Kevin Drum notes that Ezra Klein agrees with David Brooks about something):

Ezra Klein, after a full day of prostate blogging yesterday, says today that David Brooks is right when it comes to the big picture in healthcare policy:

He correctly identifies the central reality of health care politics, which is that most Americans are basically happy with what they have, but worried about keeping it. Policies that guarantee their futures are quite popular. Policies that radically change their presents are not.

Drum has a ready answer:

Well, if that’s the case, then here’s an idea: expand Medicare (or create a similar program) to cover every person in America under the age of 21. And then let them keep it as they grow older. In ten years everyone under 31 would be covered.

Only someone who has had no experience with Medicare would recommend expanding that miserable excuse for an “aid” agency, with its grotesquely bloated bureaucracy and its outlandishly incompetent bureaucrats. And don’t even get me started about what they consider an appropriate level of care.

Our health care system must be addressed … somehow. I’m no wonk—I don’t know the first thing about it. But can we think up something more effective than Medicare? Please?

Aretha sang about it a long time ago.

Now, the PLO’s ambassador to Poland shows it by visiting Auschwitz:

The PLO’s ambassador to Poland visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp on Wednesday. … After signing the camp’s visitors’ journal, [Khaled] Soufan told reporters he was there to convey his solidarity with the Jewish people’s suffering during World War II.

It would be easy to deride this as cheap political theater were it not for the fact that Holocaust denial is all the rage among some rather  prominent Muslims.

Which makes this gesture all the more powerful and resonant. So hat’s off to Khaled Soufan, and bravo.

The long road to peace begins with reconciliation. And there is no reconciliation without mutual respect.

By the way, the Pakistani ambassador to Poland also visited Auschwitz recently, I see from the same article. Nice of the media to report it, eh?

As if the Arab world’s refusal to screen an Israeli movie with a peace message isn’t unfortunate enough, the Israelis, who’ve come up with two Oscar-worthy films in one year, are also squabbling amongst themselves to compete for Hollywood’s attention.

The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard is doing a fine job of promoting women as more worthy political leaders than men. Meanwhile, back in the real world, MoDo delights in taking a pound of flesh out of Hillary.

Exerting maximum public pressure on Iran is “Trash Talk.” Fear of Iran is unreasonable; it’s the Republican base that we should fear.

Did you ever have one of those blogging days where you bookmark a ton of interesting stuff and you just know that there is no way in hell that you’re going have enough time or energy to write something worthwhile about them?

Well, that’s the kind of day it’s been, so …

I’m looking forward to reading this novel:

Mr. [Alan] Bennett poses a delicious and very funny what-if: What if Queen Elizabeth at the age of 70-something were suddenly to become a voracious reader? What if she were to become an avid fan of Proust and Balzac, Turgenev and Trollope and Hardy? And what if reading were to lead her, in turn, to becoming a writer? Mr. Bennett’s musings on these matters have produced a delightful little book that unfolds into a witty meditation on the subversive pleasures of reading.

They’ve canceled the Halloween parade in San Francisco? (Note to self: It’s still on in New York, though. Remember to be east of Sixth Avenue well before 5 o’clock tomorrow afternoon.)

Tortured about torture? It certainly won’t make you feel any better to read in the New York Times that the Bush administration”embraced harsh physical tactics.” At the same time, I’m with this guy:

In a PBS interview with Charlie Rose last week, General Hayden, the C.I.A. director, complained about negative press coverage of the agency’s interrogation practices. “What puzzles me is to why there seems to be this temptation, almost irresistible temptation, to take any story about us and move it into the darkest corner of the room,” General Hayden said.

Ahhhhhh, but a few pieces of Renaissance art from Florence have come to the Met:

Now, here’s something you don’t read about very often anymore, someone with a

deep, deep sympathy for the Israelis, not based on their political situation, but a very existential empathy for their national philosophy and their culture, which he perceives as honest and manly, really for standing for something that is good and true about the human race,

That would be Charles Hill, who’s a Yale prof and an adviser to—who else?—Rudy Giuliani.

Tom Lantos channels Rudy Giuliani [e.a.]:

Dutch lawmakers who recently visited the Guantanamo Bay military prison said they were offended by a testy exchange in Washington with a senior congressional Democrat. The lawmakers said that Rep. Tom Lantos (Calif.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told them that “Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay.” Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, was responding to arguments that the United States should shut down the U.S. prison in Cuba, the lawmakers said. “You have to help us [in Afghanistan] because if it was not for us you would now be a province of Nazi Germany,” …

Plainspokenness seems to be catching on.

This, from Arianna Huffington, is only slightly less embarrassing than Obama’s cringe-inducing announcement that he’s going to get tough sometime soon:

The president took a preemptive shot across the bow on Monday, playing the funding-equals-troop-support card, and placing the ball squarely in Congress’ court. Democrats can’t afford to sit back on their heels and wait until next year to take on the president (or worse yet, have a replay of the 2007 supplemental funding fight and cave to the president’s phony “before the holidays” demands).

They need to begin reframing the funding fight now — hammering home the message that it’s the president’s obstinacy that is jeopardizing the well-being of our troops and the safety of our country.

This is not the time for caution and playing it safe. This is the time to force the president’s hand.

It’s rare to find Arianna behind the curve, but that’s where she is. Hasn’t she heard? Iraq is pacified, no longer the featured story (or even in the headlines), and for all intents and purposes, according to Reason’s Brian Doherty, the war is over:

Just as public perception of whether the war was worth it didn’t shift toward “no” until May 2004—the first month U.S. troop deaths broke 100 in a month—a continuing decline in Iraq violence seems likely to calm down American dudgeon over a war that, after all, in a draftless world, most of us are affected by only as tragic TV entertainment. It could well be the standard accepted opinion a year from now that Iraq, while perhaps not always managed best every step of the way, has turned out well enough in the end, or so far.

Yes—time marches on.

Iraq is yesterday’s war. Today and tomorrow are about Iran, and “World War III,” as Caroline Glick writes (alarmingly):

It goes without saying that if and when a decision is made in Jerusalem or Washington to carry out an attack against Iran’s nuclear installations the public will only learn of the decision in retrospect. All the same, over the last few weeks, it has been impossible to miss the fact that the Iranian nuclear program has become the subject of intense and ever increasing international scrutiny. This naturally gives rise to the impression that something is afoot.

Indeed.

This is painfully embarrassing:

Obama Promises a Forceful Stand Against Clinton

I really like Obama, but it’s pretty clear that he has been—will be—eating Hillary’s dust. And, much as it I hate to say it, deservedly so.

George Packer recently came to much the same conclusion, via another route (by reading Arthur Schlesinger’s recently published journals):

Two months ago, I wrote that Obama, with his veneer of idealism and his pragmatic core, reminded me a bit of J.F.K. That might have been wrong. Since then, it’s become clear that Obama is not “a devious and, if necessary, ruthless man,” as Schlesinger called Kennedy. Democrats drawn to Obama’s camp project onto him the sense of politics as a higher calling that Stevenson pioneered in the early nineteen-fifties (whether there’s much substance to it in Obama isn’t completely clear). In the American liberal tradition, this means almost certain defeat. Clinton, on the other hand, appeals to those liberals who want to sleep with power and its compromises and have made their peace with it.

The exercise of power is an art. The powerful don’t announce their intentions. They act, and attack, without warning. That unpredictability is one source of their power.

NY1 is reporting the anti-war demonstration that I photographed and blogged earlier today:

Thousands Of Anti-War Protesters Rally In Union Square
Organizers say tens of thousands of people marched from Union Square to Foley Square in Manhattan this afternoon to demand an end to the war in Iraq, and to call on the Bush administration to bring the troops safely home.

I’m no expert at estimating crowds, but it was a sizable number of people, especially for a gloomy, rainy Saturday.

Condi Rice is consulting with all the wisemen and -women she can muster for the miraculous Middle East peace she plans to bring about:

Rice, who hopes the international conference in November will set the basis for negotiations on the creation of a Palestinian state, met with former president Jimmy Carter on Wednesday and spoke by telephone with Bill Clinton weeks earlier, said spokesman Sean McCormack. …

The chief US diplomat also regularly meets with her predecessors, Madeleine Albright, Henry Kissinger and James Baker, said a senior US official who requested anonymity.

On another topic, the Flack writes [e.a.]:

As PR people, we’re often asked, “what makes a story most?” We typically answer with “the biggest,” “most expensive,” “first” or whatever superlative we can reasonably conjure up. But the biggest stories tend to be those that defy conventional wisdom, e.g., the child prodigy, the cancer-survivor who went on to notch seven consecutive Tour de France victories, the waif model whose career rose to new heights after her front page cocaine bust, the Asian-African-American pro golf superstar, and the list goes on and on.

Indeed it does, even—or especially—in politics and geopolitics.

Abracadabra! I see another “Mission Accomplished” banner in the Bush administration’s future.

In Britain, a man has admitted to “sexual breach of the peace” for getting it on with a bicycle:

“[Hostel workers] used a master key to unlock the door and they then observed the accused wearing only a white T-shirt, naked from the waist down.

“The accused was holding the bike and moving his hips back and forth as if to simulate sex.”

One does rather wonder where exactly, um, the man and the bicycle were, um, conjoined.

naked man:

bicycle:

Can someone draw me a picture?

Happening now (as Wolf Blitzer would say):

New York City, October 27, 2007

… your fictional daughter killed you and thought of putting your body in the freezer but couldn’t manage it and NYTBR reviewer Lee Siegel (among others) allegedly misunderstood a plot point in your book and now he’s supposed to feel bad?

I think not.

Let me take readers back four and a half decades to see how unbearably priggish and tragically humor-challenged and literal-minded—not to mention morally correct—Americans have become [e.a.]:

Arthur Kopit wrote Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad while he was studying European theater [in 1961] on a postgraduate travel scholarship earned at Harvard. … As its subtitle indicated, he wrote the play as a parody— ‘‘a pseudo-classical tragifarce in a bastard French tradition‘‘—in the new, avant garde French theater of Arthur Adamov, Eugene Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett. It was this subgenre of the theater that, in 1961, Martin Esslin labeled the Theatre of the Absurd. …

The offbeat, dysfunctional characters—especially Madame Rosepettle and her son, Jonathan— caused some critics to complain about a lack of serious purpose in the play as well as its derivative elements, but the farcical and fanciful treatment of an overly-protective, domineering mother and her neurotic son gave New York and European audiences little pause. Most commentators could not argue with success and found the play [an] engaging spoof of everything from Tennessee Williams’s Rose Tattoo to Freudian psychology.

I haven’t read Sebold’s novel, but judging from the words of her Little, Brown publicist, Heather Fain, Siegel hit Sebold’s Achilles’ heel.

Fain (quoted in GalleyCat):

The main concern that Fain voiced when we spoke about the review yesterday was that the “mom’s in the freezer” spin might be “making light of the macabre nature of the subject matter, …”

Siegel:

Helen is, you know, cool with murdering her mother. She isn’t being arch, in case you were wondering. … Sebold may not be as dreadfully earnest as Sophocles and Dostoyevsky, but she is sincere.

Very much so. After suffocating her mother, which also involves breaking her nose, Helen tells us she “thought of the uncared-for bodies that lay strewn in the streets and fields of Rwanda or Afghanistan. I thought of the thousands of sons and daughters who would like to be in the position I was in. To have known exactly when their mothers died, and then to be alone with their bodies before the world rushed in.” Though she has just killed her mother, Helen is a generous person. She never forgets that other people are suffering and dying too.

Surely the moral conundrum is the murder itself and not what the fictional daughter does with her fictional mother’s body after the murder. But  publicist Fain is doing what she’s supposed to do: she deflects criticism away from her trying-to-have-it-both-ways author and tries to place blame on the shoulders of that author’s righteous critics.

However, Siegel is calling bullshit precisely on Sebold’s attempt to be both deliciously transgressive and morally serious:

Sebold is mining a popular and lucrative vein in contemporary fiction: peg your book to some heartrending tragedy or act of violence and you’re almost sure to be greeted with moral seriousness, soft reviews and brisk sales.

Moral seriousness is not about your subject matter. It’s about how you handle your subject matter.

Robert Reich writes:

Considering the magnitude of challenges ahead for America, it seems only reasonable that taxes should rise on the wealthy.

Can someone explain to me why this seems reasonable, or fair?

Let me explain what I mean. The other day I was talking to a friend, a very hardworking professional who makes a healthy amount of money, much, much more than her younger sister, who chose the uncomplicated life of an artist in a rural idyll, in which she has been supported for more than 25 years by their financially comfortable parents.

Now younger sister wants a Viking stove for her birthday. Says mom: No problem!

My friend, who could, without blinking, afford to renovate her entire (huge) kitchen and put in two Viking stoves, is annoyed. She hasn’t asked for a penny from her parents since graduating from college, after which she attended professional school, married another hardworking professional, and raised a larger-than-average family. Now that their kids are out of school (she and her husband paid full freight for their children’s education at top-ranked and top-priced universities), she is preoccupied with socking away enough money for retirement so as not to be a burden on those children.

I have known my friend for several decades. In all that time, it would never have occurred to her to buy something that was beyond her means–or indeed even to allow herself to wish for such things. Instead, she focused on her gratifying and socially responsible work and on her personal responsibilities. She earned her wealth, such as it is, through intense labor.

Robert Reich wants the rich to pay their “fair” share.

What’s fair? I’d say a 50 percent marginal tax rate on the very rich, meaning those earning over $500,000 per year. I’d also suggest an annual wealth tax of one-half of 1 percent on the net worth of people holding more than $5 million in total assets.

In Reich’s dream world, my friend and her husband, in addition to being treated inequitably by her parents, would also be treated unfairly by the government—all because they are hardworking people who also made a wise investment in real estate many years ago and are thus probably “worth” more than $5 million.

Now, my friend and her family are hard-core progressive Democrats. In fact, if Reich’s Rules were to come into play in a campaign, my friend would not pay without complaining. She’d be out there on the front lines volunteering for the candidate who proposed those rules. That’s just the kind of person she is.

However, I say it’s not fair to ask others in her position (which, by the way, I am not—so this isn’t a hidden plea for understanding) to do the same. Her cheerful willingness to go many extra miles to support those anonymous Americans who are not as financially comfortable as she is requires a selflessness that most people can’t—and should not be asked to—muster.

If my friend would only extrapolate from her own family situation—about which she is increasingly resentful, because her decades-long selflessness is being entirely disregarded and taken for granted—she might get a glimmer of understanding about why “liberal” or “progressive” ideas about soaking the “rich” are anathema to other Americans (including both those less well-off and those who are even better-off than she).

We don’t want to pay for little sister’s Viking stove. Furthermore, we are sick of little sister’s attitude.

Of course Reich only asks for the “rich” and “super-rich” to pay for reasonable-sounding items:

national defense and homeland security, good schools and a crumbling infrastructure, the upcoming costs of boomers’ Social Security … and, hopefully, affordable national health insurance.

But his attitude—they can afford it, so they should pay—sucks.

Trying to explain rather than excuse Bush’s decisions since 9/11 is pretty much a losing proposition in the blogosphere (which is an entertainment arena as much as it is an information medium–and thus all the infotaining drama).

Nevertheless, one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers dared attempt it, and another one responded:

Your reader wrote: “What if 9/11 had been a nuclear attack?”

‘What if,’ indeed. On the first page of his excellent and disturbing book, “Nuclear Terrorism - The Ultimate Preventable Catastrophe” - Graham Allison, a former deputy secretary of defense under Clinton (and no fan of the Bush administration), relays the following anecdote:

On October 11, 2001, a month to the day after the terrorist assault on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, President George W Bush faced an even more terrifying prospect. At that morning’s Presidential Daily Intelligence Briefing, George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, informed the president that a CIA agent code-named Dragonfire had reported that Al Qaeda terrorists possessed a ten-kiloton nuclear bomb, evidently stolen from the Russian arsenal. According to Dragonfire, this nuclear weapon was now on American soil, in New York City.

Think about it. A month after 9-11, you are president Bush.

You are still struggling to get to grips with the 9/11 attacks when you are told that the same people who have just destroyed twin towers have a nuclear weapon in New York city. What do you do? How do you defend the country?

A big scare like this is, to me, the only reasonable explanation of why Bush and his cadre of advisers have been so willing to push their response to the 9/11 attacks so far.

I agree that this is the only logical explanation for the administration’s actions (the well-advised and the ill-advised ones). And I try to be satisfied with the explanation rather than judge their actions.

After all, none of us are privy to the information they had and none of us are responsible the way they were. I cannot even judge them for overreacting. I can’t say how I—or anyone else—would have acted in their stead, with the benefit of their knowledge.

Sullivan is much harsher:

My reader suggested that this extraordinary shift in America’s constitutional balance - the creation of an extra-legal dictatorship within a putatively democratic society - was explicable only if you believe that the very existence of the U.S. is in peril. I believe Cheney believes that. In the hours after 9/11, you can understand why. The question then becomes: what evidence did they have that the danger was that grave?

He then goes on to suggest that the evidence the administration acted on was derived through torture—a “torture regime,” in fact—and therefore obviously unreliable. That’s not a crackpot theory; it’s certainly within the realm of the plausible. What I dislike about it is that it presumes that the evil warriors Bush and Cheney,  acting in bad faith, against the interests of Americans and America, didn’t care how far they went, even if they had to turn America into a dictatorship.

Sorry, but that is hysteria. Beyond that, it assumes that some Prince of Light—such as Obama, for example—can come and turn things right around and make everything all okay again. Which of course is beyond ridiculous.

The other day, I was watching a silly but diverting British series, The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard, which puts a sensible woman who’s fed up with politicians’ incompetence into 10 Downing Street to succeed Tony Blair. (Yes. I did say it was silly, didn’t I?)

The screenwriter is not at all sympathetic to Blair or to the war in Iraq, but she is sensible. She shows, for example, just how many decisions, large and small, a political leader must make every day. It occurred to me that if only more people would watch this show, they would have a glimmer of understanding beyond their pet theories about BushHitler and the Vulcans.

But when people want to judge, to condemn, to castigate, and to punish, no amount of understanding will stop them. Their fury has a life of its own.

So it goes.

Ron Rosenbaum says that blogging is best—and also riskiest—when it comes from the gut!

I agree!

That’s why I continue to read Andrew Sullivan long after haven having*** given up on him as a serious political thinker: his passion is unmistakable!

That’s what I love about ETP’s Rachel Sklar: she jumps in with both feet!

And Mickey Kaus: he throws caution to the wind!

And Jeff Jarvis: he lets it all hang out!

————

*** passion=lots of typos

photo by Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times

Clinton’s White House years become a boon

When I talk about PRopaganda^TM, this is what I mean.

A lot of big words got thrown around at the height of the left’s anti-war hysteria. The one that really made me see red was “complicity,” as in the charge that the MSM had been directly responsible for the war in Iraq.

You want complicity? I’ll show you complicity.

During their unimaginably hideous crackdown on protesters, the Burmese military junta defined the concept, if not the term, to within a hair’s breadth:

[T]hose being interrogated were divided into four categories of connection to the demonstrations: passers-by, those who watched, those who clapped and those who joined in.

Chilling, isn’t it?

Reviewing the movie Gone Baby Gone, Manohla Dargis writes:

I’m not sure exactly when Casey Affleck became such a good actor.

And then she goes on to name Affleck’s most recent appearances in the Ocean’s series, Gerry, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, unaccountably missing the performance that immediately marked him as an actor to watch:

Good Will Hunting. Duh!

Dargis should have been watching more carefully ten years ago. Yes, thanks to the Miramax publicity machine, that film became The Ben and Matt Show, but that doesn’t excuse her blindness to Casey’s obvious talent. Especially since, back then, he did the exact same thing she praises him for in his new film (directed this time by big bro Ben, who is a terrible actor):

[Casey Affleck] didn’t plead the character’s case or remind us of his own humanity; he just played the role.

Yep.

So. I’m back and I’m mellow—probably because I have studiously avoided catching up on the blogospheric eruptions that I missed while I was away (though I did follow the news, at a vast remove, in the International Herald Tribune, which, shockingly, costs € 2,20 [approx $3.10]; more later on following the news at a vast remove).

Among others, I had P. G. Wodehouse for company on my European idyll, and these words, from Psmith in the City, written in 1910, also helped to lighten my mood [e.a.]:

All political meetings are very much alike. Somebody gets up and introduces the speaker of the evening, and then the speaker of the evening says at great length what he thinks of the scandalous manner in which the Government is behaving or the iniquitous goings-on of the Opposition. From time to time confederates in the audience rise and ask carefully rehearsed questions, and are answered fully and satisfactorily by the orator. When a genuine heckler interrupts, the orator either ignores him, or says haughtily that he can find him arguments but cannot find him brains. Or, occasionally, when the question is an easy one, he answers it. …

The electors of Kenningford who really had any definite opinions on politics were fairly equally divided. There were about as many earnest Liberals as there were earnest Unionists. But besides these there was a strong contingent who did not care which side won. These looked on elections as Heaven-sent opportunities for making a great deal of noise. They attended meetings in order to extract amusement from them; and they voted, if they voted at all, quite irresponsibly. A funny story at the expense of one candidate told on the morning of the polling, was quite likely to send these brave fellows off in dozens filling in their papers for the victim’s opponent.

[Penguin; pp. 56-57]

In 1910, there was no Feiler Faster Thesis to explain (courtesy of Mickey Kaus) that candidates (and their campaign strategists) needn’t fret about not having enough time to connect with voters.

Even a century ago it was understood that only at the last minute do voters give political campaigns their

allotted minute and a half of concentrated thought.

Except: even a century ago Wodehouse knew that the great unwashed among voters don’t give candidates their thought.

They vote with their gut.

And they are likely to be swayed not by facts but by—dare I say it?—infotainment [that is: gossip, rumor, fabrication, PRopaganda^TM or anything else that makes for a more entertaining story than what reality, and a factual rendering of it, can deliver].

Upshot: time isn’t the crucial problem for candidates. As always, perception is the problem. Image is the problem. (Then, of course, there’s the little issue of connecting with the public’s mood.)

It’s not fair.

It’s not right.

It could lead us where we definitely don’t want to go.

It’s likely to offer dismal results for those of us “earnest Liberals” who want to vote for Obama—or, rather, to live in a world where Obama’s views hold sway.

But that’s the way it is.

Here’s the background to the Norman Mailer–Norman Podhoretz “feud” that Andrew Sullivan so generously alluded to and so stingily failed to provide the context for. (Every story has at least two sides.):

In taking a critical stand on the Berkely [Free Speech Movement] uprising, we did not deny the reality of the grievances against the university that had presumably caused the trouble. Nor did we deny the need for changes in the way Berkeley, and the American educational system in general, operated. That would have been the conservative or right-wing position. What we did deny was that the situation had become so bad that nothing less than revolution could possibly do any good. We thought that Berkeley was a fundamentally sound institution that should and could be improved without resort to “tactics of force and disruption” and the rhetorical violence that always seemed to accompany tactics of that kind. …

[We were served notice] that to deviate from [the Movement party line], then, even gently, was at a minimum to risk abuse and to open oneself up to the most insulting interpretation of one’s motives.

This too was reminiscent of the experience of our intellectual elders in the thirties….
In the sixties things were a bit different, but what s ome were later to think of as the “terror” also came into play then. The word “terror,” like everything else about the sixties, was overheated. No one was arrested or imprisoned or executed; no one ws even fired from a job. … The sanctions of this particular reign of “terror” were much milder: one’s reputation was besmirched, with unrestrained viciousness in conversation and, when the occasion arose, by means of innuendo in print. People were written off with the stroke of an epithet—”fink” or “racist” or “fascist” as the case may be—and anyone so written off would have difficulty getting a fair hearing for anything he might have to say. Conversely, anyone who went against the Movement party line soon discovered the likely penalty was dismissal from the field of discussion.

Seeing others ruthlessly dismissed in this way was enough to prevent most people from voicing serious criticisms of the radical line, and—such is the nature of intellectual cowardice—it was enough in some instances to prevent them even from allowing themselves to entertain critical thoughts. The “terror,” in other words, could at its most effective penetrate into the privacy of a person’s mind. But even at its least effective, it served to set a very stringent limit on criticism of the radical line on any given issue or at any given moment. A certain area of permissible discussion and disagreement was always staked out, but it was hard to know exactly where the boundaries were; one was always in danger of letting a remark slip across the border and unleashing the “terror” on one’s head. …

They were afraid of what might be said about them … and not only to their faces but behind their backs when they would be unable to defend themselves and when, as they knew all too well from their own reluctance to defend others against such insulting charges, there would be no one else to stand up for them either. …

Of course one could recant and be forgiven; or alternatively one could simply speak one’s mind and let the “terror” do its worst. Yet whatever one chose to do, the problem remained. …

[In 1968] the new radicalism was riding so high that it was in no mood for anything but allegiance, praise, and flattery. This had been enough, and more than enough, to frighten William Phillips. but what was more surprising, and more significant, it was even enough to intimidate Norman Mailer, whom Phillips commissioned to write the piece for Partisan Review about Making It.

The author of these words is Norman Podhoretz. This is from his book Breaking Ranks (1979).

I would add two things:

One: Norman Mailer has said (I can’t find the reference, but I will) that judging a man by his politics is like looking at him from the perspective of his asshole. He and Podhoretz were friends, and that Mailer tried to keep up the friendship after this, Podhoretz reports. Under the circumstances, the friendship withered.

Two: Podhoretz went on to have a magnificent career, and a profound impact on two generations of thoughtful, politically engaged Americans—as did Norman Mailer.

Am I obsessed with blasting Walt and Mearsheimer? You betcha.

The Economist ’s review pretty much explains why I’m so obsessed:

FROM the forged “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” in the 19th century to the charter of Hamas, the Palestinians’ Islamist movement, a common claim by anti-Semites has been that Jews trick great powers into needless wars. That is why an article published in March 2006 by two American academics, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, caused such outrage. Writing in the London Review of Books, they argued that the activities of Israel and its supporters were the “critical” reason for America’s invasion of Iraq. George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld may have thought that they were acting in America’s interests, but were in fact acting in Israel’s. Like previous American governments, the Bush administration had been turned by clever lobbying into what Lenin would have called Zionism’s useful idiots.

This startling thesis is, to say the least, provocative. Since it implies that American boys are dying in Iraq for the sake of Israel, the authors must have known that it would stir up painful questions about the true loyalties of American Jews and therefore attract fiery criticism. But there is no evidence that Mr Mearsheimer and Mr Walt were motivated by any anti-Jewish prejudice.

It’s a fool’s game to say that the authors were motivated by anti-Jewish prejudice. Their motivation is beside the point, and in any case unprovable (much like the authors’ thesis that the cabal-like not-cabal called the Lobby has “too much” power [how much is too much?] and “undue” influence [how much is due influence]?).

What matters is that in order to attract attention to their cause—which is to separate Americans from their sentimental attachment to Israel—Walt and Mearsheimer were willing, even eager, to bait Jews by making the most foul millennia-old accusations against them. They did this promiscuously, and with defiant disregard for the consequences.

What were they thinking?

Were they clueless? Or did they simply feel confident and optimistic about the friendly reception they would receive from Americans who, like them, think that the power of American Jews is a boil to be lanced?

To be continued, I’m sure … to my regret.

More vacation blogging, more scraping of the bottom of the barrel.

Last year, while Jeff Jarvis was still trying to explain the blogosphere to clueless MSMers, I posted a comment to his site that explains how and why I came to blog.

Here it is:

hepzeeba Says:

July 24th, 2006 at 4:28 pm
An open letter to “Someone We’d Know”:

We are longtime thinkers and readers and writers who went to the same schools as MSMers (No insult intended. Some of my best friends are MSMers.) but decided to pursue careers and professions other than journalism. We make our living doing other things, but we continue to read and to be engaged by the dynamic world around us and by the world of ideas. We like to read. We like to write. We like to make fun of what we [observe] in public life, like in MST3K. We like to debate. We understand rhetoric. We know how to check facts and sources.

It’s not journalism, though–few of us are out there bearing witness or interviewing people or acquiring other primary-source material (although with the advent of podcasting and various blogging consortia, that may be changing).

It’s…I dunno. Maybe blogging is “opinion reporting.”

We’re different from journalists, because we seek to mix it up with our readers. We’re looking for conversation and debate. We want to be involved in the intellectual/cultural life of our country (such as it is). Some of us are tired of shouting back at the talking heads on TV and NPR and at editorial writers and columnists. We have areas of expertise and opinions, too.

The blogosphere is where thinking people go to debate the politics of the day, the ideas of public intellectuals, and the opinions of paid opinion writers. It’s where the national conversation is taking place. Be there or be square.

Wasn’t it just yesterday (okay, it was 18 months ago, which I know because it was the subject of my very first blog post) that Oprah was burning James Frey (and his publishers) at the stake for playing fast and loose with the facts and didn’t the NYT’s Michiko Kakutani come down on her side and say that “Oprahness [i.e., truth-telling] Trumped Truthiness“?

Didn’t Kakutani’s NYT colleague Richard Siklos add his disapproval about this cultural slide away from authenticity (the subject of my second second post)? And didn’t their colleague Frank Rich weigh in with a column in which he made clear why we should be very, very worried about “truthiness” [e.a.]

As Oprah Winfrey, the ultimate arbiter of our culture, has made clear, no one except pesky nitpickers much cares whether Mr. Frey’s autobiography is true or not, or whether it sits on a fiction or nonfiction shelf at Barnes & Noble. Such distinctions have long since washed away in much of our public life. What matters most now is whether a story can be sold as truth, preferably on television. The mock Comedy Central pundit Stephen Colbert’s slinging of the word ”truthiness” caught on instantaneously last year …
At its silliest level, [it] is manifest in show-biz phenomena like Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey, … [If] suckers want to buy fictional nonfiction like ”Newlyweds” or ”A Million Little Pieces” as if they were real, that’s just harmless diversion.

It’s when truthiness moves beyond the realm of entertainment that it’s a potential peril.

Sociologist Joshua Gamson explained twelve years ago how this works, in his 1994 article “Incredible News” [e.a.]:

The entry of tabloid signs — the subjects, the styles, the stars — into news programming indicates to audiences not only that they should watch, but that they should watch with tabloid eyes. Even a small dose of sensationalism can be enough to indicate that entertainment rules are operating: that the audience is being courted and sold to advertisers rather than being informed, that journalists are presenting information for commercial interest rather than public interest, and that viewers should suspend belief. Let us entertain you, they say; watch us like fiction.

And, resentment in tow [my, how things have changed --ed.] people do accept the invitation, converting themselves from a believing audience into an entertained one.

And so infotainment has ruled on TV for a long time, by the mutual consent of the audience and the producers of that infotainment (read Gamson’s entire American Prospect article).

Frank Rich also alludes to this, and he blames a credulous audience [e.a.]:

This isn’t just a slippery slope. It’s a toboggan into chaos, or at least war. [But what's] remarkable is how much fictionalization plays a role in almost every national debate. Even after a big humbug is exposed as blatantly as Professor Marvel in ”The Wizard of Oz” — FEMA’s heck of a job in New Orleans, for instance — we remain ready and eager to be duped by the next tall tale. It’s as if the country is living in a permanent state of suspension of disbelief.

Democrats who go berserk at their every political defeat still don’t understand this. They fault the public for not listening to their facts and arguments, as though facts and arguments would make a difference, even if the Democrats were coherent. It’s the power of the story that always counts first, and the selling of it that comes second. Accuracy is optional.

Gamson, writing twelve years before the term “truthiness” was coined to describe the “incredible news” phenomenon, didn’t condemn the audience or put it down. In his view, our succumbing to infotainment (which in fact is pleasurable, because it’s fun) wasn’t a dumbing-down of the culture but rather a new way for us to view (i.e., skeptically) what we were being fed by the media—particularly TV:

Having fun with infotainment does not mean that the desire for truth has dissipated, but that the likelihood of finding it on television has declined. It is not evidence that tastes are tabloid-debased, or that the “masses” are dragging the rest of “us” down, or that most people are too stupid for anything but the soap operatic. The popularity of infotainment is based on accepting the summons to treat information as play.

I long ago bought into Gamson’s argument, because I had been treating information as play without being able to articulate it as such. Gamson simply gave me a language with which to describe what I did for fun, which was read between the lines of the media to tease out the subtext.

The slide into infotainment is now all but complete on television—it’s almost all “views” and no “news—. What it means is that the onus for assessing what we see on TV is on us. We all need to be media-savvy in order to be able to tease out meaning from amidst the bells and whistles.

Now (as some observers have been saying for a long time] it’s every TV viewer for himself or herself when trying to decide if, say, Keith Olbermann is being a newsman or an entertainer when he appears in your living room.
And back in May, MSNBC wanted you to know that if you’ve got a problem with the melding of “news” and “views,” well — that’s your problem, because you’re hopelessly old school:

For many years, the rule for journalists was simple: maintain strict objectivity. Even for television hosts unafraid to say what they think — Chris Matthews, for instance — there’s still a little mystery about what they’ll do inside a voting booth.

Some journalists are such purists that they don’t vote at all.

To one critic, Olbermann’s actual performance at the debate and in similar situations was less important than the message sent by his presence.

“It’s sort of like putting a professional wrestler in an anchor chair and saying `he can do this,’” said Tim Graham, director of media analysis at the Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog. “Well, he can do this. But he’s known as a professional wrestler.”

Well, he was known as a professional wrestler. Nowadays, Olbermann doesn’t just proclaim himself to be a Journalist; with his demagogic “special comments,” he eagerly invites comparisons of himself to Edward R. Murrow [!].

At least Glenn Beck has the decency (or savvy) to present himself as a “rodeo clown,” and CNN doesn’t have him anchoring events such as presidential debates—yet. On the other hand, they’ve got Rick Sanchez doing some kind of news-flavored program at 8 p.m.

This guy mugs so much for the camera that he’s only a red nose and a yellow bowtie away from official clown-dom.

I’m telling ya, folks: TV “news” ought to come with a warning label:

NEWS: VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED

Stephen Walt at a meeting with the Dallas Morning News editorial board [e.a.]:

[T]here is a conventional wisdom in the United States about the state of Israel that we are challenging. And that conventional wisdom tends to portray Israel in the most positive light. … We don’t love Israel.

You don’t say!

Walt again:

[W]hat policies should the United States be adopting vis-à-vis Israel and the other countries in the region, and in particular, what should the United States be doing when Israel’s conduct or actions are contrary not only to American interests, but to American values?

Now, hold on a minute. I thought international relations “realists” such as these esteemed “scholars” are interested only in a nation’s interests, not its morals.

Whatever. While Walt and Mearsheimer try to sort out their antipathy and hostility from their so-called “scholarship,” the rest of us will wait and see what President Hillary Clinton or President Rudy Giuliani—and their successors of the next few decades—”do” with regard to Israel.

I’m still on vacation, so consider this blog-fill if you insist, but this is something I’ve been meaning to write about.

I’m fascinated by our society’s ever-changing rules for what’s considered acceptable behavior and, also by how we deal with it.

In colonial times, you’ll recall, the guilty and condemned were routinely insulted in addition to being injured: their punishment was carried out in public.

From Newsday’s community profiles section:

Imprisonment made little sense in a society that saw punishment as a community matter, said Eli Faber, a professor of history and criminal justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

“Why bother to put people in an expensive institution that they can break out of?” he said. “Picture a person who commits fornication. He’s going to be whipped in front of his mother, his sister. He’s going to have to live with these people . . . If you lock people up, why would there be shame? Nobody would see them.”

Do they still teach this stuff, about our not-so-very-evolved Puritan roots? I wonder.

Recently, Katie Couric asserted that everyone in the audience at the National Press Club with her thinks that Bush lied, so people died:

“Everyone in this room would agree that people in this country were misled in terms of the rationale of this war,” said Couric, adding that it is “pretty much accepted” that the war in Iraq was a mistake.

When people accuse the media of having a liberal bias, this is what they mean. It is Couric’s default position—and her colleagues’ default position, she says—that the Bush administration acted in bad faith in deposing Saddam. That is the “liberal” position she parrots—that Bush lied us into war in order to secure his reelection in 2004. Why, Frank Rich wrote a book about it, so it must be true.

I put “liberal” in quote marks because there is in fact nothing liberal about this position. Indeed, it requires an unusual degree of cynicism and detachment—some might called it a deranged detachment—from reality to actually believe this, if you really think about it. Which, I suspect, most people who claim to hold this view haven’t done, because most people don’t think politically: that is to say, they have opinions, but they don’t spend a lot of time thinking about their positions (see Louis Menand on Bryan Caplan)

Because if you say that Bush acted in bad faith (by “misleading” us into war), you are also saying that the president of the United States deliberately took us into war heedless of the potential disaster both to Iraq and to America. I understand that this position is usually spouted by people who also think that Bush is stupid or following God’s orders or under the control of evil neocons who want to make the world safe for Israel—all the more reason to consider them perversely detached from reality, as far as I’m concerned. But that’s not my point. My point is that if you seriously believe this—that Bush lied and that he lied us into war purely for his party’s political benefit—then it is incumbent on you to persuade me, first, that a president would actually do this. And no matter what you say to me—even if you remind me of, say, Richard Nixon’s evil “Jew count,” which is about as creepy as a president can get—I’m going to tell you to get a goddamn grip, because you may think it’s oh-so-sophisticated to be of this view, but what it really is, is ignorant and embarrassing.

Back to Couric. Having established that all of her colleagues in the room are ill-informed and detached “liberals” like her, she then goes on to admit an ignorance and incuriosity so complete that since 2003, she has never even tried to understand the Bush administration’s case for war:

“I’ve never understood why [invading Iraq] was so high on the administration’s agenda when terrorism was going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan and that [Iraq] had no true connection with al Qaeda.”

Couric continues to enumerate the now familiar talking points:

Further, Couric said the Bush administration botched the war effort, calling it “accepted truths” that it erred by “disbanding the Iraq military, and leaving 100,000 Sunni men feeling marginalized and angry…[and] whether there were enough boots on the ground, the feeling that we’d be welcomed as liberators and didn’t need to focus as much on security.”

Here’s the kicker: she envisions a time when she may be called upon to admit to these brave but dangerous ideas in front of a camera, and she courageously volunteers to do it.

She added “I’d feel totally comfortable saying any of that at some point, if required, on television.”

She is a total embarrassment to her profession. I don’t know which is more humiliating—her claim to speak the undisputed truth that “everyone knows” or her belief that she might be called upon to testify in a future HUAC.

Listen up: I’m a big Leonard Cohen fan too. I agree that

… everybody knows that the plague is coming
Everybody knows that its moving fast
Everybody knows that the naked man and woman
Are just a shining artifact of the past
Everybody knows the scene is dead
But theres gonna be a meter on your bed
That will disclose
What everybody knows

But until that plague comes, when I happen to be home at 6:30 and feel like watching a news show, I’ll be tuning in to Charlie Gibson, who’s a grown-up.

Time magazine’s Richard Stengel first exposes to the light of day Ahmadinejad’s formidable PR campaign and then acts as a force multiplier for it by falling—hard—for the charm offensive:

The invitation was on creamy stationery with fancy calligraphy: The Permanent Representative of the Islamic Republic of Iran “requests the pleasure” of my company to dine with H.E. Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. …There are about 50 of us, academics and journalists mostly. There’s Brian Williams across the room, and Christiane Amanpour a few seats down. …

This is now an annual ritual for the President of Iran. Every year, during the U.N. General Assembly in New York, he plots out a media campaign that — in its shrewdness, relentlessness, and quest for attention — would rival Angelina Jolie on a movie junket. And like any international figure, Mr. Ahmadinejad hones his performance for multiple audiences: in this case, the journalists and academics who can filter his speech and ideas for a wider American audience.

Hmmm. Angenlina Jolie is of course a gorgeous movie star, so I can see why the press slavers over her. But what’s Stengel’s excuse for drooling all over Ahmadinejad’s smooth performance when he is a seasoned reporter, who is expected—and paid—to be shrewd, skeptical, and analytical? And, of course, when the stakes are considerably higher than merely giving devoted attention—and a platform—to a run-of-the-mill fame whore.

When it comes time for him to address the comments, he does so by citing each speaker by name — 23 in all, he notes. In contrast with what he calls the lack of respect and dignity accorded to him at Columbia — where, he says, he found it odd that an academic institution which prizes tolerance would treat him without any — he addresses each person carefully and patiently.

Why, his manners were impeccable, in contrast to our rudeness! And surely that’s all that matters when everything else out of his mouth is an odious lie!

Early on—before the “how ruuuuude” meme broke out in the MSM—George Packer had quite a different view on this [e.a.]:

Some Columbia students condemned Bollinger’s withering introduction—as if free speech should also be free of consequences. They didn’t understand that they had just witnessed a small victory for intellectual freedom and liberal values. One student who got the point, Stina Reksten, of Norway, told the Times, “I’m proud of my university today. I don’t want to confuse the very dire human rights situation in Iran with the issue here, which is freedom of speech. This is about academic freedom.” Ahmadinejad was given a chance to hold forth, but it was not a free ride. In inviting him, the university didn’t surrender its powers of judgment: his monologue of sophistry and lies was preceded by hard truths. Bollinger demonstrated that universities don’t have to cave in to their critics on either the right or the left—that certain principles are stronger than political opportunism.

I couldn’t agree more. And here’s what one TNR commenter—who has family and friends back in Iran—had to say about that [e.a.]:

I applaud Bollinger’s rudeness, because someone has to be. It sure as hell ain’t gonna be any Iranians - those in Iran are cowed the rest of us abroad have families and friends who could be terrorised to buy our silence.

I applaud Bollinger’s candour because for far too long, we in the Liberal West have applied our “notions of hospitality” without once thinking of the broader consequences. How many tyrants and dictators have we coddled out of politeness?

No, Sir: Bollinger was right in bring to Ahmadinejad’s attention what it is that any right-thinking man or woman finds offensive about him. And, in fact, he got the answer he was hoping for, the supreme expression of Ahmadinejad’s stupidity: “there are no homosexuals in Iran, not like here.” In a sense, of course, he is right - “not like here” - because they get hanged; but it was the broader implication that was the issue, and he got the response he deserved in the laughter and sniggers of the audience.

It is not necessary to [overanalyse] what happened. Columbia should not have invited the jackass; having done so, it should not have molly-coddled him. And Ahmadinejad should know next time not to accept invitations such as this, or expect brutal candour.

Indeed.

But ETP’s Rachel Sklar had by far the best angle on this story—on what a snooze it must have been for the participants to spend hours and hours in that room while A’jad and 23 academics droned on and on.

So that puts Ahmadinejad opening his mouth to speak at about 9pm. By now, dinner is long gone, so you can’t even toy with food on your plate. You may be on your second, third, fourth cup of tea and/or water, just because it’s in front of you. Are you allowed to leave the room to go to the bathroom, or will that offend His Craziness? (But if you do go to the bathroom, at least you can be sure that no one from the Iranian delegation will play footsie with you in the stall, ’cause they don’t have gay people there). Meanwhile, Ahmadinejad is just now warming up, “with a half-hour ode to the relationship between man and God that might have been dictated by the Persian poet Rumi.” Aaaaah can this even be distilled to a soundbite? I would be pinching my thighs under the table to stay awake at this point.

They don’t refer to it as “Islamophobia”—a term promoted by Islamists and one that is sure to put off Americans who are sick and tired of being called names by special-interest groups with grievances—but the Islamic Society of North America is unhappy about Muslims’ image problem nevertheless:

It is time for the United States to stop treating every American Muslim as somehow suspect, leaders of the faith said at their largest annual convention, which ended here on Monday. Six years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans should distinguish between mainstream Muslims and the radical fringe, the leaders said.

True enough, and it would be helpful if mainstream Muslims would take the opportunity to introduce themselves to their non-Muslim American friends and neighbors. (”We’re here; our get-ups look weird; get used to it” comes to mind as a slogan.)

My only issue is this—what does Israel have to do with this “growing intolerance” toward Muslims?

Leaders of American Muslim organizations attribute the growing intolerance to three main factors: global terrorist attacks in the name of Islam, disappointing reports from the Iraq war and the agenda of some supporters of Israel who try taint Islam to undermine the Palestinians. [e.a.]

I’d really like to abandon my stereotypes, as the headline on Neil MacFarquhar’s piece encourages me to do. Too bad MacFarquhar just underscores the stereotype of the New York Times as the source for mainstream apriori and enduring hostility to Israel: anti-Israel prejudice, as in pre-existing judgments that interfere with an objective analysis or a situation.

MacFarquhar allows the Muslim group to make the unsubstantiated charge against “some supporters of Israel.” For “balance,” he quotes a rabbi who is happy to denounce some of these “supporters”—two Christian fundamentalists and one Jew. Not an Israeli but an American Jew:

Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, denounced by name Christian fundamentalists like Pat Robertson and Franklin Graham, as well as Dennis Prager, a well-known radio host who is Jewish.

“The time has come to stand up to the opportunists, the media figures, the religious leaders and politicians who demonize Muslims and bash Islam, exploiting the fears of their fellow citizens for their own purposes,” Rabbi Yoffie told the opening session.

Right. Muslims are being “demonized” because it’s somehow good for the Jews, and Israel.

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? And if not now, when?” asked the Jewish sage Hillel two thousand years ago.

In 2007, Saul Friedlander explains what he meant:

The Nazi state first achieved the isolation of millions from their neighbours through the ever-increasing weight of official vindictiveness. Jews gradually were restricted in their shopping hours, their schools, their use of telephones, cars, bicycles, electrical appliances; they had to build their own air-raid shelters, use their own cobblers, were denied fruit, gingerbread, chocolate, pets, white bread, furs and tobacco. Even so, when, in the East, the exterminations had begun, Jews in the West could still live out for a time a restricted life without a sense of immediate danger amid neighbours who at a personal level were sometimes sympathetic but disengaged. The bleakness of this book comes above all from its portrait of the collective timidity of so many, with whom it is uncomfortably possible to identify. They may have been distressed at what they saw but, in the face of the state’s brutality and the success of its propaganda machine on popular opinion, they feared first for themselves. Jewish persecution, argues Friedlander, could not have been taken to its genocidal extremes without the personal obsession of Adolf Hitler; yet the course it took only became possible because of endemic European anti-Semitism. ‘Not one social group, not one religious community, not one scholarly institution or professional association in Germany and throughout Europe declared its solidarity with the Jews.’

On this side of the Atlantic, hyphens are a fussy holdover—or is that hold-over?— from days gone by. They’re a staple in British English, however. Or they were, until the most recent edition of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary was published:

About 16,000 words have succumbed to pressures of the Internet age and lost their hyphens in a new edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.

Bumble-bee is now bumblebee, ice-cream is ice cream and pot-belly is pot belly.

And if you’ve got a problem, don’t be such a crybaby (formerly cry-baby).

The hyphen has been squeezed as informal ways of communicating, honed in text messages and emails, spread on Web sites and seep into newspapers and books.

“People are not confident about using hyphens anymore, they’re not really sure what they are for,” said Angus Stevenson, editor of the Shorter OED…