Ends and Odds

Rumors are flying that Dick the Dick could resign. I think maybe we’re all getting a little overheated.

Also–via Kevin Drum, I see that Paul Waldman stumbled onto a truth I wrote about awhile back. A couple of truths, in fact. Waldman writes,

Yet Republicans (and more than a few Democrats) raise a caution. Americans, they argue, are pretty conservative; no matter what is going on this week or this month, conservatives far outnumber liberals, so Democrats always start at a disadvantage. Democrats who want their party to stand up for a strong progressive agenda, they claim, are barking up the wrong tree. Democrats must stick to the center, or lose.

Even those with impeccably liberal pedigrees are making this argument, such as Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne. “According to the network exit polls, 21 percent of the voters who cast ballots in 2004 called themselves liberal, 34 percent said they were conservative and 45 percent called themselves moderate,” Dionne wrote. … Michael Barone of the National Journal looked at the same numbers and pronounced us to have “a conservative electorate.” Evan Bayh, a probable candidate for president, cited the same figures to argue for a more centrist Democratic Party. “Do the math,” he said. Noam Scheiber of The New Republic pronounced the liberal/conservative/moderate split “the most important thing you need to know about contemporary politics.”


As I wrote earlier
,

But the problem with this explanation is that the word liberal has been so demonized by the Right that even liberals don’t know what it means any more. I’d be willing to bet that a whopping large amount of people who call themselves “moderate” are liberals who don’t know it, or who would be liberals if someone could make a case for liberal government without some rightie goon dancing about shrieking “Tax and spend! Tax and spend!” …

….Frankly, I think genuine liberalism has been absent from public discourse and policy for so long that I think today’s voters might find it quite refreshing. Considering the younger ones have never been exposed to liberalism before, maybe we should call it something else and tell ’em it’s a new new thing. I bet they’d take to it like ducks to a pond.

Fact is, a lot of people who don’t call themselves liberals hold liberal ideas, whether they understand that those ideas are “liberal” or not. People don’t know what the word liberal means any more. The righties have done such a through job of demonizing the word that people are afraid of it. It’s like the hoards of people who say they believe in equal rights for women, “but I’m not a feminist.”

I smack such people whenever I meet one, btw, so if this applies to you, keep your distance.

Waldman writes that the “median voter” sure looks like a liberal.

At this moment in history, that voter is pro-choice, wants to increase the minimum wage, favors strong environmental protections, likes gun control, thinks corporations have too much power and that the rich get away with not paying their fair share in taxes, believes the Iraq War was a mistake, wants a foreign policy centered on diplomacy and strong alliances, and favors civil unions for gays and lesbians. Yet despite all this, those voters identify themselves as “moderate.”

And we know why this is true, don’t we? Waldman writes,

The answer lies in a decades-long campaign to make the word an epithet — from Ronald Reagan taunting Michael Dukakis as “liberal, liberal, liberal” to a host of Senate candidates who faced television ads calling them “embarrassingly liberal” or “shockingly liberal.” Through endless repetition, conservatives succeeded in associating “liberal” with a series of traits that stand apart from specific issues: weakness, vacillation, moral uncertainty, and lack of patriotism, to name a few.

For example,

Liberals may write best-selling books about why George W. Bush is a terrible president, but conservatives write best-selling books about why liberalism is a pox on our nation (talk radio hate-monger Michael Savage, for instance, titled his latest book Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder).

That’s exactly what I wrote here. I did a title search and found (as of May 2005):

Books by conservatives with the words liberal or liberalism in the title (not including the Michael Savage titles already named above):

* Ann Coulter, Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism
* Ann Coulter, Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right
* Ann Coulter, How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter
* Mona Charen, Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First
* Mona Charen, Do Gooders: How Liberals Hurt Those They Claim to Help (and the Rest of Us)
* Sean Hannity, Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism
* Sean Hannity, Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism
* John Podhoretz, How Dubya Became a Great President While Driving Liberals Insane
* David Limbaugh, Persecution: How Liberals Are Waging War Against Christianity
* Michael S. Rose, Goodbye Good Men: How Liberals Brought Corruption Into the Catholic Church
* Robert Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, Modern Liberalism and American Decline

If I expanded this search to include “The Left” I could list a great many more titles along the same lines, and most of them sold a respectable number of copies.

Now here’s my list of books by liberals with conservatives or conservatism in the title:

* Thomas Frank, What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America

And that was the only title I found, unless you include:

* Michael Lind, Up from Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for America

Mr. Lind is a recent convert from neoconservatism, and I don’t know for sure that he’s calling himself a liberal. So that title may not count.

As I wrote in an even earlier post, it’s easy to find broad-brush condemnations of liberalism coming from conservatism. But it’s remarkably difficult to find broad-brush condemnations of conservatism coming from liberals.

Sure, there was plenty of snarking about conservatism. But when liberals attack conservatives, liberals tend to be person- or issue-specific, and give reasons — This guy is a jerk because he did thus-and-so. This policy stinks because it’s going to have such-and-such effect.

Kevin suggests we fight back by “focusing on extremist conservative ideology, something we don’t do often enough.” We on the Blogosphere focus on it, but are we demonizing it the way the righties demonized liberalism? I’m not sure we’ve got it in us to do that. Although I’m willing to give it a shot.

But we’ve got to remember that conservatives are all about defending the Powers That Be–the corporations, the military-industrial complex, and various entrenched institutions dedicated to keeping the powerful in power and the playing field as uneven as possible. All they have to do to defeat us is make people afraid of us. Demonizing forces for change and real reform,* ensures that the status quo will win by default.

(*What righties call “reform” amounts to dismantling what’s left of the New Deal and reversing all civil rights case law since the McKinley Administration–“reforming” backward instead of forward, in other words. We might call that “unreform.”)

But liberalism has to do more than make people afraid of conservatives. We have to give people a vision of empowerment and hope, that government can be better, and can do better, to make America a better place for all of us.

And before we can do that we must neutralize what Steve M. calls the “Protocols of the Elders of Liberalism.

Given that the Right pretty much controls mass media, that’s not going to be easy. But I believe we have to try. And maybe if enough people become disillusioned by the Right, they’ll be ready to listen to what we have to say.

Gray Lady Not a Lady Any More

Today the Los Angeles Times takes the New York Times to task for its mishandling of Judy Miller. An editorial in today’s LAT accuses the NYT of “manufacturing a showdown with the government.”

The details of the Miller case (at least those that the paper has made public) reveal not so much a reporter defending a principle as a reporter using a principle to defend herself. There is still no satisfactory explanation, for instance, of why she changed her mind after 85 days in jail and decided to reveal her source.

Personally, I suspect the NY Times is on its way out as “the paper of record.” The Miller episode reveals very questionable standards of journalism, to say the least. And anyone (like a blogger) who routinely checks out stories from several different newspapers probably has noticed that other papers often do a better job. That, and the questionable business decision of putting popular content behind a subscription wall, suggest the Gray Lady is past her prime.

In today’s Salon (behind a subscription wall, naturally), Farhad Manjoo writes that Judy Miller’s unethical actions have created an internal mess at the New York Times that’s “bigger than Jayson Blair.”

On the one hand, it appears that Miller was not the source of Valerie Plame’s identity, as many speculated. However, Manjoo writes,

She protected — and, indeed, still looks to be protecting — people she knew were trying to discredit Wilson, even though they were possibly breaking the law, and even though she seems to have had no legal or ethical basis for doing so.

Judy Miller’s actions had less to do with protecting sources than covering her own butt.

Miller stonewalled the reporting team working on this case. Or, as the paper put it, “Ms. Miller generally would not discuss her interactions with editors, elaborate on the written account of her grand jury testimony or allow reporters to review her notes.” And that’s despite the fact that on Wednesday Judge Thomas Hogan lifted his contempt order, and Miller appears to be in no legal jeopardy in the case.

One Times staffer who spoke to Salon said her relative lack of cooperation with her colleagues is likely to continue to rankle the newsroom, even now that the story has been told. There doesn’t seem to be any sound journalistic reason for her selective silence; as Jay Rosen, the NYU journalism professor and blogger writes, “What principle of confidentiality extends to ‘interactions with editors?'”

Then there is the unbelievable fact that Miller cannot recall the most key detail in this incident, the source for Plame’s name. Discussions with some at the Times indicated that this would be the hardest pill to swallow for people there: Either Miller is lying, they said, or she’s sloppy to the point of ineffectiveness in her reporting. Neither scenario speaks for her continued employment as a star reporter.

There’s no excuse for any of that. And what were the Times editors thinking? The newspaper sank millions of dollars in Judy’s defense, yet the publishers and editors themselves had no idea what she was up to. And still don’t, apparently.

… it’s unclear why the Times allowed Miller — a reporter whose discredited work on weapons of mass destruction had recently embarrassed the paper — to be put in charge of the Times’ response to investigators looking into the Plame leak. Some revelations are astonishing: Apparently nobody at the newspaper asked to review Miller’s notes in the Plame case before allowing her to defy Fitzgerald, and before the paper’s management made her a high-profile symbol of press freedom in peril.

The Times account shows that senior management did not press Miller on her sources and what the sources had revealed to her about Plame, before backing her stance in public and in numerous editorials. It’s hard to imagine why they didn’t make sure she wasn’t being used by officials in the Bush administration who may have been breaking the law. Then there’s the matter of Miller’s own unethical actions: The Times’ report showed she lied to her editors about her involvement in the case, and maybe more disturbing, she agreed to allow Libby to hide his motives from readers by identifying him in two different ways. Why is she still working at the paper? (Unconfirmed reports say she has taken a leave of absence, but there’s no word of any disciplinary action against her.)

Rem Rieder writes in American Journalism Review:

Most disturbing is the sense that the Times at times is a ship without a skipper, or, better yet, an asylum run by the inmates. Strong leadership and editorial oversight seem hard to come by.

Take the almost casual way the paper decided to put itself at the center of such an important, high-profile legal battle – one that cost the paper millions of dollars and immeasurable credibility and trust. Yet Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. and Executive Editor Bill Keller didn’t trouble themselves to find out much about Miller’s dealings with her confidential source, I. Lewis Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff.

In recent years, Rieder says, the Times has lurched from one debacle to another. In 1999 the Times embarrassed itself by running a series of articles on an alleged espionage ring run by a Los Alamos physicist named Wen Ho Lee. When the case collapsed, the Times said, um, maybe we should have asked better questions. Yeah, maybe. Then the paper helped buttress the Bush Administration’s claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, for which it offered a faint apology last year. And then there was Jayson Blair, who got away with plagiarism and fabrication for a remarkably long time.

Arianna Huffington writes that the Times editors should have noticed the flashing warning signs:

We now know that Miller’s bosses were being warned about serious credibility problems with her reporting as far back as 2000 — a warning that came from a Pulitzer Prize-winning colleague of Miller who was so disturbed by her journalistic methods he took the extraordinary step of writing a warning memo to his editors and then asked that his byline not appear on an article they had both worked on.

In today’s WaPo, Howard Kurtz quotes from a December 2000 memo sent by Craig Pyes, a two time Pulitzer winner who had worked with Miller on a series of Times stories on al-Qaeda.

“I’m not willing to work further on this project with Judy Miller… I do not trust her work, her judgment, or her conduct. She is an advocate, and her actions threaten the integrity of the enterprise, and of everyone who works with her. . . . She has turned in a draft of a story of a collective enterprise that is little more than dictation from government sources over several days, filled with unproven assertions and factual inaccuracies,” and “tried to stampede it into the paper.”

It’s the journalistic equivalent of Dean telling Nixon that Watergate was “a cancer on the presidency.” But while the Times corrected the specific stories Pyes was concerned about, the paper, like Nixon, ignored the long-term diagnosis. And, of course, the very same issues Pyes raised in 2000 — Miller’s questionable judgment, her advocacy, her willingness to take dictation from government sources — were the ones that reappeared in Miller’s pre-war “reporting” on Saddam’s WMD.

I think the Times management, from chairman Arthur Sulzberger on down, needs to think real hard about what it is a newspaper is for. One incident of compromised reporting might be forgiven, but the Times has developed a pattern. It may not be too late for the Times to mend its reputation, but it had better start doing so now. Else we’re going to be calling it the Gray Disreputable Woman.

Plame On

In the past couple of days many have speculated that Patrick Fitzgerald must be looking hard at Vice President Cheney’s staff if not the Dick himself. Today in the Washington Post, Jim VandeHei and Walter Pincus confirm this.

As the investigation into the leak of a CIA agent’s name hurtles to an apparent conclusion, special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald has zeroed in on the role of Vice President Cheney’s office, according to lawyers familiar with the case and government officials. The prosecutor has assembled evidence that suggests Cheney’s long-standing tensions with the CIA contributed to the unmasking of operative Valerie Plame.

In grand jury sessions, including with New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Fitzgerald has pressed witnesses on what Cheney may have known about the effort to push back against ex-diplomat and Iraq war critic Joseph C. Wilson IV, including the leak of his wife’s position at the CIA, Miller and others said. But Fitzgerald has focused more on the role of Cheney’s top aides, including Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, lawyers involved in the case said. …

…Lawyers in the case said Fitzgerald has focused extensively on whether behind-the-scenes efforts by the vice president’s aides and other senior Bush aides were part of a criminal campaign to punish Wilson in part by unmasking his wife.

Josh Marshall writes that three points in this story stand out. First, Fitzgerald’s investigation has dug into Cheney’s running battle with the CIA regarding Iraq intelligence. Second, Fitzgerald said he would announce his findings in Washington and not in his office in Chicago; a hint that the end is at hand, perhaps? The third is this paragraph in the WaPo story:

The special prosecutor has personally interviewed numerous officials from the CIA, White House and State Department. In the process, he and his investigative team have talked to a number of Cheney aides, including Mary Matalin, his former strategist; Catherine Martin, his former communications adviser; and Jennifer Millerwise, his former spokeswoman. In the case of Millerwise, she talked with the prosecutor more than two years ago but never appeared before the grand jury, according to a person familiar with her situation.

Josh explains:

[Millerwise] was Cheney’s Press Secretary from 2001 to 2003. She then went to work on Bush-Cheney 2004. Then in January 2005 she was appointed Director of Public Affairs for the CIA. She had apparently also worked for then-incoming CIA-Director Porter Goss on Capitol Hill. And her installation appears to have been part of Goss’s effort to install Republican operatives in key positions at the Agency. Douglas Jehl, in the Times last January, called her appointment “the latest in a series of former Republican aides to be installed by Mr. Goss in senior positions at the C.I.A.”