Where We At

28 September 08
“I’ll get the dictionary.” - Hugh Parkfield
“Why?” - Lisa Simpson
“You’ll see when you get there, the word ‘Stochastic’.” - Hugh Parkfield
“Pertaining to a process involving a randomly determined sequence of observations!” - Lisa Simpson

The last week of the presidential campaign has been so incoherent that there’s no point trying to craft a coherent post about it.  Instead I’m just going to muddle through with some observations:

- Right in the middle of the debate, just as Lehrer was popping the Iran question, I got up to take a leak and get a beer.  As I was walking back I could hear the sound but not see the teevee and I thought it had gone to a truck commercial, it was actually just McCain talking.  That was the only time all night I thought he would win the election.  He’s too manly and sonorous not to be President.

- We’re probably going to have to wait for a post election memoir or confessional op-ed before we know the real thinking behind McCain’s campaign “suspension” this week but did they honestly think they could swoop into D.C., claim credit for solving the financial crisis and get the debate postponed (so as to bump Biden/Palin indefinitely) in one fell swoop?  I can see the attraction of that scenario from their point of view but the chances of it working were awful.  For starters Obama would have had to play along in order for it to work and why on Earth would he do that?  As soon as the Blues confirmed that Obama was going to Mississippi McCain was screwed.

- The interactive format of the debate greatly helped Obama.  Neither Gore nor Kerry could directly respond to Bush when he’d go off on his crazy tangents talking about scary but meaningless bullshit.  McCain did it too, but the fact that Obama could challenge him directly (even if it just meant interjecting “John, that’s not true.”) reduced a lot of its power.

- My little sister made an excellent observation about Sarah Palin.  If her life is a Disney movie the week leading up to her debate with Joe Biden would be the “study montage”; nothing but her using flash cards to learn about intractable international conflicts, repeatedly (and hilariously) trying to pronounce the names of foreign leaders and memorizing NATO’s membership list with a catchy mnemonic.  (A Hilary Duff, Miley Cyrus or “High School Musical” song is all but mandatory.)  Then she’ll stroll into the debate on Thursday and crush stodgy old Senator Joe.

- Even discounting my own pro-Blue bias it’s hard to think that the debate was anything but a net plus for Obama.  (Polling will tell us for sure in the next few days.)  I don’t think he performed better than McCain but having the “foreign policy” debate get half eaten by the same financial crisis that ate McCain’s poll numbers was helpful.  Even on the questions that were supposed to be McCain’s turf Obama held his own.  Both guys brought their A-game but two weeks from now nothing from this debate is going to be remembered.  McCain needed something to shake up the campaign and he didn’t get it.  For someone who supposedly doesn’t understand the distinction between tactics and strategy Obama got the strategic win.

- Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric was a disaster mitigated only by the fact that the financial hullabaloo drew away most of the attention.  (The fact that awkward and embarrassing moments kept dribbling out for three days didn’t help either.)  A Palin withdrawal is now being talked about on the right and the left.  McCain can’t pull her though, nor can she “voluntarily” withdraw, it would mean conceding the election.  McCain’s whole pitch is that he’s got enough wisdom and experience to have good Presidential Judgment with a capital P and J.  If he admits, tacitly or explicitly, that his vice-president pick was a mistake that argument is exploded.

-  Then, of course, there’s the issue of dealing with an all but certain revolt amongst the fundamentalists.  Short of replacing her with the verifiable second coming of Jesus they’re going to be right pissed.  He won’t pull the rug from her unless he’s convinced he’s going to lose anyway, in which case any anything which could shake up the campaign is a good thing.  Which brings me to my final observation:

- The . . . uh . . . “erratic” behavior of the McCain campaign in the last two weeks has only two possible explanations.  Either McCain and his brain trust are simply unable to handle the wild vicissitudes and intense scrutiny of the presidential level of politics or they see themselves as being terribly behind and view radical campaign shifts as their only hope.  There are no other plausible explanations for what they’ve been doing.

No Comments » | 2008 Election, Barack Obama, Institutionalized Stupidity, John McCain, Presidential Debates, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Cautionary Example

24 September 08
“You know, I have a feeling there’s a lesson here.” - Homer Simpson
“Yes, the lesson is-” - Marge Simpson
“No, don’t tell me.  I’ll get it.” - Homer Simpson

In a campaign speech last August Barack Obama said, “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf will not act, we will.”  He was criticized for the statement by Pakistanis and Americans.  Hillary Clinton and her many supporters cited it as further evidence that Obama didn’t know what the hell he was talking about when it came to foreign policy.  Bomb a sovereign nation?  An ally, no less?  How uncouth.

Over the last few months we’ve seen that Bush the Younger isn’t above appropriating bad ideas from his political opponents.  Starting with the US airstrikes that killed 11 Pakistani troops at the beginning of June and followed shortly thereafter by rocket and artillery attacks going back and forth over the Afghan-Paki border it has been a summer of violence.  (To illustrate just how absurd this all is, consider that the 11 dead were part of the Pakistani Frontier Corps, which the Pentagon has supplied to the tune of $25 million so far, with $75 million more on the way.)  With the installation of the new civilian president Asif Ali Zardari things have recently escalated along the Afghan-Paki border.  Before we get into that though, a little background.

Last year Pervez Musharraf began to lose his grip on power in Pakistan.  Musharraf had originally supported the Taliban government in Afghanistan but abandoned them after the 11 September 2001 attacks.  Between that time and his resignation last month, a span of almost seven years, Musharraf was Bush the Younger’s Pakistani buddy.  But it was Musharraf, not Bush, who bore the political costs of this arrangement; all Bush the Younger had to do was ladle out a few billion per year from the Pentagon money barrel.  Musharraf’s fall had a lot of causes that had nothing to do with the US, but being seen as an American lapdog certainly didn’t help him stay in power.  Pakistan’s newly elected civilian government has no desire to repeat the mistakes of its now reviled predecessor.

That brings us up to this month when the violence on the Afghan-Paki border has begun to spike.  On September 3rd a story in The New York Times headlined American Forces Attack Militants on Pakistani Soil contained this prescient sentence:

But the commando raid by the American forces signaled what top American officials said could be the opening salvo in a much broader campaign by Special Operations forces against the Taliban and Al Qaeda inside Pakistan, a secret plan that Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has been advocating for months within President Bush’s war council.

Since that time there have been reports of two separate incidents in which American helicopters have turned back from crossing the border after coming under fire from Pakistani forces.  Two weeks ago 12 people were killed by missiles fired from an American drone.  As per usual there were conflicting reports over whether or not anything or anyone of value was hit, but Pakistani media reported that at least some of the dead were women and children.  Just today another American drone went down in Pakistan; both governments deny that it was shot down, insisting instead that a malfunction caused it to crash; that it was flying low and slow over a heavily armed war zone at the time is mere coincidence.

Earlier this week, of course, was the massive truck bomb in Islamabad.  Fingers are already pointing towards the ongoing trouble along the border as a motivation.  Just as under Musharraf the real costs of fighting in and around the border area are being borne by Pakistanis, not Americans.  Unlike under Musharraf though, the Pakistani government is now beholden to its people and one suspects that they won’t be willing to fight a war which is plainly not their own in exchange for a few billion dollars in aid, of which most of them will never see a penny.

The US and NATO are in a bind in Afghanistan.  The situation is getting worse and not just along the Pakistani border.  Airstrikes and treating the border of a sovereign (nuclear armed) nation as little more than an inconvenience have run their course as policy options.  Whatever small and temporary military gains they may produce (if any) are massively outweighed by the damage they do to Pakistani society, the new civilian government, and our diplomatic reputation in the region.  At least if Barack Obama gets to the big chair he won’t need to find that out for himself.  Bush the Younger has amply demonstrated the folly of that course of action, hopefully Obama will take heed.

No Comments » | Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Bush the Younger, Pakistan, Places Other than America, Sophomoric Imperialism, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Two Simple Things

21 September 08
“I only have two questions, ‘How much?’, and ‘Give it to me’.” - Homer Simpson

The sight of Republicans and Democrats rapidly agreeing with each other is always cause for anxiety, especially when it happens less than two months away from a leap year election.  This is the most partisan time on the political calendar, a time when Congress usually comes to a legislative ceasefire on account of neither side wants to give the other any more ammunition.  Yet, in the span of just a week, we’ve gone from bailouts for AIG maybe being a good thing to already being old news as the government agrees to assume staggeringly huge chunks of bad private debt in an effort to get the financial system moving again.  Even more ominously, both sides of Congress look prepared to blindly agree to this in less time than it usually takes them to rename a post office.

The current economic news can probably only be genuinely understood by <0.1% of the population and I certainly don’t belong to that group.  As such I will make absolutely no judgments on the relative merits of the currently proposed bailout, its chances for success, or even a proper definition of “success” in this context.  I’m only going to point out two extremely simple things which can be understood by anyone.  Moreover, I’m going to number them, set them apart from my usual paragraph structure and put them in bold (which I normally avoid).  Adding additional words around these two simple facts, however complementary they may be, would just distract from them and there has been far too much of that already.

#1 - The exact same government officials who allowed this mess to fester until it was a threat to the global economy are the same ones who are now planning the bailout.

#2 - The federal government always underestimates what its activities will cost therefore whatever estimates you see ($700 billion, $1 Trillion, eleventy billion) are far short of the true cost.

That’s it.  Those two things are all you need to know.  The guys in charge suck at their jobs, and the federal government has a pernicious habit of underestimating costs dating all the way back to its inception.  (That the current Administration has taken that heritage to dizzying new heights of squander and dishonesty goes almost without saying.)  My hope is that this is the last double-barreled both-fingers “Fuck You” from Bush the Younger to the rest of us.  We’ll see.

End Note:  Not that he needs any praise from me but if you want a layman’s explanation that is both clear and credible look no further than Paul Krugman’s blog.  It’s short, to the point and written by a man with a stellar track record of ferreting out this Administration’s disasters before they become widely known.

No Comments » | CDOs, Federal Bailout, Institutionalized Stupidity | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

More Virgins!

17 September 08
“Are you trying to piss off the volcano?” - Peter Griffin

The last three days have seen frightening, bewildering and undeniably grim news coming from the financial sector.  There’s trouble there, in that “financial sector”, but other than that it is all very bad and is going to cost billions to solve even an educated layman is hard pressed to make sense of the particulars.  It sounds like something from Star Trek: Captain, we’re receiving a distress signal from the Financial Sector.  The Lehmans have liquidated and the Aigs are begging Starfleet for help!

Yesterday evening, Starfleet showed up to the tune of $85,000,000,000.  The details are still sketchy, and when they do come out will be indecipherable to all but a small handful of people who will immediately being to disagree with each other over what it all means and whether or not it was a good idea.  The rest of us will be left scratching our heads and feeling another invisible hand in our collective pocket.  The federally brokered sale of Bear Stearns back in March was an unprecedented and hopefully one time event.  Now we’re barely a week removed from the federal takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which no one seems able to put a definitive price tag on, and we’re going in even deeper.  A potentially prescient paragraph in this morning’s lead New York Times article:

A major concern is that the A.I.G. rescue won’t be the last. At Tuesday night’s meeting lawmakers asked if there was any way of knowing if this would be the final major government intervention. Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson said there was not. Indeed, the markets remain worried about the financial condition of major regional banks as well as that of Washington Mutual, the nation’s largest thrift.

This record bailout isn’t the first and it might not be the last but whatever else is going on the general public has been exposed as little more than a great mass of spectators.  You may be up on your mortgage payment, behind on your mortgage payment or have no mortgage payment but unless you’re pretty high up in one of these firms or hang out with a lot of people who are your immediate connection to this story is as one way as a television program.  The experience is both frustrating and frightening and those are two unpredictable things to do to an electorate less than fifty days from an election.

Whether or not any of this will have an effect on November 4th is an open question.  As scary as it all sounds it may be too complex to really sink in; one thing’s for sure though, the general public perception of all this is that the rich people have run amok and need to be reformed.  What form that takes, how substantive and how comprehensive it is, will in great part be determined at the ballot box.  Since even the people who are supposed to understand this stuff seem to be in uncharted territory I’m not sure what the rest of us are supposed to think though.

On BBC radio yesterday Robert Reich called the Clinton-era repeal of Glass-Steagall a “mistake”.  Unfortunately for ordinary economic mortals the Wikipedia entry for Glass-Steagall Act has disclaimers about the article requiring cleanup, lacking citations and having disputed neutrality.  There simply is no quick way for a non-expert to understand these bankruptcies and federal bail outs on anything but the most superficial level.  What I do know is that just about the only people who think the economy is going well these days are Republican convention delegates and the man they nominated.  Everyone else thinks the economy is in the toilet and the events of the last two weeks are unlikely to make them feel any better.

I’m starting to feel like some tropical island peasant, the ground is shaking, everybody’s nervous, and the guys in the funny hats and robes keep taking more virgins up the mountain.  But whatever they say when they come back down, that the volcano has been appeased or that we need more virgins, you can’t help but notice that they’re sweating as much as the rest of us.  I don’t understand enough of the details to know whether or not putting a new set of guys in the robes will help, but the current ones are obviously not doing their jobs.

No Comments » | 2008 Election, AIG, Institutionalized Stupidity, Lehman Brothers, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

No Quarter Asked, None Given

14 September 08
“I don’t mind you boys doing this in the living room, but in court doesn’t Bart have to tell the truth?” - Marge Simpson
“Yeah, but what is truth?  If you follow me.” - Lionel Hutz

John McCain is under a lot of pressure these days.  His relatively comfortable and relaxed existence being a Senator for Life from Arizona has been upended by this whole being the Republican nominee thing.  He can’t go on teevee and goof around any more; he can’t say impolitic things without some journalist or website fact checking him.  He was accustomed to being a celebrity, he’s been a national figure for eight years now after all, but this amount of attention clearly doesn’t agree with him.

Much has been made about how, in the last few months, McCain’s campaign has taken on some of the harder edges previously associated with Bush the Younger’s two campaigns.  This has largely been attributed to the installation of one Steve Schmidt, a Karl Rove disciple, as the man in charge and has manifested itself in more rigorous message discipline and sharper (and often outright dishonest) attacks.  There’s nothing particularly wrong with any of this; lying, screaming, kicking, biting, eye gouging and unsanctioned foreign objects have always been and will always be a part of American politics.

The really amusing thing is that there have been experienced political observers who’ve been shocked (Shocked! I tells ya!) to see the blatant shamelessness of the McCain campaign on full display.  Time’s Joe Klein:

Back in 2000, after John McCain lost his mostly honorable campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, he went about apologizing to journalists–including me–for his most obvious mis-step: his support for keeping the confederate flag on the state house.

Now he is responsible for one of the sleaziest ads I’ve ever seen in presidential politics, so sleazy that I won’t abet its spread by linking to it, but here’s the McClatchy fact check.

I just can’t wait for the moment when John McCain–contrite and suddenly honorable again in victory or defeat–talks about how things got a little out of control in the passion of the moment. Talk about putting lipstick on a pig.

And The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan:

For me, this surreal moment - like the entire surrealism of the past ten days - is not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or pigs or fish or lipstick. It’s about John McCain. The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every sane person must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palin is a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Or did he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now the core feature of his campaign?

So far, he has let us all down. My guess is he will continue to do so. And that decision, for my part, ends whatever respect I once had for him.

(Both links come courtesy of Talking Points Memo.)

Separate from the dirty tricks angle was The Economist’s ludicrously naïve cover editorial two weeks ago lamenting McCain’s capitulation to his party’s most disingenuous and disastrous policies:

Mr McCain used to be a passionate believer in limited government and sound public finances; a man with some distaste for conservative Republicanism and its obsession with reproductive matters. On the stump, though, he has offered big tax cuts for business and the rich that he is unable to pay for, and he is much more polite to the religious right, whom he once called “agents of intolerance”. He has engaged in pretty naked populism, too, for instance in calling for a “gas-tax holiday”. If this is all just a gimmick to keep his party’s right wing happy, it may disappear again. But that is quite a gamble to take.

Apparently Klein, Sullivan, The Economist’s editorial writers and the many others out there who doubtlessly feel the same way seriously believed that John McCain was going to run a Marquis of Queensbury campaign full of high minded debate and well argued non-ideological ideas.  That a massively unpopular incumbent party can’t win by debating the issues and not kowtowing to its most fanatical partisans apparently never occurred to them.  Or if it did they assumed that McCain and the Reds would rather fight fair and lose with honor than disgrace themselves for a chance at victory.

Perhaps they were being insufficiently cynical, but in all the blather and analysis and background noise that has been generated by this 2008 campaign there are a few things which have not received the attention they deserve.  One of those things is the truly dire situation in which the Republican Party will find itself should John McCain fail in November.  Whatever thoughts you may have about whether or not this is a “change” election, or a “generational” election, or any other buzzword that has become fuzzy and meaningless with overuse when it comes to the race for the White House the Reds have a lot more on the line than the Blues.

Consider this election from the viewpoint of the Republican Party.  The White House is their only hope for retaining some of the levers of federal power; the legislative branch is closed to them.  They’re almost guaranteed to lose more Senate seats and no one expects the Republicans to do anything more than maybe stanch the bleeding in the House.  In the short run they’d be handing over undivided control of the federal government for at least two years, and that’s bad enough, but the long term picture is even bleaker.

In 1992, the last time the Democrats controlled both Congress and the White House, Blue control only lasted two years.  But that 103rd Congress was very different than the 110th that sits on Capitol Hill now.  Those nineties Democrats were out of place, the last remnants of the liberal heyday of the 1960s.  Consider the makeup of the House in 1992-1994, there were 140 seats from the 13-states of the Confederacy and the Democrats held an 87-53 majority in them.  On the state level only Florida had a majority Republican House delegation, Mississippi’s was 100% Democratic and in Texas, in what we now think of as the reddest of the red states, Democrats outnumbered Republicans 2-1.

Compare that to the 110th Congress, there are now 146 House seats in the South and even after the Republican bloodbath in 2006 they still outnumber Democrats 84-62.  Today the makeup of the House reflects the overall ideology of the country much closer than it did then.  Plus, the Blues have only been back in power for two years and the rot and corruption which cost them Congress in ‘94 (and which helped cost the Reds in ‘06) hasn’t happened yet.  Their grip on Congress is much tighter than it was fourteen years ago.  It’s impossible to say what things will be like two, four or six years from now, but unless a President Obama is massively unpopular in 2010 it’s hard to think Congress will be turning Red again anytime soon.

(Not to be overlooked, 2010 is a census year, doing well at the state and federal level then means the winner gets to gerrymander the hell out of all the new lines and the Blues are likely going to be in a much better position than the Reds.)

The presidential race in 2008 is the last stand of the Republican Party as presently constituted.  If they lose they could be spending a long time in the political wilderness and as obvious as that is it hasn’t been much remarked upon.  Looked at in that light the idea that John McCain was ever going to run anything but a pandering, dishonest, balls-to-the-wall campaign seems laughable.  There is no Republican Plan B, there is no Red fall back position, there is only John McCain.  In terms of dirt, sleaze and dog whistles, we ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

No Comments » | 2008 Election, John McCain, Print is Dead, The Art of the Possible, The Economist | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

A Known Unknown

10 September 08
“A boat’s a boat, but the mystery box could be anything!  It could even be a boat!” - Peter Griffin

Yesterday TomDispatch had a short, succinct article, authored by Andrew Bacevich, about the utter failure of Bush the Younger’s foreign.  In addition to being one of the most thoughtful conservative critics of the current Administration’s foreign policy Bacevich is an Obama supporter and an excellent writer.  I have only one quibble with his otherwise fine piece.  Bacevich writes:

The events of the past seven years have yielded a definitive judgment on the strategy that the Bush administration conceived in the wake of 9/11 to wage its so-called Global War on Terror. That strategy has failed, massively and irrevocably. To acknowledge that failure is to confront an urgent national priority: to scrap the Bush approach in favor of a new national security strategy that is realistic and sustainable — a task that, alas, neither of the presidential candidates seems able to recognize or willing to take up.

That’s his opening paragraph but the italics are mine.  Bacevich’s complaint is that neither John McCain nor Barack Obama has articulated his own vision for what American foreign policy should look like and he’s right, they haven’t.  It points to something deeper though, beyond the standard complaints about the shallowness of our political discourse.  We have no idea - none - what an Obama or McCain foreign policy will really look like.  We know that they’ll be different from each other, and at least in Obama’s case we can be sure that it would look a lot less like the current one, but we don’t know which countries or issues truly interest either man.  We can’t know those things because when it comes to foreign policy it’s still Bush the Younger’s world and the rest of us are just living in it.

If there was a universal media tag cloud for 2008 electoral foreign policy debate it would have “Iraq” in about 48-point font, “Afghanistan” at around 18-point and everything else at a microscopic 4-point.  (”Georgia” blazed briefly across the headlines but seems to have settled in just above the din of everything else.)  There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, Iraq and Afghanistan remain the main foreign problems with which we must contend even if they do often obscure more substantive discussions we should maybe be having.  What deserves some thought though is that we’re now in an era where foreign policy can change radically from one Administration to the next.

During the Cold War, which has been over for almost two decades now, there were certainly arguments over foreign policy but the overarching goal of the United States never varied from confronting and containing the Soviet Union.  There were heated arguments over tactics and whether or not a specific country or other was worth US involvement or attention, but the basic outline was, in hindsight, quite stable.

We’ve now had two post Cold War presidents, each lasting two terms, and their foreign policies have been almost polar opposites.  Some of this can no doubt be chalked up to ideology, but without the constraints of the Cold War the already huge foreign policy leeway granted an American President grows even larger.  The President decides which foreign countries to visit, which foreign leaders to speak with; the Defense Department’s soldiers and the State Department’s diplomats act on his orders.  There is, of course, Congressional influence and oversight, but the President has tremendous latitude to set his own agenda and act on it.

No matter who takes over in January, the United States will still be the premier economic, cultural and military power in the world.  Seventeen years after the Soviet Union fell apart there remains no coherent doctrine for how to use all that power and influence.  Clinton was willing to use force in Europe to pacify the Balkans (twice) but other than our undeclared air war over Iraq and the lobbing of some cruise missiles at bin Laden his foreign policy was primarily economic, pressing formerly third world countries to open their capital and labor markets, sometimes with disastrous results.

It can be hard to remember, given all that’s happened since, but during the 2000 campaign candidate Bush repeatedly made a lot of hay out of the idea that Clinton had neglected the military, that many Army divisions were not combat ready.  Candidate Bush also campaigned against nation building.  Those facts are often brought up to highlight the hypocrisy of Bush the Younger (the Army is now in far worse shape than it was eight years ago and nation building is the primary cause) but it reveals something else as well.  The foreign policy campaign issues that seemed so relevant in 2000 are distant memories just eight years later.

Some of that can be ascribed to 11 September, but certainly not all of it.  The electorate, the commentariat, and the world at large are now accustomed to Bush the Younger’s policies as they once were to Clinton’s.  Would a sitting Defense Secretary ever have dared disparage France and Germany as “old Europe” if Soviet tanks were still poised to roll West?  Of course not!  I certainly agree that the Bush Administration has abused this newfound freedom of action in uncountably costly ways, but the next administration is going to have the same freedom.

Obama and McCain have to define their policies within the context Bush has created and largely that consists of reacting to things that Bush has already done (invade Iraq) or failed to do (capture bin Laden).  (Even worse, they must simplify things to fit a teevee commercial or a sound bite.)  Once one of them becomes President he will have the power to act for himself instead of merely to react to what someone else has already done.  The context in which they are campaigning, Bush’s foreign policy, is going to start permanently receding very soon.  By the time we’re at this again in four years there will be a completely new backdrop.

Bacevich is certainly correct that neither candidate is talking much about the foreign policy of the future, but I don’t think there’s anything that can be done about that.  It is Bush the Younger’s foreign policy that we’re debating, and one way or another that won’t be what we’re getting.  This is not to suggest that there is no difference between the two, there are huge differences, but the tenor of the foreign policy debate in America will be wildly different four or eight years from now and there isn’t a way to have that debate today.

No Comments » | 2008 Election, Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Iraq, John McCain, Sophomoric Imperialism, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Three Blind Mice

7 September 08
“What about being an illiterate TV clown who’s still more respected than all the scientists, doctors and educators in the country put together?” - Bart Simpson

As someone who enjoys writing and bullshitting about politics I’m the natural audience for cable news but I almost never watch it anymore.  Over the course of the nineties cable news degenerated into an incoherent, unwatchable mess and I lost interest.  The information content plummeted to near zero and the chattering yahoos took over.  At this point CNN, MSNBC and Fox News have evolved into little more than gossip channels, differing from E! or mindless sports blather only in topic.  There isn’t much point in watching them unless you enjoy that sort of thing, which I don’t.

The overwhelming majority of the time I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.  Political junkies have a right to mindless entertainment the same as anyone else.  The people who run the cable news channels are trying to pay the bills and they do so by showing commercials to the small minority of people who like to follow politics no matter how far away from an election we are.  The problem is that for the next two months political chatter actually matters and when the great bulk of the public tunes in they are woefully underserved by the usual dreck.

Not to go all McLuhan and risk some kind of Annie Hall style smack down here but in this case the medium really is the message.  CNN, Fox News and MSNBC didn’t send all of those famous people to Denver and St. Paul on expense account to not have them on screen.  It doesn’t take seventy-three situation rooms to put a camera in front of Barack Obama or John McCain, but that doesn’t matter because their primary motivation is not anything that could be called journalism, or even merely coverage.  The primary motivation is to get people to watch CNN/MSNBC/Fox News and in order to do that they have to become part of the story.  Each network has its own cabal of correspondents and analysts to ensure that you (yes, you!) want to hear their opinion and won’t change the channel until you’ve done so.

As I’ve written before anyone who thinks the cable channels are out to serve the public and act as journalists, in the old fashioned sense of the word, is hopelessly naïve.  Cable news serves its customers extremely well, but its customers are not the broad public but rather a thin slice of it.  The general citizenry wants information about the candidates, their positions, and the sources of their campaign funding; in other words hard information.  But the cable channels don’t provide that, they’re busy talking about pregnant teenagers and perceived social gaffs and did you hear that Hillary and Sarah got into a fight in the second floor girls bathroom between math and English class?  Their audience is the political newshounds, the ones who think they already know the basic stuff and therefore care about every single squiggle of the news cycle.

As per usual the place to turn for concise exposure of televised stupidity is Media Matters (via Pandagon):

During MSNBC’s August 26 coverage of the Democratic National Convention, NBC News chief Washington correspondent Norah O’Donnell asserted that during the upcoming Republican National Convention, “[t]he Republicans … are going to use from Day One through Day Four to hammer [Sen.] Barack Obama” and asked MSNBC political analyst Mike Barnicle of the first night of the Democratic National Convention, “[W]hy not position a senator, like Claire McCaskill [D-MO], up there for five minutes and let her throw some red meat out to the crowd?” In fact, McCaskill did speak on the first night of the Democratic National Convention, and in that speech, McCaskill repeatedly criticized both Sen. John McCain and President Bush. However, MSNBC did not air the speech during its live coverage of the convention.

It’s a staggering display of ignorance to have the Washington correspondent for one of the three cable news networks not know that a US Senator had spoken the night before at the convention she was supposedly covering.  Forgetting some of the specific content of a speech is certainly understandable, there are a lot of them after all.  But O’Donnell didn’t even know McCaskill had spoken!  If there’s a sports equivalent to this it would be something like an NFL analyst criticizing a player on Monday for sitting out the previous day when in fact he started the game and made the highlight reel on SportsCenter.

CNN/MSNBC/Fox News put their talking heads on instead of convention speakers because it’s better television and there’s a perverse but undeniable logic to that choice.  Any television set that gets the three cable news channels also gets C-SPAN and if someone wants to merely watch the speeches all he has to do is pick up the remote.  The Democratic and Republican parties certainly thought their speakers were worth watching or they wouldn’t have been given speaking slots.  By and large the news channels disagreed because many of the speeches are boring; they’re mostly delivered by people who aren’t interested in you the home viewer, whereas the talking heads are professionals.  They make the big bucks because they can make television compelling enough to make you the home viewer want to stick around after the ads for clean coal and prescription drugs.

The dishonesty of it all was up for public display this week thanks to Mike Murphy and the immortal Peggy Noonan:

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain, indeed.  The on camera talk is blatantly contradicted by the more honest thoughts expressed once they thought they were off air.  The on-screen - ahem - analysis is completely disingenuous, but nobody really cares because everyone knows that it’s actually theater, not discussion.

Watching CNN/MSNBC/Fox News before and after the acceptance speeches I was awed by the stupidity.  Listening to these morons actually kinda pissed me off and it certainly made me want to stick around after the commercial break if for no other reason than to feed my self satisfying and righteous anger.  But talking back to my teevee doesn’t do anything other than make me feel slightly superior until I realize that I’m doing exactly what they want me to do.  I wouldn’t argue with a sitcom or a rerun of Howdy Doody, why should I argue with these shows?  The cable news channels operate on approximately the same mental level and the only intellectually honest course of action is to turn them off and simply ignore them.

Anyone who’s ever watched more than three episodes of The Daily Show has seen one of their uproarious montages of cable news stupidity.  To be sure those are spliced together for maximum comedy, but they also actually happened.  Subjecting myself to a little bit of the real thing for the Obama and McCain speeches instantly reminded me why I don’t watch these channels.  I just can’t stand them, not because it makes me angry, but because I feel embarrassed that anyone would degrade and humiliate themselves for money and fame by going on teevee and acting like clowns.  Pornography is more honest and the people involved actually have less to be ashamed of.

Packaging this low brow entertainment in the traditional garb of sober journalism was a stroke of marketing genius and it’s been done so well that a great many people cannot tell the difference between the two.  The obvious question is, what effects does this have on the real world (including the outcomes of our elections)?  I don’t think there’s any way to really answer that question, but I don’t think I’d like the answer.

No Comments » | CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, The Vast Wasteland | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

One Step Forward, Three Steps Back

3 September 08
“Hi Dad, anything new in the paper today?” - Jay Sherman
“Oh . . . usual stuff . . . big type here, little type here.” - Franklin Sherman

I do not know who does layout work at The New York Times but someone deserves a pat on the back for a nice little juxtaposition on yesterday’s A12.  The front page of Tuesday’s Times had a story about our handover of Anbar province to the Iraqi government, “U.S. Hands Off Pacified Anbar, Once Heart of Iraq Insurgency“.  That story jumped to page A12 where, right beneath it, there was another Iraq story, “U.S. Military Will Transfer Control of Sunni Citizen Patrols to Iraqi Government“.

The first story chronicled a little ceremony held in Ramadi where formal responsibility for Anbar province was turned over to the Iraqi military.  As with the much touted transfer of sovereignty in 2004 it has never been entirely clear just what the real implications are for these security handoffs; U.S. military personnel seem to still be involved in combat or patrols after a province has been handed over.  While I’m sure there are changes in the military bureaucracy and maybe a lightening of American responsibilities by no stretch of the imagination does it mean that American troops are done getting killed in Anbar.

The second story is far less hopeful and far more concrete.  The opening sentence lays it out, “Come Oct. 1, the Iraqi government will take over responsibility for paying and directing the Sunni-dominated citizen patrols known as Awakening Councils that operate in and around Baghdad, American and Iraqi officials said Monday.”  They key word there is “paying”.

The Sunni insurgency is basically comprised of those who lost out after Saddam Hussein was removed from power.  It’s always tempting to think of dictatorships as oppressing “the people” and being resented.  But things are rarely so clear cut and in Iraq the Sunni minority, which traditionally held outsize political power given its relative portion of the total population (even before Hussein), did alright.  They didn’t have any political freedom, but materially they were treated comparatively well.  Then we showed up and installed a government dominated by Shiites; the Sunnis lost their privileges and got upset, and the country descended into civil war.

Thick skulled war supporters here in America like to tout the success of our troop escalation, which they refer to, with an enviable lack of self awareness, as the “surge”.  There is a macho logic to it all: we stopped fucking around and started doing proper counterinsurgency, canned Rumsfeld, sent in more troops, opened up with good old fashioned American firepower, and now Iraq is getting better.  It’s a nice story if you’re a war supporter who had been getting despondent (it plays well with those who believe in the myth that we could’ve won in Vietnam if we’d taken the gloves off), unfortunately it doesn’t fit the known facts.

The - ahem - “Anbar Awakening” began with one contact between an Iraqi sheik and an American colonel in September 2006, months before the vapid term “surge” was being kicked around in the press.  It has become a program whereby we pay previously hostile Sunni militias, in both cash and arms, not to attack us.  Casualties went way down on both sides and at least in the short term it’s win-win; our government can claim progress in Iraq and the Sunnis don’t have to exhaust themselves fighting us when they’d rather be fighting the Shiites.  Combine that with the violent, ethnic reorganization of Baghdad (via Prof. Cole) and the rate of death declined considerably, however it has not made Iraq any more politically stable than it was before.

What that second Times story means is that starting October 1st those nice Sunnis, the ones who haven’t been fighting us as long as we’ve been supporting them, will have their paychecks signed by the Shiite government of Nouri al-Maliki.  The story concludes:

Sheik Ali Hatem al-Suleiman, leader of one of the largest tribes in Anbar Province, said the Iraqi government must bring all the Awakening members into its security forces. If it cannot, he said, “then it’s not a real government.”

It’s not a real government, that’s a downright warlike statement coming from a leader of a large (well armed) minority.  It becomes even more chilling when we combine it with this passage from yesterday’s article by McClatchy’s Leila Fadel (one of the true gold-standard bylines for Iraq news):

The Iraqi government is eager to take over the Sons of Iraq program, a U.S. initiative that pays mostly Sunni former insurgents to protect their neighborhoods. The Shiite-led government’s aim, however, isn’t to absorb the mostly Sunni groups into the security forces, but to disarm and in some cases detain the men.

That puts things in a very grim light, al-Maliki’s government wants to detain and disarm these men, the men themselves view any attempt to do anything other than incorporate them into the Iraqi military as illegitimate.  It’s certainly not a guarantee of civil war, but it doesn’t augur well for peace and reconciliation.

No Comments » | Iraq, Nouri al-Maliki, Print is Dead, Sophomoric Imperialism, The New York Times | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos