It would have been nice if he’d grilled his hawk guests like this before the war, though.
Category Archives: News Media
Let’s Find the Joke
Is Rush Limbaugh about to have a Don Imus moment? Apparently Rush presented a little parody ditty called “Barack the Magic Negro”” on his radio show last month, and some of his own staff are fomenting mutiny over it.
The song ostensibly was inspired by this David Ehrenstein op ed in the Los Angeles Times, wherein the fabulous David E (who is African American) writes about how whites perceive Barack Obama. The Rush parody, unfortunately, has an entirely different point to it.
According to this site, in its most recent video incarnation the song (titled “U Da Real Negro Al, Screw Obama”) is performed by Paul Shanklin, a conservative political satirist, who tries to imitate the Rev. Mr. Sharpton’s voice. The video includes a slideshow of images of Sharpton and Barack pointing out the differences in their “blackness.” The song alleges that Barack Obama is not a “real” black man, which was not David Ehrenstein’s point at all.
The term “magic negro” (or “magical negro,” and other variations), refers to a stock character of (white) fiction — a benevolent African American who drops into the plot Deus ex machina-style to counsel and redeem the struggling white main character. Rita Kempley explained the “magic negro” in 2003:
Morgan Freeman plays God in “Bruce Almighty;” Laurence Fishburne a demigod in “The Matrix Reloaded,” and Queen Latifah a ghetto goddess in “Bringing Down the House. ”
What’s the deal with the holy roles?
Every one of the actors has to help a white guy find his soul or there won’t be a happy ending. Bruce (Jim Carrey) won’t get the girl. Neo (Keanu Reeves) won’t become the next Messiah. And klutzy guy Peter (Steve Martin) won’t get his groove on.
In movie circles, this figure is known as a “magic Negro,” a term that dates back to the late 1950s, around the time Sidney Poitier sacrifices himself to save Tony Curtis in “The Defiant Ones.” Spike Lee, who satirizes the stereotype in 2000’s “Bamboozled,” goes even further and denounces the stereotype as the “super-duper magical Negro.” …
… Historically, if a black person is thrust into a white universe, it is inevitable that the white people will become a better person,” says Thomas Cripps, author of “Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era” and other books on African American cinema. “Sidney Poitier spent his whole career in this position. Sidney actually carried the cross for Jesus in ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told.'”
See also “Stephen King’s Super-Duper Magical Negroes” by Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu, written October 2004:
The archetype of the Magical Negro is an issue of race. It is the subordination of a minority figure masked as the empowerment of one. The Magical Negro has great power and wisdom, yet he or she only uses it to help the white main character; he or she is not threatening because he or she only seeks to help, never hurt. The white main character’s well-being comes before the Magical Negro’s because the main character is of more value, more importance.
I think it’s debatable whether presidential candidate Obama neatly falls into this stereotype. On the other hand, I do think there’s truth in the observation that white Americans are more, shall we say, comfortable with some African Americans than others; Colin Powell also comes to mind. This underscores the point that “race” is as much a social construct as anything else, but this is a huge topic I don’t have the energy to dive into right now. Some other time, maybe.
In his Los Angeles Times op ed, David Ehrenstein elaborates:
And what does the white man get out of the bargain? That’s a question asked by John Guare in “Six Degrees of Separation,” his brilliant retelling of the true saga of David Hampton — a young, personable gay con man who in the 1980s passed himself off as the son of none other than the real Sidney Poitier. Though he started small, using the ruse to get into Studio 54, Hampton discovered that countless gullible, well-heeled New Yorkers, vulnerable to the Magic Negro myth, were only too eager to believe in his baroque fantasy. (One of the few who wasn’t fooled was Andy Warhol, who was astonished his underlings believed Hampton’s whoppers. Clearly Warhol had no need for the accoutrement of interracial “goodwill.”)
But the same can’t be said of most white Americans, whose desire for a noble, healing Negro hasn’t faded. That’s where Obama comes in: as Poitier’s “real” fake son.
The senator’s famously stem-winding stump speeches have been drawing huge crowds to hear him talk of uniting rather than dividing. A praiseworthy goal. Consequently, even the mild criticisms thrown his way have been waved away, “magically.” He used to smoke, but now he doesn’t; he racked up a bunch of delinquent parking tickets, but he paid them all back with an apology. And hey, is looking good in a bathing suit a bad thing?
The only mud that momentarily stuck was criticism (white and black alike) concerning Obama’s alleged “inauthenticity,” as compared to such sterling examples of “genuine” blackness as Al Sharpton and Snoop Dogg. Speaking as an African American whose last name has led to his racial “credentials” being challenged — often several times a day — I know how pesky this sort of thing can be.
Obama’s fame right now has little to do with his political record or what he’s written in his two (count ’em) books, or even what he’s actually said in those stem-winders. It’s the way he’s said it that counts the most. It’s his manner, which, as presidential hopeful Sen. Joe Biden ham-fistedly reminded us, is “articulate.” His tone is always genial, his voice warm and unthreatening, and he hasn’t called his opponents names (despite being baited by the media).
Like a comic-book superhero, Obama is there to help, out of the sheer goodness of a heart we need not know or understand. For as with all Magic Negroes, the less real he seems, the more desirable he becomes. If he were real, white America couldn’t project all its fantasies of curative black benevolence on him.
This is too nuanced for righties, I realize, but you see that David isn’t writing about whether Barack Obama is inherently “black” enough, but rather about how he is perceived by whites. David says himself, “Speaking as an African American whose last name has led to his racial ‘credentials’ being challenged — often several times a day — I know how pesky this sort of thing can be.” His line about “Obama’s alleged ‘inauthenticity,’ as compared to such sterling examples of ‘genuine’ blackness as Al Sharpton and Snoop Dogg” was, as I read it, intended to ridicule people who make such comparisons. (Like Rush Limbaugh.)
When David’s column was published, a number of righties wallowed in feigned outrage over it. This blogger and his commenters oozed disgust at the racism of “White liberal elitists.” (I actually read through this muck; not one of them appears to have even a glimmer of what David’s op ed actually said.) “And is LIBERAL David Ehrenstein who coined ‘Magic Negro’ as a description for Barack Obama still writing for the L.A. Times?” writes this dimbulb.
I’ve been googling around trying to find the “lyrics” to the Rush parody song so that you don’t have to suffer through actually watching the putrid video. I had no luck, but Greg Sargent provides a description:
Let’s start with a particularly lovely Rush/Shanklin special. It has a voice parodying an Al Sharpton who is so illiterate that he spells the word “respect” like this: “r-e-s-p-e-c-k.” Here’s a transcript of the relevant bit, where the Sharpton stand-in is standing outside Barack Obama headquarters asking Obama for attention by singing the following lyrics to the tune of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect”:
“R-E-S-P-E-C-K. Wha-choo mean it ain’t spelt that way? R-E-S-P-E-K-T? I need a dictionary!”
There’s more. As Media Matters reported the other day, Rush sang the ditty “Barack the Magic Negro” on his show on March 19, basing the lyrics on an L.A. Times Op-ed piece. But it gets better.
Now Rush is running a new, improved version of the “Magic Negro” song that’s way more fleshed out — and way, way, more eye-opening, too. It features a parody of Sharpton singing about “da hood” and saying that Obama is “ar-ti-coo-late.” Just give it a listen, it’s hard to describe how low it is.
There are also routines where the Sharpton stand-in insults Obama by saying “yo mama’s so fat” and so forth, as well as one where Sharpton demands that Obama explain himself to the “commooonity.”
The only racist slam Rush and Shanklin left out were watermelon jokes.
More Jokes:
Go see Bob Geiger’s Saturday cartoons. Read also about the senior Bush Administration official and former AIDS czar who resigned after his patronage of an “escort” service was uncovered.
Update: Garance has more:
There’s a big difference between a conservative Southern white man — in this case, Rush’s regular contributor Paul Shanklin, from Tennessee — doing these kinds of parodies of Al Sharpton and Barack Obama and, say, Kenan Thompson’s affectionate parodies on SNL. In addition to “Barack the Magic Negro,†Shanklin is also responsible for such tasteful Rush Limbaugh Show ditties as “Osama Obama.â€
Lest you think such things are limited to brief moments on the radio, Shanklin’s “Magic Negro†song has already been turned into a YouTube clip which makes its highly offensive lyrics even more apparent. It’s like a slap in the face, nothing but pure racial insult against Obama, who is charged with being inauthetically black and pictured in a Klan robe.
Why We’re Not Parasites
Yesterday Oliver Kamm accused bloggers of being “parasites” and charged that political blogs stifled healthy debate. He did this in the Guardian blog site, Comment Is Free. I’d never heard of Kamm, so I did some checking. He appears to be one of those faux-leftist neocons of the Christopher Hitchens / Martin Peretz ilk. An overeducated twit, in other words. Anyway, he begins,
Political blogging has come of age. At least, that was the idea behind the BBC’s Newsnight screening of a report by a high-profile blogger who writes under the pseudonym Guido Fawkes. His film argued that blogs provided more acute and independent political analysis than traditional journalism, owing to the absence of an editor, proprietor or regulator. Theatrically insisting on being filmed in darkness to maintain his supposed anonymity, “Fawkes” debated his thesis with Michael White of this newspaper.
It was a catastrophic performance, mainly because the blogger required continual correction on points of fact. He thereby illustrated blogging’s central characteristic danger. It is a democratic medium, allowing anyone to participate in political debate without an intermediary, at little or no cost. But it is a direct and not deliberative form of democracy. You need no competence to join in.
Yes, there are plenty of bloggers who write in ignorance of facts. However, these days there are plenty of paid “professionals” working with benefit of editors, proprietors and regulators who are just as ignorant. In fact, some of the worst offenders among the bloggers are getting their misinformation from the pros.
Blogs are providers not of news but of comment. This would be a good thing if blogs extended the range of available opinion in the public sphere. But they do not; paradoxically, they narrow it. This happens because blogs typically do not add to the available stock of commentary: they are purely parasitic on the stories and opinions that traditional media provide.
I actually think there is a glimmer of truth in what Kamm wrote above. I am very much dependent on commercial news media for most of the information I provide in this blog. I get annoyed with bloggers who think that, somehow, “citizen journalists” will someday replace professional news bureaus. Very little of what we bloggers do even faintly resembles what news reporters do, even though technology is effecting enormous changes in how news is gathered and disseminated.
However, if you want to know why we’re not parasites, read Glenn Greenwald. Glenn says that — glory be! — Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post is finally catching on to what the U.S. Attorney scandal is about. Just two weeks ago, Hiatt was still in “nothing to see here; move along” mode. But today — today, mind you — Hiatt published an editorial that suggests maybe some U.S. attorneys were fired because they didn’t bring phony charges against Democrats that might have helped Republicans win elections.
Today, he figures this out.
As Glenn says, there’s nothing in this editorial that hasn’t been well known for weeks, even months. Josh Marshall has been blogging about it since December 2006. I wrote a month ago, after one of the document dumps,
As has been widely noted in the recent past, the pattern suggests that the White House and the Republican Party generally have been using the Justice Department as part of their election campaign process. In other words, Karl and Co. have been turning our criminal justice system into a Republican Party machine.
Thanks mostly to the work of professional reporters — some of whom work for the Washington Post — all of the evidence has been Out There for some time. But media establishment figures like Hiatt would not look at it. Just like they won’t investigate the apparent sandbagging of Nancy Pelosi. It was this same thick-headed obliviousness on the part of major news media that drove a lot of us into blogging. The establishment guys seem to need someone to smack them in the head (figuratively) and holler Look! Pay attention!
In this light, I highly recommend Gary Kamiya’s piece in Salon titled “Iraq: Why the Media Failed.” Here’s a snip:
The media had serious preexisting weaknesses on all three fronts, and when a devastating terrorist attack and a radical, reckless and duplicitous administration came together, the result was a perfect storm.
The psychological category is the most amorphous of the three and the most inexactly named — it could just as easily be termed sociological. By it, I mean the subtle, internalized, often unconscious way that the media conforms and defers to certain sacrosanct values and ideals. Journalists like to think of themselves as autonomous agents who pursue truth without fear or favor. In fact, the media, especially the mass media, adheres to a whole set of sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit codes that govern what it feels it can say. Network television provides the clearest example. From decency codes to subject matter, the networks have always been surrounded by a vast, mostly invisible web of constraints.
Seen in this light, the mass media is a quasi-official institution, an info-nanny, that is held responsible for maintaining a kind of national consensus. Just as our legal system is largely based on what a “reasonable” person would think, so our mass media is charged with presenting not just an accurate view of the world but also an “appropriate” one.
What “appropriate” means in absolute terms is impossible to define. In practice, however, its meaning is quite clear. It’s reflected in a cautious, centrist media that defers to accepted national dogmas and allows itself to shade cautiously into advocacy on issues only when it thinks it has the popular imprimatur to do so.
Smack dab dead on, I say. Kamaya goes on to describe the journalism elites and insiders who “swim happily in the conventional wisdom that flows all around them.” And he says “The blogosphere represents the beginning of a national revolt against the now-discredited media gatekeepers.” Amen to that.
I think a big part of the problem with news media is inherent in mass media and, even more, media monopolies and conglomerates. Before the mass media age most people got their news from (mostly) independently owned newspapers of wildly varying quality. Yes there were newspaper syndicates, but it would have been unusual, I think, for a media corporation to own more than one newspaper in the same media market. And most cities had more than one newspaper.There was true news competition, in other words. The system we have now gives us journalism that is less competitive and more conformist. There is not only less independent coverage of news, but in recent years media corporations have been downsizing their reporting staffs to cut costs.
That said, I don’t know that basic news-gathering is being done any less competently than in the past. I graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism in 1973, which means I was there just as Woodward and Bernstein’s Washington Post investigative reports of Watergate were getting attention. This time is looked back on now as some kind of golden age of journalism. But I remember my professors — many of whom were, literally, old newspaper guys with years of reporting experience [*] — sniffing at all the hoopla and saying it just showed that most reporters were asleep at the wheel. Why did only Woodward and Bernstein investigate what was behind the Watergate burglary? Too many of the Washington press corps, the professors said, were lazy sots who just took press releases from the White House and rewrote ’em.
Time and time again, we leftie bloggers look at facts being reported in the mainstream press and see patterns and significance in them the pros don’t see until months later, if ever. Often we have little or no information we didn’t get from the MSM; what differs is how we put the facts together and interpret them.
I think we’re seeing the end of the Mass Media Age, although it’s not clear to me what’s going to replace it. I only hope that soon the Washington media elite and the “pundits” who can’t see what’s right in front of them will seem as antiquated as typewriters and carbon paper.
[*] This post is respectfully dedicated to the memory of Thomas Duffy, a crusty old geezer with DTs who used to scare the stuffing out of me, but who taught me a lot, and who told wonderful stories about reporting on the Chicago mob in the 1930s.
Sandbagging Pelosi
Paul Krugman today writes about the Little Lie Technique. You’ve heard of the Big Lie, of course. Krugman defines the “little lie” as
… the small accusation invented out of thin air, followed by another, and another, and another. Little Lies aren’t meant to have staying power. Instead, they create a sort of background hum, a sense that the person facing all these accusations must have done something wrong.
Little lies can be manufactured from trivial things, like the falsehood that Al Gore claimed to have invented the Internet or the Bill Clinton haircut story. These stories sometimes arise from sloppy reporting, but I think most of the time political operatives make them up and feed them to reporters. There’s little fallout when the story turns out to be false, because it was such a trivial matter. But the Little Lies add up. And, of course, the Little Lies get repeated by the political hacks doing commentary on CNN and Faux Snooze and MSNBC, and by bloggers. By the time the stories are debunked everyone’s attention has wandered somewhere else.
Krugman continues,
This is the context in which you need to see the wild swings Republicans have been taking at Nancy Pelosi.
First, there were claims that the speaker of the House had demanded a lavish plane for her trips back to California. One Republican leader denounced her “arrogance of extravagance†— then, when it became clear that the whole story was bogus, admitted that he had never had any evidence.
Now there’s Ms. Pelosi’s fact-finding trip to Syria, which Dick Cheney denounced as “bad behavior†— unlike the visit to Syria by three Republican congressmen a few days earlier, or Newt Gingrich’s trip to China when he was speaker.
Ms. Pelosi has responded coolly, dismissing the administration’s reaction as a “tantrum.†But it’s more than that: the hysterical reaction to her trip is part of a political strategy, aided and abetted by news organizations that give little lies their time in the sun.
Josh Marshall wrote late last night, “From the start of this sub-controversy over Speaker Pelosi’s comments in Damascus I’ve suspected a tampering hand from the White House.”
You may have heard the story that Pelosi said she had conveyed a message from Israel to the Syrians, but Prime Minister Olmert’s office issued a statement that seemed to contradict what Pelosi said. “With admirable diligence,” Josh snarked, the Washington Post took the Olmert statement at face value and blew it up into a big bleeping deal. And ever since news stories and commenters have repeated this story that either showed Pelosi was lying or didn’t know what she was doing.
Josh quotes a Ha’aretz article that straightens out what actually happened, and of course this vindicates Pelosi. Josh also writes,
Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA) is the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, a Holocaust survivor and very close to AIPAC. He was with Pelosi in the key meetings in Jerusalem and Damascus and he says “The speaker conveyed precisely what the prime minister and the acting president asked.”
Josh also quotes an article from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency by Ron Kampeas. This is Kampeas:
If that was the case, why did Olmert need to make a clarification, as Israelis were not speaking on the record. Lantos suggested there was pressure from the White House.
“It’s obvious the White House is desperate to find some phony criticism of the speaker’s trip, even though it was a bipartisan trip,” said Lantos, a Holocaust survivor who is considered the Democrat closest to the pro-Israel lobby. “I have nothing but contempt and disdain for the attempt to undermine this trip.”
Pelosi was sandbagged? And get this —
Last year, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice talked Olmert into a 48-hour cease-fire during the war with Hezbollah to allow humanitarian relief, but within hours Israeli planes were bombing again, to Rice’s surprise and anger. Olmert had received a call, apparently from Cheney’s office, telling him to ignore Rice.
These people so creep me out. Anyway, Josh just posted a YouTube video about this.
TPM TV: April 9, 2007
And get this, from Think Progress —
Rep. Nick Rahall (D-WV), who traveled last week with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) as part of her delegation to the Middle East, said this morning on C-Span that Pelosi told Bush of the trip to Syria a day before they left, and Bush did not object.
Rahall said, “The Speaker had met with President Bush in the halls of the U.S. Capitol just the day before we left and mentioned to him that we were going to Syria. No response at all from the President.†…
… Despite the White House’s public rhetoric that the trip was a “bad idea,†President Bush “did not tell her not to go, nor did the State Department tell us not to go,†Rahall said. “The State Department was certainly aware of our traveling to Syria and our full itinerary. And there were State Department officials in every meeting that we had on this codel. So that is all hogwash as far as I’m concerned.â€
She was sandbagged, people. The Bushies must be scared to death of her.
Update: The little lies fabricated about Barack Obama are a tad feeble.
Bloggers Behaving Goodly?
The front page of the New York Times today features an article by Brad Stone titled “A Call for Manners in a World of Nasty Blogs.” In brief, some techie bloggers have thought up code of conduct rules intended to make the web a little less hostile.
It strikes me that many of their supposedly brand-spanking-new recommendations are things that I and other political bloggers started doing a long time ago. The techies need to catch up.
One of the techies, Tim O’Reilly, summed up the recommendations thus:
-
1. Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.
2. Label your tolerance level for abusive comments.
3. Consider eliminating anonymous comments.
4. Ignore the trolls.
5. Take the conversation offline, and talk directly, or find an intermediary who can do so.
6. If you know someone who is behaving badly, tell them so.
7. Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person.
The first two items already are in effect here and on many other leftie blogs. As you know, I keep a pretty tight lid on comments here. Some hostile commenters take offense when I delete their comments and accuse me of “censorship.” But as I see it, this blog is not a public utility; it is my personal property. I pay for the bandwidth, and I’ve worked damn hard for nearly five years to build up a readership. I feel no obligation to allow anyone to piggyback on my work to publish smears, vulgarity, lies, or anything else I find offensive. Anyone who is deleted or banned from this site can start his own blog.
This policy has paid off, IMO. I love it that you regulars often write long, thoughtful comments, whereas comments on some other blogs are mostly one-liners. There are plenty of other places on the web in which to indulge in flame wars, if that’s what you like.
There are many blogs on Right and Left that don’t allow comments at all, or hold comments in a moderation queue for approval, or that don’t allow comments without prior registration. I think that’s fine; individuals need to do what feels best for them. If I’m getting a lot of hostile traffic from a link on a right-wing site I sometimes suspend comments on a particular post, or I’ll turn on the moderation queue for a while so that nothing gets posted until I approve it. Usually in three or four days the flamers get discouraged, lose interest, and go away.
I think if I allowed flamers to post here freely they would have taken over the comments a long time ago. Allowing a pack of bullies to dominate comments is not “free speech.” It’s “mob rule.”
Regarding #3 — I don’t mind if someone is anonymous if his/her comments are within comment guidelines. I require commenters to provide an email address (which could be bogus, I suppose), but this is mostly to discourage spam. I get thousands of spam comments every day, most of which are filtered out automatically without my having to deal with them. Sometimes legitimate comments get caught in the spam filter and are not posted, and I’m sorry about that, but without the spam filter I’d have to turn off comments altogether. Technically, I wouldn’t know how to ban anonymous posters. I could require registration, but lately there have been many new registrants that I believe to be bots. I assume this is part of an attempt to circumvent the spam filter.
Regarding #4 — I don’t ignore trolls. Trolls are disruptive. If I conclude a commenter is a troll, I ban that commenter.
Regarding #5 — No, sorry, I don’t like to take conversations offline. I’ve got other things to do with my life that carry on ceaseless email arguments. I respond to emails about my posts once in a blue moon, but mostly I ignore them. I want all comments and discussions about my posts to be in the comments. If someone’s arguments are so offensive I delete them from the comments, this is probably someone I don’t want to waste time arguing with, period.
Regarding #6 — Occasionally I do caution people they are skating on thin ice and risk being banned. Or sometimes I just ban people outright; it depends on how nasty the comment is, what mood I’m in, the weather, the phase of the moon, etc.
Regarding #7 — That I do not do; I am much snarkier on the blog than I am in person. Good blogging is being gut-level honest about what one really thinks. Face-to-face discussion has a bigger element of social interaction that must be respected.
I do wonder why the New York Times thought this story was so important it deserved being on the front page. I guess the (formerly) Gray Lady just couldn’t pass up a chance to wag her finger at us unwashed peasants and tell us to mind our manners. ‘Twould be nice if the Times and other news outlets showed as much concern for the quality of their own work.
Update: While we’re talking about blogging — why I’ve got no respect for the TTLB Ecosystem.
Update2: What Digby says.
Journalists Should Not Be “Disinterested” About Truth
I’m a little late commenting on the bogus charge that John McCain was heckled by Michael Ware, but it’s been weighing on me so I’ll comment anyway.
I sometimes wish videos of President Lyndon Johnson’s press conferences were available on the web (if they are, let me know). As I remember it, at some point after the Vietnam War began the Washington press corps began to hound LBJ mercilessly. The press became openly antagonistic to Johnson, and I won’t say he didn’t deserve it. When reporters began to treat Richard Nixon the same way they’d treated LBJ, Nixon sent out Spiro Agnew to stir up faux outrage against the nattering nabobs of negativism and whine about liberal media bias; thus a myth was born. The fact is, as I remember it the press was a shade gentler to Nixon than it had been to LBJ. And by the time Reagan came along they’d become sufficiently defensive about “”liberal media bias” that reporters generally treated Reagan with kid gloves compared to the way they’d treated presidents Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter. And in comparison to the press corps in Johnson’s day, today’s White House reporters are a neutered and toothless lot, indeed.
I thought of LBJ’s press conferences yesterday after I saw this post by the Instaputz:
DISINTERESTED JOURNALISM: John McCain heckled by CNN reporter.
Ah, professionalism.
UPDATE: Hard to argue: “Michael Ware’s behavior here is flat out unprofessional. If CNN keeps him on staff after this incident, that says something, doesn’t it?”
ANOTHER UPDATE: John Tabin: “Heckling at a press conference is very rude, and wouldn’t be acceptable even from an opinion journalist (I wouldn’t dream of laughing in Nancy Pelosi’s face during a press conference). That said, isn’t it better when guys like Ware let their biases hang out, rather than embedding them in reports that are ostensibly objective?”
Wouldn’t it be better still if they just did an honest job of doing, you know, their jobs?
Later, Raw Story posted videos of the alleged heckling and, um, it wasn’t heckling. And to be fair, several rightie bloggers, including Reynolds, retracted their allegations.
But I want to address the part about reporters being “disinterested,” which means objective or neutral. Objectivity and neutrality are splendid. But “neutrality” and “objectivity” don’t translate into “pretending not to notice when a politician is lying his ass off.”
“Objectivity” used to mean that one shouldn’t allow personal biases to get in the way of telling the truth. Now it seems to mean one mustn’t tell the bare-assed truth about what politicians are up to, especially if they’re Republicans, because it makes the politicians look bad.
Regarding John McCain’s stroll through a Baghdad market (accompanied by 100 troops and two Apache helicopters), Kirk Semple writes in today’s New York Times:
A day after members of an American Congressional delegation led by Senator John McCain pointed to their brief visit to Baghdad’s central market as evidence that the new security plan for the city was working, the merchants there were incredulous about the Americans’ conclusions.
“What are they talking about?†Ali Jassim Faiyad, the owner of an electrical appliances shop in the market, said Monday. “The security procedures were abnormal!â€
The delegation arrived at the market, which is called Shorja, on Sunday with more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees — the equivalent of an entire company — and attack helicopters circled overhead, a senior American military official in Baghdad said. The soldiers redirected traffic from the area and restricted access to the Americans, witnesses said, and sharpshooters were posted on the roofs. The congressmen wore bulletproof vests throughout their hourlong visit.
“They paralyzed the market when they came,†Mr. Faiyad said during an interview in his shop on Monday. “This was only for the media.â€
He added, “This will not change anything.â€
At a news conference shortly after their outing, Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican, and his three Congressional colleagues described Shorja as a safe, bustling place full of hopeful and warmly welcoming Iraqis — “like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime,†offered Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican who was a member of the delegation.
McCain and Pence and everybody else who staged that little stunt in support of the war deserved whatever razzing they got from the press. The fact that we are still being told about the soldiers and helicopters is not “media bias“; it’s “what a free press looks like.”
Pardon?
I will be surprised if President Bush pardons Scooter Libby. As Ezra says, Bush’s famous “loyalty” only goes one way —
It’s long been his M.O to cut loose even the most faithful of servants after they outlive their usefulness. And Scooter Libby has definitely outlived his usefulness. To pardon him would refocus the blame onto the presidency, make it clear the administration felt indebted to an underling doing their bidding. That’s all true, of course, save for the indebted part. Libby was doing their bidding and now it is done. End of transaction.
Well, almost. Peter Baker and Carol D. Leonnig report for the Washington Post:
President Bush said yesterday that he is “pretty much going to stay out of” the case of I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby until the legal process has run its course, deflecting pressure from supporters of the former White House aide to pardon him for perjury and obstruction of justice.
Scooter’s lawyers plan to seek a new trial. As long as there is even a possibility of more litigation, the White House can continue to use the “ongoing legal proceeding” excuse not to answer questions about Libby. That’s another reason I don’t believe we’ll see a pardon at least until after the 2008 elections.
Much is being made of Libby juror Ann Redington‘s desire to see Libby pardoned. I watched the Hardball segment in which she said this. My impression was that she was still thinking with Juror’s Mind, striving mightily to be fair and impartial. I’d be more interested in what she has to say about six months from now.
So Redington didn’t bother me nearly as much as Kate O’Beirne, sitting next to her, did. Kate thinks the jury tried its best but came up with the wrong verdict. Libby is, of course, innocent, no matter what the jury says. Just as Bill Clinton is guilty, even though Paula Jones lost her suit against him. See, courts are irrelevant. All you need to know to judge guilt or innocent are the political leanings of the accused. Anyone Kate judges to be one o’ hers must be innocent.
Hardball producers could save wear and tear on Kate if they just keep an inflatable Kate doll handy. Inflate it, stuff it into a chair, and play prerecorded talking points. ‘Twould be no better or worse than the real Kate. In fact, they might be doing that already.
At this point I don’t much care if Scooter sees jail time or not. If he were pardoned, it would not be like the pardons of Richard Nixon or Caspar Weinberger, whose pardons saw to it they were never tried. Avoiding those trials amounted to a cover up. But we’ve had Scooter’s trial; we know what happened. And Scooter’s just a factotum. It’s his masters I’m interested in.
Speaking of factotums (factoti?), David Brooks broods over the Libby trial today. He begins —
Three years ago I said some pessimistic things on TV about the war in Iraq. Scooter Libby called the next day. Methodically, though with a touch of wryness in his voice, he ran down a list of the hopeful developments he thought I was ignoring. Then as we were signing off, he interrupted himself and said: “Anyway, that’s the positive spin. I can do the negative spin just as well.â€
Of course, Brooks was content with the positive spin.
Over the years, we had two lunches and about a half-dozen phone interviews, and he was more discreet each time. I would sit there — learning nothing — and think, We know the Bushies are not like us Jews because they’re willing to appear less knowledgeable than they really are, but can Scooter Libby be like this, too? [emphasis added]
Is that or is that not a damn weird thing to have written?
Yet it was hard not to like the guy — for his intelligence, his loyalty and his meticulous attention to ethical niceties. (At lunch he wouldn’t let me pick up the tab. He’d lay a $20 bill on the table to cover his half.)
Brooks goes around buying lunches for government officials? (I started to write “cheap lunches,” but I guess that shows I’ve lived in New York City too long.)
Yet that doesn’t begin to cover the sadness that this trial arouses, for the proceedings have revealed the arc of what the administration was and could have been.
Cue the violin music.
When you think back to the White House of 2003, the period the trial explores, you will discover a White House consumed by a feverish sense of mission.
Staff members in those days went to work wondering whether this would be the day they would die. There was a sense that any day a bomb might wipe out downtown Washington.
Hold that thought.
Senior officials were greeted each morning by intense intelligence briefings. On June 14, 2003, for example, Libby received a briefing with 27 items and 11 pages of terrorist threats. Someone once told me that going from the president’s daily briefing to the next event on Mr. Bush’s schedule, which might be a photo-op with a sports team, was like leaving “24†and stepping into “Sesame Street.†No wonder administration officials were corporate on the outside but frantic within.
The White House culture was also defined by the staff’s passionate devotion to the president. Bush’s speeches after 9/11 inspired a sense of intense connection, and the emotional bonds were kept perpetually aroused by the onset of war, by the fierce rivalries with the State Department and the C.I.A., and by the administration’s core creed, that everything it does must be transformational.
It was a time, in short, of grand goals but also of discombobulating and repressed emotion. [emphasis added]
But those intense emotions, especially the fear, not to mention a stew of underlying character pathologies, were driving the “grand goals.”
Today, the White House culture is less intense. The staff’s relationship to the president has simmered down, from devotion to mere admiration.
How precious.
Today, the White House staff is less disciplined but more attractive. There is no party line in private conversations. The trick now is to figure out what administration policy really is, because you can now talk to three different people and get three different versions on any topic. There’s more conversation and more modesty. The vice president has less gravitational pull, and there has been a talent upgrade in post after post: Josh Bolten as chief of staff, Henry Paulson at Treasury. If Bob Gates had been the first defense secretary, the world would be a much better place today. [emphasis added]
Then in the next paragraph, Brooks writes,
The administration has also lost its transformational mind-set. After cruel experience, there’s a greater tendency to match ends to means, and to actually think about executing a policy before you embark upon it.
Wow, thinking. Just imagine anyone in the White House actually thinking. But they can’t be thinking real hard, since no one has any idea in hell what Bush’s policies actually are.
There’s much more tolerance for serious freethinkers — the Johns Hopkins scholar Eliot Cohen was just hired at State.
In his book Fiasco, Thomas Ricks identified Eliot Cohen as a supporter of Paul Wolfowitz. (See p. 16.) He was one of the military experts assembled in December for the purpose of telling Bush the Iraq War is still “winnable” and that it was OK to ignore the Iraq Study Group recommendations. So much for serious freethinking. The Bushies are drawing the same tainted water from the same old well.
In short, this administration’s capacities have waxed as its power has waned. And you can’t help but feel that today’s White House would have been much better at handling the first stages of the war on terror. But that’s the perpetual tragedy of life: the owl of Minerva flies at dusk. Wisdom comes from suffering and error, and when the passions die down and observation begins.
I picture Brooks with a three-day beard, crying into a gin bottle in some seedy Washington watering hole. How tragic it is — the Bush White House, after six years of bleeping up the planet, is finally getting its act together, even though no two of them can agree on what the act is. If only they’d done it sooner. Like six years ago. But now that they have embarked on the serious mission of governing — thinking about it, even — it’s too late, and the owl of Minerva has flown off with the mouse of accomplishment in its beak. And Brooks has the sorry task of having to write a column about it. Where be your gibes now? your gambols? your songs? your flashes of merriment, that were wont to set the table on a roar?
Yes, so tragic. Pass the gin.
Bush’s Slow Bleed
On the same day that Joe Biden writes in the Boston Globe in favor of repealing the 2002 war resolution, Julie Hirschfeld Davis of the Associated Press reports that Dems are backing away from the idea. Or maybe they’re just postponing it. Or not.
However, later in the article, Hirschfeld Davis claims that a rift has developed between Jack Murtha and Nancy Pelosi over plans to use congressional spending powers to force a change in Iraq policy. But a closer look reveals that Hirschfeld Davis is suffering a rift between her keyboarding fingers and her brain. HD writes,
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., meanwhile, said she doesn’t support tying war funding to strict training and readiness targets for U.S. troops.
The comments distanced her from Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., who has said he wants to use Congress’ spending power to force a change in policy in Iraq, by setting strict conditions on war funding.
Pelosi said she supports holding the administration to training and readiness targets, but added: “I don’t see them as conditions to our funding. Let me be very clear: Congress will fund our troops.”
Asked whether the standards should be tied to a $100 billion supplemental war spending measure _ as Murtha has proposed _ Pelosi demurred, saying it was up to the panel that drafts funding bills.
HD of the AP is comparing apples to oranges and coming up with spinach. To understand where Pelosi and Murtha are coming from, check out what Lolita Baldor (who would name a kid “Lolita”?) reports for the Associated Press —
Strained by the demands of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is a significant risk that the U.S. military won’t be able to quickly and fully respond to yet another crisis, according to a new report to Congress.
The assessment, done by the nation’s top military officer, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, represents a worsening from a year ago, when that risk was rated as moderate.
The report is classified, but on Monday senior defense officials, speaking on condition on anonymity, confirmed the decline in overall military readiness. And a report that accompanied Pace’s review concluded that while the Pentagon is working to improve its warfighting abilities, it “may take several years to reduce risk to acceptable levels.”
Just one more indicator that Bush’s Folly is making us more, not less, vulnerable. Anyway, Nancy Pelosi just issued this statement:
This unacceptable state of readiness affected our military long before President Bush ordered an escalation of the Iraq war in January, but the escalation is making it worse.
The harmful effects on the readiness crisis of the President’s escalation plan are just beginning to be seen. Two Army brigades scheduled to go to Iraq in the spring will do so without completing their normal training cycles and without all of the equipment required to do their jobs. We should not be sending troops to Baghdad unless they are fully trained and fully equipped. We already owe a great deal to our troops, and we do them a disservice by putting them in dangerous situations without being fully prepared.
What Pelosi says it not at all at odds with what Jack Murtha has proposed. To the contrary; as David Sirota explains, Murtha’s plan also supports troop readiness. Although you wouldn’t know that from reading the “mainstream” media. Quoting the Washington Post:
To be sent to battle, troops would have to have had a year’s rest between combat tours. Soldiers in Iraq could not have their tours extended beyond a year there. And the Pentagon’s ‘stop-loss’ policy, which prevents some officers from leaving the military when their service obligations are up, would end. Troops would have to be trained in counterinsurgency and urban warfare and be sent overseas with the equipment they used in training.
Hmm, you might be saying. I thought Murtha’s plan was all about de-funding the war; what the Republicans are calling a “slow bleed.” In fact, “slow bleed” is what the Bush Administration is doing to our military, and Jack Murtha is trying to stop the bleeding.
What Murtha proposed was tying war funding to readiness. According to the WaPo article by Jonathan Weisman and Lyndsey Layton linked above, Murtha “botched” this proposal.
The plan was bold: By tying President Bush’s $100 billion war request to strict standards of troop safety and readiness, Democrats believed they could grab hold of Iraq war policy while forcing Republicans to defend sending troops into battle without the necessary training or equipment.
But a botched launch by the plan’s author, Rep. John P. Murtha (Pa.), has united Republicans and divided Democrats, sending the latter back to the drawing board just a week before scheduled legislative action, a score of House Democratic lawmakers said last week.
For the life of me I can’t figure out what it was Murtha “botched.” After wading through several paragraphs reeking with hysteria, it appears that Murtha’s only “flub” was that he announced the plan on a web site associated with Moveon.org. After which all of Washington came down with the vapors.
Please.
Anyway, since Weisman and Layton announced that the Dems are rifting, our gal Hirschfeld Davis picks up the cry:
The developments on both sides of the Capitol reflected a new level of disarray in Democratic ranks on Iraq. Swept into power by voters clamoring for an end to the war, Democrats have seen their efforts falter under a reality more complicated than they found on the campaign trail.
Hirschfeld Davis doesn’t mention that most of the “complications” are being manufactured by the Right Wing Echo Chamber. The fact is, you have to go to leftie web sites to get a clear, non-hysterical explanation of what Murtha proposed. The MSM is just recycling rightie talking points and declaring the plan “botched” and the Dems “divided”; the usual narrative, in other words.
Stupidity, Illustrated
Who’s Left?
Sometimes I think lobotomies must be a prerequisite for becoming a “pundit.” So many of them exhibit a profound inability to, actually, think.
Take David Brooks. Please. In his column today (which you can’t read if you don’t have a subscription, but you ain’t missin’ anything), Brooks declares that today’s young people are the “children of polarization.”
Today’s college students, remember, were born around 1987. They were 2 or 3 when the Berlin Wall fell. They have come into political consciousness amid impeachment, jihad, polarization and Iraq. Many of them seem to have reacted to these hothouse clashes not by becoming embroiled in the zealotry but by quietly drifting away from that whole political mode.
In general, their writing is calm, optimistic and ironical. Most students in my class showed an aversion to broad philosophical arguments and valued the readings that were concrete and even wonky. Many wrote that they had moved lately toward the center.
I would love to have a talk with these young people to find out what they think “center” means, since the term has been rather ill-defined lately, but let’s go on for now … Brooks describes one young man he met while teaching a political theory course at Duke University — I feel faint at the thought — who
… grew up on a struggling ranch in Idaho. His father died when he was young and his family was poor enough at times to qualify for welfare, though his mother refused it. Duke, with its affluence and its liberal attitudes, was a different universe.
Kendall arrived deeply conservative and remains offended by people who won’t work hard to support themselves. But he now finds himself, as he says, cursed by centrism — trapped between the Pat Robertsons on the right and the Democratic elites on the left, many of whom he finds personally distasteful.
By “Democratic elites” I assume Brooks is referring to the inside-the-beltway hothouse flowers we’ve all come to know and despair about. However, why Democratic Washington insiders are “elite” and Republican Washington insiders are not rather escapes me.
He has come to admire the prairie pragmatists, like Montana’s Jon Tester and Brian Schweitzer. In a long conversation with his brother Sage, who works on the ranch, Kendall decided that what the country needs is a party led by “entrepreneurial cowboy politicians†with a global perspective.
But here’s the truth that Brooks lacks the courage to acknowledge: Tester and Schweitzer, Democratic Senator and Democratic Governor respectively, are progressives. Liberal, even. Much more so than the Washington Democratic insider “elites,” who for years have tripped all over themselves running to the “center.” As candidates, Tester and Schweitzer both were cheered enthusiastically by us loony lefty bloggers, which ought to be a Clue. Both of these fellas are strong economic populists, championing the needs of the ordinary workin’ person against those of the wealthy and well-connected. And they’re both (I think) anti Iraq War (Tester for sure) and on the liberal side of most social issues you can think of.
(BTW, while researching this post I found a diary post by Cogitator at MyDD from last May titled “Why the DC elite will shun Brian Schweitzer.” )
Yet in the World o’ Pundits, insider elites like Joe Biden are “liberal” and Tester and Schweitzer are “centrist.” Why? First, because most pundits are idiots. Second, because Tester and Schweitzer are outdoor-type guys who like to hunt and fish and drive pickup trucks. In other words, they don’t conform to a stereotype “lefty” that lives in David Brooks’s head.
You have to read between the lines a bit, but I infer from Brooks’s column that he defines “centrist” or “moderate” as “someone who doesn’t think government can work.” He speaks of another of his Duke students:
He came to Duke with many conventional liberal attitudes, but he’d seen the failures of the schools in his neighborhood, where many of his smartest friends never made it to college. He’s a big fan of school vouchers and now considers himself a moderate Democrat: “I’m a Democrat because I think the Democratic Party is a better vehicle for the issues I care about: balancing the budget, checking President Bush’s foreign policy and curtailing global warming. However, I’ll switch to the Republicans in a heartbeat if I believe my ideas are better received in the G.O.P.â€
Brooks doesn’t define what a “conventional liberal attitude” is, or why balanced budgets, checking Bush’s foreign policy and fighting global warming do not qualify as “liberal.”
I liked this paragraph:
For many students, the main axis of their politics is not between left and right but between idealism and realism. They have developed a suspicion of sweepingly idealistic political ventures, and are now a fascinating mixture of youthful hopefulness and antiutopian modesty.
Ah, but realism has a well-known liberal bias.
They’ve been affected by the failures in Iraq (though interestingly, not a single one of them wrote about Iraq explicitly, or even wanted to grapple with the Middle East or Islamic extremism). But they’ve also seen government fail to deliver at home. A number wrote about the mediocrity of their local public schools. Several gave the back of their hand to the politics of multicultural grievance.
One wants to kick Brooks out of the way and talk to these young people directly, because one suspects that Brooks may be injecting some of his own biases into his narrative. These young people are also likely reflecting the conventional wisdom among their peers at Duke. I don’t know where the Duke student body falls on the political leanings scale, but I suspect it isn’t exactly Oberlin. And if Brooks is the one teaching them political theory, then you can bet those kids understand the real difference between Left and Right about as well as Brooks can tell shit from shinola.
Be sure you are sitting down before you read this:
If my Duke students are representative, then the U.S. is about to see a generation that is practical, anti-ideological, modest and centrist (maybe to a fault).
That’s probably good news for presidential candidates like Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton, whose main selling point is their nuts-and-bolts ability to get things done.
‘Scuse me while I go bang my head against a wall and shriek for a while.
First, if there is one thing I would like America to know about Rudy Giuliani, it’s that 90 percent of what he did for New York after 9/11 was be on television. He actually had little direct hands-on interaction with the recovery efforts at Ground Zero, although he gets credit for the fact that the wealthy and resourceful city of New York did not completely fall to pieces because a relatively small part of it was destroyed that day. Pundits just love to tweak the hapless mayor of New Orleans for failing to clean up the Katrina mess, not noting that (1) Katrina impacted the entire city, as well as much of the region; and (2) New Orleans is a poor city in a poor state. Certainly there are things Ray Nagin could have done better, but had Giuliani been mayor of New Orleans when Katrina hit I doubt he would have come out of that catastrophe looking all that competent, either. In fact, the deaths of many New York firefighters can be blamed on Giuliani’s management incompetence.
And then there’s Senator Clinton, of whom I am hugely ambivalent. Exactly what has she “got done” so far? Anything major? And is she not one of Brooks’s “Democratic elites”? For that matter, isn’t Brooks a member in good standing of the nation’s political elite? If not, who the hell is?
The problem with national politics for the past several years is not a polarization between “Left” and “Right.” It’s that a cabal of extremist right-wing ideological whackjobs took charge of government, while the opposing party, which had long slipped its tether to any recognizable set of political values whatsoever, timidly chirped “me, too.” And the young folks recognize this, I suspect, better than Brooks does.