Here's a great Rachel Maddow segment about the staged disruptions of Democratic representatives' town hall meetings around the country.
These organized mobs remind me of Mussolini's black shirts. After the Brooks Brothers riot in Florida (2000), I can't say I'm completely surprised, but it still does amaze me that a major political party and its allies are willing to stoop this low.
I guess the only antidotes are intense blogger pressure on the media to report on the groups involved and their leaked strategy memo, and large crowds of people genuinely interested in rational public discourse.
Showing posts with label news media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label news media. Show all posts
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Friday, December 26, 2008
A (Very) Belated Note to My Readers
As you've undoubtedly noticed, I haven't been posting much since the election. There was no point at which I made a conscious decision to cut back on my posting; rather, a combination of things (exhaustion at the end of a year of furious election-related activities, issues related to work and family, an utter lack of interest in the non-stop stream of "news" stories consisting of little more than idle speculation about the choices and implications of Obama administration nominees) combined to divert my attention elsewhere.
I'd like to make a brief statement about the last item in my parenthesized list above. I realize that there are business reasons for the continual production of stories purporting to read the tea leaves about what the future will presumably hold in the upcoming administration. Newspapers/magazines/TV news shows/blogs all want to hold the attention of their audiences. This is especially true of those media outlets dependent on advertising for their income. Eyeballs translate to advertising dollars, etc. That's simply how the game works & I accept that.
On the other hand, I don't pretend for a second to have the ability to read minds or see into the future. Nor do I believe that any of the prognosticators claiming predictive powers have those abilities, either. Predictions about future political events, it seems to me, imply a relatively simple teleology in which objectively observable criteria translate in a relatively straightforward way into concrete political results. I think that implication is grossly misleading because it completely overlooks such imponderables as unforeseen events and, at least as important, the interpersonal dynamics involved, both within a given administration and between that administration and its political constituencies and opponents, domestic as well as foreign.
By way of a quick illustration of what I mean, consider for a moment a few historical examples. Imagine for a moment the possible alternative paths that our political history might have taken had (a) Richard Nixon won the 1960 election rather than JFK; (b) the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King not been assassinated in 1968; (c) the GOP had not decided to cater to the far right with their tacit acceptance of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt tactics in the 1950s, Nixon's southern strategy, and their appeals to the religious right from Reagan to the current infestation of the White House. Imagine, for that matter, the kinds of presidential candidates political parties would and would not have been willing to nominate were American culture not afflicted with a widespread attitude according to which hostility to elitism translates to a hostility toward education. Imagine further that the social arrangements into which we've all been socialized since birth were considered to be not merely an accepted natural order of things, but the cumulative results of a series of choices made by humans in response to changing events and contexts.
The point I'm trying to make is that history, culture and politics are the combination of social context, individual personalities and chance. I don't know how those things will shape our world. I feel confident in Obama's ability to make reasoned, principled, humane decisions in the interest of our country and this planet. I have no idea how things will happen. So I wait.
In the interim, as I find things of interest to mull over, I'll share them with you. You have been warned... ;-)
I'd like to make a brief statement about the last item in my parenthesized list above. I realize that there are business reasons for the continual production of stories purporting to read the tea leaves about what the future will presumably hold in the upcoming administration. Newspapers/magazines/TV news shows/blogs all want to hold the attention of their audiences. This is especially true of those media outlets dependent on advertising for their income. Eyeballs translate to advertising dollars, etc. That's simply how the game works & I accept that.
On the other hand, I don't pretend for a second to have the ability to read minds or see into the future. Nor do I believe that any of the prognosticators claiming predictive powers have those abilities, either. Predictions about future political events, it seems to me, imply a relatively simple teleology in which objectively observable criteria translate in a relatively straightforward way into concrete political results. I think that implication is grossly misleading because it completely overlooks such imponderables as unforeseen events and, at least as important, the interpersonal dynamics involved, both within a given administration and between that administration and its political constituencies and opponents, domestic as well as foreign.
By way of a quick illustration of what I mean, consider for a moment a few historical examples. Imagine for a moment the possible alternative paths that our political history might have taken had (a) Richard Nixon won the 1960 election rather than JFK; (b) the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King not been assassinated in 1968; (c) the GOP had not decided to cater to the far right with their tacit acceptance of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's witch hunt tactics in the 1950s, Nixon's southern strategy, and their appeals to the religious right from Reagan to the current infestation of the White House. Imagine, for that matter, the kinds of presidential candidates political parties would and would not have been willing to nominate were American culture not afflicted with a widespread attitude according to which hostility to elitism translates to a hostility toward education. Imagine further that the social arrangements into which we've all been socialized since birth were considered to be not merely an accepted natural order of things, but the cumulative results of a series of choices made by humans in response to changing events and contexts.
The point I'm trying to make is that history, culture and politics are the combination of social context, individual personalities and chance. I don't know how those things will shape our world. I feel confident in Obama's ability to make reasoned, principled, humane decisions in the interest of our country and this planet. I have no idea how things will happen. So I wait.
In the interim, as I find things of interest to mull over, I'll share them with you. You have been warned... ;-)
Saturday, June 7, 2008
Coverup and Call to Action
Doubtless you already know that the Senate Intelligence Committee, now under Democratic control, has finally released the second part of its report on the Bush administration’s misuses of intelligence in the prelude to the Iraq war.
For those who haven’t followed the issue closely, Bush and his cronies set up an "alternative" intelligence outfit in the Pentagon (the Office of Special Plans, run by Douglas Feith) to provide the administration with phony “evidence” to back up a decision he arrived at beforehand. Like Alice in Wonderland, “first the sentence, then the evidence.”
Then, adding to the fun, when forced to set up a congressional investigation of government activities in the lead-up to the war, Bush and Cheney, working with their cronies in Congress, arranged to have the “investigation” split in two—the first part, dealing with intelligence failures, focused on the CIA and was completed before the 2004 election (the timing is crucial here). The second part, dealing with the activities of the White House, was delayed until after the 2004 election (again, timing is everything here). Then the Republicans in Congress dropped the second part altogether, which is why it’s taken until now for a Democratic Congress to finish and issue the report. Clever, yes/no? I believe the term that describes this whole process (except the last part, obviously) is “coverup.” Needless to say, even if there were enough Democrats willing to support impeachment (and a number of Dems representing conservative districts do not), it’s too late now for that.
Now add another piece to the puzzle. The obvious question when faced with all this is, why didn’t people organize massive protests, flood the media with letters, e-mails and phone calls, and generally raise a ruckus about this? Let me answer that by asking another question: Who was going to tell them? As you can see, the machinations undertaken by Bush and friends were pretty convoluted. It bears mentioning here that 80% of the public gets ALL of its news from television. Yet there were no arresting visuals to show on the evening news. There hasn’t been, until now, anything close to a smoking gun—just a steady stream of reports occurring outside the glare of MSN exposure (McClatchy newspapers were stellar, as were the National Journal and a number of lefty blogs). The result? Up until fairly recently, somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% of the public thought Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. Many thought Iraqis were among the 9/11 hijackers. In short, a news media devoted to entertainment in the chase for advertising dollars and cowed by the administration into docility provided no useful information for the American public to use in evaluating the situation. After all, it was only a story about the way this country was manipulated into backing the unprovoked invasion of another country, with its attendant loss of thousands, perhaps millions, of lives.
So here’s where we come in. Barack Obama, as we all know, is running on a platform of bringing change to the way Washington functions and the ways we think about what government can and should do. Part of that, obviously, involves ending the misbegotten war in Iraq. To do that, we need to educate the public about the reality of what’s been done by President Katrina and his cronies in our name. The starting point of that education, it seems to me, has to be alerting people to the coverup outlined above and then the reality that coverup was designed to obscure.
Please feel free to offer your observations in the Comments section below.
Links:
For an excellent collection of essays on the Iraq war by noted historians, see Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn from the Past, ed. Lloyd Gardner, Marilyn B. Young
emptywheel has a discussion of the politics around the release of Phase II of the report here:
See the Center for Public Integrity’s War Card for an exhaustive record of the entire history of manipulation.
John Dean on the Bush Administration’s manipulation of the Senate’s Iraq Commission
Republican Senate Intelligence Committee chair shifted blame from the White House
Rep. Jane Harmon charges House Intelligence Committee Republicans with refusing to investigate White House behavior prior to the war
NYT: Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence Doubts
White House hid evidence of NIE doubts re claims made in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech
Cheney, Libby withheld key documents on Iraq war intelligence from Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004
NPR: Iraq War Intelligence Fact Check
For those who haven’t followed the issue closely, Bush and his cronies set up an "alternative" intelligence outfit in the Pentagon (the Office of Special Plans, run by Douglas Feith) to provide the administration with phony “evidence” to back up a decision he arrived at beforehand. Like Alice in Wonderland, “first the sentence, then the evidence.”
Then, adding to the fun, when forced to set up a congressional investigation of government activities in the lead-up to the war, Bush and Cheney, working with their cronies in Congress, arranged to have the “investigation” split in two—the first part, dealing with intelligence failures, focused on the CIA and was completed before the 2004 election (the timing is crucial here). The second part, dealing with the activities of the White House, was delayed until after the 2004 election (again, timing is everything here). Then the Republicans in Congress dropped the second part altogether, which is why it’s taken until now for a Democratic Congress to finish and issue the report. Clever, yes/no? I believe the term that describes this whole process (except the last part, obviously) is “coverup.” Needless to say, even if there were enough Democrats willing to support impeachment (and a number of Dems representing conservative districts do not), it’s too late now for that.
Now add another piece to the puzzle. The obvious question when faced with all this is, why didn’t people organize massive protests, flood the media with letters, e-mails and phone calls, and generally raise a ruckus about this? Let me answer that by asking another question: Who was going to tell them? As you can see, the machinations undertaken by Bush and friends were pretty convoluted. It bears mentioning here that 80% of the public gets ALL of its news from television. Yet there were no arresting visuals to show on the evening news. There hasn’t been, until now, anything close to a smoking gun—just a steady stream of reports occurring outside the glare of MSN exposure (McClatchy newspapers were stellar, as were the National Journal and a number of lefty blogs). The result? Up until fairly recently, somewhere in the neighborhood of 70% of the public thought Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. Many thought Iraqis were among the 9/11 hijackers. In short, a news media devoted to entertainment in the chase for advertising dollars and cowed by the administration into docility provided no useful information for the American public to use in evaluating the situation. After all, it was only a story about the way this country was manipulated into backing the unprovoked invasion of another country, with its attendant loss of thousands, perhaps millions, of lives.
So here’s where we come in. Barack Obama, as we all know, is running on a platform of bringing change to the way Washington functions and the ways we think about what government can and should do. Part of that, obviously, involves ending the misbegotten war in Iraq. To do that, we need to educate the public about the reality of what’s been done by President Katrina and his cronies in our name. The starting point of that education, it seems to me, has to be alerting people to the coverup outlined above and then the reality that coverup was designed to obscure.
Please feel free to offer your observations in the Comments section below.
Links:
For an excellent collection of essays on the Iraq war by noted historians, see Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam: Or, How Not to Learn from the Past, ed. Lloyd Gardner, Marilyn B. Young
emptywheel has a discussion of the politics around the release of Phase II of the report here:
See the Center for Public Integrity’s War Card for an exhaustive record of the entire history of manipulation.
John Dean on the Bush Administration’s manipulation of the Senate’s Iraq Commission
Republican Senate Intelligence Committee chair shifted blame from the White House
Rep. Jane Harmon charges House Intelligence Committee Republicans with refusing to investigate White House behavior prior to the war
NYT: Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence Doubts
White House hid evidence of NIE doubts re claims made in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech
Cheney, Libby withheld key documents on Iraq war intelligence from Senate Intelligence Committee in 2004
NPR: Iraq War Intelligence Fact Check
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