TSW #36

[DemocratsForProgress]

Jeff Rosenzweig: TSW #36

It’s a mercy that I caught every moment of prime time TV coverage of the Democratic convention (mostly via PBS, where the daft commentary was generally kept to a minimum, at least when David Brooks wasn’t talking). If I’d had to depend on certain myopic print and internet pundits for a retroactive overview, I’d be as hopelessly clueless about the event as they are.

Others, of course, aren’t myopic at all; they just have a naked agenda. In post-truth America, anyone can have a soapbox and say just as many patently untrue things as the mood, or the paymaster, might dictate. And it pays; there’s always someone somewhere – or thousands, or even millions – who, no matter the transparency of the falsehoods being pushed, will take the bullshit straight up. Recently, for instance, I ran across an absolutely remarkable Wall Street Journal piece by Charles G. Koch, a gentleman whose name, in some bright and, let us hope, not too distant future, will be as synonymous with “traitor” as Benedict Arnold’s. Koch’s piece is entitled “Corporate Cronyism Harms America.”

That’s sort of like Jerry Sandusky penning an impassioned appeal to street-proof your kids, or A-Rod bemoaning the effect of performance-enhancing substances on baseball, or David Koresh doing a PSA spotlighting the perils of cults.

Steve Huntley of the Chicago Sun-Times contributed a piece on the convention that splits the difference between the myopic and the agenda-driven. It reads suspiciously as though it had been written before a single speaker had taken the stage in Charlotte, although Huntley inserted a glib reference to the President’s and the ex-President’s speeches that could just as easily have been based on an intuitive notion of how they would unfold as on the actual speeches themselves. Huntley has a lot to say, most of it so utterly silly it’s hardly worth responding to, but responding to this sort of tripe is why TSW exists, so here goes...

More at: http://www.democratsforprogress.com/2012/09/24/tsw-36/