Joe is out being Marathon Man this morning. He left the house at 7am to run the Marine Corps Marathon. His parents are in town to watch and lend moral support. So you get me for breakfast.
There is some very bad news out this morning about President Obama undercutting the public option in the Senate. Very bad. That will be the subject of my next post, around 10am. But rather than start out on a negative note, for your morning coffee, I'd suggest reading instead Frank Rich in today's NYT. One of the things I love about Frank Rich is the way he strings seemingly unrelated events together in to a symphony of meaning. He sees things we don't, and we're the better for finishing one of his columns. Today's is no different. Frank writes about the balloon boy hoax, but digs much further into the media culture, and American culture, of political (and financial) hoaxes, from George Bush's Mission Accomplished to the hoax that calls itself Fox News.
Here's a snippet:
Next to the other hoaxes and fantasies that have been abetted by the news media in recent years, both the “balloon boy” and Chamber of Commerce ruses are benign. The Colorado balloon may have led to the rerouting of flights and the wasteful deployment of law enforcement resources. But at least it didn’t lead the country into fiasco the way George W. Bush’s flyboy spectacle on an aircraft carrier helped beguile most of the Beltway press and too much of the public into believing that the mission had been accomplished in Iraq. The Chamber of Commerce stunt was a blip of a business news hoax next to the constant parade of carnival barkers who flogged empty stocks on cable during the speculative Wall Street orgies of the dot-com and housing booms.
As “balloon boy” played out, the White House opened fire on one purveyor of fictional news, Fox News, where “tea party” protests are inflated into a national rebellion rivaling the Civil War and where Glenn Beck routinely claims Obama is perpetrating a conspiracy to bring fascism to America. But the White House’s argument is diluted by the different, if less malevolently partisan, fictions that turn up on Fox’s competitors. On CNN, for instance, Lou Dobbs provided a platform for the nuts questioning Obama’s citizenship. When an ABC News correspondent insisted that Fox was “one of our sister organizations” in an exchange with the president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, last week, he wasn’t joking....
If Heene’s balloon was empty, so were the toxic financial instruments, inflated by the thin air of unsupported debt, that cratered the economy he inhabits. The press hyped both scams, and the public eagerly bought both. But between the bogus balloon and the banks’ bubble, there’s no contest as to which did the most damage to the country. The ultimate joke is that Heene, unlike the reckless gamblers at the top of Citigroup and A.I.G., may be the one with a serious shot at ending up behind bars.
Read More......
