The Wit and Wisdom of Barney Frank

"Best line of the piece"

That you are part of the high end of our political press is just depressing, and frustrating.

Jay,
thanks for linking to this article on one of my favorite congressional reps. I was happy to see the picture painted of Mr. Frank to match the impression I have always had of him. That of a hard working, consensus building democrat who truly wants to help the american people. thanks again.

Someone should blog about the Doug Feith appearance on the Daily Show, which was one of those weird American media moments--kind of like the earthly equivalent of an eclipse or a rare planet alignment:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=168543&title=douglas-feith-uncut-pt.-1

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=168544&title=douglas-feith-uncut-pt.-2&byDate=true

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jul/17/iraq.usa

http://www.slate.com/id/2100899/

I don't get it, Jay... you need to explain this.

Do you mean that it's funny because Barney Frank is so devoted to working in the legislative branch that he wouldn't want to take a judicial position judging a beauty contest?

You could say that about Republicans and good governance in general. They don't like government, so when they're elected they do a lousy job of it.

I love Barney.

And speaking of strange bedfellows (okay, we really weren't), it always amuses me that Lou Dobbs is now such a Barney fan, too.

This is exactly right, from super dave:

"You could say that about Republicans and good governance in general. They don't like government, so when they're elected they do a lousy job of it."

Not only do they hate the majority of government programs but they harbor a genuine contempt for the institutions of good governance. So why would people choose to give the government over to them? I never understood that about republicans.

Douglas Feith interview is a paragon of journalistic qualities: serious, pithy, respectful, evidence-based, hoisting of a clueless blowhard ("Dumbest F---ing guy in the world" - Tommy Frank, not a genius) by his own petard. In short, all the things that MSM (Jay Carney, Joe Klein, Michael Scherer) are not. If Jon Stewart is the harbinger of shape of things to come, then let us bury the MSM with dispatch.
I haven't read Time magazine regularly since I have been sixteen. The reason I stopped reading was that any given article of Time magazine can be either drastically improved or logically destroyed by thinking of 30 seconds. Since then my occasional perusal has solidified those impressions and buttressed the impression that Time has been regressing in its quality and hirings. In my world (software development), it has been shown that once you hire a B-type developer (who is about 5 to 10 times worse than A), they hire C and qualities regresses at every next iteration. This is what has happend at Time where Jay Carney (B) hiring leads to Michael Scherer hiring (D) and things get worse progressively. If these so-called journalists can't do basic reporting, or thinking then their employment is a form of affirmative action for deluded, delusional, easily-led, entitled, weak-minded incompetents.
The one good thing may come out from the death of Time and its ilk (as evidenced by declining circulation) is the revealing of utter stupidity and ignorance of Jay Carney and Michael Sherer who give empty-suit a bad name. Their world is ruled Matt Drudge (as Mark Halperin wrote in his book and went onto emulate him by being less interesting, informative, rigorous version of the original) which speaks to their aspirations or lack thereof.

I say "weird American media moments" because it's the ultimate polarity of "fake news" talking to "fake news," and sadly, we as a country we can't seem to get any realer than that. It's the full power of "fake news" satire vs. the full power of "fake news" Washington-hard-right-mandarin PR.

Matter, meet anti-matter. There should be an explosion, but incredibly there is not. I hope Stewart was wearing his lead apron under his suit, because that guy's throwing off so much radiation he could power his own nuclear submarine.

Terrapinion:

Yup, they get elected. They screw everything up via corruption and incompetence. Then they say, "Hey look, government is bad". No, you morons, bad government is bad.

For journalists covering Congress, one of the best things about game-changing elections like the 2006 mid-terms is that they create a trove of new story lines.

Is that because journalists themselves are the intended consumers of "story lines", Jay?

...Because us political news consumers, you know, hate your f--king story lines, and consider their promulgation one of, if not the largest failures of your profession.

So you'd have to have a pretty low opinion of your audience to keep shoveling narratives at them that demonstrate a lack of credibility, good faith and self-awareness, and an almost total disconnect from their actual concerns.

Remember how you guys ate up the Abraham Lincoln landing?

MATTHEWS: What's the importance of the president's amazing display of leadership tonight?

[...]

MATTHEWS: What do you make of the actual visual that people will see on TV and probably, as you know, as well as I, will remember a lot longer than words spoken tonight? And that's the president looking very much like a jet, you know, a high-flying jet star. A guy who is a jet pilot. Has been in the past when he was younger, obviously. What does that image mean to the American people, a guy who can actually get into a supersonic plane and actually fly in an unpressurized cabin like an actual jet pilot?

[...]

MATTHEWS: Do you think this role, and I want to talk politically [...], the president deserves everything he's doing tonight in terms of his leadership. He won the war. He was an effective commander. Everybody recognizes that, I believe, except a few critics. Do you think he is defining the office of the presidency, at least for this time, as basically that of commander in chief? That [...] if you're going to run against him, you'd better be ready to take [that] away from him.

[...]

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you, Bob Dornan, you were a congressman all those years. Here's a president who's really nonverbal. He's like Eisenhower. He looks great in a military uniform. He looks great in that cowboy costume he wears when he goes West. I remember him standing at that fence with Colin Powell. Was [that] the best picture in the 2000 campaign?

[...]

MATTHEWS: Ann Coulter, you're the first to speak tonight on the buzz. The president's performance tonight, redolent of the best of Reagan -- what do you think?

COULTER: It's stunning. It's amazing. I think it's huge. I mean, he's landing on a boat at 150 miles per hour. It's tremendous. It's hard to imagine any Democrat being able to do that. And it doesn't matter if Democrats try to ridicule it. It's stunning, and it speaks for itself.

So you see, we news consumers are abandoning mainstream political news coverage in droves, because you (I'm sorry to have to put it this way, Jay) myth-obsessed, desperate-for-fiction freaks in the national press corps keep trying to foist characters, story lines and action--really boring summer release movie scripts, if you will--on a public whose anger at America's problems being ignored or trivialized has become palpable (and pollable).

Is it just too boring for you to report on what Barney Frank actually intends to do with respect to banking regulation...without referencing the fact that he's an openly gay man once?

Thanks for reading this, Jay Carney.

Stuart,

sorry to tell you man, Jay Carney is a drive-by. He has like a coward left the Swampland comments looooooong time ago. It's too bruising and honest for the wilted flower to engage in an honest accounting of their failures.

"myth-obsessed, desperate-for-fiction freaks"

It's not even good mythology or fiction. You'd think that with an evil cabal in the White House hell bent on destroying the Constitution, two wars, natural disasters across the face of the globe and proliferating narco-states, they'd find some good stuff to post about.

But we get stories about gay jokes and catching fish.

Doug Feith: Giving Sophistry A Bad Name:

"It says a lot about the state of our political culture that the best interview of Doug Feith was conducted by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. That’s not to take anything away from Stewart — as usual, he manages to be funny, astute, and (mostly) respectful while revealing his guest as a disingenuous, dissembling weasel. It’s sad that the news show in which Feith is subjected to his most challenging interview was originally created as a satire of news shows."

http://thinkprogress.org/wonkroom/2008/05/13/feith-sophistry/

the difference between carney, scherer et al and john stewart is courage. js has the courage to be confrontational (jay and mike will say it is job securtiy that prevents them from being confrontational because of the need for access. coupled with the news as a profit center they can't afford to do this, and perhaps they are right...that is a conversation worth having) whereas msm is fairly cowardly and starstruck...

Jay Carney is a drive-by.

I guess that you're right. Even Joe is man enough to respond to commentary (albeit with a post and not an actual comment).

Maybe Jay's a technological illiterate, and can't figure out how to use these "account" thingies. Maybe that's the problem, in which case he should man up and ask for help.

It's not even good mythology or fiction.

No, it's not. It's fourth or fifth rate Robert Caro knock-offs. It's the most boring story in the universe. It's like the political press corps "rediscovers" the characters in a Bud Light commercial that, for some unexplained reason, runs over and over again every football season since you can remember.

You hate the people who are marketing this beer to you, because they have the money to make you watch the most irritating, boring and pathetically non-entertaining commercial (for a product that you know is inferior) endlessly. You know that the people who produced the ad focus-grouped it enough so that they could have ass-coverage for their account, but not enough to actually know what kind of spot makes people want to kill them after they've seen it a million times.
It makes you want to invent technology to bypass viewing ads, or seek that technology out.

...and that's the "story line" and "characters" and "narratives" that the national political press corps thinks is "interesting to cover" --a repetition-killed Bud Light commercial intended for morons.

Anyway, I've got to stop commenting on threads started by Jay Carney, since the guy won't have anything to do with us.

Do not worry about the MSM - they will rediscover their ability to confront politicians once those politicians are Democrats. They love to beat up on Dems - that is how we ended up with eight years of Bush to begin with! If Gore had been given a fair shake then none of this would have happened.

If Gore had been given a fair shake then none of this would have happened.

Yes, if the political press corps had done its job in 2000, 2003 and 2004, thousands of our brave kids wouldn't be lying in the ground dead as a testament to their f--k-ups and pretensions.

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