Watching CNN this morning, it’s readily apparent that old habits will be hard to break.
A conversation I had more than once this weekend involved Janeane Garofalo, and not just because Janeane Garofalo is fun to talk about. During the runup to war, and even during its execution, the anti-war face of TV news debate was either Phil Donahue (cancelled) or Garofalo (celebrity). The standard trick was to place her against a Very Serious Member of the Foreign Policy Community, letting them rattle on about the various ways that ethnic and religious subgroups of Iraq would be trampled into bliss using the magic power of unprovoked invasion. Garofalo’s standard answer was that invading a country based on bad evidence, a shaky rationale and no clear aim except making oil cheaper would probably turn out very, very poorly. That answer was generally met with, at best, a scoff, coupled with the sort of stern yet irrelevant lecturing that informed us going to war was a very weighty decision whose obvious righteousness was validated by the fact that we were going to war, dammit.
Five years later, and some hippie who criticized the war in the first place is on his way to Iraq to talk to a prime minister who agrees with him on getting the fuck out...and said hippie could be president soon.
First, let’s talk about how Obama’s trip is being covered. Despite the fact that his foreign policy vision has been largely validated in the past week - McCain caught up to Obama on Afghanistan and the aforementioned endorsement by Maliki - the main discussion today and over the past few days has been whether or not the press is covering Obama’s trip too much and whether or not the coverage of them talking about the coverage results in too much (and too favorable) coverage for Obama. It’s a tesseract of inanity - a new fourth dimension of coverage about the coverage of the coverage will soon emerge, with Jessica Yellin invited on to discuss how she talked about her in-depth discussion of the impact of Obama’s trip on the race…without ever mentioning what Obama did, how he did it or who he did it with.
Call it the Fafblogging of the media: CNN is the whole world’s only source for CNN!