Entries from August 2008 ↓

Cindy McCain is a doofus, but the motherfucking Russians are out for blood. They’ve just assassinated another journalist.

I’m cleaning out my drafts folder, so … apropos of nothing:

Christopher Beam explains something that I’ve previously referred to as “going there”—the place where no detail is spared and where infotainment takes on a truly vulgar cast [e.a.]:

It’s okay for a candidate to admit he sins multiple times a day in the abstract. But the moment the sins become concrete, he’s pummeled for it. “Sin” covers everything from eating too many fries to murder. That’s why it’s such an easy question to ask and to answer. It sets up the faux-humble “forgive me, I’m human” rhetoric we hear on the campaign trail. But when things get specific—think Jimmy Carter admitting “I have lusted in my heart”—people get squeamish. When things get too specific—I have lusted in a Radisson hotel—that’s when the punishment begins.

With Obama’s exotic background (which, we’re often reminded, is a plus) and in the absence of a core character (or recognizable positive archetype***) that he conveys and pushes out into the world—and, even more important, with its replacement by ingenious campaign tactics and strategy that include “outreach” (via celebrity marketing techniques) to all elements of society, including consumers, instead of just the usual voters, pundits have been forced—or they’re desperate, depending on your point of view—to invest Barack Obama (and the obstacles he faces on his way to the presidency) with meaning.

Phillip Kennicott, deconstructing the prattle about the Temple of Obama, detects racism in an attempt to deny Obama entree into the Old Dead White Guys Hall of Fame.

Closer examination of Obama’s platform (the architectural, not ideological one) suggests some basic neoclassical precedents, including the Oval Office. That may account for part of the criticism he received: It is presumptuous to assume the trappings of the White House before earning the keys to it. This is hubris, the Greek term for dangerous pride.

It’s an idea that Republican National Committee spokesman Danny Diaz emphasized by slyly comparing Obama to a deus ex machina — the divine figure at the end of a Greek play who sets the world in order.

“It’s only appropriate,” Diaz said, “that Barack Obama would descend down from the heavens and spend a little time with us mere mortals.” …

But there’s another architectural reference that may have greater resonance. While neoclassicism was the default architectural style across the United States, it became particularly associated with the aristocratic architecture of the antebellum South. Obama wasn’t just borrowing ancient precedents, he was unconsciously recalling — and appropriating — the look of Tara and dozens of other (real) plantation houses.

Is race involved in the criticism of Obama’s “temple”? Perhaps. [e.a.]

Perhaps not! Why make of this more than it was? a huge self-congratulatory party for the Democratic Party—with staging by the same dude who works with Britney Spears! with fireworks!—and, consequently with a great deal for observers of the culture to mock, or to detail with dispassion.

Left, Hillary Clinton; right, Michelle Obama. (Left, Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; right, Paul J. Richards/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images)

The crazy thing is that even as they’re shrewdly planning this visually pleasing extravaganza and taking all the spontaneity out of it, when it unfolds, it is still a momentous occasion—especially for African Americans—and for all Americans who care about equal rights and about creating a more perfect union.

But you run a political campaign with the social and political and media culture you’ve got, not the one you wish you had.

Very, very interesting times.

———-

*** It’s hard enough to run for president as a lefty law prof—just ask Bill Clinton. But a black lefty law prof? Well, no wonder Obama needed a Narrator!

A while back, Andrew Tyndall referred to media coverage of the Democratic primary as Reality Gameshow journalism.

Stop thinking of this election as a race to the wire to be won by the candidate with the finest pedigree, truest form and best connections. Start thinking of it as a cast of larger-than-life characters, scheming against each other while simultaneously trying to appear attractive to the electorate audience. Week by week the group undergoes media trials such as candidate debates and Sunday morning interviews. Each primary election constitutes another potential elimination round.

The winner gets to be a constant television presence in our homes for four years.

Now Alan Jacobs, noting that all four candidates for the top spot have very interesting life stories, elaborates on this notion.

You could make the argument that this is the first election fully to bear the marks of a reality TV world, of Oprah and Survivor and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. And also the Olympics, at least as presented by NBC. We’re perhaps more accustomed than we ever have been to hearing Fascinating and Dramatic Life Stories, stories filled with Conflict and Tension and Obstacles Overcome, preferably in exotic settings — like, you know, Hawaii, or Alaska, or Vietnam, or Scranton. Biden has the bankrupted father, the upbringing in poverty, the stutter, the horrific accident that killed his wife and daughter; McCain has the . . . well, you know all about that; Obama has the — well, you totally know all about that; and now here comes Sarah Palin, just your typical snowmobile-racing, moose-hunting, basketball-playing, beauty-contest-entering-and-almost-winning member of the NRA and Feminists for Life with five kids, one of whom has Down’s syndrome. Other forms of reality TV will never catch up. Looks like the political is the personal — maybe from here on out.

That would be a rash and probably frivolous argument, and I’m not going to make it, but you could. If you wanted to. [e.a.]

Indeed it would be rash and frivolous to make this argument, but I’ve been making it for a while—since February 2006, in fact, when I started this blog! A great deal of public life is about PR (or what I call, less charitably, PRopaganda^TM).

Palin is already getting the People magazine treatment

There’s a lot to know about Sarah Palin, who is John McCain’s surprise pick for his vice president. She’s been governor of Alaska for 20 months and served two terms as mayor of her hometown of Wasilla, Alaska, all while raising five children. PEOPLE sat down with Palin, 44, recently to discuss her life, career and family.

Here are five things you may not know about her:

Item five is the one that I find most interesting:

She has her own style. Palin may be comfortable in a fisherman’s vest or hunting fatigues, but on the job as governor she wears Kazuo Kawasaki designer glasses and black Franco Sarto boots!

How many gun-totin’ mamas do you know who wear designer glasses, huh?
Upshot: she’s authentic, but that doesn’t mean she’s not self-aware, and a clever politician.

This is our politics.
This is our democracy.
Get used to it.

update: by the way, if you want a villain to blame for our collective addiction to soap opera-style stories on TV, look no further than the late Roone Arledge. I discussed him here, after ABC’s Jim McKay died.

Even more interestingly, it seems that Arledge’s signature “up-close-and-personal” sob stories, which moved over to NBC with Olympic coverage, are no longer the done thing.

During the planning, Mr. Ebersol also acceded to a move pushed by members of his staff to cut way back on the now much-mocked athlete profiles, usually known as “up close and personals,” during which heart-tugging tales of overcoming handicaps and tragedy are often recounted. The overall number dropped from about 160 eight years ago to 80 in Athens and only about 60 this year.

“I always loved them,” Mr. Ebersol said. “I sit there and cry at them. I might as well be part of that female demographic we’re seeking.”

Up-close-and-personal stories may no longer be the done thing in sports coverage, but it looks like they’re all the rage in political coverage.

The debut of Sarah Palin, the new gal in town, is still the subject du jour 24 hours later, having wiped Obama’s smashing convention spectacular from the news cycle and thus, for all intents and purposes, from memory. His really big shew didn’t have time to stick, because McCain trampled all over it with fresh meat.

The media’s instant switchover from covering Obama’s triumph to covering the sensational instant celebrity Sarah Palin reveals the danger in relying on the MSM to carry your message (and your momentum, not to mention your water), as Obama did with the convention spectacular: you can be swept aside by the next story that comes along. And if the story introduces an exceptionally telegenic new archetype (who scores) into the tired old cast of the “Mediathon” (see Frank Rich’s brilliant article about the phenomenon)—well then, if you’re Obama, you might just have lost your mini-momentum.

But you had a fabulous moment! Even I thought so!

Wretchard analyzes the meaning and impact of McCain’s VP pick:

One of the more interesting questions for political historians is whether McCain chose Palin before or after Obama chose Biden. After a long period of bleeding numbers at the polls, Obama had a chance at Denver to take the initiative in two ways: first to refocus the election on George W. Bush and second, to dominate the news cycle for at least a couple of days. But several circumstances spoiled the opportunity. First, Denver turned out to be at least partly about the Clintons; an misfortune which BHO endured with gritted teeth. Yet even when the duo had sullenly lumbered off and he strode at last into the limelight before the stage the rumor that McCain was about to select his Veep was beating on the edges of the media’s attention. At first there seemed little to worry about; there were contingency plans in the event McCain selected either Romney or Pawlenty. But now it is clear the old attack pilot pulled a move which aims to exploit several chinks in Obama’s armor: gender and class.

From early indications, BHO’s camp has elected to expend at least some ammunition to attack Palin. Despite its aggressive appearances [it] is a defensive move designed to blunt the potential threat she poses to his narratives. The effort will divert resources away from what should have been Obama’s central focus: attacking GWB and McCain.

Every campaign is about both hearts and minds, of course.

We Americans don’t have much in our minds—we’re an ignorant lot, and apparently don’t care to change our ways—but we’ve got open hearts

There’s a surefire way to capture our hearts—with a great story.

It looks like the Red American hot mama from Alaska has got one hell of a story. And the visuals aren’t bad either.

Whether she’ll make a difference in the election is something we can’t know now. But that she has the potential to make a huge difference in the image of rural, conservative, evangelical Americans is undeniable (just as Obama has already made a huge difference in the image of African Americans).

Who’d a thunk it?

Being a dyed-in-the-wool cynic—somewhat like my favorite director, Billy Wilder, who was of the opinion that there isn’t a whole lot of difference between the Republicans and the Democrats, and that the difference that really counts among human beings is between human decency and indecency-–I appreciate Glenn Reynolds’s observation:

For me, of course, most of the fun of the past 24 hours has come from watching Democrats get caught up in the whole identity-politics tangle. As the San Francisco Chronicle says, “Republican Sen. John McCain played the gender card like an ace Friday with his surprise choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate.”

Should McCain be above tricks like that? Well, maybe, but . . . nah, it’s politics, who am I kidding? And I have to say, this whole election, which a year or two ago looked to be a boring slog between Hillary and Rudy, has been the most entertaining I can remember. Regardless of how it comes out, let’s be thankful for that! [e.a.]

Of course policies do make a difference, and to the extent that political parties can change policies it does matter which party is in power. But the needle doesn’t ever move too far from the center in America. Neither party will ever be the ruin of the country, and neither party will ever be the savior, either.

So … unless we’re out there participating and making a difference (and even if we are out there participating and making a difference), we might as well sit back and enjoy the show.

This is our glorious democracy.

And politics—which includes public circuses and spectacular attempts to influence public opinion while stealing your opponent’s thunder—is indeed the greatest show on earth.

Jack Shafer on the media’s typical coverage of campaigns contains this gem about last night’s spectacle in Denver—and a useful reminder [e.a.]:

Instead of decoding the Obama propaganda, the broadcast press mostly wallowed in it: Flipping the dial, I didn’t hear much in the way of disparagement from the talking heads. Indeed, the fact that the networks paid $100,000 to install a Skycam to hover over the cheering hordes at Invesco Field proves how easily they can be co-opted by a campaign that spends the money to produce a terrific “show.” The Skycam added no journalistic value to last night’s coverage, only buckets of oomph for the Obama-Biden ticket. If you can’t avert your eyes from such spectacles and the network anchors refuse to frame them skeptically, be prepared to discount the emotional effect they may exert on you.

He’s right, of course. What he doesn’t note is that the very next day, the Republicans put on an equally compelling “show” with the very photogenic Sarah Palin:

Aren’t political campaigns fun?

Especially when a resurgent Russia is all but forgotten in the process?

It’s funny how being mugged by reality makes people change their minds:

Santa Barbara County became a symbol of the national environmental movement’s passionate opposition to offshore oil drilling when an oil spill devastated its coastline in 1969. On Tuesday, it became a symbol of the changing national mood as its board of supervisors debated whether to welcome new wells along California’s shores.

The supervisors voted 3 to 2 on Tuesday to end the county’s opposition to offshore drilling, although the vote will have no practical impact on state or federal policies.

But the speed with which opinions have changed in Santa Barbara County as gasoline prices have climbed has been astonishing. The vote there reinforces, at the local level, a shift evident in national polls and in the delicate willingness of Democratic leaders like Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive presidential nominee, and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, to open the door to limited coastal drilling.

Three weeks ago, the Public Policy Institute of California released a poll showing that 51 percent of Californians now approve of offshore drilling, a 10-point increase in a single year. “I don’t think any of us expected to see the day when there’d be more than 50 percent support for oil drilling,” said Mark Baldassare, the institute’s research director. [e.a.]

Holy cow—that’s not the Santa Barbara I know! It looks like America’s dependence on foreign oil has now become officially anathema.

In case any of you thought that electoral politics was about issues and policies, read what

this commenter at Ann Althouse’s blog has to say about McCain’s pick of the unknown (to me) Sarah Palin as his VP:

This is a subtle, brilliant choice, and once against shows the McCain camp getting inside the Obama camp’s decision loop. For almost every criticism you can find for Palin can redirected at Obama. The decision will provoke more heat than some others would have, but better to suffer the slings and arrows toward the bottom of your ticket than the top.

Upshot: it’s all about the strategy. So what it is, is war by other means.

And in case you think that Barack Obama really is a new kind of politican rather than an old-fashioned political warrior, consider this story related by Jodi Kantor in yesterday’s New York Times [e.a.]:

In 2006, Mr. Obama backed Alexi Giannoulias, a 29-year-old friend from the basketball court, for Illinois treasurer. Opponents accused Mr. Giannoulias of corruption, citing thin evidence: a loan his family’s bank made to a convicted felon. After Mr. Giannoulias worsened the situation by calling the felon a nice guy, Mr. Obama told him to fix his campaign or get out of the race.

“I was almost crying,” said Mr. Giannoulias, who eventually won. “He was almost upset at how thin-skinned I was.”

It is not that Mr. Obama does not experience emotion, friends say. But he detaches and observes, revealing more in his books than he does in the moment.

Also from the comments at Althouse’s blog [e.a.]:

[Palin] earned the nickname Sarah Barracuda and won Miss Congeniality both before the age of 21.

Sounds like a natural politician to me.

Remember back when I referred to Obama as a reptile?

This, dear readers, is what our electoral politics has come to. Not exactly change you can believe in.

Noah Millman, who cops to being a registered Republican (I mention it in case any of my readers can’t stand to read anything written by a Republican or a conservative, though, frankly, if that’s how you feel, I’d be surprised to find you among my readers), decided to try to write Obama’s acceptance speech.

First, though, he tried to capture the essence of his subject—his elusiveness.

I still, at this late date, have no idea why Obama is running. I mean, I know why: he wants to be President. He’s “got game” – you don’t need more reason. But Obama has done a rather astonishing thing: he’s built an entire movement – he’s built a fundraising and organizing machine comparable to a national political party, in fact – without really standing for anything in particular. He is not, as George McGovern was, running to take the Democratic Party decisively to the left, nor is he, as Ted Kennedy was, running to restore a certain kind of liberalism within the Democratic Party, nor is he, as Bill Clinton was, running to transform liberalism into some kind of new, Third Way synthesis. Apart from his position on Iraq, he in no way distinguished himself from his rivals as representing a particular faction or even a particular worldview within the Democratic Party or the tradition of American liberalism, and Iraq he has forcefully maintained was a matter of his personal good judgment rather than an indication that he thinks about foreign policy profoundly differently from the Washington consensus. Obama has been attacked from various quarters for running a personality-based campaign, all about his own innate wonderfulness and ability to magically bind up all our political wounds and so forth. And while it’s certainly true that Obama has his lunatic supporters who think he’s the messiah, I think the real reason he’s perceived this way is that, lacking an animating cause, the candidate himself perforce became the cause. And that’s a huge problem because, in the end, a majority of voters is simply not going to vote for Obama on the basis of his innate wonderfulness.

To me, that’s about as clear an expanation—for those who really need one—of McCain’s attacks on Obama’s celebrity status—a status Obama sought in order to deflect attention from his obvious lack of stature as a credible political leader with a track record.

John Podhoretz also captures this nicely as we all wait for Obama to appear in his Temple in Invesco Field [e.a.]:

It certainly is nice to see and hear Stevie Wonder on the stage there at Invesco Field. And I know this is happening 90 minutes or more before Obama takes to all the networks with his acceptance speech. But this ellision of a pop stadium concert with a political convention does really make explicit the very problem that began Obama’s descent earlier this summer — the idea being that he is a showbiz idea of a leader rather than being a real leader.

Bingo! And McCain has exploited that weakness—the absence of steak and its replacement with the sizzle of rock star charisma and jelly-kneed fans—very effectively. Now, every time the Obama campaign plans a heavily stage-managed pseudo-event or spectacle, a lot of bloodhounds are on the case.

Maureen Dowd picked up on this:

Democrats have begun internalizing the criticisms of Hillary and John McCain about Obama’s rock-star prowess, worrying that the Invesco Field extravaganza Thursday, with Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi, will just add to the celebrity cachet that Democrats have somehow been shamed into seeing as a negative.

But elsewhere in the New York Times! we hear that Team Obama is ignoring the possible pitfalls [e.a.]:

Some aides worried about the setting overwhelming the message. But those closest to the planning said they had no regrets and were sticking to the sort of big-event politics that no other candidate has been able to match this year.

“We are leaning into this, how can you not?” said Jenny Backus, a campaign strategist working on the convention plan. “This is the enthusiasm gap,” referring to what polls show as excitement for Mr. Obama that Senator John McCain’s campaign has not matched.

Well, sure, there’s plenty of excitement for Mr. Obama among his fans. But it’s more than a little weird to watch the spotlights sweeping over Invesco Stadium, to hear the rock music, and to think that this is the Democratic convention rather than American Idol.

Karl Rove is hardly an objective voice, but he explains how this extravaganza feeds directly into McCain’s strategy to deflate the Obama Messiah:

Making your speech in front of 75,000 people at Invesco Field could add to the view that this man is a celebrity, a rock star, somebody who’s fresh in the political scene, been taken by the press clubs. And that’s been a problem for Sen. Obama. Ever since he went to Europe and made the speech that he was running for president of the United States in Europe, in Berlin, he’s been in a slide. And question is whether he will stop that tomorrow night or accelerate it. And it’s a high stakes venue, no if’s, and’s or but’s about it. …

[T]hey had the biggest rally in the history of Pennsylvania just before the Pennsylvania Democratic primary — 35,000 people were in a rally for Sen. Obama in Philadelphia, and he lost the primary in Pennsylvania by almost two to one. So I wouldn’t take his ability to generate crowds. In fact, historically, if you look at this, some of the largest crowds in presidential campaign history were those entertained by George McGovern in the final moments of his horrendous defeat in 1972.

But the show is about to start, so I’m going to kick back and enjoy it!

Just how many people in America are paying attention to the Democratic convention? It’s hard to say, of course, but early indications are that more people tuned in (to the networks, at least) to see Hillary on Tuesday than to watch the action with Biden (and with Bill Clinton) on Wednesday night:

All the broadcast networks’ numbers fell, with NBC holding the largest audience, based on Nielsen’s overnight metered household ratings from 55 markets. NBC brought in a 4.1 rating/7 share, slipping 16% from Tuesday’s numbers.

ABC’s audience declined 24% to a 2.9/5, while CBS dropped by 11% to a 2.4/4.

I’ve only done a bit of convention-watching myself. If I’m representative of the population, the excellent entertainment provided by the Dems for an hour last night may have been for naught.

Here’s what you missed, according to David Gergen, speaking last night on CNN immediately after the end of the onstage events [e.a.]:

DAVID GERGEN, CNN SENIOR POLITICAL ANALYST: I thought it was a fine speech [by Biden]. It was a serviceable speech. I don’t think it’s a memorable speech. It will never make Bill Safire’s anthology.

But what was most important in the speech, Anderson, and what I think worked both in the hall and on television was the tableau that unfolded here over the past hour.

And that I thought the Democrats had their best hour of television of the convention starting with the moment they rolled out that Spielberg film on the veterans, on honoring the Veterans in a poignant way, moving on to Beau Biden’s speech, which I thought was a home run.

That was a remarkably good speech. And then when the cameras went to Michelle Obama and you saw her tearing up as she heard again the story of the loss of the family early on, I thought that was a revealing moment for television viewers, some of whom have thought she’s an angry woman. That wasn’t an angry woman you saw tonight. She was very human.

And I think it was consistent with her own speech earlier in the week. And then Joe Biden gave a good speech. It was a solid speech but then — but what I think really helped was Barack Obama coming on. And then, it was as if the Democrats brought it all together tonight for the first time.

And I must tell you, I think the importance of tonight is that perhaps the Democrats have begun to reverse the momentum of the campaign.

John McCain has been coming on very strong against them; he’s caught up with them. They desperately needed to reverse momentum if they were to win in November. I think they started to turn it. My one single voice, it’s really the voters who counts about this, it’s the public who counts on this. We’ll wait to see what they did. But I think tonight and tomorrow night if they can reverse momentum, the Republicans will have their chance to take it back next week but I think that’s very, very important as a potential opening for the Democrats to reverse the momentum

Well, it might reverse the momentum if a lot of on-the-fence voters were watching the Dems celebrate themselves, but that doesn’t seem to be the case (outside the blogosphere, that is).

Plus: attentive readers will note that Gergen, the ultimate spouter of inside-the-Beltway conventional [no pun intended!] wisdom, says that the Dems need desperately to reverse the momentum. That should worry Obama fans—oops!—I mean: Obama supporters; they’re in love and so they’re not attentive to the arrows being slung at him from all directions.

And the arrows are coming fast and furious. Obama isn’t oblivious to them. Quite the contrary.

But first things first: he’s got a really big shew to put on tonight, folks!\

I don’t have the patience to read commentary on the convention, which, despite my better instincts, I did watch for a couple of hours last night. Having watched, I feel compelled to note what I picked up in Biden’s call-out to “traditional” Dems—especially because it was so weirdly out of place in the current left/liberal/progressive/Dem “discourse” about foreign policy.

Biden is a total hawk:

And for the last seven years, the administration has failed to face the biggest — the biggest forces shaping this century: the emergence of Russia, China, and India as great powers; the spread of lethal weapons; the shortage of secure supplies of energy, food and water; the challenge of climate change; and the resurgence of fundamentalism in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the real central front in the war on terror.

Ladies and gentlemen, in recent years and in recent days, we’ve once again seen the consequences of the neglect — of this neglect with Russia challenging the very freedom of a new democratic country of Georgia. Barack and I will end that neglect. We will hold Russia accountable for its actions, and we will help the people of Georgia rebuild. [and the crowd roared ---ed.]…

Al Qaida and the Taliban, the people who actually attacked us on 9/11, they’ve regrouped in the mountains between Afghanistan and Pakistan and they are plotting new attacks. And the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has echoed Barack’s call for more troops. …

Doesn’t this rather sound as if Biden is on the warpath?

Who’s the warmonger now?

It’s all rather odd.

The only other pundit I’ve read who has noted the foreign policy confusion among Dems is Matt Welch, who wrote this before Biden’s speech at the convention:

All We Are Saying Is, Make Smarter War
Will Democratic foreign policy be built by the hawkish Madeleine Albright?

Here’s one reference to the foreign policy part of Biden’s speech that (spectacularly) misses the obvious:

Looking abroad, Biden slammed McCain repeatedly for his poor judgment on everything from Iraq to Iran to Afghanistan to international diplomacy: “Again and again, on the most important national security issues of our time, John McCain was wrong, and Barack Obama was proven right.”

Biden did a lot more than slam McCain’s judgment. He laid out an aggressively interventionist foreign policy under an Obama administration.

Are pundits trying to hide this, or didn’t they notice?

Philip Kennicott reviews the movie Traitor, starring the fine actor Don Cheadle:

Once again there are terrorists in our midst, and once again they are Muslims, hiding in sleeper cells, posing as ordinary Americans, waiting to cause mayhem. Heroic action is needed.

To save us from the terrorists?

More pressingly, to save us from films such as “Traitor,” a long-winded thriller starring Don Cheadle as a conflicted Muslim who is either an undercover U.S. operative or a ruthless killer, or maybe both.

Wait. It gets worse—or, rather, better [e.a.]:

The film’s moral reasoning is all parenthetical: There are bad guys out there (but they’re not all irredeemably bad), and while we must fight them, we shouldn’t sink to their level (except when we have to). This doesn’t add up to real nuance. It just encourages people to break the rules and feel bad about it. The film, which borrows a line from Samir as its subtitle (”The Truth Is Complicated”), would be stronger if it thought more simplistically: Terrorism is always wrong, as is breaking the laws of civilized behavior to fight it.

How hard is it for the makers of American popular entertainment to get this? Terrorism is always wrong, and so is the uncivilized behavior sometimes used to fight it.

I haven’t seen The Dark Knight, but from what I’ve read, that movie fails the morality test, too.

The Dark Knight does not provoke profound debate about our methods and purposes. It spectacularly affirms them. “We don’t get the hero we need,” Gary Oldman’s Commissioner Gordon says, with Niebuhrian wistfulness, “we get the hero we deserve.”

Memo to Hollywood: one, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war. Get us rewrite!

TigerHawk notes that despite Americans’ rising confidence in winning the “war on terror” (per this Rasmussen Report), they are still deeply unhappy about President Bush (as they well should be, because he has been a dreadful, incompetent, moronic “leader” despite his having had one correct impulse: to respond forcefully to 9/11—and these are my thoughts, not TH’s; he seems to be a lot more generous toward GWB).

TH writes [e.a.]:

The place of the presidency of George W. Bush in history will almost certainly turn on the state of the Middle East in another generation. If the ruling class in the region remains a teeming hive of scum and villainy, then Bush will land in the lower ranks of American presidents (although not “the worst president ever,” insofar as it would be virtually impossible for Bush to sink below James Buchanan). If, however, the major governments in the region have become more representative, more transparent, less corrupt and less oppressive, history will remember that George W. Bush was the first world leader to declare that end as his aspiration.

Sadly, Bush will not live to see the result. It takes around half a century for history to judge an American presidency. People have to die, records have to be declassified, and, most importantly, the judgment must be rendered by historians who were not themselves caught up in the partisan politics of the day.

That’s an interesting observation, especially in light of George Packer’s comments the other day about LBJ and his persona non grata status in the Democratic Party:

For decades Johnson has been a pariah in the Democratic Party, because
of the disaster into which he led the country in Vietnam. And
today, because of our complex racial politics, even his successes, which partly redeem the sins of his war, can’t be attributed to Johnson. When Hillary Clinton, during the New Hampshire primary, made the historically unimpeachable point that there would have been no Civil Rights Act without a President Johnson to push the bill through, she was accused by everyone from the New York Times to the Obama campaign of somehow denigrating King. These charges were false, but they showed that there is something unmentionable about Johnson’s courage and his accomplishment.

Upshot: it probably takes a lot longer than 50 years for history to make its judgments—and even then they will not always be what we hope.

I’m not in the business of educating whippersnappers—at least not online. (I’ve got a life, you know, and it happens to have lots of young people in it.)

This commenter at Matthew Yglesias’s site, however, is very interested in taking the fight to the whippersnappers. He takes exception to Yglesias’s habit of staking out the proper “progressive” line and claiming (for it, and for himself) the moral high ground … without ever backing it up [e.a.]:

[Y]ou utterly void your argument of any intellectual content when you restort to logical fallacies — in this case, using ad hominem semantics to tar the opposing argument. When you say, “requires people to temper the natural human instinct toward moralistic posturing” you make two ad hominem attacks on your opponent, 1) arbitrarily labeling opposition to international bad actors as mere “posturing” without substantive value (you give no rational argument why this is should be so a priori or otherwise; 2) that your opponents must be resorting to these actions out of “intemperate instincts” rather than on rational grounds - again you give no argument (other than a vain implication of false consciousness). These tendentious characterizations of your opponent’s position give the impression that you have little interest or confidence in arguing the issue on the actual merits.

Your argument claims that your position is moral because the outcome is moral, but you specifically void your position of any morality or rationality when you insist that opposing wrongs is not moral but mere posturing. Perhaps opposition to a bad actor must be curtailed for realistic reasons, but this does not make your silence or the bad act thereby good, merely an unfortunate, unavoidable, but immoral reality.

You also make a generic implied assertion which is demonstrably false historically, that “maintaining a good relationship” will inexorably or even predominantly lead to cooperation and commerce and away from violent conflict. These kinds of things need to be decided case-by-case, on the merits, and can never be decided with certainty. Taking a stand, symbolically, diplomatically, or economically, is not always mutually exclusive with “maintaining a good relationship.” Depending upon its effects on opposing regimes, it may or may not be effective, while “maintaining a good relationship” may or may not turn out to incite conflict more directly. Likewise military intervention is sometimes the path to the least overall violence. It depends.

Since these outcomes cannot be known — either way — in advance, it is wise to be cautious. But your dogmatism on which choices are generally optimal regardless of context, made plain by your unwillingness to state your argument merely in rational terms, totally ignores the fact that there are also moral costs, and often long-term costs to “peace and commerce”, to saying and doing nothing (be it symbolic, diplomatic, economic, or even military).

At least try to state your argument in ways that appeal more directly to reason and less to tendentious semantics.

But Samantha Power reviewed Yglesias’s book, so he must be a very important thinker, right?

Maybe!

Not to get all Gawkerish and conspiratorial about it, but one hand washes the other inside the Beltway, too—even if one hand belongs to a mere blogger and the other to a Harvard professor and journalist. Ms. Power might merely have been acknowledging Yglesias’s defense of her after her “Hillary is a monster” remark was dutifully reported by The Scotsman.

Just sayin’!

No convention coverage here.
Indeed, no convention watching and certainly no convention live-blogging here.

In fact, no blogging here at all till the urge strikes again.

I know you all are just crushed.

Those of us who like to think of our blogs as political diaries get a morale boost from this project, in which George Orwell’s diaries are being reprinted in real time 70 years after he wrote them. What a great idea!

The NYT reports:

The scholars behind the project say they are trying to get more attention for Orwell online and to make him more relevant to a younger generation he would have wanted to speak to.

“I think he would have been a blogger,” said Jean Seaton, a professor at the University of Westminster in London who administers the Orwell writing prize and thought up the idea of the blog. …

Like any good political blogger, Orwell devoured the news, making clippings and looking for shifts in public and government opinion, Professor Seaton said. “He’s partly obsessed by the newspapers because of the start of the world war,” she said. “The diary is written against this almost traumatized understanding that there is going to have to be a second world war.” [e.a.]

Serializing it in a replay of real time is pure genius as a means of drawing people into the diaries, because one of the most enticing aspects of any drama is that you don’t know how things will turn out:

Professor Seaton said the material was full of tension.

“You do know how this story is going to end,” she said, “but one of the brilliant things is that Orwell doesn’t know how it is going to end.”

A most excellent way to tell the story of part of the twentieth century to a new generation: with hyperlinks!

Bravo!

Joe Klein went to a Frank Luntz-led focus group of independent voters and found out—surprise, surprise!—that they want details and specifics and reliability and trustworthiness:

–”Change” as a theme is over. Too vague. And Obama’s rhetoric has begun to seriously cut against him. “No more oratory,” one woman said. “Give us details.” (There may be a racial component to this, by the way, as some white people associate soaring oratory with African-American leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. and Jesse Jackson.)

–What do they want? Given a list of 31 personal attributes the next President might have and asked to pick the eight most important, “Accountability” finished highest with 13 votes, next was “Someone I can trust” with 12, “honest and ethical” was third with 11. “Agrees with me on the issues” got one vote. They didn’t care if the candidate was a Washington insider or outsider. “A dynamic and charismatic leader” got two votes…(Add: When Luntz asked them which was more important, “accountability” or “change,” the vote was 17 to 4 in favor of accountability.)

–What does “accountability” mean? That, I think, is the key to this election. They know that the country is on the wrong track and big changes are necessary, but they don’t trust politicians, or government, to bring those changes about. (McCain’s government waste message resonates big-time with these people.) I got the feeling that if either candidate said, “I’m going to hire a private accounting firm to keep track of any new initiative I offer and make sure that it’s being done as efficiently as possible,” that would have a big impact on people.

Most interesting: it wasn’t about the issues at all for most undecided voters, or about the image and presentation of the candidates; rather, it seems to be about the candidates’ essence, or character.

accountable

trustworthy

honest and ethical

That’s what we seem to want.

Expect a lot more negative advertising to poke holes in the other guy’s character.

Good luck to Barack Obama. He’s gonna need it! (That’s what my gut tells me, but my gut has been known to lie!)

It seems like a shrewd pick if Obama is interested in sending a reassuring signal to Dem centrists (not so much for the netroots, of course, but what are they gonna do? vote for McCain?).

I like Ann Althouse’s take:

I discussed this a couple days ago, and I was guessing that maybe Bob was reflecting his Baptist background, and I my Episcopalian background, while McCain was had a basically Episcopalian orientation, but had, more recently switched to Baptist, and perhaps this could help us understand McCain’s varying levels of expressed religiosity. And now, here is Biden showing what I’d theorized was the Episcopalian style. Biden is Catholic.

Episcopalian, Catholic, whatever… I like this modesty about religion in public life.

Yep, that’s important to me, too. This is a secular society, and I like it that way. Plus, Biden is a liberal hawk, and so am I.

Jeff Bezos has been hyping the Kindle all over the place, and I make it a point not to buy any hype at all. None. Whatsoever. This guy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation isn’t buying Bezos’s hype, either. But it doesn’t prevent him from speculating about the imminent digital revolution in books suggested by a successful wireless device that stores lots and lots and lots of text.

And he’s got a good list of questions for the folks in the book industry to ponder:

• Will e-book readers be open to content from any source?
  So far, it looks like Amazon’s Kindle is limited in the type of file it can read. PDF files, for example, have to be converted before the Kindle can read them (whereas Sony’s reader can handle any type of file). Worse, books downloaded from Amazon appear in a proprietary .azw file format, which can’t be read on other devices. (The Kindle also bizarrely charges users $1 for each blog or RSS feed they subscribe to.) And if you’re trying to read digitally from Canada, you’re out of luck. Users should be able to seamlessly move content from their e-book reader to their computer to their cell phone. The winner of the format wars to come will be the one that can provides the greatest interoperability.
• Will digital books carry DRM?
  After insisting on dysfunctional copy protection for years, the music industry has finally realized that DRM doesn’t work. By making legitimately paid content harder to use than content downloaded for free, DRM punishes paying customers by locking up their content. And, since DRM is always circumvented eventually, it does nothing to prevent piracy (the Kindle’s DRM has already been cracked). Sellers of digital books and the makers of reading devices can save themselves — and their customers — ongoing headaches by avoiding these attempts to restrict customer rights to their content now.
• Will the first sale doctrine still apply when books are digital?
  Book readers are accustomed to passing their dog-eared copies of books without thinking about it. In the world of physical books, the first sale doctrine says that a book buyer can transfer the book by loaning, re-selling it, or even renting it out if they like, without infringing on the publisher’s rights. What happens when sharing a book with a friend means making an additional, perfect copy? Readers should not be asked to give up their first sale rights, whether their books are digital or made out of paper.
• Will libraries carry digital books?
  Libraries loan out a limited number of copies of new books for free, and publishers don’t complain. But what happens when the number of books on loan is unlimited, and the “loan” makes a perfect copy? Libraries should maintain the right to distribute books, even when books are digital.
• Will bookstores survive the shift in technology?
  Bookstores have always played an important role as community meeting places and as curators of our literary culture. But even great bookstores, such as Berkeley’s Cody’s Books, have been closing or are struggling as more people get their content instantly over the web. Bookstores must find a way to interact with digital content and monetize a broader range of goods and services that come attached to “book culture,” or they may end up suffering the same fate as the music stores that are rapidly going out of business.
• Will publishers be open to new business models?
  The music industry tried putting their heads in the sand and hoping digital music would go away, and it didn’t work. Now, the major labels are (belatedly) experimenting with a number of delivery options for music, from online radio to subscription services to pay-what-you-like downloads. Book publishers should learn from their friends in the music industry and move aggressively to try out new models.

Good questions all, but I doubt that anyone in the industry has the time to ponder them.

And while publishers are getting pummeled by the digital revolutionaries into thinking about what format to deliver their “content” in, Sarah Lacy, writing in BusinessWeek, has ideas for them about how to market their “product” in a Web 2.0 world.

Some of them make sense. But this one is just revolting:

Create stars—don’t just exploit existing ones.
When an author is established, publishers have to do less to make a book sell. So bidding wars start. As a result, even some best-sellers aren’t very profitable.

Instead, publishers should take a page from the handbook of Gawker founder Nick Denton and create stars. Find micro-celebs with a voice, talent, a niche base of readers, and most important—enthusiasm. Then leverage the publisher’s brand (and the techniques I advocate, of course) to blow them out.

Require as part of the contract that the author blog, speak on panels, attend events. Give them incentives for delivering—say, though Web traffic of the number of followers they amass on Twitter.

At the risk of sounding like a lit snob … are you fucking kidding me?

As an atheist I can’t claim familiarity with any aspect of Christianity, which was as good a reason as any to avoiding making too much of the “no cross in the dirt” smear against McCain (though I did make something of it).

My ignorance makes me appreciate Ann Althouse’s nuanced thinking all the more [e.a.].

If the “cross in the dirt” story were true, wouldn’t a good Christian have “witnessed” to it early on?

Watching this now and comparing Bob’s take on Christianity to mine, I have a theory about why McCain shifted from not talking about the cross to talking about it.

McCain was initially an Episcopalian, and only fairly recently identified himself as a Baptist. My Christian upbringing was Episcopalian, and Bob Wright was raised as a Southern Baptist. Bob thought of Christianity as something to witness at every opportunity, and I thought Jesus’s admonition to keep one’s religion private. …

Could it be that McCain, as an Episcopalian, thought more like I did, and then later, after becoming a Baptist, saw the matter more the way Bob did?

Could be!

any of the commenters at Gawker, as is their style, prefer to snark about the detention of graffiti artist James Powderly (along with many other protesters of all stripes) by the Chinese authorities for the display he mounted in Beijing:

But others understand that it’s no joke to be jailed in China,

I think this is awesome and courageous.

Really? Tiananmen Square was awesome and courageous. This is just self-aggrandizing and pointless.

Really? Going to prison in China is no joke. It gets a message out there for people to see and that is important. Would you do it?

how is this self-aggrandizing, exactly? He’s in prison, and I’m sitting on my ass in a (somewhat) comfy office chair reading about thinking “shit, I feel bad for the Muslims and non-Kool aid drinking Chinese when the Olympics are finished

There’s a lot of other reporting about this worrisome incident too, as you can see at this Google News link. But there’s nothing about this incident on Memeorandum.

Why is that? I thought the blogosphere is supposed to be much more informative than the TV newsbiz. The internet and TV are sharing news-viewer eyeballs, according to Pew.

I was hoping that the internet would be an improvement on the MSM. Right now, it’s Moe at Gawker—yep, Gawker—who’s reporting news that people should be aware of (because it’s a head-on collision between Western political culture [and freedom of expression] and Chinese “authoritarian” political culture [no freedom of expression].

So kudos to Moe at Gawker for going where the newsbiz doesn’t go.

Not that, say, the New York Times isn’t trying to cover China soberly–it most certainly seems to be.

[T]he Beijing police still sentenced the two women [in their 70s] to an
extrajudicial term of “re-education through labor” this week for
applying to hold a legal protest in a designated area in Beijing, where
officials promised that Chinese could hold demonstrations during the
Olympic Games.

Then the NYT goes and ruins its coverage with an almost incomprehensible level of naivete about the Chinese regime [e.a.]:

It is unclear why the police have detained people who sought permission to protest. [Really? Which part of the maniacally controlling Chinese government's motives is unclear? Huh? ---ed.]
Some political analysts say the police may be refusing to enforce the government’s order, announced last month, to allow protest zones. Chinese lawyers and human rights advocates also suggested a more cynical motivation — that the authorities were using the possibility of legal demonstrations as a ploy to lure restive citizens into declaring their intention to protest, allowing the police to take action against them. [You don't say! Fancy that! ---ed.]

When it comes to a Communist (or formerly Communist) or an “authoritarian” regime, there’s no use in wondering why it does what it does. It does it (whatever outrage “it” is) because it can, because it holds total power over the people it rules. Once upon a time, the people who wrote for the New York Times assumed that their readers knew this. Now it’s unclear whether even the journalists writing these stories know these things or if they’re just playing dumb. Oh well!

But even if the NYT were to give it to us straight up, the paper just doesn’t have a big enough megaphone among those who live online. Which, these days, is a lot of us. And the appetite for news doesn’t seem to be too large either.

Here are some more findings from that Pew survey:

• In spite of the increasing variety of ways to get the news, the
  proportion of young people getting no news on a typical day has
  increased substantially over the past decade. About a third of those
  younger than 25 (34%) say they get no news on a typical day, up from
  25% in 1998.
• A slim majority of Americans (51%) now say they check in on the
  news from time to time during the day, rather than get the news at
  regular times. This marks the first time since the question was first
  asked in 2002 that most Americans consider themselves “news grazers.”
• Social networking sites are very popular with young people, but
  they have not become a major source of news. Just 10% of those with
  social networking profiles say they regularly get news from these sites.

I admit to not wanting to believe my eyes and ears, but Russia is a nightmare and I can’t ignore it any longer.

Now the Ophtalmologist from Damascus is playing footsie with them:

Syria raised the prospect yesterday of having Russian missiles on its soil, sparking fears of a new Cold War in the Middle East. President Assad said as he arrived in Moscow to clinch a series of military agreements: “We are ready to co-operate with Russia in any project that can strengthen its security.”

I was kinda hoping that the Israelis were trying to peel Syria away from its embrace of various evildoers after Damascus was softened up by the Mugniyeh assassination and the obliteration of the nuclear facility (and there was also the recent assassination of his right-hand man).

Oh well! I guess no one is worried about the Middle East anymore now that Russia’s back on the map and outta control, man.

Tonight the BBC reported (and you can see it in this piece too) that Russia threatened to attack Poland with nuclear weapons!

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice travelled to Warsaw for the ceremony, after 18 months of negotiations.

The deal has angered Russia, which has warned the base could become a target for a nuclear strike.

Washington says the system will protect the US and much of Europe against missile attacks from “rogue elements” in the Middle East such as Iran.

And what do the Poles say?

Before the conflict in Georgia there was a reasonable amount of popular opposition in Poland to the missile defence deal.

But new surveys show that for the first time a majority of Poles support it, with 65% expressing fear of Russia.

Stars are fans, too:

Kobe [Bryant] took a moment to talk to NBC about how exciting it was to watch Phelps and how he hopes to share in the gold medal winning. While NBC showed footage of LeBron and Kobe cheering the race, Kobe gushed, “Me and LeBron both just felt like fans for a while. It was incredible.”

Yep, the thrill of losing yourself is incredible.

TheEgyptian Sandmonkey is even snarkier than Gawker:

You know, when he first showed up in the political scene, everybody in the democratic party called him the second coming of Bill Clinton. I guess they never knew how accurate they really were. Boy was I surprised. Mr. My dad worked in a windmill and I have a dead so and a cancer stricken wife is phony baloney. Who knew? …

Our boy cheated on his cancer-stricken wife. No wonder he was talking about two Americas, he was sleeping in two bedrooms, one in each America. But before you feel bad for his wife, please take a minute and chill. Don’t think she is a victim. Ok, so she has cancer, that makes her a cancer victim, but come on, u get the idea. She knew of the affair in 2006, and still supported his running for office in 2008, …

Alas, too bad, I always liked Edwards (I like my politicians the way I like my lawyers- scummy, fake, manipulative and pretty. Hallo, I did endorse Obama, people. That should tell you something) and the nice little image of the American dream realized that he and his wife have presented to us so well. No longer will women lament how they never got a man this decent, who is attractive, young-looking and a millionaire, and yet won’t cheat on his old fat wife. They once again got their fantasy shattered and will continue to believe that we are all the same. Thanks John, you dick, for ruining even that for us. Now go chase an ambulance, you will need the money, having a new-born baby to raise that you probably hate now and everything. Enjoy.

Poor tortured Philip Weiss is trying to figure out if the attacks on the “Lobby” and pro-Israel Jews and Jewish neocons that he peddles on his blog are good for the Jews or bad for the Jews [e.a.]:

It’s true there are a lot of antisemites on my side of the fence, I can’t deny that. They show up in my comment section, and Richard Witty has told me that David Duke posts some of my posts.

Two years ago Tony Kushner said it gave him angst to speak out on the Israel/Palestinian issue in the noble way that he has for two reasons, because a lot of Jews were screaming at him that he was a terrible person, and of course you don’t always know who’s right; and also, because he didn’t want to be giving comfort to antisemites [an admirable sentiment, no? --ed.]

I don’t know what to do about it and frankly I don’t know how much to care.

Well, at least he’s honest about it …for a moment. He doesn’t actually care about the impact of his writings. And then he rationalizes his obsessive anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist screeds as a professional interest:

The chief issue here is journalistic. What is true and new and important? That’s your charge as a journalist.

Okay, dude—and what about your charge as, you know, a human being? one who attracts nasty, unapologetic anti-Semites to your site?

Weiss is still trying to work it out. While he works his head further up his ass, convinced that American Jews hold too much power, you may be interested to hear the opinion of a German journalist, Henryk Broder, who addressed the problem recently in a colloquium on anti-Semitism that took place in Germany, where they know a thing or two about the phenomenon.

And Broder suggests that we stop thinking in terms of the past and thing about the present—and the future [e.a.]:

[A]nti-Semitism is not a matter of a prejudice, but rather of a sort of resentment. …The distinction between a prejudice and a resentment is as follows: a prejudice concerns a person’s behavior; a resentment concerns that person’s very existence. Anti-Semitism is a resentment. The anti-Semite does not begrudge the Jew how he is or what he does, but that he is at all. The anti-Semite takes offense as much at the Jew’s attempts to assimilate as at his self-marginalization. Rich Jews are exploiters; poor Jews are freeloaders. Smart Jews are arrogant and dumb Jews — and, yes, there are also dumb Jews — are a disgrace to Jewry. The anti-Semite blames Jews in principle for everything and its opposite. That is why there is no point in trying to debate anti-Semites or in wanting to convince them of the absurdity of their views. One has to marginalize anti-Semites: to isolate them in a sort of social quarantine. Society must make clear that it disdains both anti-Semitism and anti-Semites: just as it disdains parents beating their children and rape — including spousal rape — even though it well knows that it cannot monitor everything that transpires behind closed doors.

Well, Philip Weiss certainly doesn’t disdain intolerant, blinkered anti-Semites. He bends over backward to understand them:

Giraldi probably brings a little ethnic resentment to it, I read that in some of the lines that Pollak quotes. Not good, not very spiritually evolved. But is ethnic resentment in and of itself criminal or does it constitute hate speech?

Neither. It is a priori resentment, and nurturing it does not promote understanding between people or progress on social issues.

Broder has much to say on the relationship between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, too, and you should read his whole address. But I’ll close with the kicker:

The modern anti-Semite pays tribute to Jews who have been dead for 60 years, but he resents it when living Jews take measures to defend themselves.

David Mamet, who has a place of honor on my blog, wrote this in the Forward (no longer available in the archives but still available here) long ago [e.a.]:

Assimilated Western Jews say, “I don’t like this Sharon,” as if to refer to the prime minister simply as “Sharon” were to over-commit themselves. They are like the office assistant raised to executive status who immediately forgets how to use the fax machine. “This Sharon” indeed. Well, there are all sorts of Jews. One dichotomy is between the Real and the Imaginary. Imaginary Jews are the delight of the world. They include Anne Frank, Janusz Korczak, the Warsaw Ghetto fighters and the movie stars in “Exodus.” These Jews delight the world in their willingness to die heroically as a form of entertainment. The plight of actual Jews, however, has traditionally been more problematic, and paradoxically, those same folk who weep at “Sophie’s Choice,” sniff at the State of Israel.

Here, in Israel, are actual Jews, fighting for their country, against both terror and misthought public opinion, as well as disgracefully biased and, indeed, fraudulent reporting. Here are people courageously going about their lives, in that which, sad to say, were it not a Jewish state, would, in its steadfastness, in its reserve, in its courage, rightly be the pride of the Western world. This Western world is, I think, deeply confused between the real and the imaginary. All of us moviegoers, who awarded ourselves the mantle of humanity for our tears at “The Diary of Anne Frank” ? we owe a debt to the Jews. We do not owe this debt out of any “Unwritten Ordinance of Humanitarianism” but from a personal accountability. Having eaten the dessert, cheap sentiment, it is time to eat the broccoli. If you love the Jews as victims, but detest our right to statehood, might you not ask yourself “why?” That is your debt to the Jews.

Martin Kramer unearths the mysterious role of Persia scholar Ann Lambton, who recently died at the age of 96, in the 1953 ousting of Mohammed Mossadegh:

Her obituaries tell some of her remarkable story as a pioneering scholar and a formidable personality. They are also interesting for what they omit, regarding her role in the idea of removing Mohammad Mossadegh from power in Iran.

The Independent obit says nothing. The Times obit makes an all-too-brief allusion: “She was consulted by British officials on developments in Irano-British relations, especially during the crisis in 1951 when Iran’s Prime Minister, Muhammad Mussadiq, caused a furore by nationalising British oil interests in Iran.” Yet we are not told exactly what she proposed in these consultations. The Telegraph is more explicit: “Lambton’s insights into the strengths and weaknesses of Iran’s then prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, proved a valuable aid to Britain’s eventual success, in concert with America, in precipitating an end to Mossadegh’s premiership and in ensuring a continued, though reduced, British share in Iran’s oil production.” Yet we are not told just how she imparted these “insights,” or why they were “valuable.” The Guardian quotes a historian as saying her advice “marked the beginnings” of the 1953 coup, but does not explain what she advised or how she had such a profound effect. So what is the fuller story behind these allusions?

Read the whole thing. Kramer sets up his inescapable conclusion nicely:

The present incumbents in power in Iran are careful to shut out Western Orientalists, not because they fear the situation in Iran will be misrepresented but because it might be accurately represented, exposing the weaknesses of their regime. The historian Ervand Abrahamian, mentioning Lambton (and Zaehner), writes that it should not be surprising that the coup “gave rise to conspiracy theories [among Iranians], including cloak and dagger stories of Orientalist professors moonlighting as spies, forgers, and even assassins. Reality—in this case—was stranger than fiction.” The reality is that it isn’t easy to hide one’s vulnerabilities from an intimate stranger such as Lambton. The fear of Orientalist professors, both there and here, has never been that they might get things wrong, but that they are very likely to get them right.

There are many ways to know thine “enemy,” and none is better than to live in his midst.

Gawker is already snarking about Michael Phelps, natch (with help from those who know Phelps).

That was fast! Michael Phelps was a rocking gold-medal winner, then a record-breaking champion athletic God, then the $100 million endorsement kingpin, then a celebrity sex symbol. The whole process took maybe a week. Now? …

Bloggers aren’t the only ones slamming Phelps in public. Here’s the stone-cold way fellow 2008 Olympian swimmer Amanda Beard reacted to rumors that she hooked up with him:

“Eww, that’s nasty… I have never, ever hooked up with Michael Phelps,” Beard said …

Meanwhile, the dorky, unsophisticated TV-viewing audience loves him:

The most jaw-dropping statistic: The night Michael Phelps won his eighth gold medal was the most viewed Saturday night program (31.1 million) on NBC since 1990. The night peaked at 39.9 million viewers during the 4 X 100 medley relay. NBC promised advertisers a 14.5 primetime rating, according to SportsBusiness Journal’s John Ourand. It will get that even with the usual second-week tune-out.

Who doesn’t love a winner?

Moe, that’s who—that S.I. cover is such a retread, she says, missing the point: that normal people (that is: people who don’t obsessively read Gawker in order to confirm that they’re right to envy and hate anyone who is successful) love winners…at least for a while.

David Gergen can always be trusted to spout the conventional Beltway wisdom, and if that CW is right, Obama is in trouble. He didn’t win over any new converts during his talk with “Pastor Rick,” says Gergen. Also, McCain’s campaign is picking up [e.a.]:

McCain is now on a sustained roll in his campaign. Since the time he shook up his organization a few weeks ago, he has been much more focused and has started to get through to voters. Democrats — and the press — didn’t like the quality of those ads, but they seem to have worked politically. His stand on drilling and on Russia have also strengthened his aura of command. And now Saddleback.

That’s quite a run and it is reflected in the polls: not only have the national numbers tightened up but McCain has actually moved ahead (slightly) in three key battleground states: Ohio, Virginia and Colorado. …

In short, the tide is moving for the first time in the Republican direction. And the realization is setting in that McCain might just win.

We are still many weeks away from the election and the overall landscape clearly favors the Democrats, but these latest developments put pressure on Obama and his party to pull themselves together or face a stunning upset.

Dick Morris is rather more pointed in his criticisms. He makes it clear that Obama himself is responsible for his decline:

Last week raised important questions about whether Barack Obama is strong enough to be president. On the domestic political front, he showed incredible weakness in dealing with the Clintons, while on foreign and defense questions, he betrayed a lack of strength and resolve in standing up to Russia’s invasion of Georgia. …

Obama gave away Tuesday night, Wednesday night and part of Thursday night to the Clintons. …

If Obama can’t stand up to the Clintons, after they have been defeated, how can he measure up to a resurgent Putin who has just achieved a military victory?

Good question!

When the Georgia invasion first began, Obama appealed for “restraint” on both sides. He treated the aggressive lion and the victimized lamb even-handedly. …

After two days, Obama corrected himself, spoke of Russian aggression and condemned it. But his initial willingness to see things from the other point of view and to buy the line that Georgia provoked the invasion by occupying a part of its own country betrayed a world view characterized by undue deference to aggressors.

That’s a canny observation, and I believe that the election will be decided by those (”swing” or “independent”) voters who make personal judgments about candidates on just such a basis rather than by party or by race or gender or age or income level.

Obama’s first reaction to almost every “crisis”—whether it’s geopolitical or in his own campaign—is the same: Everybody should just calm down.