his year, there is a special birthday in liberal media. The Nation – the longest consecutively published weekly magazine – is turning 150; and in celebration, it published its longest issue to date. Included was a reprint of the magazine’s Founding Prospectus from 1865: "The Nation will not be the organ of any party, sect or body."
In defiance of the founding statement, The Nation has always proudly proven itself to be an “organ” of extreme liberalism.
In a Monday blog post, Michelle Goldberg suggested that the takeaway from Carly Fiorina’s presidential candidacy is that Republicans may be as cynical as they are dumb.
For Goldberg, the cynicism is two-pronged. One prong is the hope that Fiorina will attract the same sort of “anti-feminist” voters that Sarah Palin did. The other is that she’ll be able to needle Hillary Clinton in a manner that men wouldn’t for fear of being called sexist.
The dumb part, claimed Goldberg, is that Republicans seem to assume voters won’t figure out that Fiorina “is as bad as any of the male candidates on issues of unique concern to women. She’s implacably anti-abortion…and is against equal pay laws. The question…isn’t whether Fiorina will appeal to women, but whether Republicans are blinkered enough to think that she will.”
Alex Wagner and her two left-wing panelists on the Wednesday edition of her MSNBC program – Salon's Brittney Cooper and The Nation's Ari Berman – likened the use of the word "thug" to describe the rioters and looters in Baltimore, Maryland on Monday to a notorious racial slur against blacks. Wagner played up how "there are folks, like CNN's Erin Burnett, who don't understand why it's offensive; and why some people are saying the 'T' word is the new 'N' word."
In a Tuesday post, The Nation blogger Dave Zirin argued that it’s politically unseemly for Gov. Scott Walker to root publicly for certain Wisconsin sports teams, including the University of Wisconsin basketballers, who came up just short in last night’s men’s national title game against Duke.
Zirin claimed that it’s “almost flagrantly irresponsible” for the media to publicize Walker’s support of the Badger hoops team “while ignoring that…Walker has made it his mission to cut hundreds of millions of dollars from the very public university system bringing glory to the state.” In Zirin’s view, Walker is “a soulless vessel for Koch brothers cash who in the name of a career advancement to the White House, is willing to both mercilessly attack any and all expressions of public life while at the same time using sports to shamelessly bank on what he imagines to be the ignorance of the US electorate.”
Last week, NewsBusters brought you "Stumped," as April Ryan struggled to cite a single foreign policy success by her super-fave, President Obama. In the best Hollywood tradition, this morning we bring you a sequel--Stumped II: Syria!
On today's Morning Joe, lugubrious lefty Eric Alterman of The Nation mag was stumped when Joe Scarborough asked him what the US should do about Syria. After humming, hawing and a couple of false starts, Alterman asked how much time they had. Right, as if if only he had more time. Shades of that SNL skit in which President George H.W. Bush tries to skate away from a question only to be informed by the moderator that he had plenty more time.
Many people fantasize about what they’d try to accomplish if they were president of the United States. Some even write it down, and a few publish their thoughts, as Moore did earlier this week in the 150th-anniversary issue of The Nation. A few of the ítems on Moore’s list of twenty seem to be meant humorously (e.g., “free HBO for everyone”) but he’s serious about the clear majority of them, which are consistent with the lefty views on economic and political issues that he’s expressed since the 1980s, first as a print journalist and then in movies such as Roger & Me and Fahrenheit 9/11.
The left-liberal magazine The Nation has just published its 150th-anniversary issue, which includes Alterman’s piece on the state of American conservatism. Alterman makes two main points. One is that conservatives are ideologues, whereas liberals are pragmatists. The other is that prominent righty pundits routinely spew nonsense not because they’re dumb, but because extremist plutocrats control the conservative movement.
“We have allowed conservatives to define the terms of debate at a time when conservatives have lost all sense of moral, intellectual and especially practical responsibility,” opines Alterman. “Today’s conservative intellectuals [are] making calculated attempts to undermine our democracy, exploiting and manipulating a public that has decreasing resources for the kind of reliable information that would lead to a pragmatic ‘liberal’ response. It’s time we woke up to that reality while we still have a country—and a planet—left to save.”
Leslie Savan writes that “as a character, and not merely a critic, of the right, [Stephen] Colbert held a unique key to the riddle of modern conservatism: How do they keep getting away with it? Why have so many conservatives turned into such small-minded haters and deniers of science, of reality?”
The Nation’s Leslie Savan alleges that conservatives still are fixated on the image of the Rev. Al as “a radical and a race hustler,” and opines that “because he’s the best-known single figure in the growing protest movement, the right will blame him for any violence.”
In the ultimate in Occupy Wall Street hypocrisy, the hardcore lefties at The Nation magazine are hosting a fundraising Caribbean cruise again in December, and using The New York Times to do it. A promotional e-mail carries the quote “The love boat for policy wonks – The New York Times.” That’s a headline...from 2008.
We had to snort a little that this “love boat” will be talking about taking all the shame out of the more extreme forms of birth control: “Katha Pollitt reframing the national discussion around abortion.” It also features the “lead food columnist” of The New York Times, Mark Bittman.
How extreme is MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry? Extreme enough that she recognizes no right to speak to a pregnant woman seeking an abortion. That “choice” to abort only has merit if no one disturbs it by counseling against it.
In a column for The Nation, Harris-Perry sulked about the Supreme Court ruling striking down “buffer zones” in Massachusetts. “This decision has, in the end, unleashed something far more insidious than the danger of a few extremists having greater access to kill or maim. The Supreme Court has decided—unanimously—that the First Amendment protects the right of every single American to approach and intimately 'counsel' any pregnant woman,” she complained.
When TV’s Sunday-morning political chat shows book conservative guests, maybe they’re just trying to be evenhanded, but The Nation media blogger Leslie Savan opined in a Tuesday post that often the programs do it so that the right will be less likely to badger them about their liberal bias. As Savan put it, “Sometimes seeking balance is really a plea to call off the dogs.”
What riled up Savan in the first place was one such booking, of Dinesh D’Souza on last Sunday’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” but she also griped about the Sunday shows generally letting Tea Party guests off easy (“It’s as if mainstream media are as afraid of the far right as John Boehner is”) as well as about “the corporate media…offer[ing] their stage to far-right media figures” including Laura Ingraham.