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By Weldon Berger, on November 17th, 2006
Steve Clemons at The Washington Note earns a ticket behind the curtain and finds that the Wizard is depressed. After attending a dinner populated with “a few former Secretaries of State and foreign ministers, top intelligence officials, think tank chiefs, Senators and House Members, former National Security Advisors and Secretaries of Defense,” Clemons says that “many TWN readers have already known and posted commentary on how screwed America is in its current situation — but still, it’s a different thing when actually dining and drinking with folks in mega-power positions who concur.” We are aghast to learn that mortals are endowed with analytical powers akin to those enjoyed by gods and we are shocked, shocked to learn that what we had taken as a Galactus-like indifference on the part of the mega-powerful is in fact the helplessness of wee lambs before the adolescent storm that is The President …
Digby pulls back the curtain — well, not a curtain, exactly, more like pasties — and reveals the nippleheads manipulating the levers of power in the Washington press corps. “I knew it would happen in one form or another … the DC press corps hates having to criticize Republicans. Republicans make them feel all icky and call them liberals (which they so, like, aren’t!) I confess, however, that I’m a little bit awed by how smoothly they have transitioned back into their assigned roles. I thought there might be a moment or two of cognitive dissonance as they went from grim and serious reports about terrorism and war to shallow personality politics and tabloid character assassination.” Yeah, well, there’s a precondition for cognitive dissonance that we suspect is lacking among the press …
Continue reading Three Dots Over Washington: Oz Edition
By Weldon Berger, on October 18th, 2006
Pennsylvania’s Rick Santorum has arrived at the strangest and most geographically dislocated analogy ever for the War on Terra®: it isn’t World War II or the Cold War, but the War of the Rings. There’s no way to do justice to his remarks, so we’ll let them speak for themselves.
“As the hobbits are going up Mount Doom, the Eye of Mordor is being drawn somewhere else,” Santorum said, describing the tool the evil Lord Sauron used in search of the magical ring that would consolidate his power over Middle-earth.
“It’s being drawn to Iraq and it’s not being drawn to the U.S.,” he continued. “You know what? I want to keep it on Iraq. I don’t want the Eye to come back here to the United States.”
Iraq must be Gondor, then, which makes sense because it’s the cradle of mortal civilization. Mordor must be Pakistan, since that’s where bin Sauron is holed up, except Sauron’s eye was distracted from Mordor and Santorum wants to keep it distracted from us, which means we must be Mordor, which is confusing because we’re a simple, decent country much like the Shire; this demented tool can’t even get his fictional geography straight. But it’s all good, because we know how it ends: we win, and nobody we really care about dies. The only real question is casting …
Continue reading Three Dots Over Washington: Osama bin Sauron Edition
By Weldon Berger, on February 27th, 2006
A friend of mine recently began writing a “three-dot” column, one of those exercises in stringing together otherwise unrelated items of gossip, celebrity spotting and local news. Washington Post reporter/columnist/man about town Dana Milbank has recently taken up a three-dot column at Slate, although he has so far refused to acknowledge the inherent dottiness of it. It occurs to me that this ethereal and short-attention-span format lends itself to coverage of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress as no other can, which is probably why the institutional press have covertly adopted it. . . . → Read More: The “three dot” theory of governance …
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Word of the Decade Ignoranus: An ignorant asshole.
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The “three dot” theory of governance …
A friend of mine recently began writing a “three-dot” column, one of those exercises in stringing together otherwise unrelated items of gossip, celebrity spotting and local news. Washington Post reporter/columnist/man about town Dana Milbank has recently taken up a three-dot column at Slate, although he has so far refused to acknowledge the inherent dottiness of it. It occurs to me that this ethereal and short-attention-span format lends itself to coverage of the Bush administration and the Republican Congress as no other can, which is probably why the institutional press have covertly adopted it. . . . → Read More: The “three dot” theory of governance …