Something strange in Staunton's water supply?
In the Daily Progress veteran political writer Bob Gibson zeroes in on the role that Rep. Virgil Goode’s now infamous is playing in Virginia’s real world of politics, and in a somewhat distorted reflection of that world -- Virginia’s teaming blogosphere.
“...
Goode’s unapologetic comments about cutting off immigration from the Middle East and warning against more Muslims in the Congress capture a spirit of anti-immigrant fervor generally popular among rank-and-file Republicans. More moderate Republicans from U.S.
Sen. John W. Warner, R-Alexandria, to Rep.
Thomas M. Davis III, R-Fairfax County, don’t speak for that large segment of the GOP faithful. Goode is carrying the ball for a lot of people in the economically distressed southern half of his sprawling rural district.
”
Then Gibson turns his sights on a parallel brouhaha that has splattered from one edge of the blogosphere to the other over the holidays:
“...
Waldo Jaquith, a prolific Charlottesville blogger on the left side of the political spectrum, drew the line at a few graphic images one of the pro-Goode, anti-Muslim bloggers posted depicting the beheading of an American in Iraq by Islamic terrorists. He removed the offending images and the blogger from his well-read political blog aggregator. Jaquith runs one of the few aggregators that shows every blog entry on about 170 Virginia political blogs - left, right, center or out there -- offering a political commons for discussion and well-rounded reading.
“Formerly known as the Virginia Political Blogs, Jaquith’s commons now appears as Waldo’s Virginia Political Blogroll, born last week after a 132-part discussion about his decision to delist the blogger who thought photos of a beheaded American added heft to his point of view.
“A few right-wing blogs named after donkeys and dogs have taken themselves out of the commons, or have been tossed out, presumably to go where grass is greener and debate is leaner, or more one-sided.”
Click
It seems the Boycott Waldo movement was mostly centered in the Staunton area.
I don’t know how many different people it really involved, but I'm left to wonder why Republicans in that part of Virginia seem so different than others?
Or, could there be a hidden reason beyond clashing brands of conservatism for a clique of rightwing bloggers to have turned on Jaquith, then their fellow Republican bloggers in the ODBA. What would make them do that?
Well, I don’t know what sort of plots may have been really been behind this situation. But maybe there’s a bizarre reason for all this bizarre behavior, a reason no one has thought of.
Maybe it’s even something as off-the-wall as this: There’s a Werner Herzog film called “Heart of Glass” (1976) that is supposedly drawn from a true story in which a whole village in Eastern Europe wigged out because a natural hallucinogen was contaminating the water supply.
It put the entire population in a zombie-like trance. Sounds a little like some parties I almost remember in the 1970s, but I digress..
.
It’s said that director Herzog actually hypnotized the actors in order to get them to perform as strangely as they do in this movie.
So, maybe something weird has gotten into the water out there in the part of Virginia where Interstate 64 intersects with Interstate 81?
And, if some nefarious somebody did slip a mickey into the public water supply for those bloggers that Gibson mentioned -- named after donkeys and dogs -- who in hell would do such a thing?
Lefty bloggers? Communists, or maybe Muslims?
The recent in the Virginia blogosphere, about the value and propriety of a mischievous blogger using stills of captives being beheaded by terrorists, has just reminded me of that tart Cold War black comedy.
Ripper
When I saw Dr.
Strangelove as a teenager it knocked me out. It was liberating! I loved it then and still do.
The blatant and backward anti-Muslim prejudices being exhibited by some of the defenders of both Goode and the aforementioned beheading post have reminded me of the same sort of goofy anti-commie attitude -- like that of General Ripper -- which was in the air when I was growing up.
Now I think some of the tough-guy bloggers, who claim to have such a yen for spilling Muslim blood, would be happy to install Gen. Ripper as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, if they could.
Their cartoon-like swagger is pure Gen. Ripper.
A few of Gen.
Jack D. Ripper’s choicest lines from Dr. Strangelove are as follows:
“.
..Your Commie has no regard for human life.
Not even his own.”
“..
.He [Clemenceau] said war was too important to be left to the generals. When he said that, 50 years ago, he might have been right.
But today, war is too important to be left to politicians. They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
”
“...
Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face.”
Maybe some of my readers have their own favorite Dr. Strangelove lines that I overlooked in this post?
.
All in all, it’s been quite a year for Virginia’s blogosphere. Two aggregator sites were established -- and -- which have magnified the reach of blogs on the left, right and wherever, by creating a new way to easily follow a particular story as it ripples across the landscape, or just peruse the news and views.
They provided an overview that had not existed before.
Two blogger confabs were held: the in Charlottesville in June, and the in August. Topics to do with political blogging were discussed; presentations were made by invited individuals who served/posed as experts.
With both conventions there were bloggers who came away from them singing the praises of the collegial spirit they found, although both events also has their critics.
There have been other efforts/proposals during the past year which sought to have bloggers from both sides of the aisle working together. Conaway Haskins’ was one with merit.
Another was spawned here at SLANTblog -- and pulled off with with a great deal of help from -- it was a call to bloggers to try being more original for three days of posting. It was dubbed .
Then came the somewhat unexpected rapid tightening of the Webb vs.
Allen senatorial race. A chilly, more partisan wind began to blow, as the season changed and the nation came to Virginia’s blogosphere to find out what the was going on. We all watched in amazement as the originally thought-to-be-unbeatable incumbent committed YouTube suicide before our very eyes.
Since that election, the result of which tilted control of the U.S. Senate to Team Donkey, the grumbling denials of reality by the bitterest of Republican bloggers has torn at the fabric of what bloggers during the summer saw as nonpartisan, common interests.
Now, at year’s end, there’s an effort afoot in the Virginia blogosphere, coming from a handful of rightwingers who apparently want to do whatever injury they can to Virginia Political Blogs. They are currently trying to sell the absurd idea that Waldo Jaquith removed a blog from his VPB aggregator’s blog roll because the hard-hitting propaganda being used by that anonymous blogger to defend Virgil Goode’s awkward position was just too damn effective. That it had cleverly one-upped some lefty bloggers, so it had to go.
Horsefeathers! That is a cheap and dirty effort to create an instant myth out of thin air. Put it in the echo chamber and see who will believe it.
Waldo removed the material because he wanted no part of promulgating sicko material he felt was beyond the pale (decapitation photos) appearing on his web site. Remember folks, it’s his web site, he has charged no one a fee to have their posts amplified by appearing there, and he has made no promises to the bloggers.
Is this rather nefarious effort being pushed by bloggers, who are demonstrating their conclusion that having a aggregator site -- which automatically puts all their commentary beside all the commentary of their opponents -- has not been working to their benefit?
Generally speaking, their repetitive fear-mongering and sloganeering to support George Allen didn’t do much to carry the day against the arguments presented by bloggers writing in support of Jim Webb.
More recently, they weren’t really helping Virgil Goode with his self-inflicted troubles much, either. Sorry, A-Team and B-Team, and GGD, but it’s true.
Then came the V-bomb (V for violence). A blogger ( ) posted pictures of terrorists decapitating their captives, which meant they would also automatically appear on Waldo‘s aggregator site.
When Waldo saw the pictures he promptly removed them by deleting the link to the V-bomb blogger.
He says that was the only quick way to get rid of the pictures on VPB.
So, the above-mentioned pack of conservative bloggers now wants to hound Waldo out of the aggregator biz, calling him a selective censor who makes his calls based on partisan considerations. Throw in some jealousy over the fact that Waldo Jaquith is frequently quoted on blogging topics by the mainstream press and you’ve got the foul-smelling witch’s brew that is bubbling in the blogosphere.
For some background on this story click , , and . To find more, go to one of the aggregators mentioned above. There’s plenty to read, if you are so inclined.
With some of the same spirit used to attack the Sorensen Institute’s blogger convention as being too lefty, some of the same players are again seeking to divide the burgeoning blogosphere into name-calling partisan camps.
This pack may next ask Waldo to remove their links from his links list of blogs-to-be-presented at VPB. If they object so strongly to what he is doing -- why not?
However, for that ploy to pay off they would have to convince some of the more respected conservative bloggers to take up their side in this totally contrived war of words, and also push away from VPB.
Will the heavyweight conservative and Libertarian bloggers follow V-bombing GGD and his/her barking pack of supporters in trying to kill off VPB, by pulling out of Waldo's VPB blogroll?
Stay tuned .
.. the answer will be apparent in the next few days.
The return of James S. “Jaws” Gilmore III James S.“Jaws” Gilmore III is back in the news. He’s thinking about running for president in 2008, or so he says. It’s also said he is considering another run for governor in Virginia in 2009.
Well, I can’t imagine another candidate Democrats would rather run against in either election. And, I must wonder which Republicans in their right minds, or left, have actually asked Gilmore to run for president, or any other office. I suspect it’s mostly his idea.
Perhaps the reader wonders why I slapped the nickname “Jaws” on Jim Gilmore. Well, a little over five years ago, when his own dismal disapproval ratings as governor were below sea level, he launched a commission, a Shark Task Force, to study the peril of shark attacks on Virginians.
With the news of a pair of shark attacks off the nearby coast, Gilmore must have thought he heard opportunity knocking on the door.
Immediately, the semi-savvy player donned an imaginary pith helmet and khaki shark-hunting outfit to strike a pose. Standing in defiance of an enemy that no one could possibly defend, Gilmore must have imagined his popularity would soon soar again.
Note: Washington Business Journal (SEPT.
5, 2001): “In response to the recent shark attacks at Virginia Beach and in North Carolina, Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore has convened a task force to examine the issue. The shark task force will be headed by Secretary of Natural Resources John Paul Woodley, State Del.
Terrie Suit (R-Virginia Beach) and several marine experts ...
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush recently said that the media attention to the recent spate of attacks is overblown.”
Blithely ignoring the sitting president’s brother, Gilmore might have cocked his pith helmet to one side, to listen to what sounded like, “Knock, knock.
..”
In 1997 Gilmore had galloped to triumph with his No-More-Car-Tax mantra.
Virginians liked his blue collar style. Then, as governor, he stubbornly stayed on that same tired workhorse issue through his four-year term, until it collapsed in a heap in the spring of 2001. Meanwhile, Gilmore’s handling of the Hugh Finn right-to-die-with-dignity case was diabolically clumsy; his handling of the Sally Mann censorship flap at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts was bull-in-a-china-shop clumsy.
So, with some justification Governor Gilmore is mostly remembered for his stubbornness and his awkwardness. Yet, his boldest move of all -- the Shark Task Force -- should not be forgotten.
“Knock, knock.
...
”
“Who’s there?” Gilmore may have whispered, thinking he heard the shark musical theme from the movie “Jaws” playing in the background.
Two months after the launching of Gilmore’s Shark Task Force, Republican Mark Earley lost in Virginia, handing the keys to the Governor’s Mansion to Democrat Mark Warner.
Gilmore wasn’t National Chairman of the Grand Old Party long enough to do much more than be remembered for being fired, and, of course, denying that he was fired.
Note: USA Today (Nov. 30, 2001): “Gilmore resigned, effective in January, saying he wasn’t willing to commit to the extensive travel and time away from family required to prepare for the 2002 elections.
He leaves after less than a year in office, a period marked by disappointing elections...
”
Well, as history unfolded, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 overshadowed all else in the news for a long time. So, lame duck Gilmore and his Virginia Shark Task Force’s findings were ignored on December 14, 2001.
Furthermore, the first sentence of the VSTF report sort of made it unnecessary to read the rest of it.
Note: “In more than 390 years since the English settlement of Virginia there had never been a fatal shark attack in Virginia waters until September 1, 2001 when a 10-year old boy named David Peltier was attacked near the Little Island Fishing Pier at Sandbridge...
”
The report went on to say that sharks usually live in the ocean and every now and then one of them bites a person who is also in the ocean.
Soon, late at night, presidential hopeful Gilmore may hear a familiar sound. “Knock, knock.
..”
Putting his ear to the door, Gilmore might ask, “Who’s there?
”
From the other side of the door the shark music will be there, again. But maybe this time there be more -- a voice! It’s a voice sounding something like a popular former Saturday Night Live guest host, Sen.
John McCain.
“Candygram.”
“There was a brief period of wishful thinking after the Baker/Hamilton Commission report was issued last week that W’s ‘Axis of Evil’ might have died along with any real hope of winning in Iraq -- but no.
“Only days afterward, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice not only confirmed that we would NOT speak to either Iran, an axis member, or Syria, a serious runner-up, but also said she sees the Middle East as being ‘rearranged’ in ways that provide the United States with a ‘new strategic context’ and a ‘clarifying moment.
’
“One could agree with the clarifying moment part, but only in the realm of sarcasm...
”
Click ; it is the view of a trained eye. Word of the Year?
Geoffrey Nunberg’s latest , presented yesterday on NPR’s Fresh Air, examined the contenders for Word of the Year. He mentioned possibilities from “truthiness” to “netroots.” Nunberg then explained the case for why “ ” ought to win the prize.
“It’s a strong field this year, what with contenders like Islamo-fascism, netroots, dwarf planet, buzzkill, and ‘the decider.’ Or if you were looking simply for the most bounce to the ounce, you might decide to go with macaca, an item whose first and only appearance in American public discourse could be credited with tipping the Senate to the Democrats. Given the razor-thin margin in the Virginia Senate race, it’s a fair bet that George Allen would have kept his seat if not for the flap when he used the word to refer to an Indian-American at a campaign rally and then tried to explain it away as a term he’d made up on the spot without knowing what it meant.
If that was so, it was certainly a bit of freakish bad luck that led him to tumble on a word that happens to be a racial slur in the North African French spoken by his mother...
”
Eventually, the linguist’s crisp essay looked more deeply than most commentators can manage into Michael Richard’s diatribe/meltdown in a comedy club -- with its uncomfortable aftermath of apologies -- and the key word used by Richards.
By the way, Nunberg is a professor at UC Berkeley’s School of Information and a researcher at the Center for the Study of Language and Information at Stanford University. Click .
Alas, peace is still waiting for its chance
In February of 1964 the Beatles made their initial appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show. At the time most people probably didn’t connect the events, but those two appearances were only three months after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Surely, the somber mood of the nation following the jolts -- Bang! Kennedy. Bang!
Oswald. -- had something to do with why those early Beatles recordings cut through the heavy airwaves with such verve.
Clearly, there has been no explosion in the American pop music scene since -- pow!
-- with anything near the equivalent impact of Liverpool’s Fab Four.
Then, in 1980, the murder of moody John Lennon had an impact on the public few would have predicted. It was as if a world leader had been gunned down on the street in Manhattan.
Lennon’s obvious contributions as a songwriter and musician were huge. However, it was the working class hero’s tart integrity and delight in taking risks that set him apart from his teen idol counterparts, many of whom toyed with politics and social causes as if they were merely hairdos or dance crazes.
With the Vietnam War still underway in the early ‘70s, President Richard Nixon looked at Lennon and saw the raw power to galvanize a generation’s anti-establishment sentiments.
Fearful of that potential, the Nixon administration did everything it could to hound Lennon out of the country. The details of that nasty little campaign are just as bewildering as some of the better known abuses that flowed from the Dirty Tricks Department in the White House during those scandal-ridden days.
With two-and-a-half decades of perspective on Lennon’s death, it’s possible to see that even if that particular nut-case (a man I choose not to name because I refuse to add in any way to his celebrity) hadn’t pulled the trigger, it could easily have been another one; there were bullets out there with John Lennon’s name on them.
Like the comets of each generation are bound to do, sometimes Lennon burned too bright for his own good.
And speaking of assassins, at this time I’m also reminded of an item that ran in the Nashville Banner on Feb. 24, 1987.
The article began with this:
“Two Nashville musicians remained free on $500 bond today after they went on a magazine-shredding tear …to protest People magazine’s current cover story.”
The two musicians were Gregg Wetzel, and Mike McAdam. As members of the they were fixtures in Richmond’s Rock ‘n’ Roll scene in the early ‘80s.
By the time the story mentioned above was published, the pair had established themselves as respected sidemen in Nashville -- Wetzel on piano and McAdam on guitar.
In a nutshell, Gregg and Mike became incensed at seeing the magazine with a cover story about John Lennon’s murderer. They felt spotlighting the killer in that way might encourage another deranged wannabe to take gun in hand to go after whoever.
So they fortified themselves with an adequate dose of what-it-takes -- legend has it they were drinking out of an Elvis decanter -- and set out on a mission to destroy the cover of every copy of the offensive publication they could find on the strip. As the reader may know, this sort of endeavor is best done in the wee hours.
In the course of their fifth stop, at a Nashville convenience store, the avenging angels were stopped by the cops and charged with “malicious mischief.
” Shortly afterwards, in a interview about the incident, McAdam said, “If another guy like [name withheld again] sees that, he might think he can get on the cover of People magazine by killing a politician or artist.”
Bravo!
Primary among the reasons John Lennon was selected for the kill by his stalking murderer was he had a rare ability to move people.
In that sense, Lennon was slain for the same reason as political figures such as Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy. Two thousand years ago Jesus H.
Christ was taken out of the game for much the same reason: He challenged people to change; to take a chance on a life based on something better than might making right.
Although Nixon miscalculated Lennon’s intentions, the soon-to-be-disgraced president was probably right about the former Beatle’s potential to focus the anti-establishment sentiments in the air. What Nixon didn’t grasp was that Lennon -- in spite of his mischievous streak -- was really more interested in promoting peace than fomenting revolution.
Even today, some of Lennon’s best post-Beatles cuts seem fresh, they still have the feeling of being experimental. Now, well into stranger days, indeed, chance we wonder? .
.. imagine.
Update: Click a Kate Bredimus story about the history of the Good Humor Band at Richmond.com., penned in 2002.
Then, the following postscript has just come in, via email, from the old magazine-shredder himself, Gregg Wetzel:
“The cops looked at me and McAdam, decided we weren’t exactly flight risks and entrusted our transport to the pokey with an attractive female officer, all by her lonesome. On the way to the hoosegow, Mickey hit on the cop. True story.
”
“What is it about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert that makes them so refreshing and attractive to a wide variety of viewers (including those so-important younger ones)?
I would argue that, more than anything else, it is that they enthusiastically call bullshit. Calling bullshit, of course, used to be central to journalism as well as to comedy. And we happen to be in a period in our history in which the substance in question is running particularly deep.
The relentless spinning is enough to make anyone dizzy, and some of our most important political battles are about competing views of reality more than they are about policy choices...
”
OK. One of the most important things the mainstream print media and broadcasters do every day is to decide what is news and what isn’t.
Partisans squawk all the time about biased coverage of the news, which happens.
And, it can be galling when a bias leaks into what are supposed to be news reports, rather than editorials, OpEds, etc. Yet, the real power to promote or diminish people and ideas comes from being able to decide to put a story on the front page, or page 37, or no page at all.
Now comes the story of the exchange of words between President George Bush and Senator-elect Jim Webb at a recent White House reception.
For background -- in case you’ve been on another planet this week -- here are links to two stories that will give you the lowdown on this brouhaha: “ ”; “ ”.
What I’m saying here is that this story about ruffled black-tie feathers at what was a traditional social function is a page 37 item; it should have appeared in the Style section of a daily newspaper. It should have merited about 300 words, at most, and gone away the next day.
Instead, it has been at the top of the political news for days.
Why?
My answer indicts three factions: This story has been seen as useful by Bush supporters, as well as Webb supporters.
And it has served a bunch of editors looking for an easy way to come up with enough copy to fill a political news space that has to be filled every day.
My answer is another angle on the bullshit factor in today’s way of reporting news by the mainstream media. What I’m saying here is that this little exchange between Bush and Webb meant little, if anything.
If the reports about the incident are accurate, both men chose to pass on the opportunity to ignore a little barb in the words of the other. They are the same age, from very different backgrounds, and my guess is they don’t like one another all that much.
If Bush’s supporters want to think Webb was being boorish .
.. so what.
Who cares? If Webb’s supporters want to think Bush was being imperious ..
. so what. What’s new in any of that?
That is exactly what those groups of partisans thought last week, too.
Of course, fooled into thinking something important had happened, the political blogosphere exploded with outrage. The Bush backers unanimously see Webb as a hothead who will fail miserably in DeeCee.
The Webb backers see Webb as a bigger hero than ever, because he bucked up to a president they loathe.
Not much news in any of that, either.
Furthermore, to suggest that this tempest in a teapot is indicative of what will be Webb’s inability to understand the sausage-making Washington culture, or to work with his colleagues, is pure spin.
To me, all it says about Webb is that it looks like he plans to be the same guy, no matter who he’s talking with. Perhaps Webb is going to try to avoid the game of being off-the-record or two-faced, at certain times, with certain people. He wants to be the same guy all the time.
So, the news is that Webb plans to continue to be Webb. And guess what -- Bush is planning to keep being Bush. End of story.
, same day.
T.
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