I wish I had the lack of scruples you need to really cash in. I also wish that there were some some kind of liberal welfare. I do occasionally read Red State, and I find it second or third-rate in every measure that matters. Bad writing, poor reasoning, lousy editing, crappy comments, shitty community, lame administration, so-so layout. I’m pretty lame myself, but it’d be nice to have some conglomerate come along and buy this site for six figures, for CNN to give me a contract to mouth-off about shit I barely understand, and for people to pay for my endorsements of organizations I already support.
What cracks me up is how easy it is to rise to the top of the Republican commentariat. If you’re black, you’re already there. Just change your voting registration and you can be a highly-paid cable news pundit tomorrow. If you’re white it’s a little harder, unless you’re a blonde women. Blonde conservative women are interchangeable, but you can get in the rotation and fill-in when others are sick or traveling abroad on one of the National Review’s awesome cruises.
White men like me have to work to get to the top of GOP’s money-tree. It helps to hire people to dress up like pimps and create highly edited and misleading videos. But, really, if you can craft a coherent paragraph of previously approved talking points, you’ve got a shot to be the next Erick Erickson.
Our version of welfare was academia, unions or foundations/think tanks.
Rich people cut checks to people who say nice things about them and advocate for their interests. That seems to be a logical state of affairs and one that’s existed across history. Our power comes from being organized; without it we’re all solitary voices typing into dead air.
I’m more focused on quality. The money would be nice, but there is more of a meritocracy on the left in all fields of creative endeavor. I can’t write a screenplay to save my life, but I could probably get a movie made if I wanted to Ayn Rand adaptations or some kind of Ronald Reagan with superpowers movie.
“Ronald Reagan with superpowers” reminds me of the time i heard Glenn Beck state that the the Apocalypse was about to happen, but Reagan recognized this: to stop the Apocalypse, he referred to the USSR as “the evil empire” and that fixed everything.
Booman, we should TOTALLY write that movie.
here’s the post.
it’d be a great movie, Boo. I’m seeing a Ronald Reagan as tall as Godzilla. It’s gonna be awesome.
I think we should stick with more of a Clark Kent thing. He can get changed in the bathroom of Randolph and Mortimer Duke’s office bathroom.
There has to be a scene where he actually demolishes the Berlin wall with his bare hands.
even better: he looks at the wall, shakes his fist and intones, “TEAR. DOWN. THIS WALLLLLLLLL!”
…and the wall demolishes itself.
I’ve met people who believe this really happened.
It’s not just quality. The people on the left with money simply don’t see the value of investing it in media infrastructure the way folks on the right have done. Liberal talk radio is an obvious example; it’s worked in the handful of markets where it’s been put on a station with a decent signal and given a real promotional budget. The futile effort to fund a daily labor-oriented newspaper goes back decades.
When I was at the height of my paid punditing, about a decade ago (just as blogging was taking off), I literally could count fewer than two dozen people in the country that were making a living in any medium doing left-of-center commentary. We all knew each other, because it was such a bizarre, foolish way to try to earn a livelihood. Fox News had more people on their set at any given moment. Newspaper columnists, especially outside the NYT/WaPo circle of hell, were similarly stacked. It’s not much better today.
Yeah, the left is more of a meritocracy in who rises to the top, in part because on the right it doesn’t take any real talent to take today’s approved talking points and put them (sometimes) in your own words. But that top is a much, much narrower place, and it’s not just because of the corporate interests that dominate our media. It’s also because people that want to start left-leaning media outlets usually can’t find funding, even on the left.
You could become a paid left leaning punching bag. See Alan Colmes.
Boo. You have to understand the true value proposition. You can’t because you are not a conservative. 🙂
No one makes serious money, anywhere in the economy, by making sure kids are educated and fed, gays can marry, wars are moral, worker economic rights are protected, etc. Where’s the coin in that?
But ensuring a reliable voting block that knowingly or not will keep government subsidies for the wealthy and corporate America? That inspires investor confidence! I can quantify that in terms of a Dow Jones bump and the stock options bonus options some have. It’s NOTHING to write a check to keep that happening.