Apparently Jeff Greenfield was joking the other day on CNN when he offered one of the stranger political analyses we’re likely to see. Greenfield, as I wrote yesterday, used his time on “The Situation Room” to comment on the Barack Obama phenomenon — critiquing his wardrobe and even riffing on his name (Obama-Osama). The whole thing was a joke and he’s surprised that we didn’t get it. (We didn’t get it because it wasn’t set up as a joke and didn’t include the clues necessary for us to know it was satire.)
He admits to not being funny — his wife apparently questioned whether people would get it — but then offers this bit of nonsense to explain the reaction:
Most of what happened here, I think, is a demonstration of the hair-trigger instincts that have grown up among some of the bloggers (not to mention the need to fill all that space every day, or hour, or 15 minutes).
In a political world where partisans routinely assume the worst about their adversaries — and where conspiracy theories stretch from Bill Clinton as a drug ring- and murder-enabler to Bush as planner of 9/11 — there’s a tendency to find malice aforethought.
And explosions of outrage take a lot less a time than falling into the habits of the Mainstream Media — like, say, calling or e-mailing a reporter to ask, “What were you thinking?”
So it was the blogger’s fault that he told a bad joke? It was the blogosphere’s fault that the faux analysis he crafted was a nearly perfect recreation of the kind of thing we already are seeing and hearing on Fox News, that he didn’t clue us in at all leaving us to wonder what kind of nonsense he was offering?
I think what the bloggers were reacting to — certainly what I was reacting to — was the tendency for not only Fox but the mainstream media to buy into silly, shallow analyses like this — as it did with Al Gore and George W. Bush in 2000.
The fact is, this is exactly what passes for political discourse on cable news these days and Greenfeild should have known this. He also should have known that he is not Jonathan Swift, Jon Stewart or the SNL Weekend Update anchors.
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Hank Kalet 