I don't know what is worse, the latest blather from Peggy Noonan in the WSJ here from 25 April, or this gibberish from Megan McArdle from 24 april.
Noonan is getting stupid here, though I appreciate her disdain of the harrassment that fliers have to endure. But somehow her dislike of having a security worker smell her mascara, spills over into whether Obama loves America enough.
McArdle is simply prattling in a circular fashion to my eyes. To which I reply; Take two Coase theorems followed by a Nash Equilibrium four hours later, and call me in the morning.
Noonan drags up Henry Ford. Henry Ford? He was a racist, a race baiter, an anti-semite, published a viciously anti-semetic journal, operated a goon squad masquerading as a "sociology department," applauded Hitler, was decorated by the Nazi regime, and openly repeated the gibberish about "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." The only thing I would want Obama to do is visit a Ford auto plant in the US; Henry would roll over in his grave. From Henry we jump to George Washington; a time leap of Heinlein-like proportions. Phew! Noonan will say anything to belittle Senator Barack Obama.
McArdle on the other hand is doing little more than cleverly done mental masturbation. Pointless, useless, non value stem winding; and in the Atlantic Monthly when so much is becoming known about the Bush administration's kleptocracy.
Playing the public for a sucker is the objective.
Prepare to be misdirected, misinformed, lied to and just plainly "stupidified" by a media that realizes the jig is up with the public as pertains to Bush, and the general direction of the nation.
Noonan is but a symptom of the general media malaise that will grip the nation as we move inexorably towards the November elections and the end of the reign of the radical Conservatives. At no time since perhaps Franklin D. Roosevelt at the start of World War II has the media been more in bed with an administration and certainly never for this long.
We will eventually learn why the media sold out to Bush and continued to do so in spite of, or perhaps because of, the lies, deceits, and abject failures of his administration. But until we do, and an end is put to the current media order, increasingly, we will see a shrill, but stupid, dictat coming from our well-known columnists and news services. A sort of disjointed mumbling, and half-hearted self justification filled with guile and bale will dominate the national discourse with McCain being the annointed media choice well in advance of the farcical and useless Republican national convention.
The internet is the only answer to this propaganda, the international press, though limited has not fallen so hard for the Bushist siren song.
This "Babylonian Captivity" of America at the hands of the Bush/Cheney political cabal, the ideological "new Trotskyites," a.k.a. the Neo-conservatives, and the radical right wing of both the Republican and the Conservative parties will end in the failure that has been both foretold and justly earned by the ruinous policies and amaturish administration of the Bushists.
