Month: April 2007

More Story Talk

by digby

Atrios and Ann Friedman have been discussing the need for real stories about abortion and it reminded me of a post I wrote a couple of years ago during the Schaivo circus and it seems like a good one to add to the mix today:

Matt Yglesias over on TAPPED makes a good point about the new parental notification law. It pretty much clears up any remaining notion that repealing Roe vs Wade will solve the abortion issue once and for all so we can put all that unpleasantness aside as various progressive states will do as their constituents require and everybody will live happily ever after.

Pro-lifers are driven by a very serious moral commitment to the idea that aborting pregnancies is a serious wrong. They’re not going to be happy sitting idly by while Virginia women travel to Maryland or the District of Columbia to have abortions any more than they’re happy with inter-state travel to avoid parental notification laws.

That is correct. I don’t know how long it’s going to take Democrats to understand that those who vote one way or the other on that issue alone cannot be finessed. We can try to sound sympathetic to the “ick” factor and whittle away at the rights of women over time until there is only the most bare right to abortion if the woman’s life is threatened and it won’t make a difference to those who believe it is a fundamental issue of morality. We have to fight this one on the merits.

This reminds me of an interesting article by Paul Rogat Loeb in USA Today from a while back in which he writes that one of our problems with abortion is that we have not told personal stories:

Even if you’ve heard enough about Terri Schiavo, it seems useful to consider why President Bush’s political grandstanding in her case backfired. More than 70% of Americans, including solid majorities of self-described evangelicals, opposed the intervention of the White House and Congress. Those surveyed mistrusted the Bush administration’s disregard for local control, the rule of law and the right to be protected from a capricious federal government.

Their responses also speak to a broader shift in how we deal with difficult end-of-life issues. For 20 years, gradually increasing majorities have agreed that for all our technological inventiveness, what some people need most is the right to die in peace. You’d think this belief — that the most difficult decisions must be our own — would also raise support for maintaining the right to abortion. But it hasn’t. In the 30 years since Roe v. Wade, support for keeping abortion legal has stayed even, at most, and new onerous restrictions keep getting imposed.

The difference comes, I suspect, from the stories we tell, and those we keep hidden. Many families have wrestled with end-of-life choices. But they’re brought on by the illness and aging of loved ones, not by our own actions. No one judges us for having a sick parent as they might for our sexuality. So we’re likely to talk in public about such choices.

But most women don’t publicly discuss their abortions. Although a third of all U.S. women have abortions by age 45, they’re more likely to view the dilemma as a product of their own failures — to use adequate birth control or to have the financial or emotional resources to afford another child. They’re more likely to feel shame.

When the movement to legalize abortion began, advocates talked about the human costs of prohibition. They told the complex stories of why women would choose to value their own lives, choices and possibilities over the potential life of the fetus. They framed abortion as an act of compassion. We see this in the recent film, Vera Drake. Its working-class protagonist in postwar England views her actions “helping young girls in trouble” as part of the same ethic of caring as looking after her aged mother. Pro-choice activists eventually told their stories powerfully enough to convince America that its abortion policies had to change.

Since Roe, these voices have been neutralized by those speaking for the humanity of the fetus. Some oppose abortion from compassion and conviction. The motive of others, who also campaign against sex education, access to birth control and financial support for poor families, seems more like punitive vindictiveness. As the stories of the women involved faded, the reasons why women have always made this difficult choice, and will keep doing so, got told far less often.

Schiavo was a soap opera that everyone could understand in narrative terms. And most people underestood that it was a complicated story in which all of the characters were drawn in various shades of heroism, love, selfishness and grief. The discussions around the Easter table in many homes, I suspect, were characterized with sighs and stories of “remember your Aunt Millie’s first husband Bill back in Baltimore? She had to pull the plug and her son wasn’t happy about it at all” kind of dialog. “Morality” was probably not the frame in which this topic was overtly discussed because the morality of the issue was so complicated.

Abortion, I think, has always been difficult to talk about because it had to do with sex — and therefore, in some people’s minds, sin. But I do remember back in the day that one of the things that made abortion finally come out of the closet was the willingness of people to talk about the issue. The stories were of the horrors of the back alley abortions they endured and the complexity of circumstances that led them there. For instance, here’s just one example from Gloria Feldt’s book “Behind Every Choice is A Story” of a complicated situation and the horrible way the women was forced to deal with it:

In 1970 I had a back-street abortion. I had a young daughter of 18 months at home and was separated from an abusive husband. When I found out I was pregnant with another child right after finally having the courage to leave an abusive man, I cried and cried. This was before abortion was legal. I told a close friend who said she knew of a doctor who performed these abortions.

I went to his clinic, which was dirty and sleazy underneath an underpass in Metairie, Louisiana. I was treated as a criminal and so were all the other women in the room. You had to give $150 in cash before they would even speak to you. I was led to a back room where there was no caring or anesthetic to be found. It was very painful and I threw up immediately and kept throwing up for over an hour after the procedure. My girlfriend who went with me was worried as I did not come out right away as others had. She inquired about me and was led to the back room where she saw that I was in pain and throwing up. She held my hand and got a washcloth to wash my face and help me. She asked the nurse if there wasn’t something wrong and she replied “this is how some of them get.” My girlfriend was horrified at the coldness and uncaring atmosphere of the place. We left sometime after and she drove me home and called a friend who was an intern at the time. He came to the house and prescribed some antibiotics and pain medication. He was very kind.

This ABC News poll says that 81% of the public believe that abortion should be available to rape and incest victims. That is not an absolutist “culture of life” position. However, 57% of the public believe that abortion should be illegal if the reason is to end an unwanted pregnancy. The question, of course, is what does “unwanted” mean and who decides? If you were to tell that personal story, a woman with a toddler already and an abusive husband she is trying desperately to leave, would 57% agree that this particular unwanted pregnancy should be dealt with in that horrible back alley situation? Should she have been forced to have this child under those circumstances? I doubt it.

Certainly, a fair number would say “tough” — that women should have to carry the preganacy to term and give it up for adoption. But suppose that meant that the abusive father would have the right to take full custody? And, after all, how easy is it to give the sister or brother of your two year old up for adoption? And what about money or health care or legal fees? People don’t want to think about the practical, financial aspects of having a child under stressful stituation, but it is likely to be a primary concern of the person who is going to have to pay the price. I know that in the discussions I had about the Schiavo case, the issue of cost was somthing that came up in every single conversation. Who pays and where will the money come from are things that real people talk about when they deal with these issues.

I understand the impulse of those who say “I’m not sorry” as a way of expressing their right to dominion over their own bodies. As a knee jerk civil libertarian, I am very sympathetic to a straight forward expression of individual rights. But from a political point of view, it makes far more sense to present this issue as one of complicated morality which individuals see differently in different circumstances and which politicians are much too craven and self-interested to intervene.

There are probably cases in which large numbers of people would see abortion as repugnant on some level. But there are many, many cases that would evoke the dinner table conversations that happened around the Schivo case if people knew the stories. 16 year old girls who made mistakes and 34 year old struggling mothers of two whose birth control failed and women who have no money and low paying jobs and medical students with a mountain of debt and a year to go. These stories may or may not meet every single person’s criteria of what constitutes a “good reason” for having an abortion. But every single one of those women might very well decide that the circumstances are so dire for them that they will take their chances with a back alley abortion if a legal one is unavailable. That is the stark, dramatic choice that this country faces in this debate. And as Matt says, don’t count on being able to just drive to California or Canada (even if you can come up with the money) because repealing Roe vs Wade will not be the end of it. They will not stop until it is outlawed nationally.

It is important to introduce back into the dialog the fact that this is not an abstract moral issue, but a multi-dimensional, intensely human dilemma. When people understand things in those terms they are far more likely to want the government to step back than step in. It seems they know instinctively that the blunt instrument of government in the hands of moral absolutists is a bad idea.

Update: And yes, it would have been very helpful if people knew the horrible situations in which some of these young girls affected by the new parental notification laws find themselves. Parental notification laws do not hurt the healthy families that just want to help their girls make a good decision. Those kinds of families can deal with complexity and have probably built up a lot of trust over the years. These laws hurt the girls whose families are cruel, violent and authoritarian. Many adult women have had their lives ruined because they were forced to bear the burden of their parents’ obsessive religious or political zealotry.

Update II: Friedman points out that the pro-choice movement has been publicizing these stories, but they don’t seem to be able to penetrate the mainstream media.

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No Prodigal Son, He

by tristero

This fine open letter protesting Tenet’s recent book implicitly makes an important point about redemption and forgiveness. You earn it, you don’t cash in on it. And you do so not merely by writing a self-serving book that cashes in on the present (well-deserved) disgust with the Bush administration’s bloody and totally immoral war, but you take the symbolic action of returning the medal you received from your fellow scoundrels and you also take the very real action of refusing to profit from your cowardice and culpability. In short, Tenet needs to behave like a truly honorable human being instead of a Bush-league hustler.

Whether or not this moral dwarf ever redeems himself isn’t that important, however. More to the point is that we shouldn’t waste any more time listening to him. That has been one of the major problems of the US in the 21st Century. Both the national government and the public political discourse have been dominated by people who are so utterly worthless they make one appreciate Paris Hilton all the more for the qualities of her incisive mind.

It’s high time that those who were right all along about Iraq have a significant national voice. The country should be listening to – ie, the networks should be running numerous interviews with – Brady Kiesling, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, and many, many others. And no one should be bothering to pay attention any further to the likes of Peter Beinart, Kenneth Pollack, George Tenet, Francis Fukuyama, Willaim Kristol, Rich Lowry, George Will, David Brooks, Tom Friedman, Christopher Hitchens, and Michael Ledeen. Whether or not they now recognize they were wrong, the fact is that they were when it counted most. Time to listen to those who got it right from the start.

Fat chance. But I thought I should mention it.

High School Not So Confidential

by digby

The principal of Gig Harbor High School said Thursday that a school official should not have shown the parents of a student the video-surveillance footage of the girl kissing another girl in the cafeteria. And he vowed that such an incident wouldn’t happen again.

But Principal Greg Schellenberg said an investigation has found that no rules or policies were broken.

“It wasn’t a violation of policy and procedure … but we all agree it was not a good use of surveillance,” Schellenberg said. “It was an abnormal use of our equipment and it won’t happen again. This is not a Big Brother institution.”

Even so, a spokesman for the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington said the group plans to look into the matter.

“I have a hard time believing this incident would’ve been handled the same way if it was a heterosexual couple,” said spokesman Doug Honig.

Earlier this year, Schellenberg said, the parents of the sophomore girl asked the school’s dean of students, Keith Nelson, to alert them if school officials noticed their daughter engaged in any “unusual behavior.”

Then in early February, a video camera in the cafeteria recorded a kiss between the sophomore and a senior girl, Schellenberg said.

Nelson showed the video to the sophomore’s parents, who then transferred her to a school outside the Peninsula School District, Schellenberg said.

[…]

Schellenberg granted that Nelson could have simply told the girl’s parents what had happened without showing them the video. But he said that the school would have handled it the same way had she been kissing a boy.

Well that’s a relief.

When did they start putting teen-agers under constant video surveillance in high schools? Or maybe I should ask when America the free decided that East Germany and the Soviet Union weren’t all bad?

Somehow I can’t help but think it isn’t a coincidence that all this stuff started happening when the anti-communist freedom loving conservatives became dominant in our culture.

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ABC’s Of Hypocrisy

by digby

I know others have pointed out that Randall Tobias, the “abstinence makes the heart grow fonder” AIDS czar is a screaming hypocrite for his extra-marital “massages,” but I’m still gobsmacked by this particular item:

On Thursday, Tobias told ABC News he had several times called the “Pamela Martin and Associates” escort service “to have gals come over to the condo to give me a massage.” Tobias, who is married, said there had been “no sex,” and that recently he had been using another service “with Central Americans” to provide massages.

Here was Tobias on PBS some time back explaining his approach to globally combatting AIDS:

Well, the heart of our prevention programs is what’s known as ABC: abstinence, be faithful, and the correct and consistent use of condoms when appropriate. This is not an American invention; this is something that President [Yoweri] Museveni in Uganda figured out over time when he recognized that there was an enormous problem in Uganda.

And it’s also not “ABC: Take your pick.” It’s abstinence really focused heavily on young people and getting them to understand that the best way to keep from getting infected is to be abstinent and not engage in sexual activity until they are old enough and mature enough and get into a committed relationship, such as a marriage. B is being faithful within that committed relationship. And A and B, those two things together clearly had a huge impact in bringing the infection rates down in Uganda.

C recognizes the fact that there are individuals in high-risk circumstances who either by choice or by coercion are going to find themselves unable to follow A and B, and therefore they need to have access to condoms, and they need to understand the correct and consistent use of condoms. I think more and more of the experts, the people who really understand the prevention requirements with HIV/AIDS, have come to endorse ABC in a very balanced way as the appropriate prevention centerpiece.

Ok. This approach has had some success in Uganda and maybe it could have some success elsewhere. But we know that cultural factors play a very strong role in AIDS prevention, as Tobias acknowledged:

But I would also add that as important as ABC is, the fact is that this is a disease where 50 percent of the people infected in the world are women. When I cite those numbers to people here in the United States, I find most people are astonished. They just have no idea about that. In some countries in Africa, it’s well above 50 percent that are women and girls.

In many cases this is driven by cultural factors, where young girls are having sex with older men and [are] coerced to do that, where women aren’t regarded as equal citizens with men. So there are lots of things that need to be done addressing those kinds of cultural issues also.

From what we hear, the main prostitution ring may have been made up of skilled and educated women who chose to be call girls for a variety of their own reasons. This is none of my business and if politicans and others have not been out there preaching sexual morality on Fridays and getting happy endings on Saturday then I don’t see that it’s anybody elses business either.

Exploiting illegal immigrants or poor women is another thing altogether. Indeed, it is, as Tobias himself said, a matter of coercion and if he had anything to do with something like that he should be in much deeper trouble than just patronizing a call girl agency for a little extra-curricular massage. It’s possible, of course, that this Central American “service” is also made up of young professional women who are making some extra cash on the side, in which case I make no judgment beyond his rank, laughable hypocrisy on the faithfulness and abstinence issue. But let’s just say I’m skeptical. That “cultural issue” he talks about is pretty universal, but you would expect that the man who has been all over the globe and seen the results of such exploitation would have been cured of his taste for third world masseuses.

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Consulting The Experts

by digby

Via Kevin, I see that James Fallows also noticed that Dan Bartlett told a little fib regarding one of Tenent’s accusations:

Tenet, as mentioned earlier, would have better served his country (and his reputation) by speaking up more promptly about the Bush Administration’s failure ever to have a “serious debate” about whether it was worth invading Iraq. But his failing was telling the truth too late — not sticking to, well, a lie like the one Bartlett uttered yesterday (according to the AP) as part of the White House’s attempt to rebut Tenet:

“This president weighed all the various proposals, weighed all the various consequences before he did make a decision.”

I say plainly: that is a lie. To be precise about it, no account of the Administration’s deliberations, by anyone other than Bartlett just now, offers even the slightest evidence that this claim is true. Innumberable accounts offer ample evidence that it is false. I have asked this direct question to many interviewees who were in a position to know: was there ever such a meeting or discussion? The answer was always, No.

Actually, that’s not precisely true. It has been documented that Bush sought advice from some people:

According to “Plan of Attack,” Bush asked Rice and his longtime communications adviser, Karen Hughes, whether he should attack Iraq, but he did not specifically ask Powell or Rumsfeld. “I could tell what they thought,” the president said. “I didn’t need to ask their opinion about Saddam Hussein or how to deal with Saddam Hussein. If you were sitting where I sit, you could be pretty clear.”

And then there was the Big Kahuna:

Bush said he did not remember asking the question of his father, former president George H.W. Bush, who fought Iraq in the 1991 Persian Gulf War…”You know he is the wrong father to appeal to in terms of strength. There is a higher father that I appeal to,” Bush said.

So it’s not really fair to claim that the president had just made up his mind without input or consideration — he consulted with Condi, Karen and God. He just didn’t weigh the options and consequences with his secretary of defense, State, the military or any experts. Let’s not be unfair here.

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Braindead Currency

by digby

Here’s a new one: evolution is an ancient Jewish conspiracy:

The second most powerful member of the Texas House has circulated a Georgia lawmaker’s call for a broad assault on teaching of evolution.

House Appropriations Committee Chairman Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, used House operations Tuesday to deliver a memo from Georgia state Rep. Ben Bridges.

The memo assails what it calls “the evolution monopoly in the schools.”

Mr. Bridges’ memo claims that teaching evolution amounts to indoctrinating students in an ancient Jewish sect’s beliefs.

“Indisputable evidence – long hidden but now available to everyone – demonstrates conclusively that so-called ‘secular evolution science’ is the Big Bang, 15-billion-year, alternate ‘creation scenario’ of the Pharisee Religion,” writes Mr. Bridges, a Republican from Cleveland, Ga. He has argued against teaching of evolution in Georgia schools for several years.

He then refers to a Web site, www.fixedearth.com, that contains a model bill for state Legislatures to pass to attack instruction on evolution as an unconstitutional establishment of religion.

Mr. Bridges also supplies a link to a document that describes scientists Carl Sagan and Albert Einstein as “Kabbalists” and laments “Hollywood’s unrelenting role in flooding the movie theaters with explicit or implicit endorsement of evolutionism.”

Ok, so this guy’s just a lunatic crank, right? Anyone who believes this anti-semitic drivel thankfully doesn’t have any real effect of people’s lives. Oh wait:

In the world of family-planning and reproductive rights, it’s been business as usual at the 80th Legislature: The agenda is schizophrenic and often steeped in hypocrisy…Consider the perennial quest to define “life” as the magical moment at which sperm meets egg. This year, that definition has found its way into House Bill 175, the so-called “trigger bill” filed by Rep. Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, which would ban all abortion in Texas (unless the mother would otherwise die), if the U.S. Supreme Court ever decides to reverse Roe v. Wade.

The point of the bill, says Kathi Seay, spokeswoman for Rep. Frank “the Fetus” Corte, is to demonstrate that Texans are committed to upholding the sanctity of life. (Chisum agreed to carry the bill, but Corte’s office is fielding all questions about it.) While Chisum, Corte, and similar-minded lawmakers champion the rights owed the unborn, they nonetheless fail to support the kinds of programs and policies – like the Children’s Health Insurance Program – that might better demonstrate real concern for the living.

There’s a good reason for that:

To hear Seay tell it, HB 175 does reflect real compassion: “Now, access to health care is a fine thing,” she says, but “the point is, how a society treats life really matters and spills out into other issues.” Some might think that unplanned pregnancies leading to unwanted children might correlate to the relative incidence of child abuse; Seay counters that abortion “devalues” life, which is what truly leads to child abuse and other social ills. Before Roe, none of our current social problems existed – end abortion, she says, and those problems will disappear.

So elected officials in Texas believe that that evolution was invented by the Pharisees and child abuse is caused by abortion. They have a very big agenda:

The session droned on until after 4am, dominated by a stream of middle-aged women determined to share tales of abortions past and the consequent turmoil in their lives. Rhonda Arias, founder of something called the Oil of Joy for Mourning, argued that many women in Texas prisons trace the source of their problems to abortion. (Arias played a video for the committee wherein one woman averred that abortion turned her into a “crackhead whore.”) Abortion usually results in substance-abuse problems and, therefore, Arias concluded, actually leads to an “increased risk of becoming involved in auto accidents.” Much of the evening was devoted to more of the same.

Yes, these people are cranks. But a majority of the Supreme Court basically agreed with them — especially the Justice whom most people in the country inexplicably believe will honor precedent and vote with the four more liberal justices to uphold Roe. I don’t know why they think that. Kennedy adopted the framework of the looniest, most sexist argument out there as justification for his opinion — that women can’t be allowed to make a decision they might later regret. It is only a matter of time before they are able to entrench the next step in that thinking — that women who have abortions are a danger to society. They are, after all, out of their minds.

The forced childbirth movement quite wisely adopted this logic back in the 90’s knowing that the stereotype of the hysterical woman who doesn’t know her own mind would be convincing to an awful lot of very stupid people — even a fair number of women. It convinced a majority of the Supreme Court.

If the Supreme Court buys this nonsense in 2007, it is not a stretch to think they’ll believe that abortion causes car accidents in 2010 — or that evolution is actually an ancient Jewish conspiracy in 2015. It’s all part of the same braindead anti-intellectual streak that has gained currency in this country over the last few years — from the Texas State legislature to the highest court in the land.

Now that the Bush administration has temporarily embarrassed the Republicans on the national stage, look for the states to become their primary “laboratory.” And the state legislatures are filled with rightwingnuts who believe things like the above. They may not have many overt allies among national legislators at the moment, but they seem to have some close friends among the youngest members of the Supreme Court.

Here is an interesting in-depth article about the entirely made up “Post-Abortion Syndrome” from a January 2007 NY Times magazine which features the woman mentioned in the article above, Rhonda Arias. It reports on all the medical and psychological data which shows that this concept is bunk and it interviews members of the movement in depth:

On a rainy morning in November, a dozen women gathered a block from the Supreme Court, at a row house owned by the Gospel of Life Ministries, an anti-abortion group. The women planned to spend the day rallying on the steps of the court while the justices heard a challenge to the federal partial-birth-abortion ban. ..At the courthouse, the women unfurled banners and signs that read, “I Regret My Abortion” and lined up to hold them. A giant picture of a bloody fetus floated above the crowd. Behind Forney’s group, two dozen people in NOW and Naral T-shirts chanted: “Right to life, that’s a lie. You don’t care if women die,” and “You get pregnant, let me know. Anti-choicers got to go.” Forney eyed them. “All these years and they still haven’t figured out it would be wise to find common ground with women like us,” she said.

I asked her what she had in mind. She talked about making abortion “unthinkable” by making sure that women have better choices. At first this sounded like Bill Clinton’s “safe, legal and rare” formulation, or Hillary Clinton’s characterization of abortion as a “tragedy.” But along with promoting adoption, the reforms Forney and Morana described were Baby Moses laws, which make it easier not for women to avoid pregnancy in the first place or to take care of children to whom they give birth but to abandon newborns at places like fire stations and hospitals. [no trauma there, I guess. ed]

Forney and Morana compare abortion to smoking. “The suppression of truth about the harms of abortion is the same as the suppression of truth about the harms of cigarettes,” Morana said. Once the public understands the trauma of abortion, as they now do the health problems associated with cigarettes, then “changing the law will be an afterthought,” Forney predicted.

And this is why it is a terrible idea to try to make common cause with these people. They are liars and they are slightly insane. The dangers of smoking are scientifically valid. The dangers of “post-abortion syndrome” are not. When Democratic politicians like Hillary Clinton call abortion a tragedy in order to make common cause with these people they are bringing the day closer when women will be crawling out of back alleys gushing blood again — a process that truly does cause terrible trauma. The real kind.

You cannot allow anti-intellectual nonsense to dictate public policy, whether its anti-semitic drivel about evolution or made up statistics about “post-abortion syndrome.” The very fact that they are lying and cheating and “strategizing” their allegedly moral appeal against the right to abortion should be clue enough that they do not have faith that they can convince people with an honest argument. I find this time and time again with the anti-choice crowd — a disingenuousness that borders on psychopathy.

Everyone in the country should be very concerned about any group that lies for our own good, whether it’s politicians in Washington lying about an unnecessary war, anti-choice activists who make up statistics to advance their cause or religious folks who claim they just want “all theories” taught in science class. It’s all part of the same thing. They know they will not prevail if they tell the truth. That is fundamentally undemocratic — and unamerican.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?

By Dennis Hartley

Picture if you will: Sometime in the near future (October of 2007 to be precise), President Bush makes a trip to Chicago for some speechifying and political schmoozing. As his motorcade nears the site of a scheduled luncheon, it runs into a gauntlet of agitated demonstrators. When the crowd suddenly and unexpectedly breaches the police line, all hell breaks loose; there is a moment where the President appears to be in actual physical danger before things get back under control. The President is whisked off to his luncheon, he makes his speech, and decides afterwards to “work the ropes” and shake hands with supporters for a few minutes before heading out (much to the chagrin of his Secret Service detail). Suddenly, gunfire erupts and the President crumples to the ground.

This is the audacious opening scenario of British writer-director Gabriel Range’s speculative political thriller Death of a President , now on DVD. While in its initial (and sparse) theatrical release, it invoked some amount of “controversy”; primarily knee-jerk reaction from those who assumed this was going to be some type of sick Bush-hating liberal snuff fantasy (a conclusion drawn, of course, before they had even screened it).

Setting politics aside (for a moment), the film itself turns out to be a somewhat tame (and at times downright tepid) affair, despite its sensationalistic premise. Range utilizes the docu-drama technique of blending archival news footage with mixed-media film stocks (a la “JFK”) to lend an air of authenticity to his milieu. Technically speaking, the opening sequences depicting the actual assassination event are quite effective and chillingly believable. The director apparently filmed an actual anti-Bush demonstration in the streets of Chicago, then for the sake of continuity invited some of the same “real” protestors to appear as extras in the “fake” motorcade scene (which invites comparisons to Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, in which actors were thrown into the midst of some of the actual 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention demonstrator/police skirmishes and told to improvise).

Unfortunately, by front-loading the relatively gripping assassination enactment and then descending into a much more static, History Channel-style blend of talking-head “recollections” and “dramatic re-enactments”, Range shoots himself in the foot and removes any possibility of suspense or dramatic tension (don’t expect an edge of your seat thriller a la “The Day of the Jackal.” There is a “whodunit” element, but things slow down to such a crawl that it feels anti-climatic when the real killer is revealed.

The most interesting aspects are the speculations about a post-assassination political climate. And yes, most of your dystopian nightmares about a Cheney-led administration are alluded to, including a particularly foreboding piece of “emergency” legislation entitled the “Patriot Act 3” (shudder!). There is also a treatise of sorts about the post-9/11 tendency in this country to make “rush to judgment” assumptions about people of color (this film would make an interesting double bill with The Road to Guantanamo.)

“Conspiracy-a-go-go” buffs might find this one worth a look; others may doze off.

Political Hit Parade: JFK, Bobby , Interview With the Assassin, The Assassination of Richard Nixon, The Times of Harvey Milk, Suddenly, Executive Action, Winter Kills , In the Line of Fire , The Parallax View, The Manchurian Candidate, Taxi Driver ,Bob Roberts, Bulworth, The Day of the Jackal,Nine Hours To Rama, Z.

Character assassinations: The Hunting of the President, The Contender, Advise and Consent, The Politician’s Wife, Scandal(1989)

Politicians kickin’ it, ol’ school: I, Claudius, Macbeth (1971), Julius Caesar (1953), Richard III (1955), Hamlet(1996).

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Think Outside The Rolodex

by digby

Atrios is writing some interesting things today about the blogosphere. I’ll just add this:

PETER BEINART: I don’t think that I presented myself as a Middle East expert per se. I was a political journalist. I was a– a columnist writing about all kinds of things. Someone in my– in my position is not a Middle East expert in the way that somebody who studies this at a university is, or even at a think tank. But I consumed that stuff.

I was relying on people who did that kind of reporting and people who had been in the government who had– who had access to classified material for their assessment.

BILL MOYERS: And you would talk to them and they would, in effect, brief you, the background on what they knew?

PETER BEINART: Sometimes, but–

BILL MOYERS: I’m trying to help the audience understand. How does– you described yourself as a political– a reporter of political opinion, or a journalist–

PETER BEINART: Yeah.

BILL MOYERS: –political opinion. How do you– how do you get the information that enables you to reach the conclusion that you draw as a political journalist?

PETER BEINART: Well, I was doing mostly, for a large part it was reading, reading the statements and the things that people said. I was not a beat reporter. I was editing a magazine and writing a column. So I was not doing a lot of primary reporting. But what I was doing was a lot of reading of other people’s reporting and reading of what officials were saying.

Can someone explain to me exactly how this is different from what most bloggers do? I realize we are all pathetically compromised DFH’s of the highest order, but even so, there are many, many people in the world who can read, analyze and then write about their conclusions. Beinert is a clear writer, but not a great one, such as (gasp) Christopher Hitchins or Andrew Sullivan whose gifts for language might be a selling point even if they are wrong most of the time. All he really has going for him is his allegedly sharp analytical ability. And yet in the greatest test so far of his generation, he failed to see what many of us out in the country saw using exactly the same methods. We read everything (including, btw, Knight Ridder and Scott Ritter and Carnegie Institute for Peace and old PNAC manifestos) and concluded that Bush was following some bizarre middle eastern quest that had been pre-ordained by a bunch of nutty neocons for a variety of ridiculous reasons, none of which added up to a decent rationale for an Iraq invasion. When I read some anonymous source quoted in TIME magazine say that the administration was throwing reasons at the wall to see what stuck, I recognized that for the truth. The evidence certainly supported it. I assume that Beinert read most of the same things I did, probably more, and yet he backed the president and argued for war. The only difference I can see then between Beinert and me was that I was far away from the corridors of power and was making my conclusions based on nothing more than what my own eyes, ears and mind were telling me. He was living in the GOP establishment bubble and had lost the ability to see beyond it.

Although there are many great bloggers who live in DC and float around the periphery of the establishment, for the most part they are not part of the power structure and function either as ambassadors and liasons for the netroots movement or operate as activists rather than power brokers. Considering how decadent and self-serving the politico-media establishment has become over the past few years, this may be the single most important thing that bloggers bring to the table. Certainly, as it concerns punditry, that’s the case.

I suppose it could also be argued that the DC pundits are just not as smart as the rest of us but I doubt it. They aren’t stupid or uninformed. Still, results are results and there must be a reason why so many members of the political media have been so wrong so often for the past decade and a half. Out here in the hinterlands, a whole bunch of us have been able to see through what was going on, while it was going on. It’s not just partisanship and it’s not just a fluke. From the silly travel office flap in 1993 until David Broder’s heinous little screed yesterday, there is a long continuum of establishment petulance, confusion, triviality and error. If it isn’t their proximity to those who are spinning them, I can only assume that they are either dumb, craven or Republican. It’s got to be something.

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The Liberal Press Accentuates The Negative

by tristero

A truly alarming headline in the NY Times: Rebuilt Iraq Projects Found Crumbling. This is serious because it implies that Halliburton the Bush administration has been more interested in messing things up than in actually permanently rebuilding Iraq, a scurrilous charge. But then, buried on page two online, we read this:

Besides the airport, hospital and special forces barracks, places where inspectors found serious problems included two projects at a military base near Nasiriya and one at a military recruiting center in Hilla — both cities in the south — and a police station in Mosul, a northern city. A second police station in Mosul was found to be in good condition.

Y’see how the liberal media distorts things? These professional surrenderists looked at the decaying airport, the hospital, the special forces barracks, the military base at Nasiriya, a recruitng station in Hilla, and the other Mosul police station where there’s mucho problems and drew the worst possible conclusion, a conclusion completely contradicted by the facts on the ground.

A truly objective headline – which also, by the way, would promote America’s clear interest in success in Iraq – would have read

Rebuilt Iraq Project Found Not Crumbling

And that’s the truth. And it’s the exact opposite of what the commie al Qaeda assassin Bill Keller would have you believe.

Multiple Choice

by tristero

Okay, ladies, gentlemen, and Republicans, no peeking. Which conclusion actually is true regarding Bush Administration policy and rightwing ideology?

(A) Support for blank check funding of the surge in Iraq – as favored by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress – looks increasingly foolish and indefensible.

(B) Advocating the privatization of Social Security as a means of resolving a very real but overblown problem – as favored by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress – looks increasingly foolish and indefensible.

(C) Reliance on abstinence-only sex education as the primary tool to reduce teenage pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases – as favored by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress – looks increasingly foolish and indefensible.

(D) Promotion of faith-based initiatives – as favored by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress – looks increasingly foolish and indefensible.

(E) Insistence upon making tax breaks for the rich permanent – as favored by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress – looks increasingly foolish and indefensible.

(F) Advocating an amendment to the US Constitution to ban same-sex marriages – as favored by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress – looks increasingly foolish and indefensible.

(G) Retaining Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General of the United States – as favored by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress – looks increasingly foolish and indefensible.

(H) Respecting the judgment and intellectual integrity of Paul Wolfowitz – as favored by the Bush administration and conservatives in Congress – looks increasingly foolish and indefensible.

(I) All of the above.

(J) None of the above.

Well, that was easy.

And that’s exactly how easy it is these days to grind out editorials about this unbelievably bad presidency and his unbelievably corrupt and dim-witted ideological partners. The tragedy is that it was just as easy to do so much earlier, when they could have made a difference, for example, regarding public willingness to support an utterly idiotic and immoral invasion.

What’s hard is trying to understand why anyone, including the editors of the NY Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the New Republic, every American television station, and so on and so on and so on, gave these fuck-ups a free pass for so long when it was patently obvious from day one that everything they believed or did was, to coin a phrase, “foolish and indefensible.”