Brendan Calling

I Write Letters…

…and sometimes they get published. Last week, in the Philadelphia Daily News, Gar Joseph wrote some really stupid crap:

Clout: Obama mania: Is this 2008 … or 1984?

By Gar Joseph
Philadelphia Daily News

Daily News Clout Columnist
U.S. SEN. Barack Obama’s critics have called his presidential campaign a cult of personality.

His glassy-eyed supporters are enraptured. The media are docile. Hollywood stars make music videos about him.

“There is something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism,” Joe Klein of Time magazine has observed.

But we ask you, does the campaign poster on this page remind you of a totalitarian cult?

Wait, don’t answer that.

The Soviet-style heroic Obama, the use of a single word “Hope,” do make the SEPTA bus shelter posters a bit reminiscent of George Orwell’s “1984.”

Joseph’s drivel has to do with this poster that has been popping up all over Philadelphia:

Joseph continues:

The question is why the Obama campaign endorses artwork that makes him look like Big Brother.

The column is more than just stupid: it’s a model of laziness and slacking. “Glassy-eyed supporters”? “Totalitarian cult”? This isn’t reporting or even writing: it’s copying down what you saw on “Drudge” this morning. So I wrote a letter directly to the lazy hack, and surprisingly it got published. I didn’t even get the customary call to confirm authorship.

TO GAR Joseph at Clout:

Could you please knock off the stupid “cult member” cheap shots at Obama’s supporters? It’s stupid, it’s trite, and it’s also untrue:

Speaking as a 38-year-old parent, homeowner and taxpayer who supports Obama, and who’s been voting for 20 years, it’s personally offensive and denigrating for you to describe voters like me as mindless cultists.

After eight years of a president who has gone out of his way to divide the country on partisan lines, including rallies at which only his most hard-core supporters are permitted to attend after signing loyalty oaths, and at which protesters are harassed by the Secret Service, you have some nerve describing Obama’s campaign as “a totalitarian cult.” The president’s political opponents are targeted by a politicized Justice Department, and you accuse Obama’s campaign of being like “Big Brother”?

What fantasy world do you live in?

Instead of simply parroting whatever the twits on “Fox and Friends” are ranting about this week, why don’t you do some research and earn that paycheck Brian Tierney pays you? Talk to people you’re reporting on instead of relying on stupid stereotypes. It’s not that difficult.

Brendan Skwire

I’m not going to say Gar Joseph is an idiot (you can come to that conclusion on your own) but is it too much to ask that someone who writes a column about politics actually, ya know, talk to the people he’s writing about?

I happen to know the co-chair of Philadelphia’s Obama campaign personally. He’s also in the running to be a delegate, and is hardly a “cultist”. All of the old church ladies on my block have Obama stickers on their cars: I don’t think any of them have confused Barack Obama with Jesus Christ.

Joseph’s “the media are docile” line pretty much takes the cake: this is the same media that’s made a big to-do about Obama’s pastor for the past THREE FUCKING WEEKS while ignoring McCain’s law-breaking. That doesn’t even take into account the despicable caviling behavior during the run-up to the War in Iraq, the disappearance of the war from our front pages, the failures to investigate the administration’s law-breaking.

It begs the question, “Who are you trying to fool, Gar?”
I’m not sure which is worse: that Joseph actually thought this was acceptable work or that his publisher, who’s been losing money on his investment, keeps this lazy slacker on staff.

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