Everything that is wrong with David Brooks

Brooks on Wednesday, writing about the shallow ABC debate that everyone hated:

We may not like it, but issues like Jeremiah Wright, flag lapels and the Tuzla airport will be important in the fall. Remember how George H.W. Bush toured flag factories to expose Michael Dukakis. It’s legitimate to see how the candidates will respond to these sorts of symbolic issues.

Okay, but, see, no it's not. Only in the twisted mind of a mainstream political reporter is anything related to these issues "legitimate". The other day I had an argument with a commenter in which I suggested that our media (elite and wannabe-elite) is cognitively incapable of distinguishing the symbolic from the real; well, here you have Exhibit A. This man needs help.

...Perhaps the greatest contribution of political blogging since its inception around 2002-2003 has been its thesis that mainstream political journalism, as an institution, is intellectually bankrupt. Digby has been the most prominent and eloquent articulator of this thesis, and Atrios probably the most reliable, but it informs almost all the discussion everywhere from activist-type blogs to snark blogs to the wonkosphere and outward. It's a commonplace at this point. So maybe that's why so many bloggers were in such googly-eyed outrage on Wednesday night; ABC unabashedly and unreservedly endorsed all the transparently stupid bullshit that we've spent years trying to beat back. Moments like these, and Brooks' astonishing column, ought to remind us how far away we really are from having a media with a brain...

Journalism old and new

More commentary on this when I have a power cord for my laptop (in the mail somewhere between New Hampshire and Cambridge), but I provide the following for now unadorned:

1. BostonNOW, a new experiment in a physically-printed newspaper that is at least partially reader-edited—a bizarre hybrid of Daily Kos and the Metro—is set to begin its first print run of 150,000 copies soon.

2. The New York Times, meanwhile, holds up the noble old flag of print media with a six page piece on how tough it is to be hot and wealthy at Newton North High School.

You still have to be pretty, thin and, as one of Esther’s classmates, Kat Jiang, a go-to stage manager for student theater who has a perfect 2400 score on her SATs, wrote in an e-mail message, “It’s out of style to admit it, but it is more important to be hot than smart.”

“Effortlessly hot,” Kat added.

"I Don't Know Anyone Who Voted For Nixon"

MyDD's Matt Stoller posted a quick thought today that grabbed my attention:

It's so interesting to watch the DLC struggle aggressively against the mainstream of American opinion while furiously thinking of themselves as representative of it. Boomer pundits like to reminisce about their days in the left, saying that in 1972 their elitist liberal friends were shocked Nixon won because they didn't 'know anyone who voted for Nixon'. It was evidence to them how out of touch the liberals were. It's interesting how the DLC just can't fathom an America that is against this war, they just can't believe it. They are as out of step with the mainstream as the left was in 1972.

I think when Matt writes "DLC" he means more the centrist DC establishment in general -- the "punditocracy" or whatever you want to call it -- Team Lieberman, basically. Or at least he's hinting at it. And this follows a general trend that's come out lately in the blogosphere, prompted by the "surge" debate: the overwhelming sense that much of our media and political establishment is absurdly out of touch.

I'll look closer at this notion and its implications for the party, after the jump.

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Music Blogging

I almost flipped my lid when I saw this on First Draft -- apparently, there's a website out there with a huge library of user-hosted music files, perfectly legal. It's called Radio Blog Club, and you can basically describe it as YouTube for mp3s. Much like YouTube, they give you code to embed an audio file anywhere, making it supereasy to blog with a soundtrack. For instance, here's Clapton:

Or, if you're not the classic rock type, try Girls Aloud (commercial British pop that, amazingly, is actually really good):

There are catches. Adding your own music to this thing is complicated and technically clunky (you have to upload it to your own webspace, put up their player, etc. -- and it uses a lot of finicky PHP and XML, which I learned the hard way after Harvard FAS hosting spit it all back in my face). The library is huge, but pretty random, and heavier on British and European acts than their stateside equivalents. And the website itself is weird and clearly translated from French.

Nevertheless. How AWESOME is it that you can legally and easily blog all this great music? I personally think that any and every blogpost would benefit greatly from a soundtrack (setting the mood, you know), and I know I'm not the only music-obsessive on this blog (cough*Garrett*cough) that likes to share new and interesting bands. We'll see if that kind of thing develops.

--Plus, you can customize the color scheme of the player, which is cool -- especially when you use it to obscure the name of the song. First person to identify this band gets a dollar (and no Googling the lyrics, that's cheating):