Month: October 2007

Salad Bar

by digby

Speaking of the desire among Republicans to draft Peter Pace and other Bush era generals to run for office, Matt Yglesias smartly observes:

Now of course there’s a long tradition of generals (but not, I think, admirals) entering politics in the United States, starting with George Washington. Contemporary conservatives, however, seem to be misunderstanding the tradition in crucial respects. The idea, normally, is to nominate flag officers who are associated with noteworthy victories — from Andrew Jackson to Wesley Clark — or else for a junior officer who showed noteworthy courage in battle (John Kerry, John Kennedy) to run for a lower office. Neither Franks, nor Petraeus, nor Pace is actually popular, probably because insofar as anyone knows who these guys are it’s from their association with a giant unpopular fiasco in Iraq.

This is correct. But Republicans are suckers for Republicans in uniform. I don’t think they’d care if he had been convicted of war crimes, they’d love him if he were GOP. (They’d actually love him more if he were convicted of war crimes.) The problem for Republicans is that there just aren’t as many of them as there used to be. And Independents and Democrats might have some objections to electing a Bush toady and Iraq war architect, no matter how much salad he has on his chest.

Nonetheless, it would be a very tempting campaign for the right as they could work themselves into a full-on frenzy and start speaking in tongues and whirling around like dervishes if any Democrat even whispered that one of these men had not been fully competent in their jobs. (A congressional censure would certainly be in order if the opponents ran a negative ad or spoke in anything but the most reverential tones.) You can understand why the Republicans would be hot to do it — phony hypocritical hissy fits are their specialty. They would tie the opposition up in knots.

Winning would be beside the point, really. This is their idea of recreation.

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Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

by digby

Cheney shot an old man in the face:

As soon as he got that news, Bartlett sprang into action, and by the time newspaper presses ran that night with the photo, the incident had already been officially reported to state authorities, a fine was paid and Bush had issued an apology. The result: a one-day story that you, in fact, probably never heard before reading this.

The way Bartlett describes the Cheney incident, it took forever to reach anyone with Cheney, and the White House aide discovered to his horror that the hunting party had already been strategizing for 24 hours. They planned to give the story to a Corpus Christi reporter, except that, it being the weekend, no one could find him.

Bartlett finally reached the vice president and urgently presented another option: getting him on the phone with a national press pool to explain the entire incident in his own words ASAP. There was dead silence. Then, the vice president intoned he would handle it his way. Which Cheney did.

He had heavyweight help, though, remember?

The White House typically releases information immediately on incidents involving the president’s personal life, such as bike-riding accidents, to avoid the appearance of covering up embarrassments. It is highly unusual, if not unprecedented, for the White House to allow a private citizen serve as its de facto spokesman.

But current and former aides said the White House rarely imposes its practices, especially on press matters, on Cheney. The vice president’s office often operates autonomously in a manner that many top White House officials are reluctant to challenge.

In this case, Cheney worked with family members and former aide Mary Matalin on how to handle the fallout of the shooting accident, said a person close to the vice president who demanded anonymity to talk about internal discussions.

Dick Cheney’s spin artist. There’s an epitaph for you.

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Standing Their Ground

by digby

Brave New Films has released a powerful new film today about a subject that has the potential to knock Rudy Giuliani’s campaign to its knees. Most of us know that the NY Firefighters are mad as hell at Giuliani, but this films starkly lays out one very serious reason why: the radios.

Giuliani came into office in 1994, shortly after the first WTC attack. He knew then that the radios didn’t work properly and yet it took him seven years to deal with the problem. And when he finally got around to it, he gave Motorola a sweetheart, no-bid contract for radios that were never tested in advance. When the NYFD got them, they didn’t work and they had to be reissued the same radios that had proved inadequate in 1993.

That’s why, on September 11th, the firefighters didn’t hear the warnings to get out of the buildings. The cops heard them. They mostly got out. Their radios could get the right frequency. The firefighters’ old radios couldn’t.

In perhaps the most chilling moment of the film, the audience gasps in horror as Giuliani unctuously testifies before congress that the dead firefighters were heroes for “standing their ground.”

This man is basing his entire candidacy on the fiction that he is a great “wartime” leader who can keep the country safe. But it’s clear that although he had eight years to do it, he couldn’t even provide necessary equipment for the first responders in NY. Why would anyone want him to lead the most powerful country on earth?

These firefighters’ families are tired of waiting for an explanation and they are asking for an investigation. The Real Rudy reports:

New York City councilman Eric Gioia has the power to begin an investigation. If we can garner enough attention and signers, we have a major opportunity to help launch an investigation.

Go sign the petition. This could lay bare the false premise of Rudy Giuliani’s candidacy once and for all.

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We Are All Godless Now

by digby

I confess that I’m a little bit surprised at all the uproar over Coulter’s statements about “perfecting” the Jews. I’m no theological scholar, but I’m pretty sure she’s just mashed up some methodist teachings from her youth with some rancid pop-theology she got from hanging around with people who think the “Left Behind books” are prophesy. I’m sure she did it for effect, but I also think it’s not quite the deliberate, unprecedented insult that everyone thinks it is.

I’m not excusing her. This is the same person, after all, who famously said after 9/11 that we should “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.” It’s not like she doesn’t truly believe that the Jews are all going to hell. (Many Christians do, including her Dear Leader, by the way.) But that’s just one small part of her noxious, hate-filled wordlview. She’s the worst kind of bigot who believes that anyone who isn’t a member of her personal bloodthirsty tribe should be converted or killed. I don’t think she has any special antipathy for Jews because she thinks they need to be “perfected” (which she seems to think is the same thing as “converted.”) She thinks everyone should be converted to her beliefs in all things. Preferably through force and intimidation:

“We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed too. Otherwise they will turn out to be outright traitors.

So I find it just a little bit surprising that so many people are finding this one comment about “perfecting the Jews” out of bounds. As if there aren’t literally thousands. And it can’t just be that she said something religiously incorrect. The woman wrote this, for heaven’s sake:

Democrats revile religion but insist on faking a belief in God in front of the voters claiming to be “spiritual.” They can’t forthrightly admit they are Druids, so they “reframe” their constant, relentless opposition to every Biblical precept as respect for “science” or the “Constitution”—both of which they hate. Their rage against us is their rage against the Judeo-Christian tradition. I don’t particularly care if liberals believe in God. In fact, I would be crestfallen to discover any liberals in heaven. So fine, rage against God, but how about being honest about it? Liberals can believe what they want to believe, but let us not flinch from identifying liberalism as the opposition party to God.

You can read an extended excerpt of the first chapter, here.

This week, spouting some half baked theological nonsense about Christian perfectionism is a huge insult. That screed above, however, is no biggie. Pardon me for failing to see why one is so much worse than the other.

And anyway, as Atrios has been saying for a while, once you start making religion a major litmus test in politics it’s only a matter of time before people starting arguing about who represents the “one true religion.” (In politics talk it’s called “drawing contrasts” or “negative campaigning.”) People fought wars for centuries over this stuff. In the middle east they still are.

I guess a lot of Americans feel they really missed out on something and want a little bit of that action for themselves. So get ready. We’re all likely to have to become theologians before this is over so we can figure out for whom to vote. I can hardly wait.

Update: I guess I’m not writing clearly today. I agree that Ann Coulter is an Anti-Semite. She is also a racist, a homophobe, a sexist and an eliminationist, a totalitarian and a liar. She is a horrible person on every level as I have written many times. I’m just surprised that this particular slur is considered unusual.

I’m sure she did it for effect, meaning that everything she does is for effect on some level. But I also wrote that truly believes that Jews are going to hell. She also said, “I would be crestfallen to discover any liberals in heaven.” This is how the woman thinks. Why would anyone think this comment about Jews being “perfected” (which she clearly doesn’t understand in any theological sense) is different than any other disgusting screed she’s ever written. What am I missing?

UpdateII: Sara at Orcinus explains that this “perfected Jew” term is a specific fundamentalist Christian line that goes back a ways. My apologies. I had thought it was just a muddled perversion of the Wesleyan view of “Christian perfectionism.”

Perfection” is an idea — and a phrase — with a long fundamentalist pedigree that goes back at least to the 1960s, and perhaps farther. The idea that Jews are God’s Formerly Chosen People, who somehow got broken and lost — and eventually, superceded in Daddy’s favor — when they failed to recognize Jesus as the Messiah is a favorite Evangelical conceit. In this view, God misses the Jews and would still rather choose them — but his hands are tied. He simply can’t do that until they come around to his way of thinking on the Jesus thing. In the meantime, these stubborn “imperfect” ignorants (gifted from the start with way too much free will — an error God has been trying to reverse ever since) have left him no choice but to give their spot on his big lap to the Christians. Of course, “perfected” Jews” — those who come to accept the Christian Messiah — are God’s best beloved of all.

Fascinating. I would imagine that I’m still right that Coulter got this from her “Left Behind” buddies at the Coral Ridge Ministries. I just have to laugh at the idea that this extremely sophisticated pit viper actually buys the fundamentalist line, beyond the fact that everyone is going to hell but her and Rush Limbaugh.

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You Kids Get Off My Lawn

by digby

I just suffered through one of the most excruciating experiences of my life. I watched Bill Cosby ramble on like he was drunk, dominating the conversation, for nearly an hour on Meet The Press, most of the time speaking pure gibberish.

(Imagine him doing it in his patented Fat Albert voice as well…)

Excerpts:

MR. COSBY: “Somewhere in my life a person called my father has not shown up, and I feel very sad about this because I don’t know if I’m ugly, I don’t know what the reason is.” And so there’s a great deal that a person has to put up with.

[…]

MR. COSBY: …in times of need, etc., etc. So when you look at education, it is my belief that it is there with a very ugly head. However, it is also my belief that this is not the first time my race has seen systemic or institutional racism. There were times, even worse times, when lynchings were acceptable. Sure, the newspapers wrote about it, but it happened. Juries were set and freed the, people who did the, the lynching. Therefore, we knew how to fight, we knew how to protect our children, protect our women. Today, in lower, lower economic areas, some people—not all—some people are not contributing to that protection. Therefore, when you see these numbers, you see, you see numbers and the character correction has not happened. Many times it’s the TV set, a BET or, or videos played, kids look at it and they admire it. It’s the proliferation of drugs into the neighborhood.

[…]

MR. COSBY: Drugs work. Drugs work. It—there’s a domino effect that the dealer—and we’ve heard this over and over—feels, “Well, what else, what else can I do? I might as well do that.” But I don’t think people draw enough to the reality that “I sell you, you use it.”

[…]

MR. COSBY: If a young girl says, “I want to have a baby because I want something that, that loves me,” that young lady is saying something. And we’ve got to talk to her about herself and her idea of love. She hasn’t graduated from high school, she’s willing to, to have a child. All of these character corrections are not being done while record companies are putting out records inviting people to continue that kind of behavior, to, to not talk about get an education. It’s just as easy to put that to a rhythm.

[…]

MR. COSBY: But you see, when youth does that, you have to understand that youth—these are, these are kids, they, they don’t have the responsibilities that, that we have. They don’t have to have a job. They don’t have to support a family. They don’t have to buy insurance. They—so they’re, they’re free-forming and they’re freewheeling. It’s the people who make these records. It’s the, it’s the guy in the boardroom. I have another friend of mine who said to me, “I, I write rap lyrics.” He said, “And I went to a man”—I mean, “I went to work, and the guy said, the executive said to me, ‘I want lyrics about rape. Rape is good.’” He said, “And I looked at the guy, and I said, ‘You’re talking about my mother.’ And the guy said, ‘Well, if you don’t want to write it, then I’ll get somebody else who will.’” But, see, all these things, this dopamine-raising level. Alvin has a very interesting viewpoint on whether or not kids are listening to the lyrics. Because if you, if you challenge them, you say, “Why are you listening to that?” They say, “I’m not listening to the words. I just like the beat.”

[…]

MR. COSBY: Yes, because the people know exactly what I’m saying. See, a great deal of, of the negative is about people not wanting so much attention in that area, but it has to come out. If it is what it is and that is a horrible, horrible problem, then we must direct ourselves to it. I keep thinking about a parent who’s called in to, to the principle’s office because the child is misbehaving, and so many teachers have, have said, “And the parent comes in yelling at us that their child would never do that and why are they called, and all of a sudden it’s, it’s no longer about ‘We’re, we’re here to talk about making corrective behavioral changes in your child,’ but about the parent who is using all kinds of language and threatening people.” It’s something that goes into the person.

Now, just let me, let me say this. When I say it the way I say it, I felt and I still feel that it has been said so softly, so intelligently, so carefully that people are used to it and they’re not responding. There’s inertia and there’s entropy. Now, when I was in the service, the first great shock I had was when this man with a cigarette hanging, smoke going up into one eye, with his Navy hat on in charge of us, and I had done something—I don’t even remember what it was. It was sort of innocent, but I was only two days in the Navy. And this man up this face to mine—it was a white man—they never curse. He never called me the N-word, but they had words they would call you like a one-eyed maggot. You know, and it hurt. You said, “What?” But what he said was, “I’m not your mother.” And, man, I wanted to knock him out, but I knew that I didn’t want to go to the brig. And, and what’s happening here is when I used that, that, that language and I use it that way, I’m trying to wake people up, that inertia, I’m trying to move them from that entropy because we’re, we’re in the stage now we can’t take much more with all—we need our men to be fathers. The book you wrote, the book you have about your father, kids grow up with, not—I mean, they know somebody was the other half, but they don’t know who. And by the time, if they ever met the person, they, they would have to go way, way back and not realize why—and within themselves, they, too want to Domestic violence—what are the numbers on the domestic violence?

[…]

MR. COSBY: Yeah. Doesn’t that make sense? I mean, vote. If you’re—in Detroit, the population, OK, is at 75 percent. It’s even higher now. So here’s what a woman says. I called, I said, “What, what’s the number of your kids in the, in, in, in the jail?” “Well,” she says, “let’s say 190.” I said, “Thank you.” Then I went to a policeman, I said “I want you to get—find out how many of them are medicated.” Because I didn’t want to get it messed up. Then he came back, he said of the 100 and whatever, whatever, 75 percent of them are medicated. So I said, “OK, the next question is, you medicate a kid for 18 months or whatever. When that kid gets out, what happens to the medication?” So a call comes, and it’s a woman on the phone. I say, “Yes, ma’am.” She says, “Well,” it’s a black woman. She said, “The white ones get the medication, but the black ones don’t.” I said, “But the population of Detroit is 75 percent. Why are you letting this happen?” I got no, I got no clarity. There’s something about inertia.

[…]

MR. COSBY: May I say something, though? Is it all right?

MR. RUSSERT: Please.

MR. COSBY: I have a friend. Her name is Jessica Pope, and she spoke at a—or two or three of the callouts. She’s a graduate of Swathmore. She’s African-American. She’s from Memphis, Tennessee. And she spoke to the people and she said, “I want you to think of your children like you think of, of a genie in the lamp.” In that we all know the story of the genie in the lamp. There’s a genie, and she also equates genie with genius, genie/genius. So in order to have the genie come out of the lamp and grant you your three wishes, you rub the lamp. You rub it, the genie comes out and grants you three wishes. She then says, “Think of your child that way. Rub your child. Stroke your child like this magical lamp. The genie/genius will come out.” And then I add to it, and the other two wishes you can put in your hip pocket and save for a rainy day.

MR. RUSSERT: Bill Cosby, Alvin Poussaint, thank you both very much.

I didn’t make any of this up, I swear.

Dr. Alvin F. Poussaint, professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School, was on the show as well, and was allowed to speak a little bit from time to time on the subject. Mostly though, the transcript says:

DR. POUSSAINT: Hm.

This gibberish epidemic is getting way out of hand.

Update: To be clear, I’m not saying that Dr. Poussaint didn’t have anything to say, but merely that Cosby babbled and filibustered so much he was barely able to get a word in edgewise. The discussion would have been much more informative if Poussaint had been the one doing most of the talking, I’m sure. You can click the link to the transcript if you’re interested.

Dr Cosby, who holds a Phd in education, was on Meet The Press for a hour incoherently lecturing the black community about the language they use. I do find that a bit bizarre. But it’s not just him. It’s becoming a common problem among many public figures, as I wrote here.
In Cosby’s case, the problem certainly isn’t because he’s speaking in some urban African American street vernacular that a middle aged white broad like me can’t possibly understand. Indeed, he’d be appalled that anyone would suggest he used anything but the King’s own English — that’s his whole point. Cosby was speaking in rambling, white bread gibberish, the same kind that George W. Bush uses all the time.

I didn’t comment on the substance of Cosby’s thesis, although I find it depressingly familiar and facile. The problem with his performance today is that it takes an interpreter to figure out what it is.

Update II: From the “It’s Always Something” files:

It did not come easy for us in this country, under the weight of the vast influx of immigrants and the residual effects of the frontier tradition, to consolidate a secure internal order based on custom and respect for constituted authority; but finally we managed. This internal order is now in jeopardy; and it is in jeopardy because of the doings of such high-minded, self-righteous “children of light” as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates in the leadership of the “civil rights” movement. If you are looking for those ultimately responsible for the murder, arson, and looting in Los Angeles, look to them: they are the guilty ones, these apostles of “non-violence.”

For years now, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King and his associates have been deliberately undermining the foundations of internal order in this country. With their rabble-rousing demagoguery, they have been cracking the “cake of custom” that holds us together. With their doctrine of “civil disobedience,” they have been teaching hundreds of thousands of Negroes — particularly the adolescents and the children — that it is perfectly alright to break the law and defy constituted authority if you are a Negro-with-a-grievance; in protest against injustice. And they have done more than talk. They have on occasion after occasion, in almost every part of the country, called out their mobs on the streets, promoted “school strikes,” sit-ins, lie-ins, in explicit violation of the law and in explicit defiance of the public authority. They have taught anarchy and chaos by word and deed — and, no doubt, with the best of intentions — and they have found apt pupils everywhere, with intentions not of the best. Sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind. But it is not they alone who reap it, but we as well; the entire nation.

It is worth noting that the worst victims of these high-minded rabble-rousers are not so much the hated whites, but the great mass of the Negro people themselves. The great mass of the Negro people cannot be blamed for the lawlessness and violence in Harlem, Chicago, Los Angeles, or elsewhere. All they want to do is what decent people everywhere want to do: make a living, raise a family, bring up their children as good citizens, with better advantages than they themselves ever had. The “civil rights” movement and the consequent lawlessness has well nigh shattered these hopes; not only because of the physical violence and insecurity, but above all because of the corruption and demoralization of the children, who have been lured away from the steady path of decency and self-government to the more exhilarating road of ‘demonstration’ — and rioting. An old friend of mine from Harlem put it to me after the riots last year: “For more than fifteen years we’ve worked our heads off to make something out of these boys. Now look at them–they’re turning into punks and hoodlums roaming the streets.

Will Herberg, “‘Civil Rights’ and Violence: Who Are the Guilty Ones?”, The National Review Sept. 7th, 1965, pp. 769-770.

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Spitting On The Troops

by digby

We’ve now come full circle. The anger and disdain among political activists toward returning Vets is back with a vengeance. And it’s pretty ugly. Sadly No finds one example (regarding this article in today’s WaPo about a returning vet with PTSD):

How does one decipher whether a person is truly mentally ill, or is exploiting their battle experiences to their fullest advantage?

How do we know if Troy is the person he is because of the battlefield experiences, or if he is choosing to be this person because others are enabling him? Since we’re not hearing from Troy’s pre-war family and friends it is difficult to really know what he was life prior to his tour in Iraq.

I’m very skeptical of Troy’s “problems” and so should others who read this article.

He is capable of rational thought and he is making choices. He choses to swallow pills and watch TV in the dark- to shut himself in…to refuse medical/psych care and, I really wonder- the required services that would make him a better person.

When we enable some people to be the worst they can be, they take advantage and do just that.

The political activists who metaphorically spit on the troops today are on the right.

This is going to be more common as we come up against the government’s responsibility toward our military and the brainwashing these selfish right wing creeps have undergone for the last 20 years. I don’t think they’ve ever contemplated the fact that their patriotic reverence for the troops might conflict with their anti-government philosophy. After all, the military is a government program. And there are going to be veterans who need the government’s help for the rest of their lives.

Sadly No documents some of the comments to that post which illustrate the strange new mental terrain these people are entering. This one says it all:

The liberal mindset is what causes PTSD. Boys being raised to men without a strong male role model, and having a false sense of what life is about is causing our young men to go to war and come home freaked out.

That’s an excellent diagnosis, no doubt endorsed by the experienced doctor shopping medical expert Rush Limbaugh. But it doesn’t really hold water since combat stress has been around since cave days. In WWI they called it shell shock. In WWII they called it battle fatigue. In Vietnam they called it PTSD. Whatever it’s called, it’s one of the most common war injuries of all.

In fact,in the Ken Burns doc on WWII, I was startled to see this statistic:

One out of four Army men evacuated for medical reasons in Europe and the Pacific suffered from neuro-psychiatric disorders. There were many names for it – “shell shock,” “battle fatigue,” “combat exhaustion.” The office of the U.S. surgeon general sent Dwight D. Eisenhower a study by two soldier-psychiatrists that found “there is no such thing as ‘getting used to combat.’ … Each moment … imposes a strain so great that men will break down in direct relation to the intensity and duration of their exposure. Psychiatric casualties are as inevitable as gunshot and shrapnel wounds.” Army planners determined that the average soldier could withstand no more than 240 days of combat without going mad. By that time, the average soldier was probably dead or wounded.

I don’t think all those soldiers in WWII had liberal single mothers who didn’t know how to raise proper children, do you?

The keyboard commandos are in grave danger of jumping the patriotic shark at this point. As much as these movie addled children love the glory they think other people dying confers upon them, the horror of war is actually very real. And the reality affects those who fight it directly, not those who sit in judgment between trips to the mall. Many men and women who have been involved in this thing, regardless of their politics, are injured in body, mind and spirit. But these cheerleaders on the right apparently aren’t willing to put up with any veteran who doesn’t hide all feelings of ambiguity, pain or disagreement. They are already calling them “phony”, mentally unstable or malingerers in the right wing noise machine. It’s not likely to get any better.

This war has always been a movie to them. And these people like their entertainment to be simple black and white battles between good ‘n evul. Soldiers with problems or misgivings about the war are uncomfortable shades of gray, participants with moral authority who actually donned the uniform and threw themselves into danger and yet they behave in ways that can only be understood as “liberal”. The enemy. Some will even need help from the government and many will think they deserve it, even as they say they are now against the war they fought. How would a John Wayne cartoon deal with that?

The Iraq War Vets are coming back to a country in which many of the military’s most ardent defenders demand they never allow anyone to see what they have been through or speak views that might force armchair generals to face the fact that war is not a game and that the American military is made up of real human beings instead of figments of a Hollywood screenwriter’s imagination. They fought for Rush Limbaugh’s fantasies. What a terrible thing to do to them.

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Just How Bad Is Our National Discourse?

by tristero

This is the week Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize. This is also the week where plausible allegations surfaced that the Bush administration had sought illegal wiretapping within at least 5 weeks of Bush’s installation in the White House. So what is the lead article in the print edition of the NY Times Week in Review (the Sunday editorial/op-ed section)? Are you stting down? Believe me you need to.

Reporters and their cats:

IT was a bitterly cold night in the Baghdad winter of 2005, somewhere in the predawn hours before the staccato of suicide bombs and mortars and gunfire that are the daily orchestration of the war. Alone in my office in The Times’s compound beside the Tigris River, I was awaiting the telephoned “goodnight” from The Times foreign desk, eight time zones west, signaling that my work for the next day’s paper was done.

Iraq’s strays inherit land said to have given rise to all domestic cats.
That is when I heard it: the cry of an abandoned kitten, somewhere out in the darkness, calling for its mother somewhere inside the compound. By an animal lover’s anthropomorphic logic, those desperate calls, three nights running, had come to seem more than the appeal of a tiny creature doomed to a cold and lonely death. Deep in the winter night, they seemed like a dismal tocsin for all who suffer in a time of war.

With others working for The Times in Baghdad, I took solace in the battalion of cats that had found their way past the 12-foot-high concrete blast walls that guard our compound. With their survival instincts, the cats of our neighborhood learned in the first winter of the war that food and shelter and human kindness lay within the walls. Outside, among the garbage heaps and sinuous alleyways, human beings were struggling for their own survival, and a cat’s life was likely to be meager, embattled and short.

And then the writing gets maudlin (sarcasm).

As it happens, Frank Rich’s column today is a rant about America’s “whatever” attitude towards Bush’s torture policies. Normally, I would agree with him, this country is indeed far too complacent. But when Rich’s employer, and the paper of record, leads off its Sunday editorial section with a long article about reporters and their cats, blaming the public for not taking the news seriously strikes me as grotesquely misplaced.

Cats, for crissakes.

Update by Digby: I don’t normally intrude on tristero’s posts, but this just seems so necessary. From Ken Silverstein at Harper’s, discussing the Howie Kurtz interview on The Daily Show last week:

Kurtz related that Lara Logan’s bosses at CBS had once asked her “to do the lighter side of Baghdad–let’s do a story about female soldiers who are keeping cyberpets online.” I guess if Kurtz had received that request, he would have jumped from his desk and begun preparing a long segment on G.I. Jane and “Barky” the Cyberdog. Logan, because she has self-respect, refused. Indeed, as Kurtz related, she emailed back, “I would rather stick needles in my eyes than spend one second of my time on that story.” Kurtz seemed appalled by this, but Stewart clearly sided with Logan. His reply to Kurtz: “Good for her.”

I also have to confess that I quite liked the cat article. What can I say? — D

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Crimes and Misdemeanors

By Dennis Hartley

The late great Paddy Chayefsky would surely be pleased by the opening salvo of searing verbiage that launches writer-director Tony Gilroy’s superb new legal thriller, “Michael Clayton”. The fine British actor Tom Wilkinson nearly walks off with the movie before the opening credits are even finished rolling with a magnificently performed voiceover rant that recalls Howard Beale’s “cleansing moment of clarity” in “Network ”.

Wilkinson portrays Arthur Edens, a crack lawyer and senior partner for a prestigious New York corporate law firm who is, well, cracking up. On the eve of closing a case he has been working on for several years on behalf of U-North, an agrichemical company faced with a class-action lawsuit, Edens suffers a Dostoevkskian meltdown and suddenly decides to side with the plaintiffs and publicly expose his client’s turpitude in the matter.

As you can probably imagine, with many millions of dollars at stake and the reputations of both the corporation and law firm on the line, there are some very powerful, pissed off people sitting in dark boardrooms, scrambling for a quick and decisive solution to their “problem”. Enter the film’s title character, Michael Clayton (George Clooney, in a first-rate performance). Clayton, who is on the payroll as an attorney, is in actuality the firm’s “fixer”, who cynically refers to himself as a “janitor” (he’s not a “cleaner”, like Jean Reno in “La Femme Nikita”, but akin to Harvey Keitel’s “Mr. Wolfe” in “Pulp Fiction”).

Clayton cleans up other people’s messes, but cannot get his own life in order; he’s divorced and up to his eyes in gambling debts and bad investments. And, like his friend Arthur, he’s having some primal doubts about the moral and ethical ambiguities involved with what he does for a living. His immediate concern, however, is to salvage this potential disaster for the firm by coaxing Arthur back to reality. Arthur may have a screw loose, but he hasn’t lost any of his shrewd lawyer chops, so he won’t be swayed easily. Still, Clayton is sure that if he can just get him back on his meds, he’ll come around.

In the meantime, unbeknownst to Clayton, the head of U-North’s legal department (Tilda Swinton) has already lost patience with the situation at hand and enlisted a pair of much more sinister “fixers” to zero in and eliminate the problem (with extreme prejudice). As the situation becomes more insidiously deadly and the stakes become extremely high, Clayton, ever the compulsive gambler, faces the ultimate moral choice: he could risk his life and “do the right thing”, or he could “play it safe”- at the risk of losing his soul.

Gilroy extrapolated on this moral dilemma previously in his screenplay for the 1997 Taylor Hackford film, “Devil’s Advocate”, in which he pitted fledgling lawyer Keanu Reeves’ naïve idealism against senior partner Al Pacino’s devilishly Faustian temptations. In “Michael Clayton”, the situation isn’t so black and white; ethics and principals cast minimal light in this shadowy noir world of boardroom conspiracies.

This film marks Gilroy’s debut as a director. His intelligently constructed screenplays for the Jason Bourne trilogy have all featured refreshingly adult dialog and subtle character nuance that has played no small part in setting those three films apart from the majority of mindless Hollywood action thrillers. That being said, “Michael Clayton” is not as fast-paced as the Bourne films, but it is no less gripping (and there’s only one explosion!).

In fact, “Michael Clayton” harkens back to the kind of films that Sidney Lumet used to make, like the aforementioned “Network”, and more specifically, “The Verdict”. I see some parallels between Paul Newman’s brilliantly nuanced turn as the burned out ambulance chaser who gets a chance at redemption in the latter film and Clooney’s equally accomplished performance as the disillusioned Clayton. I also thought Tom Wilkinson’s character would have felt right at home in the underrated 1979 satire “…And Justice For All” which features Al Pacino’s classic courtroom meltdown (“YOU’RE out of order! HE’S out of order! “We’re ALL out of order…”)

Clooney and Wilkinson both deliver Oscar-caliber performances, and are well-supported by Swinton, who gives depth to a dragon-lady character who would likely have been more cartoonish and one-dimensional in the hands of a less-accomplished actress. I also got a kick out of Sydney Pollack, who gets some choice lines (Pollack co-produced, along with Steven Soderbergh, Anthony Minghella and Clooney). Gilroy has made something you don’t see enough of at the multiplex these days-a film for grown ups.

Evil Corporate Bastards: The Insider, Thank You for Smoking, The Corporation, The Bad Sleep Well, Roger & Me, Who Killed the Electric Car?,Enron – The Smartest Guys in the Room, Manufacturing Consent – Noam Chomsky and the Media, In the Company of Men.

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Gibberish

by digby

It’s been a long week. Maybe my brain just isn’t firing on all cylinders, but I can’t make any sense of this.What in the hell is Donny Deutsch actually saying in this exchange on the Today Show?

LAUER: Conservative commentator Ann Coulter is no stranger to controversy, and she’s made big money by being outspoken, but some critics claim her comments this week on CNBC’s The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch crossed a line. Are they right? You decide.

VIEIRA: Donny Deutsch, good morning. Watching it again, your reaction?

DEUTSCH: I have to set the context up.

VIEIRA: OK:

DEUTSCH: It’s very interesting. It’s ironic she was on my show because our show, as you know, is about motivation and success stories. I pride that it’s the only kind of positive night-time talk show.

VIEIRA: But you put her on.

DEUTSCH: It’s an American Dream — I put her on –actually my producer didn’t want to — to celebrate her business model. Like her or hate her, she has a very successfully business model. She goes to the extreme. She makes millions. Let’s analyze the business model. So I didn’t want to fight at all. I was like, “You know what? Enough of this nonsense.”

VIEIRA: But this is part of her business model, isn’t it? To be provocative.

DEUTSCH: OK, which, exactly — she demonstrated. And frankly, in my old days, I would have started screaming. I guess to me — I think we’re at a moment in time. I think it’s over. I think it’s silly. I think we are creating between — I want to link her and Britney Spears. It’s very interesting. Britney Spears will crash her car again —

VIEIRA: [unintelligible] Yeah.

DEUTSCH: — because until she does, she doesn’t exist. Ann Coulter, without even realizing it — I don’t think she was doing that on purpose. She genuinely was like, “I’m sorry I offended you.” But we’re creating these critters in the media — that she — until she does that, she doesn’t exist. And I want to hear somebody in the media to say, “It’s kind of over. It’s boring. It’s silly.” I think — and I think the candidates need to follow this. I didn’t — we didn’t service this. I didn’t even want — we didn’t even want to run this. I think people are just tired of this nonsense.

VIEIRA: But what is it about this that crossed the line? Can we go down memory lane with Ann Coulter?

DEUTSCH: Sure. Yeah.

VIEIRA: Last year on your show, about Bill Clinton she said, “I think that sort of rampant promiscuity does show some level of latent homosexuality.”

DEUTSCH: Right.

VIEIRA: Muslims: “We should invade their countries, kill their leaders, convert them to Christianity.” On the 9-11 widows, she said among other things, “I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much.”

DEUTSCH: Right.

VIEIRA: This is her stock-in-trade. Talk about marketing.

DEUTSCH: There’s — exactly. Which — and this — she’s a lounge act. The scary thing for me here was she wasn’t doing it on purpose. She wasn’t. And I think that’s what — we’re playing dangerous with words in our society that there’s no accountability. There’s a glibness that we in the media kind of elevate, and I’m here to kind of say I’m personally tired of it, and I think America is tired of it also.

VIEIRA: So you’re saying she should not be allowed on the air?

DEUTSCH: Oh, of course she should be allowed on the air. It’s free speech. But I think the consumer’s going to start to vote, and I think you’re going to see less of this stuff on television. If you’re really following the things that are successful today, hate is going out. People are seeing the stu– when the producer is booking the show goes, “Oh, here we go again.” People are just tired — you’re tired of it. I’m tired of it. And forget — this is not an indictment on her. This is not a religious discussion. This, to me, is a moment in time where we kind of say, “Enough.” Everybody in the studio is there watching, going, “Oh,” yet we’re talking about it. So you go, “Wait a second. Aren’t we part of the problem?”

VIEIRA: Of course we are. We’re perpetuating it.

DEUTSCH: But I’m going to raise my hand as one and say, “You know what? Over. Done. I don’t care. It’s not that interesting. It really isn’t.”

VIEIRA: All right, Donny Deutsch. Thanks very much.

That’s just incoherent. If he thinks that the country is getting tired of Coulter’s nonsense then why in the world does he have her on? And if he thinks that she’s a lounge act, (a rather unusual way of describing an S&M show, but whatever) why does he excuse her by saying she didn’t know what she was saying? Viera understands that the media is part of the problem, but Deutch’s commentary is blithering nonsense.

Something very disconcerting has been happening in our discourse for some time, even worse than the up-is-downism that has characterized the most unctuously presumptuous members of the Cheney administration. It’s no longer just Bush who is blatantly dumb on TV. A lot of public figures these days adopt all the poses and cadence of ordinary conversation, but actually speak in some sort of gibberish language that makes no sense.

It reveals itself most jarringly in the Republican presidential campaign:

Romney, for example, issued a 23-point economic plan yesterday that, if you didn’t know better, you might think was a parody written by Jon Stewart for “The Daily Show.”

In addition to proposing additional cuts in every major revenue source (income, inheritance and corporate taxes), he would effectively eliminate all taxes on interest, dividends and capital gains; make all health-care spending tax-deductible; give additional tax breaks to make America “energy independent”; and provide a rebate to businesses for tax payments that might be “embedded” in the cost of anything they export. He opposes raising the cap on wages subject to the payroll tax.

Clearly, Romney’s view is that the tax code is supposed to be used in the service of every economic objective other than raising revenue for government services. He figures his other initiatives — like repairing transportation infrastructure, improving education and worker retraining, and strictly enforcing immigration laws — can be accomplished without spending an extra dime.

While he’s at it, Romney intends to tear up the Constitution by giving himself a line-item veto and the right to cut back any congressional appropriation by 25 percent, while requiring a 60 percent congressional “supermajority” to raise any tax.

And in a stunning display of intellectual inconsistency, Romney is determined to let each state figure out its best solution to the health-care crisis but not let every state figure out how to structure its legal system, instead imposing a federal one-size-fits-all version of tort reform.

Here’s Romney looking and sounding very authoritative on foreign policy and yet what he is saying is complete nonsense.

Matt Yglesias comments:

The idea that we should be laying awake at night afraid that a group of at most several thousand people who control almost no territory or valuable military equipment might establish a universal caliphate or “collapse freedom loving nations like us” is ridiculous. Al-Qaeda’s goals are absurd, and obviously so, and one ought to say so confidently. The fact that a relatively small group of people with lunatic goals can nevertheless knock down giant office buildings and murder a huge number of people is, indeed, something to be afraid of but not nearly on the grand geopolitical level Romney is postulating here.

On top of that what does this have to do with Iran?

Rudy and McCain are no better:

Rudy Giuliani on whether or not it’s a problem that China owns so much of our federal debt: “the way to balance to books is to sell more overseas — sell energy independence, sell health care.”

John McCain on monetary policy: “I’m glad whenever they cut interest rates, I wish interest rates were zero.”

They gesture and talk and sound for all the world as if they are speaking with intelligence and authority. But they make no sense at all.

It makes you feel a little bit crazy. Last night I saw Tucker Carlson on Bill Maher respond to a discussion about bombing Iran with a non-sequitor asking why people think it’s wrong to have a shotgun under the bed if you live in New York City. It seemed to have something to do with self-defense, but the analogy was so weird that it froze the panel a little bit trying to wrap their minds around what he was actually saying. Tucker’s not stupid. He was indulging in the puerile “I know you are but what am I” style of rhetorical combat and knew exactly what he was doing. (His schtick is being a snotty little jerk.)But it was jarring in its incoherence, nonetheless, and even with a sharp panel of Maher, Paul Krugman and Joy Behar, it was impossible to truly nail him down when he was simply asserting gibberish and aggressively pretending it made sense.

This Bushian elementary school level argumentation has been around for some time on the right, but now it’s becoming common in the media as well. And the Republican candidates have adopted it as their preferred mode of communication. I don’t know if it’s going to be successful this time, but unless the media do more than act as theater critics (he looked and sounded presidential!) and actually address the substance of what these people are saying, we could have another president whose communication style is so deliberately simple minded and opaque that we will spend the next four years trying to read between the lines to figure out what is really going on. (Come to think of it, that’s undoubtedly one reason they do it…)

Luckily for the country and the world, the favored winners at this point, the Democrats, are not allowed to get away with such things because their voters live on planet earth and have a bottom line requirement that they communicate clearly. Indeed, they are frequently held accountable by the press for things they never even said. But when I hear the media itself adopting these right wing obfuscatory tactics I continue to worry. They remain the ones who are “interpreting” the election for the people and some of them sound as incoherent as Bush, Romney and Giuliani a good part of the time.

Why in the world does someone who speaks and thinks like Donny Deutch have his own current events show on television? It makes no more sense than he does.

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One More White House Horror

by tristero

If this country still had a working system of laws and a government with at least some checks and balances left in place, it would be a huge scandal simply that Bush “sought” to do this:

A former Qwest Communications International executive, appealing a conviction for insider trading, has alleged that the government withdrew opportunities for contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars after Qwest refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency program that the company thought might be illegal.

Former chief executive Joseph P. Nacchio, convicted in April of 19 counts of insider trading, said the NSA approached Qwest more than six months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to court documents unsealed in Denver this week.

Details about the alleged NSA program have been redacted from the documents, but Nacchio’s lawyer said last year that the NSA had approached the company about participating in a warrantless surveillance program to gather information about Americans’ phone records…

Nacchio’s account, which places the NSA proposal at a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, suggests that the Bush administration was seeking to enlist telecommunications firms in programs without court oversight before the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. The Sept. 11 attacks have been cited by the government as the main impetus for its warrantless surveillance efforts.

The allegations could affect the debate on Capitol Hill over whether telecoms sued for disclosing customers’ phone records and other data to the government after the Sept. 11 attacks should be given legal immunity, even if they did not have court authorization to do so.

These allegations “could” affect the debate? I doubt it. Should? Hell, they should spark immediate investigations and wholesale resignations. Think about it:

Within five weeks after George W. Bush moved into the White House (after a stolen election, let’s not forget), his administration sought to wiretap without any legal oversight whatsoever, severely punishing those that insisted on obeying the law.* Not work to change the law, mind you, but rather to disobey the laws of this country with total impunity.

Within five weeks. Long before 9/11. Kee-rist.

Now, cynical, deeply uncivil Bush-bashers will surely sneer, “What took them so long?” Count me among them. I’m certain it started earlier. The disgraceful, felonious behavior that we already know about is just a drop in the bucket.

Prediction: If this garners any level of national outrage (but it probably won’t), then in response, every rightwing lunatic will squawk that Qwest’s failure to participate in February ’01 was clearly the reason Bush didn’t know about the 9/11 plot until it was too late. Had they only been able to tap everyone’s phones without all those pesky restrictions, y’see..

And if that happens, you will see very thoughtful commentary as people take that argumment seriously, instead of expressing fury at being taken for suckers.

h/t to Duncan.

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*This, of course, assumes that Nacchio’s allegations are true, but given what we know already about this worst ever of administrations, they sure smell like they are.