I'm sorry, but sometimes this place just drives me up the wall! I can accept the way people differ - passionately, but honestly - over health care reform. I can even accept - some of the time - people questioning the president's motives and motivation, whether the Democrats need to get a spine or grow a pair, and as for taking pot shots at the Republicans, well, I'm right up there on the line blasting away with the rest of us.
And if a diary gets me mad, or puts me in a funk, I will step quietly away from the computer and wait for it to pass.
But not this time. Not when a diary takes a pundit to task for something he didn't say, which totally misses the point, and then people here agree with it!
I'm talking about Frank Rich Goes There: Obama as hollow as Tiger Woods?
The thing is, Frank Rich did no such thing.
Now, in fairness to the route66, he did eventually catch on:
update.... my take and headline re. Rich's column do focus on the current state of affairs that Barack Obama finds himself in; Rich concludes his column with the graf I quoted first. I don't think Frank Rich intended to directly compare the antics of Woods with the efforts of the President and the situation each finds themselves in currently. The obvious snowballing of America by many parties, before Tiger, is paramount in the article. Many comments below have automatically focused narrowly on the fact that both are black and accuse Rich of racist undertones. Read the article and reach your own conclusions. I'm going to bed.
(Sorry, there's no timestamp on the update.)
I do wish he'd changed the title, though.
But my real quarrel is all the commentators there who, without reading Rich's article (here, by the way), or, for that matter, without reading the diary - which, again to be fair, did talk more about what Rich had in mind - assumed that Rich was attacking Obama, called him a racist or worse names.
Briefly: Rich's point is this:
If there’s been a consistent narrative to this year and every other in this decade, it’s that most of us, Bernanke included, have been so easily bamboozled. The men who played us for suckers, whether at Citigroup or Fannie Mae, at the White House or Ted Haggard’s megachurch, are the real movers and shakers of this century’s history so far.
Or, to quote the diarist again:
Rich details the "bamboozling" of the American Public throughout the decade, from Enron to Bush, Citgroup to John Edwards, Barry Bonds to Balloon Boy. He reserves his most pointed criticism for Tiger Woods, in a scathing indictment that makes Woods the poster boy for all that is wrong in America.... [Emphasis added]
The diarist got it half-right. (Only half, though, because the title is so misleading.)
The only time Rich brought in Obama was in his suggestion, in his final paragraph, that some people on the left and the right are beginning to look at Obama with the same cynicism which we've now turned on Tiger Woods. And then he says:
The truth may well be neither, but after a decade of being spun silly, Americans can’t be blamed for being cynical about any leader trying to sell anything. As we say goodbye to the year of Tiger Woods, it is the country, sad to say, that is left mired in a sand trap with no obvious way out.
Once again, Rich is not attacking President Obama, not comparing him to Tiger Woods, not making a racist connection or anything like that. He is saying that the cynicism exemplified by Woods' actions and our reaction to them is so pervasive that not even the President of the United States can escape being tainted with it. (Nor does it help that the previous president deserved all that and more.)
This would have been obvious to anyone who took the time to read Frank Rich's op-ed piece. For that matter, if people had read what the diarist put into the diary, they would also have caught on.
Instead, I found myself wading through comment after comment about how racist Rich was - and by the way, Rich never once mentions Woods' race; he focuses on
the exceptional, Enron-sized gap between this golfer’s public image as a paragon of businesslike discipline and focus and the maniacally reckless life we now know he led.
And on how the media fell for it.
Some of you got it. I saw a number of comments - and put in some of my own - pointing out how Rich was misrepresented. But too many of you took the headline, or someone else's comment, and ran with it right off the cliff.
People, we're supposed to be better than this. We're the blog that argues on facts, that makes people back up their assertions, that demands proof when someone makes an outrageous claim (or even an ordinary one). We're the place where diaries have more links than text, sometimes, as people document their evidence. "So where is it written?" ought to be the motto around here.
Maybe our nerves are raw over health care, or Afghanistan, or the latest Lieberman or GOP outrage. Or what Glenn Back said. (And why we should care.) All the more reason to stop and take a deep breath when something doesn't feel right.
We were all very proud of Al Franken when he stood on the Senate floor the other day and said: "We are entitled to our own opinions; we're not entitled to our own facts." What would Senator Franken say if he saw us now?
I've said my piece. It's late, Jean's waiting for me, and I've got two sick cats to worry about. Like route66, I'm going to bed.