General politics thread

See, this is where the confusion began for me. And maybe that makes me a "piss poor reader," like you said.

But I didn't mean to state or imply that Laura Wagner owes Ryan Lizza "deference." What I asked was whether his body of work merited this (and the rest of her) assessment:

Lizza is best known for his long history of writing bland, studiously respectable studies of Washington power from millimeters left of center.

Yeah, I said in the thread title that she "pissed me the fuck off," and used the hashtag #WhitmanManCrush. But I was trying to joke about me previously gushing over his work. It was a thing. A gag. It came up again he was fired.

But then we got down to business this morning, and I posted this:

In other words: I don't remember who the prior Gawker bomb throwers went after. Do you? (You noted that Peter King was one.)

Then I posted this:

In other words, he seems inoffensive and consistently competent.

This is a reference to the fact that some of you seem to follow media criticism and personalities more closely than I do, mostly because I'm not very active on Twitter.



This is me asking whether Lizza's work itself merited, again, this assessment:

Lizza is best known for his long history of writing bland, studiously respectable studies of Washington power from millimeters left of center.

Or this one:

In practice, of course, this seems like a way for two people who are pure vessels for whatever their sources want to say—two moderately ambitious people who are inclined to present powerful people the exact way they want to be presented—to do so in concert. For all their differences, Lizza and Nuzzi are one in how they write about politics like it’s reality TV—there for our enjoyment or, sometimes, outrage—and conveniently ignore the real and human cost of political decisions themselves, instead preferring to focus on the humanity of the people making or defending decisions that literally kill the people they are supposed to serve.

If she's right, of course Ryan Lizza doesn't merit "deference." But I think Darrell Issa, for example, would dispute that Lizza presented him in "the exact way (he) want(s) to be presented." But that's just one example, and it was a story that resonated with me, that I remembered, because it was a job well-done, in my opinion.

Regardless, that then led to this:

And this is where I began to lose the thread here. I'm not exactly sure what you were getting at with this sentence. I did think that the bolded portion, in which you stated that you have "heard often," that practicing journalism "does not make them experts," is a misstatement of what you've heard in these arguments, at least from me. I don't think that journalists aren't experts at journalism. I do. I think that experts, as a general matter, should still be willing and able to articulate their expert positions, when called upon to do so. And, in fact, experts are constantly being called to task. They are called to task in every film or album review. Congressmen - ostensibly experts at governing - are called to task across the op-ed page of every major newspaper in America, daily. 

So I made a post clarifying my position in prior arguments. You have since characterized that post as a "fit." I disagree. But we agree to disagree.

Anyway, while I was clarifying my prior position, it apparently went over my head that the point you were trying to get at was that I was demanding that Laura Wagner show deference to Ryan Lizza because he doesn't give me the sads, but Charlie Pierce does. (Editor's note: My first known interaction with Charlie Pierce was a couple of weeks ago, on Twitter, when I inquired about the "Willard" quip.)  But, to be clear: Laura Wagner owes Ryan Lizza no "deference."  I merely wondered whether her position on the work of Ryan Lizza was: (1) an accurate assessment; and (2) matched the consensus on Lizza's work because, again, she stated it thus: Lizza is best known for his long history of writing bland, studiously respectable studies of Washington power from millimeters left of center.