:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 9.11.2010 ::
:: Why 9/11 is no longer a day free of politics ::
Never Forget (To Vote for Me)
Slate.com
The liberal panic of the week, now that Saturday's Quran-burning ceremony has been canceled, is the mystery-cloaked rally that Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin are holding in Anchorage tomorrow evening. "Right Wing Leaders Plan To Use September 11th Anniversary To Make Money," writes Lee Fang at ThinkProgress. "Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck Exploit 9/11 for Profit" reads a headline at Firedoglake.
Instant outrage, just add water—although unlike every other news-cycle-burner of the year, there might be some actual outrage here. Between the Palin/Beck event in Alaska, the launch of a new war-on-terror documentary (America At Risk: The War With No Name) produced by Newt Gingrich in Washington, a rally against the Park51 Community Center in New York City, and the made-for-cable idiocy in Florida, there is something new about the way the 9/11 anniversary is being played in 2010.
Until this year, America basically operated under the impression that politics stopped on Sept. 11. In 2008, Barack Obama's campaign caught some flack for promoting a fundraiser with Warren Buffett that would have been held on the 9/11 anniversary; in public, both his campaign and McCain's campaign were pulling down TV ads. They spent the anniversary attending a solemn memorial at Ground Zero, and that was it.
Two years on, that just seems quaint. In New York, Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio (yes, him) has super-glued his campaign to the spat over the construction of a Muslim community center two blocks from Ground Zero. His commercial on the topic is as subtle as a bazooka, with imagery of the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center as the background for his plea that "New Yorkers have been through enough." He's not dropping it as the holiday approaches, and he is one of many politicians holding events and fundraisers tomorrow—as if Sept. 11, 2010, were just another Saturday. If there's been a backlash, no one's noticed it.
How did we get from 9/11 as sacred day-of-no-politics to this?
Read more here.
Slate's coverage of the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.
posted by me
:: 8:52:00 PM [+] ::
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