Rosa Brooks: "Oh, my gosh, Hillary Clinton is female! Barack Obama is, uh, black!"

finally, a voice of reason...

The media just can't stop gushing and clucking and gasping about it all. Oh, my gosh, Hillary Clinton is female! Barack Obama is, uh, black! Will American voters accept a female candidate? A black candidate? Are voters more sexist or more racist? What's a bigger problem in America today, sexism or racism?

Snore.

These questions are tedious and inane. Simplistic efforts to evaluate whether racism or sexism is "worse" are inherently meaningless. Racism and sexism operate in complex and different ways. We should reflect on the ways in which racism and sexism have marred our history and cast shadows over our future, but let's not turn it into a parlor game about who's got it worse, women or blacks.

Increasingly, the media obsession with whether Americans will be less likely to vote for a black man or for a woman is also beside the point -- because to an emerging generation of younger voters, the very terms in which the questions have been framed no longer make much sense.

snore indeed...! when my youngest, my daughter, was in high school, i was both surprised and extremely gratified to discover that she and her group of friends included guys, gays, and people of color, and that they thought absolutely nothing about it... they chose each other because they all had many interests in many things - movies, books, issues, music, interesting facts - none of which had anything to do with sexual orientation, gender, or color of skin... while i'm from the high school generation of the early 60s, my high school, a small school (450 in grades 9-12) in a small city (100,000) along the front range of the rockies, featured a noticeable percentage of blacks and hispanics, and we, too, thought nothing of it... (gay...? we hadn't a clue, unfortunately...) anyway, i was delighted to see my daughter and her friends blithely carrying on as if none of those things mattered, which, of course, they don't...

rosa brooks is spot-on... voting for a black man or a woman is a non-issue, and anybody of any generation who has two brain cells to rub together knows and accepts that... to have our national media talking heads go on, and on, AND ON, endlessly, about these non-issues is nothing more or less than all those salacious and suggestive television ads, craftily designed to stimulate our sexual desire, sprinkled liberally between news stories about the societal benefits of abstinence as the only approved form of sex education... in short, it's total crap...

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NOW we see that they were lying: a blinding glimpse of the obvious

it's a good thing rosa brooks is directing her comments to traditional media outlets and not including the blogosphere and non-traditional news sources...

Like freed hostages who gradually cease to identify with their captors, mainstream media outlets seem to have been seized by a new spirit of liberation in their coverage of the Bush administration. Lately, we've seen a rash of astonished, outraged stories and editorials relating to the administration's recently discovered malfeasance.

[...]

The new media message is righteous and clear: Administration officials tricked us — all of us! They assured us that everything they did was legal … necessary … for our own good … but now we see that they were lying!

Well, yeah. So what else is new?

[...]

Bush and Cheney valued power and expedience, nothing more — and much of the time, they didn't even bother to cover their tracks when they bypassed long-standing laws and regulations. Similarly, when it came to compliance with our laws and constitutional traditions, they hardly even pretended to give a hoot.

So why did it take us so long to notice?

[...]

It's hard not to conclude that collectively, we were all too cowardly, slothful or puffed up with our own self-importance to ask the right questions and stand up for principle. The administration didn't trick us; we tricked ourselves.

Someday, the Bush era may come to seem like a bad dream, a shameful, inexplicable interlude in American history. We're right to be outraged by Bush and Cheney, but we should also save a bit of outrage for when we look in the mirror.

yeah, well, rosa, the media STILL aren't taking nearly the forceful stance they should be taking in light of the illegal outrages perpetrated on the citizens of the united states and half of the rest of the world by the criminal occupants of the white house... as supposed keepers of the flame of truth, journalists should insure that these outrages are on display on the front pages of newspapers, as lead stories on local, network and cable news, and front and center on every news website, daily, across the country... citizens and media alike can't afford a minute's rest until that cabal is removed from office...

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