A Disappointing Resumption Of Identity Politics

Some heralded Barack Obama's election as the 44th President of the United States as a death knell for racial/ethnic identity politics in the country--and that has turned out to be quite naive.

Talking heads in the mainstream media are already complaining about the skin tone and ancestry of Obama's cabinet nominees. Writing for CNN, Ruben Navarrette Jr. whines:

This week, President-elect Barack Obama unveiled his national security team and continued the sorry tradition of presidents overlooking Latinos as they fill the top-tier of the Cabinet appointments. The four big posts have been filled, and there is not a Latino anywhere in the mix.

Even liberals who like to think of the Gonzales appointment as a kind of failed social experiment because it lets them off the hook for future stabs at diversity would be hard-pressed to suggest that they couldn't do better and that Obama couldn't find a single Latino to name, oh I don't know, secretary of state.

You would have thought Bill Richardson was a shoo-in for that job, with his gold-plated resume: Seven-term member of Congress; special envoy to North Korea, Iraq, Cuba and Sudan; U.N. ambassador; energy secretary; New Mexico governor and five-time nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize for brokering cease-fires and negotiating the release of hostages. What a slacker. I'm surprised Richardson never got around to securing peace in the Middle East.

Continue reading.

This is nothing short of ridiculous. I care far more about executive appointees' knowledge and experience than I do any physical characteristics about them--and so should everyone else. Diversity in top-level officials is important because it is evidence of decreasing problems with all kinds of discrimination; however, criticizing Obama for not following some sort of absurd quota system annoys me immensely.

Speaking as a gay man, I honestly don't care whether any top administration officials are gay. I just want to live in a world where an individual's sexual orientation has no effect on his or her chances of obtaining any sort of job. There's a big difference. Anyone who thinks token appointments made for the purpose of placating minorities necessarily represent a solution to the problem of unfair discrimination in American society is not particularly intellectually sophisticated.

But I guess all this nonsense is just one more reason I'm not a Democrat.

Doctor Amputates via Text Message Instructions

From CNN:

Duped by CNN

I was recently on CNN's homepage. Under the "Other News" section was a link titled "Ticker: Obama "disappointed" in Richardson. I clicked on link wondering what had happened since I heard he was added to Obama's Cabinet. Damn YOU CNN!! The title of the actual blurb is "Obama 'deeply disappointed' Richard shaved beard". (I concur, btw)

As my rage subsided and I decided to write this post, the ticker now discusses a Florida congresswoman that hung up on President elect Obama twice.

Free Sarah Palin!

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSNkloIFTQ0)

(Via Minnesota Independent.)

Congrats again to CNN. Keep it up. Be relentless. It's the only way to embarrass the McCain campaign into letting Palin out of her protective shell.

And if they still refuse to subject Palin to any substantive media scrutiny, perhaps it will be time to take Dan Savage's advice:

Maybe it’s time for the media to pull all reporters—print and television, photographers and videographers—off the McCain campaign. Entirely. Press coverage of a campaign is supposed to be a two-way street. The candidate wants to get his mug on television, he wants his rallies and speeches broadcast and written up, he wants to use the media to reach the voters. In exchange for allowing themselves to be used, the candidate is supposed to make himself available to reporters and anchors, answer questions, hold press conferences. The McCain campaign isn’t holding up its end of the deal. It’s using the media to reach voters without making Palin and, increasingly, McCain available for questioning.

But I can't imagine that would actually work. It's a classic collective action problem: no one major media outlet could afford to boycott the McCain campaign unless all other major media outlets actually joined the boycott as well.

CNN's Political Ticker Integrates "Fact Check" Posts

Again I find myself compelled to praise CNN. Their new focus on fact-checking in their political updates is great. Rather than just presenting the old "the Republicans said X, but the Democrats said Y" fluff, they're actually presenting their readers with objective analysis of the truthfulness of claims the parties make.

The CNN Political Ticker can be found here. And examples of what I'm talking about are here, here, and here.

Note to CNN: Presidential Elections aren't Games

CNN's coverage of McCain's choice of Palin for his running mate is every bit as vapid and shallow as I imagined it would be:

Palin: Pioneer, maverick -- and now game-changer

What do we know about Sarah Palin, the 44-year-old first-ever female governor of Alaska, wife and mother of five, and now GOP vice presidential nominee?

On Friday, a new part of her identity dominated the political scene: game-changer.

She enters an already historic election, knowing well two of the biggest things McCain needs her to do: shore up votes among social conservatives and win over disaffected Hillary Clinton-supporting Democrats, many of them women.

Hey, Josh Levs (the hack writer behind the above article), your research abilities are apparently about as faded and vanishingly miniscule as your byline. But don't feel bad--I wouldn't want my name particularly visible on such a trite piece of nonsense.

This isn't a game. It's an election--and an damned important one.

John McCain is 72 and has a history of malignant skin cancer. His VP has to be ready on day one. By which I mean ready to lead, not ready to pander to disgruntled women who think supporting female candidates regardless of their political positions is in some way indicative (let alone compatible!) with serious feminism.

And as I've already pointed out, what we know about Palin is that she denies humanity's role in global warming and thinks creationism is worthy of time and attention in our nation's already embarrassingly low-quality science classrooms. She, like George W. Bush, obviously puts ideology ahead of empirical reality.

All this horse race reporting is pure horse shit. It's so self-referential and devoid of meaning it would make Derrida blush. Of course Palin's alleged identity as a "game-changer" is dominating the "political scene." It's all the hacks in the mainstream media are babbling about. How are substantive issues supposed to enter the public discourse of journalists don't bring them up?

Good Piece on Race from CNN

I spend a lot of time bashing the mainstream media, but I'm happy to point out good pieces when I see them--regardless of where they appear.

This article proves that CNN is capable of getting it right:

"We were dressed professionally," Wells told me. "It was casual Friday. We had on dresses and casual office wear. We were racially profiled. It was as simple as that."

Wells says she and her friends were detained by six Gwinnett County, Georgia, police officers for "about an hour and a half" at the entrance of an Old Navy store, owned by Gap. Their crime, as Wells sees it, was being black in America.

In her letter to Murphy, Wells describes enduring "disdainful stares from the mothers and grandmothers and children entering the store." Police responded to a call from mall security about a gang of shoplifters in the store. They found no stolen merchandise on Wells or her friends. No one -- not the police, not the store managers -- bothered to apologize.

And, thankfully, rather than spluttering out on a some lame "on the one hand we have people who say racism remains problematic in modern American society, but on the other hand we have other people who say it's not--so who are we to know anyway?" note, it ends with a decisive call to address the real issues we obviously still face as a nation:

Wells has decided to not only get mad but get active, writing and talking about what happened to her and her friends on a day they just set out to do some shopping.

Making a change is not for the weak willed. Our documentary "Black in America" will make you proud and angry, hopeful and frustrated. Please, go out and DO something about what you're seeing and feeling. Give your money, give your time, write op-eds, commit to changing the part of reality that's not good.

Bravo, CNN, keep it up and I might start thinking about adding some of your RSS feeds into my reading list. But only if you syndicate your entire articles rather than just the first paragraph or two. Embrace the future, I can tell plenty of your employees want very much to do so.