alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

July 7, 2006

The Ante Room

by AltHippo @ 1:57 pm. Filed under Uncategorized

It’s very interesting to read this Glenn Greenwald post in justaposition with Eric Boehlert’s Lapdogs. Here’s Glenn:

Despite the bespectacled professorial costumes of respectability and moderation, Reynolds ceased being different than the Michelle Malkins and David Horowitzs of the world some time ago. That is the camp he has chosen, and any residual doubts about that ought to be resolved by the fact that he will always find ways to defend them even when it comes to blatant garbage like the treason accusations against the NYT and the subsequent, home-address-publishing right-wing lynch mobs which they foreseeably inspired.

That does seem to be the company Insty keeps. Malkin, the NRO gang, Horowitz, and others in the League of Bloviating Hatemongerers.

I’m not sure if this has as much to do with Reynold’s giving up Liberterian ideals for the hard-right. It’s more about being part of a club that gives him access and visibility. It’s Insty’s version of the Cool Kids Club.

It reminds me of Lapdogs. I don’t have a specific passage in mind, but more the description of a Washington press corps that resembles less a hard scrabbling Woodward and Bernstein, and more the anteroom at the Palais de Versailles. It’s clubby. It’s chummy. It’s the meal ticket to rave gallas, dress-up balls, and yachting on the Chesapeake. It can’t do the job of making the system accountable, because it is the system.

I’m sure they look back at the hard-charging days just starting out their careers, but then it occurs to them that it sucks to be middle-middle-class these days, and being a media darling isn’t too shabby either.

Update: I went through my copy of Lapdogs, and found a relevant passage to support what I had said about the Washington Press corps and the White House being clubby and chummy: (Lapdogs, pp. 69-70)

Meanwhile, PBS’s Gwen Ifill made friends with Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice. appearing onstage together at the National Association of Black Journalists Convention in August 2003, Rice publicly thanked Ifill for inviting her over for dinner and complimented her for being such “an excellent cook.” Again, that sort of after-dinner outreach to top government officials has been a cornerstone of the capitol’s social fabric for decades. But it’s been the media’s own supine performance during the Bush years that raised questions about impropriety.

Because around the same time Rice was complimenting Ifill’s home cooking, Bush’s top adviser was coming under increasing pressure to explain why, as then-national security adviser, she hadn’t kept out of the 2003 State of the Union Address the questionable allegation that Saddam had sought to boost his nuclear weapons capabilities by purchasing uranium from Africa. It was later revealed there were sharp differences within the administration , at both the State Department and the CIA, as to whether the allegation was true. The State Department, in fact, labeled the uranium charge “highly dubious.” The White House eventually apologized for including the uranium portion in the address. But questions persisted as to whether Bush’s team, led by Rice, knowingly included false allegations in the State of the Union Address in order to scare Americans into war.

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hip·po·pot·a·mus n. A notion, perhaps distinct from conventional wisdom, that needs to be verified by reality-based scrutiny.

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