Maybe the Thrill is Gone for Chris Matthews?

Back in 2008, MSNBC anchor Chris Matthews made this "objective assessment" of Barack Obama:



Of all the left-leaning media personalities, Chris Matthews personifies, in my view, all that's wrong about journalism. One might even consider him a caricature. The fact that he could even admit on air about having a "thrill up the leg" after listening to Obama speak, and consider the statement an"objective assessment," goes beyond caricature. Matthews is the same person who told Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe, shortly after Obama was elected, "I want to do everything I can to make this thing work, this new presidency work." When Scarborough asked if that was an appropriate thing for him, as a journalist, to say, Matthews said, "Yeah, that’s my job. My job is to help this country."

Nearly six years into Obama's disastrous presidency, it appears that at least a few Obama loyalists in the media are starting to emerge from their euphoria. It's a bit of a culture shock, for instance, to listen to Chris Matthews today, throwing a few of his celebrated hardballs leftward. Here he is, asking the same kind of questions many of us on the right have been asking for over a year, regarding the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012: 

How come this is shrouded in mystery? What I can't understand is all these months later we're still trying to figure out what happened. I just want to know, as an American, what happened? Did everybody do what they were supposed to do? Did everybody make a really good desperate effort to save the lives of our people over there or didn't they? If they didn't, that's a problem, but I want an answer. 

Good questions. Questions that should have been asked (and not just by Republicans) from Day 1. Instead, like docile, well-trained house pets, the mainstream media compliantly accepted the Obama administration's deceptive narrative, letting both him and Hillary Clinton off the hook, and allowing the Republicans to be the "bad guys" in their attempts to get to the bottom of this story. 

I guess the thrill is gone, at least for Chris Matthews, and hopefully, for other mainstream journalists, as well. I won't say too little, too late. I will say (again), shame on those in the media who continue to lob softballs at the Obama administration. And not just about Benghazi. There are more scandals in this administration than there are journalists, it seems. Perhaps now, as the health care debacle continues to come apart at the seams, and the president's bald-faced lies get more and more scrutiny by an increasingly skeptical press, these other scandals will be re-visited more objectively.

Here's the rest of the Hardball segment, if you're interested. 

Real Clear Politics: Chris Matthews on Benghazi

Thoughts After Reading "The Kite Runner"

I brought Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner with me on a 3-day weekend visit to Columbus, Ohio, to visit my son. I'm still working on another novel, which I'd tried to finish before my trip, but too many things conspired against my finishing that book, and I didn't want to bring an almost-finished book on a cross-country trip in which inches and ounces are precious commodities. So I left Wouk's Brooklyn at home, tucked Hosseini's Kabul inside my backpack, and finished it in 3 days. The cover image didn't even make it to my blog's sidebar (What I'm Reading).

I've been meaning to read this. It's been sitting in my bookcase (right next to A Thousand Splendid Suns, also still unread), for awhile. As usual, I'm several years behind the rest of the reading world, scrambling to catch up, hoping someday to keep pace. Anything I say here will no doubt be redundant. The book came out in 2003--what's left to say? But here are my thoughts anyway, for what they're worth. 

The grand themes, as I see them, are courage and honesty and family love. Courage, as in not cowardly. Honesty, as in not only truth-telling, but truth-living, being true to who and what you are. Amir argued this point to himself when he discovered the truth about his relationship to Hassan, the lies he'd been led to believe all his life, the truth about his father. "I may be a coward, but at least I accept that I'm a coward," he told himself. Nevertheless, there he went anyway, venturing back into Taliban-controlled Kabul to rescue Hassan's small son, setting up a face-to-face meeting with a brutal Taliban leader to try and negotiate for the boy's freedom, fully aware that he could be walking toward his own death. What was driving this recklessness? What replaced the cowardice that had haunted him his entire life, ever since the day when, as a 12-year old boy--immobilized, petrified, horrified--he watched Hassan get beaten and raped, watched, knowing there was nothing he could do to stop it; realizing, too, that Hassan would have done anything in his power to stop it had the situation been reversed. The choice Amir made to stay hidden, to slip away, to pretend he hadn't seen what happened, would have repercussions for decades in the lives of all the characters in this story. 

There would be no reconciliation, no pardon, no public renunciation of his sin, but redemption is another of the grand themes in this book. Amir does find redemption at the end, awkwardly, clumsily, painfully. The courage he discovers is not the courage of a man facing death (which he does), but the courage to tell his wife the truth about his hidden shame, the courage to talk candidly about his father's sin in a society that shuns such sin. 

Honesty and courage, interchangeable in this story, leading to redemption. Leading, too, to faith, another of the great themes. Finding peace, if not solace or answers, face-down in prayer. 

Who is the kite runner of the title? Hassan, the hair-lipped boy, of course. But also, as the final pages show, Amir, his own upper lip now cleft--the result of a terrible, nearly fatal beating--Amir, broken, hobbled, but also healed, and forgiven, is the kite runner.

Old People

Found this song, well searched for it, actually, after Peggy Noonan mentioned it in the book I'm reading. I hadn't heard of it before. She referred to Bette Midler's version, so I searched for that, listened, cried, but then I wondered who wrote the song (John Prine) and found a video of him performing. Posting them both here. 

"Hello in There" 


Ow. 

Here's the songwriter's version. 

The Internet Knows

I've been reading Clay Johnson's book, The Information Diet, and also listening to what Eli Pariser has to say (he wrote The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You, which I haven't read yet). I think Johnson got some of his ideas for his book from Pariser, but no matter. They're both making the same points, which has to do with how the Internet (Google, Yahoo! News, Facebook, are mentioned specifically) use sophisticated algorithms to basically give users the information they want (or what the Internet thinks they want) based on their browsing history.

So many unclear pronouns in that paragraph. Sorry.

The point these two men and others are making is that the Internet is, if not creating, then it's perpetuating the polarization that exists in society. The phrase I'm hearing is confirmation bias, which is "the tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions" (I got this definition from Science Daily). What's going on is the Internet somehow keeps track of our online activity, our "clicks"--articles we read online, links we follow, websites we visit, articles or sites we "like" on Facebook, etc.--and then, when we search for information in a search engine like Google, the top results conform to the kinds of links we've clicked on before. To illustrate this, Pariser asked two friends to Google the word "Egypt" and then show him the search results. One friend's results were all about the political uprising in Egypt while the other friend's results had to do with pyramids and traveling to Egypt. Same search term, two different users, completely different results.

Pariser calls this trend "concerning" since it appears what's going on is when we search for information on the Internet, we're not getting what's true or current or relevant about something but rather what conforms to what we want to be true about something. Confirmation bias. 

Certainly, we can take control of our searches. There are strategies for forming queries that filter out some aspects and include another. And yes, those are the strategies I teach in my English 100 classes. But not everyone has the time, interest, inclination, or patience, let alone the cognizance to either recognize or appreciate the need for such deliberate use of the Internet. The very fact that we're searching the Internet for something suggests that we're in a hurry. The analogy to fast food that Clay Johnson uses in his book is apt: a quick burger satisfies the empty belly much the way a random Google search satisfies the unfocused mind. 

For the record, both Pariser and Johnson are lefties. Pariser founded MoveOn.org and Johnson started Blue State Digital. But I like them anyway! They both seem to appreciate and even respect the notion that there's more than one way to view the world. After he left MoveOn.org, Pariser went out of his way to befriend conservatives so he could hear what they had to say (he has an interesting story about how Facebook "hid" his conservative friends from his newsfeeds). 

Contrast this with most people on the left who not only don't befriend conservatives let alone listen to their viewpoints (test it: ask your favorite lefty which conservative author he listens to or reads--I'm willing to bet they have no answer), but actually dismiss conservatives altogether. Some even go so far as to label conservatives dangerous and their views taboo (that's the latest from Al Gore regarding people who challenge the idea that human behavior is responsible for global warming). And the current drama in Washington, D.C. over the president's flawed health care law has Democrats calling Republicans terrorists and anarchists. The president's own spokesman told Jake Tapper on CNN News that they won't talk with people who have bombs strapped to their chests. So much for actually listening to the other side.

Anyway, here's a 15-minute interview with Pariser. I'll add his book to my list of things to read next.