Wash Your Bowl

Junk food corrupts absolutely

2006-02-27T14:20:00.000-05:00

Is this due to the seductive power of Doritos?

TOPPLED Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein has ended his hunger strike on health grounds.

The former dictator began his hunger strike earlier this month to protest against the conduct of his trial.

His chief lawyer Khalil Dulaimi, who met Saddam for seven hours in Baghdad yesterday, said: "The president maintained his hunger strike for 11 days but was forced to end it for health reasons."

He's certainly good at table-thumping, but not so convincing when it comes to matters of principle.

Once and future secrets

2006-02-21T20:47:00.000-05:00

The U.S. government is reclassifying archived documents that it previously declassified, which puts anyone who copied the documents in potential legal jeopardy:

Mr. Aid said he believed that because of the reclassification program, some of the contents of his 22 file cabinets might technically place him in violation of the Espionage Act, a circumstance that could be shared by scores of other historians. But no effort has been made to retrieve copies of reclassified documents, and it is not clear how they all could even be located.

"It doesn't make sense to create a category of documents that are classified but that everyone already has," said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel of the National Security Archive, a research group at George Washington University. "These documents were on open shelves for years."

No, it doesn't, but you've got to give them credit for chutzpah.

Although this smacks more of mid-level cubicle-dwellers in the CIA and other agencies needing something to show for the thankless assignment they were given. As the piece notes, it's logistically problematic to retrieve the unsecret copies that are floating around out there - all the more so now that some of the documents have been conveniently digitized by GWU's National Security Archive. The situation presents certain epistemological problems. If someone possesses public knowledge, and a veil of secrecy descends over it, what is the nature of the knowledge? You get into a Rumsfeld-type regression of "known knowns" and "unknown unknowns."

Out there

2006-02-20T10:40:00.000-05:00

Isn’t Johnny Weir’s coyness about his sexual orientation the smart PR move? It's driving his media coverage. Multiple outlets are profiling him, leaving the question open while furiously telegraphing their answer in code (But isn’t "flamboyant" more than just code in this case? He really is flamboyant in the both the classic and the modern campy-kitschy-gay sense of the word.).

Now media graybeards have started debating about whether it’s OK to ask him whether he’s gay:

"The first question is: What's the journalistic purpose of reporting someone's sexual orientation, especially against that person's will -- why does it matter?" says Roy Peter Clark, a senior scholar and media ethicist at the Poynter Institute, a leading journalism research group. "I think the answer has to be more than, 'It's just interesting.' A news organization that publishes very private information like that, even about public figures, has a responsibility to be transparent about their news judgment."

This is faintly ridiculous. Maybe – maybe – it applies to someone in politics or the business world, where there is a clearer distinction between the job and private life, and that wall remains more or less intact. But Weir is a figure skater and celebrity. Self-expression is his job, and “gay” refers not only sexual preference but to identity. Weir has chosen to hype his own personality quirks, and is evidently enjoying this immensely. It’s also entirely to his advantage to be asked about sexual orientation, and to be coy about it. If he denied it, it would look like he was lying or in denial. If he said he was gay, the story would be over.

Illegible

2006-02-17T21:50:00.000-05:00

Jay Rosen elaborates on the meaning of Quailgate, noting that the White House, partly at Dick Cheney’s instigation, has systematically marginalized the national media and particularly the White House press corps. Given that the WHPC does have more than its share of prima donnas, who appear obnoxious even when they are actually acting in the nation’s best interest, there is no political downside to dissing them, as there once was. Quite the opposite:

The public visibility of the presidency itself is under revision … More of it lies in shadow all the time. Non-communication has become the standard procedure, not a breakdown in practice but the essence of it. What Dan Froomkin calls the Bush Bubble is designed to keep more of the world out. Cheney himself is almost a shadow figure in the executive branch. His whereabouts are often not known. With these changes, executive power has grown more illegible under Bush the Younger— a sign of the times in Washington.
…
Cheney has long held the view that the powers of the presidency were dangerously eroded in the 1970s and 80s. The executive “lost” perogatives it needed to gain back for the global struggle with Islamic terror. “Watergate and a lot of the things around Watergate and Vietnam both during the 70’s served, I think, to erode the authority I think the president needs to be effective, especially in the national security area,” he said in December.

Some of that space was lost to the news media, and its demand to be informed about all aspects of the presidency, plus its sense of entitlement to the star interlocutor’s role. Cheney opposes all that, whereas Fitzwater accepted most of it. That’s why Fitz is appalled and Cheney is rather pleased with himself.The people yelling questions at Scott McClellan in the briefing room, like the reporters in the Washington bureaus who cover the president, are in Cheney’s calculations neither a necessary evil, nor a public good. They are an unnecessary evil and a public bad— ex-influentials who can be disrespected without penalty.

Where is all of this going? Is the MSM on a trajectory toward complete irrelevance, to replaced by Fox News and right-wing bloggers as the conduit for political news? To the extent the media’s current problems are the result of multiplying competition and declining audiences, perhaps. But the Bush/Cheney pushback may end up being short-lived, as the White House’s treatment of the media depends entirely on the occupant of the White House. If John McCain is elected, for instance, things will change – at least until the media inevitably turns on him. If a Democrat is elected (s)he will not be able to turn to the phalanx of puffed-up talk-show hosts and other right-wing news outlets Bush/Cheney use to get their story out.

But having been shut down so effectively during the Bush years, the White House press corps will probably never regain the privileges or respect it once got from the institution it covers.

Cheney and Britney

2006-02-17T09:57:00.000-05:00

So Cheney had it both ways: He yielded to the public obligation to provide an explanation for shooting a man, while at the same time flipping the bird (as it were) to the media.

Now, according to the Hotline, the Cheney vs. Media conflict is escalating:

We hear that major television networks and some print entities are trying to figure out a way to follow the Vice President during his weekend sojourns.

Typically, Cheney is unmolested by the media on weekends. No one, aside from a protestor or two, stakes out the Naval Observatory in DC and his staff keeps his schedule closely held.

The President, by contrast, almost always has a full protective pool of print and television reporters accompanying him -- even when he attends completely private events, such as a fundraising reception at the home of Sen. Maj. Leader Bill Frist last week, or one of his impromptu outings to a favorite Tex-Mex joint in Cleveland Park.

But when Cheney wants to get out of town, he can come and go as he pleases. Major media organizations have tried to keep track of Cheney informally but have had little success. (The last time the media camped out on Mass. Ave was during the '00 recount -- when Gore was in office.)
So the networks are thinking about establishing an informal pool to stake out the Naval Observatory and to exchange, on a limited basis, editorial information to facilitate that pool.

Print outlets will also ramp up their coverage.

This is either harrassment or the plot of a bad sitcom. But these private trips are sometimes newsworthy even when no one gets shot. Cheney is arguably as powerful as the president, yet operates almost completely out of public view. It's a shame that it's come to this. There ought to be some basic understanding between the media and the White House that would allow a basic flow of information. The coverage needn't be intrusive. It helps no one, especially Cheney, when the media resort to paparazzi antics. This is getting into Britney Spears territory. Is a Sean Penn moment that far away?

Meanwhile, a TPM reader raises a good question:

Here's a painfully obvious observation. Untold millions of tax dollars are spent on secret service agents and what-not, and the veep is prancing around the wilds with a bunch of other men of a certain age, all carrying GUNS? Let's assume that there isn't anything particularly different about Mr. Cheney that would cause him to make this kind of mistake, which then means that any of his hunting buddies could have been the one to go oops, and he could have been on the business end of the fire-stick. Boom! What were they thinking?

The Secret Service must be thinking hard about what happened. Between his minders there and the media, Cheney will likely end up paying for the shooting mishap with some of his freedom of movement.

Cheney, Miss Manners and Watergate

2006-02-15T09:25:00.000-05:00

Official Washington is amazed at the vice president's unwillingness to make any sort of public explanation or statement of contrition about shooting a man:

"I cannot believe he does not look back and say this should have been handled differently," said Vin Weber, a former Republican congressman from Minnesota who is close to the White House. Weber said Cheney "made it a much bigger issue than it needed to be."

Marlin Fitzwater, a former Republican White House spokesman, told Editor & Publisher magazine that Cheney "ignored his responsibility to the American people."

These criticisms reflect a certain post-Watergate, information-age etiquette. If Cheney followed the commonly-accepted rules for vice presidents-who-shoot-people, he would have promptly disclosed the incident, then come out before the cameras, said he's sorry and wished his friend a speedy recovery. Then the media and the public would, as they say, get closure and move on.

The etiquette presupposes a certain compact between public officials, the media and the public. It's often silly, but it until recently it worked reasonably well. It's predictable (public officials will screw up in spectacular and unexpected ways, necessitating explanation and contrition that go beyond mere spin – for example, when Reagan admitted trading arms for hostages). It gives public a brief glimpse past the carefully-buffed image. If done right, it lets officials get on with actually governing. Even Bush has (reluctantly) observed these rituals from time to time.

But Cheney is out to destroy the post-Watergate consensus in its various forms, from the commonly-accepted definition of the separation of powers on down. He rejects this etiquette and the compact that underlies it. Cheney despises the media. His attitude toward the public is obscure: Paternalistic? Contemptuous? Oblivious? In any case, he simply doesn’t care to observe this ritual, no matter how useful it might be. That is part and parcel of his overall aim to degrade the basic machinery of accountability that has emerged over the past 30 years.

He would care if this made any difference in terms of his ability to wield political power. That depends solely on the president, and how much he values the basic civility that the etiquette embodies.

Surely the words "Dan Quayle" can be worked into this somehow

2006-02-14T10:02:00.002-05:00

Rob Corddry: Jon, tonight the vice president is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington. According to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush. And while the quail turned out to be a 78-year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face. He believes the world is a better place for his spreading buckshot throughout the entire region of Mr. Whittington's face.

Jon Stewart: But why, Rob? If he had known Mr. Whittington was not a bird, why would he still have shot him?

Corddry: Jon, in a post-9-11 world, the American people expect their leaders to be decisive. To not have shot his friend in the face would have sent a message to the quail that America is weak.

Stewart: That's horrible.

Corddry: Look, the mere fact that we're even talking about how the vice president drives up with his rich friends in cars to shoot farm-raised wingless quail-tards is letting the quail know "how" we're hunting them. I'm sure right now those birds are laughing at us in that little "covey" of theirs.

Stewart: I'm not sure birds can laugh, Rob.

Corddry: Well, whatever it is they do -- coo -- they're cooing at us right now, Jon, because here we are talking openly about our plans to hunt them. Jig is up. Quails one, America zero.

At some point, the veep will come out and make an apologetic statement topped off with a self-deprecating joke (he is capable of this when politics demands it, the past 48 hours notwithstanding), and this will be over. At least until then, it will be highly amusing and emblematic in that Carter vs. killer rabbit kind of way.

Will this herald a new era of liberal dominance by helping America wake up at last? Nah.

The coma patient was listed in "very relaxed" condition

2006-02-13T10:19:00.000-05:00

Dick Cheney's hunting accident saga has apparently occasioned the invention of new hospital terminology for describing a patient's condition:

The hospital listed Whittington's condition as "very stable."

No doubt the "very" is intended to be reassuring, but the effect is just the opposite. It sounds like they're trying a little too hard to be reassuring, and something may be wrong. Do we really need spin in this situation?

"Stable" itself is a word that obscures more than it reveals:

The term “stable” is not particularly helpful and its use is specifically discouraged by the American Hospital Association. The problem with “stable” is that it simply means that a person’s condition is not changing: One person could be terribly ill and another ready to go home, and both are “stable.”

"The rage-based reverence for The President as Commander-in-Chief--and the creepy, blind faith vested in his goodness--is not a movement I recognize"

2006-02-12T22:55:00.000-05:00

Here's a conservative's extraordinary attack on the pro-Bush right, especially the right-blogosphere:

As much as any policy prescriptions, conservatism has always been based, more than anything else, on a fundamental distrust of the power of the federal government and a corresponding belief that that power ought to be as restrained as possible, particularly when it comes to its application by the Government to American citizens. It was that deeply rooted distrust that led to conservatives’ vigorous advocacy of states’ rights over centralized power in the federal government, accompanied by demands that the intrusion of the Federal Government in the lives of American citizens be minimized.

Is there anything more antithetical to that ethos than the rabid, power-hungry appetites of Bush followers? There is not an iota of distrust of the Federal Government among them. Quite the contrary. Whereas distrust of the government was quite recently a hallmark of conservatism, expressing distrust of George Bush and the expansive governmental powers he is pursuing subjects one to accusations of being a leftist, subversive loon.

Indeed, as many Bush followers themselves admit, the central belief of the Bush follower's "conservatism" is no longer one that ascribes to a limited federal government -- but is precisely that there ought to be no limits on the powers claimed by Bush precisely because we trust him, and we trust in him absolutely. He wants to protect us and do good. He is not our enemy but our protector. And there is no reason to entertain suspicions or distrust of him or his motives because he is Good.

We need no oversight of the Federal Government’s eavesdropping powers because we trust Bush to eavesdrop in secret for the Good. We need no judicial review of Bush’s decrees regarding who is an "enemy combatant" and who can be detained indefinitely with no due process because we trust Bush to know who is bad and who deserves this. We need no restraints from Congress on Bush’s ability to exercise war powers, even against American citizens on U.S. soil, because we trust Bush to exercise these powers for our own good.

The blind faith placed in the Federal Government, and particularly in our Commander-in-Chief, by the contemporary "conservative" is the very opposite of all that which conservatism has stood for for the last four decades. The anti-government ethos espoused by Barry Goldwater and even Ronald Reagan is wholly unrecognizable in Bush followers, who – at least thus far – have discovered no limits on the powers that ought to be vested in George Bush to enable him to do good on behalf of all of us.

And in that regard, people like Michelle Malkin, John Hinderaker, Jonah Goldberg and Hugh Hewitt are not conservatives. They are authoritarian cultists. Their allegiance is not to any principles of government but to strong authority through a single leader.

As they say, read the whole thing. It captures something important about the present political moment and the degree to which it's dominated by emotion: the gut feeling that your guy's right and the other guy's wrong - facts be damned. Truthiness ascendant.

The idea of Bush as a resolute and "good" leader (a notion made addictive by its marriage to raw power) dominates the conservative movement. Its crude simplicity shuts down useful political debate. It's corroding conservatism and all of American politics. What will happen when Bush leaves the scene?

Dude, get over it

2006-02-12T21:30:00.000-05:00

Jim Brady, the washingtonpost.com editor who famously suspended blog comments after ombudsman Deborah Howell's Abramoff mistake, has a long piece today that says, basically: Dammit, those horrible Internet people insulted me and I didn't like it one bit:

I am a twit without a functioning brain.

I also do not have any [ censored ].

Despite 10 years spent in online media, I really don't understand the Internet.

I am a dangerous ideologue , an enemy of democracy .
...
My career as a nitwitted, emasculated fascist began the afternoon of Jan. 19 ...
...
...the word "comments" doesn't convey the obscene, vituperative tone of a lot of the postings, which were the sort of things you might find carved on the door of a public toilet stall. About a hundred of them had to be removed for violating the Post site's standards, which don't allow profanity or personal attacks.
...
Instead of mollifying angry readers, the clarification prompted more than 400 additional comments over the next five hours, many of them so crude as to be unprintable in a family newspaper.
...
I was honored as "Wanker of the Day" on one left-wing blog. Another site dissected my biography in order to prove that I was part of The Post's vast right-wing conspiracy.
...
Out in the Web woodshed, a handful of bloggers called me gutless or a puppet; some of them compared me to assorted body parts and characterized me as the worst person to come along since, well, Deborah Howell. And any nasty posts I didn't see myself, my friends gleefully provided to me via e-mail. A few friends said they came close to jumping online to defend me, but chose not to for fear they'd be next in line for a public flogging.

...One of the complaints about my manners closed by telling me to go do something unprintable with myself "and that Wa:Po rag you ride about town." Uh, thanks.

OK, we get the picture! It's rough out there. Everybody should be nicer. Flaming vituperation is inimical to intelligent debate, etc. etc. Anyone who has spent 10 minutes on the web anytime in the past decade knows this already. Brady is the editor of one of the world's more influential and sophisticated media websites. He should develop a thicker skin.

He continues:

This all raises a question: Why are people so angry? It was a mistake, it was corrected. Part of the explanation may be the extremely partisan times we live in. For all the good things it has brought our society, the Web has also fostered ideological hermits, who only talk to folks who believe exactly what they do. This creates an echo chamber that only further convinces people that they are right, and everyone else is not only wrong, but an idiot or worse. So when an incident like this one arises, it's not enough to point out an error; they must prove that the error had nefarious origins. In some places on the Web, everything happens on a grassy knoll.

This is a pretty thin gruel, especially from someone sitting at the nexus of the Internet, the mainstream media and national politics. People are not "so angry" because they live in an echo chamber -- though that certainly helps. The anger emanates from a genuine sense of grievance and betrayal on both sides of the ideological divide. The right believes that MSM outlets like the Post are repositories of liberal bias, condescending to and culturally incompatible with large swaths of the population. The left believes the Bush administration and right-wing media have manipulated and cowed the MSM by using its own rules against it. Neither of these beliefs explains everything, but both have the ring of truth. Which is why the MSM are being whipsawed every day out there.

Afterward, he was greeted as a liberator

2006-02-12T17:23:00.000-05:00

Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and injured a man during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, his spokeswoman said Sunday.

Harry Whittington, 78, was "alert and doing fine" after Cheney sprayed him with shotgun pellets on Saturday while the two were hunting at the Armstrong Ranch in south Texas, said property owner Katharine Armstrong.

Armstrong said Whittington was mostly injured on his right side, with the pellets hitting his cheek, neck and chest, and was taken to the hospital by ambulance.

Political funerals

2006-02-11T12:36:00.000-05:00

Enough already with the debate over Coretta Scott King’s funeral. Martin Luther King was a minister and the leader of a movement and the two roles were inextricable. A funeral that tiptoed around today's sharp political divisions would have been surprising, even inappropriate. It would have been a sign that the Kings’ struggles really are ancient history when they are not. It’s become de rigeur for Republican presidents to embrace the King legacy, and it’s nice that we all agree now, at least symbolically. But there is an element of opportunism to it, and M.L. King would have understood but perhaps not fully welcomed the embrace, given how much it papers over.

So when Joseph Lowery denounces the Iraq war, well, he’s just doing his thing. It’s hard to believe the Kings would have wanted him to remain silent on the issue. Jimmy Carter’s digs, meanwhile, were not frontal attacks:

The efforts of Martin and Coretta have changed America, they were not appreciated even at the highest level of government. It was difficult for them personally -- with the civil liberties of both husband and wife violated as they became the target of secret government wiretapping, other surveillance and as you know, harassment from the FBI.
….
This commemorative ceremony this morning and this afternoon is not only to acknowledge the great contributions of Coretta and Martin, but to remind us that the struggle for equal rights is not over. We only have to recall the color of the faces of those in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi, those who were most devastated by Katrina to know that they are not yet equal opportunities for all Americans.

These are, well, facts. The Kings were wiretapped and harassed. Katrina did show that equal opportunity is still a long way off. If merely alluding to these things is embarrassing to Bush, maybe that's because he should be embarrassed.

Still missing

2006-02-08T10:04:00.000-05:00

Christian Science Monitor Jill Carroll has been held hostage in Iraq for one month. She has all but dropped out of the news here. Elsewhere, people are rallying to support her:

In Europe, meanwhile, Carroll's plight has been gaining attention in recent days. First, a large poster of Carroll's photo has been hung outside the city hall in Rome, where it will reportedly remain until she is found. Today, a demonstration in Paris urged support for Carroll's eventual release.

Actress Juliette Binoche and former French hostage Florence Aubenas were involved in the Paris event, according to Reporters Without Borders, which staged the demonstration to mark the one-month anniversary of Carroll's abduction.

The group released 30 white balloons from the human rights esplanade at Trocadero, overlooking the River Seine, to mark each of Carroll's 30 days in captivity, according to the organization's Web site. Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Robert Ménard told the group that it was "essential to demonstrate." "Thirty-seven journalists have been kidnapped since the start of the war in Iraq in March 2003," he added. "Five of them losing their lives."

Why do Europeans care more about this than Americans do?

Go Aggies

2006-02-08T09:42:00.000-05:00

Youthful political hack George Deutsch has been forced out of NASA's public affairs office after tut-tutting scientists about ignoring intelligent design in references to the Big Bang. Turns out he didn't graduate from Texas A&M as he had claimed. Great that he's out of there, though he is just a symptom of a broader problem within NASA and the government.

Sadly, this will be the best thing that ever happened to Deutsch. There is no such thing as bad publicity in the culture wars. He is now a hero of the religious right, and has a bright future in GOP advocacy. We'll be hearing more from him in the near future.

Brokeback

2006-02-05T22:44:00.000-05:00

Is Hollywood too far to the left? Maybe. But the debate over Brokeback Mountain is tedious. I haven’t seen it (as a general rule, I don’t go to movies to watch people get their hearts broken) but by all accounts it’s good. The political content isn't in the story but in the fact that it exists as a film aimed at a mass market. But inasmuch as it is a modest commercial success, then that takes some of the political edge off, no? The real story not that some barrier has been traversed, or that people are flocking to catch some kind of cultural wave and flip the bird at Karl Rove (as Frank Rich proclaimed) but that it's an arty movie doing pretty well at the box office. Unusual, but it happens.

On the liberal issue, Matthew Yglesias notes that the demographic Hollywood aims at (urban, young) is itself pretty liberal, so it’s not surprising the content skews that way. But there is a more fundamental issue: Liberals are better at strumming the heartstrings than conservatives. The most common Hollywood story arc is that of an underdog combating and ultimately triumphing over oppressive forces (cruel or clueless parents, school cliques, evil empires, robot overlords, etc.). This formula encompasses an impressively wide range of stories and themes, few of them political. But it is also basically the same, romanticized way liberals view themselves – in a noble struggle to build a better society and achieve justice. By contrast, there is no similar, universally compelling conservative storyline. The hectoring triumphalism and exaggerated piety that run through modern conservatism (think Sean Hannity or Lee Greenwood) don't make for great storytelling. “Conservative” story lines tend to come out overtly political or clichéd and sentimental. Which is why Rupert Murdoch hasn't sent Roger Ailes to Hollywood - at least not yet.

Absence of Prudence

2006-02-05T18:11:00.000-05:00

This is very parochial, concerning a tiny universe of writers and intellectuals. But it's noteworthy for the way it revels in the public airing of petty grudges. Nay, it doesn't revel - it gambols, aiming to make its targets look condescending, stupid and cheap.

...And Jacob Weisberg, whose name does not appear below and who was for many years a staff writer and an editor at The New Republic. He now runs Slate, apparently unpleasantly enough for a few first-rate staffers to have already departed to Yahoo!, with perhaps a few more highly valued staff thinking about it.

In an age when ironic snark and the angry broadside are the rhetorical poses of choice, this is interesting for its incestuous bitchiness toward former colleagues, its use of the shiv rather than the bazooka. (Maybe shiv is the wrong word. It implies subtlety, in short supply here. Serrated knife? Blunderbuss?) We want to know more - what scores are putatively being settled here?

Fatwa

2006-02-04T21:53:00.000-05:00

Just as the Hamas election victory was, the distressing cartoon protests (an odd phrase, suggesting the Justice League or Looney Toons on strike) in Europe and elsewhere is a clarifying moment for Islam and the West. There are bright lines being drawn now that will certainly cause their share of pain, but may (years from now) nudge history forward and away from broken records of Muslim grievance and the West's post-colonial guilt and ambivalence.

Mockery that offends religious sensibilities may seem like one of the more frivolous on the list of freedoms we enjoy. But it's important. If some forms of mockery are truly beyond the pale, then people can reject and ignore them. But if the debate and discussion, however crass, are silenced by the threat of violence then the game's up. Where group grievances rule, cynicism flourishes. The public discourse descends into mushy relativism, a competition to see who's been wronged the most, not who's right.

It's not surprising the U.S. government is behaving in a craven fashion and the American media are taking a pass on this one - it's one of those can't-win-either-way situations. But as Christopher Hitchens points out, it's not particularly encouraging:

The question of "offensiveness" is easy to decide. First: Suppose that we all agreed to comport ourselves in order to avoid offending the believers? How could we ever be sure that we had taken enough precautions? On Saturday, I appeared on CNN, which was so terrified of reprisal that it "pixilated" the very cartoons that its viewers needed to see. And this ignoble fear in Atlanta, Ga., arose because of an illustration in a small Scandinavian newspaper of which nobody had ever heard before! Is it not clear, then, that those who are determined to be "offended" will discover a provocation somewhere? We cannot possibly adjust enough to please the fanatics, and it is degrading to make the attempt.

Strange attractors

2006-02-03T10:27:00.000-05:00

Mickey Kaus has a point. It's a minor and somewhat maddening point, to be sure: How is it that one WPost employee (Tony Kornheiser) taking money from the Redskins is a conflict, when another (Howard Kurtz) taking money from CNN is not?

I have no idea. But the question does illustrate the fractal-like nature of the media business these days. Web and cable are proliferating. People are selling themselves across different platforms, spreading their memes where they may. You get conflicts nestling within conflicts.

With the media's credibility under siege, every conflict of interest, every small taint of bias must be exposed and expunged, from within or without. The media police -- bloggers, ombudsmen, and journalists like Kurtz -- are expanding their reach and power. The ombudsmen are themselves being ombudded. Nobody's above it all anymore. That's great, even if it's making some media outlets skittish and bureaucratic. What's bad is that few media types, including the mainstream critics like Kurtz with pretenses to traditional objectivity, have figured out how to maneuver through this quicksilver landscape. If they're top of the world one minute, they may be felled by a viral meme the next.

A God in Colchester

2006-01-31T09:48:00.000-05:00

Did we really need this?

Bush Highly Revered in Utah
Support for the president continues to be nearly unanimous in the tiny town of Randolph.

It's an amusing headline, recalling conquered barbarians worshipping distant Roman emperors as gods. The story, alas, is a mass of faux-anthropological cliches. The residents of ultra-red Randolph, in northern Utah, regard dijon mustard with suspicion. Evoking James Watt, the county is proud of its one Catholic, one Mexican (married to the Catholic), and the pair of African-American twins on the cheerleading squad. Residents have none of the problems afflicting the rest of America (Iraq casualties, homeless people, hurricanes, etc.) and thus no clue about what is going on anywhere else in the nation or world. A political analyst (another journalistic stock character) attributes their avid support for Bush to a lack of cynicism. David Finkel (who did similar portraits of Red and Blue communities before the 2004 election) implies that, like the president they revere, these people are living in a fantasy.

Perhaps they are. But this article tells us more about the Washington Post than Utah. Randolph and its inhabitants are rendered via typical elite media formulas: at best, they are salt-of-the-earth innocents, at worst, rubes. Part of this was doubtless a function of time - Finkel probably had very little of it, making it difficult to get a three dimensional portrait. With more time, perhaps he could have discovered hints of doubt or disquiet under the relentless cheeriness, or plumbed the sources of the town's ideological lockstep in people's lives and experiences. But he didn't, and you don't get the sense that insights were what the Post was after here.

Colbert and God

2006-01-28T15:51:00.000-05:00

Here is a fascinating post on Stephen Colbert and the dissonance, or tension, or convergence, between comedy and religion (not Pat Robertson, that is, or the one about the Pope, the Rabbi, and Bill Clinton in a rowboat, but the way in which a religious sensibility may influence comedy):

Speaking of Colbert and religion: Did you see his show on Thursday, with Paul Begala as the guest? Begala is going on about how he needed to teach Bill Clinton how to get his ideas across in short, simple form for the news. Begala describes how he made his point to Bill Clinton, who was bellyaching about how his wonky policies couldn't be condensed into sound bites. Begala reached in his back pocket and pulled out a copy of the New Testament that he's been carrying since 1979. At this point on the show, Begala actually pulls out the tattered, taped-together book and says he highlighted John 3:16 and handed it to Clinton. Begala hands the opened book to Colbert, points to the verse, tells Colbert to read it, and says he's going to time him to prove -- as he proved to Clinton -- how much can be said in 5 seconds. Colbert takes a slight glance at the book, flips it shut, looks straight at Begala and says, "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that those who believe in him shall not die but have eternal life." Begala says, triumphantly, "Four and a half seconds!" And Colbert says "That's the Christian sound bite."

I was struck by this moment on the show. The interview was going very well -- Begala speaking crisply (about speaking crisply) and Colbert slipping in perfect zingers. And then Begala wants to use the New Testament to prove a point about how he got through to Clinton. I felt that, reciting the verse, Colbert was not being the Colbert Report character but that his own religion was dictating that he had to say the verse as a demonstration of his own faith, and it wasn't right to fool around with that. I can't say why I feel so sure. The Colbert character would, I think, have been more pleased with himself to know the verse. You'd have felt the preen. I experienced this moment as a startling statement of faith, the kind of thing you don't normally see on TV.

The real Colbert, whom we can only catch glimpses of on TV behind his mask of absurdist pomposity, is a thoughtful and interesting person. He is a practicing Catholic. His father died in a plane crash. You get the sense that the facts of his life and personal history temper his comedy a bit, and for the better. He isn't impishly mining the zeitgeist like his colleague Jon Stewart, at least not in the same way; there's something a little more complex going on.

Grip and grin

2006-01-27T10:13:00.000-05:00

Consider those photos of Jack Abramoff and George Bush, floating out there somewhere in the ether, shielded from view. The White House is doing everything it can to ensure no image of the president and the disgraced Republican lobbyist/felon together ever graces your computer screen. Media outlets of all stripes are doing all they can to put those jpegs in the public domain.

This is a race between two titanic forces of American political/cultural/media life -- the Bush-Rove Machine and the Tabloid Culture. The former depends on the iron control of information and perception, and on the unerring loyalty of its followers. The latter thrives on the public's bottomless appetite for exposure and embarrassment. And it has a lot of cash to spread around. Which will win?

Oprahfreygate

2006-01-26T20:48:00.000-05:00

Oprah staged an amazingly complete reversal of her mealy-mouthed support of serial exaggerator/fabricator James Frey today on her show, going so far as to stage a parade of her own critics, from Richard Cohen to Maureen Dowd.

Some attribute this to cynicism -- she did it to put this behind her -- and others to ego -- she did it because he defiled the Church of Oprah. These suppositions have some truth to them, but none of them fully explains what happened.

Anytime someone like Oprah (0kay, there is no one like Oprah) gets into a mess like this, there is no way to separate the public drama from whatever private motivations may have shaped it. Her statement was clear and that's what counts. One of our most revered media figures was on record saying its okay to lie - giving the stamp of approval to a media already saturated with spin and other forms of deception. Now that's cynical. And in the therapeutic culture she champions, she is once again a champion of self-examination and public-truth-telling, not an enabler. All is right again in the Oprah universe, and in the places it overlaps with ours.

The fact that she recognized this would be great TV and played it for all that it was worth, well, why not? If only our politicians could move so sure-footedly.

Luke, I am your father

2006-01-26T10:39:00.000-05:00

Of course Tim Russert displayed a particularly icky Washington brand of elitism, insiderism and logrolling on Sunday's Meet the Press, promoting his college sophomore son Luke’s XM Radio show with James Carville. Russert's personal touches are well-known (at least to those who watch the show semi-regularly). He has made his affection for the Buffalo Bills an irritatingly regular feature. He wrote and promoted a book on his working class father's homespun wit and wisdom. When Bill Clinton was about to name his new dog in the late 1990s, a rumor circulated it would be “Luke” and Russert promoted the choice on the show (Clinton picked the more generic, less New Testament “Buddy”).

Some of this is aimed at lightening the show's inquisitorial tone, some to show that Russert is a regular guy. But the effect is the opposite: Russert, Carville and their families evidently inhabit a world alien to the rest of us, a world where you can have naming rights to the president’s dog and conjure “income streams” from thin air. And they like flaunting it. As Tim Noah wrote last week, if journalists want to have some claim on the truth, they must be conversant with the people they write and report on – so why do they broadcast their sumptuous riches to the world?

But the newer, more distressing feature here is not Russert’s evocation of Marie Antoinette, but the fact that he’s doing it for profit. With the media fracturing into a million tiny pieces, each with its own millimeter-sized demographic slice, everyone’s an entrepreneur. Old media are now launching pads for hundreds of new ventures. The media extend their “brand” into a new domain, and give a lift to obscure new enterprises – satellite radio, webcasts, podcasting, etc. There’s nothing wrong with this – the music must change, right? Except that the proliferation of hype cheapens the brand or otherwise screws it up (cf. the TimesSelect disaster). It also erodes credibility, the old media’s most precious and rapidly disappearing commodity. At the bottom of this slippery slope. each in its own niche, sit Fox News, US Weekly and Skating with Celebrities.

The ombudsman's naiveté

2006-01-22T14:26:00.000-05:00

The eruption over Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell’s columns is a great case study for the cultural anthropologists studying the bumpy transition between old and new media. Howell, of course, is “old media.” And she was slammed by “new media” in a flood of nasty comments on a Post blog after she mistakenly said Democrats had received “Abramoff money.” She later apologized for the mistake – in fact, Democrats had not received direct contributions from Abramoff himself, though many had received money from Indian tribes under the direction of Abramoff and/or his firm. (This is an important distinction, given that many Indian tribes were giving to the same Democrats long before Abramoff came along – a subtlety Howell does not acknowledge).

Howell’s initial comment was not only mistaken but glib – she implied that the scandal might put Democrats in the dock shortly. It was a knowing comment, implying that all politicians deserve our close observation if not our outright suspicion.

Of course they do. And Howell obviously regards herself as an experienced journalist who has seen it all in her "50-year career." But it’s also obvious that whatever she’s seen didn’t prepare her for this.

Howell’s original column and her responses since then display a kind of naiveté about the nature of the scandal and the media coverage of it. She’s seeing it through a conventional MSM prism: She floats above the political fray, applying even-handedness tempered by cynicism. But as Josh Marshall points out, this once-praiseworthy approach can no longer be taken at face value. It has been deconstructed and compromised by the past decade's nasty political splits and evolving technology.

The MSM have spent years being thrashed by the conservative media/political apparatus for being too liberal and this has made them skittish. "Fairness" has evolved from one of the highest journalistic goals into a bureaucratic yardstick for media outlets to prove they're not biased. So journalists create false equivalencies – for every venal Republican in a story, there’s an unwritten rule that you have to find a venal Democrat. If such “fairness” leads to the reporting of objective falsehoods, though, something’s seriously wrong.

But it’s hard for the media to absorb this lesson. “Everybody does it” covers both the “fairness” requirement and satisfies the Republican critics. Unfortunately, it also coincides nicely with Republican spin, which artfully exploits traditional MSM rules in a variety of ways.

So there’s a backlash on the liberal side, particularly the blogosphere. The majority of critics, unfortunately, are sending flaming emails and comments. But the best critics urge the media to aim at telling a true story, rather than misrepresenting reality with “he-said, she-said” or “everybody does it” formulas. In addition to being intellectually lazy, those reflexive approaches favor those who are better at saying things in a coordinated fashion (i.e., Republicans).

Howell seems to exist a decade or so back so in media time. She appears unmindful or unaware of the history and subtle brilliance of Republican/conservative media coordination and manipulation, or its cumulative influence on the behavior and psyches of MSM-types. And she obviously had no clue about the anger and frustration over this trend on the liberal-Democratic side.

Add into this the Post's inexperience with blogospheric anthropological quirks – the more freewheeling comments on left-leaning sites, the ease with which comment threads can descend into vitriol as rage reverberates – and you have a meltdown in the making.

Howell’s column today doesn’t really resolve things. She concedes on the Democrats vs. Republicans issue, definitively calling Abramoff a “Republican scandal.” But the tone of the column is defensive and doesn’t betray much understanding of the swirling forces at work here. It would serve her and the Post to take a harder look at them rather than huffing about flaming comments.

Water line

2005-12-27T22:10:00.000-05:00

Mirabeau breach
Originally uploaded by edgeofkaos.

The water line(s) on a small apartment building near a levee breach in the London Avenue canal in New Orleans.

Principles of Drudge

2005-12-22T11:48:00.000-05:00

Reading Matt Drudge is a guilty pleasure - a mixture of Republican and pro-Bush propaganda, Hollywood gossip, items about hurricanes, Mel Gibson and Princess Di, and obscure obsessions such as his seemingly arbitrary hatred of fellow traveler Bill O'Reilly. (Did this grow out of some specific incident, or is it just that Drudge, like the rest of us, can't stand the guy?)

At times, though, some of Drudge's biases and obsessions cannot coexist. Today's example is the NSA-Bush-surveillance issue. For years, Drudge has been trumpeting each instance of expanding government surveillance of ordinary citizens everywhere in the world, which he obviously regards as a scandal, a menace to freedom, whatever. Today, he flags this story about plans in Britain to create a system that will monitor the movement of every car in the country.

The Bush-NSA story, which apparently involves the government's warrantless sorting through emails and telephone calls, is a telling example of the ever-widening eye of government surveillance. Yet Drudge is ignoring an issue obviously near and dear to his heart and instead pushing a straight-up administration line on the story. He links to a story about Clinton doing similar things and to another saying "warrantless searches not unprecedented."

I expect -- indeed, I hope for -- a degree of arbitrariness from Drudge. In a sea of Internet-driven talking points, a little anarchy goes a long way. But it is interesting to read the tea leaves and wonder what's going on inside his head. Who is he talking to? Why has he decided that defending Bush is preferable to dissing secret, unauthorized domestic spying? What do they have on him? Of course the Bush-NSA links are below several items on Elton John's wedding jewelry, indicating he may feel some ambivalence.

Private eyes are watching you

2005-12-20T12:09:00.000-05:00

Sorry for my long absence. The Bush-NSA controversy has finally yanked me out of my blogging break.

So far this is taking the ordinary trajectory (senators express deep concern, hearings are planned, Gonzalez spins, Bush repeats the 9/11 mantra a few times and huffs about lives being at stake, and nothing much changes). But if is what it appears to be, it may not be going away, and could be big trouble for Bush. The evidence available so far (nicely summarized by Kevin Drum here) points to some kind of data-mining or sorting operation in which huge quantities of data – emails, cookies, gas bills, whatever – are scanned looking for particular patterns or strings of data. Such a new technology-dependent operation could be useful, and it would not be automatically authorized by FISA – or perhaps any judge. Hence there may be legitimate practical reasons for breaking the law – which, let's be clear, is obviously what Bush did.

I don’t think we can judge the true need for or the efficacy of this domestic spying effort right at this moment. What was the urgency? Was it a specific case? Was it a realization that we were capable of doing something potentially effective but had no legal authority to do it, and getting that authority would be problematic? Knowing how Cheney and Bush operate, I figure the latter. But we don't know right now.

If the president is allowed to break the law as he sees fit in the pursuit of terrorist suspects, without oversight or any checks from other branches of government – or without even a basic understanding by those branches of what he’s doing – it’s crazy, and, well, un-American. As Orwell (and the Bush administration) have demonstrated, language is a flexible and perverse instrument. It's extremely easy for a government to label someone it doesn't like a "terrorist." And the line between any president's good and bad judgment is dangerously thin.

This is a real test for our system. I hope the three branches of government are capable of sorting this out. They haven't been doing such a hot job on that front lately.

The reason they may have to – and why this is potentially big trouble for Bush – lies in the nature of the program. At least from the clues so far, what the NSA is doing is not what people normally think of and may be inclined to support when the "domestic spying" phrase is floated – eavesdropping on a handful of nefarious evil-doers, then catching them or otherwise disrupting their plot to blow something up. If it is data mining, the problem from a political standpoint is that, well, nobody likes the idea of the government reading their emails. That would be extremely unpopular.

Now, perhaps people won’t mind if this is a kind of sorting algorithm in which email or other personal information is scanned and the vast majority discarded without a human being ever laying eyes on it. But (without knowing a damn thing about this) no investigative process is entirely automated. Computers are extremely useful, but human eyes have to enter the process at some point before it can pinpoint the pieces of information that finger bad guys. Which means Joe NSA may be looking at your last credit card bill at this very moment.

Not even Wensleydale?

2005-10-09T23:01:00.000-04:00

We saw Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit this weekend. It's great. But it does not quite reach the level of sublimity that the earlier half-hour efforts do. The Wrong Trousers and A Close Shave in particular are not mere children's entertainments but intricately-plotted, layered dramas. The characters and the world they live in seem like real people. Just to give an example: In ACS, Wallace develops a possible romantic interest in Wendolene Ramsbottom, the owner of a knitting shop. But Wendolene has been forced into a life of crime by her highly intelligent cyber-dog Preston, aiding him in his sheep rustling scheme. Wendolene's motives throughout the film are ambiguous and troubling. The budding affection between her and Wallace seems genuine at first, but later it appears she may have been using him to effect her escape from Preston. Or she may even be a willing participant. She says nothing as Gromit is sent to prison for crimes she and Preston have committed. At the end, she and Wallace part ways when she expresses a distaste for his beloved cheese. It's not clear if she really does hate cheese or if that's just her way of dumping him.

Wallace and Gromit are themselves a codependent pair. When Gromit is arrested and put on trial for sheep rustling, Wallace does not express outrage at the injustice being done. He simply says "Oh, Gromit!" with sorrow and reproach. It looks like he believes Gromit might be guilty, though he does later bust him out. In TWT, he needs some extra money and rents out Gromit's room to a penguin. When trouble arises, his first impulse is to say, impatiently, "where's Gromit?" Wallace's expectation is that Gromit will selflessly ride to his rescue - which he invariably does. Gromit is the only genuine adult in the films.

Back to my original point. COTWR is a very good film, packed with charms, entertaining throughout. Worth seeing alone for the Stinking Bishop cheese. Or the tenderness that Gromit lavishes on his giant melon. It at least returns his affection by growing so robustly.

But the movie lacks some of the emotional and plot complexity of the shorter films. There are no characters caught in a web like Wendolene. The bad guy is a buffoon, not a genuine threat. Earlier bad guys, Preston and Feathers McGraw (the penguin), are smart and devious - worthy adversaries for W&G, or at least G. They appropriate Wallace's inventions for their own ends. (There is a Ph.D. thesis for someone on what the W&G films say about technology run amok.) In form, COTWR suffers a bit as well. Both TWT and ACS are mysteries - we know something's afoot, but the full dimensions of the nefarious plot are not revealed until close to the end. The films make you think back on everything you've seen and reinterpret it. The main surprise in the COTWR occurs midway through, and after that it's just a question of how to sort out all the plot threads.

I don't want to get too down on Nick Park and Aardman for making a movie that almost, but doesn't quite, measure up to their previous efforts. Maybe it was the unusual pressure of making a studio film with Dreamworks, or the distinct challenges posed by the form of a 90-minute feature instead of a short. Obviously they have set their own bar incredibly high.

Reality 1, Bush 0

2005-10-06T22:25:00.000-04:00

We shouldn't be surprised. It was bound to happen one day. But it's amazing how fast all of Bushworld is just unraveling before our eyes, turning to dust and blowing away like the CGI mummies in those movies. There is no need to list all the bad things that have befallen Bush & Co. lately. The situation is continuing to deterioriate. What's astounding is the Bush people seem to have no clue how to regain the upper hand. They are just throwing paint at the canvas and hoping some of it sticks. Bush himself appears dazed and dispirited. Rove is (apparently) about to be indicted. Party discipline has broken down, and disciplinarian-in-chief Tom DeLay is out. The heretofore amazing political and message discipline emanating from the West Wing are nowhere to be seen. Miers may well win confirmation, but the choice has divided the right. Karen Hughes is a sideshow, a bad joke. The ill will stirred up by the government's incompetent response to Katrina has not dissipated and is now being fueled by the outrages of the bloated contracting process. The Senate is rebuking Bush/Cheney on torture. It's like multiple organ failure. All the contrary political forces and hard truths that have been systematically denied or held in check for the past four years are rampaging through the Bush body politic.

It's funny to see Bush so adrift. Given that his formula has been both effective and simple (stick to a few things, repeat them endlessly, slavishly reward your supporters, screw the opposition, ignore everything else, including policies that actually work) I thought he'd stick with it. But he moved off it a bit with Roberts (non-provocative to the left) and then way off it with Miers (provocative to the right). If you're used to always having your way and believe your own PR, when reality catches up with you, you'll have no practical tools to deal with it.

Judy Judy Judy

2005-10-05T23:27:00.000-04:00

If it's true what they're saying and Judy Miller has secured a $1.2 million book deal, there are so many layers of self-delusion involved not even the inevitable huge remainder pile will begin to jar her and her editor friend back to reality. I just don't get it. Is Miller dumb enough to think she is really some kind of First Amendment heroine from days of yore? And I thought publishing houses had to rigorously hew to the bottom line these days. But no.

The basic problem is no one will want to read such a book. I sure won't. It will be deathly dull and self-righteous. Some people will rush to check the index for their own names. Lou Dobbs will interview her again. But that's about it. Miller is about as unsympathetic a public figure as you could hope to find, the possible exceptions being Bush, Cheney, Libby, Rove, Novak, Ann Coulter ... never mind. Suffice it to say she is unsympathetic. Brittle, arrogant. She also has no apparent capacity for self-reflection. You know she's never going to come clean on her role pushing Chalabi and WMDs - any more than Cheney is. Her 85 days in prison were over something nobody understood or cared about. The whole exercise was apparently quite pointless, and in the process she has selfishly squandered the principle she claimed to be upholding in an attempt to turn herself into a martyr.

There is an interesting story to be written here, but Miller is not the one to write it.

Time for another vacation?

2005-10-04T22:47:00.000-04:00

Bush looks really odd lately. I did not see his press conference this morning, but lately his attitude in public appearances has been diffident or petulant - not especially presidential. It's nothing we haven't seen dozens of times before, but without the old swagger and urgent bluster to pull it all together, he looks lost. The Daily Show has replayed a couple of his announcements in the past few weeks, one on Rehnquist's death, the other on Miers' nomination. In each case, Bush was given a sort of encyclopedia-style laundry list of accomplishments. Rehnquist was born in Wisconsin. He served in the army. In Italy. He was on the board of the Salvation Army. He worked for five and a half years in the Justice Department. He was a distinguished jurist, much admired by his peers. And so on. Ditto with Miers. I know that there is only so much rhetorical flash you can work into these announcements, but the image of Bush plodding his way through them is just ... depressing. Nor was he having a good time at another recent press conference, fielding questions on Cindy Sheehan in the heat at some godforsaken Texas roadside. He was clearly annoyed to be there. Then more recently there were a couple of exceedingly rare admissions of error, in which he looked like his intestines were being pulled into a squareknot while he was uttering the hated words.

This is not a man who is enjoying his work.

Bush is so over

2005-10-03T21:19:00.000-04:00

With the nomination of Harriet Miers we see the Bush presidency imploding before our eyes. From the outside it is a baffling choice. She will not wow liberals. She will piss off conservatives. It's dispiritedness all around! It's kind of nice that there will be no grand, world shaking ideological battle over the Supreme Court, but in some ways this is worse - there will be a debate over basic competence, mediocrity and cronyism, all of the things that brought the nation so low in the response to Katrina.

Bush appears to have gone into an angry, defensive crouch. Has he lost his touch for politics and withdrawn into a state of pure churlishness, nominating a friend because he has so few of them, a crony just to stick it to ... well, everybody? Andrew Sullivan thinks so:

The one thing that could motivate him to appoint a crony as obviously unqualified as Miers is precisely to stick a finger in the eye of those accusing him of cronyism. Tell him we need more troops in Iraq? It's the one thing he won't do. Tell him he's a big spender? We get: "It's going to cost whatever it costs." Tell him he has botched the Iraq occupation? He'll give the architects Medals of Freedom. There's an adolescent streak of pure willfulness in the man. He cannot and will not self-correct. If pushed into a corner, he will simply repeat the error in order to prove himself immune to criticism.

It's going to be a long three years.

Katrina

2005-09-07T22:04:00.000-04:00

Hi - sorry for not posting. I have been involved with coverage of the Katrina disaster, which has sucked the oxygen out of all other parts of my brain.

Hard to know what to say. I am heartsick and searching. We have seen some unbearable things in the past week and undoubtedly will see more as the weeks wear on, things once thought virtually impossible in America. That will force some soul-searching, some changed minds. When an event like this occurs it becomes a reference point in people's lives and a cultural touchstone. What kind of new path do we all find ourselves on right now? What will stay the same and what will change?

New Orleans not out of the woods yet

2005-08-30T10:44:00.000-04:00

New Orleans dodged a direct hit from Katrina. But it's not over there. A breached levee late Monday sent more water pouring into the heart of the city from Lake Pontchartrain. The flood waters are still rising, hampering rescue efforts and causing more damage. It's a big mess and it's getting worse.

Frank Rich, Bush appeaser?

2005-08-29T23:12:00.000-04:00

The left is believing its own PR over Cindy Sheehan's success. Its leaders appear to fancy leading a Vietnam-like political/cultural tidal shift against the war, then riding it to electoral victory as Bush recedes, Johnson-like. This is a pipe dream. The country may be turning against the war and Bush, but that doesn't mean it's going to embrace the Michael Moore position on things. The left's incipient resurgence could drive a wedge through the Democratic Party and ruin its national political prospects for another decade.

This piece blasting Frank Rich for being insufficiently anti-war illustrates the aggrieved attitude of frustrated entitlement on the left. Its message is: We've been right all along. We ate it when Kerry ran. Never again.

Yes, let’s trash Frank Rich. No columnist has except Paul Krugman has so consistently devoted himself to ripping the Bush presidency, week after week, with a gusto that was quite entertaining before it got so f***ing repetitive. Rich’s focus has gotten so laser-like he has even dropped the forced, framing pop cultural allusions (low point: The Day After Tomorrow captures the national mood) in favor of all-out scornful invective!

Rich is accused of “triangulation,” the worst of Clintonian sins in the eyes of both hardcore liberals and conservatives - making this a shot across Hillary's bow as well. But triangulation is the only thing that might save the Democratic Party here – and the U.S. effort in Iraq. If some sensible pullout plan can be engineered that holds some promise of self-government and stability, it is the best course between the Bush’s mindless “stay the course” and the left’s strategically dangerous “get out now.” But as Rich notes, the right will tag any such policy, no matter how sensible, as cutting and running. How can the Democrats address this problem? With some grownup Republicans fretting over this, bipartsanship holds the most promise both for an actual withdrawal policy and for a political way forward for Democrats. Unless the left, flush with Sheehanesque righteousness, makes that impossible.

Thank you, New Orleans

2005-08-29T13:34:00.000-04:00

It takes a hurricane to get someone to articulate what should have been said to the cable networks long ago:

SHEPARD SMITH: You’re live on FOX News Channel, what are you doing?

MAN: Walking my dogs.

SMITH: Why are you still here? I’m just curious.

MAN: None of your fucking business.

I saw Shepard Smith briefly this morning. He appeared to have only a limited grasp of what was going on around him - whether the city was going under, what damage had occurred, etc. They had to bring on a New Orleans Fox station anchor a little later to clear up some of his goofs.

New Orleans - still there

2005-08-29T11:07:00.000-04:00

Katrina is one badass hurricane, but it appears that New Orleans has dodged the worst-case, flood-the-bowl scenario. The Big Easy apocalypse depends on a lot of factors in addition to the hurricane's overall strength: The storm must be moving along a particular track, at a particular angle and at a relatively slow speed, so that so much water is pumped from the Gulf of Mexico into Lake Pontchartrain it overtops the city's levee system.

But Katrina moved just far enough east that this didn't happen. Some good news on an otherwise difficult day.

Hoping the NEA is not involved

2005-08-27T22:21:00.000-04:00

Via Althouse, here is the latest from the art world:

Artist plans to exhibit sculpture of Ted Williams' severed head
PHOENIX --A Connecticut artist plans to exhibit a sculpture of Boston Red Sox great Ted Williams' severed head at a New York gallery next month.

Daniel Edwards of Moosup, Conn., said the inspiration for the sculpture came to him when it was revealed that the Hall of Famer's head was removed and cryogenically frozen with his torso at Scottsdale's Alcor Life Extension Foundation.

The sculpture shows Williams resting his chin on a baseball.

"I think the piece isn't ghastly," Edwards said.

How does he achieve that effect?

I think he borrowed this idea from Futurama.

More on the media debate

2005-08-27T17:54:00.000-04:00

The interesting back-and-forth continues in the new/conservative/mainstream media debate. Tim Rutten has a column in the LATimes today in which he takes apart the politics-is-everything modus operandi of Hewitt's and many others on the right:

[Talk radio] may be politically preoccupied and loyally Republican, but it isn't conservative in the traditional sense. Historically, the West's conservatives have believed in the persistence and profound influence in human affairs of all sorts of nonpolitical institutions — religion, family, tradition, social convention and property, for example. It's a conception that respects privacy, proportion and restraint, and resists the urge to reduce all human activity to the product of a single source or impulse — whether economic (communism) or historical (fascism).

While the political talk-show hosts and right-wing bloggers claim to have a quarrel with mainstream media's alleged bias, their real gripe is that the news media's traditional values stand between them and what they'd like to accomplish, which is the total politicization of all reporting and analysis. Combine this with the messianic confidence that new media — mainly talk radio and the Internet — inevitably will undermine and destroy the economic health of mainstream media — especially newspapers — and you've pretty much got what Yeats had in mind when he wrote:

If Folly link with Elegance
No man knows which is which

Political talk-show hosts see everything through the prism of their partisan politics and insist, as an article of faith, that everyone else is always doing the same. In this sense, their approach to current affairs is less a conservative one and more a creature of that most powerful of American vices: narcissism.The controlling assumption is: I look at the world in this fashion and, therefore, everyone else does too.

Hewitt (who graciously, though critically, links to me again) says Rutten is wrong: He believes Nick Lemann is genuinely fair and balanced. The problem is that the Nick Lemanns out there are few and far between, and disappearing:

Unlike what Tim Rutten would have you believe I believe about old media --wherein every reporter of every MSM outlet is a deeply dishonest lefty conspiring to subvert Bush and his allies in every paragraph-- old media has many fine reporters doing much good work life this piece by Lemann, but their numbers are dwindling as successive generations of new hires move the newsrooms farther and farther to the left, and as agenda journalism goes uncorrected because it is undetected, so complete is the shared values and ideologies of the rank and file of the newsroom staffs.

Is this really true, though? Most journalists I know are bourgeois liberal good government types who have a vested interest in the economic status quo - not political leftists. They might not agree with Bush's tax cuts or the Iraq war, and those attitudes can influence coverage - but they're not trying to build socialism in America. And newspapers and TV are, to varying degrees, starting to pay attention to the liberal bias and transparency problems - thanks in part to the drumbeat on the right.

Why shouldn't journalists reveal their politics?

2005-08-27T15:43:00.000-04:00

One more thought about the piece on Hugh Hewitt in The New Yorker. Toward the end, writer Nicholas Lemann personally addresses Hewitt's (quite valid) point that by keeping their politics secret, mainstream journalists sow doubt about their motivations, preconceptions, etc., which are mostly liberal. Hewitt posits that this means the entire mainstream media enterprise is a just a liberal charade.

Lemann writes:
If Hewitt does write about me, he will surely ask me to reveal whom I voted for in the last Presidential election. I might as well get started with the transparency now. Although I do vote, I'm not going to tell him. Like the house of the Lord, journalism has many mansions, and the one Hewitt inhabits is surely one of them. But in another of the mansions, reportorial journalism, the object is different. One can be curious or not, fair-minded or not, intellectually honest in the use of evidence or not, empathetic or not, imprisoned by a perspective or not. For a reportorial journalist to announce his voting record is to undermine his work. It dishonors the struggle to do it right.

I don't quite follow this, and don't really buy it. And if I don't, Hewitt and a sizable segment of the population probably won't either. It's always awkward for the media to be withholding information. (Just ask Judy Miller.) We don't need to know everything about media people, such as what DVDs Lemann rents, where he buys his granola, or whatever (though David Brooks might find it interesting). His work - which defies easy ideological categorization - speaks for itself.

But voting and party registration do reveal something about the way he thinks about the world of politics and policy, which is what he's writing about. Why would disclosing them "dishonor the struggle to do it right"? It's information that may be relevant in judging whether the writer is "imprisoned by a perspective or not." The flip side, of course, is that the vote for Kerry (or Bush) becomes a way to unfairly dismiss the journalist in question as shilling for the Democrats or whatever, and his/her journalism as nothing more than propaganda. But that's already happening anyway. The current omerta approach has become a big problem - a little honesty might actually help.

Where does Sheehan go from here?

2005-08-27T00:08:00.000-04:00

I just saw Cindy Sheehan on Bill Maher's Real Time. I still don't get her. She looked pleasant, seemed like a real person. But when Maher tried to tease out something genuine from her, all he got was boilerplate rhetoric we've heard from the left for, well, years: Bush lied, Downing Street Memo, peace is better than war, etc.

Sheehan has nicely checkmated Bush. The old divide-and-slime approach isn't working, and that's immensely gratifying. But is Sheehan really the stuff of a mass movement?

But then again, it could have been Jude Law

2005-08-27T00:02:00.000-04:00

I don' t have the mental bandwith to follow the Able Danger story about whether somebody somewhere IDed Mohammed Atta prior to 911. But you know a story is getting ready to jump the shark when you see something like this:

Smith acknowledged that the picture of Atta he claims to have seen on the chart was very grainy, but he says he recognized Atta by his distinctive cheekbones.

The New Yorker dips its toe in the blogosphere ocean, then withdraws it

2005-08-26T11:19:00.000-04:00

Welcome Hugh Hewitt readers. He's right about The New Yorker not putting the Lemann piece online. It's crazy. What were they thinking? They seem to be hazily aware that the blogosphere exists and has political/media influence, but unaware of its basic operating principles.

The New Yorker takes a fair and balanced look at Hugh Hewitt

2005-08-26T00:02:00.000-04:00

Nicholas Lemann’s New Yorker piece on conservative radio host/blogger Hugh Hewitt (inexplicably unavailable online) is a fascinating cultural artifact. A hundred years from now historians will find it a useful distillation of the trends now roiling the media landscape, especially the conservative media’s attack on traditional journalistic standards.

In this piece mainstream media coolly regards conservative media. Writer and subject are each symbols of the competing empires. Lemann is the dean of the Columbia Journalism School and an accomplished practioner of the craft. Hewitt is a hyperpartisan ideologue whose main purpose, aside from destroying the Democratic Party, is to expose the mainstream media for being a big cabal of “far left” liberals.

Lemann’s point of view is that of the thoughtful, fair minded liberal intellectual meeting a man and a cultural phenomenon. Hewitt’s point of view (at least as Lemann presents it) is that Lemann’s approach is essentially dishonest, masking a tissue of political biases and attitudes.

Of course there is no real comparison between these takes. Hewitt is a hack whose political agenda determines everything he does. Lemann’s journalism is interesting because it’s unpredictable.

Lemann portrays Hewitt as unencumbered by reflection or doubt, genially multitasking his way through the day, spreading conservative memes via radio, the web and TV. But he bends over backwards not to condescend or dismiss – at one point going a bit too far in insisting on Hewitt’s independence from the conservative echo chamber.

In the most interesting part of the piece, Lemann watches Hewitt grill Dana Milbank of the Washington Post on his radio show. Hewitt is right about one thing: the MSM does tend toward self-deception. It purports to be fair and politically detached, but attitude – especially anti-Bush attitude – seeps into the coverage, which journalists then preposterously deny. Hewitt delights in exposing this, twisting his prey – even the redoubtable Milbank - into knots.

But if the piece illustrates one thing, it’s the essential rigidity of the conservative media enterprise – something that will one day be its downfall. Hewitt’s belief that politics determines everything – that it is everything – sounds little different from the guiding principals of various Marxist-Leninists and ivory tower liberals he despises. They had their day, he’ll have his. With luck the Lemanns of the world will survive them all.

And get the audiobook read by Dick Cheney

2005-08-25T11:58:00.000-04:00

This is a real book. From the press release:

The full-color picture book tells the story of two brothers who open a lemonade stand only to encounter a Kennedy-esque mayor determined to tax away their profits while a pants-suit clad Hillary outlaws sugary drinks and an ACLU lawyer confiscates their picture of Jesus.

“With left-wing books like 'Rainbow Fish' and 'King & King' flooding our nation's classrooms, 'Liberals Under My Bed' lets conservative parents share a story with their kids that reflects their values, while having fun doing it,” says World Ahead president Eric M. Jackson. “Not only is it important to teach kids about the American Dream, they must also understand that there are people out there who don't believe in freedom and traditional values.”

Rainbow Fish a liberal plot to destroy America? Who knew?

The-Teams-That-Must-Not-Be-Named

2005-08-24T21:21:00.000-04:00

Keith Woods proposes that media outlets edit out all offensive team names such as "Redskins." Impractical? No, he says:

Take this example: We may report that a man "suffered head injuries" in a traffic accident. That's accurate. Or, we may say that "a huge gash was opened just below the left temporal lobe of the brain and small portions of brain matter were scattered on the asphalt." That, too, is accurate. It's just that the second one's likely to hurt many people, not least among them the family of the person on the pavement.

Yuck! But this argument is preposterous. He is suggesting the media selectively filter out facts, stigmatizing certain words as a means of shaping public perception. Never mind the basic unworkability of this idea (Should TV pixilate team logos, helmets, jerseys, fans who dress up like Indian mascots? Who decides what's offensive? What do we call them, the "Florida Fighting S-------s"? Hasn't the liberal media taken enough hits for exactly this kind of paternalistic idiocy?) - there is a debate about these team names, and its proper place is in the public square. If the public rejects the stereotypical names, they will disappear from sports. If the media want to hasten that process, they can comment on and spotlight the issue. They don't have to protect our virgin ears from all offense.

As Dumbledore tells Harry Potter, always use the proper name of a thing.

More Mush from the Wimp

2005-08-24T20:28:00.000-04:00

I almost never agree with David Frum. But he is on target with this observation:

Again and again during the Bush presidency - and yesterday most recently - the president will agree to give what is advertised in advance as a major speech. An important venue will be chosen. A crowd of thousands will be gathered. The networks will all be invited. And after these elaborate preparations, the president says ... nothing that he has not said a hundred times before.

If a president continues to do that, he is himself teaching the public and the media to ignore him - especially when the words seem (as his speech yesterday to the VFW seemed) utterly to ignore the past three months of real-world events.

It's true - Bush hasn't given a truly "major speech" in months - maybe years. It's just more mush from the wimp, again and again. As Frum goes on to say, repetition has its uses. But message discipline is useless if your message has been out there forever and has diverged ever farther from what people see and are thinking about.

Kevin Drum notes that Frum's suggestions on how to address this are weak - based as they are on the assumption that this is more a rhetorical/communications problem than a disconnect from reality. Drum suggests several more substantive things Bush could do - encourage people to enlist, let gays serve openly in the military, come up with a real energy plan. Of course, none of these things will happen because each disturbs some segment of Bush's carefully-assembled, Rove-approved 51 percent majority (which ceased to exist not long after election day, but never mind that now):

If Bush isn't willing to take even a single one of these modest steps and run the risk of annoying even a single one of the interest groups that support him, why should any of the rest of us take his "central front in the war on terror" seriously? Obviously he doesn't.

This is the central failing of the Bush presidency. True leadership sometimes means rising above politics. That confers credibility in tough scrapes like the Iraq war - a sense that the leader in question can see the world in three dimensions. But Bush is so vested in not doing anything that suggests political weakness or doing something his political enemies might want, he's trapped.

But the only editorials he reads are in the Washington Times

2005-08-23T21:27:00.000-04:00

The publisher of Editor&Publisher is calling on newspaper editorial pages to call on the president to get out of Iraq:

It's time for newspapers, many of which helped get us into this war, to consider using their editorial pages as platforms to help get us out of it. So far, few have done much more than wring their hands, or simply criticize the conduct of the war, or the lack of body armor for our troops. Not many months ago, in fact, some papers, including The New York Times, were calling for more U.S. troops for Iraq. Now it's literally do-or-die time.

If it is literally do-or-die time, it's equally imperative that all those who write about those who write about the media call on the media writers to call on newspaper editorial pages to call on the president get us out of Iraq.

Some sea salt might help

2005-08-23T21:15:00.000-04:00

Glad we cleared that up:

Andrew Sullivan just called me a paleo-con. That's hitting below the belt. As I've explained before, I am a Russell Kirk-style Tory crossed with Michael Novak/Richard Neuhaus-style Catholic neo-conservative, with a mild dash of libertarian for seasoning.

Intelligent Design vs. Darwin everywhere 24/7

2005-08-23T13:31:00.000-04:00

If we must endure the idiocy of the Bush/Frist teach-all-points-of-view position on evolution in the public square, Christopher Hitchens says, let's just take their argument to its logical conclusion:

If we take the president up on his deceptively fair-minded idea of "teaching the argument," I think we could advance the ball a little further in other directions also. Houses of worship that do not provide space for leaflets and pamphlets favoring evolution (not necessarily Darwinism, which is only one of the theories of evolution and thus another proof of its scientific status) should be denied tax-exempt status and any access to public funding originating in the White House's "faith-based" initiative. Congress should restore its past practice of giving a copy of Thomas Jefferson's expurgated Bible—free of all incredible or supernatural claims—to each newly elected member. The same version of the Bible should be obligatory for study in all classes that affect to teach "divinity."

Hitchens also makes the quite sensible suggestion that you can "teach the controversy" - in a history or social studies class. And when you do, the anti-evolutionists of the past 150 years inevitably end up looking silly.

"And the future really does look a lot like Minority Report"

2005-08-22T23:47:00.000-04:00

Six Feet Under is no more. The final episode was very good, but for one jarring note: Did David really have to dream he was wrestling with the hooded demon that's been stalking him, then pull back the hood and find ... his own face? Then embrace the Demon-David and get on with living his life?

I like Star Wars and Earthsea as much as the next person, but we're expecting a little more here.

At least this didn't break down along red-blue lines

2005-08-22T21:42:00.000-04:00

The latest hot debate in the media is whether to add a hyphen into the grammatically challenged title "The 40 Year-Old Virgin":

Those adding the hyphen included: The San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Seattle Times, Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, The New York Daily News, USA Today, The Boston Globe, San Diego Union-Tribune, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and Newsday.

But many others went along with the movie-makers and left it out, including the the influential Los Angeles Times, both in its review by Carina Chocano, and a story today on its box office triumph. Others going along with the error include The Houston Chronicle, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Sacramento Bee, Syracuse (N.Y.) Post-Standard, and Toronto Star, not to mention the magazines Entertainment Weekly and Rolling Stone.

Balanced practicality?

2005-08-22T14:58:00.000-04:00

Apparently, you can't be a true player on the world stage these days without your own empty catchphrase (via Drezner):

Mr Hu's catchphrase is “balanced development”. This will be a central theme in a new five-year economic plan (a still cherished relic of the central-planning era) due to be discussed by the Central Committee in October and ratified by the legislature next March. It will be Mr Hu's first opportunity to put his stamp on a long-term economic strategy.

What happens when Hu's "balanced development" runs into Rice's "practical idealism"?

Against Sheehan's righteousness

2005-08-22T14:32:00.000-04:00

Cindy Sheehan offers what looks like a magical elixir of righteousness for Democrats – an addictive and dangerous one. Addictive because she’s making Bush look bad; because for once the right is having a hard time sliming and dismissing a Bush critic; and because she’s voicing what a lot of people on the left have been thinking and feeling since 2002. They just haven’t had a truly resonant national spokesperson before now. Being a stay-the-course guy, John Kerry sure didn’t fit the bill.

It’s dangerous because it's all too reminiscent of the kind of brain-dead stuff we've been hearing from the other side for years.

Since before the whole Iraq mess began, the right has held a near-monopoly on emotion in the public sphere in the form of chest-thumping patriotic anger about 9/11. For a brief period that anger was a truly unifying national sentiment, but then Bush ... well, you know the rest. His politicization of 9/11 and the Iraq war has been both cynical and, well, sentimental to the core. Strip away all the arguments about WMD or terrorism or democracy and the whole Iraq war is just an emotional, gut-response by Bush&Co. They wanted to kick someone's butt, and Saddam was available. Their mastery of this post 9/11 psychological landscape – even in the face of their Keystone Kops performance in an actual war - has helped the GOP maintain its grip on power.

But politically speaking, do liberals really need or want to go head-to-head with Bush in a contest of righteous anger? As a short-term tactic, maybe it works because it does crystallize a lot of disquiet about Iraq. And as a genuine expression of grief it is entirely legitimate. But what does it really mean? Not much, Jonathan Chait argues:

The left seems to be embracing the notion of moral authority in part as a tactical response to the right. For years, conservatives have said or implied that if you criticize a war, you hate the soldiers. During the Clinton years, conservatives insisted that the president lacked "moral authority" to send troops into battle because he had avoided the draft as a youth or, later, because he lied about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

So adopting veterans or their mourning parents as spokesmen is an understandable counter-tactic. It was a major part of the rationale behind John Kerry's candidacy. The trouble is, plenty of liberals have come to believe their own bleatings about moral authority. Liberal blogs are filled with attacks on "chicken hawk" conservatives who support the war but never served in the military. A recent story in the antiwar magazine Nation attacked my New Republic editor, Peter Beinart, a supporter of the Iraq war, for having "no national security experience," as if Nation editors routinely served in the Marine Corps.

The silliness of this argument is obvious. There are parents of dead soldiers on both sides. Conservatives have begun trotting out their own this week. What does this tell us about the virtues or flaws of the war? Nothing.

If liberals and Democrats want to call Bush to account for the shenanigans of the past few years, isn't the best course to be the grown-ups - the ones who see things as they are and offer powerful arguments to set them aright? This is not to discount emotion in politics, or even the occasional dose of Sheehan-style righteous anger, just to say that alone they won’t win the argument – and might end up losing a lot of votes.

Mid-August musings

2005-08-18T22:39:00.000-04:00

To my small universe of readers, apologies for not posting much this week. I’m on vacation.

This is great:

Pretty much all of my life, with occasional moments of imbalance, a cup of coffee and a gallon of gas have been about the same price. A few years ago, coffee took the lead, but recently gas caught up. Yesterday, gas took the lead, however, and I bet it will stay in the lead at least until Starbucks invents a new gimmick such as blending bee pollen with java and infusing it with ionized oxgygen to create a ten-dollar morning super-drink. In fact, yesterday was the day when gas officially became a luxury item for me, much as coffee did a couple of years ago and water did, too, come to think of it.

If we can afford $3 for a cup of coffee, why not for a gallon of gas? Isn’t our whole way of life like the $3 cup of coffee – a weave of pleasant but mostly unnecessary indulgences that Dick Cheney would have us believe is “our due”?

Matthew Yglesias goes to the movies in Iceland. Years ago I went to Norway on vacation and had a similar experience. Not only was there an intermission, there were also assigned seats. The movie was Nuns on the Run, in which Robbie Coltrane and Eric Idle play petty criminals who cross their boss and are forced into hiding as nuns (a possible inspiration for Sister Act, which came along a few years later). It was called “Nonner pa Flukt” in Norwegian, which for some reason remained stuck in my head. Nonner pa Flukt.

I don’t know Norwegian, and Babelfish doesn’t do it, but I assume this is pretty much a straight translation – “Nuns in Flight,” “Fleeing Nuns” or something like that. Of course, depending on where you are abroad, American movies are likely to have more liberally translated titles. I remember renting Annie Hall from a video store in Mexico, and it was called “Dos Extranos Amantes,” which means “Two Strange Lovers.” Prosaic, but at least accurate. Some pop-cultural effluvia don’t translate well. “Batman” is known as “Batman” – not as the “Hombre Murcielago” for obvious reasons.

On a related point, I am reading Snow by the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. It's great. Michiko Kakutani would employ the word “limns” to describe what it does for the modern Turkish identity – and for the whole current, epochal clash between fundamentalism and post-enlightnment modernity. More on this later. One thing that jumped out at me: The Turkish city of Batman plays a minor role in the political drama. Coming across this is, well, slightly jarring to the pop-culturally attuned American. It of course fits perfectly well with the geography in the book, which is set mostly in the provincial city of Kars, and I’m not saying Pamuk should avoid it because it may sound odd to Western ears. But Pamuk is also cosmopolitan to the core, and his books are aimed in part at an international audience. He must be aware of the cultural meanings embedded in his text, flowing easily in the Turkish and jumping out in the English translation. What can he mean by it?

Internet biodiversity on the rise

2005-08-15T22:38:00.000-04:00

Need a pet tiger for your towheaded, pixilated child? Check eBay.

Hillary and Rupert, sitting in a tree

2005-08-15T21:29:00.000-04:00

David Carr has an interesting column in the NYT describing the unexpectedly cordial relationship between Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and Hillary Clinton. This has recently played out in the pages of the New York Post, which has been trashing her GOP senate opponent Jeanine Pirro in much the same way it trashed Hillary in her 2000 campaign - at least until Giuliani dropped out. But that's just part of a broader trend:

Just last month, The Post's editorial page, which has historically viewed Mrs. Clinton as the female version of Beelzebub, called her "the unlikely warrior," lauding her support of increased troop strength in Iraq. And Ms. Clinton was busy last month assailing the corrosive qualities of Grand Theft Auto, suggesting that the government needed to help the video game industry develop some standards. It is an upside-down, crisscross world where the rubrics "conservative" and "liberal" lose any sort of meaning. Even within the company, Mr. Murdoch's political bent does not prevent him from working with Democrats. Peter Chernin, the News Corporation's president, is a major Democratic figure who contributed more than $100,000 to John Kerry's failed presidential campaign. Gary Ginsberg, a vice president for corporate affairs and the company's chief spokesman, is a former Clinton White House aide.

"The company has a cordial and respectful relationship with both Clintons," Mr. Ginsberg said.

And the Clinton camp chose to smile and wear beige as well.

"The New York Post and other media outlets are just reflecting the reality that Senator Clinton has worked tirelessly and done a good job for New York," said Philippe Reines, her press secretary. Things changed when the former first lady added senator to her title.

When Clintonites say the Post is "reflecting reality," you know something odd is happening. Carr makes several stabs at deciphering the tea leaves - Murdoch respects power; Murdoch doesn't see the need to trash people in power who can help him in Washington; Hillary has moved rightward; the Post, Fox News and other News Corp. outlets want to keep Hillary around now so they can trash her when she runs for president - because she gins up great ratings and readership.

Obviously, with Murdoch business comes before politics. It helps him to get close with Hillary, at least for now. And Hillary is smart to encourage it - the constituencies she wants to reach overlap with those of the Post and Fox News. But to take the final point above a step further, this rapprochement shows how much, even now, conservatism depends on liberals to keep itself afloat both ideologically and financially. Without political lodestars like the Clintons, whom would conservatives rage against? Ted Kennedy is so 1980. A centrist liberal like Hillary is much more useful to the right. Whether tacking left or right, she is an automatic buzz-generator for the VRWC (her term, still creating buzz seven years later). And this reflects the basic parasitical nature of American conservatism - 90 percent of conservatism amounts to a critique of liberalism, liberal programs and liberal attitudes, real and imagined. Without people like Hillary around, conservatives might have to take responsibility for running things.

WMD found in Iraq!

2005-08-13T15:24:00.000-04:00

I saw this headline:

Chemical Weapons Stash Found

...and for a split second thought "Wow! They found some of Saddam's WMD!"

But no. This is a chemical weapons factory created by the insurgency. Saddam's missing WMD - that's so 2003.

This is distressing, to say the least. Laying the democracy issue aside for a moment, we can say now say one thing about Iraq: Not only was the original strategic rationale for invading (WMD, long-term threat to the United States) flat-out wrong, the invasion has accomplished exactly the opposite of its original aims. Iraq didn't have many ties to terrorists. Now it's the new Afghanistan. There weren't any WMD. Now they're making them to use against U.S. troops.

When they try this in Iraq, the U.S. can withdraw

2005-08-13T02:08:00.000-04:00

"Jenin is well known for fighting the Israeli occupation, and we wanted to give a civilised view of the city," project manager Samir Abu al-Rub told the Reuters news agency.

The symbol of civilization? A 750-meter-long sandwich. Actually, it's heartening to see the Palestinians pursuing this kind of community-minded frivolity. A shame it was too hot to make the record-setting sandwich:

A mere 10 minutes under the burning sun turned the freshly-baked baguettes rock hard.

Crush! Kill! Destroy! Cindy Sheehan!

2005-08-12T22:23:00.000-04:00

Here's a good critique of the right-wing attacks on Cindy Sheehan - the ridiculous, Rovian drumbeat of "charges" and "questions" about her character and her motivations:

Something else about this story that infuriates me is the vision of feckless, smarmy smearsters and cowards hiding behind keyboards in cities like Washington and New York (and yes, Miami), punching out electronic missives in a pathetic and desperate attempt to impugn the integrity of a woman sitting in the dust and August heat of Texas---a woman who, along with her dead son, embodies everything that's right about this country. The growing division between the professional class of spinning punditry and the vast expanse of Middle America that actually does the working, the fighting and the dying so the pundits can spend their time chattering has never been more clear than with this story.

It's rule number one in politics today: Anyone whose criticism of the president has some credibility and gets attention must be automatically, robotically smeared by elements of the right-wing echo chamber. It's stupid and it doesn't really help Bush. In this case it's hurting him. Common decency dictates you don't go out and slime grieving mothers - even if they do make friends with Michael Moore. So I think the Cunning Realist is correct: the right has crossed a line and lost its claim to a common touch here.

One can only hope this means that the everything-is-politics-and-thus-fair-game MO is finally running its course.

Are science and common sense compatible?

2005-08-12T21:51:00.000-04:00

John Horgan has an interesting op-ed in the NYT today arguing that with the rise of counterintuitive theories such quantum mechanics and relativity, scientists have come to regard common sense as anti-scientific:

Scientists' contempt for common sense has two unfortunate implications. One is that preposterousness, far from being a problem for a theory, is a measure of its profundity; hence the appeal, perhaps, of dubious propositions like multiple-personality disorders and multiple-universe theories. The other, even more insidious implication is that only scientists are really qualified to judge the work of other scientists.

I agree. But he goes a bit overboard in denouncing any theory that can't be tested experimentally as innately preposterous, focusing on string theory and the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum mechanics:

My problem is that no conceivable experiment can confirm the theories, as most proponents reluctantly acknowledge. The strings (or membranes, or whatever) are too small to be discerned by any buildable instrument, and the parallel universes are too distant. Common sense thus persuades me that these avenues of speculation will turn out to be dead ends.

Horgan is a smart fellow, but here he seems to be taking the cliched role of the naysayer whom history eventually proves wrong. Can we really say definitively that no genuine insight exists amid the faddishness and flux of various speculative theories, in physics or any other branch of science? A hundred years from now, maybe 99 percent of the theories du jour will no longer be with us. But I suspect we need that 99 percent to churn up the 1 percent that emerges as the new scientific consensus.

The other odd thing about this piece is that it makes no mention of Intelligent Design, which is of course the one unprovable theory everyone's talking about right now.

Breasts and getting high banned in Kentucky

2005-08-12T21:03:00.000-04:00

Garrison Keillor is apparently too racy for radio listeners in Kentucky. Station WUKY has decided to stop airing Keillor's Writer's Almanac segments because they contain what the management considers "offensive language":

The warnings, issued by the program’s production company, came about Curse of the Cat Woman by Edward Field, which contained violent themes and the word “breast”; Thinking About the Past by Donald Justice, which also used the word “breast”; and Reunion by Amber Coverdale, which contained the phrase “get high.” The poems were scheduled for broadcast between July 23 and Aug. 12.

WUKY never heard complaints about The Writer’s Almanac because the station always edited potentially offensive language, [station manager Tom] Godell said. Prairie Home Productions and American Public Media, the segment’s producer and distributor, do not edit or select the content.

“It’s not a terrible burden to edit, but my concern is that something slips through,” Godell said. “We have certain standards of decency, and I expect our national producers to do the same thing.”

How lame is this? The people running this station may be laughably prudish, but it looks like he real reason they're cancelling Keillor is because they're too lazy to keep editing the segments.

You can see why the preposterous decision to edit would lead to problems. How would you edit these poems from PG down to G? One alternative is to audibly bleep out the word "breast" - thus evoking raunchier, or just plain weird, imagery with various alternative body parts:

The BLEEP of Mary Something, freed from a white swimsuit...

Or would they do what's now standard practice for movies airing on basic cable - have someone who sounds like Garrison Keillor dub in a less offensive word that sort of sounds like the original?

The brassiere/brulee/bratwurst of Mary Something, freed from a white swimsuit...

An argument for moderation

2005-08-11T19:17:00.000-04:00

Should computer game addicts in Internet cafes be treated like social drinkers in bars or parties - go past a certain point and they take your mouse away?

SEOUL, South Korea - A South Korean man who played computer games for 50 hours almost non-stop died of heart failure minutes after finishing his mammoth session in an Internet cafe, authorities said on Tuesday.

The 28-year-old man, identified only by his family name Lee, had been playing online battle simulation games at the cybercafe in the southeastern city of Taegu, police said.

Lee had planted himself in front of a computer monitor to play online games on Aug. 3. He only left the spot over the next three days to go to the toilet and take brief naps on a makeshift bed, they said.

If a tree falls on Cindy Sheehan in the Drudge Report, does it make a sound?

2005-08-11T17:26:00.000-04:00

I've been avoiding saying anything about Cindy Sheehan. I doubt that protesting the Iraq war by the side of a road in Crawford in August is the best way to work out your grief. There is clearly nothing Bush could say or do to mollify her, just as it's clear there is nothing Bush is willing to do in that vein. It's just a sad situation.

In the "not helpful" category: A certain problem of logic arises when someone claims to be "silently, respectfully grieving" and supporting the president and troops "silently, with prayer and respect" by broadcasting it the Drudge Report.

Circular reasoning on Intelligent Design

2005-08-11T11:35:00.000-04:00

Maybe something is eluding me here, but does the ordinarily brilliant Jacob Weisberg miss the boat in this piece about the Intelligent Design debate?

Evolutionary theory may not be incompatible with all forms of religious belief, but it surely does undercut the basic teachings and doctrines of the world's great religions (and most of its not-so-great ones as well). Look at this 1993 NORC survey: In the United States, 63 percent of the public believed in God and 35 percent believed in evolution. In Great Britain, by comparison, 24 percent of people believed in God and 77 percent believed in evolution. You can believe in both—but not many people do.

He goes on to recount how evolution led Darwin to doubt his Christian faith, and cites others thundering about evolution’s incompatibility with church doctrine. He concludes that we ought to stop pretending that evolution is not a threat to believers.

This is OK as far as it goes. Evolution is indeed a threat to what a lot of people believe – otherwise school boards wouldn't be arguing over it. But in trying to rise above it all, Weisberg buys back into the simplistic notion that evolution and religion offer roughly equivalent explanations for our presence here on earth. It’s the same “let’s debate it” position that Bush took - with the addendum that the debate’s already over and evolution has won and we should stop pretending otherwise.

Certainly, a backstory linking human existence to God is central to many people’s religious beliefs, and evolution chafes against this. But is the principal function of religion to offer a factual explanation of how we got here – or to help people understand why we're here and how we ought to lead our lives?

Sometimes religions demand that people believe things that don’t stand up to scientific scrutiny. But the fact that religion shouldn’t be taught in science class doesn’t mean religion is invalid, or that science can’t coexist with religion. Science simply doesn’t address the core religious questions, the "why" and the "what" as opposed to the "how." If we could scientifically prove or disprove God's existence it would put an end to these stupid political debates - and to a lot of dorm room bull sessions. But it would have the downside of eliminating the essential mystery of existence. That mystery is still with us, as is the question of how to orient ourselves toward it, something that science can't get into. We need a bright line between the two.

Not to be snarky, but here's a correction to the excerpted paragraph above: Evolution is not doctrinally incompatible with Buddhism, which is non-theistic and doesn't address the origins of humanity in its canonical texts.

The Army's latest solution for detainee abuse

2005-08-10T21:04:00.000-04:00

The Defense Department could respond to widespread abuse of its detainees by putting a stop to torture and holding the brass who enable it accountable. Instead, it's decided the way to go is to crack down on adulterers.

What else to make of the strange case of Gen. Kevin P. Byrnes, whom the Army pulled from duty because he had an extramarital affair with a civilian:

Having an extramarital affair can be deemed adultery and a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. But such cases rarely go to court-martial and usually end in administrative punishment such as a letter of reprimand, according to military lawyers. Relieving a general of his command amid such allegations is extremely unusual, especially given that he was about to retire.

The Army has been hurt over the past year by detainee-abuse cases and has been accused of not going after top officers allegedly involved in such abuse. Army officials said relieving Byrnes was meant to show the public that the service takes issues of integrity seriously.

"We all swear to serve by the highest ideals, and no matter what rank, when you violate them, you are dealt with appropriately," said one Army officer familiar with the case. "Relief of command is a huge consequence. He's had an extraordinary career, but at the end of the day, the Army has to hold people accountable for their conduct."

Update: Here's one theory on why Byrnes has been canned - bureaucratic infighting over an IT project. How prosaic.

More reaction/speculation here, including some from my fellow koan-blog, One Hand Clapping.

Kyoto Zen garden

2005-08-10T00:09:00.000-04:00

Originally uploaded by edgeofkaos.

A few years ago we visited Japan. It was wintertime and the light was pale. I took some photos of temples in Kyoto. I don't remember the name of this one, but it was a striking place.

These are the days of lasers in Afghanistan

2005-08-09T23:24:00.000-04:00

An artist aims to recreate the Afghanistan Bamiyan Buddhas using wind- and solar-powered laser beams.

Britney biology 101

2005-08-09T20:26:00.000-04:00

Should someone explain to Christina Aguilera the concept (which she may find horrifying) that it's typical for pregnant women to gain weight? And then, like, they can lose it again?

The mission was going well until the Klingons at Fox News violated the Neutral Zone

2005-08-09T10:47:00.000-04:00

Overextended metaphor alert:

He was Mr. Spock to Brokaw's folksy Bones McCoy and Rather's impetuous Captain Kirk -- an alien intelligence from the planet Canada, offering not a hug or even a reassuring pat on the shoulder, but a poker face that was accented, on rare occasions, by a faintly raised eyebrow.

Releasing books into the wild

2005-08-08T22:45:00.000-04:00

Ever wonder what to do with books you've read and no longer have use for? We have a lot of these lying around - it doesn't feel right to toss them, but neither does it do much good to stack them up in the basement, never to be read again. Here's one solution:

Many of you wrote in to recommend www.bookcrossing.com for discarded books. The system works as follows:

Read a good book (you already know how to do that)

Register it here (along with your journal comments), get a unique BCID (BookCrossing ID number), and label the book

Release it for someone else to read (give it to a friend, leave it on a park bench, donate it to charity, "forget" it in a coffee shop, etc.), and get notified by email each time someone comes here and records journal entries for that book. And if you make Release Notes on the book, others can Go Hunting for it and try to find it.

Harry Potter and the MPAA Ratings Board

2005-08-08T20:44:00.000-04:00

The movie version of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, due for November release, will be rated PG-13, not PG like the previous films.

This makes some sense, as the story involves blood-drawing and dismemberment for a pseudo-Satanic ritual. Plus a murder. Pretty strong stuff. But I'm looking forward to the movie version of the climactic confrontation between Harry and Voldemort - among the best scenes in the series thus far.

Still, bad news for all six-year-old HP fans.

"Will 'Half Blood Prince' be R?" one commentor jokes. "SECTUMSEMPRA! Maybe Tarantino could direct it."

Jack Abramoff, old economy guy

2005-08-08T18:57:00.000-04:00

Josh Marshall has been looking into the latest Jack Abramoff scandal:

To recap the details, Abramoff's clients in Guam paid him $324,000 in 36 separate checks for $9,000. They didn't pay it to him directly but used a Laguna Beach, California attorney, Howard Hills, as the cut-out. The Guam clients sent the money to Hills; Hills sent it on to Abramoff, etc.

Now, as we also noted, the $9,000 number jumps out because it's just shy of $10,000. And banks must report all transactions over $10,000 to federal regulators.

I was curious whether bundling payments like this is a crime even if there's no other criminal activity tied to the transaction. And the answer seems to be: absolutely.

Abramoff's activities recall an episode from season 4 of The Sopranos. Carmela, fearing for her own financial security, swipes $50K that Tony has stashed in a backyard bin.

Here's how TWOP describes it:
Anyway, now we go to Carmela, who is counting out cash at her local bank. She's investing precisely $9,900, and the broker is nice enough to inform her that he's required to tell the IRS about any transaction of $10,000 or more. "Oh, really?" wonders Carmela, before opening her notebook to reveal that she's made four other identical deposits. "I want it in something safe," she adds. "Something old economy."

Can GSAVE be saved?

2005-08-08T11:15:00.000-04:00

I almost gave up last week trying to figure out exactly what was going on with GWOT and GSAVE. Was it all just about having an acronym with some uplift? No, it wasn't. It was the result of a long process of policy development/retrenchment within the Defense Department and National Security Council. They sensibly concluded that focusing all resources on killing and capturing terrorists wasn't enough.

But while "global struggle against violent extremism" may be a more nuanced - er, accurate - description of the nature of the problem, it makes a lousy slogan. It sounds even vaguer than a "war on terror." It addresses causes, not effects, and Bush doesn't do root causes. With GSAVE the aim is to stop people from being extremists - a worthy and neglected goal. With GWOT, the goal is to stop the extremists from blowing us up. Simpler and easier. You can see why Bush quickly switched gears and went back to the "terror" mantra.

But what of the underlying policy shift? Does Bush's repudiation of the slogan equal a rejection of the whole GSAVE package? Ed Kilgore postulates that it might, and that the conflict reflects growing divisions between the White House and Pentagon over Iraq:

...there's the constant drumbeat of suggestions from the Pentagon that things are going so swimmingly in Iraq that we might be able to begin bringing home troops by next spring--in sharp contrast to Bush's repeated argument that any talk of withdrawal prior to the military defeat of the insurgency, or a dramatic increase in Iraqi security capabilities, offers encouragement to the enemy.

A lot of Democrats think the Pentagon is finally getting out of denial. But on the Republican side of the punditocracy, there's neoconservative editor Bill Kristol , who thinks Rummy and the boys are turning coat and undermining Bush after having concluded that Iraq is a military disaster that's redeemable only by an Iraqi government that's showing us the door, even as Bush still holds out for a U.S.-led victory over the insurgents.

Is this, the most "disciplined" administration in memory, about to be torn apart on the issue it has made its very signature? Hard to imagine, but it's starting to look that way. It would sure be ironic if Rumsfeld finally got the sack not for his incompetent handling of Iraq, but for his belief that a change of course is necessary.

All that is solid melts into air

2005-08-08T00:18:00.000-04:00

From the ABC News website:

Most Sent Headlines
Peter Jennings Dies at 67
Famous Atheist Now Believes in God
Woman Eats 35 Bratwursts in 10 Minutes

Warning: globalization metaphor overload

2005-08-07T20:34:00.000-04:00

Via Drezner, Jagdish Bhagwati argues that the world isn't flat - flatter, perhaps, but still pretty bumpy:

In truth, the flat road is not flat at all. Take the supply of educated manpower in India. Of the numbers in the age cohort for college education, only about 6% make it to college. Of these, only two-thirds graduate, and just a small fraction can read English. Of these, a further fraction can speak it; and of these, a smaller fraction still can speak it in a way which you and I can understand. The truth of the matter, therefore, is that even for the call-answer and back-office services, the numbers who will compete are only a very small fraction of the numbers being thrown about. India's huge size and the dazzle of the few Institutes of Technology are totally misleading. The road is not flat; the gradient becomes steep as wages rise for those who can manage while others cannot qualify.

A good point: There are still all those people out there living in poverty, somewhere out beyond the edge of Friedman's flat earth, missing out on the frictionless flow of goods and services.

Bhagwati goes on to point out that global competition is increasing. This isn't exactly flatness, but more like a bumpy roller coaster:

The real problem in the increasingly globalized economy is rather that most producers in traded activities -- an expanding set because services have become steadily more tradeable -- face intensified competition. A specific producer here will find rival suppliers stealing up on him from somewhere, whether Portugal, Brazil or Malaysia, indeed from sources which may not include India and China. In consequence, almost no producer is truly relaxed. I was at a Parents' Day at my daughter's camp in 1991 in Vermont and talked to a father producing chips in Silicon Valley. He lamented, as did Bill Clinton soon after, that competition from Japan and South Korea was fierce (and wicked). So I turned to another dad listening in on us and asked him what he did. "I grow mushrooms," he said. "Ah, you must be happier," I remarked. He replied, tearing at his hair: "Oh no, Taiwan is killing me!"

Rushdie's anti-absolutism

2005-08-07T10:22:00.000-04:00

I walked around stunned in the first few weeks after 9/11, feeling confused and put off by the flood of trite “why do they hate us” speculations. Then, while working out on a stairmaster at the gym one day, I read this essay by Salman Rushdie. It made me begin to think hey, there’s a way forward here.

The piece offered no grand plan to defeat Islamic extremism, no perfect insights into why they hate us. It was a more personal statement, of a kind missing at the time – and, unfortunately, mostly missing ever since in the great divide over the Iraq war – the voice of sensible cosmopolitan humanism, free of the jingoism of the right or the cravenness of the left:

The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women's rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex. These are tyrants, not Muslims. (Islam is tough on suicides, who are doomed to repeat their deaths through all eternity. However, there needs to be a thorough examination, by Muslims everywhere, of why it is that the faith they love breeds so many violent mutant strains. If the West needs to understand its Unabombers and McVeighs, Islam needs to face up to its bin Ladens.) United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan has said that we should now define ourselves not only by what we are for but by what we are against. I would reverse that proposition, because in the present instance what we are against is a no-brainer. Suicidist assassins ram wide-bodied aircraft into the World Trade Center and Pentagon and kill thousands of people: um, I'm against that. But what are we for? What will we risk our lives to defend? Can we unanimously concur that all the items in the above list -- yes, even the short skirts and dancing -- are worth dying for?

The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his world-view, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them.

How to defeat terrorism? Don't be terrorized. Don't let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.

I wish we could say that, especially in the United States, we had followed this advice. We've made some attempts, but some of our own worst (and absolutistic) impulses were unleashed as well.

Rushdie argues in a piece today that it’s time for an Islamic reformation. The current Muslim clerical establishment is, by and large, invested in a view of the Quran and the faith as existing outside of history, immune to any understanding not of the absolutistic, revelatory kind:

It should be a matter of intense interest to all Muslims that Islam is the only religion whose origins were recorded historically and thus are grounded not in legend but in fact. The Koran was revealed at a time of great change in the Arab world, the seventh-century shift from a matriarchal nomadic culture to an urban patriarchal system. Muhammad, as an orphan, personally suffered the difficulties of this transformation, and it is possible to read the Koran as a plea for the old matriarchal values in the new patriarchal world, a conservative plea that became revolutionary because of its appeal to all those whom the new system disenfranchised, the poor, the powerless and, yes, the orphans.

Muhammad was also a successful merchant and heard, on his travels, the Nestorian Christians' desert versions of Bible stories that the Koran mirrors closely (Christ, in the Koran, is born in an oasis, under a palm tree). It ought to be fascinating to Muslims everywhere to see how deeply their beloved book is a product of its place and time, and in how many ways it reflects the Prophet's own experiences.

However, few Muslims have been permitted to study their religious book in this way. The insistence that the Koranic text is the infallible, uncreated word of God renders analytical, scholarly discourse all but impossible. Why would God be influenced by the socioeconomics of seventh-century Arabia, after all? Why would the Messenger's personal circumstances have anything to do with the Message?

The traditionalists' refusal of history plays right into the hands of the literalist Islamofascists, allowing them to imprison Islam in their iron certainties and unchanging absolutes. If, however, the Koran were seen as a historical document, then it would be legitimate to reinterpret it to suit the new conditions of successive new ages. Laws made in the seventh century could finally give way to the needs of the 21st. The Islamic Reformation has to begin here, with an acceptance of the concept that all ideas, even sacred ones, must adapt to altered realities.

Injecting this notion of historicity into Islam, of course, would be a highly dangerous enterprise. If something like this goes forward, there will be tensions, violent at times, in the dialectic between the Word-of-God absolutists and the historical contextualists, and everyone who finds himself somewhere in between. But let’s not worry about that right now, because there is effectively no “in between.”

This idea mirrors the current debates over the Bible, evolution, etc. The important point is that in the West (or the United States anyway) debates are occurring. They’re often reallllly stupid debates, but we can conduct them without blowing things up.

Democracy can wait

2005-08-06T10:04:00.000-04:00

It's taking Iraq by storm, but the inexorable wave of democracy sweeping the Middle East has yet to reach the UAE:

"We live in the best democracy ever," says Samir Marzouqi, 19, who lives in a country where citizens never vote.

As a national of the United Arab Emirates, he lives in what is now the only country in the Gulf which has no elected bodies. Political parties are banned.

But he points out that the sheikhs who rule the UAE attend regular open meetings where citizens can air concerns.

And, as many of his peers stress, with free health care and education, a booming economy and political stability, few want to complain anyway.
....
"Everybody is happy, everything is going smoothly, and I don't think we should jeopardise that to be a democratic country," says UAE national Sharifa Maawali, 27.

Of course, when the gravy train ends the sheikhs could find themselves in trouble. But it's interesting to note what a little political moderation and prosperity can do to sap democratic aspirations.

The Novak crack-up

2005-08-05T21:30:00.000-04:00

Bob Novak's sudden exit from "Inside Politics" yesterday, apparently spooked at the sight of a bulky red book, had a distinctly Novakian weirdness to it - huffing self-righteousness underlaid by veins of anger, its original emotional/historical sources obscure. Novak may be cracking under pressure or just dodging Plame questions. But after months of silence, something is obviously up.

The cross-currents of pressure are growing, and Novak's not handling it well. After swearing up and down to every interlocutor that he couldn't say a damn thing about the Plame case, why did he write a column this week disputing what a witness - a CIA spokesman - had said about what happened?

The lawyers also urged me not to write this. But the allegation against me is so patently incorrect and so abuses my integrity as a journalist that I feel constrained to reply.

After publicly declaiming on the case, his pretext for not commenting or answering questions evaporated. The air of obscure, impenetrable mystery around him disappeared. He became just another guy who had testified and was conducting a CYA campaign - "fair game," as Karl Rove might put it. As Jay Rosen describes it:

It seemed to me, as a viewer, that Novak was in an impossible position every time he went on the air to talk politics. If he met his duty to himself (by not speaking up while the Plame case was open) then he could not meet his duty to his peers and his profession.

This was to tell CNN viewers just what he knows about a newsworthy story, and answer a fair-minded interviewer’s questions. To put a man on the air in a situation so constrained is neither fair nor wise. It didn’t make journalistic sense, or human sense.

So what happens now? Novak will disappear from TV for a while. But his credibility and career are now in serious danger.

The God-given right of every American to display a giant, blue, flag-waving muppet on the roof

2005-08-04T22:24:00.000-04:00

The latest NIMBY issue:

A giant blue statue of "Sesame Street's" Big Bird character perched above a roof has angered homeowners in a Wisconsin neighborhood, according to a Local 6 News report.

Al Emmons of Greendale, Wis., has been displaying the statue on his home's chimney located at Bluebird Court.

However, neighbors complained that the bird diminished the historic integrity of the community and went to officials to get Emmons to remove the statue.

"It's just an unhealthy obsession," Emmons said. "It's such a silly thing to get upset about. That's also what the big to-do is, is that everyone is wondering why would they get so upset about having a blue bird on a guy's chimney that the kids made."

Lots of cocaine in the Po Valley

2005-08-04T21:30:00.000-04:00

A lot more people may be getting high in Italy than previously thought:

Scientists have found large quantities of cocaine residue in a river in northern Italy - suggesting consumption is much higher than previously thought.

They say they found the equivalent of 40,000 doses a day in the Po valley, home to about five million people.

The study, published by the UK's Environmental Health magazine, tests sewage and rivers for levels of a by-product of cocaine metabolism.
...
The new report suggests that past studies of cocaine use in Italy - mainly based on population surveys and crime statistics - had been optimistic.

According to official estimates, people living around the Po consume about 15,000 doses of cocaine a month.

If accurate, this new estimate means cocaine consumption is 80 times the official figure. Not sure what the broader implications of this are, but it raises some questions - are the official and/or standard academic methods for surveying drug use way off?

Who is the Democratic Grover Norquist?

2005-08-04T20:35:00.000-04:00

Mark Schmitt makes a lot of sense in this post - there is no point in Democrats trying to emulate Grover Norquist in terrorizing party moderates in the name of discipline and unity:

...Norquist's merciless treatment of moderate Republicans is not going to be a legacy that he or his allies will be proud of. By forcing the moderates to toe the Club for Growth line, he and his allies may have won some battles, but they will surely regret it in the long run. By placing these moderates in incredibly awkward positions, he has made them even more vulnerable than Bush alone has already made them. And when Democrats make gains in 2006 and later, it will be the moderates who are first to go, with Chris Shays of Connecticut among others joining Maryland's Connie Morella in early retirement. Or, Norquist will succeed in replacing these moderates with more pliant conservatives who will be even more vulnerable in their districts, such as Mike Ferguson of New Jersey.

Also, the idea of a Democratic version of Norquist - who is of course as nutty as they come, even if he knows how to organize the grassroots and toss off soundbites - is truly frightening. I assume that the Democrats who yearn for their own Grover want someone with the organization skills, but not the radical ideology. At least I hope so. Who are the potential Grovers out there, anyway?

Intelligent design and political correctness

2005-08-04T12:32:00.000-04:00

It’s atrocious - and an international embarrassment, not that he cares about that - that the president cannot endorse the overwhelming scientific consensus with regard to teaching evolution. Sadly, this is a consensus position in the United States so it makes political sense to take it.

But one reason Bush can make such a statement is its sheer, all-encompassing blandness:

"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought, and I'm not suggesting -- you're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, and the answer is yes."

Let the debate unfold! Evolution, intelligent design, biblical creationism – it’s all part of the landscape of what people believe and we ought to take into accounts all points of view. On the surface, it sounds eminently fair-minded and typically American. And it is reasonable to teach children facts about our society: that many people think evolution is a crock and the world was created 6,000 years ago – in a social studies class. But that’s not what Bush means.

What's most interesting is that Bush's “different ideas” position appropriates the foundation of the left’s now increasingly musty multicultural agenda – that everyone’s unique cultural identity ought to be acknowledged and that no offense should be given to any individual or group – and uses it in service of the religious right, to attack science. It's equally soft-headed no matter who’s using it.

Update: The Washington Post has an editorial noting the irony here:
For more than 30 years, the conservative movement in America has been doing battle with the forces of relativism, the "do your own thing" philosophy that eschews objective truth and instead sees all beliefs and all personal choices as equally valid. Instead, philosophically minded American conservatives have argued that there is such a thing as objectivity and that some beliefs really are better, truer or more accurate than others. Given this history, it seems appropriate to ask: Is President Bush really a conservative?

Do we really need to listen to the aircraft evacuation drill?

2005-08-03T10:23:00.000-04:00

On planes poised for takeoff on tarmacs around the world today, everybody's going to be listening for a change when the flight attendants rehearse the evacuation procedures.

By next week, though, Toronto will be forgotten and passengers will be leafing through the SkyMall instead.

And that's probably OK. How many people on that Air France flight listened before takeoff? I suspect anyone who has flown more than a few times has subliminally absorbed the necessary information, and all that's needed is a trained crew to put it into action.

Roller coaster at sunset

2005-08-02T22:05:00.000-04:00

Another old, interesting man-made pattern - one of the old roller coasters at Hersheypark.

History still hasn't ended

2005-08-02T21:33:00.000-04:00

John Gray throws cold water on Tom Friedman and the whole globalization-leading-us-to-utopia mindset. He compares it to its most obvious global economic utopian antecedent, Marxism, and finds it shares some of the same flaws:

It is an irony of history that a view of the world falsified by the Communist collapse should have been adopted, in some of its most misleading aspects, by the victors in the cold war. Neoliberals, such as Friedman, have reproduced the weakest features of Marx's thought—its consistent underestimation of nationalist and religious movements and its unidirectional view of history. They have failed to absorb Marx's insights into the anarchic and self-destructive qualities of capitalism. Marx viewed the unfettered market as a revolutionary force, and understood that its expansion throughout the world was bound to be disruptive and violent. As capitalism spreads, it turns society upside down, destroying entire industries, ways of life, and regimes. This can hardly be expected to be a peaceful process, and in fact it has been accompanied by major conflicts and social upheavals. The expansion of European capitalism in the nineteenth century involved the Opium Wars, genocide in the Belgian Congo, the Great Game in Central Asia, and many other forms of imperial conquest and rivalry. The seeming triumph of global capitalism at the end of the twentieth century followed two world wars, the cold war, and savage neocolonial conflicts.
.....
Unfortunately the problems of globalization are more intractable than those of corporate life. States cannot be phased out like bankrupt firms, and large shifts in wealth and power tend to be fiercely contested. Globalization is a revolutionary change, but it is also a continuation of the conflicts of the past. In some important respects it is leveling the playing field, as Friedman's Indian interlocutor noted, and to that extent it is a force for human advance. At the same time it is inflaming nationalist and religious passions and triggering a struggle for natural resources. In Friedman's sub-Marxian, neoliberal worldview these conflicts are recognized only as forms of friction —grit in the workings of an unstoppable machine. In truth they are integral to the process itself, whose future course cannot be known. We would be better off accepting this fact, and doing what we can to cope with it.

This essay argues some compelling points: That globalization isn't pretty, and that history is richly complex and unpredictable, driven not just by economies but by nationalistic passions, cultural and religious traditions, and perhaps now increasingly by global environmental stresses. In this distinctly American world-historical moment, this self-evident truth is something that we - and our leaders - tend to forget or ignore.

Thanks to Frank Foer subbing for Andrew Sullivan for the link.

Does the Judy Miller-as-source theory make sense?

2005-08-02T12:40:00.000-04:00

There's continued speculation, and riffing on that speculation, that Judy Miller was a source of information for administration officials in the Plame case, not the other way round. Thus she's actually protecting herself, not some anonymous source, by going to prison.

Isn't this a little farfetched? If it were the case, when the truth eventually came out the NYT would have a scandal on its hands that would have Times executives yearning for the good old days of Jason Blair. Is the management of the paper really dumb enough go to the mat on Miller's behalf, editorializing in full high dudgeon mode about the First Amendment and the role of a free press, yadda yadda, to cover up a lie?

Much of the Miller speculation just seems to be people who hate her dishing dirt about her at clambakes.

Dam of yore

2005-08-02T00:58:00.000-04:00

The Kensico Dam in New York - a grand work of masonry completed in 1917. It has fountains, granite gazebos (above - is that what you call this?), a sense of artistry you rarely see today. I wanted to walk up and touch the stones, but there was some police tape blocking the way. There's a big park at the foot of the dam. It's lovely and relaxing - but also interesting to hang out there and think of all that water so close behind that looming wall.

Watch a little "Scarborough Country" and rethink things, Judge Posner

2005-08-01T20:55:00.000-04:00

I couldn't get very far into Richard Posner's long essay on the media in the NYT Book Review. I started reading, but he seemed to be stating rather obvious points not particularly well. Then it turned out I didn't have to read the damn thing because Jack Shafer promptly confirmed my impression and eviscerated it as hackwork.

The thing that stopped me was what seemed to be Posner's central point (and the reason the NYT commissioned this - to give us a distinctly Posnerian insight that no one else has had). After reciting common arguments on the left and the right - the left complains that the right wing media are biased and inaccurate and eroding the quality of the MSM; the right complains that the media are liberal - he says this:

Strip these critiques of their indignation, treat them as descriptions rather than as denunciations, and one sees that they are consistent with one another and basically correct. The mainstream media are predominantly liberal - in fact, more liberal than they used to be. But not because the politics of journalists have changed. Rather, because the rise of new media, itself mainly an economic rather than a political phenomenon, has caused polarization, pushing the already liberal media farther left.

Here Posner commits the basic error of many conservative media critics - he buys into the symmetry fallacy: the idea that in our political culture "liberal" and "conservative" describe mirror-images or symmetrical opposites.

They don't. The "conservative media" are explicitly conservative. Sometimes outlets like Fox News theatrically pretend not to be. What Posner calls the "liberal media" do have a lot of liberals working for them - as he notes. Sometimes their collective bias - or more often, just attitude - creeps into the coverage. But the MSM follow a different set of rules than the conservative media - one reason they are falling all over themselves these days. Can you really say that the Washington Post is liberal in the the same sense that the Washington Times is conservative?

These are obvious points familiar to anyone who has followed the endless debate over media bias the past few years. It sounds like Posner is visiting his formidable brainpower on this subject for the first time, like an anthropologist documenting his encounter with a previously undiscovered stone-age tribe. He doesn't seem to know Journalism 101 - for instance, the distinction between an average newspaper's editorial positions (politically/ideologically identifiable) and its news pages (not).

In one section, Posner makes hash not just of journalism, but of economics and political science. He postulates a town with two newspapers, one liberal, one conservative, each occupying a niche analogous to the Democratic and Republican Parties:

One of the two newspapers would probably be liberal and have a loyal readership of liberal readers, and the other conservative and have a loyal conservative readership. That would leave a middle range. To snag readers in that range, the liberal newspaper could not afford to be too liberal or the conservative one too conservative. The former would strive to be just liberal enough to hold its liberal readers, and the latter just conservative enough to hold its conservative readers. If either moved too close to its political extreme, it would lose readers in the middle without gaining readers from the extreme, since it had them already.

But suppose cost conditions change, enabling a newspaper to break even with many fewer readers than before. Now the liberal newspaper has to worry that any temporizing of its message in an effort to attract moderates may cause it to lose its most liberal readers to a new, more liberal newspaper; for with small-scale entry into the market now economical, the incumbents no longer have a secure base. So the liberal newspaper will tend to become even more liberal and, by the same process, the conservative newspaper more conservative.

Leaving aside the alt-weekly market, is there any town in America where the "liberal newspaper" has slanted its coverage more to the left recently to attract more "liberal" readers? If anything, the opposite is true. Newspapers are more concerned now with charges of liberal bias, not less. And as Shafer notes, the idea that CNN has moved leftward to compensate for Fox news is laughable.

Some friendly editor at the Book Review should have sent this back for another draft.

"Some bad things could happen"

2005-08-01T20:42:00.000-04:00

The space shuttle has some strips of filler material protruding from its heat shielding:

Wayne Hale, the deputy shuttle program manager, told a news conference that engineers simply did not know enough about the problem to leave it unattended, so they decided to conduct the spacewalk Wednesday to "set our minds at rest."

"At the end of the day, the bottom line is there is large uncertainty because nobody has a very good handle on the aerodynamics at those altitudes and at those speeds," Hale said. "Given that large degree of uncertainty, life could be normal during entry or some bad things could happen."

First the foam, now this. For God's sake - isn't it time to just shut down the whole shuttle program and find some other route to orbit? The shuttle program is like a car with 100,000 miles on it - there are a hundred little things decaying and going awry. But we don't launch cars into space.

Thinking big

2005-08-01T11:53:00.000-04:00

For some time my six-year-old son has been obsessed with the googolplex (the impossibly large number, not the Googleplex, the corporate HQ for Google). He had a passing interest in infinity, but it was a little too abstract to hold his attention. But for him the googolplex has the virtue of making the incomprehensible mathematically concrete. And you know something, it is a pretty friggin' big number:

A googol is greater than the number of particles in the known universe,which has been variously estimated from 10^72 up to 10^87. Since this is less than the number of zeroes in a googolplex, it would not be possible to write down or store a googolplex in decimal notation, even if all the matter in the known universe were converted into paper and ink or disk drives.

Thinking of this another way, consider printing the digits of a googolplex in unreadable, 1-point font. TeX 1pt font is .3514598mm per digit, which means it would take about 3.5 * 10^96 meters to write in one point font.

The known universe is estimated at 7.4 * 10^26 meters in diameter, which means the distance to write the digits would be about 4.7 * 10^69 times the diameter of the known universe.

Next year in the Ivory Coast?

2005-08-01T11:46:00.000-04:00

Believe it or not, there are some places (but not many - three, to be precise) in worse shape than Iraq.

I prefer "idealistic pragmatism"

2005-07-31T12:31:00.000-04:00

This has been a banner week for trite political sloganeering. First, apparently solely because we needed a better-sounding acronym to reassure people in the face of terror attacks, we dropped the GWOT and replaced it with the GSAVE. Today we find that Condoleeza Rice's new slogan is "practical idealism."

Where have we heard that before?

To be fair, Rice has obvious reasons for using the phrase. But is there any political slogan more vapid?

Bolton's moustache and Condi's boots

2005-07-29T21:46:00.000-04:00

Oh, come on!

Too often we see this same seventh-grade behavior among adults. While healthy civic discourse involves disagreement on issues of policy, too often people are prone to bully and harass their opponents with attacks on physical appearances when they are unable to articulate a valid and logical opposing argument.

Mocking public figures for their disastrous personal style choices is not just a right - it's a necessity!

Mean guys

2005-07-29T21:29:00.000-04:00

I was watching the House debate on CAFTA a couple of nights ago. Florida Republican Clay Shaw was running things. Time after time after a Democrat spoke, Shaw would dish out a nasty aside dismissing the previous speech as the ravings of a liberal or a fool, then throw it over to a Republican who would set the record straight. His Democratic counterpart, Charlie Rangel, behaved like a gentleman. Republican leaders also pointedly dismissed the Democrats as partisan hacks for opposing the bill, though it was the GOP that had engineered the whole scenario for exactly such an outcome. Does political rhetoric really have to be not merely hot, but insulting and belittling? Even Newt Gingrich had a kind of flamboyance to his rhetoric that made it hard to think he really meant it all.

Why are the Republicans behaving sensibly?

2005-07-29T20:49:00.000-04:00

First Bush makes a reasonable choice for the Supreme Court. Then today, Frist breaks with the White House and the religious right on stem cells.

After four years of ideological confrontation from the White House and its allies, are the grownups back in charge in Washington? I wouldn't get too excited yet. High-minded centrism and bipartisanship are not exactly breaking out all over.

But anyway ... there are several interpretations of this sudden softening of the hard-right monolith.

1. There is a genuine intra-party split underway on stem cells, the first of many as Bush heads toward lame-duckitude. Maybe. But I doubt Frist would have broken with the White House without Rove's advance knowledge and approval.

2. Karl Rove and his 51 percent polarization strategy are on the outs due to some combination of Plamegate and other factors - the failure of the Social Security proposal, et al. Unlikely. Though it certainly seems that Rove wasn't the main moving force behind the Roberts nomination.

3. Bush's political weakness has taken the bloom off the confrontational approach. More likely. Bush needed a victory and some public goodwill - and it looks like Roberts will deliver on both. By the same token, Frist's move is a logical and smart one for him. After months of awkward pandering, he's actually doing something we can believe he believes in - that is also popular with a majority of the country. He also gives the Republican Party a big tent feel on the issue, which it needs.

4. The grownups are actually back in charge. Unlikely. Have you seen Brent Scowcroft recently? In fact, there are no grownups in the Republican Party anymore. We can only hope that objectively speaking, polarization's political dividends are declining.

Pay no attention to that woman behind the curtain

2005-07-29T00:08:00.000-04:00

When Karen Hughes starts her new job trying to spin the entire Arab world with her special brand of pathologically rigid message discipline - i.e., repeating the same sunny catch phrases over and over while Bush & Co. go on their merry way, doing what they please - it won't work:

To fight these [anti-Western] ideas, friendly state visits from Laura Bush will not suffice. Neither will more Britney Spears songs for Muslim teenagers, which is what we play on U.S.-funded Farsi and Arabic radio in the Middle East. Instead, we need to monitor the intellectual and theological struggle for the soul of Islam, and we need to help the moderates win. This means making sure that counter-arguments are heard whenever and wherever Muslim clerics and intellectuals are talking, despite the impact of Saudi money.

Like all PR, Bush- and Hughes-style PR is at its heart fakery, and insulting fakery at that. Only 50.3 percent of Americans bought it in the last election. It won't sway the Arab world.

Should Democrats embark on a grand march toward universal health care?

2005-07-28T23:51:00.000-04:00

This Rick Perlstein article rises to an impossible height above the political landscape to argue that the one sure-fire way for the Democratic Party to regain the upper hand is to pass universal health care:

These programs make life in America fundamentally better. And because these gooses, Social Security, Medicare, lay golden eggs. They manufacture Democrats.

It is the duty of every generation of Democrats to produce new geese to lay 70 years of golden eggs. It is the only way our party has grown—as Bill Kristol puts it, by reviving the reputation of the Democrats as the generous protector of middle-class interests. They know they're screwed if we're credible in our pledge to deliver new kinds of power to ordinary people in their every day lives.

Democratic congressmen can do that, for example, by making a credible collective pledge that if you vote Democrat enough you will never pay another medical bill as long as you live. You really think people wouldn't stop voting Republican then?

Well, yes. And Perlstein, who wrote a book tracing the rise of modern conservatism, knows a thing or two about what makes political movements tick. Shorn of all short-term priorities and positioning, this makes sense. Of course it would be great if the Democrats could create universal health care! This is what they do best, and they should constantly have their eyes on that goal.

But best not to think too hard about this. The idea is both monolithic and abstract. He offers no clues on how to get to there from here, either politically or programmatically – that’s not his job. Matthew Yglesias analyzes that here. And in that same general neighborhood of monolithic abstraction, or abstract monolithism, or whatever, the Democrats have two other problems besides their inability to pass gigantic, popular entitlement programs: They are culturally out of tune with the country, and people don’t trust them to protect us all from terrorists or to exercise American power around the world.

Bribing war criminals to surrender

2005-07-28T15:49:00.000-04:00

I wonder what this:

Karadzic's wife appeals to her husband to surrender
PALE, Bosnia-Herzegovina (AP) — The wife of fugitive Radovan Karadzic appealed Thursday to her husband to surrender to the U.N. war crimes tribunal "for the sake of your family."

Has to do with this:

In the Balkans, war crime pays. This year, a record 20 accused war criminals have been turned over to the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia at The Hague, compared with only three in 2004. But NATO troops didn't nab these fugitives in daring dawn raids. Negotiators did much of the work, offering generous financial incentives. "Everybody here in Serbia believes the government gives big money to indictees," says Natasa Kandic, head of the Humanitarian Law Center in Belgrade. "If you want to go to The Hague, you'll be rewarded and your family will have a very good life."

Some of the incentives are legally mandated. Serbia passed legislation last year to provide pensions to its indicted war criminals. The law gives indictees a full salary, plus unspecified "compensation" for family and legal expenses. In the Republic of Srpska, the Serb-controlled part of Bosnia, benefits are even more generous: a full salary to the indictee himself, a double salary paid to his family, plus 80 euros a month to each of his school-age children. (A typical Bosnian Serbian salary is only 200 euros a month.) Family members also get four expense-paid trips a year to The Hague to visit indicted loved ones. And last year Srpska added a cash bonus of 25,000 euros for anyone who surrenders.

Still more generous inducements are offered to the really big fish. According to Serbian media reports, Gen. Vujadin Popovic got a bonus of $1 million when he turned himself on April 14. Popovic was the commander of the Drina Corps in Bosnia, which conducted some of the worst ethnic-cleansing campaigns in the region. Serbian government officials have told human-rights activists that Gen. Ratko Mladic, the accused architect of the Srebrenica massacre, was offered $5 million to turn himself in, although in the end he decided to stay on the run. (The U.S. government still has a $5 million reward for his capture.)

I'd guess Karadzic would be entertaining similar offers. The article cites various reasons for this egregious policy: Serbia wants into the EU and must expedite the process; there is residual support for these criminals, etc. But buying surrenders and confessions undercuts the whole purpose of the war crimes tribunal, doesn't it?

The Times randomly searches for a position

2005-07-26T23:00:00.000-04:00

Daniel Radosh continues his exploration of the absurdities of random bag searches:

You know you're in trouble when the Times is urging the government to restrict civil liberties even more.

It's true. The Times editorial in particular is a masterpiece of editorial writing kitsch. In its high-minded, goo-goo way it aims to please every possible constituency among its readership and thus cannot make a coherent argument. It says in spite of the civil liberties problems, we must search bags - but not harshly or unfairly or in a way that profiles. But not half-assedly either! And we have to do it like this for a long, long time. And please don't shoot anybody like they did in London, that would be really bad. Oh, and the Bush administration is screwing up again.