what Atrios and Thers and Molly say

http://www.eschatonblog.com/2008_05_25_archive.html#7389209452869582713

I haven't watched the flick, but this is exactly how I've been feeling:

It was my "holy shit everything is really screwed up" moment when I suddenly realized that all of our elites - politicians, supremos, and especially the media - did not deserve the modest naive faith that I had given them. I'm not saying that I lacked any cynicism about the various institutions before, but just watching the media piss on our Democracy over that time period was incredibly jarring.

For me, the wake-up call was not just the transparent fraud that was Bush v. Gore; it was not that the Admin was screwing the country - I'd seen that when Nixon was president.. that's when I left the GOP. It wasn't the laughably amateurish dishonesty of Colin Powell's presentation to the UN, which dishonesty (it seems to me) had to have been obvious to anyone who had been following mideast news. It wasn't that The New Pravda was doing stenography rather than journalism. It wasn't even the dishonesty and mindlessness of the advocacy for the Iraq War.

What got me was that my conservative sparring partners in essence laughed at my naivete, agreed with me, and said (more-or-less) "We've got ours, Jack, and guess what!?! we're running to the bank, and you can't stop us now!"

Think "liberal hunting license" and you have the right idea.

(Yeah, yeah, I know: "from the sublime to the ridiculous". I'm a clown, so sue me. The fact is, we're social animals, and the closer the source of the shock, the harder it hits. It's a lot more jarring when people you think you know act like mafiosi than it is to see some outfit in DC acting like mafiosi.)

Which sits comfortably with "what Thers said":

http://whiskeyfire.typepad.com/whiskey_fire/2008/05/lose-its-appeal.html

Movement conservatism is a racket. It is solely about power and money. Whether conservatism, classically defined, is a Great Thing or a Stupid Thing is irrelevant. What's being fielded is a racket, and all these protestations that the Bushies are not true conservatives (whatever that animal might be) are irrelevant. The time to separate from the Bushies' "conservatism" was some years ago, not today.

There's a name for this concept: intellectual honesty.

Ya got it, or ya don't.

About the use of 4LW. Molly specifically discussed this a week or three ago (http://whiskeyfire.typepad.com/whiskey_fire/2008/04/on-stilts.html), so "what Molly said."

(Update: oops, sorry, I remembered it as a Molly post, but now that I look, I think it's Thers again.)

Well, OK, to rephrase one of her points: American political discourse is constrained by a host of conventions. Those conventions may have been useful in the past, but they have ossified into a decadent formalism which allows journalists to evade inconvenient truths while still pretending to serve a useful public function.

Whatever wedge it takes to get people out of their comfortable shells and paying attention.. think shock value. Defying  convention is a Good Thing(tm) here.