Michael Moore's triumph in "Fahrenheit 911" is a measure of Jay Rosen's observation that "the terms of authority are changing in American journalism." In 1968 after the North Vietnamese Tet offensive, it was the CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite who signaled "enough" to the American TV audience, and to Lyndon Johnson. In 2004, it is the freelance camera dude and eternally unmade bed from Flint, Michigan who has cut through all the embedded blather about G. W. Bush and the so-called war on so-called terrorism. It's a great country, and a great moment, in which one man can make the networks, the New York Times, the very best of our old institutional media (try the babbling David Brooks this morning) look so foolish, so irrelevant to the truth we really need to know. Shall we talk about this?
James Der Derian of Brown University got me started here with an email this morning. A friend writes, as the New Yorker used to say:
True Lies
James Der Derian
Politics has always been a struggle over meaning, and when politics escalates into war, the first casualty is - as California Senator Hiram Johnson famously remarked in 1917 - the truth...
Lewis MacKenzie on the Canadian Afghanistan Withdrawal
by Ian Welsh
Retired General Lewis MacKenzie has an article on the disgraceful excuse offered by the DND for why our troops wouldn't be staying in Afghanistan to act as a rapid reaction force during the elections.
If you don't recall, the excuse was as follows:
What the Americans are looking for is not exactly what our troops are trained for.
Actually, as it happens, it's exactly what they're trained for.
Earlier this week, we took a look at a number of "Presidential Indicators" which might provide some insight into the outcome of the November 2004 presidential election.
I'd like to, in advance, suggest yet another potential indicator: The 9/11 Fahrenheit opening weekend gross indicator.
Here are my thoughts: If this film has a blowout boxoffice for its opening weekend, that might actually be implying that the vein of, lets call it "discomfort" against the incumbent runs far wider and deeper than many moderates previously believed.
If, on the other hand, the film does rather poorly, it suggests, perhaps, that the only people really angry at the President are hardcore partisans. (Perhaps, perhaps not -- I'm thinking out loud here).
An element of truth -- or at least recognition -- of this can be seen in the way both sides have alternately promoted and dissed the film: Some Lefties have been encouraging people to go see it, while some Righties have mounted active campaigns to discourage exhibitors from showing the movie.
I cannot say what the uptake is on the encouragement, but as the Al Franken - Bill O'Reilly dispute demonstrated, orchestrated campaigns of censorship have a tendency to backfire.
(Its not just the Right which seems never to learn this, but the Left also:
Barbra Streisand learned that the hard way when she attempted to have photos of her house suppressed. She lost, and the photos became far more widely distributed than if she hadn't ever said anything in the first place).
The 9/11 Fahrenheit thesis is but a mere half-formed theory, and I cannot say something like this has ever been tested before. Baybe the total gross has more predictive power, or the opening month sales, or even DVD rentals will be instructive; I cannot say. This is only a thoery, so your mileage may vary . . .
Anthony Lewis brings a practiced literary eye on the torture memos. The ones meant to offer exact boundaries of how to break the spirit of the Geneva Convention, while breaking only the serifs on the letters. Lewis is, as always, careful, complete and concise: placing the gist of the problem before the reader in the space that lesser writers would spend rummaging through their notebooks.
But in the end he misses the deeper point: it is not the moral self of America which is lost, it is the ethical self. It is not a personal cleansing which is required, but a political one. It is time to admit that in an age where the Vice President treats "Fuck You." as a greeting, where House Republicans threaten Democrats with physical violence, that even asking "at long last have you no shame?" is a misdirected remedy.
This obsession with personalization of politics comes from a very simple problem: we don't know what is going on, we know that the real problems are not discussed, and hence the slender reed that Democracy hangs on is our sense of whether a politician is a "good person" and will not do "bad things" when we aren't looking. It is what drove the Clinton scandal: he did bad things while no one was looking.
As we can see, in the wreckage of an election which already is about the what is said during the election: politicians learn that once you can fake sincerity, you have it made.
Links between US and Communists in Vietnam revealed!
by Alan Rosenblatt
It has come to my intention that Ho Chi Minh contacted the Eisenhower Administration in the 1950's seeking U.S. support. Despite advisors telling Eisenhower that Ho Chi Minh could not be elected dog catcher, these contacts are disturbing and might suggest collaboration between the United States and this notorious communist revolutionary!
It was one of those odd coincidences: I came across so many separate "Presidential election indicators" today that I decided to gather them all in one place for your blogging pleasure.
The most comprehensive grouping was in USA Today, which discusses six 'reliable' presidential-election indicators.
Unfortunately, I can't say they are very reliable, as they are mostly in conflict with each other (at least half of them are gonna be wrong):
CNN reports that during the shoot of the annual Senate photograph earlier this week, Patrick Leahy and Dick Cheney had what a Cheney spokesman characterized as a "frank exchange" of words. Several witnesses confirmed that the exhange was ffffrank indeed. Seems that Cheney let ffffly with the "f" word, very in Leahy's fffface. On the ffffloor of the Senate! Onlookers were, er, sssshocked.
The death toll from today's wave of attacks on Iraqis and coalition forces rose to 92, officials said, as a Web site said a group linked to al Qaeda associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was responsible. At least 285 were wounded in bombings and ambushes in Mosul, Ba'qubah, Ramadi, Baghdad and Fallujah, according to officials.
For the first time since the start of the war in Iraq, a majority of Americans say the United States made a mistake in sending troops to that country, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll released Thursday.
As always, there's some dissonance in related poll results, which reflects either the bizarre self-cancelling way questions are framed, or confusion on the part of the public, or both. However, in sum things are not looking good for the incumbent.
Bush/Cheney has spent a fortune to paint a negative picture of John Kerry, but in spite of that Kerry's favorables have continued to climb as Bush's have fallen.
At BOP, the Senate is close to our deliberative hearts. So it's an honor to welcome two new BOP sponsors, Russ Feingold and Betty Castor. (I'm going to adopt Atrios's sponsorship policy; I won't endorse everyone who advertises, but if you can make a good argument why they respect blogs and a diversity of voices, I will give them a shout-out).
Betty Castor, a great Floridian candidate for Senate, put one up as well. We can win this race and I have fairly good sources there (she respects blogs, something that's close to my heart), so I'll keep you up to date on what I know about it. In the meantime, here's a way to be nice to Betty.
There are several really cool technologies that I'm going to be writing about over the next few weeks - one that has to do with cell phones, one called Progressive Punch, and Actblue.
This is the fourth in a series making a case for the various parties. The Liberal case is here, the Conservative one here and the NDP one is here. As with the other articles there is no attempt to be balanced within this article.
Let's face facts, all three of the major parties are broken. The Liberals are corrupt, the Conservatives are irresponsbile radicals who want to remake Canada in a way that most Canadians don't support and the NDP are a guttered promise built on class warfare which has never had success at the Federal level. If you vote for any of them you're voting for the lesser of three evils. But there is another choice - another way: a place where your vote can build something new that points the way to a better future for Canada.
The article I'm discussing treats its readers like children, unable to care about or understand policy or governance.
I don't know if you've seen this bizarre NYT article on Schwarzenegger. As far as I can tell, his policy regime is built on (a) borrowing money, (b) cutting social programs, and (c) doing it with flair, optimism, and political savvy. This article pretends to cover his time as governor, but it's really covering what his time as governor looks like to a pop psychologist. For instance:
The governor, his skin and hair the color of a tarnished brass bed, his pectoral muscles testing the strength of his shirt buttons, is clearly a man enjoying himself and at ease with power. He said he had not encountered any major surprises in his latest career and found himself fully engaged in public policy. The biggest adjustment, he said, is learning to live with a schedule drawn up for him by others.
That's the cult of personality worship at work. Treating the readership like children, unable to understand or care about policy or governance but obsessed with American Idol-like details of celebrity, seems to be a staple format, even in such respectable outlets as the New York Times. And there's more that's attempting to elevate this guy into Reagan's orbit of delusion.
Read it again, and realize that the computer economy, now headed for "cheap and stylish" rather than a constant race to leapfrog on technological advantage - is going to become different. Just as assembly line workers are now paid less, so too will technology workers.
Stirling Newberry writes for BopNews and is an advisor to the Jim Newberry campaign. The opinions expressed here are his own.
At a certain point, the American public decides that the record speaks for itself. That is, the book closes on an Executive's actions, and anything else that happens is simply "putting lipstick on the pig", last minute attempts to pander for votes. This point is somewhere around June of the election year. From there on in the focus shifts, more and more, to deciding - rather than taking in.
This has saved Presidents: Truman's economy hit a down draft late, but not in time to swing public opinion. It has also torpedoed Presidents: Carter pushed the economy out of the 1980 recession very quickly, but people decided that it would not last.
In short the book on Bush has been written, and while there will be improvement in some sectors, people will realize that the "long term" isn't going to be seen in the next few months. This is why Rove wanted the hiring uptick to start a year before the election, "it takes a year for people to believe it is real".
Think back to a year ago, to those eerie days before Bush unleashed hell over Baghdad. Millions of people had protested around the world to prevent the invasion, but in the days before the invasion, it had become clear that our protests would count for nothing. Bush was going ahead with his little adventure in Mesopotamia. It was just a matter of time.
Against that tragic background, there was a quieter tragicomedy staged closer to home. Tobacco farmer Dwight Watson drove his tractor into a pond on the Mall in DC, claiming the tractor was loaded with bombs. The bombs, it turned out, were nothing more than a couple of cans of Raid.
That whole tragicomedy came to an end today when Dwight Watson got sentenced. In some weird way, I keep seeing Dwight Watson as a metaphor for the larger problems with discourse and political debate in this country.
