So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version — or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald’s florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin.

Note: the audio is a little garbled at the beginning.

Snarking has been part of the air we breathe for a long time. It is said to have entered American pop culture in the 1950s, with Mad magazine, Stan Freberg, and so on. Not at all. They were practitioners of the honorable art of Satire. They exaggerated traits rather than punishing them. There was affection involved. Snarking has come into its own as a rhetorical style in this age of the internet. The web simultaneously allows anybody with a computer access to a worldwide audience, but the probability of complete invisibility. You can speak, but in a sea of so many words, no one will hear. You can win listeners by writing something worth reading, but you can win them more easily by snarking. When you snark the famous, you not only associate yourself with them, but propose yourself as their superior. This is so essential to the process that I have never observe the snarking of an unknown person.

Please make a soundboard of these Obama MP3’s which I found over here via over there.

• obama_blam
• obama_complicated
• obama_fries
• obama_ignorant
• obama_number
• obama_that_guy

UPDATE: And boom goes the proverbial dynamite: http://obamasoundoff.com/

The web gets a lot of credit for sharing, but that’s because the people who invented the web have to find creative ways to make it sound amazing. But when you send someone an email with an article you think they should read, you might as well have interrupted their morning meeting in person, waving it around frantically with half a mouthful of donut. But leave your favorite pieces in your bathroom, and you have a captive audience who’s probably grateful to look at Luke Menand’s latest so you two can have something to talk about for ten minutes before moving on to Wife Swap.

Of course, You want to read the entire post.

Reading through the appendix, as it turns out the book was originally published by Harper, in conjunction with the Book of the Month Club. (It would eventually be the first Book of the Month Club selection by an African American author.) It seems as if Harper was amenable to publishing the book consistent with Wright’s artistic vision, but the club (presumably fearing its members’ sensitive natures or even government censors) took exception to several passages, most notably a sex-tinged scene in a movie theater balcony towards the beginning of the story. Wright acquiesed, probably grudgingly, to the club’s wishes, and completely rewrote the theater scene.

(From PeteLit)

(More at The Telegraph)

What I noticed caught me a bit off-guard. There was a story on the threat of terrorism, which started off with a historical gloss of Al Qaeda activity from the 1990’s to the present. While there were the obligatory-and-expected digs at Clinton’s supposed passivity, these digs were evenly spread when it came to GW’s first nine months in office. And still more surprising to me was the prominence that Fox not only gave to Obama’s prescient speech in 2002 about not getting bogged down in a dumb war, but also the readiness to take on McCain/Palin’s attacks on Obama’s wanting to read Miranda rights to terror suspects–in a truly fair-and-balanced approach, Fox showed that Obama’s views were otherwise.

All the while, the scroll bars (there are literally 4 different scroll bars now) were scrolling things like, Hillary seeking to mobilize women voters, Karl Rove saying that McCain’s ads are going too far (when the pot calls you black, you must’ve really gone far), and Greenspan criticizing McCain’s purported middle-class tax relief. In short, Fox was showing info-bites that one might find on the Huffington Post.

Now it’s old news that Rupert has been trying to cozy up to Obama, but was I witnessing something larger trickling down here? Surely just a few minutes is not scientific, but more evidence is surfacing that my experience was not a mere aberration.

Maybe I’m clueless and don’t recognize that there was simply enough red meat thrown by showing the word “Hillary” or by showing that Obama opposed the Iraq invasion like all the other anti-Americans, but if I am right that Fox is leaning more in his direction, what does this mean? Do the powerful simply recognize that an Obama presidency is inevitable? Or perhaps are they truly frightened that McCain might die, leaving my wacky Aunt Sarah in charge?

Or maybe more cynically they realize that with two unwinnable wars and a shit-tanking economy that there are no easy answers to fixing the Bush legacy, that the next president is doomed to a one-term clusterfuck of catastrophes, and they’re taking the bearish approach that the clusterfuck could have long-term residual impact on that president’s political party?

On Monday, for instance, China’s response to the earthquake as constrasted with Myanmar’s to the cyclone:

With scenes of the calamitous cyclone in Myanmar still fresh — and the military government’s languid, xenophobic response earning it international scorn — China’s Communist Party leaders are keenly aware that their approach to the earthquake will be closely watched at home and abroad.

And this morning, China’s newfound openness as contrasted with Glasnost:

Chinese leaders are well aware of the Soviet experience. The bloody crackdown against the democracy movement in Tiananmen Square in 1989 seemed motivated in part by fears that a relaxation of repression would lead to a replay of Soviet turbulence in China.