
Friday, December 4, 2009
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Please Tell Me It's Just Another Hoax!
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Christopher Foss
October 26, 2009
So my question for general consumption: What balloon is Frank Rich living in anyway? In defending Richard Heene, little Falcon a.k.a. "balloon boy"'s dad, Rich declares the "balloon boy" incident a "reflection of our time"...
Rich insists we have to "look past the sentimental moral absolutes"...and he asks that we muster some sympathy for the devil, in this case the "Bad Dad," Mr. Heene.
Sure, sympathy's one thing, but to blow up the already hyper-inflated Balloon Boy episode to iconic proportions, suggesting the hoax represents an "epitaph of an era" – is quite another...and, worse, I worry about the potential a widely read editorial like his has to galvanize Fox News conservatives who already make a habit of decrying bleeding heart liberalism with annoying regularity. Must we give these fringy types fodder?
Rich twists the proverbial balloon into all sorts of cartoon shapes when he speculates, as follows: "Richard Heene is the inevitable product of this reigning culture, where “news,” “reality” television and reality itself are hopelessly scrambled ..."
Rich will occasionally demure: "None of this absolves Heene of blame for the damage he may have inflicted on the children he grotesquely used as a supporting cast in his schemes,” he states, “But stupid he’s not. He knew how easy it would be to float ‘balloon boy’ when the demarcation between truth and fiction has been obliterated."
First of all, I wonder how accurate it is to portray Heene as a savvy exploiter of a media climate that "obliterates the demarcation between truth and fiction."
But what is one to make of Rich’s core thesis that Balloon Boy Dad is simply part of the fictionalized news media culture we are all complicit in?
Rich discerns a kind of "poignancy in [Heene's] determination to grab what he and many others see as among the last accessible scraps of the American dream." After all, Heene, a construction worker by trade, had had some difficulty finding work in recent months...(Is there a chance he was too busy appearing on "Wife Swap," the ABC "reality" program and, um, concocting the ornate balloon boy hoax to focus on his usual craft and trade? According to news accounts, Heene spent endless hours with the balloon in his garage).
Rich claims that reality TV programming is "among the country's last dependable job engines" - and so with more than a little inference, Rich is suggesting that Heene was just "at work" when he perpetrated his hoax.
Rich writes: "Heene is a direct descendant of those Americans of the Great Depression who fantasized, usually in vain, that they might find financial salvation if only they could grab a spotlight in show business."
The Heene Hoax, may perhaps reveal a few truths about the state of our news-as-entertainment culture, but I'll go out on a limb here and maintain with “sentimental” certainty that the Heene's hoax is totally indefensible.
The Rich piece which as usual takes up a sizable chunk of the paper's Sunday editorial real estate, betrays a marked bias in his "defense" of Heene, and while it may reflect an understandable desire to factor in broad socio-economic effects that could have played a role in motivating Heene, this sort of slant on the facts does the cause of liberalism – bleeding heart or otherwise – no good at all.
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Cypher discovers SomaFM (where have I been?)
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
April 8th, 2008:
From Boston.com: "Obama foreign policy claim stirs controversy" (Read Sigh-pher's response, below!)
Barack Obama has long argued that he has shown better foreign policy judgment than his remaining presidential rivals, specifically in opposing the Iraq war.
But at a fund-raiser in San Francisco over the weekend, he reportedly made the case that he has more foreign policy experience as well -- a claim getting a lot of blowback from presumptive Republican nominee John McCain and Democratic contender Hillary Clinton.
According to an account posted online on The Huffington Post, Obama was answering a question about what he would look for in a running mate if he wins the nomination. "I would like somebody who knows about a bunch of stuff that I'm not as expert on," he replied. "I think a lot of people assume that might be some kind of military thing to make me look more commander-in-chief-like. Ironically, this is an area -- foreign policy is the area where I am probably most confident that I know more and understand the world better than Senator Clinton or Senator McCain."
Clinton took exception when asked about the comment while making the rounds of the morning TV shows in advance of the long-awaited testimony today by General David Petraeus, the top US commander in Iraq, and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, the top US diplomat.
She laughed, actually, before responding on Fox News. "Well I’m somewhat shocked by that since I don’t see any evidence of it," she said. "This is kind of hard to square with his failure to ever have a single policy hearing on the only responsibility he was given, chairing the European and NATO subcommittee the foreign relations committee.
"I don’t know," she continued. "I’m speechless. Making an assertion like that belies the facts and the record."
Blair Latoff, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee, said in an earlier statement, “Perhaps in an effort to one-up his own ridiculous assertions about John McCain’s record, Barack Obama laughably claimed to have more foreign policy experience than Senator McCain. Even by Obama’s standards, this is a horrifyingly false claim without a shred of supporting evidence. Perhaps the junior Senator from Illinois should focus on explaining to voters what exactly his foreign policy experience is before comparing it to John McCain’s wealth of experience on the issue.”
McCain and Clinton, as members of the Senate Armed Services Committee, will get their chance to question Petraeus and Crocker -- and make their points as candidates -- this morning. Obama will get his turn this afternoon when the two testify before the Foreign Relations Committee.
Sighpher's response:
This is nothing newsworthy here... First of all there is the matter of the context of Barack Obama's remark: he was talking about the qualities he would seek in a VP that would complement his own. He was also speaking in the context of the endless claims by