Memo to Campaign Journalists

Take a vacation. Please. You're more embarrassing than the candidates. Look, everything is about to go quiet for a while because the Olympics are going to blot out the spotlight. Then we'll have the party conventions, which will utterly rewrite the electoral landscape. Then it gets real. Right now, nothing matters. Nothing. And when you insist on writing like it does, you get puerilities like this:

But in a nation in which 66% of the voting-age population is overweight and 32% is obese, could Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability? Despite his visits to waffle houses, ice-cream parlors and greasy-spoon diners around the country, his slim physique just might have some Americans wondering whether he is truly like them.

Well, duh. He is a smoker, or was until very recently. We may be a nation of uneducated lard-asses, but we generally recognize smokers tend to be skinnier than non-smokers. Hell, even the government knows this.

The same goes for political bloggers, who beclown themselves by shrieking that McCain was "fearmongering" back in October 2001 when he suggested Iraq was a suspect in the anthrax mailings.

As Atrios recalls, shortly after 9/11, conservatives were pinning the blame for the anthrax attacks on Iraq, laying the groundwork for a subsequent invasion. John McCain was part of this fearmongering effort.

...

He preyed on the public’s fear at the time by claiming that the anthrax “may have come from Iraq”

O, the tyranny of hindsight! Back then, we knew very little. Except that at least some of the anthrax was "weapons-grade," the messages were overtly Islamist (or written to sound that way) and when you went looking for an entity capable of crafting that quality of fatal spores, and with the historical track record of doing such things, and with an immediate beef with the U.S., Iraq was on the short list. McCain qualified what he said with warnings that little was known: "There is some indication, and I don’t have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may — and I emphasize may — have come from Iraq."

That hardly counts as "pinning the blame" and it didn't require a subscription to The New Republic to pencil in that dot connection at that time, however wrong it turned out to be.

Logo Rhythms

[Posted by reader_iam]

What were you all thinking?



Perhaps you were to meaning to evoke the warm fuzzy of another song from that movie?



Better to have thought again, in keeping with the fundamentals your mothers no doubt tried to teach you:



(Hat tip to Blue Crab Boulevard for the last, though I sorta think Gaius won't thank me, in context. But what can I say? Sometimes in life things just get piled together in a heap and you work with what you have to sort it out--just like mama said.)

"So he’s accused of screwing the brothel"

[Posted by reader_iam]

Me, I would have used that as the hed for a blogpost about a news story like this.

Heck, I just did. Joe Gandelman, on the other hand, went with an actual straight news headline on his blogpost--in other words, he took the high road, in a time when even official, traditional news outlets don't always bother to observe the discipline in question on actual news articles--which pretty much explains why I still read his blog/mag regularly, even amidst the drastic falling off of my online engagement, especially blogs, more generally.

Just wanted to recognize and acknowledge all o' that, aloud.

Quickies

[Posted by reader_iam]

It's amazing to me how unbloggable I've found even major news stories, recently. Perhaps I'm suffering from some sort of hype-fatigue. Who knows? In any case, here's a partial list of my reactions to some stuff, big and small, that's been in the headlines:

1) Rove's departure. "Anti-climactic."

2) Chavez's move to consolidate power over the longer term. "Satisfyingly, though distressingly, predictable. People who didn't think this would happen right on schedule are the same sort who think George Bush won't leave office as scheduled--in short, fools."

3) Petraeus' report to be written by White House! "What's shocking or even surprising about this? Among other things, the Commander in Chief lives and works there, for good or for ill. In any case, I don't remember certain members of our Congress being so all-fire eager to get information from the horse's mouth when they boycotted a briefing with Petraeus a few months back. Political hay, plain and simple. The report is and was going to be criticized--or embraced, depending--regardless of its technical author."

4) AT&T issues book-length iPhone bills. "It figures, knowing what I know about that culture (based on some consulting experience years ago). And isn't it a charming touch to have text messages compiled and printed out? I've come to the conclusion that Icepick is right, and these "bills" are a good and healthy reminder: Any privacy we think we have is an illusion; corporate America has pretty much our entire lives in databases and, our protests to the contrary notwithstanding, most of us do and will continue to willingly and eagerly enable that, mostly for convenience."

5) Scott Thomas Beachamp: "The triumph of truthiness. And where did anybody get the idea that major fact-checking takes place anywhere in newspapers and magazines anymore? The very idea that departments of fact-checking still meaningfully exist is a quaint anachronism. I mean, what the heck--are we confusing TNR with the New Yorker circa 1955, or what? Make no mistake, I believe fervently in the importance of fact-checking. I just don't believe it takes place particularly rigorously anywhere anymore, for most part."

6) Campaign 2008: "Nails, meet chalkboard. Does anyone truly like picturing any of the candidates as president, much less find them inspiring? And whose idea was it to turn our traditionally already too-long campaign season into a freakin' marathon? I can't decide whether they're trying to irritate or numb us into submission, but in either case, it's darn near a criminal offense, and I resent it. So there."

Enough for now.

What Passes For Healthy Debate These Days

[Posted by reader_iam]

(Quotes from this article.)

"Frankly, Michael Moore is an example of why the health care system costs so much in this country. He clearly is one of the reasons that we have a very expensive system. I know that from my own personal experience," said Huckabee, who lost more than 110 pounds and became an avid runner after he was diagnosed with diabetes.

"I know how much more my health care cost when I didn't take care of myself than when I do take care of myself, not only in terms of doctor visits but regular diseases, illnesses, chronic things that come up, monthly prescription bills," Huckabee said. "All of those things have gone dramatically down since I've taken care of myself and worked to live a healthier lifestyle."
...
"Looks like Mike Huckabee is auditioning for some insurance company dough, since he's raised just about no money and sparked zero interest since jumping into the race," O'Hara said in a response provided by Moore's production office. "I wonder what the good governor would say to the French, who drink more, smoke more, eat more cheese and still live longer than us despite paying less for health care?"
...
"Let me ask you, have you ever met anybody when they were really sick say, 'Oh my gosh, I have a desperate disease. Get me to Havana, I've got to have the best health care in the world,'" Huckabee said.
...
"Anything we could do to help steer people to healthier habits comes back to us many times over and that's a real focus that needs to happen," Huckabee said.

"Right now, insurance companies will pay $100,000 or more for a quadruple bypass but wouldn't pay a couple hundred dollars for a person to have nutrition counseling and maybe to work with an exercise physiologist to determine how to get those extra pounds off. ... It's a lot better to spend some more money on the prevention side than it is on the intervention side."
...
"No wonder the Republicans are in such trouble - their entire plan to fix the health care system in this country is to tell people to lose weight," [O'Hara] said. "Maybe if Mike Huckabee and his Republican friends stopped sucking up to health-insurance campaign contributors they wouldn't feel the need to blame Americans for this crisis. Just because he stopped eating Twinkies by the bushel doesn't make that an outline for a national health care plan.

"There's nothing worse than a reformed smoker - or Twinkie eater for that matter - preaching conversion." [OT Aside: Is O'Hara inadvertently decrying health nag-and-nanny-ism here? Wow, what irony--but that's a whole other subject.]

Playing With Fire

[Posted by reader_iam]

Joe Biden refers to the Yearly Kos Convention as "the Daily Kos thing," which blooper doesn't escape scathing notice. As always, Matador Joe's timing is impeccable, what with the convention coming up at the beginning of August and his planning to attend and all. I mean, talk about waving a red flag! (Clumsily, too.)

Listen to yourself, Joe:

[Q:] Do you think in the era of YouTube and video cellphones, you can get away with being Joe Biden? ...
[A:] The answer is probably not. ...

***

Also, partly for the record and partly because I can't resist: MBNA, as a corporation, is no more, having been bought out by Bank of America. Might need to update the snark. Only sayin'.

Hat tip, Memeorandum.

A Real Yuck (No Yuk About It)

[Posted by reader_iam]

In the "He'd never stop throwing up" category.