The boundless stupidity of S.E. Cupp (or, Sarah, I am disappoint)

I don't make it a habit of reading wingnuts. Sure, I have some thoughtful conservatives on my RSS reader, and I pay attention to the more crazy things they say when they make news, but I don't make a ritual of enraging myself by exposing myself to regular doses of crazy. So I don't often read S.E. Cupp, but whenever I do find myself following a link from some blogger or forum post, I find myself stunned at how she manages to be mindbogglingly shallow and ridiculous while simultaneously being astonishingly dull and mundane. It's a potent cocktail and I'm getting to the point where I'm dreading the sight of those ridiculous glamour shots of hers. (This one looks like a parody of Lynda Carter.)

In that spirit I stumbled across this recent column and while my expectations were not disappointed, my faith in literacy and intelligence were. It's a love letter (one of many, presumably) blatantly sucking up to the Palinista movement, so she can keep getting page clicks and invitations to Palin pep rallies like the one she describes in the opening of the piece. She attempts to describe the mood of the gathering and the movement as one of ecstatic happiness to reinforce her thesis - which we'll get to in a second - but her prose is so leaden and clumsy instead of describing the excitement of good-hearted folk, it reads like a horrific frenzied bacchanal.

After a couple paragraphs of this - which reminded me of the long windups I'd read from the mass communications majors I worked with at the college newspaper who ponderously attempted to insert local color and florid prose into their pieces - we finally get to her thesis:

And then it hit me. The reason Palin has become
such a lightening rod, a kingmaker and a punching
bag, a celebrity and a power player, is simple. It's
because she's so gosh darn happy.

My first reaction is to wonder if the New York Daily News still employs any copywriters because "lightning" is spelled wrong. My second reaction: That's it? That's what you come up with?

It's been over two years since McCain selected Palin in a temper tantrum because his advisers told him he couldn't pick Joe Lieberman. Two years of near constant media coverage, numerous books, millions of words speculating on the Palin phenomenon. While I wouldn't expect anything in the way of serious research from her, surely she has encountered some of this work, if only accidentally. And after two years, this professional commentator, who during those two years was paid to write books and columns offering her opinions, observation, and analysis, presents this flimsy epiphany and expects us to be greeted with agreement, praise, and a nice check from the Daily News.

While back in the reality-based community, we greet it with incredulity. This is the best you can do?

Let's take her thesis seriously for a moment, which is more than it deserves.

But for her detractors, nothing raises the ire of
cynical liberals more than a happy-go-lucky, totally
unburdened, freethinking and self-assured
conservative woman who has everything she wants
and then some. And without anyone's help.

Why this would raise "the ire of cynical liberals" is not explained. It never is. It is just assumed. Why would we want to keep people down? Why would we advocate "big government" and social programs if we didn't actually want to pull people up? The real cynics are those who are unable to understand empathy and selflessness and project their cynicism onto others. They assume every issue and program has some kind of conspiratorial agenda, usually some kind of scheme to purchase votes.

What really raises the ire of this cynical liberal is not that Sarah Palin is happy-go-lucky, but that she happily and cynically goes around trashing people and issues held deal by liberals. This doesn't just happen with programs and issues liberals advocate, but she trashes fundamental concepts: intelligence, literacy, expertise, language, spelling, and truth. And she does it all with a wink while she rakes in the money of those ecstatic rubes that Cupp attempts to praise in the opening of her piece.

In all this I've given Cupp's piece more credit then it deserves. Her "thesis" isn't an argument proposed and explained in the column, it is merely a reference to arguments made and assumptions held by other conservatives. It's a set of tropes and cliches: good-hearted happy people, cynical unhappy liberals, big government, etc. It's not so much a coherent argument as the lengthy equivalent of a series of slogans or a bunch of blather serving merely as a carrier perpetuating a meme. The best response to this nonsense would be, of course, another meme:

Sarah, I am disappoint.

How James O'Keefe finally went too far

James O'Keefe thinks he is a victim.

I've been approached by CNN for an interview where I know what their angle is: They want to portray me and my friends as crazies, as non-journalists, as unprofessional and likely as homophobes, racists or bigots of some sort....

Instead, I've decided to have a little fun. Instead of giving her a serious interview, I'm going to punk CNN. Abbie has been trying to seduce me to use me, in order to spin a lie about me. So, I'm going to seduce her, on camera, to use her for a video. This bubble-headed bleach-blonde who comes on at five will get a taste of her own medicine, she'll get seduced on camera and you'll get to see the awkwardness and the aftermath.

Let's take a look at the context for a second. A 26 year old whose only accomplishment is a string of fraudulent videos was being courted, so to speak, by a professional journalist who flew to Maryland at his request not to interview him, but merely to persuade him to consent to be interviewed. With this kind of red carpet treatment, to insist on personal victimhood requires one to be either a con artist, a sociopath, or possessed of a high degree of cognitive dissonance. Or perhaps all three simultaneously. It would take the proverbial army of psychologists to suss out which is which in the current conservative movement and their collective fantasy of victimization.

The reason that this particular stunt of O'Keefe's is getting significiant pushback - despite abundant objective evidence of his perfidy - is because this time that fantasy of victimhood has collided with mainstream journalism's fantasy: its self-image of doing serious, important work.

Sure, conservatives have mounted a decades-long assault on journalism and instead of pushing back, time and time again mainstream journalism has accepted the non-existent charge of "liberal bias" and dutifully moved rightward. But in a perverse way, conservative attacks actually validate the mainstream media's sense of self-importance. They reassure journalists that they have an effect on the public, that their work really does matter. And they don't have to do any real reassessment of journalistic institutions, they just have to tweak the content a bit, quote more conservative talking points, add more right-wing correspondents and columnists. The liberal critique of journalism is more substantial, raising basic questions about the methods of journalism and its role in society and attacking the core assumptions of the mainstream media. In other words, liberals aren't just saying you are leaning too far in one direction from the center, they are saying that you are doing your jobs incorrectly in a very fundamental way. This is, I think, why while the reaction of journalists to liberal criticism ranges from being dismissive to going completely apeshit, conservative criticism is meekly accepted.

In the past, the media has completely embraced criticism from this particular conservative, perhaps most famously exemplified by the ombudsman of the Washington Post asserting that the media should pay more attention to the already overhyped ACORN story. But this time the reaction is an immediate pushback. You can see it in this tellingly defensive remark buried in CNN's story on O'Keefe's latest prank:

Boudreau, who has won multiple awards for her investigative reporting, called the comments "ridiculous."

You can just hear it, can't you? "How dare you question that we're doing serious journalism here? We've won awards."

It is even more blatant in Boudreau's first person account of the incident, which is astonishingly defensive about her nine years as a professional journalist. Since I rarely watch CNN these days, I can't judge how good of a journalist Boudreau is, but if you're going to assert your seriousness as a journalist, perhaps you should mention some of the actual journalistic work you've done instead of merely proclaiming your work ethic. "But I got blood on my shoes! I'm a serious journalist!" This is the kind of bland, content-less "journalism" that substitutes showing up at the crime sense and walking in blood for actually investigating a crime, the kind of "journalism" that congratulates itself and gives itself "multiple awards for investigative reporting" without tackling or questioning issues in any substantive manner. For this kind of journalism, O'Keefe's crime wasn't to be a partisan activist trafficking in fraudulent videos, it was to question this self-congratulatory fantasy, and journalism isn't going to let him get away with it.

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