-- Eugene Robinson, in his Washington Post column today,



-- Glenn Greenwald, on Game Change by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, in his post "'Political reporting' means 'royal court gossip'"

By all accounts (including a long, miserable excerpt they released), the book is filled with the type of petty, catty, gossipy, trashy sniping that is the staple of sleazy tabloids and reality TV shows, and it has been assembled through anonymous gossip, accountability-free attributions, and contrived melodramatic dialogue masquerading as "reporting." And yet -- or, really, therefore -- Washington's journalist class is poring over, studying, and analyzing its contents as though it is the Dead Sea Scrolls, lavishing praise on its authors as though they committed some profound act of journalism, and displaying a level of genuine fascination and giddiness that stands in stark contrast to the boredom and above-it-all indifference they project in those rare instances when forced to talk about anything that actually matters.



This reaction has nicely illuminated what our press corps is. The [Halperin-Heilemann] book is little more than royal court gossip, churned out by the leading practitioner of painfully sycophantic, Drudge-mimicking cattiness: Time's Mark Halperin. And all of the courtiers, courtesans, court spokespeople (i.e., "journalists") and hangers-on who populate our decadent little Versailles on the Potomac can barely contain their glee over the opportunity to revel in this self-absorbed sleaze. Virtually every "political news" TV show is hyping it. D.C. reporters are boasting that they obtained early previews and are excitedly touting how intensively they're studying its pages in order to identify the most crucial revelations. Just try to contemplate how things would be if even a fraction of this media energy and interest level were devoted to scrutinizing the non-trivial things political leaders do.



Revealingly, one of the sections receiving the most attention is the microscopic examination of the sexual proclivities of John Edwards, his marital conflicts with his wife, and their various personality flaws. That reaction is predictable and, obviously, predicted, which is why the lengthy excerpt they released focuses on those matters. Notably, the Edwards scandal was relentlessly pursued and first "broken" by The National Enquirer, and I defy anyone to read the book excerpt on Edwards (to the extent you can even get through it) and identify any differences between the book's tone, content and "reporting" methods and those found in the Enquirer. Meanwhile, Matt Drudge -- crowned by Halperin and the co-author for his prior book, Politico Editor-in-Chief John Harris, as The Ruler of The World of Political Journalists -- has been (in return) screamingly promoting the book non-stop for days, as has Drudge's cloned, adopted child, Politico.



This is the most revealing aspect of this episode. The National Enquirer, Matt Drudge and Politico aren't aberrational extremes in our press corps. As Halperin and Harris correctly noted in calling Washington journalism "The Freak Show," they are at its epicenter, leading the way. The reason there is such a complete merger of interest among low-life tabloids, Matt Drudge, reality shows and the Washington political press corps is precisely because they are indeed indistinguishable -- merged. Even for people who thought that John Edwards' sexual activities were relevant when he was running for President or vying for a high administration position, at this point he is a completely destroyed, discredited non-entity with no political future, and mucking around in the life of him and his wife is pure sleazy voyeurism. Subjecting the Edwards to this sort of vicious, judgmental scrutiny is a cost-free activity, which is why so many are so eager to engage in it.



The real value of a book like this lies in the opportunity it presents for Washington's elite class to distract themselves and everyone else from the oozing corruption, destruction, decaying and pillaging going on -- that these same Washington denizens have long enabled. With some important exceptions, that is the primary purpose of establishment journalism generally. Even better, the book lets our media and political elite -- and then the public generally -- feel good about themselves by morally condemning the trashy exploits of Rielle Hunter and the egoistic hypocrisies of the irrelevant John and Elizabeth Edwards. As The Nation 's Chris Hayes so perfectly put it: "Just when you think the news cycle can't get any stupider, Mark Halperin publishes a book." All imperial courts -- especially collapsing ones -- love to occupy themselves with insular, snotty trivialities. As this book and the excitement it has produced demonstrates, providing that distraction is exactly what our press corps most loves to do and what it does best. The media sleazebags who turned Bill Clinton's penile spots, cigars and semen stains into headline news for two straight years haven't gone anywhere; they're actually stronger and more dominant than ever.



Harry Reid's comments were crudely put, yet true



By Eugene Robinson

Tuesday, January 12, 2010; A17



Skin color among African Americans is not to be discussed in polite company, so Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's newly disclosed remark about President Obama -- that voters are more comfortable with him because he's light-skinned -- offended decorum. But it was surely true.



Color bias has always existed in this country. We don't talk about it because we think of color as subordinate to racial identification. There are African Americans with skin so light-hued that only contextual clues speak to the question of race. I remember once looking up some distant cousins on my father's side. They were so fair of hair and ruddy of cheek that I thought I'd gone to the wrong house, until one of them greeted me in what I guess Reid would call "Negro dialect."



Forgive me if I am neither shocked nor outraged. A few years ago I wrote a book about color and race called "Coal to Cream," and the issue no longer has third-rail status for me. What I would find stunning is evidence that Reid's assessment -- made during the 2008 campaign and reported in a new book by journalists John Heilemann and Mark Halperin -- was anything but accurate.



Advertising is a reliable window into the American psyche, so look at the images we're presented on television and in glossy magazines. The black models tend to be caramel-skinned or lighter, with hair that's not really kinky -- which is how I'd describe mine -- but wavy, even flowing. A few models whose skin is chocolate-hued or darker have reached superstar status, such as Alek Wek and Tyson Beckford, but they are rare exceptions.



Skin color could hardly be a more conspicuous attribute, but we don't talk about it in this country. That's been a good thing.



I became interested in perceptions of color and race when I was The Post's correspondent in South America. On reporting trips to Brazil, a country with a history of slavery much like ours, I kept running across people with skin as dark as mine, or a bit darker, who didn't consider themselves "black." I learned that at the time -- roughly 20 years ago -- fewer than 10 percent of Brazilians self-identified as black. Yet at least half the population, I estimated, would have been considered black in the United States.



This was because American society enforced the "one-drop" rule: If you had any African blood at all, you were black. In Brazil, by contrast, you could be mulatto, you could be light-skinned, you could be "Moorish" brown, all the way to "blue-black" -- more than a dozen informal classifications in all. Color superseded racial identification. In Salvador da Bahia, I met a couple who considered themselves black but whose children were lighter-skinned. The children's birth certificates classified them as branco, or white.



The Brazilian system minimized racial friction on an interpersonal level. The American system fostered such friction, through formal and informal codes that enforced racial segregation. But our "one-drop" paradigm also created great racial solidarity among African Americans, while maximizing our numbers. We fought, marched, sat in, struggled and eventually made tremendous strides toward equality. The most recent, of course, was Obama's election, which is difficult to imagine happening in Brazil -- or, for that matter, in any other country where there is a large, historically oppressed minority group.



Brazil has now begun addressing long-standing racial disparities through affirmative action initiatives. But the upper reaches of that society -- the financial district in Sao Paulo, say, or the government ministries in Brasilia -- are still so exclusively white that they look like bits and pieces of Portugal that somehow ended up on the wrong side of the ocean.



American society's focus on race instead of color explains why what Harry Reid said was so rude. But I don't think it can be a coincidence that so many pioneers -- Edward Brooke, the first black senator since Reconstruction; Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice; Colin Powell, the first black secretary of state -- have been lighter-skinned. Reid's analysis was probably good sociology, even if it was bad politics.



Much worse, as far as I'm concerned, was the quote the new book "Game Change" attributes to Bill Clinton. In an attempt to persuade Ted Kennedy not to support Obama, Clinton is supposed to have said that "a few years ago, this guy would have been getting us coffee."



I guess the one-drop rule can still trump Harvard Law.

I'm grateful to Glenn Greenwald for calling attention to's Chris Hayes's comment on the appallingly much-talked about book by John Heileman and Mark Halperin:Clicking through Glenn's link reveals that this comment of Chris's is in fact a tweet. Twitter-proofed as my life is, I know there are people who are attracted to the medium precisely for the literary and/or journalistic challenge of the 140-character limit. In this tweet of our Mr. Hayes, I think we have a winner.Is there anyone whoknow that Mark Halperin is not only an idiot, but a pompous, self-important one? (You mean, apart from the people who incomprehensibly continue to employ him and the even larger group who continue to take him seriously?) Not surprisingly, Glenn G has some well-considered thoughts on the subject, in the post that contains the link to Chris Hayes's tweet, " 'Political reporting' means 'royal court gossip' ":Of course, one of the most explosive "scoops" of the Heilemann-Halperin tome is the remark Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid apparently made about Barack Obama's skin color. Of course serious discussion of almost any aspect of the race issue remains all but impossible in our society, except for those rare moments, like the one during the presidential campaign that produced candidate Barack Obama's eloquent speech on the subject, which mostly achieved the objective, not of having a conversation on the subject of race, but of making the subject go away again.But really. are there any words for the state we've reached when we have the "gotcha"-squad people who've picked up the Reid remark actually using it to accuse the senator of being a racist? These are, after all, card-carrying members of the New Confederate Party, a party that may or may not beracist rage but that certainly embraces it. If those people had a shred of decency, after making their hypocritical accusations, they would repair to the privacy of their gun dens and blow their poisoned brains out, ideally after scribbling a note apologizing for having been born. But even this objection to our revived conversation about race doesn't go far enough. As Gene Robinson points out in his column today, the idea "that voters are more comfortable with [Obama] because he's light-skinned" "may have offended decorum," "but it was surely true."

Labels: Eugene Robinson (WaPo), Glenn Greenwald, GOP racism, Mark Halperin