Marginalization of the obvious

By Fester:

Hilzoy, as she (temporarily???) retires from blogging describes her initial reason to pour out her thoughts and opinions on the internet. Her reasons are quite similar to mine, and I imagine countless thousands of other liberal bloggers who looked at the world in 2002 and screamed What the Fuck:

The main reason I started blogging, besides the fact that I thought it would be fun, was that starting sometime in 2002, I thought that my country had gone insane. It wasn't just the insane policies, although that was part of it. It was the sheer level of invective: the way that people who held what seemed to me to be perfectly reasonable views, e.g. that invading Iraq might not be such a smart move, were routinely being described as al Qaeda sympathizers who hated America and all it stood for and wanted us all to die.

Marcy Wheeler, who said an oh so naughty, but accurate and common place phrase on TV adds some evidence to this amazing dissonance:

And the DC press corps, I think, is apparently still horrified by the possibility that you can just say it, like that, blow job, and in doing so, expose it for all its tawdry but ultimately minor import. Perhaps just saying it like that would break the spell they were under for two years, break the magic of the Presidential blow job. I don't know.

At some point, though, we as a country have to be willing and able to weigh what the Village did in the late 90s against the massive illegality of the Bush White House and, finally, realize there are more important things than a blow job, and we need to take those more important things at least as seriously as that magic blow job that captivated the press for so long under Clinton

And this is Marcy on MSNBC, the 'liberal' cable news network that is aghast at an honest description of the imbalance of wrongness:

�Your idea is that after investigating Bill Clinton for a blow job for like five years, we shouldn�t investigate the huge, grossly illegal things that were done under the past administration, only because Alberto Gonzales was too much in the back pocket of Dick Cheney to do it while he was still in office.�

We spent as a society a few years and who knows how much legal and media time chasing down a blow job and that was seen as vaguely appropriate, and now trying to figure out if/when/whom and how many war crimes have been committed is a fringe and inappropriate behavior.  I can understand Hilzoy's intrepration of generalized and collective political discourse insanity in 2002.  I still think that our political system is severely skewed and out of whack, but it is a little less insane, although being wrong is still better than being either right or skeptical.