Entries by Dan (63)
This Week in Tyranny
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
Has anyone been more unjustly marginalized than Scott Ritter?
On the surface, Mohammed’s story was too much to believe. I was willing to accept any account that held that specific Iraqi groups, such as Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, were opposed to my visit to the extent that they might issue threats in an effort to intimidate me from coming. But the concept of the United States government being involved boggled the mind.He was consistently right about Iraq in the run up to the war, and now his ongoing investigations as a journalist are fraught with danger. And the maniacally secretive and vindictive nature of the Administration makes it hard to dismiss something like this out of hand.
One participant’s account of the proceedings at Guantánamo: “Spray and pray. Charge everybody. Let’s go. Speed, speed, speed.” Not to be too flippant, but when even the kangaroos in your kangaroo court are dismissive of its legitimacy you’re turning it into an open joke. More seriously, some in the military have acquitted themselves admirably in this dark time. I plan to go into more detail with Thursday’s post.
While we’re on the subject, the next trial is getting ready to begin. This time it’s Canadian Omar Khadr. How’s that shaping up?
Khadr’s Pentagon defense lawyers are seeking to have the charges dismissed on grounds a general at the Pentagon exerted unlawful influence over the prosecutor at military commissions. They are also seeking to revisit a so-called Child Soldier defense. Defense lawyers say were Khadr to go to trial he would be the first child soldier prosecuted for a war crime in modern times.There is a reason the administration does not want these trials to happen on American soil or under the American system of justice, and it has nothing to do with the worst of the worst, preventing future attacks or being at war. Rather, we have treated these people shamefully and in direct contradiction to a humanity towards captives that goes - literally - back to George Washington. They don’t want us to know that.
Both of those last items came courtesy of the Miami Herald’s increasingly indispensable Guantánamo coverage by Carol Rosenberg. Journalism, my friends.
Marisa Taylor of McClatchy writes (via) about our terrible Attorney General’s proposal to allow the FBI to do away with post-Watergate restrictions on surveillance. She quotes Michael German, late of the FBI and current policy counsel for the ACLU:
I’m concerned with the way the attorney general frames the problem. He talks about ‘arbitrary or irrelevant differences’ between criminal and national security investigations but these were corrections originally designed to prevent the type of overreach the FBI engaged in for years…Nobody’s complaining about the FBI collecting domestic intelligence when it’s appropriate and authorized under the law. What the attorney general is doing is expanding the bureau’s intelligence collection without addressing the mismanagement within the FBI. If you have an agency collecting more with less oversight, it’s only going to get worse.Taylor:
The Justice Department’s Inspector General has found that between 2003 and 2006 the FBI sought personal records of Americans by relying improperly on so-called “national security letters”, rather than seeking court approval. Last week, the FBI apologized to two newspapers for secretly obtaining reporters’ phone records without following proper bureau procedures. FBI officials have said the bureau has since instituted stronger oversight to prevent abuses, but German said recent events demonstrated that Mukasey needed to strengthen the FBI’s guidelines, not “water them down.”And Mukasey cites a “loud demand” for these changes. He cites no sources of loudness though. What a jerk.
Finally, I’ve coined a new word - invasia (n): The inability to remember recent wars of aggression.
UPDATE: Diane on Planet Gulag. Jim Henley on where that puts us.
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PrintThe Hippie White House
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If it is true that our earliest experiences are the most influential (child is father to the man and all that) then the sixties are the dominant years for our current leaders. It has since become a cliché that the era never really ended and continues to fundamentally shape our discourse, but I only agree to a point. After all, every generation is shaped by the events of its time and those events exert an ongoing influence. On the other hand, the turbulence then does make it more influential than other periods. Starting with the Kennedy assassination and ending with Watergate there was an unpopular draft, the Vietnam war, additional traumatic political murders and other momentous events that have cast a very long shadow. And of course the generation formed in this cauldron was also part of a huge population spike, which imprinted the swirl of controversy even more firmly on the national psyche. But even without the demographic component it was destined to be much-discussed because it was marked by contentiousness that has not been matched until perhaps recently. (Side note to today’s young people: Hope you like those arguments you’re having! You can look forward to another forty years of them.)
The resignation of Richard Nixon and the winding down of the war shortly thereafter seemed to end that chapter, and a couple of interpretations hardened into conventional wisdom. My best attempt to summarize goes like this: “The antiwar activists were basically right to protest; the war was waged under a false premise and should never have escalated as it did. They made their points very rudely though, and it would have been nicer if they had been a little more polite and diplomatic. And Nixon stepped way over the line and deserved to leave office in disgrace.” It still flares up periodically, as in Patrick Buchanan’s 1992 Republican convention speech (“[t]here is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself.”) but it usually seems to be along the lines of how the sixties coarsened our culture and introduced moral relativism. The basic take on the war itself or the resignation looked settled. However, beneath the surface on the far right was a sense of rage, shame and defiance. Some like young David Addington believed (per a childhood friend) America “should have stayed and won the Vietnam War, despite the fact that we were losing”. Others like Dick Cheney concluded that “Watergate and a lot of things around Watergate and Vietnam, both during the ’70s served, I think, to erode the authority” of the President. In other words, a small but eventually influential group on the right never conceded anything.
From their perspective the only problem with Vietnam was that we left, and when they finally got to direct a war of their own there would be no such mistake. In the face of total discredit and loss of faith from the public they would continue a deeply unpopular war because to do otherwise would be to concede “we don’t have the stomach for the fight”. The domino theory was perfectly valid, and in fact lived on as a “benign domino” of democratic reform in the middle east. And Nixon was right to wiretap without warrants - period. It became impermissible to say so in polite company, but he got a raw deal. Quietly but insistently members of this group managed to get their hands on the levers of power, and they set to righting the wrongs of that prior era. And of course, it also means the next generation of Cheneys, Bushes and Addingtons are currently justifying torture, championing (and studiously avoiding service in) the Iraq war, and arguing that respecting civil liberties turns the Constitution into a suicide pact.
But like an O. Henry short story here is the upside down twist at the end: The hippies won anyway. The administration that so self-consciously distanced itself from the flower child ethos has adopted some of its most remarked upon features. Its leaders are cheerfully vulgar towards those they disagree with, and far from being apologetic they justify it with an “if it feels good do it” attitude. They are resolute authority haters, dismissive of all attempts at oversight and casually contemptuous of the law. They avoided service in a war they supported through exquisitely timed pregnancies or neglected stateside duties. They wear suits instead of tie dies, but otherwise conform perfectly to the caricature of dissolution they have taken great pains to repudiate.
This Week in Tyranny
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
Marcy has pretty much been a one-woman wrecking crew on the anthrax investigation. Every new obfuscation and dubious claim is getting annihilated in near-real time, which would be a lot more entertaining if the subject wasn’t so serious.
The Pentagon has shut down one of its spying operations:
The Defense Department said it had “disestablished” the Counterintelligence Field Activity office, or CIFA, created in February 2002 by former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to manage defense and armed service efforts against intelligence threats from foreign powers and groups such as al Qaeda.
Those responsibilities will now be carried out by a new organization called the Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center, overseen by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency.
CIFA’s operations stirred concern among members of Congress and civil liberties advocates. A CIFA database known as Talon, set up to monitor threats against U.S. military installations, was found to have retained information on U.S. antiwar protesters including Quakers after they had been found to pose no security danger, officials said.
This could just mean that now we have to watch out for the Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center. Or in other words, the military equivalent of renaming R.J. Reynolds to Altria.
Is the Drug Enforcement Agency using mercenaries? It could just be a poor choice of T-shirts but I would certainly welcome a confirmation to that effect from the DEA. And maybe someone in a big media outlet could make use of some sources, or someone in Congress could ask a few questions. Hope springs eternal.
Salim Hamdan was convicted of changing lug nuts and basically given a sentence that ends on January 20th. Breathtaking incompetence, just breathtaking (via).
Michael Mukasey continues to be awful. This is the company he keeps.
All this, and no mention of Ron Suskind.
Truth, Justice, and the American Way
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
Prairie Weather inspired this week’s post. I have been unsuccessfully trying to write about what may be a vast, unexamined record of wrongdoing from the administration, and a brief exchange started by PW finally got me unstuck. Stuart Taylor Jr. has argued for pardons, Cass Sunstein agrees and Victoria Toensing has added (via) her own dubious logic to the drumbeat. A consensus has developed among political and media elites that no good purpose would be served by enforcing the law(!) and so for the sake of a smooth transfer of power and a calming of the political waters in the capitol we must let it all pass.
On the face of it I am vehemently opposed to ignoring criminality for the sake of comity. There is no position outlined by the pro-pardon group that is the slightest bit compelling to me. Sunstein’s belief that “I don’t think it’s appropriate at this stage to attempt to impeach two presidents consecutively” is completely absurd. At what stage would it be appropriate? If one party impeaches a President in a fit of cheap political grandstanding is his successor inoculated against it? What kind of crime would it take for Sunstein? Has anyone heard specifics? All I’ve heard so far are banalities along the lines of “any crime has to be taken quite seriously” and “are we in favor of immunizing people who worked in the White House in the last eight years from accountability for criminal acts? I don’t think anyone should be in favor of that.” Thanks, professor.
Toensing’s warning that “[i]f we don’t protect these people who are proceeding in good faith, no one will ever take chances” is outrageous as well. “We” do not need to protect people - the law does that. One of the signal achievements of this administration has been successfully advancing the notion of a patriotic duty to break the law. If the President “asks” individuals or businesses to do something plainly illegal out of loyalty to America then they may do so (even if they have access to an entire department of lawyers who could tell them they are breaking the law). A simple appeal by the President trumps the law, plain and simple. This is the concept of good faith that Toensing advances, and is euphemistically reduced to “taking chances”. What she describes is the absolute authority of the dictator. As for Taylor, see Andrew.
The crux of the problem is that the Republican party has come to view the law as entirely political. When Congress passes a law, or a President follows it (or doesn’t), or the Justice Department enforces it (or doesn’t), or the Supreme Court rules on it - these are all political footballs to be kicked around, not fundamental building blocks of a functional society. In other words, lawless, ignorant, contemptible hacks are fine as long as they are OUR lawless, ignorant, contemptible hacks. The collapse of integrity and wholesale politicization at Justice is not a problem in and of itself; it only is a problem if a Democrat does it. (The fact that they vote along party lines on these issues when they don’t walk out entirely should be all the proof you need.)
In an environment like that we will never get a full and satisfactory investigation. Every step of the way some GOP loyalist will cry foul and insist the REAL politicization is the belated enforcement. If we want to bypass all that maybe we should take up PW’s suggestion of “giving the country clotheslines laden with dirty linen and encouraging the voters to smell the stench and make up their own minds.” Or as John Mecklin put it, “[u]ntil we know the entire story of the conduct of the war on terror, a new story — with America reassuming a believable role as a guarantor of human rights — can’t really begin.” We could get a much better idea of the full truth by granting immunity and compelling testimony with a threat of perjury hanging over it.
I have to admit that such a scenario is in a way extremely unpalatable to me. Crimes have already been committed and a good part of me would be outraged if I knew that we were forever giving away the opportunity to see justice for them. But the question may come down to, would you rather have some justice with some truth, or no justice with full truth? And would you rather have maybe a handful of convictions that are forever criticized or a full toxic dump of truth that even the most rabid partisan will not approach? And wouldn’t the existence of such a thing, one way or another, create a justice of its own?
UPDATE: Today is the anniversary of Richard Nixon’s resignation, and the Accountability Now PAC is sponsoring a “Money Bomb” to mark the occasion. Please consider donating and making your voice heard, even if it only seems like a nominal amount. There is a greater difference between zero and one than between one and a million.
This Week in Tyranny
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post
A very busy week. First up:
Troubling indications are emerging that the government is building a massive, virtually oversight-free domestic surveillance apparatus that could be cataloging private information on untold numbers of innocent Americans all under the guise of fighting terrorism, a new report warns.“Fusion centers” is the new phrase to watch out for, brought to you by the administration’s National Strategy for Information Sharing. Considering the dishonest and Orwellian language they their allies have used in the past this is remarkably restrained language.
Senator Obama has promised to “review every executive order signed by President Bush” if elected. That’s the kind of statement that could be an encouraging indication of his desire to roll back some of the excesses of the current administration or it could just be feel-good blather. Not to seem cynical but I lean towards the latter. Obama is a politician and therefore is sometimes willing to trade positions on issues for different reasons (e.g. his new willingness to consider offshore drilling). I’m not critical of that in general (though there have been issues - FISA and the Iraq war in particular - where a line had to be drawn) and I’m sympathetic to the need to adjust. But that also means, let’s not be naïve either. There will be a lot of pressure to go along and get along, let bygones be bygones, not litigate the past, not criminalize policy differences, etc. A President Obama might be very tempted to let them be as a goodwill gesture to the authoritarians in Washington D.C. Having all those expanded powers at his disposal would just be gravy I’m sure.
I didn’t cover this in my post on Thursday but part of the problem with our current Attorney General is that the press either ignores him or publishes contemptible nonsense that focuses on his personal virtue and ignores the radicalism of his actions as AG. For example, when the department he leads tries to keep challenges to the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) secret I don’t especially care that “[h]e doesn’t do politics, and he doesn’t do popularity contests. He doesn’t do flavor-of-the-month. He does law.” Bullshit.
(The fact that so much attention is focused on officials’ private conduct and so little on the way their actions in office affect the people they represent is generally beyond the scope of Pruning Shears but when it bumps up against a topic here I like to point it out. A lot of reporters are less concerned with what happens from 9 to 5 than what happens from 5 to 9.)
I neglected to point this out last week, but just for future reference: When I write with a low opinion of Cass Sunstein this is the reason why (via).
From the “wouldn’t it be nice” file comes the news that “U.S. District Court Judge John M. Facciola ordered the Bush administration to locate the missing communications on portable devices and individual workstations.” Even if all the emails existed on some combination of devices there probably isn’t a master list of all such devices, and even if there were how would Facciola’s order be enforced? How would even a single device be certified as having been properly searched?
Britain doesn’t trust us? Why on earth not?
Libby pointed to a report that the President is trying to marginalize the CIA. More than any other agency the CIA has produced inconvenient analysis for the administration so it isn’t really a surprise that he wants to squash it like a bug.
The court did note, in several places, that Congress likely has (again, at least in theory) the inherent authority to arrest and detain Executive Branch officials who refuse to comply with their Subpoenas. But they have demonstrated no appetite for exercising that power, and short of something truly threatening like that, it is difficult to envision Bush officials being meaningfully forthcoming in any Congressional investigation.Here’s a comment I left at Marcy’s place this week on another topic:
Sorry, but this kind of crap is a waste of time. Congress needs to enforce existing violations of the law instead of trying to think of every loophole that a creative administration will dream up in the future. That’s a fool’s errand - the problem isn’t that the law is ambiguous, it’s that the administration is contemptuous of laws and the body that creates them. Every time they do one of these “let’s criminalize waterboarding again and then it will be really illegal” exercises they are playing into the administration’s hands. Don’t those guys get tired of being beaten like a drum?Congress doesn’t need more laws. It needs to take action.
On a happier note, see here and here [WHOA! Link broken! - Dan] (via) for two examples of signs of life in the GOP. If Republicans in Congress are becoming willing to challenge the President we may have finally turned a corner. Let’s hope it’s not just a summer mirage.
Finally, a note on economics and politics. John McCain has released a tax plan that is transparently false and it is being treated like a realistic proposal. Let’s go back to the thoughts of a certain candidate for Senate on the election year reporting in 2000:
[I]n the second debate, Bush said, “By far, the vast majority of my tax cut goes to those at the bottom.” (Actually, only 13 percent of his proposed tax cut went to the bottom 60 percent.) Did the press say anything? No. Why? Because their attitude was, shrug, “He doesn’t know.”When that is the starting point for economic policy reporting don’t be surprised if it leads to disastrous results. Unless you are lazy or of below average intelligence there is no reason to give such dishonesty a free pass.
The Ongoing Awfulness of Michael Mukasey
I have written previously about how the administration will be more concerned with covering its tracks than anything else in its final months, and recently the pace has picked up. Maybe the passage of the new FISA bill kicked it off in the same way Memorial Day informally starts summer in America (and Labor Day ends it - you can keep all your fancy solstices and equinoxes). Whatever the cause though, the effort is underway to run out the clock, cloud the law and excuse the guilty. A key leader is Michael Mukasey. He has already shown a willingness to be a demagogue on terrorism and an apologist for torture. Now he is wants Congress to ignore the Boumediene decision with a leap of logic that would - literally - create the permanent environment of a police state:
[A]ny legislation should acknowledge again and explicitly that this Nation remains engaged in an armed conflict with al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated organizations, who have already proclaimed themselves at war with us and who are dedicated to the slaughter of Americans-soldiers and civilians alike. In order for us to prevail in that conflict, Congress should reaffirm that for the duration of the conflict the United States may detain as enemy combatants those who have engaged in hostilities or purposefully supported al Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated organizations.
This is a classic administration attempt to take a narrow need and expand it to contain whole new worlds of authority. (Remember, the only fix needed for FISA was a law allowing warrantless surveillance for foreign-to-foreign communication that passed through American infrastructure.) What is needed is for the military in Afghanistan and Iraq to operate prisoner of war camps. Even this is a little bit slippery because there will not be a Missouri or Appomattox moment in these wars, but eventually our soldiers will stop serving in combat roles. At that point we will have reached the closest we will get to a definitive conclusion. With that as a rough guide we could target a final disposition for all enemy combatants.
That isn’t what Mukasey wants, though. He wants anyone “dedicated to the slaughter of Americans-soldiers and civilians alike” to be the target, not those who are actively fighting us (the possession of such dedication would presumably be determined by enlightened souls such as…Michael Mukasey). He wants to set up a system where an unknowable quantity like bad intent is the standard for detaining people. The fact that the administration has been doing so and has suffered four consecutive reversals by the Supreme Court does not seem to trouble him. What he really wants is for Congress to give legal cover for the executive branch’s illegal detention system.
Equally disturbing is the duration of this alternate justice system. The effective suspension of habeas corpus will be “for the duration of the conflict”, which the administration prefers to mean “as long as anyone in the world wants to do America harm.” In other words, permanently. The actual scope of what we are (or should be) doing from a military perspective is very limited: Having soldiers capture or kill the remnants of al Qaeda and their Taliban sponsors somewhere in the remote regions of Afghanistan (and maybe the Pakistan border too). We could probably limit it even more - the Taliban have been routed from power and al Qaeda no longer has training camps from which to plan new attacks. We could just keep watching the area, keep them on the run and disrupt any attempts to settle down and organize. The formal military campaign against the people who attacked us has been over since December 2001.
What is left is tracking those who survived the campaign in those areas and law enforcement efforts elsewhere. John Kerry was derided for making that suggestion in 2004 but he was right. Even formerly reliable allies of the President have begun to concede this obvious point. The bulk of our efforts should focus on intelligence gathering (a substantial part of which can be accomplished by activities as prosaic as reading local newspapers), identifying cells of activity in both friendly and hostile countries, and finding ways to disrupt them. (One more obvious point: Identifying and detaining potential terrorists is easier when the country they operate in has a favorable impression of us.) It is a serious threat but not an existential one, and anyone looking to characterize it as such - as an endless war with no well defined enemy or articulation of victory - may fairly be suspected of ulterior motives. The effort did not require the erosion of civil liberties that have already happened, and our ongoing efforts against those who would do us harm do not require further concessions to extremists like Mukasey.
This Week in Tyranny
NYT:
Britain should no longer rely on assurances by the United States that it does not torture terrorism suspects, an influential parliamentary committee said in a report released [July 20th].It’s almost turning into drudgery to catalog all the different ways our country’s torture program is a bad idea. One of our closest allies now believes we are untrustworthy, and there’s no reason to fault such a conclusion.
You know you’ve got a weak case when evidence starts getting thrown out of your custom-made kangaroo court.
Memo to Linda Sanchez: Unlike me, you can actually do something about Karl Rove’s illegal defiance of Congress. Leave the blogging to the amateurs, you twit. Just do your job.
The Miami Herald has been doing a fantastic job covering Guantánamo and even has a dedicated page for it. Carol Rosenberg’s latest dispatch (via) reports that the U.S. released one of the actually important suspects it captured, and did so for
no apparent reason. We’ve more or less resigned ourselves to
criminally incompetent behavior from the government on the domestic
front, but as more and more gets revealed about its conduct in foreign
affairs it is becoming increasingly obvious that “heckuva job”-level
hackery is a primary characteristic there as well. Forget bad PR
internationally over torture - the administration might be fighting
transparency and oversight so ferociously because they know what the
American public will think when its abysmal performance is revealed
there as well. (The Herald’s Guantánamo page has been added to my “Window Washers” blogroll, and I certainly hope more lofty recognition is in the offing.)
Finally, a non-executive power note. The video of the President saying “Wall Street got drunk” got lots of attention, but what jumped out at me more than anything was: “The question is, how long [until it sobers up], and not try to do all these fancy financial instruments?” Did he really say “all these fancy financial instruments”? Isn’t it embarrassing that our Harvard MBA President sounds like a rube whose idea of financial planning is stuffing money under a mattress? And isn’t it outrageous that he doesn’t know even the most basic particulars of the meltdown? Isn’t it a damning indictment that he apparently never picked up the phone and said “Paulson, get in here!” That he evidently never asked anyone “what are these here HELOCs I keep hearing about?” I don’t expect the President to be a financial wizard - though lately it seems no one is, just a bunch of impostors - but isn’t it reasonable to expect him to take the time for a quick tutorial on a handful of the major details? “Fancy”?! God help us.
Afflicting the Comfortable
So was born, lived a little space, and died the Progressive party. At its birth it caused the nomination, by the Democrats, and the election, by the people, of Woodrow Wilson. At its death it brought about the nomination of Charles E. Hughes by the Republicans. It forced the writing into the platforms of the more conservative parties of principles and programmes of popular rights and social regeneration. The Progressive party never attained to power, but it wielded a potent power.
The two party system in America is remarkably durable. Just the phrase “third party” conjures up images of John Anderson, Ralph Nader, Ross Perot and George Wallace. These are all people who exited or were never inside the system. It implies actors at the margins engaged in Quixotic (though see here and here) attempts to fundamentally alter conventional politics. It also postulates two parties as though they are fixed poles on the political map. Nearly everything about the way we talk and think about American politics assumes the context of two major parties fighting for majority control.
In general it has served us well and seems reasonable enough. Short version: We have one party for each side of the political spectrum. If you favor a more active government in domestic affairs and a predisposition for collaboration internationally vote Democrat. If you favor less spending on social programs and a more assertive “peace through strength” attitude abroad vote Republican. Anyone anywhere on the political spectrum has to choose one of these, and in doing so the most radical elements on both sides will be usefully channelled into moderate positions, resulting in generally prudent policymaking that changes on a gradual and sustainable slope. You won’t have governments falling every nine months and the kind of turbulence associated with whipsaw changes in direction.
This model only becomes problematic if the tension and adversarial nature assumed in it turn into cooperation and collusion, as in the quadrennial orgy of bribery and corruption at the party conventions. A look at the FISA reform circus tells you all you need to know about how united the Democrats and Republicans are on eroding our civil liberties. Yes, some of the former opposed it (Dodd and Feingold in particular were passionate and articulate) while the latter were nearly unanimous in their support. That difference noted, the Democratic leadership and enough of its members were fully on board, and let’s face it - the end result is all that matters. Glenn Greenwald summed it up beautifully: “While there are substantial, important differences between Republicans and Democrats, critical political debates are at least as often driven not by the GOP/Democrat dichotomy, but by the split between the Beltway political establishment and the rest of the country.”
In a situation like this supporting a third party candidate like Bob Barr or a true major-party maverick like Ron Paul can serve a great purpose. Looked at from a horse race perspective these candidacies are almost uniformly failures. The most successful in the last generation - Ross Perot - did not win a single electoral vote. But he won 19% of the popular vote on a candidacy centered on, if not almost entirely based on, balancing the federal budget. The deficit reached a then-high of 316 billion dollars in July of 1992 - and was balanced by January of 1998! There are plenty of reasons for the turnaround, and the US economy is unfathomably complex; on such a scale it is basically impossible to draw a 1-to-1 correspondence with any kind of cause and effect. But Perot’s candidacy put the issue on the table and made fiscal responsibility in Washington a priority.
Those of us deeply disappointed with the Democrats and who are partially redirecting our energy, time and money elsewhere can aspire to much the same result. No one seems to think the Libertarian Party is poised to replace one of the current major parties (though such seismic shifts have happened occasionally), and there is no reason to expect additional ones as long as the Lani Guinier Heresy is alive and well. But we are not fighting to change the anatomy of the body politic, rather to inject some unpopular ideas into it. Political, media and cultural leaders at the highest levels are very much at ease with a system where criminality is mere mischief and the natural result of policymaking. Such things are to be grappled with in academic settings and think tanks, not prosecuted in court. Changing that environment would result in a great deal of discomfort and there is an enormous predisposition to just look discreetly away. (Please see Andrew Sullivan’s demolition of this monstrous proposition). If we can help to end the polite ignoring of lawlessness, the treating of felonies as shuttlecocks to be batted around as part of a delightful but inconsequential game - if we can get at least some of them to start living by the rules the rest of us must live by - then our efforts will be a success regardless of whether or not they ultimately result in an ongoing movement.
Vacation, all I ever wanted
No post this week - I’ve been away. My travels took me to Kay’s neck of the woods so we had a great al fresco dinner. And yes, she’s a pistol in person too.
Giving Up The Third Habit
No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post. A copy of this was mailed as a letter to the editor this morning.
My parents always subscribed to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, so I grew up around newspapers; they were as regular a part of our household as our cats. As a kid I’d look at the Sunday comics, and later on the 1980 Browns would prompt me to grab the newspaper every day. I first started reading “real” news in 1984, when the front page of the second section had a columnist slot called “Focal Point”. Mike Royko was featured three times a week, and when that year’s Olympics rolled around he touched off a huge controversy with a series of columns about how he and his buddies decided which of the women’s teams to cheer for based on which ones had the nicest butts. (Memorable headline from a column he wrote at the conclusion: “The Bottom Line”) When his column moved inside to the Op-Ed pages I moved with him. So yes, I first started going to the most high-minded section of the paper when my teen eyes were lured there by T&A.
In college I lived a few houses down from a convenience store, and it was my source for a newspaper in the morning, beer in the evening and cigarettes just about any time. I always thought the first of these would be a constant, though I’ve since given up the others. Instead it was interrupted by a couple of years in Tanzania, a wonderful time that unfortunately also required me to substitute my morning newspaper and coffee with short wave radio and indifferently brewed tea. When I got back to America I eagerly resumed my ritual and it has since been a fixture in my life. But it is with genuine sadness I now write that this habit will go the way of the latter two.
I think papers are best for analysis, investigative pieces and long-range, trend-related reporting. Basically anything that can’t be summarized in two minutes gives newspapers an advantage over TV and online reporting (which may end up with its most popular use in the “email the headlines to my Blackberry” model). They seem to be going in the opposite direction though, trying to “prove” they can summarize news as quickly as their electronic competitors. To me that’s a losing game since newspapers will never be as immediate, and it’s a shame that the industry seems to be so rattled by the “gee whiz” novelty of the Internet. A newspaper is an astonishing piece of technology and can deliver a certain kind of news very efficiently. Its basic form hasn’t substantially changed for several centuries for good reason. There seems to be no confidence left in that fact.
Instead they have engaged in a race to the bottom. In the same week the LA Times announced its latest round of cuts the PD gutted itself and called it a redesign. The result is almost literally unreadable. The sports pages seem least affected (make of that what you will) but there is now a single forum page. Competing for space on it are letters, editorial cartoons, editorials, charts, statistics, and syndicated writers. Even distinctive in-house voices like Elizabeth Sullivan’s are increasingly banished to remote electronic outposts. The front section now has lots of little stories delivering little news. Business is a Potemkin section with a front page and nothing behind it, and Arts & Life is a reduced and chaotic mess. Start to finish I now go through the paper in about fifteen minutes.
Over the weekend the public editor wrote “[n]ewspapers do not have the luxury of standing still…The challenging part of that responsibility is that it often runs headlong into a reality that every newspaper editor learns early in his or her career: Readers Hate Change.” His slightly condescending tone seems to put those of us objecting to such wholesale diminishing of the paper with, say, the cranks who were pissed off when Marmaduke was dropped.
”Rightsizing” seems to be the trend, though, and what ails the PD is ailing most newspapers now. But clearly these new models are not designed with people like me in mind. I may well be a dying breed - someone who wants to sit down at a table and spend at least a half an hour every day reading articles (not summaries) and interested in hearing a variety of voices on lots of topics. Maybe the vast majority who plunk down money for a paper want it packaged to go, as convenient to hold and consume as an Egg McMuffin. If papers have no other choice, if they can no longer cater to my kind, I understand even if I’m not very happy about it. But they won’t have me along for the ride anymore either.
Please cancel my subscription.