| Subject: Re: Fw: Davis piece |
| From: Tim Rogers <timr@dmagazine.com> |
| Date: 9/20/10, 15:30 |
| To: barriticus@gmail.com |
Hey, I'm downtown and there are all these black hebrews doing a demonstration with white christian counterprotesters and whatnot, would you be interested in seeing a piece on this?Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2010 16:16:35 -0500To: Barrett Brown<barriticus@gmail.com>Subject: Re: Fw: Davis pieceYeah, this second version works, Barrett. I will tinker a bit. I'll prune. But this is good. I've got it on our schedule right now for the next issue (November).
On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 10:31 AM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
No problem. I'll be off hunting for a couple days but will have my blackberry.On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 11:24 AM, Tim Rogers <timr@dmagazine.com> wrote:
I'm slammed with our deadline for the October issue, editing stuff that will go in that issue. Hopefully have time later today to read this.
Be patient.On Tue, Aug 31, 2010 at 9:16 AM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Hey, Tim-Did this last version work for you?On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 5:19 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Let me know if this works:Newly-elected Dallas County Community College District trustee Bill Metzger was understandably excited at having been picked to be among those speaking at last Augusts Freedom Rally. I had written some stuff, what I wanted to say, Metzger told a Republican audience at Hillcrest High Schools Franklin Stadium, but I knew when I got here it didn't mean anything because I'm here for one reason - my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, without whom I wouldnt be here today, and Ive got to give him all the credit. Having thus dispensed all available credit, Metzger was unable to thank or even mention his mother, who must have been of some noticeable assistance by virtue of having held the same seat immediately prior to his taking it, and thus possessed of certain helpful connections. Still, Metzger did find time to mention his own son and even went to end the speech with a rhyme that the young fellow had supplied to him for the occasion. Be a star - vote straight R!
Mark Davis - the Dallas Morning News columnist and local radio host who also subs for Rush Limbaugh and was thus the natural choice to MC an event sponsored by area Republicans - has a more nuanced take on the duties of a conservative to his party of preference. Here at the rally, Davis made a point of noting that a candidate doesnt necessarily merit conservative support simply by virtue of his name being listed next to an R; attendees, he said, should be voting for the right kind of Republican... Because there are two kinds of politicians that need to fear the passion of a little group I like to spread some love to every once in a while: the Tea Party! There are two kinds of politicians that need to fear their wrath: Democrats making government too big, and Republicans making government too big!
Such willingness to criticize elements of his own party for doing those things which he criticizes when perpetrated by the opposing party is a rare and wonderful attribute, one that gives us some indication as to Mark Davis value as a political commentator. Even knowing that Davis will sometimes go so far as to display some relatively high level of historical literacy and intellectual honesty and is thus the superior of his many colleagues, we might note that many of his colleagues are not all too difficult to surpass in such things and thus note that all we really know is that Davis is better than a great number of mediocre people. If that is sufficient to Dallas needs, then we need not look much closer; if we have higher standards, though, we may be inclined to determine whether or not the pundit we have elevated to national stature is capable of, say, answering a particular question without accidentally showing himself to be only slightly more competent than a great number of pundits who are not particularly competent at all. A few days after the rally, then, I asked Davis such a question, and we will examine the answer presently.
On paper, the San Antonio-born Davis has done quite a bit to earn his status as Dallas most influential conservative commentator; after graduating from the University of Maryland, he worked stints as a news reporter in a couple of markets and even managed to get his first radio show at a station in Florida at the age of 24, later hosting similar programs in Memphis and D.C. before making his way back to Texas in 1994 to take what has become an extraordinarily successful spot on WBAP. Even more admirable than Davis resume, though, is his aforementioned willigness to criticize figures of his own party when appropriate. In the course of hosting the Limbaugh program a few months back, he lauded Rand Paul for appearing on NPR at the risk of hostile questioning while also criticizing the candidate for having recently cancelled a scheduled appearance on Meet the Press. To agree to and then bail on such an appearance, to not have the guts to show up, is among those things for which Davis will happily attack a fellow Republican on the nations most popular venue of Republican commentary. When a caller claims that liberals dont have the guts to show up on Fox News, Davis corrects him, noting that many of them clearly do seeing as how the network indeed routinely plays host to liberal guests, none of whom appear to have been kidnapped for the purpose.
Davis has even gone so far as to criticize Sarah Palin in response to her expressed grievances against the mainstream media for asking her questions that she and her supporters consider unfair. There are no unfair questions, Davis asserted. I am happy that he thinks so, because the questions I asked him were composed in preparation for a rousing game of Get the Conservative to Denounce Ronald Reagan in Extraordinarily Harsh Terms Without the Conservative Realizing That This Is What He Is Doing.
Rules:
1. Locate a conservative.
2. Ask him what he thinks about certain behavior that you know Ronald Reagan to have exhibited but which the conservative probably does not.
3. Inevitably receive an answer in which that behavior is denounced.
4. For every insult that is accidentally directed towards Reagan, add a point.
5. Add a point if the conservative is merely of the fiscal or foreign policy sort and thus potentially knowledgeable about history and harder to trick. Subtract a point if its a social conservative.
6. Subtract a point if the conservative acknowledges that conservatives also engage in this behavior.
7. If the conservative does not accidentally insult Reagan, you are the first person to lose this game.
Now, lets see how we did.
Question for Mark Davis: Speaking of moral equivalence, there seems to have been a significant rise in rhetoric against Israel on such occasions as it reacts against outside threats in which that nation's actions are equated with those of Nazi Germany. Is such deliberate use of that kind of terminology the result of mere sloppy thinking or is it something worse?
Explanation of Question for the Reader: In 1982, Israel launched an attack on West Beirut in an effort to strike at the PLO, at which point a distressed King Fahd of Saudi Arabia called Reagan and asked him to intervene against Israel. Agreeing that intervention was prudent, Reagan in turn called Menachem Begin and informed the Israeli Prime Minister that he was perpetrating a holocaust. Begin, whose parents were both killed in the actual Holocaust, responded that he knew perfectly well what constituted a holocaust and that he did not believe this particular expedition to fit the criteria, but nonetheless backed off at Reagans request.
Answer by Mark Davis: Nazi Germany and Hitler have sadly become the go-to references when rhetorical bullies seek to end debate with a cheap shot. Whether it's an Obama critic suggesting his socialism has a Hitler flavor, or a Bush-basher attaching Hitler-style motivations to George W's exercise of executive power, these playground taunts achieve nothing to advance discourse. It stems from two common characteristics of today: immaturity and laziness. The thin-skinned adolescent rants of much of today's dialogue show that we often prefer to use flamethrowers to incinerate opponents rather than scalpels to dissect what they are saying.
Results: Davis has accidentally characterized Reagan by way of a total of seven negative descriptions. He subtracts a point from my score by noting that even conservatives engage in such behavior and also gets the handicap point for being a social conservative, leaving me with a score of five. I remain the grandmaster of some stupid game I made up.
Now, the reader may perhaps object that it is unfair to set someone up in such a fashion, akin to baiting deer in an effort to shoot them. If that is the case and it is not - then let us do something more akin to sitting around in the woods and waiting for a deer to walk into a tree over and over again until it dies; let us see if Davis can write a column in which he accidentally attacks Reagan without any prompting from me. Better yet, let us see if Davis can write a column in which he accidentally attacks Reagan not only while himself bringing him up by name, but also in the course of lauding him for having refrained from doing several things that he actually quite famously did.
A few months ago, Davis took Obama to task for signing a nuclear arms reduction treaty with the Russians. "The ignorant assertion that our nukes and their nukes are the same is not new, Davis noted in a column for The Dallas Morning News. Ronald Reagan ignored such droning 30 years ago, driving the Soviets to their knees by refusing to gut U.S. nuclear capability and by refusing to scrap missile defense technology."
Davis is correct to note that the sameness of U.S. and Russian nukes is an old idea, but to the extent that anyone outside of Austin has advocated such a view, it would be hard to top Reagan, who routinely painted all nukes with the same brush. Such weapons, Reagan proclaimed, are "totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization. The Great Communicator, then, not only failed to ignore such droning, but routinely engaged in it himself, having greatly communicated in 1984 that "nuclear arsenals are far too high" and that his "dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the earth, never once stopping to qualify his statements in such a way that Davis might have preferred. It wasnt for nothing that Terry Dolan, chair of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, complained around then that "[t]he administration hasnt co-opted the peace movement. The peace movement has co-opted the administration."
Reagan did not confine himself to mere high-flown rhetoric; Davis to the contrary, Reagan did indeed gut the republics nuclear arsenal by way of SALT III, later known as START, a series of treaties that were updated by George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and area man George W. Bush, and which eventually resulted an 80 percent reduction of all nuclear weapons. Obamas 2010 version of START is simply a long-scheduled continuance of a policy that Reagan considered to be among the most important of his own accomplishments and which had been American policy since the first SALT treaty was signed by that dreamy idealist Richard Nixon. Davis does not get around to mentioning any of this, perhaps due to space constraints; though he is presumably more erudite than DCCCD trustee Bill Metzger, he does not seem to be much more proficient in the budgeting of his output.
The problem here is not that Davis is a particularly bad pundit. He appears to be better-informed and more prone to intellectual honesty than most of the people who believe the things that he believes, which is to say that he is in the regular habit of taking his allies to task for doing those things to which he believes himself to be opposed. That he sometimes does this on purpose makes him a particularly good pundit and that, I would suggest, is the real problem.
I apologize to Davis for having asked him a question with the sole intent of making him look bad. I did so because I wanted the answer to a different and broader question: Having been given the opportunity to inform the electorate of Dallas and even sometimes of the nation as a whole, have you checked to ensure that you are sufficiently competent to fulfill that responsbility, and that you are not simply doing damage to the understanding of the millions of people to which you have been provided regular access? I consider this to be a legitimate question. To get an accurate answer, one must ask it indirectly.
On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 3:49 PM, barri2009 <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Gotcha, makes sense, will rework it today.Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
From: Tim Rogers <timr@dmagazine.com>Sender: timmytyper@gmail.comDate: Thu, 26 Aug 2010 14:48:48 -0500To: <barriticus@gmail.com>Subject: Re: Fw: Davis pieceI'm pretty fond of this, Barrett. The opening scene is good. I like that you set up Davis as a good guy. I like the game--both of the games. But you need to hold the reader's hand just a bit more.
To wit: after the second graph, before the Davis bio, we need to know what's happening here. We need a short nut graph that let's us know this isn't a profile in the traditional sense. It's a high-concept takedown. So you've got to say, plainly, "He's Dallas' most influential commentator. But is he any good at it? I decided to put him to the test." Or words to that effect.
You eventually do do that, but not until right before the Rules, which is more than 600 words in. That's too long to wait, I think. By then, the reader is settling in for a traditional profile, and the change in direction is jarring.
Does that make sense?
The other thing I'd say is that the ending is a bit abrupt.On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 1:17 PM, barri2009 <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T
From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>Date: Wed, 25 Aug 2010 11:56:44 -0400To: Tim Rogers<timr@dmagazine.com>Subject: Davis piece
Newly-elected Dallas County Community College District trustee Bill Metzger was understandably excited at having been picked to be among those speaking at last Augusts Freedom Rally. I had written some stuff, what I wanted to say, Metzger told a Republican audience at Hillcrest High Schools Franklin Stadium, but I knew when I got here it didn't mean anything because I'm here for one reason - my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, without whom I wouldnt be here today, and Ive got to give him all the credit. Having thus dispensed all available credit, Metzger was unable to thank or even mention his mother, who must have been of some noticeable assistance by virtue of having held the same seat immediately prior to his taking it, and thus possessed of helpful connections. Still, Metzger did find time to mention his son and even went to end the speech with a rhyme that the young fellow had supplied to him for the occasion. Be a star - vote straight R!
Mark Davis, the Dallas Morning News columnist and local radio host who also subs for Rush Limbaugh and was thus the natural choice to MC an event sponsored by area Republicans, has a more nuanced take on the duties of a conservative to his party of preference. Here at the rally, Davis made a point of noting that a candidate doesnt necessarily merit conservative support simply by virtue of his name being listed next to an R; attendees, he said, should be voting for the right kind of Republican... Because there are two kinds of politicians that need to fear the passion of a little group I like to spread some love to every once in a while: the Tea Party! There are two kinds of politicians that need to fear their wrath: Democrats making government too big, and Republicans making government too big!
The San Antonio-born Davis has done quite a bit to earn his status as Dallas most influential conservative commentator; after graduating from Maryland?, he worked stints as a news reporter in a couple of markets and even managed to get his first radio show at a station in Florida at the age of 24, later hosting similar programs in Memphis and D.C. before making his way back to Texas in 1994? to take what has become an extraordinarily successful spot on WBAP. More important than Davis resume, though, is his admirable willingness to criticize figures of his own party when appropriate. In the course of hosting the Limbaugh program a few months back, he lauded Rand Paul for appearing on NPR at the risk of hostile questioning while also criticizing the candidate for having recently cancelled a scheduled appearance on Meet the Press. To agree to and then bail on such an appearance, to not have the guts to show up, is among those things for which Davis will happily attack a fellow Republican on the nations most popular venue of Republican commentary. When a caller claims that liberals dont have the guts to show up on Fox News, Davis corrects him, noting that many of them clearly do seeing as how the network indeed routinely plays host to liberal guests, none of whom appear to have been kidnapped for the purpose.
Davis has even gone so far as to criticize Sarah Palin in response to her expressed grievances against the mainstream media for asking her questions that she and her supporters consider unfair. There are no unfair questions, Davis asserted, and I am glad that he thinks so because the questions I asked him were composed in preparation for a rousing game of Get the Conservative to Denounce Ronald Reagan in Extraordinarily Harsh Terms Without the Conservative Realizing That This Is What He Is Doing.
Rules:
1. Locate a conservative.
2. Ask him what he thinks about certain behavior that you know Ronald Reagan to have exhibited.
3. Inevitably receive an answer in which that behavior is denounced.
4. For every insult that is accidentally directed towards Reagan, add a point.
5. Add a point if the conservative is merely of the fiscal or foreign policy sort and thus potentially knowledgeable about history and harder to trick. Subtract a point if its a social conservative.
6. Subtract a point if the conservative acknowledges that conservatives also engage in this behavior.
7. If the conservative does not accidentally insult Reagan, you are the first person to lose this game.
Now, lets see how we did.
Question for Mark Davis: Speaking of moral equivalence, there seems to have been a significant rise in rhetoric against Israel on such occasions as it reacts against outside threats in which that nation's actions are equated with those of Nazi Germany. Is such deliberate use of that kind of terminology the result of mere sloppy thinking or is it something worse?
Explanation of Question for the Reader: In 1982, Israel launched an attack on West Beirut in an effort to strike at the PLO, at which point a distressed King Fahd of Saudi Arabia called Reagan and asked him to intervene against Israel. Agreeing that intervention was prudent, Reagan called Minister Menachem Begin and informed the Israeli Prime Minister that he was perpetrating a holocaust. Begin, whose parents were both killed in the actual Holocaust, responded that he knew perfectly well what constituted a holocaust and that he did not believe this particular expedition to fit the criteria, but nonetheless backed off at Reagans request.
Answer by Mark Davis: Nazi Germany and Hitler have sadly become the go-to references when rhetorical bullies seek to end debate with a cheap shot. Whether it's an Obama critic suggesting his socialism has a Hitler flavor, or a Bush-basher attaching Hitler-style motivations to George W's exercise of executive power, these playground taunts achieve nothing to advance discourse. It stems from two common characteristics of today: immaturity and laziness. The thin-skinned adolescent rants of much of today's dialogue show that we often prefer to use flamethrowers to incinerate opponents rather than scalpels to dissect what they are saying.
Results: Davis has accidentally characterized Reagan by way of a total of seven negative descriptions. He subtracts a point from my score by noting that even conservatives engage in such behavior and also gets the handicap point for being a social conservative, leaving me with a score of five. I remain the grandmaster of some stupid game I made up.
Now, the reader may perhaps object that it is unfair to set someone up in such a fashion, akin to baiting deer in an effort to shoot them. If that is the case and it is not - then let us do something more akin to sitting around in the woods and waiting for a deer to walk into a tree over and over again until it dies; let us see if Davis can write a column in which he accidentally attacks Reagan without any prompting from me. Better yet, let us see if Davis can write a column in which he accidentally attacks Reagan even while bringing him up himself, and does so in the course of lauding him for having refrained from doing several things that he actually quite famously did. I mean, its hard to imagine that a person so incompetent would be given a position of great prominence, but lets check just for fun.
A few months ago, Davis took Obama to task for signing a nuclear arms reduction treaty with the Russians. "The ignorant assertion that our nukes and their nukes are the same is not new, Davis noted in a column that appeared in The Dallas Morning News. Ronald Reagan ignored such droning 30 years ago, driving the Soviets to their knees by refusing to gut U.S. nuclear capability and by refusing to scrap missile defense technology."
Davis is correct to note that the sameness of U.S. and Russian nukes is an old idea, but to the extent that anyone outside of Austin has advocated such a view, it would be hard to top Reagan, who routinely painted all nukes with the same brush. Such weapons, Reagan proclaimed, are "totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization. The Great Communicator, then, not only failed to ignore such droning, but routinely engaged in it himself, having greatly communicated in 1984 that "nuclear arsenals are far too high" and that his "dream is to see the day when nuclear weapons will be banished from the face of the earth, never once stopping to qualify his statements in such a way that Davis might have preferred. It wasnt for nothing that Terry Dolan, chair of the National Conservative Political Action Committee, complained around then that "[t]he administration hasnt co-opted the peace movement. The peace movement has co-opted the administration."
Reagan did not confine himself to mere high-flown rhetoric; Davis to the contrary, Reagan did indeed gut the republics nuclear arsenal by way of SALT III, later known as START, a series of treaties that were updated by George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and area man George W. Bush, and which eventually resulted an 80 percent reduction of all nuclear weapons. Obamas 2010 version of START is simply a long-scheduled continuance of a policy that Reagan considered to be among the most important of his own accomplishments and which had been American policy since the first SALT treaty was signed by that dreamy idealist Richard Nixon. Davis does not get around to mentioning any of this, perhaps due to space constraints; though he is presumably more erudite than DCCCD trustee Bill Metzger, he does not seem to be much more proficient in the budgeting of his output.
The problem here is not that Davis is a particularly bad pundit. He appears to be better-informed and more prone to intellectual honesty than most of the people who believe the things that he believes, which is to say that he is in the regular habit of taking his allies to task for doing those things to which he believes himself to be opposed. That he sometimes does so on purpose makes him a particularly good pundit. That is the problem.
--
Regards,
Barrett Brown
512-560-2302
--
Tim Rogers
Editor
D Magazine
750 N. St. Paul St., Ste. 2100
Dallas, TX 75201
214.939.3636
www.dmagazine.com
--
Regards,
Barrett Brown
512-560-2302
--
Regards,
Barrett Brown
512-560-2302
--
Tim Rogers
Editor
D Magazine
750 N. St. Paul St., Ste. 2100
Dallas, TX 75201
214.939.3636
www.dmagazine.com
--
Regards,
Barrett Brown
512-560-2302
--
Tim Rogers
Editor
D Magazine
750 N. St. Paul St., Ste. 2100
Dallas, TX 75201
214.939.3636
www.dmagazine.com