Campaign 2016: The Dumb Season Starts Early (Matt Taibbi)

[ellenrr]

Thanks in part to a Beltway gossip network that loves chattering about the Clintons and just can't wait until 2016, and thanks in part to a punditocracy that is perennially covering the same story, regardless of year (i.e. the next presidential election), the groundwork is already being laid for the moronic typecasting that always goes on at the outset of the Big Race.

And selling is exactly what's going on. The presidential election, after all, is just an enormously lucrative reality show for the commercial media, and no reality show flies if you can't identify the characters and their roles in a 30-second commercial – the hysterical pageant mom, the duck-call patriarch, the ambition-mad Kardashian mom raising her kids by text, in the recovery room after her latest neck tuck.

The latest linguistic fad is to describe a candidate as being prone to making "populist appeals," a concept nearly as nuts as that ostensible single horizontal line of all possible beliefs. Only in the Beltway do they have to come up with a special term to describe the inexplicable (to them) phenomenon of a politician who advocates for his actual constituents, instead of just whoring along the usual career track like everyone else.


http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog/campaign-2016-the-dumb-season-starts-early-20131113

[daleanime]

1. Kick....

[libdem4life]

2. Here's the earlier thread.I heartily dislike the link and the title with two brilliant, accomplished

women possibly friends, in the photo ... and from a very unflattering angle. I'm all for reposting some things. I'm sure the intent is to inform, but it's kind of insulting to them, IMO.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/1251338864