Politics and Press

Post Olympic News Blues

The Vancouver Olympics were many things to many people – but for some they were a terrific diversion from the world of American politics. What follows is a quick and by-no-means inclusive review of some of the events driving us to the Olympics coverage:

• Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz joined with former NY Times Columnist and Palin voyeur Bill Kristol in supporting and ad branding the Department of Justice the “Department of Jihad” and labeling 7 lawyers who had represented Gitmo detainees “The Al Queda 7”.  McCarthyism lives.

• The South Dakota state legislature passed a bill which would require high school science courses to teach that world weather phenomena (e.g. climate change) are affected by a variety of dynamics including “astrological” dynamics.

• Thomas Friedman reported in his NY Times column that the town of Tracy, California plans to charge residents $300 and non-residents $400 per 911 call unless they have paid a $40 annual fee. In case of severe chest pains, drive to the next town.

• Several reports describe Wall Street investment banks’ political donations moving strongly toward Republicans. This is strange punishment of the Democrats for bailing them out of their self-induced collapse but understandable as Republicans circle their wagons to protect the same banks from virtually any serious regulations.

• In his imitation of Fidel Castro, Glen Beck spoke for nearly an hour at the CPAC 2010 Conference, or Coven, or whatever it was called.  There are hundreds of hilarious quotes in the ramble but one sample is as much as we can stand:  “He chose to use his name, Barack, for a reason. To identify, not with America — you don’t take the name Barack to identify with America. You take the name Barack to identify with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical?

• One U.S. Senator – Shelby of Alabama – tied up 70 of President Obama’s nominations for important federal positions because he wants a defense project built in his state.

• OJ Simpson offered to donate to the Smithsonian the suit he wore when he was acquitted of two murder charges. In one of the few good news stories of recent weeks the Smithsonian turned him down.

• Tea Party leader Mark Williams went on CNN and during his meltdown, said that President Obama was “an Indonesian Muslim and a welfare thug”.

BRING BACK THE OLYMPIC GAMES!

Fox Presents: Fear and Loathing in America

• The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason. – Dr. Hunter S. Thompson

A visit to the barber today – with its typical random comments on the state of the world –provided a vivid reminder of the bizarre power of Fox News as a purveyor of misinformation and fear. That Fox is in the business of misrepresenting reality is not an original discovery since any reasonably intelligent adult who lives in the real world and reads about the real world knows that Fox’s O’Riley, Beck, and Palin etc. are clowns and buffoons – our own strange brand of Iran’s Ahmadinejad.

We have an intelligence deficit in America and it is growing. There have always been fringe movements in America – on both ends of the spectrum. But the current right wing fringe seems to be – or pretends to be – so scared of so many things that one has to wonder how they can come out from under their rocks.

Their major fear is terrorism. No one wants a screw-up the size of Bush and Cheney’s failure to act on warnings that led to 9/11. But just where does Rudy Giuliani get off working up a frenzy over Captain Underpants’ failed airline bombing when his boys Bush and Cheney totally screwed up by ignoring warnings that led to an actual, successful terrorist attack? It is not enough that he is a scumbag – what is infuriating is that the press actually gives that pathetic hack a microphone. The Rudys of the world have conspired to create a country consumed with fear of some possible event but unable to understand that 1) such an event may be inevitable, 2) that the country is doing all possible to prevent such an event – even under Obama(!) – and that 3) we are in this together and to use security threats as political currency is to be one with the enemy. Cowardice is the name to be given to those who would scare the people into giving up their liberties and their constitutional rights – tactics that give the victory to Al Quada. Shame on all of those who have set out to frighten us and shame on those who buy into it without serious thought of the loss of liberties they have accepted.

The PON (Party of No) and Fox and the ranting Tea Partiers have gained a certain power with their use of fear. We are scared to use our tried and true judicial system to bring terrorist criminals to justice – omigod – do not try them here, do not try them there – let’s eliminate the constitution and just throw them into a cell somewhere – but not here – lest we all might have to take a risk that is not even a real risk. Cowardice? No need to sell it here buddies – we got enough. We will take our shoes off in the airport; we will allow you to body search our toddlers and our grandmothers –because it makes us believe we are safe. We believe in Santa and the tooth fairy.

We are afraid to allow natural gas into our ports if it comes from Yemen – let’s live on firewood and refuse to trust the Coast Guard with our safety – they cannot be trusted.

We cannot allow gays in the military unless they lie about being gay; Congressman Hunter from California is scared that we might end up with hermaphrodites and transgenders in the military – now that is truly scary. Senator McCain is also concerned – after agreeing to support the military leadership – he has now jumped ship, illustrating the fragility of courage. The fact that Britain’s, Canada’s, Australia’s and Israel’s militaries have no problem with gays makes no impact – this is America – no gays – unless they lie about being gay. Jesus – you cannot make this stuff up.

Eight years of Bush and Cheney and Republican leadership left us with a useless unwinnable war in Iraq with hundreds of thousands dead, an untenable situation in Afghanistan, a horror show in Pakistan, a deficit of $1.2 trillion, an economy dominated by greed at the top and subservience below, a broken healthcare system, a tax system designed to protect the rich and screw everyone else, and a government committed to eliminating civil liberties. And what do we fear? –decent, affordable healthcare that mythically includes death panels; regulating banks that have royally screwed us; a centrist President Obama who some believe to be a socialist – a Muslim, a terrorist, a Kenyon, or God help us – a black. We are not supposed to consider such possibilities but it is time to grow up and smell the garbage. There is a real stink in the country.

A friend suggests that the anti fluoride folks must have been right and that it is why people are losing their sanity. They fear foreigners, immigrants – legal and illegal; any suggested change of the status quo; terrorists both real and imagined; mythical socialists, black political leaders. Fortunately for them, there is a standing army of banal and venal politicians and newscasters ready to march to the Fox Drummers. We are truly screwed.

Is Massachusetts Turning Red?

The special election to fill Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat has apparently become surprisingly close. At least that is what the pundits are saying. Massachusetts has a health care program similar to the national program being hammered out in the Congress, allows same-sex marriage, voted overwhelmingly for Obama, and has not sent a Republican to the U.S. Senate since Ed Brooke was defeated for re-election in 1979.

Scott Brown, the Republican candidate is a state senator with a not especially compelling record but has run an aggressive campaign with considerable outside support from conservatives. He has vowed to be the 41st vote against national healthcare reform, does not support abortion rights, runs Cheney-style terrorist threat ads in his National Guard uniform, opposes same sex marriage, and once sponsored an amendment in the state senate to allow hospital staff to refuse contraception to rape victims.

Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate, has run a bland campaign until recently and has belatedly stepped up her rhetoric. If Massachusetts goes against its historic liberal roots, it will be a nasty wake-up call to Democrats nationwide and could signal the beginning of the end of the Obama presidency. While this seems unlikely it is now a possibility.  No one would have predicted this scenario when Senator Kennedy died.

Oh Afghanistan

A. J. Liebling wrote about Afghanistan as the place the press wrote about when they had space to fill, no news to fill it, and a subject to write about that absolutely no one gave a shit about. So again time changes and we not so suddenly have to worry about Afghanistan, a place few of us has visited and even fewer of us really wish to visit.

President Obama has now presented his plan for our continued involvement in that country and it was a pretty slick presentation. The press is beating its collective something or other about it but basically he said it is over. We will send 30,000 troops there to fill in for the Bush-Cheney failure and then start to get all of them out of what has turned out to be a monster mess. The focus of the press after the speech has been on the selling of whatever he is doing to all the political players. John McCain, a man wrong about every major issue he has discussed is uneasy – that is a good sign for the Obama decision. Some Republicans think he should never had indicated we might actually be smart enough to leave in good time – I guess better to believe we are a bunch of morons.

But it was a refreshing speech that did not talk down to us, did not bullshit us through false patriotism from neocon chicken hawks and – for a change – did not lie to us about our safety and the strength of our enemies. The battle against terrorists remains in play but there is new evidence that we have leadership that is smart, sophisticated and unwilling to pander to the underbelly of American society.

Thanksgiving Press/Media Turkey Wrap-Up

The past week has offered the press  several grand stories giving them the opportunity to downplay or avoid much of substance, and they have not disappointed.

First was the spectacle of the press falling all over itself to provide attention to a polo-playing, self-promoting couple from Virginia who managed to crash the White House state dinner held for the Prime Minister of India. Lost in the obsession with that banal, stupid escapade was the relative importance of much that is at stake with the U.S.-India relationship. The reasons for the importance of that relationship will be lost on most Americans as they hear non-stop about a couple of weird narcissists.

Following that story was the tale of a professional golfer driving into a tree at – gasp! – 2:30 a.m. – the morning after Thanksgiving. The press has been having a field day with this tale, wondering why he was out driving at that time of night? And could there be some domestic abuse involved? and, is he having an affair? And what will happen to his “brand”? And then covering their collective ass by going on ad nauseum as to whether the press was entitled to knowing everything there is to know about the golfer’s private life – having already speculated on that life without any real facts.

And of course there has been the mind-crushing coverage of Sarah Palin’s book which apparently will be bought by millions of Americans and perhaps even read by some of them, although one can hope the books mostly become doorstops. In any case the publishing event of the fall gave the press an opportunity to rehash some of the former VP candidate’s nutty comments and in its own way to help whip up interest in the book. So it goes.

Democracy is Coming to the U.S.A.

From the wars against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
Leonard Cohen

Three weeks on the road was a welcome break from the silliness of American politics but back home in the U. S. of A. and time to begin to catch up.

Good to see our old friend Joe “LOOK AT ME!” Lieberman once again finding a way to suck himself onto the national stage. While it is difficult to imagine his doing more damage than his unbridled support of the unnecessary and ultimately failed war in Iraq, his fighting to deny health care insurance to 36 million Americans is a pretty good start. Coming from the state that is home to 72 insurance headquarters, with three times the U.S. average of insurance jobs as a percent of total state employment I suppose it should not be surprising. Nor should we be surprised by his pompous, pontifical commitment to self-interest.

Also good to see the state of Maine – population 1.3 million (or ca. .004% of U. S. population) finding itself one of the chief arbiters of  health care reform through its Senator Olympia Snow. Having watered down the stimulus package to satisfy Maine’s other Senator, Susan Collins, Senate Democrats seem to be doing all they can to emasculate the health care bill to satisfy Senator Snow. All in the name of a kind of faux bipartisanship.

Then there is the Catholic Church hierarchy and its willingness to threaten the fires of hell on any Catholic senator ignoring its health care reform abortion edicts. This from the church that discriminates against women, forces celibacy on its priests, facilitated thousands of pedophiliac rapes, seems to believe that condoms increase the risk of HIV infection, and actually still believes birth control to be a sin.

One highlight of our recent travels: sitting in a Munich apartment watching CNN’s Wolf Blitzer spend an entire hour interviewing the balloon boy and his family about the great fabricated adventure that managed to suck Wolf into a kind of parallel universe where truth is irrelevant and a family’s bizarre hope for attention is satisfied by a lazy, gullible press, willing to track an empty balloon for hours on end only to learn that they were the victims of a fraud. This turned out to be perhaps the funniest TV show of the year. Can’t wait for the Emmys.

2009: The Summer of Hate

Autumn has not come soon enough. The summer of 2009 was characterized by some of the ugliest and most stupid political nonsense that the country has ever had to put up with. Birthers question Obama’s citizenship and search for evidence of his secret African, Muslim birth certificate; Obama’s efforts to reshape a disastrously expensive and inadequate healthcare program has turned into accusations that he wishes to organize death panels to move the country toward forced government-run euthanasia; dumbbell radio has initiated rumors that Obama is plotting to put conservative, white voters in prisons, etc. ad nauseum.  Republican senators and congressmen are making careers out of outright lies and there are enough people looking for reasons to hate Obama that those lies find fertile ground. Former Governor Palin continues to shock us with her vapid stupidity and ugly posturing, Senator Grassley suggests that death panels might actually be in the wind, South Carolina gives us a Congressional mediocrity who shouts “you lie” at Obama and thousands of less than ordinary people march in Washington shouting stupidities and lies into the TV microphones. “Town Hall” meetings to discuss healthcare reform frequently included the sideshow of idiots with guns, roaring their disapproval of healthcare reform while screaming their rights to carry assault rifles to political rallies. What do we do with people who rant they want no government role in healthcare and in the next breath rave about keeping government’s hands off their Medicare? What can be said to people who in one breath call Obama  “Hitler” and in the next, “Stalin”? What can we make of Fox cable commentators that promote the lie that Obama  wants America to be a “socialist” country – or even a communist country? Or that Obama “hates white people”?

American politics has always had its nutcases but mostly they have been on the fringe and political parties have tolerated them while trying to maintain at least a moderately high road of discussion and dissent. This is no longer the case with Republican politicians milking the cow of hatred and fear to further their meager agendas and much of the press reporting their lies and fabrications as if they deserve equal time. The current healthcare debate is the focus of much of the ugliness and it seems increasingly likely that we will get a watered down mess of a bill that will fail to reduce costs and improve quality largely because of the stupidity of a small portion of the country, the cowardice and venality of politicians on both sides of the aisle, and the pathetic performance of a mainstream press that focused on process issues and largely avoided calling out the liars.

A more general question is why such ugliness? Has any president in memory been insulted, lied about, and threatened the way Obama has? There has always been a robust political discourse in America but the current atmosphere is different – and I join Maureen Dowd who in today’s NY Times calls it by its hidden name: racism.

Press Clips: The Professor, the Policeman, the President and the Press

In case anyone was on Mars and missed it, the big story the past week was the arrest of African-American Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. for “Disorderly Conduct” (that is defined as “whatever the police think it is”) when caught living in his own home. But that story only became the REALLY BIG one when President Obama opined in response to a press questioner that it appeared to him that the “police acted stupidly”. This has led to the press bombarding us with critiques of the president’s choice of words and lengthy displays of support for the country’s brave policemen. Only later did some of the press consider the realities of black men’s history with the police in this country and the press largely missed the point by focusing initially on the “acted stupidly” comment and then on the race issue – but with no real depth of understanding. Perhaps the most sensible comments were from Christopher Hitchens in the online journal, Slate, in which he reminded readers of the constitutional guarantee of a “man’s home as his castle”, that there is “no legal requirement to be polite in the defense of this right”, that police are not always drawn from the best and brightest (my paraphrase of his comments), and that “Gates should have taken his stand on the Bill of Rights and not on his epidermis or that of the arresting officer”

Read Hitchens’ full piece at this link.

Walter Cronkite and Intelligent TV Journalism, RIP

On hearing that Cronkite had died almost my first thought was that we will never have another like him – honest, a real journalist, modest, – a guy who simply and effectively reported the actual news. Hard to know what he would have made of Sarah Palin, the Senate hearings on Judge Sotomayor, the death of Michael Jackson, or the meanderings of Governor Sanford. My hope and belief is that he would have nailed Palin as a fraud, spent 2 minutes on Michael Jackson, largely ignored the sins of Governor Sanford and castigated the old, white, Southern male Senators who embarrassed us throughout the Sotomayor hearings.

Iran and Mucho Macho Americano

Whenever I forget how pitiful the American press has become I turn to PBS’s Lehrer Report knowing that Judy Woodruff is likely to remind me. While I largely avoided cable TV and network news talk shows during the Iran election fallout I had noted in the NY Times and Washington Post the comments of various Republican politicians to the effect that the president had not been “forceful” enough in his comments on the Iranian elections. (Much like foreign leaders had not been forceful enough in discussing the U.S. presidential election of 2000 when our Supreme Court handed the presidency to G. W. Bush, rather than bother to count the votes in Florida.) Comments came from the usual suspects, Senators McCain and Graham, Representatives Boehner and Kantor, Newt Gingrich, right-wing neocon columnists like George Will and Charles Krauthammer, and of course the usual blowhard media types on Fox TV and dumbbell radio.

Obama’s point – that it was strategically essential to avoid making the U.S. the outside force to be blamed for the demonstrations – was lost on these political hacks and we were treated to the predictable displays of American artificial testosterone. Virtually every credible Iran analyst supported Obama’s approach and assessed it as correct, as did Indiana Republican Senator Lugar – one of a diminishing number of Republican Senators with foreign policy bonafides.

Understanding a difficult, complex situation in Iran requires more effort than most Americans will give to it and unfortunately more effort than most of the American press will put into it. The attraction for simple-minded blowhards to spout meaningless slogans is too strong for a country that long ago decided to see all events through a strictly American prism. This is just the time for PBS to step up and provide the kind of background and intelligence needed to sort through the complexities. Lehrer and Woodruff gave us what they too often fall back on – an interview of two politicians (Senators Graham and Kerry) on opposite sides to argue about things that more often than not avoid any prospect of actually educating the viewer about anything other than where the two stand on whatever is defined as the issue. Woodruff’s interview served to carry the GOP’s water, asking in two or three different ways just why Obama did not speak out more strongly. Senator Graham was all over that while Senator Kerry did as well as could be expected to educate the viewers on some of the realities of the situation.

It is perhaps unfair to pick on Woodruff when so many of her colleagues in the press bow to the same gods of vacuity and simplicity (anyone who watched the Obama’s press conference can attest to that), but we used to expect more from PBS than mind-numbing, self-serving debates by politicians.

For anyone seeking an intelligent, instructional and nuanced view of the Iranian situation and Obama’s response to it, I recommend Terry Gross’s interview yesterday of Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Listen to it here.