I was watching the footage today of Pat Tillman’s family testifying before the Waxman committee and was reminded of this little piece of the story that I’d put out of my mind — the thoroughly insulting comments by one of Tillman’s officers who was in charge of “investigating” the circumstances surrounding his death:
Kauzlarich said he is confident the current probe will not result in criminal charges against the shooter or shooters. He said investigators would not still be examining the incident at all if it were not for Tillman’s NFL celebrity — he walked away from a multimillion-dollar contract with the Arizona Cardinals when he enlisted — and the pressure brought to bear by Tillman’s family on a number of Washington politicos.
“His parents continue to ask for it to be looked at,” Kauzlarich said. “And that is really their prerogative. And if they have the right backing, the right powerful people in our government to continue to let it happen, then that is the case.
“But there [have] been numerous unfortunate cases of fratricide, and the parents have basically said, ‘OK, it was an unfortunate accident.’ And they let it go. So this is — I don’t know, these people have a hard time letting it go. It may be because of their religious beliefs.”
In a transcript of his interview with Brig. Gen. Gary Jones during a November 2004 investigation, Kauzlarich said he’d learned Kevin Tillman, Pat’s brother and fellow Army Ranger who was a part of the battle the night Pat Tillman died, objected to the presence of a chaplain and the saying of prayers during a repatriation ceremony in Germany before his brother’s body was returned to the United States.
Kauzlarich, now a battalion commanding officer at Fort Riley in Kansas, further suggested the Tillman family’s unhappiness with the findings of past investigations might be because of the absence of a Christian faith in their lives.
In an interview with ESPN.com, Kauzlarich said: “When you die, I mean, there is supposedly a better life, right? Well, if you are an atheist and you don’t believe in anything, if you die, what is there to go to? Nothing. You are worm dirt. So for their son to die for nothing, and now he is no more — that is pretty hard to get your head around that. So I don’t know how an atheist thinks. I can only imagine that that would be pretty tough.”
Asked by ESPN.com whether the Tillmans’ religious beliefs are a factor in the ongoing investigation, Kauzlarich said, “I think so. There is not a whole lot of trust in the system or faith in the system [by the Tillmans]. So that is my personal opinion, knowing what I know.”
Asked what might finally placate the family, Kauzlarich said, “You know what? I don’t think anything will make them happy, quite honestly. I don’t know. Maybe they want to see somebody’s head on a platter. But will that really make them happy? No, because they can’t bring their son back.”
(I wonder if Kauzlarich is a believer in the death penalty?)
Apparently there are quite a few atheists in foxholes after all. On CNN they just said that there are almost 6000 members of the military who claim to be atheists or agnostics. Another 114,000 leave the question blank on their forms.
Waxman wondered if the comments might fall under the category of “comments unbecoming” and he was told that they broke no rules. Perhaps in the strictest sense they didn’t. But nobody who considers himself an honest, upright conservative Christian person should believe it was ok to lie to Tillman’s family for PR purposes and then imply that their absolutely reasonable questions were the result of being insufficiently religious. (And how insulting is that to other people who are!)
Something awful has happened to our military with this infiltration of extremist Christians in the officer ranks. And the problem isn’t that they are believers or even that some of them have simplistic views of what makes people tick. The problem with so many of these conservative Christian types in government across the board is that they are so unethical and dishonest. I don’t know if that comes from the Elmer Gantry tradition or what, but our experience with experimental theocracy has certainly shed light on this rather unexpected characteristic.
Update: Michael Froomkin tells me that Bush “hopes” that someone is held responsible.
I noticed this odd omission this morning too. Why didn’t the NY Times review the Bill Moyers documentary that’s slated to air tonight called “Buying The War”? They barely even mention it.
The LA Times did:
“Deep Throats were talking, but few in the press were listening,” Bill Moyers says in ‘Buying the War”, a cold-eyed look at how lock-step with the Bush administration the mainstream news media became in the months leading up to the Iraq war.
Airing tonight on PBS, the documentary marks Moyers’ return as a regular PBS presence. he left his previous eries, “Now With Bill moyers,” at the end of 2004, frustrated by what he saw at the politicization of public broadcasting under then Corporation for Public Broadcasting Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson.
Tomlinson is gone and Moyers is back (albeit with a suspicious lack of fanfare.) “Bill Moyers Journal” (which last aired in 1994) wi8ll settle into Friday Night on KCET after tonight’s premiere. In “Buying the War,” Moyers the citizen journalist (in the good sense of that term) goes back over the hawkish national climate in 2002 and ’03, and the echo chamber the Bush administration created out of the mainstream media, including hallowed institutions such as “Meet The Press” and the New York Times, in selling the idea of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear weapon programs and ties to Al-Qaeda.
The heavy-hitters that Moyers says he tried but failed to get to comment for “Buying the War” include former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Times columnists Thomas L. Friedman and William Safire, and Fox News Channel architect Roger Ailes.
The lighter hitters you will see a lot of are Warren R. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay, reporters in the Washington bureau of Knight Ridder Inc, along with their bureau chief John Walcott.
This is Moyers’ larger point: that these men were exceptions to the rule, writing stories that questioned the veracity of official intelligence, and because Knight Ridder (now owned by McClatchy Co.) didn’t have a paper in New York or Washington, their dissenting voices couldn’t compete with the theme of the moment.
The front pages were blaring, and cable news, of course, was banging the drum — and the pots, and the pans. The clips alone that “Buying The War” amasses are chilling, what amounts to a hall of mirrors, administration officials leaking and spinning and then going on talk shows to point at their media-fed leaks or spin.
Phil Donohue, fired as host of an MSNBC show in early 2003 says he was told he could have a war advocate on his program as a solo guest, but dissenters had to be balanced out from the right.
“Our producers were instructed to feature two conservatives for every liberal,” he says.
There is no on representing the conservative argument here, not the deeper ideological reasons for believing in the Iraq invasion. But that’s partly Moyers’ position: In the run-up to war, point-counterpoint emerged as a devastating sham.
I guess it’s not so surprising that the NY Times didn’t bother to review this. It’s cowardly, however.
Those of us who have been following this story in depth from the beginning know most of this, of course. But I’m glad that Moyers has amassed the footage and put it all in one place so that people can see it again in its glory. It’s a big story and I’ll be interested to see how many of the most dizzying moments during that long national acid trip Moyers was able to capture.
My personal favorite was Bush’s press conference a few days before the invasion began. Matt Taibbi put it best:
The Bush press conference to me was like a mini-Alamo for American journalism, a final announcement that the press no longer performs anything akin to a real function. Particularly revolting was the spectacle of the cream of the national press corps submitting politely to the indignity of obviously pre-approved questions, with Bush not even bothering to conceal that the affair was scripted.
Abandoning the time-honored pretense of spontaneity, Bush chose the order of questioners not by scanning the room and picking out raised hands, but by looking down and reading from a predetermined list. Reporters, nonetheless, raised their hands in between questions–as though hoping to suddenly catch the president’s attention.
In other words, not only were reporters going out of their way to make sure their softballs were pre-approved, but they even went so far as to act on Bush’s behalf, raising their hands and jockeying in their seats in order to better give the appearance of a spontaneous news conference.
[…]
Newspapers the next day ignored the scripted-question issue completely. (King himself, incidentally, left it out of his CNN.com report.) Of the major news services and dailies, only one–the Washington Post–even parenthetically addressed the issue. Far down in Dana Millbank and Mike Allen’s conference summary, the paper euphemistically commented:
“The president followed a script of names in choosing which reporters could ask him a question, and he received generally friendly questioning.” [Emphasis mine] “Generally friendly questioning” is an understatement if there ever was one. Take this offering by April Ryan of the American Urban Radio Networks:
“Mr. President, as the nation is at odds over war, with many organizations like the Congressional Black Caucus pushing for continued diplomacy through the UN, how is your faith guiding you?”
Great. In Bush’s first press conference since his decision to support a rollback of affirmative action, the first black reporter to get a crack at him–and this is what she comes up with? The journalistic equivalent of “Mr. President, you look great today. What’s your secret?”
Newspapers across North America scrambled to roll the highlight tape of Bush knocking Ryan’s question out of the park. The Boston Globe: “As Bush stood calmly at the presidential lectern, tears welled in his eyes when he was asked how his faith was guiding him…” The Globe and Mail: “With tears welling in his eyes, Mr. Bush said he prayed daily that war can be averted…”
Even worse were the qualitative assessments in the major dailies of Bush’s performance. As I watched the conference, I was sure I was witnessing, live, an historic political catastrophe. In his best moments Bush was deranged and uncommunicative, and in his worst moments, which were most of the press conference, he was swaying side to side like a punch-drunk fighter, at times slurring his words and seemingly clinging for dear life to the verbal oases of phrases like “total disarmament,” “regime change,” and “mass destruction.”
He repeatedly declined to answer direct questions. At one point, when a reporter twice asked if Bush could consider the war a success if Saddam Hussein were not captured or killed, Bush answered: “Uh, we will be changing the regime of Iraq, for the good of the Iraqi people.”
Yet the closest thing to a negative characterization of Bush’s performance in the major outlets was in David Sanger and Felicity Barringer’s New York Times report, which called Bush “sedate”: “Mr. Bush, sounding sedate at a rare prime-time news conference, portrayed himself as the protector of the country…”
Apparently even this absurdly oblique description, which ran on the Times website hours after the press conference, was too much for the paper’s editors. Here is how that passage read by the time the papers hit the streets the next morning:
“Mr. Bush, at a rare prime-time press conference, portrayed himself as the protector of the country…”
Meanwhile, those aspects of Bush’s performance that the White House was clearly anxious to call attention to were reported enthusiastically. It was obvious that Bush had been coached to dispense with two of his favorite public speaking tricks–his perma-smirk and his finger-waving cowboy one-liners. Bush’s somber new “war is hell” act was much commented upon, without irony, in the post-mortems.
Appearing on Hardball after the press conference, Newsweek’s Howard Fineman (one of the worst monsters of the business) gushed when asked if the Bush we’d just seen was really a “cowboy”:
“If he’s a cowboy he’s the reluctant warrior, he’s Shane… because he has to, to protect his family.”
A whole bunch of America sat there watching these sycophantic performances with our jaws agape, wondering if we had lost our minds. Bush was barely articulate, as usual, mouthing the worst kind of puerile platitudes (when he was coherent at all) while the press corps slavered over him as if he were Cicero. Bush, the clearly in-over-his-head man-child was molded into a hero and cheered by the media as he led this country into the dark, morass of an illegal war in the middle east. It was the most disorienting thing I’ve ever experienced in my life.
There are many similar memories of that bizarre period, which, looking back, I realize were a strange kind of book-end to the equally freakish Clinton impeachment — the earlier story marked by its triviality and the latter by its terrible seriousness. Yet the press behaved in both as if they were cheerleaders for the Republican line not skeptics or fact-finders (and certainly not truth-tellers) while half the American public and most of the world looked on in utter disbelief. It was a very bad time. And I wasn’t sure if we would ever be able to sort it all out. I’m still not.
Check your PBS station listing for tonight’s Moyers report. It’s important to document the atrocities and I’m glad that Moyers is out there doing it — and giving some props to the Knight Ridder guys who actually did their jobs. It was what kept some of us sane when the whole country seemed to be going over the edge.
How many people around the country do you suppose are having converstions like this?
CALLER 1: — I really thought — I really, about six months ago or so, I started saying, “It’s unwinnable,” and I, you know, I just figure, well, maybe we ought to start pulling out, but you have to, right now, say, they’re doing this surge, I don’t know if it’s going to work or not, I’m not a military tech, you know, person —
GIBSON: [Caller], let me just tell you. This is the real deal: If this war is lost, it’s Iraqis who lost it. The one thing that drives me up the wall is saying, “Look at all the deaths you Americans have caused in Iraq.”
No! ‘Scuse me?
We invaded the place, we knocked over Saddam, and then Iraqis began killing each other. They didn’t go to the U.S. commander and say, “Pretty please, may I go kill some Sunnis?” “Your commandership, sir, may I go kill some Shia?”
No. They just went on a killing spree of their own and it’s not our fault. And the war is lost —
REID : This war is lost.
GIBSON: — are contemptible words. Contemptible. You got a new word? [phone number]. I need more words. Gibson on Fox.
[…]
GIBSON: [Caller] in Kentucky.
CALLER 2: Look, Harry Reid’s a buffoon, but I think you’re being a bit disingenuous —
GIBSON: All right.
CALLER 2: — when you say that we’re not responsible for the chaos in Iraq. I mean, who was it that disbanded their security forces and left that country in an unstable state?
GIBSON: Look, good point. The Bremer period is going to take the fall on the Iraq story — dismantling the Baathist organization, not letting anybody who was a Baathist run the electric system or the sewage system or the garbage pickup or any of that stuff. They’re going to take the hit on it. And the Bremer period where they disbanded the army, that’s going to take the hit on it — I guarantee you.
But, and that’s a mistake, I agree that was a mistake, but who is doing this killing? Give me a break. These are Iraqis killing each other. So what did we do? If you’re saying it’s our fault that we unmasked them as knuckle-dragging savages from the 10th century — fine! I’ll take credit. But thanks — but thanks for the observation, [Caller].
Meanwhile, from the April 25 edition of The Washington Times
Winston Churchill called him “one of the noblest Americans who ever lived,” and Theodore Roosevelt called him “the very greatest of all the great captains that the English-speaking peoples have brought forth.”
But has political correctness turned Robert E. Lee into a villain? That will be the question explored by six historians this weekend at a symposium commemorating the bicentennial of the Confederate commander’s birth.
“We were afraid that Lee would not receive the honors he should get because of the prevailing political correctness,” says Brag Bowling, a Richmond resident who helped organize Saturday’s event at the Key Bridge Marriott Hotel in Arlington.
[…]
Hostility to Confederate heritage “has really gotten bad in the last decade,” says Mr. Bowling, who says that political correctness in academia and in the press often leads to “dishonoring Confederate soldiers and ignoring the true reasons why the South wished to secede.”
Greg Palast, who has been writing about the “voter fraud” fraud for years, writes an interesting piece today arguing that Gonzales is irrelevant to the deeper problem within the DOJ with respect to voting rights.
We’ve been here before. Gonzales is getting Libby’d. Takes the bullet for Karl Rove and the White House. If you wondered why the Republican jackals like the sinister Senator Specter piled on Gonzales — it’s because they were told to.
These guys learned from Richard Nixon. In 1973, when Nixon was getting hammered over Watergate, he threw the Senate Committee his Attorney General, a schmuck named Richard Kleindienst. Famously, Nixon’s own Rove, a devious creep named John Erlichman, told Nixon to leave the Attorney General, “twisting slowly in the wind.”
Rove and Bush are doing the Nixon Twist on Gonzales.
I think so too. When someone like Jeff Sessions is tearing into Gonzales, then you can bet money it’s a political strategy. That guy has never gone against the wingnut grain in his life.
When I read Palast’s piece it immediately reminded me of a Bush quote that I’ve always found to be illuminating:
During a trip to West Point on June 1, Bush pulled White aside for a private talk. “As long as they’re hitting you on Enron, they’re not hitting me,” said Bush, according to this Army official. “That’s your job. You’re the lightning rod for this administration.”
For all his faults, one of the hoariest myths about Bush that persists to this day is that he is loyal to a fault — one of those backhanded criticisms that actually makes him somewhat sympathetic. It’s nonsense. Bush uses people like kleenex, always has. He keeps people like Rummy and Gonzales around long after any other president would have because they serve a purpose —- reinforcing the idea that he is not personally responsible for anything that’s happened.
In this case, Gonzales keeps the eye off of Rove, Bush’s brain (and conscience.) The longer they leave him out there as degree of separation between the corruption of the DOJ and the white house, he serves his purpose. That’s why he hasn’t resigned and why Bush hasn’t asked for it. He’s doing his job.
Update: Here was the the dog that didn’t bite during the Libby trial:
Wells contended, it was Rove—the political strategist—who had to be protected at all costs. He was, Wells said, “the lifeblood of the Republican Party” and the man George W. Bush absolutely needed for the coming re-election campaign. Indeed, after [then-press secretary Scott] McClellan issued a public statement exonerating Rove of any involvement in the leak (a statement that turned out three years later to be false), Cheney and Libby huddled about the matter. McClellan had cleared Rove but at that point had said nothing about Libby, leaving the implication that Libby had leaked but Rove hadn’t. Cheney personally wrote a note, an excerpt of which Wells read to the jury and highlighted by displaying on an audio-visual machine during his opening statement: “Not going to protect one staffer and sacrifice the guy that was asked to stick his neck in the meat grinder because of the incompetence of others,” Cheney’s note read.
The translation, according to Wells: The vice president was not going to allow Karl Rove to be protected and Libby to be sacrificed…
The Libby defense ultimately didn’t go there for reasons nobody understands. But it does track nicely with the old “lightning rod” theory of governance, doesn’t it? Gonzales is getting the Libby treatment. I wonder how much he likes it.
This has been around for a while, but I just heard it today. Cultural critic (and African American blogger) David Ehrenstein, wrote a provocative article in the LA Times in which he referred to Obama as “the magic negro” and deconstructed what he saw as the Barack Obama phenmenon among liberal white voters. You can agree or disagree with Ehrenstein’s thesis, but I really don’t think there’s any doubt that a rich, white rightwing gasbag taking his piece and doing a song parody called “Barack the Magic Negro” by an Al Sharpton impressionist is not exactly done in a spirit of brotherly love.
You can hear the song as it was played on The Rush Limbaugh Show here.
Whether rappers make insulting videos or black comedians say the “N” word or African American cultural critics take on white liberal guilt, one thing is abundently clear: is just not acceptable for white people (particularly rich, white conservative men) to do song parodies of black people using racist stereotypes. I can’t even believe it’s necessary to point that out. But for some reason people like Rush and Imus just can’t contain themselves and I don’t think we have to think too awfully hard to figure out why.
Limbaugh did his own song and dance on the program, twisting himself into an unintelligible pretzel pretending that he was criticizing white liberals for being racist while defending his right to air minstrel shows:
LIMBAUGH: David Ehrenstein, the L.A. Times today, “Obama the ‘Magic Negro.’ ” It’s just infuriating. It is the left that continues to besmirch these people. It’s the left that continues to question their so-called authenticity. These people are all human beings. Talk about Sharpton, Reverend [Jesse] Jackson, these people are all human beings. Now some of them are in the race business. I understand that. But look at who it is that keeps focusing on whether they’re authentic enough. Authenticity based on skin color. Who is it doing this? It’s the left. You know what, I got a suggestion for those of you at the L.A. Times. Let’s cut to the chase. Go get an old-fashioned auction book and put it in the town square. Put it somewhere where it looks like it’s real and just bring all these black people up there and auction them off and find out who it is that sells for the highest price.
That’s essentially what you’re doing with all of these nonsensical categorizations — Obama’s not black enough, Obama doesn’t have — he’s not down for the struggle, Obama doesn’t have a legitimate civil rights — civil right background. Obama’s ears don’t look like a black person’s ears, they’re too big, Obama doesn’t sound like a black person, he’s clean and articulate. The left’s saying all these things. Now he’s the “Magic Negro,” which is a convenient trick for the L.A. Times to blame a bunch of white people for being racist. OK. Let’s find out who the — just get an auction block and grab as many blacks as you want to put them up there and let’s start the sales, L.A. Times, and let’s see who it is that fetches the highest prices. Isn’t that essentially the way they’re approaching this? These are commodities. These human beings are simply commodities, and they are there for some purpose other than their own human existence? You doubt the racism and the groupthink and the superiority of the leftists in this country, you’d be making a grave error.
And then he sang “We Shall Overcome” and recited the “I Have A Dream” speech.
Well, no, he didn’t. He whimpered about being misunderstood:
LIMBAUGH: For example, you could take 10 seconds of me saying, “Obama is the Magic Negro” and make it look like I said it, rather than the fact that I’m repeating it from an L.A. Times column today. So the BBC is getting ready — and we declined their permission to use this in that regard. We said, “If you want to do it just on Rush, and we’ll send you a compendium of what’s been said.” “No, no, we’re not interested in that.” So they’re doing a hit piece on talk-show hosts in America, the way they’re talking about Obama, which is precisely my point.
It’s the L.A. Times, and it’s Joe Biden, and it’s all these other people who are raising questions about his authenticity. In fact, there was an honest story, but even it, and I forget where it was — last week, might have been a blog, I forget. And this — the person writing this story begrudgingly admitted that even Rush Limbaugh is saying there’s something to this Obama guy and so he’s not being overly critical of Obama, but then the snide follow-up was, “That’s because so many people are excited about — so many people on the left are being critical of Obama for one reason or another that Limbaugh is not being genuine in his respect that he’s showing for Obama.”
[…]
LIMBAUGH: … Nobody knows enough about him to support him on the basis of policy or substance. And so the white people who are supporting Barack Obama, the “Magic Negro,” are doing so precisely because he’s the “Magic Negro.” By supporting him, white people get to assuage their guilt over this nation’s history with slavery and the Confederacy and all this other tripe. [you’re letting your racist slip show, Rushie. ed]
And this has led to a number of points being made by me, brilliantly so on this program, that it is the left in this country that looks at people and sees their skin color or their gender or their sexual orientation as the first things they notice about them. The whole point of this piece is to accuse white people of being racist. They don’t really like Obama, they don’t really like black people, they feel guilty over what this country’s done to black people, so they support Barack because he’s the quote-unquote “Magic Negro.”
This is the same newspaper that has run a couple of stories on “is Barack Obama is black enough?” This prompted a drive-by caller, Dan from Fruitport, Michigan, to suggest that the Democrats, since they feel so bad about this, should offer black credits to someone like Obama who is not black enough in the eyes of the L.A. Times and other liberals. So he could go out there and buy black credits, so he could — like Gore, you know, offsets his carbon use with carbon credits, Obama the “Magic Negro” could offset his lack of blackness with black credits. Then say he could down for the struggle [sic] and that he has roots in the civil rights movement. Reverend Sharpton’s upset, you know, “Obama, where were you when we marched for justice in Selma?” and so forth. So clearly, it is a — I mean, it’s just remarkable to continue to witness the actual racism that exists on the left, using the term “Magic Negro” to apply to you white people who are supporting Obama. Singing a song in my head here during the break: “Barack, the Magic Negro, doo doo do doo.”
I know. That’s almost painful to try and deconstruct into anything sane, much less logical. (And it’s infuriating to hear this bloviating pondscum take Ehrenstein’s piece and turn it into wingnut horse apples.) But when you wade through his blather what you get is that he’s making a slick, cynical pitch that liberals are racists and Rush Limbaugh is a friend to the black man knowing full well that his loyal following are aware that’s a line of complete crap. We know this, not just because he is a well known rightwing racist jerk, but because he demonstrates this great “respect” by broadcasting a parody of Al Sharpton that might as well have been done by Amos and Andy.
He knows his audience and what they are thinking. And that little ditty “Barack the Magic Negro” will stick — not in the minds of the liberals whom Ehrenstein claims see him as the great assuager of liberal guilt, but by racist creeps who just love to snicker and snort over the word “negro.” Dittoheads know exactly what Rush is about here no matter what kind of patently absurd nonsense he spews about liberals putting African Americans up on auction blocks. Everybody’s in on the joke.
But it’s also clear from the totalhysteria emanating from the rightwing media the past week or so that they are nervous about what happened to Imus. It was no partisan left wing boycot that brought him down. Corporate America decided that he was too hot to handle all on its own. So I doubt that Limbaugh is happy about having this little racist number all over the internet no matter how “proud” he is:
Uh-oh, Dawn’s shaking her head on that. What are you saying, if I do that, I then will own the term, because I will be taking it above and beyond how it’s been used? Well, that’s what we always do here. We do parodies and satires on the idiocy and the phoniness of the left. We could throw in — yeah, we could put an L.A. Times lyric in there to make, you know, make it obvious who it was who actually used the term. I mean, don’t start telling me to shy away from this stuff. That’s why I’m where I am, that’s why I’m who I am, and for which I make no apologies. I’m very proud and happy.
My oh my. That has just a little bit of the stench of fear about it, don’t you think?
Jonah Goldberg has a fascinating piece in the LA Times this morning. Apparently, the American people are too stupid to be listened to:
HUGE NUMBERS of Americans don’t know jack about their government or politics. According to a Pew Research Center survey released last week, 31% of Americans don’t know who the vice president is, fewer than half are aware that Nancy Pelosi is the speaker of the House, a mere 29% can identify “Scooter” Libby as the convicted former chief of staff of the vice president, and only 15% can name Harry Reid when asked who is the Senate majority leader.
Also last week, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found that two-thirds of Americans believe that Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales’ firing of eight U.S. attorneys was “politically motivated.”
So, we are supposed to believe that two-thirds of Americans have studied the details of the U.S. attorney firings and come to an informed conclusion that they were politically motivated — even when Senate Democrats agree that there is no actual evidence that Gonzales did anything improper. Are these the same people who couldn’t pick Pelosi out of a lineup? Or the 85% who couldn’t name the Senate majority leader? Are we to imagine that the 31% of the electorate who still — after seven years of headlines and demonization — can’t identify the vice president of the United States nonetheless have a studied opinion on the firing of New Mexico U.S. Atty. David Iglesias?
Oh, before we proceed, let me make clear: This isn’t a column defending Gonzales. This administration should have long ago sent him out of the bunker for a coffee-and-doughnut run and then changed the locks. No, this is a column about how confused and at times idiotic the United States is about polls, public opinion and, well, democracy itself. We all love to tout the glories of democracy and denounce politicians who just follow the polls. Well, guess which politicians follow the polls? The popular ones, that’s who. And guess why: Because the popular ones get elected. Bucking public opinion is the quickest way for a politician to expedite his or her transition to the private sector.
More to the point, Americans — God bless ’em — are often quite ignorant about the stuff politicians and pundits think matters most. They may know piles about their own professions, hobbies and personal interests, but when it comes to basic civics, they just get their clocks cleaned on Fox’s “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?”
Though examples are depressingly unnecessary, here are two of my favorites over the years. In 1987, 45% of adult respondents to one survey answered that the phrase “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” was in the Constitution (in fact, it’s a quote from Karl Marx). Then, in 1991, an American Bar Assn. study reported that a third of Americans did not know what the Bill of Rights was.
That the public mood is a poor compass for guiding the ship of state is an old lament. Here are two reasons why.
The first has to do with the laziness, spinelessness and vanity of political elites. Citing polls as proof you’re on the right side of an argument is often a symptom of intellectual cowardice. If the crowd says 2+2=7, that’s no reason to invoke the authority of the crowd. But pundits and pols know that if they align themselves with the latest Gallup findings, they don’t have to defend their position on the merits because “the people” are always right…
Which brings us to ideology. The days when politicians would actually defend small-r republicanism are gone. The answer to every problem in our democracy seems to be more democracy, as if any alternative spells more tyranny.
Americans love that kind of talk. I hope the whole field of GOP presidential candidates listens to the DP on this one and startssaying they won’t listen to the idiot voters. After the performance of the Resolute Codpiece and his pantload administration for the past few years, they are in a perfect mood to leave themselves in the hands of some more Republicans who know what’s best for them.
But what is most interesting about Goldberg’s column (aside from the shocking fact that he has one) is that he fails to note who the most uninformed people in the country are. I’m sure you saw this coming. I’ll let let Steve Benen explain:
As the researchers explained in their report, “The extent of Americans’ misperceptions vary significantly depending on their source of news. Those who receive most of their news from Fox News are more likely than average to have misperceptions. Those who receive most of their news from NPR or PBS are less likely to have misperceptions. These variations cannot simply be explained as a result of differences in the demographic characteristics of each audience, because these variations can also be found when comparing the demographic subgroups of each audience.”
Almost shocking was the extent to which Fox News viewers were mistaken. Those who relied on the conservative network for news, PIPA reported, were “three times more likely than the next nearest network to hold all three misperceptions. In the audience for NPR/PBS, however, there was an overwhelming majority who did not have any of the three misperceptions, and hardly any had all three.”
Looking at the misperceptions one at a time, people were asked, for example, if the U.S. had discovered the alleged stockpiles of WMD in Iraq since the war began. Just 11% of those who relied on newspapers as their “primary news source” incorrectly believed that U.S. forces had made such a discovery. Only slightly more — 17% — of those who relied on NPR and PBS were wrong. Yet 33% of Fox News viewers were wrong, far ahead of those who relied on any other outlet.
Likewise, when people were asked if the U.S. had “clear evidence” that Saddam Hussein was “working closely with al Queda,” similar results were found. Only 16% of NPR and PBS listeners/viewers believed that the U.S. has such evidence, while 67% of Fox News viewers were under that mistaken impression.
Overall, 80 percent of those who relied on Fox News as their primary news source believed at least one of the three misperceptions. Viewers/listeners/readers of other news outlets didn’t even come close to this total.
In other words, Fox News viewers are literally less informed about these basic facts. They have, put simply, been led to believe things that are simply not true. These poor dupes would have done better in this survey, statistically speaking, if they received no news at all and simply guessed whether the claims were accurate.
I have a sneaking suspicion that those Fox viewers skew the surveys pretty badly, don’t you? Like this one, who asks:
So, we are supposed to believe that two-thirds of Americans have studied the details of the U.S. attorney firings and come to an informed conclusion that they were politically motivated — even when Senate Democrats agree that there is no actual evidence that Gonzales did anything improper?
Somebody’s a little bit “uninformed” isn’t he? Senate Democrats most certainly do believe that there is evidence that Gonzales did something improper and that is why they are holding the hearings. Most of Jonah’s braindead countrymen also understand that when a public official says he “can’t recall” 75 times when there is documentary evidence in front of him which should have jogged his memory, that he’s either got serious mental deficiencies which render him unfit for the important job he’s doing — or he’s lying. You don’t need to be “informed” of all the details to understand these things. It’s common sense that we yokels out here in the hinterlands use every day in our dealings with other yokels.
And anyway, if Goldberg’s column is indicative of what they are saying around the National Review water cooler these days, then times have really changed around there.
After the fracas had quieted down, the next logical question of the evening was, “What party are you going to?” In the past, there have been only one or two after-parties to attend, the most prestigious being Bloomberg’s.
But last year, things began to change when Capitol File magazine and Reuters offered their own competing post-parties. And this year, Vanity Fair reignited its after-party—which the mag stopped hosting in 1999—at the Adams Morgan condo of scribe Christopher Hitchens.
The VF party was the evening’s most sought after ticket, precisely because it was billed as so exclusive. Heavy-hitting journo names filled the guest list, whereas Bloomberg and Capitol File mixed beltway insiders with people outside the political tent.
In our informal poll before the dinner, taken while attending “Hardball with Chris Matthews” Executive Producer Tammy Haddad’s famous garden party (which she co-hosts with a slew of others), most people reported they were going to Bloomberg.
As the Weekly Standard writer, Matt Labash told us: “I’m going to Bloomberg with my friends. Do you think I want to stand in a room with Sean Penn and Doug Feith? I know how that story ends. In blood and tears. And oil. Oily tears. I’m going to Bloomberg because I’m a man of principle.” Of course late that night we saw him cabbing over to Hitch’s house, but that’s neither here nor there.
Syndicated radio host and Democratic commentator Bill Press confessed: “I’m crashing the Vanity Fair party—here’s why. I have crashed the Bloomberg party so many times it’s no fun anymore. It’s true. I’ve been to the party so many times it’s no fun anymore.”
Former Washington Poster and New York Daily news gossip columnist Lloyd Grove told us: “I’m on the list at Bloomberg. I haven’t tried Vanity Fair, maybe I’ll show up…since my coach turned into a pumpkin and I’m no longer important I hope people who I’ve been nice to and done favors for will pay up!”
Meanwhile TV siren Morgan Fairchild, looking smokin’ in her gold trench coat, was unaware of the Vanity Fair party. “I’m going to at least Bloomberg and Capitol File. I haven’t been invited to Vanity Fair. Maybe someone will invite me.”
Reporter Tim Burger’s after party choice was: “Bloomberg.” Then again, he works there. “That’s not the only reason,” he said diplomatically. “The main reason is because it will be simply the best.”
Taylor Griffin, a former top spokesman at the Treasury department and now in the private sector, said he was going to Bloomberg because “it has always been the best.” Do you secretly wish you were going to Vanity Fair? “I hear it’s all Democrats.”
I’m really sorry I missed the pre-party red carpet coverage on CSPAN 3 where Chris Matthews and Adam Nagourney decided which paunchy, Republican white guy was the totally sexiest man in Washington. (Fred Thompson came in a close second to that perennial hunk Ted “Sanjaya” Olsen. In yet another sign of his sinking poll ratings, George “the codpiece” Bush lost the top honor for the first time in six years. Ouch!)
As a special treat just for Hullabaloo readers, my spies on the ground were able to discover the secret appetizer recipe Hitchens served at that fabulous Vanity Fair soiree at his condo. Shhhh. Don’t share it with anybody who isn’t somebody:
Ingredients: 1 cup ketchup 1/2 cup chili sauce 3 cups bourbon 1/4 cup onion — finely chopped 1/2 cup sugar (or grape jelly) 1 teaspoon Louisiana Hot Sauce 1 pound “Li’l Polksas” or Cocktail Franks
Directions:
Combine all ingredients except franks and one cup bourbon in saucepan and heat on medium heat until almost boiling. Drink remaining bourbon. Lower heat; simmer uncovered 5 minutes. Add franks; simmer 8-10 minutes until heated through. Serve hot in chafing dish.
Gov. Eliot Spitzer will introduce a bill in the coming weeks to legalize same-sex marriage in New York, his spokeswoman said Friday, a move that would propel New York to the forefront of one of the most contentious issues in politics.
Though he has long voiced support for same-sex marriage and promised during his campaign last year to introduce legislation to legalize it, Mr. Spitzer did not mention the issue in his State of the State speech in January or in remarks a week ago outlining his priorities for the remainder of the legislative session, which ends June 21.
But the spokeswoman, Christine Anderson, said that Mr. Spitzer would not back away from his campaign pledge.
“The governor made a commitment to advance a program bill, and he will fulfill that commitment during this legislative session,” Ms. Anderson said, using the term that refers to legislation introduced directly by the governor rather than through a state agency or by the Legislature.
I assume from the tone of the article that this is not likely to pass, which is a shame. But I admire Spitzer for doing it, getting it on the record and standing behind his promise. Most politicians learned the wrong lesson from Bill Clinton’s gays-in-the-military battle in which he came into office and did what he said he would do in the campaign and was burned at the stake for it. He backtracked with “don’t ask don’t tell” but it at least changed the status quo, which is worth something even if it’s not everything. Since then, too many Democratic politicians have shied away from saying they would do anything concrete on social issues at all.
Spitzer seems to understand that you have to keep plugging away at these things from different directions in order to make progress, regardless of the liklihood of passage, and that it’s incumbent upon progressive politicians to use some of what Bush likes to call “political capital” to do it. It’s only by constantly coming back to first principles on social change again and again that people internalize that they have become mainstream. Good for Spitzer for keeping this on the agenda.
MSNBC guest Karen Hanratty “Republican Strategist” on Gore:
There was a blind quote in one of the papers, actually Carville, James Carville said if he loses 15 pounds we’ll know he’s running, and I thought, it’s going to take a lot more than that! (Gales of laughter on the panel.)
Presidents who win are usually very athletic. Bush runs like a seven minute mile! And Clinton liked hamburgers but he worked out.
