Will wonders never cease — even the always-lean-to-the-right Chuck Todd, et al, finally figured out that Andrew Breitbart was pulling his chain.
“After conservative activist James OKeefe pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for entering a federal building under false pretenses, you would have thought that all of us in the ACTUAL news business would have learned this lesson about Andrew Breitbart and his prot訩s: Theyre not out for the truth; theyre out for scalps.”
— Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, Domenico Montanaro, and Ali Weinberg, from “Snookered,” MSNBC First Read, July 21, 2010.
But hold the phone — Chuck and Co. blundered into the swamp of Standard-Issue Beltway Conventional Wisdom lower down on the same page:
“But here is something to consider: It’s the country — not the system — that’s stacked against liberals and progressives.” […]
“From 1989 (after Reagan’s presidency) to now, the most stable data in the NBC/WSJ poll has been that roughly one-fifth of the country identifies as being liberal, while one-third identifies being conservative. Even in 2008, when Obama decisively won the presidency, the average in the poll was 25% liberal, 36% conservative. And in 1996, when Bill Clinton easily won re-election, it was 22% liberal, 34% conservative. For Democrats, this means that if they want to win national elections, they need to win about 60% of the self-described moderate vote — which Obama did in ’08 and congressional Dems did in ’06, per the exit polls. By comparison, however, John Kerry got 54% of the moderate vote in 2004.”
Chuck, Chuck, Chuck — for 30 years the Right-Wing Media Machine and the GOP have been pushing the ‘hate liberals’ message nearly unopposed by the milquetoast Dems or the MSM. Is it any surprise that most people would rather say they were conservative — depending on how the poll question is phrased, of course — than an evil liberal, whatever their actual political beliefs? What about the surveys that consistently show a majority support abortion rights, health care reform, Social Security and a passel of other not very conservative views? What about the massive public outrage when the Republicans tried to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case? Now that you’ve disabused yourself of Breitbart, how about recognizing that that ‘center-right country’ nonsense is straight from Andy’s ideological and strategic mentors, Karl Rove and Lee Atwater? Chuck, no matter what they say, I have hope for you yet.
All that shows is the obvious…
A. There’s a propaganda smear campaign to make sure the word “liberal” can be used like nigger and spike effectively: by the same assh…s who used nigger and spike in the past. (How do you spell “spike?” Not that I really need to know.)
B. Any moron should know the universe isn’t divided into “Liberal” and “Conservative…” except the media morons and the Neos who have an obvious agenda to pretend it is, because that obviously is to their advantage.
Well, that’s the thing: Todd could be one of the most excruciating of the ‘media morons’ at times — for him and his minions to see the light about Breitbart is a big step forward.
BTW, it’s spelled with a ‘c’ instead of a ‘ke,’ not that you really needed to know that, except I thought you were talking about somebody’s dog for a moment.
I had to chuckle. I can just imagine one of my more anal English teachers standing over the playground bully and threatening him with staying after school and writing the improperly spelled word 1,000 times.
Not that your approach was like that in any way, the image just made me laugh. Reminds me of an Onion piece where an English prof writes a screed complaining about the spelling errors in the suicide notes of his students.
It’s a sad hangover from once working as a proofreader for a chain of suburban newspapers. I’d get called on the carpet if some insignificant word was spelled wrong. (Not that I don’t make my share of ‘typos’ these days.) But, since it was a tedious job and the editors sometimes missed things, we proofers kept ourselves entertained by intentionally inserting misspellings and seeing if we could get away with it. Converting a ‘uniformed’ general into an ‘uninformed’ general was fairly easy and more accurate, and the editors never wised up on that one; we once had an article note that a campaigning politician was an accomplished country ‘banyo’ player rather than a ‘banjo’ player. (‘Baño’ is Spanish for bathroom.) And we once had the corrupt jackass mayor of a suburban town ‘insipid’ in his pursuit of governmental excellence rather than ‘inspired.’ We also had him ‘sightsniffing’ on a vacation in New York rather than ‘sightseeing.’ And the readers of that rag were informed that that same mayor ‘peed’ into the future rather than ‘peered’ and saw ‘blight’ at the end of the tunnel. Good, clean fun and none of those were ever caught.
As an English major who studied to be a teacher, and ended up a Communications/Mass Media major, I got a kick in the 70s when the local Gannett rag hired an ex-girlfriend’s friend to be a “proofreader.” Being Gannett, and the “quality” of their papers, I had no doubt she told me the truth. She and another friend had been hired and told they only had six months, when they would be let go… and someone else would take their place for another six months.
Sharon never made it through public school and English was by no means “her subject.” I was working at a gas station. I assume, being a grad, they thought I was too expensive of a hire. I would have worked for minimum.
Figures. When Gannett takes over a paper the ads triple: at least, and content goes to the level of rip and read: at best.
Time-Life, as the parent corporation was called in those days, owned the chain of papers I worked for, under the local name of Pioneer Press. They gave me a standard high school level grammar/English usage/spelling test and that was it. But I had already been working in production for the same company, so it wasn’t really much of a change.