Life in the People's Republic of Canada.
2004-09-21
Obligatory Rathergate Posting
I suppose I should mention Rathergate. Or "Danron" if you prefer. Well, here are my thoughts:
- I'm beginning to feel some fatigue over this story. I don't know how Glenn Reynolds, et al, can keep it up. I'm not sure if this has helped or hurt either candidate - keeping John Kerry out of Americans' faces for a couple of weeks certainly isn't going to hurt him, and Bush looked pretty good back in his TANG days.
- A catchy name to sum up a story really helps: "Danron" and "Rathergate" sure beat the pants off of "That-thing-with-Dan-Rather-and-those-fake-memos-about-Bush's-National-Guard-service." I guess that's Marketing 101, eh?
- Some of the anti-Bush folks are deriding the "blogger triumphalism" that the right wing blogs are feeling about this whole thing. Gloating's never cool, but in this case, I fall in with the folks who beleive we're seeing something important happening here.
- "Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true." - Demosthenes. In this case, what an entire news organization wishes, but that shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone. Blogs have long been pointing out that the media often have the storyline predetermined and will ignore inconvenient facts that don't fit with whatever they've got in mind (and emphasize facts that support their story). And of course, Demosthenes made his case almost 2,400 years ago...
¶ 10:30 PM 
