Clueless

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News media elites still suffer from the vapors over Stephen Colbert’s masterful evisceration of them and their profession Saturday night. I do believe they feel insulted.

Someone should warn them to stay away from Eric Boehlert’s new book, Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush. Colbert only gave them indigestion; Boehlert will send them into apoplexy.

You can read the intro here and a large excerpt at Salon and True Blue Liberal. In this excerpt Boehlert focuses on the buildup to the invasion of Iraq. He argues that Bush could not have ordered the invasion without the help and approval of the MainStreamMedia. Here’s just a snip:

MSNBC was so nervous about employing an on-air liberal host opposing Bush’s ordered invasion that it fired Phil Donahue preemptively in 2003, after an internal memo pointed out the legendary talk show host presented “a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war.” MSNBC executives would not confirm — nor deny — the existence of the report, which stressed the corporate discomfort Donahue’s show might present if it opposed the war while “at the same time our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.” By canning Donahue, MSNBC made sure that cable viewers had no place to turn for a nightly opinion program whose host forcefully questioned the invasion. The irony was that at the time of Donahue’s firing one month before bombs started falling on Baghdad, MSNBC officials cited the host’s weak ratings as the reason for the change. In truth, Donahue was beating out Chris Matthews as MSNBC’s highest-rated host.

Newspapers played it safe, too. In 2003 the Columbia Journalism Review called around to letters-page editors to gauge reader response to the looming war in Iraq and was told that at The Tennessean in Nashville letters were running 70 percent against the war, but that the newspaper was trying to run as many pro-war letters as possible in order to avoid accusations of bias [emphasis added].

And who would have accused them of bias? The VRWC, of course.

Indeed, between the time Bush first included Iraq as part of the “axis of evil” in January 2002, and the time the invasion commenced in March 2003, the MSM didn’t seem to know how to cover those who opposed the war. The press just wanted the protesters to go away. Maybe because, as influential broadcast news consulting firm Frank N. Magid Associates informed its clients, covering antiwar protesters turned off news consumers, according to its survey. On October 26, 2004, antiwar protesters staged a massive rally in Washington, D.C., drawing more than 100,000 people from across the country. The next day in a small piece on page 8 that was accompanied by a photo larger than the article itself, the New York Times reported falsely that “fewer people attended than organizers had said they hoped for.”

This reminds me of Peter Daou’s “triangle” theory. Years ago the Right established a power triangle of blogs and online forums like Free Republic, news media, and the Republican political establishment to hammer the American public relentlessly with their messages and talking points. That’s how they were able to dominate mass media and our national political discourse, and that’s how they came to dominate Washington, DC. Those outside the VRWC triangle, even when they represent a majority opinion, are rendered voiceless. We leftie bloggers are, slowly, making some inroads, but it’s been an uphill struggle.

Boehlert describes “Hardball” on March 6, 2003, a few days before the invasion:

“Hardball’s” Chris Matthews hosted a full hour of discussion. In order to get a wide array of opinion, he invited a pro-war Republican senator (Saxby Chambliss, from Georgia), a pro-war former Secretary of State (Lawrence Eagleburger), a pro-war retired Army general (Montgomery Meigs), pro-war retired Air Force general (Buster Glosson), a pro-war Republican pollster (Frank Luntz), as well as, for the sake of balance, somebody who, twenty-five years earlier, once worked in Jimmy Carter’s White House (Pat Caddell).

As I remember it, on those rare occasions when someone timidly expressed a note of caution about the invasion, some rightie goon at his elbow would interrupt with a high-volume recitation of the fear-mongering talking points du jour. Any attempt at an actual critical discussion of the war was shouted down.

To oppose the invasion vocally was to be outside the media mainstream and to invite scorn. Like some nervous Democratic members of Congress right before the war, MSM journalists and pundits seemed to scramble for political cover so as to not subject themselves to conservative catcalls. One year later, a pro-war writer for Slate conceded he was “embarrassed” by his support for the ill-fated invasion but he insisted, “you’ve got to take risks.” But supporting the war posed no professional risk. The only MSM risks taken at the time of the invasion were by pundits who staked out an unambiguous position in opposing the war. Bush’s rationale for war — Saddam Hussein, sitting on a swelling stockpile of weapons of mass destruction, posing a grave and imminent threat to America — turned out to be untrue. And for that, the press must shoulder some blame. Because the MSM not only failed to ask pressing questions, or raise serious doubts about the White House’s controversial WMD assertion, but in some high-profile instances, such as with Judith Miller’s reporting for the New York Times, the MSM were responsible for spreading the White House deceptions about Saddam’s alleged stockpile; they were guilty of “incestuous amplification,” as former Florida senator Senator Bob Graham called it. Being meek and timid and dictating administration spin amidst a wartime culture is one thing. But to be actively engaged in the spin, to give it a louder and more hysterical voice, is something else all together. In fact, the compliant press repeated almost every administration claim about the threat posed to America by Saddam. The fact that virtually every one of those claims turned out to be false only added to the media’s malpractice.

This malpractice was ongoing before the invasion, of course, it played a large role in the 2000 election campaigns, as Digby noted:

When the media treated Al Gore like a circus clown and overlooked the fact that George W. Bush was a gibbering idiot (and admitted openly that they did it for fun) I held in my intemperate remarks because I thought it would harm the party in the long run if we attacked the press as the Republicans do. When they reported the election controversy as if it would create a constitutional crisis if the nation had to wait more than a month to find out whether they had the right president I kept my own counsel. After all, who would defend democracy when something truly serious happened?

After 9/11 when they helped the president promote the idea that the country was at “war” (with what we didn’t exactly know) I knew it was a terrible mistake and would lead to a distorted foreign policy and twisted domestic politics. But I didn’t blame the media because it was very difficult to fight that at the time. They’re human, after all.

And when they helped the government make their case for this misbegotten war in Iraq, I assumed that they knew what they were talking about. After all, I had been defending their credibility for years now, in spite of everything I’ve mentioned. If they would screw up something like this, then for what was I holding back my criticism? This was the most serious issue this country had faced in many a decade.

When no WMD were found and I was informed that the NY Times had assigned a neocon shill to report the story, and then defended her when she was implicated in a white house smear to cover up its lies going into Iraq, I no longer saw any need to defend them or any other mainstream media outlet who had rah-rahed the country into Iraq because of promises of embedded glory on the battlefield and in the ratings.

This is fifteen long years of watching the Times and the rest of the mainstream media buckle under the pressure of GOP accusations that they are biased, repeatedly take bogus GOP manufactured scandals and run with them like kids with a brand new kite, treat our elections like they are entertainment vehicles for bored reporters and generally kowtow to the Republican establishment as the path of least resistance. I waited for years for them to recognise what was happening and fight back for their own integrity. It didn’t happen. And I began to see that the only way to get the press to work properly was to apply equal pressure from the opposite direction. It’s a tug of war. They were not strong enough to resist being dragged off to the right all by themselves. They needed some flamethrowers from our side pulling in the opposite direction to make it possible for them to avoid being pulled all the way over.

During the Florida recount debacle reporters stood aside and allowed Republican operatives like Howard Baker to lie to TV cameras without being corrected. And through most of the Bush Administration the press was little more than a conduit for the GOP propaganda machine. I’ve seen a change since Katrina, but it hasn’t changed enough.

Ironically, Jack Shafer at Slate writes that “many journalists” believe “the Bush administration has declared war on the press.”

Do the Bushies disrespect the press? Give them the runaround when they ask questions of the White House press office? Has the administration sown disinformation, overclassified, reclassified the previously declassified, tightened FOIA, and paid pundits to carry its water?

A million times yes.

Yet stonewalling, investigating the sources of leaks, intimidating reporters with visits from FBI agents, and otherwise making reporters’ lives miserable aren’t tantamount to a Bush war on the press. Instead of backing the combat metaphor, I subscribe to Jay Rosen’s more modest diagnosis of an ongoing administration strategy to “decertify” the press from its role as purveyor of news and information. By attacking the press corps’ credibility and legitimacy, the Bush administration expects to frame the national debate—make that “eliminate the national debate.”

This is not a new development. You might remember the Great Media Blitz of October 2003. The Bushies seem to have decided news coverage of Iraq had lost that lovin’ feelin’. Here’s a snip of an Associated Press story of October 13, 2003, no longer online:

President Bush, annoyed by what he considers the “filter” of news reporting, will seek to go around the press on Monday through television outlets that do not routinely cover the White House.

Bush was giving a series of interviews to make the case that the situation in Iraq is getting better.

I’m sorry I didn’t preserve the rest of the story. But as I recall Condi and Dick and the rest of the crew more or less boycotted national media, and for a few days they spoke only to reporters from local and regional news outlets and to sympathizers like the Heritage Foundation in order to paint rosy pictures of progress in Iraq. The result was that for a few days the Administration’s message just about dropped off the radar screen altogether, and soon the “blitz” was quietly abandoned. Of course the Bushies still look for ways to catapult the propaganda past the news media establishment whenever it can, but they haven’t yet been able to cut it out of the picture altogether. Shafer continues,

The best journalists practice judo, using their foes’ brute force against them. Every time the Bush administration cracks down on openness, it creates new sources for journalists inside the bureaucracies. Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, says the strategy of decertifying the press works only if you can block the press from obtaining alternative sources of information. That’s something the administration hasn’t been able to do, says Blanton, citing the blockbuster stories about the Bush’s secret prisons, secret torture programs, secret rendition operation, warrantless wiretaps, and so on.

This means, of course, getting information from whistleblowers and leakers, and the VRWC triangle is working overtime to plant the idea that whistleblowers and leakers and journalists who talk to them are traitors. Never mind that when that source of information dries up we’re pretty much done for as a democracy. Try explaining that to a rightie. Or try explaining that to a tree stump, which is equally futile.

Sidney Blumenthal recaps some of Colbert’s monologue in the Guardian‘s “Comment Is Free” blog.

After his mock praise of Bush as a rock against reality, Colbert censured the press by flattering its misfeasance. “Over the last five years you people were so good – over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn’t want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out … Here’s how it works: the president makes decisions … The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ’em through a spellcheck and go home … Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know – fiction!”.

This wasn’t meant to be funny.

Some in the press understand the peril posed to the first amendment by an imperial president trying to smother the system of checks and balances. For those of the Washington press corps who shunned a court jester for his irreverence, status is more urgent than the danger to liberty. But it’s no laughing matter.

I don’t doubt the press corp thinks it don’t get no respect. But they’ve only themselves to blame. They still have the power and the means to report the truth, if only they’d get over themselves and use it.

Update: See “The Fox News Effect” — Bush owes his presidency to Faux Nooz.

Update update: See also Dan Froomkin.

t’s true that Colbert and Stewart have a lot of fans within the press corps who appreciate and maybe even envy their freedom to call it like they see it.

But I think that message was just too much for the self-satisfied upper crust of the media elite to handle when Colbert threw it right in their faces on Saturday night.

Here they were, holding a swanky party for themselves, and Colbert was essentially telling them that they’ve completely screwed up their number one job these past six years. Is it any surprise they were defensive?

Historians Are Relieved

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The jury in the Zacarias Moussaoui case has sentenced him to life in prison rather than giving him the death penalty. This is good; it saves me the trouble of writing a long diatribe about how STUPID it is to execute people who might have unique personal information about a historically significant event. Moussaoui’s not talking now, but in ten years, or twenty years, he may change his mind.

We’ll never know what information Timothy McVeigh took to the grave.

Failures of Leadership

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Charlie Savage writes in today’s Boston Globe:

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, accusing the White House of a ”very blatant encroachment” on congressional authority, said yesterday he will hold an oversight hearing into President Bush’s assertion that he has the power to bypass more than 750 laws enacted over the past five years.

”There is some need for some oversight by Congress to assert its authority here,” Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said in an interview. ”What’s the point of having a statute if . . . the president can cherry-pick what he likes and what he doesn’t like?”

Specter plans to call administration officials and constitutional scholars to the hearings, to be held in June. Even if the Senate finds Bush really has exceeding his authority, there is little they can do about it beyond refusing to fund programs — or impeachment.

Specter’s announcement followed a report in the Sunday Globe that Bush has quietly asserted the authority to ignore provisions in 750 bills he has signed — about 1 in 10.

Over the past five years, Bush has stated that he can defy any statute that conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution. In many instances, Bush cited his role as head of the executive branch or as commander in chief to justify the exemption.

On Monday night’s Countdown, Savage explained that often the laws Bush says he can ignore have nothing to do with war or national security, however.

OLBERMANN: With the signing statements or the PATRIOT Act renewal, the ban, military ban on torture, it seemed as if an argument could have been made for preserving the wartime powers of the president. That certainly can be argued. But there was something there to discuss.

But in some of these cases, whistleblower protections, nuclear regulatory officials, and what—the war has nothing to do with that, does it?

SAVAGE: That‘s right, Keith. There‘s the—in the domestic spying program scandal last year, which continues, the torture ban waiver that he asserted, and more recently, the—his assertion that he could ignore the oversight provisions of the PATRIOT Act.

The common theme in all those was, I‘m the commander in chief, we‘re at war. No matter that the Constitution gives all kinds of war-making powers to Congress, really, these laws don‘t apply when we‘re at war, because I have to protect the national security.

But what I found when I went back and read all these documents, which no one has paid attention to in the media or in Congress for the last five years, is that Bush‘s claims that he can ignore and defy laws that he thinks, under his own interpretation of the Constitution, are unconstitutional, has gone well beyond anything to do with national security.

Certainly the military and spy agencies have a lot to do with these laws that he‘s saying he doesn‘t have to obey, but there‘s many others that have to do with giving information to Congress, protecting whistleblowers who want to bring government wrongdoing to the attention of Congress, affirmative action, which has nothing to do with national security at all, or even his own interpretation of his own powers, but rather his interpretation of the, you know, the equal protection clause of the amendment, which is—the Supreme Court has been quite clear about.

Read Glenn Greenwald for more analysis.

When Bush doesn’t like a bill, instead of trying to compromise with Congress, or even veto the bill, he pretends to accept it and then negates the bill behind Congress’s back with a “signing statement.” I wrote about signing statements in more detail, including their use by past presidents, in this post. Bottom line, Bush is claiming power no other president has claimed, including Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War and Franklin Roosevelt during World War II, because he’s a “war president.” Or “the decider.” Or whatever he wants to call himself.

I say this indicates what a piss-poor leader the man is. Exercising power is not the same thing as leadership, as John Gardner argued —

Although leadership and the exercise of power are distinguishable activities, they overlap and interweave in important ways. Consider a corporate chief executive officer who has the gift for inspiring and motivating people, who has vision, who lifts the spirits of employees with a resulting rise in productivity and quality of product, and a drop in turnover and absenteeism. That is leadership. But evidence emerges that the company is falling behind in the technology race. One day with the stroke of a pen the CEO increases the funds available to the research division. That is the exercise of power. The stroke of a pen could have been made by an executive with none of the qualities one associates with leadership.

Seems to me “leadership” involves the free and willing followship of other people. But a dictator is someone who has enough power that he doesn’t have to bother about leading.

Why We Don’t Fight Like We Used To

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In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, writer Shelby Steele wrote an op-ed that is breathlessly, spectacularly stupid even by rightie standards. Truly, the thing should be preserved in formaldehyde and displayed in the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Museum.

Steele has noticed that we don’t fight wars like we used to.

There is something rather odd in the way America has come to fight its wars since World War II.

For one thing, it is now unimaginable that we would use anything approaching the full measure of our military power (the nuclear option aside) in the wars we fight. And this seems only reasonable given the relative weakness of our Third World enemies in Vietnam and in the Middle East. But the fact is that we lost in Vietnam, and today, despite our vast power, we are only slogging along–if admirably–in Iraq against a hit-and-run insurgency that cannot stop us even as we seem unable to stop it. Yet no one–including, very likely, the insurgents themselves–believes that America lacks the raw power to defeat this insurgency if it wants to. So clearly it is America that determines the scale of this war. It is America, in fact, that fights so as to make a little room for an insurgency.

Certainly since Vietnam, America has increasingly practiced a policy of minimalism and restraint in war. And now this unacknowledged policy, which always makes a space for the enemy, has us in another long and rather passionless war against a weak enemy.

So far, so good. But if you haven’t already read Steele’s piece you will never, ever, guess why he thinks we don’t fight wars like we used to. It is, he says, because of white guilt.

No, really. I am not making this up.

White guilt makes our Third World enemies into colored victims, people whose problems–even the tyrannies they live under–were created by the historical disruptions and injustices of the white West. We must “understand” and pity our enemy even as we fight him. …

…Today words like “power” and “victory” are so stigmatized with Western sin that, in many quarters, it is politically incorrect even to utter them. For the West, “might” can never be right. And victory, when won by the West against a Third World enemy, is always oppression. But, in reality, military victory is also the victory of one idea and the defeat of another. Only American victory in Iraq defeats the idea of Islamic extremism. But in today’s atmosphere of Western contrition, it is impolitic to say so.

Whites need to feel better about themselves so that they can resume blasting third world peoples into smithereens for their own good, says Steele, who is an African American writer seriously in need of therapy.

You’ll have to read the piece yourself to experience and appreciate the full-frontal absurdity of it. I’m not going to repeat the entire argument here.

As Glenn Greenwald wrote, righties clasped this piece to their virtual bosoms.

… many pro-war Bush defenders are drooling with reverence and praise, and for some reason, are viewing Steele’s piece as some sort of license to unleash some of the truly ugly impulses which they usually have the decency, or at least political sense, to hide.

This rightie, for example, is going on about “identity narratives” and calls for the defeat of “institutionalized linguistic assumptions,” which, I take it, are what is holding us back from our proper role as world conquerors. It’s way more academic ontological theory than I want to handle before breakfast. Or after breakfast, for that matter.

David Neiwert argues that what the righties are really celebrating is the excuse for racists to enjoy and honor their racism. Digby summarizes:

The argument here is that racism is dead so we needn’t worry about killing, deporting, marginalizing or demonizing “the other.” How convenient for the party that has been exploiting the southern strategy for forty years and finds itself nearly as unpopular as the disgraced president who first embraced it.

Billmon touches on what I want to write about today:

[Steele’s op ed] is, to say the least, a unique argument — one in which standard counterinsurgency warfare tactics (not to mention our president’s liberator fixation) are redefined and then dismissed as the geopolitical equivalent of the VISTA program. It’s the neoconservative take on street crime displaced about 8,000 miles, with Iraqi insurgents filling in for black inner city youth.

I would suggest this is simply Steele’s way of putting the war in a familiar context — that of his pseudo-scientific social theories — rather than any kind of coherent argument about U.S. policy in Iraq. As the saying goes: To a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I suppose it was too much to expect Steele to restrict himself to jabbing his thumb in America’s own racial sores, while leaving the quack theories about Iraq to his ideological comrades-not-in-arms at the American Enterprise Institute.

But as Glenn notes, there is a method to Steele’s madness. His little dissertation isn’t just a Hoover Institute seminar on criminal justice run amok. It’s an ingenious, if muddled, attempt to push the old law-and-order buttons in order to justify a more directly genocidal approach to warfighting. Just as filling prisons with bad guys (or, if your Charles Bronson, gunning them down in the street) is still the conservative answer to crime, massive firepower is still the conservative way to win a guerrilla war. The only problem is that our own bleeding hearts won’t let us do it.

Awhile back I posted an argument that the reason we Americans haven’t had an all-out, whoop-it-up total victory since World War II is that the nature of war itself has changed. And to this post, Mahablog commenter aloysha added:

The nature of war has gradually changed over time. … War between nation-states evolved from mainly being waged between armies, to being Total, involving entire populations. … As military technology evolves over time, it empowers different social organizations. For example, about 500 years ago the invention of the cannon favored a concentration of power, which enabled the rise of the modern nation state. Only a King could afford cannons, thus subduing the armies of smaller competitors, ie warlords. This balance has held pretty much until recently, finding expression in ever more expensive items such as battleships, ICBMs and stealth fighters, which only a large nation state could afford.

In recent times, technology has shifted, to empower decentralized, smaller organizations, ie sects and terrorists, which is the main reason why they have appeared and grown strong. The hatreds and rivalries were always there, it’s just that formerly, technology enabled a strong central state to keep the lid on the rabble.

War used to involve nations fighting over territory. Now our real enemies, the terrorists, are not attached to territory. We used to pound a state until the head of state surrendered. Now, among our decentralized cells of enemies, there’s no one with the authority to surrender. We might be armed with the most powerful, high-tech weapons ever devised by man, but our enemies can effectively strike us with anthrax or a “dirty” nuke in a suitcase or, as on 9/11, a few guys with box cutters. How does a nation-state use conventional warfare to strike at such an enemy? It seems anachronistic and out-of-place, like sending a 19th-century horse cavalry to execute a mounted saber charge against inner-city street gangs.

In Vietnam, the biggest reasons we didn’t apply total war was not “white guilt,” but the Soviet Union and China. Johnson and then Nixon tried to fight a “middle way” war that would be tough enough to subdue North Vietnam but not so tough as to draw other superpowers into the conflict against us.

And then there was the simple contradiction summed up in the phrase “We had to destroy the village to save it.” We could have won a military victory in Vietnam, yes, just like we could win a military victory in Iraq if we pull out all the stops. But we would have to destroy cities, villages, populations, pretty much the whole country, to do so. Few would be left alive to appreciate the peace and freedom purchased by war on their behalf. Such a victory would not defeat Islamic extremism, as Steele argues; it would inflame it.

We’re trying to apply war in a surgical way — cutting out only our enemies — and we don’t seem to have figured out how to do that without killing the patient we say we want to save.

It might be argued that we’ve been weakened by our own military strength; we’re an armored knight prepared to slay dragons but besieged by stinging ants.

Donald Rumsfeld, I suspect, recognized this historical shift in the nature of war. In 2001 he took on his role as Secretary of Defense with the notion to transform the military to prepare it for “irregular” or “asymmetric” warfare, meaning wars against enemies that are not nation-states. Rummy was thinking smaller, lighter, faster; he was thinking special ops and high tech. And that made some sense. But Rummy botched the job, in part because his own vision hadn’t evolved enough.

David Von Drehle argued that Rummy’s plans were defeated by the “old ‘iron triangle’ of contractors, Congress and the brass.” Williams Lind argued recently,

While Rumsfeldian “Transformation” represents change, it represents change in the wrong direction. Instead of attempting to move from the Second Generation to the Third (much less the Fourth), Transformation retains the Second Generation’s conception of war as putting firepower on targets while trying to replace people with technology. Its summa is the Death Star, where men and women in spiffy uniforms sit in air-conditioned comfort zapping enemies like bugs. It is a vision of future war that appeals to technocrats and lines industry pockets, but has no connection to reality. The combination of this vision of war with an equally unrealistic vision of strategic objectives has given us the defeat in Iraq.

Go here for more on “Fourth Generation” war. Essentially Lind is calling on rethinking war at all levels; “not merely how war is fought, but who fights and what they fight for.” I cannot say if Lind knows what he’s talking about or not, but it’s evident to me that such rethinking is necessary. And for a lot of reasons we don’t seem to be able to do that. The President claims that everything changed after 9/11, yet he keeps trying to compare our current conflict, whatever it is, to World War II. He’s still sinking money into the bleeping “star wars” missile defense shield, for pity’s sake, while leaving ports and chemical plants unguarded. The contractors and lobbyists and generals still want their big boats and guns and planes.

And the war hawks are not only incapable of grasping that our military tactics and goals need serious updating; they want to retreat to the glory days of General Funston in the Philippines.

Colonel Frederick Funston boasted he would ‘rawhide these bullet-headed Asians until they yell for mercy’ so they would not ‘get in the way of the bandwagon of Anglo-Saxon progress and decency.’ The United States did in the Philippines precisely what it had condemned Spain for doing in Cuba. Soon stories of concentration camps and ‘water-cures’ began to trickle back to the United States …Mark Twain … suggested that Old Glory should now have ‘the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross bones.’ [S.E. Morison, H.S. Commager, W.E. Leuchtenburg, A Concise History of the American Republic. Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 490]

Shelby Steele may be eager to take up the White Man’s Burden, but I think we’d be better advised to let it go.

Too Pathetic

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Following up the story by David Schuster blogged about yesterday — righties have declared David Schuster is lying. And how do they know? Because he contradicts stuff said awhile back by (get this) Andrea Mitchell and Bob Woodward.

In other words, this reporter must be lying, because that reporter (in Woodward’s case, someone entangled in the mess more than he’d like to admit; in Mitchell’s case, someone with a well-established track record of scrambling facts) said something else.

What can one say but — holy bleep.

Ugliest post I’ve seen so far comes from this guy, who clearly doesn’t understand that Plame-Wilson was in operations, not analysis. And some of the comments are even uglier. In their sick, twisted little world, Plame-Wilson is the traitor because … well, because. She must have done something wrong. Why wasn’t she home with her twins?

Glenn Greenwald does the heavy lifting and addresses the Kool-Aiders. I don’t have the energy for it right now.

Coming to America

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I have a confession to make. Most of my ancestors came to America undocumented. They were without passports or even a green card, and they didn’t go through immigration processing.

That’s because most of ’em got here in the 18th century.

The ones we can document, anyway. Tracing the family tree backward through the generations, one sometimes hits a dead end. We’ll learn that William married Amanda in some Appalachian holler during the Andy Jackson administration but find no clue where Amanda came from or how long she and her folks had been here. My family were not exactly, um, aristocrats, so record-keeping was haphazard. But I do know that one branch can be traced back to some of the original Pennsylvania Dutch, arriving ca. 1710. Two of my great-times-four grandfathers fought in the Revolution. Generations of my foremothers bounced west on buckboards, gave birth in long cabins, and dug gardens in the virgin wilderness.

The latecomers included my mother’s mother’s grandparents, who arrived from Ireland shortly after the Civil War. And the absolute last guy off the boat was my father’s father’s father, William Thomas of Dwygyfylchi, Wales, who arrived ca. 1885. He married Minnie King, whose father Fielding King had marched through Georgia with General Sherman in a Missouri infantry volunteer regiment. We haven’t traced the generations of Kings back very far, however, so we have no idea when they came to America.

Anyway, this means none of them went through Ellis Island, which didn’t open for business until 1892. A few years ago, when Ellis Island became a national monument, the feds ran print ads with historic photos of Ellis Island immigrants. The captions claimed that the Ellis Island people “built America,” which pissed me off because that wasn’t true. By 1892 all of our major cities were already established; the intercontinental railroad was completed and running; the Midwestern fields cleared from the wilderness by my ancestors were well-tilled and filled with rows of corn. The Ellis Island people just filled the place in some, as far as I was concerned.

Well, OK, they filled it in a lot. Fifteen million immigrants arrived in America between 1890 and the outbreak of World War I in 1914. Earlier waves of immigrants had mostly come for the virtually free farmland, and they fanned out across the prairies and plains. But a large part of the fifteen million remained in cities and took factory jobs. They brought with them talent and industriousness but also crime and poverty and other problems that overwhelmed the cities. This in turn brought about a growth in government and a shifting of government programs from local to state to federal. For example, beginning in the 1910s the states, and eventually the feds, established “welfare” programs to relieve the destitution of immigrants; in earlier times, destitution had been dealt with by local “poor laws.”

Eventually they and their descendants assimilated to America, but it’s equally true that America assimilated to them. This is a very different country, physically and culturally, than it would have been had immigration been cut off in, say, 1886. The newcomers had not shared the experience of carving a nation out of the wilderness and fighting the Civil War. For a people often discriminated against, the Ellis Island-era immigrants were remarkably intolerant of African Americans and shut them out of the labor unions, making black poverty worse. And early state and federal welfare programs provided services only to whites. Immigrants literally took bread out of the mouths of the freedmen and their descendants, exacerbating racial economic disparities that we’re still struggling with today.

Much of American culture as it existed in the 1880s — the music, the folk tales, the way foods were cooked — was washed away in the flood of immigration and survived only in isolated places like rural Kentucky, where the descendants of colonial indentured servants still pretty much had the place to themselves. Here in the greater New York City area I am often dismayed at how much people don’t know about their own country. There are second- and third-generation Americans here who don’t know what a fruit cobbler is, for example. And as for knowing the words to “My Darling Clementine” or “Old Dan Tucker” — fuhgeddaboudit.

On the other hand, there are bagels. It’s a trade-off, I suppose.

I bring this up by way of explaining why I am bemused by some of the negative reactions to yesterday’s immigrant demonstrations. Yes, I realize there’s a distinction between legal and illegal immigrants nowadays. There is reason to be concerned about large numbers of unskilled workers flooding the job market and driving down wages — we learned a century ago that can be a problem. But the knee-jerk antipathy to all things Latino — often coming from newbies (to me, if you’re less than three generations into America, you’re a newbie) who aren’t fully assimilated themselves — is too pathetic. They’re worried about big waves of immigrants changing American culture? As we’d say back home in the Ozarks, ain’t no use closin’ the barn door now. Them cows is gone.

(I can’t tell you how much I’d love to confront Little Lulu and say, “Lordy, child, when did they let you in?”)

Near where my daughter lives in Manhattan there’s a church that was built by Irish immigrants. It is topped by a lovely Celtic cross. Now the parishioners are mostly Dominican. In forty years, if it’s still standing, maybe the priests will be saying masses in Cilubà, or Mandarin, or Quechuan. Stuff changes. That’s how the world is. That’s how America is, and how it always has been. Somehow, we all think that the “real” America is the one that existed when our ancestors got off the boat. That means your “real” America may be way different from mine. Fact is, if we could reconstitute Daniel Boone and show him around, he wouldn’t recognize this country at all. I think they had apple pie in his day, but much of traditional American culture — baseball, jazz, barbecue, John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever” — didn’t exist in Daniel Boone’s “real” America.

Latinos, of course, already are American, and in large parts of the U.S. Latino culture had taken root before the Anglos showed up. This makes anti-Latino hysteria particularly absurd, because Latino culture is not new; it’s already part of our national cultural tapestry. And who the bleep cares if someone sings the national anthem in Spanish? As Thomas Jefferson said in a different context, it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. I’m sure the anthem has been sung in many languages over the years, because the U.S. has always been a multilingual nation. Along with the several native languages, a big chunk of the 19th-century European farmers who fanned out across the prairies and plains lived in communities of people from the same country-of-origin so they didn’t have to bother to learn English. And many of them never did. It’s a fact that in the 19th century, in many parts of the U.S., German was more commonly spoken than English.

Yes, maybe someday America will be an officially bilingual nation, and maybe someday flan will replace apple pie. Flan is good, and there are many multilingual nations that somehow manage to make it work — India, China, Belgium, and Switzerland come to mind. Even much of my great-grandpa’s native Wales stubbornly persists in speaking Welsh. Multilingualism doesn’t have to be divisive unless bigotry makes it so.

What’s essential to the real America — our love of liberty — is the only constant. And, frankly, it’s not illegal immigrants who are a threat to liberty.