By my count, the people mocked in the latest episode of “Mouthpiece Theater”—the Washington Post Web series starring Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza, in which the pair, billing themselves as “two of the biggest maws in Washington” and smirking like teenagers who’ve just stolen some Schnapps from their parents’ liquor cabinet, loosen their ties, don chintzy smoking jackets, and generally deride recent political events—include, in order of appearance:
- Barack Obama
- Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
- James Crowley
- David Vitter
- Chip Pickering
- Mark Sanford
- “the entire Republican Congressional leadership team”
- Jeff Sessions
- John Cornyn
- Dennis Kucinich
- Henry Waxman
- Robert Byrd
- Rahm Emanuel
- Hillary Clinton
- the citizens of the United Kingdom
- the citizens of France
- the citizens of Russia
- the citizens of the People’s Republic of China
- the citizens of Canada
- Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
- the Pope
- automakers
- Sarah Palin
- swine flu victims
No joke. And I mean that literally: “Ménage à Stella Artois” manages to be both glibly insulting and extraordinarily un-funny. Milbank and Cillizza, through a series of (bad) puns that use the colorful names of microbrewed beers to poke fun at people in the news (swine flu victims should drink…Isolation Ale! Ha!), suggest, among many other things, that “the entire Republican Congressional leadership team” should drink Satan Red/Devil’s Brew/Fallen Angel/Evil Eye/Hell Bier (get it? because they’re demonic, I guess?). Oh, and that the Secretary of State should drink…Mad Bitch.
Classy.
One wonders how much of the Post staff’s time and resources were devoted to researching, writing, staging, shooting, and editing such an extraordinarily value-free contribution to the annals of political commentary. Milbank and Cillizza are no Stewart/Colbert—they’re not even Letterman/O’Brien—not only because they’re simply not as funny, but because their status as (ostensibly) reporters means that they owe us more than lame-puns-for-the-sake-of-lame-puns, as per the typical humor of late-night TV. “Two of the biggest maws in Washington”—judging from the impish grins they maintain throughout the video and from their general teehee! look what we’re getting away with! tone (oh, and from the fact that their video closes with TotBMiW taking swigs of Jackass Oatmeal Stout)—seem, actually, to understand this. They seem to understand, in other words, that “Mouthpiece Theater,” in its spectacular lack of substance, represents a kind of journalistic subversion.
But, in that, the pair are victims of irony rather than purveyors of it. Yesterday’s “Beer Summit”—and, in particular, the media’s treatment of the event as alternately epic and ironic (as in, for example, dubbing the thing the “Beer Summit” in the first place), is certainly ripe for criticism. The video in question could have been—relatively—trenchant, along the lines of the “suds summit” column Milbank published in today’s Post. It could have been, given the participants, witty/revealing/justified. Instead, “Ménage à Stella Artois” simply mocks itself. And in that, it mocks by extension:
- Dana Milbank
- Chris Cillizza
- the staff of The Washington Post who are not Dana Milbank and Chris Cillizza
- the audience of The Washington Post
- all of us, generally.
These two narcissists, purporting to be journalists, are the modern-day equivalent of the palace fools at Versailles. Such is their total state of self-absorbed cluelessness, romping and giggling from their privileged, juvenile, atrophied and condescending little media world inside the beltway, that they actually think that what they are doing is funny. Well, outside the moat, the peasants aren't laughing. They aren't watching, either. And that's the modern-day of equivalent of storming the halls of power: consigning the 'elite' media such as the Washington Post to utter irrelevancy. Cake, anyone?
#1 Posted by pitchfork, CJR on Fri 31 Jul 2009 at 04:52 PM
And the Post let Dan Froomkin go but kept these two clowns.
#2 Posted by cab91, CJR on Fri 31 Jul 2009 at 05:36 PM
Lord above! Can they please put us out of their misery and come up with something funny? Their repentance and suicide, for example.
#3 Posted by nell gwyn, CJR on Fri 31 Jul 2009 at 07:34 PM
Rahmmm Emmmanuel might have the most commonly misspelled name in America.
#4 Posted by Hardrada, CJR on Fri 31 Jul 2009 at 08:18 PM
"Given the participants," it could only have been what it was.
#5 Posted by LP Steve, CJR on Sat 1 Aug 2009 at 09:41 AM
"Mouthpiece Theatre" is lame, but I'd argue that as a bad but obvious attempt at humor, it's less detrimental than how Cillizza spends his time when not doing that. All the guy does is call the second rate political operatives who populate national political committees (DSCC, DGA, DCCC and their Republican counterparts) and put whatever they tell him in a blog post as "analysis." Generally he's either too lazy or too clueless to do any actual research himself about the campaigns he "covers."
Unlike these lame videos, what he "reports" about campaigns matters. He affects the outcome with what he writes in his blog. It affects fundraising, whether someone gets a primary, how other people report on the race, etc.
I've always found puzzling the tolerance for his transparently shallow and poorly informed analysis at a newspaper that considers itself the nation's foremost resource for coverage of politics.
#6 Posted by richard_d, CJR on Sat 1 Aug 2009 at 06:51 PM
Cilizza's mediocrity is par for the Washington Post. They have lacked a good political desk for years, the last decent political reporter, Peter Baker, left for NYT several years ago. Now there is no one there that rises above mediocre. Interestingly, both Mike Allen and Dana Milbank used to be good reporters at the Washington Post political desk, but judging from the poor quality of their subsequent work, they must have had a damn good editor when they were covering the early Bush Administration.
#7 Posted by Tom, CJR on Sat 1 Aug 2009 at 11:28 PM