Politics and Press

As The General Speaks His Mind, Journalists Lose Theirs

“[McCain] hasn’t held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded — that wasn’t a wartime squadron. I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.”

Retired General Wesley Clark set off a brief firestorm over the weekend with the above quote and Senator McCain and the press immediately went nuts. Now, it is easy to understand that McCain would be a little upset since having been shot down and suffered imprisonment seems to be one of his most salient features, but what the hell is wrong with the press?

One can parse Clark’s quote a thousand times and still not come to the conclusion that he was saying anything other than what he said – that “…getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is [not] a qualification to become president.” But the print and TV press went bozo over it, implying that to have said that was to criticize McCain’s service to the country, thereby implying that getting in a plane getting shot down actually IS a presidential qualification.

Having gone through a long, tedious primary season we now look forward to the familiar process of the press avoiding analysis of issues and focusing on the “horse race” via the meaningless minutia that the press deems worthy of blowing up into something superficially serious.

It will most likely be ugly, nasty, and stupid. And come next January we will have a new president who will most likely have been elected without benefit of a smart, sophisticated, analytical press.

Campaign ’08: The Other Edwards Speaks Out

Sunday’s NY Times carried an Op Ed piece by Elizabeth Edwards (Bowling 1, Health Care 0) on the role of the press in the campaign and it is a dandy. It is no secret that she is a smart and honorable woman who is widely admired by people on both sides of the political aisle but the skill and grace with which she skewers the press is remarkable.

She suggests that we are getting a kind of “Cliffs Notes of the news”, and that the press’s group decision to ignore serious candidates like Senators Biden, Dodd and Brownback simply eliminated them from serious consideration leaving the press to its search for various personality cults. As she says:

The decision was probably made by the same people who decided that Fred Thompson was a serious candidate. Articles purporting to be news spent thousands upon thousands of words contemplating whether he would enter the race, to the point that before he even entered, he was running second in the national polls for the Republican nomination. …

…Watching the campaign unfold, I saw how the press gravitated toward a narrative template for the campaign, searching out characters as if for a novel: on one side, a self-described 9/11 hero with a colorful personal life, a former senator who had played a president in the movies, a genuine war hero with a stunning wife and an intriguing temperament, and a handsome governor with a beautiful family and a high school sweetheart as his bride. And on the other side, a senator who had been first lady, a young African-American senator with an Ivy League diploma, a Hispanic governor with a self-deprecating sense of humor and even a former senator from the South standing loyally beside his ill wife. Issues that could make a difference in the lives of Americans didn’t fit into the narrative template and, therefore, took a back seat to these superficialities.

The next time the NY Times is seeking a regular columnist they could do a lot worse than recruiting Ms. Edwards.

Campaign ’08: A House of Cards

A petty reason perhaps why novelists more and more try to keep a distance from journalists is that novelists are trying to write the truth and journalists are trying to write fiction. - Graham Greene

Watching the first segment of House of Cards, a 1990 BBC series, recently I began to think that I had seen it already, but with an American cast. In the British version Ian Richardson plays Francis Urquhart (“F.U.” in the headlines) a tough, cynically self-serving Member of Parliament bent on gathering as much personal power as possible regardless of the cost to other politicians or his country.

I was particularly struck with the portrayal of a young, ambitious reporter who unwittingly becomes one of F.U.’s tools in destroying his political enemies. Urquhart simply provides her with “off-the-record” information that she then uses to beat up on whomever is next on Urquhart’s list. It is all easy work for her and effective politics for Urquhart.

And a lesson for all journalists covering today’s political campaigns in America: do what it takes to get “access” to the players, jump on anything smacking of scandal, pump it up and by furthering the interests of your “player”, enhance your own career. House of Cards has become a playbook for many of today’s American politicians and their friends in the press but it is a helluva lot more entertaining as fiction.

Campaign ’08:It’s the Press Stupid - And Vice Versa

Last week’s debacle that barely passed for a debate on ABC is one more piece of evidence that we are stuck with a press and media that are committed to the avoidance of intelligent discussion of serious issues. The ingredients that are inexorably moving this election into a kind of fantasy-land of mind-numbing trivialities are all in place: lazy reporters playing off candidates’ criticisms of their opponents; the media’s willingness – no, eagerness - to pump up meaningless side issues like lapel pins and nutty ministers; endless hours of so-called analysts on cable TV pimping for their own candidates; an over-reliance on vapid man-in-the-street interviews and apparently an almost total unwillingness to explore serious issues in depth.

Senator Clinton’s campaign has mismanaged itself into a Rovian corner from which it is reduced to calling her opponent schoolyard names, hinting at character flaws in Obama (then denying she did any such thing) and feeding the lazy but hungry press with tiny little issues that they can then blow up into earth-shattering issues. That the Clinton campaign is deficient in honesty and seriousness is of course no surprise – it informed their earlier incarnation and for the most part people do not change. The Obama campaign has been caught in the position of having to defend the Senator on trivial issues, has not done a good job at it, and has become increasingly and obviously frustrated which simply feeds the beast.

But the really discouraging part of the situation is the complicity of the press in directing the interest of the voters towards meaningless issues while helping them avoid doing the hard work of thinking about real issues. This is old news but given the state of the country we need more and better not the same old crap. Now it is on to Indiana, another state where flag pins, nutty ministers, bin Laden and the over-rated threat of Iran can be used to pump up the volume and drown out serous discussion of serious issues.

PBS GOES ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL

It is easy to despair over Fox News and less easy but still readily possible to despair over CBS, NBC and ABC news. But there has always been this sense that PBS would raise the bar – would be serious and discuss real issues. Sorry – that is no longer the case. Witness the Lehrer Report.

Tonight Judy Woodruff covered – for an endless and painful twenty minutes – the South Carolina Democratic primary. Having sat through that - whatever it was - I can say with some authority that issues in the South Carolina Democratic primary do not exist. I would have thought that there were issues around Iraq, the economy, education, and health care, but no. The issues are first of all, are more people going out to hear Bill Clinton prostitute himself in support of loyal wife and next-in-line in the dynasty, or going to Southern Baptist churches to sing and clap for the candidates.

And how does the Lehrer Report analyze this primary? Why the cheapest and safest way possible – the tried and true man/woman in the street approach. “Why, Ahh believe that Bill Clinton is the first black president” or “Obama will bring us all together”. Good lord – what is this all about? Why would any sane person contribute to PBS to give us this mindless puff (as compared to the good work of Bill Moyers)? Woodruff interviewed what seemed like a thousand citizens of S. Carolina, almost none of them interested in discussing a serious issue. And we end up with a kind of horse race with Woodruff as the track tout babbling about something neither she nor we know anything more about tonight then we did before PBS went into boredom mode.

IRAQ: THE MYTH OF THE SURGE

‘Why should we hear about body bags and deaths and how many, what day it’s gonna happen?'’ Mrs. Bush declared. ‘’It’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?'’ – Barbara Bush, commenting to Dianne Sawyer in March 2003

Conservatives, neo-cons, and ordinary journalists have recently flocked to flack the success of the “Surge” in Iraq.  Columnists like the NY Times’ new neo-con voice of balance, William Kristol and the Boston Globe’s neo-con voice, Jeff Jacoby, are among those declaring the U.S. winners in Iraq in a print replay of Bush’s  2003 “Mission Accomplished” aircraft carrier speech. And recently more serious analysts who applaud the surge and ignore history have joined their voices.

The success of the surge is a 4th quarter field goal in a game being lost by 30 points. Makes you feel good to get on the scoreboard, gives the kicker a moment of pride and the cheerleaders a chance to strut their stuff. But the game is lost and most of the crowd has left the stadium.

The war began in 2003 on a lie –no weapons of mass destruction – certainly no nuclear threat. When no WMD were found, the rationale shifted to “spreading democracy” in the region. When it became apparent that that was bogus it shifted to going after Al Quada whose existence in Iraq was a direct result of the U.S. invasion.

The Times’ Kristol views the war as virtually won, writing in the Times that. “…Because the U.S. sent more troops instead of withdrawing — because, in other words, President Bush won his battles in 2007 with the Democratic Congress — we have been able to turn around the situation in Iraq…”. Jacoby writes in the Globe ”THE NEWS from Iraq has been so encouraging in recent months that last week even the mainstream media finally sat up and took notice…” And in fact, the “mainstream media” (whatever the hell that is) in general views the surge as proof that the war is being won.

Well, hold on there. Looking at costs and benefits– something the administration and the press are loathe to do – reminds us of the long term and continuing damage done to legitimate and serious national interests. The sole benefit to the Iraq fiasco might be the removal of Saddam Hussein from the scene. While this is a potential benefit to the Iraqi people as a whole it is not clear that it benefits the United States other than the psyches of our President, his Vice President and the neo-con chicken hawks.

Saddam’s secular Iraq was not available to Al Quada and served as a buffer to Iran. Al Quada now operates in Iraq, Iran is joining forces with the Iraqi government and a once-secular country is taking on the face of a fundamentalist Islamic country. This is not good news for the U.S. It is simply not easy – if even possible – to find a single major benefit from the adventure.

Costs are a different story:

•    4000 (and growing) American lives;

•    Somewhere between 150,000 and 600,000 Iraqi lives (this latter figure is tough to pin down but assuming the lowest number – the equivalent toll in the U.S. would be 2 and quarter million civilians dead!);

•    An estimated 30,000 seriously wounded Americans (not including those troops coming home with serious mental injuries);

•    Hundreds of thousands of wounded Iraqis;

•    2 million Iraqi refugees in neighboring countries;

•    2 million additional refugees within Iraq;

•    The likelihood of a Civil War if and when American troops leave;

•    The sullying of America’s reputation throughout the world;

•    Iran’s increased influence in the region;

•    Over $2 trillion of U.S. taxpayers’ money spent and committed without increasing taxes to pay for it – leading to an economy in which the dollar is in the toilet, oil is approaching $100/barrel, the U.S. deficit is out of control and the U.S. economy is heading towards a recession (for a discussion of the economic effect of the war see this article from the Milken Institute Review);

•    An over-extended U.S. military with seriously reduced recruitment standards;

•    National embarrassment and shame.

The surge has succeeded in reducing current casualties to a point that apparently is acceptable to the American people and much of the press. Commentators like Kristol and Jacoby do serious damage to their country’s national interests when they promote the continuation of such a disaster.  We deserve better.

Campaign ‘08” Iowa and Schadenfreude

Well, tonight is the night the press has told us that we have been waiting for after many months of political polls, prognostications by the media Big Heads, and TV ads bouncing between stupid and nasty and humorous and stupid. Take your pick from Mitt Romney’s simple-minded gutter politics on pardons and immigration or Mike Huckabee’s ignorant babblings about his own personal Jesus Christ who apparently sends his message to all of Iowa’s evangelicals. One of these guys has to come in second, which provides a measure of Schadenfreude that can only be maintained if the winner then takes gas in New Hampshire.

On the Democratic side we can choose from the so-called “experience” of a former first lady who tells us that she actually met Benazir Bhutto, an African American of some charm who claims to give us “hope” and a lawyer who made huge amounts of money suing corporations who has morphed into the enemy of all special interests. Again, the polls shift and the prognosticators prognosticate. But the press has delivered damned little serious discussion of the real issues and all candidates get away with simple messages, shifting views to satisfy newly discovered constituencies, and mind-bending banalities, many of which are simply not true and some of which are bizarre beyond belief – unless you are an evangelical, literal interpreter of the Bible.

The entire Iowa Caucus process is corrupt and ultimately meaningless. The candidates buy votes in one way or another - they give snow shovels away, they pay for babysitters, they give away meals and transportation – all so that some miniscule percentage of Iowa voters will manage to support someone or other and allow someone or other to go into New Hampshire with the title of “Winner” of a ridiculous process. The press handles all of this in typical fashion – they interview men and women in the street, many of whom cannot seem to make up their mind about anything until the last bell. It seems they have no real connection to a set of political ideals. But there they are on the Lehrer Report babbling about nothing of substance as Judy Woodruff beams in support.

Then there are the questions of why candidates like Joe Biden, Bill Richardson, Dennis Kucinich, Ron Paul, etc. never quite make it into the Iowa polls. And therein is the real scandal. The press anointed the front-runners months ago - largely based on how much money a candidate could raise. It was certainly never based on a review of policy, real experience, judgment and honesty. “Follow the money” is the message and the press has done an enormous disservice to the country with its lemming-like parade over the cliff of celebrity worship (Obama, Clinton, Giuliani) and money worship (Clinton, Romney, Obama).

The Lehrer Report just completed its pre-caucus coverage with comments from a group of academics and two journalist-political operatives (Mark Shields and David Brooks) and it is clear that PBS has gone the route of the rest of the media. It is the Banality Turnpike and it leads to the lemming’s cliff. Nine months to go and then we can consider whether the first thing is to kill all the lawyers or to kill all the journalists. Tough call.

Iowa and Iowans deserve better than this farce – so does America. There has to be a better way to choose leaders – else we end up with another G.W. Bush.

The Romney Watch

Mitt Romney’s money has so far kept him in the first tier of the Republicans running to be the next George W. Bush. But as the campaign goes on – and especially the general election campaign if he should win the nomination – Romney will be faced with serious questions about his religious beliefs and his history of driving companies into bankruptcy for his own benefit. Once he defeated a weak candidate for governor in Massachusetts it did not take long to recognize him as “All Suit, No Man” – a governor with shifting views on just about everything as long as it moved his career along the right path. I refer readers to the two pieces below which take him apart quite nicely. It has become common for the press to refuse to push any candidate on his or her religious beliefs in the mistaken view that such beliefs are too “personal” and irrelevant to an election. George W. Bush told us that God was his mentor and chief advisor. Seems to me to be relevant in making a judgment on his capacity to govern and lead in a complex world. The same should be true for Romney.

Mitt the Mormon: Why Romney Needs to Talk About His Faith
By Christopher Hitchens, Slate

And

Mitt Romney: Will Republicans Elect a Bloodsucking CEO?
By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com

Desperate Acts of a Desperate Man? Bush and Iran

The visit to New York of Iran’s President Ahmadinejad has highlighted America’s paranoid fear of a third-rate clown from a second-tier power. Having placed Iran within his Axis of Evil, President Bush now must deal with the fact that his invasion of Iraq handed Iran the strategic gift of unparalleled influence in the likely Iraq of the future (for a detailed analysis of why this is so, see Peter Galbraith’s The Victor in the October 11 issue of the New York Review of Books).

While the United States begins the long and painful process of coming to grips with the Iraq reality of – at best – stalemate and at worst – defeat, it has proven all too tempting to lay the blame as far away from the White House as possible. And what better place than Tehran? Ergo, the ongoing stories of weapons being smuggled into Iraq from Iran, ignoring the unpleasant fact that the U.S. has basically armed both sides of a civil war in which its own soldiers and marines are caught in the middle. The American press dutifully reports every account of Iranian weapons found in Iraq, joins in the jingoistic threats of bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities and ignores the unpleasant reality that the vast majority of deaths in Iraq can be traced to Sunnis and Shiites killing each other and even some of their own – frequently with American weaponry.

The recent Israeli flyover of Syria led to hints of North Korean-Syrian cooperation on nuclear weapons development; hints  given the same credibility the press gave Saddam’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. At the same time the Cheney wing of the administration sees an opportunity to scuttle the talks with North Korea, something they have tried to do from the beginning of those negotiations. All of which begs the question: what is Bush planning for his swan song?

One possibility is for Bush to continue to pressure for more sanctions on Iran; another would be open direct negotiations with Iran and yet another would be to initiate bombing attacks on Iran’s nuclear and military facilities. At this point it seems the first of these options has been chosen, the second is almost surely not going to happen but the third option remains viable. President Bush is not known for his subtlety of mind – indeed his behavior suggests an impatience with those who disagree with him and a schoolyard bully’s tendency to use others to fight his battles for him – in this case it could be his own Air Force and/or the Israeli Air Force. A bombing attack on Iran would feed some of his more vocal neo-con supporters and leave one more mess for his successor to clean up.

An analyst friend theorized this week that perhaps the best solution to the perceived nuclear threat from Iran would be to do what was done to the Soviet Union in the Cold War: serve notice that a nuclear attack on any country by Iran would be met with subsequent annihilation of the Iranian nation and its people. Détente was never a perfect solution – but it worked for 50 years against a foe a whole lot tougher than Iran and it could possibly put an end to foolish posturing by American politicians and media editorialists.

The Failure of Bush’s Surge

President Bush, his GOP Congressional supporters, and a large proportion of the American news media have cooperated in pulling off the great Petraeus shell game. It goes something like this: you start with 130,000 troops in a failed occupation in Iraq and make a case for a short-term surge of an additional 30,000 troops to provide time for the Iraqis to put together a strong central government with all factions in Iraq sharing power. You report in six months that the surge has been successful and that you expect to begin withdrawing from Iraq in a year or so by removing 30,000 troops. So, of course, we are right back where we started and – at this writing – no closer to a strong government in Iraq than we were a year ago. But the withdrawal of 30,000 troops is an illusion. The U.S. military has simply run out of available troops and 30,000 would need to be removed regardless.

Putting the surge into context requires understanding that there remains no end game strategy from Bush; that the U.S. military is in a highly weakened state with generals predicting problems responding to additional threats; that the violence in Iraq remains high and is mostly not connected Al Queda; that 2 and a half million Iraqis (largely the middle class professionals) have left the country; that the British pulling their troops out of Basra is already leading to increased sectarian violence there; that the cost to the United States will soon be over a trillion dollars; that the war in Afghanistan is suffering due to our inability to supply adequate troops there: that Iran remains the likely big winner in Iraq because of Bush’s inability to even consider the real consequences of his fiasco; that much of the billions spent on reconstruction in Iraq has been wasted on shoddy construction or simply stolen by corrupt contractors; that soon the American military death toll will be over 4,000 and the number of wounded over 30,000; that hundreds of thousands Iraqis have been killed in the aftermath of the invasion; that the basic infrastructure in Iraq is worse than it was under Saddam; and that no longer does anyone use the word “victory” when discussing the future of our efforts in Iraq. It would be impossible to make up a perfect storm of ignorance and arrogance to match what the Bush presidency has done in Iraq.

As for General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker, it is, in my view, wrong to fault them for trying to make the best of the rotten hand dealt to them. They were careful to avoid making the kind of stupid boasts that regularly come from their President – “bring it on”, “mission accomplished”, “we’re kickin ass in Iraq”. etc. – and while they put the best face they could on the situation, the blame must be laid at the President’s desk – with the complicity of the American electorate who elected him not once, but – for God’s sake – twice!