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I remember an episode of The McLaughlin Group from years ago, in which John McLaughlin asked Pat Buchanan “Who won the week?”  Buchanan hesitated, and McLaughlin pressed him harder: “Come on, Pat! Someone’s got to win the week!”

Buchanan finally answered that nobody had won the week–“It was a draw,” he explained. McLaughlin let it go after that, though he didn’t seem happy about it.

McLaughlin was a pioneer in this entertaining-but-superficial style of political reporting. But as is so often the case, those who followed the trail have mimicked all of his flaws while picking up none of his entertaining virtues.

And so the political press covers everything with a fast-paced and myopic focus on which groups happen to be winning or losing at the moment.  In general, the extent of one side’s win or loss is over-hyped, giving an impression of a more permanent victory or defeat than is warranted.

For instance, remember a month ago when President Trump was winning in the headlines because the press liked his address to Congress? That seems like ancient history now, because all the headlines are about the defeat Trump suffered when his health care bill couldn’t pass the House.

It’s sort of like coverage of a sporting event, except that unlike sports analysts, political pundits tend to assume that whichever team happens to be winning at the moment will continue to do so forever, even if the lead is extremely small.

The real problem with this is not just that leads to absurdly hyperbolic analysis, or even “we have always been at war with Eastasia“-style retconning in the way journalists re-phrase narratives to make them appear consistent.

No, the real problem is that the serious stories in politics are slow-moving and gradual phenomena, and are imperceptible over the course of a week or even a year.  You have to be able to see the big picture, not just which party is winning or losing on a given day, in order to understand them.

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The press is causing everyone to panic about the Ebola virus.  It’s terrible for the victims of course, and they have my sympathy.  What I am about to say isn’t to suggest that their suffering is not terrible, and I wish those suffering from it a recovery, and my condolences go to the families of those who have succumbed to it.

But–the press needs to get a grip.  Ebola is actually less communicable than the flu, or mumps, or other diseases that have been going around.  I’m not a medical expert, but everything I read says you will know if you were in contact with someone who could have communicated the virus.

It’s a terrible thing.  I wish the CDC had done a better job of handling it.  But the U.S. press is acting as if we are all about to die. In general, I’d say that panicking is not really a great response to a given problem.

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Stop the presses!

I know you’ll think I’m crazy, but I saw it with my own two eyes, I did!  He was being interviewed by Brian Williams of NBC, who said something like “an anonymous Romney staffer said you were planning to pick a boring white guy for VP”.  And Romney chuckled and said something like “you told me you weren’t interested.”  UPDATE: The verbatim quote from Romney was: “You told me you were not available”.  Same thing, really.

Now, it’s true that minutes earlier, Williams asked him something about a gun control law he passed as governor, and Romney answered with a barrage of weasel words and non-answers the likes of which I’ve seldom seen.  And even more pathetically, Williams totally let it go without follow-up questions.  But still, you have to give Romney credit: he made a joke that wasn’t awkward or forced, which is pretty rare for him.  And after all, “likeability” is what wins elections!

Really, it happened!  I tried to get the clip, or at least a transcript for you  at NBC’s website, but I can’t get the clip to embed, or even play correctly on my computer.  It might be here.  Or that might be an interview with Kathy Griffin.  For some reason, I was having a heck of a lot of trouble with navigating their site.

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I have a confession to make, my fellow liberals: I have never liked Keith Olbermann.

I agree with most of his political opinions, of course. But for some reason, he always seemed like a jerk to me. I feel bad saying that about a guy I never met, but he just does. I could never stand to watch his show Countdown on MSNBC or Current TV for very long; I mean, sure, he was very witty and clever in mocking various Republicans, which of course is something I am quite in favor of, but the guy just annoyed me. He has a way of speaking always slightly too loudly. (A trait he shares with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, although Olbermann does at least have a better speaking voice) Everything Olbermann said and did on his show seemed so overly theatrical, it was hard to take him seriously at all.

I also thought he was incredibly obnoxious on NBC’s Football Night in America. It seemed like he only had three or four jokes that he used every Sunday night during the highlights. I always dreaded when anybody fumbled the ball just because I knew Olbermann was going to say “so-and-so is stripped–fortunately only of the football.” It was funny the first ten times, man.

I suspect he actually is a jerk; at least, that would explain why he keeps getting fired from every network he goes to.

But at least he is partially responsible for Rachel Maddow getting her altogether superior liberal talk-show. That’s something to his credit.

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I see that Sean Hannity had a special show last night documenting the alleged “history of the liberal media”. This is a key element in the Republican story of recent history. In fact, I think it is something of a deus ex machina in that story.

Television news–excluding Fox News, obviously–is dominated by liberals. I’m willing to admit that, actually. But note that I say “dominated by”, not “biased in favor of”. This may seem somewhat strange, but I think that while most individual journalists lean towards liberalism, particularly social liberalism, they try to keep their biases in check. (I suspect that that’s the first thing they teach you in journalism school.)

It is my belief that, rather than creating a liberal bias in the media, this concentration of liberalism has the effect of making a conservatives a type of entity which the media covers with uncomprehending interest. If “familiarity breeds contempt”, as the old line goes, then unfamiliarity has bred a kind of fascination.

The press in general tends to display their liberalism not, as you might expect, by always deriding or marginalizing conservatives, but by treating them as if they are some exotic type of creature they have never seen before. They react, not with outrage, but with surprise and curiosity when they hear a conservative spout some standard talking point.

For example, last year then-Senate Candidate Rand Paul said that he liked the 1964 Civil Rights Act insofar as it desegregated public places, but was uncomfortable with it desegregating private ones. This is a fairly typical libertarian position, but the press reacted like they’d never heard it. They did not smear Paul as a racist, however, despite what some people might say.

They reacted with a general lack of understanding and a realization that this was controversial. They knew this wasn’t what they all believed about the Civil Rights Act, and so they were just sort of puzzled.

This process repeats itself on issue after issue. Liberal journalists simply do not know that much about Conservatives, and so always cover them with a curiosity and, oftentimes, interest. In fact, while their coverage is not always glowing, I believe it may provide the Conservatives with an advantage in terms of getting their issues covered.

Incidentally, Eric Alterman wrote a very interesting book called What Liberal Media? that examined some of these issues. The book has a lot of flaws, particularly in just how broadly Alterman is willing to define “bias”, and obviously he’s a liberal himself; but it’s still one of the better books I’ve read on the topic.

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One of the stories on the NBC Nightly News tonight was about the fact that “Mr. Peanut“, the Planters Company mascot, would be “voiced” for the first time ever in a new commercial.

That was a story.

On the nightly news

A program which, I must point out, has only a half-hour time slot. (Which, when you factor in commercials, works out to about twenty minutes of time for actual content.)

It didn’t seem terribly important to me, but perhaps I am just a curmudgeon.

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“Pilate saith unto him, ‘What is truth?’…”–John 18:38 

Most people probably believe that of the two major political parties in the United States, it is the Democrats who are more prone to relativism. There are two main reasons for this. The first is that there are more intellectuals, who are always given over to questioning traditions, in the Democratic party. The second is that many years of conservative propaganda has told everyone so.

Most of this is the work of the religious Right, though the Atheist philosophy of Ayn Rand also rejects the idea of anything other than absolute Truth, and it is certainly more widely heard in “conservative”,or–if we must use the term–“right-wing” circles. And there is some truth to all this; after all, does not the word “Conservative” itself suggest a certain intellectual and philosophical rigidity?

But, of late, there have been signs of a creeping relativism among conservatives. For example, this column from paleo-conservative writer Patrick J. Buchanan. An excerpt:

““Naked reason,” pure rationalism… ignores that vast realm of sentiments, such as patriotism and love, that reside in the terrain between thought and feeling.” 

Buchanan, admittedly, is far from one of the major players in the Republican party, having been effectively ostracized years ago. But there is altogether something very “post-modern”, as Andrew Sullivan often says, about the behavior of the conservatives of late. Recall the odd incident early this year when Rudy Giuliani and other prominent conservatives appeared to have forgotten about the 9/11 attacks.

(As Henry Leland says to Mike Thorton in Alpha Protocol: “There are only so many coincidences that can happen before they stop being coincidences.”)

Of course, one could easily explain away such things by pointing out that it is merely the inevitable result of competing–nearly warring–political parties. A strategy, nothing more. Indeed, I suspect a credible case could be made that changes in the media and the education system have produced a general increase in the relativistic outlook, and we only notice it with conservatives because they are, historically, less susceptible to it.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that strategically speaking, the Republicans are moving more and more towards a relativistic approach to reporting and analyzing every issue. Much of their criticism of Obama is based on how he makes them feel, or the image he projects.

Perhaps Lee Atwater had some part in it. (On some sites, I have seen the phrase “Perception is reality” attributed to Atwater. I doubt he originated it, but it does encapsulate his worldview.) Still, from at least Edward Bernays onward, propagandists, strategists and ad men, or whatever name, must have at least a touch of relativism to carry out their duty.

Now, I cannot stress enough that it is mostly the conservative intellectuals and strategists who seem to think this way. All the examples I gave, with the partial exception of Giuliani, were very much the behind-the-scenes tactician sort, not the leaders, and not the rank and file. I don’t think we will ever see Sarah Palin, for example, engaging in anything other than black-and-white moral reasoning. (“We win, they lose…”)

That’s part of what’s so odd about it, in fact. On the one hand we have the traditional non-relativist view of the world characterized by most of the Republican politicians, but pull away the curtain and we find men like Karl Rove–heir to Atwater–and other such strategists. Buchanan, let us not forget, was a strategist for Richard M. Nixon. (Nixon, by the way, was interested in the works of Nietzsche.) Even Dick Cheney, in his role as an adviser to Gerald Ford, famously said: “Principle is OK up to a certain point, but principle doesn’t do any good if you lose.”

It is pointless to counter by saying that the same is true of Democrats. Of course it is. Carville, Axelrod, Rahm Emanuel and the rest are all doubtless cut from the same cloth. But the Democrats as a whole are already supposed to be the party of relativists, to hear the Republicans tell it, and they’re kind of correct. Nothing reveals this more than the fact that Democrats in general will tend to attack Republicans for being too absolutist. Whereas, the Republicans pride themselves on seeing through the moral haziness in which the liberal intellectuals lose themselves by understanding the absolute, God-given differences between True and False, Right and Wrong.

Let me, as Obama would say, be clear:  the majority of the Republican party believes in a rigid, absolutist, traditional Christian morality–or wants to, anyway.  But many of their strategists are willing to do almost anything to achieve victory, and are more than happy to bend the truth in order to get what they want. And they are fairly open about it.

In short, their strategists appear to be using moral and factual relativism in order to justify the rank-and-file and their leaders behaving like moral and factual absolutists.

All comments are welcome, and disagreement is encouraged. 

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This video has been getting a lot of attention today. Since I’ve been discussing the reasons for the Tea Party a lot lately, I thought I’d address it.

Much is made of the fact that the Tea Party members shown here are apparently unaware of the fact that their taxes are at present slightly lower.

Well, the obvious response must first point out that if anybody at this event did give a reasonable discourse on, for example, Ricardian Equivalence, it wouldn’t make this video, because of its makers’ stated agenda. Secondly, it must be pointed out he interviewed so few people that it’s hard to call it a significant sample. Lastly, most people become flustered when asked to speak on camera, and tend to babble a little. So, the bias of the piece makes it rather difficult to have any faith that we are getting a real representation of the Tea Party.

That isn’t to say that the video is worthless–the search for completely unbiased reporting is in any case, I think, quixotic. The bits that document the rehearsed performances and speeches are pretty effective in showing them to be rather silly. (As are similar things at Left-wing rallies, I’ll bet.) I found Lord Monckton’s little rallying cry about Fox News anchors to be fairly Orwellian.

Overall, I’d say it’s a useful piece of footage to some extent, but by no means should people go judging the Tea Party by it.

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    NewsBusters gives their analysis of The Chris Matthews show’s analysis of why that is. NewsBusters probably thinks it’s because Obama is an idiot, and Chris Matthews’ crew… well, they don’t really know why, but they sure like to speculate randomly about it. They generally feel it’s because he’s uncomfortable because of the time constraints.

    Well, each explanation might be correct. But I have an alternate theory: I suspect Obama may be finally starting to figure this charisma thing out. He knows that it’s the best weapon in his–and his party’s–arsenal, and that by using it sparingly it only becomes more effective. Last year, as Helene Cooper rightly says, Obama was basically overexposed. (Of course, she then wanders off onto the idea that the press conference was boring–more on that below.) Not that charisma wears out, of course; but it’s still best to hold your most powerful asset in reserve for when you really need it–which for Obama will be in 2012.

    If I were in his shoes, I’d keep a low profile for a while–let everyone forget about him.

    Now, as for the Matthews gang, what the hell is this: “It was a lot of econ, it was a lot of just in the weeds stuff. It got really boring. I thought.” It’s only boring if you’re a shallow person, with no interest in policy matters. The President’s job is not to entertain you. Part of the reason charisma is such a big factor in Presidential elections is that people forget this fact.

    Also, Chris Matthews, well… I stand by my previous statement regarding Matthews.

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    NewsBusters is mad at Sally Quinn for saying:

    “This is the Vatican’s Watergate. The Pope is Nixon. I mean, if you look at the signs, and the way they’re behaving, it’s exactly the same way. They’ve done something terrible. They’ve denied it. They’ve accused their accusers.”

    Apparently, she took a much kinder attitude towards Jeremiah Wright in 2008, and that annoys NewsBusters. I don’t care about that. What’s really interesting is that it seems to me that what the Pope is accused of doing is far more serious than what Richard Nixon did. Covering up a burglary is bad, but covering up child abuse is a horrible crime.