Equal Thyme (and Sage Parsley)

I was going to Scarborough Fair, except it was the Los Angeles Federal Court Building and it wasn’t fair.

click for the larger version (with bonus joke)

A producer I knew from my time as an editor of two Los Angeles Arab-American community newspapers (The News Circle and MidEast Business Exchange) had called to ask if I’d join a protest (this was the early 1980s). Several students were being held incommunicado by the Reagan Justice Department and were going to be deported without benefit of due process of law. (Sound familiar?)

You betcha, I’d said. I drove the old lemon-meringue colored crackerbox Toyota Corolla downtown and found a parking space, and found Richard in the crowd. He pointed me to the organizers, who were very happy to have a blond-haired, blue-eyed protester. They gave me a placard asking for simple fairness.

The TeeVee people were conspicuously there, with their fancy vans and giant cameras on athletic cameramen’s shoulders.

I was easy to spot that night.

But that’s not why I’m telling you this story. It’s about what the guy from the Jewish Defense League taught me — a huge, hulking fellow in his yarmulke and tefillin, payess a’danglin in the breeze.

You see, the fellow from KNBC TV (NBC Studios in Burbank) was interviewing the JDL guy.

There were about a hundred of us protesters and one JDL guy, and he didn’t even have a dog in the fight. So, what the hell was he doing there?

I wondered about it, and when I saw the protest on channel 4 later that night, he got half the time on the tube.

And that’s when I understood how newsies — to show they’re “fair and balanced” — always include the “other side” even when the counter-protesters are few (in this case, one) and their points aren’t exactly in opposition.

He was THERE to get his free TV time, knowing that they’d HAVE to put him on. He made his talking points, and the report dutifully moved on.*

[* The students were deported anyway, as I recall. Our presence had made zero impact. Seems strange how it prefigures this week's Supreme Court decision on habeas corpus at Gitmo in a synchronicity-echoing way.]

And knowing that fatal flaw in the TeeVee newsers’ “fair” approach to news, every group in creation has exploited it … and its unintended consequence.

You can take one or two nutballs (I don’t mean the JDL guy. He was simply being a media pro), quote them, quote a couple of talking heads talking about the two nutballs or a stereotype of someone LIKE them (“stereotype” meaning a cartoonish character who probably doesn’t actually exist) and conflate the whole soufflé into a “movement.” (Don’t stomp too hard or it’ll deflate.)

You can see it in two current media manipulation campaigns: the “Obama Jewish Problem,” which has never had much evidence to go with an avalanche of partisan speculation and meme-tossing. (I’ve dealt with this at length elsewhere. And elsewhere. And elsewhere. And especially HERE.) And in the “Hillary Supporters will be voting for McCain” tale currently playing in home theaters everywhere.

We fancifully create a magic reality by understanding precisely WHERE the limits of the camera’s depth of field are. We “inflate” a couple dozen people (imported to put on a “show”) into an angry mob BECAUSE of the inherent depth of field DISTORTION of the TV camera: as we saw when Tom DeLay’s staffers, and other GOP operatives flew down to Florida to “riot” in Palm Beach County to stop the hand recount in 2000, or in the square in Baghdad, when huge “crowds” showed up to pull down Saddam’s statue, which a US humvee finally had to do, after a US soldier wiped a “9-11″ flag all over the statue’s face.

Or when “Mission Accomplished” appeared on the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln, turned AWAY from San Diego harbor, so that it would look like “Roger Ramjet” George could be “landed” (the TV showed the plane landing and  many assumed Bush was flying.)

(He wasn’t.)

And so, they trot out the disgruntled “Hillary supporters” and talking heads, and the movement seems to be no larger than the JDL guy’s contingent, but on TeeVee, it looks like one.

Which is the intention.

And which becomes, they hope, self-fulfilling prophecy.

Who is “they”?

Well, let’s just remember that there are only two advantages that Republicans have this year (they don’t even have their traditional advantage of money):

1. They stay unified and divide the Democrats
2. Democrats are always willing to fight Democrats, but rarely Republicans, strange to say.

Well, whether the Republicans are “unified” remains to be seen, but this year, the process has been ENTIRELY run by the TeeVee cameras in a way that is  both overwhelming and obscene.

We began, you might recall, with a humiliating game show called “Who Wants To Be President?” And they ran it almost EXACTLY like American Idol.

We had a long and in many ways phony primary showdown between Hillary and Obama, after John Edwards realized that he had been literally IGNORED off the stage by the corporate lapdogs of the media.

And now they’re extending the “narrative” to the point that we don’t even remember that it’s NOT a made-for TV miniseries.

They say that it’s only for the ratings, and they say they’re being fair and balanced, but, really, after this many years, don’t you think they KNOW that interviewing the 100 “counterprotesters” and giving them equal time with the 100,000 anti-war protesters is intentional distortion?

So, now we have the “Hillary” backlash. Earlier we had the “Latinos don’t like Obama.” And we have the “Jewish problem.”

The GOP has a “race” problem like you wouldn’t believe, and, of course, they LOVE turning the tables to claim that everybody BUT them is “playing the race card,” when their game this year has been “52 pickup.”

(Yeah, “Captain” Ed Morrissey, who shut down his blog to go to work for Hatemeistress Michelle Malkin’s aptly named “Hot Air” has a race-baiting screed just this morning. Same Morrissey who sets up conference calls with the White House to discuss defenses in the Alberto Gonzales affair.)

(But some, meaning to be reasonable, believe that this cannot possibly be the case.)

They like to remain behind the scenes, playing “Let’s You and Him Fight.” They understand that most people just go by appearances, and so they are the “Invisible Man” sowing seeds of dissension while keeping a low profile.

But they forget one important fact:

A child can track the Invisible Man in the snow, and their footprints are all over.

It’s the only way that they can win. But, like the Wizard of Oz, as soon as the curtain is pulled back, he can’t be the Wizard any more.* Right Karl?

Courage.

* to paraphrase Frank Rich’s brilliant formulation.

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UPDATE 12:43 AM PDT June 22: Just stumbled on this. Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post noted on Friday:

Karl Rove Watch

Jonathan Martin of Politico looks for signs of third-party groups preparing to spend millions attacking Barack Obama — and finds Karl Rove.

“Multiple Republican sources say that Karl Rove has been in contact with donors such as [Sheldon] Adelson [a Las Vegas casino mogul who has been the chief financial patron of Freedom's Watch] and [T. Boone] Pickens [the Texas oilman who gave $3 million to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth] about helping to create an independent effort but that to date nothing has come of it.”

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