Political Crack

Expanding Our Threat

We’ve moved on from killing journalism to killing politics.Take it away, Alexandra Pelosi:

I think that the blogs have poisoned the political atmosphere in
such a way that I never saw this kind of anger and hatred in 2000. In
2008, I was impressed by how angry it got. But you know elections have
gotten nasty. I do think that blogs have really given people a place
to, I don’t know, maybe it’s therapeutic for them. But it’s really
gotten them fired up in a way. They talk to each other online and then
they get worked up and then they go meet each other at rallies. And I
just feel like the Internet has really changed the climate at the
political rallies. Because I remember the Bush rallies as being fun.
But you know, a lot’s happened. 9/11 and all that poisoning the well.
The whole partisan Bush years and the war poisoned the well. A lot of
other things contributed. You can’t just blame the blogs.

I was
hoping my film was going to be an artifact of a moment in time. There
is a lot of talk about change. Even John McCain was talking about
change. But change is always going to be harder for some than for
others. And there’s always going to be those who are not ready. And you
see people in my film saying, “I’m not ready. Hey, I’m a redneck, I’m
proud of it, I’m more backwards than the rest of you, and I’m just not
ready. Not ready for a black president, not ready for change, I’m just
not ready.” In four years, in eight years, you may look back at this,
and it may be something totally new. Like a Jewish president or a gay
president or who knows? And this will all seem like nothing. I’m not
giving an infomercial for Barack Obama’s change. I’m just saying that
this will be interesting in the future to see people who just weren’t
ready for this. They may be wrong, but they may be right.

A.

24 thoughts on “Expanding Our Threat”

  1. I’m sorry, but this woman is an idiot.
    “I think that the blogs have poisoned the political atmosphere… You can’t just blame the blogs.”
    Same paragraph.
    And closing paragraph #2:
    They may be wrong, but they may be right.
    Is there a part of the UCLA Communications program where they put the brain slugs on you?

  3. I really like Pelosi’s films, but this is twice in one week she’s pissed me off. She was equally obtuse on Maddow the other night.

  7. ‘OH MY FUCKING GOD! WE CANNOT HAVE THAT IN A PARTICIPATORY DEMOCRACY!!!!!’ and ‘So we should leave the politics to the professionals (like her mom) and just go shopping?’
    Yes, Hecate and Missy, that’s it exactly. The people who have been running things for years really do think they know better than we do how things ought to be run. Therefore, the thinking goes, we should just leave things up to them.
    It was ever thus. Just read theOld Oligarch (a.k.a. Pseudo-Xenophon)–it’s been like this since ancient Athens.
    So when we start to suggest that, hey, maybe we might just have some good ideas ourselves, the weenie circuit gets the vapors. Especially if we use profanity.
    Fuck ’em. We don’t need them. Get enough people worked up and going to rallies, and you can get around the Old Oligarchs. Just look at what happened in November. We’re gonna have to keep the pressure on, though, or those we elected in November will let themselves be “guided” by the Oligarchs.

  8. what was the context of ms. pelosi’s little spasm?
    the first and second paragraphs seem completely unrelated.
    bloggers and red necks are preventing her film from being “an artifact of a moment in time”?
    WTF?
    what, did we walk through the middle of a shot?
    the moment she wanted to capture didn’t actually happen because we wouldn’t line up and say “cheese”?
    what is she talking about?
    people like her make me feel less bad about my own periodic incoherence.

  9. Pelosi: “I think by being born in San Francisco and living my adult life in Manhattan, I’ve had enough indoctrination into the blue party. I didn’t think I needed any more exposure to that.”
    BULLSHIT. Much of her issue with “red” america has more to do with CLASS than with politics.
    If she were to go to rural North Carolina or coastal Texas and meet the working class people that voted for Obama, she’d be just as clueless.

  10. I think its pretty clear that she’s not the sharpest knife in the bloc. For one thing she seems to think it was possible, in some universe, for politically active people to be the same in 2008 as they were in 2000. How could that be? In the election of 2000 we didn’t know, right up until election night, that it was possible for an election recount to be hijacked and a good president turned down and a bad one installed by a 5/4 vote of the Supreme court. We’d never seen a “republican riot” and we’d never realized how deeply divided the country would become. Within four short years, and within eight long ones, our country was attacked, we launched two unsucessful wars, watched 40,000 injured troops come home to roach infested hospitals, learned that our government had turned to torture as its first choice in handling a largely innocent prisoner population, and every five seconds the government warned us to “watch what we say” and to report on other citizens if they looked like they were getting out of line. In what *universe* could any adult person be less angry, or even as calm, in 2008 as they were in 2000? You’d have had to be brain dead. The blogs didn’t do that. Bush’s activities did that.
    aimai

  11. She’s safe in her little bubble, self-made with all the little do-dads and kitschy things she’s collected that tell her she’s hip and cool, hanging from the walls.
    But we’re angry. Roarrr!
    Sorry, but angry doesn’t cut it, kid. You get angry when the mailman runs over your cat. You get angry when you slice open your finger cutting chili peppers. Living through eight years of Bush/Cheney is not anger. It’s unrequited rage with a dash of apoplectic. People were tortured, thousands were killed in unjustifiable wars, our homeland attacked, a gorgeous city left to rot, the Constitution used as toilet paper and the wholesale destruction of our economy so that a few greedy assholes can run up their off-shore bank accounts.
    No, I wouldn’t call that angry.

  12. Let me take a modest stab at an Athenae rant:
    Gee, Alexandra, it couldn’t be that the political atmosphere was poisoned by ONE OF THE MEMBERS OF THE GOP TICKET SAYING OBAMA PALLED AROUND WITH TERRORISTS, right you insufferable twit? And maybe eight years of peace and prosperity creates a more mellow political environment that eight years of war, incompetence, greed, corruption and general category 5 douchebaggery FROM THE FUCKING REPUBLICANS, RIGHT ALEXANDRA? They may be nice enough folks when you put on your documentary hat but the people they voted for have crippled our economy and destroyed our image abroad. You know what? THEY WERE WRONG. Moron.
    How’d I do?

  15. My experience with my Repub relatives has convinced me that they really don’t understand why anyone would be mad at Bush or them, just because some Arabs forced us to torture the heck out of dozens, if not hundreds of innocent people, those same Arabs forced us to destroy Iraq to protect ourselves from Saudis in Afghanistan, the wealthy folks did what wealthy folks do, and too few wealthy folks lived in the flooded areas of New Orleans. It is a mystery to them, and watching Fox News prevents them from ever solving that mystery. Absolutely clueless is the appropriate description of them.

  16. And Rush wasn’t around in 2000?
    Rush was around. Al Franken’s book of the mid ’90’s “Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot” is the real reason for the eternal recount of the sputtering mind in MN.

  17. And I just feel like the Internet has really changed the climate at the political rallies. Because I remember the Bush rallies as being fun.
    Oh, yeah, totally!
    As a matter of fact, there were so many good things about them, I’m even having trouble figuring out the best part!
    Let’s see, was it:
    – Signing the loyalty oaths to get in
    – The prospect of getting ejected —or even arrested — for wearing the wrong t-shirt or button
    – “Free-speech zones” miles from the rally itself
    – The scripted questions and hand-picked audiences…
    “Fun, fun, fun” as the song said. Why wouldn’t we want to go back to that?

  19. In the 90s you wouldn’t believe how light hearted and jovial the constant cries of “HE’S NOT MY PRESIDENT” were.
    Peaches and Cream I tell you. Just like the Iraqis threw roses at us – but only after first removing the thorns.

  22. She is wrong. There were no blogs during the Clinton Administration but the Republicans were foaming-at-mouth with Clinton hatred just the same.
    It’s isn’t blogs that led to this fury but talk radio and the ceaseless hate speech from the right.

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