Wag the Debate
Wag the Debate
[Ed. Note: Sam Seder, Janeane Garofolo and the Majority Report Team will be guest blogging this weekend on ThinkProgress.org from the HBO Comedy Festival in Aspen, CO.]
Greetings from Aspen!
We’re here in Colorado to broadcast our Air America Radio show, “The Majority Report,” live from the HBO U.S. Comedy Arts Festival. As part of the festival, tomorrow, our co-host Janeane Garofalo will be in a panel called “Wag the Debate,” sponsored by none other than the Center for American Progress.
Everyone on our staff is a big fan of the new thinkprogress.org project, so we jumped at the opportunity to guest-blog. And since we’re much, much better looking than Judd Legum (and, to be honest, than most of the thinkprogress.org staff), we figured we could add some much-needed show-business glitz to this thing. But then Judd vetoed our photo submissions, on the basis that radio doesn’t qualify as show-business glitz. After giving it some thought, we decided he was right, so we’re just sticking to the words.
One of the things we’ve focused on time and time again on the Majority Report is exposing the crucial role cable-news pundits and hacks (we’re still trying to figure out the difference) play in selling the Bush Administration policies to the public. We saw the same play used time and time again in the run-up to the Iraq war: unqualified, uninformed people going on television to dishonestly convince the American people that we urgently needed to send our sons and daughters to war in Iraq to prevent an imminent attack, perhaps even a nuclear attack, on our home soil.
And yet, even after this has been exposed in every possible way, almost two years since the beginning of this war, we still see the same tactics used to spin the news out of Iraq in the Administrations favor. But thankfully, some great people are stepping up to call a spade a spade.
And, of course, the liberal blogs–and radio shows, like ours–will crunch out as much commentary as we can about this. But sometimes, the best way to crystallize a situation, to make it digestible to the public, is through a narrative. And last week, the Right Wing Noise Machine M.O. triggered a little narrative that’s as enjoyable as it is important.
One of our Majority Report regulars, Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan, is a bona fide Middle East expert.
But last week, Jonah Goldberg of the National Review attacked Professor Cole and attempted to undermine not just his ideas, but his credibility. Cole, besides appearing on our show, started making the pundit rounds on outlets like C-Span. Perhaps Goldberg figured that a mild mannered and qualified intellectual like Professor Cole would take the attacks laying down. He was very, very mistaken.
Professor Cole responded with vigor, calling Jonah Goldberg out as a case study in the art of a disinformation hack. On his great blog called Informed Comment at www.juancole.com, Prof. Cole popped the puff of people like Goldberg, who even though they know virtually nothing firsthand about what they’re talking about, still feel entitled to stump:
An argument that judgment matters but knowledge does not is profoundly anti-intellectual. It implies that we do not need ever to learn anything in order make mature decisions. We can just proceed off some simple ideological template and apply it to everything. This sort of thinking is part of what is wrong with this country. We wouldn’t call a man in to fix our plumbing who knew nothing about plumbing, but we call pundits to address millions of people on subjects about which they know nothing of substance.
The debate on whether a pundit should be at all qualified apparently isn’t over: next week, we’ve invited both Professor Cole and Jonah Goldberg on our show to duke it out.
– Sam Seder, Janeane Garofalo, and the Majority Report Team
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Recently Walter Davis of Ohio State wrote a brilliant essay on the literal thought processes of christian fundamentalist. Inherent in the process is the apparent rejection of contiguous non-disassociative reality. In its place are serial disassociations, so that the true believer can read a mandate on one page of the bible, hold it to be literally true, turn to another page, read a completely opposite mandate and hold that to be equally true. Most MSM pundits are really no different. What is totally lacking in both is the profound substantive importance of hermeneutics.
February 11th, 2005 at 9:28 pmThe contempt that the right wing has for education and scholarship is appalling. Surely they can’t all have been C students like Bush? Yet let an academic suggest that he is more qualified to talk about the area he’s spent years studying than a right-wing “Everyman” who couldn’t find the capital cities on a map a year ago – and it’s LIBERAL ELITISM!
Right-wingers seem to have the notion that all professors do is sit around devising new ways to sell Marxist propaganda and “corrupt the youth” (as an earlier show trial once said. :) Since money is all they seem to understand, perhaps we should ask them who they’d rather have managing their investments – a PhD economist or a right-wing talking head blowhard. I bet when it got personal, they’d admit that education means something.
February 12th, 2005 at 3:40 pmI’m much better looking than Sam Seder.
February 12th, 2005 at 4:21 pmLiving Under FascismBy Davidson Loehr, First UU Church of Austin Feb 7, 2005
http://www.axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/article_15511.shtml
“In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, “write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”
Vice President Wallace’s answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan. See how much you think his statements apply to our society today.
“The really dangerous American fascist,” Wallace wrote, “… is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power.”
In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism he saw rising in America, Wallace added,
“They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.”
By these standards, a few of today’s weapons for keeping the common people in eternal subjection include NAFTA, the World Trade Organization, union-busting, cutting worker benefits while increasing CEO pay, elimination of worker benefits, security and pensions, rapacious credit card interest, and outsourcing of jobs — not to mention the largest prison system in the world.”
February 12th, 2005 at 6:39 pmHello Thinkprogress.org!
I’m just a regular over at the Majority Report Blog and thought I’d pop in to check out this scene in preparation for Sam and Janeane being over here tomorrow!!
February 12th, 2005 at 7:13 pmJaneane & Sam — Get your super-sized Hurl Bags ready — Bush’s “pick” for Poet Laureate — former Atty.Gen.John Ashcroft OR Judge Roy Moore of verses-on-stone-tablets fame!!!
February 13th, 2005 at 9:37 amhttp://swiftreport.blogs.com/news/2005/02/next_up_for_ash.html
Cheers!
Robin
Weeeelll… finally another post.
This isn’t what’d you’d call… a BUSY blog, is it?
Does anybody have any idea WHEN Sam and Janeane will be here?
February 13th, 2005 at 10:56 am(tumbleweeds)
(dry desert wind)
(cyotee howl)
February 13th, 2005 at 11:39 amAll punditry from now on should be judge from ‘good look’
I refuse to read blog written by non ‘good looking’ people.
February 13th, 2005 at 4:15 pmComment by wanda  February 13th, 2005 @ 4:15 pm
hey Wanda!!
feh! all this looks nonsense.
I’m not sinking to that level.
(huffery, puffery)
(de la Milk Chan)
Just Kidding…
February 13th, 2005 at 4:22 pmI remember when I saw my first Jerry Springer episode. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at–just a bunch of idiots with insane problems provoking each other in front of cameras for the entertainment of a live cheering audience and couch potatoes across the country.
Minus the live cheering audience (R.I.P Crossfire), isn’t that what we have in our punditry today?
After watching T.V. news and “debate,” reading the newspaper, and listening to the radio, I honestly–HONESTLY–am actually less informed about Social Security than I was before I started–because now I have a set of lies and soundbites to move past before I get to the truth–a truth that, to the chagrin of pundits and government officials alike, has a disappointing lack of entertainment value.
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