Howl

I don’t read Bob Somerby’s Daily Howler often enough.

How you see things depends an awful lot on where you’re standing, and over here on the Western end of the bandwidth, we liberals and progressives tend to stand together clustering behind our A-listers and trying to see over and around their shoulders as they pretty much hog the view.

The results sometimes is that what we see is what we tell each other they’re seeing (As in “What digby says” and “I think Atrios has this exactly right” or “Ezra hits this one out of the park”), forgetting that it’s possible that they aren’t seeing clearly at the moment.  The sun’s in their eyes, they’ve forgotten their glasses, their gaze is focused on the middle distance when the important stuff is happening in the foreground or far, far off on the horizon, they’ve been fooled by a mirage, they’re not really looking anyway, they’re reading from a guide book, there are trees, billboards, giant rock formations blocking their view and they’ve mistaken the trees, billboards, and giant rock formations for the actual sights.  They call our attention to the wrong points of interest and even to points that aren’t really there.

It happens.

Somerby, however, isn’t taking the same packaged tour.  He’s traveling in the same general direction and on the look out for a lot of the same things, but he doesn’t stand over here, he stands just a little ways over there, or back there, or up ahead, or he does stand over here but he faces another direction, looking to the left when we’re all focused on what’s happening to our right, looking right when we’re all staring intently straight ahead.  Whatever.  He’s looking at the same landscape we are but since his perspective is slightly different he sees different things in it.  To him the shadows are falling in a different way, the sun’s illuminating a different patch of ground, and therefore the colors are brighter or duller or even not the same colors.

This doesn’t make where he’s standing the right or better place to stand, necessarily.  And there are times when he seems to be looking at everything with his eyes crossed or through very darkly tinted shades or under the influence of a killer headache. 

But it’s usually a good idea to detach from the rest of the tour group and walk the little ways over to where he’s standing.   Things do look different from over there.   They can be clearer, for one thing.  When you get over there, out of earshot of the group and the tour guides, you can feel like you’re really seeing something with your own eyes and that can be a revelation.

At any rate, here’s how the Dave Wiegel affair looks from where Somerby’s standing, and I can tell you the way the light and shadows fall on Wiegel viewed from Somerby’s vantage point isn’t quite as flattering as it is seen from elsewhere.

And likewise Sarah Palin doesn’t look quite so much like…well, like herself, at least not her self as we’ve come to expect to see that self.

I’m not saying I’d want Bob as a constant traveling companion.  He has a way of going on and on.  But he doesn’t want me tagging along with him either.  What he wants for me and you and the rest of us is what he wants for himself, room to wander about and see things for ourselves without taking it for granted that what the tour guides are telling us we should be looking at are what we really should be looking at or that what the tour group has agreed they all saw was really there to be seen.

Comments

[nothstine]

Somerby is, of all my regular online readings, the one most guaranteed to make me uncomfortable, which is why I put myself through the masochistic ritual. Much more uncomfortable than, say, reading Kristol or Goldberg. They're an annoying but predictable joke; little more. Reading them is the symmetrical opposite of "what digby said," etc. It massages one's prejudices but in no way threatens them.

Somerby's another can of worms, though.

There's his insistence that every time smug lefties mock the tea-partiers [i.e., the rank and file right] for being/acting stupid [or racist], it reinforces one of the right's two ur-memes: Liberals think they're smarter than you are. And every time that happens, a right-wing angel gets its wings. This, says Somerby, is no way to get the r-a-f right to listen to you or rethink any of their assumptions -- and it's hard to say he's wrong.

And Somerby never misses a chance to go back to the One Great Crime from which great [political] fortunes have sprung: the hounding of Gore in 1999-2000 by the media, including the so-called liberal media, a crime that has gone not only unpunished but unacknowledged by leftie pundits. Somerby says their silence on the subject has careerist, tribal motives, and again, it's hard to argue. I can't much enjoy Frank Rich anymore, thanks to Somerby.

He's the wormwood I make myself drink along with the fine vodka of what-digby-said, etc.

I wouldn't want him to change, although there are some mornings I'd dearly love to edit him. Even a little.

bn

[MaryRC]

I'm not impressed with Somerby's complaints about digby's Palin post and Steve Benen's Paul Rand post. While it's good that we don't all walk in lockstep, it's another thing to bend over backward in order to present a different perspective and Somerby is really stretching here.

Regarding digby's post it's lame to say "Well, part of Palin's speech was word salad but look, here she made sense"." It's like the old British joke about only parts of the egg being spoiled. Of course digby's going to bring up the word salad. If you're a speaker with a well-thought-out message that you believe in then there shouldn't be any word salad.

What this speech tells us isn't that Palin is smarter than we like to pretend, it's that someone else wrote it and Palin is trying to wing it without a teleprompter (an option she has boxed herself out of after all those Obama-teleprompter jokes) or reading her notes all the time. It's harder than it looks, but if she knew what she was talking about she could do it. The word salad part is the give-away.

As for Benen's post about Paul's fence, speaking as one of the commenters (who, I admit, enjoyed myself by making an insulting remark, just like the ones Somerby scolded us for): Benen also linked to the article that according to Somerby explains how the fence would work.

Paul does mention the fence and border stations in the same paragraph. But supposing you follow Somerby's leap -- "Oh, he means an electronic sensor that would alert a border patrol station." It still doesn't explain how this would work. Wouldn't wild animals set off the sensor? A falling tree branch? How many times would helicopters have to scramble for a false alarm? Does this quasi-explanation make the idea any less dumb? Even other Republicans couldn't figure this out. Why shouldn't we make fun of it? To quote Oscar Wilde, we'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

And now the Paul campaign has walked this back, according to Benen's latest update, and blamed the "underground" part on some un-named fall guy.

Which leaves Somerby as the only person who thinks the underground fence makes sense -- if in fact he does and isn't just looking to be contrarian.

[dave]

"Regarding digby's post it's lame to say "Well, part of Palin's speech was word salad but look, here she made sense"." It's like the old British joke about only parts of the egg being spoiled. Of course digby's going to bring up the word salad."

It may be "lame" to say it, but if you truly cared about moving public opinion on the oil spill issue why wouldn't you focus on the part of Palin's speech that you agree with? Your comment perfectly exemplifies Sommerby's point. Its oh so much easier and feels so much better to just mock the idiots who don't agree with us. We liberals don't try to persuade because doing so would be "lame."

[Elayne Riggs]

"Somerby, however, isn’t taking the same packaged tour." Would that tour be the (in)famous liberal blogger junket to New Amsterdam, or the group trip to meet Bill Clinton right before Hillary declared her candidacy in '07?