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Entry: Fool Me Twice Link: http://www.takimag.com/blogs/article/fool_me_twice#6143 Post contents: <i>"Hillary is a professional, Washington politician. She requires money, good will, and votes. Like her husband, Hillary’s actions are coldly calculated, often triangulated, and always self-serving. Everything is a career move. In their defense, one can only observe that Hillary and Bubba have plenty of company"</i> True enough, yet I wonder if we're giving Nurse Ratched too much credit for being media savvy. There's a new medium out there, and if you're reading this you're using it right now. The dynamics of this medium, it seems to me, are quite different than those of newspapers, radio, or TV. Has Hillary mastered those dynamics? Ron Paul would seem to have done so. He's no great stump speaker, but so what? we've got no stumps now. He's not much of a looker, as far as I can tell. So what in the age of Internet? I've watched him use with success the Net to get his troops there "firstus with the mostus". The Great Satan (FDR) mastered radio, as Al Smith didn't, and Kennedy TV, as Nixon didn't. To what extent was the immigration sell out defeated this summer by TV, talk-radio, or by Internet organization? Is the world dividing into folk who watch TV, folk who listen to talk-radio, and folk who do neither and use instead the Internet? (forget newspapers) If so, is TV a passive, and ultimately unserious medium, and hot media such as radio and print get people moving? Another thought: Would your classic print and TV columnist (George Will or Sam Donaldson, or Mussolini and I. F. Stone) survive in the world of instant talk-back and write-back? -- and be able to do something other than just sputter in red-faced rage and whine to block those who expose their logical fallacies and tiresome buncombe? It requires other skills than the stump speaker needed to deflate hecklers. And when the stump speaker got a microphone, he needed only to turn up the volume. Won't do in cyberspace. In the TV age, pre-cable, Nurse Ratched and Duce Rudy would simple control the three networks. With internet, anyone can have a blog. I suppose will find out Nov 2008, if not sooner, which medium is still the key one. Night thoughts. Sent at: 2008 07 24