PDS spreading

[wombat_socho]

I think I'm going to ignore a couple of Minnesotans on my f-list who seem to have come down with full-blown PDS. Don't need the aggravation, God knows.

Work today was back to normal, e.g. ninety minutes of actual work broken up by web surfing and calling Kaiser to get prescription refills straightened out.

Review of John Barnes' The Armies of Memory to follow; right now I gotta go shoot POS.

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Now playing: Pat Benatar - Invincible

Comments

[chebutykin.livejournal.com]

Hey, fair 'nuff. I knew the grenade was loaded when I threw it.

To be fair, though, I don't read/watch the pundits on the left, myself, as I'm sick of bile. It's just that the Palin feeding frenzy happened so fast and furious that it was hitting the middle-road news outlets before being well-checked. It's hard to say if the McCain campaign was stupid or brilliant (possibly both) for springing the Palin nom from out of the relative blue: on one hand, it caught the competition by surprise; on the other hand, it caused the media to grab at every shred of "news" they could possibly get their hands on.

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

That's what part of the reaction on the Right is all about - the fact that the "drive-by media" have just been recycling every weird rumor and slanderous allegation the KosKids, Andrew Sullivan, etc. have been coming up with without even bothering to do the most basic fact-checking.

I was a little worried myself that Governor Palin might be the second coming of Dan Quayle -who was not half the moron he was portrayed as- but her popularity with the base and the growth of the alternative media has prevented the media from doing the kind of smear job they did on Quayle. It doesn't hurt that she's very poised, very down-home, and not about to let herself get pushed around. Having Frank Murkowski's scalp does that for a woman, I hear. :)

[chebutykin.livejournal.com]

...has prevented the media from doing the kind of smear job they did on Quayle.

Quayle dug his own grave. He may as well have handed himself to the media and contemporary satirists on a silver platter, with an apple in his mouth. All politics aside, the man was a disaster to the English language.

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

Good job absorbing the image the media fed you.

Before being nominated as Bush the Elder's VP, Quayle had developed a reputation as one of the more tech-savvy young Senators, mainly due to his interest in space and missile defense issues. Of course he came to look like an idiot, with reporters constantly following him around noting his every misstep. You'd look like a moron too if that happened. I will admit that he seemed easily rattled - something he has in common with the junior Senator from Illinois. ;)

[chebutykin.livejournal.com]

Obama can form a sentence while speaking extemporaneously, which is an art form that seems to get rarer and rarer in politics. Quayle couldn't, and yes, I'd look like a moron, too, if I did the same thing. Which is why I said I said that he'd handed himself to the media on a silver platter. All they had to do was quote him verbatim.

Perhaps we are defining "smear campaign" differently. (I'm saying this in all seriousness.)

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

Yes, Obama certainly can extemporize - that "lipstick on a pig" line was pure comedy gold, to say nothing of "my Muslim faith". Problem is, when he extemporizes, he comes off as a Harvard man doing an impression of P Diddy, which is every bit as lame as it sounds. This is why I make no attempt to look or sound Latino - I wasn't raised that way and it would sound 120% fake, because I wasn't raised in that environment any more than Obama was raised around black folks.

I do have some sympathy for the poor bastard - he's quite obviously a TCK trying to fit in *somewhere* where he can be comfortable being himself, and he hasn't found it yet. Being in the harsh spotlight of national politics while being beholden to the Daley Machine ain't going to help.

The definition of "smear campaign" is one I was introduced to during my two runs for the Minnesota House, e.g. "presenting true facts about your opponent that said opponent finds hard to explain to their constituents".

[chebutykin.livejournal.com]

The definition of "smear campaign" is one I was introduced to during my two runs for the Minnesota House, e.g. "presenting true facts about your opponent that said opponent finds hard to explain to their constituents".

Yeah, there's the issue. My definition has always included a necessary component of deliberate fact-twisting. Depending where you look for a definition, too, there are references supporting both your and my definitions of the word.

Getting back to Quayle, what I was trying to get at is that the media didn't really have to do anything other than quote the man. I bought a book back during the Bush Sr./Quayle years that I found fascinating, simply for the audacity of it. It was listed in the humor section of the bookstore, and all it was, was a collection of verbatim Quayle speeches. The "author" of the book merely put chapter headings between the quotes, and that was it.

(Pardon any grammar problems -- your "reply" boxes have gotten rather narrow, and so I'm typing blind.)

[wombat-socho.livejournal.com]

Naw, looked OK to me.