Via Meida Matters, Jon Decker, a Washington corrispondent for Reuters said on MSNBC:
[L]et's not forget Barack Obama bowling. You know, this cuts to "is this person real? Do they connect with me as a voter?" You know, for someone who's in a bowling league in northeast central Pennsylvania, in Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, they can't identify with someone getting a 37 over seven frames.
The good news is that I'm writing a paper on our Ionescoesque media, and they are just handing me evidence. The bad news is, we're still talking about Obama's bowling score.
In other good news, Decker correctly said 37 over seven frames, so at least he's being factual in his blatent disregard for anything coming close to common sense. Also, I think if Obama's biggest demographic problem is with people in the Scranton area who play in bowling leauges, he doesn't have much to worry about...
Hunter, over at DailyKos, has this to say:
My first reaction was the sensible one: to pray to God to please kill me, immediately. Preferably by meteor. But one of the defining characteristics of my life is that God just isn't that into me, and/or all the meteors are already spoken for, so it never works.[...]
Yes, there are uninformed, dull-witted voters in the world, people who will decide who to vote for based on choice of beer. But why--why, in the name of all that is holy, and several things that are not--would the political media itself, presumably the group of people most informed about the actual issues of governance riding on each election, choose to celebrate that lack of substantive information and instead wallow in the meaningless?
Hunter gets this right--the media is celebrating this meaningless non-issue. And, as I pointed out before, the way they are able to do this is by cloaking their essentially normative value--good bowlers make good presidents--in a positive cloak--the people think that good bowlers make good presidents. Why do they do this? They believe that if they report on something, it is necessarily true that the public finds it interesting. The more they report, the more the public cares. But, of course, this isn't necessarily true.
If you have no idea what I'm talking about, see here, here, and here.
In other news, I finished Murikami's Kafka on the Shore. I just couldn't put it down last night, so, I'm friggin exausted and have much work to do before class starts again.
Worth it. More will be revealed.
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