Two Awesome Takedowns Of Preening D-Bags

Excerpting these pieces really doesn't do them justice, so be sure to read them both in their entirety.

First up, Jeff Goldstein leaves Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall battered, bruised, and looking for the tag number of the truck that hit him.

... Marshall is overtly proud that he’s surrendered his duty as a first responder for himself and his family and, in extremis, his community or nation, for the cheap grace of claiming no taint from the demon metal / polymer killing machine so fetishized by those who don’t recognize that arms are for hugging (and aborting fetuses), not for the pleasure or yahoos who believe themselves some bulwark against imaginary tyrannical evil. Besides, everyone knows the best weapon is an ostentatious new law coupled to a good, hearty Twitter sneer campaign. Drop bon mots, not bombs!

Not to be outdone, Michael Moynihan dismantles the snotty Piers Morgan and leaves him stacked in nice, tidy little pieces ready for shipment back to whatever hole he crawled out of.

According to Politico, Morgan feels set upon, annoyed that his critics focus only on his interviews with conspiracy theorists like Jones and former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura. “Why don’t people watch my interviews with Justice Scalia, President Clinton, President Carter, the Dalai Lama, Michael Bloomberg, any of the Republican candidates for the nominee race, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.” It’s a question that CNN’s top brass would also like answered—his ratings have ticked up recently, though are still well short of his competitors at MSNBC and FOX—but it also rather misses the point. The act of interviewing clever and important people doesn’t, on its own, confer respectability. If The View were to spend twenty minutes discussing literature with Philip Roth, the only lesson to be drawn is that ABC hired a terrific booker—and that Roth was perhaps getting desperate in retirement.

Enjoy.

posted by Andy at 10:02 AM

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