Media

NYT: Who’s The Internettiest? Obama, Edwards or Clinton?

'08/12 Election, Activism, Blogs, Democratic (in)action, liberalism, Media, Pointlesss centrism, Sensible Liberals, US politics
Published on 1 Comment on NYT: Who’s The Internettiest? Obama, Edwards or Clinton?

Eugene Robinson writing in the NYT gives it to Edwards by a blog-length:

[…]

So what do the Web sites HillaryClinton.com, BarackObama.com and JohnEdwards.com tell us about their namesakes? At first glance, they seem to confirm what we think we already know. Clinton’s site evokes a super-competent juggernaut, with every base covered and every hair in place. Obama’s is very much a work in progress. And Edwards’s Web site suggests the patience, attention to detail and willingness to take risks that you would expect from a trial lawyer who rose from nothing to become a self-made millionaire.

Clinton and Obama are first-name candidates on their sites — “Hillary” says this, “Barack” says that. Edwards is more formal — he’s “John Edwards” or “Senator Edwards,” if you please. Perhaps that’s a necessary reminder, since he’s not, technically speaking, a senator anymore.

As for overall tone and scope, it’s hard to evaluate Obama’s campaign cyber-HQ because it’s so clearly a provisional, placeholding site with not much but a couple of videos (the announcement; a biography) and a big button you can click to become a contributor. There’s a link to his Senate reelection Web site— he would have to run in 2010 — and if you find the link and click through, you get a fuller picture of the man.

The Clinton and Edwards sites, as one might expect, are largely about the business of getting elected. Clinton’s home page tells you how to “Join Team Hillary” or become a “HillRaiser” of campaign funds. Edwards likewise prominently advises how to join his team, but his home page also focuses on some issues — he’s against global warming, we learn, and opposes an escalation of the war in Iraq.

The real difference is depth and ambition. Both Clinton and Obama (he on his Senate campaign Web site) say they want to have a dialogue with the American people about how best to solve the nation’s problems. But Edwards has already started his conversation with the nation. His Web site is an exercise in social networking that includes not only a blog, where surfers can post their thoughts, but also cyber-diaries written by Edwards’s family members.

“The soft rain of last night has left the field behind the house dewy with a low fog. Maybe the gossamer meadow is the reason I feel contemplative this morning,” begins a recent entry by Elizabeth Edwards. Her diary posts generally draw more comments than her husband’s.

Somehow, it’s hard to imagine Hillary Clinton waxing about any gossamer meadow.

Edwards’s Web site is less YouTube than MySpace. It tries to take advantage of the Internet’s great paradox — that a technology so devoid of human contact can nevertheless create a sense of intimacy and connection.

So, Mama’s playing it safe, Obama’s not quite ready and Edwards is up to something interesting. In the “Second Life” sense, at least. We’ll see about the real world.

I’m hoping (though it’s a hope based on not much actual foundation) that Obama and Clinton are being encouraged to stand as stalking horses for Clark/Edwards, on the principle that they’ll keep the likes of Fox and the Right’s other swiftboating squads busy while the real candidates do an end run round the opposition. Let’s face it , Clinton or Obama won’t get through the primaries, because the voters just don’t trust them.

This is the most deliberately, wilfully and blindly incompetent administration ever: they’re almost proud of it, incompetence is a strategy for them – remember Grover Norquist‘s famous axiom about ‘drowning the government in a bathtub’? The Republicans refined that concept slightly and now they’ve almost but not quite waterboarded the government to death. The American public seems desperate for some saviour to rush in, free the captive and arrest the torturers, someone who knows the difference between right and wrong and knows what do do about it . Even more imporatant, that someone has to be someone the public trusts.

I can’t see how the DLC can hope Hillary will be the candidate even though her adverts are all over the blogs like a rash: no-one trusts her, everybody hates her, even her own side. If she’s depending on the loyalty of the sisterhood and female votes to carry her through, well she’s shit out of luck. Republican women hate her (and paradoxically enough, the whole ‘stand by your man’ schtick post-Lewinsky made them hate her all the more) and Democratic women don’t seem to be much moire enamoured, what with her support for the war and carefully triangulated non-positions on choice and reproductive freedoms.

As for Obama – other than oodles of charisma and photegeneity, what has he got? If elected he’d be another Tony Blair : a one term politician with little experience in national or international politics and with bugger-all managerial experience. And we all know how that turned out. Obama talks a good fight, he looks good, but can you see him running the country yet? 2 elections down the road when he has some solid experience under his belt, yes. Now, no – and I’ve yet to mention the regrettably ever-present possibility of a far-right assassin, something that goes for Hillary too.

Damn it. I hate it that the most viable ‘liberal’ candidates (and I use the scare quotes deliberately, because neither Edwards nor Clark fit my definition of liberal) candidates will be, yet again, white, wealthy middle class men.

But unless some deus ex machina in the shape of the perfect Dem candidate comes along, that’s what’ll happen.

Bread, Racists & Circuses

bigotry, Culture, Manufacturing consent, Media, Race, Video
Published on 2 Comments on Bread, Racists & Circuses

I can’t get Channel 4 so haven’t seen for myself what this racism on Celebrity Big Brother row is about. So I had a little dig at YouTube and found this video of Jade Goody asking Jermaine Jackson (yes, that Jermaine Jackson) whether or not he is black and if so, how is it his brother is white. See for yourself and cringe:

I think that settles the question of whether Jade Goody is a racist or not, don’t you?

But leaving the jawdroppingly banal yet strangely fascinating onscreen behaviour aside, all the hooha in the world press over this, encouraged by Channel 4 and Endemol, is all just so much bread and circuses to pacify the proles. Look! Over there! Slebs! Behaving badly! I would not be at all surprised if the remaining three inmates, all of whom are hungry for fame, had come to some mutially beneficial arrangement with Endemol : how very odd that this happened just as rating slipped…

Lenin calls Bg Brother and other ‘choose your evictee’ type shows ‘placebo democracy’ and says they originate from the same political place as control orders and ASBOs, a way of allowing people an illusion of control so that they don’t notice the lack of real democracy.

That glass box, again. posted by lenin

The whole point of Endemol’s shit-fest on Channel 4 is to force together personalities so incompatible that normal human comity would be impossible, never mind solidarity under the stress of sensory deprivation and constant surveillance. Getting ‘celebrities’ on the show (three of whom are only ‘celebrities’ by dint of a previous connection with the show) therefore guarantees a daily hit of scandal, and therefore mega mega advertising revenues. Further, since C4 controls every condition obtaining in the show, and since their interventions are designed to be humiliating and bizarre, they can always confect a bit of controversy when phone-in rates slump and the tabloids find something else to gyrate over. And what is more, when the bad guy of the hour is evicted, a new balance is created and the recipient of much sympathy the day before can become the latest villain. The infinite malleability and masochism of the characters is one of the dramatic points on a desperately boring programme. So, rancour, humiliation, indignity and daily bullying are part of the mix, and it is entirely hypocritical for people who watch and like this show to complain about it.

[…]

can’t help but think of this whole ‘Neighbours from Hell’ drivel we get in the British press, in which readers are titillated and outraged with daily tales of torment from hideous people next-door or down the road. If it isn’t kids spitting and swearing, it’s old men flipping the bird, or trimming the hedges from over the fence. If it isn’t rowdy couples, it’s gyppos settling on the commons, and asylum seekers eloping from the back of a lorry. These are the people New Labour promises to “boot out” and leave to fend for themselves “in a crackdown on yobs”. These are the people who are expected to face ASBOs and “welfare disincentives” as part of the government’s Respect Action Plan. These are the families the government pledges to put in “Sin Bins”, a conceit that could quite easily have been supplied by Endemol. These are the people New Labour pledges to evict from the very country. New Labour’s campaign message – vote to evict the arsehole! Let them fend for themselves in the ghetto. The tabloids will feature pictures and descriptions of new arseholes every day and encourage readers to participate in a phone-in poll to demand eviction. A daily diorama of candidates for the Sin Bin will be the topic of quasi-anthropological inspection and curiosity, their fate to be decided by our placebo democracy..

There’s only one arsehole I want evicted and he’s sitting in No. 11 day-dreaming about his ‘legacy’ and ignoring the fuckups he’s created. Well, Tone, here’s your legacy in all her glorious ignorance and ill-educated spite. I give you Jade Goody, the ultimate product of Blair’s Britain:

Doesn’t she make you proud?

Read more: UK culture, UK politics, Racism, TV, Big Brother, Jade Goody, Jermaine Jackson

Linky, Linky

bigotry, Blogs, Culture, Food, Kittens!, Media, Race, UK politics, US politics, Video, War on Iraq, War on Terror
Published on 1 Comment on Linky, Linky

Mineralia:

Why carbon offsetting is just as another money making scheme exploiting liberal guilt.

How does Bush define victory? It’s the oil, stupid:

Under the new American-drafted law, the Iraqi government will offer contractual concessions up to 30 years’ long to foreign companies, using a system known as a PSA (Production Sharing Agreement). In other words, American and other Western oil companies are being allowed to exploit Iraq’s current predicament and negotiate self-serving, one-sided oil PSA’s that will legally commit the entire country of Iraq for the next 30 years.

Animalia:

3 cat videos –

Hot cat on turtle action!

The cat that likes to floss

Just Say No! Cats and the demon weed

Vegetalia:

Professional chav Jade Goody’s racism gives a fading reality show a popularity injection and the nation something to talk about. (Pssst, don’t mention the war!)

These white women, behaving like bitchy schoolgirls in the playground, have reduced Ms Shetty to tears on several occasions, accusing her of wanting to be white, having facial stubble, being “a dog”, making their skin crawl, touching their food (“you don’t know where those hands have been”), and have signally failed to get her name right, calling her “the Indian” at one point.

They might not have been quite as motivated by group tyranny as Orwell described – that “hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture . . . that seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current” – but there seems no doubt that their pack behaviour was offensive to Ms Shetty and damaging to our desire to be seen as a tolerant nation. Remember the message: without intellect we are lost. Clips of those lumpen women are being broadcast round the world as typically British, voicing British sentiments; by default we are all cast in the same mould of molten ignorance; all reduced to the racist drone of a thousand pub conversations.

Marginalia:

Madison Guy has links to some of the best street fashion photoblogs on the web, courtesy Avedon’s comments section.

James Wolcott asks why are are British sex scandals so much more interesting than American ones? Short answer, for our politicians the illicitness is 75% of the fun and the danger of being caught adds more spice. American politicians do it from a feeling of entitlement rather than in the spirit of titillating adventure, so it’s more about the greedy consumption of a ‘luxury’ sexual product like high-class call-girls (or rough trade or kids as the case may be) than the eroticism and thrill of the chase. Though the erotic aspect falls down somewhat in light of the four-year liaison between former PM John Major and ex-health Minister Edwina Currie – “By the way, Edwina, that was a not inconsiderably satisfying orgasm”. Ewww.

Resolution? What New Year’s resolution? For your sweet tooth, here’s Fanny, a French patisserie chef who blogs in English at Foodbeam.

Read the recipes and patisserie reviews, drool over the pictures, and get baking. I made her Petits carrés au caramel et au chocolat, known to us commoners asmillionaires shortbread, last weekend using white chocolate ( because that’s what we had) and it was very, very rich and absolutely delicious.

Read more UK, Politics, Oil,IraqCats, Cake,Big Brother, Fashion,. Sex scandals.

Willing Tools

Manufacturing consent, Media, Pointlesss centrism
Published on

It’s most amusing to watch the reception of Joe Klein – “… not so much a political writer as a bad theater critic” – the Slate columnist and alleged liberal is getting as he sheds his designer bathrobe and dips his carefully-manicured toes into the choppy waters of the blog sea, via the safety of Time/CNN’s new astroblog, Swampland.

(Btw did you notice Ana-Marie Cox is now Time Washington Editor? And they call it serious journalism? Wahahahahaha.)

Myself, I’m amazed by Klein’s chutzpah: after having spent the past few years basking in journalistic comfort onshore, idly cursing the swimmers, he seems to have expected a sedate Hamptons water-polo match in which position and seniority would give him innate advantage.

Surely blogging would be a doddle for such a fine figure of a pundit and anonymous novelist as Klein, if so many provincial neanderthals were doing it, wouldn’t it?

Of course, having no editor to save his skin or tone down his vainglorious self-certainty and belligerence he floundered badly straight away – hysterically accusing the blogging left of being illiberal, anti-American and hoping for US defeat and in the process lying, saying that he’d never supported the Iraq war when his own words said otherwise.

Oh dear. He didn’t want to do that…

Understandably he’s getting an ass-whupping from the real bloggers:

Late yesterday I was mulling why exactly Klein feels the need to presuppose the worst motives on the part of unnamed liberals and Democrats — whom he regularly accuses of rooting for America to “lose” — when Klein went ahead and unwittingly revealed a possible answer in his new post. It’s vanity.

[…]

To look into the mirror and see a brave and heroic pundit staring back, of course, you need to flatter yourself into believing that you’re challenging entrenched ideas and the people who hold them in some way, even if you aren’t. This impression can be created in several ways. One is to simply dream up a whole class of people, claim they hold “extreme” opinions based on nothing at all, and set yourself up as a lonely warrior against them — preferably while standing shoulder to shoulder with other lonely heroes of moderation like John McCain and Joe Lieberman. That’s David Broder’s preferred approach. Another way is to dream up a whole series of nefarious but nonexistent motives driving colleagues’ opinions, so that you can deprive those colleagues of credit for those opinions, and position yourself as, again, braver and more heroic than they are — even though you agree with them. That is Klein’s approach — and I submit that at bottom it’s all about vanity.

Klein issued a challenge in his post that has already been deftly parried by Boo Man. So here’s a challenge for Klein: Back up your arguments with facts and evidence. Produce one example of someone whose comments betray the fact that they’re tacitly rooting for American failure. Quote this person. Explain why this person’s quotes should be interpreted that way. If you manage to get that far, then maybe consider finding a second example, and even a third. That doesn’t sound all that hard, does it?

One might think that a journalist who has had the very basis of his reporting skill challenged in such a very public way might be a little shame-faced that his lack of professionalism had been so devastingly exposed. Not Klein.

But why is this little blogospheric kerfuffle of any importance at all in the larger political media picture?

There appears to be yet another evolutionary change happening with political blogs as the big news corporations switch their loss-making paper operations online and the group and community blogs become, in their turn, more corporate. The online operations of the media conglomerates are now being recast, falsely, as group or community blogs themselves, a direct marketing challenge to the likes of Kos and Atrios – the use of folksy names like Swampland is one way of fooling visitors that what they are reading is the voice of the average American.

This is not just about Joe Klein spouting his outdated and overexposed mouth off, entertaining though that is. This is about TimeWarner using its online presence to take on the liberal blogs – ‘We, the corporate establishment are patriots; you, the liberal bloggers, are unwashed hippies” – using Klein as its willing proxy.

They’re slapping down any attempt at encroachment on one of their markets, of course; it’s a fiduciary duty to maximise shareholder value and dividends. What else can they do? They won’t be happy until until they own or control all the media outlets, it’s what conglomerates do, and liberal independent blogs are a direct challenge to corporate dominance of the news markets and public opinion.

“The largest media company in the world is the standard bearer of synergy and vertical integration in the modern digital age. The marriage between “old” media Time Warner and “new” media AOL in 2000 was heralded by many experts as a sign of a new era. The belief was that traditional media companies had to align themselves with online partners or risk the chance of finding their business model and methods obsolete. A weak ad market, subscriptions for new online users hitting a plateau, and a less than expected demand for broadband Internet service are just some of the reasons why AOL Time Warner never jumped started an overhaul of the entire media industry as first predicted. The company dropped AOL from its corporate name in 2003 in an effort to show Wall Street that it still valued its core assets. With such influential brands as CNN, Warner Brothers studio, Sports Illustrated and AOL Instant Messaging, a Time Warner property is never too far away from any consumer’s fingertips.”

Supposed journalists like Klein don’t see this at all: First Amendent? Democracy? Accountability? Phooey. Blogging is for them just an opportunity for further personal aggrandisement and for unencumbered-by-truth-or-editing, vainglorious ranting in which they can get back at all their percieved enemies. And get paid for it!

Klein has confused the immediacy of blogging and the fact that the posts scroll off the screen with the notion that what he’s written is gone, because he doesn’t see it any more: he thinks there’ll be no consequences from his lies: that was yesterday and besides he’s got TimeWarner at his back. He’d better think again.

Read more: Media ownership, Blogging, Media conglomerates, CNN, Time magazine, Time/Warner, Joe Klein