So what went wrong? According to Barack Obama, the problem is he overestimated you dumb rubes' ability to appreciate what he's been doing for you. "That I do think is a mistake of mine," the president told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "I think the assumption was if I just focus on policy, if I just focus on this provision or that law or if we're making a good rational decision here, then people will get it."
But you schlubs aren't that smart. You didn't get it. And Barack Obama is determined to see that you do. So the president has decided that he needs to start "speaking directly to the American people."
Wait, wait! Come back! Don't all stampede for the hills! He only gave (according to CBS News's Mark Knoller) 158 interviews and 411 speeches in his first year. That's more than any previous president -- and maybe more than all of them put together. But there may still be some show out there that didn't get its exclusive Obama interview -- I believe the top-rated Grain & Livestock Prices Report -- 4 a.m. Update with Herb Torpormeister on WZZZ-AM, Dead Buzzard Gulch Junction's Newstalk Leader, is still waiting to hear back from the White House.
But what will the president be saying in all these extra interviews? In that interview about how he hadn't given enough interviews, he also explained to George Stephanopoulos what that wacky Massachusetts election was all about:
"The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office," said Obama. "People are angry and they're frustrated, not just because of what's happened in the last year or two years but what's happened over the last eight years."
Got it. People are so angry and frustrated at George W. Bush that they're voting for Republicans. In Massachusetts. Boy, I can't wait for that 159th interview.
Presumably, the president isn't stupid enough actually to believe what he said. But it's dispiriting to discover he's stupid enough to think we're stupid enough to believe it....
Posted by: Mike ||
01/23/2010 11:41 ||
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Link ||
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#1
The proof is Obama's election to the presidency.
Posted by: ed ||
01/23/2010 11:54 Comments ||
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#2
The bright folks on the Left think that the whole problem is that they haven't explained their ideas and policies to us in a sufficiently convincing way. That's why we rubes don't get it.
To the contrary, they have explained it sufficiently, and that's why we say, and vote, NO!
Posted by: Steve White ||
01/23/2010 12:09 Comments ||
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#3
Klassik Kommentary!
Got it. People are so angry and frustrated at George W. Bush that they're voting for Republicans. In Massachusetts. Boy, I can't wait for that 159th interview.
#6
Obviously we don't understand it, because how could anyone oppose it? The idea of legitimate dissent is apparently dead and gone. We understood it just fine, and we hated it! Is that so hard to understand?
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/23/2010 15:06 Comments ||
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#9
I keep telling you folks that this is one time the Zero is correct. The same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office
What this idiot and most of the idiots in DC don't get is WHAT THAT THING IS!!!!!
That thing is extreme anger and frustration that the corrupt financial dealings that got us into this mess are on both sides. Mostly Democrats but too many 'pubs too are nothing more than cogs in the machine that accepts millions from the fat-cats and return billions through shady laws. This is rent-seeking and corporatism all the way through. That's what is driving the anger.
Yes there are some other ancillary issues but they can be looked as as part of this main one.
Transparency, an end to ear marks and an end to punitive regulations at the behest of the big boys to punish the small fry, those are the things that need to be done.
#12
Can't believe people used to think this guy was smart. Sheesh.
As for explaining things, liberals don't do that. The more they explain, the less people want to vote for them. So they have become expert in not telling people what they are really up to.
Now that folks are starting to figure out what Obama is about, he thinks he can put the genie back in the bottle. He's going to go around trying to obfuscate and confuse in hopes of softening the opposition to his actual policies. Typical f&$king marxist bulls#@t.
#2
It was an excellent presentation. As usual Glen Beck had all his facts straight. However, sooner or later, the Left will try to rebut this; and, as always, fail miserably.
#4
Beck is a pathological liar. He refuses to retract his statement that his mother died by suicide, when officials found same to be an accidental drowning. Beck's lies are particularly depraved, given that authorities found no discernible motive for suicide. Beck concocted one in his blame-tossing mind. He doesn't cry for his country; he cries for his unstable self.
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/23/2010 17:45 Comments ||
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#6
Mr. Wife has a great-uncle who walked into Lake Erie and drowned several decades ago, at a time when the uncle was suffering the twin deficits of mental and physical old age. The death was ruled by the authorities to be accidental, and so his great-aunt got the insurance money after all. The authorities can choose to be kind as well as... difficult, Crineck Trotsky2972, especially in smaller communities.
Posted by: Frank G ||
01/23/2010 8:30 Comments ||
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#2
Well, the suddeness and thoroughness of his change coupled with the trigger (from the article) certainly seems to point to some mental condition to me.
I was a close follower of LGF for years until the comments got too predictable, voluminous and generally spiteful so I missed the blow-up.
But if the trigger was as portrayed here then I'm afraid Charles went bonkers.
#3
And I don't think it was all that sudden. It was a rolling flameout, and his positions shifted as he cut connections. That's the sign of someone who builds his world-view based on external feedback rather than intrinsic principle, and who relies on a pretty black-and-white friends-and-demons relationship dynamic.
I say he isn't a lunatic, he's an asshole.
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
01/23/2010 9:35 Comments ||
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#4
This paragraph sums it up well:
Thus in retrospect it also seems clear that the Vlaams Belang blog war, with its attendant scary buzzwords (fascist, racist, Nazi), gave Johnson the intellectual cover to do something he wanted to do anyway, which was to conduct a kind of public self-purge of the alliances he acquired on the road to fame.
#5
Good article. CJ did some good work a while back (Rathergate, exposing "fauxtography" in news coverage of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, etc.), but lately he's become paranoid, obsessive and extremely tedious.
And, in the end, irrelevant.
Posted by: Dave D. ||
01/23/2010 10:25 Comments ||
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#6
A lot of that stuff, like with the memo, was when he was jumping on someone else's bandwagon.
#7
I have been banned from LGF after questioning the hype of Global Warming (in a well-mannered, well-reasoned way quoting scientists). Happened to many others, too.
CJ runs his blog like an absolute dictator. If he changes his views, you have to, as well, or he will ban you. We have always been at war with East Asia.
Of course most people prefer to be on blogs where you meet others you feel compatible with. This is how I feel here. Same wavelength and all that. Civil, snarky debate. Just great.
But that doesn't mean you have to agree with every group opinion 100% In fact, echo chambers are boring.
LGF will slowly vanish. Nobody needs a watered down Daily Kos.
Posted by: European Conservative ||
01/23/2010 15:55 Comments ||
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#8
What's happened to Charles makes me sad. I'll always be grateful for his Rathergate and fauxtography work, but he's gone off the deep end.
I haven't been there in a long time and don't intend to go again. I even dropped him from my computer "favorites." :-(
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
01/23/2010 16:14 Comments ||
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Posted by: ed ||
01/23/2010 19:28 Comments ||
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#12
Hmm, must have overwritten the comment:
Stick a fork in him. He's done.
Posted by: ed ||
01/23/2010 19:30 Comments ||
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#13
Damn--nice to read a well-written summary of all that transpired, especially since I wasn't there to witness the unveiling of his true nature.
I used to be a daily LGF reader, but felt that the site was becoming nothing but a hatefest and stopped visiting long ago. The shortcut remained in my "Favorites" collecting e-dust well before the flame wars broke out. When I finally heard about them, I re-visited the site, saw what it had become, and deleted the link altogether.
I continue to see blogs post attacks on Johnson (especially singling out his bland photography) now and then. Really, the best thing to do is forget this guy. His megalomania only feeds on the attention, be it good or bad.
Speaking of which, I had forgotten about him until I saw this article. I'll go back to that happy state soon enough.
Posted by: Dar ||
01/23/2010 20:38 Comments ||
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#1
I always assumed that Green Footballs was a 1960s-'70s reference to Dexedrine. aka "greenies", they were briefly popular among pro football players.
#2
It seems borderline ridiculous that the political character of an extremist Belgian party, which in the last parliamentary election captured just 17 seats out of 150 in the Chamber of Representatives
Just 17 seats?
Thats a large number for a third party.
Otherwise it appears perfectly legal to advocate separating Flemish and French in Belgium, but not christian and muslim. Go figure.
#3
The article brings up a question, but in the usual squirrelly big-think journalist fashion, refuses to actually make a judgment. That question is - has Johnson gone bonkers, or was he always an asshole, and 9/11 just scared him straight for longer than some of the other reformed assholes.
There's a good argument to be made that he's just reverting to norms. He doesn't have the medical issues and journalistic-political history which makes it fairly obvious what happened to his fellow Horseman, Andrew Sullivan. Nobody ever heard of Charles Johnson before the blogsphere blew up, and those that had were a bunch of tea-toking jazz retreads.
I have a natural bias against artists and those with an artistic temperment. I don't think it's an accident that so many successful fascists were failed artists. Johnson's made his LGF Yenan a barbed-wire gulag. That itself is damnation enough.
The rest is noise.
Posted by: Mitch H. ||
01/23/2010 9:31 Comments ||
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#4
I recall Eric Hoffer covered these cases very well.
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