Monday, October 12, 2009

In all probability, E.J. Dionne is the most useless journalist in America today

Today being Monday, and Tuesday being owned by David Brooks, the New York Times' living monument to journalistic uselessness. But it's not Tuesday quite yet. I'm tired and unusually irritable for some reason. Tried to go to bed early, reading Hunter S. Thompson's Songs of the Doomed, but that stuff is not recommended bedtime reading and I kept waking up with horrible nightmares.

So I checked the SiteMeter (still no Instalanche) and then I checked Memeorandum and saw an idiotic headline, Angry White Men Have Real Grievances, which was doubly idiotic in that it was on a column by E.J. Dionne, whose absolute uselessness probably explains why the Washington Post felt it could get away with hiring Michael Gerson to write a "Republican" column.

Dionne and Gerson: An even match, a absolute stalemate, the resistible force and the moveable object, the journalism of ignorance and inertia.

What is it that so irritates me about Dionne and Gerson? I look at Dionne's biography:
Before joining The Post in 1990 as a political reporter, he spent 14 years at The New York Times, covering local, state, and national politics, and also serve as a foreign correspondant in Paris, Rome and Beirut. Dionne began his column for The Post in 1993. He is a University Professor at Georgetown University and a senior fellow at The Brookings Institution. . . .
Dionne received the American Political Science Association's annual Carey McWilliams Award in 1996 for a major journalistic contribution to the understanding of politics. In 2002, he received the Empathy Award from the Volunteers of America, and in 2004 he won the National Human Services Assembly's Award for Excellence by a Member of the Media.
Ah, that's it: The ambition to Change the World, to Make a Difference, the stultifying seriousness of his journalistic sincerity, the Politics of Earnestness.

From which, of course, derives his uselessness. It's rather jangling to imagine somebody so ultra-sincere, so horribly priggish, working for 14 years as an actual reporter. But he was, after all, working for the New York Times, which may explain everything.

For someone who once worked as a political correspondent, Dionne doesn't actually seem to know much about politics. He's got his Change the World agenda, and everything he sees is filtered through that peculiar lens:
The effort to understand where Obama hatred comes from has been one of the few growth areas in the American economy.
But the phenomenon isn't particularly mystifying: After 12 years of GOP congressional control, the electorate did one of their period "throw the bums out" moves in 2006, elevating Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to the top, putting the Democrats in control. Then, in 2008, the voters completed the housecleaning, electing Obama to the White House.

Now buyer's remorse is setting in. A substantial number of voters seemed to believe that Obama would bring to Washington a large supply of magic pixie dust, which he would sprinkle hither and yon to create Good Jobs, Peace, Prosperity and Social Justice.

Some nine months in, a lot of those people are baffled to discover that we have a pixie dust shortage. The "angry white males" of the Dionne headline are basically Republicans who didn't vote for Obama, and now they're saying, "Hey, you morons, we tried to tell you this guy was hosing you, but you wouldn't listen!"

How many people "hate" Obama? I don't know. Dionne talks about "too many racist signs at rallies and too many overtly racial pronouncements in the fever swamps of the right-wing media," but I spoke at two Tea Party rallies in Alabama -- of all places -- and don't recall any such signs. As for the "fever swamps," I suppose that Dionne means talk radio and Fox News, but cites no examples of the "overtly racial pronouncements" which alarm him.

Dionne's a worry-wart, is what he is. His natural posture is of thoughtful hand-wringing, and we're not really surprised when he goes off on an Australian tangent:
This is not a uniquely American problem. Last week I caught up with Australia's deputy prime minister, Julia Gillard, who was visiting Washington for a conference on education. Though Gillard diplomatically avoided direct comment on American politics, she said what's happening here reminded her of the rise of Pauline Hanson, a politician who caused a sensation in Australian politics in the 1990s by creating One Nation, a xenophobic and protectionist political party tinged with racism.
Has E.J. been to Australia lately? Has he interviewed any Hanson supporters? For that matter, has he been to any of these Tea Party rallies and talked to any of the protesters?

What is Dionne actually up to with this column? He's offering excuses to his fellow liberal elitists, who are increasingly perplexed by the failure of the Pixie Dust Theory. What is slowly dawning on the elite is that the American people aren't quite so stupid as the elite always imagine them to be. They can learn, those voters, even if the process is too often difficult, painful and slow. I tried to explain this shortly after the election last year:
Perhaps the most brilliant thing about Barack Obama's successful campaign was its vagueness. In offering himself as the all-purpose Change We Can Believe In, Obama gave believers a blank slate and a tacit license to project upon him their deepest longings.
Not that there were no specifics. His promise of tax cuts for 95 percent of Americans and tax hikes for those earning over $250,000 had a statistical specificity that Obama's Republican rival never matched. And those who recall Obama's Democratic debates with Hillary Clinton will remember intense disagreements over ultimately forgettable details of their health-care plans.
Details, however, were not the Obama campaign's strongest selling point. Rather, Obama succeeded by capitalizing on the kind of boundless Hope that prompted a Florida woman, Peggy Joseph, to her memorable declaration after a late-October campaign rally: "I won't have to worry about putting gas in my car; I won't have to worry about paying my mortgage. You know, if I help him, he's gonna help me."
If there are, as Dionne tells us, some substantial number of "angry white males" who are perpetrating "Obama hatred," they're wasting their time.

What is needed is not anger or hatred, but patient explanation to the Peggy Josephs that they've been scammed, hustled, burned by Democrats who have done what Democrats have always done: Promised voters the moon, stars and sun, without any real intention of delivering on the promise.

The answer to this kind of Pixie Dust nonsense is not for the Republicans to try to steal the Pixie Dust formula, offering their own magical policy panaceas. Rather, the GOP needs to speak the brutal truth: There are no pixies and no magic.

There are no panaceas. We can neither return to some mythical edenic Golden Age nor are we marching toward some future Utopia of perfection. Decades of trying to vote ourselves into Heaven-on-Earth have created the very problems -- e.g., the actuarial nightmares of Social Security and Medicare -- which today's promise-'em-anything Democrats claim they'll fix.

"Grow Up, America" would be an accurate slogan for what the nation really needs. It wouldn't be a popular message, but it would be a true assessment of what ails us: A childishness, a politics of wishing, of which the naivete of Peggy Josephs was but an extreme example.

Well, you won't get any such cold cynicism from the earnest hand-wringing columns of E.J. Dionne. And it's probably for the best. Better foolish sincerity than cynical wisdom, and I probably need to find something more tranquil for bedtime reading than Songs of the Doomed.

10 comments:

  1. Anyone who opposes Obama will be called a racist. This became very clear during the campaign when this tactic was used against Bill Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro. Last time I looked Geraldine was not an Angry White Male.

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  2. "The answer to this kind of Pixie Dust nonsense is not for the Republicans to try to steal the Pixie Dust formula, offering their own magical policy panaceas. Rather, the GOP needs to speak the brutal truth: There are no pixies and no magic."

    Cut. Print. Perfect. ;)

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  3. Not cynicism, but a clear realism tempered with the decency and optimism that are standard issue American traits. Cynicism is too quick to say it's all crooked and then deal itself in.

    I don't know if that's too hard a sell these days, but it's really what most of this country needs. Enough of this "everybody should have everything, all the time" outlook. No, they'll have to earn it, even if it's essential. If they can't we'll give 'em a hand, but only a hand. Sorry, there's a real world with unyielding facts.

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  4. E.J. is a perfect manifestation of the girly-man syndrome that Arnold Schwartzenegger noted before being told to shut up by his girly-man Dem opponents in the media and elsewhere. Take a look at Drudge today and you can see AS is now becoming feminized very rapidly---being an E.J. Dionne clone will do that to you.

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  5. As an Australian, I believe that I can clarify a few things regarding both Pauline Hanson and Julia (the communist) Gillard.

    First of all, Pauline Hanson in her maiden speech in the Parliament did manage to strike a chord with a public that was sick and tired of the political correctness associated with the Aboriginals in particular. This sounds xenophobic but the fact is that legislation has been passed that gives anybody who claims to be aboriginal certain privileges. It means for example that a landlord has a really hard job evicting any aboriginal who becomes a tenant of property, especially in the ACT.

    Without re-hashing the history, Pauline Hanson was ousted from the Liberal Party because of some of her comments. She then started up her own party, but the fact is her following was not that great, and on top of that the followers seemed to be more like the real Nazi party people. It was just a nasty time in politics. The thing that got Hanson in the end was something to do with the equivalent of USA voter fraud. She ended up serving a prison term.

    There is absolutely no comparison between the Hanson movement and the TEA party movement. None. Nada. Zip. Zilch. It is like chalk and cheese. If Julia Gillard sort to make such a comparison then she was being somewhat dishonest with the comparison. That is probably not surprising for a woman with Gillard's background. We are talking about an ex-communist, and a union organizer. This is Julia Gillard's background.

    The TEA party movement is totally different from the movement that brought Hanson into the limelight. The TEA party movement has been motivated by the fact that taxes are too high... I really do wish that Australian conservatives would get off their collective butts and send a similar message to KRUDD(Kevin Rudd but we call him Kevin Krudd for a reason).

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  6. Per usual, some very insightful analysis, Stacy [I think it will get you The Spot-On Quote Of The Day over at TCOTS (I know, big whoop)].

    1) I second kent's comments.

    2) As for the Peggy Josephs of this world: there is no point in wasting one's time trying to convince them of the errors in their thinking. Since day one they have been told that 'The Man' is out to get them and that, therefore, they've got to get what's rightfully theirs by any means necessary. Its been drummed into their brains that they deserve whatever slices of the pie they can grab because they are being oppressed by the rich and middle classes. Being trash and having no ambition to be anything more than trash knows no race nor ethnicity.

    3) I do not hate Barack Hussein Obama; I do hate everything his little Leftist heart stands for. My attitude towards him personally is the same as Howard Roark's towards Peter Keating in The Fountainhead...

    Peter: What do you think of me [personally], Howard?

    Roark: Peter, I don't think of you at all.


    4) You should be reading John Derbyshire's WE ARE DOOMED: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism before you lay thee down to sleep. Its quite liberating and comforting.

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  7. As another Australian I pretty much agree with Maggie's account on Pauline Hanson and Julia Gillard with 3 exceptions.
    1) Pauline Hanson had her conviction overturned on appeal although she did do time.
    2) Her followers were not really all that Nazi like-they were more just people that had a gut full of both other parties and considered the new age affirmative action stuff to be 'reverse racism'.
    3)They only ever elected a hand full of Hanson people to parliament and never amounted to much. Certainly not to the extent they had hundreds of thousands of people marching in the streets.
    Julia Gillard is a master of the Alinsky method and her claim that the TEA Party movement is similar to the Hanson Party is such an exaggeration it is laughable. Julia is such a lefty she would find a home in both the SEIU and the Obama Administration.

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  8. Awarded the THE SPOT-ON QUOTE OF THE DAY at: TCOTS

    There is no Santa Claus and anyone who is a real world manifestation of Robin Hood is nothing but a lousy two-bit punk thief. We cannot allow the ongoing Immanentizing of the Eschaton to continue.

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  9. ej dionne is the worst opiniated reporter ever.an obama yes man to be sure

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  10. angry white man is a typical type of reporting by dionne.he refers to the typical white male and gives his opinion of them.stop right here.how would he know what a typical white male thinks because he surely isnt a typical white male.he doesent have any of the traits to be called a typical white male.he is an opionated coward and and would never have the guts to stand before a real white male.hes just a weasel

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