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Billmon: Flushing the Cheney Administration Down the Memory Hole
Billmon: Flushing the Cheney Administration Down the Memory Hole
I have a strong hunch the political-media complex (i.e. the Village) is going to want to move fairly quickly to the post-Soviet solution I described earlier — skipping right over the perestroika and glasnost to get directly to the willful amnesia and live-in-the-moment materialism of mid-1990s Russia.
Which means, in turn, that Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Feith and the whole noxious crew are about to get flushed straight down the memory hole: banished fairly quickly from public discussion and corporate media coverage — in much the way the Iran-Contra scandal (go ahead, Wiki it) was almost immediately forgotten or ignored once it became clear that the fix was in. America apparently had its big experiment with truthtelling and reform in the post-Watergate era, and the experience was so unpleasant that nobody (or nobody who counts) is willing to go there again.
In general, a better written, more entertaining post than his last.
But Billmon still distorts the actual record with a slippery liberal narrative far too much.
This was not exactly a whopping big surprise — it seems to be the way most societies cope, consciously or unconsciously, with the aftermath of a trip through the totalitarian funhouse
No, it is the way most societies cope with Jeffrey Sach’s neo-liberal, “Shock Therapy” economic restructuring, which was designed to plunge populations into poverty and despair so that the West can control all the wealth through corrupt proxies. Almost worked too. Shame on you, Billmon, for eliding the US’s role in a tragedy of epic human proportions. (But then, we don’t really care about those Russians anyway.)
To call this “candor” is either a baldfaced lie — or an admission that you are completely incapable of recognizing the difference between a lie and a truth. And while ABC (like Bush himself) may only be guilty of the latter, not the former, the fact that this produces reporting that is functionally indistinguishable from a lie is telling. It shows just how far the system — specificially, in this case, the Beltway political press — has wandered from reality.
Bush knows when he is lying. Why are you absolving him while pretending you are not?
The system has not “wandered” from reality. It has always functioned this way. Chomsky has spent his entire career documenting this — specifics and theory, perhaps 50 or more books — but who cares about knowledge when making a breezy point on the web? If you don’t like Chomsky — the most respected and quoted intellectual dissident in modern times — go back and read historical US press coverage of slavery and the Indian Wars. That will show anyone that reality has always been “what we say it is.” We wouldn’t have needed a Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Kurt Vonnegut, or Joseph Heller had the system not “wandered from reality.”
There is just a yawning disconnect between the nature of the crimes allegedly committed (and, in many cases, essentially admitted): waging aggressive war, torture, secret prisons, illegal wiretapping on a massive scale, obstruction of justice, perjury, conspiracy — to the point where it would probably take an army of Patrick Fitzgeralds and a full-time war crimes tribunal a year just to catalogue them all — and how the story is being treated in the corporate media.
A clear distortion, or at least mis-reading, of who Patrick Fitzgerald — arch-conservative hero of liberals, burier of official malfeasance — really is, and the function he played for the ruling class.
Give Obama two weeeks and he will have committed every crime you mention above, as have all Presidents before him. The one he will address is the one you don’t mention: open prisons.
It’s not quite Pravda — at least some of the hard questions are being asked, if only half-heartedly
The official narrative of “The War on Terror,” and all of its battlefields, is never questioned in the corporate media; only the “judgement” of individuals.
As to whether we live in a system as lockstep secretive and inhumane as you imply the Soviet Union was, clearly we have been reduced to the Sovietologist’s game of discerning who is standing next to whom to figure out what the next war, attempted coup, purge, bubble collapse, or asset give-away is going to be. A congress where only five are brave enough to protest the massacre in Gaza is a government which doesn’t diverge in any fundamental way from the Politiburo. The same can be said for all of the votes — with Democratic complicity — which preceded and enabled the abovementioned crimes.
And, as in late Soviet times, the absurdity of the official story line is only reinforced by the other systemic failures that surround it: in our case, financial collapse, plunging asset prices, massive fraud and a corrupt, sclerotic political system that may be incapable of doing even the most simple, obvious things (like printing and spending sufficient quantities of fiat money) to stave off an deeper downward spiral.
Just as you refuse to recognize that “Shock Therapy” was intentionally applied to the Soviet Union for political purposes despite their obvious destructive effects to humans — the hundreds of books and studies by respected scholars and the actors themselves, apparently having little effect on you — it appears verboten to ask whether the same “Shock Therapy” might now be intentionally applied by our ruling class to ourselves for the same political purposes.
What you mystify by calling “incapability” is actually a systematic program of asset and pension-fleecing of the middle class and the redistribution of wealth upwards to the ultra-wealthy. Ah well, books will be written about this too in twenty years, and if we are still alive we may read them and reminisce.
What we need now is reporters who are brave and perceptive enough to put the facts together before it is a fait accompli, a historical artifact constructed upon the gravestones of millions, not reporters who lull us to sleep with non-controversial stories of how bad Bush and the press are.
This being the case, I have a strong hunch the political-media complex (i.e. the Village) is going to want to move fairly quickly to the post-Soviet solution I described earlier — skipping right over the perestroika and glasnost to get directly to the willful amnesia and live-in-the-moment materialism of mid-1990s Russia.
Which means, in turn, that Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Feith and the whole noxious crew are about to get flushed straight down the memory hole
Gee, ya really think so, Billmon? See my last sentence above.
All in all, just more entertaining but useless verbiage to fill up the web, our time, and attention span, while leading us astray in our thinking with a few judicious lies larded between the stale truisms.
Posted by: Malooga | Jan 13 2009 18:44 utc | 11
I’m sorry I should have posted this over here on this thread-oops
This is a mean rant. Not much new in it, probably not even any truth, just my crazy views on life at the moment Obama and bad things. I had to spew this somewhere–try not to get any on you and remember to flush when finished.
The news has me in a funk.
Listening to Democracy Now! Driving home from a buddy’s house and hearing pro-israel supporters at a rally talking about killing Palestinians and sounding exactly like rednecks, but with funny, whiny accents. They were vomiting hate and shitting-out horror fantasies of what needed to be done to Gaza. After about three minutes of their racist anger, the program switched to a group of jewish folks condeming israel’s actions, and voicing their support for the Gazaans.
This group, by design or luck sounded like scholars compared to the hate mongers, when discussing the plight of Gaza and the horrors caused by the IDF. The contrast between how both groups sounded when talking got me thinking, and then I started to feel even worse as I realized I was hearing the voice of typical political thuggery from one group and the voice of the soon-to-be disappeared intellectuals out of the other.
I felt a darker sadness wash over me as I thought about what is about to happen in the world… And I’d suggest you find extra copies of the books you care about, and hide them someplace very, very safe.
History is the same tired, three-act play preformed over and over. The script doesn’t change; the leading actors spend most of their time lying and seeing who can bugger the most extras before the curtains close. Think Caligula, the movie, and the moment his lard-covered fist…Which shows how things have gotten worse, as they don’t even bother with the lard these days.
I’ve read too many books, too much about history to see any quiet future left for me. Instead I see but a bunch of those “interesting times” the Chinese like to curse others to enjoy.
I think reading Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Fitzgerald’s, A Diamond as Big as the Ritz would show you some of the possible futures we might experience. But there is also part of me that could be convinced of a future earth as seen though the eyes of Douglas Adams
I feel like I’m viewing the past through a stained-glass window; the exact same scene, but a different color and shade, depending upon which pane you choose to look through. Looking out my magical multicolored window at the Obama moment and I can see many different possibilities through the slices of tinted glass.
I have the most unpleasant feeling come over me while thinking about what the next months of Obama’s administration are likely to bring. The sensation is similar to food poisoning in that I don’t know if I want to puke, shit or both.
It isn’t that Obama himself makes me sick. He is just another in a long list of actors who play their part with enthusiasm and gusto on the public stage. He’s done a damn fine job of saying his lines and making his audience believe he is the second coming of both dead Kennedys, and the Black Jesus, all rolled-up into one.
America’s Summer-of-Love-Woodstock-hippies let Nixon walk and ended up voting Reagan into office after tiring of the touchy-feely former nuclear submarine commander called Carter.
They did this while snorting coke in urban hot tubs and proclaiming that, “Greed was good!” which they have continued to shout loudly for 29 years, despite all the evidence to the contrary.
The Baby Boomers, which are a mighty generation of massive, mindless, television worshiping degenerates who have, though laziness and ignorance, squandered the country their parents and grandparents saved pennies to buy–while fighting two terrible world wars to protect (well, at least this is what they thought they were fighting for.)
Voting Obama into office is a wishful, wistful way the spoiled generation of Boomers is hoping to prove they didn’t really sell-out and the “justice” they fought for was finally realized. This, they think, will be their legacy when like Bush’s, it’s just more of the same old crap, repackaged all nice and touchy-feely.
“Oooh, we’s finally gots us one of them colored fellows elected president, damn ain’t we progressive?”
Obama will do to and for the average black dude, what the typical white politician does, and that’s screw him. Just like what happens to the average white dude and average Hispanic dude, ect. I just wonder how hard a screwing the middle class will take before they wake-up and realize their poopers hurt even worse than before.
The reason for their rectal pain is easy to understand, what will happen because of it is another thing.
I’d venture to guess the voting-block that brought Obama to the white house will refuse to see the obvious, like the emperor who’d heavily invested in a new set of clothes. This combined with their increased chance of age-related dementia, prescription drug use and general grumpiness will give the State an endless army of rats, informers and willing prison guards who all vote Democrat, so they can’t be evil? Can they?
I don’t want to believe that a society that can give us Dunkin’ Donuts, the Internet and Madonna is but inches away from stepping right back into some backwoods bullshit past. But from where I sit it looks like it wouldn’t take a very big, or very slippery, banana peel to cause us to slip right back into some feudal freak show with thumb screws and hot irons.
Them good old Inquisition dayz are here again, Dawg.
Posted by: David | Jan 14 2009 5:28 utc | 26
I did have something of substance to add to the discussion, it is billmon’s comment to the Jay Rosen Presslink article about how journalism acts as a gatekeeper for what is allowed to be discussed.
In essence the article boils down to the fact that there are three areas of discourse: understood truths (US is good, support of Isreal, the Constitution allows free speech) which are undisputed, an area of debate (more vs. less support for the welfare state, abortion etc.) where journalism can advocate or engage, and finally the fringe opinion which gets no traction or mention whatsoever (Us imperialism, the sameness of the two major US political parties).
It is a good article and well-argued in my opinion. Reading the comments there are the usual trolls and fakers, and others who try to bend the discussion towards their own agenda, but also some quality same-level responses that engender a response from the author.
One of these is from our man billmon, with the response quoted below.
Note that the “donut” is a diagram used by Daniel Halin as quoted by Jay Rosen as the source of his piece:
“It’s easily the most useful diagram I’ve found for understanding the practice of journalism in the United States, and the hidden politics of that practice. You can draw it by hand right now. Take a sheet of paper and make a big circle in the middle. In the center of that circle draw a smaller one to create a doughnut shape. Label the doughnut hole “sphere of consensus.” Call the middle region “sphere of legitimate debate,” and the outer region “sphere of deviance.””
Jay’s doughnut analogy accurately describes the mechanics of how consensus is manufactured, but I don’t think it really captures the intentionality in the process.
The established media — particularly the Washington-based political media — are not passive agents here. They have an overt bias for consensus and against “deviancy”, which means they want the doughnut hole to be as big as possible and they want to exclude as much “deviancy” as possible from admission to the sphere of “legitimate” debate.
The result is that the doughnut itself keeps getting thinner. Issues, particularly big issues, tend to migrate inward, into the sphere of conventional wisdom (the intelligence proves there are WMDs in Iraq; financial deregulation promotes economic growth; the Social Security system is going bankrupt) while alternative — or even worse, radical — points of view, which might enliven the sphere of “legitimate” debate are consistently excluded.
But the gatekeepers are hardly value neutral. As Jay notes, they largely reflect the biases of their sources — but they also tend to share those same biases, the common denominator of which is the need to preserve the power and privilege of the status quo, of which the gatekeepers are themselves a part, and not a trivial one.
Even the exceptions to the rule tend to prove the larger point. Based solely on the evidence, for example, the issue of global climate change should have long since migrated inward to the sphere of consensus. But the establishment media, by and large, stubbornly preserves the fiction that there is a legitimate scientific debate — much as an earlier generation of journalists (their salaries partially funded by the Marborough Man) helped drag out the “debate” over the health hazards of smoking.
It’s hard to overlook the pattern here: Issues or ideas that pose a threat to powerful interest groups (sometimes based on voting power, as in Jay’s example of David Brody being admitted to the Meet the Press charmed circle, but more often based on financial or bureacratic power) get treated one way by the gatekeepers; issues or ideas that benefit those same groups are handled another way.
I know it sounds shrill, but instead of a doughnut I’m sort of reminded of Hannah Arendt’s totalitarian onion, in which each layer shields the one underneath from contact with external reality, creating a perfectly self-contained pseudoreality in which the party (and/or The Leader) can always be right.
Fortunately, we don’t live in a totalitarian society, so there are inherent limits on the gatekeepers’ ability to follow their own biases to such extreme ends (one of those limits, thank God, being the rise of interconnected media). Still, Big Media had its dysfunctional way in the public forum for many years, the result being that we now find ourselves and our democracy (such as it is) in a pretty big hole.
I’m posting this to further the discussion but also in the hope that Alabama, who I respect, will not piss off Malooga, and vice versa, who I also respect. Your differences may be over religious or sanctity issues, or Malooga’s outspoken criticism of Israel and US leaders, or what else I don’t know. You both have enlightened me and I appreciate that.
But Alabama, as far as I know he has been a member of this audience for years, just as you and I have been. So his attacks on the guy who first got me interested in the relationship of politics and economics are at the least well informed.
I have to say that I too find the writings of Malooga bitter fruit but all the same he brings valuable focus to our discussions here.
Posted by: jonku | Jan 14 2009 8:15 utc | 29
@Copeland #20, alabama #28:
Who can have forgotten when Billmon was the voice crying in the wilderness?
I can’t speak for others, but I certainly don’t.
Billmon was like magic for me. He taught me and he entertained me. He woke me up to the potential of writing and the web. And he attracted a brilliant stable of commenters — the core of which remains to this day. Truly, I wouldn’t be who I am, if not for him. I still remember the night when I, recovering from surgery and unable to sleep from the pain, read him and his commenters with a fervor verging on prayer… until the rosy fingers of dawn appeared through the window behind the wan screen, and I realized that I had — in an intellectual way — fallen in love.
I went back about a year and a half ago and downloaded what I could find of his website and spent about four hours poking through the booty, re-reading some of my favorite pieces and tracing the emergence of different of my favorite commenters.
His economics pieces were great, and many still hold up very well. My favorite piece was the one where he traced the Presidents – the ideas they and their parties stood for — and their opponents as a Hegelian thesis, antithesis, synthesis continuum: I learned — and understood — more about American history in one hour than I had in twelve years of school. In a word, the man was simply brilliant.
Later, he moved from deep analysis to short, pithy, often humorous feuilleton, which I also enjoyed, but did not find incomparable, as his previous posts had been. Others could also pen them, and to me, some of his uniqueness and the sheer sustained depth of his insight had been lost. His method of exposing ripe hypocrisy by juxtaposing a set of quotes over time has been adopted by many on the web, most notably our very own b, right here at the new bar. (By the way, b has proven himself far less petulant and reactive to criticism over time, and a far better investigative reporter, if not his equal in style, which no one was or is. Of course b is writing is his second language, but then so was Isak Dinesen.)
But the goal of the student is not to apotheosize the teacher and stagnate, but to truly honor that teacher by growing beyond him. I did that with my childhood hero, my Uncle, who taught me about baseball and the world with love and tenderness. One day I woke up and realized that he revered Nixon, and supported the war in Vietnam. I shed a tear and moved on in my intellectual journey, with respect for what I had learned — especially in baseball, where I was taught as a batter to really get into the pitcher’s head and suss out what he was thinking. I had learned the greatest lessons: to think for myself, and to put myself in another’s place.
And I continued on my journey with Billmon. I learned from him, and I learned to think about Politics from him. One mustn’t forget Billmon at his best: How his coruscatingly bitter cynicism, albeit always couched in a velvet glove of irony and humor, encapsulated a wise worldview of how the motley crew of weak and tragic humans, whose pretense it is to lead us, really operated. Billmon, at his best, had the rare ability to channel the sarcasm of Swift, the humor of Twain, the irony of Bierce, and the sociological insight of Mencken. It was an unparalleled gift.
I’ll never forget one night, having spent three hours fully digesting “The Best Billmon Ever” and the three hundred comments which followed (I was far too shy and insecure to comment myself in those days), that I introduced my brother, also a big-time financial reporter, to Billmon. I sat impatiently, reading the post for a second time over my brother’s shoulder as it glowed in the Netscape browser on the dusty 15″ cathode ray tube barely visible through the forest of post-it notes sprouting like an invasive cancer from the periphery and threatening to take over the whole screen. Finally, he stirred. “What do you think,” I asked apprehensively. “He needs an editor,” was my brother’s entire laconic response. Clearly, I learned, Billmon was an acquired taste.
So what happened, you may ask. Simply put, I grew and Billmon shrank.
In a better world, I would have no interest in politics whatsoever, but would spend my days making art. A dozen years ago, I was rebuilding a life which had completely fallen apart. I needed faith, and part of that faith was a naive faith in the system, in the essential justice of our society. After all, we finally had a Democrat, Clinton, in office. He might not be perfect, but surely things were getting better.
Then came that ridiculous exercise in impeachment, along with that sanctimonious prig of a Grand Inquisitor, Ken Starr. The whole thing stunk so bad I could not ignore it. As I was working as a computer programmer, I had discovered the web, and I began reading about politics and listening to NPR. I thanked God Clinton was bombing the hell out of Milosevic. (Well, you can see that my political views have evolved!)
Anyway, I thought of the whole affair as an odd one-offer, an inexplicably unique event, until the first stolen election. I followed that campaign very closely; Gore wasn’t perfect, but I liked him. And I simply could not believe what was happening. When I wasn’t reading every Democratic blog and website I could find, I was glued to NPR. I still remember sitting in my car in Chinatown, waiting for my meal-to-go to be ready, when I heard the Supreme Court’s decision reported. This, to me, was like the second plane hitting the WTC. A pattern was becoming apparent. The aftermath was even more strange to me. Gore conceding. NPR’s swift change of gears, “Move along folks. Nothing to see here. Nothing to see here. Move along.”
I was raised to be a scientist when I grew up (very useful in my counter-culture days), and parts of my mind still work that way. I knew that I needed to collect more data, and I knew that I needed to find theories which could account for the events and behavior I was witnessing. I continued reading on the web.
But I still had a strong liberal faith in the essential goodness of the system, and the possibility of reform – a faith that shattered unexpectedly a year later when the two planes crashed into the WTC. A decade earlier, my father had worked in Building Two on the 95th floor, the very spot where the first plane entered the North Tower. I could envision what the person sitting at that desk must have seen coming at him through the window. I remembered those buildings being built; my father and I used to go to the site weekly and watch the progress; they were almost a part of me. And, because my father had been an engineer, I had gotten a structural tour of the building before the floors were built out; I had seen every single girder and rivet that NIST later wrote about, and even have a core of the concrete flooring as a paperweight. I was no longer just a spectator to history.
In the ensuing years I continued to learn slowly and grow. I discovered Daily Kos soon after its inception, and don’t want to really admit how many hours I frittered plowing through many swamps of comments. And I discovered Billmon, and the late great Steve Gilliard, within a month of them starting their blogs.
But the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq forced me to grow in different ways, too. It wasn’t until I discovered Chomsky’s pre-invasion talk on “US Grand Imperial Strategy” that I began to look beneath the surface politics of the corporate media and understand the interests and motivations of Nations. When I read “Manufacturing Consent” I felt as if the veil had been lifted from my eyes, and I could finally decode events. I listened to NPR manipulate the public into accepting what was essentially the West’s imposition of Karzai. Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States” taught me that Nations are not monolithic – that my interests and George Bush’s were not the same. The short comic book, “Addicted To War,” along with Blum, Churchill, and Parenti gave me a concise understanding of war and the US’s actual record.
I had begun doing Radio – hosting a weekly four hour political program. My work often involved up to forty hours a week of interviewing and listening to tape of every single intellectual, analyst, writer, and commenter who interested me as I planned programming. I attended the Boston Social Forum and developed another set of contacts and ideas. And I discovered more subversive, less mainstream sources. Wade Frazier’s amazing website was very influential in getting me to contextualize politics within the development of mankind, as well as to understand the small-minded conspiratorial and vindictive nature of government power. So was Ken Knabb’s – who bravely continues to attempt to fuse radical politics with Buddhism; it was he who introduced me to the Situationists and Debord. Another veil falling. And another. And another, yet.
By now, of course, I was also reading Billmon, and then MOA, and following every link and reference I could: learning from the wisdom of so many posters; ferreting through Uncle $cam’s thousand and one Alice in Wonderland-like rabbit holes, never sure where I will end up when I finally poke my head to the surface; and researching every text and author that r’giap, with his prodigious mix of praxis, learning and sensitivity, and others, cited: Benjamin, Althusser, Bourdieu, Foucault, Baudrillard, Gramsci, Frank, Wallerstein, Smith, Ricardo, Ronald Wright, Roy, Said, Fuller, and Marx, of course, among many others.
The point here is not to present a complete history of my intellectual development; that would be impossible even if I had wanted to. The point is that I was constantly growing, thinking, refining fresh ideas, testing out new theories, and yes, making mistakes and getting lost in cul-de-sacs, too – but I was thinking critically, and I was taking information from as many different fields of intellectual inquiry as possible in order to build up as syncretic and humanistic a world-view as possible.
Meanwhile, over all these years I had been attending a monthly poker game along with my brother, attended by all of the big-shot financial reporters in the city I was living in. All of these reporters were liberal Democrats, and thought of themselves as unusually savvy and knowledgeable because of their profession. Every one of them could have argued the relative merits of CDSs until the cows came home. But they could not understand world events, and they were as easily mislead and swayed by blatant propaganda as the average voter.
Surely, Billmon is more than a cut above these people; insight like his can only come from the highest tranche. And he possesses a wealth of knowledge, especially about American history, economics, and politics. And yet, he does suffer from the limits of his profession.
So while I was growing, Billmon was shrinking. No one can fault a man for putting his family ahead of his blogging. But we can fault him for his increasingly blind and ahistorical partisanship – which was not nearly as evident at the Whiskey Bar. And we can fault him for the lazy use of cliché, which he never would have fallen to in his heyday. We can blame him when his writing is not particularly insightful or entertaining, since those qualities were his hallmark.
Sometimes, I wonder why he is still writing. After all, Billmon is Billmon, cited in wikipedia, winner of numerous awards, and known throughout the world, because of the unparalleled excellence of his writing. Go back and do as I did if you don’t believe me: Read his greatest posts from Whiskey Bar, the ones that ran pages upon pages, which you never wanted to end, the ones that set the entire blogosphere atwitter. If he was still writing like that, I would be his biggest fan. But he is not. He is more like a washed-up athlete taking batting practice and missing more balls than he hits.
I will never be the writer Billmon once was; to my mind, nobody is. Chris Floyd has been a journalist for decades; his insight shines for me like Billmon’s once did. But he will never be the writer, the stylist, that Billmon was. And nobody has to agree with me, but I do feel that I, the student, have, in many ways, surpassed my teacher, my guru, in insight and knowledge, if not in style. But that’s just my opinion.
I have no problem with anyone enjoying Billmon’s latest writing – we all have different tastes – but it simply doesn’t compare with his earlier work. It is hack writing. If it didn’t have Billmon’s moniker at the top, if it was one of a thousand posts to Daily Kos every 24 hours, no one would be reading this article and no one would be talking about it. Obama is not going to prosecute Bush? After saying that he wasn’t going to during his campaign… Well, as Gomer Pyle used to say, surprise, surprise!
If people choose to believe that I never heard of Billmon, and don’t remember the “good old days,” (as if this is some fundamentalist religion that must never change) that is their right. If they feel that I am crashing, and trashing, the Holy Bar, they can petition b to have me “dis-barred.” (Bad pun.) I intentionally attempt to challenge people’s thinking, but I have no great need to post here if people feel that I am upsetting them.
Posted by: Malooga | Jan 14 2009 9:28 utc | 32
So while I was growing, Billmon was shrinking. No one can fault a man for putting his family ahead of his blogging. But we can fault him for his increasingly blind and ahistorical partisanship – which was not nearly as evident at the Whiskey Bar. And we can fault him for the lazy use of cliché, which he never would have fallen to in his heyday. We can blame him when his writing is not particularly insightful or entertaining, since those qualities were his hallmark.
Indeed, and before I go on, Malooga, your#32 was beautiful, I was half way through it, nodding in agreement before I got a clue as to whom may have wrote it, then was not surprised.
The reason I italicized the above is because, Billmon himself has said as much on occasion, and Indeed, who can blame anyone, for looking out for their family, what with dental bills, mortgages, keeping peace with the spouse by keeping food on the table etc, I never ever saw him as a gatekeeper, he had an exceptional way of letting you know when he was risking and tempting his bread and butter. That’s why I respected him so, even in his moodiness, but mostly his honesty in sharing his internal conflicts. David at #33 shines the light on the meta of it. And you are right malooga, before Billmon quit writing this last time, he was as you say, simply brilliant in his ability to suss out the bullshit and further, as you say, “Billmon, at his best, had the rare ability to channel the sarcasm of Swift, the humor of Twain, the irony of Bierce, and the sociological insight of Mencken. It was an unparalleled gift.” But then something happened, I remember thinking, ‘they got to him’ someone replaced him, this of course may or may not have happened, but that’s honesty what I thought. Before the second time he quit writing he toned down his razor sharpened analysis, even his humor waned, when he closed the bar, I was devastated, but knew he had to do what he had to do. He was true to himself, and one has to respect that.
I even remember his (Billmon’s)defending some of my posts, when others weren’t able to believe in the depths these jackals have gone and would go to. But something changed, he began attacking his commentator’s then closed the comment section, I was personally offended when he singled r’giap out calling him a Marxist fruitcake, I was deeply shocked, by that, none the less continued to read him, all the while knowing regulars like annie and others still believed in him, I did too, but never got over his attacking his audience, but, sometimes abruptly but mostly slowly and surely he backed away from his Lazar beam hit’s on the powers that be, and since he’s been back at Dkos, his writing has been watered down to a large degree for me. And like jonku, I value both Alabama and Copeland, but do not agree with their reactions here thus far in this thread.
As most of you know, I eat sacred cow, , no one in my moral and value system is above criticism myself included. Finally, I wouldn’t say I have out grown billmon, he just stopped writing.
Posted by: Uncle $cam | Jan 14 2009 13:24 utc | 35
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