Politics and Press

The interaction of the press and politics; public diplomacy, and daily absurdities.

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The Emperor and the cuckoo bird

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Now let’s get this straight. A monumentally thuggish North African political regime, that blew up a British passenger plane not long ago and is trusted by nobody, arrests five completely innocent Bulgarian nurses and a Palestinian doctor, accuses them of infecting 400 children with Aids, who were actually infected by unhygienic hospital conditions, sentences them to death by getting confessions after medieval torturing, throws them in unspeakable jails for eight years, and finally decides it can use them to blackmail the European Union, which reluctantly negotiates an agreement costing 1 Million Dollars per infected child. These depressing negotiations are undertaken by EU officials over the course of a couple of years, and reach fruition during the presidency of Germany. Thus Angela Merkel is ultimately responsible for negotiating the agreement, which leads to the freeing of the six prisoners.

But who is it who shows up in Libya for the photo-op at the liberation of the prisoners? Why it’s none other than Cecilia Sarkozy, newly-crowned first lady of France, who has flown in on her husband’s private jet to revel in the glory at the liberation. Now she has played no role in all this, and neither has her husband or for that matter, France, other than its supposed membership in the EU. France’s former Minister to the EU, Pierre Moscovici, notes: “Sarkozy has taken on the strategy of the cuckoo, the bird who lays its eggs in other birds’ nests.”

Ariane Mnouchkine, France’s leading theatre person and the director of the Théatre de soliel, put it this way as she turned down the position offered to her to become the Chaired Professor of Theatre at the College de France, a call that she had received 8 months before, but which needed the approval of the President of France to become valid. When she received Sarkozy’s document, which made it seem like he had annointed her, she wrote the following:
“Nicolas Sarkozy has turned us into collaborators by attempting to curry favour with anyone played up by the media – artists and others. That is unacceptable. Therefore I must turn down the offer of this position, which had pleased me so much…. The whole world saw what happened with the Bulgarian nurses; they tried to make us believe that it was the President of France who had engineered this agreement when every one knows that the diplomats of the European Union had been working at it for years. It’s high time that Sarkozy stops trying to make us believe that he’s the one who makes things happen.”

Oh yes one more thing. On the day after his wife flew to Libya, the President himself showed up there, shared a brotherly kiss with the Libyan leader, and announced that France would supply Libya with a nuclear reactor to be built by French engineers on the coast near Tripoli. It turns out he does make things happen.

The Brits bring Culture to the Primitive East

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Ryan Air and its copycats have made it possible, and now its easy for anyone to leave the British Isles and travel to continental Europe for next to nothing to demonstrate to the local bumpkins the state of British culture in the twenty-first century. No sooner have eastern European countries, long neglected under the Soviets , restored their finest urban centres to something approaching the splendour of pre-Soviet days, than British hordes book dirt-cheap flights for their stag parties, descend drunkenly with the hens, as they call their mademoiselles, on the restored centres of cities like Bratislava, Krakau, Riga, or Talinn, and do their best to demolish them. It used to be the British football fans who were the chief hooligans, but recent failures at west European events like last year’s peaceful and heavily-policed football World Cup in Germany have convinced the lads to test lesser security forces to the east.
Spectacular Prague was the first to fall, long since having lost its innocence to what the Süddeutsche Zeitung calls “the locusts from the islands”. Now Prague must close down its famous and beautiful Karlsbrücke for a long time as it tries to repair the damage done to it, which includes heavy-duty vandalism of the centuries-old statues that line the bridge. Prague police have also been confronted with Clockwork-Orange inspired beatings by howling British drunks of Czech beggars. But Prague is already old hat and now the cities being invaded are further east and even more vulnerable since the police are not prepared for such hooliganism.
My brother and I can still clearly remember the British gentlemen who were sent out to bring civilization to the colonies in places like India, Kenya and Canada. They may have seemed a bit eccentric on foreign turf, but they were certainly not loutish, dangerous drunks. This current version of those Colonel Blimps makes the old group seem almost charming.

Murdock’s Outrageous Outage

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Two weeks ago Bill Moyers saved a bit of time on his weekly PBS show, Bill Moyers’ Journal, to blast Rupert Murdock and his proposed take-over of The Wall Street Journal. As Moyers stated,

“[Murdock is] not the first to use journalism to promote his own interests. His worst offense with FOX News is not even its baldly partisan agenda. Far worse is the travesty he’s made of its journalism. FOX News huffs and puffs, pontificates and proclaims, but does little serious original reporting. His tabloids sell babes and breasts, gossip and celebrities. Now he’s about to bring under the same thumb one of the few national newsrooms remaining in the country.”

Well, just this Friday, Rupert Murdock got Moyers back – at least that’s my sneaking suspicion. Moyers’ Journal began normally enough this past Friday. It comes into my home via DirecTV which, like FOX, is owned by Murdock. Less than five minutes into Moyers’ show, my screen went black. Then DirecTV put up an announcement on screen warning viewers not to call DirecTV – that our local station was having technical difficulties.
Now, understand that DirecTV provides great video service. It fails occasionally during a heavy rain or snow storm when the satellite signal may be blocked, but in the 10-12 years I have been a subscriber to DirecTV I cannot remember a time when a single station went dark. I was suspicious immediately because I watched Moyers blast Murdock two weeks ago – and because the subject of Moyers show this night was the impeachment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney. Rupert Murdock is a great supporter of Bush and was one of the loudest supporters of Bush’s invasion of Iraq, claiming that the greatest thing to come out of the war would be “$20 a barrel for oil.”
I immediately thought Murdock’s DirecTV may have dumped Moyers’ show from the air. Luckily I had a tv in the house that used an antenna to pull in signals off the air. With the cause of the blackout, according to DirecTV, local tv station technical difficulties, I wasn’t sure Moyer’s Journal would be viewable on my other tv set but I gave it a try. Lo and behold, I could watch Moyers’ show on my 2nd set – apparently the “local tv signal difficulties” did not extend beyond DirecTV. I learned subsequently that cable subscribers did not lose service either – just Murdock’s DirecTV subscribers like me. That night, on Moyers Journal, Bruce Fein, a conservative Reaganite, and John Nichols of the Nation magazine put forth the argument that impeachment was necessary to pull the country back from the illegalities and excesses of this Administration. It was an excellent show even if you may not agree with the arguments of the two program guests [note that one was conservative and one liberal – for all the criticism, Moyers’ programs are exceptionally balanced].
Bill Moyers has had a lot to contend with just to bring his ideas to tv. First it was Bush appointee Tomlinson and his actions as Chief of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Now, it appears Murdock has Moyers in his sights. But this is not just a concern of Bill Moyers – everyone should think long and hard whether someone like Rupert Murdock is good for this country. Can we really afford to have so much media power in the hands of a single individual – particularly a single individual like Rupert Murdock?

Canada goes to war

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Sixty-six Canadian soldiers have died in Afghanistan. The death of each one of them has received front-page coverage in leading Canadian papers, and the CBC runs the risk of becoming repetitive with its films of funerals and returning coffins. Sixty times as many US soldiers have died in Iraq, but in total their stories have probably not been told as prominently, movingly and dramatically as have those of the dead Canadian soldiers in their home media.
The US effort in Iraq now surely seems doomed to catastrophic failure, at least partly because, as Senator Joe Biden recently put it, Americans have lost any desire to keep sending their kids to their deaths in the meat grinder of Iraq. At the same time the Canadian armed forces are having no trouble finding record numbers of recruits, despite the daily scenes of violence and death in Afghanistan. There is certainly some opposition to the war in Afghanistan. The socialist NDP Party wants the troops brought home immediately, the opposition Liberal Party wants a withdrawal at the end of the current mandate in 2009. But in general there is a perhaps surprising amount of general public support for the sudden display of Canadian military strength in what is considered a just cause.
Prime Minister Harper announced this week that Canada would design and build, at a cost of 3-4 billion dollars, 6-8 frigates with moderate ice-breaking capabilities to patrol Canada’s increasingly threatened Arctic water routes, particularly the Northwest Passage. For the first time, a Canadian submarine will be present in the Arctic this summer and Harper has promised to build a deepwater port in the Arctic. Critics of Harper’s announcements demanded more not less for the Arctic, including the 3 full icebreakers he had claimed he would build. These are enormous expenses for the world’s second-largest country, with one-tenth the US population, caught in the Arctic between the first and third largest, both of whom have shown they can afford nuclear ice breakers. But it seems to be an expense that Canadian citizens are willing to pay and that’s at least partly because the Canadian military has managed to begin to regain something of the stature it once enjoyed as a result of its powerful presence in both the First and Second World Wars. It may not yet be punching above its weight, as it did back then, but it seems at least to be returning to the weight class to which it rightfully belongs

The Catastrophic Near Miss

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Italian prime Minister Romano Prodi called the compromise solution to the European Union’s attempt to settle its endless bureaucratic wrangling over national and European-wide powers a step backwards. Europe, he suggested, had fallen into a situation in which some countries put their own national interests first while others presented those of Europe, whatever that now may mean. There is no question about who he meant by the former. Poland had made its intentions to play the spoiler clear for the last couple of months, and Great Britain, with Tony Blair leading it for the last time, once again in the end played an anti-Europe card which left mainland Europe wondering if the island kingdom really ever considered itself part of Europe.

In the end all 27 countries signed onto a compromise (otherwise there would be no rules of order for the EU today) which many, like former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, felt “hardly avoided a total catastrophe.” If there was anyone who came out of this event looking good, it was German Kanzlerin Angela Merkel, who piloted the leaking ship of state with more patience and expertise than most would have imagined not long ago, and managed to sail it into some kind of safe harbour for the time being. Unfortunately for the EU, her term of office as president of the EU runs out on July 1, and her successor will have to have the patience of Job and the wisdom of Solomon to get that ship back on a stable course.

Mitt Romney: All Suit, No Man??

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His no-hair-out-of-place look has led some to refer to Mitt Romney as “Governor Perfect”. But former Governor of Massachusetts Mitt Romney has not-so-subtly shifted positions from middle of the road to far right on abortion, stem cell research, gun control, civil unions for gay couples, homosexual adoption, and birth control privacy laws, among others. He has added support for the Iraq adventure to his current repertoire as he courts the right wing of the GOP for primary votes and it is apparent that he will do almost anything, take on any view and change any opinion, to reach the White House.

What would candidate Romney look like in a general election when the extreme right has less influence and any GOP candidate must gain support from independents? He has said that his positions have “evolved” since he left the governorship of Massachusetts and it is probable that they will evolve backwards as time and events demand. He is one more in a long (and growing) line of presidential candidates with no central core of beliefs and should have a large sign on the back of his suit: “Voter Beware”.

In 1968 George Romney, Mitt’s father, was a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination and discovered very late in the game that supporting the Vietnam War was a loser of an issue so he changed his mind, claiming that he had been “brainwashed” by the military (Gene McCarthy commented that a “light rinse would of sufficed”).

Seems like the Romney genes are intact, but going through life on a haircut and a smile do not make for a good president. Now it is up to the American press to put on their big-boy pants and start dealing with issues and the political history of all the candidates and forget about suits, haircuts, slick commercials, and canned responses aimed at narrow interest groups.

Clarification from the Resident-in-Chief

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“In terms of a deadline, there needs to be one. It needs to happen.”
— George W. Bush, June 9, 2007, on the urgency of completing UN talks on the future of Kosovo
“I don’t think I called for a deadline…I did? What exactly did I say? I said ‘deadline?’…OK. Yes, then I meant what I said.”
— George W. Bush, asked about his statement the next day

Horror Show on the Streets

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During the soccer world championships a year ago in Germany, there was general euphoria and pride among the Germans that the atmosphere had been so serene and that there was almost no sign of the hooliganism that has plagued – some would say ruined – the European national sport in the UK, Italy, the Netherlands, and elsewhere. The German police made a great and ultimately successful effort to keep the usual British suspect-thugs from entering Germany or at least from getting into the stadiums. But there was one aspect of the law and order campaign that continues to be very disturbing – people of colour, and other obvious outsiders, whether athletes or fans, were advised not to stray far from secure areas in former East German cities like Leipzig, where the only only venue in the former DDR was located. The reason was clear for anyone used to life in West and East Germany – the Neo-Nazis had strongholds in parts of East Germany that were unimaginable in western cities like Munich, where one would be stunned to see Neo-Nazis, outfitted in their military paraphernalia, unless they were surrounded by Munich police who were keeping angry protesters away from them.
That this is not the case in eastern Germany was made grotesquely clear on the weekend in Halberstadt, a small city in Sachsen-Anhalt that is considered to be a centre of Neo-Nazi strength, 100 kilometers northwest of Leipzig. The state theatre there put on a performance of the Rocky Horror Picture Show on Friday evening. At 3:00 on Saturday morning, 14 members of the ensemble, on their way home from the post-premiere party, were attacked on the main street of the city by a drunken horde of Neo-Nazis. Five musicians, actors and dancers were so badly beaten that, with broken bones and severe bruises, they ended up in the hospital. One actor, who was wearing a Mohawk hair cut because of his theatre role, had his nose broken. According to eyewitness accounts, police did eventually show up at the scene of the crime, but did little to stop it. Eventually one 22-year old with a record of violent assaults and wearing the traditional bomber jacket, was first arrested and then set free.
No motive could be found other than that the theatre group seemed to be having too good a time, and perhaps the mob didn’t like the Mohawk because they felt it mocked them. The scandal was large enough for the premier of Sachsen-Anhalt to join the chorus of critics of the police, and the suspect was arrested again on Sunday evening, admitted his part in the beatings, but wouldn’t identify any colleagues. As it turned out, in April a young lad wearing a bomber jacket had attacked a young girl sitting in a bus on her way home from a music lesson. Well he did not actually attack the girl, but rather her cello, which he proceeded to smash in a thousand pieces. Now that there are virtually no Jews left in this part of Germany, it seems that anybody considered different – Africans, Turks, gays, actors, artists, cellos – can be openly attacked and the police don’t seem to want to do much about it.

Scooter – Holy Cow, they’re locking him up

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Scooter the Second [Scooter the First being Phil Rizzuto, of course] has been convicted of lying to the grand jury and sentenced this week to 2 and a half years behind bars. I don’t think many people thought much about his plight or really cared how severe a sentence he would receive. And, as it turns out, the severity of the sentence should have been no surprise, in part because he had a bunch of clowns, incompetents, and criminals in his corner as character references. Appearing on Scooter’s behalf through letters and other testimonials were the usual suspects, all of whom cited Scooter as a family man, a dedicated public servant, and specifically not an idealogue. How do we know this? Because the likes of Richard Pearle and Douglas Feith [manipulators of US foreign policy in the middle east and instigators of the disasterous Iraq invasion] said so. So did Donald Rumsfeld [the man responsible for sending 125,000 men and women to do a job that would have been tough for 500,000 – and then never acknowledging his deadly errors]. But the creme of the bunch is Henry Kissinger, he of Cambodia invasion fame [2 million dead by the time the Kymer Rouge finally lost power] and the government official who approved the overthrow of Salvador Allende [assassinated during the takeover] and the installation of the murderous Pinochet in Chile [and the subsequent deaths of thousands]. Kissinger said in defense of Libby that he knew what it was like, with all the pressures of federal service, to “forget” how and when things happened. Let us never forget the role of Kissinger in the darker pages of US history. It continues to amaze how he, like a bad penny, keeps cropping up.

The New Europe Takes Shape

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The photo chosen to dominate the first page of the weekend edition of the Süddeutsche Zeitung speaks volumes. Beneath a blazing headline – “Scharfe Töne zwischen Merkel und Putin (Sharp notes between Merkel and Putin)” – is a satisfied-looking couple. They are about the same height, the woman appears friendly and relatively self-assured, but she looks rather frumpy and certainly does not exude power. The man next to her, however, does. He is dressed in a perfect suit, his legs spread apart in the pose of a colossus, his eyes hidden by mysterious sunglasses, and behind him, in what the Süddeutsche calls “a beloved backdrop”, the Volga River flows down to the sea. We are in Samara, until 1942 the centre of German-Russia where the Volga Germans had their own republic in the Soviet Union. The Russians, represented by Wladimir Putin, are meeting with the European Union and his partner is German Kanzlerin Angela Merkel.
Putin and Merkel speak German together and don’t need an interpreter. In the past they have gotten along much better than any important European leader other than Tony Blair has been able to get along with George Bush. But the constellation of the new Europe, with Russia taking on an increadingly central and potentially threatening role as keeper of the natural resources that Europe so desperately needs, is no longer as comfortable as it was when Putin came to power seven years ago. The alpha male of Europe, with its black-belt leader, has concluded that it has reached the point in its return to economic stability where it can display its teeth and claws for the perusal of its much smaller European neighbours. So far it has been the smallest of them – Georgia, Latvia and especially Estonia – which have gotten the clearest signals that the wolf has left its lair, but Germany, the only other European power that could seriously imagine itself in the alpha male role, learned its lesson sixty years ago and is unlikely to put a male with sunglasses back in power. Tony Blair’s farcical attempt to fill the position by acting as Bush’s lackey in Iraq – Germany. France and Canada said no thanks – only confirmed the world view that the illusion of former power cripples the UK in all its foreign endeavours. The next in line, Nicolas Sarkozy, upon becoming French President said he was going to meditate in a monestary for a few days. He was then caught by the press vacationing on a yacht belonging to a millionaire friend near Malta, as the French suburbs once again erupted in violent protest Cynics are waiting with baited breath for the results of his first meeting with Putin, which will occur in June in Baltic Germany at the annual meeting of the eight leading industrial powers. No one is betting that the French will impress Russia with their latest entry into the Judo ring, where Putin holds that black belt.