Oh, No, Not that Pogo Line Again
I always enjoy a deliciously heated rant by Roger Kimball. Today, for example, he fricasees a most worthy target, the New York Times:
Having divested myself of my subscription to The New York Times some years ago, I rarely encounter physical copies of our former paper of record. It always comes as something of a shock when I do. The general smarminess and tendentiousness of the writing somehow always come as a surprise. Even leaving the politics to one side (something, alas, that the Times never does), there is a hard-to-define preposterousness that infuses its pages. Smugness comes into the equation, as does a certain element of pretentiousness. For those of us unused to the rhetorical cocktail, the effect is slightly emetic. All that knowingness, the unstoppable presumption, the fetid clubbiness that binds the paper to its chosen audience: I find it partly distasteful, partly absurd.
Speaking of which, the Times' most revered pundit, Thomas L. Friedman, has this "fresh" observation re responsibility for the Gulf oil gusher:
We cannot fix what ails America unless we look honestly at our own roles in creating our own problems. We — both parties — created an awful set of incentives that encouraged our best students to go to Wall Street to create crazy financial instruments instead of to Silicon Valley to create new products that improve people’s lives. We — both parties — created massive tax incentives and cheap money to make home mortgages available to people who really didn’t have the means to sustain them. And we — both parties — sent BP out in the gulf to get us as much oil as possible at the cheapest price. (Of course, we expected them to take care, but when you’re drilling for oil beneath 5,000 feet of water, stuff happens.)
As Pogo would say, we have met the enemy and he is us.
As Pogo would say? Well, maybe he would have said it--some time back in 1970, the vintage of the saying. In between then and now, it's been quoted like maybe a gazillion times, and thus officially strayed into cliche territory ages ago. In 2010, do people even know--or care--about Pogo? More to the point, if that's the best Tom can come up with under the circumstances, I think he's pretty much admitting that he's completely tapped out.
6 comments:
That quote from Walk Kelly's Pogo is from long before the '70s, more like the late '40s or early '50s. It was in some of the Pogo books my folks had, the ones I learned to read on.
Unfortunately that helped be be a damned ol' Democrat right up until I voted against Jimmeh Carter.
At the risk of showing my age I actually remember which of the Pogo charectors represented McCarty and Nixon.
Actually, Tom, we have met the enemy and he is you and your fellow travelers.
The current administration has turned down oil spill mitigation help from every country that has offered assistance.
Obama and the democrats.
When Bush warned about the insolvency of Fannie May and Freddie Mac, it was Obama and the democrats who stopped any reform.
It was Friedman and the democrats who claimed that the Iraq war was lost. It was Obama, Hillary and the democrats who attacked General Petraeus' surge.
It was the MSM who refused to vet Obama,and hid or minimized his inadequacies and it is Tom Friedman who has been a loyal Obama booster.
Sorry, Tom Friedman, the enemy is you.
Yes, I know it's a twist on an older quote--"We have met the enemy and he is ours." That doesn't make the line any more topical. In fact, I think Friedman would have seemed, well, smarter, if he had paraphrased a Shakespeare quotation: "The fault, dear Barack, lies not in our stars but in ourselves..."
The sad thing is, even when Friedman makes sense for a few seconds - mentioning the perverse incentives contributing to the real estate bubble, for instance - he follows it up with complete nonsense. Sure, we all sent BP out into the gulf... but who mandated that BP drill under 5,000 feet of water? Don't think that was "both parties," Tom.
His style is a whole different topic, which you and Kimball cover well. As a shoddy writer myself, I'll skip that topic entirely, hah.
When you write for the NYT, you are obligated to appear unbiased, using inclusive possessives, when fault lies with liberals. The other way around.....no so much. Good boy Tom.
You live to drivel another day.
And why are we drilling in the Gulf at all, i/o in Oklahoma, Texas, or Alaska, where, let's face it, it would be a lot easier to cap an out-of-control gusher than under 5000 feet of water? Presumably its the tangled and impenetrable web of environmental and other regulations, mostly promulgated by the Democrats.
Most sensible people recognize that, if we can't have the Constitution Party or at least the Libertarians at the helm, we'd do significantly better with both the exec and the legislative branches in the hands of the Repubs than the spendthrift quasi-Socialist Democrats.
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