Entries Tagged 'dazed and confused' ↓

The conventional wisdom of the media elite, crystallized today by David Brooks, says that Hillary Clinton cannot possibly win.

Last week, an important Clinton adviser told Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen (also of Politico) that Clinton had no more than a 10 percent chance of getting the nomination. Now, she’s probably down to a 5 percent chance.

Five percent.

It would be way too tiresome to provide the dozens of links that support Brooks’s point of view. It’s much more interesting to link to the news side of things at the New York Times, where someone is (finally) asking the important question: can a “progressive” win the White House?

Of course the NYT doesn’t frame the question quite like that. Instead, the sly headline writer asks: “Can a Liberal Be a Unifier?”[ e.a.]:

the Obama campaign is challenging the fundamental political premise that has prevailed in Washington for more than a generation: that any majority coalition must be carefully centrist, if not center-right. Bill Clinton ran in 1992 as a candidate willing to break with liberal orthodoxy on many issues, including crime and welfare, and eager to move the party — which had lost five of the six previous presidential elections — to the middle. Mr. Clinton’s New Democrats assumed a certain level of conservatism among voters.

Mr. Obama and his allies are basing his campaign on a different bet: that the right-leaning political landscape Mr. Clinton confronted has changed. Several major Democratic strategists, and outside analysts as well, argue that the country has shifted to the left because of the Iraq war, the economy and seven-plus years of President Bush, and that it has become open to a new progressive majority.

Further down, we hear once more this claim about a new political climate that is favorable to Obama:

[M]any of Mr. Obama’s supporters say he has recognized this new political climate in a way that Mrs. Clinton has not. They say he is ready for a new, self-assured era in which progressives (few have returned to using the word “liberal”) make no apologies about their goals — universal health care, withdrawing troops from Iraq, ending tax breaks for more affluent Americans — and assume that a broad swath of the public shares them.

That’s an interesting assumption, but I fear it’s not rooted in fact. Indeed, the NYT quotes TNR in a most interesting way:

As The New Republic recently put it, “Clintonism is a political strategy that assumes a skeptical public; Obamaism is a way of actualizing a latent ideological majority.”

If skepticism is Clintonian, call me a Clintonite. A latent ideological majority? In what universe?

Currently, despite the party establishment’s wanting to give her (and the centrist voters who are loyal to her) the bum’s rush, she is neck and neck in votes with her messianic Democratic opponent. Call me skepetical, but I say this more or less ensures that in a general election, Obama will be buried in a match-up with McCain. And that when the voting is finally over, the dreamers’ “latent ideological ‘majority’ ” will represent an even smaller but more hysterically vocal minority.

Only by then, they will have (conveniently for their enemies) labeled themselves as a proudly out-of-the-mainstream political party. A neat trick, that.

Ann Althouse analyzes a Rasmussen poll:

Poll results:

“How do you rate Obama’s speech? Excellent, good, fair, or poor?”

30% Excellent
21% Good
26% Fair
21% Poor
1% Not sure

Althouse [e.a.]:

The important break in the numbers is between “excellent” and the rest, and 70% said the speech fell short of “excellent.” This is, I think, disastrous for Obama. …

Asked whether the speech was “racially divisive, unifying, or neither,” only 30% — 30% again — thought the speech was “unifying,” which is what Obama intended it and his entire campaign to be.

Obama’s popularity has been built on unifying us and transcending race. If only 30% of us heard unification in that speech, then the speech and the connection to Wright have been massively destructive to what is the chief substance of his reputation.

 No kidding.

But Althouse gets the last word, because she’s got the best metaphor:

Obama told white people to feel guilty about race just when they’d been so happy thinking that loving him, just him, was the answer to racial problems. When we saw him consorting with someone who seemed to hate us, we needed reassurance that Obama loves us, and loving Obama was enough. But he didn’t say that, and now we’re confused. Our boyfriend was telling us he needs to see other people, and we don’t understand the relationship anymore.

I think we can safely declare that Obama-mania is over.

The Daily Mail attacks the British Olympic Association for its ourtrageous coddling of the Chinese with a vivid reminder of Britain’s shame and dishonor in the run-up to World War II:

National disgrace: In a picture from a German archive never before published in Britain, the England football team give Nazi salutes in Berlin in 1938  [e.a.]

Here are the facts, from the Mail:

British Olympic chiefs are to force athletes to sign a contract promising not to speak out about China’s appalling human rights record – or face being banned from travelling to Beijing.

The controversial clause has been inserted into athletes’ contracts for the first time and forbids them from making any political comment about countries staging the Olympic Games.

It is contained in a 32-page document that will be presented to all those who reach the qualifying standard and are chosen for the team.

From the moment they sign up, the competitors – likely to include the Queen’s granddaughter Zara Phillips and world record holder Paula Radcliffe – will be effectively gagged from commenting on China’s politics, human rights abuses or illegal occupation of Tibet.

Here’s the argument against, from David Mellor, also writing in the Mail:

The Chinese have no right to a free ride this summer. And it isn’t just because China isn’t a democracy or that basic human rights and fundamental freedoms are denied to its citizens.

China is a menace to the civilised world for many other reasons, ranging from its support for renegade regimes such as the government of Sudan, who used Chinese weaponry to commit the Darfur massacres, to its shameless emergence as the number one polluter.

The Chinese deserve as much criticism over their contributions to global warming as over their suppression of human rights.

Long live the British tabloid media!

[reposted to correct a typo in the title] 

Will sharia come to Britain? The notion certainly has a lot of people up in arms.

Ali Eteraz makes the case against (in case you need to hear it).
As for me, I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon. For one thing—though it’s not PC to bring this up, but it does reflect reality—there most certainly is a supernationalist streak in Britain, most obviously represented by its soccer hooligans. Potentially violent, uncontrollable “Islamophobia” is a real concern among this demographic, and it is not to be ignored.

Perhaps it was those, er, “blokes” who the otherwise sharia-loving (and enemy of culture) Tariq Ramadan was thinking of when he nixed the Archbishop’s idea:

“These kinds of statements [about the addition of sharia in Britain] just feed the fears of fellow citizens. I really think we, as Muslims, need to come up with something that we abide by the common law and within these latitudes there are possibilities for us to be faithful to Islamic principles.”

For another thing, on one side of the front page of its website, the Daily Mail tears to shreds the sharia-embracing Archbishop of Canterbury:

Officials at Lambeth Palace told the BBC Dr Williams was in a “state of shock” and “completely overwhelmed” by the scale of the row.

It was said that he could not believe the fury of the reaction.

On the other side of its front page, the Daily Mail goes about its business, advertising its other typical features:

Femail

Bedraggled and bra-less: Britney back to her old tricks after hospital release
A spell in a psychiatric hospital seems to have done little to change Britney’s lifestyle - or her dress sense

Cheek to Cheeky…the girls bare all for a good cause
Cheeky Girl Gabriela Irimia has never much cared for the twinset-and-pearls image of an MP’s consort - but this pose with her identical twin sister Monica - is risque by even her raunchy standards

Rehab star Amy is all smiles after getting her teeth fixed ahead of Grammy performance tonight
Amy Winehouse is all smiles these days after finally being granted a US visa - and getting her teeth fixed

‘Sadistic Wife Swap nearly cost me my sanity’ says TV presenter Anna Courtenay
On last week’s Channel 4 show Wife Swap, businesswoman Anna Courtenay, 42, was seen trading her privileged expat life in Marbella for nine days with another family on an ‘eco-friendly’ tugboat. She was not prepared for the lengths to which producers were prepared to go in the name of entertainment

When the Mail is forced to clean up its lurid act, let me know. Likewise, satellite TV in Europe (which is a mixture of lecturing imams and soft-core pornography). Then I’ll get nervous about sharia.

In the meantime, I take comfort from the sensible attacks on the mental defective masquerading as the Archbishop of Canterbury:

The most damaging attack came from the Pakistan-born Bishop of Rochester, the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali.

He said it would be “simply impossible” to bring sharia law into British law “without fundamentally affecting its integrity”.

Sharia “would be in tension with the English legal tradition on questions like monogamy, provisions for divorce, the rights of women, custody of children, laws of inheritance and of evidence.

“This is not to mention the relation of freedom of belief and of expression to provisions for blasphemy and apostasy.”

The strong counter-terrorism efforts undertaken by the British government are announced by officials and covered by the press, and so it’s logical to assume that the British people are aware of the various programs, right?

Probably not, Timothy Garton Ash suggests:

This has got to stop. Britain’s snooper state is getting completely out of hand. We are sleepwalking into a surveillance society, and we must wake up. When the Stasi started spying on me, as I moved around East Germany 30 years ago, I travelled on the assumption that I was coming from one of the freest countries in the world to one of the least free. I don’t think I was wrong then, but I would certainly be wrong now. Today, the people of East Germany are much less spied upon than the people of Britain. The human rights group Privacy International rates Britain as an “endemic surveillance society”, along with China and Russia, whereas Germany scores much better.

What degree of infringement on our freedoms are we willing to tolerate in order to feel secure?

It seems quaint now (shamefully so) to think of how outraged I felt only ten years ago when, in conversation with friends, I heatedly accused Rudy Giuliani of being a “fascist” for his Orwellian installation of surveillance cameras in Washington Square Park (in an effort to keep out drug dealers and other undesirables).

Like many people, since 9/11 I’ve traveled a long road in search of answers to these questions—without success so far.

Samantha Power, a distinguished and eloquent author and academic and supposedly a close adviser on foreign policy to Barack Obama, suggests that we “rethink” Iran. Perhaps not surprisingly, considering who she is advising (the King of Hope), her expert “advice” is also founded on hope—and nothing but,, as she herself admits in this pathetic, intellectually dishonest, and useless piece in Time magazine [e.a.]:

A new Iran policy should start with the premise that any country behind a problem can also be behind a solution. No aspect of the Iraq quagmire can be resolved without Iranian involvement. Washington has a better chance of modifying Iran’s influence in Iraq–and Afghanistan, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon–than of immediately halting it.

To do so, we need to broaden the range of policy tools we draw upon. That means refraining from redundant reminders that military force is still “on the table,” which only strengthen the hand of hard-line Islamists and nationalists. It means broadening cultural contacts with the Iranian people, bypassing the regime through Voice of America and the Internet. And it means trying high-level political negotiations, something the Bush Administration has so far shunned. Supporters of engagement should not equate dialogue with concessions. We should ask international negotiators to insist–as we did with the Soviet Union during the cold war–that Iran address human-rights issues as well as security concerns. It’s true that earlier attempts at engagement have produced few dividends. But what negotiations can do is diminish perceptions of U.S. arrogance and remind the world of the urgency of getting Iran to cooperate on issues of shared interest, from preventing state failure in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan to caring for Iraqi refugees.

Dear Samantha Power:

Your candidate repeats this cute phrase over and over again on the stump: that it is stupid to keep trying the same things over and over again and to expect a different result.

Let me remind you that

a) successful negotiators (like, for example, John Edwards) never take anything off the table before beginning negotiations.

b) recent cultural exchanges have led to Americans being jailed and then intimidated after their release

c) Iran has a tendency to change “negotiators” just as negotiations begin to get somewhere (i.e., just as Iran is tempted to make some compromises)

d) international “negotiators” are working against the businessmen in their own countries, who are writing contracts with Iran right and left, now that the NIE declared Iran kosher.

e) “diminishing perceptions” of U.S. arrogance, such as for example Bush’s recent Middle East trip, are a PR exercise in futility. Photo ops and talk are cheap. People the world over are not as stupid as you think.

The Iranians don’t want to deal. They want to rule, with an iron “Islamic” fist—over people who are not interested in their manner of governance.

Stop selling false hope. You are not doing your candidate—or our country—any favors.

The NYT’s David Carr delivers grim news to “creatives”:

I’ve got some bad news for striking Hollywood writers: Election 2008 is a breakaway hit.

January was supposed to be the month when the writers’ strike took its toll, subjecting viewers to a menu of desiccated repeats and cheesy reality shows. Instead, the primary season is serving as the backdrop for one of the most compelling runs of event television in years, creating the kind of chatter network marketers would kill for and spectacular ratings for cable news.

Carr repeatedly tries to suggest that it’s the absence of appealing alternatives (like sports, late-night comedy, and scripted shows, for example) that accounts for the huge gains in audience numbers for “cable news” since 2004.

The Times’s Bill Keller disagrees:

“I think the level of interest in the presidential race would be intense even if writers were still churning out episodes of ‘24’ and ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ ” he wrote. “It’s a defining race for both parties, with a cast of fascinating candidates, some of whom fall into the breakthrough category. There also seems to be a visceral national yearning to turn the page.”

Perhaps. But I’m more inclined to accept the explanation of Brian Grazer, who is not a gazillionaire producer for nothing [e.a.]:

“There is a new episode on almost every night,” said Brian Grazer, a Hollywood producer who is in what is left of the Oscar hunt with “American Gangster.” “It is very human to be constantly searching for new stories, and now that the traditional outlets of those stories are shutting down, people are finding their drama in these unfolding events.”

So, yes, I agree with Grazer and with Keller. But neither one of them will come out and say the bleeding obvious: that it is the manner of coverage of politics that is drawing in the audiences. The “drama” is being manufactured by the cable “news” networks. (In this case, it is helped along by the wide-open nature of the political race, but that only makes it easier for the networks to churn out stories with unpredictable endings.)

It is not news. It is infotainment—in other words, information (none of which is necessarily true) packaged as entertainment.  

Now do you believe me when I say that Infotainment Rules? Here’s what I wrote:

Television, however, delivers what sells, and what sells is entertainment—or stuff that is packaged like entertainment. Infotainment doesn’t have to be bad or stupid or crass. High-quality infotainment may in fact be superior to dry “news” as a vehicle for delivering information to audiences.

Once again: I do not endorse the hideous devolution of TV “news” into infotainment. I am merely trying to get people to understand that what they’re getting on TV is not “news.” It’s entertainment, and the goal of its producers is to get you to watch their channel.

They do it by hooking you on stories. If the stories are exciting and the ending isn’t known to anyone in advance (as in an election, or a sensational kidnapping, or some violent flare-up somewhere, for example), people tune in. That’s why cable “news” is addicted to horse-race coverage of the U.S. election that is ten months away and can barely turn away to give any attention to the visit of our president to the Middle East.

If you want to know the news, take advantage of the vast amount of information available on the Internet and read widely.

If you want fictional rather than reality-based (and reality-bending) entertainment on TV and you want our political process to be a little more serious and less unseemly … I don’t know how to advise you. All I do is call ‘em how I see ‘em.

Philip Weiss discovers anti-democratic extremism.

I was shocked by Benazir Bhutto’s assassination. Any fool knew it was coming, that is the not the point. It was the pure evil infamy of it. They hate democracy. Who hates democracy? Well, some elements of radical Islam. When David Axelrod of Obama’s campaign yesterday hinted that Hillary Clinton was somehow responsible because she voted for the Iraq War, I thought, Don’t be an idiot. …

After the Cold War, Susan Sontag famously said that the National Review was more reliable than the Nation on the Soviet Union. This time around the left must show that it is more reliable than the Weekly Standard and the New Republic about “the war on terror”. We are winning this ideological battle because we have not overstated the threat, and they have, and we do not ignore the fact that the Palestinian situation is a red flag across the Muslim world. Yet we can’t forget: there are forces of darkness out there.

The sewer rats in his comments section are none too pleased about Weiss’s revelation:

We liked you better when you blamed everything on the Jews.

Posted by: Realist | December 28, 2007 at 07:57 AM

For his cheerleading of those other blamers of the Jews, Weiss made a Top Ten Moonbats of 2007 list:

Weiss has become an “Israel Lobby” fundamentalist. In his eyes, to question the scholarship of Walt and Mearsheimer is to question truth. Every page of their book is gospel. Any negative review of their work is automatically dismissed as a “smear,” and every day that passes without an expose of the “Israel Lobby” on “60 Minutes” or the cover of Time magazine is further evidence of Jewish control over the media.

This mild critique doesn’t do Weiss justice. He has to be read to be believed. I’ll give you all the pleasure of finding out for yourselves, but I won’t provide another link.

As the Hollywood writers’ “strike” continues, various heavyweights have started to make power plays–um, I mean, separate deals. Like Letterman:

CBS’s late-night star, David Letterman, is pursuing an interim agreement with the Writers Guild that would allow him to return with his writers on Jan. 2. Mr. Letterman is in a position to make such a deal because his production company, Worldwide Pants, owns both his show and the one that follows on CBS, which features Craig Ferguson.

The fly in the ointment?

One representative of a late-night show said that some members of the guild leadership might have concerns about making a separate arrangement with Mr. Letterman, and that an agreement was far from a sure thing.

Ya think? Nah. I think that everyone will be making separate arrangements soon enough. The same NYT article notes that Conan and Leno are going back on the air in some way, shape, or form come the New Year. No word yet on Stewart and Colbert, but I’m sure they’ll feel the pressure soon enough from their network, too.

The way they will rationalize this breakdown of strikers’ discipline is also suggested in the Times piece. In contrast to Ellen DeGeneres and Carson Daly, who are already back on the air and to whom “the writers [which ones? --ed.]] “reacted with anger”:

the NBC hosts, along with Mr. Letterman, Mr. Kimmel and the Comedy Central hosts, have won praise from the writers for staying off the air so long and for paying their staffs.

So the game is over. Those who played by the rules and paid the proper respect won the moral high ground—the only ground that seems to count inside the Hollywood bubble. The only problem with this formulation is that this time, the game was played (and it’s not over yet) in full view of a nation that is already furious with Hollywood, bored by its products, and contemptuous of its residents, except as fodder for deliciously corrosive and often ruinous gossip.

If the point of this strike was for Hollywood writers to garner respect for themselves, it is to laugh. Instead, they have exposed themselves as beyond clueless about the technological revolution that is swallowing up not just their future but their present.

Via Mickey Kaus, I’m encouraged to find out that some folks have been trying to get through to Hollywood:

The video is funnier than most TV comedies. It reportedly got 400,000 hits–more than many cable shows. It was put up on the Web by unpaid performers seemingly just for the hell of it (and maybe the exposure). Doesn’t that sort of make Marc Andreesen and Rob Long’s point about the tenuous positon of both Hollywood and the Writers Guild? … It’s as if the Linotype operators went on strike and decided to publish their story in four color offset!…10:36 P.M.

Steve Boriss is a little more pointed in his analysis, and sees Hollywood (properly) as only part of a much larger picture:

By placing all forms of entertainment, including news, on the same medium, the Internet has launched a Darwinian struggle where the news, entertainment, and video game industries are now direct, head-to-head competitors for the distraction of audiences from their daily concerns. Crueler still, they must also now compete against mere amateurs, talent around the globe, blogs, porn, and also their former selves — their own archives of older articles, older movies, older programs, and older games never before available. That’s why audiences are plunging and pink slips are flying across all media – newspapers, TV, and Hollywood. The emerging, unified Internet entertainment, a.k.a. “InterTainment,” industry is now just one big happy family – but only if you happen to be a member of the audience

So why “worms” in the title of the post? Because, as Stephen Jay Gould reminded us in 1997, natural selection favors worms:

Darwin himself told us in his last book, The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, that we should never underestimate the collective power of worms on the move. Our general culture also recognizes two primary metaphors, one inorganic and one organic, for the reversal of received opinion. Well may traditionalists fear the turning of these two objects: tables and worms. The inversion of the humble worm, especially when disturbed, may bring down empires. Shakespeare told us that “the smallest worm will turn being trodden on.” And Cervantes wrote in his author’s preface to Don Quixote that “even a worm when trod upon, will turn again.”

A new media world will rise. Hollywood will not be left behind in the dust. Trust me.

A lot of ink has been spilled about Iraq-themed movies bombing at the box office. I contributed my share back in September, before the movies started bombing. It wasn’t that hard to foresee: Even the most casual student of the culture (never mind the political culture) could have predicted the financial failure of these films.

For example, Sheila Nevins of HBO had this to say to the NYT’s David Carr, also in September:

“Paying money at the door of a movie theater to see the suffering of others is different than watching [a documentary] on television. It is a much tougher sell in a theater.”

So everybody involved should have known the risks.

Thus, the really interesting question is why, despite such knowledge, Hollywood “creatives” chose to make these movies and why Hollywood “suits” chose to green-light them. Note that this is a two-part question, because in Hollywood, as just about everywhere else in life, it takes two to tango.

Brian De Palma for one wasn’t shy about announcing his intentions for his highly controversial Redacted. It was propaganda—the good kind, that is.

In October, before the movie was released, he told Karen Badt that he wanted to shake people up. Images, he said, are a very powerful tool of persuasion.

[K.B.] What was your aim in making this film?

[B. DeP] With the Vietnam War, I remember picking up Life magazine and seeing pictures that would horrify me. The pictures are what will stop the war. If we put these pictures in front of a mass audience, maybe we can stop the war, The hope is to get Americans to be incensed enough to stop the war. Americans have not learned from their past mistakes because the architects of this war are the same that were right there

So De Palma’s aim was to make propaganda. As I’ve written before, propaganda efforts can fizzle, as Civil War photographer Mathew Brady found out.

In this piece, Roger L. Simon nails De Palma for ignorance, and nails Hollywood’s reflexively anti-war stance for reeking of phoninessness.

[T]here is a subtler and more treacherous roadblock to authenticity in all this that is not frequently acknowledged. While the Vietnam and Iraq Wars are often equated by the liberal-left, the differences between the two are greater than the similarities, especially in the critical area of who is the adversary. For Vietnam: The evils of communism could be and were rationalized by the left as a plea for social equality in an economically unjust world. For Iraq: The evils of Islamofascism and just plain fascism are considerably harder, indeed almost impossible, to rationalize.

This problem is particularly true for Hollywood because the evils of Islamofascism – notably extreme misogyny and homophobia – are justifiably big no-nos to people in the Industry. In fact, they are close to the biggest no-nos of all for them in their daily lives. Who is worse than a sexist pig? Only a violent, murderous sexist pig who wants to take over the world. It then becomes a complex balancing act indeed to make a movie that ignores or downplays this in order to criticize the US as the larger villain. No one has been able to come close to pulling off this balancing act in a film. In fact, it may well be impossible because it is fundamentally dishonest.

Finding credible villains and credible good guys for the movies is Hollywood’s big challenge, of course. It’s going to take a long time. I don’t expect the search to be over anytime soon, because America’s got a self-image problem. That, I believe, is what’s reflected on our movie screens. Like the rest of us, the people making our entertainments are confused. They’ve lost the thread of the American narrative. They focus relentlessly on the dark, the deviant, the dispossessed, and the disenfranchised. Or on the transgressive.

For a change, they should look to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. I think they’d find a nice surprise awaiting them at the box office.***

———————-
*** Politicos should also take note of this. Der Spiegel’s Gabor Steingart published a piece last week on America as a “depressed superpower.” Here’s his (uplifting) conclusion:

Sometimes real life mirrors fiction. Three of the country’s most renowned political consultants recently got together for the first time in a lecture hall at the New York Public Library: George Lakoff of the University of California at Berkeley and a close advisor to the Democrats, Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, and Drew Westen, a psychologist from the University of Michigan, also a Democrat. The three men have spent decades practically at each other’s throats.

But now they were talking about ideals, the best way to run a campaign and language, including the wrong kind of language. The Republican said that he was troubled by the term, coined by Bush, “War on Terror,” because it spreads fear and stifles optimism.

Westen, one of the two Democrats, said he had fond memories of Ronald Reagan and his legendary campaign ad titled, “It’s morning again in America.” The ad tells the story of a country in which inflation is down and marriages are up, a country that is “prouder and stronger and better” than it was before. The rich voice of the announcer tells Americans that they can “look forward with confidence to the future. It’s morning again in America.”

Westen insisted on playing the ad for the 500 people in the audience. The effect was dramatic, as if someone had suddenly declared a cease-fire in an era marked by political conflict.

The three experts on the stage were also visibly moved. Luntz, the Republican, was the first to speak, and his words were in the language of reconciliation: “Can’t we understand each other again? Can’t we come together again? Can’t we all regain hope again?”

His words were met with thundering applause.