Media Dumbness.

Dave Weigel HERE on the absurdity of the latest Palin/Romney spat, and what the 2012 election might look like:

How many people were directly quoted in this spat? None, unless you count the Romney Twitter account. Andy Bar hustled in getting those quotes from Mysterious Palin Aide of the Deep, but his talent is wasted when he plays kid who whispers the gossip about the popular kids to the less popular kids. It's stuff like this that informs my dark, dark suspicion that 2012 will be more about nonsense than policy, and that people who think Palin needs to bone up on policy don't get this.

I bitched earlier this year year about my uneasiness with how readily accepted Game Change was despite much (most?) of it being based on anonymous sources:

How come we accept a book like Game Change as gospel truth even though it is built upon anonymous sources as told to by second-hand anonymous sources about people the authors carefully refuse to say whether or not they even spoke to themselves, and we're okay to use such a book to set our sights on whichever public officials we choose to hope to destroy; yet when someone like James Frye writes a memoir that turns out to not be 100% true we have a collective meltdown and as country have to lay on the couch for Oprah to stroke our heads and whisper in our ears that everything's gonna be alright? What the fuck?

I also questioned the gossipy Edwards  tell-all The Politician:

And yet here we have a guy that once claimed paternity of Edwards' kid, presumably to protect Edwards and therein his own career as well. And now he's running around selling a book, presumably to make himself a bunch of money. And yet nobody that I've seen so far has asked "why on Earth should we believe somebody who was willing to be part of the paternity cover-up in the first place?" I mean, a few years ago this guy was willing to claim another kid to be his own so that the father could become president, and now we swallow up everything he says without even blinking? Really?

It's easy for things like blogs to delve into gossip, it's just the nature of what happens when a billion people have the opportunity to do something. But now we've seen actual books published that aren't much more than thinly-disguised gossip and they're treated as if they were the Bible by serious people with serious jobs who can greatly influence an audience. So to think that the 2012 election, PARTICULARLY if Sniffy is in any way involved,  will be anything more than a fucking episode of The Hills is wishful thinking at this point.