The headline is reassuring, if you care whether your tax dollars are being used to fund war atrocities. It says U.S. disputes 90 civilians killed in Afghan airstrike. To put it mildly, that is utterly misleading, in a way oh so reminiscent of 2002/2003. Here are the first nine paragraphs of the article:
Convincing evidence” indicates a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan last week killed 90 civilians, including 60 children, a U.N. fact-finding human rights team said Tuesday.
The U.N. team said its findings were based on interviews with eyewitnesses.
The Afghan government, which also investigated Friday’s incident, announced Sunday it had concluded that more than 90 civilians, most of them children, were killed. The U.N. Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said 15 Afghans were wounded.
“The Afghan people and the Afghan government have lost their patience,” said Humayun Hamidzada, a spokesman for Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
“We cannot see our children being killed in our villages or the killing of innocent people, and our hope and strong request is to reach a new agreement with the international community which clarifies all the conditions, so that in the future, the fight against terrorism should happen in the boundary of law, so that civilians are not affected,” he said.
Kai Eide, special representative of the secretary-general for Afghanistan, released a statement saying a U.N. assistance mission team met Monday with the district governor, local elders and residents of the Shindand district of Herat province, in western Afghanistan.
“Investigations by UNAMA found convincing evidence based on the testimony of eyewitnesses and others that some 90 civilians were killed,” Eide said.
Fifteen women and 15 men were among those dead, and 15 other civilians were wounded in the airstrike, the team said.
Afghan ministers on Monday demanded a review of international troops within its borders.
Then, there’s a report that an unnamed military official expressed “doubt about the high death toll.” Maybe it’s 30, the US official asserts, without any evidence. Then:
Eide, in his statement, provided details of the results of the attack.
“The destruction from aerial bombardment was clearly evident, with some seven to eight houses having been totally destroyed, and serious damage to many others. Local residents were able to confirm the number of casualties, including names, age and gender of the victims,” he said.
Eide said residents from a number of households in Nawabad village confirmed that foreign and Afghan military personnel came into the area.
“Military operations lasted several hours, during which airstrikes were called in,” he said, quoting the residents.
But if you’re in a hurry, all you’ll see is that headline. And think there might be some doubt.
Beyond the usual pleasure of reading one of Digby’s dispatches, I was happy to read this morning’s anecdote about the Hillary supporter who was ready to work hard to get Barack Obama elected.
Though I’ve been greatly annoyed by the relentless reporting of the “rift” in the party, when Hillary gave her fantastic speech last night, I started to wonder if the media’s inflation of the magnitude of the perceived internal war might actually turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Clinton so skillfully connected this election and its consequences to the history, sacrifice and struggle of American women for equality and fairness, I began to think maybe John McCain did the Democrats a favor with his ads fanning those flames. Clinton’s Harriett Tubman reference last night was brilliant.
I also thought about Hillary’s campaign and how different the outcome might have been had she taken Rachel Maddow’s advice early on and focused her attention on John McCain and the GOP, instead of trying to take down Obama.
But, as Digby wrote this morning, the media narrative is like a piece of Ikea furniture. The holes are already drilled, the dowels already measured out and there’s only one way to put it together, no matter how painful it is to assemble it into its catalog-photo orientation. And in the end, of course, there are obviously a few screws loose.
For the loosest screws, we can always turn to Fox News, where they set the bar low yesterday, explaining that Michele Obama’s speech actually re-enforced her negative image — that is, when you replace her words with completely different words. This will be fun to do with McCain next week. (“The glimmerings of democracy are very faint in Russia America today, and so I would be very harsh.”)
Steve Benen notices today that other media outlets aren’t replacing Clinton’s words with their own, they’re just ignoring them completely and inviting “body language experts” to demonstrate that she was essentially lying.
On the evening of June 28, a few hours after Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton appeared together in Unity, N.H., for their first post-primary joint appearance, CNN devoted quite a bit of airtime to “body-language experts.”
At one point, one of the “experts” argued that the position of Hillary Clinton’s navel carries great political significance: “She angles her belly button toward him. She’s treating him with respect. She has her hands in a fig leaf position, which tends to be a passive position, really turning the power over to Obama. We face our belly buttons and the core of our body to people we like, have affinity toward and people we respect. And she’s doing it.”
It was, to my mind, some of the worst on-air political “journalism” — I use the word loosely — I’ve ever seen from a major news outlet. And yet, CBS News this morning did the exact same thing.
I’m disappointed. I was expecting to wake up and learn that anonymous sources leaked word that wasn’t even Hillary last night, but an impostor. Maybe even Barack Obama in a Hillary costume.
I know this will not come as news to any of you, but there is something truly wrong with Maureen Dowd. She obviously wrote most of today’s column before she heard the speech — or maybe she was just in her usual demented fugue state and couldn’t separate fiction from reality again. Whatever the case, this column is far more indicative of her own obsessions and commitment to the little psychodrama playing inside her head than anything approaching relevance to actual humans.
The only question is whether she still has the juice to change the narrative of last night to reflect her Bizarroworld take on events. I would say that it’s even money that by the end of the week we’ll be hearing certain quarters of the media parrot her, if only because the “Dems are in disarray” theme is such a compelling nursery rhyme for puerile gasbags. (And others, like Dowd, have a twisted and unhealthy obsession with Clinton and will welcome any opportunity to nurse their delicious loathing.)
Still, the consensus among the gasbags in real time appears to have been (I only got to see the replay later on CNN) that Clinton was successful and that the much anticipated spitting in Obama and his supporters’ eye had not happened. Indeed, with the exception of a couple of the GOP shills, everyone agreed that she could not possibly have done any more. (But, of course, the pundits all said that Al Gore won those debates in 2000 in real time too…)
I don’t know who Dowd has been talking to, but there is likely a bit of Heisenberg principle involved when it comes to the delegates. Sure, I’ve seen a few examples of both Clinton and Obama diehards being obnoxious. But it has been very, very rare. Unlike Dowd, nobody recognizes me and I don’t spend time hanging with professional political operatives with axes to grind. I walked miles in that Pepsi center and around downtown Denver yesterday, eavesdropping on conversations of ordinary attendees and her convention is not the convention of the rank and file.
For instance, I was riding on a tram yesterday with a delegate from the midwest who was festooned with Hillary buttons. I asked her if she was excited about the speech to come and if she expected it to be controversial. She said that she hoped Hillary felt free to bask in the glory a little bit but that she knew she would come through for Obama. I asked her if she was going to vote for her in the roll call and she said she was sent there by people who voted for Clinton and she wanted to cast that vote. But she also said that as soon as he was announced the winner she was going to take off all of her Hillary buttons and put on her new collection of Obama buttons, which she pulled out of her bag to show me. I asked if she would work to get him elected and she chuckled and said, “of course I will, I’m president of the Democratic Club!”
The media see people like her as exotic birds or amusing chimps playing in the trees and consider them decoration for the real event — the careerist posturings and gossip of the elite insider class, which they present as what these rank and file delegates — committed Democratic activists and grassroots workers — think about all this. For them, this is really just one big Georgetown party, displaced from “their town” by necessity in order to keep the serfs happy. The only story that interests them is the story they tell each other about themselves.
I think that Hillary’s speech was quite obviously a success among Democratic voters and probably among a few Republicans who had to give her some grudging respect for simply being a good politician. Whether that translates into votes among the holdouts on the Democratic side, I don’t know. (It’s possible that some of those people were never voting for her, but rather voting against Obama.) But judging from the reaction in that hall last night, I would guess that rank and file supporters on both sides are ready and willing to bury the hatchet and go forward to bury McCain.
What the village gasbags like Maureen Dowd will do is equally predictable — they will continue to tell riveting tales about themselves and their friends and call it political reporting.
Clinton did a great job last night, as I expected. She’s a pro.
Her supporters were ecstatic in the hall, cheering and crying. I was standing with a group of Obama supporters who were skittish beforehand, obviously because of the media hype. They too were thrilled with her speech, spontaneously clapping and high fiving the big applause lines. Lots of love for Hill tonight from Dems of all stripes.
I’m sure Jack Cafferty and Chris Matthews won’t stop flogging the dead horse until somebody finally stages an intervention for their uncontrolled Clinton addiction, but I would hope that the rest of the gasbags could give it a rest for a while. (McCain shills, not so much.)
She had many good lines tonight, but the one that really sticks is this one:
“I want you to ask yourselves: Were you in this campaign just for me? Or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids? Were you in it for that boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage? Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible?
It’s a very effective line and a generous one. She showed leadership there by explicitly challenging her most ardent followers to look beyond her. That’s not easy for politicians to do.
I also think this campaign may have been a crucible for her in that she rediscovered her feminist roots. An awful lot of progressive women did. It wasn’t so much because of a commitment or loyalty to Hillary Clinton herself but rather an unexpected and stunning realization that sexism still runs so close to the surface in our culture. Hillary didn’t lose because of sexism but her campaign certainly exposed it. And it’s had an effect on a lot of women. Certainly, last night, some of Michelle Obama’s biggest applause lines had to do with women’s equality (and it didn’t just come from Hillary supporters.) Clinton’s grandest achievement in this campaign may have been to raise that awareness — and hopefully she will use her position as the most powerful woman in the US Senate to advance the cause.
As a personal aside, I have a telling anecdote to share about the evening. I was waiting at the elevator at the Pepsi center with Julie Bergman Sender, who is shooting a film of the convention, when we were rather brusquely pushed aside by a couple of security guys and told to wait. A large entourage of big men in black suits came marching down the hallway and I thought, this has to be somebody really, really important like Al Gore or Bill Clinton. After all, politicians are casually hobnobbing all over the place this week. Only the biggest names have this kind of security.
It was Steny Hoyer.
Why would he need that kind of security in the friendly environs of the Democratic National Convention, of all places?
Much of our political coverage amounts to gossip and bad sports commentary. When the Obama campaign rebutted McCain’s “celebrity” attack ad with one of their own, the AP reported that “McCain’s ‘celebrity’ taunts are bugging Obama,” taking their cues from GOP strategist Terry Holt, who asserted, “If the celebrity issue were not hurting them, they would have ignored it.” The Politico pushed the same angle in “GOP’s celeb-Obama message gains traction,” adding a dose of the GOP’s beloved gender attacks:
“This is a typically superfluous response from Barack Obama. Like most celebrities, he reacts to fair criticism with a mix of fussiness and hysteria,” McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said.
Ron Fournier’s hit piece on Obama over the Biden VP choice really boiled down to, “Obama’s weak, and scared of McCain,” repeated over and over again for emphasis. Sometimes, the shallow coverage favors the Democrat, as with LA Times blog Top of the Ticket’s “Barack Obama gets under John McCain’s skin,” but it’s still rather silly stuff, especially when that’s all there is to the story. Still, most of the recent “head game” stories seem to focus on Obama. If he’s attacked and says nothing, the charge must be true or he’s weak, and if he punches back, it must be true and he’s “rattled,” “upset” and so on. (Obama’s probably most been most effective when gently mocking, as with his tire gauge retort.)
The head games fascinate the press, but reality just ain’t that popular with them. Earlier this month, Bob Somerby chronicled how on Race to the White House, Rachel Maddow dared to mention that McCain’s off-shore drilling proposals “would really have no impact on gas prices for, I don’t know, a generation,” and then added, “That’s brilliant politics. It just has no basis in reality.” Her point was promptly brushed over by John Harwood and David Gregory, as well as Pat Buchanan, who remarked:
David, I’ve got to step in here because Rachel has really finally nailed one cold. Look, we’ve got $4 a gallon gasoline, $150 a barrel oil, and the Republicans are blaming Barack Obama for it, and they are succeeding with the issue and forcing him to change. That is a winner. Astonishingly good politics, a rarity for the Republicans lately.
The consequences of policies don’t matter. What matters is how everything plays. (At least Maddow’s getting her own show now.)
Digby’s post linking Eric Boehlert is a good reminder of how the game works. The degree of Clinton-trashing Boehlert documents is striking, while New York magazine’s “Obama Agrees to Roll-Call Vote for Clinton. Does That Make Him a Sissy?” plays into familiar dynamics. Somehow, I doubt that Hillary or Bill Clinton will deliver a true Mark Antony speech laced with nasty digs at Obama and a call for insurrection. I don’t doubt for a second, though, that some reporters will eagerly look for such digs. (It beats writing about health care.) Karl Rove trashed Michelle Obama earlier, suggesting she was unpatriotic. He loves to attack the strength. Rove’s remarked that he practices politics “as if people were watching television with the sound turned down,” and he had to be nervous seeing the happy Obama family last night and how well that played. (It’ll be interesting to hear what he says about Hillary Clinton’s speech, but I’d be surprised if he didn’t hit the divisiveness theme somehow.)
Rove’s a partisan hack, of course, but at least some viewers know he worked for Bush (although his work for McCain should always be disclosed). I’m more concerned about supposedly objective reporters. I keep coming back to these examples because the contrasts are so stark – the Obama tax plan would give more money to the middle class than the McCain plan, which would also make the rich even richer, and McCain’s plan for reducing the deficit amounts to wishing for a pony. By all means, let the McCain campaign have its say, let them defend their policies and critique Obama’s. But reporting the actual policies would be nice. (The competing tax plans have gotten some air time on TV, but it’s been pretty scant.)
Many of these issues aren’t that hard to cover, either, yet it’s far more common that we hear about Obama’s celebrity, or that like Bush before him, John McCain is a swell guy. And did you know he was a POW, but reluctant to talk about it? He’s a scrappy guy, a great American underdog story, poor little Admiral’s son made good, losing the primaries in 2000, counted out this time around, but bouncing back… I suppose McCain hasn’t gone full-blown into the “Aw, shucks” mode of Fred Thompson, and hasn’t yet hit the full Bull Durham mode of saying he’s gonna give the presidency 110%, he just hopes he can help the country, just wants to give it his best shot and the good Lord willing, things’ll work out… But McCain has been running mainly on his personality, on his persona, and has gone something like 146 consecutive starts speeches offering incoherent statements and unsound policies. He really has been the Teflon candidate.
McCain’s popular with the press, but he also benefits because so many of our political journalists have an awfully odd attitude toward their beat. As Bob Somerby observed back in June:
In short, these people hate knowledge, complexity; they hate the infernal need to explore. Let’s put it another way: They hate politics. It’s weird, yet the contrast constantly strikes us. Sports reporters love to talk about sports. [Richard] Cohen hates talking about politics.
Most of all, they hate talking about policies and their consequences. That would be boring – and more work. The sporting life, the gossip game, is both easier and more fun. Honestly, I think there’s a place for little side stories, learning more about a candidate as a person, biographical details, favorite movies and all that. However, especially when it comes to television coverage, often we receive little more than fluff, with not much substantive discussion. And if that weren’t bad enough, there’s generally favoritism to the fluff.
DDay’s post “If A Nose Grows In The Forest…” explored these dynamics earlier this month. After noting that NBC’s Chuck Todd “comes out and admits that he’s a sportscaster,” DDay observed:
Here’s the thing, though – in the case of the Village, it’s more like a home-team sportscaster. The guy who is paid the Raiders to cover the game, and he hates every other team and has no problem shaping the story to benefit his guys.
We’ve seen, many a time, how the press will vouch for Saint McCain. But while there are certainly plenty of godawful sportscasters, they tend to, y’know, report what actually happened. Even if we view the press as sportscasters, or even home-team sportscasters, our press corps lacks good play-by-play announcers, but is positively overflowing with really bad color commentators.
To strain this metaphor even further (and apologies to all non-sports fans), say the Green Bay Packers were playing the Chicago Bears and scored the first two touchdowns. If our political reporters were sportscasters, David Broder would insist that the Packers should let the Bears score, Sean Hannity would loudly proclaim that the Bears did score, and Cokie Roberts would misreport the score and then proceed to ignore the game.
I’ll be interested to hear the speeches tonight, not so much the commentary. Still, I must remember there’s always room for the coverage to grow far worse. Some day in the months ahead, we may see some enterprising news producer combine the worst of Bob Costas with the worst of Charlie Gibson, and bad debate questions will plunge to a new low: “Senator Obama, at the Beijing Olympics, Michael Phelps won an unprecedented eight gold medals, bringing pride to America, while his mother Debbie cheered him on every step and stroke of the way. So why are you raising his capital gains taxes?”
Frustrated by the mounting toll of civilian deaths from U.S. and NATO airstrikes in Afghanistan, the government of President Hamid Karzai called Tuesday for a full-scale review of foreign-led military operations in the country.
Our foreign policy is literally blowing up in our faces on multiple fronts, but the media is dead-set on whether or not someone with a sign somewhere is a PUMA or not.
If you read one thing as you watch the growing gasbag hysteria leading up to Clinton’s speech tonight, read this great piece by Boehlert. It’s all you need to know to keep this thing in perspective and understand why DFH’s like us complain about fictional narratives.
Most of the bloviators who are covering this allegedly unprecedented rift were around when these earlier events happened. They are, as usual, passing around pre-masticated oppo talking points (when they aren’t just making shit up.) There’s no excuse for this.
Also, if you haven’t seen this handy tool from Media Matters Action Network, check it out. Perhaps we should all send it to the press so they too can understand how the right manufactures scandals and then uses the media as their sales force.
You can always tell an election is nearing. The ads start airing during your shows. The bumper stickers become more visible during your commute. And Joe Scarborough begins his gradual, but inevitable transition from thinly-veiled, independent “journalist” to complete water-carrying GOP hack. It’s really the same script every election cycle and it usually blooms like a flower with an episode like today’s Morning Joe:
The only time he shut up during the entire segment (other than during the beginning of Mika Brzezinski’s newscast, which he interrupted and ended prematurely) was when David Shuster challenged him: to say “John McCain was wrong.”
SHUSTER: One final point: It’s very different to say, “Yes, we ought to take the Iraqis up on their word,” and at the same time say, “You know what, when John McCain ridicules that very point, he is wrong.” And if you want to say, right now — we can end this argument — “When John McCain ridicules the point that we ought to take up the Iraqis and get out of Iraq, and he ridicules that, he is wrong.” You can say that right now and that’s the end of this.
SCARBOROUGH: Well, actually, you’re trying to pick a fight with somebody that wasn’t fighting with you. As a guy…
SHUSTER: Well, you can end the fight by saying “John McCain is wrong.” Go ahead say it. “John McCain is wrong when he ridicules people who call for a timetable.”
[a few seconds of cafeteria din]
SCARBOROUGH: I.. wha… whuuu… miii… Where am I? Am I on Crossfire? I thought they cancelled that show… John McCain is John… OK… John McCain is wrong for blah, blah, blah, whatever you said. We’re not on opposite sides here.
This smackdown followed seven minutes of schoolyard taunts by Scarborough, including, in the most sarcastic tone he could muster, “Ooooh, you’re an independent! Why, I feel soooo comforted by the fact that you’re an independent! I bet everybody at MSNBC has ‘independent’ on their voting cards! Ooooh, we’re down the middle now!”
Truly embarrassing. You can tell the GOP is in trouble this year, because Joe usually waits until somebody mentions Mary Cheney before he percolates completely.
He’s probably still smarting from last night, when Keith Olbermann muttered, “Jesus, Joe, why don’t you get a shovel?” while Scarborough was praising McCain’s Karl Rove 2.0, Steve Schmidt.
This is, of course, nothing new, but Karl Rove has once again proved himself to be a total jackass:
I don’t think she did too well on saying I love America. That wasn’t adequate enough because, look, people are gonna hear that, and then those that have paid attention to her earlier comments are gonna try and square those two off.
I thought it was heartbreaking that she had to say it at all, but the idea that it was inadequate is mind boggling. How could she possibly make it any more clear? Wrap herself in the flag and speak in tongues?
The idea that they are going to continue to attack Michelle Obama for being unpatriotic and “hating America” is pretty sickening. I guess it’s just part of their ongoing character assault on Obama in general, but it’s still very cynical. And I’m not sure it’s very effective, certainly after an event like last night. When you see them as a family with their two adorable little daughters, both Michelle and Barack are so incredibly normal, so relaxed and smiling, that these harsh “unamerican” attacks seem very out of place. Last night they sure didn’t look very “exotic” to me — they could have been any All American family I see every day down at the mall.
I find Barack to be very appealing when he’s around Michelle and the girls. I don’t know what it is — it’s some sort of subliminal thing — but I get a very warm and friendly feeling toward him that’s different than the more cerebral appreciation I have for him as a politician or inspirational feeling I get from his speeches. There’s some heuristic decision making going on there that I don’t understand, but I recognize it. I would imagine that Karl Rove is well aware of that effect.
Following up on Tristero’s comment below, I understand that some of the gasbags have come around to the idea that the Democrats can’t go after the Republicans because the American people are sick and tired of the partisan attack politics of Washington these past few years.
Isn’t that precious? The American people are sick of vicious, bloodthirsty Republicans which means that Democrats can’t mention the fact that Republicans are vicious and bloodthirsty.
As I wrote earlier, there seems to be some common belief among the villagers that because the cable shows have relatively small audiences that they have no influence. That might be true if the audience they do have didn’t consist mostly of the professional political class.
These people are being tremendously dishonest (or they’re just dumb) when they frame this election in those terms. John McCain has launched a non-stop character attack on Barack Obama and they advise the Democrats to be soft because the public is sick of Republican attacks. Yeah, that’ll work out.
I fervently hope the Democrats don’t agree with that nonsensical conventional wisdom and strongly attack the Republicans over the next three nights. That “advice” is a recipe for defeat.
