Next Stop on the GOP Crazy Train: 'Newtsville'

[babylonsister]

http://www.thenation.com/article/164761/next-stop-gop-crazy-train-newtsville

Next Stop on the GOP Crazy Train: 'Newtsville'
Eric Alterman
November 22, 2011 | This article appeared in the December 12, 2011 edition of The Nation.

snip//

The respectful response of the media to the batshit-crazy statements one hears from the second-tier Republican candidates—candidates who occasionally rise to the first tier and then just as quickly sink down again, having never been serious contenders in the first place—is doing definite damage to this country. How many credulous Americans may have decided to shun the HPV vaccine for their daughters after hearing Bachmann’s nutty suggestion that it causes mental retardation? What of the insistence of that ignorant idiot Herman Cain that the “objective” purpose of Planned Parenthood’s founding was to “kill black babies before they came into the world. It’s planned genocide.” Now we’ve got a new front-runner, Gingrich, who holds, among other crazy notions, that the Obama administration’s “secular-socialist machine represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did,” when his diseased brain is not focusing on his moronic (and racist) contention that “only if you understand Kenyan, anti-colonial behavior, can you begin to piece together” the inspiration for Obama’s foreign policies.

Gingrich is the man of the hour, as amazing and ridiculous as that may be. Like Cain and Bachmann, he is a better bet for a rubber room somewhere than the Oval Office. But this fact—obvious to anyone who’s paying attention—does not stop various media machers from pretending long enough to fly his ideological freak flag for him for millions of Americans. When, writing in the Washington Post, Pulitzer Prize–winning pundit Kathleen Parker describes “the sudden surge of Gingrich, who, whatever his flaws and despite the weight of his considerable baggage, is no intellectual slouch,” and says he “may be just the ticket”—well, one is left speechless. Pretending that these people might be president, and hence deserve to be treated as if what they say is true, is not merely unjustified—given that the nominee is almost certain to be Romney—but akin to playing accessory to a kind of ongoing intellectually criminal activity.

snip//

Reporters representing reliable media outlets are supposed to defend the discourse from the virus of this ignorance. But for a variety of reasons they no longer do so. Part of the explanation can be found in the foolish willingness of so many reporters to treat Fox News, Drudge and various talk-radio hosts as respectable voices in the debate without regard to their motives or qualifications. A second, no less significant problem is the tendency of even the most sophisticated political reporters to treat the entire process as a contest between rival teams and ignore the substance of their arguments and policies, as if politics were simply a spectator sport with fewer (and perhaps crazier) fans than the Mets or the Red Sox.

Speaking of these Tea Party–inspired “candidates,” reformed right-winger David Frum writes that a “political movement that never took governing seriously was exploited by a succession of political entrepreneurs uninterested in governing—but all too interested in merchandising. Much as viewers tune in to American Idol to laugh at the inept, borderline dysfunctional early auditions, these tea-party champions provide a ghoulish type of news entertainment each time they reveal that they know nothing about public affairs and have never attempted to learn.”

Somebody better tell the MSM…

[ginnyinWI]

1. the "news" as we know it just isn't set up for thoughtful debate

We can blame the media, but it is really only giving us what we want---tv networks full of sound bites and the briefest discussions that never really let you reach a conclusion. It's all eye candy on the tube. People don't take the time for a full hour news/interview program that doesn't have a lot of emotional content or colorful graphics. They simply don't want to spend the time. So we get a bunch of clowns parading in front of the cameras from day to day. And nobody in the media dares to say that someone or other doesn't deserve his moment in the spotlight.

News magazines are shrinking into non-existence. Daily newspaper readership is down. You scan headlines on your portable device but often don't go any further. We are marching backward as far as being informed voters, back to the 1800s, maybe, when only a few elites really knew what was going on, and the rest of the population decided based on very little information. OR they simply voted with their party and let others decide for them.

[yellowcanine]

2. "is no intellectual slouch" Truth is that Newt IS intellectually lazy - whether that makes him a

"slouch" of not is a judgment call. His books are poorly referenced and researched as are many of his pronouncements supposedly based on history. He is a pop historian at best and much of the time his "history" turns out to be political wishful thinking.