who's on first?

In the middle of a long and understandably frustrated post about their recent controversial cover, New Yorker writer and sporter of longer hair than you probably expected, Hendrik Hertzberg, writes this sentence:

Andy Borowitz, whom I ran into the other day at a New Yorker softball game, remarked casually to me that the cover had a “P.O.V.”—point of view—“problem.”

Ah, to see that game in action.

oasis

It seems like the Pope Benedict XVI really took Wall-E to heart. According to the BBC, he told World Youth Day that "In so many of our societies, side by side with material prosperity, a spiritual desert is spreading - an interior emptiness, an unnamed fear, a quiet sense of despair." He went on to say that "The world 'needs renewal.'" These statements resonate, for some people, as deeply true. However, whether something as densely organized and hierarchical as Roman Catholicism provides the answer remains an open question. Still, hearing such thoughts spread wide by a more-or-less respected figure warms, in an odd way, the dialectical heart.

(Link)

"Where is that marvelous ape?"

The Huffington Post, self-described on their homepage as "The Internet Newspaper," may not abide by the highest journalistic standards.

Reporting on a joke that John McCain might have told over twenty years ago, Sam Stein, "reaches out" (perhaps he will "go forward" with his reporting if he has enough "bandwidth" and/or "cycles," but, hey, "it is what it is") to a reporter who covered the possible initial incident. She helpfully tells him,

"I'm not sure exactly what the wording was of the joke, but something was said. Some joke involving a rape and ape was said. Enough women repeated it to me at the time and the McCain campaign had a non-denial denial," said Coile, now with the Arizona Daily Star. "It came after his 'Seizure World' joke, in which he referred to the [retirement community] Leisure World as Seizure World... I just think it reinforced this idea that John McCain is humor-challenged." (Link)

Even though she's "not exactly sure what the wording was of the joke" she is certain that "something was said." Excellent. It's a good bet that something was said at an event where speeches were made. To bolster her claim that "something" was said, she cites another questionable joke McCain made, which almost adds up to circumstantial evidence. Then she goes on, after an unbracketed ellipses (did she just pause or were words taken out of her quote: HuffPo, what style manual are you using?), to vaguely confirm that McCain in fact told the joke: "it reinforced this idea that John McCain is humor-challenged." What does "it" refer to? The joke that was confirmed through rumor? "Enough women repeated it" to Coile to confirm? How many women is "enough" to qualify for fact checking?

Whether or not McCain actually told the joke is obviously irrelevant here. With but a wink and a nod to objective reporting, The Huffington Post clearly wants only to extend the narrative of John McCain-as-chauvinist-douchebag. Trying to pretend otherwise is low--exactly the kind of thing HuffPo would jump on Fox News for running with. Sure, he might not be the most sensitive speaker, but what of his actions, the substance? The article ends with a another nod to the idea that substance trumps innuendo (it quotes Linda Barter the head of the Arizona Women's Political Caucus, who says, "John McCain has not been pro-choice or supportive of issues related to women's reproductive health"), but this only adds a sheen of respectability to a petty partisan hack job.

"We've a long time together, me and you"

Note the level of detail: the tear on the chair, the lighter, the red eyes, the tattoo on the dolphin's arm, the water in the bong. Truly impressive.

(Link, thanks to J.R. Norton)

Att: Obama

W.H. Auden, in "September 1, 1939," was on to something:

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

(Link)

magic wand

There is undoubtedly a rhetorical virtue in stating the obvious, in getting back to the fundamental crux of the argument, but President Bush takes this virtue to a disturbingly tautological extreme. A few months ago, when asked at a press conference about rising gas prices, the President declared that, if he had one, he would wave a magic wand to reduce them; the stark reality was, however, that he didn't have a wand, magic or otherwise. (This was also the same press conference where he said he had yet to hear about gas prices nearing four dollars per gallon.) Today, at another press conference, the President invoked the same device, and pleaded the same impotence: that magic wand just doesn't exist:

There is no immediate fix. This took us a while to get in this problem; there is no short-term solution. I think it was in the Rose Garden where I issued this brilliant statement: If I had a magic wand -- but the President doesn't have a magic wand. You just can't say, low gas. It took us a while to get here and we need to have a good strategy to get out of it. (Link)

Extemporaneous speaking is difficult, especially when dealing with complex issues. But a pattern of this kind of non-logic substituting for genuine thought and argumentation belies a deeper, more disturbing problem.

Witness, for example, President Bush's recent gag at a "private meeting" at the G8 summit:

The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."

He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.

Mr Bush, whose second and final term as President ends at the end of the year, then left the meeting at the Windsor Hotel in Hokkaido where the leaders of the world's richest nations had been discussing new targets to cut carbon emissions. (Link, via clusterflock)

This kind of critique is almost too easy to make, but apathy presages a surrender of freedom. By focusing, perhaps necessarily, on the larger themes, the press fails to take note of the nuances of these arguments, which are not arguments at all but weak apologetics for a hardened epistemology.

(The New York Times and NPR on the today's press conference)

sharks don't love you back

(Link)