The loonies at MSNBC are fantasizing about how to wreak vengeance on the warmongers:
Noting that “prominent Democrats” had ruled out impeachment, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann asked former counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke on his show last night, what “remedy” there could be for the lies and misinformation highlighted in the new Senate Intelligence Committee reports on the Bush administration’s misuse of pre-war Iraq intelligence.
CLARKE: Well, there may be some other kind of remedy. There may be some sort of truth and reconciliation commission process that’s been tried in other countries, South Africa, Salvador and what not, where if you come forward and admit that you were in error or admit that you lied, admit that you did something, then you’re forgiven. Otherwise, you are censured in some way.
Now, I just don’t think we can let these people back into polite society …
Somehow I think we will avoid truth and reconciliation commissions here in the U.S. and A.—or at least so I hope! They’re getting pretty popular up in Canada!
But these revenge fantasies of Richard Clarke’s remind me of something Jared Diamond wrote in the New Yorker recently, in an essay about tribalism [e.a.]:
We regularly ignore the fact that the thirst for vengeance is among the strongest of human emotions. It ranks with love, anger, grief, and fear, about which we talk incessantly. Modern state societies permit and encourage us to express our love, anger, grief, and fear, but not our thirst for vengeance. We grow up being taught that such feelings are primitive, something to be ashamed of and to transcend. …
But, while acting on vengeful feelings clearly needs to be discouraged, acknowledging them should be not merely permitted but encouraged. To a close relative or friend of someone who has been killed or seriously wronged, and to the victims of harm themselves, those feelings are natural and powerful.
So, yes: Feelings of vengeance, like all other feelings, need to be addressed and processed so that people can move beyond them. But truth-and-reconciliaion councils are a vehicle for wallowing in those feelings, not for moving beyond them (just as the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s “liberation theology” nurtures the grievances of his congregation and ensures that their racial resentment will live on in future generations).
Well, let’s hope we don’t enter a new era of witch-hunting, which some Dems (the ones who want to “look into” the instances of “racism” and “sexism” in the primary campaign between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama) seem bent on.
On that score, there’s one small encouraging sign buried deep in the biography of a future President Obama. When Barack Obama was practicing what he learned from Saul Alinsky, he reputedly felt uncomfortable with some necessary parts of the process of community organizing.
But, although he was a first-class student of Alinsky’s method, Obama also saw its limits. It appealed to his head but not his heart. For instance, Alinsky relished baiting politicians or low-level bureaucrats into public meetings where they would be humiliated. Obama found these “accountabilitysessions” unsettling, even cruel. “Oftentimes, these elected officials didn’t have that much more power than the people they represented,” he told me.
At one meeting, where residents of an asbestos-laden housing project confronted their property manager about whether their homes had been tested, Obama suddenly had the urge to warn his target. “I wanted to somehow let Mr. Anderson know that I understood his dilemma,” Obama wrote in Dreams, with the kind of empathy that is the hallmark of his autobiography. He was sometimes more interested in connecting with folks on the South Side than organizing them. He studied the characters he encountered so closely that Kruglik says Obama turned his field reports into short stories about the hopes and struggles of the local pastors and congregants with whom he was trying to commune.
Let’s hope that a President Obama will prove to be a late-stage dissenter from the School of Alinsky.
update:Instalanche! Thank you, Glenn Reynolds!
Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around. Mostly, I write about media culture (”They call it news. I call it infotainment.”) But even though I’m not a politico, like everyone else during this election season, I find myself writing a lot —way more than I’d like—about politics.
Stephen Hayes, writing in the WSJ, suggests that Republicans ignore the power of Obama’s rhetoric at their own peril. And he nails Obama’s special gift:
Mr. Obama has the unique ability to offer doctrinaire liberal positions in a way that avoids the stridency of many recent Democratic candidates.
I agree with Kaus—the heuristic cues about Obama’s way-leftiness are obvious to those people who are tuned in to political code, which is a tiny fraction of the electorate. Millions and millions of entranced and besotted fans, however, get deceived, plain and simple.
And that makes me deeply unhappy about Barack Obama’s expected candidacy: unlike Reagan, to whom he is being favorably compared, he is being fundamentally dishonest with the vast majority of potential voters.
The job of his opponent will be to dismantle Obama’s pleasingly vague idealism with a relentless barrage of detailed, specific questions on policy—and particularly on the “dumb” Iraq war (his signature issue) and what he, as president, would do about Iraq on Day One, Day Two, Day Three, etc.
Whoever thought up and produced this Obama video is a PRopagandaTMgenius. Not that the under-30 set isn’t entirely in Obama’s corner anyway, but this pretty much seals the deal in terms of putting Obama in the territory of “hip.”***
Though the effectiveness of the message-delivery system can’t be disputed, there is an obvious weakness in this kind of campaigning—and this kind of candidate—as Jeff Jarvis points out: It’s all rhetoric.
To me, this only underscores the notion that Obama’s campaign is the most rhetorical of the bunch: speeches and slogans so neat they can fit in 4/4 time.
I agree. The Obama campaign more and more begins to resemble a celebrity marketing campaign, as I mentioned here:
The way Barack Obama is being covered by the media and the blogosphere, he’s not a political candidate anymore—he’s a celebrity. He doesn’t have political followers—he’s got fans. He doesn’t have a political platform—he’s got a one-word slogan—”change” [which works, ’cause “change is good,” just like Nissan says, right?]. He makes narcissists feel so good about themselves.
So: the slogan has changed—now it’s “Yes, we can”—but the marketing pitch is the same: Obama’s the one.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
HOWARD KURTZ, HOST (voice over): Conjuring Camelot. The media gets swept away over Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Barack Obama. Are journalists promoting the rookie senator as the next JFK? …
KURTZ: The presidential campaign is a blur now, all sound bites and snippets, a 22-state dash to Super Tuesday just two days from now. John McCain has been boosted by winning Florida, by the backing of his formal rival, Rudy Giuliani, and by favorable coverage from the reporters he talked to for hours every day.
Hillary Clinton claimed victory in Florida, a beauty contest where no Democrats campaigned because of the a dispute within the party, but the press wasn’t buying her spin.
And Barack Obama, well, the pundits have been comparing him to JFK since he first started flirting with running. And when Ted Kennedy and Carolina Kennedy endorsed him this week, the media somehow magically transported us to this moment in 1961. …
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOHN F. KENNEDY, FMR. PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Let the word go forth from this time and place — to friend and foe alike — that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans. (END VIDEO CLIP)
KURTZ: Every anchor and correspondent, it seemed, picked up that metaphor and ran with it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
BRIAN WILLIAMS, NBC NEWS: On the broadcast tonight from Washington, passing the torch.
KATIE COURIC, CBS NEWS: Tonight, passing the torch.
CHRIS MATTHEWS, MSNBC: The torch gets passed, the Clintons get passed by.
WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: Barack Obama touched by the legacy of Camelot.
HARRY SMITH, CBS NEWS: Ted and Caroline set to hit the campaign trail after they announced the heir to Camelot.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
KURTZ: Why have the media gone haywire over this Kennedy endorsement?
The consensus of Kurtz’s panel? Because it makes for a great story. (regardless of what it means, if anything).
The media is all about storytelling. It is not about “the news.” Infotainment rules.
Beyond that: you can’t burst a successful PRopagandaTM gambit with a lot of words. The only way to beat it is to create an even bigger, better, and eye-catching one.
*** “He’s got soul,” said one of my son’s friends. Being New Yorkers, with everything that’s entailed (that is: living in a bubble of harmony and tolerance … especially now that Giuliani is no longer our mayor), my (young adult) kids and their friends don’t form a representative sample of youth, of course. But they serve as a bellwether of the attitude of their generation.
They feel betrayed. They feel that they were lied to. They want a reason to believe.
I’m struck by some very different reactions to the major political endorsements of the last couple of days, both of which I would categorize as major PRopagandaTM events.
When Barack Obama was crowned by the Kennedy family on Monday at a rally at Washington American University in Washington, D.C. (ETP’s Rachel Sklar delivered a flavor of the ambience here), I didn’t hear a lot of objections to the adulatory press coverage, of Google News offered one small sample:
By contrast, on the next night, while anchoring Florida primary coverage on MSNBC, Keith Olbermann set the deeply disapproving—if not outraged—tone for liberals when he heard that Rudy Giuliani would be endorsing John McCain the next day. (I wrote about it here, as I watched K.O.’s creepazoid performance. He also dissed Hillary Clinton by saying that her primary victory in Florida was “meaningless.”)
I wasn’t around to watch the Republicans’ piece of political theater (live, from the Reagan Library) the next day (you can watch it here), but The Flack offered his professional color commentary:
He ran a losing campaign with more than his share of PR gaffes.
Yet, as I sit here watching Rudy Giuliani’s withdrawal and endorsement speech, I can’t help but think how he timed this anti-climactic announcement to run live on the local TV network lead-ins across most of the nation. Geesh. He finally did something right on the media strategy front. [e.a.]
The Flack is impressed professionally but appalled personally:
The nation’s local TV news directors took the bait — hook, line and sinker — to hand over to this right wing ideologue unfettered access to a large hunk of their news programming holes. The Giuliani withdrawal speech morphed into a several-minute commercial for that pasty, anachronistic candidate who has stood by this failed presidency more than any other. [e.a.]
I’m left with the impression that if local TV news directors had handed over unfettered access to a left-wing ideologue, everything would have been just fine and dandy—from both a professional and a personal point of view.
Because I wasn’t around to watch TV during either of those live events and I don’t have the time to research how much airtime either of them got and on which channels, I can’t parse which PRopagandaTM event got “fairer” treatment by the media. Nor do I care.
I get the Rudy hatred.*** What I don’t get is the attitude that TV programmers somehow shouldn’t have given airtime to strategists who came up with a very effective PR campaign, regardless of its content.
“Free media” is free to those who can grab it, no? The competition’s PR “consiglieres” just have to try harder, that’s all. It’s the American way!
———-
*** Though I don’t share it. He did a lot of good things for New York while haranguing us with his in-your-face law-and-orderism, which during Election ‘08 has been characterized as “Rudy is a fascist.” Been there, done that. Whatever.
Personally, I welcome what I see as a trend toward moderation in the Republican Party that the rise of McCain and Giuliani signals—I hope it means a trend of having opponents across the aisle that Democrats can work with.
I also agree that Giuliani has run a campaign of ideas—and that unlike his opponents on the Republican side, he has ideas.
But I know that partisanship trumps everything right now. Oh well.
I can’t help it if I’m a close reader, okay? So after I read Matthew Yglesias’s disapproving post about Hillary rushing to her feetat the SOTU to applaud Bush’s line about the terrorists knowing that the surge had worked, I went and clicked on the link he provided and read the whole piece.
When Bush warned the Iranian government that “America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf” Obama jumped up to applaud. Clinton leaned across Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), seated to her left, to look in Obama’s direction before slowly standing.
I long ago stopped trying to post any responses over at Yglesias’s place, because if he reads them, he gives no indication of having done so and rarely, if ever, responds—not very blogger-like. But I note that others continue the effort to address Yglesias’s points, as if they are worth discussion.
One commenter brought my point to his attention [e.a.]:
I agree with Steven this is pretty clear evidence HRC is just hawkish by nature, and that’s a good enough reason to not give your vote to her.
But can someone tell me what to make of this?
When Bush warned the Iranian government that “America will confront those who threaten our troops, we will stand by our allies, and we will defend our vital interests in the Persian Gulf” Obama jumped up to applaud. Clinton leaned across Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del.), seated to her left, to look in Obama’s direction before slowly standing.
The Illinois senator strongly criticized the former first lady last year when she supported a resolution calling for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard to be designated a terrorist organization. Obama supporters and other Democrats charged the vote would give Bush political cover to begin military operations against Iran.
Wouldn’t Obama’s criticism of the Kyl-Leiberman bill mean he shouldn’t stand up here? And didn’t he give that vote a pass in any case? Does not compute.
Posted by plum | January 29, 2008 10:01 AM
A couple of points: Mr. Obama’s fans don’t seem to care much about what he stands for—even if it includes a strong and aggressive national defense—as long as he doesn’t make much noise about it or as long as he doesn’t use threatening language or as long as he doesn’t seem (on the surface) to relish combat the way Hillary Clinton does.
I find that weird, but maybe not so weird. (More about this social/societal/cultural phenomenon another time.)
The other point that becomes obvious when you read the Hill piece that Yglesias linked to is that there is a huge dividing line among the Democrats—a fight for the soul of the Democratic party, is how Ron Silver put it long ago—between mostly young militant peaceniks and battle-hardened and beaten-up-by-reality liberals.
But it also seems to be about those who accept reality and those who are wary of Wag the Dog scenarios and Gulf of Tonkin lies, as this commenter at Yglesias’s place suggests [e.a.]:
The difference [between Hillary and Obama] is between those who have been tricked into thinking that Iraq has something to do with terrorism and those who understand that Iraq is an allegory for the American domestic factional struggle.
DIVIDED WE FALL.
Posted by Frank Wilhoit | January 29, 2008 9:26 AM
That makes both this election and what comes afterward very, very interesting—to me at least: the culture war (which is what we argue over when we argue over the Iraq war) is still on. Full force. It certainly won’t end with Bush, or with Clinton, or with McCain.
Nor would it end with Obama, however. But I’ll let the dreamers dream.
Political correctness (for the purposes of this post, I will define it thus: “You’re not allowed to say that; only I am allowed to say that”) was the left’s gift to America. The left meant well. (I know, because I was on the left—comfortable and at home on the left, that is—at the time.)
Now the left, represented by the Democratic party, is having interesting problems. (I haven’t felt comfortable on the left for a long time, because the left has abandoned liberalism, I believe, but that’s another story for another day.)
My point is this: Two candidates who represent the apotheosis of progressive ideals are vying for the presidency. One is black. The other is a woman. If you’re a sensitive, well-meaning progressive, how do you support one of these candidates without smearing the other and earning yourself the label of “sexist” or “racist”?
To her great credit as a media critic and journalist (and without a lot of pickup by other media writers, except for Mickey Kaus and I’m not sure he counts except in the blogo-universe, where he counts a lot, in my book), my cyber-pal Rachel Sklar of ETPhas been asking this question for a while now (though somewhat less directly than I write about it here).
[F]raming Obama’s support in terms of a wave of hope and optimism and Clinton’s support as inevitability imposed by a suffocating dynasty might have been just a tad unbalanced. It’s funny, even as I write this I feel the need to check and recheck to make sure I don’t somehow say this wrong. Obama is that candidate — the one you are careful writing about. I don’t think it’s just me.
Rachel Sklar notes an insufficiently remarked on Obama advantage: (”[E]ven as I write this I feel the need to check and recheck to make sure I don’t somehow say this wrong. Obama is that candidate — the one you are careful writing about. I don’t think it’s just me”) …
Last night, Rachel put up a very long post analyzing the sad but inevitable viral viciousness of the Obama “fairy tale” remark by Bill Clinton (which he ihas been going out of his way to explain)[e.a.]:
Context isn’t just important, it’s everything — especially in these days of insta-pickup by blogs and online news sites, where just a snippet of text is enough to launch a million clicks.
You’d think that in the case of this election, where the race is tight and a nasty rumor or smear can make all the difference, people might want to be a bit careful. Alas, no.
Now Jules Crittenden picks up the theme. Understandably, being on the opposite side of the political spectrum from Rachel (I assume), he’s got a somewhat different take—namely, how “careful” is everyone supposed to be and for how long?
My big question is, does this mean if Obama gets elected no one can ever use the words “fairy tale” again, or any other words that might suggest he doesn’t know what he’s doing or what he’s talking about or that he might be full of it, because that might be perceived as racially insensitive? That’s a pretty serious issue, regardless of Obama’s politics, if political speech is going to be curtailed about something as important as the performance in office of the president of the United States, because someone’s feelings might get hurt. I’m guessing anything remotely resembling any of the delightful remarks about Chimpy’s appearance, intelligence, preparedness for office and performance in the last seven years would pretty much be out.
Here’s the thing. I believe that Barack Obama is not likely to have his actually feelings hurt by “racially insensitive” speech (no more than I would be if I were running for office and encountered “religiously insensitive” speech). Despite the smooth presentation, he is a hard-ass politician who came up through Chicago, which has a history of dirty, vicious politics. Alleged racial insensitivity and gender insensitivity are, in this race, merely cudgels with which to beat political opponents. They’re powerful and loaded cudgels, but they are still only cudgels (and not evidence of real racism and real sexism, which are not about the things you say about people but about the things you do to people who are less powerful than you).
Here’s the other thing: I believe that most normal people get that. Politics is a dirty business. There is no way for your candidate to win unless the other guy or gal loses. And you do whatever it takes for your guy or gal to win—no matter how dirty or hurtful. That’s just the way it is.
Political correctness may become a casualty of this election. Or, at least, one can always hope.
Apparently, there’s been quite a reaction to the announcement that Bill Kristol will have one of the most coveted bully pulpits in America: a column in the New York Times. I first wrote about this a couple of days ago and then went out of town.
Now the Times has been confronted. Editorial page editor Andy Rosenthal finds it easy to defend his hire:
Rosenthal told Politico shortly after the official announcement Saturday that he fails to understand “this weird fear of opposing views.”
“The idea that The New York Times is giving voice to a guy who is a serious, respected conservative intellectual — and somehow that’s a bad thing,” Rosenthal added. “How intolerant is that?”
“I was flattered watching blogosphere heads explode,” Kristol told Politico. “It was kind of amusing.”
She’s not in the blogosphere, but could Kristol have meant Katha Pollitt?
Just shoot me. First, it was Sam Tanenhaus, conservative editor of the New York Times Book Review being put in charge of the News of the Week in Review section. That means one conservative will determine how politics,culture and ideas are covered in TWO of the most important sections of the supposedly liberal newspaper of record. Now, says the Huffington Post, the Times is set to announce that Bill Kristol will be writing a weekly op-ed column. That’s Bill Kristol ,Fox commentator , editor of the the Murdochian agitprop factory Weekly Standard, George W. Bush’s propagandist in chief, co-founder of the Project for a New American Century, relentless promoter of the war in Iraq , ideological bully and thug.
Kristol responded directly to that attack (via Exurban League, where you can check out his Thug 4 Life pic too):
Give a holla to my neocons in the Bay,
I’m livin’ in DC still clutchin’ on my AK.
Tell ‘em,
“Thug for life,
High till’ i die”
When ‘em stupid Nation witches ask why!
Among other spicy events to look forward to, election 2008 is about to get a little more interesting (Kristol has a one-year contract).
Bottom line, says The Politico, this is a smart business decision for the New York Times:
Despised or not, Kristol is bound to create controversy (read: Web page views). It’s no surprise that during this overheated election season Newsweek and other such magazines are bringing in political lighting rods like Karl Rove and Markos Moulitsas.
In the new media world of the early 21st century, apparently it’s no longer enough to merely attract attention. You want (or need) to attract lightning to get noticed.
The Politico notes that the political campaigns are all revved up:
The presidential campaigns in both parties have begun reacting ferociously to real or perceived attacks from rivals, goaded by a tight campaign calendar that leaves no room for error, and a determination to show they’re tougher than John F. Kerry was in 2004.
All of the candidates have sought to exploit any whiff of negativity from their opponents by pivoting off the charges with counterattacks designed to gain sympathy or political advantage within their own party.
This is yet more evidence, for those who need it, for the validity of the Feiler Faster Thesis, in which Mickey Kaus was making an observation about momentum in politics. He suggested that with the speeding up of everything in our everyday life,
there are now simply more opportunities for turns of fortune and that voters are able, for the most part, to keep up. …
”The FFT, remember, doesn’t say that information moves with breathtaking speed these days. (Everyone knows that!) The FFT says that people are comfortable processing that information with what seems like breathtaking speed.” [e.a.]
Campaigns are responding rapidly to attacks because they are trying to turn every moment in the spotlight—even (perhaps especially) moments of crisis—into an opportunity. They have learned the hard way that unless you answer every attack, you leave yourself open to the possibility that your opponent’s displeasing narrative about you, or his attack on your image, will stick to you.
Rapid response is about upping the ante, about fighting bad PR with better PR in the hope that you will accrue an image of yourself appealing enough for voters to cast their ballot for you. What’s amazing about it is that politicians do this even though most voters aren’t even paying attention. They just cannot afford to stand still as the river of news***rushes by them.
——————-
*** Doc Searls recently elaborated this concept. I’m still trying to process it. Totally fascinating stuff:
Here’s the problem with most news: it isn’t. It’s olds. It happened hours ago, or last night, or yesterday, or last month, or before whenever the deadline was in the news organization’s current “news cycle”. It’s not now. …
News is a river, not a lake. It is active, not static. It’s what’s happening, not what happened. Or not only what happened.
But what happened — news as olds — is how we’ve understood news for as long as we’ve had newspapers. The happening kind of news came along with radio, and then television. Then we called it “live”. Still, even on the nightly news, what’s live is talking heads and reports from the field. The rest is finished stuff.
There’s a difference here, a distinction to be made: one as stark and important as the distinction between now and then, or life and death. It’s a distinction between what’s live and what’s not.
This distinction is what will have us soon talking about the life of newspapers, rather than the death of them.
Because it’s not enough to be “online” or to have a “presence” on the Web.
To be truly alive, truly new, truly part of the life of its readers, a newspaper needs to be on the live web and not just the static one. It needs to flow news, and not just post it.
There are multiple examples of the NYT’s idiocy every day, most of which I can rise above, because it is still a fine newspaper.
Today, however, Gail Collins, the author of an amusing and enlightening book that I have mentioned a couple of times (Scorpion Tongues)—a book that proves she is way, way, way smarter than this—made my teeth hurt with this tossed-off sentence in her column (which is thin gruel in general):
If it hadn’t been for [Joe Lieberman's] unhelpful performance in Florida after the 2000 election, perhaps Al Gore would be president now and there would be peace and global cooling throughout the planet.
There would be peace and global cooling if Al Gore were president?
REALLY?
And this in a column dissectingHillary’s congenital pandering?
Dutch lawmakers who recently visited the Guantanamo Bay military prison said they were offended by a testy exchange in Washington with a senior congressional Democrat. The lawmakers said that Rep. Tom Lantos (Calif.), chairman of the House Foreign AffairsCommittee, told them that “Europe was not as outraged by Auschwitz as by Guantanamo Bay.” Lantos, a Holocaust survivor, was responding to arguments that the United States should shut down the U.S. prison in Cuba, the lawmakers said. “You have to help us [in Afghanistan] because if it was not for us you would now be a province of Nazi Germany,” …
"Even in the most civilized societies the demagogues are
always in wait, ready and testing. They are indefatigable and we will never entirely prevail over them. And that is OK.
But if we stop resisting them, they will prevail over us. And that is not OK."
