Man Crush

Is it such an accepted bit of wisdom that policy doesn't grab eyeballs, or a contempt for those who are smart enough to demand substance, or WTF is it that results in this kind of crap masquerading as political analysis?

Mitt Romney is so good he is almost too good.

Candidates want people to come away from their events thinking “presidential,” not “slick.”

But Romney is so polished and looks so much like a president would look if television picked our presidents (and it does) that sometimes you have to ask yourself if you are watching the real deal or a careful construction.

Romney has chiseled-out-of-granite features, a full, dark head of hair going a distinguished gray at the temples, and a barrel chest. On the morning that he announced for president, I bumped into him in the lounge of the Marriott and up close he is almost overpowering. He radiates vigor.

And he can’t wait to stand next to John McCain on a stage and invite comparison. (McCain, who looks less hearty than Romney, was severely injured while fighting for his country as a Naval aviator. Romney never served in the military, though the band at his announcement played both “Anchors Aweigh” and “The Marines’ Hymn.”)

That's maybe the worst article I've seen since this blog started. It's cotton candy; there's literally nothing in it except measuring manly chins and manly muscles, and looking for flip-flops and how things will "play" with the base and horse-race process politics. It's literally everything bad about journalism thrown into one article.

If these Presidential beat reporters can't pass a basic policy quiz, or just turn up their noses when anything meaningful gets discuss, can we have a vote in the country to fire them? The number of poll respondents there would make American Idol look like a group of volunteers for shark cage duty.

P.S. Speaking of the media, I don't think I've ever seen as bristling an effective a takedown of anyone as I see in this Matt Taibbi article about Joe Klein. A sampling:

He is the living, breathing incarnation of American "conventional wisdom" -- and what American "conventional wisdom" is is a spineless, slavish, power-worshipping watcher of polls who has no problem whatsoever denying today what he said yesterday, and is mostly interested in making sure he still has invitations to the right Beltway parties.

The war, you might have noticed, has not budged very many of these people from their places. Many of them now claim to be against the war. But they're the same people they were three or four years ago, and they're still quite openly sneering at the people who really were right all along. They seem to hate us even more, now that we've so obviously been proven right.

Klein's getting pressure from his left so he's starting to turn around, but that doesn't make him any less spineless (actually more so). Matt Taibbi might be my favorite current political writer (not good enough to get me to buy Rolling Stone, but still).