One of my favorite things about the current media world is the way that pundits can be such complete assholes while complaining that it’s sad how uncivil our discourse has become. Here’s Krauthammer attacking Andrew Sullivan:
Sullivan’s post merits reading as the quintessential Sullivan, leaping from nonexistent fact to blanket ad hominem without even a pause for a reality check.
In fairness, Sullivan was completely wrong — he alleged that Krauthammer changed his views on a gas tax when Krauthammer had not.
General Winfield Stuck
they are not the only ones. Just read this blog comments today.
DougJ
Just read this blog comments today.
Ha!
ellaesther
Nope, you canna trick me into clicking on a Krauthammer post. You canna!
Also: @General Winfield Stuck: Indeed.
Hey, how about that time that you and I got a little button-pushy with each other — AND THEN APOLOGIZED AND HAVE EVER SINCE BEEN NOTHING BUT BUDDIES!
Observe, young ones! It can be done!
I would despair, but I’m too tired.
General Winfield Stuck
@ellaesther:
Yup, it can.:-)
MikeJ
Village rules: don’t say “fuck”, anything else is ok. One Mr. Θερσίτης has written the definitive treatise on this I believe.
gwangung
@ellaesther: I’m a little amused/despairing on how smug commenters here are about being so much better than the wingnuts when so many of us act the same way and show the same qualities. (See various threads today)
SpotWeld
I renew my call for a pundit thunderdome
Elie
gwangung
I hear that.
Am feeling pretty worn down and a little disappointed..
So much for the give and take of liberal democracy…
freelancer (itouch)
Awww. You fuckers are all a bunch of softies. It’s adorable.
I love you bastards.
freelancer +2
jcricket
It reminds me of Atrios’ “time for another blogger ethics panel” trope. When a blogger does something bad/wrong now or then it’s an indictment of the entire genra.
But when pundits are factually mistaken from top-to-bottom, guilty of influence peddling, or simply writing fact-free columns – for years at a time – it’s all a matter of opinion.
And people wonder why newspapers are sucking wind.
I read Sully, although I don’t know why, considering he’s a hypocritical naval-gazing pompous gasbag of the first order – but Krauthammer can suck it. Whenever I see that centenarian-looking idiot gracing my editorial page I can be sure I’m in for another neocon screed of useless drivel either completely devoid of original thought or filled with inane ramblings of a discredited war-mongering know-nothing.
At least Sully apologized.
jcricket
@SpotWeld: Can we alter the rule of Pundit Thunderdome so that two pundits enter and no pundits leave?
I’d pay for that.
Lev
You know, I much preferred the days when the GOP was a Midwestern Party, and they spent all their time complaining about cussin’ on the radio. Now that they’re a Southern Party, they’re the ones yelling and covering stripper deaths ad nauseam and inviting sex tape golden shower recipients onto their shows. This is no mystery. Texas has the largest amount of churches in the country, and the largest number of strip clubs too.
Then again, the only reason the GOP is not completely destroyed at this point is because people are freaked about the economy and they don’t think Obama has fixed it well enough. If they were acting this crazy in a time of relative prosperity they wouldn’t be polling more than 25%.
Something Fabulous
@gwangung: Yeah, what was up today? So much name-calling and such, more than usual, it seemed to me. Sunspots? Turkey withdrawl?
Something Fabulous
@Something Fabulous: and, my first official apology for whatever that weird bolding issue was. I feel so– part of things, now. Sigh.
ellaesther
@gwangung: If I could have been around more, I probably would have waded in and started telling people off — it really, really bugs me, mainly because it does no one any good at all. We need to be the change we want to see in the world, etc, etc….
BombIranForChrist
I don’t know what it is that bugs me about Sully so much.
When I first started reading him, I enjoyed what he had to say. But man, he got tedious and sloppy pretty fast.
And I now know who he is. He’s that dude you met at a party. He always seems to be alone, kind of hovering near the punch bowl, and so you kind of wonder what’s wrong with him. But when you step up for some punch, and you start talking with him, you think, “Wow, this guy is more interesting than I thought. I wonder why he is standing here all alone?” And then you say goodbye to the dude, but he keeps following you, talking to you. You try to have other conversations with other people and he is there, joining the conversation, arguing with you (pleasantly). You go to the bathroom, and mercifully he is not there, but as soon as you return, he manages to find his way over to you to reconsider a point he made earlier while near the punch bowl. And so this guy just follows you fucking everywhere and you realize that your night is now fucked and you are not going to get laid because this punch bowl dude will never, ever leave you alone until you kill him.
This is my relationship with a Sully.
Krauthammer is just an asshole. I mean, just look at his column photo. What kind of person poses for a camera like that? He looks like a satanic Mr. Bean.
Mark S.
@General Winfield Stuck:
I’ve been out the loop most of the day. What did I miss?
Martin
@General Winfield Stuck:
Ah, but we come here because we know we are complete assholes. Wildebeests migrate because they are wildebeests. BJers post assholish comments because we are assholes.
Martin
@BombIranForChrist:
I stopped reading Sully and read Fallows instead. I’m so much happier.
Anne Laurie
@Something Fabulous:
Four whole days of being Nice, even to the people we actually like (much less the arsehole side of the family) is too much of a strain on the system for a bunch of evil-minded Eeyore-identified curmudgeons like us. Harsh words and name-calling here in our clubhouse are the inevitable whiplash reaction to not killing all the many, many, many people who deserved to be killed during the last several days.
Delia
I think he looks like the most sanctimonious, self-righteous, and prissy bag of douche that ever breathed air upon this earth. He writes like one, too, which is why I find it extremely hard to read him.
Martin
@Anne Laurie:
Next year, everyone work in “Fuck you and pass the mashed potatoes” into their holiday routine. Anne Laurie suggests we’ll all be better people for it.
Phoebe
@ellaesther:
I don’t even know what it was about, but I agree completely. I want to disagree without being disagreeable and it is so insanely hard. It takes practice.
Steeplejack
I have been keeping graphs for the past few months, and outbreaks of (more than usual) asshole-ishness by BJ commenters appear to correlate with no pictures of Tunch. I am not implying causation (yet), but the data points don’t lie.
Oddly, pictures of Lily correlate with nothing except a spike in the use of the phrases “cute doggeh” and “nom nom nom.”
ellaesther
@BombIranForChrist: HA! Satanic Mr. Bean! Oh, bless you for that!
Back before I gave up on daily newspapers (a year ago!), I wrote a fair amount of freelance newspaper commentary, much of it about Israel/Palestine. As any leftie opinions on Israel/Palestine require “balance,” I was almost always run on a page on which either Krauthammer or Goldberg also appeared.
It was painful, and made sending copies of the opinion page to my mother exercises in origami, as I would work very hard fold things in a way that hid their smug and/or Satanic Mr. Bean faces entirely.
Mark S.
I actually find it pretty hilarious to read Krauthammer whining about being accused of being cynically partisan. That would be like Sully complaining about someone calling him gay.
As for Krauthammer’s piece in question, he at least isn’t a complete global warming denialist, but geez, sunspots? Ocean currents? Maybe the earth will just correct itself? Why doesn’t he just advocate spraying sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere? That might work too, who the fuck knows?
Elie
Anne Laurie @ 20:
You may have a point there…
Still, I am smarting and a little surprised
I’ll get over it though
ellaesther
@Steeplejack: In other words: You are not saying — you are merely saying.
General Winfield Stuck
@Steeplejack:
I was just thinking the same thing. It’s Cole’s fault like everything else except for when it’s Obama’s fault.
The Tunchmeister soothes the savage beast in us, with Regality. Or something.
Wile E. Quixote
@Delia
It might be because he’s in a wheelchair. Strangehammer is a quadriplegic the uptight look might be because he’s fixed in that position. He’s still a dick though. His column on Bush Derangement Syndrome was every bit as sleazy as FACT magazine printing the fake survey of psychologists/psychiatrists in 1964 that said that Barry Goldwater was crazy.
Steeplejack
@ellaesther:
Let me be perfectly clear: it would be irresponsible not to speculate.
Steeplejack
@General Winfield Stuck:
Or something. And I think it’s called fear.
gwangung
@Something Fabulous:
@ellaesther:
@Phoebe:
Yeah, that’s it. We will NEVER agree on everything. We’re humans–we’ll never do that. But we can agree on some things and disagree on others…and still work together on the things we agree with, and not demonize each other on the things we do disagree on.
(And if we’re REALLY sophisticated, we’ll realize different groups of us will have different sets of things we agree and disagree on, and act accordingly).
Wile E. Quixote
That was supposed to be nested blockquotes. Darn. Something is screwed up with my browser.
As far as Strangehammer goes his quote vis a vis Sully is a perfect description of most of the columns George Will has written, oh wait, Will is publishing on treeware and not teh intertronz, so it’s different.
gwangung
@Steeplejack: THAT’S IT!
ellaesther
@Elie: I was involved with some late-night catching up on work when I was lurking around earlier, so I didn’t really get a chance to engage, but I saw some nasty, nasty words thrown your direction. I’m so sorry it came down on you like bricks!
And @Steeplejack: My point exactly.
MikeJ
@ellaesther: Is it possible to discuss the Berkeley daily planet issue without tuning into a whole big I/P discussion? If so, I’m interested in hearing the view of someone who keeps up with such stuff.
ellaesther
@Elie: Also, the comments of certain people deserve to always, always be read as “PiePiePiePiePiePiePiePiePiePie” ad infinitum — even if you don’t have the Pie filter set up.
Allow your eyes to skip past certain names and mosey along! Nothing but Pie to see here (or, rather, there. You see what I mean).
wasabi gasp
Ad hominem is a rancid old jizz mop of a term.
Wile E. Quixote
@ellaesther
Careful, DougJ is known for hiding entire Krauthammer columns in his posts via steganography. If you cross your eyes like you need to look at one of those 3-D hidden image paintings you can clearly see the words “Bomb Iran. Bomb them now!” in many of his posts.
Plus if you have a Macintosh DougJ can create posts that take your system over and turn the spinning beach ball of death into a will-sapping, mind-controlling HYPNO-WHEEL OF DEATH! and before you know it you’ll be his mindless slave, contentedly reading any number of Krauthammer columns, agreeing with Fred Hiatt, thinking that George Will would look good wearing nothing but a bowtie and glasses and God only knows what else!
ellaesther
@MikeJ: Ok, full disclosure, I had to google what you were talking about in order to appear as if I knew what you were talking about!
But now I’ve read about it and sadly, I think that the answer is no…. Israel and the institutional American Jewish community (as opposed to actual American Jews, who often hold very different opinions to the institutions who claim to represent them!) have long conflated criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, and while I — an American-Israeli Jew — would say, and have said, that that’s utter nonsense, my opinion has yet to have much of an impact on the thought of Israel and the institutional American Jewish community!
And now, dear Balloon Juicers, I go to bed. Lila tov (good night) to one and all!
Steeplejack
It’s late, and I’m getting ready to pack it in soon, but at some point I would love to see a discussion on Balloon Juice about David Bohm’s book On Dialogue, if anyone here has read it.
I was thinking about it earlier this evening (for obvious reasons). It’s a nice exploration of the whole subject, in particular the heretical notion that dialogue may be a better approach than “debate” in many situations.
Crazy talk, I know, but at least I didn’t go all Wholeness and the Implicate Order on you, like I wanted to.
Anne Laurie
@Martin:
Or deader people, depending on the immediate dysfunctionality level. It’s safer to vent to a community-of-choice on the internet than in the meatspace, for a lot of us. Although I made a deliberate decision not to add much to the conversation from the mudflats of Secaucus this past weekend, you’ll notice. Never let it be said that thirty-plus years of annual wetware holiday experimentation hasn’t proven useful to the greater community!
Steeplejack
@Anne Laurie:
That’s a pretty good restaurant. I ate there once about 10 years ago.
Wait, what?
Wile E. Quixote
@Steeplejack
Just as long as you aren’t Going Rogue on us.
Elie
ellaesther@ 36:
Thanks.
You know, I knew what you say, and yet I fell in anyway.
I chalk it up to an informative experience in weird-anger- land
Do you think some of these folks take it off this blog and into their real lives?
Hope not.
Steeplejack
@Wile E. Quixote:
I will definitely go rouge before I go rogue.
Yutsano
OT (mostly because the topics so far have depressed me tonight) but Geaux Saints!!
MBSS
i got deleted on RCP for saying that sour kraut is as ugly on the inside as he is on the outside.
Steeplejack
@Yutsano:
The Saints did look great tonight. They thrashed the Patriots and made it look easy. Who dat? Dey dat!
MBSS
i told my buddy to take the saints D over the pats D for his fantasy team…
he’s a new englander, so his fan sentimentality got the best of him.
srv
Woah. Wait a second.
Did Krauthammer actually write an article that did not compare Sullivan’s views to 1939?
Woah.
Martin
@Anne Laurie:
Well, I know better than to speak out of turn in Secaucus. Hell, I know better than to even go to Secaucus, to be honest. You know why you can’t pump your own gas in Jersey? It’s because they know half the people there would douse the guy next to them and set him on fire, just for the fuck of it.
In SoCal you can throw a casual fuck-you, though. People kinda go in shock for about 4 hours trying to figure out why you just did that. It can be pretty entertaining to turn the NY on in the right crowd.
Yutsano
@Steeplejack: I used to like the way Eli pouted but now nothing warms the cockles of my heart like a pouting Tom Brady.
Yutsano
@Martin:
You can’t in Oregon either. I heard the rationale behind the law once but it still makes no sense to me.
Yutsano
@Anne Laurie: I think this is a hint Anne. OPEN THREAD!! OPEN THREAD!!
freelancer (itouch)
@Yutsano:
Wait, what the fuck?! There are laws against pumping your own gas?
Are there also laws against brewing your own coffee? Someone unpack this, please.
Martin
@Yutsano:
Really makes you think twice about pissing off an Oregonian, doesn’t it? They’re some mean motherfucking, pot-smoking, euthanizing, treehuggers up there.
Martin
@freelancer (itouch):
Yep, Oregon and New Jersey it’s illegal to pump your own gas. You need to rely on a gas pumping professional, usually named ‘Junior’, who graduated with a 4-year Hydrocarbon Delivery professional degree.
In New Jersey you can’t make left turns either. There are some sharp tacks in Jersey, let me tell you.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Wile E. Quixote:
Gee… thanks a WHOLE lot for THAT little visual… you just triggered a bout of hysterical blindness… which luckily for
you means I won’t be able to find my favorite mashie niblick for at least 36 to 48 hrs…
Yutsano
@Martin: You know, I had even money that Oregon would pass a gay rights law before Washington would, but we got there first (and only because our pissant Supreme Court wussed out on marriage by one vote!) so I guess technically we’re more liberal now.
Martin
@Yutsano:
Well, I figured California would have beat all of you, but, well, we’ve got some fucked up electorate down here. Our neighborhood is still pretty fractured over the Prop 8 issue. That was just ugly.
Martin
Actually, technically we did beat you all, we just thought we were too good to do the right thing, or something. I don’t know – I’m still bitter about it.
Comrade Kevin
@BombIranForChrist:
I’m sorry, but there is no other kind. Rowan Atkinson has a lot to answer for.
Yutsano
@Martin: Honestly? I thought California was a liberal paradise until the real effects of Prop 13 and the Governator came around. That kinda ruined my image of the entire state. Prop 8 just cemented the problems in my head. I actually have a liberal friend in CA who likes the idea of Prop 8, she just wants the residential portions kept. Otherwise she’d be priced out of the state.
MBSS
@Martin:
a lot of california is red. orange county has traditionally been a stronghold. the valley areas are filled with knuckle dragging mouth breathers, and only the coastal metro areas are reliably blue and open-minded. hell, once you add in nixon and reagan you’re talking california as a veritable conservative epicenter.
Martin
On economic issues, California definitely has a strong conservative bent – but on social issues? Not so much. California has some of the most progressive social laws out there – labor rights, renter rights, anti-discrimination laws and so on. When the two intersect, the economics usually wins, but Prop 8 didn’t have an economic angle to it – it was purely a social issue. It was a little stunning.
gex
@Martin: Except that is the social issue that since Hawaii in 1993 straight people left and right can agree on: they hate them some fags. Pretty much every two years we get a nice little vote reminding us of that somewhere. I think maybe NH is the only SSM/civil union state that did it legislatively, and even that doesn’t tell you much how a referendum would go over.
If you were surprised, you weren’t paying attention.
RedKitten
Wait…that isn’t a normal part of the holiday routine?
Hm — I guess I’ll have to ask Mom where THAT little tradition started, then.
arguingwithsignposts
I can attest to the New Jersey gas-pumping mafia. Which explains a lot to me. Go Saints! Love that Tom Brady/Patriots ass-kicking last night.
Except for BoB and certain trolls, I digest all the commentary with the requisite grains of salt and love. As Elle (I believe) said in an earlier thread, there are a lot of lovebugs here. Wonder if Gex is doing okay?
We are all sieves now.
Anne Laurie
@Steeplejack:
Not the blue crab, I hope. When I exercised the dogs behind the Red Roof Inn, there were large official notices in both English & Spanish explaining that eating the crabs would not only give you cancer and damage your unborn children, but subject you to a $3,000 fine. I guess the locals are so tough that cancer & birth defects just weren’t enough of a threat…
arguingwithsignposts
@gex:
Hope you’re doing okay.
I disagree to some extent. At least 48 percent of Mainers voted for marital equality. It’s not a majority, but it’s more than zero. We don’t all hate us some fags.
Svensker
I loathe Krauthammer with the loathing of a thousand loathes, but he is a very smart guy and he has absolutely nailed what it is about Sully that drives me bonkers. What he said.
bago
Well, if I would have known it was going to be THAT kind of party…
Left Coast Tom
@Martin:
And yet when I’ve been to Oregon gasoline has been considerably cheaper than the self-pumped gasoline available to the south. I actually think CA should outlaw self-serve. If we’re not getting any economic benefit from it then why not go for the free convenience?
Svensker
NJ, too. Gas is very cheap here, even though self-serve is illegal. Although I’d bet our low gas taxes are going to go up very shortly.
Mike in NC
A hardcore Republican friend of mine thought Mr. Bean and Jay Leno were the two funniest people on the planet, so I guess you could argue he was consistently WRONG…
Corner Stone
@Lev:
Hells to the Yeeeeaaahh!