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Monday, May 08, 2006

Help wanted

Well, it’s happened again.  I go ahead and paste Richard Cohen’s head shot on this website, and my readers find it deeply disturbing.  Worse yet, I put Richard Cohen’s head shot on this website on a Friday, and (as you know) I rarely post on the weekends, so he’s been up there for three full days, just like he was back in October, when I did some on-the-fly Cohen-mockery at the end of a long week.  So by Sunday night, a commenter who goes by the name of John (if that is his real name) was reduced to a strange combination of abject begging and personal abuse:

Please, most dangerous one, post some new content so as to push that picture off of the front page. It freaks me out every time I see it up there.

On second thought, though, it does look like a picture of you in 20 (10?) years.

I know, I deserve it.

But what a time to be at a loss for words!  Here I’m faced with a blog emergency, I’ve got to move the Cohen photo down the page, and I’m sitting here at the keyboard, stupefied.

You know, I can understand why the press went in the tank for Iraq.  There’s no mystery why Tweety and Liddy had simultaneous wargasms about the flightsuit.  I can see why the Plame story and the Downing Street Memo are so bo-ring to the CWmeisters.  I don’t blink in disbelief when every bobblehead says in chorus, “Democrats, too, were involved in the Abramoff scandal.” I wasn’t surprised that the Washington Post, burned first by nasty mean blog commenters and then by their own Ben “even my prepositions are plagiarized” Domenech scandal, would order a takedown of Maryscott O’Connor, who, together with a couple of other liberal bloggers, has precipitated a National Civility Crisis.  I could have predicted that poor Joe Klein would need to have his many wounds kissed and dressed by Hugh Hewitt.  I know all too well why DC power couple Ana Marie Cox and Chris Lehmann have signed up for the nose-pinching “Colbert is not really our cup of tea, dahling” society.  And I don’t even think very highly of Richard Cohen.  In fact, these days I’m thinking he could beat Jeff Goldstein in a head-to-head matchup of supercilious, ignorant, self-satisfied wankers, and remember, my prognosticatin’ record has been pretty good lately.

But for some reason, I just wasn’t ready for the weekend media blackout on Hookergate.  Of all things to trip my incredulity wire!  On Friday I was readin’ around the usual blogs, and many of them were on full-alert Pony Watch.  On Monday I find that the only people still talking about Hookergate are . . . bloggers. Really smart, reliable ones like Laura Rozen and Kevin Drum, mind you, not those foul-mouthed denizens of the fever swamp (i.e., everybody else, including you).  Well, at least this reminds me why I started reading blogs in the first place, back in the summer of 2002—out of a growing sense that almost everything else had become worse than useless.  (Yes, I know it took me way too long, another eighteen months, to start my own damn blog.  Give me a break already—especially those of you who think I’ll look like Richard Cohen in a decade or two.) But that’s a long way to go to look for a good side.

Digby’s explanation is that Tony Snow is in charge, and the Blizzard of Blarney is in full effect for all the boys in the club.  Plausible enough.  But here’s what I don’t understand.  Normally, the press loves a good scandal, and by “good scandal” I mean “a scandal with gambling and hookers” as opposed to one of those bo-ring things that involve yellowcake and obscure forgeries and undercover agents working on nuclear proliferation.  So what gives?  Why are we being asked to believe that Goss wasn’t sufficiently committed to the purging of the CIA?  Who is supposed to be fooled by this?  Are our doughty reporters themselves fooled by this?  Or does Karl Rove simply have the names and addresses of all the hookers employed by the National Press Club, so that the silence is underwritten by a policy of mutually assured destruction?

I have a followup question, too.  I’m just old enough to remember how much the Nixon Administration hated the press—but the way I remember it, the feeling was entirely mutual.  Here we’ve got ourselves a dumber, more incompetent, and possibly even more malevolent version of the Nixon Administration, complete with utter dripping contempt for the press—and the fourth estate’s collective response, with a couple of exceptions here and there over the past five years, has been “thank you, sir, may I have another?” (Let’s not rehash the widespread Heather Outrage that constituted press coverage of Clinton and Gore, and that offered the Beltway punditry at their most prurient; thankfully, we don’t need to, because Digby has that one covered with two coats.  But then again, if Monica’s blue dress constituted a constitutional crisis, why aren’t juicy GOP sex scandals every bit as exciting?) Honestly, folks, I’m feeling like we’re at the point where, if the Bush Administration announced that Porter Goss was killed in a bizarre gardening accident, we would be reading in tomorrow’s paper that Porter Goss was killed in a bizarre gardening accident, and the “story” would be festooned with sidebars on how little-understood the phenomenon of modern gardening accidents really is.

So I’ve got nothing today, nothing.  If it weren’t for the pressing need to move the Wizard of Wank down the page a bit (which, I believe, I have now done—hey, mission accomplished!), I’d just go back to grading my (now overdue) graduate seminar papers and leave the blog to fester for another day.

I do have good news on the blog-festering front, though, and I’ll let you in on the details later in the week.  In the meantime, please tell me what the hell is going on in the world of the Heathers.  All theories, even plausible ones, are welcome.

Posted by Michael on 05/08 at 09:09 AM
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