corrente

Juan Cole has an even-more-must-read-than-usual post up today. It's gotten a good amount of attention because of the conclusion of his evisceration of Jonah whatsisname (a hint on the outcome: in a battle of wits, Jonah is unarmed) but hidden down toward the end is one of the best summaries yet written of just why morons like Jonah, in their witless ramblings, are dangerous: they are serving as leading lemmings in our march to the cliffs:

Cranky rich people hire sharp-tongued and relatively uninformed young people all the time and put them on the mass media to badmouth the poor, spread bigotry, exalt mindless militarism, promote anti-intellectualism, and ensure generally that rightwing views come to predominate even among people who are harmed by such policies. One of their jobs is to marginalize progressives by smearing them as unreliable.

The corporate media failed the United States in 2002-2003. The US government failed the American people in 2002-2003. That empty, and often empty-headed punditry, which Jon Stewart destroyed so skilfully, played a big role in dragooning the American people into a wasteful and destructive elective war that threatens to warp American society and very possibly to end the free Republic we have managed to maintain for over 200 years. Already severe challenges to our sacred Constitution have been launched by the Right. Goldberg is a big proponent of "profiling," which is to say, spying on people because of their ethnicity rather than because of anything they as individuals have done wrong. That is only the beginning, if such persons maintain their influence on public discourse.