I don’t even have much of a rant about this. My response is more like - “eh, so what else is new?”.
I think my real rant is against this whole damned fucking administration because things have gotten to the point where this is the kind of behavior I expect from them.
I’ve actually come to expect this kind of crap. In fact, I’ve even come to expect that they’ll try to pull off shit like this in the most blatant and incompetent manner possible. Even their attempts to hide their incompetence are incompetent!
We’ve already seen faux-journalistic govt promo vids passed off to TV networks and broadcast without disclaimer . . . but this breaks new ground! :mad:
So FEMA held a press conference where they answered questions that have been left on voicemails all week. The staging of it was poor, but it is not like FEMA has not been answering questions of the press this week.
I listened to FEMA answer questions on NPR within the last 48 hours. If FEMA ONLY did this type of press relations, it would be a scandal. I don’t see that this is such a crisis moment.
This is a great OP, davidm! Can you talk a little bit about how you were able to both quote the article and provide a hyperlink to it, given the complexity of vB coding?
Why the playacting? Why not just appear before the cameras, state that they’ve received a number of questions they’d like to answer, and then read the questions and answer them. In any case, this way of doing things at the very least gives the appearance of cherry picking the questions (whether they really did or not). And why not give a days notice, or at least a few hours? What was so urgent about these particular questions that they had to be answered NOW, even if it meant that reporters wouldn’t have enough notice to be able to attend? It certainly sounds like an excuse used to avoid actually facing reporters.
He really, honestly, expected the press to attend with only 15 minutes notice? It all sounds way too convenient to me.
This thing was obviously staged to look like the real thing. They pretty much admitted that. If they really truly believe that that’s a legitimate way of doing things, then I don’t know what to say.
And I never said it was a “crisis moment” so you can put that strawman away.
I agree that the playacting was dumb, but that it also served to get information out. They should have just made a press briefing where they answered several questions.
You DID make it a big deal by pitting them, so there is no strawman on my part. You think that this is so evil that you need to pit - I am stating that it only warrants attention in a mini-rants thread.
I guess I think that the FEMA transgression is low on the list, and the paid columnists is the bigger ticket item.
In term of bad behavior ranking:
Press releases full of data. Low evil
Press briefings. Low evil.
Press briefings disguised as a press conference (yet apparently not too much of a secret). Low-middlin evil.
Only meeting with friendly reporters. Medium to high evil.
Paying columnists. High evil.
I am not some governmental or Bush apologist, I just didn’t see this as such a horrible thing. Now, if this was the ONLY press contact - I would have questioned it more. Since I listened to NPR interview them, however, I am fairly confident that FEMA has been making itself available for questioning.
I wasn’t aware that there are different levels of rants that belong in different type of threads. (What’s a “mini-rant” thread?) Just how evil does something have to be before I can pit it?
You’re reaction is actually illustrating the point I was trying to make. When I first saw this article my reaction was similar to yours - “what’s the big deal”? But when I thought about it I realized that my lukewarm reaction just showed how far we’ve come and how numb we’ve become to the antics of this administration.
This should be unacceptable behavior but they’ve gotten away with so much, we’ve seen so much behavior worse than this, that we dismiss it as “eh, no big deal”.
That was my rant. It wasn’t about this one specific incident. It was about how numb we’ve become and how far our standards of acceptable governmental behavior have been shifted. That IS a big deal.
