A couple of interesting stories for a beautiful fall day!
Maureen Dowd speculates on a conversation between George W. Bush (43) and Bill Clinton (42) upon hearing that 44 has won the Nobel Peace Prize. Even amidst the humor of the piece, Dowd manages to highlight the possible alternatives that might have been more plausible as recipients of the Nobel than Obama.
And the front page of the Washington Post today has a story about the coarsening of public discourse and political rhetoric as related to viral videos and technological change. Refreshingly, the story has a historical sensibility that recognizes the limits of presentism and recites some interesting negative moments from the past–Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and the like. Perhaps this sensibility comes because the story consulted and cited Tom Benson from Penn State.
1 response so far ↓
1 James Gilmore // Oct 11, 2009 at 10:26 am
While I liked most of the Post article, my only problem with that is that it dealt in the same false equivalencies that all the other commentators roll out whenever they want to avoid the appearance of “bias.” Case in point:
What they fail to point out here is that the Hitler depiction (I’m presuming they’re referring to the MoveOn controversy) wasn’t even officially a part of any PAC, but a user-submitted ad to MoveOn, and that Code Pink is just as critical of Democrats as they are of Republicans. In other words, they occurred outside the Democratic Party’s power structure, and with no overt (and likely no covert) support from the party apparatus or its leadership.
On the contrary, some of the most egregious examples of anti-Obama discourse – the “birther” controversy, the “death panel” nonsense, etc. – have found their way into mainstream Republican discourse, being mouthed not by the extreme groups outside the party but by Congress members and leaders within the party. The Post article quotes Michael Steele, chairman of the RNC, in comparing the NJ “Obama song” to Stalinesque propaganda. If Howard Dean had even said the word Stalin in relation to anything about President Bush during his tenure as DNC chairman, we wouldn’t have heard the end of the outcry even to this day.
The “mainstreaming” of hateful discourse among Republicans, as opposed to its marginalization among Democrats, is a crucial difference, I think, and one that gets overlooked by a media that’s eager to deflect charges of “bias” by engaging in “he said-she said” rather than engaging more critically with what’s happening in the discourse.
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