(Barry's been in Yurrup so long he's forgotten how
to pronounce English, it seems, and thinks the word
"wrong" begins with a "wuh" sound...)

Barry is so obviously thrilled to have found what
he thinks is an incriminating difference between
two of my posts to feed his Gotta Get Judy jones
that you almost gotta feel bad about having to set
him straight. Nonetheless, I shall persevere:

--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB <no_re...@...> wrote:
>
> --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, TurquoiseB <no_reply@> wrote:
> >
> > Did anyone else notice the thing that Judy
> > ...uh...failed to mention while blaming the
> > Treasury and blasting Politico for "repre-
> > hensible reporting?"
> >
> > Hint: It was her OWN "rephrehensible report-
> > ing" only a few hours earlier. See below.
> 
> Notice the difference in *language*
> between the two paragraphs describing
> the same Firedoglake article? In the
> first (most recent), "Treasury" is
> the Bad Guy. But interestingly, in
> the earlier introduction to the same
> link, it's not "Treasury" at all; it's
> "the White House" and "the administration."

Bar, here in the good old U.S. of A. we 'Murcans
use the terms "White House" and "administration"
to refer to what we call the "Executive Branch" of
the gummint (the other two being the Legislative
Branch--Senate and House--and the Judicial Branch,
the federal judiciary).

Besides the president and vice president, the
Executive Branch includes the various
departments and the Cabinet, composed of the
heads of those departments, known as Secretaries.

One of those departments is the Treasury Department.
Its head is Timothy Geithner, Secretary of the
Treasury, who is, of course, working very closely
with President Obama on the financial crisis.

If you were to read either Glenn Greenwald's or
Jane Hamsher's posts to which I linked, you'd find
that the terms "White House," "administration," and
"Treasury" are used pretty much interchangeably to
identify those who are responsible for the AIG 
bonus "carve-out" and who are now blaming Dodd for it.

Barry's confusion on this point is amusing enough,
but it gets even better:

> Methinks someone is still carrying a
> torch for Hillary and determined to find
> any way possible to demonize the (spit)
> man who "done her wrong."

<cackle> Poor Barry!

> Me, I don't give a shit about "Whodunnit?"
> in this case. In this case there seems to
> be little question that AIG's lawyers
> *would* have sued the U.S. government
> if the bill had forced it to abrograte its
> contracts with its hideously incapable
> employees. It was a monumental fuckup
> caused by pond scum (corporate lawyers).

Actually, Bar, AIG is currently 80 percent
owned by the U.S. government (i.e., the
taxpayers).

If their bonuses are abrogated, the AIG
executives who were to receive them might well
attempt to sue AIG, but AIG itself ain't gonna
be suing the U.S. government anytime soon.

> It's just that IMO the public "blame game"
> is the work of petty, vindictive children,
> whether it comes from the right or the
> supposed left. BillyG and Willytex and
> others were using this situation to smear
> Obama and the White House,

Actually (as Barry subsequently realized),
BillyG didn't participate in the thread about
AIG.

Willytex was initially using the situation to
smear *Dodd* on the basis of the administration's
false accusations, but he's equally happy to
smear the administration if he can, because they're
all Democrats, y'see.

 for their petty,
> vindictive reasons; Judy was using this
> *same* situation to smear Obama and the
> White House, for *her* own petty, vindic-
> tive reasons. What's the difference?

The difference, of course, is that Dodd is not
guilty of what the White House is trying to smear
him with.

> Me, I'm just using the situation to *point
> out* those petty, vindictive actions, and
> remind people that sometimes the self-
> styled "voice of integrity" on this forum
> has none.

And who better to point the finger at petty,
vindictive actions and complain about lack of
integrity than Barry?

<horselaugh>

 Why is there such a difference
> in the language in the first quotes (which
> were posted twice) and the second? Could
> it possibly be an attempt at "spin" to
> "affix blame" where *she* wanted it affixed?

No, it's because Barry's hopelessly confused.
The specific terminology was different between
the quotes, but not the folks the terms referred
to.

For the record (as Barry would have realized if
he'd been reading my posts with any attention,
rather than simply looking for something to Get
Judy with), I think the administration is generally
doing a good job with the financial crisis.

The AIG bonus mess was a slip-up, though, and
trying to blame Dodd for it was a dirty trick
for which the administration shouldn't get a
pass. On the other hand, the furor over the
bonuses is largely a matter of optics; they're
a tiny fraction of the amount of money involved.

The administration is trying to "adjust" those
optics to mitigate the furor--especially the
complaints about Geithner, whose resignation is
now being called for in some quarters--so one
can understand the motivation if not approve of
the method. The popular (and largely ignorant)
outrage being fed by the right is likely to get
in the way of the administration's future actions
to solve the financial crisis, so assuaging it
is crucial.

Unfortunately, the administration chose a bad
approach to covering up its responsibility for
the bonus gaffe. If Dodd had had his way, there
wouldn't have been a gaffe.

(To his credit, Obama has explicitly taken
responsibility for what is being done--and
not done--to solve the financial crisis. It
would be even more to his credit if he were
to publicly exonerate Dodd of responsibility
for the bonus mess.)

Since this is my last post until Friday, I'm
importing the following from another related
post of Barry's:

> I think this is important to point out here on
> Fairfield Life at this point in history. A *lot*
> of what is posted here consists of people cutting
> and pasting their favorite "News sources" to 
> support their own bias and "spin" the News and
> "affix blame" to the people that THEY want to
> "affix blame" to. Raunchy reads the pro-Hillary
> blogs and reposts them here to demonize Obama,
> the man who "done her wrong." Judy does the same
> thing from time to time, and cuts and pastes her
> own "preferred sources" to demonize the "culprit
> du jour" that *her* bias wishes to affix blame
> to. Willytex and some of the right-wingers do the
> same thing with *their* "preferred News sources"
> to cast the blame on the people *they* want to
> demonize. And ALL of them seem to imply that 
> *their* News sources can be trusted.

You'll notice, first of all, that Barry names
*only* those who post criticisms of Obama. do.rflex,
for example, is conspicuously absent from the above
rant, even though he posts nothing but pro-Obama
items, and cuts-and-pastes in far greater quantity
than anybody else. It seems Barry believes that
only criticism of Obama is "biased."

That said, I can't even remember the last time I
posted anything from a pro-Hillary blog. Does
Barry assume that because Jane Hamsher is female,
therefore her blog must be pro-Hillary? I don't
even think it was during the primaries, but I don't
read it unless someone I do read links to it, so
I really don't know.

Or does Barry assume that anybody who criticizes
Obama must be pro-Hillary?

Glenn Greenwald certainly isn't. He supported
Obama in the primaries.

More generally, the thing about bias in the media
(including blogs) is that if you're reasonably
intelligent and pay attention to what's going on in
the world, you can discern *degrees* of bias in
what people write and say, and if you want to be as
objective as possible, you avoid letting yourself 
be influenced by those who are hopelessly biased
(in either direction) and stick with the reporting
and opinionating of those who demonstrate more
balanced views.

Both Hamsher and Greenwald are progressives, but
they're among the more objective pundits on the
left. They both support progressive Democrats
over Blue Dog Democrats and Republicans, but when
progressives misbehave or show poor judgment, they
don't hesitate to criticize them.

Barry genuinely doesn't understand this kind of
behavior. He doesn't read widely or attentively
enough to evaluate degree of bias, and he
attributes any criticism of the people he supports
to a bias against them.

This shortcoming, along with his fanatical bias
against me, is responsible for the series of howlers
in his current spate of posts.



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