Paging Captain Obvious
– posted by thehim
Jim Miller is stumped:
So, here’s a challenge for our local journalists: Commit journalism. Find out the answers to those basic questions. Tell us who these “anti-war protesters” are, and what they want.
They want cupcakes, Jim. My god. I think we can forgive journalists for not assuming that their readers have the IQ of a footstool.
November 16th, 2007 at 9:10 pm
I’ve been to several protests where there’s a call and response “what do we want” and then the answer. So I imagine it isn’t too tough to do.
November 16th, 2007 at 9:25 pm
How about this gem:
“And if you want to be a real reporter, you might even ask them why they desire an American defeat — and a victory for the terrorists.”
That’s gotta be a joke.
November 17th, 2007 at 8:16 am
That’s gotta be a joke.
You would think.
November 17th, 2007 at 10:34 am
Does he have a sense of humor?
November 17th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
I spent a bit of time asshole-tearing in that post’s comments.
Why is it that Republicans think that Iraqis are all “terrorists?”
November 17th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
Love the title fo this post, by the way.
Oh, and Miller refers to the Olypmia anti-war group hosting the event as ’shodowy” because he read their “About us” statement and they said they had no officers. I though he should have used their “Contact Us” link and fucking asked them himself.
November 18th, 2007 at 11:38 am
The Right owns patriotism (just ask them). If they want a war, then that war is patriotic, even if they refuse to fight in it themselves. Opponents of that war are unpatriotic. If soldiers who fought in that war now oppose it, then they are unpatriotic “phony soldiers”, so declared by another patriot who never fought.
And, since the unpatriotic are dishonest (saying, for instance, that they oppose killing for oil; the Right knows that noboby ever opposes naked greed!) we must investigate them, always at their expense. If we find nothing, we keep investigating, until we bankrupt or harrass them into stopping their unpatriotism.
This has been “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (I’m quoting that title from memory), and it’s been around for a long, long time. Jim Miller is as unoriginal as he is insulting.
November 20th, 2007 at 9:35 am
Yes, Paddy Mac, you’ve got the right title. Richard Hofstadter wrote the essay for Harper’s in November 1964. I don’t know anything about Jim Miller, but it’s not unlikely that that was before Captain Obvious was born.
I remember reading the paper (and several other Hofstadter works, including his seminal 1948 The American Political Tradition) when it was fairly new, probably as a college student in the late ’60s. Many brilliant insights, more than just a few of which are still (or do I mean again?) quite applicable. Among the many such trenchant observations in The Paranoid Style: