Driftglass makes a solid point about Rachel Maddow’s perturbation at the booking of Iraq warmongers on television to talk about the situation there as if they are experts.
…MSNBC shares several floors of a building with NBC.
And they cross-pollinate all the time.
If Dr. Maddow really wants to find out why the fuck “we” keep booking “people who were so, provably, terribly wrong” and “treat[ing] them like experts on the very subject they were wrong about” all she has to do — literally — is grab a video camera, walk down the hall and ask her colleague David Gregory or his bookers and producer why they do what they do.
Then air that footage.
And then we’ll all know.
It would be one thing if they invited the Bill Kristols and Paul Wolfowitzes of the world on in order to demand an explanation and perhaps some apologies, but to solicit their opinions on what to do in Iraq now?
After all the documented propaganda and lies? After all the poor prognosticating about every single little detail of what would happen if we invaded, how we’d be greeted, whether there would be sectarian fighting, whether it would put a damper on extremism, who would benefit in the region, how much it would cost, how long we’d have to stay, whether they had anything to do with 9/11, whether or not they had weapons of mass destruction, and so on?
It’s not that they can’t make interesting guests in kind of the way that Joseph Goebbels would have made an interesting guest had he not killed himself, his wife, and their six children.
“Welcome back to Hardball, Herr Goebbels. Seems like Poland and West Germany have hit kind of a rough patch. How do you think the chancellor should handle it?”
When you lie your country into a war that leads to utter catastrophe, you should lose your right to be treated as an expert on foreign affairs. That the Republican Party has no bench of substitute experts isn’t anybody’s fault but their own.
If Dr. Maddow really wants to find out why the fuck “we” keep booking “people who were so, provably, terribly wrong” and “treat[ing] them like experts on the very subject they were wrong about” all she has to do — literally — is grab a video camera, walk down the hall and ask her colleague David Gregory or his bookers and producer why they do what they do.
Then air that footage.
And then we’ll all know.
Then Brian Roberts would fire her and the next time she’d be on TV would be some local access channel somewhere, or else Democracy Now! Maddow really doesn’t know? Is she that much in the bubble?
She knows. That segment last night is about as far as she can go “naming names” on her own channel.
So be it then. Somerby goes over the top with his anti-Rachel posts but in many ways I have little to disagree about. I think she’s overrated, and sucks up to power like the rest of them.
you’ve earned a lifetime right to being treated as a moral and social pariah.
*Unless you live in the most powerful Empire that has ever existed on Earth.
It is especially galling vis-a-vis Iraq to see a pompous failure like Wolfowitz yapping “what shoulda been done now!”
But this unaccountability of the (mostly conservative) “experts” is a general phenomenon, it seems—thus we have to listen to federal reserve chiefs who saw no housing bubble, and then said it was contained, and to economists and pundits who assured us that (inadequate) stimulus would lead to Weimar inflation, climate cranks arguing arctic ice would increase, and global temps fall, and (the all time favorite) that tax cuts raise gub’mint revenoo, not lower it. And of course health insurance regulation would wreck American health care, and that no one would pay their premiums, that even slight financial restriction on Wall street would deter banker’s profits and “incentives”. Always wrong, all the time.
I guess once one has held a position of power in America, one’s credibility for teeveee yapping just can’t be tarnished. This appears doubly true if one is one of the coaches of Team Conservative. The latest Iraq media affair makes me wonder if the American boob now actually thinks that the invasion of Iraq was another great American success, and that’s why our corporate media has all the past hee-roes of Bushco back on the program.
It now seems that failed leaders/”experts” and a failed media hand in hand. Today’s rigged media has no problem whatever blatting the musings of established failures as “expert opinion” and one cannot lose “expert” status by endless error. Also, one would have to actually know something about a topic one covers to know who has been right and who has been flagrantly wrong about it. Finally, it would seem the bosses of the corporate media also need to protect “conservatism” and need to make sure the boobs can’t really figure out how bad things are—and why.
I viewed from Baghdad the Sunni VP under Maliki and he capsulated in 5 minutes what is happening in Anbar province. It’s not about the extremist group ISIS, it’s about a Sunni uprising, corrupt leadership in the Iraq Army and a history of abuse towards the people. In Mosul, the Army laid down its weapons and uniforms and fled as they did not want to fight the citizens of Iraq’s 2nd largest city. Half a million citizens fled to Kurdish areas for safety, not from fear of Sunni militants, but from the expected aireal bombing from Iraqi war planes. See my earlier comment about the former Baathist military leaders and soldiers who lost their jobs and income under Paul Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority. [1920 Revolution Brigades] Gen. Jay Garner was the person appointed by president Bush at the time of the invasion, a complete failure. He was asked for comment in an intervies with CNN’s Amanpour.
○ Crisis in Iraq: ISIS Is Locating Bases in Residential Areas
Bremer did make the his seemingly incompetent predecessor, Garner, look good.
Garner took the job knowing there was no plan to rebuild Iraq, nor an intention to stabilize society. When the UN came in, they compensated and performed the lion’s task. A great person died due to lack of security after the U.S. Army defeated Saddam’s forces. A truck bomb killed chief U.N. envoy to Iraq, Sérgio Vieira de Mello.
Fox invites NFL analyst Terry Bradshaw on air to talk about Benghazi/
Not being an NFL fan, it’s possible that I wouldn’t know who Terry Bradshaw is except for the one time that I attended a certain industry annual event. To describe this event as male dominated would be an understatement. (A long line for the men’s room and no line and open stalls in the women’s.) Bradshaw was the keynote (aka paid speaker). It was the most sexist and crude speech that I’ve ever been subjected. Made me literally nauseous. He’s a despicable man.
I don’t think you want to say “made me nauseous” since that means that you made other people want to throw up. You were going for nauseated.
Really? Because I would have said “made me nauseous”, too. Have I gotten it wrong all these years?
:: pauses to look it up ::
nauseous |ˈnôSHəs, -ZHəs, -ēəs| adjective
1 affected with nausea; inclined to vomit: a rancid, cloying odor that made him nauseous.
2 causing nausea; offensive to the taste or smell: the smell was nauseous.
* disgusting, repellent, or offensive: this nauseous account of a court case.
It appears we are all correct!
another example of a word being misused so often that its definition comes to be accepted.
Nausea is the the feeling of wanting to vomit.
Nauseated is the adjective form.
Nauseous is like gaseous or onerous. It doesn’t describe a person but an object, unless the person causes nausea in others.
Try it out.
I feel gassy.
I feel gaseous.
I am ornery.
I am onerous.
Also, your use takes away the pleasure and coherence of the following:
Dick Cheney is nauseous.
That should mean that Dick Cheney is an awful person who makes others sick.
Not that Dick Cheney wants to throw up.
Where I grew up, one would say that Dick Cheney is nauseating. Being around him makes you feel nauseous.
P.S. If I were Dick Cheney I would want to throw up if I realized what a disgusting creature I was!
It’s just weird.
abstentious- You wouldn’t say, “That man is very absentiating.”
acrimonious- You wouldn’t say, “They have a very acrimoniating exchange.”
advantageous- You wouldn’t say, “The situation is very advantagitating.”
adventurous- You wouldn’t say, “That girl is very adventuritating.”
So why do you want to say something is nauseating?
If you say, “I feel adventurous,” you hope people think that you are in the mood for adventures, not that someone else made you feel that way.
More to the point, you don’t say:
I feel defeatous.
I feel fatigous.
He made me enervatous.
The -ed and -ous suffixes are pretty consistent in how they are used, and I have no idea how they got all confused with the word nausea.
English is a very convoluted language.
Thanks Obama!
Well, yes and no.
It certainly is one of the least rule-based languages, which makes it really hard to learn.
It also makes it so people tend not to pay much attention to the rules that do exist. People just learn how things are said and not so much why they are said that way.
Still, if you go around saying, “I am nauseous,” you should at least realize that sounds to a lot of folks like saying “I am religious.” In other words, you’re saying something about your character and who you are, not how you feel at the moment.
How about “it makes me (feel) nervous”?
What a nerviating thing to say!
Or “anxious”? You can feel nervousness or anxiety either in the here and now, or as a disposition.
I smell a philosophy student. The devil knows his people.
How about another example?
“I find that behavior obnoxiating.”
“I am obnoxious.”
let me help put an end to this debate.
I think we all agree that dick cheney would be best used as firewood.
Hopefully, the issue has been resolved. Now let’s start a discussion on this use of ‘hopefully’. Such nitpicking makes me nauseous.
nauseous:
Discussion:
Would have been better if I said “made me feel nauseous,” but that was implied.
“X nauseated me” is correct. As is “X made me feel nauseous.” “X made me nauseated” is clunky.
I”m sticking with “we’re all correct”.
And historically sense 1 is the original meaning,sense 2 is a recent innovation. Like God is gracious (bestows grace), her mother is gracious (manifests grace). When the verb “nauseate” was coined (it doesn’t have a Latin or French ancestors, unlike the adjective) its participle “nauseating” started to swallow up the semantic space where “nauseous” lived and shoved it into the new territory. That’s life, language changes.
Speaking of NFL QB’s … I saw over the Twitter machine that Brett Favre cut a Chamber of Commerce sponsored commercial for out-to-lunch Thad Corcoran.
Here is the real problem behind all of this. President Obama is human and like all humans he made a very bad mistake. That mistake is now coming around and biting all of the USA in the A$$. He should of immediately had charges brought against all of those members of the Bush Administration for war crimes. He chose not to instead with the old we must go forwards.
This was a big mistake one cannot go forwards without first dealing with the corruption of the past. Karma gets ya every time. Like it or not the only way this country will heal properly is with us dealing with this criminals ASAP.
Tell that to all the millions of people who would never have gotten health care.
I should add that part of me really wishes that they had all been prosecuted. It’s the pragmatic part of me that believes President Obama wouldn’t have been able to get any other thing done. And I imagine they would have fought the prosecution, too, and maybe nothing would have been accomplished.
Think: Closing Gitmo. Not a big success even though it is and was completely the right thing to do.
Exactly right. Obama accomplished as much as he did those first two years because he walked a difficult line to just keep the Dems together.
BushCo his number one priority but very little else would have gotten accomplished.
His number one priority was continuing to rescue the banksters. That was in his year one. Year two was a health insurance reform proposal that the health insurers had provisionally signed off on.
Did you seriously make a post in this thread about Obama’s karma???
I would rather have Maddow ask Paul and Cruz if we should work with Iran to help with Iraq.
Driftglass…whoever that may be…is just being silly.
It’s talk television.
It’s talk television that is totally owned by the corporate interests that also own the government.
It’s talk television the sole real purpose of which is to give each and every sociopolitical demographic its own comforting little nest of untruths.
How do you know the news media are lying?
When they are speaking about something of truly serious import to the lives of the people at which they are aimed.
This little set of lies for the (snicker) “progressives,” another for the conservatives, another for the centrist white middle class, et., etc., etc. They can snipe at each other in a personal fashion…witness that lame flame war between the Limbaugh/O’Reilly faction and the MSNBC/Olbermann faction back a couple of years…but that’s just situation comedy. It’s entertainment for the rubes. Actually confront the mainstream, thousands-of-times-more-profitable/thousands-of-times-more-important-for-the-PermaGov-Big Fix centrist media about its own set of lies? About the blood that has been spilled and the lies that have been told in the name of profit? Please!!! It so ain’t gonna happen. If it did happen it would only happen once, because whoever did that would be out of a job so fast it would be months before anybody even remembered her name.
And so it goes.
Ain’tcha gettin’ tired of alla that empty foofaraw, Booman?
Ain’tcha?
I am.
Been tired of it for over a decade.
WTFU.
AG
Driftglass understands better than most.
I can see from a commercial pov, that having these whacks on makes for ” compelling” teevee that gets lots of tweets.
In that economic calculus I choose not to watch.
Why there are not more, ney, it seems any actual experts or people from that era who predicted exactly what happened is a bit more puzzling. How about having them BOTH on WITH the people who got it right and see if they can retain their self proclaimed expert status in light of the cold hard fact.
Begrudgingly I also don’t think these criminals should be prosecuted. It would have provided lasting (seeming) evidence and martyrs for the reactionary right that Obama is indeed the antichrist and even less would have gotten done in his administration including repairing whatever we can in the Middle East.
Rather these people should have to live with the shame of their actions in the full public eye of history. That is a sad life. OJ tried it and couldn’t pull it off. So of the Watergate guys tried to make amends and I think found some peace. Some were defiant and angry and miserable to the end.
But it is craziness to let olly North describe himself as an expert on hostage negotiation.
It’s showbiz. We live in a celebrity culture – for some talentless people, their fame is their only currency.
Most “news” stories are pre-written.
Be fair now. Hardball pretty much universally hates the GOP and the neocons at this point. Probably because Matthews feels so embarrassed at how badly he fell for their bullshit last time. He actually calls them out pretty damn directly these days.
iirc Matthews opposed the Iraq War until General Wesley Clark penned What Must Be Done to Complete a Great Victory and commander codpiece reduced Matthews to a fourteen year old groupie. A reminder for the Clarkistas (who either consciously or unintentionally were instrumental securing the nomination for Kerry and giving GWB a second term):
How this noxious, simpering drivel didn’t nauseate the Clarkistas has long been a mystery to me.