Chris Bowers writes about one of my favorite subjects today: American tribal identity.
Over the past year and a half, I have slowly developed an argument that the electorate is, in general, non-ideological, not interested in policy, and generally unmoved by the day-to-day minutia of political events that, within the blogosphere, are treated as cataclysmic events. Sure, most people hold general political beliefs, but in general national voting habits are motivated by something else–something more basic. As we look for ways to motivate voters in November, we need to remember the powerful role that identity plays in political decision-making. As progressives, we shrug off concepts such as the “battle of civilizations,” but if you look closely at demographic data, maybe it is a battle of civilizations taking place after all. We may very well be living in an era of identity politics. Who knows, maybe every era of American politics is an era of identity politics.
I think the evidence is overwhelming that it is. He reproduces one of those great maps that break down everybody by something or other and like most of them, it ends up showing the south as being a homogenous region surrounded by a hodgepodge of different things everywhere else. In this case it’s religion, but it could be anything, including electoral results or sociological indicators. It’s just a fact that the south has a very strong regional identity of its own. And I don’t think the rest of the country is quite like it. That divide has been with us since the beginning and it far transcends any mommy/daddy party dichotomy.
I watched the country music awards the other night and saw what looked like a typical bunch of glammed up pop stars like you’d see on any of these awards shows. Lots of cowboy hats, of course, but the haircuts, the clothes, the silicone bodies were not any different from any other Hollywood production. But the songs were not. There are plenty of Saturday night honky tonk fun and straightforward gospel style religious and patriotic tunes. But there is a strain of explicit cultural ID that wends through all of them.
Gretchen Wilson and Merle Haggard’s song “Politically Uncorrect” perfectly captures the sense of exceptionalism and specialness of southern culture:
I’m for the low man on the totem pole And I’m for the underdog God bless his soul And I’m for the guys still pulling third shift And the single mom raisin’ her kids I’m for the preachers who stay on their knees And I’m for the sinner who finally believes And I’m for the farmer with dirt on his hands And the soldiers who fight for this land
Chorus:
And I’m for the Bible and I’m for the flag And I’m for the working man, me and ol’ hag I’m just one of many Who can’t get no respect Politically uncorrect
(Merle Haggard) I guess my opinion is all out of style (Gretchen Wilson) Aw, but don’t get me started cause I can get riled And I’ll make a fight for the forefathers plan (Merle Haggard) And the world already knows where I stand
Repeat Chorus
(Merle Haggard) Nothing wrong with the Bible, nothing wrong with the flag (Gretchen Wilson) Nothing wrong with the working man me & ol’ hag We’re just some of many who can’t get no respect Politically uncorrect (Merle Haggard)
Now that’s identity. I emphasized the “can’t get no respect” part because I think that’s key, as I have written many times before. The belief that these ideas are particular to this audience, that they stand alone as being politically incorrect and are “out of style” for holding them, is a huge cultural identifier. And it’s held in opposition to some “other” (presumably someone like me) who is believed not to care about any of those things — particularly the welfare of the common man.
Bowers writes:
Motivating voters and pulling off a landslide election will require a gut-level change of attitude about the two parties among millions of Americans. For all of the great policies everyone will suggest Democrats to run on this fall, ultimately winning will be based just as much on how Americans view their identity in relation to the image of the two coalitions as anything else. We need to avoid falling into the wonk trap of assuming that people are motivated by policy details. It is the identity, stupid. We need to explore ways to motivate voters for progressive causes with that in mind.
The conservative southern coalition has a very clear sense of identity. They always have. I would suggest that back in the day the New England and Midwestern cultural identifiers were pretty solidly Main Street bourgeois — if you made it your kids got to go to college and you got to join the chamber of commerce and the country club. But that’s no longer the case. The non-southern Party appears to exist mainly as a repository of opposition to conservative policies. Is that true?
Perhaps the big question is this: If you could write a country song about Blue State identity, what would the lyrics say?
Media Matters has determined that the alleged “concern” about this woman Big Bill (the 60 year old quadruple bypass survivor) is supposed to be schtupping comes from one year old Globe Magazine cover story:
Healy offered no specific reasons for this purported interest among “prominent Democrats” aside from the amount of time the Clintons spent apart, a mention of a decade-old affair, and a reference to year-old “concern[]” over a “tabloid photograph showing Mr. Clinton leaving B.L.T. Steak in Midtown Manhattan late one night after dining with a group that included Belinda Stronach, a Canadian politician.” Healy continued: “The two were among roughly a dozen people at a dinner, but it still was enough to fuel coverage in the gossip pages.”
It was also enough to fuel a front-page New York Times article, and the rapt attention of the Washington press corps, as Media Matters has documented.
Healy did not identify the “tabloid” in question, but he seems to be referring to the Globe magazine, which in the spring of 2005 ran a headline about Clinton and Stronach that read “Bill caught with blonde AGAIN! New divorce battle with Hillary.”
The New York Times is literally circulating rumors from the Globe and the giggling schoolmarms of the DC press corps are eating it up. Ok. Fine.
But as Jane pointed out the other night, and Media Matters notes today, the Globe has another shocking cover story up right now, and one that should be of grave concern to the screeching magpies:
Has anyone informed David Broder and Chris Matthews of this development? Not only isn’t the president sleeping with the first lady, he’s drinking again. I am very “concerned.”
There is a lively debate going on in the blogosphere about whether the FBI should be allowed to raid a congressman’s office. I will let others make the legal and philosophical arguments. I would just offer this from the Church Committee files:
The historical backround of political abuse of the FBI involves at least three dimensions. The first is the Bureau’s subsurvience to the Presidency, its willingness to carry our White House requests without question. When L. Patrick Gray as Acting FBI Director destroyed documents and gave FBI reports to Presidential aides whom the FBI should have been investigating after the Watergate break-in, he just carried to the extreme an established practice of service to the White House. The other side of the practice was the Bureau’s volunteering political intelligence to its superiors, not in response to any specific request. And the third historical dimension was the FBI”s concerted effort to promote its public image and discredit its critics.
[…]
The committee staff found in these “O” and C” files (“Official and Confidential”) such special memoranda on … all the members of the Senate Subcommittee chaired by Senator Long which threatened to investigate the FBI in the mid-1960’s. Some of these “name check” reports and special memoranda contained derogatory information about his wife. The reports on members of the Long Committee were compiled in a briefing book, with tabs on each senator.
[…]
In 1965, the FBI declined a request of the Justice Department Criminal division to “wire” a witness in the investigation of former Johnson senate aide Bobby Baker. Although the FBI refused on grounds that there was not adequate security, the Criminal Division had the Bureau of Narcotics in the Treasury department “wire” the witness as a legitimate alternative. When the Baker trial began in 1967 this became known. Presidential aide Marvin Watson told the FBI that President Johnson was quite exercized, and the FBI was ordered to conduct a discrete “run-down” on the head of the Criminal Division in 1965 and four persons in Treasury and the Narcotic Bureaus, including specifically any associations with former Attorney General Robert Kennedy.
[…]
At the request of President Johnson made directly to FBI executive Cartha Deloach, the FBI passed purely political intelligence about United States Senators to the White house which was obtained as a by-product of otherwise legitimate national security electronic surveillance of foreign intelligence targets. The practice also continued at the request of Mr. H.R. Haldeman.
That is just a tiny bit of the Church Committee summary of the historical political abuses perpetrated by the FBI through the mid-70’s. It was bipartisan, which is why I chose to highlight the incident with Johnson.
I am quite sure that Congressman Jefferson is nobody I want to defend (for his politics and much as his criminality.) But the FBI and the executive branch have a long sordid history of using their power for political ends. (Even Hoover never believed they could raid a congressman’s office, however.)
Recently, the FBI’s conservative culture has led to some in the bureau covertly helping Republicans as we saw during the Clinton years. Convicted spy Robert Hanssen had a relationship with Robert Novak that seemed to be based upon his political loathing of Janet Reno, although as with so many of these cases, it’s hard to tell what motivates individuals. But history shows that the FBI can be used by any party for nefarious purposes which is bad enough and requires constant vigilance and oversight. When it is used for partisan reasons directly against the congress you have a problem of an even greater dimension.
The reason to be against this is political and constitutional, not legal. It’s entirely possible that the warrant they got was proper and that their cause is just. And I have no doubt that Hastert had a hissy fit and got Bush to seal the documents to cover his own ample ass. But the bigger issue is something that someone wrote in an email a couple of days ago: This Republican Justice Department, led by a lifetime Bush loyalist and good friend to Karl Rove now has every Democratic strategy memo that ever came across Congressman Jefferson’s desk. Trust ’em?
The New York Times is verifying that the Pentagon now acknowledges that a massacre took place at Haditha. In fact, they are briefing members of congress on it to try to keep the story from blowing up into a huge scandal on the level of Abu Ghraib.
Considering the explosion of outrage on the right against John Murtha for discussing it earlier, this concerns me:
The first official report from the military, issued on Nov. 20, said that “a U.S. marine and 15 Iraqi civilians were killed yesterday from the blast of a roadside bomb” and that “immediately following the bombing, gunmen attacked the convoy with small-arms fire.”
Military investigators have since uncovered a far different set of facts from what was first reported, partly aided by marines who are cooperating with the inquiry and partly guided by reports filed by a separate unit that arrived to gather intelligence and document the attack; those reports contradicted the original version of the marines, Pentagon officials said.
You will recall that Joseph Darby, the soldier who blew the whistle on the Abu Ghraib abuses was vilified by his neighbors. And then there was this:
He was a 24-year-old pilot flying over the Vietnamese jungle on March 16, 1968. The crew’s objective: draw Viet Cong fire from My Lai, so helicopter gunships could swoop in and take out the enemy gunners.
Thompson spotted gunfire but found no enemy fighters. He saw only American troops, who were forcing Vietnamese civilians into a ditch, then opening fire.
Thompson landed his helicopter to block the Americans, then instructed his gunner to open fire on the soldiers if they tried to harm any more villagers. Thompson and two other chopper pilots airlifted villagers to safety, and he reported the slaughter to superiors.
“We saw something going wrong, so we did the right thing and we reported it right then,” Thompson said.
The Vietnamese government estimated that more than 500 were killed.
Army Lt. William Calley Jr. was convicted in a 1971 court-martial and received a life sentence for the My Lai massacre. President Nixon reduced the sentence, and Calley served three years of house arrest.
Thompson received the prestigious Soldier’s Medal — 30 years after the fact.
His acts are now considered heroic. But for years Thompson suffered snubs and worse from those in and out of the military who considered his actions unpatriotic.
Fellow servicemen refused to speak with him. He received death threats, and walked out his door to find animal carcasses on his porch. He recalled a congressman angrily saying that Thompson himself was the only serviceman who should be punished because of My Lai.
Does anyone think that it will be any different this time?
Jane’s tending to her sick pup so I’ve got a post up over at FDL this afternoon. That is if anyone’s interested in a little more Broder bashing (with a sprinkling of Chris Matthews squealing like a blushing schoolgirl.)
Give a big shout out to Move-On and Matt Stoller for successfully turning out grassroots support for net neutrality. It just passed the House judiciary committee 20-13.
This was a real grassroots victory — until recently, it seemed like an easy gimme to the wealthy telcos. This is good news for us intrepid bloggers, but it’s good news for the internet in general. Much like the FEC regulations that we managed to stave off earlier my support for net neutrality not based upon a general disdain for regulation. Regulation is often a necessary thing. But this medium is just too new, too important and too democratizing to allow corporate interests to sneak in the back door with phony concerns designed simply to enhance their profits at others’ expense.
If the internet needs regulating in some presently unimagined way, I’m sure we will all see it. Right now, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
I don’t live in DC and I’m sure it’s not nice of me to be derisive about its culture. After all, I live in the biggest glass house in the world — LA — where high culture is defined by fake breasts and “the zone” diet. But still. I can’t help but feel that there is something really wrong with a place that elects themselves a “wise man” like this:
Perhaps you’ve already seen this column by David Broder, Dean of the Washington Press Corps, in which he explains what he’s interested in:
But for all the delicacy of the treatment, the very fact that the Times had sent a reporter out to interview 50 people about the state of the Clintons’ marriage and placed the story on the top of Page One was a clear signal — if any was needed — that the drama of the Clintons’ personal life would be a hot topic if she runs for president.
Now, here’s the Broder on Meet the Press last December, explaining what he’s NOT interested in:
MR. RUSSERT: David Broder, is it possible for official Washington–the president, Democratic leaders, Republican leaders–to arrive at common ground, a consensus position on Iraq?
MR. DAVID BRODER: It’s possible, Tim, but they won’t get there by arguing about who did what three years ago. And this whole debate about whether there was just a mistake or misrepresentation or so on is, I think, from the public point of view largely irrelevant. The public’s moved past that.(more)
There you have it. The public has moved past all that ugliness about whether the president lied about a war that’s killing thousands of people and draining the treasury at a mind boggling pace. But they can’t get enough of 60 year old Bill and 58 year old Hill’s bedroom habits.
This man really needs to leave the beltway more often. I would advise him to come out here to California and spend some time in Malibu. Maybe he’ll even catch a glimpse of Angelina and Brad. They could be worth fantasizing about (although I think he should keep his sexual thoughts off the pages of the Washington Post. It’s kind of trashy, don’t you know.)
So Kenny Boy Lay went down today. Let’s hear if for the justice system.
But let’s also hear it for the White House press corps who after eight long years of invetigating every transaction that members of the Clinton administration ever made, never really gave a damn about Kenny Boy’s very intimate connection to George W. Bush and apparently still don’t.
Now that we have the guilty verdict, let’s revisit what we know of that relationship, shall we? From Consortium News, 2002:
George W. Bush is trying to rewrite the history of his and his family’s relationship with Enron Corp.’s disgraced former Chairman Kenneth Lay. So far, Bush has enjoyed fairly good success as the U.S. news media has largely accepted the White House spin.
But the reality, as established by a wealth of historical record and recent disclosures, is that Lay and Enron were instrumental in Bush’s rise to power – and Bush played an important behind-the-scenes role in advancing Enron’s aggressive deregulation agenda, which helped the energy trader ascend to its lofty perch as the seventh-biggest U.S. company.
The Bush-Lay coziness earned the Enron chief a nickname from Bush as “Kenny Boy.” But more importantly for Enron, Bush pitched in as governor and president whenever the energy trader wanted easier regulations within the U.S. or to have U.S. taxpayers foot the bill for loan guarantees or risk insurance for Enron’s overseas ventures.
The Bush-Lay relationship helped Enron extend its reach across the globe, with the appearance of a successful company, as it pulled in billions of dollars in investment money from tens of thousands of unwary investors.
Now, in trying to insulate Bush from the spreading Enron scandal, White House aides have emphasized that administration officials rebuffed Lay and other Enron executives who sought a federal bailout to save their corporate skin. But the documentary record paints a different picture, showing that the administration did what it could last year to help Enron, until the Houston energy trader’s collapse was so far advanced that its deceptive bookkeeping could no longer be kept out of public view.
[…]
With Enron’s ignominious collapse over deceptive accounting, Bush began to act as if he barely knew Lay. On Jan. 11, Bush told reporters that Lay “was a supporter of Ann Richards in my run in 1994.” Bush implied that he had gotten to know Lay as a Richards holdover appointee to a Texas business council. The impression Bush sought to create was untrue.
The Bush-Lay relationship can be traced back at least a half decade before the 1994 race. It grew out of the Houston social circle where oil tycoons have long rubbed shoulders with political players – and where Ken and Linda Lay had grown close to George H.W. and Barbara Bush in the 1980s. Since 1988, when Lay backed the elder George Bush in his run for the White House, Enron and its executives have written big checks for one Bush initiative after another.
Besides the political financing, Lay has supported private and charitable activities of the Bush family. Lay joined one of Barbara Bush’s charities to promote literacy as he served as the honorary chairman of the Celebration of Reading at Houston Wortham Theatre Center. [The Guardian, Jan. 30, 2002]
A trustee of the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation, Lay has donated $50,000 as a patron as well, the New York Daily News reported. In 1999, the Lays chipped in $100,000 for the Andersen Cancer Center at Texas A&M University in a fundraising drive led by then-Gov. George W. Bush and his wife, Laura.
During the Republican presidential primaries in 2000, Enron corporate jets were made available eight times to Bush’s campaign staff and his parents, with the future president sometimes personally arranging the flights. [New York Daily News, Feb. 3, 2002]
[…]
In 1985, Lay created Enron by merging his company, Houston Natural Gas, with one of the largest pipeline companies in the world, Nebraska-based InterNorth. Lay named the new company, Enron, and set its sights high. Political allies would be critical to Enron’s growth.
In his first major venture into politics, Lay went to work raising money and organizing support for then-Vice President George H.W. Bush’s campaign for the Presidency. Bush, who built his own fortune in the Texas oil fields, was appreciative as he battled through a tough Republican primary and then defeated Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis.
In the weeks after the 1988 election, Lay may have gotten his first dividend on his investment in the Bush family. Enron had joined the bidding for a contract to build a $300 million pipeline in Argentina. The government appeared close to choosing between two other companies — one from Italy, Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, and the other a partnership between Argentine firm Pérez and America’s Dow Chemical.
Argentina’s Minister of Public Works, Rodolfo Terragno, later told Mother Jones that he considered Enron’s one-page project outline “laughable.” He also noted that Enron “wasn’t well established in Argentina.” [Mother Jones, March/April 2000]
But Enron apparently was getting well established in the power corridors of the U.S. A few weeks after the 1988 elections, Terragno said the president-elect’s eldest son, George W. Bush, called to check up on “the slow pace of the Enron project.”
[…]
George Bush ran a hard-hitting campaign, suggesting that Richards was soft on crime. Critical to the campaign was getting his message out, and critical to that effort was money. Bush turned to his father’s old political benefactor, Ken Lay. Enron and Lay contributed $146,500 to the Bush campaign, seven and a half times more than they contributed to the Richards campaign. Lay also publicly endorsed Bush. [Texans for Public Justice]
[…]
n the 2000 campaign, Lay was a Pioneer for Bush, raising $100,000. Enron also gave the Republicans $250,000 for the convention in Philadelphia and contributed $1.1 million in soft money to the Republican Party, more than twice what it contributed to Democrats. [www.opensecrets.org]
Lay and his wife then donated $10,000 to Bush’s Florida recount fund that paid for Republican lawyers and operatives to ensure that a full recount of Florida’s ballots never occurred. To this day, Bush has refused to release an accounting of how that recount fund money was spent.
After Bush took the White House in January 2001, Enron Corp., Enron’s President and Chief Operating Officer Jeffrey Skilling, and Ken Lay contributed $100,000 each for a total of $300,000 to the Bush-Cheney Inaugural Fund.
These contributions cemented Lay’s standing with the White House. From the beginning of the administration, Lay advised on policy and personnel. The Enron chief was on the short list for two Cabinet posts, Energy and Treasury, though he ultimately stayed in the private sector.
Starting in late February 2001, Lay and other Enron officials took part in at least a half dozen secret meetings to develop the Bush’s energy plan. After one of the Enron meetings, Vice President Cheney’s energy task force changed a draft energy proposal to include a provision to boost oil and natural gas production in India. The amendment was so narrow that it apparently was targeted only to help Enron’s troubled Dabhol power plant in India. [Washington Post, Jan. 26, 2002]
Other parts of the Bush energy plan tracked closely to recommendations from Enron officials. Seventeen of the energy plan’s proposals were sought by and benefited Enron, according to Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., ranking minority member on the House Government Reform Committee. One proposal called for repeal of the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, which limits the activities of utilities and hindered Enron’s potential for acquisitions.
Besides listening to Lay’s advice, Bush put the corporation’s allies inside the federal government. Two top administration officials, Lawrence Lindsey, the White House’s chief economic adviser, and Robert Zoellick, the U.S. Trade Representative, both worked for Enron, Lindsey as a consultant and Zoellick as a paid member of Enron’s advisory board. [http://www.public-i.org/story_01_011102.htm]
Bush also named Thomas E. White Jr., an 11-year veteran of Enron’s corporate suites, secretary of the Army. White had run a key subsidiary, Enron Energy Services, which is now the focus of allegations about accounting irregularities. After taking office in May, White vowed to apply his Enron experience to privatizing utility services at military bases. White’s subsidiary had been responsible for selling energy services and Enron was eager for contracts with the U.S. military.
Public Citizen, a liberal watchdog group, has demanded that White fully explain 29 meetings and phone calls with senior Enron officials after White became Army secretary. White says the conversations were with “personal friends” about “Enron’s deteriorating financial conditions.” [Washington Post, Jan. 27, 2002]
At least 14 administration officials owned stock in Enron, with Undersecretary of State Charlotte Beers and chief political adviser Karl Rove each reporting up to $250,000 worth of Enron stock when they joined the administration.
Those are just a few of the many highlights. Bush’s career had in many ways been enabled by his relationship with Kenny Boy — and Enron’s scams had been helped along by Kenny’ Boy’s relationship with George W. Bush.
That story was never of any interest to the press corps. (Perhaps if Kenny Boy had worn a striking yellow pantsuit things would have been different.) The fact that the biggest campaign contributor to the occupant of the white house was in charge of the biggest corporate ponzi scheme in history should have been news. It wasn’t.
Kenny Boy’s going to jail. Let’s hope he ends up rooming with Karl Rove. There would be a very nice symmetry to that.
Update: Here’s a first person account from one of the many tens of thousands of people whose lives were adversely affected by Lay, Skilling and Bush in the Enron debacle. It’s journlaistic malpractice that the press never made this clear.
Bush doesn’t worry about being politically correct or care what other people think of him. He likes to listen to white guys singing country and rock and doesn’t care if Jerry Falwell objects to some of the lyrics.
Right. He’s a real maverick:
He flew halfway across the country in a vain effort to save her life, but in the week since, President Bush has retreated back to his ranch and remained largely out of sight as the nation wrestled with the great moral issues surrounding the fate of Terri Schiavo.
The president has said nothing publicly about the bitterly contested case since Wednesday, when reporters asked about it and he said he had exhausted his powers to intervene. On Saturday, as he used his weekly radio address to express condolences to the victims of a school shooting in Minnesota and extol a “culture that affirms life,” he did not mention the most prominent culture-of-life issue in the public eye.
The juxtaposition of racing through the night in Air Force One to sign legislation intended to force doctors to reinsert Schiavo’s feeding tube and choosing not to use his bully pulpit to advocate for her life afterward demonstrates how uncomfortable the matter has become for the White House. For years, Bush has succeeded politically in stitching together the disparate elements of the conservative movement, marrying the libertarian and family-values wings of his party. Now he faces a major Republican rupture.
Reporters en route to Arizona on Air Force One last week opted to watch the movie “King Kong” in the press cabin. Not so Tony Snow, the new White House press secretary and former Fox News commentator, who told reporters that he spent the flight in the staff cabin watching Gen. Michael V. Hayden’s confirmation hearings to be the new C.I.A. director — on CNN.
Okay, once you’re back from the dental surgery room and had your jaw returned to its proper place, let’s state the obvious:
In a country with a rational press, any reporter on that plane who was watching “King Kong” instead of the Hayden hearings would be fired within 1 hour of the publication of Bumiller’s story. Including, apparently, Bumiller herself.
Like I just said, no one was fired, as far as I know. And the farce of an open press continues – not that anyone other than the press itself believes it.
And there’s also an obvious question here: What the hell was Bumiller thinking? She couldn’t have possibly realized that she portrayed herself and her pals as exactly as lazy and dangerously incompetent as we thought they were. If she had, she never would have let that paragraph see the light of day.
Now, because I think there are a few important but easily overlooked issues at stake in this seemingly minor incident, I’d like to mull it over a bit. It’s another one of those “yeah, it’s oh-so-telling, but cmon, it’s trivial” things that really isn’t trivial at all. Let’s start by trying to figure out what got Bumiller motivated to write this clearly embarassing if not potentially self-destructive lead in the first place.
I’m pretty sure Bumiller started out with this. She wanted to stroke Tony Snow, telling him – but more importantly, his masters – that he takes his job seriously. If you read the rest of the article – a sniffy, snooty account over the tussle to have something other than extremist propaganda available to watch in the press cabin – you learn that at an earlier time, poor Tony overstepped his bounds as press secretary and was gotcha’d by a former colleague at Fox (now, that’s trivial, imo). And then, it becomes explicit that Bumiller was buttering Snow when she writes:
Mr. Snow, who is at the White House by 5:30 a.m. to start plowing through his briefing books…
and she continues, clucking sympathetically (did I just mix metaphors? Butter Snow? Clucking? Nevermind) over the dilemma poor Snow faces being fair – but not too fair – to his tv ex-station. (Nothing about being balanced, tho.)
But here in the lead, she just wanted to be humorous and light in her praise. So Bumiller used somewhat self-deprecating humor but basically standard office joshing and jocularity in a passive-aggressive effort to be charming as in, “Ha! Here we are enjoying a new movie but Tony, you can’t do that anymore, can you? Nose to the grindstone, you poor guy, hope you really enjoyed watching those hearings ‘stead of Naomi Watts! (grin) “
But by doing so, in writing up the lead, it simply never occurred to Bumiller that the true subject was not the workaholic Snow but her pals. She hadn’t thought to consider -was she drunk?- that she was calling herself and her colleagues lazy, incompetent, and willfully, deliberately ill-informed and disinterested in their jobs. From her point of view, it’s was just, “Hey! We work really hard, we need to unwind like everyone else, what’s the big deal? And besides, it our job to report the White House, not hearings of White House appointees. Can I get some more sherbert, please?”
In other words, The White House press corps is so utterly corrupt and inept that it doesn’t even know what working, nevermind working as a reporter, means. Bumiller wasn’t arrogantly flaunting her laziness and incompetence. She couldn’t even see it. Nor is it likely she could ever be taught to see it. Otherwise, it would have been utterly impossible to have written anything like that for her boss to see. “Tough day, Mr. Keller? Not me, I was catching up on my movies during the Hayden hearings! Gosh, I’m sleepy, gotta turn in now. Kiss-kiss bye bye!”
It’s almost as if the press corps clowns are preparing for a return engagement of the infamous March of Folly press conference.
For reasons that I’m sure say much about my mechnanisms for association, I was reminded of Temple Grandin’s efforts to make conveyor belts leading animals to their death in the slaughterhouse as stress-free as possible, by keeping them ignorant of the dreadful fate that will soon befall them. And then I thought, yeah, and I’m on that conveyor belt, too, but y’know, fellow beasts:
I’d really really appreciate it if I got just a teensy bit of the good skinny on what is happening right now, and why. My distressingly imminent fate may be to wind up as a tub of glue, but even so, I wouldn’t mind being apprised of the glue factory’s conditions.
If it’s not too much trouble, of course.
But seriously, who cares? Bob Somerby notes the mordant humor in it, but finds more important things to focus on. And he very well may be right. But I do care about this one (and the others, too, duh). If only because as a symbol of the rot at the heart of American mainstream journalism, I would care. This story makes its point in the most direct and devastating way: Congress is getting bamboozled yet again by the Bushites, and the press is boggled by bouncy KIng Kong and his paw candy. It’s let ’em eat cake for the Wired Age.
But it’s more than a starkly obvious symbol. There are two realities here that bear taking a moment to tweeze out.
First of all, the time to express outrage is before things get so bad there’s a second March of Folly. People got killed – lots and lots and lots of innocent people, thousands of people – in good measure because the American, and especially the Washington press corps, were mesmerized by the sight of an earlier eight hundred pound gorilla – the Bush administration’s shock and awe propaganda of 2002 and 2003.
Dammit, those bozos should be fired now, not later when they’ve done -yes, done as in Judy Miller done – major damage. So I’ll object loudly now, when it’s seemingly trivial. It may not make any immediate difference, but it just might straighten up a few toes when it gets serious.
The second issue is the other main subject, besides fluffing Snow (that a better metaphor?), of Bumiller’s column. CNN is not very good, but it is a news outlet, not a 24/7 source of extremist propaganda (well, not yet anyway, even if that CCC graphic is truly scary). It should be a matter of grave concern that this is not only the main source of information for the Bush/Cheny administration but that the administration went to ridiculous lengths to make sure that rightwing propaganda, and only rightwing propaganda, be broadcast to the press corps when traveling with the president. How ridiculous were those lengths? They were so extreme that it was only by asking the question publicly, and very carefully by pre-emptively insisting that the question was entirely serious, that anything changed. Before that, all attempts to get the situation changed were rebuffed.
C’mon! Isn’t it just a matter of opinion, that Fox is what you call “extremist propaganda?” After all, American officials nicknamed CNN the “Communist News Network.” Different strokes is all. And since it’s just opinion, it’s silly and trivial.
No.
Saying that Fox News [sic] is extremist propaganda may not have the same value as an assertion of fact, as say, the claim that all life has common ancestry and evolved over billions of years. However, the ungodly extent of Fox’s lies, distortions, and far right boosterism has been objectively documented over and over again. These aren’t “mistakes” or nuances resulting from differing perspectives. This is deliberate radical activism with a particular goal: to advance an extreme right agenda. There is nothing comparable at CNN or at any other national television outlet. None. Only Fox would permit a scoundrel to compare a vice president of the United States to Goebbels and not so much as even make a token objection. Or even take note of it.
To demand that the American press subject itself to extremist indoctrination whenever the administration had the opportunity to manipulate what they could watch was not immature behavior for a presidency, but scandalous behavior by a government working hard to emulate a tinpot dictatorship. It’s also telling. And very ominous.
Of course, does this really need to be said? – it’s only a trivial incident when compared to the slaughter, torture, misery, and corruption the Bush administration has perpetrated. But just as it obviously isn’t the worst by a long shot – for my money, the 9/11 intelligence failure, Iraq, the war on science, and Katrina are the worst, so far – the dangers of a US government all but compelling a literally captive audience of reporters to watch propaganda should not be minimized or ignored.
“Right! “‘All but,’ you said it yourself! They may be sometimes strapped in but they can do what they want! The press don’t have to watch TV, y’know, they can read a book and actually learn something, hunh.”
Ok, very slowly now. It is a simple fact that Americans mostly get their news from television. At the very least, it behooves a responsible press corps to watch a fair amount of televised news. At the very least. On the other hand, there simply is no reason for the press to watch a steady diet of extremist propaganda unless someone wants them to take it seriously as fact. It is outrageous that the administration was trying to pass off one as the other and offer it with a straight face. It is outrageous that the press apparently permitted them to do so for so long.
(Insert boilerplate here that reading books is also a good idea for the press to do more often than they have. Oh, and it’s also a good idea to wear socks much of the time.)
