Morrissey:

For the national media, though, the Casey Anthony trial swamped out most other stories, including such minor topics as, er, who will lead the nation.  Eric Ostermeier at Smart Politics researched Lexis-Nexis for the period between the start of the trial and its conclusion yesterday and found that more media attention fell on Anthony than any Republican candidate for the presidential nomination.

Not surprisingly, CNN came in first place in the Casey sweepstakes, with a whopping 567 reports, including those at its sister channel HLN, which covered the trial live.  CNN had more invested in promoting the trial as a news story.  Remember this when media outlets try to argue that there is a “firewall” between news reporting and editorial and sales groups.  ABC finished second with 173 reports in the 42-day period, and Fox got the bronze medal with 122.

Doug:

In any case, while this is depressing in some sense, it is hardly surprising. The television media, especially the cable networks, tends to focus obsessively on trivialities like the Anthony trial, and the audience seems to eat it up. … Certainly people like Ed and I, and probably most of the people who read our respective blogs, would prefer it if the cable networks spend less time on nonsese like this (or other stories like the Natalee Holloway case or, to go back further in time, Jon Benet Ramsey).

I think it’s fair to assess that the Casey Anthony trial attracted more coverage over the past six weeks because the Casey Anthony trial had actually been happening in the past six weeks. The GOP primaries don’t even begin until a year that is not 2011, which we are still very much in the midst of.

So, yeah: Does anyone really mean to argue that what the U.S. really needed over the past couple months was less trial-of-the-century coverage, more reports that Candidate D may or may not have undertipped a waitress at a Denny’s outside of Dover, New Hampshire? Major news networks, especially this early in the race, “tend to focus obsessively on trivialities” no less when reporting who the next president may be. So why beg for a bonus six months of this?

The most prominent past races pitting a president against a former member of his team have come after deep public divisions over war, peace, and security. Lincoln fired McClellan, his top Civil War general, after months of exasperation over how McClellan was fighting the war. The dismissal came in November 1862, and it wasn’t until October 1863, nearly a year later, that McClellan declared himself a Democrat and entered the political arena.

Not that McClellan ever had to criticize Lincoln in public or explain to voters why he disagreed with his own party platform calling for a negotiated settlement with the Confederacy. Back then, “presidential candidates did not campaign themselves,” says John C. Waugh, author of the 2010 book Lincoln and McClellan. “McClellan certainly didn’t. He made three appearances during the whole campaign. He didn’t speak at any of them.” Lincoln didn’t campaign, either, but he pulled levers from behind the scenes and beat McClellan by 10 points.

Okay, so McClellan was a wartime U.S. Army general who campaigned against and otherwise antagonized a wartime president. None of that is true of Huntsman; none of the context is comparable to this possible scenario of Huntsman vs. President Obama. Having once served as a general is not the same as having once served as a political appointee. Dare I say, these two scenarios aren’t meaningfully comparable at all.

On a separate note, the analysis in this piece is awful.

“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy.” – Martin Luther King, Jr

A quick google search turns up lots of tweets, all of them from today.  Searching Martin Luther King Jr. quote pages for the word “enemy” does not turn up this quote, only things that probably wouldn’t go over nearly so well, like “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy to a friend.” I’m pretty sure that this quote, too, is fake.

She attributes spread of the “quotation” to unease among many observers that Americans have seized this moment, a long-postponed victory over a global villain, to take leave of our own moral bearings.

It is hard not to think that some of the impulse to celebrate “justice being done” may also contain a certain pleasure in revenge — not just “closure” but “getting even.” The world is not safer with Osama bin Laden’s violent demise (threat levels are going up, not down), so no cause for celebration there; evil has not been finally removed from the Earth, so no reason for jubilation on that count. The War on Terror goes on, so there is no closure in that regard. The truth is that “celebrating justice” when one person is killed — as happens regularly in the gang wars of American cities — only incites further desire for revenge, which, from “the other side’s” viewpoint, is usually called “justice.”

I think there’s a difference between celebrating the death of a categorically evil force and morbidly savoring the many crude details: that bin Laden “saw it coming,” that the bullet smashed through his cornea, that maybe we’ll get to grin over photos of a bruised, bloodied corpse. Anyone who could savor a death — any death — so thoroughly, I don’t want to share a moral plane with in condemning murder and murderers.

All of that said, I have no idea what Kai Wright is on about:

We have a $14 trillion deficit. A massive giveaway to defense contractors lurks inside that number—a transfer of public funds that has been justified, in ways both explicit and implicit, by the evil visage of Osama Bin Laden. And now, Washington is as likely as not to make up the loss by taking apart the safety net that once created something like economic justice in America. But the president would like us to agree that we are great because we can kill. “May God bless the United States of America,” Obama declared last night, a sentiment echoed by so many today. Indeed. But the familiar refrain feels to me more like an urgent plea for forgiveness than the triumphant war cry that it is.

So there you have it: We have no business celebrating the death of a mass murderer as a basically just event, because our economic system is corrupt. It’s a sloppy and obnoxious argument — all 1960s sentiment, but with none of the inspiration or focus. It’s the moral pose of a Very Serious Liberal. It’s a pose that aimlessly strains both the poseur and anyone who entertains him.

Part of Trump’s appeal is that he is a giant middle finger to the political system—the politicians, the press, all of us. This is all very postmodern, of course. Trump is not a champion of those who have lost faith in the system. He’s a champion of himself. His views are not well-known. But he is a place for the faithless to park their feelings.

Neither Trump nor ‘birtherism’ are champions of the downtrodden, sure — but they’re not “a place for the faithless to park their feelings” either. ‘Birtherism’ has nothing to do with “the system;” it’s a reaction to the scary, Manchurian, black guy who happens to be helming the system at this moment.

“The system” now isn’t much more oppressive, or significantly different, than it was three years ago under our most-recently-former president. “The system” (and the unemployment rate, and the federal budget deficit, and the housing market, and income tax rates) won’t be instantaneously rebooted and transformed upon Mitt Romney’s inauguration. Yet I bet you many dollars that the ‘birthers’ will resume their normal sleep cycles the moment that one no longer occupies the Oval Office, just as they slept soundly prior to his inauguration.

This is all to say: Jamelle Bouie is correct.

A few commentators have suggested that we’re living in the age of conspiracies, and while that might be true, I’m not sure that it explains the extent to which birtherism has found a prominent place within the Republican Party. Here’s my guess: birtherism is prominent because the president is black. To a depressingly large number of Americans, “blackness” runs counter to this country’s identity, and an African American president is, by definition, illegitimate. Short of resigning the presidency, there’s really nothing Obama can do to change that.

I would posit, dear readers, that it is not a love of food that breeds morbid obesity but an abuse or neglect of the self.  So many eat to the point of causing themselves pain, that extra dark step where it is no longer pleasurable, where they hope that if they hurt themselves enough they might finally might stop.  Real obesity isn’t the mere incorporation of a few bad habits but the complete dearth of good ones.

The pre-packaged libertarian response, which I am inclined to adopt here, is: Why does it matter? You can make a few roundabout arguments, sure: a liberal utilitarian criticism about health care costs; or other consequentialist criticisms about long-term costs versus short-term pleasure, and about various real and potential costs to your kin; or a conservative cultural criticism about self-restraint and roads to America’s ruin.

But if the pleasure you draw from fast-food transcends diabetes, or if your circumstances don’t promote Whole Foods habits or healthy dietary knowledge in general, how is that not a personal problem in every sense of the word “personal?”

“likability” (a subjective and completely amorphous quality) has absolutely nothing to do with presidential approval or electoral performance. I’ve made this point a million times before, but Barack Obama is presiding over a sluggish economy with high unemployment; if you’re trying to explain his low approval ratings, that should be your first stop. Indeed, the two most popular presidents in recent memory — Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton — also had their approval ratings dip in the face of poor economic performance.

Yes, the unemployment rate is likely hugely more important to voters — certainly to voters who aren’t strenuously committed to either political “side” — than various Barack Obama personal trivia, but I don’t understand how Jamelle’s point about relative importance necessarily translates to “likability” having “absolutely nothing to do with presidential approval or electoral performance.”

To ding further, I think that Jamelle is confusing the specifics of an example with a more general theory of elections and voter choice. “Likability” isn’t going to make anyone forget that they — or their spouse, or their child, or their neighbor — is unemployed (or under-employed), but “likability” intersects many variables: clarity of message, your ability to raise money, your ability to amass short- and long-term volunteers, the extents to which you motivate short- and long-term volunteers, leadership perceptions writ general, etc. These variables do in fact greatly affect your ability to be elected to office. I and many others might toss Hillary Clinton and Adrian Fenty as recent testaments to this notion.

Asserting strictly that likability is meaningless, or that it is at best valueless, maybe makes a bit of sense in a paradigm where voter choice is binary and between apparently diametric options, but what about in unwieldy primaries, where the differences among candidates are relatively arbitrary? What about races in which there is no incumbent to index present circumstances to, or in which present circumstances can’t be so clearly indexed to a particular party? What about in local races where politics might prove more retail/social than at grander scales? What about in races where at least one candidate is either remarkably charismatic or intensely personally offensive?

That is: what about in most elections that aren’t presidential re-election campaigns at the nadir of economic recession?

UPDATE: Jamelle notes via Twitter that he wasn’t making his argument as a grand theory of elections, but as an observation of presidential elections in particular, where likability “doesn’t much matter.”

First, there’s still significant daylight between “doesn’t much matter” and “has absolutely nothing to do with.” That said, narrowing the observation to presidential election politics requires, I think, a pretty hard pivot of political science: voters consciously and unconsciously digest candidates’ personalities in deciding whom to vote for (among candidates who are tolerable against requisite ideological criteria) and how to participate in elections, expect in presidential elections, where they don’t, because it’s the economy, stupid, or something.

Anthony Warren is different from many of his Georgetown peers in that he isn’t from an upbringing that’s always reinforced this idea that the world perfectly and efficiently rewards hard work, but his undergrad years have made him soft; he’s lost sight of how difficult life was growing up, how difficult life was for his mother, who never went to university and was never conventionally successful but was nonetheless the most dedicated, hard-working person he’s ever known.

It’s Anthony’s reconciliation of everything he learned in undergrad about the world and about success with (1) his childhood (past) and (2) his difficulty starting out in the world and defining a sustainable sense of purpose (present).

It’s Anthony’s reconciliation of his past and present insecurities with his need to believe in himself now more than ever. It’s the story of a kid building self-esteem at generational and national low point that gradually precipitates an emotional low point for him personally.

It’s the story of my generation, more narrowly of the Class of 2009.

Granted, this is completely anecdotal, but I hear women say things all the time like, “I just can’t date a guy that’s shorter than me.” Warning: I am about to take a very controversial opinion on this: Women who discount men because they are short are, well, kind of bigots. … Height discrimination seems to be one of the last socially accepted irrational dating biases. If you’re short, there’s literally nothing you can do about that. When I say that I think women who refuse to date a man simply because of his height I usually get a litany of reasons defending this position—pretty much all of which are irrational.

I typically wince when people ask individuals or demographic groups to testify to their romantic preferences. Asking someone to account for why they specifically aren’t attracted to black women isn’t significantly different from asking someone to account for why they are generally attracted to men, even if the biology and sociology behind these two phenomena (for instance) isn’t necessarily similar. In my mind, there are two points at play: (1) we don’t all have soild, concise explanations for why we’re attracted to what & whom, and the deep explanations of these things are probably complex in many ways; and (2) romantically, no one owes anything to anyone to whom they aren’t already committed.

It’s harsh, as any Caulfield-type likely learned in high school or undergrad, but no one owes anyone romantic consideration.

UPDATE: Shani enters –

There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting what you want, but casting aspersions on a whole group of men because of personal preference quite literally is bigotry.

Sure, this is bias in the literal sense, but the literal sense is unhelpful here. Are rationality and social fairness really, or even ideally, essential components of romantic attraction? For whom is romantic attraction a Rawlsian exercise?