Former president Clinton making the case for Obama:

…And this is why I hate presidential debates.

Barack Obama says we should change current policy and be willing to meet with the leaders of rogue nations without strict “preconditions.” Hillary Clinton says strict preconditions are important when arranging diplomatic engagements as they prevent rogue nations from using meetings with the US President for “propaganda purposes.”

And yet this slight juxtaposition in foreign policy priorities doesn’t enter the blogo-punditsphere via a sober discussion on whose view may be right on the merits, but rather through a whole load of nerdy and useless political gossip over whether or not Obama made a “gaffe.”

All this brouhaha when both Clinton and Obama’s debate-time comments actually don’t really contradict each other—if anything, each answer represents a difference in emphasis; Obama would like to emphasize a drastic change in America’s approach to foreign policy and diplomacy, while Clinton looks to emphasize her experience on the nitty-gritty details of diplomatic engagements.

We should recognize that, as he himself says, Barack Obama’s not going to be inviting Hugo Chavez to the White House for tea and crumpets bright and early Wednesday January 21st, 2009. At the same time, Hillary Clinton, given the benefit of the doubt (not that I think she really deserves it), probably won’t abide by the same stifling “preconditions” as the current administration (ie we’ll only talk to you if and when you do everything we tell you to.)

There’s so much emphasis on “winning” in these things and yet winning has nothing to do with giving the most compelling arguments in support of your ideas, it’s all about “saying what you’re supposed to say” as part and parcel of a pre-scripted horse race. The first slight indication of a difference in policy thus becomes a matter of who made a “gaffe” and who didn’t, who “knocked one out of the park” and who didn’t, who manipulated the narrative well and who didn’t.

We go from substantive discussion on policy and judgement into an endless and obnoxious series of “gotchas” and gaffes, flubs and “slams.”

If this is politics, well then I freaking hate politics.

Prosecute more incidents of prison masturbation.

Michael Moore and Stephen Colbert discuss the current state of television news:

Colbert: I am proudly owned by my sponsors. I will never say one thing against the Pasta Pro™ pasta strainer.

Moore: Right. And that’s why you’ll have a long and successful career.

Colbert: Good.

Moore: And so, your point is … ?

Colbert: That I have a healthy relationship with my sponsors. And that’s how TV works.

Moore: In other words, it’s not really about telling the truth.

Colbert: No, we are selling things

Probably only partially true, but well spoken nonetheless.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows gets leaked.

Super-nerdy Wikipedians attempt to add information revealed within said leak to Deathly Hallows Wikipedia entry.

Dedicated super-nerdy Harry Potter fans do whatever possible to preserve the sanctity of the Harry Potter marketing campaign magical novel, expecto patronuming all mention of the leak from said Wikipedia entry.

Super-nerdy Wikipedians counter with further obsessive leak-related Wikipedia editing.

The battle rages on, via Wikipedia Talk Pages.

(FYI, link may reveal sensitive information)

Moore calls truce on beef between he and CNN. This statement from the Moore camp is pretty spot-on:

CNN’s report attempted to challenge ‘SiCKO’ by arguing the film only used facts that backed up the movie’s thesis. In fact CNN, by creating confusion over the acceptability of using different reports and research, along with using a biased expert whose background was not identified, engaged in the very tactics it was attempting to accuse ‘SiCKO’ of using.

Of course, the glaring difference is that ‘SiCKO’ is a self-admitted opinion piece, whereas CNN is trying — in between the various ads for Cialis — to hide beneath the fig leaf of being an unbiased, neutral news reporting agency.

The true downfall of Gupta’s piece refuting SiCKO wasn’t the confrontational tone, the health industry-associated expert, or their oppositional facts, it was the self-professed notion that Gupta’s piece was the “objective truth” somehow above Moore’s opinion-based film. Neither piece can, or should, exist without the other, and both pieces “suffer” from the editorializing of information sources, as editorializing is the only way to tell a story.

No news report, documentary film, or non-fiction book can ever even hope to present “the whole story,” something which can only be collected over time through a variety of sources, of varying degrees of bias coming from a number of angles.

Good for Moore, good for CNN.

Patton Oswalt enlightens us on which summer blockbuster good Americans will be enjoying this weekend:

Matthew Yglesias stretches his foreign-policy bona fides:

Mostly, the paranoia of the national security apparatus — represented by the chief of Sector Seven and the guys who want to imprison Bumblebee — versus the correct liberal view that we need to widen the circle of allies, distinguish between good and bad alien robots, etc. Similarly, the Autobots have a minor conflict between the more hawkish Ironhide and the more dovish Optimus Prime on the subject of killing humans, in which Optimus’ more pacifistic stand gets a positive portrayal.

I love big fucking robots.

Ignore Andrew Sullivan’s oh-so-sophisticated analysis of this charged political exchange, but I think Michael Moore v. CNN & Sanjay Gupta provides some good insight not just into the current state of the American health care system but into conflicting states of American journalism as well:

On one level the exchange is a bit petty; both Moore and Gupta use facts from reliable sources, facts that, at times, somewhat disagree. The result is a quibbling back and forth that amounts to little more than “HHS is better…nooo, WHO, WHO!”, an impassioned dispute which may sound somewhat familiar to Billy Madison fans.

The most jarring point of distinction, however, is less over numbers and more over methodology and news-philosophy, as best illustrated by this comment from Dr. Gupta:

“[T]o just say to someone who doesnt have a sophisticated understanding of how health care works that its free is just not true.”

Who doesn’t recognize that “free” health care means tax-payer funded? Does Dr. Gupta really think we’re all that dense? (Moore himself actually raises the taxes issue directly in the film, going so far as to point out that France is “drowning in taxes.”)

This brings out my biggest beef with the most common criticism leveled against Michael Moore, the notion that the people who see his films aren’t adult enough to form their own understandings of the issues he presents without falling completely under the sway of his entrancing/brain-washing arguments.

How is this not infantilizing the American people? Moore’s movies don’t exist in a vacuum and that’s why they work. As Gupta acknowledges, without SiCKO the current American discussion on the ongoing health care crisis wouldn’t be nearly as robust as it is right now. In-depth discussion and analysis has been popping up in local press, online magazines, and even on MTV (bringing truth to the youth, Ruth!). If anyone out there is basing their entire views on the health care industry solely on what they see in a Michael Moore movie then they’re clearly not getting the whole story. Taken as a part of a healthy media diet, however, SiCKO does a world of good.

The mainstream press insists on on-the-spot “objectivity” out of a condescending belief that the American people are incapable of fully informing themselves by seeking out a multitude of opposing viewpoints. MSM corespondents even go out of their way to deny their own convictions (a clearly impossible task) for the supposed good of the American discussion, a very pre-blog mindset that I’m hoping will soon dissipate.

This became abundantly clear in an awkward way earlier on CNN, where Moore went head-to-head with Wolf Blitzer on the Situation Room, remarking right at the close of the interview “And thank you, Wolf, for saying during the break that you liked my film” to which Blitzer awkwardly replied (almost apologetically) “I thought it was a powerful movie.” Saying something is “powerful” is a lot different than saying you “liked it”, a distinction Blitzer had to cling to for fear of coming across as “biased” toward Moore (which he clearly is, to some extent) by acknowledging on-air he thought he made a good movie.

Opinion journalism of the Moore-come-blogs variety does away with this annoying condescension by laying its balls right out on the table. Lou Dobbs is patently wrong on essentially every position he has ever held on any issue, from outsourcing to immigration, but I much prefer his “bias at the outset” form on news analysis and insight to the Wolf Blitzer “I’m Not Allowed to Say I Liked a Movie” kind.

Moore is in the same exact vein. To point out that Michael Moore editorializes the facts in order to support a central argument is really nothing more than to point out he is a prominent pundit with a political position. This is what the best in opinion journalism does, and it’s very much why Moore’s films are so successful, influential, and, yes, effective.

Andrew Sullivan highlights some “good news about smoking,” touting a new study that shows smoking may reduce one’s risk of Parkinson’s. Sullivan quotes David Harsanyi, who asks:

My only question is how many major news organizations will give this politically incorrect fact the attention it deserves? If eating tofu lowered your risk of Parkinson’s by 54 percent would it be a front-page story? Should it be a front-page story if tobacco does the trick?

I recently heard cutting off your head is a sure-fire way to prevent brain cancer. I wonder why I haven’t seen this on the front-page..

In a new column up on TNR, Jon Chait takes Mayor Bloomberg to task over his promises of non-partisanship:

“Any successful elected executive knows that real results are more important than partisan battles and that good ideas should take precedence over rigid adherence to any particular political ideology.” So declared New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg upon renouncing his membership in the GOP last week. The problem, of course, is that people don’t agree on what “real results” or “good ideas” are. Cutting taxes? Raising taxes? Funding stem-cell research? Banning stem-cell research? This is exactly why we have partisan battles in the first place.

Since when is partisanship synonymous with disagreement? Like Tom DeLay before him, Chait (and his party-happy buddies) seems quick to misconstrue just what “partisan” really means.

Politicians of the non-partisan stripe (Bloomberg, Obama, etc.) aren’t looking to do away with political disagreement (who would be? That shit would be undemocratic.) Like many Americans, they’re hoping to put an end to the ridiculous team-based political mindset—a debilitating process wherein a line is drawn in the partisan sand, on either side of which political players line-up and duke it out, concerned not with what’s working but more with who’s winning.

Pro-partisan gadflys like Chait (apparently) and Delay seem to enjoy this type of political “fighting” out of some sort of nerdy attraction to the gritty sport of it all (see Greg Sargent’s constant boxing terminology, and nauseating overuse of the verb “to slam”). But every sport has it’s own limited appeal, and the growing ranks of undeclared voters seems to indicate that a lot of Americans aren’t really into petty political bickering, especially not when such fights become less about differences in policy position and more on promoting party unity and winning one for the home team.

This type of misanalysis is especially puzzling coming from Brendan Nyhan, a guy who throws a weepy hissy fit anytime a political pundit tows the party line rather than speaking truth to ideological party power.

And what prompted Jon Chait to go from knocking the liberal blogosphere for its insistence on ideological purity to knocking Bloomberg for his insistence of not adhering to ideological purity?

People have been lamenting the death of hip hop for about half as long as hip hop has been around, a whiney autophobia that Mos Def best undercut with the right-on observation that “people talk about hip hop like it’s some giant living in the hillside coming down to visit the townspeople.”

Matt Taibbi’s current column up on ad busters on the supposed sorry state of American liberalism is one of those giant in the hillsides type crybaby laments.

The liberalism Taibbi objects to—snooty college kids in Chaiman Mao t-shirts and “noisy Upper West side cocktail parties”—has little, if anything, to do with the Democratic party or the current left-of-center punditsphere.

If anything, the overdeveloped self-righteous urge to Fight The Power that defines these groups (as Taibbi describes it) has turned off any of the smelly dreadlocked/snotty Banana Republic-frocked masses from supporting anything as The Man-ish as a modern day political party.

Ross Douthat’s not buying it either:

The right had the left on the ropes for a long time, but for now, at least, it’s the other way around. Public opinion is going liberalism’s way on everything from gay marriage to taxes to health care to poverty to global warming, and the Iraq War has temporarily undone conservatism’s long-running advantage on foreign policy.

I think they’re largely talking past each other. Matt Taibbi’s smelly liberal giant in the hillside just isn’t coming down to get with the townspeople anymore. The rising wave of public support of left-leaning policy has come about largely because the conservative equivalent of the Chairman-clad masses has taken over the Republican party, a rhetorical extremism that is fundamentally unpalatable to anyone to the left of Ann Coulter.

While the Republicans were staging wide-scale revolts against the likes of Lincoln Chaffee, the Democrats were busy embracing and celebrating guys like Barack Obama and Jim Webb, ideological liberals who approach their liberalism under fundamentally conservative world views of public restraint and personal responsibility. The lunatic fringe Taibbi rightfully finds so disagreeable is largely an isolated entity, with little to no bearing on the current political landscape (and let’s hope it stays that way).

Taibbi should stick to making fun of dying popes.