Category Archives: News Media
David Schuster Is Da Man
Logan Murphy writes at Crooks & Liars,
David Shuster filled in for Chris Matthews this evening on “Hardball†where he interviewed neo-con author, Fouad Ajami, and absolutely shredded him over his Wall Street Journal OpEd comparing Scooter Libby to fallen U.S. Soldiers in Iraq. Shuster was relentless, never letting Ajami off the hook and blasting him with the truth and hard facts.
Go to C&L to see the video.
The Natives Are Restless
Today David Broder looked through his telescope and spotted native savages just beyond the Potomac. 
The belief that official Washington is deaf to the people’s wishes is a staple of political rhetoric for both Republicans and Democrats — even those, including Thompson, who have operated inside the Beltway for decades.
Let a reporter who is not running for anything suggest that exactly the opposite may be true: A particularly virulent strain of populism has made official Washington altogether too responsive to public opinion.
The sight of those spears and feathers and tribal campfires must’ve upset poor Broder’s chintz-and-teacup sensibilities.
From Aristotle to Edmund Burke, philosophers have written of the healthy tension that normally exists between the understanding and strategies of leaders and the sentiments and opinions of their people.
We simple tribal people should let Bwana make our decisions for us.
In today’s Washington, a badly weakened president and a dangerously compliant congressional leadership are no match for the power of public opinion — magnified and sometimes exaggerated by modern communications and interest group pressure.
Any minute now, the savages will break into Broder’s tastefully appointed study and leave mud on the hand-made Turkmen carpeting.
[The immigration bill] was buried by an avalanche of phone calls to the Capitol from good citizens decrying what they had been told on many talk radio stations and by some conservative politicians: that it was an amnesty bill.
People were misled by talk radio and some conservative politicians? So shocking. All my delusions are shattered.
The “fast-track” process, in which Congress casts only an up-or-down vote on trade deals negotiated with other countries, has been the key to a vast expansion in world trade. But the resulting trade agreements have run into populist protests from labor and liberal groups that blame them for the loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs.
The Bush administration has responded to Democratic pressure by including enforceable new labor and environmental standards in several pending bilateral trade agreements. But the action by the House means that any further deals are unlikely as long as Bush is president.
“Fast track” is, of course, a policy set by the wise and thoughtful Washington political class who know better than we natives do what’s good for us. Public Citizen mourns:
After a brief, damaging existence, Fast Track was pronounced dead on June 30, 2007.
The demise of Fast Track allowed the U.S. Founding Fathers to stop rolling in their graves over Fast Track’s trampling of constitutional checks and balances. As well, victims of Fast Track-enabled trade agreements welcomed the news, given the anomalous procedure’s record of damage despite having been locked up and out of commission for blocks of time since its inception. …
… Fast Track delegated away Congress’ exclusive constitutional authority over trade – allowing the executive branch alone to choose trading partners, set the substantive terms of trade policy, and even sign trade agreements, all before Congress ever voted. The controversial delegation mechanism allowed Congress only a yes or no vote on trade agreements after they had been negotiated and signed and by its very design shut out public and congressional oversight. …
… Fast Track’s lifelong philosophy was, “Just trust the president.” Even after being kept in chains for much of its existence, Fast Track’s legacy includes millions of peasant farmers who have been displaced by fast-tracked trade deals, workers whose wages have remained stagnant since Fast Track’s hatching in the mid-70’s, millions of Americans made ill by fast-tracked trade deals that required food imports not meeting U.S. safety standards, the evisceration of the U.S. manufacturing base, and much more damage. Many Americans celebrated Fast Track’s long overdue demise and joined a national day of prayer for a better procedure that in the future could replace Fast Track to ensure trade agreements would benefit the majority.
Those deeply connected to Fast Track, including President Bush and representatives of the National Association of Manufacturers, the American Chamber of Commerce, Pharma and other corporate lobbies, gathered at board meetings and campaign fundraisers to mourn their loss.
Let’s go back to Bwana Broder:
… ending the president’s negotiating authority will only do our country damage. …
…The point is pretty basic. Politicians are wise to heed what people want. But they also have an obligation to weigh for themselves what the country needs. In today’s Washington, the “wants” of people count far more heavily than the nation’s needs.
Broder finishes his column and calls upon his houseboy for more tea. Inside, all is civilized and orderly — silver polished; blinds lowered, privileges protected. Outside the natives paint themselves and sharpen their spears, wailing for their lost jobs and the growing harshness of their lives.
See also: Harold Meyerson, “Global Safeguards for a Global Economy.”
Such a Sweet Girl
See the new, nice Ann Coulter.
Update: Elizabeth Edwards Confronts Coulter During Live Television Appearance
The Freak Show
Believe it, or not: Watch Mitt Romney speak about health care for one minute and nineteen seconds and say not a single thing that’s true.
On the plus side — David Schuster, filling in for Tucker Carlson, demonstrates the right way to conduct an interview.
Get a Room
Why I Dropped My Subscription to The New Republic
This is why. Editor-In-Chief Martin Peretz thinks it’s just awful that poor Scooter Libby has to spend 30 months in jail. Why, all he did was perjure himself and obstruct a federal investigation. What’s the big deal?
TNR is supposed to be a liberal magazine. It hasn’t been for a long time, but it pretends. I did subscribe, briefly, once upon a time, ca. 2003. Lately the new owners have been trumpeting the “new” TNR. I’ve gotten two sample issues. See? It has a new format. It’s so much prettier.
The only change that would tempt me to renew is a complete overhaul of the masthead.
Fantasy Land
When George W. Bush first became president, it seemed to me that Peggy Noonan was everywhere in media gushing about the wonderfulness of Dubya. “Doesn’t he look presidential?” she would swoon. Jonathan Chait wrote,
It was during the summer of 2000 that Peggy Noonan’s adoration of George W. Bush began in earnest. The GOP candidate, she wrote in her Wall Street Journal column, “seems transparently a good person, a genuine fellow who isn’t hidden or crafty or sneaky or mean, a person of appropriate modesty.” Over the next year or so, she went on to call him “respectful, moderate, commonsensical, courteous,” and “a modest man of faith.” She has seen in him “dignity” and “a kind of joshy gravitas.” And this was before September 11. Since then, he has risen in her estimation. The president has “a new weight, a new gravity, a new physical and moral comfort.” He possesses “a sharp and intelligent instinct, an inner shrewdness.” He is “emotionally and intellectually mature.”
Since I didn’t see anything the least bit presidentialish in The Creature, I assumed that what Noonan saw existed only in her imagination. Peggy is, after all, the same person whose book about Hillary Clinton was so, um, imaginative. David Brock wrote,
Delivered without the faux scholarly apparatus accompanying other Hillary Clinton attack books, much of The Case Against Hillary Clinton is literally made up. Page after page is littered with imaginary dialogue and fantasies that belong in a 50-minute session—a 17-page Hollywood speech that Mrs. Clinton never delivered, a fake interview with Tom Brokaw after she loses the Senate race, a fictional scene in which movie producer Harvey Weinstein disrespectfully lights a cigarette in the First Lady’s face, a moment when it dawns on Hillary as she flies into LaGuardia that she looks like the Statue of Liberty, a conversation between James Carville and Harold Ickes at Mrs. Clinton’s graveside, even a passage where Noonan channels Eleanor Roosevelt to tell us what she would say about Hillary Clinton: “One senses there is something strange there.”
Well, yes, there is something very — nay, exceedingly — strange there. And that something is Peggy Noonan’s head.
In the early parts of the Bush Administration — both before and after 9/11 — right-wing pundits were tripping over themselves in their rush to microphones to praise the virtues and general wonderfulness of George W. Bush, and it was a spectacle both strange and terrible to behold. Because if you had your head screwed on straight you knew good and well Bush was nowhere near the person they said he was. I actually called this phenomenon “Peggy Noonan syndrome.”
But apparently George Bush’s speeches and behavior became so outrageous it broke through the thick fog of Noonan’s fantasies and projections. Now she writes,
The beginning of my own sense of separation from the Bush administration came in January 2005, when the president declared that it is now the policy of the United States to eradicate tyranny in the world, and that the survival of American liberty is dependent on the liberty of every other nation. This was at once so utopian and so aggressive that it shocked me. For others the beginning of distance might have been Katrina and the incompetence it revealed, or the depth of the mishandling and misjudgments of Iraq.
But he was saying crap like this since right after 9/11. For example, on Friday, September 14, George Bush spoke at a prayer service at the National Cathedral:
Just three days removed from these events, Americans do not yet have the distance of history. But our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil.
And rid the world of evil. Just like that. Y’know, we’ve tolerated this evil thing far too long. It’s time we did something about it.
(Note to future generations of Americans, if there are any: If your leaders ever start to talk about ridding the world of evil, revolt immediately.)
What I came in time to believe is that the great shortcoming of this White House, the great thing it is missing, is simple wisdom. Just wisdom–a sense that they did not invent history, that this moment is not all there is, that man has lived a long time and there are things that are true of him, that maturity is not the same thing as cowardice, that personal loyalty is not a good enough reason to put anyone in charge of anything, that the way it works in politics is a friend becomes a loyalist becomes a hack, and actually at this point in history we don’t need hacks.
Kinda takes your breath away, don’t it?
Anyway, what set Noonan off today is that persons in the Bush Administration engaged in the usual straw-man demonizations of their critics. But this time the critics were not us liberal loonies, but conservatives opposed to his immigration policy.
The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic–they “don’t want to do what’s right for America.” His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, “We’re gonna tell the bigots to shut up.” On Fox last weekend he vowed to “push back.” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want “mass deportation.” Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are “anti-immigrant” and suggested they suffer from “rage” and “national chauvinism.”
Why would they speak so insultingly, with such hostility, of opponents who are concerned citizens?
You tell us, Peggy. They’ve been doing this since Day One. Odd that you would have just now noticed it.
Chait wrote in the 2002 article linked above
The hallmarks of the hero-worship style are a Manichaean moral sensibility, eloquent prose, and assertion rather than argument. This might seem like a harmless, even refreshing, counterpoint to the politics of personal destruction, which both parties now disdain as mindlessly partisan and corrosive to civic health. But Peggy Noonan’s glorification of George W. Bush isn’t a departure from the politics of personal destruction at all. It’s the very same thing. …
… The problem with Noonan’s brand of hero-worship isn’t that character doesn’t matter. Reasonable people can disagree about the proper weight to place on personal virtue versus ideology in evaluating a politician. But for Noonan and her ilk, conservative ideology and personal virtue are so deeply intertwined that it is virtually impossible for a good person to pursue liberal policies or for a conservative politician to be morally flawed.
Her dislike of Hillary Clinton was so profound that Noonan filled most of a book with her own fantasies about Hillary Clinton’s private behaviors and thoughts and offered that as proof of what an awful person Hillary Clinton is. She did the same thing with Gen. Wesley Clark, dismissing him as a “nut.” For people like Peggy, it’s not enough to disagree with someone’s opinions. A person who does not share her point of view must be depraved.
Anyway, what’s amusing about all this is that, even as she calls for “wisdom,” Peggy and some of her cronies have found another screen on which to project their hopes: Fred Thompson. Go read this gush-a-thon over Thompson from just two weeks ago (via No More Mister Nice Blog). Peggy’s falling in love with another bad boy again, I fear.
Chris Matthews Discovers Objectivity
He has his moments, I must admit.
“David Broder is the voice of the people.”
This is from an article by Jebediah Reed about wild card Dem presidential candidate Mike Gravel.
Beaming after the Columbia event, Gravel walks with Alter to a nearby Cuban restaurant for a late lunch. On the way they encounter a gray-haired gentleman in owlish glasses. Alter greets him very respectfully. “This is Tom Edsall,” he says. Edsall was a senior political writer for the Washington Post for 25 years. He retired from the paper in 2006 and now writes for the New Republic and teaches at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
Gravel smiles broadly and says, “Hey, can you straighten out David Broder?” Broder, an influential columnist at the Post and the unofficial godfather of the D.C. press corps, has been a target of much criticism from liberal blogs for seeming to provide political cover for Bush on Iraq, even with a majority of Americans now opposing the war. “He doesn’t believe in the power of the people!” Gravel says. Edsall blinks and looks perplexed. “David Broder is the voice of the people,” he replies matter-of-factly. Gravel starts to smile, assuming Edsall is making an absurdist joke. But Edsall is not joking. The two men look at each other in awkward silence over a great gulf of unshared beliefs, then Gravel chuckles and walks ahead into the restaurant.
Of course David Broder is the voice of the people.
… these people.
Unreal.