There is a sickness afoot in the land when a popular non-political blogger makes note of a politician’s lowering of his own standards and his commenters attack him for speaking his mind.

Jeff Jarvis:

Whenever you want to show how soft big media are on Barack Obama, refer back to Howard Kurtz’ column on their coverage of the candidate’s hypocritical flip-flop on campaign financing. Chapter and verse.

Some comments [e.a.]:

Just drop it. It’s clear you were a Clinton supporter, but if you want a Democrat in the White House in 2009, the political reality is that attacking Obama is the same supporting McCain.

Jeff, would you consider some even handed-ness in your political posts ? It makes your position on press bias seem fairly hypocritical.

Jeff replies:

I am likely to be an Obama voter but that doesn’t mean I can’t hold him to high standards. I am not a member of his cult so I can disagree with him. It’s allowed out here. No, I won’t drop it.

Commenter:

Jeff, you’re entitled to “hold Obama to high standards,” just like the rest of us. And I realize, in a post like this, you’re trying to expose the inherent bias of the media, not bash Obama. But that’s what you’re indirectly doing.

I realize you’re trying to change the media, but please don’t (conciously or unconciously) swiftboat Obama in the process.

Commenter Steve:

So, if I support Senator Obama, I am a cultist?

Jeff responds:

No, Steve, but I’m being told I can’t criticize him and hold him to high standards. That’s a cultist talking.

Last word (not on Jeff’s blog but here on mine, where I’m the editor) goes to this commenter from Jeff’s blog:

Obama supporters panic whenever a story appears to question, criticize, or point out the hypocrisies of their candidate.

Indeed! and get a load of this attack, published at the HuffPo, on Jon Stewart for—gasp!—making fun of the Obama Messiah. Joseph Palermo builds his case by accusing Stewart of having been complicit in selling the war in Iraq to the American people:

Slamming the UN weapons inspectors as ineffectual twits dominated right-wing talk radio at the time and The Daily Show was in effect regurgitating the talking points of those who wanted to bring the country to war. Dissing the UN’s efforts on Comedy Central inadvertently helped make the case for war. It is kind of like when Dick Cheney pointed to the New York Times to buttress his warmongering saying: “Hey, even the liberals agree with us!”

Then Palermo goes on to warn Stewart to watch his mouth when he’s making fun of Obama:

When Jon Stewart seeks “balance” for his targets of satire he can end up reinforcing the false impressions that the Bush Republicans want people to have. It’s unfortunate because political humor is a powerful force that can sway some of those “low information” voters the pundits have been flogging lately.

So too was the case last night when Jon Stewart ran a bit about Barack Obama’s decision to eschew public financing. The Daily Show seized the issue as an opportunity to display “balance” and to poke fun at the Obama campaign. But not only did the bit fall flat it played right into the Republican line, which is full of half-truths and outright lies about Obama’s decision.

During the primaries, Keith Olbermann attacked Stewart just for mentioning Obama’s middle name.

Here’s what I think: this attempt by hyper-partisan ideological enforcers to shut down the debate among Democrats about Barack Obama will backfire. Badly.

Intimidating people who are on your own side (Jarvis and Stewart are both Democrats, from what I can tell) is never a good idea, especially here in America, where, as Jeff said, we don’t—and won’t—shut up.

Undoubtedly, those trying to shut down the debate are the product (or the masters) of our elite universities, where diversity is god but where diversity of opinion is unwelcome.

Those often kindly teachers, however, do have a sense of urgent mission. Even if we put them on truth-serum, the academics who dominate the humanities and social sciences on our campuses today would state that K-12 education essentially has been one long celebration of America and the West, as if our students were intimately familiar with the Federalist Papers and had never heard of slavery or empire. Having convinced themselves that the students whom they inherit have been immersed in American and Western traditions without critical perspective—they do believe that—contemporary academics see themselves as having merely four brief years in which to demystify students, and somehow to get them to look up from their Madison and Hamilton long enough to gaze upon the darker side of American and Western life. In their view, our K-12 students know all about Aristotle, John Milton and Adam Smith, have studied for twelve years how America created bounty and integrated score after score of millions of immigrants, but have never heard of the Great Depression or segregation.

Academics, in their own minds, face an almost insoluble problem of time. How, in only four years, can they disabuse students of the notion that the capital, risk, productivity and military sacrifice of others have contributed to human dignity and to the prospects of a decent society? How can they make them understand, with only four years to do so, that capitalism and individual- ism have created cultures that are cruel, inefficient, racist, sexist and homophobic, with oppressive caste systems, mental and behavioral? How, in such a brief period, can they enlighten “minorities,” including women (the majority of students), about the “internalization” of their oppression (today’s equivalent of false consciousness)? How, in only eight semesters, might they use the classroom, curriculum and university in loco parentis to create a radical leadership among what they see as the victim groups of our society, and to make the heirs of successful families uneasy in the moral right of their possessions and opportunities? Given those constraints, why in the world should they complicate their awesome task by hiring anyone who disagrees with them?

Disagreement is at the foundation of human existence, and American democracy is successful (among other reasons) because it takes this fundamental fact of human nature into account.

Plus: If Barack Obama cannot stomach, answer, and withstand criticisms from his own side, he is unlikely to be able to withstand criticism, or attacks, from his political opponents.

When I see stupid stuff like this from a media outlet that is pretending to provide useful information to its viewers, it drives me up a wall:

 

Common Misunderstandings About Muslims

Are Muslim Women Oppressed? Why Do They Wear the Hijab? Find Out Below

Misconception: Muslim women are oppressed and forced to wear the hijab.

Truth:

Women often see it as empowering because they are not viewed as sexual objects but judged by their character.

The “truth” about the hijab has nothing to do with female empowerment or sexual politics.

Wearing the hijab is a religious custom practiced by some Muslim women.

(AP Photo )

Just as wearing a hair covering is a religious custom practiced by some Jewish women.

Somehow, the New Yorker artist who made the cover pictured below forgot—or didn’t want to—include a religious Jew in the picture. Some discussion here.

Apparently, there’s been quite a reaction to the announcement that Bill Kristol will have one of the most coveted bully pulpits in America: a column in the New York Times. I first wrote about this a couple of days ago and then went out of town.

Now the Times has been confronted. Editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal finds it easy to defend his hire:

Rosenthal told Politico shortly after the official announcement Saturday that he fails to understand “this weird fear of opposing views.”

“The idea that The New York Times is giving voice to a guy who is a serious, respected conservative intellectual — and somehow that’s a bad thing,” Rosenthal added. “How intolerant is that?”

Kristol himself is one gleeful culture warrior:

“I was flattered watching blogosphere heads explode,” Kristol told Politico. “It was kind of amusing.”

She’s not in the blogosphere, but could Kristol have meant Katha Pollitt?

Just shoot me. First, it was Sam Tanenhaus, conservative editor of the New York Times Book Review being put in charge of the News of the Week in Review section. That means one conservative will determine how politics,culture and ideas are covered in TWO of the most important sections of the supposedly liberal newspaper of record. Now, says the Huffington Post, the Times is set to announce that Bill Kristol will be writing a weekly op-ed column. That’s Bill Kristol ,Fox commentator , editor of the the Murdochian agitprop factory Weekly Standard, George W. Bush’s propagandist in chief, co-founder of the Project for a New American Century, relentless promoter of the war in Iraq , ideological bully and thug.

Kristol responded directly to that attack (via Exurban League, where you can check out his Thug 4 Life pic too):

Give a holla to my neocons in the Bay,
I’m livin’ in DC still clutchin’ on my AK.
Tell ‘em,
“Thug for life,
High till’ i die”
When ‘em stupid Nation witches ask why!

Among other spicy events to look forward to, election 2008 is about to get a little more interesting (Kristol has a one-year contract).

Bottom line, says The Politico, this is a smart business decision for the New York Times:

Despised or not, Kristol is bound to create controversy (read: Web page views). It’s no surprise that during this overheated election season Newsweek and other such magazines are bringing in political lighting rods like Karl Rove and Markos Moulitsas.

In the new media world of the early 21st century, apparently it’s no longer enough to merely attract attention. You want (or need) to attract lightning to get noticed.

In a photo gallery, Der Spiegel asks:

Does Germany already Have Sharia Law?

In Dissent, Pascal Bruckner (class of ‘68, French chapter, or, way more obnoxiously, soixante-huitard), ponders, among other things, the meaning of internationalism some forty years after our cohort came alive politically.

The third-worldism that set the wretched of the earth in opposition to the sated North is moribund as a political movement, yet it survives in our minds as a subtle poison, in the way we spontaneously denounce ourselves for the world’s disorders. We live off the dividends of our self-accusation. We are supposedly forever in debt to the poor, the oppressed, the immigrants, and our only obligation is to expiate endlessly. Consider the wave of repentance sweeping through the continent nowadays-like an epidemic, especially in the major religions. This is an excellent thing, a salutary realization of past offenses, provided that other cultures and other beliefs also recognize their errors. Contrition cannot be restricted to a few and innocence attributed to everyone who claims to be persecuted. For too many countries, particularly in the Arab world, self-criticism is confused with the search for a convenient scapegoat: it’s never their fault, always someone else’s.

Johann Hari, also writing in Dissent, reviews some current books about Islam in the West and concludes on a surprisingly hopeful note. He sees an exciting opportunity for Europe to play host to a reformation of Islam.

[A]cross the continent, groups of Muslim women are rebelling in the same way against the literalist, quasi-fascist interpretation of the Koran popularized by the mullahs. Tired of being its first victims, they are creating their own liberal lived Islams as an alternative. And if this rebellion is completed, European jihadism will be left literally unable to reproduce itself. …

The Ni Putains, Ni Soumises manifesto calls for “no more justifications of our oppression in the name of the right to difference and of respect for those who force us to bow our heads.” Multiculturalism has worked on the assumption that there is one “pure” Islam, represented by elderly mullahs. Now that Islam is splitting into liberal and literalist wings, this approach places European states closer to the reactionaries than to the feminists and liberals. We will have to ensure there are no more state-funded Muslim-only schools and youth clubs, no more privileged status for reactionary clerics. …
To host an Islamic civil war—one where the liberals win—Europeans need to junk both the conservative pining for an apocalyptic clash and the liberal fixation on multiculturalism. The potential prize is extraordinary.

I would like to believe this is possible. Unfortunately, things are just too damn weird. Anyone who says they know what’s going to happen tomorrow, much less next week or next month or next year, is just full of shit.

The world is upside down. A while back, Spengler said we should sit back and enjoy the chaos. I note that he hasn’t published a word about up-to-the-minute events since Tall Tales from Tehran went into heavy rotation in the global media

until it was thrown off the air temporarily by Sob Stories from the Royal Navy and Marines.

Meanwhile, here at home, Nancy’s Really Big Adventure

was quickly overshadowed by Don Imus’s Really, Really Bad Manners

which got him suspended from NBC.

I can’t wait to find out what happens next. Which is exactly the way the media wants it. They want our eyeballs, and they get ‘em. Because infotainment rules.

The NYT’s Caryn James is one person who gets this, although she doesn’t quite connect the dots. Today she writes about our other national obsession—Anna Nicole Smith:

From the Who’s the Daddy question to the trumped-up murder-mystery element attached to both her death and to her 20-year-old son’s, her true story has played out in real time, as breaking news. Yet to the public it has also taken on the qualities of a long-running entertainment series, part reality television and part online game show. As on any reality show, the audience has been offered characters to root for or to hiss against. Mr. Stern and Mr. Birkhead have had their personalities shaped by television producers in much the way editing turns contestants on “Survivor” or “Big Brother” into heroes or villains. In the Smith case, there are competing camps, with infotainment shows aligning with the man who has given them access, and rarely bothering with the pretence of objectivity.

My point is this: for the seemingly narcotized (if not depraved) West, the Anna Nicole Smith story is no different from the British Hostages Nabbed by Iran story. Interestingly, Iran’s master propagandists are way ahead of our guys, because they get that.

These are the days of our lives…