Balance

First of all, Pony Blow is being too clever by half when he talks about "getting it wrong". He and the people he shills for got things exactly right, in that they did precisely what they set out to do -- overthrow Saddam and establish a permanent garrison in the heart of the Middle East. Anything else can be chalked up to pure indifference as much as incompetence, ignorance, arrogance, or the rest of it. The consequences are incidental to their overall stated intent from the outset.

This is what is so infuriating about this insatiable need for media people to try to be "objective", to let "both sides" have their say. They are not even clear about what the "sides" are. It is a false dichotomy of "liberal" versus "conservative"; it is one group of people who are fed up and frustrated with being pushed around by the Cheney gang, and thinking that the Democrats are going to Do Something About This Motherfucking Shit, versus a group of people who literally have zero regard for truth, facts, reasoned debate, any of it. Snow didn't go on Bill Maher's show to "debate facts", he went on to continue his role as press secretary, which is to disinform, obfuscate, and flat-out lie.

Obviously, this is not news, but it begs the question -- why is the debate being driven by people who either don't know or don't care about the things they are talking about? This is so basic, so fundamental, and yet no one seems to be able to answer it. Why is Jonah Goldberg a published author on a press junket, making the rounds to all these media outlets? He has no idea what he's talking about, he can't even explain the premise of his book without betraying his central arguments; he sits there and baldly insists that he is not contending that "fascism" (by his own colorful definition) is inherently evil, or that "liberals" are compared to Nazis.

And yet the cover of his fucking book features a smiley-face with a Hitler mustache, and the title and subtitle consciously conflating liberalism with fascism and totalitarianism. Is he retarded, or merely disingenuous? Probably neither -- it's just another gig for him, an excuse to peddle skewed clichés to a moronic audience that hasn't the sense to know or care what's going on. It's affirmation for people who need a few fresh talking points. Given Goldberg's impossibly obtuse arguments and defenses, I'm honestly surprised the book doesn't come with a bumper sticker or two.

But he makes the rounds, peppers his cognitive dissonance with just enough references to make it sound like he's a read a book, but is unwilling and unable to explain himself. Pornmumu did the same damned thing with Party of Death, went on every show explaining that he wasn't saying that Democrats enjoy killing people. Motherfucker, it's the title of your book.

Personally, I assume that a certain percentage of media outlets, given the scope and degree of vertical integration, simply have a shared, vested interest in helping move product, regardless of the toxicity of that product. This happened last summer, when Ann Coulter got a full hour on Tweety Matthews' show to pimp the paperback edition of her book at the time. It was purely coincidental, no doubt, that the company that publishes Tweety's books owns the company that publishes Coulter's books.

No doubt Goldberg will be on Maher's show in a week or two peddling his nonsense, oblivious to the totalitarian impulses he quite actively supports. He bitches and moans about health-care initiatives and environmentalism, but has fuck all to say about a government that quite openly spies on its own people, kidnaps and tortures foreigners, and just got caught trying to manufacture a Gulf of Tonkin incident to start yet another war.

Perhaps someday, in the context of providing this much-vaunted "balance", one of our intrepid hosts or interviewers can get around to asking these people point-blank about some of these troublesome inconsistencies underpinning their most fundamental arguments.