Most peo­ple have for­got­ten, but the orig­i­nal quote — which sounds ver­rrry Found­ing Fathers-ish — was actu­ally from Ger­ald Ford, deliv­ered in one of his addresses to Congress.

“A gov­ern­ment big enough to give you every­thing you want is a gov­ern­ment big enough to take from you every­thing you have.”

This arti­cle actu­ally makes me quite annoyed with Mr. Buck­ely. For all his smug and smil­ing grand­stand­ing about Obama, it didn’t seem to take him long to dis­cover that Obama is (gasp!) a real left­ist. Duh. I feel like a lit­tle old lady that wants to whack him over the head with her umbrella.

Greg:
The quote sounded a lit­tle famil­iar, but I didn’t know it came from Ford. I like Chris Buckley’s ver­sion of it bet­ter; it’s a lit­tle pithier. But I don’t care which one we use, as long as some­one gets the mes­sage across.

Anam:
It did occur to me that it’s a lit­tle bit quick to do an about-face.

I’m not sure what I think about Christo­pher Buck­ley. The author of the above arti­cle puts him and the other two in a cat­e­gory of being accepted in the glit­ter­ing cir­cles: “If any of the three strolled unin­vited into a cock­tail party in George­town, Cam­bridge or New Haven, the host­ess would emit yelps of delight.”

So of course there would be a tremen­dous advan­tage to these guys in being all for Obama, and no advan­tage in being against him. It would be very hard to ignore that kind of pres­sure, or at least be influ­enced by it.

And to be fair, they might really have believed that Obama would turn out to be a mod­er­ate. But I’m not sure what evi­dence they had for think­ing that.

So since they made the orig­i­nal deci­sion under sus­pi­cious cir­cum­stances and flip-flopped on it a lit­tle too quickly, I won’t be sur­prised if they flip again.

I remain a Buck­ley fan. He’s not a jour­nal­ist, he’s a humorist. Any­one famil­iar with some of his books will know what I mean. Loved “Thank you for Smok­ing” and his laugh­ing at Biden in the recent book on the Supreme Court.. but for the most part, they’re more clever than humorous.

As to jour­nal­ists get­ting it wrong, there have been a num­ber of arti­cles recently here and there (FT and Wash­ing­ton Post) on the absolute lack of gumshoe reporters. There are lots of folks who work in the media these days, it’s big busi­ness… but there’s actu­ally very, very, very lit­tle jour­nal­ism going on there. “The media got rich in the 1980’s and 1990’s and then impaled itself on the inter­net.” The FT was more suc­cinct: “They fell in love with their adver­tis­er­ing dol­lars and com­pletely lost the con­nec­tion to their read­ers.” I guess the dirty secret is that WITHOUT an axe to grind, they don’t seem to have the moti­va­tion to do their job, they’d rather stay in a comfy office and try to fig­ure out what’s hap­pen­ing from cruis­ing the net, and so noth­ing not already accepted as “known” is fer­reted out. Opin­ion on pos­si­ble facts trumps the work of find­ing out what the real facts are. So IMHO, we’re left not with jour­nal­ists, but with orange toned, beau­ti­ful haired, well-dressed peo­ple read­ing someone’s press releases and mak­ing some small talk with each other — to “human­ize” the news.

But I’d under­score that there are no fact check­ers any­more; no one doing the hard work of bottom-up report­ing; and if no one is will­ing to pay for it (see a cou­ple of Supreme Court cases with respect to the dev­as­ta­tion of copy­right pro­tec­tions), then it ain’t going to come from that sector.

The result is sim­ply that the media joins the glit­ter­atti and fawns on celebs. It’s a lot eas­ier than going to the messy places where hard news is. But it means the dif­fer­ence between the NYTimes, Wash­ing­ton Post, and say… Vari­ety.… are less and less. The peo­ple cov­ered are dif­fer­ent, but the way in which they’re writ­ten about… as if from the fan’s per­spec­tive… is pretty much the same.

That is some *great* analy­sis (and I love the ‘impaled’ quote.) I’m going to see if I can get Husband-Greg to weigh in, because he’s a media guy and he’s always got good input when the dis­cus­sion goes this way.

I had heard some com­plaints about the chang­ing nature of jour­nal­ism, but I didn’t know if that was just the Old Regime hat­ing the New Regime. It’s for sure that a lot of the folks that used to be reported on — politi­cians, celebs, etc. — have fig­ured out that they can con­trol the spin by pre­tend­ing to do the reporter’s work for him (hence, the ubiq­ui­tous press releases).

And yeah, I’m think­ing that the temp­ta­tion to be a lit­tle lazy com­bined with the temp­ta­tion to tell impor­tant peo­ple what they want to hear is a tough thing to resist.

I wanted to like ‘Thanks for Smok­ing,’ but I felt my lit­tle par­ti­san hack­les rise that some­one with con­ser­v­a­tive creds would make it sound like the stereo­type of con­ser­v­a­tives is true. I should read the book, though; I only saw the movie.

Grace:

Love to hear the insid­ers take from your hubby.

As to “Thanks for Smok­ing”… movie doesn’t do it jus­tice. Shared the hes­i­ta­tion, but Buck­ley does a fair turn here and in most oth­ers. The one on the Supreme Court… won­der­ful… and most comic take on Biden as a Blowhard star on some Whitehouse-type show. Per­fect que-up for watch­ing the “State of the Nation” with Biden crack-berrying in the back­ground (noisy click­ing was audi­ble on my TV). My wife leaned over and couldn’t resist say­ing, “Send in the Nimitz”.… the Buck­ley line.
You’ll love it.