Having had a somewhat longer commute than usual the past few weeks, I have once again become a daily New York Times reader, often to my considerable chagrin.  For the last 15 years or so, as my local newspaper, the Oregonian, got thinner and thinner, I readily coughed up the extra cash for something that would last longer than a cup of coffee and a trip to the bathroom.  My choices were the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Grey Lady, so I picked her.  It was, despite Maureen Dowd, Ben Stein, Tom Friedman, Judy Miller, Deborah Solomon, Elizabeth Bumiller, Frank Bruni, Jodi Wilgoren, and William Safire, not the worst choice I could have made.  After all, Paul Krugman’s lonely opposition to Bush’s onslaught on America will forever be remembered, if only for its singularity at the time, as a balm to many worried mornings of “smoke ‘em out” and whatnot.  Then, there was Frank Rich, whose fame (and astuteness) as a theater critic warranted him a reverent mention by the cynical playwright/murderer in Ira Levin’s “Deathtrap,” (a play I produced here in 1987), but he by then had blossomed into a searingly perceptive analyst of America’s Right (as well as the craven and compromised media that love it), which he continued to be until a couple of weeks ago, when he left to join New York Magazine.

It was a fitting move; New York Magazine, to which I subscribed for many years, was born out of the ashes of the New York Herald Tribune, whose Sunday magazine arose in the late 60′s, offering a haven for talent and journalism that the New York Times didn’t think was “fit to print.”  Seriously, a Sunday New York Times for SIX BUCKS without Frank Rich?  And a (hilariously inept) paywall, to boot?  Something, I thought, must be seriously wrong on 42nd street, and today, more evidence piles up.  Bob Herbert, it turns out, is bailing out as well.  Though Herbert was never my favorite columnist, his dogged focus on racial and economic injustice sometimes led him away from more stark and timely outrages and his earnest and plain-spoken style lacked the rapier wit of Krugman and Rich, in a paper laden with ads for furs, jewels and expensive watches, it was nice to read somebody who recognized, and compellingly wrote about, the very existence of poverty and injustice in America.  And now he’s gone, too.

This leaves an op/ed page feebly dotted with such glittering journalistic jewels as Maureen Dowd and Tom Friedman the only “liberals,” aside from Krugman (who has a day job at Princeton, thankfully), on a page so degraded that it unashamedly prints the execrable, adolescent caterwauling of Ross Douthat (!), who replaced the also pre-disgraced, but nonetheless hired, Bill Kristol in the right wing slot.   Pre-disgraced William Safire preceded them, so I guess there’s a pattern here…  At the New York Times, IOKIYAR rules.

The question, then, is who will replace them?  Unlike, say, The WaPoo, which is now primarily a Graham family enrichment scheme solely dedicated to promoting the Village values of war-making abroad and austerity at home, the NYT does depend on millions of Americans ponying up the cash to read it, and virtually none of these people do so because they like Ross Douthat and nuclear power.  No conservative would be caught dead spending two bucks daily, six bucks Sunday, for the “far left” New York Times, so it might be a good idea not to cater to them quite so much, at the expense of those who actually read and support the paper.

Newspapers are, by their nature, conservative institutions, in the true sense of the word, and that is why columnists like David Broder and Mike Royko, to name just a couple, continued writing until the grim reaper got them: readers develop relationships with columnists no wise publisher would ever want to sever.  Once, this arrangement was born of competitive pressures; in today’s monopolistic environment it survived, until recently, as tradition.  Those days are clearly over in this age when even big, once-powerful papers like the NYT struggle for survival, and let go the voices that personified them.

I don’t know who will replace Rich and Herbert, but if history is any guide, they will be disappointing, indeed.

UPDATE:  Well, it looks like Joe Nocera, one of a precious few good reporters in the business section, will be moving to the op/ed page, which is good, I guess, but it weakens the business section while not bringing any new voices to the paper as a whole.  On the bright side, such a move will surely save money…  Will they pass the savings on to their readers?

Ever since Reagan, but increasingly dramatically under Bush, Republicans have been allowed to say provably wrong and completely cuckoo things in public, repeatedly, every day, knowing that no one in the MSM would ever point this out, but they nonetheless used to use this privilege sparingly.  Before he got 9/11 and the bullhorn moment under his belt, Bush himself carefully emphasized his “compassion” and commitment to education and seniors, trying mightily to keep the authoritarian kleptocracy part of his agenda under the radar, but each time he proposed something crazy or got off yet another “nucular” without any correction, he became further emboldened by the obsequiousness and willing malleability  of the “liberal” media, and he was off to the races, with demonstrably disastrous results.

Rarely is it ever discussed that Bush’s narrow 2000 loss was magically turned into a “victory” solely by the media, which also helpfully made possible his illegally gerrymandered and shamelessly war-exploiting “sweep” in 2002 and his desperately smelly “landslide” in 2004; ever since the 1998 midterms the media has been conspicuously invested in Republicans, but in the process have driven Republicans into a cocoon of insanity so impenetrable that in the actual voting booth, the relentlessly touted mandates simply never happen, and thus must be sloppily manufactured out of hype and duct tape (sometimes literally).

Ironically, all the investment that the right has made in co-opting and intimidating the media into bending to its will may, in the end, be its undoing; it has gotten to the point that all but a quarter to a third of Americans know that if the Republicans and the media are simultaneously (as usual) predicting it will be sunny tomorrow, you’d better take your umbrella.   The Republicans may indeed climb a few seats out of their deservedly humiliating minority in 2010, but only if they can continue to convincingly lie about every single thing they plan to do once in power, and they might even gain the Presidency in 2012, provided they find candidates who haven’t been born yet.  Neither seems particularly likely, if you’re not David Gregory, Brooks, or Broder.

Nevertheless, “real Americans,” unlike the Davids and their many clueless imitators, are finally catching on to the game.  FOX sloppily tried to cover up the fact that Ron Paul won the absurdly overrated CPAC poll in the manner of a cat in the litter box, but the stench remained…  Huge numbers of Americans have rejected wanton deregulation of business and bloated and unaffordable military budgets the right bequeathed us and will rightfully punish any politician who attempts subsequently to abolish Social Security  and Medicare to pay for it all, but those are the only supposed “benefits” the media and its righty paymasters have left to offer a battered electorate, and have long since dropped their bashfulness about saying so.  If they think these genius ideas are the path to a 2010 landslide, I say “bring it on.”

For a long time I lamented the fact that our mouthpiece media functions as nothing more than the Pravda of the fruited plain, yet its long-suffering audience had never caught on to this the way those Russians did, with considerable negative consequences for what remains of our democracy.  I no longer am so sure.   After a half dozen times or so, even the media-exalted Leader George Bush admitted, albeit muddledly, that “you don’t get fooled again.”

One of the funniest things about the right is that they never lose, even when they do, and they even have rather disturbing success convincing others, or at least the media, that this is so.  A lot of us, and certainly any trained psychiatrist, would look at their behavior each day, and think they were no more or less living in fantasy land than, say, Snoopy was when he battled the Red Baron on top of his doghouse; but continuing the Peanuts metaphor, the press reacts to these routine delusions like Charlie Brown does to Lucy holding the football.  The main difference is that Charlie Brown ends up on his back, humiliated, and our mainstream media keep their jobs, or even get better ones, so they can’t wait to kick again.  The New York Times never carried Charles M. Schulz’ iconic comic, preferring unfunny written versions on its op/ed page, although it’s considerably less entertaining, much less just, when their string of Charlie Browns always get awarded the field goal for the ball everyone can see Lucy is still holding over her shoulder.  The Republicans have noticed this phenomenon, and adapted to it predictably.

Usually, they can point to some to some fly in the ointment of the other side’s victory, no matter how microscopic, and failing that, they have a lot of ways to cheat, lie, and bloviate their way to some semblance of at least doubt that they did, in fact, lose again.  The fact that they lost the popular vote in four of the last five presidential elections, they ought to be by now a defeated and irrelevant minority in Congress, given their numbers, their leaders are all nincompoops, charlatans, and crazy people, none of whom can open their mouths without lying would, in a rational world, render them, well, not very interesting, at least as credible policy or political spokespeople.  But in our media landscape, lies are more interesting than truth, and crazy is much more interesting than sane, and they therefore continue to dominate public discourse, despite the fact that their policies, and even their people, are despised by a clear majority of Americans.  Ironically, that unpopularity plays to their psychological game; because they’re so vile, aggressive, and obvious about it, people do actually hate them, in addition to opposing them, in large numbers, so then these committed opponents of political correctness can cynically play the persecuted minority card and loudly cast themselves as oppressed and silenced victims.  Remember Bush Derangement Syndrome?  Anyone with a pulse or grasp of the English language couldn’t bear to watch the guy for a lot of very good reasons, but somehow they were cast as deranged meanies who just hated Our Leader, as Bush coasted blithely from disaster to disaster, quite predictably but free of any “mainstream” criticism for eight years.

You have to hand it to them, really.  Anyone who can cast themselves, often successfully, as deserving of the Affirmative Action on steroids they routinely demand and receive from the media and on the political stage, when all they ever fight for is the prerogative of the majority race, religion, and sexual orientation to oppress those who don’t conform, they’re at least standouts for their chutzpah. Then, treating the superrich, enormous and monopolistic corporations, and their many media mouthpieces as beleaguered Davids fighting the liberal Goliath, if nothing else, shows admirable creativity.  But most of all, it shows that we no longer have politics in this country; we have a rigged reality show, and the fact that this makes many people disengaged, uninterested, and no longer interested in voting, rigs the game in their favor, yet again.  Low turnout and disengaged voters tends to make them lose by less, or even occasionally win.

The worst thing about all this, of course, is that every pile of shit presented to Republicans sends everyone from Sarah Palin and Micheal Steele to David Gregory and David Broder excitedly digging for a pony, and of course they always find it, even if the pony does smell a little funny and can’t exactly pull a cart.  Bush’s dubiously legal “landslide” in 2004, and the shameful, Delay-tainted “victory” in 2002, have become so defensively sanctified in the small, pampered minds of our media stars that they continue to pretend to forget everything that, well, actually happened, either before or since.  And since nothing really happened at all unless it got on television, and the only thing our media outlets do even vaguely competently is bury their mistakes, too many Americans fervently believe a whole lot of things that are either just dubious or more often plain, unmitigated bullshit.  As the supposed guardians of our First Amendment, Walter Cronkite pointed out in 2004 that the media, particularly FOX, whose audiences were the most misled, ought to be ashamed of themselves for such malpractice and its horrendous results.  But, alas, he made a lot less money than David Gregory, you know, and Rush Limbaugh’s maids, especially the ones who get drugs for him, probably make more, too.  Money talks these days, and even when it’s lying, we all are forced to listen.*

*Fairness Doctrine, anyone?  Liberal Portland has ONE progressive radio station, which calls itself that, and FOUR right-wing ones, that call themselves “News Talk.”  Most are owned by Clear Channel.  Must be the magical “free market,” again at work.

UPDATE: You can’t make this stuff up.  Before a cheering FOX host, the startlingly nebbishy Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute explains that the real danger of Health Care Reform is that it might force insurance companies to sell a “50,000 dollar policy for (a mere) $10,000.”  France spends about half of what we do per capita on health insurance, but even here we don’t pay nearly that much for our inferior and selective care.  And, after he praised insurance companies for “saving more lives every day than Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi will in their entire lives,” he won the rhetorical point.  Talking, as though it were the most natural thing in the world, about $50,000 dollar medical insurance, would, you’d think, at least raise some eyebrows, and maybe want to at least be adjusted slightly for the talking points, at this politically sensitive time.  But not on FOX.  Lord, have mercy.

UPDATE II: Just when I thought these delusional righties couldn’t get any dumber, along comes this, and some of the chosen language sounds vaguely familiar..  Emphasis on the “liar.”

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who divide people into two kinds, and those who don’t. — Unknown

I‘m starting to think that one of the greatest dividing-lines of humanity is not the one between Republicans and Democrats, nor between rich and poor, labor and management — it’s the huge chasm separating those who live in reality, from those who don’t.

I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.

There are two kinds of people in the political world. One side accepts as fact that human beings respond to incentives (seeking pleasure and avoiding pain); and the other side believes that good intentions will conquer history, psychology, economics and any amount of bad judgment. They will beat, or cheat, reality itself.

© Dan Popp

Have you ever heard such rubbish in all your life?  If you’re a regular Hag reader, I think you have.