May 12, 2008 • Vol. 13, No. 33
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Main
John McCain did the Daily Show last night, and acquitted himself quite well. While performing decently in such venues has become an important part of our distended presidential selection process, it's not the be-all-and-end-all. If it were, we could just be done with everything and appoint Mike Huckabee Supreme Leader for Life.
Over at Hot Air, Allah noted that Stewart went easy on McCain and commented, “To my continued surprise, Perino, Tony Snow, and now even the GOP nominee were treated to 10 minutes of schmoozing with only one or two glancing blows mixed in.” There's a simple reason for this phenomenon, and it ties in with the whole Democrats-appearing-on Fox controversy of last week.
If you’re running a radio or TV show and invite a guest on, you have to be civil or that guest and like-minded guests will never return to your show. So even if being a courteous host isn't in your nature, you still bend over backwards to be nice when someone with differing views winds up on your set.
I can only think of one incident where a host really went after someone he differed with. That was when my friend and mentor, radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt (who I regularly guest-host for), interviewed Tom Tancredo, and suggested that the McCain/Kennedy immigration bill should in fact be known as McCain/Kennedy/Tancredo because Tancredo's ruinous and inflexible actions had brought McCain/Kennedy into being. Tancredo didn't much care for that suggestion, and the conversation got a bit heated. Some time after the interview, Tancredo vowed to avoid the Hewitt Show for the rest of the campaign. In case you’re wondering, the Hewitt Show survived in spite of a dire case of Tancredo deprivation.
Still, the lesson to be learned from a broadcasting perspective is that if you don't bend over backwards to be nice to people you oppose, it will be one and done - they won't come back for a second appearance if they deem the first one unsatisfactory. You may have noticed that when Bill O’Reilly has a major public personality as a guest with whom he has serious philosophical disagreements, he turns into a big pussycat whether the celeb in question is Ben Affleck, Rosie O’Donnell or Hillary Clinton. Other big named potential guests (even one that rhymes with Shmobama) could look at the experience of such predecessors and conclude that they would get a fair shot in the No Spin Zone.
That's what made the controversy over the Democrats appearing on Fox News so idiotic. Brit Hume may or may not be a conservative, but the relevant fact is that he's a fair newsman. I'm quite certain that Hume has never done anything that triggered outrage from the left like George Stephanopoulos’s conduct of the last Clinton/Obama debate did. Chris Wallace also plays it straight, and a Howard Dean-type knows that he can appear on Fox News Sunday and get a fair shot.
To get back to where we started, John Stewart obviously enjoys chatting with relevant newsmakers. Personally, I think it enriches his show (although I think the Colbert Report remains much funnier). If Stewart started giving his conservative guests rough treatment or sought to embarrass them, they would stop appearing.
Again, McCain did well last night. He should go back as often as Stewart will have him.
Philip Bobbitt, author of The Shield of Achilles, has just written a new book, Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century. In it, he talks of the need to rethink our approach to the war on terror, our concept of conventional warfare, and our understanding of victory (i.e., the Geneva Conventions need to be rewritten).
Not that I’ve read the book yet--Bobbitt was the featured speaker at a luncheon sponsored by the Hoover Institution and elaborated on his latest work. He points out the problem of the way we view terrorism as opposed to the way Europeans see it: They think in terms of the IRA, ETA, and the RAF, as opposed to viewing the problem as they once did the barbarians who sacked cities throughout Europe over the centuries or even the pirates of the Caribbean who captured Panama in 1602. (Ah yes, the Curse of the Black Pearl!)
Bobbitt refutes many commonly accepted notions, such as one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. “We have a right to put our children on a bus without fear of interdiction or violence. Those who commit such violence are terrorists.”
Why, asked a journalist, has there not been an attack on American soil since September 11? According to Bobbitt, the strategy has changed. Because of how “spectacular” the attacks were on 9/11, other acts have terror such as subway bombings are no longer seen by the terrorists as good enough. In addition, we tend to underestimate the value in capturing a member of a terrorist cell. If one is held captive, says Bobbitt, the other members assume the prisoner is talking and thus, the cell breaks up. Luck plays an important role as well and we’ve been fortunate to foil certain plots ahead of time. On the other hand, he is quick to remind us that seven years may seem a long time but it isn’t. Terrorists waited patiently for eight years to relaunch an attack on the World Trade Center.
With regard to torture, the author refused to rule it out McCain-style. There are, he said, too many instances where controversial extraction techniques have resulted in the prevention of terrorism.
Now in case you are wondering, Bobbitt is a Democrat who worked for the Clinton administration, though he seemed optimistic that both Obama and McCain would be more than able to handle the challenges of securing the nation.
Not that this was a focal point, but Bobbitt states that the number of Americans killed because of terrorism from the 1960s to today is comparable to victims of lightning strikes and death by allergic reactions to peanuts.
I’ve said this before and I will say it again: We need to have a War on Peanuts.
Robert F. Worth writes in the New York Times:
"Kuwait used to be No. 1 in the economy, in politics, in sports, in culture, in everything," [Ali al-Rashed] said, his voice floating out in the warm evening air to hundreds of potential voters seated on white damask-lined chairs. "What happened?"
It is a question many people are asking as this tiny, oil-rich nation of 2.6 million people approaches its latest round of elections. And the unlikely answer being whispered around, both here and in neighboring countries on the Persian Gulf: too much democracy.
Of course, Kuwait’s neighbors include Iraq (a democracy, whether the Times likes it or not--and get this quote: "There are Arab republics--in Yemen, Egypt, Algeria, Syria, Iraq and Tunisia--but despite their democratic forms, those countries have generally been more autocratic and repressive than the region’s monarchies."). The article refers to Qatar, Dubai, and Abu Dhabi, which are neighbors in the sense of being downstream along the Arabian Gulf, but by that measure Iran (a theocracy that is most emphatically not a monarchy of any variety) is much more a neighbor, being just across the Shatt al Arab. Then there is this opinion offered as news:
All this has left many Kuwaitis deeply disenchanted with their 50-member elected legislature. The collapse of the Bush administration’s efforts to promote democracy in the region and the continuing chaos in Iraq, just to the north--once heralded as the birthplace of a new democratic model--have also contributed to a popular suspicion that democracy itself is one Western import that has not lived up to its advertising.
Apparently they weren’t disenchanted in 2006 when, as the article describes, they pushed through an "Orange Revolution" to expand their freedoms. Odd, when you think about it, considering that the "chaos in Iraq" is "continuing" at a fraction of what it was in 2006. Coincidentally, everyone Worth quotes gripes about democracy only to add that it's "our last hope" or "isn’t the problem." As Abe Greenwald points out, it seems the "only attributable monarchy-envy comes from Worth himself."
Our friend David Frum offered some provocative thoughts earlier in the week on the changes that are afoot in the media:
Ratings are declining and circulations are plunging. Advertising revenues are tumbling, layoffs, buyouts, marquee properties sold, bought and sold again. Yet, troubled as the news media business is, media as a human activity is pulsing with dynamism, creativity and invention. There's just one problem. Nobody wants to pay for any of this, which is why salaried journalists are coming to feel like the steelworkers of the 21st century.
Perhaps some brilliant person will devise a new model to revive and sustain the big, professional news corporation, now under so much pressure, but what if it does not work? In that case, the future of the American media may look a lot like the past.
A century and a half ago, the American news media were small, polemical, often heavily subsidized by political parties and relatively poor. Horace Greeley started the New York Tribune with $1,000 in capital. That was obviously more money in 1841 than it is today, but even then, it was not so much money, not the kind of money needed to start a railway or a foundry, more like the kind of money used to start a nice looking Web site today.
Frum is quite right - the old media are dying. One of the things that is killing them is their dual pretense of objectivity and neutrality. If Dan Rather was fairer or more objective than the Huffington Post, he had me fooled.
So what will rise from the ashes of the old media castles? What we'll likely have is a Wild West of information where news consumers will have to seek out truth on their own. This isn't unprecedented. After the famous gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Tombstone's two newspapers gave starkly different accounts of the affair, one championing the Earps and the other the Clanton/McLaury faction.
Horace Greeley ran for president at the tail end of his career and invented Andrew Jackson's most famous quote at the start of it ("John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!"). Newsmen with an agenda are nothing new under the sun. And the market will reward those with a fidelity to the truth and punish those who demonstrate the opposite. Please see the pathetic Mr. Rather currently toiling away on something called HDNet for comforting evidence of that fact.
The prospect of not having a newspaper or news source of record may frighten some people since it would be new territory for the modern era. But far more frightening is a thankfully bygone era when a media powerhouse like Walter Cronkite could call the Vietnam War lost because he didn’t understand what had happened with the Tet Offensive. Worse still, so impeccable was his credibility that the country would believe him.
Better to have a nation of citizens actively engaged in finding the truth than assuming they're getting the truth from what's in fact an unreliable source.
Hillary's been trying to goad Obama into scheduling another debate. He won't bite, and she's done everything but call him chicken (though her supporters have shown no such restraint). Yet Obama looked deep within himself to muster the courage for an appearance on Fox News Sunday this weekend, after more than a year of avoiding the harsh interrogation techniques of Chris Wallace. It sort of made Obama seem, if only momentarily, like he had a little backbone.
So what does Hillary do? She one-ups him with an appearance on The Factor tonight. It's the talk show equivalent of landing under sniper fire in one of the world's most dangerous warzones. Except Sinbad's not there. Or your teenage daughter.
It could get ugly, but she's got nothing to lose.
CBS News reporter Richard Butler was rescued by Iraqi troops in Basra on April 10 after being held captive for two months. Throughout his ordeal, his hands were kept in restraints and a sack kept over his head, although he was able to hear plenty of Hezbollah propaganda and ringtones. His sparse diet caused him to lose 42 pounds.
Not pretty. But it could have been worse:
Butler said he felt it was better to be kidnapped in Iraq then taken into custody by Americans in Afghanistan.
"I was pleased I wasn't being mortarboarded in Guantanamo or being held for six and a half years like an Al-Jazeera cameraman, for instance," he said.
Absolutely. American troops are renowned for torturing network reporters. You read about that all the time. Poor bastards are dropping like flies at the hands of our soldiers. It's a real scandal.
In related news, the ratings for CBS News hit a record low last week.
Don’t worry about Richard Butler, by the way. He’s recovering at his home. In France. But you just knew that, right?
(And I know what you’re thinking: Hezbollah ringtones?!)
David Denby, the lesser half of the New Yorker's critical duo, made a revealing couple of comments in his review of Iron Man. First, he takes issue with the character's origin, deriding the fact that Tony Stark was "captured and enslaved by Wong-Chu--a chubby Commie tyrant. One might blush at this memory of sinister Orientalist Cold War pop, but the updating of the material for 'Iron Man' hasn't made it any smarter. The director, Jon Favreau, and two writing teams . . . have enlisted Iron Man in the war on terror."
Because, you see, just like the Communist threat in Vietnam, the terrorist threat in Afghanistan isn't worth worrying about! Oh, silly Favreau, why can't you just see that the terrorists just want to be left alone? Denby then goes on to write "the freelance fanatics . . . waterboard Tony Stark, which, considering what some American interrogators and their surrogates have done to suspects recently, is enraging to watch. Such are the ways of pop: we cast our sins onto others."
That's right: the filmmakers are merely projecting America¹s shortcomings on her enemies. After all, terrorists never do anything wrong. They treat their prisoners with compassion and respect. Nope, no torture or beheadings in the mountains of Afghanistan. If the terrorists really wanted Tony Stark to do their bidding, they would have reasoned him into submission. Thanks, Professor Denby.
[Check out Sonny's new blog at AFF. --ed.]
David Axelrod says of Rev. Wright's performance yesterday:
“Obviously, it’s not ideal,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior strategist. “It’s pretty clear that Reverend Wright is not out there to help Obama — he’s out there to help himself. It’s a sideshow, and the media is consumed by it.”
And the "analysis" from Alessandra Stanley in today's New York Times:
Now it turns out that Mr. Wright doesn’t hate America, he loves the sound of his own voice. He is not out of touch with the American culture, he is the avatar of the American celebrity principle: he grabbed his 30-second spots of infamy and turned them into 15 minutes of fame.
It would be easier if they just gave Axelrod a column.
At the National Press Club this morning, Rev. Jeremiah Wright deflected a number of questions by accusing the press of being uninformed. When asked to explain his remarks that 9/11 was payback for American misdeeds, Wright replied: "Have you heard the whole sermon?" The moderator said she had heard most of the sermon, and Wright retorted: "No, no, the whole sermon, yes or no? No, you haven't heard the whole sermon? That nullifies that question."
At one point, the moderator asked: "You just mentioned that Senator Obama hadn't heard many of your sermons. Does that mean he's not much of a churchgoer? Or does he doze off in the pews?" Wright answered: "He goes to church about as much as you do. What did your pastor preach on last week? You don't know? OK." And that was that.
When asked if he still believes the U.S. government created HIV "as a means of genocide against people of color," Wright asked the moderator if she had read Emerging Viruses: AIDS And Ebola: Nature, Accident or Intentional? Then, Griff Jenkins, a Fox News correspondent who apparently wrote the question, stood up and asked Wright to answer the question. "No questions from the floor," Wright shot back. All questions from the press were submitted to a National Press Club moderator, who did not press Wright on follow-up questions. Wright said, "I believe our government is capable of doing anything," but he never directly answered whether he thinks the U.S. government created HIV.
Again and again, Wright was not held to account for his own disputed claims, such as his contention that in his post 9/11 sermon he was merely quoting the ambassador from Iraq that "America's chickens are coming home to roost." To be fair, most of those in the press gallery didn't openly applaud Wright during his speech--as did Christopher Hayes of the Nation and Nadia Charters of Al-Arabiya TV, who were both sitting (appropriately) to the left of me.
Continue reading "The Media Roll Over for Wright" »
Attacking the politics of Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay is like subjecting Penthouse Forum to literary criticism. So when I took in a matinée of the stoner sequel last Friday, I was prepared to overlook the film’s distasteful depiction of our president. I was even prepared to disregard the fact that, aside from Harold and Kumar, no one has ever been sent from American soil to Guantanamo, and the only U.S. citizen ever imprisoned there was released once his citizenship became known.
What crossed the line, however, is that the American soldiers stationed in Guantanamo Bay were portrayed as rapists. Political operatives at the Homeland Security Department are fair game, but I don't think I'm going out on a limb in saying that the film's suggestion our troops sodomize detainees disrespects the many soldiers stationed there who are making great sacrifices to protect our country.
Although it’s hard to believe that Harold and Kumar will be released in any Middle Eastern country, I have no doubt that many foreigners would take this parody of Bush administration policies seriously. Do recall the Turkish film, Valley of the Wolves Iraq, showed U.S. doctors harvesting the organs of detainees to send to Israel.
An inconvenient truth:
On Friday, it was revealed by ABC News that one of the famous shots of supposed Antarctic ice shelves in the film [An Inconvenient Truth] was actually a computer-generated image from the 2004 science fiction blockbuster "The Day After Tomorrow."
Adding delicious insult to injury, this was presented by one of ABC's foremost global warming alarmists Sam Champion during Friday's "20/20".
This brings up a couple of questions. One, how did it take a matinee-idol weatherman to point out this gigantic bit of fraud? (Champion’s usual gig is warning of wind gusts on Good Morning America.) Two, between the truth-stretching, crafty editing, and outright lies of movies like Farenheit 9/11 and An Inconvenient Truth, doesn’t the concept of "Academy Award-winning documentary" sound terribly, uh, fictional? Or have moviemakers been drowning in fantasy so long that they can no longer distinguish between fiction and reality?
No word yet on if Gore & Co. received permission from 20th Century-Fox, the studio that released The Day After Tomorrow, to use the iceberg clip--or if they simply liberated it for the good of the people.
David Gergen from a March 14 broadcast on CNN:
Well, because there's a long tradition, Anderson. And among black leaders to have a different view of American history, going all the way back to Frederick Douglass, who was one of the greatest American heroes of the 19th century, you know, who -- who gained his freedom from slavery in a great order.
He was invited the a July 4th celebration to give a July 4th speech in 1852, and he showed up and said, "You know, you whites see July 4 very differently from what I see it. This is not a day of celebration for us."
And I have found that in my classroom with black students frequently. When they speak their minds and when they speak their hearts, they have a very different view. I've had a young woman tell me, "July 4, we still can't celebrate it in my family, because of what's happened to us."
And I think that we as whites have to be understanding and empathic toward that and try to understand that, that people who are African-Americans legitimately have a different perspective on what American history has meant and take that into account as we hear this.
And it's not a lack of patriotism. It is a different form of patriotism. Actually, Reverend Wright may love this country more than any of us but feel we've fallen short of what we preach and believe.
Exit question: Is it wrong to enjoy David Gergen’s monumental moronitudousnes on a kitsch level?
Alternate exit question: Is it possible to distinguish between the America of 1852 and the America of today?
Do you find yourself somehow inexplicably drawn to CNN's coverage of the primaries? I do, but for months I didn't know precisely why. There was something so comforting about the format, something so familiar. Then it dawned on me: The studio set-up, the double panel of guests, the host going to each table to get his answers. Quite cleverly, CNN producers have modeled their election team of pundits around the legendary 1970s game show, Match Game.
Host Wolf Blitzer is Gene Rayburn, Leslie Sanchez is Brett Somers, David Gergen is MacLean Stevenson, Gloria Borger is Betty White, Bill Bennett is Richard Dawson, and Paul Begala is Charles Nelson Reilly (strictly because they share the same vocal range).
We just can't seem to change channels because, subliminally, we're waiting for Wolf to say, "Jeffrey Toobin left his blank in San Diego."
The New York Times featured an intriguing profile of Robert Downey Jr. this Sunday. Star of the upcoming Iron Man, Downey is best known as the most-wasted talent of his generation (both literally and figuratively). His drug problems became so bad that he even spent some time in the clink; since his last stretch he seems newly dedicated to sobriety. Downey also emerged with a different take on society:
"I have a really interesting political point of view, and it’s not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can’t go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can’t. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics every since."
It’s unlikely that Downey will start campaigning for McCain any time soon (note the hint of intimidation that lingers in the air when he mentions "polite" Hollywood conversation), but it is nice to see that he’s putting his life back together and taking a measure of personal responsibility for his previous difficulties. Read the whole profile and make sure to check out Iron Man when it is released May 2.
The Washington Post ran a story on McCain's temper over the weekend, but the piece seems to be falling apart amid accusations that the reporter distorted, exaggerated, and perhaps even fabricated some of the events he described. McCain aide Mark Salter responded yesterday that:
If one half of it were true, it would give me pause. As it happens, the piece is 99% fiction....
The story about the Young Republican in 1982 is entirely fictional. The Bob Smith incident is entirely fictional. The Karen Johnson story is entirely fictional. Most of the others are exaggerated beyond recognition.
Salter also claims that his own words were taken out of context to exaggerate the details of an argument between Sens. McCain and Grassley in 1992. Now Salter's version has been confirmed by former Senator Bob Kerrey. Jonathan Martin reports that Kerrey disputes the Post's account, which had him intervening to prevent the argument from turning physical:
"First, I did nothing to intervene; the two Senators worked it out on their own," Kerrey wrote in a comment posted this morning under his name at 7:45....
The two senators were both "extremely angry," Kerrey adds, but McCain was "at no time threatening."
Kerrey, a Democrat and Hillary Clinton backer, concludes: "My experience is that [McCain's] anger always has a purpose and in this case the purpose was to defeat Senator Grassley's argument which he did decisively."
Everybody knows McCain has a temper, but none of these events seems to have happened the way they were reported, if at all. Still, and maybe it's just the warmonger in me, I tend to think McCain's disposition is more of an asset than a liability. Don't the American people want a president who's actually pissed off when he gets a phone call at 3 am saying the Iranians, or al Qaeda, or William Ayers (or all three working together) have just killed a bunch of Americans.
Woody Allen will film his next movie in New York, and then promptly return to Europe to do three more pictures in Spain. Everyone knows the pint-sized Jewish auteur was in something of a lull before departing for England to shoot Match Point, Scoop, and Cassandra’s Dream. And he just completed the Vicky Cristina Barcelona, in you guessed it, Spain. But New Yorkers shouldn’t take his so-called boycott too personally. One of the key reasons I would guess he’s plans to shoot another three pictures in Spain after a brief return to New York is all the money the government is giving him. As it were, the Barcelona city government dished out $1.6 million for Allen’s last picture. Of course, they claim it’s a "public investment"--not a government subsidy--but a government subsidy by any other name still smells . . .
In defense of Allen though, I must say the conventional wisdom that he did nothing of value between Crimes and Misdemeanors and Match Point is slander. Two of Allen’s great works--or at least best writing--are from the 1990s. I am thinking of Bullets Over Broadway and the Sweet and Lowdown. And though Allen is not typically associated with the conservative movement, there are several gems in his canon for the (precious few) right-leaning souls out there who actually have a sense of humor. Consider the scene in Annie Hall when Allen goes over to his ex-girlfriend’s apartment at 3:00 am to kill a spider.
ANNIE: I called you; you wanna help me ... or not? H'h? Here.
She hands him a magazine.
ALVY: (Looking down at the magazine) What is this? What are you, since when do you read the National Review? What are you turning in to?
ANNIE: Well, I like to try to get all points of view.
ALVY: It's wonderful. Then why don'tcha get William F. Buckley to kill the spider?
This isn’t Allen’s only amusing potshot about conservatives. In Bananas, when he goes to buy a pornographic magazine, National Review is hanging between Hustler and Playboy.
Blockbuster:
To the public, these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as “military analysts” whose long service has equipped them to give authoritative and unfettered judgments about the most pressing issues of the post-Sept. 11 world.
Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found.
The piece goes on for some ten pages, with one damning revelation after the next.The Pentagon distributes talking points, provides special access to retired generals, and even arranged a meeting for them with the Secretary of Defense. You'll also be very surprised to learn that many retired generals have business interests in the defense industry.
The paper offers no evidence that any of these men were using their influence to directly further a personal interest (unless one counts "networking"), and it offers no evidence of coercion on the part of the administration. So the charge is a lack of transparency, and it rests on the assumption that Americans are too stupid to surmise the likely ideological and institutional biases of a former general officer in the United State military.
Of course, Americans are not so stupid, and I suspect most will appreciate the irony of the New York Times judging retired military officers as insufficiently objective in their analysis of the war in Iraq.
Noted lefty homophobe Spencer Ackerman lasted a full three days in his new job as a blogger for the Center for American Progress before writing something entirely beyond the pale:
May Bush and bin Laden die in exactly the same way: alone, afraid, and in captivity.
Frankly, I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner--Ackerman was fired from his last respectable job for threatening to crush his editor's skull with a baseball bat. Though in fairness, as vile as this comment about the president is, it may represent a form of progress for Ackerman. At least he's no longer engaging in personal threats. But who knows what tomorrow will bring...
Is this the corollary to the rule that as Iraq becomes more peaceful, it is reported on less and less? The story I'm referring to is the poll finding that the people of Germany, France, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom no longer see the United States as the greatest threat to world peace. Instead, a majority say that distinction belongs to China:
The poll, carried out by the Harris agency between March 27 and April 8 and published on Tuesday, found that 35 percent of respondents in the five largest EU states see China as a bigger threat to world stability than any other state. Last year, that figure was 19 percent, and in 2006 it was only 12 percent. In contrast, the US has slipped back into second place, with 29 percent of the respondents viewing it as the biggest threat, down from 32 percent in 2007.
Last year the American media gave extensive coverage to the Harris poll, and to a contemporaneous Pew poll that showed a decline in the image of the United States abroad. The New York Times saw fit to wring its hands over what Iraq was doing to perceptions of our country around the world. Perhaps the paper of record will give the president a slap on the back and an 'attaboy' now that the surge has -- apparently -- restored our standing in the eyes of our European allies?
The New York Times reports that food preferences actually reveal who you will likely vote for in November.
If there’s butter and white wine in your refrigerator and Fig Newtons in the cookie jar, you’re likely to vote for Hillary Clinton. Prefer olive oil, Bear Naked granola and a latte to go? You probably like Barack Obama, too.
And if you’re leaning toward John McCain, it’s all about kicking back with a bourbon and a stuffed crust pizza while you watch the Democrats fight it out next week in Pennsylvania. …
Dr Pepper is a Republican soda. Pepsi-Cola and Sprite are Democratic. So are most clear liquors, like gin and vodka, along with white wine and Evian water. Republicans skew toward brown liquors like bourbon or scotch, red wine and Fiji water.
When it comes to fried chicken, he said, Democrats prefer Popeyes and Republicans Chick-fil-A.
Democrats drink Evian water and eat food marketed as "Naked." Surprise, surprise. Times reporters have this odd vision of modern political campaigns as involving lots of discussion about "soccer moms" and other stupid names given to niche voting blocs. They also seem to think brain scans are a big part of the game. Now the next big thing is what food voters eat. I have no doubt there are many so-called “microtargeting experts” out there. It is telling that Mark Penn prides himself as one of them, since he completely overlooked the big picture in steering the Hillary campaign into a brick wall.
Here’s a scoop: food preferences don’t often change, yet candidate preferences do. When someone who previously thought he was going to vote for Obama decides ultimately to pull the lever for McCain, he doesn’t switch from Bear Naked Cereal to Fiber One. And many of the food differences identified in the article clearly have more to do with regional differences than party affiliation. In parts of this great nation, they drink Dr. Pepper. New York just isn’t one of them. And as several WEEKLY STANDARD contributors will attest, Popeyes Chicken is loved by all.
Ethan Gutmann, author of "Carrying a Torch for China," this week's cover story for THE WEEKLY STANDARD, noticed yesterday that his story couldn't be found through Google News search, though it showed up in a search just the night before. In light of other suspicions that Google might be doing the bidding of the Chinese government, I called up Google for some answers.
Google product manager Josh Cohen told me that indexing for Google News is "completely done via algorithms" and articles are not screened based on "qualititative aspects." He added that Google will only take down articles upon the request of a publication's own publisher or if a third party obtains a court order. He said we simply were experiencing a "technical issue." For example, another story, "Vultures of the Left" by Dean Barnett, doesn't show up in Google News, Cohen says, because Google's program misinterpreted the article's lede "On April 18, 2007" as the dateline.
Other quirks and glitches are apparently responsible for articles disappearing from Google News. Gutmann's article can now be found in Google News, so it seems that Google should get the benefit of the doubt. If any funny business were going on, then Matthew Continetti's editorial on China, "Gold Medal in Tyranny," probably wouldn't show up.
Of course, Google bears some responsibility for creating an atmosphere where suspicions can thrive in the first place. The real problem of censorship overseas still exists, and Google did not help matters by creating a censored version of it's search function in China back in 2006. Cohen defended Google's policies in China, saying that "China can certainly block whomever they want" on the mainland. "In other countries, they can block whatever sites they want to and that's obviously something we can't control."
As Gutmann noted in a 2002 WEEKLY STANDARD piece "Who Lost China's Internet?" Western companies have been playing this game for some time now.
The BBC’s Peter Taylor has been reporting on terrorist groups for the last four decades. He doesn’t seem to hesitate in describing al Qaeda as far more dangerous than anything that preceded it. But ultimately Taylor and other journalists, describing how terrorists they’ve interviewed managed to transcend or rebut "governmental stereotypes," simply underline the limited utility of understanding the people who are trying to kill us.
To the extent understanding terrorism will help us defeat the enemy or transform the Middle East, there is surely value in it. More often than not, however, I find journalistic work like Taylor’s exhibits what Paul Berman properly dubbed the "rationalist naiveté." And moral equivalence is never far behind. Taylor admits, "When I talked to Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and the fedayeen--or militants--on the Israeli-occupied West Bank, I could understand why they felt the way they did and why they were prepared to hit back against Israel." How long before Taylor or some other journalist will say the same about al Qaeda?
An interesting story from the Times on the woman who broke bittergate wide open last Friday night at HuffPo:
Ms. Fowler said she found his response "professorial" and judgmental toward blue-collar voters and that even though she supports him, she was "taken aback" by them.
“I’m a religious person, and I grew up poor in a very wealthy family -- sometimes we didn’t have enough to eat, but my larger family was rich,” she said. Her father was a hunter. “Immediately, the remarks just really bothered me. For the first time, I realized he is an elitist.”
Fowler thought about it for a few days, nervous that it might damage Obama, before deciding to run with it. The Times noted that Arianna herself was "on a cruise in the Pacific" when the story broke, and that "she may not even know about the stir it created." Not true. Arianna wrote in to the paper with this update:
"I was indeed in Tahiti, but fully wired. Not only watching what was happening on our site and everything online about Mayhill's post, but watching regularly updates on CNN International! There was no escaping this story, even in the South Pacific. As for my feelings about the political fallout, here is my post from this morning."
Shockingly, Huffington's take is a bit different than her reporter's. She insists there's nothing at all "elitist" about Obama's comments, and she accuses Clinton of "twisting Obama's words in a way that confirms every right-wing demagogic caricature of her own Party." Actually, you know what confirms every right-wing demagogic caricature of the Democratic party? Arianna Huffington attempting to rebut charges of snobbery with a story filed from a yacht off the coast of Tahiti.
Last night's episode of Bill Maher's Real Time featured evangelical atheist Richard Dawkins (the very poor man's version of Christopher Hitchens), explaining why scientists can't be certain of much of anything:
I think any scientist would be unwise to commit himself to saying there definitely is not anything. I mean, I can’t definitely commit myself to saying there are no fairies. I’m pretty sure there are no fairies. [laughter] But, I think it would be unscientific to do what the extreme religious people do and say, “I know there is a god.”
It's an interesting contrast to comments by NASA scientist James Hansen earlier this week complaining about a high school textbook that didn't portray global warming as a fact rather than a theory:
IHansen has sent Houghton Mifflin a letter stating that the book's discussion on global warming contained "a large number of clearly erroneous statements" that give students "the mistaken impression that the scientific evidence of global warming is doubtful and uncertain."
So Hansen is certain that global warming is real and the greenhouse gases are the cause. As are Bill Maher, Barack Obama, Al Gore, and every other luminary of the left. Immediately following his interview with Dawkins last night, Maher proceeded to mock Christians for their skepticism of global warming (or indifference, as he would have it), explaining it as a result of their belief in the Rapture. But hasn't the left embraced global warming as their own version of the Rapture? They do not harbor any doubt, but believe with the fervor of religious conviction that the end of civilization will come as a result of consumerism. And they seem completely unaware that in believing this, they have shed the very skepticism that is supposed to define the secular left.
Also notable from last night's show was Richard Clarke claiming of Bill Clinton, "He doesn’t make mistakes." Right.
Jamie Kirchick has a piece at the Advocate titled "Liberals and Their Invisible Homophobia." This jumps out:
The liberal journalist Eric Alterman, a columnist for The Nation and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress think tank, is a particularly nasty example of the liberal homophobe. Two years ago he challenged gay, HIV-positive journalist Andrew Sullivan to prove a claim Sullivan had made about Alterman regarding military action in Afghanistan, offering to pay “$10,000 to the AIDS charity of Sullivan’s choice.” He mocked Sullivan, “who is HIV positive and likes to discuss this fact with reporters,” for his “remodeled bathroom in P-town.” Alterman regularly refers to Sullivan as “little Roy,” after Roy Cohn, the gay aide to Sen. Joe McCarthy who died of AIDS complications.
Kirchick offers a litany of other examples, but this makes twice in one week that we've seen employees of the Center for American Progress pointed out as particularly unabashed in their gay bashing. Alterman hasn't deigned to respond to the charge, and neither has Spencer Ackerman, who earlier in the week referred to Kirchick as "twinkletoes" on his personal blog before intimating that he'd gotten his position at the New Republic through some form of gay prostitution.
It's not often that I agree with Andrew Sullivan, but today he flags Ackerman's post as a "classic" case of liberal homophobia, which the Center for American Progress seems to tolerate without any concern at all. On the upside, given Ackerman's penchant for lashing out at his colleagues and berating his superiors in print, as he does yet again today in a very entertaining post, perhaps we will soon get a much better understanding of how decisions are made at CAP, if only through the eyes of a paranoid lefty with a martyr complex.
So a German opera house is staging Verdi's A Masked Ball "in the ruins of New York's World Trade Centre." This rendition also "features naked pensioners and Mickey Mouse masks, Hitler salutes and Elvis impersonators." One critic who attended rehearsals observes, "Mr Kresnik's anti-capitalist staging is unlikely to be celebrated for its subtlety." That would be the understatement of the year. Dancing and singing and performing Hitler salutes at the ruins of the WTC is about as subtle as the invasion of Poland.
The absurdity of the situation is apparently lost on the director, who candidly describes his work as "a populist critique of modern American society." Has opera ever been a populist enterprise? Does the director honestly expect the disenfranchised will hear, let alone act on, his call to arms? Which brings me to one final point: isn't a lecture from Germany about human rights still a century or two premature?
At Hit & Run, Nick Gillespie flags this video that originally appeared at Radar. The video shows a debate between Candy Lightner, the founder of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, and Alex Koroknay-Palicz of the National Youth Rights Association. It aired Monday on Fox News. The response from Marty Beckerman at Radar:
Thanks for protecting us at home and abroad, ya mindless juvenile killing machines. No drinky for you!
The Marine Corps has already taken steps to remedy this injustice by lowering the drinking age "from 21 to 18 for Marines on liberty overseas and for leathernecks taking part in official on-base command functions -- including the birthday ball." It would make sense for the other services to follow suit. If you may be asked to die for your country (though killing for one's country is always preferable), then you ought to be entitled to all the rights and privileges that citizenship affords. Meanwhile, the accusation that the government sets the draft age at 18 because those soldiers are too young to "think for themselves," well, I think Beckerman gets it right with his headline: "MADD Founder Hates Troops Almost As Much As She Hates Alcohol."
In response to this op-ed in the New York Times, CUNY Hunter College professor Jessie Daniels, Ph.D., writes:
While some might argue that having a prominent writer for the New York Times such as Bill Kristol address racism and sexism at all is a sign of progress (a point I can sometimes be persuaded by), the fact that he frames his analysis in the language of “either/or” shapes the larger debate and influences the way people think about these issues. And, in so doing, his limited, and limiting, way of framing these issues diminishes the possibilities for a wider audience to understand them in a way that’s both complex and useful.
That's just the last graph of a piece that goes on for several thousand words lambasting the boss over his failure to comprehend the complexities of race in a manner acceptable to Jesse Daniels, Ph.D. The only problem, the op-ed in question was written by Nicholas Kristof. According to her bio, Daniels, who has a Ph.D., "has taught a variety of courses at both the undergraduate and graduate levels." These include Sex and Gender Roles, Black Feminist Thought, and the Politics of Queer Sexuality.
Of course, one fears the real tragedy here is that the sloppiness displayed by Jessie Daniels, Ph.D., may lead people to question the intellectual rigor that characterizes these otherwise serious fields of study. Or maybe I'm being too harsh, Kristof does sound a bit like Kristol.
From Alec Baldwin's latest at the Huffington Post:
McCain is another right-wing, retro, deficit-loving, never-seen-a-defense-appropriation-I-didn't-like tool. But there are a lot of people in this dumbed-down country that will buy that.
There are a lot of people in this "dumbed-down" country that wish it were so, but of course nobody in the United States Congress has been a more vocal critic of defense appropriations than John McCain. The fact that he scuttled the corrupt Boeing tanker deal, which led to prison sentences for officials from both the Air Force and Boeing, has caused him considerable grief from 'defense appropriation loving tools' on the right and the left this year as the contract was ultimately handed to the Airbus-Northrop team.
Which leads me to the stunning conclusion that brother Stephen may, in fact, be the brains of the Baldwin operation.
This post appeared on Spencer Ackerman's blog this afternoon:
TWINKLETOES, YOU'RE BREAKING MY HEART:
Forgive me, but this post is for the dudes. You know how you come out of the shower -- at the gym, say -- and you're toweling off, and you feel all dry, but then you put on your underwear and you realize: Dammit, I forgot to dry under my [...]. Sometimes I wonder, could you pay someone enough to dry your [...] area for you?
Anyway, after I read this review of Heads In The Sand I finally realized: so that's why Marty keeps this dude around.
--Spencer Ackerman
The review in question was written by Jamie Kirchick, former assistant to TNR editor Marty Peretz and a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Jamie is also gay, in case Ackerman didn't make that entirely clear in his post.
There's no way this kind of thing would be tolerated at any respectable institution on the right, but according to the New York Times, Ackerman will be moving his blog to the website of the liberal Center for American Progress later this month. One wonders if the flagship think-tank of the progressive movement will think twice before moving his archives as well.
That's the headline at the Huffington Post, but even by their own sorry standards it's a disgrace.
What McCain actually said today:
The dramatic reduction in violence has opened the way for a return to something approaching normal political and economic life for the average Iraqi.
I don't think it would be a particularly bold to claim that, of the highly trafficked political websites in this country, the Huffington Post is the most propagandistic. The dreck that they publish from Hollywood actors and Democratic politicians is hyper-partisan, juvenile, and generally uninformed, but not shockingly so. It's the headlines that are egregious.
When HuffPo was started up it was supposed to be the left's answer to the bias they perceived in the Drudge Report. Instead we've now got our very own version of Pravda--and with a similar sense of journalistic integrity.
Stephen Colbert fans know that Congressmen will appear on his Comedy Central show at their own political peril. Rep. Lynn A. Westmoreland (R-GA) for example, admitted to Colbert that he could only name three of the ten commandments and that he thought of himself as a "Georgia Peach." Not to be outdone, Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) said he liked cocaine and prostitutes because it’s the "fun thing to do."
But what might be a media consultant’s nightmare could turn out to be a fundraisers dream. This forthcoming paper by University of California at San Diego political scientist James H. Fowler in the journal PS: Politics and Political Science finds that Democratic Congressmen appearing on Colbert’s segment "Better Know A District" get a 44 percent bump in their fundraising after participating in his show. Fowler summarizes his study in this recent Los Angeles Times piece. Alas, Republicans, according to Fowler, show no similar "humiliation windfall."
HT: Monkey Cage
Apparently excessive blogging can be deadly, so I'll try and keep it light today.
Matt Stoller has a post up on how the Democrats should go about "framing Petraeus" this week. Stoller chides the Democrats for a lack of message discipline. He says:
Some of them want to drill into the tactics of the surge, some want to discuss larger national security questions, and some want to concede the surge worked but that the Iraqis are somehow at fault.
At fault? You mean Iraqis might be responsible for the disastrous success of the surge?
Via Hot Air, Time magazine's Bobby Ghosh reports that "every Iraqi who offers me a view on American politics seems to be praying for a McCain victory." Apparently Ghosh didn't get the memo that the only reliable sources inside Iraq are commanders in Sadr's militia.
Joe Klein questions the patriotism of anyone who doesn't share his optimism about universal health care, social security, and alternative energy. I thought dissent was patriotic, but apparently "it is more patriotic to be optimistic about the chance that our collective will--that is, the best work of government--will succeed, rather than that it will fail or impinge on freedom." Somehow I don't think Klein counts preventing civil war and ethnic cleansing in Iraq as "the best work of government."
Ezra Klein responds to Jamie Kirchick's scathing review of Matthew Yglesias's new book. Klein accuses Kirchick of failing to read the book cover to cover, the implication being that even people who are paid to read the book can't make it all the way through. This Klein might be on to something.
And finally, Charlton Heston passed away late last night. Heston was a subscriber to this magazine and I've posted a letter he once wrote us in response to a piece on Shakespeare by Paul Cantor. It's an excellent read. Also McCain put out this statement on Heston's passing:
"Our hearts and prayers go out to the family and friends of Charlton Heston. In taking on epic and commanding roles, he showed himself to be one of our nation's most gifted actors, and his legacy will forever be a part of our cinema. Off-the-screen, Charlton Heston was also a real-life leader. He served his country and proudly gave his voice in support of some of our most basic rights. He was devoted to the cause of freedom for all Americans from the battle for civil rights in the 1960s to protecting Second Amendment rights in the 1990s. At this time of grief, let us honor a life that has truly touched millions."
Our friends on the left are also honoring Heston, but for some reason Arianna Huffington has shut down the comments on this story at her site. Surely many of her readers want to express their thoughts and prayers at the passing of a man who's done so much to protect their Constitutional rights, no?
Last week Think Progress blogger Amanda accused John McCain of plagiarizing a speech from Admiral Timothy Ziemer only to retract the story hours later. Amanda, last name unknown, had failed to check with McCain's office before running her "exclusive," and she failed even to check McCain's website to see if he had used similar language in the past. In fact, he had. In a 1995 speech to the VFW, a speech predating Ziemer's, McCain had uttered the same phrases he was now alleged to have plagiarized. Amanda apologized for her sloppy reporting, but apparently she didn't learn much from the episode.
Today she runs a story about North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry under the headline: "Rep. McHenry calls U.S. soldier in Iraq a ‘two-bit security guard.'"
Well, it isn't true. Think Progress provides the video, but at no point does McHenry indicate that the "security guard" is an American soldier. In fact, if Amanda had bothered to call McHenry's office, she would have learned that the security guard was one of the foreign contractors so reviled by the left--an individual who in any other circumstance Amanda would likely label a "mercenary." I did call McHenry's office and the congressman's press secretary offered this statement from his boss:
It was a poor choice of words to describe the foreign contractor, but anyone who was there knows that I delivered a speech praising the heroism and sacrifice of those who are serving our country in harm's way.
The choice of words does not paint McHenry in the most flattering light...calling a security guard a "two-bit security guard" isn't exactly a classy move. But once again, Think Progress has failed to maintain even the minimum standards of the profession. How Amanda got from "security guard" to "U.S. soldier" is unclear, unless it was only intended to smear, like the false accusation she leveled at John McCain last week.
Five eligible right-wing blogettes are profiled here, and several of them won’t date liberals. As Cassy Fiano explains, "How smart can this guy be if he thinks John Kerry is a great politician?" Truer words have never been spoken. I’m sure any number of Weekly Standard Blog readers (at least 90 percent of which I assume are male) are so spellbound by Ms. Fiano that they’d risk a weekend at Gore Vidal’s Italian villa for a first date with her.
If only all the featured ladies were just as enthralling. Consider Dawn Eden, the author of The Thrill Of The Chaste:
It’s easy for a man to keep this illusion of being a great, sensitive romantic if he knows he’s just going to sleep with you and then say good-bye. Anybody can be Mr. Love God for one night or one week or one month.
I have no doubt that a date with the author of The Thrill of the Chaste would be exhilarating--wait, actually, I do doubt it. Hence the conservative proverb, "Be right, live left."
Daniel Larison responds to this post from earlier today in which I asserted that "there is no doubt that the mujahideen followed the Red Army back to Moscow after the war. The slaughter at Beslan, the apartment bombings in Moscow--there have been any number of terrorist acts perpetrated on Russian soil by people who fought against the Red Army in Afghanistan."
Larison's response:
It may come as some surprise to Goldfarb, but Chechnya belonged to the Soviet Union, Chechens were Soviets and it is more likely that there were ethnically Chechen conscripts in the Red Army fighting on the Soviet side than Chechens fighting alongside the mujahideen in Afghanistan.
Thanks for the geography lesson, Dan. But I was vaguely aware of this fact. I was referring to people who fought in Afghanistan, like say Abu Omar al-Saif, and later took their jihad to C | | | |
