Politics in the Post-Media (Post-Press) World

Very interesting article by Ezra Klein in this month’s TAP on the whereabouts and activities of one Al Gore. Gore has been eerily right on so much since he was so wrong in running his campaign for the White House, hitting hard on the failings and dangers of the Bush Administration. But what is of additional interest is the ways in which he went about getting his message out:

On August 7, 2003, Gore headed to New York University to offer one of his first major speeches since his concession address; it was a notably prescient condemnation of the Bush administration’s later bellicosity and overreach. But more visionary than the content was the distribution method: the speech was Gore’s first -- but not his last -- offered under the auspices of the online-activism powerhouse MoveOn.org, an alliance that granted Gore a direct conduit to millions of engaged liberal activists nationwide.

“I know the word fell out of favor after the dot-com collapse,” mused Wes Boyd, founder of MoveOn.org, “but he’s doing disintermediation. He contacted us in the summer of 2003, said he wanted to give a speech, and was wondering if we’d like to sponsor it. What we lend to it is some of that disintermediation.”

Disintermediation is a big word for a type of subtraction, the sort that excludes the middleman (the “mediator”). As a dot-com term, it described producers selling directly to customers rather than working through established retail channels. In Gore’s case, it describes a public figure distributing his words directly to the public rather than working through established media outlets.

The reason Gore sought this out, as former FCC Chairman Reed Hundt, Gore’s friend since 1961, told me, is that “Gore wants to make change, not be part of the distortive, stifling process of the mainstream media.” Speaking into the cameras, the former VP had learned, was like talking into one of those gag gift bullhorns -- what came out had little relation to what went in.

“Gore’s own view,” says Hundt, “is that he sighed noisily in the debate and used the wrong telephone line to ask for money and the media said these are momentous events. Meanwhile, they ignore global warming and the failure to catch Osama and the destruction of the safety net.”

So Gore sought a way to bypass the filter. Every time he gives a speech under MoveOn’s auspices, a guaranteed 3 million MoveOn members get the address blasted directly in their inboxes, where it can be read in full. From there, the speech gets e-mailed around, promoted on the blogs, passed from friend to neighbor -- what tech types call “viral marketing.” At no point in this process does a news editor or television producer decide which sound bites will be emphasized for ratings. MoveOn allows him to speak on his own terms and individuals to distribute his speeches on theirs. It’s Gore Unplugged, and everyone’s got a ticket.

Gore came to this approach the hard way, having badly used and been badly abused by the traditional political discourse and dissemination through mainstream media and press outlets (“MSM”). Gore’s methods present some fascinating scenarios for dealing with a malfunctioning MSM, but I can see significant limitations and problems with the approach.

1) Already there are signs that it is an effective means (in terms of economics and distribution) of communicating with Gore’s base, and with his target audience of already committed political activists who might be convinced by his ideas. But it is not enough to have large numbers of people agree with you or to convince large numbers of people to agree with you through the unfettered force of your ideas. This support must be translated into street-level activity (there is ample evidence that Gore’s methods can also work well as a fundraising plan). Readers have to be moved to the polls, to volunteer and to organize to operate within the mechanics of elective politics. However, there is nothing in this method that prevents a simultaneous organization and marshalling of resources and funds, provided it is directed by experienced, talented and committed political operatives. There is nothing inherent in communication within the MSM media, that would suggest those results would more readily be accessible. But given the primacy of the MSM, as of this point, the political operatives, right down to the precinct level have been brought up and fed on a diet of MSM and it will be a hard habit to break.

The rise of the Republican Right was, in part, a product of a low-tech version of the Gore approach. One of the true accomplishments of the Right was its creation of a support and information network, in the form of alliances with religious organizations, Conservative think-tanks, and direct- mail political newsletters. By the time the talk-radio, and then the politically dedicated cable news networks came online in force, the groundwork and ground soldiers were already working in place, and there was a synergistic acceleration of influence. Gore means to use the web to automate these devices, and its my sense that such an approach is more suited to Democratic and Liberal potential constituents, as the internet is the way in which these groups prefer to get their information.

2. Today’s political milieu is nothing if not increasingly polarized, and the Republican Right have been the loss leaders in producing this sorry state of affairs. The polarization among the politically active is, if anything, more severe than is widely recognized, hidden by the presence of the majority of Americans within the natural center of the political spectrum, This natural centrism is hardly surprising, given the relative peace and prosperity of American postwar society. Even so, the center has been continually losing people to the margins, as single-issue controversies, such as the Viet Nam War, Watergate, abortion and 9/11 have produced fractures at the extremities of the center. The center will not hold indefinitely, when the operatives on either margin increasingly control the process and thereby the agenda.

To the extent that Gore (or some Democrat following Gore’s – and Dean’s – approach) succeeds in making headway in the nominating stage of the coming elections, there will be a tendency to discount the views of the center, despite all the blathering on and on about swing voters. The Bush Administration is like one long demonstration of the dangers of this approach -- of catering to those who are most easily accessible to and susceptible to your message. The danger is not merely one of losing contact with or support within centrist swing voters, but more significantly – losing contact with the aggregated wisdom of so many Americans.

With the rise of talk radio and politically committed cable news, and with specialty religious-oriented “news” services, such as those run by Pat Robertson, the Rove/Bush Administration had an embarrassment of media riches, only too willing to be malleable. Many of these new media outlets, when faced with troubling realities, increasingly drifted toward ‘making stuff up’ to fit their dogma. The accountability shoe never dropped. The kitten-weak attempts by the MSM to impose traditional standards were subsumed and eventually drowned within the daily cacophony of 24/7 confrontational news. The lesson was not lost on Rove/Bush, and has been largely institutionalized in their image management (see, for example, Swift Boat Veterans). Having seen the almost magic bullet quality of a distorted new media, Rove/Bush adopted these same techniques as a kind of working White House operating procedure. Where once these methods were resorted to only in times of unexpected crisis, they were soon incorporated directly into the policy-making and policy-selling process, with incredibly disastrous real world (as opposed to MSM world) results. However effective this approach has been for Rove/Bush, in terms of gaining and consolidating power, I have no wish to see a Democratic/Liberal version play out, as the Republic might not stand further success along these lines.

3. The other glaring limitation of the Gore approach is one that Howard Dean is painfully familiar with. To the extent that you are successful, you have to eventually come to terms with the MSM. I do not see within Gore’s methods, a dependable vehicle for breaking the message out into the general public, to the center, other than at last submitting to the traditional paddling gauntlet that is the MSM. From Gore’s perspective, there is less to lose than might be expected. The MSM is already pre-disposed to undermine Gore, just as it was throughout his campaign, and throughout Dean’s abortive run, and Kerry’s run, and more recently, the initial forays onto the national stage by Mark Warner. The MSM’s hostility will be even more pronounced, if they have been effectively cut out of the nominating process. But to what net effect? A more overtly hostile MSM might be less damaging in the near term, as part of the deadly impact of a biased MSM on Democrats recently has been that the attacks have been below the surface and under the guise of an ‘independent’ and ‘balanced’ MSM. Why not have at it, out in the open? Draw them out from under their cover, where their prejudices and compromised interests will be transparent, no matter the news ad campaign sloganeering. Gore’s approach is premised on an intelligent and ultimately independent electorate, if only he can be heard clearly enough.

I don’t expect the MSM to sit idly by and remain in a purely reactive posture. There have been a series of MSM articles and reports that reflect the first instinct of the MSM is to strike back at the upstart alternatives and at candidates that associate with them (the rapid take-down of Dean). You can see the MSM push-back in the deafening non-coverage of most of Gore’s major addresses during this period. Say what you want about Gore, but he is a former Vice President of the United States, and a well-informed one at that. Yet his blistering critiques on the Rove/Bush Administration’s environmental, civil liberties, and foreign policy debacles were all but ignored by the MSM (they preferred to run soft-focus pieces on how there were no strong voices within the Democratic Party).

But MSM is also busily and manically trying to co-opt the new process, with tepid results so far. Fox News is not suited to adaptation (although Murdoch is famously a political and commercial realist when it suits him), so it is not surprising to see their institutional hostility to new and independent outlets. Fox News is surprisingly calcified for a relatively young institution, so the strain from seismic shifting is starting to show within the rigors of the Fox Mindset. Nicholas Lemann has a hilarious but astute profile of Papa Bear O’Reilly in this week’s New Yorker (his description of O’Reilly’s forgotten novel “Those Who Trespass” makes me want to rush out to B&N tomorrow). Lemann makes this observation of the evolution of the O’Reilly Factor:

. . . . you’ll be surprised by how little of the content these days is political. “The O’Reilly Factor” is, increasingly, not a conservative show but a cop show—“O’Reilly: Special Victims Unit,” perhaps—devoted particularly to sex offenders; the host, in effect, is Shannon Michaels playing Tommy O’Malley. Once, when Howard Stern was asked to explain his success, he said that he owed it to lesbians. O’Reilly owes his to child molesters.

I won’t pretend to be a faithful Fox News watcher (shudder), but if ever you go out to lunch in a restaurant, diner or delicatessen, almost certainly you will be subjected to daytime spectacle of Fox News on the establishments’ large-screen televisions. At first, I expected to be confronted by hard news, Fox style (for hardheads), but what I have most often seen is America’s Greatest Police Chases and afternoon talk-show host, audience participation format shows about some lurid, not even marginal outrage (it’s like angry, amped-up Sally Jessie Raphaels have taken over). Fox personnel still affect the high-intensity, high-volume barking delivery, but what I am hearing (after the ringing in my ears quiets down) is the sound of politics passing them by. The more traditionally Aussie Tabloid format and subject matter is what sells these days.

So it is within the realm of possibility that the Gore approach could result in a change in the hard-wired-against dynamics of MSM coverage, at least over the long haul. In the pre-war era, the print media dominated political coverage. FDR rose to power and transformed America’s fortunes in the face of overwhelming editorial opposition. Radio was his secret weapon.

Mission Creaps (DHS Style)

The 9/11 Commission, co-chaired and controlled by a loyal old-line Republican, graded the Department of Homeland Security, Bush’s exemplar of post-9/11 governance, on its ability to perform its first and primary mission – responding to and preventing terrorist threats.

Provide adequate radio spectrum for first responders – Grade: F

Establish a unified Incident Command System -- Grade: C

Allocate homeland security funds based on risk -- Grade: F

Critical infrastructure risks and vulnerabilities assessment – Grade: D

Private sector preparedness -- Grade: C

National Strategy for Transportation Security -- Grade: C-

Improve airline passenger pre-screening -- Grade: F

Improve airline screening checkpoints to detect explosives -- Grade: C

Checked bag and cargo screening -- Grade: D

Better terrorist travel strategy (Border Security) -- Incomplete

Comprehensive screening system -- Grade: C

Biometric entry-exit screening system -- Grade: B

International collaboration on borders and document security -- Grade: D

Standardize secure identifications -- Grade: B-

The 9/11 Commission rightly focused on DHS’s stunning failure to meet the challenges directly relating to terrorism. They did not dwell in detail on the wisdom of broadening the brief of such an inept, ill-conceived and non-performing Department, to take on the additional burdens of overseeing and directing the response to natural disasters, like Katrina. The DHS Katrina performance was the subject of a Select “Bipartisan” Congressional Committee (Bipartisan in the sense that it was stocked entirely by Republican supporters of President Bush). The lead paragraph from the section of the Committee’s report dedicated to the performance of DHS needs no further explanation: “Critical elements of the national response plan were executed late, ineffectively, or not at all.” Here is another excerpt from the Republican Congressional report:

Not only did senior DHS officials fail to acknowledge the scale of the impending disaster, they were ill prepared due to their lack of experience and knowledge of the required roles and responsibilities prescribed by the NRP (National Response Plan).

I know of no parallel to the universal condemnation of the performance of the DHS, a potentially critical, cabinet-level department of the federal government. Bush, having butchered the preparation and response to the storm and floods, and having slept-walked and strummed through the political firestorm that followed in Katrina’s wake, begrudgingly mouthed qualified words of disappointment about his government’s shameful and abject failure. He promised to do better, and to “fix” the flaws in the DHS.

The fix is now in, in the form of a stealth Presidential Executive Order entitled, “ Responsibilities of the Department of Homeland Security with Respect to Faith-Based and Community Initiatives” once again broadening the mission of an already overwhelmed and destructively non-functioning department, this time reaching clearly into WTF territory. With respect to faith-based and community initiatives? Go ahead, link away to the order and search in vain for the words “terrorism”, “hurricane”. This is one expensive shoe dropping, and while we will get the bill, the President’s Pals will get the cash.

Here is a taste from the Executive Order:

Sec. 2. Purpose of Center. The purpose of the Center shall be to coordinate agency efforts to eliminate regulatory, contracting, and other programmatic obstacles to the participation of faith-based and other community organizations in the provision of social and community services."

Sec. 3. Responsibilities of the Center for Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. In carrying out the purpose set forth in section 2 of this order, the Center shall:
(a) conduct, in coordination with the WHOFBCI Director, a department-wide audit to identify all existing barriers to the participation of faith-based and other community organizations in the delivery of social and community services by the Department, including but not limited to regulations, rules, orders, procure-ment, and other internal policies and practices, and outreach activities that unlawfully discriminate against, or otherwise discourage or disadvantage the participation of faith-based and other community organizations in Federal programs;
(b) coordinate a comprehensive departmental effort to incorporate faith-based and other community organizations in Department programs and initiatives to the greatest extent possible;

There is no acknowledgement in the Order that the DHS failed to execute on its reason for being. But something else is missing. I was struck be the absence of qualifying terms in the Order, so as to make clear that only those "obstacles" (read - regulations, rules, laws, US Constitution) which are unfair or illegal should be targeted for elimination. Reading this Order, I might be tempted to think our President wanted all obstacles purged, whether those obstacles served a legitimate purpose or not. But that would be silly of me.

Ever with their eyes on the ball, the Administration has impressively identified and quickly corrected the most pressing failing of the DHS, the gravest lost chance of them all. The bloated parish floaters and the water-logged wreckage that once was one of the Great American Cities was a golden opportunity to cash in on American’s empty-headed empathy and their childish impulse to lend aid to those in most desperate straights.

Brownie’s ham-handed attempt to divert relief funds to Bush-supporting, quasi-religious “charities” was the source of additional consternation directed toward the Administration, and this Brownie Bumble was the one thing he did that finally shook the President’s incredible faith in his man on the ground. FUBAR’ing away the lives and City was strict Administration S.O.P., but leaving money on the table that could otherwise have gone to Rightwing coffers was the cardinal sin. Bush’s famous loyalty has its price, and Brownie was dumped overboard.

The Bush Administration’s bottomless well of overflowing offenses unfortunately obscures gems like this, as fresh atrocities spring forth from the White House on a weekly basis. FEMA, DHS and the entire Bush Administration was in full, all-hands-on- deck, do-nothing-to- help-the- drowning mode. Americans across the land were shocked into near panic by the spectacle of a significant portion of the country going under, while the government played guitars, ate birthday cake and primped and preened for the television cameras. There was an immense and immediate outpouring of help from ordinary Americans, of the most meaningful kind. They were ready, willing and able to lend support, lend even the sweat of their brows, to what they somehow dreamed up as a rational response to unfolding and cascading disaster -- a genuine rescue and relief effort.

The awful prospect of American’s taking the well-being of their fellow citizens into their own hands at last spurred Brownie to action, and he fired off a Press Release ordering volunteers to stay the hell out of it, “Volunteers Should Not Self-Dispatch”. But do send “cash”, and to this list of charities. The original list of approved charities read like it might have come directly from one of Karl Rove’s direct-mailing Political Action Committee databases. Pat Robertson and Ralph Reed would soon be even more flush, and they could jet down with some de minimis remainder of the donations and have themselves a fine old photo op. The critical flaw uncovered by Katrina was that there remained within the gutted shell of FEMA and the newly minted and hollow propaganda arm that was DHS, some pesky contracting regulations, something about qualifications and the need for at least some of the monies donated for specific relief efforts to actually go to those relief efforts. These barriers and obstacles will soon fold up like crumbling levies, and the cash will find its natural and rightful level within the coffers of the Republican Religious Wing. I feel safer already. Bring on the hurricane season!

 

Thomas L. Friedman as Mr. Pither

Last week, the Moustache of Understanding counseled us to put aside our childish and “borderline racist” security concerns about the Dubai Ports Deal: “As a country, we must not go down this road of global ethnic profiling — looking for Arabs under our beds the way we once looked for commies. If we do — if America, the world's beacon of pluralism and tolerance, goes down that road — we will take the rest of the world with us. We will sow the wind and we will reap the whirlwind.” Spoken like the true Oracle of American Facial Hair.

But even the Moustache grows weary sometimes, of being so wise, so Wednesday’s column comes not direct from the Moustache, but from the Moustache’s tummy: “My gut told me this was the case, but it's great to see it confirmed by the latest New York Times/CBS News poll: Americans not only know that our oil addiction is really bad for us, but they would be willing to accept a gasoline tax if some leader would just frame the stakes for the country the right way.” The Gut must not be on speaking terms with the Moustache, because the Moustache’s sublime and surpassing generosity toward the Arab world is not shared by the Moustache’s Gut, as in the Gut’s view, just topping your tank off at your local Exxon station is now tantamount to treason, because when our engines combust and burn gas, which we must replenish, we are, in fact, financing “Al Qaeda, Iran and various hostile Islamist charities with our energy purchases.” Whoa, whiplash city! I think it best that we await reports from other parts of the MOU’s anatomy before we draw any definite conclusions. Personally, I am reserving judgment until I hear from the MOU’s Toenails.

Thomas L. Friedman has disappeared up his own tailpipe on the Dubai Ports Deal, and his self-nullification is a welcome contribution to the debate. But Friedman has other fish to fry in his Wednesday Column entitled “Who’s Afraid of a Gas Tax?”. He once again is beating the drum for a punitive, regressive gas tax, one that will artificially and permanently inflate the price of gas above $3.50 a gallon, preferably even higher. How can he ask such a dumb-ass question? Let me help out on this. The poor, the middle and working class and just about every other American class you can take attendance on would be rightfully afraid of Friedman’s destructive proposal if it weren’t so fantastically absurd. Sticker shock doesn’t begin to describe the impact of the post-Katrina spike, when suddenly your bi-weekly trip to the gas station cost as much as courtside seats at Madison Square Garden.

Much of America already lives in the gathering shadows of debt, and solvency for many would be numbered in weeks if they had to continually peel off C-notes just to get around. Friedman would have half the country hobbling around on foot, and the economy would soon follow to that crawling pace. As the country crashed around him into economic ruins, Friedman would begin a series of columns decrying the fact that his magical solution was not executed in accordance with his Masterful Plans. Just because my theories have resulted in Great Depression scale misery, doesn’t mean we should give up on the whole program! Think of the savings on otherwise necessary expenditures to prop up our crumbling infrastructure! Forget all that bridges and tunnels upkeep.

I-95 could be converted to the world’s longest skate park! Or better yet, as it became bucolic and overrun with various weeds, grasses and native trees, it could become an enchanted bike path, stretching from the top of Maine to Key West! George W.T.F. Bush would truly be our firstest and bestest Bicycle President. When he’s not crashing, his mountain-biking has kept him in fighting trim, and it could do the same for the rest of us. Suddenly, we are all Mr. Pither on “The Cycling Tour”. No Thomas L., Americans are not clamoring to have their gas bills doubled or trebled, no matter what the CBS/Times poll has told your Gut.

The Friedman Laughing Stock is a bubble that shows no sign of bursting, so his inane and insulting ideas are no real threat to damage the vital, and growing more so, interest in the development in an alternative, cleaner, sustainable energy source. We need an new Manhattan Project devoted to this, and it seems fairish that before we saddle the economically challenged with the lion’s share of the costs, we first consider the gargantuan windfall profits the energy sector begrudgingly has had to accept in the Bush years.

Freidman has self-applied the term Flat-Earther, but even so, what can you do with someone who says, “Green is the new red, white and blue, pal. What color are you?" and thinks it’s a cant-miss winning campaign platform. Oh yeah, pal, just ask President Nader about what a hard-luck color Green is in American politics.

UPDATE: Mr. Sulzberger, Tear Down This Wall! (Let Krugman Speak)

FURTHER UPDATE: Steve Gilliard at The News Blog has also noticed something strange in Tierney and Brooks, as his title subtlety suggests.

Brad DeLong picks up from Krugman's column and adds this:

Say, rather, that five things are going on:

1. The rise of a very powerful, successful, exploitative upper class.
2. Further increases in inequality as the tax and transfer system becomes less progressive.
3. Increases in risk that threaten to move middle-class families sharply downward in the wealth distribution.
4. Skill-biased technical change that sharply raises the benefits to education.
5. Holes in the safety net--the fall in the value of the minimum wage, time-limited welfare, and so forth.

____________________________________________________________________

Mr. Sulzberger, Let Krugman be heard! In one sense, there is nothing particularly new in Krugman’s latest column, “Graduates Versus Oligarchs”, as it fits neatly with one of his central themes – the crushing and cruel concentration of wealth within the absolute pinnacle of American society. But the hard numbers tell such a harsh and unjust story that it stuns anew: “. . . . income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent”. Four-Niner-Seven ladies and gentlemen, Four-Niner-Seven. Really wraps a pretty little bow around the Bush and Republican tax polices, doesn’t it?

The column may well be Krugman’s 497th wake-up call, but how well can he be heard behind the New York Times’ subscription wall? Of course, progressive bloggers and even other columnists will pick up the call, but they lack Krugman’s command of the subject matter, his authority and his focus. Inevitably, others picking up Krugman’s column will not so much amplify as distort and dilute it, as they are much given to digressions and ad hominine and long-past relevant attacks on President Clinton. President Clinton may have been riding the rising wave of wealth inequity, but at least he tried to channel some of it off and his tenure was nothing if not prosperous for the country at large. The Republicans, in contrast, have set about pumping wealth ever higher, and are morbidly busy plugging any and all leaks – not one drop, not one cent, to be lost on the inexorable journey to the summit.

Not only does the Times wall-off Krugman behind their pricey and elitist Select scheme, they also drown out his message by continuing to put out and promote the drek that Brooks and Tierney pump out. Bread and circuses have given way to HDTVs and SUVs. Brooks and Tierney work the cultural smoker, fogging up and fouling the air that surrounds Krugman. Tierney today has another cultural fantasy piece, one of a series he and Brooks seem to be running wherein they shapeshift themselves into middle class working moms, explaining everything away in a kind of warmed over Madison Avenue of the Fifties version of momhood and family life for the common folk. It’s more than a little creepy. Brooks, at one point, seemed to edge dangerously close to a sick pathology, when he peeped in on the schoolgirl set’s chatroom banter in “Bondage and Bonding Online”. I’m not kidding, you can link it up. It’s not hard to fathom what motivated Brooks in that particularly disturbing column, but his larger mission is to distract and divide the country with cultural folderol. Brooks blithely explains away the unconscionable siphoning up and off of this country’s hard-earned wealth by attributing it all to the good study habits and clean living of his kind. Brooks’ people aren’t merely guys born on third base thinking they’ve hit a triple; they’re born like they’re white Jackie Robinsons, halfway home down the third-base line with the ball just barely at the release point in the pitcher’s hand.

Never mind the Oligarchy, be afraid of everything else in this world. Be morbidly obsessed with clumps of DNA in strange women’s wombs in every hamlet across America. Go to the Corporate Church of choice. Meanwhile, the working class, the middle class, even the marginally wealthy class are slipping. Everyone knows it and doesn’t want to think about it, no less talk about it. Each of or our ends ends in a bed with a drip, but for those below the Oligarchy, it is a lifetime’s work dripping away through our IVs. No matter no mind. Most Americans are being stalked by debt and healthcare costs and the dimming prospects of our sons and daughters. Boomers are increasingly facing a choice between a reasonably comfortable retirement, or giving the kids at least a puncher’s chance of approaching their parent’s standard of living. You can’t have both.

And the Republican approach to all this is to accelerate the inequity by unconscionable tax breaks for the ultra rich and by trying to pull the plug on the New Deal’s life support. They seem intent on cut-pursing Social Security, Medicaid and Medicare and whatever other safety net the rabble is seen clinging to. What moves them to all-hands-on-deck panic? Not Katrina. What kicks the machinery of Republican activism to adrenaline rush status? Not the prescription drug debacle. No, we’re not sweating those details. Instead, what lights their fire is the awful, unthinkable, nightmarish prospect that the UAE’s ruling Oligarchy might have to forego one small (by their standards) trinket to add to their vast horded wealth. This is what moves the movers and shakers of the Republican Party.

Full Port Press

The New York Times (and other misguided liberal columnists and bloggers) are engaged in a bizarre full-court press to ram the UAE-Ports deal through. Krugman is, as usual, the sensible, if skeptical outlier, but The Moustache of Understanding, Brooks, and Kristof are falling all over themselves trying to make the ports into a litmus test for Arab-bias. It all sounds very noble, very Grey Lady-ish, but it still makes no real-world sense. I have to assume that despite their world-traveling, these guys have never encountered a foreign-run corporation operating on American soil. Sure, the UAE will keep a lot of white, American faces visible, but the nuts and bolts of the operations will certainly be controlled from the UAE, and we will all have to take it on faith that things will be done in strict good-faith.

The UAE has a long history of complicated (to be generous about it) relations with radical, militant Islamists. Even when they are in a public stance of direct and forceful opposition, the back-channel monies and communications continue to flow. From their point-of-view, there is no inconsistency because that is simply the way they keep the lid on the powder keg they sit on at home. They will present, and perhaps even believe, they are completely committed to protecting US interests, but that will be subject to the same sort of hidden hedge-betting that is an integral part of their home rules.

What all this translates into is an unacceptable risk. Perhaps not a certainty of disaster, but certainly a significant and unnecessary risk. So until further notice, they do not get the keys to our ports, or our airports, chemical plants, etc.

I have a suggestion for the Times and like-minded liberals, straining to reach out to the Arab world. A better way of demonstrating a just and enlightened attitude toward Arabs would be to not elect to invade their countries on false pretenses, not kidnap, not hold-without-charge, not murder, not torture, not humiliate and not rape their citizens. And the best and most meaningful way these guys can do this is to not support the Administration’s ongoing efforts to make that sort of treatment a permanent part of our foreign and domestic policy.

The difficulty with this approach for this sort of liberal (leaving out Brooks and his ilk) is that it frustrates the subtext of this support – the straining, unforgivable need to reach out once again to the Bush Administration. After having been seal-clubbed to a bloody pulp over and over again over the last six years, they still are asking, bleating, “why can’t we be friends”? The Bush Administration club is not a surgical instrument. It is the bluntest and crudest of instruments. It is all about battering away for all their worth, never pausing a second to engage in the kind of nuanced reasoning that these back-sliding, gutless liberals return to like a compulsion.

There's Bear in the Woods and a Jackal on the Docks

There is a bear in the woods. For some people the bear is easy to see. Others don't see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame. Others say it's vicious and dangerous. Since no one can really be sure who is right, isn't it smart to be as strong as the bear? If there is a bear....

There's a jackal on the docks. For some people the jackal is easy to see. Others don't see it all. Some people say the jackal is tame. Others say it's vicious and dangerous. (Everyone says the jackal is filthy rich) Since no one can be really sure who is right, isn't it smart to be as strong as the jackal? If there is a jackal . . . . Isn't it smart to at least close the damn kitchen screen-door?

"Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?"

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

David Brooks, Water-carrier, at your service, Mr. Bush. But the strain is starting to show. He's suddenly quite taken with a bleeding heart concern for Arabs, but of the tonier sort, of course. Sure the UAE has gotten US Security religion all of a sudden, but that's because they were in up to their eyeballs in terror-financing and facilitating previously.

I wonder if David Brooks has ever lived in the world? How else could he make such silly statements so consistently? "Nor would the deal radically alter the workplace. If the Dubai holding company does acquire the operating firm, the American longshoremen would stay on the job, the American unions would still be there to organize them, and most or all of the management would probably stay, too." Yeah, David, rest assured that Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed wont make a move unless he has Johnny Friendly's blessings. The UAE has first, last and always been about transparency.

And it has come to this: "The oil-rich nations of the Middle East have plenty of places to invest their money and don't need to do favors for nations that kick them in the teeth." We have come to be dependent on the kindness of oil-rich strangers.


Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, Reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.

Beale: But why me?

Jensen: Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

"Report Suspicious Activity to 1-800-BE-ALERT"

If you mosey by the US Customs and Border Patrol website, you'll see that phrase "Report Suspicious Activity to 1-800-BE-ALERT", which should be familiar to anyone who's ever ridden I-95 down the Atlantic Corridor. When you're in your car buzzing by the Chesapeake Welcome Center, using your cruise control like a restrictor plate, thinking how right Jean Shepard was when he uttered the immortal ". . .God, I love I-95!", well then that admonishing phrase, in a whole continuing series of "South-of-the-Borderesque" signage, is a little out of place. Who can spot suspicious activity at 75-plus? And given the wastes that line the roadway, what would constitute suspicious activity? Someone harvesting Christmas trees from the decretory splendor that is I-95's landscaping?

But "Report Suspicious Activity to 1-800-BE-ALERT" definitely belongs on US Customs and Border Patrol websites and materials. It's not overdone, just persistently there on the left hand margin, floating over to each page you surf to.

Turning the ports over to UAE is, of course, a fantastically, almost an impossibly bad idea. Without the UAE's critical assistance, travel and lodging amenities, general facilitating and magnanimous financial support, there could not have been a 9/11.

If the Saudis rightfully claimed top billing for 9/11, UAE would have been up for Best Supporting. They provided OBL and the Taliban with an unfettered travel point of departure, virtually un-reviewed passporting and visa services, and was pretty much the ATM for the entire 9/11 operation. The 9/11 Commission Report is lousy with references to the UAE. One of those haunting missed opportunities to take OBL out before 9/11 prominently featured the UAE, and it's important to note that during this period the UAE was trying not to tick the US off, and that while it was still a few years before 9/11, we were then trying to take OBL out:

The Desert Camp, February 1999

During the winter of 1998-99, intelligence eported that Bin Ladin frequently visited a camp in the desert adjacent to a larger hunting camp in Helmand province of Afghanistan, used by visitors from a Gulf state. Public sources have stated that these visitors were from the United Arab Emirates. . . . National technical intelligence confirmed the description of the larger camp and showed the nearby presence of an official aircraft of the UAE. The CIA received reports that Bin Ladin regularly went from his adjacent camp to the larger camp where he visited with Emiratis. The location of this larger camp was confirmed by February 9, but the location of Bin Ladin’s quarters could not be pinned down so precisely. Preparations were made for a possible strike at least against the larger camp, perhaps to target Bin Ladin during one of his visits. No strike was launched.

According to CIA officials, policymakers were concerned about the danger that a strike might kill an Emirati prince or other senior officials who might be with Bin Ladin or close by. The lead CIA official in the field felt the intelligence reporting in this case was very reliable; the UBL unit chief at the time agrees. The field official believes today that this was a lost opportunity to kill Bin Ladin before 9/11.

On February 10, Clarke reported that a top UAE official had vehemently denied that high-level UAE officials were in Afghanistan. Evidence subsequently confirmed that high-level UAE officials had been hunting there. By February 12 Bin Ladin had apparently moved on and the immediate strike plans became moot. In March the entire camp complex was hurriedly disassembled.

Poor, Poor Pitiful Me (I shot a man in Texas just to watch him die)

UPDATE: I may never stop throwing up. Joe Klein has an incredible, gushing weeper of a Valentine to Cheney in the online edition of Time Magazine. It is impossible to come up with a more inappropriate analogy than the one Klien does, likening the unpleasantness accompanying Cheney's unbridled bird-blasting to the experience and countenance of veterans who have been subject to prolonged periods of live-fire combat. Kos has a commentary on Klein, and Charles Pierce at TAP lets Klien have it with both barrels. Sorry.

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Of course their first instincts were to try and spike or spin the story, but that damn Harry Whittington had gone and got himself shot, shot real good. Unless he had the decency to go crawl off under some scrub brush and die like a wounded animal, there was going to have to be hospitals and medics and such, and you show up with a face full of buckshot and people are bound to ask questions, like "Who the hell shot you in the face!" So they were faced with the inevitable disclosure, and a real beaut too, the type of incident where even Karl Rove would have to tell the Vice President, "Well there's no way to make it sound like an achievement".

Rove may be without peer when it comes to message massaging, but this Administration, with their Homeric, Titanic string of screw-ups, long ago outstripped his arts. Rove has only one speed really, and it is to tweak and tweak our biases, over and over again, so that they become self-reinforcing and amplifying to the point they drown out the details, the actuality. But there are some things, like doodlin' around on a guitar and cramming ice-cream cake into your gob while one of America's greatest cities drowns, that can not be obscured or disguised. Shootin' a guy in the face with a shotgun is also like that. More and more, what Rove does seems like dropping a dried-out turd on a fancy china plate and sprinkling a little sawdust on it, hitting the Old Triangle and yelling, Chow's On! I don't know how much more of this we can digest. Of course, there will always be those salivating at the sound of the Triangle, and this time, Brit Hume came loping up, eyes drooping and Basset Hound tail wagging, and afterwards "Please sir, I'd like some more".

So we come to Vice President Cheney's begrudging Fox interview. "And it was, I'd have to say, one of the worst days of my life". I don't think Harry Whittington will be too fond of the day, either. What can you say about Brit Hume? Murrow during the Blitz he ain't:

Q Now, is it clear that -- he had caught part of the shot, is that right?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: -- part of the shot. He was struck in the right side of
his face, his neck and his upper torso on the right side of his body.
Q And you -- and I take it, you missed the bird.

Part of the post-blast spinning was to trivialize Whittington's injuries "It was almost like he was spending time with me in my living room," said hospital administrator Peter Banko, who visited Whittington." But it seems like the guy settin' a spell in that 'living room' was in pretty rough shape:

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, I said, "Harry, I had no idea you were there." And --
Q What did he say?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: He didn't respond. He was -- he was breathing, conscious at that point, but he didn't -- he was, I'm sure, stunned, obviously, still trying to figure out what had happened to him.

* * * * *

Q His eyes were open when you found him, then, right?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Yes. One eye was open. But they got him in the emergency room in the small hospital at Kingsville, checked him out further there, then lifted him by helicopter from there into Corpus Christi, which has a big city hospital and all of the equipment.

Cheney's cover blind for not informing the press – that they first had to await a prognosis – is ludicrous. Only Administration stooges like Brit Hume or David Brooks would buy such nonsense. Why not wait until Whittington's fully recovered (let's all hope he does)? That way the whole thing can be presented as an inspirational feel-good story of the year! Cheney was in secure-undisclosed-location lockdown, hunkered in until he could get a fix on how big a disaster he has wrought this time. Despite his lip-service about concern for the Whittington family, Cheney couldn't quite bring himself to bring it off convincingly:

Q When did the family -- when had the family been informed? About what time?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, his wife -- his wife knew as he was leaving the
ranch --
Q Right, what about his children?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I didn't make the calls to his children, so I don't know exactly when those contacts were made.

Harry was leaving the ranch alright, with his face and vital organs full of buckshot. His daughter was quoted as saying she didn't know whether they were taking him to the hospital or the mortuary. Back at "Ranch Headquarters", Vice President Cheney had moved on to more important considerations – whether it would advisable for him to venture back out for more firearms hijinx on Sunday:

Q Will it affect your attitude toward this pastime you so love in the future?
THE VICE PRESIDENT: I can't say that. You know, we canceled the Sunday hunt.
I said, look I'm not -- we were scheduled to go out again on Sunday and I said
I'm not going to go on Sunday, I want to focus on Harry. I'll have to think
about it.

He's thinking about it? Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Special note is taken today, for David Brooks' tear-stained hissy fit in which he laments the state of the Washington politics. What is this world coming to, when the Vice President can't blast his friend in the face with his fancy Italian shotgun, without everyone making a big deal about it? He chides the press and Democratic politicians for not letting Cheney have his little fun in private, but Brooks falls to pieces, all busted-up inside, just thinking about the toll this must be taking on Cheney:

On a personal level, the Cheney-Whittington accident was a sad but unremarkable event. Two men go hunting. Both are sloppy, and one friend shoots another. The victim is suffering but gracious. The shooter is anguished in his guilt.

"The image of him falling is something I will never be able to get out of my mind," Dick Cheney told Brit Hume yesterday, adding, "It was ... one of the worst days of my life." Afterward, he looked back, relived the moment and took responsibility. "It was not Harry's fault. You can't blame anybody else," Cheney said. "I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend."

In normal life, people would look at this event and see two decent men caught in a twist of fate. They would feel concern for the victim and sympathy for the man who fired the gun.

Unremarkable? I know this is Dick Cheney we're talking about, a guy with the blood of tens of thousands in his hands, but unremarkable? Whittington is gracious, but given his 'sloppiness' it’s the least he could do for his Shooter. I don't know, I just don't see anguish coming from Cheney. And decent? There's a word that seldom seems to work its way into a paragraph containing the word "Cheney". 'Normal' people will reserve their sympathy for Cheney. Whittington gets concern, but that's only because if he lingers or fails, it will only cause Cheney more political grief. Heavy sob.

Grace Under Fire

It's cheering isn’t it, the way the Administration reacted to Cheney's General Mapache turn over the weekend? They tried to put Jayson Williams in jail for this sort of thing. Jayson seemed to think his bedroom was a covey, but he had the better aim. Where Cheney has it all over Williams is in the proactive public relations campaign, alternatively yucking it up over the face-spraying with outright blaming of the victim. Apparently Cheney's "line" of fire is a 360 degree radius. Pretty soon they'll have worked themselves up to "he had it coming". But then these are the geniuses behind those witty "purple heart Band-Aids" at their nominating convention, the same crew that took down Senator Max Cleland, more of a blob than a man (when was the last time he was on a mountain bike?).

Steppin' Into Eden, Yea Brother

Weirdness today from the New York Times' John Tierney, "And on the Eighth Day, God Went Green", who takes off on the formation of the Evangelical Climate Initiative, a group of Evangelical Christians advocating a proactive response to human-induced global warning, to riff dismissively on environmentalism generally. Tierney argues that Evangelical Christian's joining the global warming battle was predictable because "America has one truly national religion: environmentalism." At first blush, equating environmentalism, which is marked by a concern with global warming, with religion seems odd because the growing awareness of the threat from global warming is a product of the scientific community, a group which has a fair share of agnostics and atheists within its ranks.

But then, the Religion of Environmentalism is the favored Conservative meme in their attempt to stem the tide of growing awareness of global warming. Conservatives by nature are uncomfortable with the scientific process with its ceaseless prodding at established orthodoxy and its moral value-neutral logic. The Bush Conservatives also have a serious problem with the scientific community's reliance on facts. The Bush Administration is much more comfortable in dealing with arguments, as they ordinarily do in the political and policy realms, because arguments have emotional components which can be tweaked or twisted as the case requires. Global warming science is a particular thorn in Bush's side because consideration of the potential consequences leads in fairly short order to a re-examination of the role and unfettered primacy of the Oil Industry in our economy and our environment, and Bush is a creature of Big Oil. Chris Mooney's website is a virtual clearing house of information on what he terms "The Republican War on Science".

Tierney is a soldier in that war, and his column is engaged in the undermining of science by equating it with religious faith. Rather than answer the hard science behind global warming, Tierney (and Conservative Republicans) instead attempt to sweep up people who acknowledge scientific fact with those for whom environmentalism is a spiritual commitment (the tree-hugging, open-toed sandal crowd) and then to dismiss them all as a bunch of hippie dingbats.

It may be true that global warming appeals to the finger-wagging Calvinist scolds among us, but the fact that various groups, whether they are Calvinists or New Age Gaians, project their moral judgments onto empirical data does not say anything at all about the efficacy of the science produced that data. You do not need to have a bleak view of American capitalism to be able to read a thermometer. The world is getting hotter Mr. Tierney, and our industrial output is helping to make it so. That only becomes a moral condemnation if we fail to do anything about it.

Tierney ends his column with a classic false choice by setting climatic sciences in opposition to global efforts to combat disease and lack of drinking water. As if third world drinking water and sanitation would ever be a priority for this Administration! Why there would be Evian and Scotts Tissue for everyone everywhere, but for the enormous drain on the budget from this Administration's slavish commitment to slowing global warming.

Set Out Another Dessert Plate

UPDATE: Again with the death fantasies? Ann Coutler was apparently at it again today, as Max Blumenthal posts over at Huffington Post. Coutler was playing to her crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference today, so you can imagine each cheery thought was greeted by guffaws, foot-stomping and back-slapping.

Coulter on killing Bill Clinton:
(Responding to a question from a Catholic University student about her biggest moral or ethical dilemna) "There was one time I had a shot at Clinton. I thought 'Ann, that's not going to help your career.'"

Coulter on the Supreme Court:
"If we find out someone [referring to a terrorist] is going to attack the Supreme Court next week, can't we tell Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalito?"

CNN announced the hiring of the reprehensible radio "personality" Glenn Beck with great fanfare, and he's since been straining at the bit to be zany and controversial to live up to the hype. Normally that would be enough for me to put him on permanent "ignore", but Media Matters is officially on his case. Media Matters does matter, because the Right Wing Noise Engine is a perpetual motion machine, continually churning out propaganda. The output volume alone requires the coordinated and intelligent response that Media Matters provides.

Beck, in a bid for up-to-the- minute, cutting edge topicality, has dragged President Carter's tired old bones back into the public square for flogging: "Beck rants: Jimmy Carter biggest "waste of skin"". Media Matters provides a taste:

BECK: Is there a day that God ever says, "What was I thinking?" Here's what I mean: Do you think God ever says, "I could've used that skin making somebody of value, you know? I could have used that skin in such a -- just a better way." You know? And its not -- the reason why I bring this up is: Is there a bigger waste of skin than Jimmy Carter? Ya know, I don't mean to, you know, I don't mean to look the maker in the eyes and say, "Eh, kind of a waste," but I'm asking, do you think he ever thinks, "I don't know, man, I could've used that skin someplace else." You know?

The above certainly captures Beck's erudite wit and charm, but the more offensive and more explicit part of Beck's rant tries to draw a roadmap for motivated listeners:

BECK: I think Jimmy Carter is the luckiest man on earth, because he's still walking around. And he was president of the short-term memory country, you know what I mean? . . . . You know, maybe, Jimmy, we wouldn't be in this problem if, I don't know, you didn't have the helicopters burn in the middle of the desert. If you wouldn't have let the whole Islamic revolution thing happen in the first place. What do you say, James? Is there a bigger waste of skin than Jimmy Carter?

When you put the idea that Carter aught not be allowed to be "walking around" together with scapegoating him for all of our troubles in the Middle East, and then repeatedly bray that he's a waste of skin, you are certainly in Coutler Country, and I don't for a minute think Beck strayed there unawares. Set out another plate of cream brulee. CNN should pull the plug on Beck immediately.

NY Times: In Service to the Cause

The New York Times throws a one-two combo-punch at the Democrats again today, with the front page jab "Some Democrats Are Sensing Missed Opportunities" and an Op-Ed shot to the labonze by Maureen Dowd in "Who's Hormonal? Hillary or Dick?" with her new and ground-breaking innovation of analogizing politics to adolescent dating, a first for Miss MoDoDo.

In the front page story, the Times has already called the Congressional elections, still some months beyond a year off, for the Republicans. The entire article drips with contempt for the mealy-mouthed Democrats who, despite President F.U.B.A.R.'s spectacular misadventures, still have managed to screw the pooch. Read it if you must, but I'll spare you by providing the operative terms used to describe the Democrats: ". . . .weaker than they hoped for . . . . failed . . . . worse . . . . [W]e seem to be losing our voice . . . . frustrations afflicting Democrats . . . . largely marginalized . . . . flawed messengers . . . . fellow citizens have doubts about us . . . . Do you get the picture? Bush = Action Hero President; Democrats = clueless, wishy-washy mopes. Sensing? What a weak-o word! They should have titled the piece "Jellyfish Democrats Sensing Abject Defeat!"

Of course, there have been a few Democrats who have not lost their spines, and who seem to have found their voices and a moral imperative, a calling, to challenge this abysmal and un-American Administration. Al Gore has delivered a series of thunderous and thoughtful broadsides against the Bush Administration's grossest abuses, and John Kerry, freed (at least for now) from the temporal immediacy of campaigning, has recovered himself and re-learned to not equivocate and to stand firm. John Edwards has remained positive and proactive ever since the 2004 election.

This is where Dowd comes in. She deals with the "problem" of Democrats who do not fit the Times' and Republican conception of Democrats as the Party of quivering, cowering worry-worts, in typical fashion, by tarting up Republican talking points into her usual Zoey 101-speak. She 'femanizes' Gore into a "Beta Tree-Hugger", characterizes Kerry as a "Waffling War Wimp with Hectoring Wife", and Kerry is swishy in the bargain, because Edwards is "his true bride, the Breck Girl". Why, the entire Democratic ticket in 2004 was light in the loafers! Hillary Clinton, in Dowd's view, is . . . . well Dowd is all over the place. Hillary is either too butch or too timid, too calculating, something, you tell me . . . . just plain wrong! Howard Dean "The Scream"? Enough said.

Dowd, having lined up and knocked over the most prominent Democrats (for the 115th time), then casts her girlish gaze about, looking for any new threats to the Republican orthodoxy, and lights on Barrack Obama. She is a little late to the party, as Josh Marshall has already identified Obama as the new target of opportunity for Republican Media. Obama hasn't really opened himself up to attack, so Maur-Maur stretches and strains to recast Obama's recent dust-up with Maverick McCain (in which Obama has come off quite well) as "snide and bitchy, more like an angry missive of a spurned lover to an ex-boyfriend than a note from a respected senior senator to a respected junior one." Dowd's whole column is cross-dressed today. Maybe the strain of being over 40, single and fabulous is getting to her. The one positive note (and I will restrain from drawing analogies as to what kind of note it is) the lonely Dowd pens is to Condi Rice, whom she describes as "hyperarticulate and bristly when she gets mad, but not bitchy." In the eyes of the Beholder.

Thomas L. Friedman and the Unbreakable Shovel

Navigator, Navigator rise up and be strong
The morning is here and there's work to be done
Take your pick and your shovel and the bold dynamite
For to shift a few tons of this earthly delight
Yes to shift a few tons of this earthly delight

In my youth, there was a phrase my father sometimes used against me that never failed to cut me to the core, "You broke your shovel". The rebuke was deployed when I had fouled up some task beyond fixing, and more than that, demonstrated that I could not be counted on due to a lack of trustworthiness and character. Though there was work to be done, and my father in need of assistance, and I otherwise capable of lending a hand, so shabby was my performance as to render myself useless. An altogether ignominious sending to the showers. Think of the imagery, a mountain of earthly delight to be shifted, and me, standing hapless with only a handle in my hand. You don't get a badge of dishonor like that through mere negligence or accident, you earn it.

Thomas L. Friedman has given President Bush an unbreakable shovel. Its like's Friedman's that robotic kid from "The Polar Express", squeezing closed his eyes, praying to himself, "I do believe! I do believe!" and presto! he is still able to hear the magic bell! No amount of lying, corruption, incompetence and disaster can break Freidman's will to believe that this Administration operates in good faith.

Things have gotten bad enough for Thomas L. that in his latest column, "Will Pigs Fly?", he preempts the field and gets the drop on everyone by calling himself "weak in the knees", in need of some spine, and, of course, a "moron". Now, "Moron" that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. And also, uh Dude, Moron is not the preferred nomenclature, uh "Idiot", please. Friedman's words have become like silver iodide seeded onto cumulus clouds, always producing a downpour of ridicule and laughter. Still, there's something pathetic in the spectacle of the man trying to beat everyone to the punch.

In the face of all that has happened over the last few years, the endless rounds of empty Administration promises and outright lies, and in full knowledge of who George W.T.F. Bush is, and the oily spring from whence he sprung, Friedman is, in his own words, giving Bush "a new reputation to live up to". This new Friedmanified Bush is an environmental progressive, someone suddenly in absolute earnest and concerned about global warming and the state of American education. There's not a moment to lose! Crank up the windmills! Get Willie Nelson with his Crisco-fueled car on the horn!

And this new Bush, sanctified and transformed by the munificence of the Mustache of Understanding, well for this Bush, words have actual meaning beyond their power to fool the rubes for another day. I have come to expect so much from Friedman, but even so, he has the capacity to astound. Friedman's blumpy gullibility produces this bizarrely insane sentence:

"When the president changes language on an issue like this - in a sustained manner (and we still have to see if it will be sustained), the whole country and bureaucracy starts to talk differently. "

Whatever can he mean? No one believes a thing this guy says. Even Peggy Noonan is tuning him out: "The president's State of the Union Address will be little noted and not long remembered. There was a sense that he was talking at, not to, the country. . . . It went through a reported 30 drafts, was touched by many hands, and seemed it. Not precisely a pudding without a theme, but a thin porridge." But even Friedman may be becoming dimly aware that Bush is long on promise, short on delivery. After issuing Bush his 115th Free Pass, Friedman includes this ominous warning shot: "And if he fails to carry through with this energy initiative, I'll be the first to rip for it". I foresee many sleepless nights at the White House, "Karl, drop everything you're doing and get on this energy addiction thing right away. There's not a moment to lose! Friedman's on our case!"

The Laughing Stock climbs ever higher.

Brooks to Working Class: "You're Not Poor Enough (Yet)"

Brooks To Working Class: “You’re Not Poor Enough (Yet)”

David Brooks chides liberals today in “Dollars and Sense” for their excess of concern for the poor, suggesting that liberals have adopted an overly negative view of reality. Liberals are so bummed out because they’ve “read thousands of gloomy articles about downsizing, outsourcing and wage stagnation”. Somewhere, there are liberal statistician/elves slavering away, compiling dreary economic statistics to keep their liberal masters in a state of permanent midnight. Always with the negative waves Moriarty, always with the negative waves.

It’s the usual Brooks mush, citing to unidentified opinion polls to support his peculiar suppositions. He cheerily cites to an essay that estimated that “only” 19 percent of males and 27 percent of females are poor or working poor. Uh, wake me when it reaches 50 percent? Brooks takes flight from an article posted on a Democratic website over the summer by Steve Rose, whom Brooks mislabels as a “liberal economist”. If he were a true liberal, his stuff wouldn’t be up at DonkeyRising. If you look at Rose’s work, he is clearly in the “Brooks wing” of the Democratic Party. You find such nuggets as “While liberals think that having more than 45 million people being uninsured is a travesty, it still means that over 80 percent of the population does have coverage”. That’s like Vince Ricardo touting the CIA as a career choice: “Are you interested in joining? The benefits are terrific. The trick is not to get killed. That's really the key to the benefit program.”

So the key to learning how to stop worrying and love the economic bomb is to be within the majority who have health insurance, and who are not among the poor or working poor. Along those lines, Brooks references an anonymous poll that ostensibly demonstrates that families with average annual incomes “feel as if they're doing quite well and don't feel oppressed by forces beyond their control.” You can just imagine the wording of that poll/p.o.s.

Brooks eventually gets to the reason he’s been spooning out his economic fluffernutter, when he ties it into his stock social/cultural theories of American conservative values. I like to think of Brooks as the Times’ domestic Moustache of Understanding. Tom “Aarfy” Friedman patrols the foreign beat, while Brooks walks among us, right here at home, misconstruing the blindingly obvious at every turn. Values Are Flat. Or something like that.

Brooks advises: "If you are a middle-class woman, you have more to fear from divorce than from outsourcing. If you have a daughter, you're right to worry more about her having a child before marriage than about her being a victim of globalization. This country's prosperity is threatened more by homes where no one reads to children than it is by big pharmaceutical companies. . . . Conservatives, especially evangelicals, have had free rein to offer their own recipe for social renewal: churches that restrain male selfishness, decency standards that check hedonism, social norms that discourage childbearing outside wedlock."

So, if the Democratic Party is to survive, its future must be as a kind of marginalized Amen Corner to the Rightwing of the Republican Party. We must all throw in with the effort to convince the poor and working poor that they need to get married up, religioused up, and hung up, before they can be initiated into the Magical World of the Morally Prosperous! Pay no mind to your lack of a job, money for rent, healthcare, etc. Those things are just nagging distractions.

If, on the other hand, you evince concern over the economic, health and educational conditions that produce poverty, you are necessarily selfish, a hedonist, a bastard promoter, and necessarily against families, niceness and heaven itself.

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children;wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They kneltdown at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

'Oh, Man. look here. Look, look, down here.' exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling,wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Wheregraceful youth should have filled their features out, andtouched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelledhand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, andpulled them into shreds. Where angels might have satenthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. Nochange, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in anygrade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, hasmonsters half so horrible and dread. Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to himin this way, he tried to say they were fine children, butthe words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lieof such enormous magnitude.

'Spirit. are they yours.' Scrooge could say no more.

'They are Man's,' said the Spirit, looking down uponthem. 'And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers.This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both,and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy,for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless thewriting be erased. Deny it.' cried the Spirit, stretching outits hand towards the city. 'Slander those who tell it ye.Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse.And abide the end.' 'Have they no refuge or resource.' cried Scrooge. 'Are there no prisons.' said the Spirit, turning on himfor the last time with his own words. 'Are there no workhouses.'"

The Sociopathic Presidency

UPDATE: Bob Herbert Picks assembles some of Bush's greatest hits in today's column "A President Who Can Do No Right" (registration required):

"This guy is something. Remember his "Top Gun" moment aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln? And his famous taunt — "Bring 'em on" — to the insurgents in Iraq? His breathtaking arrogance is exceeded only by his incompetence. And that's the real problem. That's where you'll find the mind-boggling destructiveness of this regime, in its incompetence"

Incompetence, of course, but that is too generous by half, because many of Bush's follies were in the face of emphatic, dire warning of the consequences. It is not as if the Bush Administration suffers merely from a want of execution.

We had in Lincoln, the Depressive Presidency, in Kennedy the Compulsive Disorder Presidency, and in Nixon the Paranoid Presidency. Now with Bush, we are indeed fortunate to be living through (knock-on-wood) the first Sociopathic Presidency! Bush's behavior closely tracks the diagnostic models for anti-social personality disorder, in his cunning, lying, lack of empathy or remorse, his irritability and his impulsiveness. But never mind all that head-doctor mumbo-jumbo, gobbley-gook. You don't need a doctorate to know two-bit rednecked peckerwood guttertrash when you see it.

It is important to keep in mind that most of these displays of scaliness in Bush were open and notorious, peeking out of the most tightly scripted and stage-crafted image cocoon in the history of politics. So here are some of the highlights:

1) Bringing coat hanger ass-branding to Yale;

2) Bailing on Guard Service while his contemporaries were dying in Viet Nam -- couldn't even care enough for them (or for his Poppy's reputation) to show up, preferring coke, cough syrup and Bourbon to his dress-up "service";

3) Yucking it up about presiding over the Texas-style execution of Karla Faye Tucker;

4) Disinterest in his daughter's emergency appendectomy -- Bushie has such a lot of hard bark on him that he barely felt a thing -- didn't hurt a bit -- why, I understand Bushie didn't even need a local for it;

5) Too busy playing the Crawford Cowboy during the summer of 2001 to heed specific warnings of impending OBL use of airliners as weapons against Americans on US soil;

6) "Bring it On!" While our military hunkered down and endured IED's;

7) Blah, blah blah-ing his way through his stock "War on Terror" speech, while on the golf course! "I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now, watch this drive."

8) Hilarious "Where are those darned WMDs?" comedy bit while the dead or maimed count climbed higher than a pinball machine about to tilt (still cracks me up!);

9) Presidential sanctioning of the torture and murder of naked Sunni cabdrivers (and as an added starter -- throwing the poor grunts doing his dirty work for him under the bus at the earliest opportunity);

10) Refusal to acknowledge the dead and maimed returning from Iraq while taking month-long vacations to allow "good crisp decision-making" , citing need to "get on with his life", while the "volunteer" army recycles endlessly back to Iraq;

11) Celebrating the drowning of New Orleans with icecream cake and crooning -- "Here's a little ditty and I hope you'll like, I call it "The Kat Five Blues" ";

12) On his recent visit to a military hospital, equating his drunken brushcutting scratches with amputees and disfigurements of war; and

13) Chiding the stricken Aerial Sharon for his bad diet and slovenly exercise regime.

Of course there are many more examples that support an observational diagnosis of the President, than can be wedged into a top dozen-or-so list, things people close to Bush see every day, like his inappropriate smirking and joking when confronted with tragedy, his inability to distinguish between America and himself (for the hundredth time, jerky, we love America, God, and our military – its you we have a problem with). And just pallin' around with the likes of that creep Cheney, and with DeLay is a bad sign.

Free Speech in the Police State

In a speech timed to avoid mainstream media detection, with the press corps preoccupied with the Alito confirmation showhearings, President Bush today magnanimously and courageously proposed to allow Americans to actually debate the war in Iraq, despite there being elections scheduled in the coming calendar year. Funny, I hadn't realized that we now need a Presidential Benediction before we dare speak. Inalienable rights and all that. But hold on, now, don't go thinking Bush has gone all free-love hippie on us, as there will be limits on this free speechifying, and he is going to be the guy calling the fouls:

"We face an added challenge in the months ahead: The campaign season will soon be upon us -- and that means our nation must carry on this war in an election year. There is a vigorous debate about the war in Iraq today, and we should not fear the debate. It's one of the great strengths of our democracy that we can discuss our differences openly and honestly -- even in times of war. Yet we must remember there is a difference between responsible and irresponsible debate -- and it's even more important to conduct this debate responsibly when American troops are risking their lives overseas. . . . The American people know the difference between responsible and irresponsible debate when they see it. They know the difference between honest critics who question the way the war is being prosecuted and partisan critics who claim that we acted in Iraq because of oil, or because of Israel, or because we misled the American people. . . . When our soldiers hear politicians in Washington question the mission they are risking their lives to accomplish, it hurts their morale. . . . So I ask all Americans to hold their elected leaders to account, and demand a debate that brings credit to our democracy -- not comfort to our adversaries."


Bush is for Free Speech the same way his EPA is for "Clean Skies". Of course it is a hack partisan speech, before another hand-picked, "you-betcha Sir!" audience, so I hardly expect eloquence, but his speech, equating serious dissent with disloyalty, is a grave insult to Americans and patriots everywhere. It is sickening to see Bush again using our military as his human shield against the normal accountability of our democracy.

He sends our young soldiers to fall and die in his elective, fraud-in-the-inducement war in Iraq without adequate armor, logistical support or even a decent interval of real aforethought about the consequences. There's no exit strategy? There's no strategy, period. This Administration uses the military in a way that can only be described as contemptuous. The lives and welfare of our troops are tweaked throughout the American election cycle like they're just another of Karl Rove's little toys, jerked hither and yon. They are set upon the dirty tasks of the worst of our Chickenhawk Neocons back home, set to torture and murder under color of administration "authorization", although that "authority" seems to dissipate like smoke in a haze of legal memorandum and specious legal argument when light is shown on our dark practices, leaving the grunts and the brass behind to take still another hit for the Administration. Our men and women are set upon tasks that violate their own and our American heritage and our laws, and that defile the military's code of honor, earned at such steep price.

The military is left to hunker down without the benefit of a coherent mission, huddling behind shabby, cheap armor, while off-budget money gushes all over the debris around them to be siphoned off by who-knows-what. Every dollar down Chilabi's blackhole, every dollar misappropriated by some conservative-connected contractor corporation, is a dollar that could have gone to save the arm, the leg, the face, or the life of one of our under-armored soldiers.

But it is irresponsible, it is disloyal, it is treachery, to take note or to speak of the grave misconduct of this war by the Bush administration? We are to stand mutely by while our military is dissipated and degraded by these Administration creatures? We are permitted to ask "how?" but not "why"? In Bush's speech, the only honest inquiry concerning the war is the methodology of its prosecution. He seems to be operating under the impression that having put the lie over to get us into Iraq, he is freed from the consequences of it, even as our men and women continue to suffer and die in service to it.