Obama: Too Cool for School? Too Sexy for his Shirt? Too Good to be True? Too presidential to be president? Too intelligent to be loved by morons? Too black to be loved by hard working white Americans? Too white to be loved by Jesse Jackson? Too loved by Foreign leaders to kick some French ass? Too deserving of respect not to seem arrogant? Too accomplished not to make me feel insecure? Too faithful to his wife to be the chastened champion of family values?
August 5th, 2008 Posted in PoliticsMilbank, who is often wickedly revealing, last week seemed mostly wicked as he turned benign campaign tableau — an Obama motorcade, a talk with the Treasury secretary, a "pep rally" with congressional Democrats — into evidence that Obama thinks he’s already the winner.
What motivates such idiotic press antics? First, they need stories. Essentially tabloidal in their coverage, they need the verbal equivalent of celebrity paparazzi photos.
Second, they take their own intellectual laziness as a form of cleverness. Once a meme is out there, you will find a few thousand columnists merely repeating it, as if it something oh-so-clever and new. The legitimacy of the idea depends not on evidence but how salacious it is, how much controversy it can stir up. That the idea du jour is unoriginal is precisely what makes it so clever and repeatable — the way has been paved, it should effortlessly produce agreement as the received wisdom. That is is unoriginal doesn’t mean it is not new, any more than the fact that Stonehenge has been around forever means that your first visit isn’t a new experience. The collective wisdom is just out there, and just because you’re no the first to visit doesn’t mean that you’re not oh-so-clever for having made the visit.
Bad and stale ideas, parroted as original insights by lazy columnists.
I haven’t had time to stop being astounded by the breathtaking herd mentality of these "opinion-makers" and "analysts," their lack of intellectual self-confidence and independence, their entirely unreflective shallowness, and the almost pornographic nature of their ruminations.
