Negative Space: unreasoning partisanship
- All omissions are not created equal
- The story of Corporal Jeff Starr’s quote illustrates not only why you can’t trust major newspapers in the United States, but also that you can’t trust some people to understand why we care about misquotes.
- Attack the policy, not the person
- You can save yourself a lot of embarrassment if you make it a point to debate the policies you dislike about a politician, rather than making fun of the politician’s looks, mannerisms, or family.
- Brainwashing 101
- Except for a few high points, this documentary is disappointing, and especially so whenever the director appears on-screen. It takes an important issue and trivializes the political causes and implications.
- Crying wolf over Bush
- Kerry’s supporters are his biggest problem. They’re practically calling their own candidate an incompetent liar.
- Did the Associated Press shoot down Harry Reid?
- In their zeal to take down the Tea Party movement, did the Associated Press just take down Harry Reid?
- Diverse opinions, unlikely scenarios, and spin
- More and more, having an organization that supports diverse opinion, an understanding of its own limitations, and a desire to learn, is considered to be poor policy, weakness, and failure.
- Embarrassed by our president
- “The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances of the man who has to be pointed out to intelligent foreigners as the President of the United States.”
- Fahrenheit 9/11 Reviews Show Restraint
- Reviewers of Michael Moore’s latest work appear to have learned their lesson: don’t put anything you learned in writing, because it is probably wrong. The first rule about Fahrenheit? Don’t talk about Fahrenheit.
- Happy birthday, Mr. Weird and Painful Rash
- Red state, blue state, blowhard, birthdate.
- Media misdirection
- What does it matter when major news organizations try to rewrite history through omission and misdirection?
- Mistakes were made
- Rice admits that “thousands of mistakes were made”. Obviously, then, the result must be flawed.
- Mocking presidential decrees
- Last minute maneuvers in congress can make a mockery of privacy protections. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey.
- More people need to read legislation
- The Boston Globe complains that the vice president’s office reads legislation looking to see how it affects the executive branch. More people should read bills to see how it affects them. There ought to be a law giving us all time to do it!
- No double standards
- Think not what punishment you want for your enemies, but what trials you want for your friends.
- Nobody wants immigration reform
- “Immigration is not a problem to be solved.” A confident and successful electorate could understand that issues are more important than who you hate. Unreasoning partisanship, however, is a problem that often seems as if it has no solution.
- Peace activists and suicide bombers
- Once again, how much are we willing to support because “it kicks Bush in the nuts”? Or because it kicks the mainstream media in the nuts?
- Principle is not an automatic gainsaying of any statement the other side makes
- Mindlessly opposing what “the other side” says is not principal. And conservatives are fond of saying that anything the government can legislate, it can break. Why does that not apply to marriage?
- Question with boldness
- Thomas Jefferson is probably second to Mark Twain with regards to having apocryphal quotes attributed to him. In Jefferson’s case some of these apocryphal quotes are not so much wrong but too mild.
- Reality-based conspiracy
- I’m not getting involved in the Rove countdown, because the whole thing is too unsourced for even the loosest conjecture. But an aside about Dan Rather’s faked memos struck me as too funny to pass up.
- Red vs. Blue working out well in Houston
- Our antagonistic attitude in politics has become so ingrained that we naturally assume the worst even when people are doing their best to help.
- Reporting from press releases
- Much of what we read in the newspapers is not reporting: it is a rewriting of a press release written for the purpose of being used in place of news reporting.
- Should Bush have ousted Governor Blanco?
- What President Bush’s detractors are saying when they say he didn’t respond fast enough is that the federal government should have taken control from the state government. The administration, not surprisingly, thinks that power might not be a bad one to have.
- This wasteful political bloodsport
- Alaska Governor Sarah Palin resigns—to save Alaskans money, and to save her family from the savage liberal arena. And, most likely, to avoid a lame-duck governorship. Resigning now is clearly the right thing to do if she’s going to run for president; all the more so because even though it’s the right thing to do it also reduces her chances.
- The ultimate question of Bush, Iraq, and genocide
- News sucks. Really, I just don’t understand how headlines and stories are chosen. Dog bites man can be a story, if that man is George Bush.
- Who controls discussion of CIA activities?
- When the CIA wins the battle of defining who can and cannot be talked about, there may be a partisan victory in the short run, but in the long run we all lose.
- The Wisdom of Partisan
- Throughout history, the people willing to split the baby have been the people who win. Can we break that thread?
- “I didn’t know the gun was loaded!”
- The unreasoning red-blue hatred fanned by the press today is pushing us towards a federal dictatorship.
More Information
- Palin Announces No Second Term
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“My choice is to take a stand and effect change - not hit our heads against the wall and watch valuable state time and money, millions of your dollars, go down the drain in this new environment. Rather, we know we can effect positive change outside government at this moment in time, on another scale, and actually make a difference for our priorities - and so we will, for Alaskans and for Americans.”
- Sarah Palin Announces Resignation as Governor, Part 2
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"There is where truly the worthy causes are in this world and that’s where our public resources should be, our public priority. We have time and resources spent on that, not on this superficial, wasteful, political bloodsport."
