Media ArchivesMay 10, 2008Smear JobsMore excellent work from NRO. Robert Malley has a job at the International Crisis Group where he, among other things, writes analytical reports about the situation in the Middle East. In the course of doing such work, he has spoken with leaders of Hamas. Naturally, this equals "connections with Hamas" and "palling around with terrorists." I guess by this standard Jeff Goldberg's a Hezbollah operative or something. Jenna's Wedding
It seems that First Daughter Jenna Bush is getting married, and she and the groom, showing some class and good sense, have chosen not to make their wedding a huge public spectacle. According to The Washington Post, the American people are very upset about this. I've certainly got my share of gripes with the Bush administration (disastrous war, determination to give inequality a boost, catastrophic approach to climate change, illegal surveillance, systematic torture, etc.) but I'm gonna say they deserve a pass on this one. And, further, I'd hypothesize that I'm not alone. I haven't heard anyone complain about the non-public nature of the wedding, nobody's emailed to urge me to blog about it, indeed, I didn't even realize this was happening until the Post front page informed me that I felt deprived of the wedding photos I crave.
Mighty ARVNGeorge WIll reviews Rick Perlstein's masterpiece, Nixonland and picks a very strange nit: "Calling South Vietnam’s army 'a joke' is not historical analysis, it is an unworthy dismissal of men who fought and died for more than a decade." But, look, South Vietnam's military was a joke. That was the whole crux of the issue with Vietnam. The South Vietnamese government had little legitimacy and couldn't build workable state institutions. Even after years of intensive U.S. backing, the South Vietnamese army couldn't hold off the North without substantial financial and logistical aid, and the assistance of American air and sea power. UPDATE: Rick comments to say he "have chosen a better word than 'joke.'" Still, ARVN was not a very competent fighting force -- that's why they lost! It's true, as various commenters are pointing out, that North Vietnamese forces also received Soviet support, but the quantity of U.S. support for the South was always much greater than the quantity of Soviet support for the North. It was like Afghanistan in reverse (or Afghanistan was like Vietnam in reverse) -- the commies had better proxies, so a low-cost endeavor for the U.S.S.R. was able to create a high cost endeavor for the U.S.A. May 8, 2008Nothing to See HereMichael Calderone and Avi Zenilman: "'Deafening silence' from networks on military analysts". It's as if The New York Times' famous ability to set the agenda for TV news magically evaporates when wholesale corruption on the part of TV news becomes the story. They were complicit in lying to the public, they got caught, and they're not even slightly embarrassed or ashamed. May 7, 2008Tiering Iron ManWaPost derides Iron Man as a "second-tier" super hero. Jonathan Last tries to defend his first-tier status, but I think that's a mistake. The problem with the article is that it doesn't do due deference to the significance of the second tier. At the end of the day, the first tier of costumed crime fighters is limited to just three members -- Superman, Spiderman, and Batman -- truly ubiquitous figures who any American could recognize even if they don't know anything about them. Iron Man belongs firmly to a second-tier of major comic book characters who'd be instantly familiar to anyone who was, at any time in his or (less likely) her life a reader of superhero books. Where a lot of folks surprised about the success of the Iron Man film seem to me to have gone wrong is just in underestimating how big the audience for the second-tier is. But the reality is that while current-and-former comic book fans are a minority of Americans, it's a pretty big minority, and it doesn't really take that many people to make a hit movie. A third- or forth-rate hero like Elongated Man could never carry the day, but the second tier is fertile ground if you just manage to put a decent film together. My Head BlogsHere I am bloggingheadsing with Reihan Salam mostly talking about HITS but the New York Times liked the part about Iran. Now We KnowTim Russert just said "we now know who the Democratic nominee is going to be." I certainly agree with that, but I do wonder why it's just now dawning on the TV talking heads. March 4 was Clinton's chance to make up the ground she lost in February, and she wasn't able to do it. We knew as of March 5 who the nominee was going to be. Oh well. Glad to see more folks are realizing, and maybe we can wind this thing down. I guess I should try to go to bed before flying to California tomorrow for the Nixon Library event (be there!). May 6, 2008The Said FactorI like the thought, but I'm skeptical that Kathy G. is right to think that more widespread knowledge of Edward Said's work would have posed some kind of substantial stumbling block to the effort to sell the country on the Iraq War. The main intellectual drivers behind America's post-9/11 approach to the Middle East were, if not Said experts, at least broadly familiar with the general thrust of his work (I'd put myself in that category as well) which is precisely why you see things like The Weekly Standard publishing an Edward Said takedown piece by Stanley Kurtz on their October 8, 2001 issue. Then they took another whack at Said in their November 12, 2001 issue. And Frank Foer offered a sweeping dismissal of Middle East Studies as a discipline in the December 3, 2001 issue of The New Republic tracing the field's flaws to none other than Said. In general, this was a period when "Arabist" became a term of disapprobation and it temporarily became conventional wisdom that foreign service professionals' judgment was mostly corrupted by excessive solicitousness of the opinions of foreign governments. Elites were generally familiar with the broad set of ideas that called the wisdom of invading Iraq into question -- from Middle East studies thinking to the realist tradition of international relations analysis to the mainstream opinion of the U.S. Army officer's corps -- it just came to be generally accepted that these strands of thought were mistaken. Kids TodayBlake Hounshell draws our attention to a distressing trend: A teenage rap duo in Chicago has recorded a track, aptly called "The Economist," that extols the British publication's breadth and brevity and samples podcast commentary by correspondents Edward Lucas and Anthony Gottlieb. The answer, of course, is "heavy-handed editing" facilitated by lack of bylines. May 5, 2008Shocking Results
NYT polls the gas tax issue. How remarkable. It's almost as if the press' unusual decision to make some effort to cover the issue in a substantive way led to a better-informed electorate. Weird, wild stuff. It's strange to me how media types can simultaneously keep in their heads the idea that voters are very concerned about things like high gas prices and the rising costs of health care, but wouldn't be interested in political news that focused on which candidates have good ideas for addressing those problems. Oh well, hopefully we can get back to all freakshow all the time soon. May 4, 2008Gone Too FarMy estimation of Hillary Clinton has gone way down over the past six months, but we Obama fans still have a long way to go before we can match the likes of WorldNetDaily's "How Hillary will lead America into hell". May 3, 2008JournamalismHaving sung the praises of the vituperative British press it is worth pointing out that one downside of British media norms is that newspapers deem themselves to have much more leeway than ours do in terms of publishing stuff that's totally made up. Here's for instance, the Sun reports on a totally non-existent EU plot to dismember the UK:
According to the article, "“Secret plans reveal the South of England will be renamed TRANSMANCHE – and governed in part by bureaucrats in France." Apparently the Daily Mail "reported" on a similar plot last summer. The Fox FactorPeter Suderman doesn't understand why netroots types get so upset when Democrats go on Fox News: Perhaps I’m not enough of a partisan, but I wouldn’t be bothered — in fact, I’d be rather thrilled — to see any conservative candidate, especially one I particularly liked, do an interview with Keith Olbermann, or even, say, a sit down with The Nation. The difference between Fox and The Nation is that The Nation makes no pretense of being anything other than what it is. If a conservative politician sits down for an interview with Katrina vanden Heuvel or Eric Alterman or Chris Hayes or any other worthy Nationeer they'd be engaged in an interesting exercise in reaching out to self-consciously progressive media. Fox News, by contrast, is heavily invested in selling the idea that it's a "fair and balance" straight news source even though it's run by former GOP political operatives and people go from being Fox anchors to running the White House press shop. Sitting down for Fox interviews is thought to lend legitimacy to this pretense of neutrality that Fox is seeking to foster, a pretense that makes Fox's anti-Democrat biases all the more damaging to Democrats. May 1, 2008Lincoln-Douglass
Apparently there was some confusion in Fox News' coverage of Hillary Clinton's proposal that she and Barack Obama compete in some Lincoln-Douglas debates. I think there's an underexplored historical counterfactual in which the United States uses a different kind of electoral system -- like popular vote with a run-off -- that resulted in a Stephen Douglas presidency without any change in the underlying shape of public opinion. Cable News DeclinesVia Matt Stoller, some evidence that the total audience for cable news is on the decline: MSNBC’s ratings momentum continued in April, as the network finished the month as the only cable news net to show a viewership increase over last year (342,000 vs. 333,000, M-Su Total Day). MSNBC also showed the most growth in weekday primetime, up 9% in the key Adults 25-54 demo (253,000 vs. 232,000), while CNN dropped 9% and Fox News Channel plunged 14%. That's nice for MSNBC, and I do think they're the best cable network and have come to rely on them for primary-night coverage, and the overall lowering tide would seem to be good for America. One of my new lines when print journalism types start fretting about the blogosphere is to remind people that the emerging media landscape can't possibly be worse than 24 hour cable news, which often seems to be going out of its way to be uninformative. TV News: We Don't CareRead Glenn Greenwald on Brian Williams' stunningly unresponsive "response" to the NYT's revelation that the coterie of ex-officers used by TV news to comment on military affairs was riddled with conflicts of interest and being used as a Pentagon propaganda arm. I'm not sure what's more stunning, that Williams can't be bothered to correctly state the nature of the complaint, or that his response is actually more than we've heard from any other network. Apparently, nobody's even slightly embarrassed by any of this. And on some level, why should they be? Since as best I can tell all the networks are complicit, as long as they all agree to just hum along nobody should lose any market share to anyone else. Rove on Stress PositionsGreat catch by Jon Chait: Rove writes, "Another McCain story, somewhat better known, is about the Vietnamese practice of torturing him by tying his head between his ankles with his arms behind him, and then leaving him for hours." So, wait, now putting prisoners in stress positions is torture? I was going to say "it's funny because it's true" but it's really not all that funny that we now torture people as a matter of policy in the United States. Wingnut Versus WingnutIt's Stephen Hayes versus Laurie Mylroie in a hilarious "battle of the Iraq/al-Qaeda conspiracy theorists." My preferences here lie with Mylroie who takes on a more extreme, and therefore more coherent, worldview in which we're supposed to essentially believe that Saddam Hussein is the cigarette smoking man behind all evil in the galaxy. Hayes, by contrast, tends to operate as someone who's primarily interested in scoring debater's points -- "liberals sometimes say there was no connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda, but an Iraqi guy and a guy who knows Saddam met once in 1996 so we had to invade to stop another 9/11!" April 30, 2008Some Collegial AdviceWhether or not one enjoys blogs and blogging, I don't think that writing a blog that seems to consist primarily of complaints about blogging is likely to attract a large audience to the new Jeffrey Goldberg blog. Blogs are mostly read by people who like blogs -- writing about the evils of blogging is probably a good op-ed subject. Like rather than wondering aloud "why more people don't simply pick up the phone once in a while" why not pick up the phone once in a while and write a blog that's dramatically better than all the phone-less blogs out there, thus proving the superiority of phone-based blogging? Meanwhile, though, thanks to the blog I saw Goldberg's Q&A with Shmuel Rosner in which he makes a ton of good points. April 29, 2008Accept No Substitutes
Some turns of events just cry out for the NY Post headline treatment. Meanwhile, a friend Twittered the suggestion that perhaps the right way to understand Rev. Wright is as a successor figure to the Billy Carter / Roger Clinton / Neil Bush tradition of embarrassing associates. Sorry I Missed ItI once again was not invited to the White House Correspondent's Dinner, and this recounting by Mike Scherer doesn't make it sound very interesting except this one part: As is tradition, the President stood to do a short stand-up act, which included the retelling of an old joke about Vice President Dick Cheney watching Bush through a peephole in the Oval Office door while masturbating. Such is the state of Washington humor. Um . . . really? That happened? And it's an old joke? April 28, 2008Mmmm....Beer
Ezra Klein wonders when arugula became the signpost of fancy-pants elitism. I wonder, too. On the one hand, I'm pretty much a fancy-pants elitist but I'm really not sure which of the various leafy greens you see in salads is the arugula. Apparently it's also used as a garnish at Olive Garden. But the real question is when did beer become so downscale? Go to a retail corridor in a yuppified neighborhood in any town in America and you'll find a bar full of people drinking . . . beer. Go to a Whole Foods in a town where supermarkets are allowed to sell beer and you'll find . . . beer. Surely these are well-known facts. Meanwhile, in literal sense the American "beer track" seems to involve Obama-friendly plains states plus outliers like Nevada (casinos) and New Hampshire (people driving in from neighboring states to avoid taxes). HITS Evening EventI'll be doing a reading/Q&A/signing event for Heads in the Sand at the Borders on 18th and L in Washington, DC Thursday at 6PM so folks whose "jobs" and such prevented them from coming to my CAP event on Friday should come by and check it out. Tough Enough
James Fallows talks about how politicians want to talk about their agenda, but the press only wants to hear about the freak show: The obvious complaint, easily dismissed by reporters, is that press coverage is biased against or "too tough on" this or that candidate. Reporters tell themselves: Hey, we're tough on everybody. You're not strong enough to take it, maybe you should find a different line of work. What's driving this, I think, are the dual desires to be "tough" and to be "objective." In particular, being objective is thought to preclude being tough about public policy because that would entail picking sides in ideology-inflicted arguments. And people didn't get into this business in order to provide softball coverage. So instead you ask tough questions about process or about trivia, even though there's little evidence that these are the subjects about which people want to hear. April 27, 2008I'll Be BackFireDogLake seems to be having server problems so I had to stop contributing to my book salon over there a bit more than half way through. But assuming things get fixed, I'll return tomorrow to try to follow up on the questions still outstanding. Check it out -- if you haven't seen an FDL salon before, it's a pretty cool format. Book SalonI'm going to be doing a FireDogLake book salon on Heads in the Sand today at 5PM, so if you've got any questions about the book you'd like to see answered, definitely head that way and ask 'em. April 26, 2008Mixing BowlStrange but true, a reasonably kind review of Heads in the Sand by Robert VerBruggen (my new favorite conservative writer) in National Review -- "Blogger Extended: Matthew Yglesias's Heads in the Sand is a mixed success." April 25, 2008Snow JobIn his debut as a CNN commentator, former White House press secretary Tony Snow says it's unfair for John McCain to criticize Bush's handling of Katrina, and suggests that Dick Cheney could be a big political asset. This seems like right-wing hackery so egregious as to be counterproductive to the cause. NotedThere's a whole lotta unintentional comedy packed into the first two paragraphs here. Back to the Future
GFR gets down with some cake-blogging: As blogs move us into a less heavily copy-edited world, I sometimes wonder if we’re moving back into a more 16th and 17th century form of writing, where the idea of correct spelling was less important than the communication of meaning — which, in reality, can be accomplished just as well with incorrectly spelled words and homonyms as with a more perfect language. And also: as we move ever deeper into this new world of speech-like writing, will the perfect, formal language of the page one day seem as antique and elaborate as Victorian silverware? It's plausible. Many people have remarked that political blogging has certain affinities with the pamphleteering tradition of the 17th and 18th century, so perhaps the idea of shifting toward the stylistic elements of that era should be expected as well. The fundamentally international nature of the internet can push in this direction as well. English words have different "correct" spellings in different English-speaking countries, so insofar as people become accustomed to reading foreign websites they'll get used to reading a lot of misspelled words. Or, rather, to having a more flexible concept of what the significance of spelling is. Heads in the Sand
I'm not sure if you've heard, but I wrote a book recently called Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats which examines the politics and policy of the 21st century national security debate from a progressive perspective. The main idea of the book is that the key to future political success for American liberalism is dependent on mastering the national security issue, and that the key to doing this isn't to endlessly continue the vacuous search for "toughness" but instead to ditch the people and ideas who wound up leaving so many Democrats complicit in the Bush administration's horrible war in Iraq. Fred Kaplan calls it "a smart, vital book," Ezra Klein deems is "a very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care" and Hendrick Hertzberg emphasizes that it's not boring (as those of you who get the Ezra Klein joke may surmise), "Heads in the Sand is not just a razor-sharp analysis cum narrative of the politics of national security in general and the Iraq war in particular, it's also an enthralling and often very funny piece of writing." Today is the "official" release date, so not only can you order a copy but I think it should now be in brick and mortar bookstores. Also if you live in DC and have a job that lets you wander off to think tanks in the middle of the day come see me today at noon talking about these issues with Rand Beers, Kurt Campbell, and Brian Katulis. So, you know, buy my book. Tell your friends to buy my book. Read the book, even! Polling AccuracyGood magazine takes a look at the historical track record of different media polls in terms of forecasting the general election. ABC looks like the winner to me, with Washington Post and Harris also worth taking seriously. April 24, 2008The Press and the WarNot to get too invested in being an apologist for the media's pre-war malfeasance, but it should be said that there's a reason the press mostly relied on foreigners rather than American Democrats to make the case against the invasion of Iraq -- the leaders of the Democratic Party were all supporting the President's decision. If Tom Daschle, Dick Gephardt, Joe Biden, John Kerry, John Edwards, Joe Lieberman, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright, etc. had all been against the war, I'm sure they would have been treated unfairly (as Nancy Pelosi, Al Gore, and Howard Dean were) but we would have heard from them. Meanwhile, my understanding is that not only were key leaders backing the war, but they were also urging anti-war Democratic politicians to not make too much noise and fuss since the main electoral strategy for the 2002 midterms was a doomed effort to take the war "off the table" by having almost everyone in a tough race (either incumbent or challenger) back the war. This whole episode in our history has been surprisingly forgotten (along with related developments like Phil Donohue getting sacked from MSNBC for opposing the war) considering how recent it was, but you can relive it all in Heads in the Sand if you're so inclined. The Quickening
Here's Time's cover. I certainly hope this primary can come to an end without anyone getting decapitated. But the correct reference is "there can be only one" in the rarely used subjunctive tense so as to emphasize the mythic nature of the dictum. Meanwhile, it's worth observing that it's not totally clear that there really can be only one. There are a lot of good reasons to think an Obama-Clinton unity ticket would be an awkward, inconvenient pairing. But at the same time, Reagan-Bush was an awkward inconvenient pairing and that didn't stop it from happening. And it's not as if JFK and LBJ were soul mates or anything. If Obama and his team conclude that Obama-Clinton is the only way to make sure that everyone's rowing in the same direction then you could easily imagine them deciding that consolidating all the Democratic elites behind the ticket is more important than the fact that a Clinton VP choice would wreak havoc with his message. Pie TossTom Friedman gets pied at Brown: That's funny, but for a more intellectually rigorous Friedman takedown, I'd suggest the preface to Heads in the Sand, which attempts to elucidate the "Friedman Units" concept for a wider audience as well as explore the larger significance of Friedmanesque behavior. InferencesPatrick Healy has an excellent article in the Times making the point that it's illegitimate to make inferences of the form "A lost State X in the primary, therefore A will lose State X in a general election" or "A lost Demographic Y in the primary, therefore A will lose Demographic Y in a general election." If Clinton loses Demographic Y that could be because their preference is Obama > Clinton > McCain or it could be that they think Obama > McCain > Clinton and their behavior in the Obama/Clinton race doesn't give us any evidence. The best evidence we do have to test these claims is provided by the early general election polling matchups, we can at least illustrate broad trends. According to Gallup, Clinton and Obama are both tied with McCain: In head-to-head matchups against presumptive Republican nominee McCain, Clinton and Obama perform almost exactly the same. In Gallup's latest tracking of the general election, based on interviewing conducted April 18-22, McCain has a one-point lead over both Clinton and Obama. In the April 18-20 USA Today/Gallup poll, both Clinton and Obama were slightly -- but almost identically -- ahead of McCain among likely voters. In neither instance is there any meaningful difference in how the two candidates stack up against McCain. Obviously, there's no way Clinton could be tied with McCain without picking up the lion's share of Obama supporters, and there's no way Obama could be tied with McCain without picking up the lion's share of Clinton supporters. Basically, there's nothing to see here. April 23, 2008Cohen on McCain: He Can Do Know WrongVia Somerby and Lemieux, Richard Cohen has an war is peace moment: And so it will be the job, the obligation, the solemn task of the next president to restore that trust. John McCain could do it. He's an honorable man who has fudged and ducked and swallowed the truth on occasion—about the acceptability of the Confederate flag, for instance—but always, I think, for understandable although not necessarily admirable reasons. To be simplistic about this, you're looking here at a press that's hopelessly in the tank for John McCain. To try to be a bit more charitable, you're looking here at a press that's hopelessly invested in the doomed epistemology of character. We can't know what lurks in the hearts of pols, but we can make inferences based on their behavior. But all politicians' behavior is mixed. So we (and by "we" here I mean "Richard Cohen") read that behavior through our preexisting beliefs about their character. And since we "know" that McCain is honorable, he fudges and ducks and swallows etc. for "understandable" reasons, whereas other, lesser politicians are just soulless scumbags. Of course McCain's reasons are understandable -- he wants to win! -- but they're just the same reasons everyone else has. They pander, he's understandable. They lie, he fudges. It's all senseless. Which is, I suppose, just another way of observing that we're looking at a press corps that's hopelessly in the tank for John McCain. Prepare for BikebloggingI'm pretty much a lifelong non-owner of a bicycle, and I've certainly never done city biking in traffic, but I just got one yesterday. So be prepared for many future posts about the low quality of America's bike infrastructure and how we should be more like Amsterdam or Copenhagen. For example, the city fathers of Washington, DC should consider that though it's nice that they've established some bike lanes, the key thing would be for the lanes to connect with one another and go into the downtown area so they'd be helpful for people trying to get from where they live to where the bulk of the stuff is. It's like how the roads for cars don't just stop arbitrarily. Think about it. Also, to the bike thieves of the world -- don't steal my bike! April 22, 2008The Scumbag LineI don't know how many readers of this blog check out the comment section. But I think it's interesting. One of our longest-time contributors goes by the name of "Petey" and has traditionally had a lot of interesting things to say about both politics and basketball. Lately, though, all of his posts consist more or less of calling me a "trust-fund scumbag" and accusing me of being opposed to universal health care. It makes for an odd argument. Basically, before Iowa Petey strongly supported John Edwards. My feelings were more mixed, but I came down softly on Edwards' side. Now Edwards is out of the race. Petey thinks Hillary Clinton's health care plan is better than Barack Obama's. As it happens, I agree. Petey also thinks there are other problems with Hillary Clinton. As it happens, I agree with that, too. To me, the problems with Clinton outweigh the fact that I think she has a better health care plan -- among other things, I think the outcome of 2008 Senate elections will have a larger influence on the ultimate shape of health care policy than will the outcome of the Clinton_obama primary -- but Petey disagrees. From this rather narrow disagreement, a huge amount of bile has spewed, including repeated insistence that I oppose the idea of universal health care when I clearly don't. There are no perfect presidential candidates any more than there are perfect presidents. But by the end of January we had two options, and I think Obama's the better one. As of today, it's even more constrained than that -- if Clinton does poorly tonight, she'll be forced out of the race and progressives will be in good shape to acquire a level of political power we haven't had in decades. If she does well, she'll stay in the race and an incredibly destructive Democratic primary will continue for a while longer and the odds still make it overwhelmingly likely that Obama will emerge as the winner. That would be bad. I like her health care proposal more than I like Obama's (and I like Obama more on foreign policy, climate change, and several other issues) but I hope she does as poorly as possible tonight and gets out of the race. Either way, though, it's deeply irrational for people with similar political views to get so mad at each other just because we may disagree about which politicians do the best job of imperfectly embodying those ideals. ElitismProgressive Media USA notes that if you're looking for an elitist in the Presidential race you might want to look at the super-rich guy who made his fortune by marrying an heiress: And of course the couple still won't release the part of their tax returns that has all the money on it. The Blind Praising the BlindI continue to wonder what the point is of exercises like having Adam Nagourney or the team of John Harris and Jim Vandehei defend the ABC News debate. What the debate's critics are saying, after all, is that ABC's conduct was the apotheosis of everything that's wrong with MSM campaign coverage. To point out in response that the people most responsible for the MSM campaign coverage status quo thought it was good seems totally non-responsive. What I'd like to see in defense of ABC would be to identify some likely Democratic Party primary voters in Pennsylvania or some other upcoming state who are now better-informed about the election than they were previously. Until that happens, though, I'm going to stick with James Fallows' observation that ordinary citizens show an extremely low level of interest in this sort of stuff. The fact that the people who've turned political reporting into appalling farce found the somewhat more appalling than usual farce of last week's debate even more delectable than the merely appalling debate work we'd seen earlier from Tim Russert and others is no kind of defense at all. April 21, 2008The Stature GapI'm not sure I buy the notion that McCain is too much of a rageoholic to be president. For one thing, I've had some anger management issues in my life and McCain doesn't seem that bad off to me. For another thing, coming from someone else I might worry that he'd inadvertently start a horribly destructive war with North Korea or something, but McCain's made it clear in the past that his considered view is that a horribly destructive war with North Korea could be a good idea. The anecdote that highlights McCain's real problem is here: A platform that had been adequate for taller candidates had not taken into account the needs of the 5-foot-9 McCain, who left the suite and went looking for a man in his early 20s named Robert Wexler, the head of Arizona's Young Republicans, which had helped make arrangements for the evening's celebration. Confronting Wexler in a hotel ballroom, McCain exploded, according to witnesses who included Jon Hinz, then executive director of the Arizona Republican Party. McCain jabbed an index finger in Wexler's chest. 5'9" is probably too short to be elected president and, even worse for McCain, this is an anecdote from 1986. In the intervening 22 years he's almost certainly shrunk due to spinal compressional and he's actually below average. We used to elect short men to the White House before the invention of, you know, photography but there's no way this is going to fly in a modern context. Blogger SweatshopThe true story of my life: There ought to be a law. Hey! Policy! What?Mark Steyn writes: Well, why shouldn't they vote on "character"? Barack Obama has no accomplishments, no legislative record, no nuthin'. So if you don't want to vote on character (ie, his condescension to crackers too boorish to understand how sophisticatedly nuanced it is to have a terrorist pal and a racist pastor), what else is left? Leaving aside the fact that Barack Obama does, in fact, have accomplishments and a legislative record the other thing one could consider beyond a candidate's record is his or her proposals. You can bore down into detail about these proposals on Obama's website. Alternatively, you can opt for a more general characterization of the McCain/Obama choice where McCain would favor lower taxes, less generous services, and a more business-friendly regulatory environment whereas Obama would favor higher taxes, more generous services, and a regulatory environment that's more influenced by the views of environmental, consumer, and labor organizations. This whole general neighborhood of inquiry really ought to be familiar to someone who writes about politics for a living. April 20, 2008Everyone an Anti-SemiteFor reasons I can't quite comprehend, even some pretty hardened TNR-haters seem to see Leon Wieseltier as making a positive contribution to the world. Certainly, some very good stuff appears in the back of the book over there, but the man's own work is a kind of writing-as-thuggery. Anyways, it seems I have to add my colleague Andrew Sullivan to the ever-growing list of people TNR deems motivated by hatred of Jews. The context -- Bill Kristol sitting in his partisan hack armchair and determining that Barack Obama's Christian faith is insincere: And now for the grossly undialectical bit. The ink on the Times was not yet dry when Andrew Sullivan rushed to the defense of his idol, I mean Obama. When one types all the time, sooner or later everything will be typed, and so Sullivan, in his fury against Kristol, typed this: "A non-Christian manipulator of Christianity is calling a Christian a liar about his faith." Ponder that early adjective. It is Jew baiting. I was not aware that only Christians can judge Christians, or that there are things about which a Jew cannot call a Christian a liar. If Kristol is wrong about Obama, it is not because Kristol is a Jew. So this fills me with a certain paschal wrath. Nice little blog you have there, Obama boy. Pity if frogs or locusts should happen to it. Let my people be! Um . . . really . . . noting the irony of Kristol's attack is now "Jew-baiting"? We seem to be defining our problems down here. But in Wieseltier's view, this is the equivalent of enslaving the entire people of Israel. And Wieseltier himself is, I guess, Moses? How preposterous. And this isn't a blog post -- Wieseltier has, nominally, an editor who ought to be able to engage in some quality control. April 19, 2008Military AnalystsThis is must-read stuff from the New York Times. It's about the ex-generals who show up on television as "military analysts" presumably there to provide a neutral point of view. In practice, however, it seems that they mostly have close ties to defense contractors as lobbyists or executives and are, in fact, just part of the Bush administration communications apparatus. Conservative PCWhat Chait said. A Great CauseGene Healy published this post on John McCain's fetishization of the idea of serving great causes a while ago, but I really like this one parenthetical joke: McCain’s sometime ideological guru and op-ed page cheerleader, David Brooks, expresses similar themes in his writings. Even in Bobos in Paradise, Brooks’s foray into “comic sociology,” he warns darkly of “the temptations that accompany affluence.” “The fear is that America will decline not because it overstretches, but because it enervates as its leading citizens decide that the pleasures of an oversized kitchen are more satisfying than the conflicts and challenges of patriotic service.” (As a young man, Brooks served abroad with the Wall Street Journal Europe.) This is a theme with a substantial lineage including, notably, important affinities with a lot of Theodore Roosevelt's thinking. I have a piece forthcoming about McCain's foreign policy which notes that one distressing possibility is that he actually believes this stuff and sees war-induced hardship as a benefit rather than a cost when thinking about foreign policy decisions. The President was, I think, getting at a similar idea when he claimed to envy our troops serving on the front lines since he was missing out on on the "exciting" and "romantic" opportunity to experience "great danger." Normally when you hear this kind of stuff it mostly seems foolish, as when middle aged men such as Brooks or Bush who chose not to serve when they had the chance start musing about the romance of war. Coming from someone with John McCain's background and experiences it has much more credibility (which I think Brooks was and is shrewd enough to understand -- part of his initial late-nineties enthusiasm for McCain is precisely driven by the reality that McCain is one of the few politicians who can say this kind of stuff in a credible way) but also more troubling in some respects. McCain, after all, knows what he's talking about so it seems relatively unlikely that he's going to suddenly realize how perverse this is (the risk is that life will get good, we need policies to ensure a healthy baseline of death and destruction ) and reconsider. April 18, 2008The LiebershiftJon Chait makes some pretty short work of his colleague Kirchick's dumb post on Joe Lieberman (if only other Planksters did the same more often...) but if anything Jon concedes too much. For example, agreeing that Lieberman "ran as a pro-war candidate." Did he? I dunno. He ran ads saying things like "I'm staying because I want to help end the war in Iraq in a way that brings stability to the Mid-East and doesn't leave us even more vulnerable" and made statements on the trail about how "No one wants to end the war in Iraq more than I do." That kind of thing isn't literally inconsistent with his post-election position on Iraq, but I think it's clear that Lieberman was trying to use artful wording to present himself as much less of an Iraq hawk than he really is. Certainly, Lieberman very much argued that Connecticut voters shouldn't view the election as a referendum on the war. After all, a referendum on the war would have meant Lieberman would lose the election since the war, enormously unpopular around the country by 2006, was even more unpopular in Connecticut. Instead, Lieberman tried to imply that he and Lamont were both for ending the war, and also argued that it would be foolish to base your support on a single issue. Today, Lieberman is arguing that John McCain's fanatical support for endless war in Iraq is a decisive reason to vote for him even though Lieberman nominally disagrees with McCain's positions on a whole host of other issues. That's a substantial change from the Lieberman who ran in 2006, on both what to think about the war and it's salience as an issue. They Write LettersI was too slow on the uptake to actually sign this thing but I'd like to associate myself with its sentiments. Long story short -- ABC sucks. April 17, 2008StandardsThere's been something a bit odd about scanning the news all day and seeing all these accounts of media people lecturing the audience that, contrary to the opinions of the people who watched the debate last night, that the performance of the debate moderators was, in fact, very good. If voters don't think the debate focused on important, interesting topics, then too bad for them! If voters don't think the debate was informative, then too bad for them! The press, once again, gives itself a standing ovation and that's what matters. On an unrelated note, I've been in about a million conversations navel-gazing conversations about the decline of "old media" like newspapers, magazines, and network television and never once has anyone suggested that declining audience might be in any way related to the quality of the product. Everyone knows that it's the public's duty to read newspapers, whether they find them useful and informative or not. In Sort of Defense of George StephanopoulosI thought last night's debate sucked, but this is unfair: Stephanopoulos has, over the years, shown tons of willingness to be unfair and/or inept in his coverage of the Clintons so I see no real reason to attribute his unfair or inept coverage of Barack Obama to any larger motive. Beyond that, while the questioning last night was truly egregious, allegations of special bias against Obama don't make sense. When Hillary Clinton was the frontrunner, most of the debate hostility focused on her. Her campaign and her supporters whined about it, but the complaints didn't really make sense -- of course you focus on the frontrunner. It's the same thing now. The debate was what it was because an awful lot of TV news is silly and horrible, not because anyone was doing Clinton special favors. April 16, 2008Out of TouchI'd forgotten that for months now Charlie Gibson has been asserting that $200,000 is a solid middle-class income, blissfully unaware that just 3.4 percent of U.S. households have an income of $200,000 or more. You could be richer than 96 percent of your fellow citizens, but still just folks to Gibson. Obviously that's not on a par with being bad at bowling or anything on the "out of touch" scale, but it's still disappointing to learn that even our salt of the earth working class multimillionaire television news personalities aren't utterly infallible. Check ThatHow is it that Charlie Gibson is challenging the candidates with reference to a constitutional provision that was overridden by Amendment XII over 200 years ago? I've seen a lot of dumb TV news stunts over the years, but that really takes the cake. Food for ThoughtOgged brings us aphorism 270 from Nietszche's Beyond Good and Evil: The intellectual haughtiness and loathing of every man who has suffered deeply--it almost determines the order of rank HOW deeply men can suffer--the chilling certainty, with which he is thoroughly imbued and coloured, that by virtue of his suffering he KNOWS MORE than the shrewdest and wisest can ever know, that he has been familiar with, and "at home" in, many distant, dreadful worlds of which "YOU know nothing"! Ogged says this is John McCain. At the end of the day, though, I'm skeptical that McCain's life story really explains much of anything about his political ideas for good or for ill. Blogger MeritAlex Rosmiller takes aim at "the myth of meritocracy" as it applies to the blogosphere. I think most of what he says he right -- despite the lack of barriers to entry, there's still a very real sense in which things like timing and social networks are crucial to success in the political blogosphere. There is, though, one sense in which merit really does play a larger role in the blogosphere than in the dread MSM. That is that, overwhelmingly, the only way for a blogger to succeed in having a lot of readers is for a lot of people (relative to the modest scale of blog enterprises) to genuinely find the blog worth reading. The MSM doesn't really work that way. A newspaper is all bundled together. So as long as The New York Times is worth reading (which it is) and Bill Kristol has a New York Times column (which he does) lots of people are going to see Kristol's columns. Him keeping his job just depends on him continuing to have the favor of the NYT high command. And then the mere fact of his presence on the op-ed page makes the columns "important" and worth reading for anyone who wants to participate in "the conversation." Similarly, notwithstanding the unbearable inanity of Tim Russert, nobody can make it in big-time politics without submitting to the Russert Probe and a Russert interview with a major politician is, as such, a major news event worth watching. So Meet The Press can be a successful enterprise without anyone even liking it. The much larger number of distribution channels on the internet makes this kind of phenomenon -- where you become important just because someone gave you an important job -- is much less likely. Good blogs can go unfairly neglected, and bad blogs can become popular, but popular blogs are at least well-liked. I may not care for Instapundit, but Instapundit's readers really do like it, which is a real contrast with the typical MSM situation. Her Name is Her Name
Ariel Levy checks in on Robin Morgan: These days, she is more concerned about offending people. “I always fall into the trap of thinking if I’d written it better, surely, surely they would have understood,” she said, referring to the young women who were upset by “Goodbye (#2).” (“Morgan’s essay is incredibly condescending,” one blogger wrote. “It completely fails to recognize that there are a variety of valid reasons younger women might decide to support Obama.”) Morgan put a log on the fire with her good arm. “They think I’m telling them what to do, but they are investing me with an authority I never had. Why is that? Do you know why that is?” But who is this mystery blogger? Could it be my friend Ann Friedman, Deputy Editor of The American Prospect and Editor of Feministing.com? I think it just might be. Perhaps a casualty of print's sad space constraints, but you'd think that at least the online version of an article that mentions a blog post could link to the post in question. Readers interested in exploring the issue further might like to see the context. Who knows? The Hayes Stands AloneI haven't heard much about Doug Feith's new book, War And Decision, but Spencer Ackerman has a two post series which brings to light the amusing fact that Feith's book fails to back up Steven Hayes' various contentions about Iraq/al-Qaeda linkages even though as best anyone can tell Feith was the source for all of Hayes' "reporting" on the subject. This kind of thing, one assumes, is how Feith managed to acquire an unusually bad reputation amidst an administration packed to the ceiling with incompetents and war criminals. April 15, 2008Keeping It RealPaul Waldman has a very nice column on the bizarre spectacle of multimillionaire television journalists adopting faux working-class personae. The Need for NarrativeBrendan Nyhan writes about how the need to construct a campaign narrative can lead to people substantially overestimating the importance of this or that campaign occurrence. For example, current polling makes it look likely that Hillary Clinton will beat Barack Obama by a bit more than ten points. Now if you'd said on March 5 "looks like Clinton will win Pennsylvania by about 12 points" most people would have said "sounds about right, she has a huge advantage in the polls right now but Obama always gains ground through actual campaigning; still, demographically speaking it's very favorable terrain for Clinton." But today it's essentially inevitable that any failure on Obama's part to close the gap will be substantially attributed to "bittergate" even though failure to fully close the gap was not only predictable but widely predicted weeks ago based on Pennsylvania's age structure, educational attainment, and African-American population. Good Work CommentersYou just won a prize. April 14, 2008More Praise for Heads in the SandBlogger, economist, foodie, and author Tyler Cowen says: Everyone who reads books on foreign policy should read this book. It is well-argued throughout and gets at fundamentals, rather than just slinging the latest epithets over our latest blunders in Iraq. I don't in every way agree with the author's recipe for liberal internationalism but overall this is a smarter book than whichever other tome you are likely to pick up on foreign policy. I, however, am somewhat indifferent as to whether or not you read the book, the main point is that you should buy it. Reading, though nice, is strictly optional. End of an EraWonkette spun-off from Gawker Media to become an independent site owned by current editor Ken Layne. Meet the New BlogCheck it out: Attackerman, a joint venture of Spencer Ackerman and the Center for American Progress. I, for one, welcome the ThinkProgress crew's move into franchising. I only hope that their long-range plan for world domination involves coopting/assimilating me rather than destroying me. April 12, 2008I Scream You Scream
Folio proclaims The Atlantic to be one of their ones to watch: The Atlantic Technically speaking, I think it was the all-star team of blogging talent that did the Web 2.0 era dragging. I also haven't actually heard anyone scream or seen anyone kick. But whatever. I was fascinated by the entry that followed: Lenny Dykstra | Publisher, Player's Club I grew up watching Dykstra on the great cocaine-fueled Mets teams of the mid/late-1980s and had really no idea what had happened to him since retirement. I'm glad to see he's doing well for himself, but one sort of needs to wonder how many subscribers a magazine like this could possibly attract. April 11, 2008More Praise for HITSCommenter eriks says Heads in the Sand: "I got the book yesterday and the Preface is the best summary of the Friedman Unit that I've seen. I'll read more when classes finish." Woo! Praise is always welcome -- send me an email -- but I'll also take on your criticisms and disagreements if you're inclined to try to get a response. The bad thing about bloggers writing books is that we torment you with nagging about the need to buy our book. But the good thing is that if you do buy the book, you're also buying in to a vast interactive new media experience. BlurbsHenry Farrell notes that Doug Feith's blurbers seem to be damning him with faint praise. If, indeed, you can even call "It will certainly anger many readers because it takes a different position that most other accounts on the wisdom of going to war in Iraq, on what mistakes were made, and on what made them" praise at all. Contrast that with, say, Heads in the Sand which Fred Kaplan calls "a smart, vital book" and I think your choice in spring foreign policy reading is clear. April 8, 2008AmCon BlogI'm not a paleocon myself (obviously) but I also think it's clear that one reason U.S. politics has gotten so out of whack over the past several years is that the balance within the GOP coalition has shifted so decisively against the paleo faction. For that and other reasons, a stronger paleo voice in the world is, in my view, a good thing and The American Conservative magazine has, over the years, published many valuable articles (also some crazy stuff) that I doubt would have seen the light of day elsewhere. This throat-clearing by way of welcoming AmCon's new blog to the 'sphere.
April 7, 2008Advertise With Me Instead!Clearly, the first step to getting climate change under control is to put a price on carbon, either through a tax or else through a cap and trade system. But trying to work exclusively through that mechanism probably won't work, we need, in my opinion, to go further through massive subsidies for BP's products and other efforts to help them market themselves as the "green" oil company. April 6, 2008LinksJack Shafer sure is right about this. The linking norms in the online versions of newspaper articles betray a very narrow-minded effort at profit-maximization that doesn't seem to understand that at the end of the day a website is only going to be profitable if its content is something people are going to want to read. April 4, 2008The Blogging Panel Will Be BloggedBy John Cole. One thing that occurred to me after my visit to WVU is that I, like most DC writers, have repeated the idea that there's "unprecedented interest in this election" so many times that I've forgotten that there actually is unprecedented interest in this election and a lot more people -- especially young people and students -- are doing things like showing up at panel discussions to learn more about the campaign than I remember from the 2004 or 2000 cycles. April 2, 2008He Got it For CheapMore hooker scandals: "The co-founder and former CEO of the liberal-progressive Democracy Radio and husband of U.S. Senator Debbie Stabenow was caught in February by a Troy police sting aimed at catching prostitutes, according to a police report." In striking contrast to Elliot Spitzer, however, the John in this case is alleged to have paid a 20 year-old prostitute just $150. Houses are cheap in Michigan, too. Extreme Talent WantedAre you a young or aspiring journalist interest in new media? If so, you should definitely consider applying for the new Atlantic Media Fellowship: Our Atlantic Media Fellowship Program — Selecting 5-10 Fellows |
