In the ugly milieu of political commentating, there are few voices that I actually think I ought to listen to. Fewer still whose political leanings come from the other side. But those few there are, I consider valuable. So it's disappointing to read between the lines of David Gergen's recent column "Is the Tide Turning" and find that it may be Gergen himself who's turning...into a typical talking head.
So John McCain wants to criticize Barack Obama because he's too much like Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton? What to make of the fact that McCain married someone a whole lot more like either one of them?
The problem with lashing out at Cindy McCain is that long before John McCain adopted the Bush strategy of preemptive attack for foreign policy, he used it for his marriages.
The other day, I was roundly drubbed here (see Jurrasic Batman) for suggesting that the community on the left should exert a little pressure on Hollywood for making films that can be read by the right as supporting heinous positions. Bah, humbug! said many in the comments, that's not what Batman is about! Agreed, but now there's evidence that the right is using the film just as I feared. A piece today in the WSJ proposes that
"The Dark Knight," currently breaking every box office record in history, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.
It’s one thing to say that a particular wing of modern conservatism seems a little fascist; it’s another thing to prove it unequivocally.
Jeff Sharlet’s The Family is about what is undeniably the most powerful and bizarre quasi-religious movement you’ve never heard of. This is made evident near the beginning of the book, when Sharlet gives us a scene featuring Doug Coe, the group’s leader. Coe is chatting with (or rather, instructing) Congressman Todd Tiahrt (R, Kansas):
Last week there was a bit of an uproar over the AP's announcement that they would be permitting a more personal style of writing in their news reporting. It's a bit of a shock because the AP is kind of old school when it comes to the who-what-when-where-why of news. Even though it was some time ago that the AP started disseminating stories with multiple ledes -- straight and more featurized -- this was new.
I don't have the same problem with it some do. Like Orwell, I think that personal, subjective writing might be the best way to preserve "the moral atmosphere of a particular moment in time," an argument that he makes in a wonderful essay called "Looking Back on the Spanish War."
Nevertheless, I think that the weird hybrid between news and personal writing that we're seeing now is just peculiar, and is evident in a recent NY Times story about Obama abroad.
Yesterday I posted a comment about the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, and was surprised by the response. My comment suggested that perhaps Hollywood ought to pay as much attention to the messages of their films as they do to their fundraisers. The Dark Knight, as I read it, went a little too soft on the torture and domestic spying points. The upshot seemed to be that it was okay to do both -- as long as you only do it once, and it works.
But there's a larger concern than just this one movie. Sometimes, well-meaning directors can become the mouthpiece for pretty horrific propaganda from the right. The Steven Spielberg film Jurassic Park is a great example.
Okay, it's time for the Straight Talk Express to make a stop at Liberal Land, AKA Alan Colmes City. Mr. Colmes, sir, it is your duty to seek an extreme makeover (pundit edition, airing on Lifetime this fall), and I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to call on NetRoots Nation to make a donation to your image -- all in the service of ensuring that the left is perceived as strong and resolute.
Now, don't get me wrong, we're all happy as hell that you gave up stand-up comedy and became a talking head. But the danger of playing second fiddle to Sean Hannity is that you wind up as a kind of political straight man, serving up liberal tidbits that Hannity terminators his way past -- with the help of the producer controlling the cameras.
Weirdo Greta Van Susteren, who rode OJ's coattails to fame in the '90s, if memory serves, simply could not accept the Netroots' characterization of Fox reporting as opinion. She was so upset, in fact, that she immediately set about a poorly worded complaint.
The title of her piece is What do you think? Netroots Nation Hypocrites? or am I wrong? to which the answers, at least in my case, are 1) Many things; 2) No; and 3) Yes. But let's take a moment to assess what she said yesterday on the "Greta Wire:"
Yesterday, I posted a diary asking whether we should mourn Tony Snow. The post received a fair amount of response -- about half agreed that perhaps we should not blindly revere a man who quit a good job to help a bad administration do bad things, and half who agreed with the sentiment but figured Tony Snow was either too warm for criticism, or too insignificant to merit attention. My response to this latter argument was that we would soon see an attempt at apotheosizing Snow -- one we shouldn't permit because the last thing the right needs is good martyrs to bond around. Some doubted that would happen.
In the gushing remembrances that are sure to come in the next few days about the passing of Tony Snow, it's probably wise to also pause for a reality check. Snow was a not terrible guy who will ultimately be remembered for serving as the elegant mouthpiece for an administration that had no other way to peddle its wares -- in other words, he was, for a time, the administration's principle bullshit salesman.
This is made evident by a 2007 exchange that Snow had with another recently-departed journalist, Tim Russert:
UPDATE 2: It looks like Ventura might be just trying to generate buzz...the above post has been amended to reflect the ex-gov's successful manipulation of the media to generate interest, further stories, and general tension.
Al Franken is running a new ad starting today. It just went out to his contributors last night:
The Al Franken campaign is at a critical juncture. Even while I've been trying to figure out how to embed the ad, they called me and I ponied up another $50, even though I'm about tapped out for the season.
Yesterday, I wrote a diary explaining how, as a former craps dealer, John McCain struck me as creepy and bizarre because of how he played craps. But that's certainly not the only way that John McCain is, well, kind of a monster.
At least to some extent, all the "maverick" crap in McCain's career is something of a ruse, created by McCain and journalists, to help poke holes in the conservative facade. He's not just a dick -- he's a Frankenstein monster, and now we have to figure out how to send him to the Arctic.
I was surprised that Steven R's diary on McCain and craps was the first I'd heard of this, and the only reason I'm writing a new diary is because, as a former craps dealer, I may be able to offer fresh insight. (I wrote a piece about my career as a casino dealer for GQ in January, 2001.)
The Time article that got this going was kind of a fluff piece -- Barack as a poker player, McCain as a craps player, and what does that mean, exactly -- but it did get me thinking, and searching a little. There was a fair bit to uncover...
In 1996, John McCain was having a down year. He ruffled some feathers by seeking the removal of airport parking places for members of congress (WaPo, March 10), claimed it was "demeaning and degrading" to use military personnel to help out with athletic events (St. Pete Times, June 12) and coyly fended off suggestions that he might make a good VP for Bob Dole (New York Daily News, May 23).
This last was a little awkward because he had supported Phil Gramm for president. It was a slight miscalculation. Gramm had tied for first in the Iowa Straw Poll, only to receive just .47% of the vote through the primaries. The problem may have been that Gramm had helped to fund the mostly-forgotten soft-porn "Truck Stop Women" in 1974. Gramm received "executive producer" credit on the film, and it was all voters needed to decide that McCain’s endorsement wasn’t enough. (Gramm, incidentally, is now a key McCain adviser.)
But in 1996 not everyone was convinced that McCain wouldn’t get the VP nod. One man, in particular, tried to make sure he didn’t -- a man who would later sing loudly in the swift boat chorus that serenaded John Kerry.
Q. What's worse than a media that is so war-happy, so tickled over embedded (tick-like) journalists who get juicy stories, that they effectively become a propaganda wing of the military?
A. A media that doesn't seem particularly concerned when one of its own gets killed by U.S. forces in the process.
The AP offers a report today on the death of Waleed Khaled. A Defense Department decision has just been released exonerating the soldiers who fired on the team of journalists Khaled was working with.
The reason?
U.S. soldiers responding to an ambush on Iraqi police, saw the car with the Reuters journalists inside, and mistook Kadhem's handheld camcorder and microphone for a weapon. The soldiers fired...
Forgive me if I feel a need to call out Thomas Friedman for his June 11 column titled "Obama on the Nile."
My beef is with the media in general -- a set of folks I wouldn't normally associate with Friedman -- but here's how he begins:
This column will probably get Barack Obama in trouble, but that’s not my problem.
The column is about the Muslim world liking Barack Obama, but that's not what I'm concerned with. What concerns me is what Friedman thinks about his role at this juncture in history.
Okay, I know what you're thinking about Craig Crawford. He looks a little plastic -- like an action figure of a talking head horribly come to life. And on TV he comes across like an stand up comic from the fifties, the kind of comedian who warmed up the strippers, using his own nasally laugh to sell his bad jokes (sort of like McGaffe, actually).
But it turns out Crawford is stupid, too.
On his CQ Politics blog, Crawford lashes out at Obama's handling of the mixup on his VP search team.
I'm in Korea (it's a long story), so please forgive a short diary. The Financial Times has a book review by Edward Luce that makes some interesting points I hadn't heard.
It begins:
It is often forgotten that in the 2000 Republican primaries it was John McCain, rather than George W. Bush, who was favoured by the neo-conservatives. Eight years on, the dwindling band of Republican realists are as worried about McCain's proclivities now as they were alarmed by what an ideologically born-again Mr Bush did after 9/11.
