Shootin’ Thru The ‘Tubes
With all the news and views that clog the Intertubes, sometimes it’s good to flush the system.
TGIF and it’s the “Fauxtage Edition” of Shootin’ Thru The ‘Tubes:
The righties still can’t move on from MoveOn. In the clearest sign yet that the Congress has their priorities seriously screwed up, they overwhelming voted to condemn a newspaper ad that disparaged Gen. Petraeus. President Bush even got in on the fun, calling the ad “disgusting” and chiding the Democrats for being to scared to challenge leftwing groups like MoveOn. Keith Olbermann took the Prez to task over his remarks in a must see Special Comment. His genuine outrage, as opposed to the trumped up kind being generated over MoveOn, is palpable.
But the MoveOn Maelstrom succeeded in the only respects that mattered to the righties: distracting from Petraeus’ actual testimony. Indeed, since this came to dominate the headlines, when was the last time anyone outside of the blogosphere addressed the substance of his claims? My point exactly.
Something else that has the righties knickers in a twist was a request by Iranian President Ahmadinejad to visit Ground Zero. Now I can appreciate the concerns of some over having him visit what many see as hallowed ground. And I certainly have no love loss for the guy. But like Josh Marshall, I have to wonder if the righties (and a few lefties) upset by this aren’t suffering from some prepubescent mentality where they continue to view everything through the prism of a good vs. evil paradigm. One would think our ever shifting alliances in Iraq, which they also herald as signs of success, would have disabused them of that world view. But then, these are the righties were talking about.
Update: More from Kevin Drum.
(X-posted at The Xsociate Files)
IMHO, much of this outrage can be attributed to the demonizing of the guy. And honestly, the more Cheney and his “liberal media” do that, and given their track record, the less inclined I am to believe that Ahmadinejad is the evil monster that he is portrayed to be.
Ahmadinejad is, for all intents and purposes, the Iranian George W Bush (unlike Vladmir Putin, who is the Russian George H.W. Bush). Ahmadinejad won his election by pandering to the rural and fundamentalist voters of Iran as a “values candidate” who would “stand up to the world in defense of Iran”. He was the governor of a backwater province before he became President, and his popularity in Iran has been on a mostly steady decline in Iran since his election, marked by occasional spikes when an outside country (read: the US) threatens to invade Iran.
He’s certainly not a nice person by any stretch of the imagination, and he seems to be quite willing to use anti-American, anti-Israeli, and anti-European sentiment to whip up his “base” into a frenzy about the possibility of an American/Israeli invasion of Iran to keep himself in power. Plus, he’s willing to make outrageous statements about things that are factually untrue to prove his bonafides to his “base”. He differs from Bush in that his parents were working class, rather than being born rich, and his education is apparently in engineering, rather than history.
In short, he’s pretty much a classic example of the type of politician who rises up on the conservative side of the aisle of any government that even approximates a democratic one - the type who finds it easier to gain power by scaring the crap out of the electorate instead of providing good ideas and good governance. The sad part for the Iranians is that they were never really given much of a choice in their last election - the field was winnowed down to a handful of candidates who were either moderate right wing or crazy right wing by their priests, who decide that they get to be the arbiters of who the serious candidates for elections get to be. Kind of like our “free press” except they’re more open about their blacklists.
IMHO, Olbermann is making it way to easy for the righties to point at “liberal biased in the media.” He should pretend to not be obviously one-sided at least every once a while. I’m not saying he is wrong but he’s making himself as big a target as the move-on ad. I never really liked his worst person in the world thing, but this is getting to be too much, he’ s not helping anyone with this and needs to stop.