Driftglass brings up some nice points regarding the esteemed institution of the Sunday morning punditocracy. One would think that the holiday weekend had a substantial role in yesterday's Meet the Press being pre-empted by F1 racing.
The question still remains, though: who watches this shit, especially on a regular basis. Do you watch any of these idiotic Sunday morning fuckfests, do you know anyone who does? I sure as hell don't on both counts. Most people will say that life is too short, and weekends are spent in infinitely better ways than tuning in to liars being interviewed and analyzed by insular chumps.
These people are talking to each other, not to any of us. Politics, never a respectable pastime in the first place, is now rather transparently just another racket, in a nation run by rackets. It was already a foregone conclusion by the time the two-ply bumwipe known as Citizens United passed through SCOTUS (yet another American institution that has outlived its usefulness) like a pork tamale from a disreputable taco truck.
But the CU (next Tuesday) ruling sealed the deal, legitimized the blatantly transactional nature of the American political system. The total 2012 election spending topped $7 billion. More than $2 bn was spent by the two major candidates for president. The bulk of all that money was raised and/or donated by large contributors. It is not merely naïve to suppose that the large donors, and the corporations who own the networks which broadcast the Sunday morning follies, don't have directly vested interests in the outcomes of these rituals -- it is flat-out stupid to not understand intrinsically the power and purpose of those connections.
Chomsky laid this all out more than 25 years ago in Manufacturing Consent, but the point bears repeating -- there is no hidden, dark conspiracy, no oaths or rituals sworn in smoke-filled backrooms. This is all out in the open. The hyper-concentration of ownership of these resources is self-perpetuating, and anyone wanting to enter the game knows this before they even get into the game. Any and every talking head we gawp at on any given day, or time of day, knows what the rules are, without even having to have those rules explained to them.
For every outlier like, say, Bill Moyers, there are two hundred Erin Burnetts or David Gregorys. Hell, when was the last time you saw Noam Chomsky on your teevee, versus the usual rotation of known liars, calumniators, and just lazy thinkers, giving bad or false analysis of a situation they know jack shit about? These things are not by accident, but by design -- there are large, grotesque amounts of money in play these days, and these fuckers aren't taking any chances.
The buildup to the big Battle of the Dynasties, Hillary versus Jeb, will continue apace, people will show up like they think have a real choice, and then the second after the winner is anointed in 2016, the circle jerk to 2020 begins anew. It is an industry in the truest sense of the word.
The question still remains, though: who watches this shit, especially on a regular basis. Do you watch any of these idiotic Sunday morning fuckfests, do you know anyone who does? I sure as hell don't on both counts. Most people will say that life is too short, and weekends are spent in infinitely better ways than tuning in to liars being interviewed and analyzed by insular chumps.
These people are talking to each other, not to any of us. Politics, never a respectable pastime in the first place, is now rather transparently just another racket, in a nation run by rackets. It was already a foregone conclusion by the time the two-ply bumwipe known as Citizens United passed through SCOTUS (yet another American institution that has outlived its usefulness) like a pork tamale from a disreputable taco truck.
But the CU (next Tuesday) ruling sealed the deal, legitimized the blatantly transactional nature of the American political system. The total 2012 election spending topped $7 billion. More than $2 bn was spent by the two major candidates for president. The bulk of all that money was raised and/or donated by large contributors. It is not merely naïve to suppose that the large donors, and the corporations who own the networks which broadcast the Sunday morning follies, don't have directly vested interests in the outcomes of these rituals -- it is flat-out stupid to not understand intrinsically the power and purpose of those connections.
Chomsky laid this all out more than 25 years ago in Manufacturing Consent, but the point bears repeating -- there is no hidden, dark conspiracy, no oaths or rituals sworn in smoke-filled backrooms. This is all out in the open. The hyper-concentration of ownership of these resources is self-perpetuating, and anyone wanting to enter the game knows this before they even get into the game. Any and every talking head we gawp at on any given day, or time of day, knows what the rules are, without even having to have those rules explained to them.
For every outlier like, say, Bill Moyers, there are two hundred Erin Burnetts or David Gregorys. Hell, when was the last time you saw Noam Chomsky on your teevee, versus the usual rotation of known liars, calumniators, and just lazy thinkers, giving bad or false analysis of a situation they know jack shit about? These things are not by accident, but by design -- there are large, grotesque amounts of money in play these days, and these fuckers aren't taking any chances.
The buildup to the big Battle of the Dynasties, Hillary versus Jeb, will continue apace, people will show up like they think have a real choice, and then the second after the winner is anointed in 2016, the circle jerk to 2020 begins anew. It is an industry in the truest sense of the word.
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