What happened to Chuck Todd?

Its hard to believe how inane Chuck Todd has become, considering how much I admired his reporting just two years ago.

See here. (if you don’t already know, John Cole’s Balloon Juice is a great blog, and you should read it often.)

This is going to sound like a defense of bad journalistic behavior when it is not. But you really can’t overestimate the tendency one has to trust the response one has to one’s own surroundings. It is easy for me to imagine that, given the social circles that these guys frequent, the country would indeed appear to be center-right. Hell, if I was a complete cultural newbie having been randomly dropped into Augusta, GA (my current hometown, for better or worse), I could only assume that the country is hard-right. And I’ll be honest with you: even though I’m not a total cultural idiot and highly value John Cole’s blog and other more left-leaning sites, for the most part it’s not very real to me. Sure, you people all exist, and I’m grateful (sometimes this is all the keeps me from going crazy considering where I live), but the evidence of my eyes proclaims more than anything else that you exist in a vacuum. It’s possibly some counter-intuitive side-effect of evolution, or it’s possibly just me, but sometimes it’s hard for me to believe that the country is anything but center-right given the realities of my daily life.

I’m not defending Howard Kurtz or Chuck Todd, may they burn in a thousand imaginary hells. I guess what I am saying is that if we want media types to at least seem less skewed, many tough-slog changes are going to have to happen to the culture first. And let’s face it, it’s far, far, far easier to be conservative than it is to be liberal, in the same way that it’s easier to blow up a house than it is to build it…

It occurs to me that this may sound like a pessimistic comment when it really isn’t. I think things have been leaning our way for some time now, even without the disaster of the Bush years, but I do think that these things tend to happen slowly, sometimes so slowly that one would be forgiven for wondering if things will ever change at all.

In a world where FOX rules the media world, ONE MAN has the guts to stop them. But maybe he shouldn’t.

Remember, kids: all “In a world” blog titles must be read in the voice of Don Lafontaine or else you won’t get your money’s worth outta this mess.

This situation is sort of a tough call for me. It goes without saying that I hate FOX News, especially that smarmy fucking idiot Chris Wallace, who daily pisses all over his journalistic legacy.  But…….do we really want the White House going there?  I say NO! (& very forcefully too, much like John McLaughlin, at least as imagined by Dana Carvey.)  What? No?

Yes.

Oh wait I mean

NO!!!

What I mean is, we have lots of websites, all of them very active, that are solely committed to debunking stupid FOX stories, to convincing their advertisers to pull out, among other things.  I admit that it’s all essentially a fruitless endeavor (because as has been noted many times, Murdock doesn’t give a flip about the money element of it) but it’s the only appropriate venue for airing these kinds of grievances.

I sympathize with the White House because FOX really has gone out of its way to subvert the national agenda.  The Tea Party march was almost solely organized by FOX themselves (or at least by their night-time talking heads).  But that doesn’t mean Obama or Dunn have permission to start a flame-war. (If FOX ever got openly seditious, that’s another story, but one would have to have a very high standard for what would be considered seditious.)

Now, why would I, Jason, named socialist devil, poo-poo on the parade of my hero, fellow terrorist Barack Obama?  First of all, this kind of conduct fucks with the decorum of the Office.  You can call me a stick in the mud or old-fashioned if you want: to my mind, decorum is what keeps the two-party system from erupting into a literal gang-war.  Secondly, I generally hate the slippery slope argument, but this surpasses my distaste; besides, once the State takes on the media, whether it’s justified or not, you have already slid down the fucking hill.  As much as I hate FOX News, the only weapon we have against them is the superiority of our philosophy and our culture, and to my mind, we are most definitely winning the long-term battle.

Happy things only.

My two year old son Corwin figured out what rhyming is last night.  He asked me for some cheese out of the fridge.  I picked up some, held it out and said “Now, what do we say?”

He said “Cheese, please……hahahAHAHAHAHAHAH!  Cheese please, cheese please! PLEASE! CHEESE!”

It was very funny even though it was almost 1 a.m. (he refuses to sleep some nights), especially since I remember how hard it was to get my older son to see the significance of things like that. (And if you’ve never done it, explaining exactly why a rhyme is clever is one of those very difficult first-principles type of things, the examination of which pretty much ruins the experience, like explaining a joke or a piece of art.) They are very different people.

re: Obama’s Nobel

We’ve let the right run the narrative for far too long, and the upshot is that we on the left now have to defend the selection of a few Scandanavians, whose collective hearts were certainly in the right place, if not necessarily their minds.  (I’m not saying, however, that it was a completely unwarranted choice.  If you follow the foreign policy steps Obama has taken lately – which admittedly doesn’t make for great headlines , hence the lack of coverage in the US media – you can’t be too surpsied by this decision.)  Like I said in another thread on another website, this just makes it all crystal clear to me whose side I’m on and who I choose to support.  I hope this event speaks to others in the same way.  You don’t even have to agree with the selection of Obama to see that the right is in full-on flame mode, and be completely and utterly ashamed of them for it.

Until they show some class again, I’m through with giving the right the benefit of the doubt.  Partisan mode, engage!

Further, and not necessarily to our benefit as a country engaged in a debate with itself, it also speaks volumes to me about the stance of the rest of the western world.  I used to honestly wonder what fresh hell would be brought by seeing this country polarize itself into complete chaos, and the response to this event has given me a nice taste of the things to come.  I just hope the Secret Service is has their game faces on, because I think they are going to have their work cut out for them from here on out.

I don’t get tough with anyone, Mr. Gittes. My lawyer does.

So THE MAN finally caught up to Roman Polanski today.

Erm….yay?  I don’t know.  What can I say, the guy directed Chinatown, one of my very favorite movies EVER.  Needless to say, I thought it could have ended better for him, but now that chance is gone.

I generally tend to lean towards advocacy of the victim’s wishes, and in this case it would seem the victim would prefer to just let go of the whole thing. I respect that, and could very well see wanting the same thing myself after so many years. That said, he should still get the book thrown at him for fleeing. He’s going to have good representation, so I somehow doubt that he will end up in jail for long, if at all, but you can’t just ignore the fact that he purposefully and willingly bit his thumb at our justice system (& whatever the reason may be will surely be explained, as he will have his day in court).

And I say this as a very big fan of his work and in full recognition of his importance as an artist. I saw the HBO special on him, and although I can see some mitigating factors here, I came out of it wishing that he would just turn himself in and be done with it. Now he just gets to do the perp walk and perhaps ruin his legacy (though I doubt it, he’s still a brilliant director, and this IS hollywood, after all.)

Tales from Reddit / topic: what’s been the scariest moment of your life?

I had two stories.  This is one I’ll share here:

(posted 25 days ago)

adulthood scary stuff:

2002: new son, soon-to-be-new wife, very new life, living it up in the hills of WV. poor but proud and having a good time shortly after 9/11.

me and the wife make some really good chili (ok so mostly it’s her deal, but I’ve been known to eat the hell out of it), and we decided to do a batch for that night. anyway, my ten-month old toddler of a son decides he would like to help, but of course, that’s not a good thing for baby to do. this led to me picking up baby several times by the armpits and sending him on his merry way out of the room.

well, the chili is a done deal, hot and boiling, dinner is being served. i had my hands on the soup bowls, and my wife was pouring out sweet tea, and neither one of us was able to drop everything in time to stop our one-year-old from pulling a really large bowl of the almost boiling chili on top of himself.

i was able to deflect the container a bit as it dropped so it (just barely) missed his face and upper body, but a good liter or so soaked his arm up to the shoulder and as i snatched him up (probably too roughly) i could literally feel the first few layers of skin on his arm just immediately start to peel off in my fist. we dropped everything, stood him in the shower for a few minutes and as his arms just continued to bubble and peel we decided finally that it would be better to just hop in the car than to wait for an ambulance to arrive. so that’s what we did, we drove down there with our hazards on, and with absolutely no concern for any traffic laws or consequences thereof.

of course he is fine now, reddit.  don’t you worry. he’s even got a cool scar to show for it, though now of course it is pathetically small. but that moment when it happened, it was breath-taking, and i’m wise enough to know what could have happened had it hit him full-force on the chest or face. so you have to be grateful, even when tragic things happen, because those things, bad as they are, could always be more tragic.