In his editor’s note in the current edition of Newsweek, Jon Meacham surveys the failures of the past decade or so and comes to a completely unsurprising conclusion: the right and leftbothfailed.
From the financial sector to the Roman Catholic Church, it has been a bad couple of years for–to borrow a phrase from a BP chieftain–“big, important” players in global life. Going only a bit further back in the decade, the occupation of Iraq and the response to Katrina seem to mark the beginning of an era in which apparently competent institutions have all too often proved incompetent. The history of these years fails to fit neatly into the ideological categories of left or right, for both public and private enterprises have managed to miss the mark in hours of crisis. Government is not the root of all evil; neither are corporations.
The pull quote in the print edition reads, “Recent debacles do not fit into the categories of left or right, for both public and private enterprises have failed spectacularly.”
Huh. Actually, I think most of those examples do fit pretty nicely into one category: The left opposed the Iraq War, opposed financial deregulation andsounded warnings about the housing bubble. Meacham also cited the BP oil spill; the left has longopposed offshore drilling. Meacham’s trying to say that when “government” fails, it’s evidence that the left is mistaken inputting so much faith in government. But that would require one to attribute Bush’s disastrous Iraq War to the “left.”
If you stick tothe examples Meacham offers, it would seem more logical to conclude that the left was right, and the right was mostly wrong. Unless, that is, Katrina and Catholic priest sexual abuse were ideas of the left.
Jon Meacham, who’s the co-host of PBS‘s new Need to Know public affairs program, lives in a world where the answers are always foundin the center-right part of the political spectrum. You really have to twist yourself in knots in order to try and get this to make any sense, though.
And, yes, Katrina was the failure of government…primarily because a Republican pResident hollowed out FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers was wofeully underfunded due to a right-wing jihad against government spending…But, yes, the left is at fault.
Meacham is a peacham, all right. Didn’t he recently destroy Newsweek?
That aside, this MSM meme of equivalency–it’s always the right AND the left to blame, or occasionally the “extreme” right and left, as if there is an extreme left anymore–needs to be confronted and retired. But the conundrum of course is that those who need to confront it are those who perpetuate it, and the question remains of how to hold accountable for the perpetuation a press that long ago abrogated its duty to challenge such commentary. FAIR needs to win the lottery.
I don’t mind when some organization like Newsweek tanks. There is really only about 2 percent of the whole print “news” that is even controlled by liberals, the other 98 percent is controlled by the rich. The New York Times is owned by the filthy rich Sulzberger family, not one member of which could ever be described as liberal.
Print “news” is simply a waste of good healthy trees that convert CO2 to oxygen so the print “news” media is doubly noxious.
I really truly believe this is what has been happening since 1994:
The parliamentary battle of the NSDAP had the single purpose of destroying the parliamentary system from within through its own methods. It was necessary above all to make formal use of the possibilities of the party-state system but to refuse real cooperation and thereby to render the parliamentary system, which is by nature dependent upon the responsible cooperation of the opposition, incapable of action.
Ernst Rudolf Huber (witness)
From the Chief Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality
Volume I, Chapter VII
1946
http://thegallopingbeaver.blogspot.com/2010/06/bairds-of-this-world-get-away-with.html
I watched Need to Know just last week, hoping for something _close_ to what it replaced. Man, was I ever disappointed; I could only watch the first segment on money laundering (turned it off, afterwards). No systemic analysis whatsoever, just pushing Wachovia as its “rotten apple”.
Whaddaya want from a right-wing shill sent by PBS: Pentagon Broadcasting (Corporation) to sub for its nominally left Moyers and Braggadocio?
So government, corporations and the media have abandoned their roles as informing and serving the Public in favor of praise and worship of the golden calf. We no longer admire and respect modesty, good humor, intelligence. The popular culture of sex, mindless violence and glamor is substituted.
Can we really expect anything more than the rotting foundation of our society to collapse?
Look back at all the previous “Empires”. Many just toppled over from the corruption.
I saw Meacham on The Daily and John Stewart let him slip by like Colin Powell, but I haven’t read Newsweek or Time or USWorldReport for years. Why bother.