Entries from November 2007 ↓

Courtesy of our friends at the New York Post,

Islamist fanaticism is having a Bad PR Day.

And that’s a good thing.

If you read closely, you’ll find buried in today’s New York Times the suggestion that things are indeed better in Iraq:

When sectarian violence soared in 2006, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis fled to Syria and Jordan, or moved to safer areas in Iraq. But now that the American troop reinforcement plan and a new counterinsurgency strategy have helped reverse a rising tide of car bombings and sectarian killings, there are signs that Iraqis are starting to return.

Perhaps you missed the significance of this sentence because the word “surge” was missing?

Well, never mind, because “the surge is working,” says Congressman Jack “Let’s Cut and Run” Murtha. And, The Politico reports with glee, this could cause problems for the Dems.

Are you surprised that the absence of bad news coming out of Iraq is being read as good news by the public? You shouldn’t be, if you read my post just the other day. And you definitely wouldn’t be surprised about the better news coming out if Iraq if you’d been reading Engram’s blog for the past couple of months.

The public, as usual, is way ahead of our distinguished elected representatives.

So now the Dems are scrambling to position themselves as they realize that once again they’ve been caught by surprise.

The apparent shift in voter intensity about Iraq, also captured in some polls, shows how dramatically the political context of the war debate has changed from last summer.

Democrats believed then that mounting public pressure would soon force Republicans to take flight from President Bush, allowing Congress to impose a more rapid end to the war on an unwilling administration. It has not happened yet, and if anything it shows Democrats are facing a stiffer challenge at year’s end than they had at the beginning to frame the public debate on their terms. 

One Republican put it a little bit differently:

“Democrats made a strategic calculation last January that has proven to be dead wrong,” said Kevin Smith, a spokesman for Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio). “Their message of failure and retreat makes little sense in light of our troops’ remarkable progress, and the American people are responding to their successes.”

Well, yeah. Sorta.

What’s actually happening is that the changes for the better on the ground in Iraq are making way for a narrative of success. Which is of course something different from success.

But in the war against Islamist fanaticism, where the most important battles are fought in the media, a narrative of success for America matters. A lot.

From the L.A. Times, etiquette points on how to behave in the face of a spell of no bad news for the United States:

All of a sudden, we’re getting foreign affairs news that seems, well, good. The Israelis and Palestinians are restarting the long-stalled peace process. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has stepped down as army chief of staff and promises henceforth to serve only as a civilian leader. And violence in Iraq appears genuinely to be down.

After years of unremittingly bad news, no one seems quite sure what to do with good news. Should we cheer? Take back all those mean things we’ve said about George W. Bush? Or check to see if we still have our wallets, because it’s probably some sort of trick?

When in doubt, go negative. That’s what everyone else is doing!

How to cope with the mourning process in our speeded-up world:

Management consultant and recent widower Greg Pier successfully cut his grieving time by more than a third Friday by eliminating bargaining and depression from the mourning process following the death of his wife. “After three days in denial and a full night of anger, I realized that at that rate, I was never going to get over [wife] Betty’s passing,” said Pier, who convinced himself it was time to move on with his life after a simple cost-benefit analysis.

(via The Onion)

The other day, Shankar Vedantam reported about a study on the effect of power on a person’s feelings—namely, that it inhibits their ability to feel for others:

Something happens to people once they acquire power, however, and the transformation appears to be psychological. … volunteers made to feel powerful, even in a trivial laboratory experiment, almost instantly lose the ability to see things from other people’s points of view.

A social psychologist elaborates on the paradox between what people seek in a leader and that leader’s behavior once he is chosen to lead [e.a.]:

“People in organizations and in hierarchies and in informal groups like college dorms want leaders to be socially intelligent,” Keltner said. “They will sacrifice all manner of things to have leaders who are thoughtful and engaged and give other people voice.”

But once socially gifted people rise to power, Keltner added, the paradox is that “power simplifies our thinking. We tend to see things in terms of our own self-interest, and it makes us more impulsive. We forget our audience in service of gratifying our own impulses.”

Although the study deals with the conundrum of how an otherwise empathetic person can become indifferent to the situation of others once he accrues personal power, it’s not too much of a stretch to extrapolate something about the effect of institutional power on individuals—namely, that when power becomes institutionalized, its effect is even stronger on both the powerful and the powerless.

Seen in that light, Ehud Olmert’s remarks at Annapolis, in which he validates the suffering of the Palestinians, are—or should be seen as—an important marker in the evolving nature of the dialogue between the Israelis and the Palestinians:

I wish to say, from the bottom of my heart, that I know and acknowledge the fact that alongside the constant suffering which many in Israel have experienced because of the history, the wars, the terror and the hatred towards us — a suffering which has always been part of our lives in our land
– your people have also suffered for many years, and some still suffer.

For dozens of years, many Palestinians have been living in camps, disconnected from the environment in which they grew, wallowing in poverty, neglect, alienation, bitterness, and a deep, unrelenting sense of deprivation. I know that this pain and deprivation is one of the deepest foundations which fomented the ethos of hatred towards us.

We are not indifferent to this suffering. We are not oblivious to the tragedies you have experienced. I believe that in the course of negotiations between us we will find the right way, as part of an international effort in which we will participate, to assist these Palestinians in finding a proper framework for their future, in the Palestinian state which will be established in the territories agreed upon between us. Israel will be part of an international mechanism which will assist in finding a solution to this problem.

There is way too much acrimony for anyone to notice this now, but when the history of our times is written, someone will note the olive branch that Olmert is extending, and will also note the visit of PLO representatives earlier this year to Auschwitz, where they paid their respects.***

These are the fragile foundations of a future … reconciliation. (I was going to say a future “peace,” but I don’t believe in fairy tales.)

——————
*** The Palestinians’ disrespect for the Jews’ suffering in the Holocaust was noted in the New York Times in 1989, at the tail end of a report about an informal meeting between Israelis and Palestinians [e.a.]:

There was no shouting at the meetings, and harsh words were few. One problem arose when Mr. Abu Sharif was quoted in the newspaper De Telegraaf as saying Israel’s treatment of Palestinian protesters was equivalent to the mass killing of Jews at Auschwitz. The P.L.O. officials said he had been misunderstood, but many Israeli participants reacted quickly.

David Susskind, a Belgian Jewish spokesmen, took up the issue in his remarks. He said he had spent four years of his boyhood hiding from the Nazis, and lost 80 members of his family at Auschwitz. Looking directly at the Palestinians, he said: ”There is no comparison. Please do not do it. Please keep Auschwitz out of our discussions.” Speaking of the Palestinian uprising, Mr. Susskind said, ”I feel very guilty that in the name of my people we have to kill other people.”

Future historians will also note that this was the beginning of the Israelis=Nazis slander, which by now has become cemented in the minds of Israel bashers—particularly in Britain. See this cartoon.

Pew reports that Americans are feeling more positive about Iraq:

For the first time in a long time, nearly half of Americans express positive opinions about the situation in Iraq. A growing number says the U.S. war effort is going well, while greater percentages also believe the United States is making progress in reducing the number of Iraqi casualties, defeating the insurgents and preventing a civil war in Iraq.

Roughly half of the public (48%) believes the U.S. military effort in Iraq is going very or fairly well. Judgments about the overall situation in Iraq have been improving steadily since the summer. As recently as June, only about a third of Americans (34%) said things were going well in Iraq.

No doubt people are expressing more positive opinions because Iraq is hardly ever in the news anymore—they’re not seeing it on their TV screens—as I mentioned here the other day. Americans are figuring out that things are better in Iraq simply by the absence of MSM coverage.

So it goes. As for what all this means—well, I think it spells bad news for rabidly antiwar Democrats.

The Urge to Purge lives on in the fever swamps of the nutty left. The efforts to take down Joe Klein continue apace:

Glenn Greenwald has been waging his own little war against Time columnist Joe Klein for more than a week now owing to what Greenwald says was a “factually false” description of the FISA legislation in the House in Klein’s latest piece.

Kos himself has since joined the pile on, here, and now Greenwald has kicked it up a notch, teaming up with the “tenacious” Jane Hamsher to go after Klein’s editor.

The whole thing is a bit ridiculous, but, like a battle between the Giants and Cowboys, it’s fun to watch and root for injuries.

Yep.

Agence France-Press reports that there’s big, big trouble in France:

Monday night’s violence left several buildings damaged by fire in Villiers, just north of Paris, including a tax office, a supermarket, a library and a nursery school, as well as 63 vehicles. Six people were arrested during the troubles, which lasted about six hours, police said.

A report from Le Monde newspaper described boys as young as 13 taking orders from their elders to torch buildings and forming battle ranks against the police, vowing to “do in” a “pig” — a police officer.

Authorities said guns were used against police, whose unions described the violence as worse than the rioting that hit hundreds of French cities in November 2005 — also sparked by the deaths of two youths.

According to police figures, 82 officers were injured Monday night, four of them seriously after being hit by buckshot from hunting weapons.

The Synergie police union said the youths were using “urban guerrilla” tactics.

Wouldn’t it be ironic if the Iraq war was negotiated into some kind of closure and the Sunni Arabs of the Middle East stood up to the mean mullahocracy of Iran … and then Europe became prey to urban guerrilla warfare?

Via GalleyCat, I am delighted to discover that John Updike, the dinosaur of publishing, writes about real dinosaurs for the new issue of National Geographic.

How utterly fitting.

Agence France-Press reports thatA’jad scolded Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah for consorting with the enemy:

“I wish the name of Saudi Arabia was not among those attending the Annapolis conference,” Ahmadinejad told the king late Sunday, according to state news agency IRNA.

“Arab countries should be watchful in the face of the plots and deception of the Zionist enemy,” he added.

Focusing on “the Zionist enemy” of course detracts attention from the actual state of affairs that has Iran in a tizzy:

The Islamic republic — which has made non-recognition of Israel one of its main ideological themes — has been left isolated by the attendance at the meeting of its chief regional ally Syria as well as Saudi Arabia.

This is the second time in two years that the major Sunni players in the Middle East have signaled their intense displeasure with Iran and its acolytes and clients. An interesting development.

update: I note that Eric Trager is rooting around to find out what the sudden turn of events running up to Annapolis means.***

As I write, at

9:45 AM ET, November 26, 2007

this story is nowhere to be found on Memeorandum, and it’s buried on p. A 11 of the dead-tree NYT, but it’s could signal a turn of fortune in the Middle East, too.

It looks like Condi Rice has managed to land not only Saudi Arabia but now also Syria for the heretofore mirage-like conference at Annapolis:

The Annapolis meeting, a major initiative pressed by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, will begin negotiations on a peace treaty to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while simultaneously committing Israel and the Palestinians to carry out long-postponed obligations contained in the first stage of the 2003 peace plan known as the road map.

The presence of major Arab countries, now including Syria, is meant to provide Arab sanction and support for the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas to make the concessions required for peace.

The NYT’s Steven Erlanger doesn’t allude to the implications, but this is huge. This means that Syria is allowing itself to be “peeled away” from Iran, leaving Hamas minus one sponsor.

The Israeli spokesman clarify what’s at stake here:

Miri Eisin, spokeswoman for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel, said, “The Saudi and Syrian presence is very important and is an American success.” While the Syrians are not sending the foreign minister — a diplomatic distinction that has meaning — Ms. Eisin said that from Israel’s point of view, the rank of the representative was much less important than the Syrian presence.

“Hamas is appalled, which is why we have reason to be satisfied,” Ms. Eisin said.

About the results of the meeting, Ms. Eisin said, “We’re hopeful but not optimistic.”

Mark Regev, the Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, noted that Syria had agreed to cancel a planned “anti-Annapolis summit” meeting and attend instead. “If the idea of the meeting is Arab-Israeli dialogue, Syria matters,” he said. “It would be even more positive if this were an indication of a change in Syria’s orientation” — away from Iran and toward the Saudi- and Egyptian-led Sunni Arab consensus.

There is a steaming pile of bullshit about Rice’s supremely important role in this accompanying article in the NYT,  but even if you can believe only a tenth of what’s in the piece, there’s no question but that this is a coup.

I hate to sound optimistic, but I begin to see on the horizon a loose but fully international alliance that includes Muslims, Christians, and Jews—and it so happens that it’s a disruption of the so-called “Shia arc.”

At the very least, it seems as if a page is being turned.

————-
*** Trager writes:

Over the past few weeks, consensus has continually held that little should be expected from the Annapolis conference, which opens tomorrow. Op-ed after op-ed and poll after poll have dictated that Israeli and Palestinian leaders are too weak, if not too far apart in their positions, for any meaningful progress towards peace to take place.

Yet it’s hard to reconcile the notion that Annapolis is little more than an impressive photo op with the serious diplomatic capital that Arab states have invested in it. Over the weekend, Saudi Arabia announced that it would send Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, marking the first time that the Saudis are participating in talks with Israelis present. Representatives of Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Qatar, Sudan, Tunisia, and Yemen will also participate. Indeed, the Annapolis conference has achieved such profound legitimacy that Syria—believing that it risked regional isolation by not attending—announced that it would send its deputy foreign minister.

[updated to add a link, and to fix garbled syntax]

By now it’s hard to deny that the situation in Iraq seems improved, which is why the New York Times fronts a story about the Democratic candidates’ change of “tone.”

Change of tone? They’re all going to be spinning like tops soon enough.

But that doesn’t mean that the usual suspects aren’t trying to downplay the importance of the decline in violence, the reports of inter-ethnic and inter-confessional cooperation, the stories about Iraqis moving back home, Osama bin Laden’s declaration of defeat for al Qaeda in Iraq (and/or Mesopotamia), the Mahdi Army’s cooperation with the U.S., the Anbar Awakening, and all the other successes and lucky breaks for the counterinsurgency being conducted under the leadership of General David Petraeus (aka the New Jesus).

None of this matters, of course. It’s only political benchmarks that should concern us—that’s all that has ever mattered, according to Ilan Goldenberg at DemocracyArsenal:

I have to agree with Kevin Drum. There really hasn’t been a major shift in tones. The Democrats and critics of the war have always made political progress the number one issue. The argument all summer over the benchmarks ultimately revolved around political progress. There has been no shift in tone. …

[D]espite the drop in violence, all the polls show that opposition to the war is at an all time high at almost 70%.

A commenter responds:

Both the Bush administration and the war’s critics have a paper trail to support the idea that they have always thought the core issue was political progress in Iraq. Both the Bush administration and the war’s critics also know that for the American public the core issue is the level of American casualties, as well as the overall level of violence, in Iraq. If American casualties are down and stay down, and the overall level of violence is down and stays down, the intensity of public feeling about the war should be expected to decline, even if large majorities continue to feel the war was a bad idea. [e.a.]

This sounds right to me. The public responds to what it sees or hears on the news. Public feeling about the war will start to decline also in response to the drop in “news” coverage of the war.

Out of sight, out of mind.

And Iraq is out of sight on the MSM because there aren’t any dramatic pictures to show—simple as that. No carnage and blood and gore and fire and ash and wailing Iraqis to put into heavy rotation 24/7. Fairly or not—even if Iraq is a huge mess for a long time, people will start to get the idea that things must be better—because it isn’t on their TV screens.

So the mewlings of the partisan Democrats who are now heavily invested in bad news emanating from Iraq—and, as the charming Nancy Pelosi might say, branded as “defeatocrats” to boot. And no one’s in the—will not find much of a market for their wares, I’m afraid.

For what it’s worth, I think Hillary is obviously the best positioned to take advantage of a turn of fortune for America’s adventure in Iraq.

————-

*** Nancy Pelosi to Matt Bai, quoted in the New York Times Magazine:

”We branded them with privatization, and they can’t sell that brand anywhere,” Pelosi bragged when I spoke with her in May.

I’ve been re-reading Daniel Boorstin’s classic 1961 work of social criticism The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (which is extraordinarily fresh and insightful for a 45-year-old book, by the way, but that’s a topic for another day).

Underlying Boorstin’s thesis of a mid-twentieth-century American populace transfixed by images is his notion that advertising—or any kind of marketing—succeeds by holding up a mirror to potential customers and offering them an enticing, image of themselves (more on this another day, but let’s just say for now that advertising is about fantasy-fulfillment).

Now, along comes the NYT’s Elisabetta Povoledo to tell us that Italians are transfixed by a six-part TV biopic, “The Boss of Bosses,” because the mirror it holds up to its audience shows a somewhat less than flattering image of itself [e.a.]:

“Italy has always been fascinated by the Mafia, by its personification of evil,” [a reporter] said in a phone interview.

Another possible explanation for the popularity of “Il Capo dei Capi” may be that it goes beyond mere storytelling and puts Italy in front of an unflattering — if engrossing — mirror of itself. It suggests that if Mr. Riina became the most formidable and feared mobster in Italian history, it was thanks to the collusion of political and economic forces at various levels of Italian society.

“It’s not fiction — it’s a real story that tells 50 years of Italian history, and it names names,” said Pietro Valsecchi, who produced the series. “It tells us just what sort of country we have been living in, it shows us the complicity of the state, it puts the Mafia in our face.”

There’s some evidence for the notion that its roots in reality drive the popularity of the series:

“The Sopranos,” the HBO drama about Italian-American bad guys, never caught on here.

The producer gets the last word [e.a.]:

Fictionalizing reality may be the best way to educate Italy’s distracted audience, Mr. Valsecchi said. “Italians don’t read newspapers — they barely glance at headlines. But here they’re getting the full story, with all its implications.”

Well, he gets the next-to-last word. I get the last word, which is a minor amendment to Mr. Valsecchi’s proposition: Fictionalizing reality is a way to infotain an audience—that is, to capture its attention. But let’s not get carried away. That is different from educating the audience.

You too can create a community of only the like-minded—by silently banning the undesirables with comment-deletion software.

The San Francisco Chronicle has recently activated a devious system by which it deceives commenters on its website, SFGate.com. Here’s how it works:

If you make a comment on an article posted at SFGate, and if the site moderators then subsequently delete your comment for whatever reason, it will only appear as deleted to the other readers. HOWEVER, your comment will NOT appear to be deleted if viewed from your own computer! The Chronicle’s goal is to trick deleted commenters into not knowing their comments were in fact deleted.

Via Glenn Reynolds, who expresses both disapproval and admiration—sorta.

Don’t bother to go see Todd Haynes’s horrible pretentious mess of a movie.

Munira Mizra does an admirable job of defending contemporary art against the bogus charge that it is left-wing:

It’s very easy to be anti-Bush these days, but try being anti-recycling. You’ll be branded a heretic and lose your friends in high places very quickly. Indeed, there is hardly any artistic critique or satire about environmentalism, even though the majority of people in surveys feel deeply ambivalent about being hectored about flying, carbon footprints and so on. Never mind Jerry Springer: The Opera, or even ‘Mohammed the Opera’ (if any artist would dare to do such a thing), Al Gore is practically crying out for his own musical! The artist Mark McGowan is one of the few artists who has managed to spoof environmentalism. … Why isn’t there more of this in our age of supposed irreverence and playful postmodernism?

Good question!

In my own view, most art—and I use the term reservedly, for the general culture—is politically incoherent, and dumb. Very unsophisticated stuff. Tired. Lacking in ways to explain the world we live in today.

Or are our artists, as Mizra suggests, simply afraid to go there?

[T]here’s plenty of anti-war art out there …, but where’s the pro-war art? It’s a minority view, but it’s intriguing that for all its spirit of experimentation and shock, no one in the arts is prepared to explore this argument further. And with all this concern for community art, there are a few communities that never seem to get much airtime. In the 1980s there were lots of agitprop plays about the impact of mine closures on working-class communities, so where are the plays about the end of foxhunting in the countryside? Most obviously, where is the satire about radical Islam or the ultimate attack on political correctness? When an issue so dominates in the media (and has, potentially, so much comedy value), why hasn’t anyone really touched it?

Another very good question, and I commend Ms. Mizra for raising it even if the larger artistic (and critical) community in the West, such as it is, does not.

Oh! I forgot! They’re too busy disapproving of Salman Rushdie!

Kudos busted out all over for Norman Mailer after he died a couple of weeks ago. Buried in the mountains of ink was this gem

Aside from his command of the English language, there really isn’t anything magnificent about this guy.

A fitting epitaph. Mailer might have chosen it himself!

I’m taking a break. See you on the other side.

[picture removed]

Ezra Klein’s latest attempt to lay blame for the war in Iraq won’t wash:

Lots of people, ranging from Paul Wolfowitz to Paul Wellstone, believed Iraq had chemical and biological weapons, and a far-from-completion nuclear program. The difference came in how you imagined the war would go, how difficult, and bloody, and expensive, and long, it would be. You could convince the American people, particularly after our illusory win in Afghanistan, that a short victory would be good all around. But no one would have signed up for this mess. And that’s where we needed our analysts to interject a dose of reality, a grounded take on how hard this would be, not a heap best-case, wishful thinking. And they failed us.

It pains me to have to remind the young Mr. Klein that people are responsible for their own “doses of reality.” If they fail to inform themselves—especially in a country where we can find things out for ourselves, where we have all the information available to us at the click of a mouse—it isn’t the fault of the many marketers (from every walk of life, not just politics) who are endlessly trying to sell us stuff, including ideas and images.

Don’t blame others for the fantasies that you believe in.

And while you’re at it, try to avoid denial, too.

Faced with the high odor of real perfidy [which leaves them unable simply to deny the truth], people unwilling to risk a break skew their perception of reality much more purposefully. One common way to do this is to recast clear moral breaches as foul-ups, stumbles or lapses in competence — because those are more tolerable, said Dr. Kim, of U.S.C. In effect, Dr. Kim said, people “reframe the ethical violation as a competence violation.”

She wasn’t cheating on him — she strayed. He didn’t hide the losses in the subprime mortgage unit for years — he miscalculated.

Klein doesn’t want to accuse liberal hawks like Ken Pollack of an ethical violation. He wants to cut them a break. He is still blaming them, not himself, and is barking up the wrong tree. He is still in denial.

Back in the 1960s, we seemed to understand that war is … war: not healthy for children and other living things.

Alan Dershowitz says Harvard profs are quaking in their boots:

At Harvard, hard-left radicals, led by Professor J. Lorand Matory ’82, claim that they are being muzzled. At last week’s Faculty meeting, Matory alleged that critics of Israel like him “tremble in fear” when they express their views at Harvard. He submitted a motion to resolve that “this Faculty commits itself to fostering civil dialogue in which people with a broad range of perspectives feel safe and are encouraged to express their reasoned and evidence-based ideas.”

Hey, I encourage Matory and his colleagues to express their not-reasoned and evidence-less ideas, too. It’s a free country! The First Amendment is their permit! Meanwhile, the rest of us have rights, too—including the right not to believe even the esteemed professors’ most “reasoned” and “evidence-based” ideas.

Oh, and Dershowitz has some reassuring words too [emphasis in original]:

Freedom of speech to criticize Israel and the U.S. is alive and well at Harvard and most other universities. Matory need not “tremble in fear” of anything except his pernicious opinions being rebutted in the marketplace of ideas.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant—in universities too.

The Politico notes that the political campaigns are all revved up:

The presidential campaigns in both parties have begun reacting ferociously to real or perceived attacks from rivals, goaded by a tight campaign calendar that leaves no room for error, and a determination to show they’re tougher than John F. Kerry was in 2004.

All of the candidates have sought to exploit any whiff of negativity from their opponents by pivoting off the charges with counterattacks designed to gain sympathy or political advantage within their own party.

This is yet more evidence, for those who need it, for the validity of the Feiler Faster Thesis, in which Mickey Kaus was making an observation about momentum in politics. He suggested that with the speeding up of everything in our everyday life,

there are now simply more opportunities for turns of fortune and that voters are able, for the most part, to keep up. …

 ”The FFT, remember, doesn’t say that information moves with breathtaking speed these days. (Everyone knows that!) The FFT says that people are comfortable processing that information with what seems like breathtaking speed.” [e.a.]

Campaigns are responding rapidly to attacks because they are trying to turn every moment in the spotlight—even (perhaps especially) moments of crisis—into an opportunity. They have learned the hard way that unless you answer every attack, you leave yourself open to the possibility that your opponent’s displeasing narrative about you, or his attack on your image, will stick to you.

Rapid response is about upping the ante, about fighting bad PR with better PR in the hope that you will accrue an image of yourself appealing enough for voters to cast their ballot for you. What’s amazing about it is that politicians do this even though most voters aren’t even paying attention. They just cannot afford to stand still as the river of news*** rushes by them.

——————-

*** Doc Searls recently elaborated this concept. I’m still trying to process it. Totally fascinating stuff:

Here’s the problem with most news: it isn’t. It’s olds. It happened hours ago, or last night, or yesterday, or last month, or before whenever the deadline was in the news organization’s current “news cycle”. It’s not now. …

News is a river, not a lake. It is active, not static. It’s what’s happening, not what happened. Or not only what happened.

But what happened — news as olds — is how we’ve understood news for as long as we’ve had newspapers. The happening kind of news came along with radio, and then television. Then we called it “live”. Still, even on the nightly news, what’s live is talking heads and reports from the field. The rest is finished stuff.

There’s a difference here, a distinction to be made: one as stark and important as the distinction between now and then, or life and death. It’s a distinction between what’s live and what’s not.

This distinction is what will have us soon talking about the life of newspapers, rather than the death of them.

Because it’s not enough to be “online” or to have a “presence” on the Web.

To be truly alive, truly new, truly part of the life of its readers, a newspaper needs to be on the live web and not just the static one. It needs to flow news, and not just post it.

It needs to flow rivers of news, or newsrivers.

The Politico reports that Rudy Giuliani’s moderate views are a hit with “youth”:

According to a Nov. 1 Rock the Vote poll of 18-to-29-year-olds, for example, Giuliani led former Sen. Fred Thompson by 12 points — around the same advantage Giuliani averages in polls among all Republicans nationally. …

Giuliani has better prospects in the general election than his GOP rivals. Pollster Scott Rasmussen says the New Yorker has consistently outperformed other Republicans among voters ages 18 to 29.

Various observers raise their votes in protest that the only reason the yute like Giuliani is a) because they know his name and b) they know him from 9/11, when the world began. Plus, scoffs one observer,

“The idea they’ve got [about Giuliani] is about celebrity rather than politics.”

Younger voters are more likely to get their political information from television and less from newspapers than older voters, [he] added.

[e.a.]

Now, I have no idea why Giuliani is popular among young people, but I have another idea—the idea underpinning this blog—that in today’s world (and until further notice) politicians, and anyone else seeking to have an effect in today’s complex world, which is united by instant communication of information across the globe, are exactly the same as celebrities.

Politicians are just a bunch of actors waiting in the wings for their opportunity to perform on the world stage. Could it be that the “yute” are wiser than the rest of us?

Just as one literary giant dies—Norman Mailer, who wrote in 1959 in Advertisements for Myself that he was

imprisoned with a perception which will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of [his] time

… another literary giant rises. GalleyCat’s Ron Hogan explains:

Last week, a literary agent sent out the following letter to an unknown number of editors:

“Today you will be receiving via messenger a package containing two completed works of non-fiction, and four proposals for non-fiction works-in-progress. They represent the work of author [redacted], whose disruption and transformation of the non-fiction form will, we believe, one day garner him the highest literary honors. His works will sell millions of copies, and will be translated into hundreds of languages. His name will register in the lexicon of American literature and cultural studies. And his work, by its revolutionary character, will permanently alter the landscape of publishing and the consciousness of the Western reader.”
The author is a former Rolling Stone and Village Voice contributor

Quite the sales pitch, eh?

Oh horrors! British literary fiction is going directly-to-paperback at one publishing house:

From spring, Picador will use paperbacks to launch new books from all of its literary fiction writers, unless they have a guaranteed profitable hardback market. It estimates that 80% of its literary fiction will be published in this way.

Rival publishers described it as “a seismic change”.

“Hardback then paperback has been the model for 60 years,” said Dan Franklin, the veteran publisher at Jonathan Cape. “I would be worried about the call to Cormac McCarthy to tell him he’s going straight into mass-market paperback. I think he’d say no thanks.”

McCarthy might argue his hardbacks make money. Since it was published last November, The Road has sold almost 1,000 copies a month in Britain, earning £156,221.

Kirsty Dunseath, publishing director of Weidenfield & Nicholson, said the move could lessen the prestige of the novels. “Coming out in hardback is a statement of confidence in a novel and gets the reviews,” she said. “It doesn’t say much for your confidence coming out in paperback. Anyway, £12.99 isn’t such a high price to pay - you’d happily pay that for a CD.”

But Andrew Kidd, the publisher at Picador, is convinced the hardback’s primacy is over. “Over the last few years publishers have witnessed sales of literary fiction in hardback reaching new lows,” he said. “All of us find that depressing, and there are, frankly, no reasons to think the situation might soon reverse itself.”

To the dolt who’s worried about the “loss of prestige” that accompanies paperback-only publication, I say: where’s the prestige in failing to offer the public works that capture their imagination?

If you publish the right books—the truly excellent books—readers will come.

James Taranto says he isn’t in the tank for Giuliani—ha! I don’t care if he is. I was interested, however, to read some of Giuliani’s recent remarks, which he quotes:

I get very, very frustrated when I . . . hear certain Americans talk about how difficult the problems we face are, how overwhelming they are, what a dangerous era we live in. I think we’ve lost perspective. We’ve always had difficult problems, we’ve always had great challenges, and we’ve always lived in danger.

Do we think our parents and our grandparents and our great grandparents didn’t live in danger and didn’t have difficult problems? Do we think the Second World War was less difficult that our struggle with Islamic terrorism? Do we think that the Great Depression was a less difficult economic struggle for people to face than the struggles we’re facing now? Have we entirely lost perspective of the great challenges America has faced in the past and has been able to overcome and overcome brilliantly? I think sometimes we have lost that perspective.

Do you know what leadership is all about? Leadership is all about restoring that perspective that this country is truly an exceptional country that has great things that it is going to accomplish in the future that will be as great and maybe even greater than the ones we’ve accomplished in the past. If we can’t do that, shame on us.

Well, yeah. I couldn’t have said it better myself. Also, I’ve been known to say that the candidate who offers America a pleasing vision of itself as a can-do nation is going to win the next election.

Hitchens dares to hope that the trickle of better news coming out of Iraq is good news:

To have savaged and discredited al-Qaida in an open fight and to have taken down a fascist Baath Party, which betrayed its pseudosecularism by forging an alliance with al-Qaida, is to have scored an impressive victory on any terms. However, the price of this achievement was often the indulgence of some excessive conduct on the part of the Shiite parties and militias. The next stage must be the reining-in of the Sadrists and the discouragement of Iranian support for such groups. Again, one hardly dares to hope, but there are some promising signs. The Maliki government is not using undue haste or sectarian demagogy in the case of Sultan Hashim Ahmed al-Tai, Saddam Hussein’s former defense minister, sentenced to death but not yet executed. Many Sunni Kurds and Arabs, either opposed to the death penalty on principle or opposed in this case, seem for now to have prevailed. And “the cabinet,” according to the Nov. 18 New York Times, “has sent legislation to the Parliament softening the de-Baathification law that had prevented former Baathists’ working in government jobs.” I wonder how many people, reading that ordinary sentence about “the cabinet” and “the Parliament,” as reported also in independent Iraqi media, have any idea what it means when compared with the insane proceedings of the totalitarian abattoir state that was Iraq until 2003.

Stop wondering, Hitchens. You know exactly how few people reading that ordinary sentence have any idea what it means. Stop wondering and keep on keepin’ on.

What’s this the L.A. Times is reporting? cooperation between Sunnis and Shia in Iraq?

Despite persistent sectarian tensions in the Iraqi government, war-weary Sunnis and Shiites are joining hands at the local level to protect their communities from militants on both sides, U.S. military officials say.

In the last two months, a U.S.-backed policing movement called Concerned Citizens, launched last year in Sunni-dominated Anbar province under the banner of the Awakening movement, has spread rapidly into the mixed Iraqi heartland.

Of the nearly 70,000 Iraqi men in the Awakening movement, started by Sunni Muslim sheiks who turned their followers against Al Qaeda in Iraq, there are now more in Baghdad and its environs than anywhere else, and a growing number of those are Shiite Muslims.

Commanders in the field think they have tapped into a genuine public expression of reconciliation that has outpaced the elected government’s progress on mending the sectarian rift.

Of course if you’ve been reading Engram’s blog, you know that there was never, strictly speaking, a civil war in Iraq—it was way more complicated, and way less complicated—than that.

Norman Podheretz takes time out of his 24/7 job counseling that the U.S. bomb Iran to answer a charge brought by Andrew Sullivan and now spread further by The Economist:

Linking to the Economist post, Sullivan accuses me of intellectual dishonesty for failing to admit that I have made an “error” in relying on a “bogus quotation” to bolster my argument that if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons, it would not be deterred from using them by the fear of retaliation.

I do not usually bother responding to Sullivan’s frequent attacks on me, which are fueled by the same shrill hysteria that, as has often been pointed out, deforms most of what he “dishes” out on a daily basis. But in this case I have decided to respond because, by linking to a sober source like the Economist, he may for a change seem credible.

The Economist concludes its piece by challenging Amir Taheri to produce “the original source for this quote.”

In response to a query from me, Mr. Taheri has now met that challenge.

Sullivan responds by casting doubt on Taheri:

Taheri, whose reliability has come under suspicion before, says the remark was purged or censored or removed in subsequent editions of the book. I have no independent way of confirming any of this. Taheri, it should be noted, was the source of the story that Iran had recently required that Jews wear yellow stars in public, a story that was subsequently debunked.

Well, I hate to say it, but The Economist ’s counter-translator, Shaul Bakhash of George Mason University, also seems compromised—not at all an disinterested party. He’s the husband of the Iranian American scholar Haleh Esfandiari, who was detained in Iran this past year and, under great international pressure, released. I wouldn’t be surprised if Iranian agents haven’t put tremendous pressure on both Esfandiari and Bakhash to toe the line.

His comments in The Economist certainly sound different than these impassioned words, published in May 2007:

Once Haleh was arrested, however, silence was no longer an option. It is preposterous that she is accused of conspiring to overthrow the Iranian government by organizing conferences and encouraging dialogue between Iranians and Americans. The Wilson Center issued a fact sheet; Lee Hamilton, its president and director, held a news conference; and I began to speak openly about Haleh’s frightening predicament.

The extraordinary media attention, as well as the support for Haleh from presidential candidates and political leaders, from scholars and academic associations, from the students at Princeton University who she taught to love the Persian language, from women’s groups, human rights organizations and people everywhere have astonished and gratified her family and friends.

It is easy to feel powerless in the face of a state’s overweening power — especially a state that arrests, incarcerates and accuses its citizens at will. But the events of the last few weeks — the universal condemnation Iran has earned by imprisoning Haleh and others — have taught me that people also have power when they condemn injustice and stand up for wronged individuals. Is the Iranian government listening?

Americans are too naive about Iran, and about the Middle East. It’s time to get with the program.

Not for the first time, Matthew Yglesias throws out a typical insouciant comment on his Atlantic Online blog. Also not for the first time, he gets his ass chewed out by a commenter:

We invaded Iraq “for no real reason”? This has to be the stupidest remark printed in The Atlantic in 150 years. Yglesias should stop posting until he’s at least able to pass a Jr. High current events quiz.

Besides murdering God knows how many Iraqis with routine police-state methods, Iraq killed about a million people and created a world recession by invading Iran, using wmd’s liberally (including to help kill about 250,000 Kurds), rocketing supertankers, etc in the process.

Hardly pausing for breath afterwards, Iraq then invaded, raped, and annexed Kuwait, a charter member of the UN and a US ally, killing about 300,000 of its citizens and dragging us into a war, firing missiles into Israel and Saudi Arabia, and torching the oilfields for good measure.

Given this history, and the fact that we discovered a nuclear program mere months away from producing a viable weapon, strict terms on this and other matters were included in the ceasefire agreement. It was comprehensively violated by Iraq, as were the subsequent 16 Chapter VII UNSC Resolutions. Further efforts to control Iraq’s behavior made us complicit in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Shi’ia who rose up at our behest, the near-total destruction of the Marsh Arabs and the ecosystem that had sheltered them for millenia, and the deaths of perhaps a million of the most vulnerable Iraqis by means of sanctions. By 2003, we had an army of nearly half a million perched on the edge of the Arabian desert with summer coming, and Iraq still, according to Hans Blix, in blatant material breech of its obligations, leaving us with the choice of keeping our word about “serious consequences”, or surrender. This amounts to “no real reason”?

You must be out of your mind.

Posted by Robert Powell | November 19, 2007 3:37 PM

The Sun’s Eli Lake is content merely to question Mr. Yglesias’s logic:

Matt,

How can this be? Everyone knows the neocons pressured the CIA and lied to the American public to start a needless war for Israel. Everyone knows that the State Department and the CIA knew, just knew, that Iraq was no threat whatsoever. I mean the only explanation is that Holbrooke must have been a neocon. But if he’s a neocon, well what was he doing in the Clinton administration that was paying so much attention to the real threats to America? Maybe you and Matthew Duss could explain all this to.

Eli

Posted by Eli Lake | November 19, 2007 3:36 PM

Don’t expect any fireworks, or any additional expenditure of brain cells from Mr Yglesias. He never answers such inconvenient questions—especially one that would acknowledge the case against Saddam that Democrats were making during Clinton’s regime, long before 9/11.

These questions expose Yglesias’s blind partisanship, the incoherence of his political arguments, and his intellectual dishonesty. Mostly, though, they expose his peace-at-any-price foreign policy instinct.

That instinct is going to be tested again and again in the coming years. The dangers beyond the water’s edge are real. We want a secretary of state, not to mention a president, who gets that.

One of Andrew Sullivan’s readers exposes the limits of even the best reporting. Here’s what the reader wrote to Sullivan:

The New Yorker report you cited is so bad it is scary. If this is what you are reading to figure out what is going then you need a better source. This article is riddled with incorrect facts and easements. It doesn’t just get things sorta wrong, it gets them 180 degrees wrong.

Unfortunately I can’t go through every part of the article, because much of what I would say is classified. I’ll just comment on the part you quoted from a Sheikh Zaidan. Sheikh Zaidan is not a “prominent Sunni tribal leader” at all. Actually, he is a nobody with no tribal power or constituency who probably isn’t even a Sheikh and who is likely still involved with the insurgency. The insurgency has been beaten so bad in Anbar that he is forced to cool his rhetoric. Of course they didn’t make us “crawl on our stomachs”. What happened was, we were killing insurgents like it was cool and the insurgents were killing Iraqis like it was cool. The tribes realized they were getting wiped out at both ends.

For what it’s worth: I believe that the New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson got and told the best story he could get, and could tell. But his understanding of the terrain and the larger context—his template, if you will—cannot compete with what is known by readers like Sullivan’s, who are on the ground.

It’s not that one storyteller is right and the other is wrong. Without Anderson’s template, it’s impossible for us to get a handle on a situation that for New Yorker readers is completely alien. Without the corrections to Anderson’s template offered by Sullivan’s reader, we cannot go deeper into the reality of facts on the ground.

The real problem isn’t whom to believe, however. The real problem is that people just aren’t that into finding out the truth about Iraq. They’re into political warfare at home.