Year: 2003

DEAN’S COJONES

Score one for Howard Dean. There’s no need for him to apologize for his confederate flag remarks. The fact that he held firm under fire last night struck me as a good sign of his tenacity and refusal to give in to p.c. lynch-mobs. He’s absolutely right to say that the Dems need to appeal nationally again – wasn’t that Zell Miller’s point? But the true test of a serious pol is if he can hold fast when being pummeled for the wrong reasons. Dean won the exchange in my eyes.

A NEW MEDIA TRIUMPH?

Matt Drudge is interpreting CBS’s welcome decision to punt on its anti-Reagan biopic as “the beginning of a second media century.” Terry Teachout concurs:

Of course it’s a new-media story, and of course it wouldn’t have happened five years ago. I’ve been following Big Media’s coverage of the flap over The Reagans, and just two days ago I noted with interest and amusement a wire story claiming that CBS would be pleased by the controversy, since it would inevitably increase the series’ ratings. That is soooooo last year. Those of us who blog, whatever our political persuasions, know better. Boycotts of Big Media have always been feasible in theory. (Newspapers, in case you didn’t know, take cancel-my-subscription-you-bastards letters very seriously-if they get enough of them.) In practice, though, they rarely worked, because it was too difficult to mobilize large-scale support quickly enough. No more. Fox News, talk radio, and the conservative-libertarian sector of the blogosphere have combined to create a giant megaphone through which disaffected right-wing consumers who have a bone to pick with Big Media can now make themselves heard.

One way of testing this is to see whether Jim Romenesko followed the story – a good indicator of whether it really is damaging to the media liberal establishment. He ignored it, buttressing Drudge’s and Teachout’s case. I take all of Matt’s and Terry’s points. But, from all the excerpts Drudge has exposed, this biopic seems to me to be almost one of a kind. It was so egregiously designed to attack a beloved president in his waning years, so riddled with obvious lies and distortions, so hateful in its intent, that I doubt any major network would have gotten away with it in any time. Even Leslie Moonves, the Castro-loving lefty who runs CBS, was forced to concede: “It’s biased.” Can you imagine how bad it is if even Moonves sees through it? In some ways, I think Drudge has inadvertently rescued CBS. If the miniseries had run, the backlash would have been so great, the exposure of the poisonous bias in parts of CBS so final, it might have helped destroy the already-flailing old media network. So the new media saved the old media. That in itself, of course, is a major story. And Drudge deserves credit for reporting it. Yes, reporting it. Why do the old media never give him credit when he does journalism as well as any of them?

LUSKIN AND ATRIOS

This is how the blogosphere should deal with disputes. Congrats to both of them.

FROM THE ‘DEMOCRATIC UNDERGROUND’: A new low for the far left: a post titled, “Why I Hope the Bloodshed Continues in Iraq.” I kid you not.

DERBYSHIRE AWARD NOMINEE: “One is, Do I think [a Catholic schism with liberals leaving the Church en masse] would be better that way? No. Do I think it’s possible? Do I think it’s possible for someone who believes in the sanctity of marriage, the sanctity of life, the sanctity of family, over a period of time to choose to survive with people who think it’s OK to kill women and children or for — quote — homosexual couples to exist and be recognized? No, I don’t think that’s possible. I don’t know how it’s going to work itself out, but I know it’s not possible, and my hope and prayer is that it does not end in violence. But, unfortunately, in the past, these types of things have tended to end this way. If American Catholics feel that’s troubling, let them. I don’t feel it’s troubling at all.” – Revd John C. McCloskey, Opus Dei priest and guru to the paleocon set. He’s referring to his own prediction of a future Catholic Church in which all dissenting remnants have been purged – leaving it with perhaps 30 percent of its current membership in the U.S. I have no idea what he means by “killing women.” (Abortion?) But to equate toleration of murder with toleration of the mere existence of homosexual relationships seems to me to be a revealing hyperbole. (Notice how he won’t even deign to call gay relationships “homosexual couples”. Such a term would accord them too much dignity.) Subsequently, McCloskey also makes the following statement:

“There’s a name for Catholics who dissent from church teachings. They’re called Protestants. As someone who’s really a Catholic – and if you asked me, I’d say I consider myself a Catholic – it’s something that you hope doesn’t interfere with your citizenship, but that’s reality. What I’m saying is, a lot of Catholics who were totally faithful to the church started to assimilate, but the assimilation was not simply in terms of ‘I’m a Catholic, and I’m also an American.’ It was also giving in to the Protestant secular ethos of the United States of America.”

What McCloskey is saying is that the old canard about Catholic dual loyalties is not only true but admirable! McCloskey’s radicalism is echoed by Senator Santorum, who has also attacked president John Kennedy’s distinction between public life and private religious faith. This is the new face of ultra-orthodoxy.

“WANNABE AYATOLLAH”

That’s how Eric Alterman describes me in his latest screed in the Nation, defending Paul Krugman’s limited defense of Mahathir Mohamed. Now I’m not unused to insults but this one is bizarre. If you’ve read this blog for a while, you’ll know I don’t pull a lot of punches in exposing what I think is dumb or malign or just wrong out there in the media and politics. If such criticism means I’m an ayatollah, then I guess Alterman is entitled to his opinion. But I’m a First Amendment absolutist, an opponent of all attempts to control people’s thoughts and ideas, a long opponent of religious fundamentalism of all kinds, an anti-theocrat, a supporter of the war against Islamist terror, and a strong proponent of gay rights. How this makes me like the theocrats who run Iran is beyond me. Alterman needs to find some wit to equal his bile.

REACH OUT AND TOUCH SOMEONE: Here’s some interesting ideas for human bonding, from the primate kingdom:

Genital fiddling is unique to guinea baboons, but other primates invade each other’s space in similarly challenging ways. White-faced capuchin monkeys, for example, stick their fingers up each other’s noses in greeting.

Hey, dude. Boog.