Carney To Be Named White House Press Secretary

Politically speaking, Carney is a competent choice. Gibbs lacked a formal background in the media and was never comfortable handling the press. Carney is suave and a pro, and no doubt the WH corps will enjoy bantering with one of their own.
http://www.sunstateactivist.org/ssablog/

Oh, good. Does this mean that they’ll refrain from asking hard questions because it would be “uncivil” and “un-neighborly” to do something like that to “one of their own”?
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The Villagers™ must be soooo happy.

Well at least he will have to respond to questions now, unlike his time in the Swamp when he was the most uncommunicative. I can only remember one response from him.

Via a Stuart Zechman tweet. Recherche du temps perdu.

http://curiouscapitalist.blogs.time.com/2007/04/18/jay_carney_discomfited/

Couldn’t be bothered, eh?

“White House Press Secretary”

Fantastic news, an insufferable wanker becomes minister of doublespeak. Seriously, do you guys actually watch these guys at work? Don’t think I’ve seen one since Dee Dee Myers was doing it.

Stuart just tweeted a quote from another article –
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Carney’s response to commentary correction of factual errors was “the left is as full of unthinking Ditto-heads as Limbaugh-land”
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And these were the days of a lot of really excellent commenters at Swampland.

I haven’t watched, but I think it will be worth a few looks at Carney to see how he deals with it if they stop being all Villagey and polite.

Oh, yeah, that response has got “thin-skinned” written all over it…

Maybe we should start a pool on how many pressers it will take before he has a “melt-down” all over his peers in the press room.

Carney was never a favorite here. He seemed to consider commentators here just an audience and not people you would actually interact with on occasion. He will probably feel more comfortable interacting with the Villagers as press secretary to the President.

This is the Swamp post with that quote. Too bad this was the era where all the comments were lost in the pre-primary meltdown.
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http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2007/01/23/re_the_clinton_playbook/

What a shocker..another ex liberal MSM member joining Obama..From TIME no less.

Fantastic news, an insufferable wanker becomes minister of doublespeak
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That is a great phrase.
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It’s a shame for future historians that all the comments from back then got eaten. Carney’s interactions– and, tbh, Joe Klein’s early ones– showed that informed news consumers were oftentimes none too impressed by the MSM.
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If Stuart’s gonna be all over them Twitter things, even on Swampland-related commentary, I guess I’ll have to finally go ahead & get an account. pourmecoffee, Teresa Kopec, and many many others are there, from what I gather.

From September of 2008, I respond to Jay Carney’s thoughtless and revealing remarks:
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http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/09/disruptions.html#comment-565528

Disruptions
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Posted by Jay Carney Thursday, September 4, 2008 at 10:29 pm
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Not sure what the protesters’ goal is — unless it’s to elicit sympathy for McCain among the viewers who tuned in to hear his speech. His response — telling the audience to ignore the “static” and that “Americans want us to stop shouting at each other” — let him come across as reasonable and cool-headed.

Jay Carney:
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I think that Code Pink and many other activist organizations fail miserably to move the country in the direction they profess to desire, but that’s no excuse for your abysmal ignorance.
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The protesters’ goal is to exist in the public mind, so that there’s at least the tiniest example put before the American people that real people are truly angry with what has been to them and to others in their name.
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The goal is to say “I exist!“, something that is denied them by a political media that treats them as if they’re streaking across a football field, that cuts the camera away indefinitely while commentators like you remark:

“Idiots. We’re not going to give these people the attention they’re so desperate for, so everybody has to wait while our long-patient law enforcement officers get them off of the field –OK, well then, it’s third and eight, and it looks like the Eagles are lining up with the receivers set to go wide, Jim…”

You people and your monopolies on public attention are the reason for their desperation, Jay Carney. It’s because you and your colleagues are in denial of them, their ideas and their existence that they want to shove themselves in front of your audiences shouting “Look! It’s a theater! You’re watching a movie! Look behind you! There’s something else going on! We exist!”
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It’s because you and your professional class see the world purely in terms of political tactics, etiquette and social advancement that you couldn’t possibly understand the idea of protest, let alone the motives of individual protesters. It’s one of your greatest flaws that you don’t understand the goal of someone shouting “I exist!” into the great void of your indifference, Jay Carney.
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Keep your willful ignorance of their motives, Jay Carney, and someday you might be fortunate enough to have an epiphany when you’re at the wrong end of the barrel of gun, as soon as some peoples’ patience runs out again. You and I will both be screaming for the police to come and protect our sorry selves, but at least we’ll finally share this insight.
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Stuart_Zechman, comment #565528

trifecta, joyomama, jarais, jayackroyd
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Not to mention KT…
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You can do both!

Stuart, you were great early on — didn’t need any aging to become fine wine!

Gosh I wonder what kind of scoops Claire Shipman will get?

Last bit of Breaking News — IL Supreme Court says Rahm is on the ballot. Now I’m oudda here.

The single best example of Carney at Swampland.
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To me at least.
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http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2007/01/17/running_massacre/

Zech, how many gigs of commentary do you have saved?
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BTW, did you see JNS ban Husein11 yesterday?

My fondest memory of Jay was when he got punked by Nicole Wallace on Morning Joe over Palin.

did you see JNS ban Husein11 yesterday?
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Which thread?

I didn’t know comments went back that far?

http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2011/01/26/the-gops-two-headed-sotu-response/comment-page-2/

Not sure what you mean.
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There have always been comments but they were all disappeared, alas.
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I don’t know what prompted me to comment then-maybe when he got the Biden gig.

Thanks, jc.
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One realllllly has to push it to be banned here.

No, I thought they were “disappeared” that far back.

jc-It was right before the election in 2008. I think.
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Others may be have a more specific recall.

I remember that. Busted with the Weekly Standard on his desk.

Great choice for this president now that playing kissy-face with the Right is his highest priority.

Digby (my favorite writer/thinker on the interwebs) post on Carney includes this rose to Swampland.
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“And the barbaric yawpers still exist — ironically they are especially active at Swampland, where the commentariat is one of the most engaged with the writers of anyplace on the internet.”
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http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/perlstein-redux-barbaric-yawpers-of.html

gysgt213 That is the first thing I think of when ever Jay

I did not finish, when Jay is mentioned.

Thanks for the link here. “Barbaric Yawper” sounds wonderful to me.
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Per our last exchange, if you think election ’08 then why does Carney’s Jan. ’07 post still got comments?

It appears that mainstream media types don’t feel the need to appear objective anymore. They slide easily back and forth from the media to a Democrat administration. There is not even an attempt to hide the bias.

jc-Note the dates of the comments.
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Paul-no not th…
December 9, 2008
at 4:04 pm

afguy@2

When the hell did the Washington press corps ever ask hard questions of a Democrat administration? The only hard questions came from Helen Thomas and she was just senile and no one ever took her seriously.

Like Tony Snow? Or is FNC not mainstream?
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Having said that, the incestuous relationship is disgusting.
On both sides.

Ivy_B@3,

Maybe he was at a loss for words. Too stunned by the erudition of the commenters to offer a reply.

Paul-no…@14.1,

Tony Snow, God rest his soul, did travel the route from journalism to the White House. I suppose we can say that he had his own biases. But Tony was always in the opinion end of journalism and never pretended to be an objective reporter.

FNC was never mainstream in the old meaning of the word, but they certainly are becoming the new mainstream as the dinosaur media dies out.

Actually he traveled the route from journalism -Detroit Free Press-to the White House-GHW Bush speech writer-to journalism host of Fox News Sunday not on FNC but on the FOX network-to the White House GW Press Secretary.
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But if you are outraged by one and excuse the other that’s fine.

Paul-no…@14.3,

I am long past outrage at the antics of the MSM. I have no illusions about them at all . They have never failed to meet the very low expectations I have for them.

Jay Carney should fit right in with the Washington press corps. He wouldn’t even have to take off his Time hat.

Okay.
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You are newish here, to me anyway, so I was curious about how you process.
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There is no question the comment section here is largely left of center. So I like to see new opposing views.
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Some like Neo and Appollynia (close but not the right name) come here and do not give an inch philosophically but have an integrity. When an issue cuts both ways they say so, like many (but not all) commenters on the left here do. Observe all the love for Carney here as an example.
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Others on the right come here and are beyond silly, everyone knows what they will say before they say it.
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So like I say I was curious. Thanks for helping.

Paul-no@14.5,

Saying that Swampland is left of center is like saying the Pope is Catholic.

I enjoy blogging at left of center sites even though I find the folks there very touchy. I imagine that since I joined the blogosphere in 2008 that I have probably set the world record for flagged comments. But that’s okay, once I’ve worn out my welcome, I move on to the next site.

I hope that gives you some insight into how I process. I, of course, am a proud conservative. I do not mind having my philosophy challenged but you had better come armed with something more than ad hominems and gratuitous insults when you do.

Hope that satisfies your curiosity.

Elvis, let me know what you think if you do take the plunge. I love the idea of Twitter right up until I think of 140. I see exchanges between brilliant writers and I just think, f@ck man, pick up the phone, send an actual email, hash it out in real blog commentary. Self atomization doesn’t intrigue me. Sometimes less is less.
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I like the idea of Twitter without limits. Write as much as you like, with all but 140 buried beneath a fold. If someone’s interested in reading all of it…

Carney was often discomfited. So much so, that he forsook using the verb “discomfit”. See:
http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2007/04/11/discomfited_again/
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I really don’t remember him bringing meaningful insight into the Swampland discussions. I guess we’ll see what he can say without saying anything.

As a wise commenter once quipped (was it you, JC?), it takes Stuart 140 characters just to clear his throat…

“barbaric yawpers”
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“sordid idiots”
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“humorless ego vampires”
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If I didn’t know better, I’d say they were fond of us…

“I do not mind having my philosophy challenged but you had better come armed with something more than ad hominems and gratuitous insults when you do.”
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Sorry if you feel I was doing that.
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You addressed your comment to me so I would be grateful if you can point to where I used ad hominems and gratuitous insults.

It’s all text, JC, so it’s not in gig territory, but it’s a lot in words, if not disk space.
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No, I didn’t see the ban yesterday, although I gather it had to do with somebody abusing Newton-Small, calling her fat or something.

Thanks so much for the compliment, Ivy_B.

Swampland’s pro writers and editorial positions aren’t “left of center,” they’re centrists, either ideological (like Crowley and Klein) or professional. Being a center-right publication, the columnists are partisan leaning toward establishment Democrats and their policies.
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The commentariat leans leftward, though.

Well, I for one proudly accept the title of “Barbaric Yawper.”

“Fantastic news, an insufferable wanker becomes minister of doublespeak.”
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Tweetdeck tells me there’s 68 characters left before it’s over the 140 limit.

Well, let’s face it, the best thing husein11 ever did for Swampland was serve as a moving target for sacredh’s jokes.

RE ” barbaric yawpers”
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The term comes from Rick Perlstein’s 2007 report on our takedown of a particularly poor Carney Swampland piece:

Moments later, a writer identifying himself as “Tom T” pointed out an error in Carney’s “nut graf” that would have earned a failing grade for a first-year journalism major: “Clinton’s approval rating in January of 2005 was 47 percent. It was not mired in the 30s.”
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At 9:12, the blogger Atrios, also known as Duncan Black, alerted his readers to the gaffe, and they descended on the Time blog like locusts–and, to mix the Biblical metaphor, served Jay Carney’s head up on a charger. They tabulated several more boneheaded errors: Carney wrote that 1995 was Clinton’s first State of the Union “with Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole seated behind him as Speaker and Senate Majority Leader”; but, of course, it is the Vice President, not the Senate Majority leader, who sits behind the president. He also wrote of Clinton’s “recovery … during Monica, in 1999″–but, as a commenter reminded him, “Clinton never had to ‘recover’ from Monica, unless polls in the high 50s and 60s are something you have to recover from.”
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Then the commenters unraveled the entire foundation of Carney’s argument. He had said that, because “Americans reward presidents who, even in the face of enormous distractions, focus on issues that matter to them … Bush won’t spend much time tonight talking about surging troops in Iraq or the Global War on Terror.” But, as writers identifying themselves as “jjcomet,” “dmbeaster,” and “Newton Minnow” pointed out, the issue of greatest concern to the nation “is far and away the war in Iraq, at 48% the only issue in double digits.” Another made a similar point, shall we say, more qualitatively: “The Iraq War is a DISTRACTION?? Are you serious? Am I wrong or did he compare the Lewinski scandal to Iraq??? What is the matter with you!?!?”
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At which Carney snapped back so churlishly (“the left is as full of unthinking Ditto-heads as Limbaugh-land”) that, for a moment, it was hard even to remember–why was it, again, that we were supposed to defer to the authority of newsweeklies (and the mainstream press) in the first place? Carney was rude and wrong. The barbaric yawpers of the netroots were rude and right.
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All in all, a rough day for Jay Carney. It inaugurated a rough week for those who still wish to uphold a model of cultural authority in which the fact that someone is a professional with a famous name– credentialed by other professionals with famous names–can serve as a reasonable proxy for trustworthiness.
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It marked one more step in the arrival of our new, more uncomfortable media world–one in which, to judge a piece of writing, we must gauge not the status of the writer, but his or her words themselves, unattached to the author’s worldly rank.

The nexus of reality-based analysis and crowd-sourced fact-checking proved its merits that day in a noticeable manner.
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We realized that we had started to become self-aware as the commentariat, too.

This announcement makes me very glad I don’t have cable TV, so I don’t have to watch the smug SOB.

Agreed, stuart. Who needs to continue, when 72 will do…?

Paul-no…14.7,

I was not directing my comment at you, Paul. You have been a perfect gentleman at all times. It was just sort of a general warning to the uninitiated. Sorry for the confusion.

stuartzechman@14.8,

Well, it will certainly never be mistaken for National Review or the Weekly Standard.

Of course it won’t be mistaken for those rightist publications.
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It’s not conservative media.
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But, of course, not everything that isn’t the right-wing is “left,” it’s simply not right.
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Swampland is pro-Democrat at the moment, although pro-Obama Administration (not really even pro-Obama) is a more accurate description.
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That support reflects TIME.com’s editorial stance, which is pro-centrist. To the extent that Democratic Party contains liberal elements, TIME withholds support and even condemns. Since the Obama Administration is almost exclusively populated by centrist ideologues and apparatchiks, TIME approves of that agenda.
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None of this makes TIME a rightist or a leftist organ.
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The idea of Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Joan McCarter or Marcy Wheeler writing for Swampland is laughable.
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Swampland’s pros write from and for the establishment centrist perspective.

Paul-nnto: Yes! That’s the one! The “nothing to see here, move along” post about the US Attorneys firing scandal. Carney did get props for apologizing afterwards. But his journalistic “instincts” were shown to be out to lunch…
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Re: Comments. The Great Server Crash(tm) of late 2007 was said to be the cause of lost comments prior to that date. It appears now that comments prior 23Oct08 have been lost as well. Apparently comments have an expiration date. I’m happy to see that stuart has archived some of his work.

Swampland’s pros write from and for the establishment centrist perspective.
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This seems to me to be incontrovertible.
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Swampland is pro-Democrat at the moment, although pro-Obama Administration (not really even pro-Obama) is a more accurate description.
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I don’t see that. How is Swampland pro-Democrat? I think of JNS writing that liberals wanted “the full government takeover” of health care, when the only thing she could possibly have been writing about was the public option. I mean, I heard some liberals say they wanted single payer, but I really don’t think I ever heard anyone say they wanted NHS-style gov’t provision of services. It was darn creepy to see that Luntzish Orwellianism appear unchallenged in Time magazine.
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The Swampland line, it seems to me, is that government spending is bad, even though ceasing an occupation or two and returning tax rates to where they were last time we had a functioning economy, the 1990s, would eliminate the bulk of our debt (see: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html?choices=03t205qm ).
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I don’t think that Swampland is biased against Democrats or Republicans, but I don’t see how it’s pro-Democrat.

Wait, sorry, this is a better link for balancing the budget predominantly through 1990s-era tax rates & ending occupations of foreign countries: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html?choices=809205qv

Problem is Stuart, many people see print media as National Review / Weekly Standard on one side, and everything else as the far-left. Same on cable, it’s FOX and the far-left. That’s it, end of discussion. No doubt because NR, WR and FOX claim it everyday.

Re: Server Meltdowns.
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I seem to have gotten my dates mixed up. I found this post from the High Sheriffs on 24Oct2008 apologizing for the Great Server Meltdown of 2008:
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http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2008/10/24/oops/
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There are few comments saved before this date.
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It does appear as though we were able to keep our WordPress user/account names (which wasn’t the case after the Great Server Meltdown of ’07, IIRC).