Goodman has a hard time not coming off bad when she faces down political opponents. I remember Bill Clinton showed her up pretty good when he called her up once. But like you said, much of Democracy Now's audience are unlikely to care that much. I remember people were talking about how she really nailed Clinton when it seemed like he handled her grilling w/o breaking a sweat. > From: john_gulick at hotmail.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2007 03:31:30 -0800> CC: john_gulick at hotmail.com> Subject: [lbo-talk] Dobbs on Democracy Now> > > > I sent the following message to the pwogwessive partisans of a chat group who were enthralled by Democracy Now's take-down (not!!!) of Lou Dobbs:> > Let me preface my comment here by acknowledging that Lou Dobbs’ brand of right-wing pseudo-populism is ideologically odious and offers no real way out to the predicament that confronts ordinary US wage-earners in the era of imperial decline.> > That being said – and making the inaccurate assumption that Democracy Now’s audience consists of anything other than the already converted – I don’t believe Amy Goodman or (to a lesser degree) Juan Gonzalez did a terribly effective job of taking the hot air out of this windbag in ways that were politically useful.> > Yes, Dobbs’ manner was obnoxious, but he more or less did a decent job of portraying Goodman as playing a disingenuous game of “gotcha” – i.e. trying to nail him on a few rather marginal factual inaccuracies. Gonzalez was somewhat more constructive in conveying the sense that what matters is not this or that of Dobbs’ empirical errors or unsavory affiliations with racist reactionaries, but rather the age-old nativist repertoire that he draws on, the one which demagogically blames US middle class misfortunes on dark aliens. But his efforts were only partially successful… and in front of a true believer audience would be easily dismissed as the special pleadings of the multiculturally correct. Gonzalez tried to take it to the next level by depicting Dobbs as someone who cries crocodile tears for the US’ “forgotten majority” and diverts their anger away from US transnationals to brown border-crossers, but did not really come through.> > What I find both amusing and distressing about the discussion here is that it is marked with the usual sophomoric invective about how awful and moronic the “enemy” is, but is not informed by any keen sense of how the political alternatives on offer from the alleged opposition are scarcely different and in fact will only aggravate rather than attenuate right-wing populist momentum. But I suppose I should expect nothing else from the age of internet discourse where childish vitriol runs rampant but actual programmatic differences are meager… the sad case of so-called “polarized” (sic) contemporary US political culture.> > John G> Akitacity Tohoku JP 010-1211> _________________________________________________________________> Share life as it happens with the new Windows Live.Download today it's FREE!> http://www.windowslive.com/share.html?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_Wave2_sharelife_112007> ___________________________________> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk _________________________________________________________________ Share life as it happens with the new Windows Live.Download today it's FREE! http://www.windowslive.com/share.html?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_Wave2_sharelife_112007