Alfred Landman <landmana at yahoo.com> wrote:
"Amy G & Co went about "debunking" that CNN-big-brush and his master&full
tapestry like a painting-by-numbers undertaking. "
That's the journalists' craft (or at least Amy's): asking questions "by the numbers". They dont seem to trust themselves to respond in a dialogic way.
Bob
Yes, so much (little) for the art of left debaters. Amy G & Co went about "debunking" that CNN-big-brush and his master&full tapestry like a painting-by-numbers undertaking. I was watching it, and I knew, again, as if I needed a re-shot, why the right is running the show. Like a preaching fool Amy kept saying to Dobbs: But you admit now that this was WRONG. You do, don't you!
Alfred Landman
John Gulick wrote:
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
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