Too Cool For School?

David Ignatius’s column in the Post frames Obama’s supposed unflappability as “cool,” unflinching. He seems a little flappable to me sometimes, but it’s a good political figure-ground experiment: you can read the coolness as statemanlike surety or uptight aloofness. (Guess which one the media will be going with this summer.) Ignatius captures some of [...]

Institutionalized

The irrepressible Dave Neiwart at Orcinus has a lengthy post about the now well-established patterns of racially charged (and otherwise duplicitous) political advertising. Well worth a couple of minutes to get a feel for just how institutionalized this is:
It’s important to understand the role that people like [Floyd] Brown [creator of the "Willie Horton" ads] [...]

Another Day In Paradise

Greenwald does a detailed analysis of the brazen manipulation of the media by the Pentagon’s military analysts and concludes:
But what is most extraordinary about all of this is that huge numbers of Americas who were subjected to this propaganda by their own Government still don’t know that they were, because the television networks which broadcast [...]

Say Anything

Time’s running out to get this war with Iran started. Fortunately, the neocons know just how to fire up the Decider. Greenwald’s got the goods. Worth a read to see just how free they feel to invent new realities.

There Is No Middle Ground

Tristero at Hullaballoo quoting Matt Taibi on the church run by McCain’s Christian fig leaf, John Hagee:
By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to “be rational” or “set aside your religion” about such things as the Iraq War or other policy [...]

Here Comes The Windup…

… and the pitch. Via Digby:
… The story was a giggling GOP oppo plant, but that didn’t stop the kewl kidz from running with it. I don’t need to remind you about John Kerry and his “butler” and the “green tea” and the “wit-whiz” psuedoscandals of 2004. If Clinton were still the front runner, she’d [...]

Nuclear Reaction

The half-life of credulousness among the Washington press corps is probably just long enough to get us to January, at which point, they’ll all wake up as principled watchdogs again. Meanwhile, says Greenwald:
That the administration is voicing these accusations is, of course, news, and the accusations ought to be reported. And even though it seems [...]

Echo Chamber of Horrors

Evil blogs delight in helping put innocent people in prison.
We have no such power here at Big Ink. More’s the pity.

The Secret Word is… “Farkakte”

Reed Hundt at TPM takes an avuncular tone arguing for reason and strategy in the liberal blogosphere. I’ll tilt at that windmill with him:
… What bloggers need to do is focus now on the madness and not on the Clinton vs Obama counterpoint, which all of us can agree is getting old. What all Democrats [...]

I Love The Smell Of Hegemony In The Morning

It’s not really “news,” per se, but it’s interesting analysis. Via the NY Times:
…To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of [...]