Tom Shone deftly disassembles a fresh specimen of the strange, cautious, squirmy, second-guessing/glancing-over-both-shoulders-in-every-direction auto-feedback apparatus of online film-reviewing: meta-criticism at its most eunuch.

The earnest mess on the examining table is an earnest unreview at Cinematical of director Edgar Wright's Scott Pilgrim Versus the World, starring Michael Cera, who recently starred in Youth in Revolt, establishing him as the affectless anti-hero of our age: Stupor-Boy.

Scott Pilgrim has its dull spots and blah elements, the reviewer concedes, but it's all part of the orchestral plan:

"But what's most surprising is how the movie sneaks up on you, and how it seems to know that these are its shortcomings, particularly at the beginning of the story. That I was initially bored by his dating life with Knives feels intentional in the context of the film's ending, and that he is sort of infuriatingly inactive becomes an integral part not only of the character but his eventual journey, both physical and emotional, as he navigates adversaries and obstacles of both varieties."

Undeterred by the klutzy prose of that last sentence, Shone is also unconvinced by this fan dance of equivocation and rationalization:

So Cera's infuriatingly inactive but it's integral to "his journey," and the dating scenes are slow as a setting cement but it's "intentional." For crying out loud. It's not Francis Ford Coppola we're dealing with here and even Coppola might just be able to hold himself together if Cinematical let slip with the occasional frown. But no, apparently Edgar Wright is so sensitive a creative flower that every comment must come sugar-coated, ever criticism soft-pedalled, every barb softened and proferred atop a bed of pink fuschia petals as the critic backs out of the room, blushing, curtseying and promising absolute fealty to his liege. What are these guys so terrified of? Why are these guys even reviewing?

I'll tell you why they're reviewing, Shone!* It's to show Armond White he's not the boss of them, that's why! And of course to be invited to film-blogger parties and panels where they can complain about Armond White and compare notes on the latest mumblecore movie that crawled out from between the sofa cushions like a Triffid and was shot down the street in Brooklyn over a cloudy holiday weekend.**

Shone's piece sent me over to Cinematical, which I've probably visited before but don't remember, one of those small mercies that memory sometimes bestows.

I noticed there was a review of The Town, a movie I'm interested in seeing, directed by Ben Affleck and starring himself, Jon Hamm, and Rebecca Hall--pretty solid lineup, although why the cast doesn't include Michael Cera can only be attributed to a regrettable oversight. Perhaps he has a cameo role as a motionless guy sitting in front of a saucer of milk without sipping or blinking.

Upon closer inspection, this review turned to be not of the film itself but of the trailer, which is being shown before Inception, guaranteeing maximum eyeball exposure in the theaters.

The contributor isn't impressed by the trailer, however. He is distinctly unstoked. He's right of course that the tltle lacks a certain flair, an alluring flash. But his other niggles seem rather, well, odd, and by odd I mean insipid.

"From the acclaimed director of Gone Baby Gone..." The acclaimed director of Gone Baby Gone happens to be a fellow named Ben Affleck, who also happens to be the star of The Town. You think, "Why wouldn't they just say, 'From acclaimed director Ben Affleck"?" Then you realize you've answered your own question: "From acclaimed director Ben Affleck" would make people giggle, even though it is true. People hear "Gone Baby Gone" and think, "Ooh, I liked that movie!" They hear "director Ben Affleck" and snicker. It's gotta be a bad sign when you can boast having a director who is "acclaimed" but don't want to actually say his name.

These hypothetical phantom gigglers are idiots with the mentalities of twelve-year-olds, which is probably an insult to pre-teens. Affleck the director did a bang-up job with Gone Baby Gone, capturing the dreggy undertow of druggy squalor better than almost anything outside of Breaking Bad, and it's time to quick snickering about Affleck the actor--he was moving and convincing in Hollywoodland. "It's gotta be a bad sign"--maybe they didn't want to repeat his name since he's also costarring in The Town, maybe they were simply avoiding a redundant use.

"... and the studio that brought you The Departed." Obviously, we're supposed to notice that The Town, like The Departed, is set among criminal types in Boston; therefore The Town must be as good as The Departed.

Since some of us [i.e., ME] consider The Departed an overpraised load of glazed ham, I assume or at least wouldn't be surprised if The Town is better than The Departed, but "Saying that The Town is from the studio that brought you The Departed is like saying ice cream is from the species that brought you corduroy" is one of the most nonsensical analogies ever concocted.

The writer complains that the trailer gives away too much of the plot, but that's a common complaint with so many movie trailers, the ones for comedies divulging most of not all of the good jokes, so let's skip ahead to the more concessionary end:

The Town looks like a meaty, exciting crime thriller. We love Jon Hamm. We occasionally like Ben Affleck. We are not opposed to Rebecca Hall. We are fond of supporting players like Chris Cooper, Jeremy Renner, and Pete Postlethwaite.

We're not "opposed" to Rebecca Hall? What, like she's some piece of pending legislation? As if there are other, better, unnamed candidates but, oh, what the hell, she'll do? And you're "fond" of those three actors, as if their careers and talents have earned them a head-pat for jobs well done? I'm not sure what's worse, when Cinematical is handwringingly hedging its bets or patronizingly putting directors and actors in their place.

In fairness, most of the commenters at Cinematical seem, um, unpersuaded by this preemptive wet-noodle lashing of the trailer, so maybe I'm just being mean, or to use the spelling so many people favor these days, meen. If so, too bad, walk it off.

*Shone and I are having lunch soon, which permits me to adopt this mock-aggressive tone.

**This passage is a gross caricature that does wicked injustice to the variety and vitality of such deceptively quiescent Rohmeresque life-sketches as Trudy the Truck-driver and A Coupla Hipster Chicks Eating at Burger King When the Production Budget Doesn't Cover Per Diem.

Let retrace our ghostly footsteps and recall how we were first introduced to Mad Men's Don Draper (Jon Hamm) lo so many cigarettes and cocktails and furtive kisses ago.

The premiere episode of AMC's Mad Men opened with a man in a dark gray suit sitting alone at a restaurant table, the camera moving in on his immaculate hair and broad shoulders like Hitchcock closing in on Cary Grant in Notorious. Notes are being jotted on a cocktail napkin, and the man asks the black waiter who lights his cigarette for him why he favors Old Gold. Draper (we soon realize) is conducting informal anecdotal research on cigarette brand loyalty to prep for the meeting with potential clients--the executives of Lucky Strikes, led by John Cullum rolling out his grand Southern patriarchal cadences as if he feels a song coming on--and then we're into the shark waters of advertising where men are men and women (especially Joan) are busting out all over.

Now, season four, curtain up, and once again...

As you may have heard, unless word hasn't reached your hut, Mad Men returns for its new season tonight on AMC.

More than an award-winning TV series, more than a cultural event, Mad Men has become a way of life, at least in our heads.

I've seen the premiere episode and will be posting about it later tonight after the broadcast. Or rather I'll run the opening graf here--the remaining body of the piece will be over at the Vanity Fair site, which I'll linkily guide you to, fret not.

Be aware that I will not be planting SPOILER ALERT notices throughout the rolling lawn of my reflections through a dark goblet because they annoy me whenever I see them in other people's reviews, wrap-ups, whatever. And if they annoy me to look at, I assume I'm not alone.

So if you're taping/Tivo'ing/DVR'ing the episode for later viewing and don't want your doe-like innocence as a viewer ruined as to what transpires, don't read me later tonight and write a huffy complaint that sounds like every other huffy complaint that's ever been written. Just wait until you've seen the show, then take a peek at my post, unless I've somehow offended you in the past and you're boycotting my Mad Men commentaries.

Having seen the episode, I will say this, however--I severely doubt that anyone will find the season opener a letdown.

Unlike Laura, who rereads her favorite books (Fatal Vision, Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love--if there's a common denominator there, I've yet to decode it) as if slipping into a soothing eucalyptus bath after a tiring day, I'm more "on to the next," especially when it comes to fiction.

But there's one novel I've read at least three times complete and dipped into favorite passages countless times for a quick refresher, and that's Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. The first time I read it I found it somewhat lumpy and overwrought, its beautiful, evocative descriptions and conjurings of memory marred by violet prose and church-organ religiosity. I think when I read it I was too influenced by Edmund Wilson's brusque disappointment and dismissal (Wilson having zero appetite for he considered sentimental Catholic kitsch), just as I was overly swayed by Marvin Mudrick's razoring of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time, which is just about the only other set of novels I can return to without its pleasures ever tiring.

Also, when I read Brideshead, it was still the critical fashion to prefer Waugh's earlier, more episodic, satirical, anarchic novels (Put Out More Flags, Decline and Fall, etc.), to his later, more elegiac work.

It's been years since I've looked at those more romping numbers, even those I loved most, such as Scoop and Vile Bodies, whereas Brideshead just looms richer and better.

At The Sheila Variations, Sheila O'Malley, equally besotted with Brideshead, perhaps more so, pays honors to the hold the novel has on her, its powers and virtues:

Love is love. Love breaks many of us. It comforts some, and those people hopefully realize how fortunate they are. But love lost, and love never recovered, is the theme of Brideshead, and Charles Ryder never again finds the comfort and ease that he found for a brief season in his youth, with Sebastian. It is a loss. Something he must withstand. He does. He is not a good husband, but his wife doesn’t seem to mind very much. He is a distant father. He can walk away from his life at any time, and that is the tragedy of it. He has made no ties, once he lost that first Essential one. Nothing keeps him anywhere. But Sebastian, and that bond, keeps. It is the only tether.

The book is a wrenching affair, and yet, typical Waugh-style, there are some laugh-out-loud funny sequences. A group of guys at Oxford all descend upon a brothel one disastrous evening, and Sebastian drives them home drunk, getting pulled over by the cops for weaving on the road, and they all land in jail. There is a magnificent section of the book involving a storm at sea (speaking of Edmund Wilson’s quote up above [where Wilson makes fun of Waugh's flowery euphemisms in describing the shipboard coupling]), with Charles and Julia, Sebastian’s sister, falling in love, as they fall (literally) into each other’s arms, on the rocking deck of the ship. Waugh has perceptive observations, which get funnier with each time I read them, like:

The great bronze doors of the lounge had torn away from their hooks and were swinging free with the roll of the ship; regularly and, it seemed, irresistibly, first one, then the other, opened and shut; they paused at the completion of each half circle, began to move slowly and finished fast with a resounding clash. There was no real risk in passing them, except of slipping and being caught by that swift, final blow; there was ample time to walk through unhurried, but there was something forbidding in the sight of that great weight of uncontrolled metal, flapping to and fro, which might have made a timid man flinch or skip through too quickly; I rejoiced to feel Julia’s hand perfectly steady on my arm and know, as I walked beside her, that she was wholly undismayed.

“Bravo,” said a man sitting near by. “I confess I went round the other way. I didn’t like the look of those doors somehow. They’ve been trying to fix them all morning.”

Charles and his wife have set sail on an ocean liner, and Julia (now married to a man named Rex, who is a great character) is on the ship as well. Charles and Julia have not seen one another in years. They were never really close. On their first night at sea, a giant storm overtakes the ship, and sends most of the passengers to their beds, with seasickness. Charles’ wife succumbs. The ship empties out, as everyone takes to their rooms, leaving the ship to those who are unaffected by the rocking and rolling, and strange temporary bonds start to form. Waugh writes of an impromptu party some of the passengers have:

There were eighteen people at the “get-together party”; we had nothing in common except immunity from seasickness.

A perceptive metaphor for the breakdown of the class system.

The seasick section of the book goes on for twenty or so pages. Emotions are raw, and Julia and Charles spend all of their time together, staggering around on the deck, and clamping themselves into chairs against the wall, wondering why they are not seasick, and talking about Sebastian. Through talking about Sebastian, they fall in a sort of love.

One of the things that really surprised me about the book was that after Sebastian disappears from the book in Part 1, he never reappears. He is talked about constantly, he is the focal point of all of their lives, the reason for the connections … but he never comes back. I kept waiting, hoping, yearning that Charles and Sebastian would have some final tete a tete, a moment of acknowledgement, or truth, something where an essential exchange could finally occur. But life doesn’t work that way...

The Atlantic crossing--the morose romanticism of the cold, gray waves splashing the deck as Charles and Julia cling to each other in a lurching limbo--is also one of the standout beauties of the original, untoppable Brideshead Revisited miniseries, whose hypnotic spell which never fails to put me at peace.

I don't know who these people--these counter-protesters--are personally, but they are my new superheroes and -heroines.

They restore my faith in the America of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee that I was raised in, when the Fantastic Four and X-Men taught me--taught all willing to see--that being "different" was just another way of being special, as every episode of Glee musically illustrates.

(hat tip: Attaturk at Rising Hegemon)

For the crime, the shame, the stigma, the disgrace, and leprous condition of being an Uninsured American, compounded by the insult to everything holy by being an Uninsured American with Hepatitis C*, Barry Crimmins is sent zig-zagging through an institutional maze of petty humiliations, procedural booby traps, hoop-jumping, incessant form-filling, and officious dismissal of the medical/insurance Borg that combines the charm and efficiency of Soviet bureaucracy with the sunny melodies of Kafka.

With an intermediate stage of limbo that is pure postmodern Americana, land of the free and home of the deranged:

...because of the Hep-C, everything might not be paid for. When the exam (nothing intrusive!) ended, I was told to report to a local for-profit hospital, named after a Catholic saint, for body and blood tests, necessitated by my preexisting condition. I strolled in and proceeded to the lab area, where I handed the form the doctor sent along with me to a young tech. He told me I first had to go to admitting.

I said, "So I'm going to be hospitalized?"

He said, "No. You are only going to be here for blood tests. We won't be keeping you overnight or anything."

"A-HA!" I retorted. And then I turned and went back and found admitting.

There I had to sign in and wait to be seen but my time wouldn't be wasted -- not with FOX-News blaring on a small screen suspended above several other would-be medical customers. I posited to myself that they must have some open beds in the mental ward they were trying to fill. Then I surrendered to my base instincts and fantasized about killing Neil Cavuto (and if that's not how he spells his name, I don't care.) I never watch FOX-News. I know the right wing as well as I know my hometown, as well as I know my boyhood home. There is nothing new from these reactionaries. They are the same innuendo-spewing McCarthyites they ever were. I know better than to allow their invective to splatter upon someone in my condition. My gallant liver is overtaxed enough without having to get kicked into bile overdrive by toxic talking maggots in a shiny studio.

Mercifully my name was soon called-- but wait-- just to fill out more forms. Forms that asked the same questions I had answered as many as three times already in the last few hours. Why do they make 17 copies of everything if they never pass one along to the next bureaucrat? I took a deep breath and began yet another trip through the corporate labyrinth...

A ray of light seems to open the promise of deliverance from the gazebo--O most cruel deception!

Soon a nice enough administrator brought me in and we went over my answers. It went almost too well. She gave me back the form with the request for the blood work. With it, she gave me a copy of my newly filled-out forms and told me to go back up to the lab for my blood work. The heavens opened, rays of hopeful light warmed me and then.... and then the administrator poked her head in another office, where a young woman she introduced to me as, I'm pretty sure, either a 'financial screener' or 'scanner' sat.

The administrator spoke loudly and slowly, like a kindergarten teacher, saying "Oh good, you're here! I think you will be able to help Mr. Crimmins. HE HAS NO HEALTH CARE. Mr Crimmins , Ms -name-omitted-to-protect-the-complicit-in-the-banality-of-evil, healthcare-division, will help you with some financial planning."

And then she ran, and I mean ran back to her office and slammed the door. Ms -name-omitted-to-protect-the-complicit-in-the-banality-of-evil, healthcare-division, got up and came out of her perfectly good office. She brought me to a desk at the other side of the FOX-News Memorial Waiting Room. There she announced to all the other patients and me -- "So you have no health care, Mr Crimmins?"

Getting into the spirit of farce, I stage-whispered, "None at all. I made the horrible mistake of getting sick in the United States, where we need our money for more important things like senseless, endless wars and haranguing the indigenous people of the Southwest for moving back and forth across borders created by thieving scum! But you know all about that, what with your daylong exposure to fair and balanced FOX-News!"

And that's only part of Part One.

Part Two is here, with a slightly upbeat fighting ending.

*Crimmins: "I have had Hepatitis C for almost 35 years. I'm not a junkie and never was. I just knew a junkie who I tried to help by destroying her needles. Needless to state, this was an unwise move. Because I have a disease common among IV drug users, the medical establishment generally treats me like an extra from Panic in Needle Park."

From Barbara Morrill at DailyKos (quoting an article from Politico, which I don't link to):

An unrepentant Andrew Breitbart told POLITICO on Thursday that the Obama administration and its allies have manufactured a controversy over the video he posted of Shirley Sherrod’s speech to the NAACP as part of an orchestrated effort to take him down.

“I am public enemy No. 1 or 2 to the Democratic Party, the progressive movement and the Obama administration based upon the successes my journalism has had."

I believe there's a clinical term for this.

Grandiosity.

Though of course I'm not a trained psychiatrist, like the ever-insightful Charles Krauthammer, so don't take my diagnosis as "definitive."

*A line taken from that revisionist comedy classic Carry On Cleo.

Protein Wisdom's Jeff Goldstein reacting in the comments section to a remark from one of his regulars about the unfortunate, unhelpful linkage/overlap of Andrew Breitbart and the Tea Party in the Shirley Sherrod controversy:

Comment by Jeff G. on 7/22 @ 10:35 am #

There’s no way to unconflate Andy’s agitprop and the Tea Party anymore.

Sure there is. By noting that Andrew isn’t the Tea Party, and the Tea Party isn’t Andrew. See? I just did it!...

Not so fast, Kimosabe.

From an interview Tuesday night w/ Breitbart on Fox Business News (hat tip: Matt Gertz, Media Matters):

BREITBART: I received it as it was shown, and we had two videos that were sent to us over the internet and we asked them to send, because I wanted to get this out there as soon as humanly possible because this weekend was wall-to-wall mainstream media saying "tea party racist tea party racist, tea party racist." And I wanted to send a message to these people that the tea party is going to fight back. That if the mainstream media is not going to show exculpatory video - you know, in American, you're innocent until proven guilty? In America now, under this political correctness, under a Democratic Party that doesn't allow for the other side to get its point out, you are guilty until you prove yourself innocent and you don't have the ability to go out there on the television to ABC, CBS or NBC or to CNN to say, "look at this video, they lied." This is to tell them we're going to fight back. We're going to show you, if you want to play this game in a summer when people have bad economic conditions everywhere, if you want to go the race route? Come on.

So: Breitbart footed the accelerator riding to the Tea Party's rescue "as soon as humanly possible," not much caring how complete or fair the video was, or bothering to check. Whether he actually has an official tea bag dangling from his dickie is irrelevant--it was on the Tea P's behalf that he was acting as fire-snorting vigilante avenger. If Breitbart, the Tea Party, and the perception that the Tea Party is racially divisive are now all swirled together in the mixing bowl, it's because Breitbart poured himself and his latest exploit into the mix.

I didn't post anything about the whole Andrew Breithart/Shirley Sherrod/white farmers/USDA/NAACP/Tea Party manufactured shambolic nothingburger unfolding this week because--well, Al Giordano laid it out lucidly and ringingly in a recent essay at The Field:

A wonderful essay is circulating by Alain de Botton in City magazine (I came across it via Andrew Sullivan), titled, On Distraction. In just 333 words, de Botton captures one of the central problems of this present moment in history:

“One of the more embarrassing and self-indulgent challenges of our time is the task of relearning how to concentrate. The past decade has seen an unparalleled assault on our capacity to fix our minds steadily on anything. To sit still and think, without succumbing to an anxious reach for a machine, has become almost impossible.

“The obsession with current events is relentless. We are made to feel that at any point, somewhere on the globe, something may occur to sweep away old certainties—something that, if we failed to learn about it instantaneously, could leave us wholly unable to comprehend ourselves or our fellows.”

De Botton - who has an interesting project in London called The School of Life - recommends “diets” or “fasts” of the mind, which may or may not work to alleviate such alienation depending on the individual, but do not address the larger societal problems described. Plus, the counsel sounds a little bit too much like a “self help book” prescription (and the constant overdose of media stimulation has different effects on different minds: not all suffer from bloated obesity) when his analysis can also serve as a trampoline with which we can also jump toward some additional inquiries and ideas.
Fourteen years ago I wrote a kind of manual and manifesto about arming ourselves to fight the “24-hours-a-day war between Media and Self,” and in recent months I’ve picked back up the unfinished project of that work, The Medium Is the Middleman: For a Revolution Against Media, dusted it off, and with other collaborators have set parts of it into praxis again in the realm of daily life (which especially includes what happens away from the Internet and other screens). Back then, a lot of the conclusions and ideas put forward in that document were a lot less popular and a lot less easily understood than they are now, at this present moment that de Botton describes so well. Today, there is an emerging and wide societal consensus on many of them. History has been kind to that once inconvenient analysis of “media” as the central problem of our era.

What I have often smacked down from this corner as “the poutrage of the week” and the panicked Chicken Little behavior of those who follow the commercial media’s constant feedbag of crisis and attention-seeking, is really, all of it, a consequence of the harms that de Botton describes. Like domesticated oxen, the population is yanked from media stoked crisis to crisis, all of which carry a whiff of apocalypse: an oil gusher in the Gulf now comes with underwater 24-hour live stream cameras, all available online and to TV networks, as experts - real and invented - jump onto our screens to tell us their version of what is happening. “We are continuously challenged to discover new works of culture,” says de Botton, “and, in the process, we don’t allow any one of them to assume a weight in our minds.” A few weeks later comes Israel’s raid on an aid flotilla (the Middle East being, for many, a Pavlov signifier for “apocalypse” and thus an easy ruse for the media to get all sides drooling and barking according to an age-old script) and the cycle starts anew. And next week or the following week, when fatigue sets in on those obsessions, it will be something else altogether.

[That "something else" turned out to be the Shirley Sherrod media frenzy and next week it will probably be some new sensation.--JW]

De Botton describes the debilitating effect of all this crisis-mongering on the media consumer. But we had also better study what it does to the media worker - not just journalists, per se, but communicators and artists of all kinds - who are now reduced to typing monkeys that have to go out and find those “instant experts” or cram to be able to at least play them on TV, or on a blog, or any other media. You’re expected to write or talk or shout about every crisis of the week, so you - I'm talking to you, fellow and sister media workers! - run to Wikipedia and the rest of the online library to pull up some factoids and buzzwords that fool the crowd into thinking the reporter or communicator really knows what he and she are writing or talking about. The formulaic nature of this kind of frenetic activity at work stations is killing so much of the creativity of the formerly “creative class”!

The bigger crisis of our time is, thus, Power's need to create constant crises, generated first and foremost by the commercial media, all competing for our dwindling hours of free time and attention span, and exacerbated by every kind of interest group, advertiser, opportunist, politician, "activist," aspiring tyrant or con artist who know that a person who perceives himself or his community or his world in crisis can be sold all kinds of products and ideologies to serve the salesman. When we “lose our heads” we are easy prey for the predators.

In a post-mortem of this latest media paroxysm, TPM's Josh Marshall apportions the blame where it most belongs:

Forty-eight hours ago the story was another bad apple found on Obama's cart. By yesterday morning it was another black eye for Obama and [USDA Secretary] Tom Vilsack for rushing to dump a blameless woman on no good evidence and cravenly or cowardly or pusillanimously running for cover because Breitbart, Roger Ailes and whatever other gods of The Crazy said boo! For progressives mad at their president, at some level, that's understandable. They have no relationship with and expect only the worst from the Breitbarts and Fox Newses of the world. But with Obama they expect more. And it's personal.

Still, you just have to back up from that and realize that as disappointing as Tom Vilsack's first crack at this was, the idea that he or Obama is the bad guy in this story is not only preposterous but verging on obscene. It's like the NYPD as the bad guy in the Son of Sam saga because they didn't catch David Berkowitz fast enough. Or perhaps that the real moral of the story is that the woman with the stalker should have been more focused on personal data security. Not for some time has something so captured the essential corruption of a big chunk of what passes as 'right wing media' (not all, by any means, but a sizable chunk along the Breitbart/Fox/Hannity continuum) and the corruption of the mainstream media itself as this episode.

Let's review what happened here. And for the sake of conversation, let's assume that Breitbart and his crew didn't edit this thing and hadn't seen any of the rest of the highly exculpatory video. (I'm willing to assume that for the sake of the conversation. And I think it may even be true as a matter of fact.) That's by far the most innocent explanation. And that means that Breitbart got a piece of video he knew nothing about and published it with a central claim (that it was about Sherrod's tenure at the USDA) that he either made up or made no attempt to verify. No vetting, no calls, no due diligence, not the slightest concern to confirm anything or find out what was true. Even setting aside the fact that, as Josh Green ably notes, most of Breitbart's scoops center on race and/or race-baiting, for anyone else practicing anything even vaguely resembling journalism, demonstrated recklessness and/or dishonesty on that scale would be a shattering if not necessarily fatal blow to reputation and credibility.

Yet most of the coverage has been along the lines of Breitbart sparks debate about racism or White House pratfall on prematurely canning Shirley Sherrod. Indeed, ABC tonight is sending out an exclusive on Breitbart, which is ... a puff piece about how he got his start in new media.

Or what about the Fox News? To use to terminology of infectious disease, Fox was the primary vector of this story. And to the best of my knowledge, there's been not only no disciplining of anyone in the news room but as far as I can see no retraction, apology (with the exception of a semi-retraction, on a personal basis, from Bill O'Reilly) or even discussion of their primary role in an obvious smear. The only 'press criticism' I've seen is this piece by my friend Howard Kurtz which can't be called anything but a white-wash, even including a self-serving internal email leaked from Fox about taking a careful, thoughtful approach to the story. (My god!)

Don't disagree, but I would note a rich irony. One of the news outlets that did do a decent job of investigating/debunking the Breitbart hit job was, as Marshall notes, CNN. And good for them.

But when neocons made a furious fuss about a tweet from longtime CNN senior Middle East editor Octavia Nasr, she was canned in the time it took to blink. Scott McConnell at Mondoweiss:

Led by Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, the war-mongering Weekly Standard, and former Israeli prison camp guard Jeffrey Goldberg, a campaign against Octavia Nasr was begun. It achieved its aims so quickly most observers hardly realized there was a controversy.

Vilsack apologized to Sherrod and offered her her job back. No such luck for Nasr, who ran afoul of the Israel lobby, a grievous trespass for which there appears to be no current court of appeals.

Joining the 21st century, I'm finally getting a DVR installed today and I think I know what the first program will be that I capture for later viewing: tonight's So You Think You Can Dance, featuring guest artists Jared Matthews and Yuriko Kajiya from American Ballet Theatre, performing the grand pas de deux from Don Q.

Thanks for the reminder, Haglund!

Also, is there are cooler name on TV than that belonging to Cat Deeley?

I think not.

For some reason I'm reminded that the Oakland A's used to have an infielder with the equally cool name of Shooty Babitt, whom I remember as always being described as "speedy." I don't think I've ever been described as "speedy," but then really so few people are.