Haunting the Web Since 1999
So, with that in mind: Yes, Virginia, it is ok for the President of the United States to talk to schoolchildren. In fact, it should probably be considered part of the job. Ask Ronald Reagan. Or George Bush Sr. Or just consider the picture above, taken eight years ago next week.
“‘We have been saying all along that the most important part of this debate is not the public option, but rather ensuring choice and competition,’ an aide said. ‘There are lots of different ways to get there.‘” Granted it’s in Politico, which always needs to be taken with a grain of salt, but Team Obama is apparently floating another no-public-option trial balloon. “On health care, Obama’s willingness to forgo the public option is sure to anger his party’s liberal base. But some administration officials welcome a showdown with liberal lawmakers if they argue they would rather have no health care law than an incremental one. The confrontation would allow Obama to show he is willing to stare down his own party to get things done.“
Hmmm. “Getting tough” with the Left (while having Democratic majorities in both Houses of Congress) to impress people on the Right who can’t stand you and want you to fail.That doesn’t sound like change we can believe in either, and it’s going to turn off the people who got this president elected in droves. I fear the Third Way/DLC careerist cadre in and around the administration are blowing a historic opportunity here.
Update: “‘It’s so important to get a deal,’ a White House official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity in order to be candid about strategy. ‘He will do almost anything it takes to get one.’” Sigh…I know I’m not a master tactician or anything, but, as with dropping single-payer right away, I would think telegraphing “we’re really really desperate” before coming to the table is not a very good negotiating strategy.
More recent signs of the freefall of journalistic integrity in the Beltway:
* Marc Ambinder, a thoroughly lousy blogging “journalist” in the Atlantic stable, chalks up prescient criticism of the Bush administration’s gaming of security alerts as solely the result of liberal fringe-hippy “gut hatred.” Says Ambinder in a burst of CYA blather: “Information asymmetry is always going to exist, and, living as we do in a Democratic system, most journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt, even having learned lessons about giving the government that benefit.” Way to speak truth to power, Marc. In other words, suck-up, spit-down, and let’s not let the facts — or god forbid, any attempted acts of daily journalism — get in the way of our obsequious administration boot-licking.
FWIW, after getting roundly slammed for this ridiculous understanding of what constitutes journalism, Ambinder walked back his comments…some. (It hasn’t caused him to deviate from his usual m.o., however, which is acting as stenographer to people in power and parsing the day’s news to find that exact comfortable midpoint where the CW resides. And sadly,he’s not even the worst blogger over at the Atlantic — that would be the former Jane Galt, Megan McArdle.)
* TIME’s Joe Klein has been on a bit of a losing streak lately. Ostensibly a “liberal” — at least the Village’s town crier, Howard Kurtz, considers him one — Klein is, like Ambinder and so many other of his ostensibly lefty pundit colleagues — really just an establishmentarian. He rolls over for the powerful and spends most of his copy and television appearances simply honing his “I’m a lefty, but I’m one of the sane ones” schtick. Take any given issue, look over Klein’s output, and you’ll usually find him, a la Howard Fineman, staking out that comfortable middle where roadkill dies and TV pundits thrive. (Most recent case in point: health care reform, where’s he’s for…something…but lately could really take or leave that goofy public option.)
Anyway, Klein recently made the mistake of mouthing off about those crazy lefties, and particularly Glenn Greenwald — whom he weirdly deems a “civil liberties absolutist” — in front of a very able blogger (and in a bit of grand historical irony, the granddaughter of I.F. Stone), who cut him short in hilarious fashion. Klein then took his anti-Greenwald crusade to Journolist, where his angry screeds and troubles with facts didn’t seem particularly well-received either.
So, now Klein has taken to ranting on Swampland about his recent troubles. Arguing that Greenwald indulges in “intemperate attacks in which he questions the character of — no, it’s worse than that: he slimes — anyone who has the temerity to disagree with him,” Klein also deems Aimai, the aforementioned partygoer/blogger, a “rather pathetic woman acolyte of Greenwald” — a bit intemperate, don’tcha think? As for Greenwald himself, Klein considers him “thoroughly dishonorable,” as well as — I kid you not — insufficiently pro-military. “I have never seen him write a positive sentence about the US military,” Klein declaims, a paragraph or so before he admits that “I am not a religious reader of Greenwald.”
Now, putting aside whether Klein’s blatant and bizarre Cheneyism is true — it isn’t — as well as Klein’s self-evident buffoonery here, how would penning enthusiastic copy about the US armed forces be in any way a reasonable evaluator of journalistic integrity? It’s like these pundits have so talked themselves into ignoring the grotesquely under-reported Pentagon pundit scandal that they’re starting to believe their own talking points. Screaming “You don’t love the troops!!” is a naked and craven attempt at ad hominem obfuscation pretty much every time a politician engages in it. But coming from the pen of a journalist, and a purported “lefty” one at that, it’s just plain ridiculous.
(By the way, Greenwald’s own thoughts on this are here, although the Swampland commenters do just as solid a job of eviscerating Klein for this disastrous posting. As does Aimai the Acolyte, who in her response gets in this certifiable zinger: “He’s not a public intellectual — he’s a f**king wind sock. And he knows it.“)
* Moving to another purported lefty of the establishment press, calling out the WP‘s Richard Cohen for dim reasoning and faulty logic these days is like calling the sky blue — it’s just the way it is. Nevertheless, his piece on torture today was particularly vile, and it’s a textbook case of two standard operating Beltway-pundit presumptions, also witnessed in the cases of Ambinder and Klein: [1] Establishment journalists are exceedingly special people, and [2] the height of wisdom is always to be found in the exact middle-of-the-road.
To take point one first, Cohen frets about Attorney General Holder’s new weaksauce-as-intended inquiry into CIA torture because of the outrageous and despicable violations of civil liberties committed upon…Judith Miller. He writes: “Special prosecutors are often themselves like interrogators — they don’t know when to stop. They go on and on because, well, they can go on and on. One of them managed to put Judith Miller of The New York Times in jail — a wee bit of torture right there.” Uh, no.
A few years after getting absolutely played by the powers-that-be and reporting lies about the existence of WMD in Iraq in the paper of record, NYT reporter Judith Miller spent three months in a comparatively nice prison cell because she refused to testify in the Plame investigation about one of those very same powerful people, Scooter Libby. Now, however you feel about what happened with Ms. Miller, she was not tortured. She was not waterboarded dozens or hundreds of times. She was not tortured for refusing to assert a false positive. She was never given the Room 101 treatment. And she did not die in our custody. So that truly bizarre analogy breaks down pretty quickly.
Even more irritating, however, is the hemming-and-hawing, “pox on both your houses” attempt at moderation Cohen tries to employ through the rest of this piece. “This business of what constitutes torture is a complicated matter. It is further complicated by questions about its efficacy: Does it sometimes work? Does it never work? Is it always immoral? What about torture that saves lives? What if it saves many lives? What if one of those lives is your child’s?” Cohen asks these questions as if they’re unanswerable profundities…or as if all of the considerable data showing torture is completely ineffective does not exist.
Then he plays the 24 game: “Ah yes, the interrogator must build rapport with the captured terrorist. That might work, but it would take time. It could take a lot of time.” Again, Cohen ignores the fact that the ticking-time-bomb scenario is a comic book fantasy with absolutely no application to the real world.
And he saves his worst for last: Torture, Cohen writes, “cannot be the subject of an ideological tug of war, both sides taking extreme and illogical positions — torture never works, torture always works, torture is always immoral, torture is moral if it saves lives. Torture always is ugly. So, though, is the hole in the ground where the World Trade Center once stood. ” Did you catch that? Before Cohen took us to commercial with a resounding chorus of 9/11, 9/11, 9/11, he deemed that “torture never works” and “torture is always immoral” are now “extreme and illogical positions,” right on a par with “torture always works.” Say what?
It is exactly these types of false equivalencies, usually fostered by columnists these days to CYA and prostrate before power, that is killing what’s left of journalistic integrity in the Beltway. For some reason or another — most likely so as not to lose their privileged place of influence in the hive — “journalists” like Ambinder, Klein, and Cohen seem to think it’s their job finding, and then reporting from, the safe, non-threatening and perfectly vanilla midpoint between opposing political sides. The whole “holding up claims to independent, verifiable facts” aspect of journalism is a completely lost art among far too many of today’s pundit class. It gets in the way of their lazy sense of entitlement, I guess, and I’m sure it really cuts back on the talking out of one’s ass on TV for a living.
Put another way, it’s Paul Begala’s “Neil Armstrong principle all over again: “If John McCain and Sarah Palin were to say the moon was made of green cheese, we can be certain that Barack Obama and Joe Biden would pounce on it, and point out it’s actually made of rock. And you just know the headline in the paper the next day would read: ‘CANDIDATES CLASH ON LUNAR LANDSCAPE.’“
For all of Ambinder, Klein, and Cohen’s many faults, the problem with establishment journalism today is bigger than any of them — they’re just useful case studies in a diseased system. The values ostensibly undergirding the punditocracy — speak truth to power; check your sources, resort to facts; have some clue what you’re talking about — have been corrupted, and the whole rotten enterprise is now in an advanced state of decay. (For yet another example, see MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, who — as soon as he moved up a few pegs in the Beltway regime — started laughing off torture investigations as cable news “catnip.”)
This long post may just read like sarcastic score-settling, but this is no small matter. The desiccated values and m.o. of today’s Beltway pundit class are helping to kill off health care reform. They’re helping Dubya-era criminals get away with torture. And they’re going to derail any meaningful attempts at systemic political reform in the future…unless we start holding their feet to the fire. A republic needs no courtiers — it damn well needs good journalists.
The story of our journalistic establishment over the past thirty years is basically Bob Woodward, writ large: Beltway journalists and pundits used to challenge the politicians in power and serve as the public’s vital and necessary watchdogs. Now, like any old mutt, far too many just want to sit next to the masters, bark at those who would deign to threaten them, and try to get rewarded for their servility with an occasional scratch behind the ears. This will not do.
“Holder has fallen prey to the sort of magical legal thinking that seeps through the whole CIA report: the presumption that if there’s a legal memo, it must be legal…In other words, we are now protecting the good-faith torturers. That isn’t just wrong, it’s outrageous. It ratifies the most toxic aspect of the whole legal war on terror: that anything becomes permissible if it’s served up with a side of memo. Paper your misconduct with footnotes and justifications–even after the fact–and you can do as you please.“
Slate‘s Dahlia Lithwick explains the fundamental problem with the Justice Department’s new inquiry into Dubya-era torture: “Pretending we are investigating and curtailing a torture program isn’t all that different from pretending we didn’t torture in the first place.“
Meanwhile — hold on to your hats, people — Slate‘s Tim Noah discovers that Dick Cheney hasn’t been entirely truthful about what’s in the theoretically exculpatory CIA memos. “Portions have been redacted, so perhaps the evidence Cheney claims that enhanced interrogation saved American lives has been blacked out. But judging from what’s visible to the naked eye, the documents do not provide anything like the vindication that Cheney claims.” (Of course, even if they did provide said vindication, the question of whether or not torture is effective — 24 notwithstanding, we’re pretty sure it isn’t — is a completely separate question from whether or not torture is legal — it isn’t.)
“The narrative is simple: Insurance company plans have failed to care for our people. They profit from denying care. Americans care about one another. An American plan is both the moral and practical alternative to provide care for our people.“
Cognitive scientist George Lakoff discusses how the administration should best promote health reform (and the American Plan, nee “public option”), and offers a choice critique of “policy speak” — the old progressive standby of “enlightening public opinion” — that would make Walter Lippmann very happy: “To many liberals, Policy Speak sounds like the high road: a rational, public discussion in the best tradition of liberal democracy. Convince the populace rationally on the objective policy merits. Give the facts and figures. Assume self-interest as the motivator of rational choice. Convince people by the logic of the policymakers that the policy is in their interest. But to a cognitive scientist or neuroscientist, this sounds nuts. The view of human reason and language behind Policy Speak is just false. “
Lakoff aside, the good folks at Media Matters have compiled a useful list of “Myths and Falsehoods about Health Care Reform,” and how best to refute them. And, next time somebody starts ranting at you about how Big Guv’mint never does anything right, send ’em here with a smile.
“‘I don’t understand why the left of the left has decided that this is their Waterloo,’ said a senior White House adviser, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. ‘We’ve gotten to this point where health care on the left is determined by the breadth of the public option. I don’t understand how that has become the measure of whether what we achieve is health-care reform.’” In one of the dumbest unsourced administration quotes since “the reality-based community,” an unnamed White House official indulges his/her pique with progressives by marginalizing the public option.
Uh, what? First off, this is your plan, White House folks, and not really the type of thing you want to characterize as “left of the left.” Second, the “left of the left”, as most people know, would actually prefer a single-payer system, and in fact find the public option to be pretty weak tea — the type of compromise between comprehensive reform and the status quo that we should have ended up with at the close of negotiations, not used as the opening salvo of our health care strategy. Third, the quote demonstrates a troubling arrogance toward, and an idiotic contempt for, both the administration’s natural allies in this fight and the very people who put them in office. Spitting in the eye of progressives in order to seem moderate to folks who will never, ever agree with you is not only counter-productive, but pointless and insulting.
Bad messaging, bad politics…This is an amateur move, and no mistake. One hopes Mr./Mrs. Anon. at the very least caught an earful about it this morning. And that there are some people in and around the inner circle who think a little more highly of this same public option that the administration has pushing for months. And that the archetypal DLC/Third Way contempt for progressives evinced in the quote is nipped in the bud, like, yesterday. These type of “let’s scoff at the lefty fringe” insults, like the self-aggrandizing “centrist” careerists who make them, are not part of change we can believe in. In fact, they sound entirely too much like more of the same.
TLDR version: Trying to marginalize the lefties who are behind you in order to appease the righties who hate you is not a winning strategy, in health care or anything else. Nor is it at all what we voted for. Get it together.
“So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers — these are ‘either’ the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube?…They are both. If you don’t understand that any moment of genuine political change always produces both, you can’t understand America, where the crazy tree blooms in every moment of liberal ascendancy, and where elites exploit the crazy for their own narrow interests.“
In the WP, historian Rick Perlstein puts the latest incarnation of the stark raving right-wing in historical perspective. The difference this time? The media is completely failing at its job. “The tree of crazy is an ever-present aspect of America’s flora. Only now, it’s being watered by misguided he-said-she-said reporting and taking over the forest. Latest word is that the enlightened and mild provision in the draft legislation to help elderly people who want living wills — the one hysterics turned into the ‘death panel’ canard — is losing favor, according to the Wall Street Journal, because of ‘complaints over the provision.’ Good thing our leaders weren’t so cowardly in 1964, or we would never have passed a civil rights bill — because of complaints over the provisions in it that would enslave whites.”
Honestly, this is pathetic. As I said here, it’s time to raise our expectations of what we can achieve in space, and fund manned exploration of the solar system accordingly. Particularly given how much we’re blowing on the Pentagon’s space toys at the moment, we could stand to spend a bit more on one of the most important collective human endeavors still before us.
In other words, Attorney General Holder’s big plan appears to be snag a Jack Lint (re: Lynndie England) or two, while retroactively legitimizing the real criminals who set these thoroughly un-American torture policies in motion, and then call it a day. This is not justice, nor is it change we can believe in.
Civil libertarians across the board are livid at today’s news, and for good reason. Worse, this is just the most recent chapter in the Obama administration’s blatantly terrible record on civil liberties issues over these past six months. The President’s nudge, nudge, wink wink stance on all this last April — these aren’t “really” our policies” — looks ever more mealymouthed and insulting with each new revelation. That dog won’t hunt anymore.
Whatever happens with health insurance reform, and let’s hope it passes with real teeth, the president’s civil liberties record thus far counts as a real moral failure for this administration. Their enthusiastic continuation of Dubya-era policies on this front does violence not only to the reasons why many of us voted for Obama in the first place, but to the founding principles of our increasingly aggrieved republic. For shame.
“That’s happened with increasing frequency at the FEC lately. Election-law experts, supporters of campaign-finance regulations, and even some members of the commission itself are expressing growing concern about a string of cases in which the three Republicans on the commission — led by Tom DeLay’s former ethics lawyer — have voted as a block against enforcement, preventing the commission from carrying out its basic regulatory function.” Pete Martin and Zachary Roth of TPM Muckraker delve into how Republicans antithetical to campaign finance reform have effectively sabotaged the FEC. “The FEC, he said, has been made ‘ineffective’ — and not by accident. ‘This is what McConnell had in mind.’“
“Of course, the one person who could do the most to get the commission back on track is President Obama…Most experts believe that the White House supports stronger campaign-finance laws as a goal, but, with a host of other issues on its plate, is reluctant to pick a fight with the GOP Senate leader. ‘They’re picking their priorities, and they don’t want to take on Mitch McConnell right now,’ said Hasen. ‘I consider that unfortunate.‘” Anyone else sensing a pattern?