For a while, I would write e-mails to PBS every time they had columnist Tom Oliphant on the Friday Political Wrap of the Newshour to represent the liberal viewpoint. The Political Wrap normally features New York Times columnist David Brooks and Mark Shields discussing political events of the week. The savvy liberal Shields, one of the most substantial of the Big Pundits, usually manages easily to outclass Brooks, whose descent into Republican hackery over the last year has been tragic to watch.
Tom Oliphant is one of those "liberals" about whom Robert Frost reportedly said that a liberal is someone who’s so open-minded, he’s afraid to take his own side in an argument.
Tonight the prowar "liberal" Oliphant and the prowar conservative Brooks both agreed that things in Iraq were just peachy and that the new puppet government there is neato-keeno. Except that the "liberal" Oliphant was far more effusive than Brooks in praising the wise statesmanship of President Bush over Iraq. Brooks even managed to say that Ayatollah Sistani had "endorsed" the new government, without bringing the slightest objection from Oliphant. Go read the full text of the Sistani statement that Juan Cole translated on his blog and see if it sounds like a ringing endorsement to you.
Then "liberal" Oliphant and conservative Brooks agreed that the recent modest increases in jobs were wonderful, just wonderful, for Bush’s candidacy. It was left to Brooks to point out that Iraq was preventing Bush from gaining the benefit in popularity than one might otherwise expect from modest economic growth.
Now, this role-reversal might be an example of the "counter-intuitivity" that Big Pundits are expected to display occasionally. But there wasn’t any intuition at work here, "counter-" or otherwise. These guys were playing out a clown show. It’s just that Oliphant was playing his part so badly that Brooks had to step in a couple of times to offer the only semblances of actual thought in the segment.
The two Big Pundit clowns then proceeded to agree that John Kerry’s campaign is really rotten, and that George Tenet’s resignation as CIA director was a non-story. Neither of them bothered to point out that he was almost certainly fired. Clown Oliphant even said that Tenet "wasn't pushed" to resign, and explained that only insiders like himself and Clown Brooks were paying attention to the Tenet story and that it had no political significance right now. He said that ordinary people out there weren’t gathering on the street corners to talkd about the Tenet resignation. (Does anyone gather on the street corner to talk about anything these days, except when they’re coming up with an excuse to flirt with someone?) Clown Brooks agreed.
Actually, I first heard about Tenet’s resignation from a co-worker who’s normally not especially concerned about politics. She blurted out the news when she first saw it online. But she must be some kind of freak. Because Clown Oliphant and Clown Brooks both assure us that normal folks out there who don’t share their insight, their sources and their cocktail parties don’t worry ourselves about things like this. A normal voter wouldn’t care about the fact that the head of our chief spy agency just resigned, the same week that we learn that the President is seeking out a criminal defense attorney in the case of the criminal leak of an undercover CIA agent’s identity, and while new revelations come out daily about torture in the gulag, the Iranian espionage that may have involved some of the most senior officials in the government, the intelligence failures prior to the 9/11 attacks and intelligence failures in Iraq from WMDs to the likely opposition we’d face there.
No, why should us reg'lar Amurcans be worryin' about stuff like 'at? According to Big Pundits, we're, what, too busy drankin' beer, listenin' to Chuckie Daniels records and gossipin' about American Idol and the NASCAR races to care about piddlin' little things like the fact that some of our most important government leaders may be crooks or even spies, or that we’ve gone to war based on lies fed to us by a con-man who’s an embezzler, a thief and an Iranian spy? Heck, no, you have to be a Big Pundit to care about things like that.
Oh, by the way, neither Clown Brooks nor Clown Oliphant mentioned that little bit about the President starting to lawyer up over the Valerie Plame leak. If the George Tenet resignation was only comprehensible by Big Clown Pundits, they must have figured that the rest of us slubs didn’t even know there was any significance at all to the President looking for a criminal defense attorney in a felony investigation.
Funny, they thought we were all terribly interested in Bill Clinton’s blow jobs.
Why do they bother to have Oliphant on this show? He would be a better substitute for the conservative side than for the liberal one. If Shields is going to be out, why not bring in someone like Molly Ivins who is actually a real live liberal and not afraid to talk like one? I bet their ratings would spike up every time people heard that a blunt-talking, jaded Texas liberal like Molly was going to be on verbally chopping sad little Clown Brooks to pieces, chewing him up and unceremoniously spitting him out, providing funny little anecdotes about Texas politicians all the while.
Shoot, just about any union shop steward in the country could do a better job of articulating liberal and Democratic positions than Clown Oliphant. But they might violate some rule of Big Punditry in the process. Why, one of them might even be so crass as to mention that it’s really a crying shame that the President of the United States is surrounded by so many crooks and is up to his eyeballs in problems from his own recklessness and maybe worse that he’s having to line up acriminal defense lawyer. They might even suggest that there was something less than desirable about having the country run by crooks and lying warmongers who hand out billions of dollars in public money on contracts let through glad-handing business connections!
No, no, we couldn’t have that. We need the clown show instead where Oliphant pretends to be a liberal and Brooks pretends to be a serious commentator.
When the Daily Howler says that the press corps is making "a joke of your discourse," it's stuff like the Brooks-and-Oliphant Clown Show that he has in mind.
No comments:
Post a Comment