Blogs of Mass Deception
If you see Karl Rove hiding in your hedges, call 1-877-MOONBAT. Mark Gisleson is on the beat, and he needs your help.
The City Pages - the Twin Cities "alternative" weekly handout - has always slewed to both sides of a broad, dark line.
On the one hand, they've always had some of the best actual news reportage in town. They have some reporters who do some just plain good gumshoe reporting. And while things have slid a bit on Steve Perry's watch, the actual news operation at City Pages still does a generally good job.
We're not talking about news.
WARNING: ANECDOTE AHEAD: In the mid-eighties, where I was a fringe player in the Twin Cities music scene (back when there was a Twin Cities music scene), the word among local musicians was that there were four ways to get a write-up in the City Pages:
- Be a classmate of a City Pages music critic.
- Be on the short list for all the same parties the City Pages music critics went to.
- Supply drugs for the City Pages music critics.
- Provide sexual favors for the City Pages music critics.
In other words, the City Pages swerves between being a fairly decent
newspaper, and a glorified college tabloid - one with occasional flashes of competence, even brilliance in news coverage - and quite a bunch of people stuck in in the "wannabe literary bad boy/grrl" phases of their lives.
Which brings us to Gisleson. In a Babelogue posting last week, among other rhetorical crimes, Gisleson slagged our Northern Alliance pals Fraters Libertas.
Fraters' Saint Paul slagged back.
You gotta feel sorry for Mark Gisleson. One day - actually, for fifteen years - he's running a little resume writing service. The next, he's off writing politics. And, shock of shocks, those peasants get uppity! Unlike the good old days, when writers just wrote, and readers just read, and a political analyst still got the respect they deserved, Maodammit, today the madding throng can not only publish on the web, but cut your rantings to pieces!
This is normally the part of the posting where I'd start fisking Gisleson. But with Mark, that'd be overkill. I'll let him fisk himself:
Richard Florida on the ?Creative Class War? and yes, he is talking about the arts, among other things like how the Right has convinced the creative community to work abroad where it?s friendlier [What? Artists moving overseas? That's never happened before!]... fringe lunatic base...I almost think Karl Rove is trying to lose so as to avoid the inevitable lamp post that awaits him if we have to resort to the other kind of regime change. ... Glenn ?Instahack? Reynolds at the head of the BMD* mob [That'd be "Blogs of Mass Deception". Gisleson made that up himself! ]...Bret Ellis intensity stuff about corpse-fucking Bill Clinton...pustulently corrupt administration...pretzel-choking, vacation-taking loser-in-chief!...the brown shirts [I hereby invoke Godwin's Law]... ...sarcastic God?s answer to an idiot?s prayer for a second Reagan. Well, that?s what they?ve got, up to and including the premature Alzheimer?s...
I feel sorry for Gisleson's keyboard. All that flying slobber is hell on the pads.
Funnier still, this exchange, filed before the Iowa Caucuses. Did you know that Karl Rove is not only behind the President - he's the driving force behind the Democrats, as well!:
As usual, maestro Karl's timing is impeccable: today's Des Moines Register story on Kerry is about taxes and energy policy. Tomorrow's Sunday headlines will be less kind. It's rank punditry on my part to say this kills Kerry, but I do fear that Rove has just dispatched one of his two most feared opponents [disingeuous paeon to Kerry's war record, written by someone who'd ordinarily spit on veterans, omitted] Can Karl Rove again steal what he cannot win honestly?
You know you're over the edge when
Steve Perry serves as the voice of moderation:
Yeah, Drudge has certainly been entertaining the last few days. Only one problem: Without any major exceptions that I'm aware of, this is not Rove and the Republicans doing the "opposition research," as it's called. It's the Democrats themselves, most especially the Clark camp.
Read Gisleson's stuff, especially his unmoderated blog writing. Check out some of the links he cites - one dubious, "Indymedia"-caliber moonbat writer after another - and then check out his "Blogs of Mass Deception" crack. You be the judge.
Gisleson, from what I've read so far, is like one of those talking toys, where you pull the string to hear one of half a dozen predictable, recorded phrases. Call him "Mao-o-matic".
Call this praise with faint damnation - but the City Pages can do better. If Gisleson's writing were a resume, it'd go in the circular file on the first cut.
Posted by Mitch at
January 20, 2004 07:05 AM
