Bughouse Square

Links and commentary -- Thrilling!

 

Olberman Rides Again

Keith Olberman has been reluctant to overuse his soapbox, and has refrained from giving any Special Comments for a while.  His latest is not my favorite, but at least it's current.

Telecomspiracy

Meanwhile, as we charge into Super Tuesday, Ann Coulter is endorsing Hillary Clinton on the grounds that Clinton more conservative than John McCain, who seems destined to take the  Republican primaries.  She opened this salvo on Hannity and Colmes: 

Counter-Coulter

And following up, she went on Cavuto to insist that she's not kidding. 

Contrary Ann

I personally suspect Coulter of not really believing much of the hateful crap she spews, but one thing she is not known for is inconsistency in her public statements.  But that may change if Clinton gets the nomination, because right now my best guess is that this is a desperate attempt to drive up Romney's numbers ahead of Super Tuesday.

posted by: JohnnyAngel at 02/04/08 09:36 | link | comments |

Media Narratives

The Daily Show tackles the trumped-up drama that media sources have tried to impose on the election:

Pants on Fire!

Jon Stewart also tackles the spin on financial news, including the attempt on Fox News that the prospect of a Democratic president is causing the troubles on Wall Street:

Heaven Forefend

posted by: JohnnyAngel at 01/28/08 06:49 | link | comments |

O'Reiley's Racial Miscues

Previously, I discussed Joe Biden's Racial Miscues.   Recently, Bill O'Reiley has made some remarks that are being used to accuse him of racism.  It's worth listening to the whole thing:

Ice Tea, M-Fer

O'Reiley insists he was taken out of context, and I think he has a point, but at the most charitable it must still be noted that he failed to avoid well-known pitfalls that anyone engaged in racial debates should be aware of.  He comes across as condescending, and while I'm prepared to take him at his word that all he was trying to say was that racial differences are not significant such that we should make the big deal out of them that we do, he nonetheless comes across as having a fairly negative view of blacks when he says he "couldn't get over" the fact that a black restaurant was like a white restaurant. 

His comment about "M-F'n Iced Tea" is less inflammatory in the context of the actual discussion, because he is comparing his experience of a black institution to the notion of black culture one could draw from listening to rap music.  But this is a case of protesting too much.  His stridency in pointing out the common ground between blacks and whites suggests that it's news to him.

So, the Daily Show bit on the subject, while funny, is somewhat unfair:

O'Reiley Brennt

posted by: JohnnyAngel at 10/01/07 15:20 | link | comments |

The Red Herring

Since the function of the Petraeus report was to shut people up for the time leading up to it, it has become necessary to control the damage unleashed just on account of the end of the stall.  Although Petraeus was chosen for the job because he had fewer credibility problems on the war than White House insiders, it was for the media and politicians open season on his ass. 

The Daily Show Tears Petraeus a New One

The Democrats get their Spin On

John Edwards' response, for which he bought air time, takes the opportunity to implicitly zing Hillary Clinton for her previous pro-war stance.

Ed's Ad

Of course, the advent of the Petraeus report gave politicians ample opportunity for granstanding, and lets face it -- everybody wins then.  But of all the questions Petraeus was blasted with, none has picked up steam quite like John Warner's question whether the Iraq war was making America safer.  Petraeus couldn't answer.

Saftey Nyet

MoveOn.org has come under fire for its own whipping of Petraeus:

The Infamous Ad

The ad strikes me as awfully mild for the kind of reaction it's getting.  The most vicious smear in the piece amounts to a bad pun.  Yet it has sparked Controversy.

Hardballin' It

The controversy gave Republican candidates a chance to grandstand:

McCain Enabled

Guliani vs. Hillary

As propaganda goes, this is a hat trick -- three shady tactics for the price of one. 

1) Red Herring.  As mild as the MoveOn.org ad is, the real point is that it gives the president's supporters something to talk about other than the facts of the war.
2) Bait and Switch.  Petraeus' qualifications were trumpeted in advance of his report, but as it is now coming out, people are beginning to question whether he really is the straight-shooter he has been promoted to be.  Suddenly it turns out that questions about his integrity are off limits.  I am reminded of the show Law & Order in which the defense has brought up the question of character only later to object when the prosecution addresses the question.  Your honor, the defense opened the door to this line of questioning.
3) The argument from silence.  The Guliani ad claims that the lack of explicit condemnation constitutes affirmation.  This is often implied in political discourse in which some pol demands that someone else denounce one thing or another.  This brings to mind the old story about a politician who called his opponent a pigfucker not because it was credible but just because "I want to hear the son of a bitch deny it."

posted by: JohnnyAngel at 09/17/07 06:59 | link | comments |

Bush vs. The 'Nam

After years of avoiding or dismissing comparisons to Vietnam, George W. Bush has recently made the comparison himself.  This strikes me as a terrible mistake, albiet one committed by people who get paid a hell of a lot more than I do. 

Bush's Vietnam Speech

The invocation of Graham Greene is particularly hillarious, given that Greene's pre-Vietnam war book The Quiet American prophetic about what even America's best intentions would mean for Vietnam -- unmitigated disaster.  Like a leper who has lost his bell.

This doesn't come entirely out of a vacuum.  He made the comparison rather more briefly after he made a trip to Vietnam last year.

Bush's Lessons of Vietnam:  "We'll succeed, unless we quit."
Keith Olberman comments on Bush's "Lessons of Vietnam"

Early in the Iraq War, there was some disagreement over when it was too early to call it a 'quagmire' -- the term that was used to eloquently capture the disastrous war in Vietnam.  Dick Cheney himself called it in 1994, in an interview that has been quoted here and there, but the actual video of which has recently surfaced and made the rounds on the Internet:

Cheney uses the 'Q' Word
Daily Show's Commentary on the Resurfaced Video - Even Dick Don't Know Dick

It appears that Bush learned his lessons from the Bizzarro Vietnam, the one he did go to in an alternate universe. 

In Bizzarro World, the Khmer Rouge massacres were caused by the U.S. leaving Vietnam, not by the America's callous manipulation of regional politics as leverage against Vietnam. 

In Bizzarro World, the president knew the situation was winnable, though he didn't say so in hundreds of tapes from recorders not hidden all over the White House.  The only question was how to pull out in the most embarrassing way possible.

In Bizzarro World, what the Vietnamese wanted was to be dominated by a foreign power, and the whole Sino-Vietnamese war broke out because China refused to return to their 1000 year domination, and Vietnam was not prepared to commit the hundreds of thousands of 18-year-olds it produced every year to the cause of independence. 

In Bizzarro World, comparisons to Vietnam are favorable to Bush, who not only fought bravely in the war, but has been carefully touting the war in Iraq as "another Vietnam" to gain public approval.

That's my mini-rant.  Here are some other comments Bush's Vietnam rhetoric has engendered:

David Gergen, Former Adviser to Four Presidents: "How did you get us in Another Quagmire?"
Major General Paul Eaton on Bush's Vietnam Analogy
David Schuster calls Bullshit on Bush's Vietnam Analogy

posted by: JohnnyAngel at 08/27/07 05:56 | link | comments |

Conformity, Authority and Cults

How to Start Your Own Cult

The Stanford Prison Experiment

The Milgram Experiment

posted by: JohnnyAngel at 04/13/07 06:32 | link | comments |

Talking Points and Spin

Here I'm attempting to gather several clips illustrative of the principles of 'Talking Points' and 'Spin.'

The Daily Show on The Surge

The Fair Weather Invocation of WWII

The Value of Life -- Stem Cells vs. Iraq

Rockey -- the GOP post-Katrina Shill

Rhetorical Question Marks

Curiously Similar Speeches for Two Different Nominees

Co-ordinated Rhetoric on the Foley Scandal

Newsweek's Domestic Edition

posted by: JohnnyAngel at 04/11/07 05:40 | link | comments |

McCain in Never Neverland

John Stewart sums up John McCain's new image problem.  Once credibly seen as a 'maverick,' McCain has been caught prevaricating too many times since the 2000 primaries in which he dubbed his campaign bus the Straight Talk Express:

The Curved Weiner Mobile

One netizen has compiled a video of McCain flip-flops, the most damning of which is his having characterized the Iraq War as easy and later denounces the fact that Americans were misled into believing it would be easy without owning up to his own complicity:

Double Talk Express

Proably the turn-around on McCain's reputation came when he began cozying up to the president whose primary campaign viciously smeared McCain, a war veteran who spent several years in a Vietnamese prison camp.  Recently, McCain supported Bush's troop surge, claiming that in some places, the streets were safe enough for an American to travel without protection.  He's still feeling the fallout from this.

Michael Ware Lets Loose

Questioned about this, McCain's spin amounts to claiming to have said something other than what was just quoted to him:

Hear-Say

The Colbert Report addressed the controversy:

Clap Your Hands and Believe

Sure, that was funny.  But real life outdid Colbert once again.  McCain went out to Baghdad in person to prove his point, only he went with, get this, over a hundred soldiers, wearing a bullet-proof vest, and escorted by Black Hawk helecopters and Apache gunships.  The Daily Show and the Colbert Report are off this week, but I'm anxious to see how they could possibly make this any funnier.

McCain's Neverland Ride

CNN's Cafferty gives the grumpy old man treatment on the exact same subject, but still it's pretty funny. 

Cafferty Unchained

Meanwhile, Back in the States

Newt Gingrich is rumored to be making an unannounced run for his party's nomination.  Unfortunately, he seems determined to lose the minority vote that the Republicans so carefully cultivated by appealing to religion in recent elections (more through religion's antipathy toward gays than to its concern for the poor).  First, he accuses Katrina victims of being stupid:

Gingrich: The Anti-Stupid

I believe it was Bill Maher who quipped, in response to a similar statement by a rich, white politician, "I don't understand why they couldn't just get in their Range Rovers and move to their summer homes."

Recently, Gingrich denounced bilingual education, characterizing non-English as the "language of living in the Ghetto."

In El Bario

Here's the punchline:  later, he told Hannity and Colmes he was not referring to Spanish.  So, he believes that the tiny portion of bilingual programs that are not Spanish are swelling the ghettos?  He then went into a non-sequitur about the origins of the term ghetto in jewish segretation, which doesn't explain or qualify his earlier statements (he surely doesn't mean that Hebrew or Yiddish are the languages of living in the ghetto), but merely changes the subject.

Oy Vey!

posted by: JohnnyAngel at 04/04/07 06:48 | link | comments |

U.S. Attorney Firings

Ala. the Daily Show

Bob Scheiffer Takes on the Memory Lapse Tactic

Tony Snow Grilled in the 18-day Gap in Released e-mails

The Daily Show on Bush's No Oath Proposal

Colbert Dares Democrats to Impeach Bush - Includes a round-up of presidential scandals, three of which include Alberto Gonzales

posted by: JohnnyAngel at 03/23/07 06:32 | link | comments |

Walter Reed Scandal

The key rhetorical issue of this scandal is that the 'support our troops' meme has been used as a catchall imperative to silence criticism of the administration, while an issue more relevant to such support -- healthcare for wounded veterans -- gets such shabby treatment.

John Shannon Testifies

Daily Show - M*E*S*S - Sums up the controversy.

Daily Show - M*E*S*S II - Lampoons the irony of using the 'support our troops' mantra to silence criticism of the president while neglecting to adequately armor our troops in battle and care for their wounds stateside.

Cartoons, some of them Walter Reed Related

posted by: JohnnyAngel at 03/21/07 07:12 | link | comments |