Plugging into the Blog Ziegist
Okay. It’s time I do my duty as a political blogger and comment directly on the blog-o-rific issues of the day… if anyone who’s writing a political blog that would command you to sit on the right-side of some Crossfire-esque quasi-debate show, that has neglected to do so in lieu of comments about some stupid suicide pact and a mad mass-murderer from a decade ago…, I recommend you get on the balls right now.
If not Jeff Gannon, you have Eason Jordan to attack. Or Ward Churchill. You hear that FDR’s grandson dissed Brit Hume for throwing a FDR quote out of context? (If you don’t like dissing Brit Hume, you can always gravitate right back to Dan Rather.)
Eason Jordan’s comments, either said or not said (it’s impossible to say from Davos), was completely out of line. Soldiers targetted and killed twelve journalists? Please! Twelve is such an arbitrary number that it looks like Eason Jordan is just grabbing stuff out of his butt! Now parse out the eleven deaths, and you might find one or two or three… or four, perhaps… but where does this guy get off spouting off imaginary numbers like twelve???
Ward Churchill? “Little Eichmans”, I guess, is the phrase that, 3 and a half years later, embroiled him in some controversy… befitting the phrase “The Blame America First Crowd”. It is a point, a frame of reference which stomping away does not render meaningless or incoherent. For his part, Ward Churchill says the essay was akin to a first draft, work on it a little and you get this book.
Thump through the right-wing radio shows and their comments on the Ward Churchill comment, and I hear this: “Those are fighting words! The First Amendment don’t protect ‘fighting words'”. It may be beating up straw, but… um… no. “Let’s fight” is fighting words… a controversial critique of American foreign policy, — you’d prefer the comments George Carlin made of, when all is said and done, remarkably similar though with a more amoral tone, in When Will Jesus Pass the Pork-Chops? (Or Chalmers Johnson‘s more… highbrow and scholarly version.)?
The Jeff Gannon saga throws me back to the Bush desire to “get past the media filter”, which is to say, something is plugging up what would be their pure undiluted messaging. Everything is starting to run together… Maggie Gallagher and Armstrong Williams are thrown into the mix here. And the kids today believing we should scrap the First Amendment. There’s something… there… there.
Brit Hume, you ask? Well… maybe there are lessons for how to reform social security for those born in 1865 or thereabouts.
There. I did my blogging duty. Now I can go back to talking about… I don’t know… some 60 old conspiracy theory.