Capillary Action
Instapundit Glenn Reynolds, in the UK’s Guardian, finds the major media has an instinct for the
capillary in regard to Dick Cheney’s Buckshotgate.
As if right on cue, Arianna goes ballistic, or maybe anti-ballistic given the nature of the story, with this zany
screed regarding Mary Matalin’s appearance on Meet the Press. There may be a clue here to Huffington’s long-ago switch from Republican to Democrat: Republicans, like Mary Matalin, occasionally wear brooches that are a bit gauche in La Arianna’s opinion. To hell with your whole damn party, you right-wing, brooch-wearing, accident-defenders! And don’t take her word for it about Matalin’s performance: at the bottom of the piece, we find that the liberal blogosphere agrees as one that Matalin was no darned good. Thank goodness a coterie of impartial judges could be found.
Suffice it to say that there’s a middle ground in the way we can view the whole incident. There was an unfortunate accident, everyone involved was pretty shaken up and Cheney and his people could have handled it better. Yeah, they screwed up in not getting the information out. But the MSM reaction shows one of the main problems with the media, that of context and how it’s handled and presented. Some accidents just sort of happen and have no larger significance, no real connection to anything else, but that’s in the real world. In the media world, every political story that concerns someone of conservative or Republican background has to be part of some larger and damning narrative. And if it doesn’t fit, then dammit, we’ll make it fit.
Just look at Maureen Dowd, another of the Meet the Press guests, she of the annoying parallelisms and clumsy constructions, a writer so uniformly terrible that she’s sure to retire from her NY Times post with a veritable raft of Pulitzer Prizes. Dowd attempts to link the shooting of Harry Whittington to the larger Dick Cheney narrative by invoking the phrase, "blowing off." The
transcript has Dowd saying, regarding Cheney, "We don’t what democratic institution he’s blowing off at any given minute." And other references to "blowing off" the FISA Court, the UN, etc. are made by Dowd. Leave aside whether Cheney is actually anti-democratic to the point where he’s sticking a dagger in democracy’s heart 24/7. The point is, can this accidental shooting be termed as being a "blowing off?" Did Cheney "blow off" his friend, Harry? The normal linguistic construction as regards a shooting would be to "blow away." It’s a typically maladroit Dowd construction. I shudder to think of the material Dowd rejected: "Cheney’s got to stop shooting the FISA court in the face!"; "The vice president can't keep mistaking the UN for quail, you know." It is, of course, as Dowd would insist, part of the pattern. That wonderful, blessed overall pattern that makes everything hang together.
Best of all was this exchange Matalin had with TV newspup David Gregory about his tantrum in the White House press room earlier in the week.
MATALIN: Because you went on a jihad, David. For four days you went on a Jihad.
GREGORY: And that's an unfortunate use of that word, by the way. This is not what that was.
Of course, it was on Meet the Press that Maureen Dowd herself, just a few years ago, referred to President Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign as a kind of jihad. Jeers to MoDo for being uncharacteristically silent in this instance. She should have taken the opportunity to call Gregory on the carpet, vociferously defending the God-given right to continually invoke the notion that your ideological adversaries are engaged in some kind of irrational holy war. Does free speech have no defenders left?
capillary in regard to Dick Cheney’s Buckshotgate.
As if right on cue, Arianna goes ballistic, or maybe anti-ballistic given the nature of the story, with this zany
screed regarding Mary Matalin’s appearance on Meet the Press. There may be a clue here to Huffington’s long-ago switch from Republican to Democrat: Republicans, like Mary Matalin, occasionally wear brooches that are a bit gauche in La Arianna’s opinion. To hell with your whole damn party, you right-wing, brooch-wearing, accident-defenders! And don’t take her word for it about Matalin’s performance: at the bottom of the piece, we find that the liberal blogosphere agrees as one that Matalin was no darned good. Thank goodness a coterie of impartial judges could be found.
Suffice it to say that there’s a middle ground in the way we can view the whole incident. There was an unfortunate accident, everyone involved was pretty shaken up and Cheney and his people could have handled it better. Yeah, they screwed up in not getting the information out. But the MSM reaction shows one of the main problems with the media, that of context and how it’s handled and presented. Some accidents just sort of happen and have no larger significance, no real connection to anything else, but that’s in the real world. In the media world, every political story that concerns someone of conservative or Republican background has to be part of some larger and damning narrative. And if it doesn’t fit, then dammit, we’ll make it fit.
Just look at Maureen Dowd, another of the Meet the Press guests, she of the annoying parallelisms and clumsy constructions, a writer so uniformly terrible that she’s sure to retire from her NY Times post with a veritable raft of Pulitzer Prizes. Dowd attempts to link the shooting of Harry Whittington to the larger Dick Cheney narrative by invoking the phrase, "blowing off." The
transcript has Dowd saying, regarding Cheney, "We don’t what democratic institution he’s blowing off at any given minute." And other references to "blowing off" the FISA Court, the UN, etc. are made by Dowd. Leave aside whether Cheney is actually anti-democratic to the point where he’s sticking a dagger in democracy’s heart 24/7. The point is, can this accidental shooting be termed as being a "blowing off?" Did Cheney "blow off" his friend, Harry? The normal linguistic construction as regards a shooting would be to "blow away." It’s a typically maladroit Dowd construction. I shudder to think of the material Dowd rejected: "Cheney’s got to stop shooting the FISA court in the face!"; "The vice president can't keep mistaking the UN for quail, you know." It is, of course, as Dowd would insist, part of the pattern. That wonderful, blessed overall pattern that makes everything hang together.
Best of all was this exchange Matalin had with TV newspup David Gregory about his tantrum in the White House press room earlier in the week.
MATALIN: Because you went on a jihad, David. For four days you went on a Jihad.
GREGORY: And that's an unfortunate use of that word, by the way. This is not what that was.
Of course, it was on Meet the Press that Maureen Dowd herself, just a few years ago, referred to President Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign as a kind of jihad. Jeers to MoDo for being uncharacteristically silent in this instance. She should have taken the opportunity to call Gregory on the carpet, vociferously defending the God-given right to continually invoke the notion that your ideological adversaries are engaged in some kind of irrational holy war. Does free speech have no defenders left?
posted by Oa Rove at 11:27 AM
<< Home