Sunday, June 20, 2010

Frank Rich and Peggy Noonan Bash Obama Administration

I'm so sick of talking heads, especially the ones on the left and the right. They're so pompous. In a way, Frank Rich and Peggy Noonan wrote the same column for today.
On the left, here's Frank Rich's column.
On the right, here's Peggy Noonan's "snakebit" column.
Folks are just using the oil disaster to push their own agendas. On the left, Rich is pushing for more government power by stating his belief that the Obama administration has been impotent.
On the right, Noonan is pushing the Obama-is-incompetent narrative that the republicans have been pushing since Obama took office.
The right has only been interested in more power for themselves, not in solving any of the problems this nation faces. For the republicans, the answer is always smaller government, lower taxes. That's all they have. Noonan says Obama is so incompetent that he's relying on luck and academia.
The two extremes are the only ones that ever get heard, but they're not the majority. There are grains of truth in both sides but neither the left or the right have solutions to problems. They only have their self-righteous agendas.
This story explores whether it matters what the so-called chattering class has to say. I think not.
It is not just the number of commentators or the abundance of platforms that is diluting the influence of the mainstream media, but their speed. Opinions are being served up so fast that in this case many of them were stale by the next morning.

“Things have expanded so much,” Dennis Ryerson, the editor of The Indianapolis Star, said on Thursday. “Forty years ago, newspapers ran opinion pieces by a lot of columnists, most of whom were in Washington. They had a good following and were widely respected. But now anyone with a cheap computer can become a columnist or a pundit. The definition has changed. More people are in the game right now.

“Obama couldn’t get a break from any of the national commentators,” he said. “So I was surprised when I saw a poll today that showed that Obama’s approval rating didn’t change that much. I don’t know if anyone has figured out the impact of the new information order when you have so many opinions out there.” NYT