Have you ever read a political piece that is so striking in its accuracy and powerful in its ability to accurately diagnose some unhealthy aspect of our society's nature that you just want to stand up and shout its message to the heavens (and your neighbors)? Well, I just did.
In a blog post today at Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald got fed up by the media-powered idiocy of our national discourse and fired a shot across the bow of the "journalist class." You really, really need to read it (but I would caution those inflicted with dangerously high blood pressure to keep their medication handy). Here's an excerpt:
In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to "domestic military operations" within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.
Greenwald then provides a bit of empirical evidence, showing how the truly important stories of the week were overwhelming overshadowed by the nonsense pimped by the triviality-enamored media elite. He follows this data up with some well-deserved snark:
Obama's bowling has provided almost a full week of programming on MSNBC. Gail Collins, in The New York Times, today observed that Obama went bowling "with disastrous consequences." And, as always, they take their personality-based fixations from the Right, who have been promoting the Obama is an Arrogant, Exotic, Elitist Freak narrative for some time. In a typically cliched and slimy article, Time's Joe Klein this week explored what the headline called Obama's "Patriotism Problem," where we learn that "this is a chronic disease among Democrats, who tend to talk more about what's wrong with America than what's right." He trotted it all out -- the bowling, the lapel pin, Obama's angry, America-hating wife, "his Islamic-sounding name."
Needless to say, these serious and accomplished political journalists are only focusing on these stupid and trivial matters because this is what the Regular Folk care about. They speak for the Regular People, and what the Regular People care about is not Iraq or the looming recession or health care or lobbyist control of our government or anything that would strain the brain of these reporters. What those nice little Regular Folk care about is whether Obama is Regular Folk just like them, whether he can bowl and wants to gorge himself with junk food.
I have little to add to Greenwald's insights, save a hearty "Amen!" I don't know whether people like Greenwald and Josh Marshall have any real shot at bringing honesty, responsibility and reason back to the Fourth Estate of our postmodern world, but even if the cause is lost, their attempts provide a satisfyingly-caustic sense of catharsis to this reader. Keep it up, Glenn--we are listening.