Close Readings: Dick Morris on the Romney landslide

By Dan Brooks in Close Reading 1 Comment

Harrumph!

On Halloween, political analyst and former Clinton adviser Dick Morris besmirched the good name of The O’Reilly Factor by predicting that Mitt Romney would win in a landslide. He had sailed that claim majestically around the mediasphere for weeks, despite the fact that it was, you know, insane. Romney did not win in a landslide. No actual data suggested he would, but Morris—an ostensibly unbiased analyst—had, in his own words, “worked very hard for Romney.” Was he deluding himself? Kind of. Was he deluding others? Also yes, kind of, as he explained to Sean Hannity in a thicket of prevarication that is the subject of today’s close reading. Props to Ben al-Fowlkes for the link. Bad faith after the jump.

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Are we glad we caught David Petraeus?

By Dan Brooks in lying 2 Comments

Fox News’s handy flowchart explaining the David Petraeus affair.

Last Saturday, as you know, CIA director and four-star general David Petraeus resigned after an FBI investigation tangentially revealed that he had an affair—a real clusterfudge, it turns out, hereafter to be known as the Petraeus Affair Affair. The inciting incident in his exposure was a complaint from Jill Kelly, who told the FBI that she had received harassing emails from an anonymous source. That source turned out to be Paula Broadwell, Petraeus’s awesome and/or crazy biographer, who resented Kelly’s closeness to Petraeus because she, Broadwell, was doing sex on him. My fellow Americans: you must not do sex on your biographer. It’s like buying stock in your accountant. If Johnson could go 30 years without humping Boswell, you can do it, too.

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Why do politics when you can go insane?

By Dan Brooks in Politics versus Government 3 Comments

To the untrained eye, it might seem like a center-left technocrat beat a moderate Republican last Tuesday, and politics have returned to business as usual. You probably think that, because you have been hypnotized by the mainstream media. People who see past the bias—primarily those who get their news from sources directly affiliated with one of the parties—know that this year’s election sounded the death knell for American liberty. There’s this lady, who ran over her husband with a Jeep because he didn’t vote. There’s Texas’s petition to secede from the union, which cites TSA screenings and is well past the 25,000-signature threshold after which the White House guarantees a response. And there’s Eric Dondero, the libertarian and former Ron Paul aide who has launched a personal boycott of Democrats. Props to J-Sri for the link. Insane elaborations after the jump.

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Friday links! Reality-based community edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links, Uncategorized 4 Comments

Campaign season is over, and truth can assert itself relentlessly once again. Not on TV or in conversation, of course—those are neighborhoods from which truth is long since gentrified out. But in the cold world of numbers and events and things that exist whether we believe in them or not, the discipline of the machine is once more imposed. Say what you will about what’s going to happen in the future—that stuff or some different stuff will happen. Today is Friday, and actuality is a cold splash. Whether it’s refreshing or chilling depends on how heated-up you got yourself in the last few months. Won’t you wash yourself clean with me?

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Fox News unbowed in defeat

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 4 Comments

Totally a real thing

Remember yesterday, when I expressed faint hope that the Republican Party might reform its political behavior now that it, like, didn’t work? Me either. Apparently that’s what I thought, though, and already I am refuted. Fox News—the media wing of the Republican Party—sees no reason to change its ways. Evidence: Rich Noyes’s handy guide to five ways the mainstream media tipped the scales in favor of Obama. According to Noyes, the president’s reelection was abetted by favorable media coverage, including but not limited to “partisan fact checking.” That damned mainstream media! Never mind that Fox News is the most watched cable news network, or that Noyes also claims reporters “buried” the story of the bad economy.

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