Tethered Swimming

“Everyone always says they have to work a lot harder when I’m around.” - Homer Simpson

The death of Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan has thrown our media a bit off kilter (really, who has the temerity to up and die before the New Year but after everyone has done their 2007-in-review pieces?).  Still, most of them are far too professional to let anything as inconsequential as a major assassination really affect them and so we’ve been treated to the usual mile wide, inch deep type coverage.  The hell of it is, there isn’t any point in blaming or chastising our journalistic overlords for their typically shoddy performance.  Pakistan is an extremely complicated country that has baffled people far more capable than American pundits for its entire existence.

If you want to get a decent outline of Pakistan I highly recommend this recent Tariq Ali piece in the London Review of Books.  It’s concise, informative, and very well written but it’s still almost 8,000 words long and amounts to little more than a sketch of the deep complexities of Pakistani politics.  And that was before the political earthquake on Thursday; the situation is probably even more unsettled and fluid now.

Pakistan is currently run by an unpopular man who may or may not still be a military dictator and may or may not have ordered or somehow green lighted Thursday’s killing.  Up until this week it had two ex-Prime Ministers, neither one of whom was a particularly effective or honest leader in the past, running around in preparation for an election of dubious credibility.  Now it has one ex-Prime Minister running around and the election of dubious credibility will likely be postponed at the very least.  In short, it is a very big mess.  Here’s the good news though, it isn’t our mess.  Thinking that it is, or that we can have anything but minor influence over how it is resolved, amounts to little more than arrogant masturbation.

Indeed, any involvement on our part is likely to be both clumsy and ineffective.  The American government and its agents are not Pakistanis and do not have the best interests of Pakistan or its people at heart.  Our interest in that troubled country has largely been restricted to furthering our own geopolitical goals.  This is not a recent development, it goes back decades from a time when we saw Pakistan as a bulwark against a more socialist leaning India through the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the prick waving nuclear tests with India and right up to today.  Pakistan’s government and Pakistan’s people are far more aware of that history than any American and they have no trouble differentiating between offers of aid made out of genuine friendship and self interested meddling.  Any actions we take now, and for a long time to come, will inevitably and correctly be seen as the latter.

Pakistan and its people are not threats to global stability or American security or any other grand sounding justifications for interference, nuclear weapons and Osama bin Laden or not.  Islamic government, in a Taliban style, isn’t something that they want or will get; after all these are people who have had front row seats to the ongoing debacle in Afghanistan.

Leave Pakistan alone.  Trust them to sort out their own affairs.  This is not some failed state like oh, say, Iraq or Afghanistan.  This is a country with a history, albeit a troubled one, of democracy.  This is a country that possesses an established court system, a raucous press and multi-party politics.  Those institutions aren’t perfect and have certainly gone through a lot of hard times but they are indigenous and they’ve fought hard for themselves.  They’ve fought harder than we could ever motivate them to through bribery or trickery because, unlike us, they actually care about the long term future of their country.

The Law of Unintended Consequences ensures that any actions we do take will not have the desired outcome; Bhutto was in country at least partly at our behest.  Now she’s dead and matters are worse.  We cannot guarantee a good outcome in Pakistan though force, diplomacy, economic pressure or voodoo.  We can only stand by and watch and hope for the best.

“I’d just like to use this occasion to announce my retirement, undefeated, from the world of video boxing.” - Bart Simpson

As meaningless sports achievements go, having the New England Patriots go 16-0 is pretty remarkable.  It hasn’t happened in twenty-five years and there’s a decent case to be made that the Patriots had a harder going of it than those old Dolphins; if the Pats win on Saturday night you’ll see it made repeatedly.  The addition of the salary cap will be mentioned as will the extension of the regular season from fourteen to sixteen games.  If you want to you could also throw in expansion, technical changes in the game and any other ways the league has evolved since 1972.  I think most of that is bunk, comparing teams from different seasons can be entertaining, but it’s pointless.

What isn’t pointless is the fact that the Patriots might be on the verge of crossing over from NFL dynasty to pop-culture reference point.  If you want a meaningful difference between the 1972 Dolphins and the 2007 Patriots, it’s that in 1972 there was no internet, no ESPN, and the NFL wasn’t yet the biggest sports league in the country by a huge margin.  Today we have all those extra outlets for sports information and the NFL is in a league of its own in terms of popularity.  NFL lore speaks highly of dynastic teams, the Steelers of the seventies, the 49ers of the eighties, and the Cowboys of the nineties to name the three most famous examples.  But really they’re just NFL teams that had a few good years and nobody cares about them outside of the context of football.  The same may not be true of these Patriots.

The first place it’ll be noticed is in the ratings.  The Patriots are playing at eight pm on a Saturday night, one of the two weakest nights for television viewership.  But I’ll bet you it’s the highest rated game ever on the NFL Network, it’ll probably even trounce many more widely available channels that normally would be expected to outdo anything on the NFL Network.  Then we’ll have the playoffs and I’ll all but guarantee you that any game the Pats play sets records as well, especially if they play the Colts and Peyton Manning in the AFC championship game.  Should the Patriots advance to the Super Bowl, you’d better batten the hatches and nail everything down because even by Super Bowl standards the media hurricane will be a Category 5.  It’ll shatter all kinds of ratings records and set a standard that will be all but impossible for next year to match.

And if they win, if they go 19-0, then watch out man, because we’re going to be hearing about it for a very long time.  Books will be written about the team, that’s a forgone conclusion; movies might even be made.  But anything that successful will also garner attention from other quarters.  Eventually the Writers Guild will go back to work and all manner of scripts, for plays, television programs and movies are going to reference the Patriots.  It’s not part of some dark Boston marketing ploy, it’s just a famous event that a wide audience will understand.  Guests and hosts on talk shows of every variety, from sex and dating to politics and sports and everything in between, will have a new reference point to play with.  Self help authors looking to pad their word counts will talk about how the Patriots are a perfect example of their system for improvement and success.  Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, probably it’s neither, but the Patriots’ perfect season will be with us in ways we’d never expect.  Provided, of course, that they don’t lose.

“Ah son, you don’t need all that junk. I’m sure you’ve already got something much more important, a decent home and a loving father who would do anything for you.” - Homer Simpson

I was in a Babies R Us for the first time in five or six years yesterday. It was a surprising island of calm amidst the hubbub of Christmas shopping. The clerks asked each customer if the purchase was off a baby registry and at least half the answers I heard, including my own, were affirmative. So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by the lack of holiday frenzy; humping, and its inevitable byproducts, are about as non-seasonal as things get.

The store is still pretty creepy though. For one thing, the staff was comprised almost entirely of girls either in high school or not far removed from it. On a completely logical level there’s nothing strange about that, but in a country that has a constant background hysteria over teenage pregnancy (witness the hand wringing over the Spears girl this week) it is a little off putting. For another thing, there are huge posters and hanging pictures (6′ x 4′ easy) of smiling, Caucasian infants all over the place. As strange as it is to try and conduct a business transaction with barely post pubescent females beneath cherubic iconography, that isn’t the creepiest aspect of the place. The most disturbing thing is the way the entire store is set up to indoctrinate adults into the consumer ethos of American parenting.

While perusing the baby registry I jumped to the websites of some of the manufacturers. The utter lunacy of some of these products cannot be overstated. To call many of them insane is inadequate; I don’t think there’s a word for what they are. The amount of shit people buy and use for their kids is incomprehensible. Over at Safety 1st, they have three different nail trimmers of various complexities. The sales message of marketing a product as unremarkable as nail clippers under a brand of “Safety” is a simple one: You are a Bad Mommy if you use regular nail clippers - because those might chop off a finger! Never mind the fact that the world is not filled with people walking around with missing fingertips because their parents had trouble clipping their nails when they were infants.

Just at the Safety 1st website (I don’t like exclusively picking on them because I’m sure they have a lot of company, but they have the most egregious website) there’s a blanket shaped so that it will protect the kid from the seat built into shopping carts, a “Play Yard” which appears to be a play pen but without implying that your child is in prison, knee pads for when the little sperm sprout is learning to crawl and a whole host of other shit you can use to overprotect your child.

If you want to see something absolutely disgraceful though, check out this video. It’s a product sales pitch built around the idea that everything in your home is a potentially fatal hazard. While that’s certainly true in a very paranoid way, any innocuous object can be fatal given enough cockamamie and improbable scheming, it’s also wholly disingenuous. But claiming, as the video does, that, “This year, more children will die as a result of an unintentional injury than from all childhood diseases combined,” is boldly dishonest. I have no statistics to back me up, but I’m calling bullshit on that. I can’t believe that’s true even if you restrict yourself to someplace like the Upper East Side where wealth and adult attention know no bounds.

No wonder parents in this country are all nuts. Just having the kid is probably one of the most stressful things you’ll ever go through and on top of that you have to deal with the Safety 1st mafias of the world? Raising a kid, creating another person who will in turn influence other people and the world in general in ways large and small, is an awesome task. There is no right or wrong way to go about it because every individual human being is unique and so is every relationship between a parent and a child. But scaring the shit out of new parents isn’t the way to go. In it’s small sop to honesty, I’m sure compelled only by liability concerns, that video even says that no matter how many of their products you purchase, it’s no substitute for adult supervision. That’s the rub.

If you want to keep the little tyke from getting burned, don’t put child slowing (anyone who tells you something is child proof is lying) pieces of plastic over your oven controls, teach him that fire is hot and can burn you. It’s a simple lesson and learning from adults is the only way kids really grow up.

“This is boring.” - Stan Marsh

“Yeah.  Hey!  When are we gonna to get to some action?” - Kyle Broflovski

Two more weeks, two more weeks, two more weeks…that’s what I keep telling myself.  In just two weeks we’ll finally have the Iowa Caucuses, and then less than a week after that we’ll get the first actual primary in a race that started about seven seconds after Conrad Burns conceded last November and the Senate was confirmed as going Blue.  That’s a gap of almost fourteen months and to get some actual results in place of op-ed columns and on-line dustups declaring who won what will be a welcome relief.

We’re going to get four and a half exciting and meaningful weeks from the first week in January until the first week in February and then it’ll be back to the nonsense that we’ve had to endure this past year.  Both nominations will likely be decided by the February 5th primary orgy and after that we’re going to have to endure half a year’s worth of campaigning before we even get to the conventions.  It’s stupid and wasteful, and, what’s worse, it’s going to be boring.

So get ready for the good stuff, folks, because it ain’t gonna last.  While it’s happening, here are some memes and inevitably stupid storylines to watch for, in no particular order:

The Bush Administration Lies! - To call this White House scandal ridden or scandal prone is inadequate, at this point Bush the Younger’s presidency is primarily comprised of scandals.  As more and more of the Administration’s wrongdoing ends up in court, on television or in front of hostile Congressional committees, each new day brings with it a chance for something to explode all over the people vying to replace him.

Some of these Candidates Aren’t Protestant White Guys! - (Subheadings: Hillary Clinton is a Girl!, Barack Obama is Black!, Mitt Romney is a Mormon!) - These well established facts will still be cause for some public hand wringing, no matter the outcomes.  If, say, Obama wins in New Hampshire, some television anchor will throw it to an analyst with a lead in like, “We hate to even bring this up, but did Obama have any kind of racial prejudice to overcome here?”  If Obama, say, loses in New Hampshire that same intro would sound something like this, “Do you think this had anything to do with the fact that Obama isn’t white?”  Either way religion, gender, or race will be mentioned and someone will likely take it too far and make a story about a story.  Should be fun.

Voters Really Care About X! - In the aftermath of any vote there’s usually a knee jerk poll that says that one thing was on the minds of voters above others.  That one thing then morphs into the keystone for explaining what happened.  Later and more sober analysis usually proves this wrong, but it’ll be around for a few days.

Matchups! - It’s like speculating about playoff matchups.  Do you deliberately lose in Week 17 because you’d rather play the Colts than the Patriots in round 2?  Whoever looks to be ahead on one side after Iowa, then after New Hampshire and so on, will be scrutinized against whoever looks to be ahead on the other side at the same time.  Of course, speculation about how that might affect strategic thinking voters in the next round will be rampant and completely pointless.

I’m on record as saying that I think year round coverage of political campaigns is as silly as it is relentless.  I believe that, but the flip side is that right now, as we approach the primaries, obsessive coverage and hoopla are appropriate.  A single ill phrased remark or poorly timed joke really can sink a campaign or elect a president.  Uncountable lives and dollars hang in the balance.  Let the games begin.

“Ohhh, eight carousels, we’re in for a real treat.” - Marge Simpson

One of the first little anecdotes that early adopters of the World Wide Web liked to brag about to people who weren’t yet on-line was the ability to get a weather report from anywhere in the world.  Through the magic of your 2400 baud modem you could find out the weather in Singapore, just because.  It was silly and it was pointless, but it was interesting and novel because it was from the other side of the world and you got it through your computer.

Now, of course, there are countless ways to get your weather on-line.  You can have it e-mailed to you; you can personalize your Google/Yahoo/MSN/AOL home page to display your weather forecast when you first open the browser; or you can look it up on any one of a dozen sites.  Personally, I’m a fan of www.wunderground.com and I’ve been using it for almost a decade now.  It’s got a simple and easy interface, I can switch quickly to another location just by typing in a city or a zip code and the local radar tells me with amazing precision if I’m going to get rained on should I decide to take a walk.  Those are all handy things to have in a weather site, but they aren’t the reason I’ve stuck with this one for so long.  It’s the pretty pictures that have kept me coming back all these years.

Every time I load a page, a weather picture appears in a banner at the top of the screen and in a thumbnail on the left.  To call these “weather photos” is a bit of a stretch.  To qualify all they usually need is some part of the sky in the background, though even that is optional.  What makes them so great is the endless variety.  With each page load you might get a stunning mountain view in Alaska, or drab flooding in Europe.  It ranges all over the world and while some of the pictures are better than others the overall quality of them is nothing short of amazing.

Here’s the best part, you can click on the banner or the thumbnail to see a full size image along with information about where it was taken and the user who took it.  When you click through to the full image it also loads a new and different banner and thumbnail.  You can just keep clicking and you’ll keep getting new, often quite beautiful, images from around the world taken by ordinary people.  It’s addicting.

There’s rarely anyone in the image.  It’s usually just landscape (or cityscape) and sky, a small daily reminder of all the strange and wonderful places that you otherwise would never have thought about.  There isn’t anything profound about this, and for all I know there are multitudes of photography websites out there where you can do the exact same thing, but this little window into parts of the world that you ordinarily wouldn’t see is very reassuring on some basic level.  It isn’t like seeing images of far away places on the news when some awful event is occurring, nor is it like seeing travel shows that focus on tourist destinations or exotic nature.  Rather, these are images that ordinary people take in and around the places that they live.

It’s livens up the daily routine of checking the weather but it’s also a reminder of just how much world is out there.

“Dear baby, welcome to Dumpsville, population: you.” - Homer Simpson

I have new hope, possibly unfounded, that the Democrats in charge of Congress are beginning to realize that not only do they possess real power, but that their main opponent is crippled by internal incompetence and staggering unpopularity. Passing veto bait domestic bills is useful on some level, showing the folks back home just how much you could get done with a Blue living at 1600 and all that, but it’s largely pointless. Problems with our medical system, educational system and economy will still be with us a year from now. We’ve managed to postpone dealing with them so far, another dozen months or so isn’t going to kill too many people. The Iraq War, though, is killing people right now and any rational prioritization of the work required to clean up the messes of Bush the Younger has to start with that. Getting into a serious knock down drag out budget fight with this man poses few real risks and offers almost incalculable rewards.

In that spirit, I present an open letter to our fearless leaders:

Dear Shitbags,

Quit fucking around.

Signed,

Everyone Else

Cathartic as that was it didn’t strike quite the right tone. Let’s try it again:

Dear Congress,

Running out the clock on this Administration, while certainly an appealing option, isn’t a cost neutral strategy. The longer the mistakes of Bush the Younger are allowed to go uncorrected the more costly (in every way you can think of) they are going to be to fix. The man’s approval rating hovers around thirty percent; Cholera is more popular than he is. Standing up to him is win-win. You will become more likeable by doing so and in the process you might manage to change things for the better.

Moreover, the minority who still like him are probably lost. Everything we’ve been though so far hasn’t changed their minds; if they were going to stop liking this President they would have done so by now. At some point, one that we have likely already passed, it stops being about performance and simply becomes an issue of loyalty and/or stubbornness. They are beyond hope or redemption so there is little more you can do than to simply say, “Screw ‘em.”

That leaves the rest of us, the overwhelming majority, who don’t approve of this wretched man or his foolish war. End the war and please us and we’ll re-elect you to your cushy Washington jobs. We promise. Don’t fear excoriation at the hands of press people and pundits, the American people want all the troops home within a year by a two to one margin. I don’t mean to be telling tales out of class or anything, but we-the-voters count more than they-the-talkers do. We vote, donate and applaud, what more could any politician ask for?

Their oceans of spilled ink, uncountable hours of television and who knows how many trillions of colored pixels amount to nothing more than yesterday’s news. We know what we want - the war to end, immediately if not sooner - and if you don’t do it, we’ll elect someone who will. Please forgive the cliché, but ordinary Americans, people who do not obsessively follow tracking polls, who do not wait with baited breath for the quarterly fund raising numbers, who do not know the names of national political reporters, will be casting the ballots. It is we who will have the final say.

Sincerely,

The Great Majority of the American People

P.S. If you want to indict, try and convict Dick Cheney while you’re at it, we won’t mind in the least.

“I’m Bart Simpson, who the hell are you?” - Bart Simpson

“I’m Dave Shutton.  I’m an investigative reporter who’s on the road a lot and I must say that in my day we didn’t talk that way to our elders.” - Dave Shutton

“Well this is my day and we do, sir.” - Bart Simpson

With the possible exception of advertisers and Stephen Colbert no one in this country seems happy with the state of journalism.  The ineptitude of the press, so gleefully covered by sites like MediaMatters, is shockingly easy to expose and almost impossible to correct.  The recent “Barack Obama might (maybe) pray toward Mecca” story in the Washington Post is an excellent example, but there have been lots of others.  The general complaint, so far as political reporting is concerned, is that the byline brigade covers political campaigns almost exclusively from a sporting angle and that covering politics in that way allows huge piles of obvious bullshit to go unchallenged and that in turn allows politicians as empty as Bush the Younger to ascend to high office.  There’s a lot of merit to that claim, but the seldom asked question is why.  So let’s ask it, why does the media suck?

It’s not an issue of corporate ownership, lazy journalism or partisan bias, at least not directly.  Those are symptoms of an underlying cause.  They are self perpetuating symptoms, but they are not causal.  The real cause is the audience, specifically the small but sizable fraction of the country that follows politics as a hobby, the civically engaged, if you will.  These are the people who listen to talk radio, watch cable news, and post comments on political blogs.

Six weeks ago the long suffering people over at the Project for Excellence in Journalism posted a summation of this year’s campaign coverage so far.  Not surprisingly they found that press coverage of the 2008 campaign is heavily weighted towards sporting aspects, the tactics and strategy that affect the two great yardstick numbers of modern American politics, fundraising and polls.  They note that,

On the surface of it, this looks like a cause for head scratching.  If eight out of ten people want different kinds of coverage, surely some enterprising media conglomerate would’ve realized it by now and stepped up, if for no other reason than to increase their audience and ad revenue.  Instead the media wagon rolls on and the public continues to be poorly served.

Conservatives and liberals will reliably trot out their usual bogeymen to explain this.  Those on the right will speak of the “liberal media”, run from big liberal cities and staffed by bleeding hearts from top to bottom.  The left will usually point the finger at corporate consolidation and he said/she said reports that treat verifiable facts as “in dispute”.  Both of these rationales miss something though.  The great majority of Americans, which probably includes a lot of that “eight-in-ten” cited in the Pew poll, don’t follow politics on a daily basis.

For the minority who do that raw information, about where candidates stand on the issues, their personal backgrounds and political histories, is old hat.  They know that stuff already.  (Or at least they think they know it already, based on whatever articles they’ve read or reports they’ve seen.  For the purposes of this post it’s the same thing.)  For them the sport is the news; who’s up, who’s down and why is the only new information.  Poll numbers and fundraising totals are the box scores of a 24-hour a day gladiatorial contest.

Hunter Thompson summed it all up more than thirty years ago.  From Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72:

That apt description applies not just to journalists, but to the audience as well.  It’s fun to follow politics!  It’s fun to look at it as a sport, to handicap it like one and in doing so display how cynical and cool you are.  For a certain segment of the population it’s even appropriate.  Counted federal ballots, the only truly hard data in the realm of national politics, come around only every twenty-four months.  For fans that can’t let things go that long there’s a gap to fill, and since there are millions of such people there’s money to be made filling it.

At the dawn of television, and for a couple of decades thereafter, filling that gap happened on Sundays before football.  But technology has allowed us an unlimited number of informational sources and there’s no longer any need to confine an audience to a timeslot.  Between cable channels and websites no political junkie need ever go without a fix.  That’s all well and good for the junkies, but the true cost of addiction is always borne by others.

This is not new.  This group of people has always existed; the difference between then and now is that today we have outlets for it.  Sadly, those outlets have taken the form of News when they are anything but.  I’m not sure how to divorce the two, or if it’s even possible.  Having an ever alert army of fact checking citizens on-line helps a great deal, but it certainly isn’t a solution.

Like many of the other problems we have, this one is systemic.  The rewards offered for successful sporting news political journalism (money and fame) are enormous and the penalties (a stern rebuke from the ombudsman) all but nonexistent.  There has to be a better way to structure things, be it non-profit ownership of media outlets, autonomous (non-political) governmental sponsorship of factual standards, or simply dropping the charade of impartial journalism and letting us all fight it out.  I don’t know what the proper structure of the Fourth Estate should look like, but I know the current system isn’t sustainable or particularly useful.

“You’re gonna like me!  You’re gonna love me!  Cuz I can do most any-thing!” - Gabbo Theme Song

My suspicion is that Hillary Clinton’s chances at the Democratic nomination are, and always have been, wildly over hyped.  The press has been more or less compelled into non-stop nomination coverage for more than a year now, a media favorite had to emerge and on account of novelty and fame that favorite was Hillary Clinton.  But all that coverage doesn’t count for as much as one hayseed in Iowa or one uppity Yankee in New Hampshire.

I’ve always thought her campaign rested more on flimsy conventional media wisdom than on solid political ground.  Consider the fact that she has won precisely two elections in her history, in one of the bluest of blue states against opposition that can charitably be described as “token”.  Or that even the vaunted Clinton political machine, to which she is the heir, only ever ran one truly invincible, juggernaut style campaign, that of 1996.  Yet that swath-of-destruction style has somehow become a hallmark of Clintonian politics.  Huh?  The byline brigade assumption that props the myth of H. Clinton’s inevitable triumph is that a smart, slick, triangulated campaign has to win.  Of course, if that were true the Republicans would still be in charge of Congress.

During the dark years of true Bush dominance, from 2002-2006, Hillary Clinton acted more or less like a female, Democratic version of Bill Frist.  He was a complete political whore who wanted nothing more than to be president.  H. Clinton was pretty much the same; you could reliably expect her to have rotated to whichever direction the political winds were blowing on tax cuts, Iraq, torture, you name it.  She was an opportunist Senator for the entire duration of Bush the Younger’s Administration, and now that the winds are blowing against him she’s taking up her long lost liberal mantle.

The majority of the byline brigade sees this as a natural evolution.  But that’s because they went through the same transformation, from fawning Bush acolytes to bitter opponents.  Seeing her ever shifting positions for what they are, blatant political opportunism, hits a little too close to home methinks.  What on Earth is supposed to make Democratic primary voters, who by and large hate the Iraq War and Bush the Younger with great passion and always have, believe that she’s sincere now?

Nostalgia for the Bill Clinton years can run high, but it is not lost on people that it was the scandals and shenanigans of those years that begat the current nightmare.  Some of that wasn’t the fault of either Clinton, but some of it was.  (As if on cue, Norman Hsu was indicted yesterday.)  Both Barack Obama and John Edwards come ready made without any of the personal baggage or cloudy ideological history of H. Clinton (in Obama’s case impeccably so, Edwards is merely born again).  Either one of them is, on almost any level except that of garnering media attention, a superior candidate.

Clinton does have a lot of money and a well run organization.  But Obama can match her almost exactly in both categories and Edwards isn’t exactly a penniless neophyte.  Obama’s recent surge in the polls may be just a bump on Hillary’s road to 1600, or it may be the first cracks in a deceptively fragile structure.  My money is on the latter because as great a story as Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been thus far, nothing would make for a bigger show than seeing it implode.  Her campaign has lived on spectacle, but that means it can also die by spectacle.

The Democratic primary is, and always has been, primarily a contest of John Edwards versus Barack Obama.  If you forced me to pick I’d go with Edwards just because he’s the white guy and, let’s face it, that still matters, but one of them is going to be the Democratic nominee.

“By the way, I’m aware of the irony of appearing on teevee in order to decry it.  So don’t bother pointing that out.” - Sideshow Bob

I can’t be the first person to have made this comparison, but screw it, I’m doing it anyway.

At the end of last year Time magazine declared “You” to be its person of the year.  They were widely lampooned for the goofiness of it and rightly so.  Seriously, what does “You” even mean in this context?  And if it’s about the collective creation of content on-line shouldn’t it have been “Us”?  Goofy as it was though, it got more free publicity than any other selection in years, maybe ever.  Later this month they’re going to declare a new one, but I’ll bet ten years from now people will remember the “You” year a lot better than any other.

At the moment Time, one of the flagship publications of the, ahem, old media, finds itself in a bit of a spat with many of the Yous they praised last year.  Glenn Greenwald has all the gory details and they just keep getting funnier and funnier.  To make a long and link filled story short, Time columnist Joe Klein wrote a bad column based around a demonstrably false premise.  Having had this pointed out to him he could’ve simply said, “Whoops, my bad” penned a short correction/apology and the whole thing would’ve ended.  Instead of doing that eminently sensible thing, he and his editors have raised the castle drawbridge and begun hurling boiling oil over the walls.  Time and Klein seem to be convinced that their opinions are facts and that the facts cited by their critics are opinions.  That is a dangerous position when anything and everything can and will be scrutinized on-line.

More than anything else, this incident (and the uncountable others like it, past, present and future) resembles that time early in adolescence when a kid realizes that his parents are not omniscient, omnipotent creatures.  Parents, and by extension all adults, are merely people, as hypocritical, dishonest and lazy as anyone else.  It’s a scary realization, on both sides.  It strips the young of the warm-blanket feeling of all encompassing protection.  It reminds the old of just how old (and possibly tired) they have become, obsolescence isn’t here yet, but the inevitability of it begins to hit home.

That “You” cover last year, with the tinny reflective material, might as well have been an awkward middle school photo, another haphazard attempt by the elders to frame the young into something familiar.

“Bart Simpson you’re late!  Go fill out a tardy slip.” - Mrs. Krabappel

“But I’m only…five…ten…twenty…forty minutes!  That’s pretty damn late.” - Bart Simpson

I didn’t get yesterday’s post up.  It’ll be up later today.  I’ve always seen the title of this post attributed to Henry Ford Jr. after he got caught cheating on his wife, but whoever said it, it’s true.