So how does scandal-ridden New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, bullying blowhard extraordinaire, respond to new allegations he knew full well about those lane closings on the George Washington Bridge? Why, by going on the attack, of course, verbally assaulting the man who dared come forth against him, as well as the newspaper that dared report something other than pro-Christie spin:
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, after a low-key initial response to
Friday's explosive allegations about his involvement in a bridge-closing
scandal, mounted an aggressive defense late Saturday afternoon,
attacking The New York Times and a former political ally in an email to
friends and allies obtained by POLITICO.
"Bottom line — David Wildstein will do and say anything to save David Wildstein," the email from the governor's office says, referring to the former appointee who reignited the controversy.
*****
The subject line of the 700-word email from the governor's office is: "5
Things You Should Know About The Bombshell That's Not A Bombshell." It
offers a harshly negative portrayal of Wildstein's character and
judgment.
Oh, but Chris Christie won't do and say anything to save Christie? The man's a massive egomaniac, and he's now watching his presidential ambitions slip away in slow motion.
And of course you knew it was going to be a vicious ad hominem attack like this. Surely you did, if you know Christie at all.
He's like this normally, but with his credibility already shot it would now appear that desperation is settling in.
As far as political reporting goes, the transformation of The New York Times into another Politico -- gossipy, with a right-wing bent, regurgitating Republican talking points and otherwise kowtowing to the right-leaning Beltway establishment -- is almost complete. Okay, okay, the Times has had problems for some time now. Remember when it was regurgitating the Bush-Cheney lies about Iraq, cheerleading the country into a disastrous war? Well, it may not be The Washington Post, which editorially has fully embraced the center-right, but the Times continues to get worse on the political reporting front. And the connection to Politico is clearer than you might think. One of the Times's newest reporters, holding the lofty position of national political correspondent, is none other than Jonathan Martin, who had been at Politico for almost seven years and who was one of the key figures at that mostly wretched place.
And yesterday the Times published -- on Page A1 -- a piece by Martin that is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to find at... Politico. Entitled "Republicans Paint Clinton as Old News for 2016 Presidential Election" for the web version, the piece acts as a vehicle for the latest Republican line of attack on Hillary: her time is done, she's a thing of the past, she's way too old. And just to make that clear, Martin hands the first three paragraphs to three leading Republicans, quoting each one: Romney strategist Stuart Stevens, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker. The next two paragraphs reiterate this "theme," telling us what "Republican strategists and presidential hopefuls" are going to say about Hillary and stating, citing "Republican leaders," that Hillary is "vulnerable to appearing a has-been." Does the article then at least give us the other side? Maybe quote some Democrats leaders? Maybe something about how Hillary was both a senator and secretary state after being first lady for eight years, and before that in Arkansas, and all that after a long and successful career in law? Maybe something about how her age doesn't really have anything to do with it, about how her extensive experience actually means she's qualified to be president, about how there would be nothing odd about her becoming president at her age and with all that experience behind her, about how others have run for president and won at similar ages and also with a lot of experience behind them, like, say, Ronald Reagan?
If you missed this screw up, it was quite amazing. It seems that over the weekend The New York Times thought it would be a good idea to lead an obituary about a famous female rocket scientist with her accomplishments as a wife and mother.
This was the first paragraph:
She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. 'The world's best mom,' her son Matthew said.
Yvonne Brill died last Wednesday. She was 88 years old. One of her important achievements was to have invented in the early 1970s "a propulsion system to help keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits."
The system became the industry standard, and it was the achievement President Obama mentioned in 2011 in presenting her with the National Medal of Technology and Innovation.
Criticism was swift with many wondering if a male rocket scientist would ever be described by his cooking skills.
Doubt it.
By Michael J.W. Stickings It's no surprise that the Times has endorsed President Obama, but I think the editorial is worth reading regardless. First because it's a thoughtful evaluation of Obama's many impressive accomplishments to date.This is important with respect to two audiences: 1)Progressives: There are still many progressives who are less than thrilled by much of what Obama has done as president -- and I get that, and I have been critical as well -- but there is an unfortunate tendency on the left to focus on the bad at the exclusion of the good, to blame Obama for all that he has supposedly done wrong (say, in the area of national security, where he has continued much of what we objected to during the Bush years) while refusing to credit him for anything. Health-care reform? Not enough. Support for marriage equality? He was forced into it. DADT repeal? Too late. Dodd-Frank? Not enough, and he's in bed with the bankers like the rest of them. Etc., etc. And the rest -- like rescuing the auto industry, ordering the mission to take out bin Laden, setting a firm date for the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, reversing the Bush-Cheney torture policies, removing rapacious banks from the federal student loan process, supporting veterans, fighting for fair pay for women, not to mention pulling the economy back from the brink of collapse and setting in a path to sustainable recovery -- well, it's easier just to ignore it all.
(For more on this, see Scott Lemieux vs. Matt Stoller, the latter of whom makes the progressive case against Obama. Stoller makes some good points (again, standard progressive critique of Obama stuff), but his call to support a third-party candidate, and to hand the election to Romney (because he and the president are pretty much the same) is stunningly ignorant and outright dangerous. Lemieux picks his argument apart, as he has done previously, particularly with respect to abortion. Needless to say, I'm firmly with Scott. There is a clear choice in this election. And while you may object to the fact that in U.S. presidential politics the spectrum is a fairly narrow one that excludes much of the left, there is no good reason to support a third-party candidate over Obama. If you really think it doesn't matter, you're an idiot.) 2)Swing voters: Progressives have taken their shots at the president, but Republican propaganda has also been extremely successful, along with a Beltway media establishment that parrots it, in painting him as a failure (when it's not painting him as an anti-American Euro-fascist-socialist from Kenya or Indonesia). And this narrative has taken hold, no doubt, among some low-information voters. To me, though, President Obama's record speaks for itself. While acknowledging again that I share some of the same criticisms that progressives have launched at him, to me the president's record is remarkable both in and of itself but especially given the political climate of the past four years, with Republicans in Congress taking an absolute obstructionist approach and refusing to work with him on pretty much anything, the Republican Party moving ever more rightward (embracing the Tea Party and adopting right-wing extremism as its new mainstream), and conservatism going all-out insane in its vicious assault on the president, much of it racist. Which is to say, with just over a week remaining until Election Day, and voting already underway, it's a good time to remind ourselves, and others, of all that President Obama has accomplished and what it all says about what he'd do in a second term. The
Times, with its enthusiastic endorsement, refusing to pin blame on him simply for falling short of those ridiculously lofty expectations four years ago, helps a great deal in this regard. Additionally, though, I encourage you to read
this piece at The Washington Monthly detailing President Obama's Top 50 accomplishments. As I said, remarkable. ********** Oh, and second because of its excellent characterization of Mitt Romney:
Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, has gotten this far with a guile that allows him to say whatever he thinks an audience wants to hear. But he has tied himself to the ultraconservative forces that control the Republican Party and embraced their policies, including reckless budget cuts and 30-year-old, discredited trickle-down ideas. Voters may still be confused about Mr. Romney's true identity, but they know the Republican Party, and a Romney administration would reflect its agenda. Mr. Romney's choice of Representative Paul Ryan as his running mate says volumes about that.
Just as voters need to be reminded of what President Obama has accomplished, they need to know clearly just what the alternative is. There you go.
By Carl (Ed. note: Arthur Ochs Sulzberger died on Saturday at the age of 86. -- MJWS)
It's a given that Arthur "Punch" Sulzberger changed The New York Times and created the Newspaper of Record that we've come to know. It's also a given that his decision to publish The Pentagon Papers was a watershed moment in U.S. press reporting and in journalism. It's also a given that he was late to the boat on Watergate. That he took a local New York City newspaper and made it into a worldwide phenomenon is also indisputable, although one might make the argument that in the '50s, '60s, and '70s, that was likely to happen as the world spotlight centered on the US, and the US was New York City and the other 50 states. He also took his eye off local reporting, in particular local politics, and focused the lens of the paper on national politics. It sold newspapers, to be sure, but also sold the people of NYC up the river. What had been the most reliable source of hard facts about the city had ceded the field to the sensationalist New York Post (then a liberal rag) and the middle-of-the-road New York Daily News. So much so that New Yorkers who could have shaped and influenced the direction of events here knew more about President Ford's plan to "Whip Inflation Now" than about the burgeoning financial crisis. To this day, sweetheart deals for councilmembers and borough presidents get very short shrift (e.g. Christine Quinn profting politically off her wife's legal connections). I blame Watergate, which so galvanized the nation and all but created The Washington Post. That sold papers. That forced Sulzberger to shift his focus. After all, you have 330 million Americans and about ten million New Yorkers and commuters. Who do you think deserves to be served by a national paper? As it turns out, both. The advent of the internet and 24 hour cable news made the Times almost an irrelevancy. Where it would break roughly a story a month, it now finds itself on the "analysis" end of the story, backending and summarizing where once it would lead things that bled over the paper.
Sulzberger was long gone (he left the publisher position in 1992, the board in 1997) when all this transpired, but one wonders if Sulzberger could have been a little more prescient and hired thinkers, rather than the David Brooks and Ross Douthats of the world. Anyway, godspeed, Mr. Sulzberger. You were a giant among giants and for that, you deserve your day in the sun. (Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)
Arthur Brisbane, the Times's public editor, writes:
I'm looking for reader input on whether and when New York Times news
reporters should challenge "facts" that are asserted by newsmakers they
write about.
One example mentioned recently by a reader: As cited
in an Adam Liptak article on the Supreme Court, a court spokeswoman said
Clarence Thomas had "misunderstood" a financial disclosure form when he
failed to report his wife's earnings from the Heritage Foundation. The
reader thought it not likely that Mr. Thomas "misunderstood," and
instead that he simply chose not to report the information.
Another
example: on the campaign trail, Mitt Romney often says President Obama
has made speeches "apologizing for America," a phrase to which Paul
Krugman objected in a December 23 column arguing that politics has advanced to the "post-truth" stage.
As
an Op-Ed columnist, Mr. Krugman clearly has the freedom to call out
what he thinks is a lie. My question for readers is: should news
reporters do the same?
Well, I'm a reader, so here's my answer:
Do you even have to ask this question? Of course reporters at the Times, and every other "news" publication with any credibility at all, should call out lies. And not just because Republicans happen to lie a lot. The Times should expose the lies of Democrats as well -- in fact of anyone it wishes to quote, cite, or report on.
As Joe Romm puts it at ThinkProgress: "Obviously any paper, but most especially the New York Times,
has little value to society if it knowingly prints lies — or if it fails
to do the minimal investigative reporting and fact-checking needed to
determine if a statement by a newsmaker or, say, a global warming
denier, is false."
Sure, there may occasionally be good reasons for not doing this, such as the need to cultivate good sources (as Booman notes). But it's really just about being accurate, as Steve Benen says. And while "neutrality" might be a good idea in some utopia where everyone tells the truth or has equally credible opinions, it seems to me that the consumers of news (i.e., us) deserve more, and better:
If an article is supposed to provide news consumers with the
something more meaningful — offering context, scrutiny, and analysis
that helps make sense of the arguments, giving the public a sense, not
only of what the arguments are, but whether they're accurate — then
media professionals, including beat reporters and their editors, have a
broader responsibility to help the public separate fact from fiction.
And more often than not, they don't even try.
This generally draws howls from the right, in part because
Republicans seem to lie more frequently and shamelessly, and in part
because reality has a well-known liberal bias. Indeed, the constant,
baseless accusations about "the liberal media" helped create the
forced-neutrality dynamic in the first place.
But the result is a media that fails the public. By publishing
falsehoods without scrutiny, for fear of being accused of "bias," the
media is effectively leaving news consumers with the impression that
lies and the truth deserve equal footing, which is ultimately untenable.
There you go. Now, New York Times, if you have any self-respect at all, go out and do something about it. In a democracy especially, where the rulers (i.e., the people) must be able to make informed decisions, is it essential that the media function not as a mouthpiece for competing spin but as a vehicle for truth. And to do that, they must tell you who's lying.
Glenn
Beck is worried. Not quite trembling, and not yet so crazy that he's
barking at squirrels, but worried. The uprising in Egypt marks the
beginning of the end. Communists and Islamic extremists are mounting an
offensive against the Western world.
As proof of this "communist revolt," Beck cited a story in The New York Times:
This is what I've been called nuts for for the last
two weeks. And basically, it's on the front page story, "Wired and
Shrewd, Young Egyptians Guide Revolt," and what it talks about is how
the Islamic extremists have gotten together with socialists and
communists and they have sown the seeds of revolt.
It goes without saying that people who watch Beck's show on Fox News aren't big fans of The New York Times.
Probably many of his fans (literally, fanatics) were offended by Beck's
reliance on the unpatriotic, anti-American, and undeniably traitorous
manifesto as evidence of this "insurrection" heading to the United
States.
In
the interests of context, I have lifted the following passages from the
above-referenced news article, which Beck cites as proof of a
communist-socialist-Islamic extremist movement:
•
They are the young professionals, mostly doctors and lawyers, who
touched off and then guided the revolt shaking Egypt, members of the
Facebook generation who have remained mostly faceless — very
deliberately so, given the threat of arrest or abduction by the secret
police.
• In the
process many have formed some unusual bonds that reflect the singularly
non-ideological character of the Egyptian youth revolt, which
encompasses liberals, socialists and members of the Muslim Brotherhood.
•
Islam Lotfi, a lawyer who is a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood Youth,
said his group used to enlist others from the tiny leftist parties to
stand with them in calling for civil liberties, to make their cause seem
more universal. Many are now allies in the revolt, including Zyad
el-Elaimy, a 30-year-old lawyer who was then the leader of a communist
group.
Mr. Elaimy, who
was imprisoned four times and suffered multiple broken limbs from
torture for his political work, now works as an assistant to Mohamed
ElBaradei, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the
International Atomic Energy Agency. In turn, his group built ties to
other young organizers....
•
Most of the group are liberals or leftists, and all, including the
Brotherhood members among them, say they aspire to a Western-style
constitutional democracy where civic institutions are stronger than
individuals.
But they
also acknowledge deep divides, especially over the role of Islam in
public life. Mr. Lotfi points to pluralistic Turkey. On the question of
alcohol — forbidden by Islam — he suggested that drinking was a private
matter but that perhaps it should be forbidden in public.
Asked
if he could imagine an Egyptian president who was a Christian woman, he
paused. "If it is a government of institutions," he said, "I don't care
if the president is a monkey."
Okay,
so to be clear there are, as Beck professes, communists, socialists, and
members of the Muslim Brotherhood behind the organized rallies that, as
of February 11, 2010, successfully overthrew an oppressive and corrupt
dictator in Egypt.
But
as the article clearly shows, these are not anarchists, radicals, or
extremist Muslims aspiring for some new world order run by a
fundamentalist Caliphate, as Beck believes. They are college-educated
professionals, "mostly doctors and lawyers" (one of whom is Wael
Ghonim, "a Google executive who was detained for 12 days but emerged this week as the movement's most potent spokesman") who were "born roughly around the time that President Hosni Mubarak
first came to power... and [who] all have spent their adult lives bridling
at the restrictions of the Egyptian police state – some undergoing
repeated arrests and torture for the cause." Their cause being "a
Western-style constitutional democracy."
If,
as Beck claims, there are "communist revolutionaries who are willing to
band with anyone here in America" and who are ready to spread their "cause" across the world, then America better brace for its own
revolution. "Itwill come to America," according to Beck.
Grab
your tinfoil helmets, pull out your Bibles, and sharpen your bayonets,
folks. A "Western-style constitutional democracy" is heading this way.
There's a movement afoot to give Nancy Pelosi the boot, to remove her as Democratic leader in the House. Even the Times has gotten in on the action, editorializing (somewhat persuasively):
Nancy Pelosi has been an extremely effective speaker of the House for
four years, shepherding hundreds of important bills toward passage and
withstanding solid Republican opposition. Her work in passing health
care reform and strong ethics oversight achieved what many thought was
legislatively impossible. But is she really the best the Democrats can
come up with as their leader as they slip into the minority.
Ms. Pelosi announced on Friday that she would seek the post of House
minority leader. That job is not a good match for her abilities in
maneuvering legislation and trading votes, since Democrats will no
longer be passing bills in the House. What they need is what Ms. Pelosi
has been unable to provide: a clear and convincing voice to help
Americans understand that Democratic policies are not bankrupting the
country, advancing socialism or destroying freedom.
If Ms. Pelosi had been a more persuasive communicator, she could have
batted away the ludicrous caricature of her painted by Republicans
across the country as some kind of fur-hatted commissar jamming her
diktats down the public's throat. Both Ms. Pelosi and Harry Reid, the
Senate majority leader, are inside players who seem to visibly shrink
on camera when defending their policies, rarely connecting with the
skeptical independent voters who raged so loudly on Tuesday.
With President Obama proving to be a surprisingly diffident salesman of
his own work, Congressional Democrats need a new champion to stand
against a tightly disciplined Republican insurgency.
I don't buy it. While Pelosi certainly deserves some of the blame for the Democrats' loss of the House, and is certainly not a great communicator, she shouldn't be held up as the scapegoat for a loss that was unavoidable given the state of the economy, widespread anti-incumbent sentiment, and Democrats having to defend many largely Republican districts after their '06 and '08 "wave" wins, among other factors.
Now, I realize that the Times is actually praising Pelosi as a legislator. Its argument is that she just isn't right to lead the opposition, which requires communications skills that she doesn't seem to possess.
But I'm not sure that's really what's needed of the House minority leader. After all, Democrats should be able to communicate their policies and principles, and to advance their own narratives, from the White House and the Senate -- yes, yes, lest we forget, given how the midterms are being spun far and wide as an unmitigated triumph for the GOP, that the Democrats were not only not obliterated ("shellacking" is the popular word) but are actually still in power.
On what is needed in the House, Greg Sargent, contra the Times, makes a great point:
[A]ll this seems to badly miss what one of the most important roles of
the new minority leader will be: to draw a very sharp line against GOP
efforts to roll back Obama's accomplishments.
This task could matter at least as much for the new minority leader
as communications or presenting a new face for the party. And while
Pelosi clearly has a negative and polarizing image, few would argue that
she hasn't succeeded at building coalitions and maintaining unity at
moments of extreme political stress -- exactly what she'll need to do if
she's going to hold the line against repeal efforts.
He continues:
The key thing to understand is that we're about to enter a period of bruising procedural wars -- precisely the type of thing that Pelosi has already excelled at. Republicans are already discussing ways to starve the new health-care law
by, say, limiting funding to agencies that would implement portions of
it or using spending bills to block federal insurance regulations they
don't like. The next minority leader will have to be ruthless in her
willingness to use procedural tactics to combat this kind of stuff.
So why not Pelosi, who has a strong record of standing up for liberal-progressive policies and principles and against the determined partisanship of those across the aisle?
The midterms, after all, were not a rejection of liberalism, nor of the Democrats' agenda -- even if this is what Republicans (and many in the media) would have us believe. On the issues, the Democrats remain popular, or at least their policies do. The Republicans have no mandate to govern, and Democrats certainly weren't given a mandate to move to the center. To the contrary, the poor performance of Blue Dogs suggests that the party should reject appeasement and commit itself to a liberal-progressive agenda that embraces what they've done so far, including health-care reform, and seeks to bring meaningful change to America.
In other words, there is simply no mandate for someone like Blue Dog Heath Shuler to take over the party in the House.
I've never been a huge Pelosi fan, but there's no denying the success she had as speaker, not least in keeping a rather disunited party together, and, with Republicans itching for a fight, she may just be the best person for the job.
Waterboarding is torture except when the U.S. government says it isn't and The New York Times and other major newspapers obediently stop calling it torture
I'm a day late getting to this -- thanks, Canada Day! -- but an extremely important study was released the other day showing that the mainstream media, including large outlets like The New York Times, essentially caved in to the government, that is, to the Bush-Cheney administration, when it came to reporting on waterboarding as torture:
But in the post-9/11 world, when the practice of immobilizing and virtually drowning detainees became a politically charged issue, that straightforward definition grew murky. The study, conducted by the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, examined coverage in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal and USA Today, and found a noticeable shift in language concerning waterboarding.
"From the early 1930s until the modern story broke in 2004, the newspapers that covered waterboarding almost uniformly called the practice torture or implied it was torture," the study noted. But the study found that things changed in the years when "war on terror" became part of the American lexicon.
The New York Times defined waterboarding as torture, or effectively implied that it was, 81.5 percent of the time in articles until 2004, the study found. But during 2002-2008 — when the George W. Bush White House made a concerted effort to normalize harsh interrogation methods for use on terror detainees — the Times "called waterboarding torture or implied it was torture in just 2 of 143 articles." That’s 1.4 percent of the time.
The study also noted a disparity in how newspapers defined waterboarding when the United States employed the practice versus its use by other nations — in the latter instance, newspapers more readily called the practice torture.
So much, it would seem, for journalistic independence and integrity -- to the extent that the media had much left anyway. Given how the media establishment operates, after all, this is hardly all that surprising.
But it is not an opinion that waterboarding is torture; it is a fact, recognized by everyone on the planet as such - and by the NYT in its news pages as such - for centuries. What we have here is an admission that the NYT did change its own established position to accommodate the Cheneyite right.
So their journalism is dictated by whatever any government says. In any dispute, their view is not: what is true? But: how can we preserve our access to the political right and not lose pro-torture readers? If you want a locus classicus for why the legacy media has collapsed, look no further.
*****
This is not editing. It is surrender. It is not journalism; it is acquiescence to propaganda. It strikes me as much more egregious a failing than, say, the Jayson Blair scandal. Because it reaches to the very top, was a conscious decision and reveals the empty moral center in the most important newspaper in the country.
When historians look back and try to understand how the US came to be a country that legitimizes torture, the New York Times will be seen to have played an important role in euphemizing it, enabling it, and entrenching it. The evidence shows conclusively that there is not a shred of argument behind the dramatic shift in 2002 - just plain cowardice.
In my view, the people who made that decision should resign. They have revealed that they are nothing but straws in the wind - in a time when moral clarity and courage were most needed.
Extremely well put. And I agree.
For more, see Steve Benen and, of course, Glenn Greenwald, who had a fantastic post on Wednesday responding to the study. As he correctly points out, such "compliant behavior makes overtly state-controlled media unnecessary."
It's great, and essential to any liberal democracy, to have freedom of the press. But what if the press doesn't want to be free?
The New York Times is reporting that The New York Times "will begin charging for access to its website, according to people familiar with internal deliberations." The New York Times is presumably in a good position to be "familiar with internal deliberations" at The New York Times. The decision of The New York Times to start charging for access to online content follows "a year of sometimes fraught debate inside the paper."
While I understand the need to "do anything we can to raise money," as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman put it, I suspect that, once the charging begins, I will have little to nothing to do with The New York Times online. And I hope that readers around the world send the same message.
After all, do we really need The New York Times in our lives? Is is really such an essential media outlet? And do we really need to pay for it? It is arrogance and delusion to think that The New York Times is so important that people will pay for it.
Perhaps declining readership will let the geniuses at The New York Times know that this is a terrible idea.
I have to say I loathe Ben Stein, so I was pleased to hear that The New York Times has fired him for conflict of interest. Dispensing financial advice from the Sunday Business Section while being a spokesman for Freescore.com, which offers free monthly credit reports for only $359, seems reason enough, but of course there was the financial advice itself. Ben gets his prognostications from the same source on Neptune that Jim Cramer does:
I’m writing this on Aug. 13, 2007… the stock market is cheap on a price-earnings basis, profits are fabulous… and in the long run, both here and abroad, stocks are a lovely place to be. [emphasis mine]
That's classic Ben Stein bad advice and bad enough to suggest seppuku to a more honorable man. In fact, it closely mirrors the bad advice of his close friend Cramer and to the point where Stein was willing to tell us all that Jon Stewart had "yelled and cursed" at him when in fact, it was not true. That's classic Ben Stein projection -- or outright lie, if you prefer. I did mention that I loathe him, didn't I?
For anyone who still thinks Ben has ever had much to offer beyond the faux elitism, the wildly dishonest defense of creationism and enduring belief that Richard Nixon was not a crook, I will refer you to the Ben Stein Watch archives, about to close it's "doors" now that the mission has been accomplished. Let's hope it really has been.
When William Kristol left his job at the New York Times in January after a year of error-riddled and gobsmackingly goofy op-eds, he must have left the keys to that filing cabinet for Ross Douthat. His column today is so full of gross generalizations and just plain silly comparisons between Republican and Democratic states and what it portends for the Obama administration that you have to wonder if Mr. Kristol didn't sneak in to the editing room and have at it.
Mr. Douthat compares the status of two big states -- California and Texas -- and guess which one comes out smelling like a rose:
In the Bush years, liberal polemicists turned the president’s home state — pious, lightly regulated, stingy with public services and mad for sprawl — into a symbol of everything that was barbaric about Republican America. Meanwhile, California, always liberalism’s favorite laboratory, was passing global-warming legislation, pouring billions into stem-cell research, and seemed to be negotiating its way toward universal health care.
But flash forward to the current recession, and suddenly Texas looks like a model citizen. The Lone Star kept growing well after the country had dipped into recession. Its unemployment rate and foreclosure rate are both well below the national average. It’s one of only six states that didn’t run budget deficits in 2009.
Meanwhile, California, long a paradise for regulators and public-sector unions, has become a fiscal disaster area. And it isn’t the only dark blue basket case. Eight states had unemployment over 11 percent in June; seven went for Barack Obama last November. Fourteen states are facing 2010 budget gaps that exceed 20 percent of their G.D.P.; only two went for John McCain. (Strikingly, they’re McCain’s own Arizona and Sarah Palin’s Alaska.) Of the nine states that have raised taxes this year, closing deficits at the expense of growth, almost all are liberal bastions.
As long as we're making gross generalizations, let's throw in one more: California and Texas both have Republican governors. And if California truly was a "liberal bastion," it wouldn't have passed Prop 8. Just because a state voted for Obama last year doesn't make it a liberal bastion, either; North Carolina also went for Obama, as did Florida. California's budget woes go back a lot further than just the current recession, back through administrations of both parties. Meanwhile, Texas may have a balanced budget, but that also may be due to the fact that the state doesn't spend a whole lot of money on things like education, and it shows. He also throws in the knock on universal health care and points out that the president is pushing "a health care plan that looks a lot like the system currently hemorrhaging money in Massachusetts." What Mr. Douthat forgets -- or ignores -- is that the Massachusetts plan was promoted and signed by Mitt Romney, who is often mentioned as the leading contender as the GOP candidate in 2012.
To complete the Kristol-vision, he brings up the false-equivalency argument; the Republicans have their scandals with their mistresses and hikes along the Appalachian trail, but the Democrats are corrupt, too; look at Rod Blagojevich in Illinois and William Jefferson in New Orleans. Fine; no one said the Democrats were pure, but while Gov. Blagojevich has been impeached and removed from office and former Rep. Jefferson is awaiting the verdict, none of the GOP horn-dogs have resigned their offices or given any indication that they intend to. Holding up your opposition as being just as corrupt as you are is not a good place to start preaching about political purity.
Mr. Douthat concedes that "Obama is still broadly popular, and the public is still broadly sympathetic to his administration’s agenda. But the money has to come from somewhere. You can’t have a bold new liberal era without the growth to pay for it." Well, maybe if you hadn't stood silently by or cheered on the people who pissed the money away in the first place, we'd have it. And then you could complain about liberal agendas without sounding so much like a flaming hypocrite.
Bill "Krazy" Kristol -- as krazy, and as shamelessly partisan and neoconish, at the WaPo as he was at the NYT -- may think, spinning recklessly, that Obama was irresponsibly attacking the police when he asserted in his press conference last night that the Cambridge cops who arrested Henry Louis Gates Jr. at his own house "acted stupidly," but the truth is that, even in 2009, it takes a black man in the Oval Office to point out the obvious.
Alas, the obvious is no longer obvious when filtered through the ideological prism -- see no evil, hear no evil, at least when it comes to race (unless it's the alleged reverse racism of minorities like Sotomayor, which white men across the land are oh-so-sensitive about, any threat to the privilege of their little establishment) -- of the likes of Bill Kristol.
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Obama has since defended his comments, and rightly so, saying that "everybody should have just settled down and cooler heads should have prevailed."
For more, including all the Kristol-like right-wing reaction, see Memeorandum.
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Most stupid of all, perhaps, Kristol claims in his post that Gates was likely to blame for the incident. And why? Simply because he's a Harvard professor -- who are all, it seems, stupid and arrogant.
This is why Kristol sides instinctually with the Cambridge cops.
Really? This sort of inane, instinctual commentary is what got Kristol a post at the WaPo after his dismissal from the NYT?
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The Boston Herald is reporting that the cop who stupidly arrested Gates tried valiantly to keep Celtics star Reggie Lewis alive.
And the point is what? That a good and noble act excuses all else? Forever?
Please.
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The NYT article linked above stupidly claims that "Obama has sought to transcend, if not avoid, the issue of race."
Really? Yes, I would agree that much of his rhetoric has been post-racial, but he has never avoided the issue.
What he has sought to do throughout his political career -- think back to his 2004 DNC keynote address -- is build bridges across America's deepest divides. In his brilliant speech on race during the primary campaign last year, partly a response to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright conflagration, he emphasized that America's still-abundant racial divides pose an obstacle to the realization of the more perfect union that the Founders envisioned.
Just because he talks about overcoming these racial divides -- that is, about "transcendence" -- it doesn't mean he is oblivious to the realities of the present, nor that he wants to avoid race altogether.
Apparently, though, talking maturely about race and racism flies over the heads not just of conservatives but of reporters at the NYT.
Liberal media? Yeah, right. Those of us who actually are liberals know just what a joke that is. Here's another example of a major supposedly "liberal" media outlet regurgitating right-wing spin and enabling the Republican Smear Machine:
-- The article claims, without substantiation, that Sotomayor has "championed the importance of considering race and ethnicity in admissions, hiring and even judicial selection at almost every stage of her career." The first person quoted is Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas. The second person quoted is another conservative, Gary Marx. For "balance," the article goes back to the '90s and quotes Lani Guanier, a controversial Clinton nominee back then (she withdrew) and a woman whose credibility was shattered by the Republican Smear Machine. And she is brought out to defend Sotomayor? (It's not that she can't defend Sotomayor, or that she isn't qualified, it's that her very presence in this article is loaded.)
-- The article is also grossly misleading. Sotomayor has talked extensively about her experiences, and about her identity as an Hispanic woman, but she isn't all about affirmative action and racial quotas, as the article suggests. If her nomination has brought "affirmative action and other race-conscious remedies for patterns of inequality" back into the news, it isn't because she has done so but because her opponents on the right are smearing her as an affirmative action case who has only been successful throughout her career because of her sex and race. (Her opponents are also claiming that she's just plain stupid, and hence thoroughly unqualified for the job. Who are the racists here?) And yet, as a recent study by SCOTUSblog's Tom Goldstein suggests, Sotomayor has not used her time on the bench to advance judicial remedies for discrimination. Goldstein concludes: "[I]t seems absurd to say that Judge Sotomayor allows race to infect her decisionmaking." And so what if she once said that "our gender and national origins may and will make a difference in our judging." How is that not true? How is that not true even for white male judges? (The implication is that white male judges are somehow immune from relying on their own experiences, that they, and only they, are able to transcend who they are and judge from a position of perfect neutrality. This, of course, is incredibly stupid.)
-- The article claims, also without substantiation, that "identity politics is back with a vengeance." To the extent that it is, it is Sotomayor's opponents who are responsible, not Sotomayor -- and certainly not Obama, though the article opening paragraphs suggest that he is to blame for failing to "usher in a new post-racial age," which, apparently, he was supposed to do (a gross oversimplification -- Obama spoke maturely and responsibly about race during the campaign, but it's not like he promised that he could overcome and heal America's racial divides, or that that was even possible without enormous individual and societal effort). (Obama is essentially faulted for opting for a "selection process [that] was geared from the beginning toward finding a female or minority candidate, or both." Apparently, he should have loaded up with white men. Apparently, any non-male, non-white nominee would have met with similar criticism.)
-- Once again, the article provides a platform for, and gives prominence to, Sotomayor's opponents. The first person quoted is Abigail Thernstrom, "a leading conservative scholar on race relations," who blames Obama for not "pick[ing] a post-racial candidate." What does that even mean? Are Roberts and Alito post-racial judges? If so, how? Because they're white men who espouse the right's preferred judicial fundamentalism? (The fact is, the right would have been critical of any Obama nominee. It's just ridiculous that some of them are now pushing the mirage of post-racialism and using it to bash Obama. Do they really believe in post-racialism? No. They say that they support perfect non-discrimination, but what they really promote is the interests of the privileged white male.
-- Yes, the article quotes Obama advisor David Axelrod, but what he offers is a generic line about what Obama means for America. The article goes on to quote yet another conservative, William Burck, deputy counsel under George W. Bush, before highlighting, as the other article does, Sotomayor's taken-out-of-context line about how her experiences, anyone's experiences, matter. Long before then, though, the thrust of the article is crystal clear.
These two articles aren't explicitly pro- or anti-Sotomayor (and their authors, as well as the newspaper itself, may claim they're both balanced), but, in granting primacy and prominence to her opponents, as well as to some of the key lines of attack from the smear campaign against her, they essentially, inadvertently or not, take a firm position against her. (An editorial position on her nomination is expected, but news coverage should be unbiased, and not tilted against Sotomayor, even as overcompensation.)
To defend The New York Times, and newspapers generally, which he does here. I generally read newspapers, including the NYT, online, but from time to time I like to pick one up and read it as it used to be read, including my local paper here in suburban Toronto. The future, much more so than the present, is digital, and virtual, but I do hope there is a future for old-school journalism, and that, to that end, the apparent demise of the newspaper industry, including the possible collapse of institutions like The Boston Globe, is halted, and reversed. Of course, the industry deserves much of the blame for what is happening to it, for example, by being so slow in responding to the rise of the Internet, but we, too, we media consumers, are at fault for failing to recognize the ongoing value of print media in their non-virtual form. Tear your eyes away from the screen in front of you, now and then, from your television or your computer, and get back to basics. There's something remarkably invigorating about doing it the old-fashioned way.
And, yes, I know, I say all this as a blogger, in a blog post, at a blog, in the blogosphere, on the Internet, with an eye on the TV. There's room for balance, though, and, thankfully, not all my media consuming takes place in this post-print world.
As Marc Ambinder is reporting, the young and prodigal Ross Douthat, currently at The Atlantic, is headed to the New York Times op-ed page to replace the disgraced and departed Bill Kristol. He and David Brooks will make up the conservative wing of the Times punditocracy.
I don't read Douthat all that often -- and, when I do, I generally don't agree with him -- but I regard him as one of the few conservatives who actually thinks outside the box of current right-wing orthodoxy. And, unlike Kristol, he's not a partisan hack and propagandist. Sure, it's not much of a compliment to say that someone is an improvement over Kristol, who was an embarrassment at the Times, and who is one generally, but if a right-winger was what the Times wanted, Douthat wasn't a bad pick. At the very least, he should be an interesting, if aggravating, read, perhaps even, as Andrew Sullivan puts is, "a boon to intelligent conservatism," which is hardly a crowded field, not least with Dear Leader Limbaugh and his minions dominating the right these days.
I used to read Maureen Dowd. Once upon a time. Way back when. I can admit that, can't I? She was funny, sometimes, and her intertwining of pop culture and pop politics amused me. There was never any depth to her, but it didn't matter. Reading her Times columns, pithy drivel and all, was a fine way to pass the time -- when I had some time, didn't feel like having to think all that much, and nothing more compelling was available, mainly because I was too lazy to look.
And now? Not so much. Or, rather, not at all. Part of it, I suppose, is that her former targets -- Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al. -- are no longer in power. Another part of it is that she's gotten worse. Nowadays, I find what she writes mostly unreadable. There was substance, if only a tiny speck, when she was exposing Bushworld as the bubble of darkness it was. Now she just seems shallower than ever, with little of value to add. This was the case during the primaries, when she resembled a gossip columnist more than an op-ed columnist for the leading newspaper in America, if not the world, and it is certainly the case now, training her sights on the new targets in the Obama Administration, starting in the Oval Office itself.
On 9/11, President Bush learned of disaster while reading "The Pet Goat" to grade-school kids. On Tuesday, President Obama escaped from disaster by reading "The Moon Over Star" to grade-school kids.
"We were just tired of being in the White House," the two-week-old president, with Michelle at his side, explained to students at a public charter school near the White House.
Even as he told the children his favorite superheroes were Batman and Spider-Man, his own dream of being the superhero who swoops in to swiftly save America was going SPLAT!
It just ain't that easy.
Where, oh where, to begin. (And why even bother?)
First, losing Daschle -- which is what is behind this -- isn't a disaster. It's a shame that Daschle had to withdraw, and it was his own fault for being so reckless with his taxes, but Obama will simply replace him with another, and hopefully less compromised and less corrupt, nominee. True, I thought that Daschle was the right man for the job -- or, rather, for the two jobs of HHS secretary and head of the White House health care reform office -- but there are other good candidates out there, including Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden and Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius.
Second, losing Daschle is not akin to 9/11. And reading to children at a local school on the day you lose one of your key nominees is not the same as freezing on the spot when you're told of attacks on the United States. And what's wrong with reading to children anyway? Why refer to it as escaping from disaster?
Third, Obama is a sensible and sober leader, as we have already seen. He does not see himself as some sort of superhero on a mission to save America. He has his feet firmly planted in reality, unlike a certain Times columnist desperately trying to make waves.
Fourth, Obama's presidency didn't suddenly go SPLAT! just because Daschle withdrew his nomination. That's just stupid.
Fifth, while it is indeed true that Obama admitted to screwing up, it's not at all clear what he should have done in place of standing by his friend. After all, Daschle didn't do anything illegal and his failure to pay taxes on a car and driver was probably just an honest mistake. What is refreshing is that Obama was able to admit that it could have been handled differently -- the nomination, that is -- and to stress that "there aren't two sets of rules." So how was Obama's attitude "arrogant"? How was he trying to protect "his charmed circle"? After all, Daschle resigned soon after the story about his tax problems broke. It's not like Obama thwarted justice or kept up some sort of double standard, he just thought Daschle would be good for health care reform. Furthermore, was what Geithner did so bad as to disqualify him from office regardless of his many qualifications? He apologized and paid his back taxes (with interest). Disagree with him on the issues, and recoil at Daschle's consummate Washington insiderdom, but don't slam Obama as a failure, and a hypocrite, for seeking to put together the right Cabinet for these challenging times.
I could go on, but the rest of Dowd's column is a meandering mess that further attacks Obama for, among other things, not "smack[ing] down those who would flout his high standards or waste our money." She even suggests that Americans should not have put so much trust in him -- as if he really could single-handedly fix everything that ails the economy.
The problem for Dowd, I suspect, is that she really did think that Obama was Superman. Unlike many of the rest of us Obama supporters, who never deified him and who therefore had more reasonable expectations, Dowd and her ilk set standards for him that were simply impossible to meet. It should come as no surprise that the early days of Obama's presidency have had their rocky moments. It's Washington, after all. It's politics. And the good thing is that Obama himself understands that much better than Dowd, who continues to pump out ridiculous columns at a newspaper that itself should have higher standards.
The New York Times has a brief announcement at the bottom of William Kristol's column today:
This is William Kristol’s last column.
In a way, I'm sorry to see him go; he's always been good for a laugh or a shake of the head first thing on a Monday morning, and I appreciated the glimpse into the wonderful world of Neo-Con Cloud Cuckooland where everybody is white and straight and Ronald Reagan is forever the president while the flag snaps in the breeze in that shining city on the hill. And his final opus does not disappoint; it's a paean to the successes of conservatism over the last thirty years:
Since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, conservatives of various sorts, and conservatisms of various stripes, have generally been in the ascendancy. And a good thing, too! Conservatives have been right more often than not — and more often than liberals — about most of the important issues of the day: about Communism and jihadism, crime and welfare, education and the family. Conservative policies have on the whole worked — insofar as any set of policies can be said to “work” in the real world. Conservatives of the Reagan-Bush-Gingrich-Bush years have a fair amount to be proud of.
Seeing as how they got so much wrong -- Communism in Europe collapsed under its own weight and is still in place in China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba; their response to jihadism resulted in attacking and occupying the wrong country while basically shredding the Bill of Rights here at home and enraging the Muslim world; they trashed the environment and denied climate change; they blew a multi-billion-dollar budget surplus; they deregulated the banking industry into fraud and ruin; they created unfunded mandates for education standards while schools crumbled; advocated wholesale deportation of brown-skinned aliens; and for all their weeping and wailing about "family values," the divorce rate rose in the Bible Belt while they railed against same-sex marriage and turned health care reform into a political football -- it's proof that the eternal optimism of finding the pony at the bottom of a pile of manure is still strong with them. Mr. Kristol and his fellow conservatives may, as he says, have a fair amount to be proud of, but the simple fact is that if the conservatives have been right more often than not, then John McCain would be the one in the White House and Mitch McConnell would be the Senate Majority Leader.
To his credit, Mr. Kristol does not go off in a huff, as compared to some of the more unhinged of his ilk like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh. He gives Mr. Obama credit for realizing the dire straits the country has been left in at the hands of the conservatives and hopes that he will co-opt some of their ideas such as a strong defense and patriotism, things he apparently believes are new concepts to liberals. Well, I suppose when you've spent the last thirty years in the clutches of a culture that embraces mythology over science, theocratic fundamentalism over reason, and a willingness to compromise your core beliefs for the sake of a false sense of security, not to mention the fact that you've been one of the chief proponents of this philosophy, it's a little tough to accept that fact that someone else might have a different approach to achieving the same goals of safety, prosperity, and equality.
It's time for the newspaper to move on. For Pinch Sulzberger and Andy Rosenthal to renew Kristol's one-year contract, in 2009, would be for the Times to reward failure -- and look where that got Wall Street and General Motors. It's not just that Kristol isn't another Safire (although an absence of verbal playfulness and wit is a consistent hallmark of the Kristol prose style). It's not just that his views are utterly predictable (if that were firing grounds, close to half the Times columnists would lose their jobs). It's not just that he was fundamentally wrong at least every other week throughout the year (misattributing a quote in his first column, counting Clinton out after Iowa, placing Obama at a Jeremiah Wright sermon that Obama didn't attend, predicting the imminent return of a McCain adviser named Mike Murphy who ended up staying off the campaign, all but predicting a McCain victory, sort of predicting that McCain would oppose the bailout, praising McCain's "suspension" of his campaign as a smart move, preferring fake populism to professional excellence and Joe the Plumber to Horace the Poet, urging Ayers-Wright attack tactics as the way for McCain to win, basically telling McCain to ignore all the advice Kristol had given him throughout the year, but above all, vouchingagain and again and again, privately and publicly, for Palin as an excellent Vice-Presidential choice). What the hell -- it was an unpredictable year.
The real grounds for firing Kristol are that he didn't take his column seriously. In his year on the Op-Ed page, not one memorable sentence, not one provocative thought, not one valuable piece of information appeared under his name. The prose was so limp ("Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term?") that you had the sense Kristol wrote his column during the commercial breaks of his gig on Fox News Sunday and gave it about the same amount of thought.
For what it's worth, I could not agree more. Most of my opposition to Kristol is political and philosophical, but, those differences aside, I have found his Times columns -- to the extent that I even bother to read them -- to be consistently poor. Simply put, he has been an embarrassment. If the Times really wants another conservative to pontificate alongside David Brooks, I'm sure there are far worthier choices out there. At least they can pick one who isn't a partisan hack.
Fake copies of the NYT, possibly a year in the making, were distributed in the city today, and apparently some commuters thought it was for real. The banner announces the end of the Iraq war and other stories reveal that Tom Friedman has resigned and so on. It's set in the future--next July.
Alex S. Jones, director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, and a co-author of “The Trust,” a history of the family that controls The Times, said in a telephone interview that the paper should be flattered by the spoof.
“I would say if you’ve got one, hold on to it,” Mr. Jones, a former Times reporter, said of the fake issue. “It will probably be a collector’s item. I’m just glad someone thinks The New York Times print edition is worthy of an elaborate hoax. A Web spoof would have been infinitely easier. But creating a print newspaper and handing it out at subway stations? That takes a lot of effort.”
He added, “I consider this a gigantic compliment to The Times.”
And, if you are not hip to The Yes Men, whose motto, more or less, is "Impersonating big-time criminals in order to publicly humiliate them. Targets are leaders and big corporations who put profits ahead of everything else."
Here's an example of one of their previous efforts:
"Without oil, at least four billion people would starve. This spiral of trouble would make the oil infrastructure utterly useless" -- unless their bodies could be turned into fuel.
That was the satirical message delivered by two corporate ethics activists to the Gas and Oil Exposition 2007 in Calgary, Alberta. The activists, part of political trickster collective the Yes Men, used the Exposition to stage their latest theatre of corporate absurdity, with Exxon/Mobil and the Natural Petroleum Council playing the fools.
The prank, intended as a critique of the fossil fuel industry's influence on energy policy, caused confusion and consternation on the final day of the Exposition, one of the industry's largest gatherings.
After noting that current energy policies will likely lead to "huge global calamities" and disrupt oil supplies, Wolff told the audience "that in the worst case scenario, the oil industry could "keep fuel flowing" by transforming the billions of people who die into oil," said a Yes Men press release.
Yes Man Mike Bonnano, posing as an Exxon representative named Florian Osenberg, added that "With more fossil fuels comes a greater chance of disaster, but that means more feedstock for Vivoleum. Fuel will continue to flow for those of us left."
A blog on politics, philosophy, science, sports, and the arts -- featuring news, commentary, and analysis by Michael J.W. Stickings and the Reaction team.
