Tag: Media

THE BIG LETDOWN

Posted on | by Ed | 1 Comment on THE BIG LETDOWN

I am sincerely disappointed in the way things have gone in the month since the election. I'm not referring to anything Obama-related (you people understand that he's not the president yet, right?) I'm referring to the whimper-like sound made by what we all hoped would be an entertaining torrent of right-wing vitriol in response to their resounding electoral thrashing.

Sure, there have been a few moments of hilarity, the odd shrill meltdown or grand bit of delusion. That aside, the reaction has been dominated by infantile whining and an effort to spin a few key talking points – the "center-right nation" thing, the miraculous and meaningful victory of holding a 41st Senate seat. But mostly it has just been the same nonsense; the same repetitive talking points, the same idiotic comments from your local internet trolls, the same bullshit we've been hearing for thirty years. Thus overall the reaction has been a non-event.

It has been less than background noise. The creative bankruptcy of the right-wing noise machine has consigned it, for the time being, to complete irrelevance.

I've commented before that watching Fox News is like cracking open a time capsule from January 2003. It is that moment frozen in amber, preserved for posterity.
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Its anachronistic feel reflects the increasingly obvious fact that the early Bush presidency, and specifically the onset of the Iraq War, was the zenith of the right-wing media. The far right and its ideas were legitimately mainstream. Time and Newsweek wrote about Ann Coulter as a "public intellectual." Every cable news network was cowed (by ratings, the administration, and rampant jingoism) into mimicking Fox in its coverage and parroting the White House line almost verbatim. Judith Miller was America's most famous journalist. The morning fare on talk radio provided the headlines for the evening news. The best-seller list was a roll-call of right-wing pundits.

Fast forward to today. On December 30, Ann Coulter's latest book Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America hits the stores. Oh, it'll sell a million copies to the same million people who buy everything with that bulimic horse on the cover. But be honest – does anyone give a flying shit about what Ann Coulter has to say? Does anyone pay attention to Bill O'Reilly anymore, springing into action as he rails against the War on Christmas? Does anyone treat Rush Limbaugh like a serious political commentator, discussing his daily pronouncements in earnest on the nightly roundtable shows? Does any major media outlet not owned by Rupert Murdoch take its marching orders from Dick Cheney's press releases?

Don't misinterpret me: I know that these people and their demon spawn (every time O'Reilly ejaculates, 1500 new Pajamas Media "reporters" are born) still have audiences. But they used to have an audience like the Super Bowl – that is, even people who don't care are exposed to it – and now it's more like Major League Lacrosse.

It has been ghettoized, pushed to the fringe. It has almost no influence on the mainstream, being followed only by the small group of true believers who already agree with it and thus seek it out.
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It is little more than an echo chamber for the 20% of the population who think George W. Bush has done a good job.

Like an investor who puts everything on a single stock, the RWM didn't just hitch its wagon to George W. Bush – it mortgaged the house, sold the heirlooms on eBay and emptied out Billy's college fund to bet it all on Our Leader. In the process they have utterly alienated almost all of their potential viewership. Murdoch et al have created something that can't even rightly be called conservative media, for it is as hostile to non-neoconservatism (i.e., McCain, Romney, and similar Republicans) as it is to liberalism. They bet everything on the Bush-Cheney-PNAC worldview. Like so many historically bad examples of strategic myopia, this worked really well.

Until it didn't.

These people or their eventual replacements haven't been permanently banished from the mainstream. I'm sure we'll hear from them again at some point in the future. But their behavior suggests that it's going to be a while. Nothing will change until they come up with something, anything, that resembles a new idea. They seem content to double down on the same horseshit – blah blah terrorism blah blah supply-side tax cuts blah blah Democrats are socialists blah blah teh gays. I am content to let them, as it ensures that they will make punchlines rather than headlines for the forseeable future.

A BASE BASE

Posted on | by Ed | 3 Comments on A BASE BASE

I am starting to think that the Miss America pageant will become for the Republican Party what the Iowa Caucuses used to be.
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The right has the most amusing tendency to find its salvation in beauty queens (or alleged ones) who are lauded for their intellectual merit while mouthing the exact same script as everyone else in the movement.

It is the Coulter-ization of conservative politics.

Actually, scratch that. At least Ann Coulter's hysterical horseshit is largely original. I'm more fascinated by the B-squad of Great Conservative Minds who are indistinguishable from Jonah Goldberg except for their Great Conservative Tits. And the right isn't shy about objectifying, exploiting, and (we assume) angrily masturbating at the thought of these D-list minds, elevating them to the A-list in short order.

Unless you're really lucky, you've seen the "Pretty in Mink" 2009 Calendar of right-wing pin-up girls from the Clare Booth Luce Institute. I will unironically applaud the Institute for having the decency to picture these women fully clothed; I am not sure that the world could handle the alternative. I also understand that a calendar of this sort is intended to feature attractive people. Nonetheless I think this offers excellent insight into the nature of these womens' celebrity in conservative circles.

Take, for example, Amanda Carpenter. She's everywhere – on all the major cable shows, in print, and online – two whole years after walking away from Ball State with a journalism degree. She has never had an original thought, has had no notable success as an investigative journalist, and adds nothing to the cable network stew that Robert Novak doesn't already provide. The difference, of course, is that unless something is seriously wrong with you, you'd totally hit this over Novak.

How about Michelle Malkin? What is it about anorexia that makes the right manhandle their puds so energetically? Michelle vituperates about affirmative action all the goddamn time, of course, apparently under the delusion that it is her Deep Blue-caliber mind that makes her a celebrity. Someone should let her know that the reason she's a wealthy celebrity and not a 5th-string blogger on PowerLine is that she is female, not white, and, in the far-right's dedicated circles of doughy eunuchs, fuckable.

We could go on. Mary Katherine Ham (another "undergrad-to-Fox News-in-3-years" success story). Kate "GOP Chairman in Virginia, 2004-2006" Obenshain. Coulter. All the usual bits of crumpet that a misogynist, patriarchal movement trots out before the cameras to simultaneously feign diversity and provide a fantasy marital aid to their core supporters.
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It's amazing, by which I mean not amazing at all, that the Party of Ideas is so faithfully wedded to a core orthodoxy that it demands little more than rote repitition of the creed from the most appealing spokesmodel.

Sure, everyone likes his or her own preferred eye candy in healthy doses, but folks like the CBL Institute and the millions of daily readers who follow these Hotties seem to have dangerously conflated visual appeal and intellectual contributions to the movement. Like 58 year-old fans at a Styx reunion show, the right only wants to hear the same hits over and over.

But they don't merely demand to hear "Come Sail Away" – they want a hotter band to play it.

PUTTING IT ON THE LINE, AGAINST JUDGMENT

Posted on | by Ed | 11 Comments on PUTTING IT ON THE LINE, AGAINST JUDGMENT

Making predictions is not my favorite thing. We know where people stand but not who's going to show up on Tuesday. It's simple to sit here and tell you which way the public is leaning and very difficult to predict how that will translate into electoral results.
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But I talk too much about these races to do any less than offer predictions which can be held against me at a later date. So, for your mocking pleasure, I give you the Senate races, on which I did not do half-badly in 2006, and the big race. The current Senate, for reference, is 50 D, 49 R, and one ass clown.

Easily defended seats (22)

  • Idaho (Open): Jim Risch
  • Tennessee: Lamar Alexander (i)
  • Wyoming: Mike Enzi, John Barrasso (both incumbents)
  • Mississippi 1: Thad Cochran (i)
  • Alabama: Jeff Sessions (i)
  • Kansas: Pat Roberts (i)
  • Oklahoma: Jim Inhofe (i)
  • South Carolina: Lindsey "Chickenhawk" Graham (i)
  • Maine: Susan Collins (i)
  • Nebraska: Mike Johanns
  • Arkansas: Mark Pryor (i)
  • Montana: Max Baucus (i)
  • Rhode Island: Jack Reed (i)
  • West Virginia: Jay Rockefeller (i)
  • Massachusetts: John Kerry (i)
  • Illinois: Dick Durbin (i)
  • Delaware: Joe Biden (i)
  • Iowa: Tom Harkin (i)
  • Michigan: Carl Levin (i)
  • South Dakota: Tim Johnson (i)
  • New Jersey: Frank Lautenberg (i)

    I would bet a lot of money on these races (6)

  • Virginia: Mark Warner over Jim Gilmore (Pickup – D)
  • New Mexico: Tom Udall over Steven Pearce (Pickup – D)
  • Colorado: Mark Udall over Bob Schaeffer (Pickup – D)
  • Louisiana: Mary Landrieu (i) over John Kennedy (Retained – D). Remember when the GOP thought this was a pickup?
  • Alaska: Mark Begich over Ted Stevens (i) (Pickup – D). I don't see how Tubes can survive seven felony convictions in a race he was already trailing.
  • Texas: John Cornyn (i) over Rick Noriega (Retained – R). Noriega made some noise but failed to gain enough momentum.

    Confident, but not enough to bet money (4)

  • North Carolina: Kay Hagan over Elizabeth Dole (i) (Pickup – D). Dole's recent wingnut "godless" ad shows real desperation. As Jesse Helms' former strategist said, "The next sound you'll hear is the roof caving in on Liddy Dole."
  • New Hampshire: Jeanne Shaheen over John Sununu (i) (Pickup – D). A lot more competitive than I thought, but Sununu isn't going to hang on.
  • Oregon: Jeff Merkely over Gordon Smith (i) (Pickup – D). A very pro-Obama state will have enough carryover to give the unknown challenger a narrow win.
  • Kentucky: Mitch McConnell (i) over Steve Lunsford (Retained – R). Wishing McConnell will lose can't make it so. He hangs on by a thread.

    I am not confident, but I have a reasonable guess (1)

  • Georgia: Jim Martin over Saxby Chambliss (i) (Pickup – D). This is not a brilliant call given that Martin has never led, but he closed a large gap in a hurry and has a ton of last-minute momentum.

    Here is a state in which higher black turnout – which I earlier stated can only boost Democratic results by about 1% – will make a difference. It is going to be extremely close regardless, so I'll buy the "new registrants" argument here.

    I wouldn't even bet someone else's money on these races (2)

  • Mississippi 2: Roger Wicker (i) over Ronnie Musgrove (Retained – R). This is a total wild card. More than one in five eligible voters in MS is African-American. Musgrove led early, but Wicker has consistently held a small lead for several weeks. Wicker hangs on, although if GOP voters really do throw in the towel on McCain the stay-homes will really affect races like this one.
  • Minnesota: Al Franken over Norm Coleman (i) and Dean Barkley (Pickup – D). Three way races are impossible to predict. It's great that voters have a non-mainstream choice but…

    Barkley isn't going to win. He'll pull about 15%, which accomplishes nothing for him. How that 15% affects the Coleman/Franken balance is anyone's wild guess. Franken has not run a good campaign but the Ventura/Barkley/Reform candidates in MN take positions that are more conservative than liberal. In other words, if I have to pick I will guess that Barkley's futile campaign takes more votes from Coleman than Franken. Without Barkley, Coleman would hold his seat given Franken's flat campaign.

    Wednesday morning split: 59 D, 40 R, and that male hooker from Connecticut.

    And now the big race. It would be lazy and easy to say "Obama wins" because it is looking about 95% likely at this point. But we can put a finer point on things.
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    Let me be clear that I am intent on missing low this year. Giving McCain every benefit of the doubt – the Mountain West, Ohio, Florida, and Missouri – he still cannot make the math work. So I will make a "Best case McCain" and "Best case Obama" map. Reality will probably fall somewhere between the two.

    The best that McCain can do, in my opinion, is Obama 306, McCain 232. In this best-case scenario I am going with Obama in an extremely tight NC race but McCain in Ohio and Florida.

    If everything goes as Obama hopes – cascading waves of excited voters swamp the polls while McCain's followers give in to despair – it's Obama 378, McCain 160. If the race is any more lopsided than this it will require Obama to win in some pretty unbelievable places.

    So for the econometricians, the 95% confidence interval is (306, 378). That is, the odds that Obama does better or worse than that are a combined 5%. I know that pessimism does and will forever reign in the Democratic Party, but if Obama does not win this race then everything we think we know about elections is utterly wrong and I will have more to worry about that this poor prediction.

    • THE CONSTRUCTED EXPLANATION

    Posted on | by Ed | 6 Comments on THE CONSTRUCTED EXPLANATION

    My dissertation chair, a woman with the mind of a Mensan and the patience of Saint Jude the Apostle (the patron saint of lost causes, for you non-papists), made her name in the field by researching what she calls "constructed explanations" for electoral outcomes. Briefly, elections suck at providing information. They tell us who wins, but nothing about why people voted the way they did or how Candidate X managed to prevail.

    There is competition after any election to establish the explanation for what happened. Since there's effectively no way to answer the "why" question, self-interested political actors seek to establish the explanation that suits them as the definitive one. In other words, immediately after the election there are 100 explanations thrown at the wall by the media, candidates, and parties. Five of them stick. Over the next few weeks that gets narrowed down to one – "the" unofficial official explanation of what happened. This single explanation doesn't get established because it's true or superior to the alternatives – it takes root because the people who benefit from it did the best job of selling it. Thus these things pass from idle musings to certified Conventional Wisdom.

    The 2000 and 2004 elections were extraordinarily close, meaning that the spin couldn't begin until we actually figured out who won. With the outcome of next Tuesday's presidential race being assumed by many candidates and talking heads at this point (justifiably or not), the attempt to construct explanations is already well under way. In particular, rival factions in the GOP have already fired the opening shots in a battle to explain their anticipated failure. I will bet my staggering grad student salary that the explanations will quickly winnow down to the following:

    1. If McCain wins, the conversation will not be on his accomplishment but instead on how everyone managed to get things so phenomenally wrong. I mean, there aren't even many Republicans who expect him to win at this point. Explanations about McCain having achieved a miracle comeback will be floated. Eventually, though, the dominant explanation will be that McCain simply wasn't as far behind as the media led us to believe. Polls are nonsense and the media, with their fervent pro-Obama bias, endlessly reported his inevitable win because they wanted it so badly. There might be a grain of truth here. If McCain wins there certainly will be, as the man used to say, some splanin' to do from our friends in the media and in the polling industry.

    2. If Obama wins in a historic landslide – something on the order of 400+ EV – the explanation will be "We underestimated the power of young and/or black voters turning out in large numbers." Again the polling industry will be fingered (*giggle*) for under-representing these voters in their samples in favor of lard-assed white guys in their 40s. There will of course be scant evidence that young and/or black voters were actually the cause of an overwhelming Obama win, but the explanation will be simple and plausible enough to gain wide acceptance.

    3. In the event that the election very closely resembles the predictions, the explanations will focus on the candidates and not the coverage. It will also mark the official start of what could be a 1960s Democrats-style meltdown in the GOP. In one corner will be the moderates (non-Christian Right), the economic conservatives with lukewarm committments to social issues. They have chafed at the necessary presence of the Dobson crowd ("Can't have a majority without 'em", sayeth Rove) for two decades while the religious conservatives have resented that so little of their agenda receives more than lip service. A crushing loss in Congress and the White House will be the spark that causes the simmering tensions to explode.

    The first team, who I shall call Team Palin, will consist mostly of the "values voters" and social conservatives who felt so powerful in 2000 and 2004. TP will also attract party hard-liners, the kind of people who think abandoning the party when it nominates a shitty candidate is tantamount to treason; National Review columnists, Freepers, and talk radio zombies. Their explanation is quite predictable: McCain lost because he wasn't conservative enough. He was some sort of closet liberal who failed the True Believer test repeatedly. To Team Palin, the lesson will be patently obvious: never again can the party err by nominating someone to the left of Sean Hannity. If you're one of these traitorous fake conservatives who bashed McCain for choosing the GovTard, you are not a real Republican. Mike sent me this link and called it the new "Palin Litmus Test." I think that fits. "I've got news for the Christopher Buckleys of the world — if Sarah Palin is enough to make you decide you're not a Republican, you're not a Republican."

    There's going to be a lot of this kind of dick-waving, in-fighting, and calling-out during the fight to determine who the Real Republicans are. Picture extremist Muslim hard-liners, the kind who think suicide bombers are martyrs, versus that nice Muslim guy at your office who wears Dockers and watches 30 Rock.

    Yes, the second team, who I shall call Team Traitor, will have a different explanation: "We ran a shitty candidate on the heels of a shitty President. We've gone too far. Time to ratchet down the rhetoric a little and win back mainstream America." These are the people jumping ship in advance of the election – Chris Buckley, Christopher Shays, William Weld, Lincoln Chaffee, David Brooks, Kathleen Parker, Colin Powell, and so on. These are the more reasonable, less ideologically rigid Republicans, the kind who are conservative but not mindlessly partisan. Unlike Team Palin, these GOPers will not blindly follow any jackass who calls himself a Republican. Team Traitor will of course blame the defeat almost entirely on the nomination of Sarah Palin. They will hold her up as proof that the party needs people of substance, not vapid spokesmodels.

    If the election plays out as so many are predicting, this fourth and final explanation will come closest, in my opinion, to hitting the mark. This is still a ridiculously conservative country. An historic Democratic landslide across all races will not signal a population that has found Liberalism as its new religion. Instead I believe it is the non-Democratic voting public registering its disgust with the Rove/Bush/Dobson incarnation of the GOP. Palin and this campaign represent everything you need to know about why the Democrats are likely to win big – the inanity, the shameless mudslinging, the stale ideas, the hipocrisy, the faux-moralizing, and the racist dog-whistles. Team Traitor will be correct, in essence. The GOP needs to find good candidates, come up with a new idea for the first time in 40 years, and run the Principled Campaign that gramps promised he would give us.

    But now that the GOP is stuck with the loony right as load-bearing column in their big tent, which explanation do you think will actually prevail? I think we know which one, and we're certain that it's going to be sweet, vengeful fun watching the intraparty bloodbath on the way to Team Palin's "victory."

    FAIR; BALANCED

    Posted on | by Ed | 2 Comments on FAIR; BALANCED

    Fox News headline on Obama's record-obliterating fund raising exploits: "Obama Shatters Records With Unprecedented Money Grab."

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is almost verbatim a joke from The Simpsons. Except they are not kidding. That is Fox in a nutshell: "No, seriously, this isn't satire" should be their new motto.

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    THE TIME MACHINE

    Posted on | by Ed | 4 Comments on THE TIME MACHINE

    Although not a "writer" per se, perhaps my favorite living writer not named Thomas Frank is recording engineer Steve Albini. He writes very little these days, but when he was younger and had a more active pen (not a metaphor for his penis – an actual pen) he authored some of the most classic rants about the music industry you would ever hope to read. He has heavily influenced my writing style, probably more than anyone realizes.

    Among the classics is a 1994 rejoinder to Chicago music critic Bill Wyman entitled "Three Pandering Sluts and their Music-Press Stooge." Mr. Wyman had written a feature about three successful "indie" musical groups – Smashing Pumpkins, Urge Overkill, and Liz Phair. Aside from the copious swearing and Albini's uncanny ability to be a complete dick in writing, my favorite portion is his conclusion: "Clip your year-end column and put it away for ten years. See if you don't feel like an idiot when you reread it."

    Sure enough, fourteen years later Wyman's effusive praise does seem ridiculous. SP went into a nosedive and even their "good" albums sound incredibly dated now. Urge Overkill disappeared 15 minutes after this was written. Liz Phair attempted to turn herself into a teeny-bopper, the results of which were so embarrassing that she should have been imprisoned. Wyman, in short, bought marketing hype and spoke glowingly about what turned out to be flavors-of-the-minute. Now that those artists' fad has passed, the author's laudatory words are silly in hindsight.

    Lesson learned: if you're going to write something down for posterity and general consumption, put a little thought into it with an eye toward avoiding future embarrassment. Before something is drowned in praise, be fully informed and make sure it has some staying power.

    Right-wing columnists, of course, are unable to feel shame or humility and their employers never hold them accountable for their past inaccuracies. It's simply not worth it for them to fret about how their words will look weeks, months, or years later. The only thing that matters is stoking the prejudices of their base and getting through the day's talking points. Nonetheless, you have to wonder if some of the pundit class regrets their words about Sarah Palin during and immediately after the GOP convention. Without knowing anything about her, they dove headlong into hyperbolic ass-kissing mode. I wonder if re-reading that stuff makes them feel like idiots yet.

    Bill Kristol, who privately lobbied McCain to pick Palin, gave us the classic shitburger "A Star is Born?" on September 1. At least he covered his ass by noting:

    If Palin turns out not be up to the challenge for which McCain has selected her, McCain will pay a heavy price. His judgment about the most important choice he’s had to make this year will have been proved wanting.

    Bullseye, Billy! But caveats and restraint were soon off the table as Kristol followed up a week later with "A Heartbeat Away." Here he lets us know that:

    McCain didn’t just pick a politician who could appeal to Wal-Mart Moms. He picked a Wal-Mart Mom…A Wasilla Wal-Mart Mom a heartbeat away? I suspect most voters will say, No problem. And some — perhaps a decisive number — will say, It’s about time.

    Kristol was actually shy compared to some of the others. Ron Dreher said "Why does the Angry Left hate Sarah Palin? Because of the potentially transformative power of her example" in his handjob piece, although he certainly changed his mind in a hurry! Ann Coulter chimed in with the characteristically-intelligent "The Best Man Turned Out to Be a Woman." Cal Thomas humiliates himself in "Steel Magnolia," laden with gems like:

    McCain's selection may be risky, my bet is that the pretty, pro-life, gun-toting, hockey mom is going to pleasantly surprise a lot of people with her toughness and common sense view of life and the world.

    Monica Charen tells us, in "Game Changer," that:

    McCain must also have sensed that a young, attractive woman from a western state would inject a dose of energy and enthusiasm into the race. On this, McCain may not have even guessed at how right he was (though one senses that Cindy McCain knew). Sarah Palin is political dynamite. She has transformed Republicans from flaccid to fired-up overnight. Just by being pro-life, small town, patriotic, and religious, she set the teeth of the media types on edge. By being all of that AND smart and articulate, and a budget hawk, she sent conservatives over the moon.

    The return trip from the moon didn't take long. Ross Mackenzie blows his colleagues away, though, unhinging his jaw like a snake to swallow a few extra inches of wang for the right-wing base:

    So how about a single word to describe John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running-mate? Sensational. If he becomes the next president, he may well look back and see this decision — this long Statue-of-Liberty pass downfield — as winning the game for him before Labor Day. What’s so terrific about Gov. Palin? How much time do you have?

    We all know, for example, that writing an email or phoning someone while angry is a bad idea. Emotional, knee-jerk reactions never look good in hindsight. The world of right-wing media operates by different rules, but only to a point. Some well-known righties have done rapid 180s on Palin; others will defend her to the bitter end. All of them, however, have left a trail of words that we outside of the 30% Club will be only too happy to revisit.

    KRISTOL STICKS A FORK IN IT

    Posted on | by Ed | 3 Comments on KRISTOL STICKS A FORK IN IT

    Well, add Mr. Sunnis-and-Shias-Love-One-Another to the list of rats fleeing a sinking ship (today's NYT column: "Fire the Campaign"). Note the irony in Kristol criticizing McCain's campaign for its panicked, frantic behavior in a column that reads like the author is running about like a chicken minus its head.

    Some day a friendly reader is going to register "www.billkristol.net" as a gift to me (my birthday's coming up!) and I will use it to chart a timeline of every Kristol column and major TV appearance since 2000, based on which I will determine what percentage of the time this man is actually right about anything. And as a bonus, we will see how many times he contradicts himself in print in any six-month period Friedman Unit.

    SEAN HANNITY'S SOURCES

    Posted on | by Ed | 2 Comments on SEAN HANNITY'S SOURCES

    Read up on Andy Martin, author of the "Obama is a Muslim" email, whom Hannity invited on his show to smear the living shit out of Obama. We should take seriously the words of a man whose election committee in a 1986 run for Congress included the phrase "to exterminate Jew power" according to the FEC and further stated:

    I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did, when Jew survivors are operating as a wolf pack to steal my property.

    Stay classy, Sean.

    I LOVE SARAH PALIN

    Posted on | by Ed | 7 Comments on I LOVE SARAH PALIN

    No, seriously. She is like a gift from heaven. That hateful, corrupt little troll is going to go over like gangbusters with the people who were voting for McCain anyway.

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    And exactly no one else.

    Best I can tell from her speech (usual caveat: read, not watched, as one takes 90 seconds and the other an hour) she was nominated because Ann Coulter was busy.

    Classic right-winger-unconstrained-by-facts moment: Barack Obama wants to take all your money. Ignore reality, that both candidates propose tax plans that cut taxes on everyone making under $200,000. Conservatives have a neat way around inconvenient facts like that – Obama's lying.

    Second-favorite moment: bringing up all of her kids in the first 2 minutes after days of complaining about how the media is prying into the lives of her children.

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    That mean librul media! What kind of people would shine the national spotlight on teenagers for political gain?

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    MOTORCYCLEOLOGY

    Posted on | by Ed | 5 Comments on MOTORCYCLEOLOGY

    On the topic of intellectual races to the bottom:

    I think a very interesting analysis could arise from a comparison of the ways in which non-fiction cable television has changed over the past five to ten years. This struck me when, for reasons now lost to me, I stumbled upon the website of TLC. Let me now summarize the current program roster on The Learning Channel:

    10 Years Younger ("Complete strangers guess our participant's age. Then our glam squad goes to work and takes a decade off the person's look in just 10 days!"), Flip That House, Say Yes To the Dress (bridal shopping), What Not to Wear, LA/Miami Ink (teaching valuable tattoo industry tips), Must Love Kids, Who Are You Wearing?, Makeover Train (was that a Wesley Snipes movie?), Rock the Reception, specials like "160-pound Tumor," shameful freakshowism like Little People Big World, and so on. If this is learning, freebasing cocaine is gourmet cooking.

    But let's focus on their big-ticket shows. There's American Chopper, an incisive look at the tribulations of a facially-hirsute team of motorcycle builders. Through this show I learned that motorcycles go "vroom!" and do not come from eggs. There's Jon & Kate Plus 8, which apparently exists to make the rest of us feel better about our mastery of birth control and avoidance of fertility drugs. And don't forget the original smash hit Trading Spaces, in which people attempt to fill holes in their lives by redecorating rooms. As the "Learning" channel says, "Two room (sic), 48 hours and $1000." Ed agree. That look good.

    TLC's competition has hardly fared better, filling their schedules with shows about explosions, dieting, people falling into mud and/or sewage, morons eating insects because they went into the "wild" without packing food (but with a camera crew), and people catching crabs. Now don't get me wrong. I like Mythbusters. It's fun. I'll watch some Deadliest Catch. But I also miss the kind of programming that they used to provide in spades. I want hour-long specials about the history of styrofoam. I want boring, lightly-narrated, grainy color footage of things on conveyor belts. I want detailed retellings (with bad re-enactments) of obscure historical events that did not involve muskets, swords, or warfare. I want to learn things that will only be of use on Jeopardy! or first-dates with unreasonably intelligent folklorists.

    I do not want to learn any more about historical armed conflicts. You have taught us enough about WWII, Vietnam, Desert Storm, and military toys in general to last several lifetimes. I know the thickness of the armor on every conceivable type of Cold War-era tank. I know what it looks like when precision munitions hit something and then explode. I know all of Hitler's personal habits, every person he ever spoke to, and what he ate for breakfast the day he died. I do not want to know any of this. It has stuck through simple repetition, a brute-force attack by your networks. Think of your programming as the camera-guided bomb and my brain as the Iraqi bunker.

    In short, please rededicate yourself to bland, informative programming about topics of minimal appeal to audiences. This was your bread-and-butter for years and I miss it. The invisible hand of the free market may have erred when it led you astray to programming with commercial appeal. This does not educate us. It may entertain us (although looking at TLC's roster again I am skeptical) but that is not your raison d'etre. Your switch to makeover- and chopper-based shows makes economic sense, but look at it this way: people who like makeovers and shopping already have 997 channels to call their own.