Longtime center-left-by-left Newsweek reporter Howard Fineman finally snaps awake:
WASHINGTON — In his Senate office, Barack Obama gave pride of place to a famous sports photo: Muhammad Ali (Cassius Clay back then) howling in triumph over the dazed hulk of Sonny Liston, belly-up on the canvas.
Like his boxing hero Ali, Obama is floating like a butterfly — essentially untouched — thus far in his presidential prizefight with Mitt Romney.
And that is not good for anybody: for the country, for the voters, for the political parties or even for Obama and his administration.
If American democracy is to work — if we are to prevent the blood from clotting in the body politic — presidential elections must be real contests over real ideas and real records, informed by real facts.
This campaign hasn’t really been any of those things.
Presidents do not deserve to be reelected by default. If they did, why would anyone expect that a second term to be any better or wiser?
And elected leaders need to be held to account — pinned up against the wall, so to speak — if citizens aren’t to become utterly disillusioned with the idea that we live in a system of democratic self-government.
Do tell.
As someone who came of age during Watergate, the progressive disinterest of the popular mass media in anything much beyond the current vapid parlor game of “fact-checking” opinions has been increasingly troubling to me. Not long ago I would sardonically question whether the alternative to “mainstream” media would of necessity have to be “fringe”. Not any more, not after this year. This year, I have become miserably convinced beyond any further resistance that the Fourth Estate has effectively atrophied into little more than a Third and Seventeen One-Hundredths Estate, or possibly something even more haplessly disengaged.
The right may warn of a drift into socialism and the left may fear militaristic adventurers, but the most imminent threat to the American democratic republic is being delivered right now with cheerful concern by these muppets of the ether, these turtles on posts, curious about nothing more than the latest, self-created narrative of convenience.
What do you think about the limits of free speech, post? For context and balance, of course, we will also be putting these same trenchantly irrelevant questions to the wind and the grasses.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
H/T: Ace
Today’s journalists are pseudo-intellectuals who know how to use fancy words but can’t think their ways out of a paper bag. They love Obama and overlook any and all thoughts because he represents an ideal fantasy they hold dear, the first black president. They’ve dreamed of when the first black president would elected. For decades, they’ve imagined this time of universal love and acceptance. They’ve held this fantasy tight to their chest.
Anything that goes against this dream drives a knife into their very souls. Any attack on Obama attacks their dream. They react by defending Obama, covering for him and accusing any and all attackers of racism and other questionable motives. The suffer from a form of mass psychosis where they live in a world of delusions. Like the psychotic, they fight to maintain their delusions more than strive to establish contact with reality.
BTW – I though Steve was a doctor, but he fits the profile of a MSM journalist perfectly.
When have I ever accused his attackers of racism?
Steve