As the great wheel turns, and the gloaming fades into the summer night, I place my hands once more on the monitor. Once more, the distance between us dissolves, and I am overwhelmed by your insistent voices. Oh yes, I sense you out there in the dark American night, and yes, I still have my suspicions about you.

As I was watching The Daily Show tonight, I was thinking about how more than ever, it seems there are some media types that have really started to tee off on the ridiculous coverage of this election, and the insipid nature of the state of journalism as a whole.

    While I enjoyed NN08 immensely (except for the cold brunch, the lack of plug outlets in the big hall, a candidate who repeatedly ducked a brief interview with me--although a more famous candidate did an interview with me!!--, and other minutiae), I did wonder about the explosion of New Age spirituality in the exhibitors' area.

    "Share International USA" had a booth featuring their teachings/propaganda about "Maitreya the World Teacher", complete with photo!! how convenient!! (see here on Share Int'l site for the same pic of Maitreya. Ain't it great they got a photo of the Holy One?)

    Did Arianna Huffington have anything to do with this?? Ouch.

    (below the fold, it gets WAY worse)

Trolls on your marks.  Get Set.  Counting down: 3, 2, 1.  Go.

John Ashcroft thinks it's okay to torture members of the United States Armed Forces.  However, Mr. Ashcroft sometimes has problems with facts and reality.  It seems unlikely that he would approve of the use of waterboarding on his own person.  Perhaps waterboarding would help change his mind.

A special shout out to Michael Savage.  The "brats" aren't faking autism.  In Michael's case I'd say he's not faking stupidity either.

Just for the record, in case anyone gets confused, I'm voting for the candidate who works out (That's bad, Nutz?).  He's a strong man, both physically and of character.  You may have heard of him.  His name is Barack.

Number of times I wanted Ron Paul to run the show: -1000
Number of insane things Congress has done:  I lost count.
Keep your head down, this bazooka has a hair trigger.
Onward.

I have to confess to two things right off the bat, before I get to the substance of the diary.

The first is that I did not read Arianna's "Moving to the middle is for losers".  The reason is that the title said it all and I did not agree with the premise of the title to begin with (if the premise is wrong, the conclusions have no material relevance).  I was annoyed by the utter mindlessness with which the left seemed to fall for this stupid McCampaign meme that the corporate media was priming the pump with.

The second is much more fun to confess:  I have long been a fan of Rudyard Kipling in general and his If in great particular -- I love that poem: I love its style, its substance and its sheer quiet counsel (I fancy that I live by its premise :-)

So read both (just click on the links above) and follow me over the fold to see what Al Giardano has to say about all this, oh so beautifully...

Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe
By Arianna Huffington
Alfred A. Knopf
New York: 2008
400 pages, $24.95

"There's going to be other wars," John McCain said in January 2008. "We will never surrender but there will be other wars." And, shockingly, the idea did not seem to fill him with unbearable sadness. In fact, he seemed like a grizzled football coach at the tail end of a long career, finally about to get a shot at coaching the Super Bowl.

It's tempting to slide into thinking some pundits' personalities loom larger than their actual output, and Arianna Huffington, I confess, is one of those for me. Her stage presence, her accent, her command of the microphone when put on the spot, all dazzle and make it easy to forget she writes--and blogs--as the basis of her current success. With Right Is Wrong, however, her ability to cut to the chase and make her case in print shines through as she gallops readers through all the ways and on all the topics on which the right has been ... well ... wrong during the Bush ascendancy.

Needless to say, it is not a pretty picture. Iraq, the economy, privacy rights ... Daily Kos readers know the drill. What Huffington does though is pull the strands together--or take them apart at times--to examine how it all is of one piece. She does this with writing that snaps, crackles and pops , and a goodly dose of humor. I never thought I'd say revisiting the dreary record of the Bush years could be a romp, but here you have it: It's a romp, with lots of indignation and direct-hit metaphors. Take, for example, the latter part of a chart she inserts when discussing the Bush's love of sloganeering:

2006. NEW WAY FORWARD

2007. SURGE TO VICTORY

2008. A NEW WAY BACKWARD

        A FASTER NEW WAY BACKWARD
        HOLY SHIT, LET'S GET OUT OF HERE

2009. A NEW WAY OF FORGETTING IT EVER HAPPENED

2010. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

2011. THE NEW GATHERING THREAT

Huffington has a real gift for marrying indignation and dark humor--it's one of the secrets of her success, if you look closely. She's a zippy and entertaining writer who stands out in a field in which the dreary and ponderous often gain more renown, and I've often thought she's underrated because she's often the most accessible. Right Is Wrong is a case in point--this is the ideal book to buy and pass on to undecideds you know, or people who aren't as immersed in the day-to-day shenanigans of the Bush administration as your average blog reader. There is an assumption throughout that readers are at least loosely aware of current events (the full blow-by-blow of the Plame outing, for example, is not provided, but just the mere outline), and that's what is needed to clarify the situation is equal doses parody, documentation and electric editorializing. It's an amusing batch she whips up, that's for sure.

Take, for example, her bull's eye take on the media, and one of its most revered scions in particular:

So how come Woodward, supposedly the preeminent investigative reporter of our time, missed the biggest story of our time-—a story that was taking place right under his nose?

Some would say it was because he was carrying water for the Bushies. I disagree. I think it's because he's the dumb blonde of American journalism, so awed by his proximity to power that he buys watever he's being sold.

I doubt I'll ever listen to Woodward on Larry King Live again without a neon sign flashing in my mind: Dumb blonde. Dumb blonde.

Or consider her skewering of David Gergen, who remarked, "While the benchmarks may seem like sort of a Washington game, in some ways, they're a very important prelude to the United States beginning to look for a way to disengage." Clear the way, folks, Arianna's whipped out a pair of sardonic knives:

A prelude to beginning to look for a way to disengage? In other words, let's wait six more months to see how things are going, the, if this latest in a long line of unmet benchmarks also goes unmet, we can begin to commence to initiate the starting of thinking about the mulling over of the consideration of a possible path that could, in time, lead us to begin to commence to start looking for a means that could, with any luck, result in America beginning to commence to start withdrawing from Iraq. Eventually.

Or the wry, painful observation that "We may yet reach a point where the only sector of scientific inquiry that is safe from the anti-science mobs on the Right is weapons research."

She also fires off some cunning analysis too, as she reviews the Bush administration's sanction of torture. Many critics have cited the need for revenge, or desperation for results, or general depravity or the desire to carve out more authoritarian territory for the unitary executive. While acknowledging that these other motives probably are play, Huffington makes an additional argument seemingly self-evident in its simplicity:

But there's also a way in which torture is a by-product of the well-known Bush laziness: the 9-5 workday, the long summer vacations, the impatience with detail. Torture is trying to get intelligence on the cheap.

The one oddity in the book--which can be skipped, obviously--is that each chapter closes with a kind of recap summary of the section's material that settles into a far duller and more prosaic voice (I suspect an editor urged this upon author). These closings are headed:Why the Right Was Wrong About [fill in the blank: Iraq, the economy, health care, etc.]. Huffington has a kind of giddy zest in her writing, particularly evident in book length, and these tacked-on afterthought summations appear to be an attempt to rein her in and make her less brash and more serious. This is not a good idea. She is at her best when running unhampered, and praise the heavens she's on our side and is the bigger-than-life personality--and writer-- that she is.

Arianna Huffington is far more astute and sincere than the many “assassins” who populate Daily Kos with their attacks against Diarists with their inane comments in response. Although it is obvious why most of them don’t do their own posts since they have nothing useful to say and besides it’s better hiding in the shadows for them. Back to Arianna Huffington and her IMPORTANT post on her own Website titled “ Seven Things Barack Should Do to Stop From Blowing It.”

We've seen it before: Obama's doing great; he's polling well; he's making all the right moves.  Then the media, looking to make a horse race where there isn't one, seizes on some theme or other and tries to knock Obama down.  There was the dirty Chicago pol theme, the scary black man with the aggreived wife and the crazy preacher theme and then the elitist theme.  Now we are on to the "running to the center theme."

So why are we helping them with this?  And yes, I mean you Markos and you Glenn Greenwald.Glenn Greenwald

(Source: Huffington Post)

In her freshly posted entry, Arianna Huffington breezily mentions that everyone's favorte Irrelevant Pundit with a Pink Tie had a little convo with the Prez.

We can not let the wingnuts get away with their garbage! We let them say whatever smear about how the "Islamaists" will have fair game under a President Obama. It's their scare tacticts fantasy. There's enough of this crap going around that it seems rather well planned to me.

An outrage that did not go unnoticed by dday in Neocons: Wrong About Everything:

Real men know that such multilateralism is excessively dangerous and will cause all of us to be blown to bits.

   

HEWITT: By the way, I -- I'm still trying to find two tickets to the Ohio State-USC game. And none of the USC people will give up their tickets to me. I'd pay fair price. They -- they know Ohio State's gonna slaughter the Trojans. They know that they're gonna slaughter the Trojans, and therefore they do not want me there at the bloodbath, since it's probably the last football game we'll ever get to see before the United States gets blown up by the Islamists under Obama.

Surprise visit yesterday from THE DUDE, the real one, not the character in The Big Lebowski....though that's who the character is based on--Jeff Dowd, the Dude. He dropped in to do KCRW's Guest DJ Project, and let me know he's a big fan of Left, Right and Center! Check the real DUDE out here: www.jeffdowd.com Meantime, today's show is: Guns and SCOTUS; North Korea and Nukes; Oil; Democratic Unity; Obamacons. Guest right is Jim Antle, Assoc. Editor of the conservative American Spectator Magazine. Here's today's show, some highlights below: KCRW's Left, Right and Centerwww.jeffdowd.com

Did you miss this? Satirist Harry Shearer www.KCRW.com/etc/programs/ls interviewed Arianna Huffington, Webby Award-winning blogger who is editor-in-chief of Huffingtonpost.com, and a regular panelist on the station’s popular political week-in-review show, Left, Right & Center www.kcrw.com/news/programs/lr. Right is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe. It’s serious fun. Listen here:

Harry Shearer's Le ShowKCRW's Left, Right and Center

Tune in online or on air: live at 2:30 and 7 pm Pacific time 89.9 FM in SoCal, www.KCRW.com around the world. Obama announces he won’t take public funding-- is campaign finance reform dead? Is it good news or bad news when more Americans add their dollars to elections? Would offering every voter a voucher to apply to whatever they support make Goldman Sachs’ money less influential? Should we start offshore drilling to offset the increase in oil prices? Or is that just more backward thinking, promoting further environmental ruin for not much of a difference in supply or demand? And finally, does China’s Communist-party controlled economic growth prove that America’s liberal capitalism is no longer a role model for the world’s developing powers? Tony’s just back from a trip there and shares his observations.

As we all know, McCain is trying to try court Hillary supporters and women in general by trying to portray himself as this "maverick" and "moderate".  But the truth is that McCain has an absolutely HORRIBLE record on women's issues.  

Furthermore in terms of Hillary supporters, many of them do not know that McCain only a few years ago told an absolutely unforgiveable joke about Hillary's family because he attacked Chelsea Clinton when no politician should attack a candidate's child.  He made an extremely crude sexual joke about Hillary, Chelsea Clinton, and Janet Reno.  He said "Chelsea Clinton is so ugly that her fatehr is Janet Reno".  Disgusting man.  http://www.salon.com/...

Well it's time to pull back the facade that is known as "John McCain" on women's issues.  Sit back and learn the truth.

Quotables:

Amity Shlaes says economics often lays the path for politics.
Bob Scheer says Hummers didn't drive us to high oil prices.
Arianna Huffington says McCain sounds like Bob Dole -- it's the 80s all over again.
Matt Miller wonders aloud whether the media is destroying democracy.

Congrats to Arianna: Huffington Post has again been named a big Webby Award winner -- 2008 awards go to her for best political blog and favorite People's Voice blog in the political category.

6/6/08 guest "RIGHT" Amity Shlaes ("The Forgotten Man" ) got the ball rolling calling for a new CENTER in American Politics. She's the first conservative I've heard who says LIBERAL is NOT a dirty word!

There's been too much talk lately about the deep (but healing!) divisions the Democratic primary has caused. I'd like to take a moment to step back and talk about the reason why things got that way: we were passionate about someone that inspired us. That's a good thing!

But I wanna know more. Who else inspires you? Who in politics and the media has made you passionate about politics?

Here's my short list (in no particular order, and I'm sure I'm forgetting a few):
Bill Moyers
Keith Olbermann
Tony Benn
Dennis Kucinich
George Carlin
Jon Stewart
Arianna Huffington
Barack Obama
Ed Murrow

Update: Just to clarify, I included only people who I have personally seen/heard/read and were inspired by. You need not hold yourself to such strict rules, but that's why there are some obvious, glaring omissions here.

Conservative Amity Shlaes sits in for Tony Blankley today. Her book about FDR and the failings of the New Deal in part will drive some of the discussion on today's Left, Right and Center 2:30 pm Pacific on radio (89.9 FM) and live stream at www.KCRW.com. She'll be talking about some of Obama's ideas as a new New Deal -- the good, the bad and the flat-out wrong. Hope you'll listen online or on air. More after we record the show today. And Arianna Huffington will stick around to do an interview with our house satirist Harry Shearer (Le Show, Sundays 10 am PT http://www.kcrw.com/... he blogs on HuffingtonPost.com and will be interviewing Arianna about her new book "Right is Wrong," to air later in June.