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Politics1 •

 
NO MORE ABU GHRAIB

I write the above title having just rattled off two longish posts on the matter, but with the court-martials dominating the news this week, something hit me: the media has got to put this aside -- just for a few months. MSNBC seems to be going the most overboard here (they often do). "The Abrams Report" -- a legal show, usually covering the likes of Scott Peterson and Martha Stewart -- is currently indistinguishable from "Hardball," except that Chris Matthews gets better interviews.

All of the major papers and news networks are going overtime on this issue, and I'm sure they think they're doing us a service by it. And they are -- but perhaps we could do this at another time?

Maybe I'm biased because I hate trials. Maybe the whole O.J. Simpson thing put me off the judicial system as entertainment. But we are now just a little over a month away from the Iraq handover date that George Bush insists we are sticking to. Who's taking over? How much authority are we really ceding? How exactly will the Kurd-Sunni-Shiite power-sharing work? The media's resources are busy with the Abu Ghraib investigation. So tell me how we're being served when something this important is going down on a deadline this short but the national debate is stuck on something relatively trivial. Not absolutely trivial mind you. But right now it's a major distraction.

It's also no great mystery why. Not only does Abu Ghraib have pictures (and the possibility of more) but it lets reporters cover Iraq in a familiar manner: Enron and the Catholic church have given them plenty of practice.

I hear tonight Bush is going to start giving speeches on the war on terrorism and why we're in Iraq. Perhaps that will refocus this country's writers, editors and producers. Not so we the people can meaningfully change things now -- we can't -- but so those who can will themselves be able to refocus, and do so.

P.S. Also, no more 9/11 hearings.
posted by WWB at 5/19/2004 09:22:28 PM |

 
CRI DE COERCION

Mark Bowden, who wrote the Atlantic story on coercive interrogation I linked to in the previous post, returns in the next issue with a short essay on Abu Ghraib. He re-states a critical point that my anonymous commenter (coward!) seemed to conflate with support for what happened at Abu Ghraib:

In certain rare cases keeping a prisoner cold, uncomfortable, frightened, and disoriented is morally justified and necessary

Then Bowden immediately begins adding caveats. In polite company, which the Atlantic surely is, you really can't add enough caveats to the discussion of maltreating other humans. And that's probably a good thing. But Bowden in his care not to offend actually goes too far the other way and managed to offend me. Concerning the fallout from Abu Ghraib scandal, he writes:

There are predictions (including one by Karl Rove, no less) that it will take a generation to repair the damage to America's image in the Middle East.

What? A generation? How about we not overreact, huh? No doubt Arabs are upset about Abu Ghraib; I would be, too. But not for thirty years. And does no one say, the damage done to Middle East's image in America by Nick Berg's murder will take a generation to repair? I doubt Mr. Bowden recognizes the "soft bigotry of low expectations" (as it's come to be known) in his words, but it's there.
posted by WWB at 5/18/2004 01:49:06 PM |

 
HAVING FUN YET?

For a blogger who strenuously advocated for the Iraq war a year ago, I might have something of an obligation to keep writing about it, especially as we're now in the middle of the "hard part" that we all knew was coming but mostly chose to elide past while fighting back diversionary arguments about "imperialism" and "oiiiiilllll!!!!" So what follows is a long-overdue installment.

Belle de Jour is nobody's right-wing blog; assuming it's not a hoax, the writer is a London call girl who is "frightened by the concept of Texas." Nor is it really a terribly political site. Belle may broadly be termed a liberal, but isn't a hardened partisan of the left as are many who follow the same kind of literary fiction she alludes to and emulates in her entries. (Huh huh, "entries.")

So I was a bit surprised to hear myself saying: "Damn straight!" at one post recently. (In my head only, I swear.) The post:

The papers are full of disturbing images, the sort that lead one to think about politics, war, and the politics of war, and how these acts have always happened except we could never see them before. How righteous indignation and backlash sometimes seem products of ignorance, because who could not have guessed this would happen? Did we really need pictures in order to know? Are we truly angry at governments for doing what we knew they would do?

I'm inclined to agree -- this isn't new. People can do horrible things. Small groups of people with power over others have done horrible things (See: Stanford Prison Experiment).

What is new are the pictures, which shatter the illusion that this kind of treatment is out of fashion and give the TV reports a peg to hang their segments (and segments and segments and segments) on. The more pictures that come out, the longer it stays in the headlines. The longer the story stays around, the more it seems that comes out about the chain of command. The more that, the more it sounds like these were interrogation methods and not pranks, and that regardless of how high of levels knowledge of it reaches, they did have a certain place, however once clandestine. (See: this NYT piece. Note: Concept of "waterboarding." Also: I'm with A Small Victory on this, at least as far as I had time to read.)

Up to a point, I'm not against using coercive methods of obtaining information from prisoners. My requirements are pretty simple:

1. Make sure we're doing it to terrorists and Baathists who might actually have information, not Iraqi conscripts. Yet to be cleared up is who the Iraqis being interrogated at Abu Ghraib actually were. The Red Cross has said that 90% of Iraqi detainees were wrongfully imprisoned; not much has been said about the prisoners in this case, where they came from, or where they are now.


2. Hew closer to "coercion" and further from "torture." This may be in the eye of the beholder, but for a good backgrounder on the kind of methods we've been using against al Qaeda, start with "The Dark Art of Interrogation" from The Atlantic last year.


3. At the risk of sounding like an apologist: DON'T TAKE PICTURES. Remember the kids from high school who broke into a nearby house, trashed the shit out of it, and videotaped the whole thing? They got caught, didn't they? That's the U.S. armed forces right now, thanks to these seven jackasses.


4. To be fair, it sounds like those seven jackasses were poorly supported and the result was a breakdown in the chain of command. That said, they're still jackasses.

The past point brings me back to Belle: She doesn't say it exactly, but I think she's in the "let's not release any more pictures" camp. And while I recognize their suppression is ultimately untenable, let's try to hold off for now. One, I think we get the point: Bad Stuff happened. Two, we hold back sensitive national security information all the time -- but whether that's politically acceptable right now Bush and Rumsfeld are about to find out.

One last thing. On those trials: If Rumsfeld really did have full knowledge of the kind of tactics used at Abu Ghraib, then I don't see how he survives in the end. (And I say that as a longtime Rummy fan.) Not really so much because the government is doing these things, but that we might be court-martialing (courting-martial?) soldiers for doing things that were approved by their superiors.

The what-did-Rumsfeld-know question may be about to break wide open -- watch the phrase "Copper Green" closely -- this coming week. But so far today it's been upstaged by Colin Powell's moron of a staff aide who this morning tried to cut off his interview on "Meet the Press."
posted by WWB at 5/16/2004 12:21:40 PM |

 
THE "IT WON'T BE CLOSE" BRIGADE

Three's a trend, right? That's what people say. Assuming such, the notion that the November election between Bush and Kerry will not be a close one is now just one Howard Fineman column away from being the conventional wisdom. Given events of the past few weeks, speculation leans toward a big win for Kerry, but then again we're barely three weeks out from a Fineman column titled "Why the race is looking so good for Bush."

I don't know where the meme started, but the first one I read was Andrew Sullivan, who wrote at his blog on May 6:

My instinct is that this election will not, in fact, be close. Either Bush will convince people that he is winning the war on terror and turning the economy around and win handsomely, or he won't, and Kerry will win big.

The first published but second to pass my corneas is an essay in the Washington Monthly, by the Hotline's Chuck Todd, making the counterintuitive argument that Bush is Carter (no, seriously). Title: "A Kerry Landslide?" Bottom line:

Elections that feature a sitting president tend to be referendums on the incumbent -- and in recent elections, the incumbent has either won or lost by large electoral margins.

Then on the Sunday shows this morning Christian Science Monitor reporter (and major DC hottie) Liz Marlantes repeated the meme at the prompting of Chris "tell me something I don't know" Matthews. She didn't predict the beneficiary of this supposed landslide, but after a half-hour of Abu Ghraib hand-wringing by the panelists (including Peggy Noonan), I don't need to draw you a chart.

That's three. And I expect more soon, especially from H-Fi, whose next column should be up sometime today. (His one from last week registers the good news for Kerry, but it's still written as if he's expecting a squeaker. Also not counting: John Zogby's much discussed "The Election Is Kerry's To Lose" essay, which calls the electorate "frozen in place" with "very few undecided voters.") As the next six months pass, many more commentators will try out the will-win-big theory for both candidates (here's the WSJ's James Taranto, using different indicators than Todd to make a reverse-Carter argument; see third item).

What I want to know before passing judgment is: What constitutes a landslide? 15 points? 10? 5? Compared to the 2000 election, anything more than a couple points could be interpreted as a big shift in this famously 50-50 (or is it 49-49?) country. The higher the threshold for "landslide," the more skeptical I get. If all we're talking here is "more decisive than last time," then count me on the bandwagon. Then again, considering just how preposterously close the last election was, it's no risky statement to guess that this one will fall outside the margin of error.
posted by WWB at 5/16/2004 12:10:45 PM |

 
IT DOESN'T MATTER TO ME

Pardon me while I finish rolling my eyes... Okay, better now.

How bad is disgraced "ex-conservative" David Brock's new website, Media Matters? Pretty awful when you just look at it, but worse when you realize he has a staff of researchers at a K Street office thanks to funding from John Podesta's new liberal think tank, the Center for American Progress. Every third item seems to be about a dumb comment by Rush Limbaugh, followed by a fourth item expressing outrage that Scott McClellan didn't want to get into whatever Limbaugh said at the latest White House press gaggle. Items one, two, five, six and eight -- reminder: not actual numbers -- concern how Fox News commentators criticized liberals. Number seven is about how Dick Morris' new book about Hillary Clinton contains conflicting portrayals of the New York senator.

Granted, Morris is a bit of a backstabbing, self-aggrandizing ass. But the Media Matters point-by-point critique (which happens to resemble Wonkette's Thursdays with Tina feature) is hardly evenhanded. If you already love Hillary and hate Morris, well, don't expect to be moved.

A recreation:

Morris: Gore "Claimed to Be the Father of the Internet": "When Al Gore claimed to be the father of the Internet, or that his marriage was the basis for Love Story, his exaggerations tripped him up." [Morris, Rewriting History, p. 13]

The Truth: No, He Didn't: Princeton University Professor Sean Wilentz (among many, many others) has debunked this myth: "On March 9, 1999, questioned by CNN's Wolf Blitzer ... Gore remarked: 'During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.' ... Upon viewing the Blitzer interview, though, a lazy reporter from Wired magazine picked up the story, sarcastically mischaracterized Gore in the Web pages of Wired News as claiming he was 'the father of the Internet,' and pointed out that research leading to the Internet began as early as the late 1960s. 'Vice President Gore tells a reporter the Internet was his idea,' Wired News concluded, inaccurately, adding the kicker, 'Nice try, Al.'" [Wilentz, The American Prospect, 9/25/00-10/9/00]

Ugh. The internet inventing thing? This topic is more tired than Rip Van Winkle on Nyquil. For (hopefully) the last time, remember: It is not unreasonable to understand "took the initiative in creating" as a statement of authorship, inventorship, fatherhood, etc. Also, please stop citing liberal writers at face value. Using partisans as evidence that other partisans are um, partisan, is just silly.

For a watchdog group, Media Matters seems to need watching of its own.
posted by WWB at 5/9/2004 02:42:29 AM |

 
RALL THE TROUBLE IN THE WORLD

I am not kidding when I say that until today I hadn't thought once about the hateful Marxist cartoonist Ted Rall since his semi-infamous (because his famy isn't that great) "terror widows" strip. But today, this. (Thanks, Drudge.)

That this strip is far outside the bounds of legitimate discussion is obvious. The line about Afghanistan having nothing to do with 9/11 because Saudi-funded and Pakistan-based is perhaps too bizarre even for Dennis Kucinich. (Hey, Ted -- Taliban protection? Training camps? Tora Bora? Any of this ring a bell?) What also occurs to me, however, is just how inside the bounds of such discussion it once was for me.

I don't seek out conspiratorial politics, and I never did. But within the past few years I was a frequent combatant in the "war of ideas" (as we liked to call it) on a public university campus, where Rall finds many fellow travelers; now I follow Congress from the Beltway, where debate over whether the Rasmussen poll is at all reliable is much more heated.

Besides, arguments about whether or not the United States is a racist imperialist menace to the globe eventually grew to bore me.

Though August will mark my second anniversary in the District of Columbia, this week I'm actually back in the blue parts of deep-purple Oregon -- Portland right now, where Kucinich held a protest/campaign event yesterday, and Eugene later this week, where the large anarchist contingent skews the city's political center of gravity somewhere to the left of Ted Kennedy. Ted Rall may not be famous in the Beltway, but his Q-rating in the Willamette Valley is probably on par with, say, John Kerry.

It's been ages since I've debated anarchists on the pros and cons of industrialization and the morality of capital, and frankly I'm a little out of practice. But it may well come up this week. Many thanks to Ted Rall for getting me back in the right mindset.

P.S. Rall (he calls himself TR) has an important, newsworthy bulletin. But even better, it's timely!
posted by WWB at 5/3/2004 07:09:16 PM |

 
LEFT-WING HUMOR, RIGHT-WING HUMOR

By sheer happenstance, this week I attended on back-to-back nights two different comedy acts -- one by and for Democrats, one b/a/f Republicans. It wouldn't be fair to compare the two as if they were apples and apples, but neither was one an orange. Let's say one was a tangerine, the other was an orange. Yet both were quite mandarin.

I digress.

What I mean is the Democratic comedy was performed by actual members of the House and presumably most of it was written by harried legislative aides. The Republican comedy was performed by actual working comics. It's no mystery which brand of humor Armed Prophet prefers -- I'm way more P.J. O'Rourke than I am Al Franken -- but I think I was still able to make some key observations about each:

• The Democrats couldn't get enough of the Cheney-as-ventriloquist joke from last week's Onion:

None of the jokes were quite as cleverly phrased, but that hardly mattered. It was a sure-fire laugh-getter.

(And I might add, it's a valid criticism because the White House cannot truly need them to testify together only; nobody held Bush's hand while he talked for hours and hours on end with Bob Woodward, and he came out of that looking pretty well -- much better than the advancy hype would have had it. But I digress.)

• I was pleasantly surprised that Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee came in for as much ribbing as she did. And I'm not sure it was all good-natured, either. Rep. Loretta Sanchez's Top 10 Things You'll Never Hear On The House Floor included "Rep. Lee yields back the remainder of her time." That may be mild, but it touches directly on what people don't like about her, and shows they more or less agree. (The Weekly Standard has to date the best run-down on her here -- the limousine bit is classic.)


• Let me stop picking on one female Democrat and allow me to defend (I think) another -- Jane Harman of California. Not only did the Democrats make lots of invasion/warmongering/"compassionate colonialism" jokes but they also mildly ridiculed Harman (as "wearing combat boots") for taking a strong interest on military affairs. I'd just like to know, why not Joe Biden? Is it a sexist thing? I don't know about that per se, but I did get the sense that being well-versed in military affairs is just not something a woman does -- unless maybe she's a closet conservative.


• Lastly, longtime readers know that I've ranted about The Onion and Wonkette (in just the last post, in fact) and I can't recall but possibly also The Daily Show for displaying a blatant left-wing bias while at least pretending to non-partisanship. Some may have thought perhaps I just don't like left-wing jokes. I think I can say for certain now: no. It really is about presentation. It's about time and place. I didn't like the attitude in many of the jokes, but I could still laugh at the good ones -- "compassionate colonialism" is pretty good, no?

So that's the first one. Let's see if I can be so observant about the right-wingers:

• Conservatives are aware that they are not in the mainstream of pop culture; Bush's campaign manager, Ken Mehlman, said as much before handing the mic off to the comedians. And though even as a few of these comedians mentioned this, at least one or two of them seemed to take pride in ignorance about popular culture -- one went off an a routine about how his (surely apocryphal) son wears headphones and calls his friends "homies." It didn't help that the jokes weren't very good. Then he ripped off the old Chris Rock line about the "best golfer" being black and the "best rapper" being white. (Note: Tiger Woods is not black.) It seems to me one cannot just complain about being outside the mainstream and then revel in it. The same happens when conservatives complain about media bias and use it as an excuse to do nothing about it.


• I'm sure there were plenty of moments where my leftish friends would identify a racist tinge to some of the jokes. One joke about how immigrants should learn English because the standup didn't want to learn a new word for "Grape Slurpee" struck me as ill-phrased and uncomfortably reminded me of that scene where Michael Douglas menaces the Korean shop-owner in "Falling Down." I guess the rule of thumb is this: if it's clever, it's politically incorrect. If not, it's offensive. Plenty of liberal comics fall on their faces joking about race; because of stereotypes (about conservatives as well as minorities) it's a taller order for the right to make these jokes.


• But you can always make fun of tree-hugging environmentalists.


• On the other hand, conservatives love to paint the left as anti-Semitic, particularly for excusing Palestinian violence against Israel. Best joke of the night was about how a Middle Eastern conspiracy theory claims Barbie is Jewish; there is an Arab version of the doll with a smaller bust size and traditional garb -- and when she bumps into Barbie she blows up.

So which was funnier? As you might infer from the examples above, both the best routines and worst were to be found at the conservative gig. As for left-wing and right-wing humor, is one superior? That's a tough call; I've heard people on both sides of the aisle assert with straight faces (naturally) that the other side is humorless, and that X or Y that is inherent to liberalism or conservatism makes for good humor. I don't necessarily think so.

What I do think is that political humor will always be niche entertainment, and the way things go, it can only ever truly appeal to a bit more than third of the potential comedy-going audience. About a third like the conservative humor; the same number (or judging by opinion polls, maybe just a bit fewer) like the liberal jokes. And some number less than 1/3 just don't get any of it or want ideology mucking up their laughter.

As Bill Hicks used to say: I promise there's a dick joke coming up real soon. Then again, he used to call himself the "Chomsky of dick jokes." Maybe there's no escape.
posted by WWB at 4/29/2004 01:56:41 PM |

 
OH, AND IT'S THE BLOGS THAT ARE INACCURATE?

So the New York Times gets around to doing a piece on Wonkette this weekend, and in describing the blog, the author asserts that Ms. Cox's blog

...supports no party line...

Oh, for crying out loud. The website may not carry an "Approved by the DNC" or "Paid for by John Kerry for President" label, but insinuating that the blog is unbiased is ridiculous. A Wonkette-defender could indeed point to posts where Cox has played up a story the Kerry campaign wouldn't enjoy -- that's what gossip sites do -- but she really goes out of her way to attack the Bush crowd and conservatives in general.

It's her blog (well, actually it's Nick Denton's) and it appears to be doing quite well in terms of readership. I may be in the minority, but I would appreciate the blog quite a bit more if it was up front about leaning left. [Sort of like John Kerry? Hmmm.] Of course, even if it goes unsaid, everyone knows that she writes a Democrat-friendly blog. Everyone, it seems, but the New York Times.
posted by WWB at 4/19/2004 01:48:07 PM |