For the regular folk

Crooks and Liars:

Man, I can’t wait for the PA primary. Now we’re stuck with endless debates between Obama and Hillary supporters 24/7 while John McCain goes around and around “Re-Branding” himself as a warrior of some kind. Anyway, Digby catches Tweety doing the usual hatchet job for McCain:

Sure enough, the bowling thing seems to have brought old Chris back to his “thesis:”

MATTHEWS: OK. Let me ask you about how he — how’s he connect with regular people? Does he? Or does he only appeal to people who come from the African-American community and from the people who have college or advanced degrees?…

Remember back in the dark days of 2004, when it was assumed that anyone who didn’t live in a small town in Nebraska or Alabama was automatically not a Real American? When we were all told to take our latte sipping, New York Times reading asses back to where we done come from? Yep, here we are again. (African Americans, of course, have never been considered “regular people” by conservatives. Nothing new there.)…read on

WTF is “regular people?” The media wants to pick our candidates for us plain and simple. They can’t stay out of the way and let the people vote. And we are voting at record numbers. Endless loops of footage that do not teach us anything. I talked to a network reporter who is covering the Dems and he/she said that they never knew McCain flip flopped on waterboarding. They were shocked. I was shocked too. This person is an honest broker of the facts so I realized that it’s up to the network heads to make sure they cover McCain. And obviously they are not.

While it might be used as a Letterman punch line for a second, why does it matter if Obama is a terrible bowler to the press? Yet, over and over again we see it. When has Matthews and the Village elites laced up their shoes and gone bowling when they haven’t hired the entire alley—all for themselves? Nuff said.

EvolutionBlog:

Nicholas Kristof has a good column in today's New York Times. Here's a taste:

From Singapore to Japan, politicians pretend to be smarter and better- educated than they actually are, because intellect is an asset at the polls. In the United States, almost alone among developed countries, politicians pretend to be less worldly and erudite than they are (Bill Clinton was masterful at hiding a brilliant mind behind folksy Arkansas sayings about pigs).

Alas, when a politician has the double disadvantage of obvious intelligence and an elite education and then on top of that tries to educate the public on a complex issue -- as Al Gore did about climate change -- then that candidate is derided as arrogant and out of touch.

The dumbing-down of discourse has been particularly striking since the 1970s. Think of the devolution of the emblematic conservative voice from William Buckley to Bill O'Reilly.

Well said!

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