Partial Readings: Maddening Echoes
Partial Readings: Maddening Echoes
Partial Readings: Maddening Echoes
Andrew Breitbart, the man behind a number of right-wing propaganda sites, became a news story unto himself after helping to create two false scandals: first around ACORN’s alleged pro-underage-prostitution policies, and more recently over Obama administration official and former civil rights activist Shirley Sherrod’s alleged racism. In the latest issue of Perspectives on Politics, Peter Dreier and Christopher R. Martin explain how ?the national news media agenda is easily permeated by a persistent media campaign by opinion entrepreneurs alleging controversy, even when there is little or no truth to the story.?
Because of the news media?s negligence in fact checking and quick acceptance of partisan frames about ACORN, the ACORN story was whipped into a ?disingenuous controversy??a controversy that emphasizes the appearance of controversy, but lacks the open debate and alternative perspectives of a genuine controversy. In other words, news media coverage facilitated the making of ACORN into a ready symbol for controversy, a proxy for the poor, minorities, cities, radicals, and even Barack Obama, that could be deployed for partisan purposes in subsequent elections and political battles.
Amidst the furor over burning books this week, another story of constitutional importance received short shrift: the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit?s decision that ?former prisoners of the C.I.A. could not sue over their alleged torture in overseas prisons because such a lawsuit might expose secret government information.? Bitterly noting this continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations, Glenn Greenwald writes:
Suffice to say?with great understatement?Obama’s doing this doesn’t trigger the same level of outrage and objection as when Bush did it, at least not in most circles. And I do so fondly recall the days back in the Spring of last year when civil libertarians who were vigorously objecting to Obama’s Bush-replicating legal positions were told by vocal Obama supporters that Obama was only doing this in order to ensure that Bush’s extremist legal theories were rejected by courts and thus we were all generously showered with the Magnanimous Gift of Good Precedent.
The Beautiful Mind of Dinesh D’Souza
Meanwhile, Dinesh D?Souza reveals Imperial Obama’s doppelgänger: Anticolonialist Obama. In his recent cover story for Forbes, ?How Obama Thinks,? D’Souza offers the most absurd Obama Theory to date: ?It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying.? No paraphrase could do justice to the conspiratorial madness of D?Souza?s article, so instead, a few select quotes:
-?Rejecting the socialist formula, Obama has shown no intention to nationalize the investment banks or the health sector. Rather, he seeks to decolonize these institutions, and this means bringing them under the government’s leash.?
-?Obama supports the Ground Zero mosque because to him 9/11 is the event that unleashed the American bogey and pushed us into Iraq and Afghanistan. He views some of the Muslims who are fighting against America abroad as resisters of U.S. imperialism.?
-?Incredibly, the U.S. is being ruled according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s. This philandering, inebriated African socialist, who raged against the world for denying him the realization of his anticolonial ambitions, is now setting the nation’s agenda through the reincarnation of his dreams in his son.?
Long before the real estate bubble popped and the credit market crashed, America?s industrial cities were emptying out. Now, rather than trying to attract new residents, many cash-strapped municipal governments have begun ?to think about smart shrinking,? reports Drake Bennett.
[C]ities may be better off finding totally new uses for land: large-scale urban farms, or wind turbines or geothermal wells, or letting large patches revert to nature. Instead of merely tolerating the artist communities that often spring up in marginal neighborhoods, cities might actively encourage them to colonize and reshape whole swaths of the urban landscape. Or they might consider selling off portions to private companies to manage.
