Weiner says he invented the Internet!

FRIDAY, JUNE 14, 2013

The dumbness of the whale: In our view, Noreen Malone performed a real service in a recent post at TNR’s revitalized blog, The Plank.

What service did the street-fighting pundit perform? She drew back the curtain on the sheer inanity of her post-journalistic tribe.

Malone recorded the inanity of pundit reactions when Hillary Clinton made her debut on Twitter this week. We’ll include her scolding headlines and a bit of her post:

MALONE (6/11/13): Be Less Excited About Hillary Clinton’s Twitter, Please/It’s unseemly

Hillary Clinton joined Twitter on Monday. The political press and the feminist Twittersphere (many of whom moonlight as semiprofessional Hillary groupies) all but had to sit on their hands to contain their excitement...At the Cut, which ran an extensive dialogue on Clinton’s new social networking move, Kat Stoeffel bubbled, “She's so good at it already, perfect first tweet,” in response to her colleague Charlotte Cowles’s sharp observation, “AHHH, I love it.” “Would that everything on the Internet were even a quarter as self-aware, witty and badass," added Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams to the chorus. (Note: As of press time, Clinton has not tweeted again.)

At Buzzfeed, Ben Smith argued that from that one semi-sentence, we could see straight into the heart of Hillary and capture her deepest neurosis: the fear of being perceived as old...

Malone provides plenty of detail and plenty of links, helping us see the sheer inanity which now defines elite “journalism.”

For another example of this culture, consider David Halbfinger’s news report in today’s New York Times.

Uh-oh! It seems that Anthony Weiner made a somewhat inaccurate comment about his use of the term, Obamacare. As Halbfinger starts to straighten things out, the good old days are back:

HALBFINGER (6/14/13): Anthony D. Weiner’s advocacy for Obamacare was well known to anyone watching cable news when the House of Representatives passed the legislation in 2009. But did he really coin the term?

He said so in an interview with The New York Times recently, which quoted him saying it, near the bottom of a front-page article on Thursday about Mr. Weiner’s record in Congress.

Published, the claim prompted a round of invented-the-Internet-style mockery at Mr. Weiner’s expense on Thursday.

“Invented the Internet” will never die. The “journalists” love it too much.

Please note: Fourteen years later, Halbfinger doesn’t feel that he has to explain his invented-the-Internet reference. No, Al Gore never said he invented the Net. But the thrill lives on.

In our view, the most salient fact about modern elite pseudo-journalism is its determined, manifest dumbness. Noreen Malone was working that beat in her recent post.