The happy few get chosen because some must be chosen and most must be left behind, else there would be no few so happy at their place that they will bow to keep it. The reasons why this one gets chosen and this other one doesn't are important only to the chosen, and I suspect that they themselves would prefer not to truly know.

Posted at April 18, 2008 11:48 PM in response to About last night

I never thought it was that complicated. I thought it was more the case that a happy few got chosen (chosen!!!1!one!) from the multitudes of struggling small town reporters and Harvard and Yale grads who think of themselves as scrappy small town reporters to have dinner with Katherine Graham and the Bradlees and live in million dollar houses and meet all the biggest power players and become household names.

And being people, they want to believe that they really earned it, and that the people around them are good and nice and earned their place in what Gloria Borger calls "the political class" too. And being wealthy, they are the sort of people Carlyle and Burke warned about a century and a half ago - people with all the power and wealth of nobility, but without the training of noblesse oblige - they don't like to be reminded that a lot of other clever and deserving people don't get the big nod. They want to believe in meritocracy, and Republican ideology assures them that all wealth is earned and all authority is wise and all power is honest and that nothing changed after Ecclesiastes 9:11.

So their reporting is always done to bolster their own sense of self-merit. Republicans feed that, Democrats challenge it, and they swat away accordingly.

But then, I'm just a provincial rube who only bowls in the 80's, so wtf do I know?

Posted at April 18, 2008 4:24 PM in response to About last night