625) Morally [...] knowing vaguely disreputable things about someone which you refuse to print seems indisputably superior to printing vaguely disreputable things about someone just because you happen to know them.

Adam Gopnik
"Read All About It"
New Yorker (12/12/94)

626) Ronald Reagan's political genius lay [in being] a seemingly unaggressive figure with a paralyzingly aggressive story to tell. [...] The media had pounced on Johnson and Nixon as liars, because those men knew perfectly well that what they were saying were lies. In Reagan's case, the discrepancy between reality and his words was so vast that it was pointless to argue. You couldn't expose a pattern of deception because almost everything was deception, which at some level Reagan genuinely believed to be true.

Adam Gopnik
"Read All About It"
New Yorker (12/12/94)

627) Left-wing thought in America tends to be extremely abstract [...] It offers big, systematic explanations of small things. The left has become so deeply committed to the notion that consciousness produces reality - that cultural politics are the only real politics - that many of its members have become content with victories in the field of consciousness and bored with actual political work.

On the other hand, right-wing thought in America, even serious right-wing thought, tends to be extremely personal. The right, to its credit, still believes in the consequences of individual actions, and this makes it much better at emphasizing the villainies of individuals. The right is much better at character assassination, because the right still believes in character [...]

These different habits of mind may account for the apparent oddity that, while the American media tend, in their big fog of feeling, to go left, in the details of their personal assaults they still tilt to the right. Rush Limbaugh and Noam Chomsky are both correct: most people in the American media share the cultural prejudices of the left, but they still enforce the political vendettas of the right.

Adam Gopnik
"Read All About It"
New Yorker (12/12/94)

628) The left's ambitions are political and its triumphs are cultural, while the right's ambitions are cultural and its triumphs political. This is more or less O.K. with most people on the left, since they believe that cultural victories are the same thing as political ones, but it drives the right crazy, and accounts for one of the most curious aspects of the media in the last decade - the extraordinarily embittered and vicious turn that the right-wing press has taken at a time when it is winning every political victory. [...] The reasons for this [...] aren't hard to find. Most American conservatives [...] are social or cultural conservatives - frightened or alarmed by the disruption of the continuities and verities of American life in the past twenty years. From the opposing camp, of course, the recent story of the American right looks like one of mostly unchecked triumph, but it does not look that way to the right. The right has dominated American political discussion [...] and so far nothing has changed. The flood of social transformation has, if anything, gathered force.

Adam Gopnik
"Read All About It"
New Yorker (12/12/94)

629) To Liebling's three basic personages of the press - the reporter, who says what he saw; the interpretive reporter, who says what he thinks is the meaning of what he saw; and the expert, who says what he thinks is the meaning of what he didn't see - is added the meta-columnist, who says what he thinks that other people will think is the meaning of what they haven't seen, either.

Adam Gopnik
"Read All About It"
New Yorker (12/12/94)

630) Liberalism [...] [believes] that analyzing something to death is the same thing as killing it off. To show that a Rush Limbaugh rant, for example, is stylized, and has a more complicated internal structure than you might expect, is somehow assumed to make it less dangerous.

Adam Gopnik
"Read All About It"
New Yorker (12/12/94)

Note: "3089/898" is the designation I've given to the project of posting all my collected quotes, excerpts and ideas (3089 of them) in the remaining days of the Bush administration (of which there were 898 left when I began).

As of today, there are 700 days remaining in the administration of the worst American President ever.