It's Such A Small Thing...

...yet it says volumes about Obama, the Democrats, the media, and the liberal intelligentsia. I'm talking about Barack Obama's nomination of CNN’s Sanjay Gupta for the position of Surgeon General. The guys is a neurosurgeon - cool enough, he also performed emergency brain surgery multiple times while serving as an embedded reporter in Iraq - but he is also a correspondent for CNN and CBS.

Sigh...and yet another member of the media joins the Democratic administration...isn't there any sense of discomfort within the profession that a number of high-profile television and magazine personalities/executives have left their allegedly neutral positions to work for one particular political party? Yeah, I know - unlikely. But how can we trust them next time, knowing that most of the media may simply be shilling for a job in the next administration?

And really - is Sanjay Gupta the best Obama can do for this country? Or is Obama as clueless about this cabinet post as he is about so many others (say, head of intelligence!), so he just picked the guy he saw the most on TV, thinking he would be "cool"? Shoot, if the Democrats are simply the celebrity party (Obama, Kennedy, Franken, Gupta) why not take one of the doctors from Scrubs? At least we'd get a few laughs - and, after all, laughter is the best medicine....

But who best to sum up this whole intellectual quagmire than the man who is a walking intellectual quagmire - Mr. Paul Krugman of the New York Times! His beef against Gupta is that he dared come out against the psuedoscience of the Film-maker of the Democratic Court, Mr. Michael Moore:

I don’t have a problem with Gupta’s qualifications. But I do remember his mugging of Michael Moore over Sicko. You don’t have to like Moore or his film; but Gupta specifically claimed that Moore “fudged his facts”...

What bothered me about the incident was that it was what Digby would call Village behavior: Moore is an outsider, he’s uncouth, so he gets smeared as unreliable even though he actually got it right. [wrong again, Krugman, but that'll be the subject of a different post - ed.]

And appointing Gupta now, although it’s a small thing, is just another example of the lack of accountability that always seems to be the rule when you get things wrong in a socially acceptable way.

Make sense to you? Yeah, me neither. But that's what comes out of the oven when government, politics, celebrity, and activist journalism get thrown into the pot together...