{"id":4561,"date":"2009-04-13T06:23:45","date_gmt":"2009-04-13T11:23:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4561"},"modified":"2009-04-13T08:56:20","modified_gmt":"2009-04-13T13:56:20","slug":"hope-change-andother-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=4561","title":{"rendered":"Hope, Change, And&#8230;Other Stuff"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Have you noticed how many crises and near-crises are, to the media, &#8220;distractions&#8221; from the really important news (like <a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/wp-dyn\/content\/article\/2009\/04\/11\/AR2009041102484.html\">the new Obama puppy<\/a>)?<\/p>\n<p>Mark Steyn <a href=\"http:\/\/article.nationalreview.com\/?q=ZWQwNTE2OWM2YjEwMWQzNTM4OTMzZGVhOWM0NDUxOGQ=\">certainly has:<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Tom Blumer of Newsbusters notes that in the last 30 days there have been some 2,500 stories featuring Obama and \u201cdistractions,\u201d as opposed to about 800 \u201cdistractions\u201d for Bush in his entire second term. The sub-headline of the Reuters story suggests the unprecedented pace at which the mountain of distractions is piling up: \u201cFirst North Korea, Iran \u2014 now Somali pirates.\u201dEr, okay. So the North Korean test is a \u201cdistraction,\u201d the Iranian nuclear program is a \u201cdistraction,\u201d and the seizure of a U.S.-flagged vessel in international waters is a \u201cdistraction.\u201d Maybe it would be easier just to have the official State Department maps reprinted with the Rest of the World relabeled \u201cDistractions.\u201d Oh, to be sure, you could still have occasional oases of presidential photo-opportunities \u2014 Buckingham Palace, that square in Prague \u2014 but with the land beyond the edge of the Queen\u2019s gardens ominously marked \u201cHere be distractions . . . \u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Why, it&#8217;s almost as if the mainstream media <em>want <\/em>the whole world to cooperate with a triumphalistic narrative they&#8217;ve already written, in which the Obamessiah and his Hope and Change sweeps all the world&#8217;s benightedness before it!<\/p>\n<p>Or something like that.<\/p>\n<p>NOTE TO FLASH:\u00a0 This piece is a commentary on the media&#8217;s kid-gloves treatment of Obama.\u00a0 Not, as it happens, on <a href=\"http:\/\/centrisity.blogspot.com\/2009\/04\/hooah.html\">his performance <\/a>in the pirate standoff.<\/p>\n<p>Chris Cilizza may think you&#8217;re hot stuff, but around here, you&#8217;re still just Flash. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Have you noticed how many crises and near-crises are, to the media, &#8220;distractions&#8221; from the really important news (like the new Obama puppy)? Mark Steyn certainly has: Tom Blumer of Newsbusters notes that in the last 30 days there have been some 2,500 stories featuring Obama and \u201cdistractions,\u201d as opposed to about 800 \u201cdistractions\u201d for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4561","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-president-obama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4561\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}