<h3>The State of Play</h3>

"Get your war on..."

I've not been around the blogs for months — disillusioned by media in general, I've slunk off to the world's wilder and more real places.

But hey, humankind can only stand so much reality and with Google's Chrome riding in to rescue me from good health, a sound mind, and hermitage, I popped in on David Weinberger — who promptly directed me to Jay Rosen, the NYU journalism professor who penned some of the most haunting post-911 pieces I've read.

Jay's dissecting the strategies of the forces now battling for the heart and soul of the world's greatest corporatocracy. From his pithy put-down of Mother Jones's Bad Move to his analysis of John McCain's "convention gambit", Rosen delivers on the promise of the Web, i.e. great writing by great writers a hyperlink away.

John McCain’s convention gambit is a culture war strategy. It depends for its execution on conflict with journalists, and with bloggers (the “angry left,” Bush called them) along with confusion between and among the press, the blogosphere, and the Democratic party. It revives cultural memory: the resentment narrative after Chicago ‘68 but with the angry left more distributed. It dispenses with issues and seeks a trial of personalities. It bets big time on backlash.

At the center of the strategy is the flashpoint candidacy of Sarah Palin, a charismatic figure around whom the war can be fought to scale, as it were. The Politico is reporting just that: Palin reignites culture wars.

I have no idea if the ignition system will work; nor do I claim that "this is what they were thinking" when they made the decision to nominate Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Other interpretations may turn out to be truer than mine. This is my look at the bets McCain and company seem to be placing. I am not recommending the strategy. I am not predicting it will succeed. I think it was improvised, like my description here…

Jay Rosen | The Palin Convention and the Culture War Option

And he and others set out from there (kinda reminds me why I started blogging in the first place).

Most importantly, Jay links to his scintillating 2006 analysis of Ron Suskind's Without A Doubt — Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush, a piece Rosen describes as an "intellectual scoop".

Look at it this way. You get rich folk and you get poor folk. You're a 'poor folk'. You don't understand how the rich folk do it. They appear to have no compunction taking your money. It seems they feel entitled to it.

No matter how much you reason with them, they keep taking more. And they continue to get away with it. In fact, as time goes by your poverty and their wealth appear inevitable and, to a degree, reasonable.

Being more conscienceless than 'us' (because it has become a 'them' and 'us' issue, i.e. a 'class' or 'culture' conflict in which the definitions of 'class' and 'culture' have been turned on their heads), the rich are 'better' at looking after their self-interest and creating and imposing their own 'reality'. And the wider the gap becomes — and the longer it lasts, the easier it gets for them to continue doing so.

Until we break the dynamic to which we both contribute, it will continue. Like Suskind, though, we have to understand and embrace its absurdity before we can disassociate ourselves from its dangerous implications and potentially disastrous consequences.

So, how do they do it? Because they can and we, in large part, allow them to. Hence today's more-than-bizarre headlines.

As Jay points out, "Realist, a classic term in foreign policy debates, and reality-based, which is not a classic term but more of an instant classic, are quite different ideas. We shouldn’t fuzz them up."

We really shouldn't.

Palin, the Alaska governor who was tapped last week by Sen. John McCain to be his vice-presidential running mate, met for 45 minutes Tuesday in the Minneapolis area with several leaders of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Also in attendance at the AIPAC meeting was U.S. Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.), the McCain campaign’s most prominent Jewish backer.

JTA | Palin meets with AIPAC leaders

It HAD to happen, of course ...