Shorthand

by digby

The other day I was listening to Al Franken and Jonathan Alter chatter about a speech they’d heard President Clinton deliver at a dinner for the 20th anniversary of Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. (This is the speech in which he said “people didn’t give Democrats a mandate.They gave us a chance.”)

Franken made the interesting observation that in a room filled with journalists he was the only one taking notes — which explains why there was so little coverage of the event and the speech. Alter (one of the few who wrote about it) has an excellent memory, however, and described what Clinton said in some detail on Franken’s show, focusing on a specific point that Clinton made:

“America rejected shorthand, people are thinking again.”

This was, apparently (I can’t find a copy of the speech anywhere) a bit from a long passage explaining how this election reflects America’s return to empiricism. Alter doesn’t discuss this aspect of the speech in his piece, linked above, in Newsweek. And since virtually the entire elite press corps who were present didn’t bother to write about it, it’s hard to know exactly what he meant. But it certainly seems likely that he was at least obliquely referring to the press corps, considering the venue.

On Franken, Alter did not mention that possibility and instead went on to use Clinton’s theory that Americans had voted for empiricism as an opportunity to lecture liberals that they were in danger of becoming like conservatives because they hadn’t learned to rein in their own faith-based fanaticism. He used the teachers unions as an example of how the liberals refuse to admit empirical evidence that might endanger their power base. (I know. That’s right up there with denying global warming and saying that abortion causes breast cancer.)

As I listened to this I was once again struck by the lack of self-awareness in the media. You have the former president saying this to a crowd of elite journalists and they don’t seem to think it could apply to them — the very institution that is in charge of getting out the facts to the public. (The same institution that is now giving respect to such empirically nonsensical notions as creationism.)

I have long thought that one of liberalism’s biggest problems is its liberal pundits. Alter is a good guy who is more often right than wrong and so I don’t mean to pick on him here. But his comments are revealing. While he takes the opportunity to scold liberals for their own weakness in this area, he doesn’t acknowledge his own.

Sometime back I took him to task for his lazy adherence to the tired beltway theme about McGovernite retreads. But Alter is not one of the worst purveyors of this tired trope. A much better example of egregiously obtuse liberal punditry — the kind that would likely make me become a conservative if I were young and didn’t know better, just because I wouldn’t want to be associated with it — is Richard Cohen talking about the Vietnam and Iraq wars today:

I would have fought neither war.

Before you protest “of course, Cohen,” let me explain that the “I” in the foregoing sentence is really four people. There is the “I” who originally thought the Vietnam War was morally correct, that the communists were awful people and that the loss of South Vietnam (the North was already gone) would result in a debacle for its people. That’s, in fact, what happened. It was only later, when I myself was in the Army, that I deemed the war not worth killing or dying for. By then I — the second “I” — no longer felt it was winnable, and I did not want to lose my life so that somehow defeat could be managed more elegantly.

Things are precisely the same with Iraq, and here, too, I — No. 3 — originally had no moral qualms about the war. Saddam Hussein was a beast who had twice invaded his neighbors, had killed his own people with abandon and posed a threat — and not just a theoretical one — to Israel. If anything, I was encouraged in my belief by the offensive opposition to the war — silly arguments about oil or empire or, at bottom, the ineradicable and perpetual rottenness of America.

On the contrary, I thought. We are a good country, attempting to do a good thing. In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic. The United States had the power to change things for the better, and those who would do the changing — the fighting — were, after all, volunteers. This mattered to me.

But these volunteers are now fighting a war few envisaged and no one wanted — not I (No. 4), for sure. If at one time my latter-day minutemen marched off thinking they were bringing democracy to Iraq and the greater Middle East, they now must know better. If they thought they were going to rid the region of weapons of mass destruction and sever the link between al-Qaeda and Hussein, they now are entitled to feel duped by Bush, Vice President Cheney and others. The exaggerations are particularly repellent. To fool someone into sacrificing his life to battle a chimera is a hideous abuse of the public trust.

Everything about that screams shallow, unsubstantial, flip-flopping fool. This is the face of liberalism that the right loves to use as an example of our dizzy, deer-in-the-headlights intellectual fecklessness. And if we were like him, they would be right.

It was one thing for Cohen to have followed that path the Vietnam war. He was a young man. He was also part of a culture that was drenched in the WWII ethos of American military dominance. Cohen’s journey during Vietnam is that of many Americans. What is not acceptable is that in middle age he shows exactly the same naivete as if the previous experience never happened — much like Bush and the Neocons who apparently never got past it either. This is the most embarrassing public confession I’ve read in a long time.

But that wasn’t the worst of it:

If anything, I was encouraged in my belief by the offensive opposition to the war — silly arguments about oil or empire or, at bottom, the ineradicable and perpetual rottenness of America.

On the contrary, I thought. We are a good country, attempting to do a good thing. In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic.

The “prudent use of violence could be therapeutic,” (for whom, he doesn’t say, but I must assume it wasn’t those who were on either the delivery or receving ends — I doubt it’s very therapeutic for them.) And in the same breath he says he was encouraged in his beliefs because of the “offensive” and “silly” opposition to the war which was “at bottom” a bunch of believers in the “ineradicable and perpetual rottenness” of America.

This isn’t just any Joe Schmoe. He’s a top liberal columnist in the national capitol’s premiere newspaper and he’s not only a trafficker in cliches so musty they smell like Robert Novak’s crypt, but he’s apparently so muddle headed that he doesn’t know when he sounds like a sociopath. (But I suppose sociopaths never know when they sound like sociopaths, do they?)

This statement actually does raise an important question: would the judgment of America as being “rotten” actually be all wrong if it were proven that most Americans were the type of people who think that the “prudent use of violence is therapeutic?” I think it might. It would certainly prove that most Americans are offensive.

As it is, I doubt that very many people really believe that a prudent use of violence is therapeutic. Only rich, rheumy-eyed, dissolute courtiers who live in a rarified world in which patriotic “volunteers” administer the beatings for them would think such a thing. (Or S&M porno afficionados, which I suspect may include many of the same people.)

If Clinton is correct and the American people are thinking again, it’s quite clear that Richard Cohen has not joined their ranks. He’s still splashing about in his own alternate reality, fighting the straw hippies he still sees around every corner and sharing a lifelong personal journey in which he managed to get from the toilet to the sink and back again. Jonathan Alter may be right that liberals have their own faith-based problems, but our much bigger problem is the total incoherence of people like Cohen who are paid big bucks to represent us in the media.

Update: Hilzoy says Richard Cohen should get a new job.
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