Oh wait. The “I approved this message” is missing, isn’t it? That’s because it’s a Fox News clip, not a Romney ad:
It was a segment produced by a show on a network that bills itself as “fair and balanced.” The network has continued to push the limits of its outright promotion of conservative politicians and policies, and Fox & Friends has been at the forefront. The show regularly acts as the communications arm of the GOP, attacking Democrats, promoting Republicans, and broadcasting GOP talking points, sometimes word for word. Co-host Gretchen Carlson has repeatedly advised GOP candidates how to promote their ideas in order to defeat their Democrat opponents…
On the morning after Mitt Romney clinched enough delegates to officially claim the Republican presidential nomination, Fox has launched its first anti-Obama attack ad of the presidential campaign.
This article in The New Yorker sounds the alarm about the economy not working in Obama’s favor for the November election. I really doubt the economy will have any beneficial effect for the president unless something dramatic happens. It’s been my personal observation that most people are about a year to 18 months behind the reality of economic performance—at least on an emotional level. (There is a lot of varying data and analysis on this, so take it for what it is.) But it’s getting late, and even if the economy were to dramatically improve in the next few months I doubt very seriously that anyone is going to be persuaded or change his or her vote because of it. This has been a painful slog and people have seen too many “green shoots” that turned brown to have any trust in numbers at this point.
I point out in the piece that this isn’t Morning in America, which I think may be the biggest surprise of all to the Obama campaign. Going back to the beginning, I think they were running a Reagan first term strategy — and it didn’t work.
To: The Honourable Senator Olympia Snowe (Republican, Maine) The Honourable Senator John D. Rockefeller (Democrat, West Virginia)
Madame, Sir,
Uphold Free Speech About Climate Change Or Resign
The US Constitution guarantees the right of free speech. It is inappropriate for elected Senators such as yourselves to suggest that any person should refrain from exercising that right, as you have done in your letter of October 27 to the CEO of ExxonMobil. That great corporation has exercised its right of free speech — and with good reason — in openly providing support for scientists and groups that dare to question how much the increased concentration of CO2 in the air may warm the world. You must honour the Constitution, withdraw your letter and apologize to ExxonMobil, or resign as Senators.
You defy every tenet of democracy when you invite ExxonMobil to deny itself the right to provide information to “senior elected and appointed government officials” who disagree with your opinion. You are elected officials yourselves. If you do not believe in the right of persons within the United States to exercise their fundamental right under the world’s greatest Constitution to petition their elected representatives for the redress of their grievances, then you have no place on Capitol Hill. You must go.
[…]
You will rightly deduce from Beckett’s sinister remark that after a decade of Socialist government freedom of speech does not figure in our constitution. But let me quote the First Amendment to yours: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, or abridging the freedom of speech or of the Press, or the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
I call upon the pair of you to live by those great words, or to leave.
Yours truly,
MONCKTON OF BRENCHLEY
Right-o! Or he’ll have your head on a pike, what what?
In my original piece, I discussed how Monckton’s father had been Chairman of the Iraq Petroleum Company and mused a bit on the new money aristocrats engaging a real peer of the realm to do their dirty work for them. A rather eccentric one at that:
Lord Monckton is an ardent global warming science foe who recently published an exhaustive 52 page roll of toilet paper on the subject for The Telegraph. (George Monbiot explains the whole thing in this article in the Guardian.)He has no degree in any scientific subject and has never done any work in the field. Lately, he’s best known for his (admittedly impressive) jigsaw puzzle design. But he styles himself an expert, writes nonsensical papers and then demands the resignations of anyone who disagrees with him. I think there was more intellectual rigor involved in Galileo’s trial.
So what’s the old boy been up to recently? A couple of years ago he made some news calling climate change activists, “Hitler Youth” and Nazis.
Hey all you pot loving libertarians! You don’t have to join the anti-abortion, authoritarian right wing party of the rich. (Unless, that is, you secretly agree with it and think that low taxes for the wealthy and property rights are more important than personal freedom and ending the wars.) There are Democrats who believe in downsizing the military and ending the drug war too.
Howie at Down with Tyranny writes about Beto O’Rourke, a Democratic upstart who unseated one of the most regressive Democratic warmongers in the congress last night. And he’s from Texas!
All the pundits and bloviating Beltway politicos ignored Beto O’Rourke’s race against painfully long-term incumbent, Silvestre Reyes and said the young upstart had no chance. Even the commercialized progressive groups completely ignored his contest. But early voting went drastically in his direction and, despite Reyes, last minute, heavily funded (by the Military Industrial Complex) smear campaign, O’Rourke put him away nice and easy. Even as the votes were coming in, the most unctuous shills of the DC Establishment were hoping out loud that Beto would lose. This isn’t about ideology, this is just about Establishment dick suckers sucking Establishment dick, which is what they get paid to do– to the point where they become what they do. By the end they were publicly praying for a run-off or even a Republican victory in November. The Establishment and its miserable foot soldiers are very threatened by insurgents… and victorious insurgents make them want to kill themselves.
Congratulations to the Campaign for Primary Accountability for putting almost $200,000 into helping make Congress less institutionally corrupt– and for, once again, making a complete laughing stock out of the ridiculous Cook Report, Washington’s most clueless and utterly out-of-touch prognosticators.
The good guys won another one. And nobody believed it could happen.
Please click over to Howie’s place to read about the next one of these fights against an entrenched, scandal riddled, Military Industrial Complex lackey — Lee Rogers vs Buck McKeon. It’s another one the insiders are clueless about. And this one’s against a Republican.
At this point if Charlie Cook says something, you’d probably come out ahead in the end by betting on the opposite.
Having organized 43 plaintiffs—including the archdioceses of New York and Washington and the University of Notre Dame—to file 12 different lawsuits against the Obama administration last Monday alleging the administration is violating the religious freedom of Catholics, the Catholic bishops of the United States are now preparing Catholics for what may be the most massive campaign of civil disobedience in this country since the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and early 1960s.
“Some unjust laws impose such injustices on individuals and organizations that disobeying the laws may be justified,” the bishops state in a document developed to be inserted into church bulletins in Catholic parishes around the country in June…
The bulletin insert reminds Catholic parishioners that the bishops have called for “A Fortnight of Freedom”—which they have described as “a special period of prayer, study, catechesis, and public action”—to take place from June 21 to July 4.
Read on to see just how unlikely it is that they’ll be able to get Catholics to join this crusade. (But they may have some more tricks up their sleeves.) This war n contraception is escalating.
I tend to look on the bright side of this: when Republicans denigrate everyone from Jon Stewart to our centrist President to their own Heritage Foundation health program from 1993 as “socialist,” it rehabilitates the very word “socialism.” After all, if the Republicans don’t see any daylight between Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, why not nominate a Bernie Sanders type for President in four years and give them what they’ve been asking for?
I’m thinking we’re about to break a hissy fit record today. Here’s your latest outrage and demand for an apology:
Poles and Polish-Americans expressed outrage today at President Obama’s reference earlier to “a Polish death camp” — as opposed to a Nazi death camp in German-occupied Poland.
“The White House will apologize for this outrageous error,” Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski tweeted. Sikorski said that Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk “will make a statement in the morning. It’s a pity that this important ceremony was upstaged by ignorance and incompetence.”
The president had been trying to honor a famous Pole, awarding a Presidential Medal of Freedom to Jan Karski, a resistance fighter who sneaked behind enemy lines to bear witness to the atrocities being committed against Jews. President Obama referred to him being smuggled “into the Warsaw ghetto and a Polish death camp to see for himself.”
Sikorski also tonight tweeted a link to an Economist story noting that “few things annoy Poles more than being blamed for the crimes committed by the Nazi occupiers of their homeland. For many years, Polish media, diplomats and politicians have tried to persuade outsiders to stop using the phrase ‘Polish death camps’ as a shorthand description of Auschwitz and other exemplars of Nazi brutality and mass murder. Unfortunately this seems to have escaped BaracK Obama’s staff seem not to have noticed this.”
Honestly, do you think it might be possible to unplug the phony outrage machine for a week or two? This is just getting exhausting.
Update:Thank God. I just hope it’s enough. (fingers crossed …)
It does raise a question in my mind about “social distance.” Chris apologized saying that he “sounded like a typical out-of-touch pundit seeking to discuss the civilian-military divide and the social distance between those who fight and those who don’t, I ended up reinforcing it, conforming to a stereotype of a removed pundit whose views are not anchored in the very real and very wrenching experience of this long decade of war. And for that I am truly sorry.” I’ve always thought this “social distance” was a useful thesis, helping to explain why the Villagers are so out of touch with the average person. But what I hadn’t reckoned with until now is a sort of tyranny of “walking the walk” that results once you acknowledge it.
All citizens have a right and an obligation to participate fully in American civic life. If we are now going to say that those who haven’t “walked in the shoes” of whomever is directly affected by a policy are not sanctioned to have an opinion, we are essentially saying that we are only responsible to ourselves rather than the body politic. It becomes a fragmented sort of social responsibility in which we substitute experience and expertise for democratic participation.
I hope we can go back to the old-fashioned “everybody’s entitled to their opinion” and stop with endless hissy fits, disavowels and demands for apologies. It’s exhausting
Update: I want to be perfectly clear that I believe Chris apologized completely of his own volition. He would not do it any other way. And I believe he truly meant it. On the other hand, his network is treating him very badly considering how quickly he handled it.
NBC made it extremely clear where they stood on the matter, and it wasn’t behind their employee. The Today Show ran a segment this morning on Hayes’ comments, with NBC employees as the commentators, and they universally bashed Hayes, in sometimes personal terms, for his comments, showing a real ignorance about those comments.
During a panel on Tuesday’s NBC Today, liberal pundits Star Jones, Donny Deutsch and Nancy Snyderman condemned left-wing MSNBC host Chris Hayes for suggesting fallen U.S. troops are not heroes. Deutsch was the strongest in denouncing Hayes: “I hope that he doesn’t get more viewers as a result of this…this guy is like a – if you’ve seen him…he looks like a weenie.”
Jones was clearly appalled by the offensive comments: “…the person that he [Hayes] was talking to was the officer whose job it was to call the families of fallen soldiers. Could you be more inappropriate on Memorial Day?” Snyderman voiced her disgust as well: “To criticize the young men and women who put themselves in harm’s way to protect us and then cheapen it…”
Co-host Matt Lauer actually attempted to defend Hayes: “I’m not sure he was criticizing those young men and women. He was just saying that the word is overused.” The panelists would have none of it. Snyderman declared: “But he’s wrong….Because you know what? The four of us aren’t fighting those wars. So these people are heroes to me.” Jones added: “When it’s a dead soldier, it’s not overused.”
After Lauer quoted Hayes’s apology for the remarks, Snyderman responded: “Where was that eloquence on the front hand?” Jones reiterated: “You don’t say this on Memorial Day.”
Hayes didn’t criticize troops, he merely made a point about how glorifying them without constraint has an impact on future calls for war. Lauer tried to get at that but to no avail.
The important thing here was not Nancy Snyderman or (Lord help us) Star Jones’ opinion on Chris Hayes and his views on valor and the US military, it’s that NBC scheduled this segment at all. As Inside Cable News writes:
Snydermann is an NBC News employee. Deutsch is an NBC brass favorite. And they just threw one of their own under the bus. Today staffers had to have known, or at the very least guessed, that the segment would go in this direction. Was this a subtle signal from NBC trying to distance itself from Hayes?
One could make that argument. If NBC didn’t want this issue addressed the word would have come down from the execs to Today EP Jim Bell and the word would have been “hands off”.
I’m sure that the Today Show, which is far more widely watched than a public affairs program on Sunday morning on a cable news network, got a pat on the back from the brass on that one. They know precisely how much they have riding on a consensus view of military heroism. The forces that promote and support imperialism – and here I’m talking about military contractors who make ad buys on networks like NBC – have no trouble with using the word “hero” to describe soldiers, and furthermore they know exactly what that terminology does psychologically and what it benefits.
It also benefits GE, which still owns 49% of the company. This is, after all, the network that ran Phil Donohue off the air for being against the Iraq war.
Still, this was pretty cheap. Those Today Show “hosts”basking in their superiority couldn’t shine Chris Hayes’ shoes. Yuck.
Western nations expelled senior Syrian diplomats on Tuesday in a hardened and coordinated condemnation of the weekend massacre of more than 100 villagers in Syria, nearly half of them children.
The response by the United States and others came as the top United Nations peacekeeping official gave new credence to suspicions that pro-government Syrian thugs, known as shabiha, were at least partly responsible for the killings, despite official Syrian denials of complicity.
Outrage over the killings, which constituted one of the gravest atrocities in the 15-month-old uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, coincided with a visit to Syria by the United Nations special envoy, Kofi Annan, who met with Mr. Assad in Damascus to salvage a failing cease-fire.
Mr. Annan, speaking to reporters later, said he had warned Mr. Assad time is running out.
“We are at a tipping point,” he said at a news conference in Damascus. “The Syrian people do not want the future to be one of bloodshed and division. Yet the killings continue and the abuses are still with us today. As I reminded the President, the international community will soon be reviewing the situation. I appealed to him for bold steps now — not tomorrow, now — to create momentum for the implementation of the plan.”
Yes, I’m sure Assad is just shaking in his boots.
The international community needs to figure something out. It either cares about what the Assads of the world are doing, or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t care, stop the pretenses at outrage, the expulsions of diplomats, the security council handwringing and the rest of it. Let them consign themselves to the idea that no one should ever meddle in what happens within another nation state’s borders, that any change in a country must come from within, and that we should turn a blind eye to massacres by national leaders because any sort of intervention would just make things worse and lead to more deaths. Every nation and person for itself in a global federalism, and if your particular ethnic group or democratic reformist protest is marked for death, too bad. Not our problem.
Or it can create an actual organization with teeth that can enforce principles of human rights with the same authority that a federal marshal can exercise against murderers within a nation state. Doing that would also delegitimize the selfish actions of individual nation states playing the world’s self-appointed cop.
One or the other. But enough pretense of outrage, horrified protestations, diplomatic expulsions and sternly worded letters. The Assads of the world couldn’t care less what anyone thinks of them as long as they don’t feel personally threatened.
Do something or don’t do anything and stop pretending you care. Expelling diplomats doesn’t count as doing something.
I will never understand why political campaigns think it’s helpful to telegraph their plans in public, but here’s the obligatory “inside the Obama campaign strategy” piece by John Heileman in New York magazine. To the extent it isn’t spin, it’s quite interesting, and since so much of it is unflattering, I’d have to guess that’s most of it.
The campaign principals (much like the administration itself in the first two years) are as convinced as ever that when it comes to brilliant strategy, they are the toppermost of the poppermost and show a level of confidence that borders on hubris. What seems to have changed since the last time around is that they are very, very worried about money
One of the things I couldn’t find a way to easily fit in the piece is the fact that they are basically planning to re-run the Bush 2004 campaign. I can’t help but wonder if they’ve got Marine One all gassed up and ready to land in the football stadiums to the martial strains of the Top Gun theme song “Danger Zone.”
