas by that brie-scarfing Ignatieff interloper (just visiting!)
by matttbastard
The political establishment has never come to terms with, and the media establishment just refuses to acknowledge, how deeply unpopular and discredited the GOP is among most Americans in the wake of the eight-year Bush disaster. Political and media elites don’t want to acknowledge that because they lent their continuous support for eight years to Republican power, yet — even with Bush gone — it’s scarcely possible to imagine how a major political party could be held in lower esteem among voters. By huge margins (63-29%), Americans believe the GOP opposed Obama’s stimulus package for political reasons, not because they genuinely believed it would be bad for the economy; they overwhelmingly disapprove of Congressional Republicans (38-56%) while approving of Obama (68-25%) and even Congressional Democrats (50-44%); trust Obama over Congressional Republicans to handle the economy (61-26%); and trust Democrats over Republicans “to do a better job in coping with the main problems the nation faces over the next few years” (56-30%). Those are enormous margins.
The punditry’s claims that Americans want Democrats to dilute their policies in order to attract and include Republican support is entirely misleading. The endless media stories that Eric Cantor, Michael Steele and Rick Santelli are now riding some resurgent, anti-stimulus GOP wave are pure fiction. And the incessant calls for “bipartisanship” are anti-democratic in the extreme.
The Villagers stubbornly insist on reading from a hackneyed, out-of-date script, one that no longer even remotely resembles reality (if it ever actually did). But no matter what steaming, stinking bullshit manufactured outrage merchants like Santelli, Ratigan, or Michelle Malkin brazenly peddle, as Greenwald notes the bottom line is this:
[T]he reason that Americans voted overwhelmingly in favor of Democrats in the last two elections and overwhelmingly against Republicans is because they want Democratic policies and not Republicans [sic] policies . They drove Republicans out of office in massive numbers because they don’t want Republicans and their policies governing the country.
In other words, spittle-flecked fauxpulist motherfuckers like Rick Santelli can suck it. Hopefully he gets banished to the PJTV wilderness post haste, so he can serve heaping plates of bloody red meat to the Chicago Tea Party massif alongside his ideological (and, um, intellectual) brethren Glenn Reynolds and Joe the Plumber. And the rest of us can get back to, y’know, trying to fix the mess we inherited from the previous administration.
by matttbastard
Yeah, about that *cough* top-secret “pro-Obama” book by notoriously anodyne PBS anchor and longtime Beltway insider Gwen Ifill that has the usual suspects in a histrionic froth: Howie Kurtz quotes from his September 4th profile of Ifill, in which her upcoming book is discussed:
In The Post interview, Ifill said that as the daughter of a minister who marched in civil rights demonstrations, she recognized the historic nature of Obama’s candidacy. But, Ifill said, “I still don’t know if he’ll be a good president. I’m still capable of looking at his pros and cons in a political sense.” She added: “No one’s ever assumed a white reporter can’t cover a white candidate.”
Unfortunately, Kurtz’s post at The Trail doesn’t include the paragraph that originally preceded the quoted statement:
As Barack Obama was claiming the Democratic nomination in Denver, Ifill says, a white television reporter asked her: “Aren’t you just blown away by all of this?” She said she was not.
“Aren’t you in the tank?” the reporter wondered.
As Jamison Foser observes (h/t Steve Benen):
1) The October 7 presidential debate will be moderated by NBC’s Tom Brokaw, who currently serves as NBC’s liaison to the McCain campaign — while spreading pro-McCain misinformation on Meet the Press. In fact, the McCain campaign hand-picked Tom Brokaw to moderate the October 7 debate[…]
2) CBS’ Bob Schieffer moderated one of the 2004 debates, despite the fact that he is a longtime friend of George W. Bush who had previously acknowledged that his personal relationship with Bush made it difficult to cover him. Schieffer’s brother was a business partner of Bush’s before Bush became president — and Bush made him an ambassador.
DJ rewind:
“No one’s ever assumed a white reporter can’t cover a white candidate.”
To insinuate that Ifill, who’s likely to run a tough debate and ask serious questions, can’t be impartial is insulting to all African-Americans. Because y’know, THOSE people always side with their own.
Oh, and regarding the oh-so-impartial and objective (to say nothing of, um, credible) source of all this manufactured wingnut outrage, WorldNutDaily, Kurtz sardonically notes:
On the World Net site, the “Deal of the Day” is a $4.95 offer for what is described as the “Obama blockbuster: ‘Anatomy of Deceit.'” The Web site says the book “reveals” that “his brand of change is a hostile attack on the Judeo-Christian values and freedoms most Americans hold dear.”
What was that about a “conflict of interest”, Greta?
Related: Steve M has more on The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, which he says, judging by the publishers description, “isn’t hero-worship — it’s analysis” and that even if Obama wins in November the book “isn’t going to be a bestseller — it’s just too poli-sci.”
bastard.logic 