But he's had too many birthdays!

The media is focusing almost exclusively on Joe Biden's superannuation, just like they focused on Hillary Clinton's emails. Reporters like this kind of story. It's simple enough for a tween to understand, and that's about the level of the American electorate. Reporters don't have to learn anything about it that would require effort; they can file in thirty minutes and get home to the fam in time for supper.

America's political media is worse every election, and Democrats like me are really bad at tempering our perennial expectations that they'll learn from the past and do better. Except that they have no desire to do better.

The truth is that everything Trump touches he destroys. That should be the theme of American political journalism. That dipshit failed to make money in casinos, which should be a license to print profits, but oh no, he was too busy gilding his toilet. Now he wants to destroy NATO.

Trump has already touched American democracy, and it's in deep trouble. If he gets his "short-fingered vulgarian" hands on it again, well, we'll all need to develop the skills citizens of fascism have to have to survive.

Apropos of nothing

Why would anyone pay any attention to anything Sarah Palin says?  The husky that lives next door makes more intelligent noises.

Yet our vacuous media still thinks she has something to offer.

I blog pseudonymously so I can keep using the word bullshit

You never know what sanctions you'll suffer for your opinions or for your language.

Also, too, I can still say fuck. These insane teabagger days, the ability to say fuck without being punished for it in real life is pretty helpful to my continued insouciance in the face of conserfative infestations and the general inability of our politics and our press to deal with evidence.

Segregation academies

Conservatives are frothing at the mouth (again! You'd think they'd run out of froth) about President Obama's completely innocuous comments about schools and communities separated along sectarian lines in Northern Ireland.

The reason our homegrown American paranoid wingnuts are angry about this - other than anger being what they do - is that they've spent the past forty years building separate institutions parallel to public and secular institutions.

Their building started as a way to keep their delicate little white babies from having to learn with colored chillun. You never know what might happen when children sit next to each other in class. They might become friends! Or those dark boys might deflower innocent Southern girls. Mongrelization, miscegenation, race-mixing, and bastardization of America!

Feh.

After resegregating K-12, of course, the racist wingers needed "higher" education that would permit their smallworldview to go unchallenged all the way through college and even grad school. But you can't say cadres for Christ - that sounds too much like the Bolsheviks. Hence Bob Jones University (BJU, unintended double entendre foreshadowing teabagger) and Liberty University. Too bad Oklahoma's ORU wasn't named for a televangelist named Oral Richards.

Then of course, the conservatives built their own media, intended from the beginning to get their story our, never mind what's true. Fox pretends to be news to pump out propaganda. Rush and his ilk of haters purvey unguested confrontation and won't countenance any response on their bullshit programs.

Well, not quite never mind what's true. Some viewers need a little convincing. So billionaire wingnuts built tax exempt foundations to provide a thin veil of propaganda for the alleged truth of their views. Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Accuracy in Media, and all the various denier "think" tanks on climate change, tobacco, and the so-called free market, etc.

Conservatives hate what Obama said in Northern Ireland because they've graduated from advocating separate but unequal for black folk into advocating separate institutions for themselves - and, oh by the way, the destruction of public institutions for the rest of us.

Gullible audience

Fox lies all the time, although you do have to ask whether "Fox and Friends" - the show that dominates the news stupidity in a media landscape that's filled with media stupidity - knows for sure that their bullshit is bullshit.

Here's another lie from Roger Ailes's right-wing propaganda machine:

Fox deceptively edited Obama's answer to only include the portion of his response in which he discusses long debunked myths related to the talking points, removing the beginning of Obama's answer to the question about the Benghazi attacks and the related talking points. 

Obama began his response by saying that "Americans died in Benghazi." He followed by asserting that he wanted to ensure that a similar situation doesn't happen again and that the assailants would be "held accountable."

If you watch Fox and believe it, I don't understand how you actually have enough sense to make a living and not get fleeced out of it by retail scam artists. There are a couple of possibilities:

• You live in a group home with a guard at the door.
• You like being lied to because otherwise you'd have to cope with a complex world whose complexion is not to your liking.
• You're so fearful you can't think straight.

Does Brian Kilmeade remind anyone else of Emily Litella?

By the way, did you know that the word gullible isn't even in the dictionary? Probably another Obama conspiracy...

That's not funny!

I can well imagine schlerotic wingnuts railing against the President's sense of humor.

Walking in to “All I Do Is Win,” President Obama joked “Rush Limbaugh warned you about this. Second term, baby. We’re changing things around here a little bit.”

Or maybe they'll wax wroth about teleprompters and other bullshit.

Anyhow, I'm laughing.

Media performance after the Boston Marathon bombing

Or, should I say, non-performance?

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My observations:

• CNN really truly sucks at journalism.  cnn.com, though, is still a useful source of breaking news.
• Fox I avoid on general principles, but they can manage breaking stories in between the toxic bigotry of their opinion personalities. I watched a little Shepard Smith on Monday while the story was still news and not yet another opportunity to push invidious delusions into the puke funnel of the VRWC.
• MSNBC's Rachel Maddow is vital for background. Her competitors who lean backward into infotainment breathlessly reported on pressure cooker bombs, as if everyone knew what that meant. She actually reported it.
• Both the Boston Globe and the New York Times web sites failed. To judge by the Globe's subsequent removal of access controls, they may lack enough oomph in their user authentication servers.
• NECN was o.k. for a while, but then reported that Boston was being evacuated on the strength of one cop with a bullhorn. Panic, people, panic! But keep watching!
• Any media outlet that gives Alex Jones a platform cannot be trusted.
• Infotainment is the norm:

Culpable but not the most culpable

Click image for full Nick Anderson/Houston Chronicle cartoon.

TV nooz

Not just the headline is scary

The American social norm, while more fettered by reason than the Republican social norm, is still highly unreasonable:

The survey found that 75 percent of Republicans believe at least one of the conspiracy theories that were polled, compared to 56 percent of Democrats who believed at least one of the four.

We've become a society filled with people who believe crazy bullshit, whipped into a frenzy by media that don't care what's true or false, only what brings eyeballs to advertisers.

The elephant in the room

As I've said for years, Republicans lie. They have to. Their political platform, outside of lower taxes, is unpopular, so they can't tell the truth.

The mainstream media couldn't possibly bring itself to report this truth:

"I can't recall a campaign where I've seen more lying going on -- and it wasn't symmetric," said [Norman] Ornstein, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who's been tracking Congress with Mann since 1978. Democrats were hardly innocent, he said, "but it seemed pretty clear to me that the Republican campaign was just far more over the top."

Lies from Republicans generally and standardbearer Mitt Romney in particular weren't limited to the occasional TV ads, either; the party's most central campaign principles -- that federal spending doesn't create jobs, that reducing taxes on the rich could create jobs and lower the deficit -- willfully disregarded the truth.

"It's the great unreported big story of American politics," Ornstein said.

"If voters are going to be able to hold accountable political figures, they've got to know what's going on," Ornstein said. "And if the story that you're telling repeatedly is that they're all to blame -- they're all equally to blame -- then you're really doing a disservice to voters, and not doing what journalism is supposed to do."

If the media should succumb to objectivity, the wingnuts would clamor to punish it for liberal bias in favor of reality.

The Nate Silver problem

Right-wing pundits toe the line far better than left-wing pundits. The wingers know that their job is to provide plausible bullshit for their audiences so that wingnut victories become self-fulfilling prophecies.

Left-wing pundits foolishly think their job is a combination of analysis and opinion, tethered to facts. They fail to realize they're in the propaganda business.

Nate Silver kills them both. He looks at reality with some statistical sophistication, and he and his model learn to reduce new sources of uncertainty. Why no one ever aggregated polls and then simulated outcomes based on their remaining uncertainties is a mystery.

The wingnut pundits whined about Silver's predictions, as they did about all polls. Add one more item to the (overlapping) list of liberally biased areas:

• media
• facts
• reality
• science
• now pollsters

You didn't think Fox would stop trying to bullshit you, did you?

Of course they'll keep trying. It's just harder now that Silver has once against proven his sagacity. But Dick Morris on his streak of oh-for-forever, will keep right on adding more thumb-sucks to his well established record of toe-sucking. Newt Gingrich will continue to have outlets for his wild opinions about the future, so he may well need to confess his errors again in the future.

And Neil Cavuto will continue to defend the "totality" of Fox's pundit eclipse:

The Atlantic's pundit scorecard is a wee bit harsh - no reason to flunk the racetrack touts who got it mostly right. Still, we'd be better off if we expected pundits to present arguments, instead of spewing the unreliable contents of their notoriously inaccurate guts. But that would be harder to do, and if there's anything TV pundits hate, it's the slightest whiff of effort.

But all politics is theater

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The national press corpse (most of it, but obviously not Rachel) eats up theater. The only insight they need to report on it is their subjective impression of how good the production values are. Back in middle school, they already knew enough to write up their feelings about Moby-Dick, so they can surely tell us whether they thought Mitt Rmoney, the charity drive Ahab, performed well in a good show or not. No need to investigate or even question the moral values expressed by his cynical theater, they've got their superficial and banal impressions.

Sure, Rmoney caught a bad break that Hurricane Sandy gave President Barack Obama such an easy chance to look presidential. To be presidential. Never mind how badly past Republicans have muffed that easy chance. But we all know the Mitt is all about ... Mitt, and only his policies are Bushist. You think he's whining behind the scenes about his gosh darn bad luck? While New Jersey and New York recover bodies?

Hurricane Sandy happened. One candidate actually did something constructive. It helped, of course, that he was already President and had that big FEMA club in his hand. The challenger, already on record  as favoring the end of FEMA, tried to appear to help - and utterly failed.

Rmoney didn't keep the Potemkin Village of his theatrical presentation hidden. So the press Villagers will probably hit him hard. He unwittingly let the audience in on the seaminess of backstage.

I'm still waiting for the press to care that Rmoney and his kiss-up-piss-down friends are simply and irrefutably wrong, both morally and practically. They don't care what happens to those who suffer disasters, large or small - because they are safe in their gated worlds, looking down on all of us whose lives are so contingent that one natural disaster can leave us homeless.

If we were Galtian heroes, we'd have as many houses as we needed.

Dominating the asshole vote

Scott Brown...

Getting a totally moronic bigot to spout lies when he's not spouting slurs...

Patriarca also appears to call President Obama a “filthy corrupt slimy piece of shit,” a “muslim illegal alien commie douchebag,” First Lady Michelle Obama “the first Wookie,” Obama campaign spokesperson Stephanie Cutter “a lying KHUNT,” MSNBC anchor Andrea Mitchell a “Khunt,” and DNC Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz a “sleazeball,” and “a stupid khunt.”

Lying about Elizabeth Warren's work on asbestos...

Warren’s version of the case has been publicly backed by several attorneys representing the asbestos victims, as well as leaders of an asbestos workers’ union.

“[Brown]’s flat out misrepresenting the facts,” Francis C. Boudrow, business manager for the International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Asbestos Workers Union, Local No. 6 told the Boston Globe. “It’s offensive to all these people who’ve lost lives” to asbestos-­related illness, he said.

Going unremittingly negative...

Brown determined to run as a not-particularly-bright evening drive-time AM radio host. He latched onto the nothingburger of Warren's Indian ancestry and went into it all the way back to his molars. He wouldn't shut up about it. Alternately, he tried to make an issue out of the fact that Warren had worked for companies going through bankruptcy, including Travelers Insurance, which was dealing with the whopping awards granted to the people whom the asbestos industry had poisoned and killed. This might have worked — to understand what Warren did required a knowledge of bankruptcy law beyond most people who are not Elizabeth Warren — except that Warren marshalled the lawyers for the plaintiffs in those suits, and the surviving members of the victims' families, and they all went very public about how much Warren's work had helped them and their families. Some of them appeared in a very powerful television commercial called "Ashamed," in which they criticized Brown for politicizing their private tragedies in such a reckless way. That, people could understand.

Who knew a Republican would need to work so hard to consolidate the asshole vote? And sayonara to that nice guy image he had somehow created out of undeserved media adoration.

How many Scott Brown supporters decry the lack of civility in politics as they put his signs in the yards of their $2 million houses?

Age of reason

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The Democrats' problem is that reason only works with a narrow demographic these days. We didn't always have a culture of bullshit, but we do now. Republicans believe they're entitled to their own facts, whatever they make up on the spot to avoid having to deal with actual reality. The radical right-wing media feeds this irrational belief constantly. That's its purpose - keeping the ignoramuses fooled, with their willing, even eager, participation.

Lowest common denominator

Mark Leibovich is killing democracy, and he doesn't have a clue to his own culpability.

His multi-thousand-word extended fantasy in today's Times is everything wrong with big media political journalism. I guess he had a news hole, and the early washout of the Republican National Convention left him with nothing much to write about other than himself and his feelings.

First off, his dozens of column-inches are all about him. He's too important to recede into the background and report news as if it were a factual topic:

I began to have this goofy notion, which turned into a daydream and eventually became a recurring fantasy.

This is his lead! A couple paragraphs later:

This spring, for the first time since I started writing about politics a decade ago, I found myself completely depressed by a campaign. “How am I ever going to get through it?” is not the question you want to be asking yourself as you enter what are supposed to be the pinnacle few months of your profession.

If that's all you have, you could always, I dunno, resign and look for a job as a flack.

Of course, in the best (i.e. worst) tradition of Tom Friedman, every single goddamn ordinary person Leibovich talked to liked the idea Leibovich calls "dumb, naïve, unsophisticated and frankly out of character for me, someone with little patience for the Kabuki pleasantries of politics" when he's talking to us, his callous sophisticates.

This all springs from woe is me, it's all too nasty.

The campaigns appeared locked in a paradigm of terrified superpowers’ spending blindly on redundant warfare. How many times do they have to blow up Vladivostok?

Of course, a pox on both their houses:

As with Romney, you can picture [Obama] grabbing for the Purell as soon as he escapes the rope line.

although there's the obligatory back-of-the-hand nonsense that only suggests the Romney campaign kisses Leibovich's self-important butt with a bit more of a porn star's best fakery.

His retail-politicking chores completed, Obama disappeared behind a thick black curtain next to an empty storefront, into something called the “Good News Center” — a place I was not allowed to go.

Yet, despite all the disdain, there's incredible name-dropping. Hey, ma, look who I rub elbows with!

Why do we have to go into a campaign with the press corps we have?

After all this loathing, I'm going out on a generous limb. Leibovich is filled with loathing, all right. But he misidentifies the reason. He has just enough conscience that it's self-loathing. He must realize, deep down, that he's in the dirty, useless business of packaging politics so that Americans can feel virtuous hating and ignoring and pushing away their own government.

Leibovich's problem is not that politicians are letting down political reporters. It's that political reporters are letting down their readers. It's that their readers sponge up vacuous inside-the-campaign reportage like middle schoolers soak up puberty-fueled catty gossip. It's that reporters then give readers more and more of nothing useful.

Leibovich works for what used to be a craft and a calling and now fancies itself a profession. A profession pays enough to justify the self-esteem of highly educated glorified transcriptionists for the ruling class.

Here's a hint: Stop covering the campaign and cover the candidates. Stop bemoaning the superficialities of American politics while, at the exact same time, channelling them straight to readers. Have some aspirations to make a difference beyond false balance and telling the non-cool kids which clique is cool this year.

Never happen. It's far too easy to file bullshit than it is to separate out reality from fiction.

Laughing at Pakistanis

... when we should be laughing at ourselves.

A Pakistani man has "invented" a way of bullshit-olyzing water into hydrogen and oxygen. Is this a sequel to "The Saint"? (Much as I like Elisabeth Shue, even in this movie, her performance as a scientist was completely free of the slightest credibility.)

As in America, there are qualified Pakistani experts who've spoken out against anti-scientific fraud:

It shows “how far Pakistan has fallen into the pit of ignorance and self-delusion,” wrote Pervez Hoodbhoy, an outspoken physics professor, in The Express Tribune, a national English-language daily. He added: “Our leaders are lost in the dark, fumbling desperately for a miracle; our media is chasing spectacle, not truth; and our great scientists care more about being important than about evidence.”

Hoodbhoy has had about as much impact as scientists in America when they share their knowledge of evolution, global warming, health, economics, etc. - that is, very little.

Remember, we live in an age when people take literally* the metaphorical aphorism that perception is reality. When American conservatives have built an entire media apparatus intended to provide the resolutely ignorant with excuses to remain ill-informed. When one entire major political party is devoted to lying in order to cover up the plain fact that all it really cares about is the continued establishment of oligarchy.

The pit of ignorance and self-delusion. We Americans are right there with the Pakistanis. Sadly for all of us.

---

* So sue me for anachronism, but I'm using the literal meaning of literally, not the currently dominant debased meaning that is its exact opposite.

Rude and a liar

Heckle the President at a White House press briefing? Only a Democrat. If a reporter did this to a Republican, the entire Mighty Wurlitzer of blithering right-wing special pleading would not merely note the rudeness but accuse the reporter of treason or worse.

Here's the interruption:

Mr. Obama had only been speaking for about five minutes when Mr. Munro first shouted. He continued speaking for another five minutes afterward. ...

Mr. Munro did not specify what he shouted, but other reporters who were present said the initial question was, “Mr. President, why do you favor foreign workers over Americans?”

Here's Munro's lying alibi:

I timed the question believing the president was closing his remarks, because naturally I have no intention of interrupting the President of the United States.

For conservatives, rules to live by apply only to Democrats.

Attack of the killer transformers

Steve M. sez:

[M]ainstream coverage of campaigns is hopeless: the reporters seem incapable of maintaining critical distance, so they inevitably regurgitate spin -- and that just gives the spin a patina of objectivity.

For our political press, campaigns are good for one thing only:  Road trip!

If there's a movie on the press bus, so much the better:

Veterans of past presidential campaigns know very well that neither team has yet to fully engage the billion-dollar campaign machines that will clash in spectacular fashion in the fall.

Plus, all the better if the big media stenographer can pretend that financial resources for this campaign will be anything close to equal in the aftermath of Citizens United v. FEC.

Who's the Autobot? Who's the Decepticon? Big media won't help you figure that out. That wouldn't be "objective."

Life terms

The New York Times has long been arrogant. (Wingnuts and I can agree on that.) If you've ever seen executive editor (now emeritus) Bill Keller interviewed, you know he's completely buried in a Timesman's self-importance. The scenes in The Paper where Michael Keaton's tabloid editor interacts with Spalding Gray's thinly disguised Times editor don't seem exaggerated at all.

The Times has long had a reputation as slow to pay stringers, assuming it doesn't merely assign a staff reporter to your story idea for the price of an insincere thank you. This is a paper that has persistently tried to screw its freelancers out of any share whatsoever of the digital rights to their work.

Still, the Times is the best news provider in America, and it's incumbent on me to read it to stay well-informed. I'll still notice the bullshit that Keller would defend to hair-splitting lawyerly exhaustion - say, Judith Miller on Iraq or Jeff Gerth on Whitewater. Even though the brand is more important to management than the truth, the Times still does reporting and finds the truth often enough to be worth reading - assuming you keep your bullshit detector tuned up.

The new attempt to erect a paywall has been a challenge for me. At first, I had enough computers and enough browsers to read all I wanted, but that window is closing. I've long argued - following many others - that subscribers never paid for the news, they only paid for the newsprint, why should we now pay for pixels? Our subscription fees used to pay for printing and distribution costs alone, and those costs on line are drastically smaller now than they were in the dead tree era.

Yet just as the media need to change their business model, I probably need to change my expectations. Ad revenue, the traditional honey pot of journalism, has shrunk due to the Internet. Keller may think blogs are the problem. Instead, print media companies have utterly failed to notice that their competitive advantage is not opinion - blogs do that free and often without the strange taboos and Village fealties of mainstream outlets - but rather factual news reporting. Those of us who want facts, not the latest bullshit from seldom-right but often right-wing pundits, will just have to buy them. God knows the advertisers have no interest in any truth that might possibly inconvenience them in selling their wares.

Facts are hard. Facts take work to unearth. Facts are worth paying for. Opinions? Shit, I've got way too many of my own to need to pay for anyone's. Except for Paul Krugman's.

All in all, the Times has a quality product, and that justifies some of their arrogance.

But the terms of their agreement are onerous and one-sided:

The New York Times reserves the right to modify the content, type and availability of any digital product at any time.

Only one person may use each account or accounts (user name and password) associated with a purchased product, unless we agree otherwise.

There's an adjustment to a new age! No leaving your iPad on the coffee table as if it were a paper edition.

The Times won't even tell you the price up front. You have to start ordering before you can be sure what it costs:

When you purchase a digital product, the price will be made clear during the order process. You agree to pay the price that is stated at the time of your order, as well as any applicable taxes. You also agree to the billing frequency stated at the time of your order.

Your subscription is permanent:

All NYTimes digital subscriptions are renewed automatically. ...

If your credit card expires or your payment method is otherwise invalid, your subscription or product will not automatically be terminated. You will remain responsible for all charges.

You will be responsible for all costs we incur in connection with the collection of unpaid amounts, including court costs, attorneys' fees, collection agency fees and any other associated costs.

You have to call them to terminate. They, of course, accept no obligation to answer the phone.

The Times incurs no obligation whatsoever:

We reserve the right to suspend or terminate your subscription or product for any reason, with or without notice and without further obligation. You will not be entitled to a refund in these circumstances. If any or all of our digital products are temporarily unavailable, you will not receive a refund. We reserve the right to issue refunds or credits at our sole discretion. ...

We reserve the right to make changes to our digital products at any time. If we temporarily reduce or eliminate the charge for content or access that you are currently paying for under different terms, you will not receive a refund.

If any or all of our digital products are temporarily unavailable, you will not receive a refund. We reserve the right to issue refunds or credits at our sole discretion. If we issue a refund or credit, we are under no obligation to issue the same or similar refund in the future.

Included in the terms is a sly attempt to expand copyright protection to prohibit fair use, much as the AP has tried to forbid quoting of their stories:

The Services and Contents are protected by copyright pursuant to U.S. and international copyright laws. You may not modify, publish, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, reproduce (except as provided in Section 2.3 of these Terms of Service), create new works from, distribute, perform, display, or in any way exploit, any of the Content or the Services (including software) in whole or in part.

The law guarantees me the right to quote the Times when I comment on it, but the Times wants a more restrictive contract with me. That's legal of course. Let them try to enforce it.

The "privacy" policy requires that you provide information which the Times cannot possibly justify requiring:

Registration for the NYT Services requires that you supply certain personal information, including, in most cases, a unique e-mail address and demographic information (ZIP code, age, sex, household income (optional), job industry and job title) to register. [emphasis added]

And if the corporate structure changes, information about you is an asset - no mention of that asset being constrained to the existing policy:

In the future, we may sell, buy, merge or partner with other companies or businesses. In such transactions, we may include your information among the transferred assets.

The Times is part of the American oligarchy, which permits them to get away with this sort of one-sided, albeit legal, abuse of the legal system. They can hire the sharpest New York intellectual property lawyers to write tens of thousands of words into an adhesion contract that edges right up to unconscionability in its limits on what customers can do with a simple product, when we as individuals can't even sanely read and understand those terms without hours of investment and hiring our own lawyer.

The law is supposed to be even-handed. Obviously, as O.J. Simpson, Wall St. bankers, and the New York Times know, it isn't.