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Johnnie puts his foot down

General Johnnie is on the case when it comes to cracking down on those anti-trust behemoths who would crowd out competition and leave the poor unsuspecting public with no choices and no hope. He is the consumers best friend and don’t you forget it. Just read this by John Powers in The LA Weekly if you don’t believe me.

Who Do You Antitrust?

Ashcroft’s Department of Justice is investigating possible antitrust violations on the part of two alternative news companies, New Times Media and Village Voice Media (of which the L.A. Weekly is part). While I’ll leave it to the lawyers to limn the merits of the case, I must say it’s striking that two comparatively small chains should face the scrutiny of the same DOJ that notoriously gave Microsoft a cushy deal in its antitrust settlement, takes no steps against America’s broadband monopolies, and does nothing to limit huge “synergistic” empires like Fox, AOL Time Warner and Disney. If I were of a politically suspicious nature, I would wonder whether the DOJ is targeting alternative papers like this one because we are an alternative to the corporate media — opposing the Iraq war, chronicling Ashcroft’s efforts to dismantle the Constitution and challenging our government’s near-religious faith in the market. In fact, there’s something worthy of Joseph Heller, if not Kafka, in the idea that, at this point in history, the secrecy-obsessed Bush administration is going after free weekly papers — in the name of defending free expression.

So, the all powerful alternative media are flexing their muscles in the marketplace of ideas. Have they no shame?

You go General Johnnie. Shut these corporate tyrants down!

Can you say “deluded?”

I have one more little balloon I’d like to prick before we move on to “bare breasts for peace.” (Just hold on.) I have to take issue with a meme that seems to have infected the brains of many Republicans. I’m not the first to note this, but I don’t think it can be repeated too often. It is best exemplified in a letter I read in the NYTimes on Tuesday:

“George W. Bush’s campaign tactics in 2000, the “Southern Strategy” and the Trent Lott episode are yesterdays’ news. The Republican Party, and all it stands for, won an overwhelming victory in the 2002 Congressional elections. Americans are pleased with the presiden’ts agenda just as it is.”

Ok. I won’t go into the obvious absurdity of Trent Lott being “yesterdays news” compared to the election returns because he is literally last week’s news at the very least. Of course, the election was last November’s news, before the Trent Lott scandal, but why pick nits?

The real delusion is this triumphant interpretation of the 2002 election. The Republicans gained two Senate seats and 6 House seats. This is constantly claimed to be an “overwhelming” victory.

Ah, but it is an historic victory because the party in the White House always loses in the first midterm, right? And, they usually lose by more than 25 seats in the House, too, so it was extra, super-duper overwhelming. It’s been more than 60 years since any President was so beloved by the American people that they voted for his party in the first election after his inauguration. Therefore, George W. Bush achieved something that makes him eligible for Mt. Rushmore if not canonization.

But…but…he didn’t defy history at all. And why is that?

Because he didn’t win the election in 2000, that’s why. If Al Gore had been in office as the voters wanted, there would have nothing remarkable about the 2002 GOP gains at all, except for the fact that they were so small.

Uncle Tony may have defied history, but Dubya didn’t.

My oh my

I am truly overwhelmed by the welcome wagon in beautiful downtown Left Blogtopia. Thank you all very much. Now I suppose I’ll actually have to write something, huh? Is that how it works?

And many thanks also to those who voted for me in The Koufax Awards over at PLA. (Dwight Meredith is a mensch of heroic proportions. But, we already knew that.)

Congratulations to all of those grand lefty pontificators. Gawd knows my sanity depends upon reading all of them.

Still waiting for an apology…

I just want to say this before everybody moves on to bigger and better things and forgets Old Trent and all the hoopla around the sudden “revelation” that he had been a racist all of his life.

I was very moved by Peggy Noonan who seemed so puzzled and disturbed by Lott’s unfortunate statement. She wrote:

…when Strom Thurmond ran for president in 1948 he ran explicitly as a segregationist who would attempt to stop the civil rights revolution. He never, ever should have been elected president of the United States. It is truly weird for a person who lives in our world, in the modern world, to say otherwise

She goes on to tell a little story about a Democrat who fought for civil rights back in the 60’s. She feels his pain.

It is very painful, our racial past. We made blacks and whites and all other colors equal in this country at great cost. A lot of feelings got hurt; a lot of people got hurt; a lot of people died. To pick only one of the millions of examples: Harold Ickes, the political operative who worked for Bill Clinton and now works for Hillary Clinton. I can’t imagine agreeing on too many political issues with Mr. Ickes, but back in the ’60s he helped organize the Freedom Riders to desegregate the South. In Louisiana he got into a fight with some local bad guys. He was beaten so badly that he lost a kidney. He’s still walking around with only one kidney. He’s just a middle-aged white lawyer who’d pass you by on the street in a shirt and a tie, but in this respect, in terms of what he did 40 years ago, he is a hero. There were a lot of heroes in those days. It was all wrenching, but in the end we did the right thing

(Did we, now.)

In a later column she writes

But it would be best for the Republican Party–and the country–if Republican senators were utterly brutal and moved to fire him before then. This would be a Christmas present to the country: Jim Crow’s long, gasping death is finally over. If they do not move before Jan. 6 they certainly must fire him as leader on that date.

She goes on:

“… we believe completely in our hearts and minds that all races are equal and no one should be judged by the color of his skin. And then some guy comes along and speaks the old code of yesteryear and seems to reinforce the idea that those who hold conservative positions are really, at heart, racist. We are indignant, and we have been for a long time

In the Lott scandal our indignation reached critical mass. A lot of conservatives, many of them 50 and under, decided enough is enough, let’s end this, let a new party be born. And by the way, in the particular case of Trent Lott, it didn’t start yesterday. Stanley Crouch just surprised me by sending me a column he wrote almost four years ago for the New York Daily News. It was about a Lott appearance before the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white-supremacist group. I said it was springtime and it’s time to throw out the garbage, and Mr. Lott should go.

How inspiring. But I’m a little bit confused about one little thing and I sure wish Peggy would take the time to explain it. If Peggy felt so strongly about this topic, if she’s been indignant for a long time, if Trent Lott represented the last, gasping breath of Jim Crow, then I would really like to know where in the hell she got off tendentiously lecturing Democrats like her hero Harold Ickes about how they had “lost their souls” because a few people in a crowd of 20,000 booed this despicable racist bastard at a tribute for a guy whose entire life was about social justice?

Why did she say that booing a known racial bigot at a memorial tribute for the man who was Jesse Jackson’s Minnesota campaign manager in 1988, a man who in 1997 retraced Bobby Kennedy’s 1967 national poverty tour (which started in Mississippi) was “just envy and revenge and resentment?”

Why does she demand that the GOP leadership be “utterly brutal” and fire Lott for his racist statements, which she admits had been out there for at least 4 years, (and we all know his sentiments haven’t exactly been a secret for nigh on to 35 years now, don’t we Peggy?) when just 6 weeks earlier she had the ineffable chutzpah to write the following:

Imagine Trent Lott dies, and there’s a big memorial back home in Mississippi in some big auditorium. Half the Senate shows up to show respect: Trent was a nice guy. But they show up for another reason too: to show solidarity with democracy. To show we’re all Americans together, and we respect the ballot together, and we are big enough to feel regard and respect across party lines.

[…]

When you’re in politics not to live life but avoid it, you become especially susceptible to a kind of polar thinking. You become convinced you’re with the good team and the good people over here. You become convinced anyone who doesn’t want the same policies you want must be bad. After all, you’re good, so if they disagree they must be bad. When you’re polar like that you dehumanize the people on the other side. And when you dehumanize them–well, then you wind up booing them at a funeral..

Yeah, that’s true. Trent Lott was booed at the funeral because some of the grieving Democrats there “became convinced” that Lott’s known support for things like Thurmond’s 1948 campaign platform was “bad.” They were downright “polar” about it. They “dehumanized” poor old Trent and wound up booing him.

But, just 6 weeks later, without even a trace of embarrassment, Peggy is indignant that Lott is even associated with the Republican Party.

Seriously, I just hope she can live with herself for turning the pain and anguish in the Wellstone family into a cheap, political talking point. I hope she will find it in herself to examine how she could use a totally righteous display of disgust at a man like Trent Lott, who stood for everything that Paul Wellstone fought against in his life, into a campaign strategy that deigned to lecture Democrats about the “goodness” of the man she demanded the leadership of her party “brutally” fire less than 2 months later.

Here’s some advice for Peggy, in her own words:

…you need to stop, sit down, think, question yourself, look at your actions and ponder what you’ve become. And how somehow love for your side in the fight became hatred for the other.

Let me be very candidly specific. …You need to get a good psychologist and a good holy man or woman, a priest or rabbi or minister–or how about all three–and figure out why you’re turning everything in your life into politics. Because I have to tell you what I know: Politics is the biggest, easiest way in all of America to avoid looking at yourself, and who you are, and what fence needs fixing on your own homestead.

Via Atrios. Responding to the earth shattering news that the Democratic Party has realized that the Republicans have an effective marketing arm, John Podesta announces in the NY Times today that the Dems are looking into setting up similar operations.

As Hesiod points out, this is just a tiny bit….uh….stupid. You don’t announce that you are countering a successful Republican political operation by copying it.

You say that “there is a huge wave of interest in Democratic ideas among grassroots Americans and that the party is actively helping to disseminate those ideas along with various interested parties from business and industry who are gravely concerned about the direction this administration is taking the country.” It’s spin, marketing, shading the truth, selling the product. It’s called propaganda. And you never admit to it. Ever.

Propaganda is defined by Miriam Webster as:

Pronunciation: “prä-p&-‘gan-d&, “prO-

Function: noun

Etymology: New Latin, from Congregatio de propaganda fide Congregation for propagating the faith, organization established by Pope Gregory XV died 1623

Date: 1718

1 capitalized : a congregation of the Roman curia having jurisdiction over missionary territories and related institutions

2 : the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person

3 : ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one’s cause or to damage an opposing cause; also : a public action having such an effect

Setting aside this clumsy “announcement”, it’s clear that the Democratic media operation is non-existent, and in this day and age, that is pathetic. But, it seems to me that the real problem is not just that we don’t have liberal media outlets, or a unified Democratic message. The real problem is that we don’t understand what the modern media wants and what it needs.

I think that the mainstream media is actually fairly politically agnostic. Entertainment values are what motivate them and entertainment values are driven by emotion and sensation, not reason, the basis of rational political debate. But, these values are manifested in more than a race for ratings and careerist brown-nosing of the corporate boss (both of which are big factors, but not decisive ones.) Political news coverage is shaped by celebrity, insiderism, institutional cronyism, drama, stimulus, schaudenfraude, comedy, starpower and Washington zeitgeist. And, they are desperate for material. This need for a compelling story is a yawning black hole that constantly needs to be filled and that is something the GOP has learned how to manipulate.

Therefore, I believe we have to learn to present our policies in terms of conflict, courage, empathy, community, fun, heroic deeds and sex appeal and these “stories” must be told by people who know how to tell them in a stimulating way. We must learn how to lead the press where we want it to go by using seductive themes and dramatic narratives.

I am almost certain that Clinton survived the bashing he took because of his superstar charisma as much as his brains and toughness. Everything about him was interesting, either as a villain or a hero. He was a Master Celebrity and he made everyone pay attention. The media were far more interested in his Q rating than in his job approval rating. Up or down, they wanted him on screen. And he delivered. He was the first rock star president, for better or worse.

But, his presence and the focus the media put on him meant that the Democrats did not develop the media apparatus they should have when this new 24 hr cable universe came roaring into being. The Republicans did…

However, I do not believe that they could continue to beat us at this game if we applied ourselves to it. The only reason that the GOP has managed to dominate the media political discourse is by outright buying of outlets and broadcasting the political equivalent of “Battle Bots”; selling cheap, puerile schoolyard conflict on every single one of them. This attracts the kind of viewer who also loves to watch shark feeding shows on the Discovery Channel and any movie starring Steven Sagal which is hardly representative of the electorate.

But, up to this point that’s been the only version of “The Political Show” on television. Being a political junkie, I watched in the beginning but quickly found that I hated the format. The pre-ordained positions, the ritual argument, the predictable escalation to screaming and finally the shaking hands and good natured laughter between all the participants as the credits roll just failed to interest me as entertainment — these shows are like watching the WWF. A scripted narrative pretending to be real. (I’m all too aware that the consequences are very real, but I’m talking about the shows themselves.) Since they fail to inform about anything but a perfunctory analysis of daily spin, I don’t watch much of it. There are others like me.

The CW is that Democrats don’t do well in talk radio or cable news formats because we don’t have the right combative style. We’re too dry and boring. The NY Times article says that we “talk down to people.” This may be true, but it’s really a much deeper problem than that. The reason we’ve been stymied is because we have been clinging to the idea that political media should reflect a rational discourse in which views are aired and debated with civility and mutual respect and that commercial entertainment values are inappropriate and dangerous to democracy. I agree. The problem is that ship sailed while we were standing on the dock talking amongst ourselves and patting each other on the back for our fealty to reason. It’s over. Political journalism is now part of the entertainment media, at least on television and radio, and we are foolish if we don’t recognize it and get on with it. If there were a great disaffected audience of rational thinkers who just want to be informed, then Jim Lehrer would have the highest rated news show in television. He isn’t even close.

The fact is that people want the news to entertain them, in fact they demand it.

So, we have to find a way to provide it to them instead of letting the “Battlebot’s” dominate the national consciousness with the only definition of our policies and our values that seems to get out there these days. And, I expect if the Democrats got serious and consulted with their richest contributors who run the real media that most Americans watch every single day in numbers that make O’Reilly’s look like a local weathercast that they could develop a “show” that makes Rush and his jowly cohorts look like those old kinescopes of Dave Garraway and that silly monkey.

The Democrats need to be open to radically new ideas about how to sell politics. Because whether we like it or not, it’s another media product competing in a 500 channel universe for the attention of an over stimulated populace. Liberals have to use our dominance in the world of art, communications and entertainment to translate what is already a liberal cultural environment into a liberal political environment.

The brain-dead Battlebot script is not the only script that can sell political ideas. But, it may be the only script that can sell Republican ideas.

Psst. John Podesta: Think Oprah. Think music. Think reality television. Don’t be a dumbass and diss the most exciting new medium around — the internet. (John Podhoretz said the recent blogging phenomenon reminded him of when talk radio took off 10 years ago. That’s food for thought, eh?)

OK. There’s no point in putting it off. My New Year resolution is to go ahead and start this up and let the chips fall where they may. Knowing myself, it is entirely possible that I will lose interest in it within a matter of days and will slink off into even more obscurity than that in which I already happily exist. However, I join the blogging fray today with more enthusiasm than I have usually have for resolutions, which generally last until about noon on January 1st when I compulsively begin to eat, drink, smoke, watch or read the things I had promised just 12 hours before to not eat, drink, smoke, watch or read. This is a very promising beginning, indeed. It is now 1:24 pm.

I have almost zero interest in web design, much less any talent at it. If this thing goes out of whack, Gawd knows if I’ll have the inclination to fix it. I have a pile of magazines and books next to my desk that tend to beckon when the computer gets uppity. Therefore, if something looks funky here and you are like most smart people and enjoy fixing things, please don’t hesitate to send me unsolicited advice. I wasn’t a math or tech geek, I was a history and lit geek — the worst kind, almost useless in the real world. I’ve always depended upon the kindness of my more engineering minded kin.

And, I don’t have a comments section because I couldn’t find a free service like Haloscan or YACCS that was still available. If anybody has any ideas on that score, I’m open. Far be it from me to not have comments. They are, after all, my life’s blood.

Speaking of which, my many thanks to my hero, Atrios for publishing some of my more semi-coherent ramblings on his seminal Lefty blog these past few months. In this nascent medium, that’s kind of like having Eddie Van Halen invite you up on stage to join him in a guitar solo.

Happy New Year everybody. May the Mighty Casio shake the firmament and wake up the neighborhood.