Super Film Review

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Some of the blog guys are in disagreement over the new Superman film. Oliver Willis liked it and gave it 4/4 stars. Ezra Klein disagrees. I saw it yesterday and am voting with Oliver on this one. I was thoroughly entertained. It’s especially fun to watch on an IMAX screen; some scenes are in 3D. Way cool.

It can be argued that the film is more of a romantic fantasy and less of a comic-book action-adventure epic than some might like, although there are plenty of action sequences. Some reviewers argued that the colors were too muted — the cape was more dark mauve than red, for example — but I agree with Stephanie Zacharek’s review in Salon (and I don’t agree with Zacharek all that often) —

This is a beautifully made picture, a modern-day fable marked by a strong sense of continuity with the past, and not just the recent past: The art-deco-influenced production design, the lighting, and some of the camera work carry echoes of German Expressionism. The costumes (they’re by Louise Mingenbach) are ’40s movie-star garb filtered through a ’70s sensibility — a way of honoring the sartorial vibe of Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder in the earlier movies, and also of tracing the Superman story to its just-pre-World War II roots. When Kate Bosworth, as Lois Lane, changes out of her Rosalind Russell tweed suit to attend the dinner at which she’ll be awarded a Pulitzer Prize (her winning essay bears the title, transparently redolent of heartbreak, “Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman”), her dress is a full-length ripple of dark silk worthy of Barbara Stanwyck circa “The Lady Eve.” Unlike so many contemporary Hollywood movies, which strut into our theaters as if they believe they’ve sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus (or maybe even just Scott Rudin), “Superman Returns” knows where it comes from.

Maybe the film’s style is a girl and/or gay thing.

Kate Bosworth’s portrayal of Lois Lane was panned in some reviews, but as one of the few people on the planet who didn’t care for Margot Kidder in the earlier films — she mostly got on my nerves — I was OK with Bosworth. Poor Brandon Routh had the perilous job of following the beloved Christopher Reeve, but I think he managed as well as anyone could have. The best part of Reeve’s portrayal of Superman, IMO, was the way he could shift personas from Clark Kent to Superman while barely moving a muscle, and Routh didn’t quite capture that. On the other hand, Routh’s Superman persona was more emotionally vulnerable than Reeve’s, which hinted at a more complex personality under the surface. And Kevin Spacey’s Lex Luthor is a hoot.

Update: See also Detroit Free Press review, Newsweek review.

Dear Media, Part II: The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy

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Several commenters to Dear Media, Part I pointed to corporate ownership of media as the cause of media corruption. Corporate ownership certainly is an important factor, but the situation is more complex than that. And worse.

Don Hazen provides a glimpse of the bigger problem we’re up against:

Consider that the conservative political movement, which now has a hammerlock on every aspect of federal government, has a media message machine fed by more than 80 large non-profit organizations – let’s call them the Big 80 – funded by a gaggle of right-wing family foundations and wealthy individuals to the tune of $400 million a year.

And the Big 80 groups are just the “non-partisan” 501(c)(3) groups. These do not include groups like the NRA, the anti-gay and anti-abortion groups, nor do they include the political action committees (PACs) or the “527” groups (so named for the section of the tax code they fall under), like the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which so effectively slammed John Kerry’s campaign in 2004.

To get their message out, the conservatives have a powerful media empire, which churns out and amplifies the message of the day – or the week – through a wide network of outlets and individuals, including Fox News, talk radio, Rush Limbaugh, Oliver North, Ann Coulter, as well as religious broadcasters like Pat Robertson and his 700 Club. On the web, it starts with TownHall.com

Fueling the conservative message machine with a steady flow of cash is a large group of wealthy individuals, including many who serve on the boards of the Big 80.

Needless to say, there’s not exactly a wall of separation between the right-wing media machine and corporate media managers, although it’s hard to say if media-VRWC relationships are primarily ideological or financial. In the case of the big publicly owned companies, sooner or later profits will trump all, I suspect. According to OpenSecrets.org reveals that many of the parent corporations, such as Time Warner (CNN, Time), General Electric (NBC, Newsweek), Disney (ABC), and CBS, donate more money overall to Democrats than to Republicans. On the other hand, and not surprisingly, News Corporation (Fox), the National Association of Broadcasters (an industry group representing commercial radio and television stations), and Clear Channel donate more to Republicans than to Democrats.

But if ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN, and their various print affiliates aren’t altogether in bed with the Right, why does right-wing ideology permeate so much of the news they produce? As explained here,

There is an important dynamic relationship between right-wing alternative media and the corporate media. Many of the conceptual frameworks and arguments used to marginalize left and liberal ideas in the media are first developed at think tanks funded by right-wing foundations and corporations. After these ideas are sharpened through feedback at conferences and other meetings, they are cooperatively field-tested within right-wing alternative media such as small-circulation newsletters and journals, and also by tracking responses to rhetoric in direct mail appeals. As popular themes that resonate with conservative audiences emerge, they are moved into more mainstream corporate media through columns by conservative luminaries, press releases picked up as articles in the print media, conversations on radio talk shows, and discussions on TV news roundtables.

Once the talking points are developed, right-wing operatives make sure the talking points permeate mass media. This Media Matters report shows how right-wing spin dominates Iraq War news and debate throughout mass media, for example.

And who are the operatives? A lot of them are grown in VRWC laboratories. In his book Lapdogs, Eric Boehlert describes the petrie dish Ann Coulter crawled out of:

Coulter wasn’t merely a controversial pundit; she was a pure product of the Beltway’s right-wing culture and career track. Coulter put in time clerking for Pasco Bowman II of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, litigated for the Center For Individual Rights, a right-wing advocacy group, and worked as a flak for Michigan Republican Senator Spencer Abraham. She then went on to write High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton; Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right; and Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism. [p. 113]

Several of Coulter’s books were published by Regnery, which has been accused of “promoting” books by arranging bulk purchases to push up sales figures and place books on best-seller charts. The authors then make the rounds of talk shows, repeating the books’ propaganda points as they go. Whether anyone actually reads the books is not really the point. Recently, other major book publishers have begun to publish for the right-wing market. Coulter’s most recent book, which has come under accusations of plagiarism, was published by Random House.

Thus Coulter, who had never exhibited so much as a spark of insight, wit, originality, or intelligence, is promoted to mass media prominence by the VRWC.

And this is something the Right does very well. It finds “talent,” or whatever it is about Coulter they find valuable, and mentors, grooms, and promotes that talent and gets it in front of the public. The Left? Fuhgeddaboudit.

The Right began to build its think tank-media infrastructure in the 1970s, This was, as I explained in the previous post, the same time that the Left was coming apart.

The story of the conservative rise that Stein portrays begins back in the early 1970s, when there was panic among conservatives, especially in corporate boardrooms, that capitalism was under serious attack, and something drastic had to be done about it. …

… The conservative right, starting with seed money from the Coors Brewing family and Richard Mellon Scaife’s publishing enterprise, moved forward … conservatives – in spite of political differences, ego, and competing priorities – were able to cooperate and develop a methodology that drives their issues and values relentlessly.

Starting with just a handful or groups, including the Heritage Foundation, in the early ’70s, the conservatives built a new generation of organizations – think tanks, media monitors, legal groups, networking organizations, all driven by the same over-arching values of free enterprise, individual freedoms and limited government.

Hazen goes on to explain that various right-wing organizations work together to provide each other with speakers, guest “pundits,” and other resources. They also, apparently, work closely with producers of mainstream mass media talk shows on radio and television to provide bodies to staff the “roundtables” and other guest spots the programs need to fill.

And what are liberals and progressives doing to compete? As I explained here, not nearly enough.

Rightie media infrastructure isn’t the only reason why media is screwed up, however. More will be discussed in Part III.

Reactionaries

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A commenter who labels himself “r4d20” left comments to the “Being Liberal Doesn’t Mean Being a Patsy” post, here and here, and I want to answer these comments at length because the writer brings up some important points. Beginning with:

Not to be a pendant, but the first step in elevating the culture is to at least get some terms more specific than “righties/lefties”, or “the right/the left”. I understand that its a quick and easy reference point, but I think that excessive use of generalities does interfere with clear thought.

I am a big proponent of using words and phrases with precision, but in our current political culture attempts to define various factions by standard political nomenclature will fail, IMO, because the partisan forces tearing us apart are not fundamentally political forces, but cultural ones.

Once upon a time I referred to righties as “conservatives,” because that’s what they called themselves, but whether they are or are not conservative depends a whole lot on how you define conservative. And that’s a perilous thing to do, because if you go by the bare-bones dictionary definition, “One who strongly favors retention of the existing order; orthodox, traditionalist, etc.,” the next thing you have to do is figure out what “existing order” is to be retained, and that can change over time and from place to place.

According to The Reader’s Companion to American History (Eric Foner and John Garraty, eds. Houghon Mifflin, 1991),

A uniquely American form of conservatism first arose in opposition to the nation’s sense of boundless optimism about human nature under democracy. And for roughly the first two hundred years of the Republic, conservatism was defined politically and culturally by its fears of the political excesses, economic egalitarianism, and cultural vulgarity generated by a democratic society shorn of any aristocratic restraints.

This is from an excellent overview of conservatism in America by Fred Siegel that can be found on this page, but you have to scroll down to get to it. It’s under the “American History” heading, and begins “The Reagan presidency has been hailed as the high point of twentieth-century American conservatism.” To understand fully where I’m coming from here it would be helpful to read the whole thing, but I’m just going to quote a little more, skipping to the 1920s —

According to what came to be known as “constitutional morality,” legislation supporting the right to unionize or limiting children’s working hours was an un-American form of group privilege. Laissez-faire conservatism reached its intellectual apogee in the 1920s. A critic complained that by 1924 you didn’t have to be a radical to be denounced as un-American: “according to the lights of Constitution worship you are no less a Red if you seek change through the very channels which the Constitution itself provides.”

In Europe conservatism was based on hereditary classes; in America it was based on hereditary religious, ethnic, and racial groups. The GOP, a largely Protestant party, looked upon itself as the manifestation of the divine creed of Americanism revealed through the Constitution. To be a conservative, then, was to share in a religiously ordained vision of a largely stateless society of self-regulating individuals. This civil religion, preached by President Herbert Hoover, was shattered by the Great Depression and the usurpation of the government by an “alien” power, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in league with “un-American,” that is, unexceptionalist ideas.

Conservatives were traumatized by their fall from grace. Diminished in place and prestige, they consoled themselves with bizarre conspiracy theories and cranky accusations of communist infiltration. Overwhelmed and resentful, they did not so much address the disaster of the depression as yearn for the days when they were able to run their towns, their businesses, and their workers in the manner to which they had been accustomed. Then, in 1940, just when it seemed they had Roosevelt on the ropes, World War II revived and extended his presidency.

At war’s end conservatives unleashed their frustrations. On the one hand, postwar popular conservatism was based on an anticommunist hysteria that antedated the antics of Senator Joe McCarthy. Politics for the McCarthyites was not so much a matter of pursuing material interests as a national screen on which to project their deepest cultural fears.

From here, Siegel goes on to describe the conservative political revival that began with Barry Goldwater’s presidential bid in 1964 and the conservative intellectuals and activists of the 1960s who called for a “restoration” of pre-New Deal America.

But this new conservatism did not so much win the country over to its perspective as board the empty ship of state vacated by a 1960s liberalism that had self-destructed. Conservatism triumphed because New Deal liberalism was unable to accommodate the new cultural and political demands unleashed by the civil rights revolution, feminism, and the counterculture, all of which was exacerbated by the Kulturkampf over Vietnam.

I agree with Siegel that New Deal liberalism, along with the New Left, had self-destructed by the 1970s, although the New Deal itself has yet to be entirely dismantled. But while “identity politics” and other factors splintered liberalism into thousands of ineffectual pieces, the Right got its act together. Some extremely wealthy right-wingers — Richard Mellon Scaife, Joseph Coors, Lynde and Harry Bradley, and Smith Richardson, among others — provided the seed money for the mighty right-wing think tank-media infrastructure, which you can read more about here. This infrastructure has put control of most of the federal government and news media safely in right-wing hands.

Yet, weirdly, the Right continues behave as if it is a desperate fight against a mythical “liberal elite” that runs everything, in spite of the fact that it doesn’t exist, and that progressivism itself has been cast out of power and left wandering in the wilderness for at least 40 years.

Today you’ve got the “social” conservatives, who want to return to 19th-century cultural mores; the “free market” conservatives, who want to return to the Gilded Age; the “Christian” conservatives who want to return to a theocratic America that never actually existed except in their imaginations; and the neoconservatives, who have taken the notions of American exceptionalism to new and more demented heights. And variations thereof.

Somehow these diverse groups have formed a coalition they label “conservative”, in spite of the fact that they advance contradictory agendas. Contemporary conservatism, for example, advocates restricting civil liberties in the name of freedom and extols small government while building the mightiest military-industrial complex the world has ever seen. About the only thing the various elements of the coalition have in common is that they all hate liberals, meaning not actual liberals but a cartoon straw man that represents liberalism in their minds, but which has little resemblance to those of us who are still foolish enough to call ourselves “liberals” in spite of the fact that we’re asking to be rounded up and shipped out on the first bus to the re-education camps.

This conservatism, IMO, isn’t all that conservative. It’s far more radical, revolutionary even, to label conservative. I think reactionary gets closer to it, although the standard dictionary definition of reactionaries — people who vehemently, often fanatically oppose progress and favor return to a previous condition — only works up to a point. Aggressive imperialism is a bit hard to square with returning to a “previous condition,” for example. To make that work you need to understand their urge to impose American hegemony on the rest of the world as a pro-active isolationism — eliminating the “threat” of foreignness by gettin’ it before it gets us.

In other ways, of course, reactionary works quite well — the stubborn refusal to admit that global warming is really happening, for example.

But ultimately, to paraphrase Siegel, I think the current American Right is all about politics as a national screen on which to project their deepest cultural fears.

And, since we’ve got to call these people something, I say “rightie” works as well as anything else.

In its extreme forms, rightieness is just hate. I mean, what are Michelle Malkin’s or Ann Coulter’s political principles, other than that they hate large groups of people that they associate with “the Left”? The hate comes first; whatever political principles they claim were adopted as props to justify the hate.

The commenter r4d20 continues,

While I choose to register Republican, like many/most people I straddle the line, which means that hardcore lefties call me “right” and hardcore righties call me “left”. According to the current “talking points” I am both a jingoistic warmonger, and a pro-Al Queda traitor – but at least both agree I should be shot 🙂 .

Even as a “Rightie” I have more in common with a “moderate” leftie than with a Christian Conservative. As a “leftie” I have more in common with a moderate rightie than with almost any Anarchist or Socialist.

Yet, somehow, politics on the blogosphere has divided itself fairly neatly into “right” and “left” camps, and all (except, these days, the purer libertarians) know extinctively in which camp they and everyone else should be sorted.

Here on the Left Blogosphere, you’d have a hard time finding an anarchist or genuinely socialist blogger. Most of us bloggers are the political heirs of New Deal Democrats. Most of us hold political positions that would have been considered “centrist” or even moderately conservative years ago. Yet today we’re painted as a radical “leftie” fringe utterly beyond the pale of decent, Gawd-fearing American politics. Much of the Right Blogosphere has utterly slipped its tether to reality, yet it gets called “centrist.”

And these days, a “moderate” is someone who doesn’t know what the hell is going on. If you want to preserve long-established American political processes, if you believe in the rule of law and the Bill of Rights and separation of powers and all that old stuff, you’re a leftie. Unless you just say you believe in those things even while you are trying to destroy them, which would make you a rightie.

But if the moderates on each side have been conditioned to think of all the people on the “other side” as extremist stereotypes then they will naturally choose the extremists of their own side over those of the other. The only winners are the wingnuts who maintain their support out of hyped-up fear of possible doomsday alternatives.

Yes, but the wingnuts really are going to bring about doomsday if we don’t stop them. Fence-straddling is not a sustainable position these days.

Welcome to the Nut House

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Blogging time is short today, so I’m just going to link to a few things going on elsewhere —

Per Glenn Greenwald, Michelle Malkin is not only certifiably unhinged, she has persuaded some of her more loosely wired followers that New York Times editors and reporters deserve to be hunted down.

Let’s start with the following New York Times reporters and editors: Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr. , Bill Keller, Eric Lichtblau, and James Risen.

Do you have an idea where they live? Go hunt them down and do America a favor. Get their photo, street address, where their kids go to school, anything you can dig up, and send it to the link above. This is your chance to be famous – grab for the golden ring.

This is exactly the kind of rhetoric that gets people assassinated. If I were any of the people named in this post, I’d be calling lawyers.

Yesterday David Neiwert posted revealed that Malkin’s, um, thinking has been heavily influenced by a prominent white supremacist. Not exactly a surprise, although it does make one wonder what witches’ brew of character disorders is bubbling in Malkin’s (non-Caucasian) psyche.

[Update: The Heretik links to the wingnuts so I don’t have to.]

For a sad testimony to how far off the tracks our nation has gone, see “Gitmo win likely cost Navy lawyer his career” by Paul Shukovsky in yesterday’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Follow that up with visits to Billmon and Digby.

Finally, Gary Farber tells us how to have a great 4th of July celebration.

Being Liberal Doesn’t Mean Being a Patsy

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I have finished my month as a guest poster at Unclaimed Territory. Glenn Greenwald thanked me graciously even though I snarked at some of his readers. But there’s something I want to follow up with here and get off my chest. This is not specifically about UT or its readers; rather, a couple of commenters at UT have goaded me into writing something I’ve been meaning to get to for a while.

Yesterday on UT I published a variation on the “Dear Media” post below, but with a simpler point — that our political culture is too fouled to support democratic political processes. I quoted this from Wikipedia:

Political competitors may disagree, but they must tolerate one another and acknowledge the legitimate and important roles that each play. The ground rules of the society must encourage tolerance and civility in public debate.

Two commenters went off on this quotation from opposite directions, but they both fell into the same fallacy, IMO, about what it is to “tolerate” political speech.

One guy, a frequent commenter I’ll call “PM,” clearly is on some kind of crusade against Daily Kos because he was banned from commenting there. I infer the ban came about because PM disagrees with Kos’s “crashing the gate” strategy of supporting Democratic candidates. If you’re not familiar with this, the basic idea is to simultaneously take power away from Republicans while impressing the Dems that the netroots are a force to be reckoned with. This, in turn, should enable the netroots to push the Dems in a more progressive direction in the future. I happen to think this is a sensible plan, but some disagree. As I understand it, PM thinks that Kos should be supporting the most progressive candidate regardless of party, which I think is a dead-end strategy.

Anyway, after posting some off-topic comments by way of continuing his vendetta against Daily Kos, PM wrote,

Barbara, are you for acknowledging the legitimacy of political opponents and tolerating their participation in public debate? Or are you for denying the legitimacy of political opponents and, literally, censoring any possible advocacy of them, no matter how polite said advocacy may be, simply because the advocacy comes in service of a party whose very legitimacy you deny?

You have to choose one or the other, Barbara. You can’t have both.

Yes I can have both, because I make a distinction between public tolerance and private tolerance. My respect for the free speech rights of others doesn’t translate into a personal obligation to provide a public venue for opinions with which I disagree.

Blogs are not public utilities. They are the personal creations and properties of bloggers. All of us who maintain blogs over a period of time have put an enormous amount of time and work into them, creating content and building traffic. Yes, I do it because I enjoy it, but it’s still a lot of time. Unpaid time, I might add. Further, I choose to pay for server space instead of using the free services in order to get better tech support and more bandwidth. Now the ads more than pay for the bandwidth, but that wasn’t true for most of The Mahablog’s history.

I launched The Mahablog to chronicle the ongoing atrocity known as the Bush Administration, and I occasionally wander into other topics that interest me. This blog is not a public bulletin board. I keep pretty tight control on comments (as explained here). If I had not been exercising discretion about what is allowed in comments, I believe this blog would have been swamped with rightie hate speech long ago, and the comments threads would be nothing but flames. But there are plenty of places to go on the web if you want to flame. I choose instead to maintain a place where progressives can discuss issues without being distracted by rightie flame-throwers.

Does this mean I am not encouraging “tolerance and civility in public debate.” Folks, this ain’t “public debate.” It’s private property. It’s private property anyone with Internet access can look at, but it is private nonetheless. Any participation here is provisional, and I’m the provision.

When I say I respect free speech rights, I mean that. Everybody has a right to say any damnfool thing they want, as long as it don’t scare the chickens, as we’d say back home. But you’re on your own to find a venue. Since there are countless venues on the Web for expressing just about any opinion known to mankind, that shouldn’t be a problem. But the First Amendment doesn’t give you a right to post signs on private property, nor does it mean privately owned publishers are obligated to publish what you write if they don’t want to.

In other words, if your magnum opus stinks out loud, and Random House rejects it, that is not a violation of your First Amendment rights.

Now, I believe Blogger still offers free blog space, so if someone out there is frustrated by being banned from other blogs, he is free to start his own bleeping blog. He might not get much traffic right away, but neither did The Mahablog until I put years of work into maintaining and promoting it. But I’m supposed to allow someone to piggyback on the work I did to build traffic in order to promote ideas I don’t buy into … why, exactly?

If, on the other hand, certain points of view were being censored from the Internets by the Gubmint — I don’t think that’s possible, but let’s pretend — that would be wrong. Even if I disagreed with the points of view, I support the right of citizens to express that point of view. Somewhere. Just not here. Also, I don’t go around demanding that other publishing venues only publish my point of view. If the newspaper carries pro-Bush letters to the editor, I don’t write to the newspaper demanding such letters be banned because I don’t like them. I don’t set fire to the offices of newspapers that publish views I don’t like, which is something that happens commonly in less tolerant places.

At the same time, I don’t approve of defacing or destroying bumper stickers or other expressions of personal opinion on other people’s property. If you want to plaster a pro-Bush bumper sticker on your car and advertise to the world you’re an idiot, be my guest. I don’t do to others what I wouldn’t like were it done to me. During the 2004 campaign righties whined a lot about nasty mean Democrats breaking their “Bush” signs and saying snarky things to them. I think it was wrong of Democrats to do that. But somehow the righties never noticed the number of news stories about Republicans breaking “Kerry” signs. Nor did they acknowledged that at least some Kerry voters in red states — they told me this personally — chose not to display Kerry signs for fear of, um reprisal. Like slashed tires, or bombs thrown through windows, or the family dog … well, you get the idea. That’s public intolerance, and I think that’s wrong.

In other words, while I am not obligated to publish opinions I don’t like, I do not have the right to prevent such opinions from being published elsewhere.

I hope that is clear.

The other UT commenter that irritated me was a rightie. This guy is an incessant commenter there, possibly a paid one, and I have read his opinions, and basically he’s a mouthpiece for everything Sean Hannity says. So he wrote a comment that argues, in effect, we lefties are supposed to tolerate the VRWC’s crapping on the Constitution and shredding of the Bill of Rights, because if we argue they shouldn’t do that we are being intolerant.

There is a distinction between being intolerant of opposing opinions and being intolerant of actively subverting American democracy and undermining civil liberty. There is a difference between accepting the results of a free and fair election and accepting the results of an election that was stolen by thugs who prevented minority citizens from voting. BIG difference.

As I said, this guy is essentially a Sean Hannity wannabee; I’ve yet to see him say anything original. I responded to some of his comments to my first UT post before I realized I was wasting my time. And on this thread I let him know I wouldn’t be wasting my time by responding to his comments. Notice I didn’t write to Glenn and demand the guy be banned (I have no reason to think Glenn would do that, anyway). I just said, in effect, your opinion doesn’t interest me, and I’m not going to respond to it.

Did I mention that this guy’s comments drip with contempt for lefties, yet he complains that other commenters (on a leftie blog!) are mean to him? Snark. Try being a leftie posting a comment on a rightie blog. The righties go way beyond the parameters of “mean.”

Anyway, he responded to my notice that I was ignoring him with:

Yet another example of how you recognize “the ground rules of the society must encourage tolerance and civility in public debate?”

You have just proven my point about your hypocrisy far better than I ever could have.

Nope. I support your right to express your own opinion, but that doesn’t mean I won’t think you’re an idiot. And I support your right to kick sand on a public beach, but if you kick it in my face we’ve got a problem. I’m not going to tolerate your kicking sand in anyone else’s face, either, and if I can stop you from doing that, I will.

Some people don’t understand what tolerance is. It doesn’t mean being a patsy, or not respecting personal parameters. Righties in particular seem to think that because liberals value “tolerance” we’re supposed to stand aside like grinning idiots and approve of everything they do. Some righties think “tolerance” confers on them a right not to be disagreed with.

No; tolerance of public speech means I must not stop someone else from expressing an opinion. But “tolerance” doesn’t mean I can’t express my opinion of his opinion. Tolerance of behavior as a rule means tolerating behavior that is chosen from free will and not harming anyone else. It doesn’t mean I should stand aside if behavior is harming someone else. I don’t know why so many righties can’t grasp that.

OK; I’ve vented. I feel better now.

Dear Media, Part I: Diagnosis

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Stranger of Blah3.com speaks for many of us:

Dear Media,

I hope you all enjoy lying in that bed you’ve made.

All those years of making excuses for George W. Bush’s ineptness, inadequacies, and illegalities have earned you absolutely nothing. You brushed aside his lack of experience and intellectual incuriosity in 1999 and 2000, mostly because you didn’t like Al Gore. Your behavior gave him a much better position from which to steal the 2000 election.

You bought the spin from Bush’s minions, ignoring the crisis that was taking place in Florida after the election. You believed every lie they came up with, from ‘The votes have been counted and re-counted and re-counted’ to ‘Al Gore is trying to steal the election,’ and you decided that letting Bush take office (in the most literal sense possible) was ‘best for the country.’

You papered over the fact that he was scared out of his mind on September 11, 2001 – to the point where he flew to Idaho to hide – in favor of painting him as a ‘resolute leader.’ You swallowed, hook, line, and sinker, every lie that came out of the White House in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq – in many cases embellishing the lies to make them sound more plausible. …

… And after all this, Bush and Cheney and Congress and Coulter and every wingnut pundit, whom you’ve coddled and accommodated every step of the way, show their appreciation how?

They want to muzzle you. They want to imprison you. They want to try you for treason.

Stranger links to an The American Prospect article about radio talk show host Melanie Morgan, who is the same raving loon who “debated” the SWIFT program with Al Sharpton on Monday night’s Hardball. TAP quotes Morgan suggesting that New York Times editor Bill Keller should be sent to the gas chamber for treason. She was more moderate on Hardball and was willing to reduce Keller’s sentence to 20 years behind bars.

To be a liberal in America today is to look at news media and despair. Sometime between the Watergate Era and today, the whole bleeping profession of journalism turned into the Right’s Pet Goat. The much compromised New York Times is Exhibit A. You’d think the Bush Administration would be grateful to the Times for its help with the WMDs scam. But no; the Times is now the ur-Goat.

The catastrophe that is contemporary American journalism is described in detail in Eric Boehlert’s new book Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush. I’m not going to repeat Boehlert’s arguments here; many of you know them, anyway. Instead, I want to look at the bigger picture of journalism and politics.

To see the bigger picture, you have to step back from political issues and parties, including our much-beloved debate on whether Democrats are hopeless. Instead, consider the political culture of the United States. I argue that our national political culture is so sick and contaminated that it no longer supports the democratic processes of politics and government. Sheer entropy has kept democracy lumbering along — it takes either a long time or a lot of force to stop a really big mass that’s been in motion for a while. But a political culture utterly inhospitable to rational political discussion, as ours has become, will shut democracy down eventually.

If we’re going to restore the United States to functionality as a democratic republic, our primary goal is to heal the national political culture. Otherwise, it won’t matter which party we support or how many elections we win, because the patient — democracy in America — will still be dying. But if we can heal the culture, the job of reforming other political institutions — like the Democratic and Republican parties — will be easier.

For example, many progressives have concluded it is pointless to support Democrats, because as soon as a Democrat gets inside the Beltway his spinal column is ripped right out of him. Time and time again, we’ve seen Democratic politicians make grand speeches to their liberal constituents, but once we get them elected they do little more than offer ineffectual objections to the ruling right-wing power juggernaut. And we’re all sick of this.

But I say that progressivism’s salvation will not come from any political leader or party, Democrat or otherwise. It will come from media reform. This is true because no matter who we elect, and no matter what progressive legislators might want to accomplish, they are helpless to do much until progessive policies have solid popular support. You build popular support for policies by talking about them to the American people. And for the past fifty years or so, that means being able to make your case in mass media, particularly television.

Now, tell me — when was the last time you watched a substantive, factual, civil discussion of progressive ideas on national television?

Take health care, for example. For years, we progressives have wanted some kind of national health care system, maybe single payer, maybe a combination of public and private systems, but something that would scuttle the bloated, failing mess we’ve got now. Many polls indicate that a majority of Americans are deeply concerned about health care in this country. Yet it is next to impossible to present progressive ideas about health care reform to the American public through mass media. Even on those programs allegedly dedicated to political discussion, as soon as a progressive gets the phrase “health care” out of his mouth, a chorus of rightie goons will commence shrieking about socialized medicine! And then the allotted ten minutes for the health care segment is up; go to commercial.

And that’s assuming a real progressive is invited on the program at all.

So even though a majority of the American people sense that something is wrong with our health care system, and think something needs to change, they never hear what the options are through mass media. Probably a large portion of American voters don’t realize that the U.S. is the only industrialized democratic nation with no national health care program. They never hear that, on a purely cost-benefit basis, we have about the worst health care system on the planet. All Americans ever hear is that Canada has national health care and that Canadians have to put their names on waiting lists to get services, and ain’t that awful? OK, but what about the thirty-something other nations with national health care systems that don’t have waiting lists?

Bottom line: The Right figured out how to use mass media to make its point-of-view dominant and shut out the Left. Thus, radical right-wing views are presented as “conservative” and even “centrist,” even though a whopping majority of the American public doesn’t agree with those views. Through media, the radical Right is able to deflect attention away from itself and persuade just enough voters that Democrats are loony and dangerous. And maybe even treasonous.

And if just enough voters aren’t persuaded — well, there are ways to deal with that, too. But media consumers aren’t hearing much about that, either.

Because media is the dominant political force of our time, media reform is an essential part of the cure. It’s not the only part — reform is required along many fronts — but without media reform, we’re bleeped.

So what’s this political culture thing? Genuine representative democracy is more than just elections, as explained in this Wikipedia article. It is a form of government in which “the ability of the elected representatives to exercise decision-making power is subject to the rule of law, and usually moderated by a constitution which emphasizes the protection of the rights and freedoms of individuals and minorities, and which places constraints on the leaders and on the extent to which the will of the majority can be exercised.”

In successful democracies, accountability to the people is critical. Therefore, government must be transparent except when national security requires secrecy, and in that circumstance some form of oversight of those acting in secret must be honored. It is also essential that a large majority of the people respect a social contract in the broadest sense of that term. And a fundamental part of that contract is the implicit agreement that protecting the integrity of the law, and of the institutions and processes of democratic government, comes before winning elections or enacting policies.

As explained nicely by the Wikipedia article linked above,

For countries without a strong tradition of democratic majority rule, the introduction of free elections alone has rarely been sufficient to achieve a transition from dictatorship to democracy; a wider shift in the political culture and gradual formation of the institutions of democratic government are needed. There are various examples, like in Latin America, of countries that were able to sustain democracy only temporarily or in limited form until wider cultural changes occurred to allow true majority rule.

One of the key aspects of democratic culture is the concept of a “loyal opposition”. This is an especially difficult cultural shift to achieve in nations where transitions of power have historically taken place through violence. The term means, in essence, that all sides in a democracy share a common commitment to its basic values. Political competitors may disagree, but they must tolerate one another and acknowledge the legitimate and important roles that each play. The ground rules of the society must encourage tolerance and civility in public debate. In such a society, the losers accept the judgment of the voters when the election is over, and allow for the peaceful transfer of power. The losers are safe in the knowledge that they will neither lose their lives nor their liberty, and will continue to participate in public life. They are loyal not to the specific policies of the government, but to the fundamental legitimacy of the state and to the democratic process itself.

Granted, these ideals have never been perfectly manifested in the American body politic. All human institutions are imperfect, and institutions that survive through many generations will go through cycles of corruption and reform. Often idealistic people will point to the corruptions and the many ways our nation has fallen short of its ideals and argue that the patient isn’t worth saving. I, however, take the Buddhist view that all compounded things are imperfect and subject to decay, but that’s how life is, and it’s our duty — to ourselves, our ancestors, and our descendants — to make the best of it. Not making the best of it is a bad alternative.

Although it’s never been perfect, once upon a time American political culture supported democratic processes, but now it does not. It does not because many of our civic institutions are controlled by right-wing extremists who do not respect the social contract or the values of democracy. Although they pay lip service to the legitimacy of the government and democratic processes, what drives them is the acquisition of power and the implementation of their extremist agenda by any means necessary. If rules must be broken and democratic processes subverted to achieve their goals — so be it.

Paul Krugman recognized what was happening and wrote about it in the introduction to his book The Great Unraveling. He explained that, throughout history, reasonable people accustomed to political and social stability have failed to recognize the danger of emerging radical movements — until the stability is lost. Ironically, Krugman says he came to understand this from reading Henry Kissinger’s Ph.D. thesis. As Krugman explained in a Buzzflash interview,

… reasonable people can’t bring themselves to see that they’re actually facing a threat from a radical movement. Kissinger talked about the time of the French Revolution, and pretty obviously he also was thinking about the 1930s. He argued that, when you have a revolutionary power, somebody who really wants to tear apart the system — doesn’t believe in any of the rules — reasonable people who’ve been accustomed to stability just say, “Oh, you know, they may say that, but they don’t really mean it.” And, “This is just tactical, and let’s not get too excited.” Anyone who claims that these guys really are as radical as their own statements suggest is, you know, “shrill.” Kissinger suggests they’d be considered alarmists. And those who say, “Don’t worry. It’s not a big deal,”are considered sane and reasonable.

Well, that’s exactly what’s been happening. For four years now, some of us have been saying, whether or not you think they’re bad guys, they’re certainly radical. They don’t play by the rules. You can’t take anything that you’ve regarded as normal from previous U.S. political experience as applying to Bush and the people around him. They will say things and do things that would not previously have made any sense — you know, would have been previously considered out of bounds. And for all of that period, the critics have been told: “Oh, you know, you’re overreacting, and there’s something wrong with you.”

The ascension of the radical right occurred over many years, and their takeover of government — a slow-motion coup d’état — happened gradually enough that most of us didn’t comprehend what was happening. America has been challenged by radicalism before, and always it has come back to the center soon enough. (And by “center” I mean the real center, where liberalism and conservatism balance, not the false “center” of today that would have been considered extreme conservatism in saner times.) I do not believe the coup is a fait accompli; the Right is not yet so secure it its power that it has dropped all pretense of honoring democratic political process. They’re still going through the motions, in other words. But this time I do not believe America will come back to the center unless a whole lot of us grab hold and pull at it. Hard.

How do we do that? First, we have to get our bearings and remember what “normal” is, which is going to be hard for the young folks whose memories don’t back back further than the Reagan Administration. Just take it from an old lady — what we got now ain’t normal.

Second, media reform, as I say, is essential, and will be looked at in more detail in Dear Media, Part II, which I hope to have up by tomorrow. I argue that media reform is essential to all other necessary political reform. Blogs and innovations in media technology may prove to be critical to this reform.

Supremes Slap Bush; Heads Explode

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John O’Neill and Scott Shane report for the New York Times:

The Supreme Court today delivered a sweeping rebuke to the Bush administration, ruling that the military tribunals it created to try terror suspects violate both American military law and the Geneva Convention.

In a 5-to-3 ruling, the justices also rejected an effort by Congress to strip the court of jurisdiction over habeas corpus appeals by detainees at the prison camp in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

And the court found that the plaintiff in the case, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a former driver for Osama bin Laden, could not be tried on the conspiracy charge lodged against him because international military law requires that prosecutions focus on specific acts, not broad conspiracy charges.

Naturally, the three dissenters were Scalia, Thomas, and Alito. Roberts didn’t vote because he had ruled (in favor of the government) on the case as an appeals court judge last year.

“Noone ever elected Ginsburg, Breyer, Souter or Kennedy, nor should we want to let some number of aging inside the beltway lawyers assume the role of CIC,” says this rightie, in a fervent declaration of support for totalitarian rule. Another calls it “a huge political gift for President Bush” and predicts Bush and Congress will “override” the decision. I’m sure Republican operatives are cranking out “judicial activism” talking points even as I keyboard.

Other rightie reactions: “A victory for terrorists!“; “Can’t Try Them, So Fry Them!“; “Instrument of Surrender Signed by SCOTUS.”

And that’s without looking at Malkin, the nice doggie or the LGFers. I understand Malkin’s head spins around and vomits blood when these things happen.

For a more sober analysis, see Glenn Greenwald.

This decision illustrates just how critical is the current composition of the Supreme Court. The decision was really 5-4 (because Roberts already ruled in favor of the administration in the lower court). The Justice who wrote the majority opinion, John Paul Stevens, is 86 years old, and as Justice Blackmun once famously warned, he “cannot remain on this Court forever.” If the Bush administration is permitted to replace Stevens with yet another worshipper of executive power, the next challenge to the Bush administration’s theories of unchecked power could very easily result, by a 5-4 vote, in the opposite outcome.

Our nation hangs by a thread, and that thread is John Paul Stevens.

Further,

Congress can reverse almost every aspect of the decision as it specifically pertains to these military commissions. It could abrogate any treaties it wants. It could amend the UCMJ to allow military commissions with the rules established by the President. It has already stripped the Court of jurisdiction to hear future habeas corpus challenges by Guantanamo detainees, and could act to further strip the Court of jurisdiction in these areas. We will undoubtedly hear calls by Pat Roberts, John Cornyn, Jeff Sessions, Tom Coburn (and perhaps Joe Lieberman?) et al. for legislation which would accomplish exactly that.

Have I mentioned that it would be extremely beneficial to the nation if the Dems took back Congress this November?

Update: Just so you don’t have to click on the Nice Doggie’s site to see what he wrote, you can click here to see a screen capture.

Update update: See also Scott Lemieux on Hamdan and on the Myth of Conservative Judicial Restraint.

Distinctions

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Last night President Bush, at a fundraiser in the suburbs of St. Louis, attacked Democrats for “waving the white flag of surrender” in Iraq, even though they haven’t. And he slammed media for exposing secret intelligence programs, even though they haven’t.

Peter Baker writes in today’s Washington Post:

Bush’s tone has turned tougher as he appears at more political events. At a Washington fundraiser this month, he said it was important that lawmakers “not wave the white flag of surrender” without asserting that any of them were actually doing so. In his appearance in this St. Louis suburb, he said directly that some Democrats want to surrender, adopting the more cutting approach of his senior political adviser, Karl Rove.

(Bush was in Missouri to raise money for Senator James Talent, a reliable Bush sycophant, who is closely trailing his Democratic challenger Claire McCaskill. Talent has three times the campaign war chest that McCaskill has, Baker writes, so please send McCaskill a donation if you can.)

Joan Vennochi writes in today’s Boston Globe that Bush is successfully changing the subject. Vennochi notes, first, that General Casey’s noble and sensible “withdrawal” plan is pretty much the same thing as the Democrats’ reckless and cowardly “cut and run” plan. Bush has downplayed this lack of distinction by saying troop presence would be “based upon conditions on the ground.” Which by now we all know means “based upon political expedience.”

But this week the White House seized upon the New York Times‘s story about the SWIFT program as their means for changing the subject. By stirring up unwarranted hysteria over the Times story, Bush is changing the subject of the nation’s political discourse away from Iraq (which is, um, not a happy place) to the preferred topics of terrorism and treason.

Bush condemned the report as “disgraceful,” administration officials piled on, and the political right joyously joined the chorus. Senator Jim Bunning, Republican of Kentucky, accused the Times of “treason.” The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times also reported on the financial tracking program, but most of the vitriol is aimed at The New York Times, whose parent company owns The Boston Globe. …

…Overreaching allowed the conservative news and talk show radio circuit to churn once again over what they label the left-leaning media. These patriots of the political right are constantly reminding us that US troops in Iraq are defending our liberty. Yet, they demonstrate amazing disdain for one critical piece of liberty those troops are defending — freedom of the press.

Overreaching also accomplished what it was supposed to accomplish. It turned attention away from Iraq and from Casey, his troop reduction plan and its conceptual parallel to the Democrats’ proposal.

Vennochi sites the Bryan Bender article on the actual non-secret status of the program.

At the Washington Post, Charles Babington and Michael Abramowitz echo Vennochi.

Senior administration officials say the president was outraged by articles in the New York Times and other newspapers about a surveillance program in which the U.S. government has tapped international banking records for information about terrorist financing. But his comments at a Republican fundraiser in a St. Louis suburb yesterday, combined with new moves by GOP congressional leaders, showed how both are working to fan public anger and reap gains from the controversy during a midterm election year in which polls show they are running against stiff headwinds. …

… Republican House leaders introduced a resolution yesterday condemning leakers and calling on the media and others to safeguard classified programs. … Republicans said the resolution will allow their members to register support for Bush’s anti-terrorism efforts and the anger that many feel toward news organizations. They said it also is designed to force House Democrats to stand with the media or Bush’s criticism of it — a choice many would prefer to avoid.

Democrats are drafting their own resolution but conceded the Republicans probably won’t let them vote on it. This is an example of why a Democratic majority in the House would be a good thing.

House Republicans are in full-tilt pander to the base mode. They’ve trotted out an “American values agenda” that’s a potpourri of every social wedge issue they could think of — guns, abortion, gay marriage, human cloning, flag burning, the Pledge of Allegiance, the Ten Commandments, plus some tax cuts. Gotta have those tax cuts.

“Family, faith, patriotism and hard work bind us together as Americans. Our laws should reflect those priorities,” said Rep. Roy Blunt of Missouri.

Meanwhile, Democrats work on proposals to raise the minimum wage and a reform the Medicare prescription drug program designed to lower costs and close gaps in coverage, even though these items don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of passing as long as Republicans control Congress.

Now, if I were a Democratic political consultant I’d suggest that the Dems make an all-out effort to draw the distinction between them — serious about governing, working on real nuts-and-bolts issues like making Grandma’s prescription drugs a little more affordable instead of junk issues like flag burning and cloning, for pity’s sake. But that will be hard for the Dems to do, because too many of ’em are still voting with the bleeping Republicans. Arianna Huffington writes,

Yesterday’s Senate debate on flag desecration showed that Democrats are as clueless as ever about who they are and what they should stand for. Case in point, Hillary Clinton’s ongoing attempt to rebrand herself as a red state friendly DLC Dem by supporting a bill that would have criminalized flag desecration while still holding on to her liberal bona fides by voting against the Constitutional amendment banning it.

Are we all agreed that Senator Clinton will not be the Democratic nominee in 2008?

And it wasn’t just Hillary. Kerry, Biden, Boxer, Durbin, Kennedy, Leahy, Levin, Lieberman, Obama, and Shumer all also voted against the amendment but for the criminalization bill because, according to the Times, “Democrats who voted for the [bill] in effect bought themselves the right to claim that they had voted against flag desecration, potentially inoculating themselves against possible charges of lacking patriotism in a general election campaign.” In other words, they earned the right to declare that they actually voted against flag desecration before they voted “for” it (by voting no on the amendment). Yep, that’s exactly the kind of pragmatic thinking that “wins elections for Democrats”!

Naturally, Anne Kornblut at the New York Times turned this into a story about the “rift” in the Democratic party.

The divergent views of her position reflect a broader rift in the Democratic Party over whether the key to electoral success rests in winning over centrists or by drawing clear distinctions with Republicans by staking out unapologetically liberal positions.

I don’t think they’d have to stake out “unapologetically liberal positions”; I think they could make a distinction by staking out positions on real issues instead of phony ones. But they can’t do that if there’s no clear distinction to draw.

Zack Exley writes in The Huffington Post that the American people are being misunderestimated by both parties, and that people — even red state people — are ready to follow leaders who offer substance instead of sound bites.

It’s stating the obvious to say that Democrats have been triangulating themselves to death. However, I guarantee you that we will wind up doing it one more time if our candidates don’t make a quantum leap this cycle and present America with a big, credible, challenging way to save itself — on the environment, as well as other issues.

Of all recent presidential hopefuls, McCain does the best with that kind of rhetoric. “People want to work for something greater than themselves.” However, his free market dogma guarantees that he and all other Republicans of this era will always come up empty on specifics. And empty rhetoric doesn’t work in this area. People do yearn for something greater than themselves, but they are very good at sniffing out the difference between something worth real sacrifice and nice-sounding lines written by a Senate staffer.

I suspect Exley is right, although it’s hard for me to tell from here in New York what’s going on in the rest of America.

When I still lived in Missouri, for example, it seemed to me Missouri voters were more pragmatic than ideological. I remember back in the 1970s some “tax reform” interest group that was probably a front for something else got a referendum on the ballot that would have repealed sales taxes on food and drugs. This was about the same time that California voted in the infamous (and ruinous) Proposition 13 to cut property taxes, and “supply side” tax cut theories were the new new thing. But Missouri voters defeated the referendum by a wide margin, as I recall. They figured the reduction in revenue would either cause the state to go broke, or the state legislature would just raise taxes on something else. Leave well enough alone.

So, I think, even in the Rush Limbaugh Age there must be a lot of voters, even in red states, who are ready to listen to substantive ideas about how to make the government work again instead of fluff and nonsense about flag burning.

But in our current political culture, it would be just about impossible for those substantive ideas to ever reach the voters. As soon as any proposal comes out of a Democrat’s mouth, Republicans in Congress find a way to mock it, and then the entire VRWC echo chamber twists and spins the proposal to death, so that only a cartoon version of the proposal reaches the ears of voters. What happened to Rep. John Murtha’s redeployment proposal is a classic example. Thus, empty theatrics trump substance, time and time again.

Jonathan Alter has a plan.

Anyone who dares criticize President Bush’s Iraq policy is a “cut-and-run” Democrat. The White House’s object here is not to engage in a real debate about an exit strategy from Iraq; that would require acknowledging some complications, like the fact that Gen. George Casey, commander of the multinational forces in Iraq, believes it’s time to start bringing some troops home. The object is instead to either get the Democrats tangled up in Kerryesque complexities on Iraq—or intimidate them into changing the subject to other, less-potent issues for fear of looking like unpatriotic pansies.

These are the stakes: if Rove can successfully con Democrats into ignoring Iraq and reciting their laundry list of other priorities, Republicans win. It’s shameful that the minimum wage hasn’t been raised in nine years and that thousands of ailing Americans will ultimately die because of Bush’s position on stem-cell research. But those issues won’t get the Congress back for Democrats. Iraq can.

I suspect he is right.

You would think it would be the GOP running away from the war. Instead, in gamblers’ parlance, Republicans “doubled down” on Iraq. After the good news about Zarqawi’s death, they bet that by uniting behind Bush, they would shift the blame to the squabbling Democrats, even though the Democrats have no power at all to change—or even affect—policy on the ground. Rove’s notion is that strong and wrong beats meek and weak.

Ah, yes. President Bush is always wrong, but he’s wrong with such resolve we’re supposed to admire him for it..

It almost worked. It looked recently as if Democrats were so fearful of being cast as war weenies that they would change the subject. Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid & Co. held a press conference on the Democratic issues for the fall that barely mentioned Iraq. Hillary Clinton tried to focus on a lengthy list of worthy issues that, except for the mistreatment of veterans, had little to do with the war.

Yep, that’s our crew of spineless wonders in Washington. Yet Alter sees a ray of hope.

But then, some Senate Democrats got smart for a change. They recognized that the party out of the White House doesn’t need a detailed strategy for ending a war, just a general sense of direction. When Dwight Eisenhower ran for president in 1952, his plan wasn’t any more specific than “I will go to Korea.” When Richard Nixon was asked how he would end the Vietnam War in 1968, he said he had a “secret plan”—and got away with it. So now 80 percent of Senate Democrats are united behind something called the “Levin-Reed Amendment.” The details of it (begin withdrawal without a firm timetable for getting out completely; diplomacy with the Sunnis; purging the Iraqi military and police of bad guys) are less important than that they finally came up with something.

Of course parrying “cut and run” with “Levin-Reed” won’t suffice. But Sen. Joe Biden’s riposte to the GOP’s symbolic roll-call votes—”The Republicans are now totally united in a failed policy”—is a start. This isn’t rocket science. Unless things improve dramatically on the ground in Iraq, Democrats have a powerful argument: If you believe the Iraq war is a success, vote Republican. If you believe it is a failure, vote Democratic.

Dems, Alter says, should get up every morning, look themselves in the mirror, and say “It’s not about us. It’s about them.”

Go for it, Dems.

See also: Sidney Blumenthal, “House of Shame.”

Not Too Swift

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Via Glenn Greenwald: Bryan Bender writes in today’s Boston Globe that, um, the program to track terrorists through financial transactions, was not exactly a secret secret.

News reports disclosing the Bush administration’s use of a special bank surveillance program to track terrorist financing spurred outrage in the White House and on Capitol Hill, but some specialists pointed out yesterday that the government itself has publicly discussed its stepped-up efforts to monitor terrorist finances since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks….

…a search of public records — government documents posted on the Internet, congressional testimony, guidelines for bank examiners, and even an executive order President Bush signed in September 2001 — describe how US authorities have openly sought new tools to track terrorist financing since 2001. That includes getting access to information about terrorist-linked wire transfers and other transactions, including those that travel through SWIFT.

“There have been public references to SWIFT before,” said Roger Cressey, a senior White House counterterrorism official until 2003. “The White House is overreaching when they say [The New York Times committed] a crime against the war on terror. It has been in the public domain before.”

Victor D. Comras , a former US diplomat who oversaw efforts at the United Nations to improve international measures to combat terror financing, said it was common knowledge that worldwide financial transactions were being closely monitored for links to terrorists. “A lot of people were aware that this was going on,” said Comras, one of a half-dozen financial experts UN Secretary General Kofi Annan recruited for the task.

“Unless they were pretty dumb, they had to assume” their transactions were being monitored, Comras said of terrorist groups. “We have spent the last four years bragging how effective we have been in tracking terrorist financing.”

Indeed, a report that Comras co-authored in 2002 for the UN Security Council specifically mentioned SWIFT as a source of financial information that the United States had tapped into. The system, which handles trillions of dollars in worldwide transactions each day, serves as a main hub for banks and other financial institutions that move money around the world. According to The New York Times, SWIFT executives agreed to give the Treasury Department and the CIA broad access to its database.

I can hear the righties now — the UN Security Council are traitors, too.

Dan Froomkin tells more:

SWIFT, the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, is the international banking cooperative that quietly allowed the Treasury Department and the CIA to examine hundreds of thousands of private banking records from around the world.

But the existence of SWIFT itself has not exactly been a secret. Certainly not to anyone who had an Internet connection.

SWIFT has a Web site, at swift.com .

It’s a very informative Web site. For instance, this page describes how “SWIFT has a history of cooperating in good faith with authorities such as central banks, treasury departments, law enforcement agencies and appropriate international organisations, such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), in their efforts to combat abuse of the financial system for illegal activities.”

(And yes, FATF has its own Web site, too.)

Yet yesterday press secretary Tony Snow said he was “absolutely sure” terrorists didn’t know about SWIFT. Sure.

As explained by Ron Suskind on Monday’s Hardball, some time back terrorist organizations deducted that their financial transactions were giving them away.

MATTHEWS: Well let me just tell you what you said. “Eventually not surprisingly,” and we‘re talking about electronic transfer surveillance, “our opponents figured it out. It was a matter really of deduction. Enough people got caught and a view of which activities had in common provides clues as to how they may have been identified and apprehended. We were surprised it took so long,” said one intelligence official.

So in other words, the bad guys figured out how we were catching them.

SUSKIND: Right, it‘s a process of deduction. After a while, you catch enough of them, they‘re not idiots. They say, “Well, we can‘t do the things we were doing.” They‘re not leaving electronic trails like they were.

Matthews was quoting from page 279 of Suskind’s new book, The One Percent Solution. If you start reading on the previous page, you see that Suskind was writing about all manner of “electronically traceable activities — from satellite phone calls to bank account withdrawals.”

And that’s largely how we managed, from early 2002 to late 2003, to know a great deal about al Qaeda, get a sense of who was connected to whom, and capture quite a few suspects, most of whom have vanished into overseas U.S. prisons or similar, maybe worse destinations inside Yemen, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, or Egypt. …

Eventually, and not surprisingly, our opponents figured it out. It was a matter, really, of deduction. Enough people get caught and a view of which activities they had in common provides clues as to how they have have been identified and apprehended.

“We were surprised it took them so long,” said one senior intelligence official. …

…The al Qaeda playbook, employed by what was left of the network, its affiliates and imitators, started to stress the necessity of using couriers to carry cash and hand-delivered letters. This slows the pace of operations, if not necessarily their scale, and that was, indeed, a victory. …

Incarnations of terror cells, meanwhile, were taking shape. Stealthy, diffuse, and largely unconnected to a centralized network, these were self-activated, often self-funded, and ready to download key operational guidance from an explosion of jihadist Web sites. There was no money to trace; no calls up and down the chain of command they needed to make …

There’s been some speculation about why the White House doesn’t seem interested in going after who in government leaked the program to the New York Times. Maybe it’s because there was no leaker.

Yet the pile-on continues. The Hill reports that House Republicans leaders are expected to introduce a resolution condemning the New York Times for “leaking” information about the SWIFT program. Howie Kurtz concedes —

President Bush calls the conduct of the New York Times “disgraceful.” Vice President Cheney objects to the paper having won a Pulitzer Prize. A Republican congressman wants the Times prosecuted. National Review says its press credentials should be yanked. Radio commentator Tammy Bruce likens the paper to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Even by modern standards of media-bashing, the volume of vitriol being heaped upon the editors on Manhattan’s West 43rd Street is remarkable — especially considering that the Los Angeles Times and Wall Street Journal also published accounts Friday of a secret administration program to monitor the financial transactions of terror suspects. So, in its later editions, did The Washington Post.

That’s because this isn’t about national security. It’s about politics. Republicans are out to smear everybody who stands still long enough to get smeared in order to deflect public dissatisfaction away from themselves. And if GOP party operatives plus the usual useful idiots like Tammy Bruce keep repeating the story that media is the enemy, that will make future propaganda efforts sooo much easier. Although it’s not as if media were getting in the way of the propaganda catapults up to now.