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President Bush continues to point his finger at 527 organizations -- independent, tax-exempt political activist groups that are not supposed to coordinate their work with the candidates' campaigns. Bush won't condemn the toxic slurry-dump of the Swift Boat Veterans group's TV ad campaign; instead, he insists, everyone should repudiate all "shadowy" 527 groups equally.
You can find the heart of the president's subterfuge in that tenebrous adjective. Shadowy, of course, is bad. Shadowy is covert. Shadowy is dark. Shadowy is scary. Shadowy is al-Qaida.
Bush wants us to associate these qualities with all 527s. But the charge doesn't stick. Certainly, it's fair to apply it to the Swift Boat Veterans group, which emerged out of nowhere, fired its fusillade against John Kerry, and only then began to be exposed as an entity funded and organized by close associates (and in some cases actual officials) of the Bush campaign.
That qualifies as "shadowy" in my book. But the most prominent 527 on the other side of the political field is MoveOn.org -- and calling MoveOn "shadowy" is absurd. The group is the very model of a transparent organization. Its every decision is planned and vetted openly online. Its sources of funding are well-known. Its history dating back to the Clinton impeachment saga is fully chronicled. If the Swift Boat Veterans group were a true grassroots operation with a track record like MoveOn's, we wouldn't be having this argument today: If millions of Americans were genuinely outraged about John Kerry's war record the way millions of MoveOn supporters are outraged about George Bush's presidential record, Kerry would never have made it to the primaries' starting gate.
But the Swift Boat Veterans aren't a mass movement, they're a political dirty trick. And the immediate issue with them -- the reason people are demanding that Bush repudiate them -- is not that they're a 527. The problem is that the group's charges are false.
There's a legitimate debate worth having over whether 527s represent a good or a bad thing in the McCain-Feingold campaign finance era. But the Bush campaign isn't truly interested in that issue. Having surreptitiously and effectively launched a smear campaign against its opponent from the cover of a 527 organization, the Bush team now petulantly insists, "Everybody does it and everybody should stop!" The childishness of the tactic speaks for itself.
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It feels more than a little surreal, rejoining the news after a week off
the grid. I seem to have returned to an alternate universe in which the
Democrats' war-hero candidate has been put on the defensive by the
Republicans' Guard-duty-shirking president thanks to a patently false
television ad. The economy wheezes on, the situation in Iraq continues to
deteriorate, but -- thanks to deft work by the Bush family smear machine --
the top political story is, what did or didn't happen on a Vietnamese river
three decades ago?
No one should question for a second the effectiveness of this Bush
tactic. It is precisely what has worked for Bush campaigns past (vide
Dukakis/Willie Horton, or the anti-McCain blitz in South Carolina 2000),
and there is every sign it is working again.
Josh Marshall accurately, I think, identifies the (crudely but aptly
labeled) "bitch-slap"
psychodynamics of the Swift Boat Veterans story: Facts are nearly
irrelevant here; this is about punching John Kerry and seeing whether he
punches back, and how hard. If he fails to punch back, he's exposed as a
sissy who's not tough enough to defend America. If he does fight back, the
Bushies simply point at him -- as they have already begun to -- and claim
that he's lost it, he's "wild-eyed" and unreliable and unfit to be
president.
It's exactly what every Democratic strategist knew was coming. It's
cunning, and inevitable, and low. And I think the only answer for the Kerry
campaign is to call Bush out, directly, on its lowness. The trouble, of
course, is that as long as you're responding to fraudulent Swift Boat
Veteran ads you're allowing Bush to dominate the agenda. You need to punch
back hard, and only then move on.
George Bush is acting like a latter-day Joseph McCarthy -- albeit one
smart enough to use shadowy surrogates for his dirty work and retain
semi-plausible deniability. So the best way to stop him, I'm convinced, is
to stand up and call out his campaign's slime for what it is. (The new
Kerry TV ad, "Old
Tricks," begins to take on this job.)
McCarthyism was stopped dead in its tracks on June 9, 1954, exactly half
a century ago, when a lawyer named Joseph Welch turned on the
Red-baiting senator with a withering, "Have you no sense of decency,
sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?" Welch had finally
said out loud what a lot of people had long been thinking about McCarthy.
Today's media-saturated environment is different; nothing is left unsaid
for very long, and what matters is what gets repeated most often. Still, it
seems to me that John Kerry's best plan is to find and deploy the 2004
equivalent of Welch's retort. Have you no decency, George Bush, at long last?
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And with that, I'm off for a weeklong vacation. Offline, even. See you back here on the 23rd or thereabouts.
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Over on the right side of the fence, we're hearing plenty of voices arguing that al-Qaida wants to see George Bush defeated. From where I sit, it seems equally or more likely that bin Laden and company would love to see Bush re-elected (he's been their best recruiting agent, in Iraq and elsewhere).
But really, to speculate on this subject either way is to go down a rathole. Who cares which candidate al-Qaida might favor? Osama doesn't vote. All that matters is, which candidate will best protect the American people, bolster the American economy, and help build a safer and more peaceful world for our kids?
But the prospect of an October surprise now looms scarily over the electoral landscape. And the most important thing we can do is to inoculate ourselves in advance against it.
The nightmare scenario goes something like this: Sometime in October, al-Qaida strikes inside the U.S. Either (a) Americans rally behind the president, even though the occasion of a second attack might cause us to feel the administration had failed us; or (b) though there might well have been little any president could do to stop the attack, many Americans blame Bush -- and that evokes a patriotic chorus of rally-round-the-prez from our leaders and our media, with sanctimonious cries of "Remember Madrid!"
It barely matters, then, whether the reaction goes for or against Bush. Either way -- if we accept, as U.S. intelligence reports, that "influencing the elections" is an al-Qaida goal -- the result will be an al-Qaida success. Unless we're somehow able, ahead of the fact, to draw some lines in the rhetorical sand.
The "influencing elections" debate began in earnest in March, when the Madrid attacks and subsequent fall of Bush ally Jose Maria Aznar's government led American conservatives to complain that Spain's voters had capitulated to al-Qaida in a shameful act of cowardice. Never mind that the overwhelming majority of Spanish voters had long opposed their government's policy of supporting the Iraq war; never mind that the last-minute swing against the incumbent government was sparked by disgust at the spin games it played in the immediate aftermath of the attack (when it tried to pin the blame on Basque terrorists). Details, details!
There was and is a blunt agenda at work in this gross distortion of the record: the party of Cheney and Rove is laying the groundwork to argue that, in the wake of an al-Qaida attack, it is our patriotic duty to vote for Bush. Otherwise, you know, the terrorists have won.
In a better world, the right thing to do here would be for Republicans and Democrats to agree, in advance, that neither side will attempt to make political hay out of circumstances surrounding another terrorist attack on the U.S. before the election.
I can't help thinking, though, that such a move would really be unilateral disarmament on the Democratic side -- because the Bush administration has broken every promise it has ever made about not turning terrorism into a political football. Since the war on terror is the only issue on which polls show Bush with any remaining appeal to the American public, it has become the administration's political cornerstone. And it is being micromanaged for Bush's personal political advantage.
Here's Tom Ridge, touting the glories of the president's policies out of one side of his mouth and insisting that his Homeland Security Department "doesn't do politics" out of the other! When all accounts suggest that it was an oversensitivity to political winds that led our intelligence astray in the Iraqi weapons-of-mass-destruction fiasco, here's the new choice to head the CIA -- a partisan GOP bulldog! And don't you Democrats dare oppose him, or we'll hang you by your obstructionist thumbs!
No, I don't think it's possible, given these players, to steer the debate onto the high road and keep it there. Instead, we'd all better keep on high alert between now and Nov. 2 -- not only for possible attacks, which remain a true danger, but for the outrageous distortions of the American political process that could result from them.
Of course, we can be thankful for little things: At least the trial balloon of postponing elections in the event of a terror attack seems to have been definitively exploded.
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For the past several weeks I've accumulated a set of links that I wanted to present and comment on. Each could warrant a full blog entry. But since the chaos of my life and schedule means that instead I've just been sitting on them, I'm just going to post them in a big underannotated lump. Better than not posting them at all, and probably what I should have done in the first place, one by one. If you're an avid follower of blogs you'll probably have seen many of these already.
Teresa Neilsen Hayden's amazing compendium of "Lord of the Rings" parodies provided me with a nearly inexhaustible supply of merriment.
The long view: Greg Costikyan, with whom I don't always agree but whose thoughts I will always read avidly, points out that the U.S. will not always be the "sole superpower" -- providing a good, self-interested reason for us to pay a little more attention to international law:
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We have a window of opportunity, now before our relative but precipitous decline, to establish clear and pervasive international norms of behavior, to persuade the emerging powers that it makes good sense, and is in their benefit, to behave like good global citizens. And to do that, we desperately need the good will and cooperation of our allies in Europe and Asia. As the "predominant world power," it may sometimes seem like we can dispense with this, in the face of more immediate threats. But that's foolish from a more long-term perspective. |
Danny O'Brien posts on the elusive and increasingly central issue of just how much fame and celebrity will satisfy us in an era when the middle ground -- famous for 15 minutes, famous for 15 (or 150) people -- keeps expanding. (This is the aspect of blogging that professional journalists, used to measuring readership by commercial standards, typically miss.)
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There was a time, I think, in the industries where fame is important, that you had was famous, and not. You had big stars, and you had a thin line of people who had work, and you had failures, or people who felt like failures. But now the drop-off on that curve seems to be less precipitous. It feels, stuck here, so close to the machinery of the Net, that there's a growing middle-class of fame - a whole world of people who aren't really famous, but could spend their days only talking to people who think they're fucking fantastic (or horrifyingly notorious). |
Danah Boyd pinpoints many of the problems with the current wave of social software in her talk on "Autistic social software" from Supernova. Good reading for anyone who thinks that "social software" started with Friendster -- but valuable as well for those of us who already know the longer history here:
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I'm often told that social networks are the future of the sociable Internet. Guess what? They were the cornerstone of the Internet, always. What is different is that we've tried to mechanically organize them, to formalize them. Doing so did not make social networks suddenly appear; formalization meant that they became less serious, more game-like. All other Internet social networks are embedded into another set of practices, not seeking an application to validate their existence. |
Creative Commons is doing important work in helping keep open a space for creative reuse of content in an era of hegemonic copyrightism. The organization recently moved in to share the office space for Mitch Kapor's Open Source Applications Foundation, where I've been spending a lot of time researching my book. Regular readers here know of my enthusiasm for the music of the Mountain Goats. So it tickled me to read recently on the Creative Commons blog that the Goats' John Darnielle has okayed the hosting of a free archive of live shows at the Internet Archive. Darnielle has a low-tech preference for old-fashioned tape trading over the online approach -- but the main thing is, he wants people to hear his music, and once they do, many will, as I have, become voracious purchasers of actual Mountain Goats CDs. Creative Commons, the Internet Archive, the Mountain Goats -- how can you go wrong?
Hugh MacLeod, whose trademark art is drawing cartoons on the back of business cards, has posted an ever-evolving list of thoughts and ideas on creativity that's great reading. For instance:
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The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece on the back of a deli menu would not surprise me. Meeting a person who wrote a masterpiece with a silver Cartier fountain pen on an antique writing table in an airy SoHo loft would SERIOUSLY surprise me. |
And, finally, a quote from Norman Mailer, via Jay Rosen's commentary on Mailer's coverage of the 1960 Democratic Convention -- an old one, but, for me, in the "paste this one on your monitor" class:
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"Journalism is chores. Journalism is bondage unless you can see yourself as a private eye inquiring into the mysteries of a new phenomenon." |
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Is it mere chance that, while the bunting is still being pulled down at the Fleet Center, the nation is galvanized by another threat warning from the Department of Homeland Defense? Or is there, as we're hearing, something truly, definitively different about this threat report -- something, beyond the specificity of the named targets, that distinguishes it from the previous, transparently manipulative Tom Ridge scares?
The only reasonable answer anyone not sitting in or near the Oval Office can provide is, we don't know. And that's precisely the problem the Bush administration has created for the nation.
This morning on NPR I heard Larry Johnson, described as a former counter-terrorism official at the CIA and State Department, debunk the threat report. The information behind this weekend's alert for key financial buildings in New York and Washington -- which, we're told, have been cased by al-Qaida -- apparently came from an al-Qaida communications operative captured by Pakistan in mid-July. If you read this New York Times report on him, you'll learn that the casing of buildings started even before 9/11. Maybe these were al-Qaida's alternate plans for the 9/11 attack itself. Maybe they were considering a follow-up. Maybe the plans were shelved, maybe they weren't. As far as we know, the new information is specific about location but tells us nothing about timing. Which is why the timing of the current warning -- aimed for maximum damping of any post-convention Democratic bounce -- smells so fishy.
Perhaps the Bush administration knows more than we do. But between its weapons-of-mass-destruction debacle and its record of timing bogus scares for maximum politial gain, this gang is no longer in a position to say, "trust us."
Johnson's argument, which the Times report corroborates, is that the Bush administration's warning is a cover-your-ass exercise that does nothing to make us safer but that does help reveal to al-Qaida exactly what our defense preparations look like. Oh, and of course it also helps Bush politically by underscoring his message that Americans need to be very, very afraid and only he can protect us.
Bush, Cheney and Ridge have set up themselves and the nation they are supposed to be protecting in a classic boy-who-cried-wolf situation. Unfortunately, as Johnson observed, there really is a wolf out there, and he's probably quite amused and delighted by all the Bush administration's self-serving alarms.
At a time when more than anything else we need to be able to trust our government, our government has tossed that trust away for a mess of political pottage. Beyond his economy-choking, job-limiting economic policies and his deceptively justified, incompetently executed "war of choice" in Iraq, President Bush has lost credibility in the most basic realm of defense against another 9/11. Which is why throwing this administration out on its ears is a necessary prerequisite to restoring Americans' safety. A government whose word we doubt is a government that can't protect us.
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Nicholas Carr's article (and now book) "Does IT Matter?" caused a stir when it was first published. Some aspects of Carr's argument -- that information technology is a more mature industry than it once was -- made sense; other points -- that somehow innovation is dead, there's nothing new under the sun, and all the technology industry faces today is an unending vista of cost-cutting and cutthroat commoditization -- were at best unprovable and more likely dead wrong. (Chad Dickerson had some good commentary on Carr here and here.)
Carr wrote a perfectly reasonable op-ed for the New York Times last week about Microsoft's humongous dividend give-back as an indication of the company's middle-age. I agree with much of the piece, but one passage caused my jaw to drop ground-ward:
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Software never decays. Machinery breaks down, parts wear out, supplies get depleted. But software code remains unchanged by time or use. In stark contrast to other industrial products, software has no natural repurchase cycle. |
Software never decays? Carr is a Harvard Business Review veteran, and I assume he works with computer software every day, as most of us do -- but I can't imagine such a sentence being written by anyone who uses a personal computer or runs a software-dependent business (which means virtually any business today) for any extended period of time.
In the abstract, of course software doesn't decay the way a pair of garden shears grows dull from use or an automobile engine loses compression over time. Abstract code shows no frictional wear. But the notion of "decay-free software" is as divorced from everyday reality as the notion of a "friction-free market": Both exist only in the vacuum-space of the professional economist.
In truth, while well-written software can often lead an extraordinarily long and fruitful life (I am storing the fruits of two years of book research in a 2 megabyte Ecco Pro file, in outlines composed in a program that has not been upgraded or modified since around 1997), most software today begins to rot from the moment of first use.
And the most notorious piece of decay-prone software is the one Microsoft's billions are founded on. Windows begins to accumulate barnacles of cruft in the registry the moment you first crank it up and try to use it to do anything. If you are a typical user, after two or three years of regular use your operating system will be grinding to a halt, crushed by the weight of the junk your various applications and Windows have together conspired to scatter across your directories. I know plenty of people who choose to buy a new computer not because they necessarily need some new hardware feature or upgrade but because they have given up on trying to save an ailing Windows installation -- and reinstalling Windows is enough to send most people screaming toward the nearest Dell ad.
So while Carr may be technically correct -- that software code does not "decay" the way a blade dulls -- he is, by any pragmatic view, dead wrong. From the user's perspective, software almost always decays -- it stops doing what you want it to do, or you try to do something it is supposed to do and find that you can't. The more you use it, the more likely it is to break, because the more likely you, as a cantankerous and unpredictable human being, are likely to do something the programmers haven't imagined you would do.
Tim O'Reilly's writings about software as a service outline this basic truth: Most software today "has people inside." Software decay is so universal that every piece of software needs a corps of developers to keep the rot in check -- whether you're talking about a Web service like Amazon or Google, where the programmers deliver upgrades through the Web site; or a custom business application, where the programmers work for the software company or the client company; or a consumer application, where the programmers provide users with a constant stream of patches and upgrades to keep the bugs at bay.
This is a bad thing if you are dreaming of a world of perfect software. But it certainly keeps a lot of programmers employed. And it's a more natural model for a world in which we don't expect perfection, but hope for steady improvement.
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