What’s Wrong with Washington? Great column on what idiots the punditry are by Wolcott

[Hamlette]

Washington has always been out of sync with the rest of America, but since Obama’s election, Beltway pundits seem more stubbornly and stupendously irrelevant than ever. Have three decades of being wired for Republican power blown their jittery, Twittering minds? If it were possible to reach into the television screen and throttle the scrawny neck of the Washington establishment, shake it until the dice rattled and the stem came loose, would that be wrong? Would that be considered unsporting? It pains me, as a bringer of dharma and light, to feel driven to imaginary acts of symbolic violence, but even a man of peace can take only so much until frustration blazes to the upper floor. Watching ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos, for instance, is like receiving an engraved invitation to apoplexy.

snip
Only within the Beltway popcorn popper could Gingrich, whose serpent tongue and ogre ego did so much to polarize discourse in the 1990s and abort reform, be considered a foxy catch. Only in Washington, D.C., could Gingrich, a magpie of futurist jargon and a bumptious opportunist, pass himself off as an iconoclastic force and centrifuge of ideas, a cross between Buckminster Fuller and Che Guevara leading a commando raid on the buffet table. And only within the punditocracy could “hyper-bipartisan” be bandied about as an aphrodisiac.

ship
I wasn’t brought up in a crate. I understand that one of the purposes of bipartisanship is to cram something difficult and necessary down the American people’s gullets for which neither party has the fortitude to assume full responsibility. It’s a way of turning a possible gangplank into a teeter-totter. But it only works with a willing partner, one reasonably sane and responsible, which can’t be said of a Republican Party that invites McCain-Palin proletarian spokesmodel “Joe the Plumber” (Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher) to be a special guest at one of its congressional Conservative Working Group meetings to advise on the stimulus package, and tries to make the salt-marsh mouse the symbol of pork-barrel spending. (“Mr. Gingrich sees the stimulus bill as his party’s ticket to a revival in 2010, as Republicans decry what they see as pork-barrel spending for projects like marsh-mouse preservation,” wrote New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg, never mind that there was no such provision in the bill, as the Times later acknowledged.) No matter how tightly the Republicans hole up in their huddle, say no to everything including the color of the sky, Obama will get pious flak from pseudo-moderates such as the Daily News’s columnist Michael Goodwin (a frequent panelist on CNN’s Lou Dobbs’s angry-white-men sweat lodge) for failing to entice enough Republican strays from the herd. In Washington, bipartisan cover confers legitimacy, but the American people are past that, understanding that one side has delegitimized itself. As Glenn Greenwald wrote at Salon, “The reason that Americans voted overwhelmingly in favor of Democrats in the last two elections and overwhelmingly against Republicans is because they want Democratic policies and not Republican policies. They drove Republicans out of office in massive numbers because they don’t want Republicans and their policies governing the country.” This realization has been slow to sunflower inside the official consciousness of our overseers. Greenwald: “The political establishment has never come to terms with, and the media establishment just refuses to acknowledge, how deeply unpopular and discredited the GOP is among most Americans in the wake of the eight-year Bush disaster.”

snip
But there’s also the peril that what Josh Marshall calls the para-government (the journalists, lobbyists, think-tankers, caterers) will become wired so tight that it becomes a closed system responding entirely to its own jumpy nerves. In a New Republic article about Politico, the Web-print hybrid manimal run by Washington Post stalwarts John Harris and Jim VandeHei, Gabriel Sherman reports that the columns are formatted to be read on BlackBerrys by political junkies on the fly, and racing stripes must be earned every day. “The motto around the Politico newsroom is to ‘win the morning, win the afternoon’—by which editors mean that Politico’s stories need to be the most talked about and cited in that day’s news cycle.” So we’ve gone from “Who won the week?,” a favorite question on the Sunday-morning chat shows, to “Who won the afternoon?,” time and thought processes being diced into shorter and shorter segments until we reach the 140-character capsule of Twitter, the social-networking micro-platform which Washington movers have taken to with a bang because their thumbs and narcissism don’t get near enough exercise. Howard Kurtz, media columnist for The Washington Post, relayed Meet the Press host David Gregory’s pre-show preparation: “Guests should arrive anytime now. This is a good time for me to go thru my q’s one last time. Maybe a bagel b4 air.” Yes, by all means, go for the bagel, and may its voyage through the digestive tract be a propitious one. As the traditional news business collapses around them like glacier walls, Beltway illuminati are executing tighter and tighter spirals of self-referentiality as they pursue the tweet smell of success. Chris Matthews’s antsiness used to be a comic novelty. Now it’s the studious norm. Is it any wonder the big picture has shrunk into a handful of pixels?

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/05/james-wolcott200905

Read the whole thing. Very funny and spot on.

[grasswire]

1. a good read, thanks (eom)

[Captain Hilts]

2. You forget that right out the gate Sally Quinn and David Broder declared that Clinton had "trashed"

the White House. This was before 1996.

They didn't like a poor kid who made it Big to crash their inbred party.

Idiots.

[Orsino]

3. Cool, but he's avoiding the obvious root cause.

Gingrich wouldn't have a platform were it not for right-wing media conglomeration. We let big Money buy our discourse, of course they pump it full of pro-corporate, anti-family pigs like him.