Under New Management

29 March 09
“Lenny’s reign of terror is over.” – Mr. Smithers

There are an awful lot of big news stories these days; from Iraq and Afghanistan to the banking mess and general economic woes all the way down to the little stories that often get lost as a new Administration settles in to the job of running the country.  In particular, the lead story in yesterday’s New York Times about the decision to send more troops to Afghanistan was a little head spinning.  We’re sending more troops, but they’re only duty is to train, but we’re also working on a strategic assessment and the whole thing is going to be reviewed at the end of the year no matter what happens.  Despite all that information, the scope of the article is still very narrow; the word “NATO” only appears once and the word “Europe” or “European” not at all.  And that’s just one example, from a single topic, of all the big news stories that are circulating these days.  It’s enough to make even a seasoned news reader feel a little overwhelmed.

While Bush the Younger was still in power it was fairly simple to follow what our government was doing; all one needed to do was read about a topic, hear the Administration’s plan, and assume that they were fucking it up royally.  You’d be correct pretty much all of the time but it required almost no thought and allowed you to get on with your day quickly.  The news is now more complex for the simple reason that our leaders are now more complex.  So while it’s interesting, educational and fun to debate the merits of various foreign and banking policies, government appointments and other developments, it’s also a lot more time consuming than it used to be.  The knee jerk reaction and a one-size-fits-all approaches are now very much out of favor.

That said, there is one constant that can be relied upon in these new times.  And that is the fact that, whatever else goes on, one can be comforted by the knowledge that the people in charge are no longer inept and ideologically opposed doing their jobs well.  The following passage is from that lead story in yesterday’s Times and it all but leaps off the page:

During these discussions, Mr. Biden was the voice of caution, reminding the group members that they would have to sell their plans to a skeptical Congress.

That is an almost unfathomable reversal from the previous Vice-President.  It’s just one example, but it’s illustrative of the larger issue.  Fervor and stupidity are no longer prerequisites for government employment and as such the government is no longer exclusively staffed with zealots and morons (though one can safely assume that there are still plenty of both).  We now have a Vice-President urging deliberative caution instead of heedless aggression; it takes some getting used to, but that doesn’t make it any less welcome.

As the wretched mismanagement of the late unpleasantness becomes ever more apparent, one is forced to conclude that the government is in very sorry shape, worse even that was generally known before January 20th of this year.  Fixing that will take years.  But whatever other horrible things crop up in the meantime there is comfort to be had in knowing that better people are now in charge.  That isn’t a grand conclusion or a powerful insight, but it is true.  And these days it is perhaps the only easy constant we have left.

Leave a Comment » | 2008 Election, Barack Obama, Bush the Younger, Dick Cheney, I Love America, Obama Administration, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Persian Opportunities

25 March 09
“The elders tell of a young ball much like you.  He bounced three meters in the air, then he bounced one point eight meters in the air, then he bounced four meters in the air.  Do I make myself clear?” – Ball Ambassador
“Mr. Ambassador, our people tell the same story.” – Henry Kissinger

Last week, Barack Obama recorded a video message for “the people and leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran”.  The fact that the message contains little more then boilerplate niceties doesn’t make it any less remarkable, particularly coming from an office whose previous occupant seemed to think that the Islamic Republic was a member of a super-villain like league of evil doers.  The response from Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was encouraging, reasonable and very similar to another message from Iran that came eleven years ago.

In early January of 1998 the recently elected Iranian President Mohammed Khatami sat down for a highly publicized interview with CNN’s Christian Amanpour.  The interview was billed as a public opening by a reform minded leader, and held the promise that after almost twenty years of unremitting hostility relations between Iran and America might begin to improve.  The transcript of the interview makes for fascinating reading and it amply demonstrates just how little has changed in the intervening time.

Amanpour asks about Iran’s nuclear program; Khatami replies that Iran is a party of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and its facilities are routinely inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency.  Amanpour asks about Israel and the then promising peace process; Khatami responds by saying that Iran did not believe that the current peace process would work (boy were they right) but that they were in favor of an accord on which both sides could agree.  Khatami also pointed out that it is still the official policy of the American government to overthrow his government, and that is hardly a friendly stance.

Neither country is a villain, nor a dew eyed innocent; rather both are antagonists who have heaped a lot of shit on each other over the years.  (Americans would be wise to remember that the history of Iran did not begin in 1979; we’ve been screwing with them almost non-stop since World War II.)  Khatami was, in effect, offering to set aside hyperbole and bombast and speak of concrete differences where real progress and substantial agreement were possible.  It was a promising moment that went nowhere, not because any of it was wrong or because of any fundamental differences between Iran and America, but because ten days later Monica Lewinsky became a household name.

Flash forward almost four years and the US and Iran were very quietly cooperating in Afghanistan against the Taliban, an outfit which the government of Iran has long despised.  After that, secret diplomacy (via) was undertaken to explore the possibility of a thaw in relations.  Though the details remain murky it appears that such proposals were rejected out of hand by Bush the Younger.  Apparently he and his brain trust couldn’t fathom the idea of actually talking to the Iranian government when it would obviously be so much easier to wait a year or two and then launch a regime changing attack from a pacified, democratic and stable Iraq.

Instead of marching swiftly to Tehran though, Bush the Younger and the limitlessly foolish neoconservatives who ran his foreign policy got bogged down in Iraq for six years.  Sadly for them, but happily for everyone else on the planet, their term expired before they could launch the airstrikes they had convinced themselves would cause the popular Iranian government to crumble from within.  That brings us up to the present time and a situation that is at least somewhat similar to the one that existed when Amanpour sat down with Khatami: the United States and the Islamic Republic share a great deal of mutual animosity, but have very little in the way of actual fundamental disputes.

Oh sure, we don’t want them to get the bomb, but our latest intelligence says they aren’t even trying to build one.  Besides, the primary reason they’d want one is to keep us from trying to topple their government; if we publicly gave up that insane notion they probably wouldn’t feel the need in the first place.  Even Israel is basically a red herring in this equation.  We like Israel and they don’t, but Iran is no more a threat to Israel than Indonesia, Pakistan or any other large, heavily Islamic country that has no physical access to Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, or any other part of the Jewish state.  It’s also worth remembering that the United States is already on very friendly terms with a number of governments that outright loathe Israel, most prominently Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.  On the other side of the ledger is a long list of shared opponents, starting with al-Qaeda and those pesky Taliban.

The biggest barrier to improved relations at the moment is probably current Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his ugly reputation in the West (which is mostly, but not entirely, deserved).  And while the Iranian presidency isn’t an overly powerful position within the Islamic Republic, if he’s re-elected in June it would make an opening with Iran considerably more politically costly and difficult for Obama.  It may not make things impossibly difficult, but it would certainly be easier to sell an opening with Iran the Country than one with Ahmadinejad the Nutcase.  At the moment the election is still very much in doubt, but Ahmadinejad is popular when he stands up to foreign bullies so it behooves us to act friendly between now and June.

Whatever happens, if there is one lesson to be learned from the previous two attempts to reconcile the United States and the Islamic Republic it is that things can go awry quickly.  It would be better for all involved if this one didn’t.

Leave a Comment » | Ali Khamenei, Barack Obama, I Love America, Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Obama Administration, Places Other than America, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Happy Anniversary

22 March 09
“Our anniversary?  Are you sure?” – Homer Simpson
“Well don’t worry Homey, this year you have an excuse for not remembering.” – Marge Simpson

The sixth anniversary of the start of the Iraq War passed with little fanfare this week.  Oh sure, it was noted in a few places, but for the most part it was ignored for more modern concerns like the economy and judging whether or not Barack Obama has lost control of the financial mess.  That in itself is a stunning development from a year ago when the fifth anniversary was a big media occasion, prompting a speech from Bush the Younger and reactions from the three remaining presidential aspirants.  The New York Times even noted the deteriorating tenor of Bush’s Iraq anniversary speeches from 2003 through 2008:

In 2004, he appeared in the East Room of the White House with dozens of foreign diplomats and cast the war as “the inescapable calling of our generation.” By 2006, with the insurgency worsening along with ethnic and sectarian violence, he spoke for two minutes on the South Lawn and spent most of that time talking of soldiers’ sacrifices. “It’s a time to reflect,” he said.

Those Iraq speeches served as a kind of macabre anti-State of the Union for Bush the Younger, each one growing more desperate and more detached from reality.

The rapid decline of the Iraq story as a national issue has two fundamental causes.  First and foremost is the fact that the rate of American casualties in Iraq has decreased dramatically.  The second is that we now have a President who does not view the war as a crusade to be pursued at any cost.  If those two things weren’t true, especially if Americans were still getting killed at the 2006-2007 rate, the economic news wouldn’t be able to so completely dominate the headlines.  That in itself is a sign of progress, while also showing just how badly skewed this country became under Bush the Younger.

A little more than a year ago Tom Engelhardt wrote a piece at TomDispatch, “The First Sixth-Anniversary-of-the-Iraq-War Article”.  He wrote it on the fifth anniversary as a way to point out that no matter what, a year later we’d still be occupying that country, losing soldiers and killing civilians.  He was, of course, correct and his article has stood up remarkably well; though even at TomDispatch the latest Iraq anniversary passed relatively unnoticed.  Engelhardt also laid out the eight warped fundamentals of Bush the Younger’s foreign policy (summed up as the unwavering belief that all American decisions are wise and that all problems can be solved by American arms) that lead to the Iraq War.  But those beliefs, which seemed set in stone as little as a year ago, have already weathered away significantly under Barack Obama.  This week’s opening to Iran, and the cautious but welcome response from them, is just the latest sign of the times.

In short, real progress has been made in the last year and the coming one promises even more.  Sadly there will still be a huge, albeit significantly reduced, American military presence in Iraq next year on the seventh anniversary.  And there will be a non-trivial, though presumably smaller still, number of Americans there two years from now on the eighth anniversary.  This failed and unnecessary war has twisted and turned for six painful years, and while it doubtlessly has more nasty surprises left in it, it is now twisting towards a resolution instead of stretching indefinitely into the future.

Whether one chooses to view these developments as a glass half-full or a glass half-empty doesn’t change the fact that these are remarkable and welcome changes.  It may not be the most sensational story, and won’t make those killed or maimed between now and the end any less dead or crippled, but it’s still deserving of comment, praise and encouragement.  So, here’s to a sixth anniversary that sees the war in vastly better shape than the fifth.

Leave a Comment » | Barack Obama, Bush the Younger, I Love America, Iraq, Obama Administration, Sophomoric Imperialism, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Bound by Torture

18 March 09
“I need a drink and a shower.” – Mayor Quimby

There is a stunning fact in Mark Danner’s gruesomely truthful article about American torture in the 9 April 2009 issue of The New York Review of Books.  According a former director of the CIA (it’s hard to tell which one, presumably either Tenet or Hayden), no prisoner in CIA custody has been subjected to torture by waterboarding since 2003.  That is to say that no prisoner has, since 2003, been held upside down while water is poured into his head to force his mind and body to react as though he were being violently drowned.  It is a telling fact in a vital article, but we’ll get to that in a moment, first, the background.

Danner has acquired a copy of a report given to the American government in 2007 by the International Committee of the Red Cross.  The report states, in no uncertain terms, that American detainees were tortured in CIA black sites (prisons which did not officially exist and at which torture could be practiced).  Danner quotes extensively from the report in a podcast available at the Review‘s website:

The allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that in many cases the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constitutes torture.  In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Who is making these allegations?  The fourteen prisoners who were ceremonially transferred from the black sites to the Guantanamo gulag in the late summer of 2006.  But, a skeptical American might say, these men were high value terrorists, might they be lying or exaggerating as a way to embarrass or degrade the United States?  Well, no.  As Danner documents, the tortures these men describe came to light during separate, individual interviews with the Red Cross.  They had been captured at different times and in different places, they had been held in isolation and had no chance to communicate with each other; yet their descriptions of American torture match up nearly perfectly.  In short, they’ve got their story straight and since they had no chance to straighten it amongst themselves they must be telling the truth.

Well, says the skeptical American who’d still like to disbelieve, who are these Red Cross fellows?  Might they be wobbly-kneed Eurotrash with an ax to grind against Washington and Bush the Younger?  Again, no.  This is the International Committee of the Red Cross, they have no political agenda, they are legally bound to monitor the treatment of prisoners and they are as neutral and apolitical as it gets.  For proof of this one need look no further than last summer’s rescue of Ingrid Betancourt and fourteen other hostages in Columbia.  The Columbian president had to apologize to the Red Cross when a member of their intelligence services wore a Red Cross t-shirt, against orders, during the operation.  That’s how seriously the apolitical neutrality of the organization is taken; even accidentally impersonating one of their employees is a treaty violation and worthy of a public apology by a sitting (and popular) head of state.  These charges cannot be dismissed as biased or unfounded.

What’s more, the ICRC aren’t the only ones who understood this to be torture.  Consider two other facts; thanks to the ACLU we now know that in November of 2005 the CIA destroyed 92 video tapes totaling unknown hundreds of hours of interrogation, including torture.  Second, that torture by waterboarding was discontinued as early as 2003.  Now recall the political conditions in 2003 and 2005.  The former was the height of the torture regime (the abuses at Abu Ghraib hadn’t even come out yet) but it was clear enough even then that what was happening was illegal.  The procedure was stopped.  By late 2005 the American legal system had begun to reassert itself and it was becoming apparent that punishments for law breaking were a very real possibility.  That’s when the tapes were destroyed.

If you set aside the details it’s the exact same path all government abuse of power scandals follow.  Crimes are committed because, hey we have authorization and we’ll never get caught anyway.  Uh oh, we’d better stop doing this because we’ve done a lot of illegal stuff and there’s evidence to prove it.  Oh shit, now people are asking questions, we’d better destroy the evidence to save our own skin.  It goes from A to B to C as formulaic as any serial drama.

This all leaves Barack Obama and the rest of his government in a delicate condition.  Torture cannot be concealed, too many facts are already known and there are likely more waiting to come to light.  Torture cannot be ignored, too many laws were openly violated for everyone to simply look the other way.  It has been heartening to note that between the election and now the general tenor of the conversation about this topic has shifted from “Are we going to do anything?” to “What are we going to do?” but that optimism cannot change the fact that nothing has been done yet.

In the end, and like so much else these days, it comes down to Obama himself.  Referring to Bush the Younger’s speech on prisoners and torture of 6 September 2006, Danner writes:

I watched him stare straight into the camera and with fierce concentration and exaggerated emphasis intone once more: “The United States does not torture. It’s against our laws, and it’s against our values. I have not authorized it-and I will not authorize it.” He had convinced himself, I thought, of the truth of what he said.

This speech, though not much noticed at the time, will stand, I believe, as George W. Bush’s most important: perhaps the only “historic” speech he ever gave. In telling his version of Abu Zubaydah’s story, and versions of the stories of Khaled Shaik Mohammed and others, the President took hold of many things that were already known but not acknowledged and, by means of the alchemical power of the leader’s voice, transformed them into acknowledged facts. He also, in his fervent defense of his government’s “alternative set of procedures” and his equally fervent denials that they constituted “torture,” set out before the country and the world the dark moral epic of the Bush administration, in the coils of whose contradictions we find ourselves entangled still.

Obama cannot turn back the clock, but he – and only he – can acknowledge what was done and put the United States back on the path to the moral high ground.  He must do this not only for the rest of the world, but for us as well.  As Danner notes, torture can be a popular position because it is often portrayed, utterly fictionally, as an anguished American doing what is necessary to save lives.  But that is not the reality of torture, as the ICRC report amply demonstrates; the reality is wasteful, destructive and horrifying.

The alchemical power is now Barack Obama’s, with the economy in the shape that it is and his budget, energy and health care plans in need of support it is understandable if he waits for a better moment than now to use it.  But this American wound, self inflicted like so many others by Bush the Younger, will not heal until a President looks into the camera and speaks the truth about it.

Leave a Comment » | Barack Obama, Bush the Younger, Guantanamo Bay, I Love America, Institutionalized Stupidity, Obama Administration, Print is Dead, Sophomoric Imperialism, The Art of the Possible, The New York Review of Books, Torture, War on Terror | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

The Fifth Estate

15 March 09
“I’m really, really, really sorry.” – Edward the Penitent
“I’m afraid ‘sorry’ doesn’t cut it with this pope.” – Pope

Note: Today’s post wasn’t going to be about the Stewart-Cramer interview, but it turned into an even bigger event than seemed possible at the beginning of the week and a final point deserves to be made.

Jon Stewart’s systemic dismantling of Jim Cramer and all that he represents was everywhere on Friday.  It was a stunning moment of television and it deserved all the attention it garnered.  What made it so remarkable isn’t the fact that two people went on television and disagreed with each other, nor that it was so one sided a confrontation.  That happens all the time.  Rather, it was a landmark event in the evolution of the way popular media is consumed in this country because of the stark contrast between each man’s approach to television.

Television news channels thrive on immediacy.  Getting a story first and then proceeding directly to analysis before even half of the facts are in is, after all, a great way to fill time.  During the interview Cramer even admitted as much, pointing out that CNBC has a whopping seventeen hours of live air time to fill each day.  (Stewart, quite sensibly, asked if perhaps they might want to cut back.)  But in an era of transcripts and YouTube videos, anyone can be held accountable for dumb pronouncements so filling airtime comes at the direct expense of anyone’s long term credibility.  And credibility is the only thing worth having in a world of almost infinite information sources.

There wasn’t so much a credibility gap between the opposite sides of that desk as there was a yawning mile wide credibility gulf.  Why is that?  Why is the comedian who openly admits he has no expertise the more trusted party?  It’s because Stewart makes no claims to impartiality or unbiased journalism; Cramer, on the other hand, operates under the guise that what he’s doing is, for all its bells, whistles and stagecraft, fundamentally informative.  Which is not to say that Cramer is the only party guilty of that little piece of self deception; Stewart is very clear during the interview that while Cramer has become the poster boy for sloppy, airtime filling fourth rate journalism, he isn’t alone.

Cramer exists in a medium that places a premium on speed and access over substance and research.  That used to be easy to get away with, but that’s no longer true.  Now there’s a Fifth Estate and it’s composed of easily searchable transcripts, endless publicly available video archives and the ever growing index of information available via Google and other internet services.  Once something is typed into a keyboard, or filmed by a camera lens or picked up by a microphone, odds are it’s going to end up on permanent display for any curious party.  Opinion and speculation are easily mass produced to fill seventeen daily hours of live television, but they probably aren’t going to hold up to long term scrutiny.

The Daily Show does only two hours of television per week, carefully scripted and rehearsed before taping.  It would take them two months, assuming they didn’t take a week off, to generate the same amount of original programming as CNBC puts up in a single day.  The reward for the care that goes into their production is the credibility and, yes, trustworthiness that allowed them to expose their cable television brethren as incurious sycophants posing as responsible journalists.

Reputation, trust, credibility, in a world where information is anything but scarce those are the most precious commodities and they can only be built up slowly and with great care, honesty and transparency.  Pouring bullshit and noise into a camera for seventeen hours a day is pretty much the opposite of that.  On Thursday night the nation saw what happens when the two methods collide.

Leave a Comment » | America's Elite, CNBC, Jim Cramer, Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, The Vast Wasteland | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

The Pundits New Clothes

11 March 09
“I like it better when they’re making fun of people who aren’t me.” – Homer Simpson

Usually it’s best to give things like this little public spat between Jon Stewart and Rick Santelli/Jim Cramer/Joe Scarborough a little time to settle before trying to figure it all out, but in this case the respective positions are already glaringly clear.  Cramer, Scarborough and their ilk are very scared because they see the world in which they became rich and famous shifting beneath their feet; Stewart exposing their rank hypocrisies is the last thing they want right now.  As frightened people are often wont to do, they’re lashing out as loudly as possible, hoping that the volume of their voices distracts the audience from just how nakedly feeble they really are.

First, let’s review.  On Wednesday of last week, The Daily Show did an eight minute segment highlighting the relentlessly upbeat clown show that is CNBC.  They mocked Santelli’s populist posing, Cramer’s track record of recommending soon-to-fail companies, and showcased interviews with disastrously incompetent and dishonest executives that rose to the intellectual level of fellatio.  Stewart concluded the segment with a hearty and well deserved “fuck you”.

The segment was an instant hit, being picked up by numerous media outlets (including The New York Times on Sunday and Monday) and spreading all over what Stewart would call on his March 9th show the “twitscape”.  Cramer, an attention whore in the old style, responded with an incoherent diatribe on MainStreet.com.  He writes, “I do favor almost all of Obama’s agenda, right down to having the rich pay more of their freight in this great country” but then proceeds to rant against bank “nationalization” and demand that Obama re-inflate the housing bubble (“We need to stop house-price depreciation.”)  Cramer is smart enough to see the fairyland of financial make believe crumbling around him, but instead of recognizing that it was all a dream he wants Obama to wave a magic wand so that he can go back to Bull Castle in the Enchanted Forest of Housing Appreciation.

Stewart came back on Monday, using devastating video clips to savage Cramer’s claim that it was just an “urban legend” that he was telling people to buy Bear Stearns right before it collapsed.  Tuesday morning Cramer went on The Today Show where he treated the entire world to the image of him staring blankly into a camera while they played Stewart’s clip from the previous night; watching his reaction is just short of painful.  He looks like a child that has been hauled into the principal’s office and forced to listen while his stupidities are recounted.  His only response is to shrug his shoulders, flap his arms, call Stewart’s program a “comedy show” (as if that’s supposed to hurt his credibility) and stand there, a defeated man.

Things might have ended there.  Instead, Cramer showed up thirty minutes later on Morning Joe, the MSNBC morning show that puts the lie to anyone claiming that it’s a “liberal” cable network.  Joe Scarborough proceeded to lay into Stewart for basically being a liberal cheap shot artist.  (Cramer, for his part, appeared slightly chastised telling Scarborough, “I think you ought to lighten up”.)  This necessitated another response from The Daily Show.

Last night, Stewart came on to gleefully answer “Yes” to Scarborough’s misguided charge that “is [Stewart] gonna just sit there and cherry pick over the past eight years every mistake people make.”  That is exactly what The Daily Show does, it doesn’t participate in your silly and ephemeral debate; it mocks you for having anything to do with something so demonstrably foolish.  Scarborough is, in effect, accusing Stewart of doing his job.  That’s pretty pitiful in and of itself, but he’s making his statement from a perch of smug self righteousness that is almost incomprehensibly ignorant and naive.  It’s match point to Stewart and The Daily Show though when they had Dora the Explorer patiently explain, “Doesn’t Jim Cramer understand it’s not about individual mistakes he’s made, it’s about him creating a false sense of urgency that helped hyper-inflate the bubble.”

The deeper point here is that guys like Santelli, Cramer and Scarborough are on their way out and this little spat is proof.  Only people who are utterly ignorant of the wider world would ever deliberately get into a media war with a highly rated, well respected, critically acclaimed national television show that relentlessly parodies other media outlets.  Let’s not forget that Jon Stewart did more than any other single person to get CNN’s Crossfire taken off the air; and all he had to do was appear as a guest and expose it as the pointless, ignorant numbskullery it was. 

The real fear for the cable blowhards, of both the money and political variety, is that the world that takes shape after this crisis passes will be one where guys like them are marginalized.  Cramer gets people to watch his television show and buy his books because there are a lot of people out there who think “the markets” are a carnival game where the house loses, and Cramer is nothing if not an enthusiastic barker.  Scarborough similarly operates by putting out books and appearing on television, only instead of pumping stocks he’s selling increasingly unpopular and discredited right wing talking points.  They’re both cheerleaders and they’re accustomed to living in a world where the Dow rises and Republicans win while they stand on the sideline chanting and dancing.  But the crowd has stopped responding (no matter how much leg they show) and they don’t know what to do.

A world where the economy has been saved by the Democrats and the market isn’t seen as a casino is a world where the audience for people like Cramer and Scarborough is much smaller.  There will always be money bunnies and cranky pundits, but the halcyon days are over and that realization must be a cold one indeed for men like them.  On the other side, Stewart and his kind will never go out of business because satire never goes out of style and every court needs a jester.  That’s why this fight was so lopsided; Santelli, Cramer, Scarborough and those they represent are clinging to an old order that, however much fun it was for some, didn’t make any fundamental sense. Stewart is pointing out their nakedness, but he isn’t the reason they’re not wearing clothes.

Leave a Comment » | America's Elite, CNBC, Jim Cramer, Joe Scarborough, Jon Stewart, Rick Santelli, The Daily Show, The Vast Wasteland | Tagged: , , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

A Morbidly Entertaining Thought Experiment

8 March 09
“I got a hankering for some pork products.” – Krusty the Klown

I have seen and heard more of Rush Limbaugh in the last few weeks than I have in several years.  His recent escapades have included hoping for the President to fail, receiving obsequious apologies from nominally adult members of the GOP, and confusing the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence.  It’s an entertaining spectacle, and demonstrative of just how badly screwed up the GOP really is, but count me among those who’ve always seen Limbaugh as essentially harmless, merely the latest in a long line of radio cranks that stretches back pretty much to the invention of the medium.

He’s been nationally famous for about twenty years now and while he’s never been svelte, he sure looks like he’s tipping the scales closer to 300lbs than 200lbs these days.  This led me to an interesting, if morbid, hypothetical: what would happen if he went tits up on air?  Stroke, heart attack, SYDS (Sudden Yammerer Death Syndrome) whatever, so long as it’s natural and happens live on the air.  The reaction to it would almost have to be one of the greatest and most enlightening media moments of our lifetimes, right?

Literally millions of people would hear it live on the air, and since he keeps a camera on him while he’s broadcasting the video would be instantly and universally available.  The reactions from various corners would be as swift as they would be varied.  On the one side you’d have an instant split among people who didn’t like Limbaugh, roughly along the fault line of “Rush’s Death, Funny or Not?”.  Lots of people would probably take the usual dead man approach by mouthing some weak platitudes about how even though they didn’t agree with him he was a passionate advocate or some other such nonsense.  But Limbaugh is amongst the most disliked people in America at the moment and the left, broadly speaking, is feeling its oats of late.  There’d have to be at least a decent sized group of people who openly (and gleefully) laugh, be glad he’s dead, and say that the fat bastard got what he deserved.

Of course, as soon as that happened, we’d then enter into the meta-debate: reactions to Limbaugh’s death, appropriate or not?  It would be easy for someone accused of an unseemly amount of joy at the death of a fellow human being to produce a list of horrifying things Limbaugh said over the years.  An accuser could then reply to the effect that no matter what the man said it’s still poor form to speak ill of the recently deceased.  Pretty soon we’d have blog posts and newspaper articles about the debate about the debate, the funeral would be a media circus, David Broder’s head would explode, and the whole thing would end with a lengthy and meaningless article in the New York Times Week in Review section (title suggestion: Rush Wars).

We haven’t even mentioned the inevitable scramble amongst others for Limbaugh’s radio crown, whatever long term effects it might have on the political discourse in general, and what would doubtlessly be one of history’s most strained and scrutinized White House press releases.  It would be a spectacle without equal and it would allow Limbaugh to check out in a blaze of media attention beyond even his wildest dreams before living on forever in the memorabilia industry.

I certainly don’t wish the man any specific harm, but I would unashamedly wallow in the aftermath, and I suspect I’m not alone.

Leave a Comment » | America's Elite, Rush Limbaugh | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Outside Looking In, Then and Now

4 March 09
“It’s always such a huge event, sometimes I like to sneak up to the fence and close my eyes and pretend I’m there.” – Pip

I avoid the Washington gossip sites and cable gab channels like the plague.  Partly that’s because I just can’t stand their cloying self importance.  But it’s also because I genuinely believe that the day-in-day-out, who-won-the-week-type crap is at best distracting and at worst actually damaging to clear thinking about political subjects.  My strong hunch (and it is only that for I have no data to back it up, though nor is there any to refute it) is that what Josh Marshall memorably termed the “para-government” vastly overestimates its own influence and power.  It’s nigh impossible to draw a relatively clear line of causation from chattering television programs, op-ed pieces, think tank presentations and the like to policies and legislation.  But the absence of substantiated causation doesn’t disprove it, and the discourse is self justifying.

While I cannot prove my little theory for contemporary politics, I did recently come across a wonderful historical example that is not so unlike our current situation.  Just after the election, especially once Hillary Clinton’s name started coming up in conjunction with Secretary of State, the “Team of Rivals” meme was born.  It’s a good catchphrase for the same reason that it was a good book title: it’s short, it’s easy to remember, and it’s descriptive.

I recently finished reading the actual book “Team of Rivals”, Doris Kearns Goodwin’s excellent history of Abraham Lincoln and his cabinet.  Reading the book after the title became an oft repeated political concept was illustrative in an unexpected way though.  Lincoln had an enormous number of controversial issues to deal with in his time, from moral questions like slavery to practical military concerns, plus snarled combinations of those and many others.  Each issue had supporters and opponents, some passionate some less so, and they were always eager to express their opinions, often in print.

What’s so striking is how familiar the general ebb and flow of 1860s political discourse is to a 2000s observer.  The means of communication were very different, long form speeches and open letters instead of television appearances and blog posts, but a single speech or line from the president, a senator or a cabinet member would echo across the land causing furious or joyous citizens to race to their printing presses to respond in thunderous language.  Americans were no less opinionated then than now, and though the 1860s wasn’t quite the era of instant reaction that ours is, their various reactions were often laughably inaccurate when compared to how the issue at had was actually being considered in the White House.

Modern technology has increased the speed of the reactions but it hasn’t changed the fact that everyone outside of a very select circle of officials and advisors is working with information that is – at its very best – incomplete, secondhand and distorted.  Lincoln and his cabinet had often made up their minds about some issue and were simply waiting to publicize it as supporters and critics hurled erudite English at each other in newspapers and magazines.  Watching TPM’s daily montage of vapidity, or skimming the sometimes thrice daily e-mails I get from ABC’s The Note, it’s hard not to conclude that today’s political spectators are just as poorly informed as their ancestors were.

None of this is to suggest that the great commentariat, the para-government, is entirely powerless, certainly lobbyists and dedicated interest groups can push officials in one direction or another on some issues and a relentless enough media drone on a certain topic can fundamentally alter public understanding of it.  But those in the bleachers vastly overstate their importance and probably have very little influence on the people holding the real levers of power.  The Washington echo chamber was not created by the internet, nor cable political channels, Sunday talk shows, or even radio.  It’s older than all of those.  With the broader perspective of a century and a half it’s easier to appreciate just how over-reactive, self-important and downright silly it really was, and probably still is.

Leave a Comment » | Book Reports, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals | Tagged: , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos

Some Mindsets Change Faster Than Others

1 March 09
“First up is Iraqi impressionist, Tariq El-Gamal.” – Principal Mangosuthu
“Thank you.  Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if Tony Curtis spoke honestly about US policy in the Mid East?  I think it might go something like this . . . Hey, whaddya think, we’re trying to take over.” – Tariq El-Gamal

One of the more amusing aspects of these early days of Barack Obama’s presidency has been the incredulity and surprise, sometimes bordering on the absurd, that greets Obama’s decisions, even ones that were long promised and central to his campaign.  This has recently been prominently on display when it comes to the budget, but the Iraq announcement on Friday generated the same reaction.

Sayeth Digby:

First, this morning all the gasbags are talking about how Obama may not be leaving enough troops in Iraq because there’s a good chance he’ll need to build back up. One gets the feeling that this is a piece of village conventional wisdom — that the draw down is a nice idea but that we’ll be building back troop levels at some point because we’ll “have” to, the reasons for which aren’t specified and which hasn’t been debated as far as I know.

That pretty well covers it.  The fact that promising to end the war was one of the main reasons Obama was able to secure the nomination and then win the election seems to have escaped a lot of people.  But he said he would, and now, unsurprisingly, he is.  Of course, ending the war in Iraq wasn’t the only foreign policy promise he made; he also repeatedly said he wanted to “change the mindset” when it comes to foreign policy.  It was with an eye towards that idea that Obama specifically announced that the United States wouldn’t be staying permanently in either country.

First, from the Iraq speech:

Through this period of transition, we will carry out further redeployments. And under the Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government, I intend to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Then from the interview Obama gave to Jim Lehrer:

One of the things that I think we have to communicate in Afghanistan is that we have no interest or aspiration to be there over the long term. There’s a long history, as you know, in Afghanistan of rebuffing what is seen as an occupying force, and we have to be mindful of that history as we think about our strategy.

Those are tremendously important statements.  Recall that even before the infamous “Mission Accomplished” moment The New York Times was already reporting that we were planning on having permanent bases in Iraq.  Publicly renouncing any ambitions like those is a major shift in American policy.  It is the very essence of “change the mindset”.

The importance of this is even more apparent in light of what Digby was writing about.  The armchair warriors are going to be full throated in their insistence that we stay somehow.  But Obama preemptively pulled the rug from underneath them by making these announcements now; changing the context in which the debate is conducted will make it much easier for their ideas to be exposed as the ignorant ranting that they really are.

This is the long awaited official repudiation of the policies of Bush the Younger.  The infamous New York Times Magazine article that gave us the tragically apt phrase “reality-based community” also contained another quote, much less mentioned but equally frightening, “We’re an empire now”.  An empire is the very last thing any country should ever want to be; it’s expensive, bloody, distracting and certainly no project for a nation that was founded in an imperial rebellion.  Obama is deliberately tearing down that particular brand of hubristic foolishness, the dimwitted and stubborn just haven’t caught on yet.  It is fun to watch them flail.

Leave a Comment » | Afghanistan, Barack Obama, I Love America, Iraq, Obama Administration, Permanent Bases, Sophomoric Imperialism, The Art of the Possible | Tagged: , , | Permalink
Posted by Zeno Amerikanos