Via GOS, this (from Matt Taibbi) made my day:
A few weeks back I participated in a post-election roundtable that included Peter Hart and former Nixon aide David Gergen. The session got unexpectedly hot, in particular over the whole issue of whether or not Obama had done enough to keep America’s CEOs happy. Gergen kept pressing this idea that, even though finance-industry bonuses are back up to record highs at the same time that real human beings are facing horrific unemployment and foreclosure crises, Obama needed to work harder at jacking off the CEO class.
When I got genuinely emotional in response to this idea, Gergen continually expressed not so much anger as surprise.
[….]few hours later, I figured it out. Gergen clearly had me mixed up with Matt Bai, the New York Times reporter.
Bai is one of those guys — there are hundreds of them in this business — who poses as a wonky, Democrat-leaning “centrist” pundit and then makes a career out of drubbing “unrealistic” liberals and progressives with cartoonish Jane Fonda and Hugo Chavez caricatures. This career path is so well-worn in our business, it’s like a Great Silk Road of pseudoleft punditry.
[….]I had a good laugh imagining that somewhere, at that very moment, David Gergen was telling someone what an asshole Matt Bai is. I wonder if anyone’s filled him in on the mistake yet.
This is a good summary of Matt Bai, but I can’t concentrate on that because I’ve always hated David Gergen so much. I hate him in part for being a cornfed motherfucker (I hate Bob Woodward for the same reason, despite his occasional solid journalism). At least with Joe Klein and Chris Matthews, you get some sense they got fucked with by the tough kids in the ethnic ghetto they grew up in, and that this gave them some amount of empathy, albeit along with with obvious issues with their own masculinity.
David Gergen would gladly round us up and put us in work camps if Jamie Dimon convinced him it would be good for the country.
DougJ +4
Hawes
This was also a chuckle: http://zombieland-nowbrainfree.blogspot.com/2010/12/big-dog-barksand-barksand-barks.html
Clinton stopped by the White House and hijacked the podium. Now Obama has ANOTHER hostage scenario to deal with.
mr. whipple
@Hawes: That was good, thanks.
Davis X. Machina
@Hawes: Just treat the Big Dog as a performance artist, and enjoy the show.
We won’t see his likes again, not in our lifetime. He’s about as relevant to the present three-cornered impasse as Martin Van Buren, but like the Dead, he isn’t the best at what he does, he’s the only one who does what he does.
I’m surprised there aren’t people following him around in VW buses, selling each other his mix tapes.
DougJ
@Davis X. Machina:
Very well put.
beltane
David Gergen is utterly soulless. He doesn’t even care what’s good for the country, only for a certain class of very rich people who happen to live in this country.
I am becoming distressed by the lack of concern for ordinary people not only on the part of the news media, but from popular culture as well. It was not like this at all during the Great Depression, where the plight of the common man was treated sympathetically in movies, radio and literature. Now we have reality TV which is all about cruelty and schadenfreude. How did we become such a vicious society?
Hunter Gathers
@beltane: Everybody bought into the ‘I got mine, fuck you’ ethos spawned during the mid 1980’s. Of course, doing a shit-ton of blow will do that to a society.
beltane
@Hunter Gathers: It’s really a shame. If something like WWII were to happen again, I don’t think we would posses the social cohesiveness to fight it. “I got mine, fuck you” is a loser mentality and one that always leads to failure.
Davis X. Machina
@DougJ: I saw Orr skate, Bird dish out no-look passes, Pedro pitch, Brady before the knee injury, Abbado conduct the BSO in Mahler — and Clinton on the campaign trail.
Life has been good.
AAA Bonds
Here’s something and a half:
http://www.slate.com/BLOGS/blogs/scocca/archive/2010/12/10/news-reports-prince-charles-and-camilla-assaulted-and-or-menaced-and-or-inconvenienced-by-teeming-yet-invisible-mob.aspx
beltane
@AAA Bonds: Strange that the limo’s window was “accidentally” left open as it was unusually cold there last night. There were tons of conspiracy theories about this on Twitter.
The Dangerman
@beltane:
Reality TV covers both ends of the spectrum; we have the rich worship (Paris Hilton or any of the Kardashians, a name that should be reserved for the evil Kardashian that somehow ditched OJ’s knife) and the shame for losers (each show makes special note of a loser taking the walk of shame or singing their last song, etc.).
liberty60
Ok here is something that strikes me, re: pseudoleftists-
Reading the days blogs I find that wingers hate The Deal, and blame Obama for “swindling” them;
Liberals hate The Deal and blame…Obama for selling them out.
One of the times when we could learn from them about which way our fury should be directed
Davis X. Machina
@The Dangerman:
I do like Ru Paul’s Drag Race, though, where you get to… Lip-Synch For Your Life!
mr. whipple
@AAA Bonds:
The peasants are revolting!
dadanarchist
Boomer narcissism + 30 years of Reaganism
beltane
@dadanarchist: There was graffiti in my high school that gave numerological proof that Reagan was the anitchrist (RONALD=6 WILSON=6 REAGAN=6). Maybe there was more to this theory than I suspected at the time.
AAA Bonds
@mr. whipple:
It reminded me more of this.
Corner Stone
@Davis X. Machina: I’ve seen a few things too. Life is fucking good.
johnny walker
Saw this the other day. The image of Gergen shaking his head, conferring with other Serious Folks and trying to figure out when Matt Bai became a bomb-throwing leftist asshole is great.
@liberty60: We should blame Republicans for allowing Obama to cut a bad deal with them? Not trying to be an ass, but I am not even close to following what you’re getting at. The issue here isn’t that nobody had any idea that the Republicans were bad-faith negotiators, the opposition party, etc. They are Obama’s political enemies, so the only part that’s even slightly out of the ordinary is that he says “Sounds great!” after they offer a one-sided deal on which the politics overwhelmingly benefit them.
I mean yeah, Republicans suck etc. But is “how dare the GOP try to get the most outt’ve a compromise agreement!” really the new rallying cry? It makes absolute sense for the GOP to push for everything it wants when dealing with a guy known to back down, and the idea of blaming them for doing so — if that’s what you’re suggesting — is mind-blowingly naive. Please tell me I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying somehow.
zmullls
Home schooling. Ipods. Home entertainment centers.
It’s no longer necessary to actually interact with other beings if you don’t want to.
And we used to worship brains (Hey, Mr. Wizard, could you do that experiment again?) and now we worship attitude and money.
It’s tempting to blame it all on television, and the rise of image over thought, of personality over substance, of thrill over narrative……
QUIZ SHOW may be the most prescient film of our time. That and NETWORK…..
Sometime I think we’re doomed.
Other times…..I pretty much think the same thing….
Suffern ACE
@The Dangerman: So where does Extreme Makeover fit in?
Suffern ACE
@AAA Bonds: I heard the mob had tentacles. Typical. 500 unruly people would be hard to miss, even in New York, and there would be photos galore. Those London soccer fans must really have desensitized the press.
NobodySpecial
As a cornfed motherfucker, I take real offense at being compared to the likes of Gergen, who is actually another scion of money and privilege who would be more at home on a plantation than an actual farm, sipping his fucking mint juleps on the porch while complaining about the uppity Negroes.
The Dangerman
@Suffern ACE:
Can’t say; don’t watch the show. Well, maybe in passing and channel surfing; Ty whatever his last name grates on my nerves, which is bad given he’s in every scene. If I had to take an educated guess, Extreme Makeover kinda covers both ends (“look at that squalid house” followed by “look at that mansion”).
DickSpudCouchPotatoDetective
Gergen is a complete asshole. He fits right in with the asshole crowd on CNN, very nicely. I can’t watch him.
ogliberal
@Hunter Gathers: I’m part of the generation that grew up during “Morning in America”. While I have great hopes for the under 35 crew, I fear that my generation a) thinks that Gordon Gekko was the hero in “Wall Street” and b) has the “Cadillac driving welfare queen” image cemented in their minds (as reality), no matter which party they vote for.
Mind you, this is the same generation that did quite well as folks in their 20s during the dotcom mirage. They might not be rich but they always believe they will be…or will live like they are even if they aren’t. I saw the excesses of the 90s. I participated in them. The folks who enjoyed them think they’ll come back some day. They won’t…but they hope that the Jamie Dimons and Bob Rubins and other Masters of the Universe will somehow bring them back someday…someday…
And they buy in to American hyper-exceptionalism big time. Fuck yeah, we beat the commies in hockey! Fuck yeah, we fucked up Iraq in the first Gulf War! Fuck yeah, we kicked economic ass in the 90s!
While we’re waiting for the then 20-30 year-olds who cheered on Bull Connor to die (ie, the former Southern Dems, now the GOP base who make sure their hoveround batteries are powered up so they can vote against that uppity nigra on election day and protect their government provided health insurance) we still have to contend with my peers, who really aren’t much better….a bit less obvious in their racism but much, much more greedy and delusional.
BGinCHI
No takers that Gergen is a Steve Vai fan?
OK, BG+5.
John O
LOL, BGinChi.
I didn’t realize it until a few years ago, but that is as concise a summary of Gergen as was ever written.
+4 and a huge bowl of spaghetti and meatballs. Goin’ down soon.
25thcenturygirl
I’m going to start using ‘cornfed motherfucker’ every chance I get.
thank you.
Cliff
I like Angry DougJ. Usually he’s kind of mopey, but this – this is entertaining.
Mnemosyne
@The Dangerman:
OJ’s knife-ditcher Robert Kardashian was the now famous Kardashians’ father — he died of some horrible form of cancer (colon cancer?) and their mother re-married Bruce Jenner.
J. Michael Neal
@The Dangerman: I thought the Kardashians were on Star Trek. What did I miss?
JenJen
If only you front pagers would read the comments sections from time to time. See, this is why we can’t have nice things. ;-)
I can’t get enough of Taibbi. Finished Griftopia in record time, and plan to go back and read it again, so maybe I can understand it all better instead of just looking around the house for pitchforks and guillotines. He’s just on a damned roll lately.
FlipYrWhig
I thought a “cornfed” person was a big, ruddy-faced farmboy. But I can’t make that make sense in this context at all. Help me out?
TVL
**FAP, FAP, FAP*** ZOMG, I WANNA BE A MEDIA CRITIC BUT HAVE NOTHING USEFUL TO SAY….**FAP, FAP, FAP** MATT TAIBBAI…ER BAI…ALL THE SAME…**FAP, FAP, FAP***.
CAN’T WAIT TO FAP ALLOVER THE WAPO CHAT THAT 5 PEOPLE READ. I’LL SHOW THEM WHAT DOUCHBAGS THEY ARE.
FAP, FAP, FAP….
CircleSquared
@AAA Bonds: If students can get that upset about tuition hikes, why aren’t Americans that upset about the worsening economic and employment conditions?
Or that we have to use both of those terms because the economy doesn’t seem connected to actual persons?
bob h
Obama needed to work harder at jacking off the CEO class.
Obama did succeed in preventing another Depression, which would have had calamitous effects on the CEO’s sales, profits, and bonuses, and yet they decry his “hostiity” to big business.
Currants
@JenJen: THANK YOU! I knew I’d seen this article on BJ but couldn’t find it on the front page. And thank you for posting it; after reading an awful lot of his work in the last year coincidental link, I’ve finally bookmarked his blog.
debbie
I basically just heard the same attitude expressed by an Israeli government official regarding the peace talks: It’s up to America to come up with a new solution. Israel will apparently sit back, like a Roman emperor, and show approval by a thumbs up, thumbs down.
Where do these conservative types get off?
AhabTRuler
@JenJen: Yep, I read Griftopia yesterday. Excellent and informative read, and few enough naughty words that even the more civil-minded among us shouldn’t get the usual case of the vapors.
debbie
@AhabTRuler:
It’s not the naughty words but the images he constructs (I’m only as far as Allen Greenspan in the book) that make me laugh out loud. I feel kind of guilty laughing while reading about such a colossal crisis.
AhabTRuler
@debbie: I agree, although there is less of that than I expected. All in all, it is a quality polemic written in such a style as to be accessible to those of us who are not hyper-connected political blog-junkies.
I do think it is interesting that he is more qualified in his description of the Teabaggers in the book than he is in his punditry appearances. I think it demonstrates that he is not nearly the ideologue that he is made out to be, and I think it also reinforces how limiting TV appearances and short opinion columns can be for conveying complex ideas.
He does nail Greenspan’s hide to the wall fairly.
Roy G
Mffffft, that Matt Taibbi is soooo unserious. How does he ever expect to be invited to Joe Biden’s next pool party?
Just Some Fuckhead
Sounds like Bai comments on Balloon Juice under about a dozen names.
Okay then
“Bai is one of those guys—there are hundreds of them in this business—who poses as a wonky, Democrat-leaning “centrist” pundit and then makes a career out of drubbing “unrealistic” liberals and progressives with cartoonish Jane Fonda and Hugo Chavez caricatures.” Sounds a bit like Cole, no?
de stijl
“I hate him in part for being a cornfed motherfucker”…”you get some sense they got fucked with by the tough kids in the ethnic ghetto they grew up in”
DougJ,
I’m not really understanding this. Are you saying that corn-fed motherfuckers (or as I’m reading you – midwesterners) have not, or could not, be fucked by tough kids when they were young?
Are you serious? (Assuming that you’re saying what I think you’re saying.)
DougJ
@JenJen:
Shoot me. I’m sorry I read that.
luminous muse
You are absolutely right abut Matt Bai. A concern troll for the MSM if such exists. Only good thing is I haven’t heard from him lately. Oh wait…I stopped buying the Times.
Beldar
@CircleSquared: Teevee is on. My facebook just got poked.