I’m struck by some very different reactions to the major political endorsements of the last couple of days, both of which I would categorize as major PRopagandaTM events.
When Barack Obama was crowned by the Kennedy family on Monday at a rally at Washington American University in Washington, D.C. (ETP’s Rachel Sklar delivered a flavor of the ambience here), I didn’t hear a lot of objections to the adulatory press coverage, of Google News offered one small sample:
By contrast, on the next night, while anchoring Florida primary coverage on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann set the deeply disapproving—if not outraged—tone for liberals when he heard that Rudy Giuliani would be endorsing John McCain the next day. (I wrote about it here, as I watched K.O.’s creepazoid performance. He also dissed Hillary Clinton by saying that her primary victory in Florida was “meaningless.”)
I wasn’t around to watch the Republicans’ piece of political theater (live, from the Reagan Library) the next day (you can watch it here), but The Flack offered his professional color commentary:
He ran a losing campaign with more than his share of PR gaffes.
Yet, as I sit here watching Rudy Giuliani’s withdrawal and endorsement speech, I can’t help but think how he timed this anti-climactic announcement to run live on the local TV network lead-ins across most of the nation. Geesh. He finally did something right on the media strategy front. [e.a.]
The Flack is impressed professionally but appalled personally:
The nation’s local TV news directors took the bait — hook, line and sinker — to hand over to this right wing ideologue unfettered access to a large hunk of their news programming holes. The Giuliani withdrawal speech morphed into a several-minute commercial for that pasty, anachronistic candidate who has stood by this failed presidency more than any other. [e.a.]
I’m left with the impression that if local TV news directors had handed over unfettered access to a left-wing ideologue, everything would have been just fine and dandy—from both a professional and a personal point of view.
Because I wasn’t around to watch TV during either of those live events and I don’t have the time to research how much airtime either of them got and on which channels, I can’t parse which PRopagandaTM event got “fairer” treatment by the media. Nor do I care.
I get the Rudy hatred.*** What I don’t get is the attitude that TV programmers somehow shouldn’t have given airtime to strategists who came up with a very effective PR campaign, regardless of its content.
“Free media” is free to those who can grab it, no? The competition’s PR “consiglieres” just have to try harder, that’s all. It’s the American way!
———-
*** Though I don’t share it. He did a lot of good things for New York while haranguing us with his in-your-face law-and-orderism, which during Election ‘08 has been characterized as “Rudy is a fascist.” Been there, done that. Whatever.
Personally, I welcome what I see as a trend toward moderation in the Republican Party that the rise of McCain and Giuliani signals—I hope it means a trend of having opponents across the aisle that Democrats can work with.
I also agree that Giuliani has run a campaign of ideas—and that unlike his opponents on the Republican side, he has ideas.
But I know that partisanship trumps everything right now. Oh well.
Schuessler notes a great contribution to the Stop the Death-of-Reading Hysterics Club [e.a.]:
[T]he novelist Ursula Le Guin joins the fray with an elegant, wide-ranging essay aimed at deflating the N.E.A.’s alarmism (subscription required). The “hedonists” who love to disappear into serious books have been a minority in every age, Le Guin argues. What is falling by the wayside in our own time is social reading—the kind we do in order to be able to have “nonthreatening, unloaded, sociable conversations” with casual acquaintances. In 1841, strangers on the train could chat about whether Little Nell was going to be written out of Dicken’s latest serial. Today, we huddle by the water cooler debating whether Tony Soprano got whacked.
LeGuin correctly notes that our taste for stories hasn’t vanished. Our means of telling and communicating stories is evolving, along with our technology and our modern and ever-evolving way of life.
While that happens … at a glacial pace, all you book people: chill!
Lots and lots of people read! They even buy books! Serve the audience you have.
In the old days, those who supported tax cuts for the wealthy worked closely with those who wanted to amend the constitution to ban gay marriage. Those who wanted to grow the size of the military made common cause with those who saw global warming as an environmentalist scare-tactic meant to interfere with free markets. Those who wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade also wanted to overturn campaign finance reform.
McCain, Huckabee and a nation of disconcerted Republican voters now threaten to reformulate that coalition.
Republicans in total, complete disarray—with a frontrunner they loathe and despise. What a crying shame. (I actually grew up among Republicans. I come by my cold-hearted hatred for them honestly.)
As The Politico notes, there’s an irony in the fact that the first politician to suffer 9/11 fatigue is Rudy Giuliani, at whose gentle prodding and urging we New Yorkers got back to “normal” within a couple of days after the terrorist attacks of September 2001. (The attacks, which took place about a mile from where I live, left my home smelling acrid for more than three months, so it’s not as if I could really ever forget the events of that day):
“Americans want to watch ‘America’s Top Model’ — and they really, really don’t want to be reminded that bad people want to kill them,” said Wilson, who worked for Giuliani’s 2000 Senate campaign and advised him informally this year. “Talking about 9/11 now is like ‘Remember the Maine.’”
This is true. It has always been true, because the way people cope with life—which can often be painful and difficult and challenging (particularly as you get older)—is by looking ahead to the future and leaving the past behind. That’s a good survival strategy, as long as you’ve got someone watching your back.
America should move forward. And why shouldn’t we entertain ourselves after working hard (which we Americans do, in order to afford our lifestyles)? Who wants to worry all the time, or be terrorized?
Nobody. But let’s make sure that we do not lull ourselves into complacency simply because the images of death and destruction in Iraq, among other places, no longer appear on our TV screens. There are people out there who hate us and they are plotting against us. Let’s not pretend they will go away if only we close our eyes.
“Two generations after the Holocaust, I never thought - I could not even have imagined - that within the structure of the United Nations there would be some who would attempt to de-legitimatize the Jewish State, the State of Israel, founded and built by the remnants of European Jewry and by the hundreds of thousands of Jews expelled from Arab lands,” read Lantos’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day speech.
Lantos lamented the fact that the UN chamber was too often the setting for “shameless invective against Israel,” adding that he was “deeply grateful for the numerous principled statesmen of many lands who regularly stand up against this outrage.”
Where are these “principled statesmen of many lands who stand up against this outrage”? I wonder. I haven’t heard them speak out.
But never mind. There’s more from Lantos [e.a.]:
He went on to say that this point was highlighted in the Durban anti-Racism conference the weekend before the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.
“The United Nations was holding a conference meant to put an end to racism, a noble goal if ever there was one, but the occasion was hijacked by hate-filled and venomous leaders who perverted the noble idea of ending racism, and turned the conference into a lynch mob against Israel.
“As the situation galloped toward the surreal and the gathering veered away from its intended topics of ethnic violence, racism or slavery in many countries and toward condemnation of the one democratic state in the Middle East, it was sadly evident to me that this potentially history-making conference was becoming a travesty,” continued Lantos’s speech.
The congressman, whose mother was killed in Auschwitz, said that having experienced the horrors of the Holocaust firsthand, the Durban conference was the “most sickening and unabashed” display of hate for Jews he had seen since the Nazi period.
I’m grateful to Congressman Lantos, who is the chairman of the House Committe on Foreign Affairs, for his very speedy response—only six and a half years later—to the grotesque spectacle that was Durban.
One question: what’s he going to do about Durban II, which is in the planningstages?
——– *** The UN is a useless organization, with no power and, in any case, no desire to use it even if it had power, even on behalf of good—or else it would have intervened in the many, many conflicts that have arisen since its establishment.
Nevertheless, it is among the “international institutions” favored by the left wing of the Democratic Party.
I was watching MSNBC tonight when Keith Olbermann was rendered speechless to discover what will happen tomorrow: a piece of political theater to top even yesterday’s passing of JFK’s halo to Barack Obama.
Tomorrow, Rudy Giuliani will endorse John McCainat the Ronald Reagan Library, where, coincidentally the final Republican debate of the campaign is being held.
Olbermann nearly sputtered with outrage but was constrained from saying anything too sardonic by the fact that he was, at that moment, in his “anchor” persona rather than his creepazoid-demagogue persona (which he didn’t even attempt to hide from Howard Kurtz this past Sunday on Reliable Sources—or perhaps he did, but he failed). He gives me the willies.
Speaking of symbols, James Kirchick has a very interesting analysis of what doomed Rudy Giuliani and what accounted for McCain’s rise [e.a.]:
And as Iraq recedes from being a top concern for voters, so does the case for a candidate running on a Sept. 11 platform. Giuliani’s appeal is predicated on the existence of an unruly world. …
Moreover, McCain can claim credit for the policy behind American success in Iraq far more convincingly than Giuliani. … McCain is the only candidate who actually staked political capital on backing the surge, and he has been its biggest booster in Congress.
He is now reaping the benefits of his prescience. … [A] seemingly safer world means less reason to vote for the tough guy pledging to eat terrorists for breakfast.
When the facts on the ground change, everything changes with them.
The attorneys said in a joint statement that they believed Obama was the best choice to roll back the Bush-Cheney administration’s detention policies in the war on terrorism and thereby to “restore the rule of law, demonstrate our commitment to human rights, and repair our reputation in the world community.” The attorneys are representing the detainees in habeas corpus lawsuits, which are efforts to get individual hearings before federal judges in order to challenge the basis for their indefinite imprisonment without trial.
I can’t help it if I’m a close reader, okay? So after I read Matthew Yglesias’s disapproving post about Hillary rushing to her feetat the SOTU to applaud Bush’s line about the terrorists knowing that the surge had worked, I went and clicked on the link he provided and read the whole piece.
When Bush warned the Iranian government that “America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf” Obama jumped up to applaud. Clinton leaned across Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), seated to her left, to look in Obama’s direction before slowly standing.
I long ago stopped trying to post any responses over at Yglesias’s place, because if he reads them, he gives no indication of having done so and rarely, if ever, responds—not very blogger-like. But I note that others continue the effort to address Yglesias’s points, as if they are worth discussion.
One commenter brought my point to his attention [e.a.]:
I agree with Steven this is pretty clear evidence HRC is just hawkish by nature, and that’s a good enough reason to not give your vote to her.
But can someone tell me what to make of this?
When Bush warned the Iranian government that “America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf” Obama jumped up to applaud. Clinton leaned across Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), seated to her left, to look in Obama’s direction before slowly standing.
The Illinois senator strongly criticized the former first lady last year when she supported a resolution calling for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to be designated a terrorist organization. Obama supporters and other Democrats charged the vote would give Bush political cover to begin military operations against Iran.
Wouldn’t Obama’s criticism of the Kyl-Leiberman bill mean he shouldn’t stand up here? And didn’t he give that vote a pass in any case? Does not compute.
Posted by plum | January 29, 2008 10:01 AM
A couple of points: Mr. Obama’s fans don’t seem to care much about what he stands for—even if it includes a strong and aggressive national defense—as long as he doesn’t make much noise about it or as long as he doesn’t use threatening language or as long as he doesn’t seem (on the surface) to relish combat the way Hillary Clinton does.
I find that weird, but maybe not so weird. (More about this social/societal/cultural phenomenon another time.)
The other point that becomes obvious when you read the Hill piece that Yglesias linked to is that there is a huge dividing line among the Democrats—a fight for the soul of the Democratic party, is how Ron Silver put it long ago—between mostly young militant peaceniks and battle-hardened and beaten-up-by-reality liberals.
But it also seems to be about those who accept reality and those who are wary of Wag the Dog scenarios and Gulf of Tonkin lies, as this commenter at Yglesias’s place suggests [e.a.]:
The difference [between Hillary and Obama] is between those who have been tricked into thinking that Iraq has something to do with terrorism and those who understand that Iraq is an allegory for the American domestic factional struggle.
DIVIDED WE FALL.
Posted by Frank Wilhoit | January 29, 2008 9:26 AM
That makes both this election and what comes afterward very, very interesting—to me at least: the culture war (which is what we argue over when we argue over the Iraq war) is still on. Full force. It certainly won’t end with Bush, or with Clinton, or with McCain.
Nor would it end with Obama, however. But I’ll let the dreamers dream.
I don’t begrudge this Palestinian guy his motorcycle, bought in Egypt. I loathe the lying sacks of shit referred to as Palestinian “leaders,” their UN-funded enablers, and the beautiful Jordanian queen, who took advantage of her appearance in Davos to underscore the “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza.
A Palestinian smiles as he returns to Gaza with his new motorcycle, bought in Egypt, at the border between Egypt and Gaza, in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Friday, Jan. 25, 2008. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
What kind of humanitarian crisis is it when Palestinians can go shopping in Gaza Egypt?
In a meeting in the back of his chartered plane en route to St. Petersburg, Fla., a short while ago, the onetime, longtime GOP front-runner told a small group of reporters, including The Times’ Louise Roug: “The winner of Florida will win the nomination.”
He then went on to predict he would win. And his spokeswoman, Maria Comella, said later he was speaking with confidence.
But that’s an unusually categorical statement suggesting that only a total first-place upset by Giuliani, who trails both Mitt Romney and John McCain in all major polls for Florida’s Republican primary tomorrow, will keep him in the competition, despite previous repeated vows to continue.
All you New Yorkers can breathe easy now: you won’t have to defend him!
The Charismatic Blank Slate who’s now supported by a growing list of SymbolicAmericans, supports driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants. Not a good move, if you believe certain Democratic pollsters:
Stan Greenberg and James Carville issued a direct warning on the driver’s license issue in an analysis last month designed to guide Democrats through the treacherous immigration quagmire.
“The findings about driver’s licenses are particularly notable,” they said. Two-thirds of surveyed voters oppose them, the pollsters found, and the safety argument fails to dent the widespread conviction that granting a driver’s license rewards illegal behavior.
This is going to be a big issue, I think. Americans follow the rules, and they believe in playing by the rules. Proposing that we bend them for illegal residents of the United States, who are already seen as a threat by many Americans, is not smart politics.
Obama declared that he objects to a Palestinian right of return into Israel and to negotiations with Islamic group Hamas as long as it clings to its current stance, which rejects Israel’s right to exist. He added that he will make sure to guarantee Israel’s security should he be elected president.
“I’ve also repeatedly made clear that I’m committed to ensuring that Israel remains a Jewish state and that’s why I’ve pledged my personal leadership in a process to establish two states living side by side in peace and security,” he said.
Woodward’s previous three books on the Bush years closely tracked public opinion in their portrayal of the administration. Hence, Bush at War, which came out in 2002 when the president was riding high in the polls, was hugely fawning; Plan of Attack from 2004 was less sympathetic but still quite favorable; and State of Denial, published during the dog days of 2006, was by far the most critical. But the next one is a mystery. As E&P put it, “With the current mix of strong public sentiment against the Iraq War, but some tangible progress since ‘the surge,’ the tone of the next book remains a mystery.”
By the time this book comes out, it might be George Who?. On the other hand, it’ll be campaign season, and the Republican nominee is going to have to defend Bush’s “accomplishments,” so, sure: bring on another Woodward fairy tale. It’ll add juice to the campaign.
Caitlin Flanagan, who reports that she watched Katie in the morning on the Today show for years, explains why Couric is such a disaster on the CBS Evening News [e.a.]
As everyone acknowledges, the old folks and aging Boomers who tune in at 6:30 for a half hour of headlines and human-interest stories aren’t looking for the news, but a performance of the news. (Bob Schieffer was more successful than Katie, not in spite of looking like one of the old guys down at the VA, but because of it.) Choosing an anchor isn’t a journalistic decision; it’s a casting choice. And this one was abysmal. Flop sweat and panic surrounded the broadcast almost immediately. In a move typical of television, the first things the bosses tried to change about Katie were the very things that had led them to hire her: the bubbly personality, the killer clothes, the playfulness. Now she had to sit quietly at her desk like a girl being punished. She acquired a passel of one-color blazers that looked like rejects from last year’s Thrifty Rent-a-Car collection. By now, she has all but disappeared.
Wait. There’s more:
Katie’s mandate to lure women and young people to the nightly news was in itself ridiculous and doomed to fail—and a goal beneath her talent and ambitions. No woman needs to storm the Bastille of nightly news, because the form has become irrelevant: Oprah has immeasurably more cultural, commercial, and political clout than Charles Gibson and Brian Williams, and no young person is ever going to make appointment TV out of a sober-minded 6:30 wrap-up of stories he or she already read online in the afternoon. Because Katie remembered the old world, the one in which the most-respected news was broadcast at the end of the day, she thought that she was taking a more powerful job. But the Today show —broadcast for four hours a day, a forum for interviews with many of the top newsmakers of the day, as well as for the kind of lifestyle-trend stories it pioneered and that have come to play such a big part in the nightly news—is a far more culturally significant program. One reason that this huge star didn’t have a tell-all biography written about her until now is that while she was at Today, no publisher wanted to antagonize her; a booking on the show was every new author’s dream. The release of Klein’s splashy book, then, is evidence not of Katie’s elevation, but of its opposite. She made the kind of mistake that women a generation younger than hers probably wouldn’t have. She spent her time gunning for a position that had been drained of its status and importance long before she got there. And what she has learned, the hard way, is that her climb to the top has been not a triumph but the act of someone who slept through a revolution.
Interesting stuff. It all seems to come down to what the audience expects from television—and that itself appears to have changed, along with viewing habits, as anecdotal evidencesuggests and as a variety of writers have noted.
According to an informal survey by Gawker, the New York Sun turns out to be more politically correct than the New York Times, and the New York Daily News and New York Post turn out to be even more politically correct than the New York Sun. However:
The most politically correct part of the country is also the whitest: Northern California and the Pacific Northwest,
Gawker got into compiling some statistics after reading about the agonizing over language over at the Cleveland Plain-Dealer.
Most highschoolers, 54%, stated that they learned about the Holocaust through a school expedition to Poland. Eighteen percent of students learned about the Holocaust through documentary films, and only 12% indicated that they learned about the Holocaust through their regular history classes.
Gaza vigil : Demonstrators take part in a candlelight vigil in Barcelona to protest against the Israeli blockade of Gaza. (AFP/Joesp Lago)
Too bad it wasn’t the Israeli blockade of Gaza but rather a Hamas propaganda production that turned out the lights. Note that Gaza’s “leaders” are working in candlelight despite the fact that behind the curtains, there is full, blazing sunlight.
But some of the [Palestinian] journalists noticed that there was actually no need for the candles because both meetings were being held in daylight.”They had closed the curtains in the rooms to create the impression that Hamas leaders were also suffering as a result of the power stoppage,” one journalist told The Jerusalem Post. “It was obvious that the whole thing was staged.”
Hamas took advantage of the blockade first by arranging for sympathetic Arab media to document the “humanitarian crisis,” then by daring Egypt to use force against Palestinian civilians portrayed as Israel’s victims. …
Mr. Mubarak and other Arab leaders have to resist the urge to roll over every time they are challenged by Hamas and al-Jazeera television. Would Mr. Mubarak allow tens of thousands of Darfur refugees to illegally enter Egypt from Sudan, where a real humanitarian crisis is underway?
Breaking the Waves—an incoherent and sadistic movie—pretty much sealed my interest in the so-called “transgressive”*** back in 1996. Sadism posing as art isn’t my cuppa. Am I surprised to see that the flirtation with sadism continues unabated in 2008? Not really.
Mari [Bello] one of my favorite actresses, plays Nancy. She hires a murderous pen pal on the Internet to come and kill her. (I think it’s because she’s depressed.)
While she’s waiting to be offed by [Jason] Patric, Nancy self-mutilates with a razor blade. She cuts herself all over the place. Not even her shrink, played by “Judging” Amy Brenneman, can talk her out of it. Nancy’s husband, played by British theater star [Rufus] Sewell, has no luck either.
By the time Nancy meets up with Patric’s Louis, she’s cut herself to ribbons and bleeding all over.
Long ago, I stopped wondering why anyone would greenlight such a picture—the reason is obvious: because some insecure idiot, repelled by the movie but compelled by the notion that he might be missing out on the next best thing since Pulp Fiction, said yes. It’s the same instinct that animates the art world and the world of culture: people don’t understand the “new” but don’t want to be thought of as old school, so they go along with a trend, even if it’s repulsive (because they think it’s sophisticated).
I’ve got no argument with the people making these movies. If they can find backers to fund them and actors to star in the movies and film festivals to showcase them and reviewers to write about them and audience members to pay for tickets, I will lay down my life for their right to make their gross-sounding movies.
But I do ask myself who would want to muck around in the darkest of the dark side and spend years of his/her life writing, directing, producing, editing, and acting in such a film. Not my cuppa, either.
——————
*** I’ve been meaning to write about this for a long time but can never find a moment. In 1996, David Denby published a piece in The New Yorker called “Buried Alive” in which he talks (in retrospect, it looks like a warning) about the effect on our (baby boomers’) children of a pop culture that wallows in the transgressive. Here’s an abstract of his piece.
Also, it’s never a bad occasion to bring back my favorite cultural reference:
Various critics have voiced concerns that Obama is too ambitious and inexperienced to be the next president of the United States. We disagree. Obama’s candidacy reflects a lack of political maneuvering and instead is based on a desire to see dramatic change in the political system. And what Sen. Obama might lack in political experience, he makes up with sound judgment, intelligence, charisma, and a personable and bipartisan demeanor. Furthermore, in office he will surround himself with some of the smartest and most experienced advisors in the world.
Obama represents an opportunity for a Democratic nominee who represents the value of service, intelligence, and judgment, and, most of all, an opportunity for real change, unburdened by favors owed and ideals lost. He deserves your vote.
But that’s not true across the board, as Matthew Yglesias says—he understands the rough stuff and the need for it.
Barack Obama talks about getting roughed up by Hillary and Bill Clinton: “This is good practice for me so, you know, when I take on these Republicans I’ll be accustomed to it.”
I have no idea if he genuinely means that, but it’s true either way.
And, Yglesias concludes [e.a.]:
I think it’s good for the rival campaigns to really go after one another. It’s politics, and people who want to succeed in it need the practice.
This is true. Everybody who thinks politics (and life) should be all kumbaya had better think again. No one likes aggression and negativity and certainly everyone would prefer kumbaya, but if you hate the status quo, the only way to change it is to fight it. And that means politics, often hardball politics. Confrontation. Yelling. Getting hot and bothered. That’s not very popular behavior among those who are, say, 35 and under. But it’s who we are as human beings, and fighting it out (though not violently, of course) is also good for our democracy.
[Here's] a cool piece of pop sociology written by someone other than David Brooks. This one is from Chris Lee, writing in the L.A. Times, about hip-hop moguls’ (Kanye West and Jay Z are among the devotees) fascination with The 48 Laws of Power, a quirky Swimming with the Sharks-type manual for winning at the game of life by synthezing strategies from famous historical courtiers and warriors and generals-from Sun-Tzu to Machiavelli to Richelieu.
…
The book is like a martial-arts manual for the business,” said Quincy “QD3″ Jones III, a rap producer turned filmmaker who is making a feature documentary about “The 48 Laws’ ” hip-hop connection. “It teaches people in our demographic how to think more holistically about their business practices.”
Lee points out that reviewers saw things rather differently:
“By the 36th law, you start to feel unclean and worried about your own morality,” said one. “By the 44th, you have accepted the fact that you are basically immoral and so is the world. By the time you reach No. 48, you are saying: ‘Right, who is my first victim?’ “
I kinda know what he means. It is kind of disappointing to find your peace-loving self drawn to such an unlikely book. But I confess: I was.
Yes I was. And you should be too. Especially when you read Greene’s warning about people who profess that they are above political games:
To some people the notion of consciously playing power games-no matter how indirect-seems evil, asocial, a relic of the past. they believe they can opt out of the game by behaving in ways that have nothing to do with power. You must beware of such people, for while they express such opinions outwardly, they are often among the most adept players at power.
That got my attention. Greene continued:
They utilize strategies that cleverly disguise the nature of the manipulation involved. These types, for example, will often display their weakness and lack of power as a kind of moral virtue. But true powerlessness, without any motive of self-interest, would not publicize its weakness to gain sympathy or respect. Making a show of one’s weakness is actually a very effective strategy, subtle and deceptive, in the game of power (see Law 22, the Surrender Tactic).
Obama is a politician, all right. He’s just not as obvious about it as Bill and Hillary Clinton. And if he’s not a politician, or as hard-nosed and cynical a politician as they are (and his wife tries to distance herself from such politics in the article I linked above), then no matter how great his vision and his ideas, he won’t have the power to impose his will.
While we’re enveloped in campaign excitement, the rest of the world goes about its business. Some three days after Palestinians blew their way through the border with Egypt, Egyptian soldiers are reportedly fleeing rather than confront the problem and close the border.
Egypt is in a bind. It did not want the border breached.
The Egyptian government despises and fears Hamas. It fears opposition forces within Egypt, including religious fundamentalists, being strengthened by Hamas ideology.
But equally, Egypt does not want to be seen directly as “Gaza’s jailer”. So closing the border, amid scenes of Arab fighting Arab - Palestinian stones against Egyptian riot shields - is also very unwelcome.
Israel has moved to suggest that any failure to close the border by Egypt would justify Israel in handing over responsibility for the future welfare of the people of Gaza to Egypt - neatly ridding Israel of a problem, and the source of so much international criticism.
That will not happen, but the Rafah border breach and the extraordinary scenes of a mass Palestinian breakout for shopping or simply for fresh air may yet have profound political effects on the entire Middle East peace process.
Here are the two things that might happen, according to the BBC:
The downside could be a hardening of attitudes on all sides, further complicating or poisoning the climate for concessions in the dialogue which US President George W Bush is hoping to accelerate.
The upside could be a realisation that the present situation in Gaza, and the split between Hamas there, and Fatah in the West Bank, is utterly unsustainable.
The idea that the NYT actually backs a Republican for President seems more likely to be a spoof at The Onion, but it’s evidently for real and they are giving the (very weak) nod to McCain. Yawn…. but what’s fascinating is that the brief remarks supporting McCain are followed by an attack on Rudy which is virtually pathological:
The real Mr. Giuliani, whom many New Yorkers came to know and mistrust, is a narrow, obsessively secretive, vindictive man who saw no need to limit police power. Racial polarization was as much a legacy of his tenure as the rebirth of Times Square.Mr. Giuliani’s arrogance and bad judgment are breathtaking.
It goes on. When I used the word pathological, I wasn’t exaggerating. The hatred is out of control. It would be interesting to speculate on why, but it’s late and I leave that to readers.
It’s fun to speculate why! Here’s my idea: New York liberals are afraid that if Rudy gets elected, they’re gonna have to answer for him—kinda the way that American Jews have to answer for Israel. Everyone will hate and blame New York, and we can’t have that!
Upset as I am that the MSM is ignoring everything happening in the world in order to saturate us with campaign coverage—which is an entirely different issue—Jack Shafer says pretty much everything I think about the kind of coverage we’re getting: why not cover it as a horse race [e.a.]? ***
[Y]ou can no more divorce “horseracism” (to pinch Brian Montopoli’s coinage) from campaign coverage than you can divorce horseracism from the coverage of horse races.
Horse-race coverage isn’t the devil spawn of the television age. Scholar C. Anthony Broh dates horse-race coverage of campaigns back to 1888 …. [H]e catalogs its many pluses. Horse-race journalism increases voter interest in campaigns, something you can’t say for the average newspaper’s delineation of a position paper. “The horse-race image encourages reporters to emphasize competition rather than to forecast results,” Broh writes, …
Shafer catalogs some of the issues that have been raised (which helps to educate voters while entertaining them) , and then he makes the most important point of all: that the media is not the be-all and end-all for those those want to inform themselves about political platforms and issues.
But even if the press corps had abandoned substance, no voter is more than a mouse click away from detailed policy papers and unfiltered campaign speeches by the candidates. If you’re not an informed political consumer this year, you have nobody to blame but yourself.
He also makes the obvious point:
A political campaign is more than a traveling debate society. Beyond the issues, voters need to know why a candidate is (or isn’t) performing well in the polls, is (or isn’t) raising money, is (or isn’t) drawing crowds of supporters, or is (or isn’t) keeping his cool. Candidates win or lose for a reason, reasons that have to do with issue papers but also with how they carry themselves and present their positions. Candidates appreciate this fact, which is why they commission private polls so they can construct their own horse-race results and act on them.
It’s so obvious a point: Politicians are competing for our votes. Why wouldn’t we want to watch the competition?
All I would add is that how candidates hold up under the pressures of a political campaign also gives undecided voters information they take into consideration when deciding (assuming that they’re paying attention, which is a big assumption to make).
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*** Anecdotal evidence indicates that the coverage is a hit. I know a lot of people who aren’t very much into politics who have been following the antics—it’s just another kind of Reality TV show!
There’s an interesting conversation over at Matthew Yglesias’s place, prompted by Jeffrey Goldberg’s article in the new Atlantic,in which he seems to suggest (I haven’t had time to read the piece myself yet; but I am interested in the tenor of the conversation about the topic) that the only foreign policy alternative Bush could turn to other than the neocons’ was the realists’, as represented by the reprehensible (my characterization, not Goldberg’s) Brent Scowcroft [e.a.]:
I’ve seen a lot of bloggers mine Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic article on the future of Iraq for the hilarious section where he reports that Norm Podhoretz doesn’t know what a Kurd is, but I thought I might say something about a more serious issue Goldberg raises. In particular, this near the end:
It is true that the neoconservatives’ dream of Middle East democracy has proved to be a mirage. But it’s not as though the neocons’ principal foils, the foreign-policy realists, who view stability as a paramount virtue, have covered themselves in glory in the post-9/11 era. Brent Scowcroft, President George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser and Washington’s senior advocate of foreign-policy realism, told me not long ago of a conversation he had had with his onetime protégée Condoleezza Rice. “She says, ‘We’re going to democratize Iraq,’ and I said, ‘Condi, you’re not going to democratize Iraq,’ and she said, ‘You know, you’re just stuck in the old days,’ and she comes back to this thing, that we’ve tolerated an autocratic Middle East for 50 years, and so on and so forth. But we’ve had 50 years of peace.” Of course, what Scowcroft fails to note here is that al-Qaeda attacked us in part because America is the prime backer of its enemies, the autocratic rulers of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
The other thing Scowcroft fails to note, of course, is that just because “we’ve had peace,” there hasn’t been peace in the region for 50 years.
Some of Yglesias’s commenters agree with me:
But Scowcroft’s point of view at least reaches a minimal standard of coherence.
What? Scrowcroft’s point of view is asinine. “We’ve had 50 years of peace”? Really? Which 50 years were those?
For a “realist”, Scrowcroft sure has some pretty unreal notions of “peace”.
Moreover, this was a point driven home in August 2002 by none other than Bill Keller, today editor of the New York Times but at the time a columnist for the paper.
August 24, 2002
The Loyal Opposition
By BILL KELLER
If candor counted for as much as courtesy, the author note under Brent Scowcroft’s now famous op-ed in The Wall Street Journal last week, the one arguing against war with Iraq, might have said something like this: ”Mr. Scowcroft, the former national security adviser, now makes his living advising business clients, some of whom would be gravely inconvenienced by a war in the Middle East. And by the way, he thought Saddam Hussein was finished after the gulf war in 1991.”
The fact that the Scowcroft Group, his consulting and access-peddling firm, advises global corporations does not mean his motives are impure, and the fact that, like the president he served, he underestimated Saddam last time does not necessarily mean he is not worth listening to now.
But in the debate over the next round of war — a debate that is now, thank heaven, bursting into full flower – it is worth considering what baggage the critics bring, especially when they wear the badge of statesman. The histories, interests and attitudes of the war skeptics are as relevant as whatever psychodrama President Bush may be playing out by finishing off his father’s archenemy, or whether the drive against Iraq represents some dubious alignment of American interests with Israel’s.
It would be nice if this conversation would continue rationally, because, if you’re really interested in what happened leading up to the decision to topple Saddam, why the Iraq mission didn’t work, and what a better foreign policy might look like, bashing the neocons only takes you so far.
I haven’t been to the movies in months, I barely watch TV other than cable news these days, and I ration DVDs because there’s so little worth spending the time on.*** So I can see where Roger L. Simon is coming from: hasta la vista, Hollywood!
This new group of nominees - though worthy enough artistically - is of very little interest to the public. They didn’t want to see them for the most part when they were released and - although some will get something a bounce from the nomination - most will still not see them later. The usual core audience of teenage boys is more interested in computer games and the adult audience has far too much else to do. [Like bicker on blogs?-ed. Bickering is good.] This is yet another symptom of the overall decline of Hollywood as a force in our culture.
Despite that, though, I’d still like to watch the Oscars, even just for old times’ sake, because I used to be wild about the movies. So this downbeat assessment about the prospects of a real Oscar broadcast taking place was depressing.
Guild leaders have said that if the strike continues, they will not allow writers to work on the Oscars, either, which might leave nominees and other celebrities forced to choose between attending the biggest night in show business or staying home to avoid crossing picket lines.
“I would never cross a picket line ever. I couldn’t,” said Tony Gilroy, a directing nominee for “Michael Clayton.”"I’m a 20-year member of the Writers Guild. I think whatever they work out is going to be one way or the other but no, I could never cross a picket line. I think there’s a lot of people who feel that way.”
Just because I’m more interested in reality these days—how is it possible not to be interested in reality these days, by the way? the way the media plays up the “news,” we’re tuning in as if to a soap opera—it doesn’t mean I don’t want to be entertained. Indeed I do.
The Guardian describes an extraordinary manifesto authored “by five of the west’s most senior military officers and strategists … following discussions with active commanders and policymakers, many of whom are unable or unwilling to publicly air their views. It has been presented to the Pentagon in Washington and to Nato’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, over the past 10 days. The proposals are likely to be discussed at a Nato summit in Bucharest in April.” The gist of the proposal is that the West should stand ready to conduct a pre-emptive nuclear strike against “key threats” like “political fanaticism and religious fundamentalism” and “international terrorism, organised crime” which are on the brink of acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
And I am pretty bummed about Heath Ledger, who I first saw in 10 Things I Hate About You with my then-teenage daughter and who lived and died practically in my own backyard and who lived a quiet, low-profile life and worked hard at his craft.
And, really, this surge of people across the border from Gaza into Egypt—even if it was a huge PR coup for Hamas (earlier today I argued it isn’t so big because the U.S. media isn’t paying attention)—is a pretty unsettling thing, considering how much time and energy and prestige the United States has put into the continuing “peace talks” between “the Palestinians” [represented by only some of the Palestinians, of course---namely, Fatah] and the Israelis.
Dear WGA: Free the Oscars! (And buy Hollywood some cheap good will.)
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***one exception that I’ve been meaning to blog about but never got around to was the movie Once—an unusual and unusually gratifying movie, particularly for anyone who has ever been involved in some kind of artistic collaboration. Check it out:
As tens of thousands of Palestinians clambered back and forth between the Gaza strip and Egypt today, details emerged of the audacious operation that brought down a hated border wall and handed the Islamist group Hamas what might be its greatest propaganda coup.
Hamas, which took control of the coastal territory last June after a stand-off with Fatah, has denied that its men set off the explosions that brought down as much as two-thirds of the 12-km wall in the early hours.
I agree that Hamas’s exploits and the rushing of the crossing into Egypt of an estimated 350,000 Palestinians doesn’t make for a pretty picture for the Israelis. But it’s only propaganda if it has an effect on the desired party. And we all know that the American media—presumably, those are the folks that Hamas wants to impress—are obsessed with only one thing: the campaign for the American presidency. We know this because they barely bothered to cover Bush’s Middle East trip.
Nevertheless, Newsweek and Timealso both declare this a PR victory for Hamas, and seem to be pulling for Hamas over both Israel and the United States to boot.
Meanwhile, the MSM barely pauses its campaign coverage—except when they’re descending ghoulishly on the body of a strapping 28-year-old actor, who died in SoHo yesterday, as ETP’s Rachel Sklar reports[e.a.]:
Cable news, too, reported on Ledger’s death — though only Fox covered it in the 5pm hour (MSNBC stuck with “Hardball” and CNN with “The Situation Room,” both of which seemed to stick with the Hillary/Obama spat and Thompson non-candidacy). We’ll see how those ratings stack up (indicator: The Ledger story was last night’s most-viewed clip on MSNBC, and #3 on CBS). …
The New York Times also covered Ledger’s death yesterday via its “City Room” blog; today’s comprehensive article by James Barron had no less than fourteen people listed as contributing reporters. …
The three nightly newscasts all ran segments covering Ledger’s death, with varying degrees of sensationalism: ABC teased it at the top of the broadcast with “First word is it could be drug related” and CBS’ website described the situation as “what authorities suspect is a drug-related death”; NBC stayed away from the cause of death in the tease and written description, and Ann Thompson noted that “police are looking at the possibility of an overdose,” noting the presence of bottles of “prescription drugs [and] non-prescription drugs.”
Though the day started out with the fed rate cut, Dem debate and Oscar nominations, the day’s big story was about Ledger’s death — and traditional media outlets could only run to catch up with the internet, particularly TMZ which, as usual, posted anything and everything in order to completely flood the zone. (Though I noticed the TMZ guy on with Greta Van Sustern didn’t correct her when she said TMZ had broken the story; from the looks of it, that one goes to Radar.) Not like we need any more indicators that the nature of the news cycle has changed, but this is once again evidence that the internet has muscled out the traditional media in covering — and driving coverage of — high-profile stories like this. For good or ill.
It’s definitely for ill, Rachel, if it excludes coverage of, you know, the news we actually need to know. But so it goes …
No, really. If you think about it in identity politics terms, you can’t say those things comfortably about either. Say Obama is polite, and you can be accused of implying that he’s a rare exception, that the others in his identity group are rude. Say Hillary is rude, and you’re “stereotyping women!” It’s bad enough that such nonsense is promoted in nearly every college in the country. I hate to see it working its way into the highest offices of the land.
So, at the risk of being a racist pig, I’ll say once again that Obama comes across as nice, while at the risk of being a sexist pig, I’ll say once again that Hillary comes across as rude.
At the rate things are going, it will be considered racist — and sexist — to judge individuals by the content of their character.
There are people who like that in a leader, however. And for some of us—i.e,, the bichesbitches in the house—the idea of having a shrill, braying, and grating female in charge is a great revenge fantasy.
I do, however, agree that we should be able to call her “shrill” without being accused of sexism, and to call Obama “polite” without being accused of racism. At the very least.
A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.
The study concluded that the statements “were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”
Video: Raw Video: Governor Speaks About Kennedy Endorsements
