Furthermore, exactly what ideals or broad vision do these media mavens share? Do they even bother to live up to the ideals of their job description, to strive for the truth above all, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, to stake out an adversarial position with those in power in order to arrive at the facts, loss of cocktail party privileges be damned?

This is not a movement based on any vision of government.

Whoa! How can Bai sit there and say that with a straight face?

Let’s see…

We want the Constitution to be upheld.

We want corporations cut down to size, so people can live and live well.

We want open honest government (yeah, I know a fantasy).

We want good relations internationally, so we can spend more money helping other people rather than killing them.

And, we want to live in harmony with the Earth, so humanity doesn’t get choked to death or drown in a flood or poisoned by our own food sources.

Zat it? Seems pretty simple to me and it definitely looks like a Global Vision.

BTW, Bai is irrelevant.

Yo Matt, the blogosphere is not a fantasy league, and who wins and loses elections really matters.

johnSwifty @ 131

I ran into a bit of that when writing a paper on the Sapir Whorf hypothesis years ago. These days I don’t know what to think, but the philosophy from the western schools of pessimism and nihilism continue to plague me.

Well, shhhhh, I won’t tell the Chicago Dyke! Fat old white guys who think stuff don’t count for much, on the continent or off, unless they can translate well into Akkadian.

I gotta go meet with some of them now. Take care!

For some reason Sapir Whorf always makes me think of Klingons. I remember blowing my chances (probably not that good anyway) at a job once because I could not accept it as anything other than racist.

Then you wouldn’t have wanted the job, to be sure. I tore it apart as a flawed theory by building a logical argument for accepting mathematics as a language and forcing the premise that shear genius like Liebnitz were more than capable of conceptualizing in that language body, sans actual words. Differential calculus would not exist if Gottfried had needed pre existing words to think in those terms.

Matt Bai is close, but no cigar.

He is right that we are pragmatists, but he misses the key point:

We are Principled Pragmatists — we fight for what we believe in, but whe do not make the perfect the enemy of the good.

Which is why we have such disdain for the Naderistas.
what about when hojo told timmeh to bomb terror camps in iran.let the goosestepping begin
We also understand that more often than not, even a bad Democrat (HoJoe excepted) is a 1000 times better than a Good Republican.

Of course, if the GOP wants to trade Chuck Hagel for HoJoe, I’d take that deal in a heartbeat. Better to have an occasional principled Conservative than a backstabbing Quisling.

Christy:

As a twenty-five year veteran of public administration, ten-year advocate for state and federal funding for the arts and education, a consultant to government, and administrator for public commissions and boards, I have only two words for Matt Bai and Tim Russert, which can best be communicated using one of the five digits of my right hand.