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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34516 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Times, technology, and visibility into these things change.

Is it normal to have former intelligence leaders and staff imply a candidate is committing or enabling treason? Is it normal to have the wider mainstream media actively suppress and turn eyeballs away from a scandal, against their usual approach? Normal for the adults in the room to heavily imply or outright claim their opponents are the literal reincarnation of Nazis?

Maybe it is. Perhaps all that's changed is the advent of Twitter, Facebook, the blogosphere, and ever-watchful eye of the internet to record everything for future analysis and dissection. And maybe now is the time to cut this beast down a size or two.

I'm used to media bias and political acrimony being things. I grew up through Clinton-Obama. The Trump years were fucking inexcusable.

It seems to me that American politics goes through cycles of greater or lesser political acrimony. The period roughly between Watergate and Trump (with a nadir in the early Clinton years and a gradual ramp-up afterwards) was one with outwardly good behavior and fair play on the part of politicians and the media. Before that we had the 60's with all their unrest, political assassinations, riots at party conventions, and the infamous daisy ad. Before that we had a president-for-life whose predecessor denounced his programs as socialistic and fascistic.

Growing up in a time of relative tranquility may have given many of us the impression that that state of affairs was normal rather than astoundingly and miraculously unpartisan, but like another era of good feelings it was bound to come to an end as all the problems we put on the backburner for decades finally burst back into public awareness.

Is it normal to have former intelligence leaders and staff imply a candidate is committing or enabling treason?

Kennedy did a lesser version of it to Nixon with the "missile gap" line which he and Nixon knew to be false (because they were both getting classified briefings), but which Nixon couldn't rebut without disclosing classified info.

Yeah, and to most people born after their presidencies, all that is behind the smoky curtain of history. It's the perpetual meme that all that shady stuff that happened in the past is just the messy, unglamorous history of an imperfect nation - but we certainly don't act like that any more!

And I feel extremely silly for writing that, because the naivete is blinding by now. I considered myself more cynical than most, and the degree to which people went mask-off during Trump was shocking to me. At the very least, I expected them to manage their appearance better.

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