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The kids are alright.

Like a lot of Amer­i­cans who have had it up to here with the cur­rent admin­is­tra­tion, I watch Keith Olber­mann on MSNBC. Like a lot of peo­ple who watch Keith Olber­mann, I’m not a 100 per­cent fan. The Spe­cial Com­ments set my teeth on edge, although that’s because they’re badly writ­ten, not for the con­tent, and any­way, they’re rare. There are times when the whole busi­ness just grates, too — the Fox-baiting, mainly, which feels a lit­tle like junior high school. I tire of the same old Wash­ing­ton Post talk­ing heads; give Dana Mil­bank and Eugene Robin­son a night off once in a while. But I give Olber­mann, and MSNBC, credit for try­ing to cre­ate an alter­na­tive to the rest of cable news, a place where peo­ple who’ve had it up to here, etc., can feel a lit­tle less alone, if not in the world, then in their liv­ing rooms.

Through Olber­mann I found the delight­ful Rachel Mad­dow, who is such a joy to have a girl­crush on. I love every­thing about her, but espe­cially her flaws. Her eye makeup looks like it was set­tled on in a high-level con­fer­ence between the lead­er­ship of the National Orga­ni­za­tion for Women and a drag queen. Mad­dow, whose off-the-air aes­thetic is crunchy-granola les­bian, with the short hair and the Buddy Holly glasses and the no-fuss wardrobe, wears her required-for-TV blaz­ers as though their lin­ings were actu­ally hair­shirts, and who can’t love a girl who’s uncom­fort­able on TV? I was on TV for a few years, and I was never com­fort­able there. I feel Rachel’s pain, and love the way she bears her bur­den with such good humor, destroy­ing Pat Buchanan and the other geezers they put before her. I would love to see her one-on-one with some­one like Ann Coul­ter or Bill Dono­hue or Sean Han­nity, all of whom she would bring down effort­lessly with the beams of truth in her mild gaze.

It’s always fun to watch some­one on their way up in the world, because you know the next thing is com­ing. That it would be her own show pre­ced­ing Olber­mann was no sur­prise, but I was a lit­tle taken aback by this memo from the ivory tower, by Rem Rei­der on the Amer­i­can Jour­nal­ism Review web­site. He calls the ele­va­tion of Mad­dow to Dan Abrams’ old seat “a good call,” then harrumphs:

It’s yet another step in the polar­iza­tion of the Amer­i­can media. Keith Olber­mann fol­lowed by Rachel Mad­dow means two back-to-back hours of hard left television.

Whuh? “Hard left?” I must have missed some­thing. Olber­mann is a mil­lion­aire, and Mad­dow, if not one already, will cer­tainly be one very soon. To me, mil­lion­aires aren’t hard left­ists. What both of them are is anti-Bush. To the extent that Rove, et al have suc­ceeded in label­ing any­one who opposes the poli­cies of the cur­rent pres­i­dent “hard left,” well, I salute them. Good work, comrades!

Rei­der continues:

For years, Amer­i­can news­pa­pers and tele­vi­sion news orga­ni­za­tions clung to the idea that they were non­par­ti­san, down the mid­dle. Sure, there was the end­less whin­ing from the right about the “lib­eral” media. (Today, of course, cries of media bias from the left are at least as vocif­er­ous as those from the right.) But how­ever imper­fectly, most news orga­ni­za­tions tried to report the news with­out an obvi­ous polit­i­cal point of view.

Then along came Fox, a 24-hour news cable chan­nel with a clear right-wing ori­en­ta­tion. And it was a major suc­cess, out­draw­ing cable news pio­neer CNN. There obvi­ously was an audi­ence eagerly wait­ing for it.

…Fol­low­ing Olber­mann with Mad­dow …reflects and rein­forces the trend toward sep­a­rate mega­phones for sep­a­rate audi­ences. As in the blo­gos­phere, with its pugna­cious mix of con­ser­v­a­tive and lib­eral Web sites, there is polit­i­cal TV for the left and polit­i­cal TV for the right.

Increas­ingly, we are a nation of par­ti­sans talk­ing only to themselves.

I think about this a lot. A friend who went through j-school with me said the other day, “We were taught that if you shone the light of truth on some­thing, it would be enough.” But it wasn’t. Isn’t that the les­son of the Les­ley Stahl/Ronald Rea­gan flag story? The truth isn’t what you say it is; the truth is always mal­leable. Shine the light of truth on some peo­ple, and they’ll make shadow pup­pets. Or they’ll say, “These aren’t the droids you’re look­ing for.” “True enough” is plenty good for most.

Jon Stew­art is another one of my faves. I love Jon Stew­art because, alone among peo­ple who sit behind a desk and talk to me, he seems to be telling me the truth. Middle-aged folks are always clutch­ing their chests and bemoan­ing that young peo­ple watch Stew­art the way their par­ents watched Cronkite, and oy what a crime that is. Well, no. Have any of them watched “The Daily Show?” Have you ever seen him do an inter­view? It’s funny, but it’s also really, really good. He asks ques­tions you wish so-called legit­i­mate journos would, like, “Are you seri­ous?” The point in his inter­view with Jonah Gold­berg where he throws his head back, mouth agape, and stares at the ceil­ing says more about his sub­ject, and cer­tainly his subject’s pre­pos­ter­ous book, than any­thing writ­ten in the seri­ous media.

It’s true that we’re a nation of par­ti­sans talk­ing to our­selves, but maybe that’s not such a ter­ri­ble thing. Fort Wayne, Indi­ana, once had six daily news­pa­pers, and it sur­vived. There were prob­a­bly a dozen or more in the larger cities, and they sur­vived. The so-called “objec­tive” press is a fairly recent inven­tion, and came, I’m con­vinced, from the busi­ness side, not the ivory tower — it’s a lot eas­ier to sell news­pa­pers to every­one if you at least pre­tend to be fair. (There’s a down­side to that. Exhibit one: The edi­to­r­ial page of most news­pa­pers, full of on-the-one-hand-this-on-the-other-hand-that chin-stroking, which ends in, “Who is right? Only time will tell.”)

I do worry what will hap­pen when every­one seems to be work­ing from their own set of facts, but I have to have faith that facts are stub­born things and can be sorted out. You don’t hear so much about the Obama-is-a-secret-Muslim thing these days.

Maybe it’ll be eas­ier for Rei­der, et al, to think of Olber­mann, et al, as enter­tain­ment, like Jon Stew­art, et al. It is for me, cer­tainly. I read 50 news sources a day, at least. Cer­tainly I can indulge myself in a lit­tle Olbermann/Maddow one-two once in a while, right?

I’ll visit your armed camp if you’ll visit mine. A lit­tle pris­oner exchange, say.

Blog­gage:

Twelve-year-old boy taken to hos­pi­tal after acci­den­tally ignit­ing a gas can while try­ing to light a fart. When I dis­cussed this with Alan last night, he con­fessed he’d never actu­ally seen this done and won­dered about the length of the flame. Bic-length, or flamethrower? Poor boy (Alan). How did he reach man­hood with­out wit­ness­ing this Boy Scout spectacle?

Also, poor boy with the burns on his ass.

Have a good day.

Posted on Thursday, August 21st, 2008 at 11:40 am
in Media.

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37 responses to
“The kids are alright.”

  1. alex said on August 21st, 2008 at 12:33 pm

    I can’t say I’ve ever seen a fart lit, either, although I’ve watched plenty of peo­ple try. Those sto­ries of peo­ple blow­ing them­selves up while on the john with a cig­a­rette are totally bunk.

  2. Catherine said on August 21st, 2008 at 12:45 pm

    I don’t worry about the exis­tence of par­ti­san camps. I do worry about the lack of com­mu­ni­ca­tion between camps. I tend to think that objec­tive report­ing is more of a goal than a real­iz­able thing. We all come to the table with biases, and although one can relate pure facts (and yes, facts are good), it’s unusual to do so with­out some con­text. Con­text is where bias comes in. Since I don’t really believe strongly in objec­tive truth, my con­cern is: how do we share our dif­fer­ent real­i­ties in a way that encour­ages dia­logue, com­pro­mise, and think­ing? PS, I think this blog is one place where this starts to happen.

    OK, now feel free to attack and tell me that those 2 years in grad school read­ing post-modern phi­los­o­phy were a com­plete waste of time. You won’t be the first.

  3. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on August 21st, 2008 at 1:04 pm

    It’s not unlike learn­ing his­tory from fic­tion. You can always show that peo­ple pick up errors that may or may not be inten­tion­ally com­mited by the author, but most peo­ple mostly can intuit when you’re learn­ing some­thing worth not­ing as fact (read­ing “Johnny Tremain” and asso­ci­at­ing Paul Revere with Boston) and what’s likely a whole cloth cre­ation (read­ing “The Blue & The Grey” and won­der­ing if Jeb Stu­art really was always sur­rounded by young ladies) and what’s clearly manure (read­ing “Flash­man” and hav­ing him show up everywhere).

    I enjoy MSNBC and have never watched more than fif­teen min­utes of Fox, usu­ally not will­ingly or inten­tion­ally at that, and fill in with CNN, but i’m still a con­ser­v­a­tive (and even like Jonah Gold­berg). If i think Jon help­fully edited his inter­view on “Lib­eral Fas­cism” to his own ben­e­fit, it nei­ther breaks my leg or picks my pocket.

    Col­bert absolutely rocks, and you can learn most of what you need to know between him and Jon; how that works, exactly, would take an algo­rithm beyond my skills, but you can just tell where the polemic begins or the par­ody starts, can’t you? (Cue Pot­ter Stew­art ref’n.)

    Except for Dobbs and O’Reilly. I just can’t fig­ure if they actu­ally are Elmer Gantrys or if they truly believe in their stated perspectives.

  4. Jason T. said on August 21st, 2008 at 1:10 pm

    I keep mix­ing up Ira Glass with Rachel Mad­dow. Are you sure they’re not the same person?

    As for the rest of your piece — Amen.

    One of the things that chafed my Hun­gar­ian rear dur­ing my mediocre career in news­pa­pers was the insis­tence on equiv­o­cat­ing about everything.

    I remem­ber one par­tic­u­larly vivid con­ver­sa­tion with an edi­tor who was insis­tent that I get an oppos­ing view­point on a sub­ject that was cut and dried from every angle.

    I was already look­ing for another job, so I told him, “When we write a story about child moles­ters, we don’t call NAMBLA to get their side, and when we do a story about racist graf­fiti, we don’t call the Klan, so I’m not doing it on this story.”

    He told me he was sorry he had hired me.

    I was, too.

    I won­der why peo­ple don’t read news­pa­pers any more? Hmm.

    Both sides may have an argu­ment. Only time will tell.

  5. Gasman said on August 21st, 2008 at 1:23 pm

    Nancy,
    A cou­ple of great links to the Jay Rosen arti­cle and Jon Stewart’s defla­tion of Jonah Gold­berg. I’ve been mys­ti­fied as to why so many still believe the mythol­ogy regard­ing Rea­gan. He was a bum­bling moron and had no idea that we even had a con­sti­tu­tion, let alone that he was bound by it. Gold­berg exem­pli­fies the pseudo-scholarship, the intel­lec­tual sloth that per­son­i­fies the con­tem­po­rary right wing apol­o­gists. I can­not think of a sin­gle right wing spokesper­son that debates any point with true intel­lect or advo­cacy of ideas. They all, yes I do mean ALL, use ridicu­lous hyper­bole and ad hominem invec­tive to triv­i­al­ize lib­er­al­ism with con­tempt and disdain.

    Stew­art exer­cises the kind of skep­ti­cism that the press should pos­sess. I’ve heard many print and on air jour­nal­ists state that their job is not to ques­tion author­ity, but to merely report. The ques­tion­ing, they main­tain, should be done by the polit­i­cal oppo­si­tion. Aaron Brown and Char­lie Gib­son are but two who’ve stated that opin­ion in recent mem­ory. It seems to me that both Brown and Gib­son would have said oth­er­wise toward the begin­ning of their careers.

    I agree that Olber­mann has, as of late, adopted a rather snarky tone for some seg­ments. I think it tends to dis­credit his oth­er­wise valid cri­tiques of the right wing. It can seem too much like a mir­ror image of the right wing snarky crap on Fox. How­ever, Olber­mann is still one of the few on air talk­ing heads show­ing suf­fi­cient out­rage at what Cheney/Bush et al are doing to our coun­try. For that I am grate­ful. Go Keith.

    I think that three on air peo­ple are pri­mar­ily respon­si­ble for help­ing to change American’s per­cep­tion of the Bush Administration:

    1. John Stew­art — More of a jour­nal­ist than most in the profession.

    3. Bill Moyer — He has exhib­ited an unwill­ing­ness to accept the sta­tus quo of pas­sive jour­nal­ism. He also gives a forum to gen­uine crit­ics of jour­nal­ism and Bush who also have real intel­lec­tual bona fides.

    3. David Let­ter­man — For his “Great Moments In Pres­i­den­tial Speeches.” I am con­vinced that Letterman’s nightly air­ing of Bush’s unedited ver­bal gaffes helped peo­ple real­ize what an imbe­cile Bush really is.

    Dur­ing the 2004 cam­paign, Let­ter­man would run short, com­i­cally edited clips mak­ing pok­ing fun at the can­di­dates by mak­ing them appear to say some­thing ridicu­lous. The edit­ing was so ham-fisted and obvi­ous that it was the joke. (Lim­baugh has used the same tech­nique in audio clips for decades, but the edit­ing is more art­ful and not obvi­ous, lend­ing a decid­edly men­da­cious qual­ity to the prac­tice.) How­ever, Let­ter­man real­ized that with Bush they don’t need to edit. They can ran­domly pick prac­ti­cally any 10 – 20 sec­ond seg­ment of him speak­ing and come up with incom­pre­hen­si­ble gems that fairly accu­rately encap­su­late his intel­lect. The effect has been spectacular.

    The rise of Rachel Mad­dow gives me hope that the right wing’s stran­gle­hold on the media is begin­ning to lessen. She has a brain and is unwill­ing to pas­sively cede any point to con­ser­v­a­tives that think they can blus­ter they way through an inter­view. It does no ser­vice to the Amer­i­can peo­ple to have a syco­phan­tic press corps that are pas­sive, will­ing foot sol­diers pre­pared to echo, with­out ques­tion or thought, any state­ment the White House offers. We can turn to Donna Perino for that. I’d rather lis­ten to Mad­dow. I don’t see her as a left wing shill, merely a polar oppo­site foil to those on Fox. I think she would be just as unwill­ing to accept incom­pe­tency, lying, and intel­lec­tual sloth from the left. (Except, when was the last time you saw those traits from the left?) Let’s hear it for the lesbian!

  6. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on August 21st, 2008 at 1:31 pm

    I think Let­ter­man edits, actu­ally. Watch Bushitler in his inter­view with Costas last Sun­day night. He doesn’t fart but once, as i recall.

    Hey, i laugh at the Great Moments seg­ment, which i firmly believe will con­tinue whomever the Cur­rent Occu­pant is at 1600 P.A.

    By the way, did any­one read the Jay Rosen piece to the end? In the immor­tal words of “The Princess Bride,” i don’t think that arti­cle means what you think it does. About Rea­gan, and a few other things. But it is a great piece, worth the time to scroll all­away thru, or even select all/copy/paste into a text file and print to read sloooowly. Jay’s tops.

  7. LAMary said on August 21st, 2008 at 1:31 pm

    Off track…
    Our long national night­mare of bikini beach vol­ley­ball is over. Decathalon, which may or may not be cov­ered, starts now.

  8. alex said on August 21st, 2008 at 1:37 pm

    Hey, Jason, hello to your Hun­gar­ian ass from mine!

    When I was in Chicago, I knew a Hun­gar­ian Reformed pas­tor who’s wife was from McK­eesport, but blank­ing on the name.

    And, yes, I agree with what you say above. It has always chapped my gay ass that the media couldn’t dis­cuss the sub­ject of homo­sex­u­al­ity with­out giv­ing equal time to the likes of James Dob­son, et al. Only rel­a­tively recently has this been changing.

    Edit: Desmond Par­ragh, that was the name of the pas­tor. Know them by any chance?

  9. Halloween Jack said on August 21st, 2008 at 1:42 pm

    Much shorter Rem Rei­der: ZOMG THEYRE GIVING A DYKE HER OWN TEEVEE SHOW BATTEN TEH HATCHES

    As for me, I may have found a rea­son to watch MSNBC.

    Never lit a fart. I learned about the phe­nom­e­non a lit­tle bit after I’d fig­ured out new uses for some of the other things down there, and didn’t want to risk dam­ag­ing them.

  10. Deggjr said on August 21st, 2008 at 1:42 pm

    The peo­ple who com­plain about get­ting the news from Jon Stew­art are incom­pre­hen­si­ble. As just one of many exam­ples, how would any­one know that Bush I signed the off-shore drilling ban unless they watched the Daily Show and saw their clip. I haven’t seen that infor­ma­tion any­where despite all the chat­ter about off-shore drilling.

    The com­pet­ing tele­vi­sion news car­ries the fires, car acci­dents, celebrity reports, sports results, lot­tery results, celebrity (of the par­tic­u­lar net­work) inter­views, pic­tures taken by view­ers, weather, etc. How could all that pos­si­bly have the equiv­a­lent news value of The Daily Show?

    I endure the Chicago Tri­bune. They had a front page arti­cle recently about John McCain’s role in a POW church riot with the expec­ta­tion that peo­ple should pay for that cam­paign lit­er­a­ture. They print a col­umn by Den­nis Byrne (cur­mud­geon) a cou­ple of time a week. He also has a web­site. Here are the com­ment totals for his last 10 posts: 0 – 7-1 – 2-1 – 0-0 – 7-0 – 0. As a point of con­trast, here are the com­ment totals for Glen Greenwald’s last 10 posts: 74 – 36-159 – 228-173 – 178-188 – 144-563 – 63. The Tri­bune isn’t dying, it’s relent­lessly com­mit­ting sui­cide through 1,000 cuts and it is not unique.

  11. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on August 21st, 2008 at 1:43 pm

    Alex, trust me when i say there are myr­iad many evan­gel­i­cals who do not give a Hungarian’s hiney fol­li­cles for Dobson’s opin­ions on any­one, espe­cially includ­ing their mat­ri­mo­nial pref­er­ences. We got Robert­son off the TV, but Dob­son buys his own radio time, so i guess we’re stuck with the cranky doc­tor from Col­orado Springs on slow news days.

  12. MichaelG said on August 21st, 2008 at 1:49 pm

    I’ve done my seri­ous for the month. I will, there­fore, attest to the fact that hominid exhaust emis­sions can be set afire. The flame is blue. The dura­tion is, . . . well, . . . a func­tion of the dura­tion. Talk about mileage vary­ing. This was an old col­lege dorm and army bar­racks pas­time. I never saw any­body harmed by it other than hav­ing beer forcibly ejected from their nose whilst observ­ing the process, although I never saw it attempted in prox­im­ity to an open petrol can. By the way, if cer­tain unpleas­ant vapors are encoun­tered in an enclosed space, light­ing a match or lighter can improve the atmos­phere. Burns up the rem­nants. Really.

  13. Gasman said on August 21st, 2008 at 1:54 pm

    Jeff(TMO),
    I’ve seen my fair share of the Let­ter­man “Great Moments” seg­ments and I have not seen a sin­gle one that was edited. I’ve been a record­ing engineer/audio edi­tor for 20+ years and am some­what sen­si­tive to the mis­use of the skill. There have been many other Let­ter­man seg­ments, about which I was speak­ing above, that inten­tion­ally use awk­ward, but obvi­ous edits to make the gag. How­ever, as some­one that is fairly aware of the tech­ni­cal prac­tice, I have not seen any “Great Moments In Pres­i­den­tial Speeches” in which I could detect use of a video edit. The visual edits are much more obvi­ous than audio, but I don’t recall any in which I even sus­pected an audio edit. They sim­ply don’t need to. In fact, any of the “Great Moments In Pres­i­den­tial Speeches” that I can recall are con­tin­u­ous sin­gle cam­era shots, which are vir­tu­ally impos­si­ble to edit in that context.

  14. nancy said on August 21st, 2008 at 1:58 pm

    An old boyfriend lit a fart for me once when I expressed dis­be­lief that it could ever be done, and I laughed so hard I could barely breathe. I always was easy to amuse.

    As for com­ments, this is an inter­est­ing phe­nom­e­non to me. I often won­der, why are my com­ments so good and the Freep’s so awful, and they require reg­is­tra­tion? News­pa­per com­ments in gen­eral are so awful, in fact, that many are start­ing to dis­able them, just because they suck so hard and must be mon­i­tored con­stantly. This is a master’s the­sis, somewhere.

  15. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on August 21st, 2008 at 2:01 pm

    .…should have said selected! Not edited. And that’s my point as to the durable future of “GMIPH.” Thank­ful i am that i don’t have to watch video of every week’s ser­mon, let alone the announce­ments pre-service (hello, Dr. Spooner).

    Didn’t mean to impugn Letterman’s staff, just that any­one filmed long enough speak­ing in pub­lic will give off plenty of mate­r­ial, hence my emph on “selection.”

    Why light farts when you have cans of Off! to light and blow­torch around? That, and tying a bread bag in knots, hang­ing it off a branch over a bucket of water, and then light the lower end. You get both cool visu­als and audio excite­ment, plus var­i­ous brands with dif­fer­ent color inks give a weird spec­trum of flame colors.

  16. Gasman said on August 21st, 2008 at 2:05 pm

    Jeff(TMO),
    I did read the entire Rosen arti­cle. I felt it a fair cri­tique of the media but still a bit over­awed with Reagan’s alleged polit­i­cal wiz­ardry over the media. Rea­gan was a man with lit­tle regard toward democ­racy whose Alzheimer’s was prob­a­bly show­ing its ear­li­est effects by the end of his first term. He was the pro­to­type for the mal­leable fool cur­rently occu­py­ing the oval office. He was obses­sive about Soviet com­mu­nism, but seem­ingly unaware of Chi­nese com­mu­nism. He did this nation and the world great harm. What were his last­ing achievements?

  17. MichaelG said on August 21st, 2008 at 2:15 pm

    I don’t believe there were cans of Off in those days. Can’t recall hav­ing seen one, any­way. We used to flamethrow with spray cans of Right Guard. It was judged to be the best after some mod­est trial and error.

  18. Gasman said on August 21st, 2008 at 2:18 pm

    A shout out to the Hun­gar­i­ans. My mother’s maiden name was Hor­vath. Cut me and I bleed goulash, only now it’s vegetarian.

  19. Kirk said on August 21st, 2008 at 2:21 pm

    MichaelG, many were the times when I was a lit­tle feller that I asked my mother to light a match in the bath­room because I had to use it and my father had just befouled the air. And, yes, it did work.

  20. alex said on August 21st, 2008 at 2:22 pm

    My first expe­ri­ence with flamethrow­ing was with an aerosol can full of some cheap-ass men’s cologne. My brother picked it up for a cou­ple of cents at a garage sale, jammed it into “on” and lit it — right in the back­yard of said garage sale. We were chased from the premises and our mother had already been called before we arrived home.

  21. John said on August 21st, 2008 at 2:42 pm

    Canned Lysol flames beyond the ten foot mark. Ace­tone, ten­nis balls, and third floor dorm room over­look­ing a street make for some inter­est­ing exper­i­ments. Paper air­planes loaded with pop bot­tle rock­ets also do the same.

    But I have never seen a Myth­i­cal Order of the Blue Flame demonstration.

  22. Laura said on August 21st, 2008 at 2:45 pm

    Olber­mann sort of canned Dana Mil­bank (or he quit, depend­ing on who you believe), FYI. Sadly, I have no spe­cial knowl­edge regard­ing light­ing farts.

  23. coozledad said on August 21st, 2008 at 3:14 pm

    I’ve seen a guy torch­ing farts in a dorm room. I have to say it was one of the most dis­turb­ing things I’ve ever wit­nessed, and Ive helped my wife wash mag­gots out of a wounded duck’s back. I don’t think I’d have been sig­nif­i­cantly more weirded out if he’d farted his vis­cera across the floor in a big wet glob.
    Maybe it was the dope I was smok­ing, or maybe I’d had enough of that “Ani­mal House” shit to last a lifetime.

  24. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on August 21st, 2008 at 3:19 pm

    Off! cans in 1968, orange and light blue angles all askew look­ing Howard Johnson-ish, and a noz­zle that could shoot flame a yard and a half lit off an Ohio Blue Tip match.

    Or were you going back ear­lier than that, Michael?

  25. coozledad said on August 21st, 2008 at 3:33 pm

    I didn’t know Rachel Mad­dow was a Rhodes Scholar. It’s good to see that tal­ent break­ing into prime time. She’s a clas­sic beauty, too. Could have stepped out of one of the fres­cos at Pompeii.

  26. coozledad said on August 21st, 2008 at 4:22 pm

    Sorry I’ve set up camp here, but I twisted my back some­how, and I’m just sit­ting here hav­ing some med­i­cine. It just ocurred to me that there may be some Roman fres­cos on Les­bos, too, since they used to hol­i­day there around the dawn of the com­mon era. That reminded me that some of the inhab­i­tants of Les­bos resent being asso­ci­ated with the girl’s team.
    Has this joke made it into a bad Danny Devito film yet? Two mob­sters, one from Jer­sey, one a Greek, meet on a yacht in Piraeus. The Greek prof­fers his hand “I’ve heard about you. I’ve got a cousin in Tren­ton. he builds houses there.“
    The Jer­sey guy thinks for a minute.
    “Yeah, yeah. Archie Pap­palas. Built a house for my niece. Small world. You been to Tren­ton?“
    “No, actu­ally. This is the first time I’ve been away from home. I’m a Les­bian.“
    The Jer­sey guy slaps him on the back and laughs “Ain’t we all, pal. Ain’t we all.”

    I’ll stop now. Try the Knishes.

  27. Colleen said on August 21st, 2008 at 4:41 pm

    Noth­ing of import to add, but I didn’t want MY Hun­gar­ian behind to go uncounted.

    And really. Since it’s a Hun­gar­ian behind, it’s hard to miss.…

  28. MichaelG said on August 21st, 2008 at 5:35 pm

    Between col­lege and mil­i­tary we are look­ing at about ’62/’69. Sounds like we were using infe­rior prod­ucts. I’m not Hun­gar­ian, I’m Irish. You can prob­a­bly tell. And you can count me in as a mem­ber of the R. M. fan club.

  29. joodyb said on August 21st, 2008 at 6:12 pm

    you dis­count, jeff tmmo, the irre­sistible combo of fire and what­ever emanates from the human body.
    signed,
    still not over hav­ing spawned a male child

  30. Scout said on August 21st, 2008 at 6:59 pm

    The biggest prob­lem I have with the “truthi­ness” of mod­ern day jour­nal­ism is the sales job they’ve sprung upon us that there are always two absolutely equal sides to every story… even when it is obvi­ous that one side is com­pletely full of shit. Take global warm­ing for instance. For every kajil­lion sci­en­tists that present data sup­port­ing the fact that it is indeed occur­ring, cable news goes out of its way to present the one lone wolf (usu­ally on big oil’s pay­roll) who is paid to refute it. What is so infu­ri­at­ing is that the “unbi­ased” tele­jour­nal­ist will sit there and con­duct this mad­den­ingly inno­cent devil’s advo­cate mod­er­a­tor inter­view of two peo­ple, one of whom rep­re­sents the major­ity view, the other the lob­by­ist view, that leaves the largely low info per­son with the impres­sion that ” Well hell! Sci­ence just isn’t sure yet, so I’ll just go out and buy that Hum­mer! Oh and screw recy­cling too!”

    The Jonah Gold­berg inter­view was hys­ter­i­cal. I don’t know who was fun­nier; Jonah try­ing to talk in so many cir­cles he even­tu­ally made him­self dizzy, or Jon’s suc­cinct take down of the Pantload’s silly piece of garbage. Given the premise of his mag­num opus, I hon­estly don’t think Jonah prob­a­bly did much bet­ter in the stuff they cut.

    Oh and one last thing: Rachel Mad­dow rocks.

  31. Linda said on August 21st, 2008 at 9:55 pm

    Re: the two sides not “com­mu­ni­cat­ing” with one another. It’s worse than that. If you read news­pa­pers, you might acci­den­tally be exposed to some­thing you hadn’t thought of, or dis­agreed with. Now you can check out only the web­sites you want, and spec­ify which type of sto­ries you want to read. I actu­ally read a com­ment in freere​pub​lic​.com (’cause I read all kinds of stuff) that said Fox was get­ting too left-wing; from now on, he would only get his news from freere­pub­lic or News­max. You can cre­ate your own lit­tle real­ity, unclut­tered by jar­ring things from that other reality.

  32. grapeshot said on August 21st, 2008 at 11:19 pm

    Hello Jason and Alex and Gas­man and Colleen, from yet another Hun­gar­ian. It must be Hun­gar­ian Day at NN​.com

    I dis­cov­ered Rachel Mad­dow on pod­casts from Air Amer­ica and was struck by her crisp report­ing and good sense — and her wit. I don’t watch any of the 24-hour news chan­nels, so I missed see­ing her on TV. How­ever, I’m very pleased that she has her own show now, and you can be sure that I’ll be tun­ing in to see how it goes.

    Accord­ing to Wikipedia, she actu­ally has a PhD from Oxford in polit­i­cal sci­ence. I’m very impressed, and can­not think of another pun­dit on the 24-hour news chan­nels who has such an impres­sive cre­den­tial. Unfor­tu­nately, cre­den­tials and smarts get you nowhere on TV. Let’s hope that her rat­ings num­bers are suc­cess­ful. I think they will be, but then, what do I know. I thought Keen Eddie would last more than 7 episodes.

    Maybe Rachel will guest on The Daily Show? You know, to hype her new show. Wouldn’t that be too cool for school!

  33. jcburns said on August 21st, 2008 at 11:46 pm

    Wow, a John McCain ban­ner ad on your site, Nance! (At least here, now, on this par­tic­u­lar call-up of the page.) They must be try­ing to tar­get the Hun­gar­ian demo.

  34. Dexter said on August 21st, 2008 at 11:53 pm

    Get Sir­ius XM Radio and lis­ten to Air Amer­ica in the after­noons on the XM side, Chan­nel 167. Randi Rhodes is THE BEST. Smart as hell and she gives it to McCain hard, and Ms. Rhodes is enter­tain­ing in a man­ner that make you hate it when you can’t lis­ten all the way through the show. Ms. Mad­dow is on Air Amer­ica, too, and she’s great, too…I just pre­fer Randi Rhodes.
    Very habit-forming.

  35. Jason T. said on August 22nd, 2008 at 10:15 am

    Jaj Istenem! Magyars!

    In fair­ness, I’m also half-German. My ances­tors are all proud peo­ple with a lot of rea­sons to be modest.

    Alex, I don’t know the Par­raghs, but my mother’s side of the fam­ily were Hun­gar­ian Reformed. She vis­ited the Big D sev­eral times as a teen-ager in the church youth group; appar­ently, Detroit, Cleve­land and McK­eesport are big hubs of the Hun­gar­ian Reformed Church in America.

    I used to be a pas­sion­ate believer in “bal­anced” jour­nal­ism. The older I get, the more I feel that jour­nal­ism has to be accu­rate, even if it comes at the expense of arti­fi­cial balance.

    Call­ing a spokesman from a trade orga­ni­za­tion is rarely use­ful for any story. Get­ting out of the office and using your two eyes to look and your two ears to hear are more impor­tant for any reporter than regur­gi­tat­ing second-hand information.

    The prob­lem with cable news, and the Inter­net, is that too many of us aren’t even work­ing with second-hand infor­ma­tion; we’re writ­ing about sub­jects we only know about third– and fourth-hand.

  36. brian stouder said on August 22nd, 2008 at 10:46 am

    Olber­mann sort of canned Dana Mil­bank (or he quit, depend­ing on who you believe)

    Laura — Yes! I caught just the end of Olbermann’s remarks about Mil­bank, and didn’t under­stand — and then your com­ment prompted me to Google it, and I came up with this -

    http://​www​.huff​in​g​ton​post​.com/​2​0​0​8​/​0​8​/​0​5​/​d​a​n​a​-​m​i​l​b​a​n​k​-​l​e​a​v​i​n​g​-​c​o​u​n​_​n​_​1​1​6​9​9​7.html

    and this pas­sage struck me

    Dana Mil­bank of The Wash­ing­ton Post, who noti­fied us today that after four years appear­ing with us, he had accepted another tele­vi­sion offer. This saved your crack Count­down staff an increas­ingly dif­fi­cult decision.

    For nearly a week we’d been wait­ing for him to offer a cor­rec­tion or an expla­na­tion for his col­umn from last week in which he appar­ently reported an Obama quote with­out a full con­text turned the mean­ing of the quote inside-out.

    OK — I ‘get’ that guest com­men­ta­tors might gen­er­ally share a host’s POV — and indeed, oth­ers might pre­dictably dis­agree, and still be reg­u­lar guests.….but what I don’t get is Olbermann’s “increas­ingly dif­fi­cult decision”.

    I sup­pose we can dis­miss it as an exam­ple of what Nance was refer­ring to, regard­ing “badly writ­ten” commentary.

    Plus — what DO these guest peo­ple get paid, for their seat-of-the-pants kib­itz­ing? If some­one opts to “accept another tele­vi­sion offer” — what would that offer be, I wonder?

  37. BOSSY said on August 24th, 2008 at 7:17 pm

    Bossy came over here *just in time* before you were able to steal Bossy’s boyfriend Rachel Mad­dow. Phew.

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