Stickybuffalo.com

You’ve probably read how Al Gore has called out President Obama for his duck-and-cover non-approach to climate change and any sort of progressive agenda on energy or the environment, generally.

I don’t think I even need to comment directly on that; I’ve mostly made my statements on those issues and see no call to rush out another one. I do, however, want to deliver a rebuttal to the snotty, sneering, pinheaded little example of “tut, tut” punditry posted by Frank James at NPR.org.

James begins with a condescending little head-pat, congratulating Gore on style for “one of the piece’s pithiest passages,” then having established this as the high-water mark promptly begins pissing and moaning about every substantive point.

Kicking off the “tut, tut” routine, James opines that “[Gore's] disgust for the news media have [sic] generally handled the climate-change issue is readily apparent,” implying that Gore is obviously placing himself outside the realm of what Paul Krugman calls “Very Serious People” through such a blatantly immoderate attitude. (This of course makes an astonishing contrast with NPR’s agonized, breast-beating guiltfest when a right-wing critic takes aim at perceived media faults in a far-less-erudite manner.)

Later on, James returns to the media, pontificating that Gore “mostly glosses over how that sea change has made media outlets rely more on the Trump and Sheen stories to draw audiences to their web sites. To a large degree, news outlets are responding to their consumers by giving them Trump and Sheen.”

James rakes Gore over the coals for failure to satisfactorily address this or that; the spare declaration “Gore doesn’t really deal with these questions” is obviously meant as a devastating kill-shot. Naturally, though, Mr. James has nothing to say  about the appalling implications of his own defense of celebutard journalism. Or about the directly-relevant point made by Gore, and even quoted in James’ post, that “The referee — in this analogy, the news media — seems confused about whether he is in the news business or the entertainment business.” (more…)

Lately I’ve noticed a number of terms which are frequently used, particularly by the Anglo-American news media and punditry, in ways that seem deeply misguided and misleading. I would like therefore to challenge the assumptions made in current usage of the following terms:

Center (or centre). Frankly, in the context of American politics, the term “center” seems to have become nothing less than a euphemism for “conservative,” “reactionary” and/or “Republican.” “The center” always seems to be located in a rightward direction; the only time it ever seems to apply to Republicans is in the context of a primary race, usually for the presidency, in which there is a brief window between courting primary voters and commencing the general election campaign when a candidate might “move back to the center” by means of some modest leftward shift. Otherwise, the “center” seems exclusively used to describe a position to the right of Democrats.

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As world leaders, and particularly America’s government, fret and squirm at the possibility of democratic fervor empowering “dangerous extremists” in Egypt…

I just can’t help wondering whether any of them have considered that, to many people throughout the world and to at least some right here at home, in America democracy has already led to empowering dangerous extremists, on many occasions.