This is for everyone who believes in the media's view of a certain politician; please, please read

[fpb]

I answered this to one of my online friends, but I think everyone ought to read it.

The trouble is that I knew about Sarah Palin since long before the left-wing blogosphere knew she existed. (Incredibly, Obama's own site did NOT list her among likely VP pics even AFTER she was picked!) And I know that the person I had read about bore absolutely no resemblance to the monster you people have been fed by your media. Sarah Palin was no book-burner; she was no racist (her husband is a full member of an Eskimo tribe); she was an experienced politician - twenty years' full-time career, always in responsible posts, mayor first, governor later, closely concerned with Alaska's oil business; she had toppled a corrupt male crowd who had tried to shut her out; she had thrown the lobbyists of BP, Shell Oil, Esso and so on, who had virtually owned the previous Republican administration, out of her office (this argues formidable campaigning skills - in the US, it is very difficult to turn an incumbent out, let alone a whole leadership); she had worked with the local Democrats, and her 80% approval rating after two years of government (at a time when politicians are at their lowest, between the honeymoon period and the next electoral campaign) showed that most local Democrats were as much on her side as most Republicans. And remember again those Republican enemies she has turned out. They were old and experienced politicians. If there had been anything bad to be found out about her, they would have found it out. They found nothing. And those who know her, the citizens who elected her and who know how she has been acting, give her the unheard-of percentage of a steady 80%-plus approval rating. They know what she has been doing. You do not.

What happened was this. Most of the media, after years of cutbacks and dumbing down, had no stringers or permanent representatives of any value in Juneau or Anchorage, and they went for news to the bloggers. And among the left-wing bloggers there had been a kind of feeding frenzy that I, for one, know all too well. These people hate and are proud of hating; invent lies, and revel in the lies they are inventing. You cannot tell me that the likes of aerynalexander do not hate; you cannot tell me that they do not invent lies, when I have seen at work doing just that; you cannot tell me that they are not proud of hating, when they told me the opposite to my face; you cannot tell me that they do not conspire to support each other's lies, when I have seen them do just that. Those of you who have been my friends long enough have seen it happen, in the FA wars years ago. And the result is that there is a monstrous entity that walks the earth in the posts of thousands of Harry Potter fans and Fandom_Wank readers whom I have never met, will never meet, and frankly, do not even care to meet: a fictional fpb who bears absolutely no resemblance to the person you have come to know over the years. This is the same kind of embodied, invented nightmare as the fake Sarah Palin that reaches you through the filter of most TV stations and the New Jerk Times.

The diagnostic element is that the hatred of the bloggers has affected you. You simply do not want to be told that this person is different from what the media have made you imagine her; that she is no book-burner, barely anything like a creationist, that she does not impose her views on others, and that her foreign policy is perfectly ordinary Republican fare. Everything she says is distorted or lied about, and you have been taught to get angry if the lies and distortions are pointed out. You found it terrible that the WSJ should not agree with Chris Matthews or Oprah Winfrey about a person you never met and of whom you know only what you hear from them.

I say this is diagnostic because it is the reaction of the whole opposition. I have already as good as lost a very dear friend over a similar "I don't want to be confused with the facts" reaction. And I say it because I know this vicious kind of creative, inventing hatred on my own body. So, in every sense, I know more than you do. Please, my dear friend, listen to me.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Well, that's why I usually keep my lip buttoned on political topics. We all view things differently, which is why I am a strong supporter of the Constitution--it makes room for all points of view.

And I don't have any animus against my conservative relatives (the few left, most have switched sides in the past four years) or peers, but I do get pissy when politicians (this is in general, not this current contest) use the same tactics that they hammer in their opponents, but declare that their underhandedness is okay because it's righteous and from pure motive. Blech.

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

Ah yes, the "when I do it, that's different" defense.

Unfortunately, in many cases I think that they genuinely can't see how what they're doing is like what they condemn their opponents for doing. There's a blind spot there, and no amount of pointing it out to them will change their minds. They will simply dismiss your evidence as invalid and you as "out of touch with Reality."

And if they're in a position of authority over you, they'll also dismiss you as insolent and insubordinate.

Been there, done that.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

You're right--the perspective can look so genuinely different from various positions.

I think a lot of my hot feelings come from years of the circus aspect to campaigns, in addition to the search for the truth behind implications and outright statements; as fpb stated at the outset, a lot of the accusations against Sarah Palin turned out to be distortions or outright manufactured. But personal attacks have been a staple of politics clear back to the days of Walpole being raked over the coals when the Hanoverian kings were establishing themselves.

[starshipcat.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't be surprised if it goes back to the Greeks and Romans. However, before the printing press such things would be recorded only in single handwritten copies, and thus less likely to survive the ravages of time. And what has survived may well not be among the sources that have been translated and made generally available, so you'd have to have a fair mastery of Greek and Latin to read them.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Actually, you're right. Aren't the plays full of now-obscure political reference? When I was adapting Aristophanes for my drama students a few years back, I couldn't make heads or tails out of some of the refs, and only tracked down a few after much hunting about.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

A much more powerful case can be made from Cicero - and not only because he wrote an essay about electoral campaigns that is still valuable for politicians today. One just has to compare his description of opponents in public or prosecution speeches with what he said about - or even to - those same opponents in his vast body of private letters, to see how often even the most rabid accusations could be no more than moves in a game.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Cicero! Now there's another I read far too young (in translation) to appreciate. I need to revisit him--I bet I would appreciate him far, far more now.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

And the Romans did not have "newspapers of record" that made it their business to place lies on the record and keep facts off it.

PS: I loathed the NYT, as I loathe the BBC, since long before the Palin affair. In fact, they have done nothing whatever that surprised me. I expected these man-eating beasts to do exactly what they did.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

What I was saying is that in at least one or two points you have downright misunderstood what Governor Palin was saying. In particular, when she said that she was not going to Washington to please the media, she did not mean it against Obama as you seem to think. Everyone else, including the media, perceived it as a response to the media's own onslaught on her and her family, which had already started, singling out her daughter and her baby son. Considering the situation, I would have said more and worse.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I see! At the time, it seemed to me the context was Obama-bashing. And so, of course, when I read it again, it just brought back that sense.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

She certainly did attack Obama. That is part of what was expected - and the Obama campaign did not spare her. But a lot of that speech was dedicated to chucking back in the media's teeth all the things the media had thrown at her (e.g. small-town mayor, etc.). Of course, the two things can overlap: if I am inexperienced, what will you say about your candidate for President?

My position is that this, in spite of all the mud, is a campaign that has done nothing but credit to the US system, singling out four candidates - Obama, Rodham Clinton, McCain, and Palin - of stellar attraction and ability, and quite undoing all the harm of the last - the campaign in which each of the two candidates was the best argument for the others. After the 2004 campaign, one felt that the curse of mediocrity and hollowness that has long damned democracy in Europe and Japan had finally paralyzed the USA; now it seems to me that in this at least, the selection and discovery of interesting candidates, the USA have been able to regenerate themselves to an extent that countries that have to choose between Brown and CAmeron, or between Berlusconi and Veltroni, simply cannot imagine. And long may it be so.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I hope you are right. My worries are about the growing power brokers who are not answerable to anybody.

Aside from that, I'm looking forward to the debates, when (I trust) speech-making rhetorical devices will be at a minimum, and actual exchange might be expected.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Been there, done that, as well.