I Am A Liberal Democrat Embarrassed By The HuffPo

Politics and religion
1

I made the mistake of putting The Huffington Post into my daily rotation of morning coffee clicks during the 2008 elections, as I found it to be a lefty-leaning substitute for the sensationalistic tabloidism that Drudge provides from the Right. If I noticed that the editors of the HuffPo tended to run pretty much Any Damn Thing as long as it got them attention, I guess I suppressed that.

But…over the last year, the HuffPo has gotten damned unreadable. I guess I first noticed it with a series of opinion pieces (from one source) that informed “women” as a gender that they were “unhappy”. So, first, “You are unhappy”, and then: “Here’s why, and here are your marching orders to make it better.” The part of me that began to get uncomfortable and itchy when Babs Streisand told me to boycott Colorado back in the 1980’s started to feel that way again.

What has followed is a bunch of self-congratulating memes (“Roy Sekoff debates eating meat on MSNBC!” or “Roy Sekoff calls out Senator for compromising on legislation x!”) that led up to one of the stupidest boondoggles I’ve ever seen from my fellow lefties.

If you’re a HuffPo reader, you know what I’m talking about: the stupid and ill-thought-out “Move Your Money” campaign. Starting on Christmas (with a huge picture of Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey in “Wonderful Life”), the Huff has been exhorting its readers to take their money out of big banks like Bank Of America, Citi, and Wachovia and move them to smaller, community-run banks. On the surface, maybe there’s a speck of a good idea there: Wall St. needs to get slapped around, and perhaps if a huge number of people put their money into smaller banks, the folks at Citi and BoA might get the message. Right?

Wrong. For starters, let’s put aside that once again the HuffPo deigns to give marching orders to those of us who fancy ourselves liberals to act upon en masse. (Wouldn’t it be more liberal to say: “Bank where you fucking want to”?) What’s really funny is how stupidly ill-informed the entire “Move Your Money” thing was regarding community banks. These banks invest heavily in and with the Big Boys on Wall Street. The fates of the Wall Street banks and the Main Street banks are inextricably intertwined at this point. Any second-year finance major could have given the full disclosure here. Moving your money from Bank Of America to the Bailey Home & Trust doesn’t do any good, since Bailey Home & Trust turns right around and uses that money to invest in and with…Bank Of America.

Today was the hilarious death-knell for this half-witted campaign. The Independent Community Bankers Association today voiced strong opposition to the proposal by the White House to heavily tax “Big Banks”. That’s right, the small banks who invest so heavily in Big Banks came out and unsurprisingly voiced support for the folks with whom their lot is rather irretrievably cast. The Community Banks joined with Wall Street…and the folks at the HuffPo seem baffled.

I still consider myself a liberal Democrat. I find shit like this embarrassing and off-putting. For me it lends support and credence to the worst things my party is accused of by the other side, and it makes me realize that the left has its own Tea Party contingent.

2

That’s the Building and Loan, buddy!

I stopped reading HuffPo after they gave Mrs. Jim Carrey (and her husband) the floor to weigh in on the legitimacy of their hare brained schemes to link autism and vaccines.

3

Dammit, I knew I’d blow that reference! I missed IAWL this year at Christmas…

Yeah, basically they’d rather have famous kooks post shit than actually let experts weigh in.

4

Well, I find it pretty unreadable for different reasons, but small banks operate much “safer” than big banks simple because they have to. They carry much less debt to cash than the guys that got into trouble, so there’s an argument there.

5

Be very careful here. A lot of these small banks are heavy into commerical real estate, which has crashed. I think there are lot of smaller, community banks hurting a lot more than some of the bigger banks b/c the commerical RE was last to fall (housing went first and now commerical re). These smaller community banks are one of the prime credit sources for small biz capital and that’s one reason credit has been hard for small biz to acquire.

6

You seem to be confusing libertarian with liberal. It’s not more LIBERAL to say bank where you want. It’s more libertarian.

7

Just quoting your conclusion for readability’s sake. It’s simply impossible to have an argument with someone who uses RedState.org to make their case, and the same holds for anyone with a HuffPo link, and for good reason.

The one thing that’s “bipartisan” in this country is the extent to which people will fucking spin anything. It’s pathetic.

8

No, I realize the differentiation, but probably didn’t state it as clearly as I’d have liked. It isn’t “bank where you want” that is the big stickler, it’s “let us TELL YOU where to bank” that rankles me as un-liberal and monolithic.

9

Yeah. I’ve always been iffy about HuffingtonPost, but that was the last straw for me - that and the “body cleansing movement” people, one of whom actually suggested enemas as a more effective prevention against Swine Flu than the Swin Flu vaccine. ugh. That article was actually well after I gave up on HuffPo, but someone linked me to it and guaranteed that I wouldn’t be checking it regularly any time soon.

I would like to think that the Progressive movement is the ideology with science on its side (in many things, anyway), and I hate the anti-expert “as long as I say it with enough certainty and volume you don’t know it’s not true!” routine everywhere I encounter it, left or right.

10

Yeah, HuffPo has a couple good writers, but is overall a pretty mediocre place to visit. I continue to sour on it.

11

I really only read HuffPo for entertainment and comedy stuff. They’re good for those two things.

(Also for whatever headline they’re running to see what OUTRAGE!!1!! I should be aware of right now)

12

It’s like 95%+ trashy gossip rag now anyway, which I will half-ashamedly admit is why I still go there. I haven’t paid any attention to their political coverage in ages, though I’ll occasionally learn of a big news story from their big Drudge-inspired headline/graphic.

13

Entertainment, Comedy, Books and Tech are the good sections. Everything else I take with a grain of salt, particularly the Living section.

14

I’m willing to be proven wrong, but if what my father tells me (who is a retired small bank president) most smaller banks are forced to keep their capitalization/debt ratio somewhere around 30%, whereas the bailout major banks were riding closer to 5%. Thus, less “safe” during an RE crash.

H.

15

The full-on plunge into woo-woo “science” and New Age horseshit eventually drove me away from HuffPo. If this is what being “liberal” is becoming, count me out.

16

Why in god’s name were you reading that shitbag publication in the first place?

17

It’s a tolerable news item aggregator, provided you don’t read the headlines, which are Drudge-esque in their twisting of facts and intent. Plus it’s an overcoded pile of shit that takes five minutes to load over an OC3, breaks all sorts of look-and-feel rules, and is covered over in narcissism for Arianna Huffington and her bizarre “I’m Zsa Zsa too!” accent.

H.

18

Every time I see the name “Huffington” I am reminded of this book:

I have always been intrigued by cults and general demented groupthink, so this book by Peter McWilliams (now-deceased self-help author) about his decade and a half with a weirdo SoCal cult kind of jumped into my hand in a bookstore in the late nineties. Way too dishy and needed a lot of editing, but still, quite interesting.

And Arianna Huffington figured heavily in the book, as a manipulating diva with political aspirations.

The book wound up getting taken off the market because the cult threatened to sue McWilliams and he settled by giving them the copyright. So I have one of the few remaining copies in circulation. No, you can’t have it.

19

Will you read it to me?

20

Agreed. I’m an extremely liberal Democrat, and the HuffPo is a load of shit.