Thread: "FATHER DOBBS" - Vanity Fair HATCHET JOB on Lou D

WOW! WHAT A MAJOR HATCHET JOB ON LOU!!! LOU MUST BE ENJOYING THE FACT THAT HE IS NOW THE MAIN TARGET FOR THE LEFT WING MSM!


Father Dobbs

Assaulting CNN audiences with bossy harangues, Lou Dobbs has remained unruffled by conflict and become a major weight on public opinion.

by James Wolcott WEB EXCLUSIVE September 28, 2007 Illustration by Piotr Lesniak.

If Lou Dobbs were any more full of himself, the tub would overflow. In the autumn resplendence of his telecasting career, Dobbs's self-regard, never meek or slender, has ripened into the pompatus of love. I am Lou, hear me moo, in numbers too big to eschew. It isn't just that the ratings for CNN's starship enterprise Lou Dobbs Tonight have been climbing while those of other cable news shows are being intubated, but that his force of personality and power of persuasion have elevated him to the status of a major public-opinion shaper—a heavy-lumber political slugger. If he were a Robert Ludlum hero, this chapter of his life could be called "The Dobbs Supremacy." It was Dobbs more than any other tongue flapper who put the kibosh on the Dubai-ports deal by flogging it as a risk to national security and economic sovereignty, not to mention a rude slap in the honest face of every hardworking American, which leaves out a few people I happen to know, including me. "For fifteen evenings," Ken Auletta wrote in The New Yorker, "Dobbs spoke about 'the outrage' of allowing a Middle Eastern country 'with ties to the September 11 terrorists' to operate six American ports. Dobbs certainly was not the only person to raise questions, but the resulting furor eventually prompted Dubai to abandon the plan." The scuttling of the Dubai-ports deal was a warm-up bout to Dobbs's biggest feat of strength so far, his duel in the dust with the comprehensive immigration reform bill that was the darling dream baby of President Bush—his last big domestic achievement before returning to Crawford, Texas, to enter that long night of the iguana. As we know, the bill croaked after one of those cloture votes that lend such cliff-hanging suspense to the legislative process. Although the conservative bloggers and talk-radio caterwaulers, tweaking their nipples and twirling their jockstraps, indulged in yet another orgy of triumphalism as they inflated the magnitude of their heroic role in murdering this bill in its cradle (overcome with vapors, National Review Online contributor Mark Krikorian compared the bill's defeat to General Washington's staunch performance at the Battle of Monmouth, in 177, it was the anti-Establishment establishmentarians of the mainstream media, in the persons of Dobbs and MSNBC commentator Pat Buchanan, who were the true picadors, pricking this bipartisan package as an "amnesty" bill to the frustration of its advocates and drawing first blood. "Pitchfork Pat" Buchanan's nativism has always been a niche product, however. Dobbs commands a higher, wider seat of authority, no pun intended. Presiding over the recurring segment "Broken Borders" (cue night-vision footage of Mexicans climbing over and under fences, crossing ravines, running in a crouch), Dobbs has been the chief architect in constructing the ominous, dystopian specter of illegal immigration as home invasion on an epic scale, tracking crime, disease, and rampant illiteracy across our clean floors. For a dark cloud auguring thunder, Dobbs maintains quite a sunny disposition. He can demagogue an issue without coming across as a demagogue, a pretty neat trick. Or perhaps no trick at all, simply a gift of temperament.

The secret to Dobbs's fastening influence is that he never reaches volcanic boil and squanders his rhetorical force. His frustration with the latest lunkhead decision out of Washington is seldom flung at the viewer with loose gobs of emotive rhetoric but is delivered like a C.E.O. memo and thumbtacked with a tidy variety of grimaces, clucks, rueful shakes of the head, exasperated sighs, and ironic codas, enabling him to avoid the burnout fatigue of constant umbrage. His excoriations of corporate greed and Capitol sleaze ("The Best Government Money Can Buy" is the title of another recurring segment) have been frequently bracketed with the harangues of Peter Finch's Howard Beale in Paddy Chayefsky's Network, but they are brothers-in-arms only in their choice of targets. Where Finch's mad-as-hell Beale was haggard and ash gray as he filibustered the camera—a dead man walking—Dobbs is in the rosy pink of personal condition, a fine shade of sherbet. After interviewing Dobbs over lunch at his favorite feeding spa in Manhattan, the Grill Room at the Four Seasons, Financial Times reporter Edward Luce writes, "As Dobbs arrives—wearing a suit and immaculately coiffured—and greets me warmly, I have the mischievous thought that, with a complexion this pink, US border patrol would not require night vision to spot him making a nocturnal dash from Mexico." Unlike Fox News's poster boy for heartburn, Bill O'Reilly, whose sulky demeanor bears the bite marks of grudges and slights that date back to the dinosaurs, Dobbs has a bouncy respect for how the media game is played; he doesn't believe in letting differences of opinion or petty gibes upset the melodic gurgle of an orderly digestive system. He considers journalism a non–contact sport of give-and-take. When Luce assures Dobbs that he isn't out to do a hatchet job, Dobbs replies, "Doesn't matter if you do. It's all clean, harmless fun." He doesn't take criticism personally—"Feel free to write what you like," he tells the F.T. reporter by way of good-bye, "I won't take it personally"—and he doesn't personalize his attacks, either. Where O'Reilly often falls like a load of bricks on pathetic peewees whose names have had the misfortune to hit the newswires—irately pillorying some high-school principal or Podunk judge for canceling a Christmas pageant or letting off a sex offender with a light sentence, thereby promoting the pincer grip of the "secular progressive" agenda—Dobbs is more of a big-picture finger-pointer, going after larger, interlocking interests.

For this he is to be commended. He doesn't have the finger-pointer finesse of social history or the nuance that is the property of an elegant pamphleteer such as former Harper's editor Lewis H. Lapham, whose entertaining documentary, The American Ruling Class (2005), offers a guided safari through the tribal haunts of the power elite, but he pays enough attention to the news to recognize that our overlords have grown new tumors of avarice and arrogance in the Bush era. Identified for years with the peregrine view from the executive suite as host of CNN's corporate-friendly Moneyline (so friendly that he was booked as a celebrity speaker at corporate events and did promotional videos for investment firms), Dobbs perceived through a cleft in the clouds that the American worker was enjoying few if any of the benefits of the managerial elite's perks, stock options, and golden parachutes. They were serfs indentured to a new generation of pharaohs. No one on cable news was addressing the walls and ceilings closing in on blue collars and the middle class, certainly not a pin-striped peacock such as CNBC host and Republican mouthpiece Larry Kudlow, whose fealty to Wall Street and laissez-faire was absolute. (If a supply-sider's erection could be traced on a cocktail napkin, it would duplicate the Laffer curve.) With the masters of the universe having their shoes tongue-shined nightly, Dobbs saw an opening, answered the crying need, and established a franchise persuasion operation that includes books (Exporting America, War on the Middle Class, and, coming in November, A New America: Awakening the National Spirit—too late for that, Lou!), a column for CNN.com, and lucrative spins on the lecture circuit. He is the only nightly anchor who regularly addresses the problems of organized labor, the minginess of the minimum wage, the slimy influence of lobbyists in Washington, the debt bomb ticking in subprime mortgages, and the health-insurance crisis. He is allowed an editorial license denied his colleagues. Interviewing Dobbs on National Public Radio's On the Media, Bob Garfield pointed out that such loose leeway "would never fly" on Wolf Blitzer's or Paula Zahn's show, and asked, "Why should you have a different set of journalistic standards applying to you?" Imperturbable as ever, Dobbs explained why he deserved such special due. "Well, immodestly, let me say, one of the reasons would be my experience, my education, my analysis of the issues and the empirical evidence, and a demonstrated record of, frankly, of knowing what I'm talking about."

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/feat ... cott200709

Yawn. Vanity Fair: another example of the fading dinosaur media.

Wolcott seems to prase Lou Dobbs,intermitantly,throughout this whole article,especially the last long paragraph.

A strange article.

Originally Posted by Populist

Yawn. Vanity Fair: another example of the fading dinosaur media.

Vanity Unfair, is more like it. I wonder if Rupert Murdock owns that too? This will give Lou a great big laugh. :-)

Originally Posted by USPatriot

Wolcott seems to prase Lou Dobbs,intermitantly,throughout this whole article,especially the last long paragraph.

A strange article.

Yeah, I noticed that too.

Lou Dobbs for President!

Sounds like James Wolcott thinks that we are a bunch of zombies walking around with no brains in our heads and we just follow Lou where ever he goes. I make up my own mind, Lou doesn't. I don't always agree with what he says. But, he is the only person, politition or media, who tells it like it is.

I think Mr. Wolcott might be just a little jealous of the attention that Mr. Dobbs is getting.

Maybe there is something to Lou Dobbs running for President. The attacks by the MSM seem to be ratcheting up!

Send Lou Dobbs an e-mail and tell him you want him to run for President!:
http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form5.html?9