Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Head Of Mush

Matthew Yglesias in this post notices that Donald Rumsfeld and the the blindered neocon faction of the GOP still don’t seem to understand terrorism. He says:

Rogue states are bad — don’t get me wrong — but in a fundamental sense the terrorism problem has nothing to do with them. The fact that Iran sponsors a regional terrorist enterprise (Hezbollah) and that Iraq and North Korea both did so in the past (and Iraq to a small extent continued up until Saddam’s fall) is interesting, but not really relevant to the terrorism problem that the United States faces. Rumsfeld — and Rice, and Bush — don’t get that.

They have been convinced, it seems since the beginning of time, that the only real threat to America and apple pie is the fearsome rogue state. And you can trace this completely erroneous line of reasoning as it applies to islamic terrorism to our good friend, the crazed Laurie Mylroie and her insistence that the first World Trade Center bombing was the work of Saddam Hussein. And you can go even further back to the notion that communism would be defeated only through a series of military victories against the states that adopted it. It appears that these folks’ biggest problem in life, and the reason they should never be allowed to have unfettered power, is that their thinking is so fossilized that they can never, ever let go of an idea once they have adopted it, no matter what the facts and circumstances.

They are now so deeply confused by their own twisted worldview that nobody knows what the hell they are thinking. It is true, as Matt points out, that the threat of “rogue states” like Iran and North Korea are real and require extreme vigilance. It is also true that the War On Terrorism is really a war against a bunch of loose knit organizations held together by ideology and purpose rather than a state sponsor or central location. They are two separate threats, each difficult and each distinct.

There is one exception, however, and its a biggie. There is a rogue state out there that has openly supplied nuclear arms to other rogue states, is under the despotic undemocratic rule of a military junta and is deeply involved in the spread of islamic fundamentalist ideology. The government could easily fall into the hands of the wacko Wahabist faction that forms a significant part of the current president’s ruling coalition. Yet our Secretary of State was just there last week passing out high fives as a great ally in the War on Terror. The war they insist can only be won by confronting militarily the rogue states that could someday give arms to the terrorists.

The New York Times put it this way in an editorial today:

Washington failed to protest when General Musharraf cut short the prosecution of the nuclear scientist at the center of the scandal, Abdul Qadeer Khan, with a presidential pardon. It did not object when he blocked the investigation of any military involvement. The least the administration can do now is to press privately for a full accounting. Americans are at least as threatened by rogue states and terrorists armed with Pakistani nuclear blueprints and bomb fuel as they are by fugitives holed up in South Waziristan.

Pakistan’s official version of the nuclear transfers ? that civilian scientists acted entirely on their own for purely financial reasons ? defies belief. There is no way sensitive nuclear hardware and uranium could have been transported out of Pakistan without the knowledge and complicity of the country’s all-powerful military high command and intelligence agencies. And Washington cannot know that the network has been shut down until its enablers and protectors have been identified.

Washington also needs to insist on an end to the ambiguous relations between Pakistan and the Taliban, which have allowed fighters to cross the Afghan border and attack American troops. The problem is, in part, a legacy of the Pakistani Army’s close cooperation with the Taliban until General Musharraf officially severed these ties after 9/11. A more recent complication comes from the alliances General Musharraf has made with Islamist extremist parties to prop up his dictatorial rule. These parties, which are ideologically close to the Taliban, now wield substantial power along the Afghan border.

Instead of urging General Musharraf to stop maneuvering against unfettered elections and Pakistan’s main secular parties, Mr. Powell lavished undeserved praise upon him for democratic progress. Such declarations diminish American credibility as a consistent force for democracy. Behind a constitutional facade, General Musharraf rules as a military dictator, accountable to no civilian authority and basing his power on Pakistan’s armed forces. It is the army high command that General Musharraf must negotiate with if he truly wants to move against the Taliban, Kashmiri terrorist groups or the nuclear weapons establishment.

Mr. Powell struck a somewhat surreal note in Islamabad when he announced that Washington was preparing to designate Pakistan a “major non-NATO ally,” easing access to military sales. Pakistan’s efforts to capture Dr. Zawahiri are welcome, but it is excessive to offer even a symbolic promotion to one of America’s least reliable allies.

Yes, well, there is an election coming up and nothing is more important than staging a big ole “Mission Accomplished” celebration that features bin Laden’s head on pike.

I realize that countries like Pakistan need to be handled deftly. I’m not unhappy that they haven’t sent John Bolton over there to call Mushareff a scumbag on Pakistani television. (Would that they would keep him away from North Korea.) It may even be smart to “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” in this situation. If this team had shown even a tiny bit of real diplomatic and tactical finesse during the last three years I might think that’s what they were doing. But they haven’t and they’re not:

India Saturday warned the U.S. decision granting major non-NATO ally status to Pakistan will impact bilateral ties between New Delhi and Washington.

A foreign ministry spokesman expressed surprise that U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was in New Delhi two days prior to the announcement and did not mention the decision to Indian officials.

Navtej Sarna said: “The Secretary of State was in India just two days before this statement was made in Islamabad. While he was in India, there was much emphasis on India-US strategic partnership. It is disappointing that he did not share with us this decision of the United States government.”

Indian officials were reportedly embarrassed at being caught unawares.

“We are studying the details of this decision, which has significant implications for India-U.S. relations,” Sarna said in a statement.

In a case where you have two nuclear powers, bitter rivals, seething with religious animosity and territorial disputes you go out of your way to insult the one that has no record of supporting islamic terrorism or selling nuclear weapons to our enemies and openly reward the one that does. And you do this in the name of fighting terrorism and rogue states.

They call this moral clarity.

Clearly, there is no Bush doctrine, and no deep belief in anything except the tired irrelevancy that Stalinist regimes like Saddam’s and the DPRK must be defeated in the name of fighting communism. That is all these people know and it’s all they will ever know. They do not understand the dangers of the post cold war world just as they didn’t understand the threats of the cold war.

And it cannot be ignored that we have a leader who is an idiot. Here’s the image of leadership that Karl Rove is running on, from the halcyon days of 2002. I know that those of us in blogland are aware that it is a fantasy, but a good number of Americans are not:

Lacking his father’s deep reservoir of experience to draw upon, how does Bush resolve his advisers’ titanic disagreements? He goes with his gut. He relies on an instinctive sense of who is good and who is bad overseas?and then he sticks at all costs with the call he has made. His confidence in this process has grown with his success in Afghanistan He took to heart the lesson that he should trust his moral sense and have faith in what a former Clinton aide, not without admiration, calls “rising dominoes”?the sense that if Bush unfurls a big bright flag and marches toward the mountains, the world will follow.

But when the world doesn’t follow, Bush often just keeps marching. His defenders like to point out that the President’s foreign policy has had no serious failures caused by allies’ rebelling against him. That proves, they say, that raw power determines international politics. As a senior Bush adviser bluntly declared earlier this year: “The way to win international acceptance is to win. That’s called diplomacy: winning.” If other countries get restive, U.S. officials say, who cares? Even ganged up, they will be weaker than the U.S. alone. The President summed up his lead-a-lonely-but-moral-crusade approach to foreign policy in April when he was asked whether he understood that Palestinians consider the Israeli occupation to be a form of terrorism.

That’s when he said, “Look, my job isn’t to try to nuance. I think moral clarity is important, if you believe in freedom. And people can make all kinds of excuses, but there are some truths involved. And one of the truths is, they’re sending suicide killers in because they hate Israel. That’s a truth. I know people don’t like it when I say there’s evil, this is evil versus good. But that’s not going to stop me from saying what I think is right.”

(If other countries get restive, U.S. officials say, who cares? Even ganged up, they will be weaker than the U.S. alone. That is another dangerous fallacy that animates the neocons. Again, there is no threat but the threat of a Stalinist rogue state. We’ll have faith-base missile defense up by next fall and then everything will be perfect.)

Although much of the assessment in the Time article has been proven wrong — his allies did rebel and there have been real consequences — that image has remained in the minds of many. John Kerry’s team must find a succinct way of showing that this puerile nonsense about the braindead boy-man’s PB&J filled gut has made the world far less safe than it was on September 11th, 2001. Bush’s team continues to operate like a bunch of amateurs, refusing to learn from mistakes and screwing things up over and over again. Kerry must counter this absurd impression of Bush as having a gut of steel when what he really has is a head of mush. The sickness in this administration all flows from that.

Even More On The A-word

Atrios noted that Jim Pinkerton spewed his kool-aid on the appeasement question the other day, but he hurls the glass across the room in the above linked article in Salon:

So who lost Spain? Who thereby gave Old Europe a new lease on life? When Americans were told that toppling Saddam’s regime would transform geopolitics, did anyone think that the next transformed regime would be José María Aznar’s — that “regime change” would ricochet back to Spain? The Bush administration was taken by surprise, of course, because it had chosen to ignore the huge majorities in democracies around the world who never agreed that the “war on terror” could be won in Baghdad.

President Bush pushed the Spanish — and will soon push, probably, the British — to change their government by pursuing policies that have cleaved Europe and America. Europeans, remembering centuries of experience in stomping out separatists, anarchists and fanatics, will now go their own way, without guidance from Paul Wolfowitz. French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, looking like two cats who shared a canary, held a joint press conference in Paris on Tuesday touting their own approach to fighting terrorism; there they offered words of welcome to incoming Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, inducting him into their non-American — maybe anti-American — alliance. David Frum bewailed Europe’s collective-security plan as “a defeat for the antiterrorist cause,” and yet Western Europeans have concluded that stirring hornets nests in faraway places is not the way to keep from being stung.

Which brings us to Tony Blankley in the Washington Times, who gloomily projected a “four in 10 chance that the American electorate will come down with the Spanish disease this November” — that is, boot Bush out of office; the alleged ailment might be called “appeasementitis.” Yup, it’s 1938 all over again, same as it ever was. The historically minded — here comes the dreaded alternative diagnosis of the realists — might point out that al-Qaida is a criminal gang, a cadre of loony loners and conspiratorial crazies scattered across the world. These realists understand that bin Laden’s bunch is not a nation-state with a Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, and Fuhrer. But no speck of realistic thinking seems ever to cloud the eternal 1930s-ness of the neocons’ spotless mind.

Indeed, the most serious consequence of appeasement-accusing is the assumption that goes with it: That counterterrorism strategy and conventional war strategy are one and the same. The war on terror is not World War II; it requires dramatically different actions. The neocon strategists, stalled in the ’30s — searching for Neville Chamberlain tapping his umbrella on every cobblestone street, even as they scout out the next Winston Churchill — are leading us into the bloody land of blowback.

I had noticed that Pinkerton had been sidling off the reservation about a year ago. And he’s writing for Salon. I’d say we can put away the garlic in his presence.

From Beirut To The Twilight Zone

Kevin Drum takes on the Tom Friedman “appeasement” op-ed today on his great new blog Political Animal. (And why wasn’t that one taken a loong time ago? Was somebody saving it for a renowned cat blogger to go big time?) Anyway, Kevin is definitely getting more animalistic. His take on what I agree was a steaming mound of something is downright combative:

This kind of stuff belongs on the pages of a third tier warblogger, not the op-ed page of the New York Times. It’s juvenile and disgusting.

I love it. And Kevin is right. This nonsensical Friedman blather is even worse than his usual drivel and I didn’t think that was possible. He suggests that even though the socialists ran on the platform of withdrawal from Iraq and even though the population never supported it and even though Friedman acknowledges that the Bush administration is making a total hash out of the occupation, the new Spanish government should not withdraw from Iraq because it would appease al Qaeda.

Picture if you will, September 11, 2001 and Al Gore is President of the United States. Terrorists attack London. Al Gore responds by joining Tony Blair in attacking the Taliban in Afghanistan and disrupting Al Qaeda’s operation. Almost immediately, they begin planning to invade Iraq and do so just a little more than a year later, against the will of most US allies and most Americans. It soon becomes obvious that Blair and Gore’s assertions of connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq were wrong (as were all the other national security rationales they set forth to justify the war.) The Republicans are going crazy, demanding special prosecutors, impeachment and criminal charges. (You know they would. Here are some of their comments on Kosovo.)

Meanwhile, Gore insists that the war in Iraq was absolutely necessary to protect America from the terrorist threat and he refuses to back down on this assessment. The first week in November the polls show the election is close. The economy is sluggish and people are restless. The war in Iraq is unpopular, but is no longer at the top of the newscasts. 3 days before people go to the polls, terrorists blow up several nightclubs in Miami, killing hundreds and wounding thousands.

The Gore administration casts the blame on pro-Castro terrorists. Doubts emerge immediately and within hours it becomes obvious that the Gore administration was again misleading the country about national security. He loses the election by a significantly wider margin than the polls had predicted.

The Republicans, chagrined and embarrassed, admit that the result was bad because the US has just “appeased” al Qaeda. Therefore, they promise to continue Al Gore’s foreign policy, despite the fact that they completely disagree with it and a large majority of the country rejects it, because they know that it would be wrong to allow Al Qaeda to believe they were cowed by its terrorism.

And the next day Neo destroys the Matrix and live bats fly out of Lynn Cheney’s mouth on Larry King Live.

Shave and Appeasement, 6 Bits.

Via Matt Yglesias, I read this post by Julian Sanchez on the Spanish elections and ensuing charges of “appeasement,” by the hysterical gasbags on the right.

Aznar had defended the war in Iraq as measure necessary to “guarantee the security of Spaniards from any internal or external threat,” and his government sought to dismiss claims that a Spanish club was targeted for bombing in Casablanca because of Spanish participation in the war. Meanwhile, PSOE officials had suggested that Spain, Britain, and the U.S. were “kicking a wasp’s nest,” that “the war in Iraq was going to provoke more hatred and rancor and, therefore, the threat of more instability.” Transparently, Aznar was mistaken and the opposition was correct. Are Spanish voters to be tarred as cowards if they now hold Aznar accountable for his miscalculation? A few especially glib commentators have suggested that the Spanish should “blame the terrorists,” not the PP. But why can’t they blame both?

Well, yeah. Aside from it being seriously distasteful, this excessive stomping on the body politic of the site of the worst terrorist attack on european soil tells me the wing nuts are in desperate need of a shave with old Occam’s Razor.

As I noted in a post yesterday on American Street, Mark Kleiman unearthed the shattering news that the turn-out was much higher than usual, probably as a result of the bombings and a desire to show public solidarity. It may be that those non-voters would have voted otherwise, but it may also be that they would have done what most voters in high turnout elections in Spain do, which is vote for the left candidate. It possible that the Spaniards are not, in fact, saying to the world, “We’re askeered ‘o ole bin Laden! Please don’t hurt us again!” They may have just been saying, “I hadn’t been paying that much attention to politics, but I usually back the socialists so that’s who I’ll vote for because I think it’s important in this time of tragedy.” Republicans ought to understand that. It’s how they won the midterms.

On the other hand, the very simplest explanation for why people voted out the party in power is being totally ignored by everyone and it’s a pretty good reason, too.

Man say he tough guy. He big friend of bigger tough guy. Man say his country must do what bigger tough guy say to keep country safe. Many people everywhere say bigger tough guy not know what he doing. Man say “too bad” to people.

Then bad guys blow up trains and kill and wound many. People think, tough guy and bigger tough guy not keep country safe like they say. We no like tough guy. We like other guy who not trust bigger tough guy, like we say. We make him our president.

It is hard to know how people would react in any country to a terrorist attack on the eve of an election. But, is it so impossible to believe that they might just BLAME the guys in charge of keeping the country safe for not actually, you know, keeping the country safe? I realize that this idea that you play into your enemies hands if you change your leadership is understandable to people who also believe that CEO’s should be given huge bonuses when they destroy their companies, but isn’t it a bit much for normal people to adopt this attitude? Surely, even Aeron-chair warriors must acknowledge that sometimes, when a leader fucks up, he needs to be replaced.

Then again, you could conclude that any response to terrorism that isn’t total support of George W. Bush’s policies is appeasement. Here in America it’s clear that if we have no terrorist attacks in the US before November it will be because George W. Bush has kept our babies safe and we must re-elect him. To do otherwise would be appeasement. But, if there is another terrorist attack before November we must also re-elect him because to do otherwise would be appeasement.

And, we must shop til we drop. Not shopping is appeasement, too. As is gay marriage. And tax hikes on the rich. And Janet’s nipple. It’s all pretty much the same thing. Al Qaeda is desperately afraid of Bush’s codpiece. Anything less than total support of it, no matter what, and the terrorists will have won.

Original Sin

I am gratified that Atrios has posted about this book by Alesina and Glaeser that discusses the relationship between race and social welfare. They know their stuff. Buy the book.

I wrote a long and boring mostly unread post about this a few months ago when we were all in the midst of discussing the Dean campaign’s strategy in the south, in which I argued that one simply could not separate race from Americans’ hostility to redistributive economic schemes and government social services. Indeed, they have been intertwined throughout our history. If I may be so bold as to quote myself:

The question has always been, why don’t southern working class whites vote their economic self-interest?

In this paper (pdf) Sociologist Nathan Glazer of Harvard (bio), who has long been interested in the question of America’s underdeveloped welfare state, answers a related question — “Why Americans don’t care about income inequality, which may give us some clues. Citing a comprehensive study by economists Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth called, “Why Doesn’t the United States have a European-Style Welfare State?” (Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2/2001) he shows that the reluctance of Americans to embrace an egalitarian economic philosophy goes back to the beginning of the republic. But what is interesting is that both he and the economists offer some pretty conclusive evidence that the main reason for American “exceptionalism” in this case is, quite simply, racism.

“Racial fragmentation and the disproportionate representation of ethnic minorities among the poor played a major role in limiting redistribution…. Our bottom line is that Americans redistribute less than Europeans for three reasons: because the majority of Americans believe that redistribution favors racial minorities, because Americans believe that they live in an open and fair society, and that if someone is poor it is his or her own fault, and because the political system is geared toward preventing redistribution. In fact the political system is likely to be endogenous to these basic American beliefs.”(p. 61)

Glazer goes on to point out how these attitudes may have come to pass historically by discussing the roles that the various immigrant support systems and the variety of religious institutions provided for the poor:

But initial uniformities were succeeded by a diversity which overwhelmed and replaced state functions by nonstate organizations, and it was within these that many of the services that are the mark of a fully developed welfare state were provided. Where do the blacks fit in? The situation of the blacks was indeed different. No religious or ethnic group had to face anything like the conditions of slavery or the fierce subsequent prejudice and segregation to which they were subjected.

But the pre-existing conditions of fractionated social services affected them too. Like other groups, they established their own churches, which provided within the limits set by the prevailing poverty and absence of resources some services. Like other groups, too, thedependentpendant on pre-existing systems of social service that had been set up by religious and ethnic groups, primarily to serve their own, some of which reached out to serve blacks, as is the case with the religiously based (and now publicly funded) social service agencies of New York City. They were much more dependent, owing to their economic condition, on the poorly developed primitive public services, and they became in time the special ward of the expanded American welfare state’s social services. Having become, to a greater extent than other groups, the clients of public services, they also affected, owing to the prevailing racism, the public image of these services.

Glazer notes that there are other factors involved in our attitudes about inequality having to do with our British heritage, religious background etc, that also play into our attitudes. But, he and the three economists have put their finger on the problem Democrats have with certain white Southern voters who vote against their economic self-interest, and may just explain why populism is so often coupled with nativism and racism — perhaps it’s always been impossible to make a populist pitch that includes blacks or immigrants without alienating whites.

So, we are dealing with a much more complex and intractable problem than “southerners have been duped by Nixon’s southern strategy” or that liberals have been insulting them for years by supposedly devaluing their culture. Indeed, even the nostalgia that Howard Dean professes for FDR’s coalition is historically inaccurate. A majority of whites have never voted with blacks in the south. (In the 30’s, as we all know, southern blacks were rarely allowed to vote at all.) In fact, FDR had an implicit agreement with the southern base of his party to leave Jim Crow alone if he wanted their cooperation on other economic issues. The southern coalition went along out of desperation (and also because they were paying very little in taxes.) But, as soon as the economy began to recover, and Roosevelt began to concentrate on programs for the poor, the division that exists to this day re-emerged.

I quote myself at length here, not because I love the sound of my own words, (although they are delightfully boring yet somehow dull) but because I think this work by Glazer, Graezer and Alesina contains an important insight with which Democrats simply must come to grips if we ever expect to create a government that provides a decent enough safety net to maintain a solid middle class and thus a stable and thriving society.

This ancient attachment to racism in this country is going to finally bring us down if we do not force it out of the body politic once and for all. The need is urgent, not just on a moral basis — the moral case is always urgent — but on a pragmatic, survival basis as well. The American frontier is closed, our total dominance of the world economy is rapidly diminishing and globalization and technology are pressuring the middle and working classes of this country in ways that we are only now beginning to see. This path of ever lower taxes and higher deficits in service of a nonsensical insistence on the ruination of public schools, a refusal to endow universal health care, a systematic destruction of social security and the combined devastation of rolling back workplace regulations while destroying unions is based on a theological belief in unfettered capitalism and American “individualism.” This romantic notion manifests itself as modern Republicanism but, in fact, it is nothing more than the same phony excuse for opportunism and racism that has existed since the founding. (It fueled the more virulent forms of anti-communism, as well.) Unless we commit ourselves to keeping this country’s education and health care systems secure, ensure that workers continue to have the opportunity to thrive and achieve in the workplace and provide a decent safety net for those who cannot work, we are shortly going to find ourselves living in a high tech banana republic.

The power structure of the modern GOP is centered in the south and they cannot achieve victory without it solidly behind them. These studies reveal that there is no mystery as to why its philosophy of low taxes and minimal social services finds such loyalty among people who should logically believe the opposite. Democrats must recognize that this correlation between racism and the resistence to a fair and equitable redistribution of wealth is why populist appeals will not work for us in the south or among other demographics in which this correlation is salient.

And that means we must accept, once and for all, that our commitment to civil rights cannot be separated from our commitment to reasonable taxation in service of a stable society. In our culture they are inextricably bound to one another and we will never achieve one without achieving the other. As I wrote in my earlier post on this topic, racism is America’s original sin. Until we politically and socially emasculate it, we will continue to be shackled by a fantasy of individualism and a Hobbesian worldview that can no longer be ameliorated by an endless frontier or global economic dominance.

The worst impulses of American culture are drawn from racism and those malevolent impulses are taking us into a highly competitive future without a safety net. There might be dumber reasons for a once great society to crumble but I can’t think of any.

Klaatu Barada Nikto

South Knox Bubba finds the Non-Sequitor of the Week, which had me cleaning out my ears when I heard it as well.

BEGALA: Greg, one of the ads concludes with President Bush praising freedom, faith, families and sacrifice. What sacrifice has our president asked of the rich?

MUELLER: I think everybody’s making money right now. We’ve got a Hispanic middle class, “The New York Times” reported about last year. George Bush created a Hispanic middle class.

Maybe the RNC is having a hard time recruiting talking heads or something but I’m hearing an awful lot of this kind of bizarre blather lately. I hear Ann Heche is available. She speaks fluent Martian.

Bad Hostess Behind Bars

On Friday, a jury convicted Martha Stewart of lying about a 2001 stock sale in which her broker gave her insider information concerning pharmaceutical maker ImClone. On Saturday, the media was saturated with coverage of the verdict–coverage that perpetuated the oft-repeated canard that the Stewart case was somehow an example of corporate wrongdoing. Meanwhile, in a real case of alleged corporate wrongdoing, Bernie Ebbers, the disgraced former WorldCom CEO, and Scott Sullivan, the company’s head accountant, were indicted last week in the largest case of accounting fraud in the country’s history. But those developments ended up serving as the week’s undercard to Stewart’s featured event–obscuring the fact that the two cases have little in common, and that the WorldCom case is far more important.

…apparently hungry for sensational news, many of the country’s leading media outlets failed this weekend to explain the distinction. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution called Stewart the “highest-profile figure in a procession of corporate scandals that emerged after the tech stock boom-and-bust of the 1990s.” The Los Angeles Times described her as “the first major figure convicted by a jury in the wave of corporate scandals.” And The New York Times called her “the latest and most prominent executive to be convicted since a wave of corporate scandals unfolded with the collapse of Enron.”

So-called “celebrity justice” features have long been a staple of tabloid journalism, but since the O.J. Simpson trial, the media has increasingly treated those cases as hard news…The Times and other upper-tier papers–which ostensibly shun “celebrity justice” news but were unwilling to miss out on the Stewart story–developed a narrative that made no distinction between Stewart’s trial and the cases of Ebbers, Lay, and Rigas.

TNR goes on to say “it was a clever way for “serious” papers to get in on a piece of the Martha action–and also retain their respectability,” and how this may result in less scrutiny for the more important Worldcom and Enron trials. The public, suffering from corporate scandal fatigue after Martha will feel that justice has been served and are no longer interested. Sadly, they are probably right.

But, I’ve always wondered why Martha became such a top tabloid story in the first place. She’s famous, but that’s not the most important element in a tabloid story, certainly not one that garners the kind of wall to wall coverage this one’s gotten the last few days.

In order for it to be a truly fine tabloid story it must feature sex or violence, preferably both, neither of which were present in the Martha trial. But, when I watched the week-end coverage I realized where the tabloid element of this story lies. It’s the prurient vision of Martha Stewart in a woman’s prison, surrounded by tough, tattooed, hardened criminals. Seriously. I must have heard dozens of comments like:

“What will it be like for Martha behind bars, will she be kept from the general prison population for her own safety?”

“Martha will be serving time with the type of women she normally doesn’t invite to her dinner parties in Connecticut.”

“The women in those prisons probably don’t think much of Martha’s decorating tips.”

“Martha’s going to need to learn how to negotiate with women who don’t wear aprons and get 300 dollar haircuts.”

Now, it’s obvious that there are quite a few misogynist men who simply think the uppity business bitch must be shown her place. And, among many women there seems to be a strong resentment of her cold perfectionism. I don’t pretend to understand why she evokes such strong feelings in some people.

But, the tabloid media interest in the story became clear as the week-end went on. They are aroused and tittilated by the idea that Martha Stewart could be forced to endure some sort of prison violence, sexual or otherwise. The gleam in their eye as they speculated about her fate was very revealing. Corporate wrongdoing never made these vultures so breathless and flushed.

Our press corps seems to suffer from a strange form of mass sexual neurosis. I don’t know why, but time after time they act out a twisted form of immature sexuality when covering certain public figures who apparently confuse them in some way. They really need to talk to somebody about this. This is the kind of thing that can lead people to do bad things and then who knows what could happen? Kelly Arena could find herself in a woman’s prison, scantily clad and vulnerable, at the mercy of Big Mama, the ex-Hell’s Angel and leader of the cell block who likes to “initiate” all the new girls….

Ad War

With all of this hoopla about the president’s ad campaign, I am grateful that Matt Stoller at BOP news, found this great resource at the Museum of the Moving Image called The Living Room Candidate, which shows political TV ads going back to 1952. If you have time, you should look at all of them.

I was particularly fascinated by the

1992 Election Page which showed a Bush Sr ad campaign that was almost entirely based on character assassination. Trust, trust, trust. Character, character, character. Lots of “man on the street” interviews with average Americans saying “there’s just something about him I don’t trust.”

I wouldn’t be surprised to see a reprise of this campaign. It’s what these guys do. Just check out 1988, if you want to see more (and also dispell the idea that Dukakis never fought back. He did, but he didn’t attack back, he defended. That’s the difference.)

Anyway, thanks to Matt for the link. It’s a fascinating site.

All The World’s A Stage

Ellen Goodman asks:Presidential election or casting call?

I have long believed that it is a casting call. Just as I think, sadly, that for many people 9/11 and Iraq are now seen as reality TV shows from last season. Kind of like Survivor. The question in this election is whether they want to watch the re-runs.

It’s a little bit much, however, that a member of the fourth estate would act surprised by this. After all, Goodman and her ilk cover politics and news events as if they were television shows, critiquing the “performances” of the players, even (especially) themselves, and look at all events through the lens of a pre-ordained narrative.

The president of the United States plays the role of a cowboy rancher when he can’t ride a horse and didn’t buy his “spread” until he was running for president. He lands in a fighter plane on the deck of an aircraft carrier, prances around in a skin tight jumpsuit and the press never bothers to correct the erroneous impression that he actually flew the plane.

Why in the hell shouldn’t the Democrats get a little of that action too? If we are casting the role of “President” I’m definitely going for the face that belongs on Mt Rushmore rather than the one that appears on the cover of MAD Magazine.

This is the way it is, boys and girls, and while I’m not thrilled, I think it’s long past time that Democrats got with the program. The TV program.

Smite Me

Josh ‘n Matt are all shocked ‘n shit that the Bush administration is reportedly blocking an Israeli pullback from Gaza until after the elections.

I guess they forgot that our esteemed leader informed the players long ago that he was on a tight evil-smiting schedule and they had to move fast:

“God told me to strike at al-Qaida and I struck them, and then He instructed me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I am determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me, I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them.”

Mideast peace will just have to wait. The elections have come and God has told him to strike the Democrats. He has no choice. He’ll get back to them next December after he smites the sodomites and takes a little R&R in Crawford.