Entries from January 2007 ↓
January 31st, 2007 — America at war, Hamas, just war
(updated for clarity; see below)
I may be confused about what, in 2007, we’re “allowed to” say about those who are different from us, but I’m pretty clear on what’s right and what’s wrong.
So is Bradley Burston. He agrees with me that suicide bombing is wrong. (He further agrees with me that it’s an abomination that Hamas claims it’s a “natural” consequence of Israeli occupation.) He also thinks it will be the undoing of the longed-for Palestinian state:
Let this much be said: Israel has never devised - not in Dimona, not in underground RAFAEL plants - a weapon against the Palestinian national movement that is anywhere near as effective as the Palestinian’s own suicide bomber.
Let the comments fly in, from bottomlessly self-congratulatory supporters of Palestinian statehood in Australia, New Zealand, Berkeley, from all those places where white people like yourselves exterminated indigenous populations with impunity. And stole the land on which your condo was built.
I support a Palestinian state no less than you. But if you spin your impassioned defenses of suicide bombing as a necessary tactic - a natural tactic - a natural response, you’ll be spinning that line, and waiting for an independent Palestine, for much longer than any Palestinian should ever have to wait.
Maybe, maybe not.
I’m not so optimistic. [update for clarity: I'm not optimistic that the West will hold to the moral demands it has made on Hamas; I think appeasers will seek to erase the moral distinctions between the position of Hamas and that of Fatah.] Indeed, I think that our moral equilibrium—if indeed we had an equilibrium, and one could argue that the biens-pensant of the West had lost theirs prior to the event—has been turned upside down in the wake of 9/11. Michael Walzer was among first to capture it with his spring 2002 essay “Can There Be a Decent Left?”
I haven’t come across any arguments that seriously tried to describe how this (or any) war [in Afghanistan---the Iraq war wasn't even on the horizon at the time Walzer wrote this. --ed.] could be fought without putting civilians at risk, or to ask what degree of risk might be permissible, or to specify the risks that American soldiers should accept in order to reduce the risk of civilian deaths. All these were legitimate issues in Afghanistan, as they were in the Kosovo and Gulf wars. But among last fall’s antiwar demonstrators, “Stop the bombing” wasn’t a slogan that summarized a coherent view of the bombing–or of the alternatives to it. The truth is that most leftists were not committed to having a coherent view about things like that; they were committed to opposing the war, and they were prepared to oppose it without regard to its causes or character and without any visible concern about preventing future terrorist attacks.
A few left academics have tried to figure out how many civilians actually died in Afghanistan, aiming at as high a figure as possible, on the assumption, apparently, that if the number is greater than the number of people killed in the Towers, the war is unjust. At the moment, most of the numbers are propaganda; there is no reliable accounting. But the claim that the numbers matter in just this way, that the 3120th death determines the injustice of the war, is in any case wrong. It denies one of the most basic and best understood moral distinctions: between premeditated murder and unintended killing. And the denial isn’t accidental, as if the people making it just forgot about, or didn’t know about, the everyday moral world. The denial is willful: unintended killing by Americans in Afghanistan counts as murder. This can’t be true anywhere else, for anybody else.
The radical failure of the left’s response to the events of last fall raises a disturbing question: can there be a decent left in a superpower? Or more accurately, in the only superpower? Maybe the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics. Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger, and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power. Certainly, all those emotions were plain to see in the left’s reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of the attack or to acknowledge the human pain it caused, in the schadenfreude of so many of the first responses, the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved. Many people on the left recovered their moral balance in the weeks that followed; there is at least the beginning of what should be a long process of self-examination. But many more have still not brought themselves to think about what really happened.
Walzer’s essay was published five years ago. Have we made progress on that front? Um, no.
January 31st, 2007 — earnestness, political correctness, politics
Just the other day, in reference to John Kerry paying his respects to Iran’s Khatami at Davos, I was saying that
what is “acceptable” in political discourse changes faster than you can say “homophobe” (or “Islamophobe” or “anti-Semite“). And that what is “acceptable” behavior from the domestic political opposition changes faster than you can say “visiting Assad in Syria” or “paying respect to Iran’s Supreme Shithead ….”
That got no further play in the media—I guess no one cares, because Kerry is out of the presidential race. (Well, someone cares about cares about Kerry, but my post on that will have to wait for another day.)
However—you knew there was a however, right?—Joe Biden is in hot water (considered all but dead one day after announcing that he’s running for president) for making this remark about Barack Obama:
“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
This is a major event in the leftosphere, and cool-as-a-cucumber Garance Franke-Ruta at TAPPED helpfully explains how we’re going to have to start policing our language now that we’ve got a black man and a woman running for president:
[N]ow that we have the first credible African-American and female presidential candidates in American history running, I think we’re going to learn that many of the common formulations we use to talk about ourselves and our politics can sound tin-eared at best — and downright offensive, at worst — when discussing African-American or female subjects.
And why should we watch our mouths? Because too many cooks spoil the broth. Or something. (I know it has something to do with hot liquid refreshment):
The issue isn’t just Biden being an insensitive boob, but rather that commonly used words and phrases activate different frames — remember that whole discussion? — in different contexts, and that women and African-Americans live in a verbally constraining soup of negative frames.
Forget what Biden said. He’s an idiot.
What is Franke-Ruta’s excuse for sounding like, you know, Ari Fleischer trying to intimidate Bill Maher on September 26, 2001?
Well, she doesn’t see it that way. She thinks a healthy national debate over “negative frames” will emerge.
This is going to seriously damage some public figures, such as Biden. But, overall, I think that it will be a healthy process for American society to undergo, and that we are going to learn an unusual amount about ourselves, as well as about the candidates seeking to lead us.
Hahahahahaha! Excuse me while I go count the days until I can start collecting Social Security. In the words of the immortal Maurice Chevalier (update: not to mention Lerner and Loewe!):
January 30th, 2007 — fools
Paleocon isolationist Israel hater Pat Buchanan finds much to appreciate in lefty blogger Matthew Yglesias.
Buchanan writes about the recent Herzliya conference, where international leaders and political figures met to discuss the threat from Iran. Buchanan, anti-Semitic conspiracist par excellence, is convinced the United States will go to war (again!) for Israel:
Israel’s war is to be sold as America’s war.
The project is under way. According to Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor of the Guardian, Israeli media are reporting that the assignment to convince the world of the need for tough action on Iran has been given to Meir Dagan, head of Mossad.
Listening to the war talk, Gen. Wesley Clark exploded to Arianna Huffington: “You just have to read what’s in the Israeli press. The Jewish community is divided, but there is so much pressure being channeled from the New York money people to the office-seekers.”
The former supreme allied commander in Europe was ordered out of ranks and dressed down by Abe Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League. But Matt Yglesias of American Prospect, himself Jewish, says Clark spoke truth: “(I)t’s true that major Jewish organizations are pushing this country into war with Iran.”
Yglesias, who has been worried for months about the possibility of Bush bombing Iran,occasionally shows himself capable of writing rationally about the subject:
The one aspect of the Iran question that does enjoy universal agreement is that it involves difficult, unappealing choices and a notable absence of easy answers. Under the circumstances, it’s vital that the public have a clear understanding of what is genuinely at issue here.
However, he believes there is a great right-wing conspiracy to rush us to war:
[C]onservatives are seeking to foster an atmosphere of panic and hysteria that will cloud people’s judgment and delegitimize and marginalize the considerable downside of military action.
I find hilarious that while Iran has been a declared enemy of the United States since 1979 and is known to be engaged in furious efforts to develop nuclear energy; that while Bush named Iran as part of the “axis of evil”; that while Ahmadinejad has made a year-long play for the global audience with his appearances at the UN, his photo ops with the Bad Boy from Venezuela, his Holocaust-denial conference, his repeated questioning of the legitimacy of Israel, his crude taunts, and his extravagant threats to wipe it off the map—all of which have clearly communicated to even the lowest of the lowest common denominator in America that he is a loose cannon and that, by association, Iran is deeply untrustworthy—Yglesias is worried that American conservatives (and especially American Jews) are deliberately making Iran look bad.
January 30th, 2007 — aside
…is a word that a certain war architect is, apparently, unfamiliar with.
World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz, as he leaves from Selimiye mosque in Edirne, Turkey
(via PJ Media)
January 30th, 2007 — infotainment, journalism, media, news
A former FNC staffer is so upset over Fox’s war on Anderson Cooper that he spills to Romenesko:
Loath as I am to criticize my former employer, Fox News Channel, I can’t help but weigh in on FNC’s current public go-round with the Cable News Network. Fox’s smarmy hit job on Barack Obama, which touched things off, is contemptible in its own right. But what makes this latest dustup downright nauseating is Fox’s hypocrisy in targeting one of CNN’s best for the worst of its trademark vitriol. The Mediabistro website told the story in a recent headline dripping with unintended irony: “Fox Is Going After Anderson Cooper.”
You see, it’s not the first time Fox has gone after Cooper. In the past, though, its pursuit was in hopes of luring him away from CNN.
Our informant proceeds to tell us the not-so-secret story of what goes on all over town as media companies try to raid their competitors. A.C. wasn’t interested:
I got the impression that even the producer knew he was on a fool’s errand; that for Cooper, whose talents and instincts were in actual news, coming to Fox would be a huge step down professionally.
Well, maybe. But perhaps the more relevant detail is that the CNN gig Fox was trying to lure Cooper away from had been a huge step up for ol’ A.C. (not that there’s anything wrong with hosting The Mole). Not that our informant mentions that.
But he does go on to explain how the current war on Cooper is a replay of Fox’s war on Ashleigh Banfield of MSNBC (no, I didn’t remember it either) and how some FNC guy had crowed: “We’re gonna ruin her!”
So now, per current Fox spokes-assassin Irena Briganti, Anderson Cooper is “the Paris Hilton of television news.”
Yep, and I piled on (even though I have actually been impressed by Cooper, and I appreciate the efforts he’s made to add some context and depth to the issues he raises in his broadcasts).Then comes an admission from our informant:
It is true that Cooper set himself up for the attack.
Yes, he certainly did. But our FNC informant still thinks it’s not fair, because Cooper is so obviously full of integrity:
But he did so forthrightly, by publicly criticizing Fox for the tawdry way it conducted the Obama smear.
Gimme a break. Since when does leveling a forthright accusation of tawdriness against your business rival make you honorable?
CNN is wrestling pigs in the Infotainment Pigsty along with everyone else. (It’s too depressing to link. Just watch used-car salesman Wolf Blitzer hype each and every story on the Situation Room any night of the week.) The only difference is that Fox loves to get dirty, while A.C. and the folks at CNN spend a lot of time applying lipstick to their pigs.
Feh. I’m not buyin’. (But I’m not saying it doesn’t work when you’re trying to spiff up your brand.)
January 30th, 2007 — books, how we live now, publishing
Illustration by Chip Kidd
Since I challenged you not to believe onetime industry pillar Jason Epstein when he said that book publishing wasn’t scandal-ridden, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the sensational account of the firing of Judith Regan in New York magazine, which you can read here. I’ll let GalleyCat’s Ron Hogan pique your interest:
[I]t’s a doozy of a story, especially in the way [writer Vanessa Grigoriadis] lays out the dynamics of Regan’s relationship with the rest of HarperCollins, including CEO Jane Friedman, and its parent company News Corp. But, of course, you want to hear about how Regan staffers in LA were called into a meeting room to be told about her firing, only to discover she was still eating lunch at her desk. Or about the speculation that Friedman may have jumped the gun on cutting her loose. And, let’s face it, you kinda want to know what O.J. Simpson had to say for himself during that interview. …
But my favorite detail is actually one that’s ancillary to the Regan saga:
“There were two secret books at HarperCollins in 2006, and we asked, ‘Are they worth it?’” says a HarperCollins editor. “Jane [Friedman] said that one of them was not that big a deal, but the book with Judith was going to be huge.”
Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch (subscription required; $$) is less focused on the details that will be surprising to outsiders. Instead, he hones in on the obvious lies and lacunae, and on what he calls “the large theme of this story—lots of people were involved or had knowledge, but none of them were responsible or in the wrong.”
I’ll focus on the two things that struck me the most: First, Regan’s fingerprints are all over the story and, absent legal depositions, this may be the closest we get to her side of how it happened. Second,…multiple people from [NewsCorp] are leaking and spinning without revealing the full story, and sometimes without making any sense—which is a big reason that this story keeps going and going.
Yep. I’ll cut and past a few of Cader’s observations:
source[s] are almost never named and rarely even characterized well, and even players who should be important (”Simpson’s manager”— is that Bret Saxon, or someone else?; “Simpson’s lawyers” — theoretically not lawyer Yale Galanter given his denials) are not named. …
Many of the anecdotes presented ring true to our own reports— while others, like the issue of when the book was printed, make no sense at all. …
We’re told “Mark Jackson, Murdoch’s in-house counsel, made the deal for about $880,000, put into a third-party trust for Simpson’s children.” The contract’s been published. The number is wrong…
The article doesn’t explore what “story” was pitched and Murdoch nodded assent to. … etc., etc.
Cader reserves his most bitter observations for last:
Now for the News Corp. side. Leakers there finally confirm that during the firestorm and initial defense (including Harper’s Thursday staff meeting), executives there had not read the book, or even the most controversial chapter. … “And we didn’t have the book, so we had to go on what she told us.” …
They had to. Because, even though orders had been solicited, a higher-than-initially-expected print run of approximately 400,000 copies had been set, and by the time the book was cancelled four days later on November 20, those books were printed and at least some of them had shipped, News Corp. is selling (or NY is enabling) the story that as late as Thursday, November 16 they couldn’t get anything to read. And it’s Judith’s fault, of course.
The article claims, “By November 13, the consensus among News Corp. executives was that they couldn’t wait any longer to announce the project, since a cameraman at the TV taping had leaked a video clip to Entertainment Tonight. There was one problem: Regan said the book wasn’t ready. It wouldn’t go into galley form for several days.”
Not a computer file? Not a printout? Not a photocopy? Not even something pasted into an e-mail? And why a galley for book that is miraculously printed and shipped days later? “We didn’t have the book, so we had to go on what she told us.” Until Friday, you see. “The galleys of the book were finally ready on Friday, and distributed to a small circle of executives. They were unenthusiastic.”
They like the profits from Regan’s books, but don’t like the stink to rub off on them. What a surprise.
Score: Judith Regan 1, HarperCollins -2.
And can I just say that I miss Tina Brown, who at least knows how to do “Lowbrow is Fun” while at the same time nurturing the tender egos of artistes?
And can I ask why a Random House bigwig was present at editor Bob Loomis’s 40th anniversary party in 1997:
BOB LOOMIS, who has been an editor at Random House for 40 years, has always operated on the principle that good editors are invisible, remaining in the shadows of the authors with whom they work. But on Tuesday evening, he was the center of attention at a dinner given by HAROLD EVANS, president and publisher of Random House, at the New York Public Library, to celebrate Mr. Loomis’s four decades with the house.
but why on Loomis’s 50th anniversary party in 2007 (last week) he had to be content with the Ghosts of Random House Past?
“About 25 years ago, I began to think, ‘I’m a stick in the mud,’ ” Mr. Loomis, now 80, told an audience of close to a hundred in the trustees room of the New York Public Library last week, at a tribute celebrating his 50 years at Random House. “ ‘Why wasn’t I moving on?’ ” Mr. Loomis asked, in that soft, tricky voice that compels you to lean forward and listen. Why wasn’t he like so many other editors jumping from house to house in search of bigger, better opportunities?
Well, the answer is, he would have to leave his beloved authors. Mr. Loomis has been at Random House since the days of Donald Klopfer and Bennett Cerf, its founders, and the essence of that great publishing era still lingers in the halls — at least for him, though the company has moved several times.
January 29th, 2007 — blogosphere, personal
The photo of John Edwards’s home has not been removed, as I thought it had been when I wrote this post. I’m not sure why I wasn’t able to find it this morning, and I’m too tired to look into it. The photo is available here.
Roger L. Simon, who linked to the photo, isn’t a fan of the ostentatious lifestyle, but he’s got a tip for Edwards:
He should do what the Hollywood stars do when people start to criticize their private jets and multi-million dollar residences in Malibu, Vail, etc. He should buy a Prius!
January 29th, 2007 — Iran, propaganda
Are you allowed to nap in a mosque?
Why, yes, if you’re the president of Iran. How sweet.
The Sandmonkey has something to say about this, though:
Of course, you might look like a hobo, and some smart people might ask why you would need to sleep there when you are the freakin President, but who said Propaganda was for the smart amongst us?
January 29th, 2007 — blogosphere, how we live now
The competition is getting fierce in the blogosphere:
Oh, and if you don’t link to this, you’re dead to us.
(And, no, I’m not talking about the Clinton blog ad wars.)
January 29th, 2007 — personal
It’s been two years since I was here.
January 29th, 2007 — Hamas, Israel, Middle East war
Hot off the presses. According to two different representatives of Hamas, the targeting and murder of innocent civilians inside Israel via suicide bombing is A-okay. It’s “resistance.” And resistance is legitimate.
[A] spokesman for Hamas praised the bombing as a natural response to Israeli military policies in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as its ongoing boycott of the Hamas-led Palestinian government - a position likely to complicate the group’s current efforts to end a crippling aid boycott imposed by the international community.
“So long as there is occupation, resistance is legitimate,” said Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza.
Barhoum also said attacks on Israel were preferable to the recent bout of Palestinian infighting in Gaza between his group and the more moderate Fatah. “The right thing is for Fatah weapons to be directed toward the occupation not toward Hamas,” he said.
The Hamas statement echoed a declaration by Khaled al-Batsh, a senior Islamic Jihad leader, who called the attack “a natural response to the continued crimes by the Zionist enemy.”
Fatah sees things differently (today anyway; that was not always the case. But people—and political movements—mature. Or they should.):
Fatah spokesman Ahmad Abdul Rahman condemned it, saying, “We are against any operation that targets civilians, Israelis or Palestinians.”
This is just in case you’re wondering why the United States and Israel have decided to support Fatah’s Abbas. He, unlike Hamas, has come around. It’s a sad day when the faction we have to choose as our ally merely condemns the heinous act of suicide bombing out of political expediency. But there you have it.
And a reminder from British writer Nick Cohen:
Political seriousness lies in stating which Palestine you are for and which Palestinians you support.
What choice do we have but to support Fatah and condemn Hamas?
January 29th, 2007 — PR, PRopaganda ((TM)), messages, politics, publicity
Going where Jack Shafer refused (for some inexplicable reason) to go before (see this post), Isaac Chotiner names “evil genius” pollster and “message guru” Frank Luntz “the architect of the [1994] GOP takeover.”
In TNR, Chotiner also reports that a “disappointed” Luntz (actually, he sounds enraged, not disappointed, by the idiots in Congress) is “fleeing” D.C. for “the beach.”
In Luntz’s telling, what was once a visionary movement of bold ideas has been consumed by the nasty and anti-intellectual culture that dominates Washington. “I read these blogs,” he says, his voice downbeat. “They are so bitter. So bitter and so angry. … It’s not my style.” And later: “I think Washington, D.C., is intellectually tired.”
It’s hard to argue with Luntz’s take on the state of intellectual debate in Washington. But Luntz’s career has been about nothing so much as cheapening language and obscuring honest discussion. During the debate over tort reform in 2005, a memo written by Luntz, which eventually leaked to the press, classily counseled Republicans with the following: “It is tempting to counter-attack using facts and figures. Resist the temptation. … The President’s language works because it speaks to a series of individual proposals that common sense suggests will lead to job creation.” When House Republicans wanted to gut Medicare in 1995, Luntz advised them to be, well, blatantly dishonest about what they were doing: If the cuts would be perceived as long-term savings, he said, then the public would go along with benefit cuts. “We want a solution that preserves and protects Medicare,” Gingrich said at the time, echoing Luntz’s advice. Luntz’s most notorious memo may be the one he sent out in 2003 about the threat of global warming: “Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue”–even though no such “lack of scientific certainty” exists. [emphasis mine]
Luntz is getting a bad rap: because he perfected spin for the Republicans. Even Kos has called him “formerly evil but now just a mercenary.” [In the world of the coldhearted coldblooded, a "mercenary" is a values-neutral term. I think Kos got a bad rap way back when, too.]
Anyway, it’s more than a little disingenuous to blame Luntz for the fact that our entire political culture sounds as empy and hollow as it does. For one thing, he used to work for people who were passionate about the ideas he helped them shape. For another, it’s hardly Luntz’s fault that his techniques have been mimicked by Democrats—and everyone else trying to sell ideas.
No wonder Luntz is “circumspect” in response to some of Chotiner’s questions:
And, yet, if you ask Luntz about his role in Washington over the last decade, he has no regrets. “I wouldn’t change anything,” he says. Pushed on whether his snappy and often misleading slogans hurt political debate, he is circumspect, saying only that sloganeering has been going on for 150 years.
So if Luntz is fed up with Washington, perhaps he should work for an outsider. Someone who’s got mojo but no clear message?
January 29th, 2007 — image is everything, media, politics
Apparently, important people don’t agree with my take on the John Edwards story. (I thought publishing the photo was no big deal, because everyone already knows that Edwards is rich.) The photograph has been removed from my post, however. It has also been removed from the Internet, as far as I can tell from a quick search.
The other day, TigerHawk’s link led me here. As you can see, where there was once a photo, there is now none. The note from Carolina Journal is still there at the top of the page:
Due to the extraordinary traffic generated by the link from the Drudge Report website, the main carolinajournal.com website is temporarily unavailable. The main carolinajournal.com will be available again once traffic levels return to normal.
If you do a Google News search for “Edwards estate” now, what you get are a bunch of articles that point up the hypocrisy of a guy calling himself a man of the people while living on a huge estate.
“To Some, Edward’s Grand Estate sybolizes inequity he pledges to fight”
But you no longer get to see a picture of that estate—which takes the sting out of the stories. In my original post, I wrote that the indelible image of Edwards’s wealth that you get from pictures of his estate are much more powerful than the words “rich trial lawyer.” I also opined that, because class resentment is not a huge political issue in America, seeing a picture of Edwards’s wealth will not be a turn-off to potential voters. I still believe that. (In America, we all want to be rich, and we all believe we could be rich if only we put our minds to it—it’s the essential American myth.)
The Edwards campaign obviously doesn’t agree, however. And they’ve got a point: just look at those negative stories as a result of one photograph!
To bend over backwards to be fair, however, I will say that the easy availability of such a photograph on the Internet also presents a huge potential security risk for Edwards and his family, so it could have been taken down for that reason. I absolutely agree that the privacy and personal lives of public servants, potential public servants, and their families should be protected from such unnecessary security risks, so if the photo was taken down for that reason, I understand.
However: it’s also very convenient for Edwards, who happens to be on CNN live talking to Miles O’Brien as I write and who hasn’t been asked word one about this matter. Why not? Whether the photo posed a security risk or was simply a political embarrassment, it is undoubtedly a news story.
My early conclusion for 2008 is that the MSM—and CNN in particular—is totally in bed with the Democratic candidates.
January 28th, 2007 — America at war
Via Austin Bay, Strategy Page lists the top ten myths about the Iraq war. (Wait a minute… There are myths about the war?)
He emphasizes point #10 [emphasis added]:
10- The War in Iraq is Lost. By what measure? Saddam and his Baath party are out of power. There is a democratically elected government. Part of the Sunni Arab minority continues to support terror attacks, in an attempt to restore the Sunni Arab dictatorship. In response, extremist Shia Arabs formed vigilante death squads to expel all Sunni Arabs. Given the history of democracy in the Middle East, Iraq is working through its problems. Otherwise, one is to believe that the Arabs are incapable of democracy and only a tyrant like Saddam can make Iraqi “work.” If democracy were easy, the Arab states would all have it. There are problems, and solutions have to be found and implemented. That takes time, but Americans have, since the 18th century, grown weary of wars after three years. If the war goes on longer, the politicians have to scramble to survive the bad press and opinion polls. Opposition politicians take advantage of the situation, but this has nothing to do with Iraq, and everything to do with local politics in the United States.
I made a similar point a while back, here.
January 28th, 2007 — how we live now, information war, media, political theater, politics
Rapid-response politics for the Feiler Faster era (thanks for that concept, Mickey Kaus)
Saturday, January 27:
Sam Roberts / New York Times:
Giuliani Is Cautious as He Weighs ‘08 Decision
January 28th, 2007 — aside
(edited for clarity)
What can you say about John Kerry?
Former President of Iran Mohammad Khatami, right, shares a word with Senator from Massachusetts, USA, John Kerry after participating in a session ‘The Future of the Middle East’ at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Saturday Jan. 27, 2007. Kerry criticized the Bush administration’s foreign policy during the session, saying it has caused the United States to become “a sort of international pariah.”
(AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)
Will Kerry be granted a Hugh Grant moment? I have no idea whether Kerry has totally stepped over the line this time. One of the things that concerns me is that even though I’ve got pretty good antennae, I don’t know where the line is these days—it keeps moving.
By which I mean that what is “acceptable” in political discourse changes faster than you can say “homophobe” (or “Islamophobe” or “anti-Semite“). And that what is “acceptable” behavior from the domestic political opposition changes faster than you can say “visiting Assad in Syria” or “paying respect to Iran’s Supreme Shithead [see above].”
There are arguments to be made that Kerry’s bizarre behavior could in fact help us—that in the Age of Global Political Correctness (TM), this sort of faux “public diplomacy” is appreciated by the global audience and that it makes us look good, in a good cop-bad cop kind of way. But only as long as there actually is a bad cop. Who knows? But we shouldn’t ignore the notion. It actually reminds me of Yitzhak Rabin’s determination “to fight terror as if there were not a peace process and to pursue peace as if there were no terror.” Which only sounds contradictory; I think it’s it may be the only way forward.
But back to the stuff that doesn’t make my head hurt—as in: will we forgive Kerry?
Because that’s what we do with our beloved and/or loathed celebrities: we try them in the court of public opinion, sometimes with great fanfare and sometimes almost under the radar. I also agree with author Paul Slansky, who says that we Americans are obsessed with redemption:
For [Michael] Richards, going on Letterman was a shrewd choice, says Paul Slansky, author (with Arleen Sorkin) of a wonderfully witty compendium of apologies called “My Bad: 25 Years of Public Apologies and the Appalling Behavior That Inspired Them.”
“Going on the late-night talk show, as Hugh Grant proved with Jay Leno years ago, is a fantastic stage for making an apology,” Slansky says. “The late-night talk show is almost by definition a safe, friendly environment. They’re thrilled to have you, and they’re not going to ask you any hard questions, then everybody talks about it the next day and it’s all over.”
Unless you’re Dick Cheney, it’s almost impossible to escape an incident unscathed without feeding the apology machine. Just ask Judith Regan, who ended up in even more hot water by responding to the outcry over her O.J. Simpson “If I Did It” book and TV special with an outlandish justification, casting herself as a victim, not a perpetrator - and apparently blaming her subsequent firing on a “cabal” of some sort.
So why has the apology become such an integral part of the often dicey relationship between media and celebrity?
“It probably has a lot to do with America’s obsession with redemption,” says Slansky. “People today have a major love-hate relationship with celebrities. The relationship is so fraught with Schadenfreude that people are thrilled when celebrities (mess) up, and yet they’re happy to see them back again. After all, most people aren’t genuinely sorry. Most apologies are a way of saying, ‘I’m sorry I let down my guard and let you see my inner ugliness.’”
That’s right, too, I think. We don’t necessarily need to believe that these “sinners” are reformed, but we are still addicted to the Redemption Narrative and we want to see it played out.
We like to watch.
Peter Sellers in Being There (directed by Hal Ashby and co-starring the divine Shirley Maclaine); based on the novel by Jerzy Kosinski
January 28th, 2007 — America at war, PR, PRopaganda ((TM)), language, political speech, propaganda
Jack Shafer seems to think that if only people were more aware of “unspeak”—the PR-fueled and poll-tested reductionist shorthand vocabulary that is introduced into our public discourse at an alarming rate; whose existence has been the source of contentious debate for at least twenty years (but who’s counting?); which has been used by political campaigns for at least as long; and that has picked up in global popularity as the Age of Political Correctness began— then we could simply stop the subliminial selling of political messages (i.e., propaganda) through the too-cunning-by-half use of language.
Pro-life supposes that a fetus is a person and that those who are anti-pro-life are against life,… Pro-choice distances its speakers from actually advocating abortion, while casting “adversaries as ‘anti-choice’; as interfering, patriarchal dictators.”
Unspeak (also the title of a book, by Steven Poole), Shafer explains, is
an attempt to say something without saying it, without getting into an argument and so having to justify itself. At the same time, it tries to unspeak—in the sense of erasing, or silencing—any possible opposing point of view, by laying a claim right at the start to only one choice of looking at a problem.
This stuff is right up my alley, but something is weird about Shafer’s piece. Shafer writes about this subject as if his audience were a tabula rasa and yet he never mentions the contemporary dark prince of political language —longtime Republican consultant/pollster Frank Luntz (currently unaffiliated, I just read somewhere). Shafer cannot possibly be unaware of Luntz.
Nor can Shafer be unaware that this technique is increasingly used by the Democrats—and indeed the media—who now engage in the language wars with panache (and success: they turned Bush’s “surge” into an “escalation”; and NBC took great pride in being the first to call Bush’s “insurgency” in Iraq a “civil war”).
What gives?
Also: does this apply only to the hidden political messages that are aimed at good-hearted Americans by evil corporationa and politicians?
Or do words like “Koranic food“—seriously!—count?
January 28th, 2007 — infotainment, politics, pop culture, sociology
John Edwards is a populist, right?
Well, yes and no. He used to talk about the “two Americas.” Now, however, we know which one he lives in, because it turns out he’s got a 102-acre estate in North Carolina, with a 10,000+-square foot house—and more than 28,000 square feet of contiguous indoor space.
(via TigerHawk)
This Edwards story (advanced by Drudge, apparently—read the note at the top of the page when you click on the Carolina Journal link) is actually sort of lame. People who follow politics already know that Edwards made a lot of money as a lawyer. Still, the mode of attack is effective: unlike the words “rich trial lawyer,” the images of Edwards’s sprawling compound pack a punch. No one is going to miss the message (that Edwards is not exactly a man of the people).
Here’s a question for campaign strategists and party honchos, though: Is Edwards’s wealth and privilege a turn-off or a turn-on?
David Brooks, in his December 2001 essay “One Nation, Slightly Divisible” (and in his book BoBos in Paradise), suggested that class consciousness/resentment is not much of an electoral issue in the United States.
In that essay, Brooks wrote [emphasis mine]:
[W]hen [people in "Red" America" Franklin County, Pennsylvania] are asked about the broader theory, whether there is class conflict between the educated affluents and the stagnant middles, they stare blankly…. Do you feel that the highly educated people around, say, New York and Washington are getting all the goodies? … Do you see a gulf between high-income people in the big cities and middle-income people here? I got only polite, fumbling answers as people tried to figure out what the hell I was talking about.
When I rephrased the question in more-general terms, as Do you believe the country is divided between the haves and the have-nots?, everyone responded decisively: yes. But as the conversation continued, it became clear that the people saying yes did not consider themselves to be among the have-nots. Even people with incomes well below the median thought of themselves as haves. …
In case you’re wondering why:
They don’t compare themselves with faraway millionaires who appear on their TV screens. They compare themselves with their neighbors. … Many of the people in Franklin County view the lifestyles of the upper class in California or Seattle much the way we in Blue America might view the lifestyle of someone in Eritrea or Mongolia—or, for that matter, Butte, Montana. Such ways of life are distant and basically irrelevant, except as a source of academic interest or titillation.
Indeed. And Drudge has his finger on the pulse of America’s love of gossip.
But will this spot-of-bother hurt the Edwards campaign? Doubtful.
January 26th, 2007 — publishing
It’s been a long time since book publishing was called the “gentleman’s trade,” but it’s always a good time to try to perpetuate the myth.
After it was announced that a roman à Regan, The Devil Says Mean Things to You, was going to be published, someone wondered why there weren’t more books set in the industry:
“It isn’t that kind of business,” says Jason Epstein, a longtime editor with Doubleday and Random House whose many authors have included Norman Mailer and E.L. Doctorow. “It’s very gentlemanly, and there isn’t a lot of scandal to write about. You publish a book, it sells or it doesn’t sell, and then you publish another one.”
You don’t really believe that, do you? I didn’t think so.
January 26th, 2007 — politics
Her campaign might have stolen mindshare, leaving the netroots wounded, but Hollywood is one up on Hillary—either that or Obama’s people are stealing mindshare from her.
‘Cause Hollywood is going for Obama in a big way, reports ABC (via Roger L. Simon):
Hillary’s Hollywood Friends Switch Sides
Steven Spielberg and David Geffen Invite Hundreds of Stars to Their Big Barack Obama Fundraiser
Of course it could be argued, as I did here, that Hollywood lost interest in the Clintons a while back. Plus: Al Gore has some prominent fans on the Left Coast too.
January 26th, 2007 — celebrities, celebrity culture, gossip, infotainment
This is rich.
Jossip—Jossip!—disapproves of the New York Times doing gossip. Caryn James’s dissection of Angelina Jolie’s career was
a mediocre attempt at camouflaging the Times’ eagerness to capitalize on the brewing uptick in all things celebrity while holding its head high in the same pages that run Frank Rich’s columns.
Methinks the gossips at Jossip are feeling the heat. ‘Cause James (she’s from the NYT, dontcha know) gets access and gives good dish.
Gawker is more in the spirit of things:
Caryn James Is SO On Team Aniston
January 26th, 2007 — politics
Thanks to Kos, now I know what “scoop up mindshare before anyone can even organize” (see this post) means: the netroots just got punked by Hillary’s campaign:
Ahh, Yesterday I wondered where the WSJ got the notion that Hillary had scored significant victories in the “netroots primary”, since all objective evidence suggests that Hillary, in fact, has little online support.
Turns out the reporter just rewrote these two Clinton campaign press releases: Clinton candidacy garners huge online response and 24 hours later, the reviews are in. …
And it’s a bizarre world, one in which fierce Clinton critics like MyDD’s Matt Stoller are suddenly supporters [indeed --ed]. …
The campaign also cherry picks diaries on Daily Kos to pull ones that are supportive while ignoring the many, many more that are critical, attempting to give the impression that there is massive support for her effort on the nation’s largest progressive blog.
So the Clinton campaign can make up an alternate reality where she is the prohibitive netroots favorite while her opponents — the ones with actual widespread netroots support — are left unable or unwilling to take advantage of that support. [emphasis added]
Smart.
As I said the other day, I wish the Dems would devote even an eighth of their brain cells to figuring out how to do this kind of thing in response to media-savvy jihadi assholes rather than just their fellow Democratic (or Republican) assholes.
January 26th, 2007 — books
I haven’t read the book and I don’t intend to read the book, but I can tell you right off the bat that if it was written by committee, whose members had flashes of brilliance like this
“The scenes with the wicked boss were so hilarious and so strong that I thought if we put more of that in the book, the book would work better,” Raab says. “Villains are fun, and they tend to steal the show.”
then the book is going to be a dog.
January 25th, 2007 — Middle East war, Sunni v. Shia, framing, narratives, politics, propaganda, war
Greg Gause, a guest poster at Abu Aardvark’s blog provides a somewhat different perspective from what we’ve been hearing on the intra-Muslim tensions in the Middle East. He thinks the shifting alliances and chaos reflect balance-of-power issues more than a sectarian (i.e., Sunni vs. Shia) rift. Nevertheless, Gause says, Arab leaders in Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia have their own reasons for stoking sectarian sentiment:
I think that these leaders are worried about Iran for classic balance of power reasons, perhaps with a little bit of worry about domestic Shia discontent in the Gulf states (and more than a little in Bahrain). This emphasis on an Iran-centered threat rather than a sectarian Shia threat has been manifested in establishment Saudi editorial writers’ takes on recent events. They have gone to great lengths to say that it is Iran, not the Shia, that are the problem.
However, the leaders of all of these states are willing to play to the baser instincts of their own constituencies in allowing anti-Shia rhetoric to develop, and even encouraging it in a number of cases. From our own experience in the US, we know that mobilizing public support for a foreign policy based on cold, realist, balance of power considerations is a tough sell. Just ask Henry Kissinger about détente. It would be an even harder sell for these Arab leaders, whose populations basically like the idea of Iran getting the bomb and cheered Hizballah in its confrontation with Israel this summer. You cannot sell the policy on the basis of balancing Iran, so you sell it on a sectarian basis. Thus, we hear these outlandish stories about Shia proselytization efforts in Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, wherever. Maybe there is some truth to them, but very little real results that I have seen. It is scare tactics to sell a policy that is based on classic balance of power considerations.
Interesting that even these authoritarian (to put it mildly) governments feel compelled to gain public acceptance of their policies.
Gause continues:
What is somewhat surprising to me is how readily this line has been bought. I am not surprised that Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia have bought it. It fits exactly into their ideological frameworks. I am much more surprised about more mainstream Sunni figures like Yusif al-Qaradawi playing this card. We are even seeing some liberal and Islamist public intellectuals playing the anti-Shia card. This is interesting, disturbing and deserves more analysis than I can give it.
I’ll look forward to reading what he has to say, but I’m wondering why a political scientiest would be surprised that an appeal to people’s “baser instincts” is very effective in “mobilizing” them.
Triumph of the Will (1935)
January 25th, 2007 — Israel, Middle East war, liberal opinion
…is love, sweet love.
Livni and Abbas in Davos Photo: AP
For what it’s worth, and I fear it isn’t worth much, because this story is getting barely any play while the horrid rape charges against Israel’s loony president, Katsav, grab the headlines [one of the cardinal rules of infotainment is that the "better story" always wins: sex---even violent sex---is always a "better" story than almost anything, even when the stakes are war or peace]:
Livni says Palestinian state is achievable
Foreign minister tells World Economic Forum negotiations between Israel, Palestinians must be based on idea of two states living side by side in peace. Palestinian President Abbas says agreement will help strengthen moderates in region
Peres and Abbas (Photo: Reuters)
The NYT’s Steven Erlanger says, however, that there has never been a less propitious moment to try to reignite the peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians. I can’t say I disagree.
It would be hard to imagine a less promising moment for the United States to restart serious Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations.
Six years after the last such talks, the Palestinian government is controlled by Hamas, which preaches Israel’s destruction. Approval ratings for the Israeli prime minister are barely in double digits. Gaza and neighboring Lebanon are in turmoil. President Bush is weak.
Yet the administration is holding a meeting on Feb. 2 of the so-called quartet, whose other members are the European Union, Russia and the United Nations, to be followed by “informal talks” between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, with help from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, about the shape of a final peace treaty and the nature of a Palestinian state beside Israel.
The Americans are responding to pleas for re-engagement from the European Union, the Palestinian president and moderate Arab nations.
Well, yes. But wasn’t this also the recommendation of the ISG, the so-called Baker-Hamilton and a long list of others?
On January 4, I wrote:
And every day a new political wiseman solemnly intones that the key to peace is to solve the Israeli-Palestinian issue (one way or the other).*** It is to laugh!
[update: Check out the post. When I repreinted it here, it screwed up my code/theme/whatever.]
Well, guys and gals, it looks like there’s movement on that front, so it would be good to get some encouragement…—that is, if you all were really serious about solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because it is the key to world peace an all.
January 25th, 2007 — blogosphere, books, freedom, media, publicity, publishing, storytelling
Cory Doctorow is addressing published authors who would like a more dynamic presence on the Web rather than standard static sites, but he also gets at the essential personal benefit of maintaining a blog.
The best part of all this is the agency. It sucks to be an information supplicant who has to get someone else to utter the incantations necessary to move your expressive thoughts from your head to the universal planetwide information resource. …
How many telegrams did you send when you had to dictate them over the phone to a Western Union operator? How many emails do you send now that you can clatter them off your WiFi laptop in your living room?
Yes. Agency—also known in some quarters as freedom—is what it’s all about.
January 25th, 2007 — America at war, PR, PRopaganda ((TM)), counterterrorism, information war, politics, propaganda, publicity, war
She’s barely out of the gate and, as expected, Hillary Hatred is in full flower.*** Because I’m not a politico and therefore am not in the habit of obsessing about the (alleged) deep meaning behind each and every word that comes out of a potential candidate’s mouth, it is fascinating to see the thinking of someone who does do that kind of parsing.
For example, Matt Stoller,was a big fan of James Webb’s direct, uncomplicated “progressive populist message” in response to the State of the Union, is deeply unhappy with Hillary’s “mushy, untrustworthy glop.” +++
A progressive populist message would work in bringing us huge national majorities and a mandate for massive change. Still, if this is so obvious, why are we only hearing populism, or even a pale attempt at populism, from John Edwards (and Tom Vilsack)?
On the face of it, this doesn’t make sense. It’s a winning message, so why not use it? Well, it’s a winning message, alright, but only for the public. And right now, Presidential candidates are tailoring their messages for elite donors, and the rich don’t really care about inequality or Iraq. They care first and foremost about preserving the status quo, because in the status quo they are, well, rich. That’s a problem, because if your message is targeted towards the top 1% of the country, you’re leaving 99% of the country out of the conversation.
By far the worst example of this disturbing trend among 08ers is Hillary Clinton, who is rolling over donors and trying to prevent a primary from even happening by scooping up mindshare among elites before anyone else can organize. When you hear that you aren’t credible unless you can raise several hundred million dollars, realize that this is an idea planted by these elites to entrench their power, and not something that is falsifiable. It bears saying that it’s quite probable that don’t need $100M to run for President - Kerry didn’t lose the General because of a financial disadvantage, and he didn’t win in Iowa because of a financial advantage. The ‘only credible with $100M’ idea is another and more sophisticated version of the electable or inevitable meme that hurt us so badly in 2004. It’s something that Hillary Clinton wants us to believe is true. Whether it is true is a different story. [emphasis mine]
How do you “scoop up mindshare“?
How do you do it “before anyone else can organize“?
Can you teach it? Can you bottle it?
I hope so, because it sure would come in handy in the fight against global jihad, which David Kilcullen has talked and written about. The insight that struck me is that young Muslims increasingly choose the path of jihad because there are no compelling alternatives. And he says a big part of the West’s job is to create equally compelling, attractive alternatives for these young men. (At least that’s my takeaway—and I’m particularly interested in how the media helps make both jihad and its [future] compelling alternatives so attractive.)
Could some Democrats please give me an indication that they are starting to think about how to “scoop up” disaffected Muslims’ “mindshare before anyone else can organize”?
——————-
***I am not among her fans, but I am no longer among her detractors. The Eight-Year National Psychodrama drove me crazy, but time heals all wounds. Hillary has grown, and so have I. Life does that to you—or, rather, it should do that to you. If you haven’t examined your feelings about Hillary Rodham Clinton (or anything or anybody else) in the last 6-8 years or if you haven’t examined your opinions in the last 30 years, may I kindly suggest that it’s time to look inward.
At any rate, I will consider her on the merits when it comes time to cast my vote. Believe me, I had to grow (and the world had to change, too) in order to get to that point.
+++For those of you who, like me, are not politicos, Stoller elaborates on his anti-Hillary stance. It’s worth following along if you want to understand one split in the Democratic party:
In fact, everything that Hillary Clinton is doing is designed to make us think that she cannot be stopped, to pull the plug on money for others so she can get through the nomination without having to be clear on Iraq or populist in orientation. She is desperately fighting against having to do what Jim Webb did so well - spell out plainly the irresponsibility of political and economic elites. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s a strategy. Or maybe, and this is what I believe, she sympathizes with the elite class more than the public, believing that the public are sheep who can be easily manipulated. She herself hasn’t lived in anything close to the real world since 1991. …
Ironically, though she is popular among some base voters and most progressive elites, few activists, bloggers, or local politicians actually want Hillary as the nominee. Local politicians are desperately afraid she will hurt downticket candidates all over the country. Progressives know she hasn’t dealt with Iraq, and will cripple the Democratic Party badly as Iraq gets worse in 2007 and 2008. And political junkies know that she has done very little that is substantive in the Senate except grant Bush the power to go to war and pander on flag-burning and video games. Politically, Hillary has passed out enough favors and kept every group atomized and fearful enough to make her seem both unpalatable and inevitable. That is why her camp is claiming that they are in the netroots primary, when they are simply not.
I believe her tending to an elite audience and ignoring the concerns of various activists explains the loathing of Hillary Clinton within a certain piece of the progressive base. I’ve noted before how one slice of primary voters is pretty similar to the netroots. This loathing isn’t based on the right-wing slime machine, though often progressives unwittingly slip into discussions about things like ‘electability’. It’s a loathing that is more ‘gut’, more about conflicting identities. Chris has noted this with his excellent series of about a year ago on class stratification between the activist class and the elites. Hillary Clinton is an establishment elitist, and we are opposed to this institutional baggage.
Demographics aside, one way to theorize about our ideology is that we have seen and rejected the triangulating model of politics. It’s not that Clinton wasn’t a good President in the 1990s, it’s that he failed to enact anything that outlasted him. He got nothing done on, say, global warming, and failed to establish a firm post-Cold War framework that Bush didn’t detonate in five minutes. More relevantly, the Clintonistas performed horribly in the 2000s, acting as lobbyists and warhawks, and just generally working against progressives until they realized they couldn’t overtly beat us in the PR game.
So it’s not surprising that the Hillary Clinton campaign is working to convince the DLC that she’ll do the 1990s over again, only this time with an extra helpings of the strategies that failed. …
I asked anti-Clinton people if there were ways that Hillary Clinton could get your support. A few argued that if she apologized for her war vote they would consider her, but surprisingly, a number of people said, flat-out, no. I’m beginning to understand why. There is almost no common ground between progressive activists and elitists like Hillary Clinton. Either you are in the elite stream of discourse, the place where health care can be debated without anyone in the room fearing the risks of being uninsured but where the fear of your client losing his business model is real, or you are with the plebes who are worried about their personal health care. You are either angry about being lied to about Iraq, or you are one of the unapologetic liars. We’re on one side. The elites are on the other. We can’t handle someone who enabled the war and now won’t be straight with us on Iraq after four years of watching our America slowly die. It just isn’t possible anymore for us to be in the same conversation because there is nothing to discuss. I won’t be that surprised if Clinton wins the nomination, but what she needs to fear is if the various entities that loathe what Hillary Clinton stands for start talking to each other. Right now, there’s a reticence to criticize Senator Clinton because of the legacy of the right, and because we don’t like to go after Democrats. I doubt that reticence will continue as the candidates attack each other. Hillary Clinton is a tragic figure, …
January 24th, 2007 — personal
Jacob Weisberg has the best take on Bush’s demeanor last night, and what it means:
Before last night, this imperious attitude resounded through all Bush’s speeches to Congress. His previous State of the Union addresses each represented attempts—more successful than not in the first term, more unsuccessful than not in the second—to impose his will on Washington and the world. The administration’s attitude toward congressional challenge was perhaps best summed up by Dick Cheney’s famous suggestion to Pat Leahy of Vermont on the Senate floor: “Fuck yourself.”
It would be foolhardy to think that Bush’s true feelings have changed. Until the day he leaves office, he will continue to regard members of Congress as meddlesome Lilliputians trying to tie him down. But the reality is that they have tied him down. Faced with an assertive and so far remarkably effective Democratic Congress—and with no supportive public to turn to—Bush has to suppress his arrogant and bullying style as best he can.
Yes. And can I just say that even Hillary Clinton is starting to look good to me at this point?
January 24th, 2007 — America at war, Iraq
We all know that the only argument about the surge that really matters is the one between Bush his domestic political opposition—a contest being closely monitored by just about everyone.
According to Mohammed Fadhil, reporting for PJ Media from Baghdad, however, the residents of his neighborhood are eager to get on with it:
Although the major Baghdad plan isn’t officially launched yet, every day we see several joint operations against targets in and around the city. Still, according to the latest leaked reports, it seems as if the major implementations of the plan are going to wait until the beginning of next month,.
The government here says they are waiting for the buildup of participating troops to be completed, but I think it’s more likely that they are waiting for the Ashura ceremonies to end to allow pilgrims to travel between Baghdad and the shrines safely.
The waiting is proving to be more of a burden on the people of Baghdad than the operation itself would be. Patience is fading under the pressure of the increasing numbers of suicide attacks and the civilian deaths they cause. Baghdadis are desperately waiting for the operation to begin because they hope it can reduce the occurrence of these deadly attacks that distribute death equally among civilians.
However, and despite the spike in suicide bombings there’s a good sign. The numbers of unknown bodies that carry signs of torture have decreased significantly over the last two weeks, an official in the health ministry told al-Sabah.
Michael Yon, also in Iraq, has come to a conclusion too:
At this point I would say we are probably actually losing the war, but I really think this can be turned around. Petraeus is just the man who can do it. He’s brilliant and is ready to slam those militias. We need to kill Sadr. We will lose a lot of people taking on the militias, but we should either take them on or pack up and go home. I vote for killing them.
Yes, that would be good. But I fear—indeed, we know—it won’t end there.
Like everyone else in the blogosphere, I am depressed about it.
January 24th, 2007 — celebrities, journalism, media, media criticism
I have been a fan of Anderson Cooper, because I think his heart is in the right place. Now, not so much.
I can see why CNN would want to be in the business of competing against its much more popular rival, Fox. But whoever wrote Cooper’s script the other night isn’t doing him or CNN any favors. TVNewser reports:
Fox doesn’t react to Klein or defend its broadcasts. Instead, it responds to Anderson Cooper’s comment about “the difference between talking about news and reporting it,”
Is it really good journalism, as Cooper suggests it is, for one network to jump to the defense of one potential presidential candidate out of a field of thousands?
Will CNN regularly be coming to the defense of McCain, Romney, Clinton, Vilsack, Richardson, and all the others? No, I didn’t think so.
The idea that CNN is somehow morally superior to Fox may play well in your newsroom and the editorial offices, but the audience thinks differently, as TVNewser reports here.
Fox News Channel delivered 4.5 million viewers during President Bush’s State of the Union address Tuesday night.
Between 9 and 10:03pm, FNC averaged 4,560,000 total viewers, including 1,411,000 in the 25-54 demo.
That’s almost twice as many as CNN, which averaged 2,327,000 viewers with 735,000 in the demo. MSNBC averaged 1,537,000 viewers with 679,000 in the demo (quite close to CNN)…
So, yes, A.C. You had this one coming:
FNC spokesman Irena Briganti calls it “yet another cry for attention by the Paris Hilton of television news.”
Unless you think that CNN is morally superior to Fox … in which case we should have a little talk.
