It’s not just The Atlantic that is embarrassing itself these days.

Get a load of the sophomoric horseshit being peddled by Sy Hersh, who is now proudly published by The New Yorker:

“They say the surge has worked,” Hersh said. “But do you think someday we will get an oil deal in Iraq? They’ll burn the fields first. We’re hated in Iraq.”

As for Afghanistan, “we became more of a threat to the people than Taliban,” Hersh said. We’re “losing the war there,” he said, and concluded that “Afghanistan is a doomed society.”

Hersh said he had just returned from Syria, where he was working on his next New Yorker piece, on the mysterious bombing carried out by the US and the Israelis. “The Syrians have a much longer-term perspective than we do,” he said. “They say ‘we’ve been here for 10,000 years; we’re not going away.’”

As for the short term, Hersh said, “Cheney thinks war with Islam is inevitable, so we might as well have it now.” Administration plans for bombing Iran call for targeting the Revolutionary Guards. Iran’s response, Hersh said, is likely to be “asymmetrical” - instead of striking back directly at the US, they will “hit the oil” in the Gulf. The result will be oil prices of “$200 or $300 a barrel,” double or triple the current price.

With media disaggregation around the corner and the bloody brawl for survival just now getting started, you’d think that brand owners like The Atlantic and The New Yorker would be a little more concerned with burnishing the reputation of their brands, the better to sell quality—which is what they have been known for.

But you would be wrong.

Hear the plaintive cry from director Brian De Palma:

De Palma also expressed his disappointment with the media’s coverage of recent war films, often with Monday morning stories of their box office woes and articles highlighting audience apathy like this, this, and this.

“They seem to relish it,” he says. “They are so excited that meaningful movies about our foreign policy are not doing well. They were made with extreme difficulty and financed in weird and creative ways. All made because a movie star decided to push for something he cared about.”

Boo hoo. Everyone with a worthy project needs to get in line, even including movie stars.

There are a lot of people in this country who are trying to get traction in the culture for the things they care about. It’s called a “free market” for a reason: consumers are free to ignore what you care about.

According to TAPPED, Nancy Pelosi held an intimate breakfast this morning with some friendly journalists. Among the other topics mentioned was immigration. Pelosi outlined her strategy regarding this “new” hot-potato that is dividing her party.

Her solution? To get the correct-sounding talking points:

Calling herself a “devout Catholic,” the Speaker said she’s been talking to members of the clergy about modeling from the pulpit respectful ways of speaking about immigrants.

[e.a.]

Ya know, voters aren’t like kindergarteners or religious congregations. They don’t want moral instruction about respect—or moral instruction about anything else—from their political representatives. I thought that’s what the antipathy of us secularists toward the religious right was all about: we don’t want moral instruction from anyone’s God or the self-proclaimed representative of anyone’s God. Correct?

Well, I don’t know anyone who’s yearning for a religious-themed left. So why is Pelosi looking to the Catholic Church for “modeling” a message for Democrats on immigration?

If you’re interested in understanding more about the Democrats’ looming problems with immigration, you can read Fred Siegel in Contentions:

Clinton’s definitive “no” [at last night's debate on driver's licences for illegal immigrants] took her partly off the general election hook. But with nearly 80 percent of voters opposing driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, her party, as represented by Obama and Bill Richardson, is still in the hot seat on this issue. Led by liberal Democrats, seventeen states have opposed a national standard for driver’s licenses. (In eight of these states, licenses are already being issued to undocumented workers.) This has led Peter Brown of the Quinnipiac Poll to analogize that, like affirmative action for racial minorities—an issue that badly damaged the Democrats in the 1970’s and 1980’s—today’s immigration issue has split the party’s working class supporters from its liberal activists. And as with affirmative action, liberal activists are quick to deride their opponents as racists.

Brown is right about the broad similarities. But there are also significant differences. Affirmative action and racial quotas pitted middle- and lower-middle-class white male Democrats against African-Americans and liberal activists. But on immigration, the remaining white working-class Democrats are aligned with most African-American voters, who are often those most directly in competition with low cost illegal immigrant labor.

No amount of “modeling” respectful ways of speaking about immigration is going to allay the fears of working-class Democrats, or to bring together the two disparate strands of the Democratic party—the elites vs. the hoi polloi. The fight is on. It cannot be papered over.

Clarifying the difference between “triangulation” and “bridge-building,” Mickey Kaus makes an important point about “bipartisan” politics and policy—namely, that there is nothing bipartisan about certain policy changes: they only come about when one side loses:

The Triangulator knows that bipartisan solutions don’t always require each side to give up its least important demands and meet in the middle, half-a-loaf style. Bipartisan solutions sometimes require one side or the other to give up it’s most important demand. There was nothing the left cared more about in the welfare debate, for example, than preventing states from being able to abolish welfare or rigorously require single mothers to work. In the bipartisan reform that ultimately passed in 1996, the left lost those demands.

Similarly, in the education debate, traditional due process protection against dismissal isn’t a marginal demand for the Dem-supporting teacher’s unions. It’s their core demand–not the last 10%, but the first 10%.

Yep, politics is blood sport, and there are winners and losers. To win, you must pound, batter, and stomp all over your opponent.

[[ Again: I'm not a politico, as I've said many times, but it would be impossible to ignore politics in this climate, and of course I do have an opinion:  Obama will emerge bloody, battered, and very badly beaten from this contest with the Clintons---and, yes, he's up against both of them. If he doesn't like that, by the way, he should make it an issue, take them head-on. But he is way too invested in being seen as above-it-all and morally superior. That's why he will lose. We may love him for appealing to the better angels in our nature, but this historical moment calls for us to gird our loins for battle, and to do battle. ]]

But back to Kaus. As if to make his point, I read in the New York Sun that the Bloomberg administration just emerged victorious from a battle with the powerful NYC teachers’ union:

Marshalling harsher words than she has used in months, the president of the teachers union, Randi Weingarten, is lashing out against the city, decrying a project to crack down on bad teachers.

The Bloomberg administration’s $1 million initiative aims to help principals either improve or fire unsatisfactory teachers. Principals judged nearly 1,000 tenured teachers unsatisfactory last year, but only 10 were removed from the system. During contract negotiations last year, Ms. Weingarten signed onto part of the plan, a program for teachers to help other teachers improve.

Ms. Weingarten said another part of the plan — for a new team of attorneys the city is billing the Teacher Performance Unit, which will help principals build cases against tenured teachers they believe are incompetent — shocked her when she read its details Wednesday night. “What they said to me about what this unit was and what was in this memo was the difference between night and day,” she said.

Ms. Weingarten called the team a “teacher gotcha unit.”

The New York Times covers this story rather differently:

Randi Weingarten, president of the United Federation of Teachers, called for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his schools chancellor to apologize to the city’s 80,000 teachers yesterday, a day after the chancellor sent principals an e-mail message announcing the formation of teams of lawyers and consultants meant to help principals remove poorly performing tenured teachers. Ms. Weingarten said that the message seemed timed to the release yesterday of national reading and math test scores showing little progress among New York City students. “The first speck of bad news, all of the sudden they go after teachers,” Ms. Weingarten said. The mayor said yesterday that removing tenured teachers was “a last alternative.”

The patronage system that is the teachers’ union must lose before anything changes for the better in a school system that has made it impossible to fire bad teachers.

Bloomberg, a Democrat in Republican clothing, is the First Triangulator of New York City.