Today in Tampa

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I’ve decided I’d rather follow the convention on Richard Adams’s liveblog than actually watch it on television.

More stuff to read:

Ta-Nahisi Coates, “The Myth of an Affirmative-Action President”

Matt Taibbi, “Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital.” I haven’t read this one yet, but I look forward to it.

Brian Beutler, “A Critical Juncture.” Beutler says that the Romney campaign is taking politics and media into new territory. If Romney continues with his outrageously false charges against President Obama —

… the political establishment will be facing something very new: a candidate — not his surrogates or outside supporters, but the top of the ticket — ignoring fact checkers, traditional campaign reporters, and even a few conservatives, all of whom have determined and publicly declared the attacks false.

That effectively pits the media against the Romney campaign in a test of will and influence. And it’s disconcerting to imagine that a determined media might not be able to effectively neutralize a presidential campaign intent on flooding the airwaves with false attacks. But that’s where we might find ourselves in the next couple weeks.

9 thoughts on “Today in Tampa”

  1. To me, the Lying, and the new territory this is taking us, is the real story, the elephant in the dining room, and has been for weeks. Everything else is traditional politics, and by contrast, ho-hum. See Robert Reich, How Mitt Romney Keeps Lying:

    …the Republican Party has developed three means of bypassing the mainstream media and its fact-checkers.

    The first is by repeating big lies so often in TV spots – financed by a mountain of campaign money – that the public can no longer recall (if it ever knew) that the mainstream media and its fact-checkers have found them to be lies.

    The second is by discrediting the mainstream media – asserting it’s run by “liberal elites” that can’t be trusted to tell the truth. “I am tired of the elite media protecting Barack Obama by attacking Republicans,” Newt Gingrich charged at a Republican debate last January, in what’s become a standard GOP attack line.

    The third is by using its own misinformation outlets – led by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and his yell-radio imitators, book publisher Regnery, and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, along with a right-wing blogosphere – to spread the lies, or at least spread doubt about what’s true.

    Together, these three mechanisms are creating a parallel Republican universe of Orwellian dimension – where anything can be asserted, where pollsters and political advisers are free to create whatever concoction of lies will help elect their candidate, and where “fact-checkers” are as irrelevant and intrusive as is the truth.

    Democracy cannot thrive in such a place. To the contrary, history teaches that this is where demagogues take root.

    The Romney campaign has decided it won’t be dictated by fact-checkers. But a society without trusted arbiters of what is true and what is false is vulnerable to every lie imaginable.

  2. This would be my response to Brian Beutler’s “That effectively pits the media against the Romney campaign in a test of will and influence. And it’s disconcerting to imagine that a determined media might not be able to effectively neutralize a presidential campaign intent on flooding the airwaves with false attacks. But that’s where we might find ourselves in the next couple weeks.”

    Which presumes, I’m assuming, Mr. Beutler, that we’re going to find an effective media somewhere in the next couple of weeks. Which begs the question, “Where?”
    Hmm… Maybe at a Labor Day Sale?
    Or, given the state of too much of our established media today – a “Going Out Of Business Sale.”

    In the past few decades, the media has oly been ever been effective on bullsh*t search and destroy missions against Democrats.
    The right’s cries of “Liberal Media!,” have been throughly, chewed, swallowed and digested, and the resulting equivocation have left too many in the media as unwilling (or, too willing) foils and dupes in the Conservative propaganda assault on citizens they are meant to act as shield, aganst efforts exactly like what is happening today.
    And that by “fairly” and honestly doing it’s duty to inform “We the people,” act as the “Fourth Estate,” to counter efforts by the Executive, Legilative, and/or Judicial branches of our government, or any other groups (like political parties) from damaging, or destroying, representative democracy, without the people’s willing, and knowing, consent.

    When a CNN, once a highly trusted name in TV news, now a thoroughly cowed, but all too reliable source of equivocation, is too cowardly, too afraid of repurcussions, to whisper, let alone loudly tell people about Republican brownshirt tactics against one of its own employees, a black female cameraperson, at their Convention (which is doing its best to hide its open racism, misogyny, xeno and homophobia, from viewers) ,then where are we supposed to find “effective media?”
    One of CNN’s own empoyees was assaulted and denigrated on the very floor of the Republican Convention by delegate/attendees, and the “news” network stands by, unwilling, or now institutionally unable, to report such an attack, without at least having the cover of some sort of counterbalancing, ‘Both sides do it” to act as their shield against further cries of an overly Liberal media, then let me ask again, where are we to find this “effective media,” Mr. Beutler?
    Maybe when someone accidentally steps on the toes of a CNN employee next week at the Democratic Convention, when they report THAT “assault,” they can finally openly talk about what happened at the Republican one.

    And let’s not even think about two Democratic delegates/attendees throwing crackers in the face of a FOX News reporter, and yelling, “This is how we feed racist Fascists!”

    Oh wait! THAT’S when the media will once again find its “effectiveness!”
    After all, then they can then blame the Liberals and Democrats. And that’s something they have been ‘Pabloved” into doing, so that it’s almost even beyond refelexive – if there can be such a thing.

    I hate to go all Godwin on everyone this early in the morning, or maybe it’s me, but doesn’t this remind everyone of how another representative democracy, one in the late 1920’s and early 1930’s, became a brutal Fascist regime?
    One that I dare not name, for fear of it being said that I’m just a Liberal, grossly overreacting. And yet another example of an overly hysterical commenter on a Liberal website. And you know how wild WE are – all rude and accusatory, full of wild and inflammatory conspiracies. Not at all like the tame and well-behaved commenters at Right-wing sites…

  3. The Guardian’s comments this morning (Thursday) just savage Ryan over the lies in his speech. “Warmed over” is the kindest thing said in the first dozen! If the Brits see it this clearly, maybe some R’s need to go on a cruise to reality-land1

  4. You seriously think the media would either want or dare to take on the Romney campaign on the side of the “fact-checkers” whose “dictates” they refuse to accept?

  5. Conversation overheard at my workplace last week. Lady 1 is the office racist and intellectually the laziest person I’ve met in decades; Lady 2 gets some information wrong (as do I), but sincerely tries to understand the world around her.

    L1: Have you heard how Obama wants to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicare?

    L2: You mean Paul Ryan?

    L1: No, Obama! Obama wants to cut Medicare!

    L2: That’s Paul Ryan. I heard Paul Ryan wants to do that.

    L1 [as she storms off]: No, it’s Obama. He wants to get rid of Medicare.

    I puzzled for a couple of days as to where Lady 1’s worse-than-usual BS came from, and then I heard NPR report that it’s from GOP ads trying to smokescreen the Ryan budget fiascos.

    Is it really working? For the moment, I’d say no more than usual; people predisposed to non-thinking will believe it, but apparently there is enough accurate info out there that the folks who try to think, can find it. I just hope the accurate info won’t have dissolved to nothing before November.

  6. Uh-oh, long comment in moderation. Too many exclamation points?

    One thing I’d suggest to Joe Biden in prepping for the VP debate: study how Al Gore handled Dan Quayle in 1992. “How to shut down the made-up sh*t”: a primer.

  7. I won’t be commenting today. Unfortunately, I’m gonna need to devote time normally spent reading and commenting on political matters to calibrate my dog whistle receptors. The GOP’s unrelenting barrage of lies and distortions has effected my receptors to where I’m sensing a probable shift to the over sensitivity range.

    Perhaps there is a reader/commenter out there whose receptors are correctly tuned, and who can aid me in re-establishing accuracy for my receptors. Your help would be greatly appreiciated.

    Here is my problem…Ann Romney said in her convention speech that her husband, Mitt, will not fail. My receptors responded with a reading that Obama is a failed President. No problem with that —an accurate reading. But they (receptors) also added the information the Obama is Kenyan uspurper, black*, sleazey Chicago politician, a pal of terrorists, black*,food stamp president, black*, effeminate liberal,black*, alien, Muslim,black*, socialist, advocate of infanticide, black*, aloof professor(?), black*, destroyer of Medicare, profligate tax spender,black*, non anglo, European boot licker, un American, dog eater, black*,1%er,failed president, apologist for America exceptionalism,black*….and a plethora of additional identifers. Sin numero!

    Black* = the soften,politically correct verision of the N-word.I didn’t want my receptors to be accused of racism in their neutral reporting,so I changed that word to a less offensive term.

  8. Swami,
    Great list!
    The only things missing is The New Black Panthers and black ACORN helped this black Chicago Usurper black to steal the election from the little old POW, and his cute Alaskan vantriloquist dummy.

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