With only five days to go until Christmas, Pandagon's Ezra Klein has already unwrapped one of his presents -- Maureen Dowd's column in yesterday's New York Times which casts Rumsfeld as Jimmy Stewart in "It' a Wonderful Life." But in this case, the visiting angel shows Rumsfeld not how the world is a better place because he exists, but how it's a calamitously worse place thanks to him. Klein hails it as a "gem." But what is Pandagon's "gem" is The Corner's coal. K-Lo was anything but amused by Dowd, writing, "I thought the (only?) funny part of Maureen Dowd's 'Wonderful Life' column was when she had Rumsfeld say 'Now everyone's turned on me -- Trent Lott, Chuck Hagel and that dadburn McCain.' As if Hagel and McCain aren't typically doing things to make headlines." Even the wandering eye scanning the blogsphere notices that K-Lo leaves out any explanation for Lott's motive.
MSNBC President Rick Kaplan's motive for picking Tucker Carlson to replace Deborah Norville in the cable news channel's prime-time lineup is under attack by James Wolcott. He asks, "Isn't just too-too perfect how a perceived liberal like Kaplan confounds his critics by hiring a conservative as a lead-in into a show hosted by another conservative?" Wolcott continues, "Media liberals almost never surprise anyone by having the balls and spinal conviction to actually do something liberal; no, they always feel obliged to do the cute counterintuitive thing. No one expects Roger Ailes to surprise his critics by hiring Al Franken to host a nightly show on Fox; he earns his plaudits by sticking to his toy guns and hiring Yellin' Zell Miller for an occasional round of hog callin'." The result of this behavior, says Wolcott, is a cable news medium utterly void of liberal opinion. He concludes, "maybe liberal guests and viewers should boycott and let conservatives monopolize the conversation amongst themselves, which is what they want to do anyway."
The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum is also pondering the proliferation of conservative ideas in the media. Pegging off a Los Angeles Times news story that quotes a pastor comparing the use of "Happy Holidays" over "Merry Christmas" to apartheid, Drum asks, "how do [conservatives] spread these memes so damn fast?" Drum notes that the idea that Social Security is not in crisis is only getting a "smidgen of attention", "while the 'Happy Holidays' vs. 'Merry Christmas' meme has exploded onto front pages around the country (and the world!) in a matter of days." Drum isn't writing to offer a solution; he finishes off his post with three questions: "How do they do it? How do they get everyone to pay attention to this nonsense? And most of all, how do we copy them?" (Shameless self-promotion: For more on the Los Angeles Time's op-ed page check out CJR Daily's piece from last week.)
Al-Reuters, as Charles at Little Green Footballs calls the wire service, has put out "Another astoundingly biased headline from an anonymous Arab stringer" -- "Israel Leaves Gaza Camp After Killing 11 Palestinians." In the story one learns that at least some of the 11 dead Palestinians were militiants -- a fact that the headline fails to convey. While Charles may be right that the headline is misleading, it's unlikely that the "anonymous Arab stringer" is writing headlines for Yahoo! News.
Finally, if you're looking for a lengthy essay on "what a second-rate action movie and a long-term research project by the Washington Post have in common," then check out David Adesnik ruminating on Oxblog. Adesnik breaks down Saturday's front page Washington Post story on the struggling American middle class. CJR Daily will spare the uninterested the details, but, in sum, Adesnik concludes that both the Post story and "Walking Tall" starring the The Rock are "Both are animated by a powerful nostalgia for the good old days of solid union jobs with comprehensive benefits."
Correction: This post orignially indicated that the Los Angeles Times piece cited by Kevin Drum was an op-ed. In fact the piece was a news story.
