Seymour Hersh says:

There was a dozen ideas proffered about how to trigger a war. The one that interested me the most was why don’t we build — we in our shipyard — build four or five boats that look like Iranian PT boats. Put Navy seals on them with a lot of arms. And next time one of our boats goes to the Straits of Hormuz, start a shoot-up. Might cost some lives.

And it was rejected because you can’t have Americans killing Americans. That’s the kind of — that’s the level of stuff we’re talking about. Provocation. But that was rejected.

So I can understand the argument for not writing something that was rejected — uh maybe. My attitude always towards editors is they’re mice training to be rats.

From a New York Times story on Bush’s manipulation of images showing that his war, well, kills people.

Journalists say it is now harder, or harder than in the earlier years, to accompany troops in Iraq on combat missions. Even memorial services for killed soldiers, once routinely open, are increasingly off limits. Detainees were widely photographed in the early years of the war, but the Department of Defense, citing prisoners’ rights, has recently stopped that practice as well.

Leonard Pitts Jr. captures the essence of the hysteria over the New Yorker cover.

Unless you’ve been in a cave for the last week, you’ve heard about and probably seen the cartoon showing Barack and Michelle bumping fists in the Oval Office, he in Muslim garb, she in Angela Davis, while a portrait of Osama watches an American flag burn in the fireplace. To me, even a straight description is humorous, and the cartoon is hilarious; but many Obama supporters apparently find it offensive.

Or perhaps it’s the long article about him in the same issue they’re worried about. But if they were offended by the cover, they probably wouldn’t read the article.

Which, to me, is part of the point of the cover.

To be effective, satire needs a situation it can inflate into ridiculousness. But the hysteria surrounding Obama has nowhere to go; it is already ridiculous. In just the last few days, we’ve had Jesse Jackson threatening to castrate him and John McLaughlin calling him an “Oreo.”

Add to that the whispers about Obama’s supposed Muslim heritage (not that there’s anything wrong with that), the “terrorist” implications of bumping fists, and Michelle Obama’s purported use of the term “whitey” (a word no black person has uttered since The Jeffersons went off the air in 1985), and it’s clear that “ridiculous” has become our default status. What once were punchlines now are headlines.

So, as absurd, as over the top, as utterly outlandish as the New Yorker image strikes the more sophisticated among us, there is a large fringe out there for whom it will represent nothing more or less than the sum of their fears.

Most of the arguments people made against the cover in the various comment sections I perused were strikingly weak. Anger certainly tends to cloud logic; as Bertrand Russell said,

The opinions that are held with passion are always those for which no good ground exists; indeed the passion is the measure of the holder’s lack of rational conviction.

One person applied the theory of democracy to that of humor, proclaiming that it’s only satire if “at least” a majority thinks it is. (I’m not sure what’s more than a majority in this case. Since by definition at least the artist and the editor consider it satire, there’s no possibility of unanimity. But that’s how the argument was worded, so I reproduce it in case others grasp what I missed.) Another person argued that the November vote is a life-and-death matter, and the need to elect Obama, who presumably represents life, precludes Barack-mocking in the interim.

Speaking of which, Andy Borowitz has written a fake Obama statement of sympathy with those who struggle to make jokes about him. The statement includes five officially sanctioned Obama jokes.

Barack Obama and a kangaroo pull up to a gas station. The gas station attendant takes one look at the kangaroo and says, “You know, we don’t get many kangaroos here.” Barack Obama replies, “At these prices, I’m not surprised. That’s why we need to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.”

This kind of thing is why Colbert has to push it so far, play such an over-the-top character, to satirize the current state of our various media. As Pitts says, “These days, there’s nothing more ridiculous than the truth.”

I meant to put this up a couple of weeks ago but hey, what’s the rush? If you haven’t read it yet, it’s still news to you.

The link takes you to McClatchy Newspapers’ magnificent week-long series on the open running sore that Bush has created at Guantanamo Bay.

A lot of criticism from both sides of the blogosphere is directed at the press, much of it deserved. When newspapers are bad, they are indeed horrid. But when they are good they are very, good.

I have worked for five of them, from a California weekly to the Washington Post and I’m no more sentimental about the business than my brother Bill is. Which is not sentimental at all, as you may know from his occasional posts on the subject.

But still, but still…

You can’t live with ’em and you can’t live without ’em. Someday somebody somewhere may come up with an internet business model that makes it possible for two reporters to spend eight months in 11 countries interviewing scores of Bush’s victims (a shocking percentage of them plainly innocent), their lawyers, their jailers, their neighbors, and their families. For now, though, the MSM is all we’ve got.

The McLatchy team will win Pulitzers for this job of reporting, if there is a God in heaven. Which there probably isn’t, or creatures like Bush and Cheney wouldn’t be allowed to run loose all over the planet.

Sadly, the “worst of the worst” are not at Guantanamo Bay.

Just as long as we know where everyone stands.

[Top Clinton campaign strategist] Mr. [Howard] Wolfson’s decision to join Fox represents a general feeling among Clinton partisans that the network treated her more fairly than did other networks it viewed as overly friendly to Mr. Obama.

The night Mrs. Clinton won the Pennsylvania primary, several months after Mrs. Clinton joined other Democrats in opting out of a debate that Fox News was to sponsor, her campaign chairman Terry McAuliffe declared live on Fox, “Fair and Balanced Fox!” (The network was first to declare her the victor that night.) Last month the network signed Lanny Davis, a former special counsel to Bill Clinton and a vocal support[er] of Mrs. Clinton, as a contributor.

They’re there, presumably, to balance Karl Rove and Bill O’Reilly.

Take me now, Lord.

As if to emphasize Bill’s take on the fate of newspapers, Leonard Downie has just announced he’s moving on from his editor’s desk at the Washington Post.

The Times article talks about Downie’s unassuming leadership and the 27 Pulitzers the paper’s garnered during his tenure, six of those in the most recent competition. But, as the Times says,

Mr. Downie oversaw a period of expansion — especially in The Post’s local and suburban news coverage — followed by one of contraction. In recent years, he has presided over cutbacks reducing the news staff by more than one-quarter, to about 700 people, including significant reductions in its overseas staff. Last month, more than 100 newsroom employees accepted a buyout offer, including some well-known reporters.

Like all major newspapers, The Post is struggling with declining circulation and ad revenue, even as it draws record numbers of readers online. The Post’s weekday circulation, which was over 800,000 early in this decade, averaged 673,000 in the six months ended March 31, the seventh-highest in the country. It has more than nine million Internet readers each month, according to Nielsen online, behind The New York Times and USA Today. Like the rest of the industry, it has found it hard to turn its digital audience into significant revenue.

The loss of the medium of newspapers is a sad thing for a couple of reasons. The most poignant is that we’ll probably never see them again; there’ll be paper distributions, but anything above small-town backwater newspapers will grow increasingly harder to find, if only because of the resources needed to transmit information through ink on paper.

But part of that poignancy is the fear of losing the sense of community. In the town of 30,000 I grew up in, there was one paper and everyone read it; if you wrote a letter to the editor, your neighbors would comment on it unprompted. As we move to the internet, the community becomes more abstract. At the same time, it increases geometrically in size because it overcomes the need for nearness in physical space.

Some of that feeling of community might survive the transition to bits.

I believe print newspapers will be drawn back into the past. In the short term print newspapers will cut editions down to one or two a week with tons of calendars, obits, chicken dinners, school news, etc. Then all “regular” news will be online.

Papers will be printed at central plants. and staffs in non-edit and ad departments will virtually disappear, as will big plants. The web, TV and radio will deliver most news, and perhaps the diminshed publications, like some TV news now, will become shamelessly attached to causes, political parties or philosophies. In other words, print will return to what it was in pre-civil war times.

In the immediate future, there will be cuts in publication days, combinations, bankruptcies, etc. I believe “newspapers” as we know them will become obsolete.

At first I thought there would be a slow decline. Now the figures show there will be a collapse. The dam is cracking wide open now. Latest figures show 10 to 20 percent ad losses this year compared to the same figures last year for metros.

Compound those figures for the past three years and try to come to a different conclusion. The flood will begin to sweep most metro print away in the next few years and smaller papers in the next five.

“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is Not Alex. It’s the antiMcCain, antiwar ad from MoveOn.org which is being called tasteless by the conservative punditry. Being called tasteless by it/them is of course like being called ugly by a frog.

Personally I thought the ad was (1) tasteful, (2) fair, (3) well-produced, and (4) effective. What’s more, (1) the baby was cute, and (2) I fell in love with the young mother.

So, as Thomas L. Friedman might say, and did, Suck on this, okay?

Ya gotta hand it to the AP, an organization obviously led by brains and class.

Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words.

Note that they didn’t harrass the appropriately monickered Matt Drudge, but a left-wing Retort to him. I’ve just visited it for the first time, and you can see why AP is upset: some of the entries are at least seven words long, and apparently taken from the actual headline of the article linked to.

Of course it’s clear, even to the brains at AP, that they don’t have a reasonable legal case. They’re not being harmed economically by 79-word quotations and links to the original (a basic test under the fair-use doctrine), and they admit they’d probably lose in court if they went there.

Having received a certain amount of pushback, AP backed off for a regrouping. According to Jim Kennedy, VP and strategy director, “We don’t want to cast a pall over the blogosphere by being heavy-handed, so we have to figure out a better and more positive way to do this”.

My suggestion: if they’re honest about not casting a pall, they might cease producing garbage like today’s “Blame for Spears’ pap hit-run on the other foot”. I’m not holding my breath.

New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s advice to the visiting new mayor of London, Boris Johnson:

“You don’t have to match your answers to [reporters’] questions. If you don’t give the right answers to their questions, they asked the wrong questions.”

In 1884 at the age of 28 Frank Harris was hired to run the Evening News, a London daily that was losing £40,000 a year.

As the paper was sold principally on the streets, Harris went to a 12-year-old newsboy for advice on what the public was buying. The boy showed him a competing paper’s lurid “bill” — the list of the day’s stories that newsboys displayed on their corners:

“I took the boy critic and a friend of his into my office and with the paper before us sat down to get out a new and sensational bill. Then I sent for the chief sub-editor, Abbott, and showed him the difference. To my amazement he defended his quiet bill. “It’s a Conservative paper,” he said, “and doesn’t shout at you.”

“The boy critic giggled. “You come out to sell paipers,” he cried, “and you’ll soon hev’ to shout!”

The end of it was that I gave the boy ten shillings and five to his friend and made them promise to come to me each week with the bills, good and bad. Those kids taught me what the London hapenny public wanted and I went home laughing at my own high-brow notions.

The ordinary English public did not want thoughts but sensations. I had begun to edit the paper with the best in me at 28; I went back in my life, and when I edited it as a boy of 14 I began to succeed. My obsessions then were kissing and fighting: when I got one or other or both of these interests into every column, the circulation of the paper increased steadily.

The resignation of [managing editor] Marcus W. Brauchli from The Wall Street Journal was less shocking, if only because Mr. Brauchli was appointed by the previous owners of the paper. Since he bought Dow Jones in December for $5.2 billion, Mr. Murdoch has moved swiftly to remake the stately paper, calling for shorter articles and more coverage of politics, culture and even sports — and fewer business articles on the front page.

“Plus ça change,” as the fella said, “plus c’est la même Scheiss."

Buck’s Social Security posting, below, sent me back in the archives first to April of 2003 and from there to a post from the gray, menacing dawn of the Bush misadministration. The latter was titled, Contrary to Published Reports, Social Security is Okay. For whatever historical interest it might have, here goes:

On Monday, March 19 of the year 2001, high officials of the Bush administration made it clear that the Social Security crisis was over.

In fact, as they announced at a press conference, Social Security was in better shape than ever before in its history. And it would be on solid ground until at least 2038, when the first of the baby boomers will be 92. Medicare was in good shape, too: its main trust fund wasn’t expected to run dry until 2029.

The news would have been a huge relief to the tens of millions of Americans who believe that little or no money will be left by the time they reach retirement age. But the information never got to those worried millions, or to anyone else except a few thousand news junkies and policy wonks. Television seems to have ignored the story completely. The major papers ran it, but in such a way that for most readers it remained hidden, like Poe’s purloined letter, in plain sight—

The Boston Globe gave it 658 words; the Chicago Tribune thought it was worth 488. The Washington Post ran it on page 5, the Los Angeles Times on page 9. The New York Times also printed it inside, under the gripping headline: “Trustees Extend Solvency Estimates for 2 Benefits.” The lead sentence in the Wall Street Journal was, “Medicare and Social Security, the big entitlement programs for elderly Americans, are still going broke, though more slowly.”

But here are some other possible leads — bearing an equivalent or greater relation to reality—that might have introduced the neglected little story:

“The public relations campaign to scare Americans into turning Social Security over to Wall Street yesterday had a dangerous and perhaps fatal collision with reality.”

Or, “The Bush administration today scrambled to discredit a report from its own officials that undermined the president’s campaign promise to ‘reform’ Social Security and Medicare. Far from needing reform, etc.”

Or, “Even after loading the dice by using what many economists consider to be overly pessimistic growth projections, the Bush Administration was nonetheless forced to conclude yesterday that both Medicare and Social Security would remain solid at least until the youngest baby boomer reaches retirement age.”

Or, “Record budget surpluses — the major justification for President Bush’s proposed $1.6 trillion tax cut — would disappear if economic predictions used by three of his top cabinet officers are accurate. So would any immediate threat to the stability of Social Security and Medicare.”

All these leads are supported by facts contained in the various stories. And all qualify as news under the dog-bites-man rule: a widespread assumption about the world turns out not to be true after all.

All of the stories were caused by a report from the secretaries of Treasury, Labor, and Health and Human Services, joined by two outside experts. This report and the press conference called to announce it involved federal programs that touch the lives of virtually every American. Widely perceived as on the brink of bankruptcy, Social Security and Medicare prove to be in better shape than ever before — and by a considerable margin, too.

Then why did editors and reporters conclude that the report on the Social Security and Medicare trust funds deserved no better than what amounted to a collective yawn?

Might it have been because the stories were based on the fuzziest of numbers? Although the government may be obliged to pretend it can see decades into the fiscal future, does it follow that responsible journalists are obliged to take the pretense seriously? Of course not.

It would be unkind to dwell on past instances when the press regurgitated equally fuzzy figures with childlike trust, so let’s do it. For more than ten years, the press has been squawking like Chicken-Licken that the sky was about to fall on the whole baby boomer generation. Eventally “more people believed in UFOs than think they will ever receive Social Security.”

The widely-reported quote is from Peter G. Peterson, a former Secretary of Commerce under Richard Nixon and a leader for nearly 30 years in the campaign to destroy public confidence in Social Security. Mr. Peterson’s aim in raising his false alarm was to destroy Social Security. To do this, he proposed to gamble with the fund by diverting billions of dollars away from it and into the stock market. The suckers might win or might lose; the brokers, who would take the house cut off the top, could only win.

So successful had Peterson’s doomsaying been that it still lurks unexamined in the heads of journalists as well as most other economic illiterates. So editors and reporters were reading to believe the latest spin on the old story

After all, that spin was coming from the very people issuing the report. Most of them were members of the Bush cabinet, and it was in their interest to attack the very report they were obliged by law to issue. Like Peterson, Bush wanted Social Security to look broke so he could fix it—by putting billions of dollars from it into the stock market.

One trouble with this plan was that at the moment the thing that appeared to be the most badly broken was the stock market itself. Privatization of Social Security was starting to look about as smart as turning your life savings over to the purser on the Titanic.

Another drawback was that the president, in a striking display of cognitive dissonance, was telling us that the good times were over so we had better cut taxes. The logic was that this would allow us to pay down a little of our credit card debt, while at the same time getting rid of that pesky budget surplus that was looming over the economy. Or something.

At the same time Bush, by arguing for a tax cut spread over ten years, was implicitly predicting that the economy would remain strong enough so that lower taxes would still produce enough revenue to provide needed government services. In other words we could both have our cake and eat it, under the theory that had earlier produced President Reagan’s monumental deficits.

Anyway, Mr. Bush’s cabinet officers were in an uncomfortable position. They really thought — every true conservatives does, in the deep, secret bottom of his soul — that Social Security and Medicare were crackbrained communist schemes that should be terminated at once, and with extreme prejudice. But in a nation of fools, many of them unfortunately voters, wisdom cannot be said aloud. The rabble must be scared into doing what is best for it.

For one thing, the reports in question are an annual affair. The number of years till the projected insolvency of both funds went up last year, too, and had been going up since 1997. This year’s increase, consequently, sounded like old stuff.

In the third place, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out, “when the programs finally reach their insolvency dates the government likely would have to slash benefits — a 30% cut in Social Security alone, according to the report — increase taxes, or both, officials said.” In 37 years, everybody better watchout. Officials say.

And the Journal says, “Many economists believe the programs represent a burden on all Americans that in the long run is untenable.” Many editors probably believe that, too. Certainly most publishers do.

From this point of view, then, the responsible course is to downplay a story which offers only false and temporary hope. The sad but unavoidable truth is that our reckless generosity toward the old, the helpless and the sick will lead, if unchecked, only to ruin. That this hasn’t happened in the 66 years of Social Security’s existence is a miracle that, in the conservative worldview, cannot possibly continue.

The excerpt below is by Joe Bageant, the bard of Winchester, Virginia, and the author of Deer Hunting with Jesus. His fuse has been lit by the media tizzy over Barack Obama’s mostly accurate look at white working-class resentment. Read the whole essay here. (The photo below is not of Joe, but of the younger and more photogenic Larry the Cable Guy.)

In any case, Obama has proven you cannot even use the innocuous word bitterness in conjunction with the national lie of white American culture. In the officially sanctioned media lexicon, Blacks can be angry, disillusioned and even bitter enough to burn down Watts. But the white race, being blessed by a Christian god and divine providence, never harbor bitterness in their hearts. The reason the word bitterness has caused such horror is because what is really going on out there is the sprouting seeds of class animosity. And no candidate or pontificating media mugwump dares touch that one because they are in the class that benefits from our classist society.

Dr. Hibbert: Now, a little death anxiety is normal. You can expect to go through five stages. The first is denial.

Homer: No way! Because I’m not dying! [hugs Marge]

Dr. Hibbert: The second is anger.

Homer: Why you little! [steps towards Dr. H]

Dr. Hibbert: After that comes fear.

Homer: What’s after fear? What’s after fear? [cringes]

Dr. Hibbert: Bargaining.

Homer: Doc, you gotta get me out of this! I’ll make it worth your while!

Dr. Hibbert: Finally, acceptance.

Homer: Well, we all gotta go sometime.

Dr. Hibbert: Mr. Simpson, your progress astounds me.

Frank Rich has been to see the latest Errol Morris film, “Standard Operating Procedure”. In fact he was part of a “goodly chunk of New York’s media and cultural establishment” at a Museum of Modern Art screening.

One thing that struck him was the contrast between the opulent setting and the subject of the film: torture committed with official complicity at the White House level. Do we really care about that, still? It all seems so 2005…

Rich thinks that George Voinovich, Senator from Ohio, points to the central issue.

“The truth of the matter,” Mr. Voinovich said, is that “we haven’t sacrificed one darn bit in this war, not one. Never been asked to pay for a dime, except for the people that we lost.”

This is how the war planners wanted it, of course. No new taxes, no draft, no photos of coffins, no inconveniences that might compel voters to ask tough questions. This strategy would have worked if the war had been the promised cakewalk. But now it has backfired. A home front that has not been asked to invest directly in a war, that has subcontracted it to a relatively small group of volunteers, can hardly be expected to feel it has a stake in the outcome five stalemated years on.

The original stakes (saving the world from mushroom clouds and an alleged ally of Osama bin Laden) evaporated so far back they seem to belong to another war entirely. What are the stakes we are asked to believe in now? In the largely unwatched House hearings on Wednesday, Representative Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat, tried to get at this by asking what some 4,000 “sons and daughters” of America had died for.

General Petraeus replied in terms of national interest, apparently without irony. This is certainly not in Iraq’s national interest. It’s in our national interest, if you’re the sort who thinks that what’s good for ExxonMobile is good for the country. Personally, I’m not so sure. Prices at a gas station in Belmont I pass once a week have been ten cents higher each Friday; this week premium was $4.15, regular $3.95.

Which, I’m sorry to admit, hits most of us harder than the collective guilt of having allowed our officials to order our interrogators to torture people in the obviously ridiculous hope that some useful information could be gathered. And then done nothing about it when we caught them.

Or is it really that Americans feel justified in torturing people? Because after all we’re good. Thus, by definition, whatever we do had to be done. It’s not our fault torture was called for. It’s not our fault Iraq appears to be on the brink of chaos, just because we helped Saddam take over, then armed him, and finally attacked him as one in our string of endless enemies. It’s not our fault Iran hates us, just because we overthrew a duly elected government and substituted a repressive and brutal regime, which they finally managed to throw out. What, after all, should have been our preferred method? It’s not like we were going to leave them and their oil in peace; it’s not like we were going to consider their interests in any serious way whatsoever. What tools remain other than brutal repression?

This war has lasted so long that Americans, even the bad apples of Abu Ghraib interviewed by Mr. Morris, have had the time to pass through all five of the Kübler-Ross stages of grief over its implosion. Though dead-enders like Mr. McCain may have only gone from denial to anger to bargaining, most others have moved on to depression and acceptance. Unable to even look at the fiasco anymore, the nation is now just waiting for someone to administer the last rites.

The sad thing about the attacks on Senator Obama for things said by his wife and by his pastor is that attention was paid to them by anyone except Jon Stewart. It was as if the Senator were being pilloried for consorting with persons who claimed that grass is green and — the horror, the horror! — that water runs downhill.

Reverend Wright and Michelle Obama may, for all I know, harbor private beliefs as evil as those which lurk in the minds of Richard Cheney, Osama bin Laden or, back in the day, Vlad the Impaler.

If so, however, the fact has not been reported. What has been reported proves only that both the Obama pastor and the Obama wife are guilty of truth-telling in the first degree. For example, anyone who believes that American foreign policy bore no causal relation to the 9/11 attacks is simply a fool.

And as to Michelle Obama’s deplorably recent feelings of pride in her country, I will refer you, as Judy in Canada has referred me, to this efficient evisceration of the whole issue by Rick Salutin of The Globe and Mail. I’ll add only this from Edmund Burke: ‘For us to love our country, our country ought to be lovely.”

The problem of patriotism really comes down to one question: Are patriots permitted to be critical of their nation, or must they be proud and unquestioning at all times? Once that’s answered, the puzzles dissolve.

Take Barack Obama’s wife, Michelle, who said: “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback..” That’s Position 1. Candidate John McCain’s wife, Cindy, took Position 2: “I have and always will be proud of my country.”

It’s odd that no reporters put Cindy McCain on the spot, named dubious things the U.S. has done, like its genocidal assault on aboriginals, and asked: Are you proud of that? Michelle Obama is the one they keep saying has dug her and her husband a big anti-American hole, one she still hasn’t got past.

But under Position 1 — criticism allowed — her words imply she is a true patriot, and one with a generous spirit. She didn’t wait for solutions to what presumably blocked her pride in the past: like failure to deal with the ongoing problems of race in the U.S. She was ready to be proud on the fairly flimsy basis of reactions to her husband’s campaign. She’s not just a patriot, she’s an optimistic one.

Under Position 1, the patriot test is: Does she continue to want to be proud of her nation, while demanding it live up to standards. By that test, she is a patriot with no hole to climb out of, and so probably is her pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who has taken a lot more stick than she has.

What did he say that anyone could object to on patriotic grounds — that the chickens are coming home to roost in events like 9/11? That’s just foreign policy analysis, stated metaphorically. You can disagree, but it isn’t unpatriotic. Or: “The government ... wants us to sing God Bless America. No, no, no, God damn America ... for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.” That is utterly in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

According to the Hebrew prophets, God consigned his beloved chosen people to exile for allowing social injustice, allying with evil nations — i.e., shabby foreign policy — and religious infidelity. (The black church in the U.S. has always had a preferential option for the Old Testament parts of the Bible.)

Another way to put Position 1 is: You cannot say, Blessed is the nation, unless you can also say, Cursed is the nation — they go together under love of nation. As political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote: “There can be no patriotism without permanent opposition and criticism.”

She said that in 1963, under fire from other Jews for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. She was a lifelong Zionist but critical of the direction Zionism had taken. In fact, Jews often split into the two positions over loyalty to Israel. It’s odd how that, too, has now been woven into U.S. politics. Candidates for president are required to show unquestioning allegiance to Israel as much, or more, as to the U.S. The same is becoming true in Canada.

Of course, we also have unique Canadian versions of unthinking patriotism. When the “loyal” opposition criticized the handover of detainees by our forces in Afghanistan despite possible torture, Stephen Harper and his instruments replied: Why do they criticize what our troops do? Why do they care more about the Taliban than our brave Canadian soldiers? Got that — it’s unpatriotic to ask if our country did anything to be ashamed of?

Hannah Arendt also wrote about Judah Magnes, a Zionist pioneer and founder of the Hebrew University. “Being a Jew and a Zionist, he was simply ashamed of what Jews and Zionists were doing.” The sense of shame is what can save the honour of the group and the nation. It is what Position 1 patriots provide. If there are no patriots capable of shame for what is done in the nation’s name, so there is only praise and pride everywhere, then patriotism easily slides into stupidity and worse.

BBC moved this story at 10:22 p.m. (EST) Thursday, and the 11 o’clock news only carried a sentence or two on it. But it will be all over the news by Friday morning, barring massive media misconduct. Which of course we can’t bar at all.

The US Department of State has fired two contractors and disciplined a third for accessing the passport file of presidential hopeful Barack Obama.

A spokesman for the department, Sean McCormack, said the cases were likely caused by “imprudent curiosity.” But he said it was not clear what the employees may have seen or what they were looking for.

A spokesman for Mr Obama suggested that the government could be using private information for “political purposes.”

The BBC’s North America editor, Justin Webb, says it is an extraordinary lapse in security which allowed temporary state department employees access to personal information on a man who is guarded by the secret service day and night .

The state department tracks those who access its passport database. Breaches occurred on three separate dates — 9 January, 21 February and 14 March.

“We believe this was out of imprudent curiosity, so we are taking steps to reassure ourselves that that is, in fact, the case,” Mr McCormack said…

What follows is my transcription of New York Times columnist Thomas L Friedman explaining his flat world on The Charlie Rose Show. I don’t think I’ve heard this much concentrated stupidity since listening to Ambassador G. McMurtrie Godley III at country team meetings in wartime Laos.

The transcription below contains the money shot, as they call it in the frankly pornographic rather than the political side of show biz. But if you have time to watch the whole interview you’ll see that Friedman’s performance was well-rehearsed and at least partially memorized. Thus the last three appalling paragraphs were not misspoken, but intentional.

Particularly unattractive, like Bush’s fake Texas accent, are Friedman’s tone-deaf attempts to sound like an ex-Marine Corps pogue tough-talking at the Legion Hall late at night. (Suck on this, Friedman, okay?)

And what we learned on 9/11, in a gut way, was that [the terrorist] bubble was a fundamental threat to our open society because there is no wall high enough, no INS agent smart enough, no metal detector efficient enough, to protect an open society from people motivated by that bubble and what we needed to do was to go over to that part of the world, I’m afraid, and burst that bubble. We needed to go over here basically and take out a very big stick right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble.

And there was only one way to do it because part of that bubble said, “We’ve got you. This bubble is actually going to level the balance of power between we and you because we don’t care about it. We’re ready to sacrifice and all you care about is your stock options and your Hummers.”

And what they needed to see was American boys and girls going from house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, “Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think we care about our open society? You think this bubble fantasy, we’re just going to let it grow? Well, suck on this, okay?”

That, Charlie, was what this war was about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia; it was part of the bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Baghdad because we could.

Noam Chomsky often talks about the importance of setting the limits on acceptable arguments, on what can be discussed in public. In many ways Chomsky parallels Machiavelli: he understands the rules of the game more consciously than his contemporaries, and is reviled for stating obvious facts about social attitudes that no one wants to hear. Presumably being consistently right is some compensation.

The liberalization of the nomination process has left the upper echelons of both parties less able to determine directly who wins. However, they have indirect power. They can influence which candidates are seen by the voters to be credible candidates. Through their dialogue with one another as well as their direct communications to the public, they help establish voter expectations, and therefore the range of viable alternatives voters perceive. The more they talk up a candidate’s viability, the more viable he becomes. The less they talk it up, the less viable he becomes. This is the power to set the agenda.

This perfect Chomskian statement came from — you guessed it! — the Wall Street Journal.

As usual, read Bill Greider in The Nation. Immediately. Brief taste below. Full meal here.

Bill Gross, the insightful managing director of PIMCO, the major bond-investment house, has called for virtually doubling the federal deficit in order pump hundreds of billions into new economic activity. When bond holders are more alarmed about the economy than political leaders, you know something is backwards in American politics.

Edwards, alas, probably restrained the size of his stimulus package to convince the media gatekeepers he is not wacko and thus win some coverage for his forward thinking. No such luck. Edwards has his own shortcomings, but he has been victimized by the shallow political culture that empties meaning from presidential campaigns. The press early on consigned him to the “populist” stereotype and largely ignored the serious content of his agenda.

This is the curse that leads to enervating, brain-dead presidential cycles. Substance bores political reporters. Most of them do not understand economics or even know much about how government actually works. Given their ignorance, they prefer to play the role of theater critics and imagine that readers are desperate to hear their highly subjective and utterly unreliable reviews of the sideshow.

It’s possible, perhaps even usual, to be a good writer and a poor thinker. Never having read anything by Bill Kristol, I assumed that literary talent must explain why the New York Times was giving him the most desirable platform in American journalism.

Then his first column came out. Here’s how it began:

Thank you, Senator Obama. You’ve defeated Senator Clinton in Iowa. It looks as if you’re about to beat her in New Hampshire. There will be no Clinton Restoration. A nation turns its grateful eyes to you.

But gratitude for sparing us a third Clinton term only goes so far. Who, inquiring minds want to know, is going to spare us a first Obama term? After all, for all his ability and charm, Barack Obama is still a liberal Democrat. Some of us would much prefer a non-liberal and non-Democratic administration. We don’t want to increase the scope of the nanny state, we don’t want to undo the good done by the appointments of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, and we really don’t want to snatch defeat out of the jaws of victory in Iraq.

I won’t waste time on precisely why this is such an awful piece of writing; for that, go here. And I can’t tell you why the Times hired him, except that their stated reason — to give right-left balance to the editorial page — cannot possibly be the real one. A couple of hours poking around the right-wing blogosphere would turn up any number of conservatives who think and write far better than Kristol. And they’d come a lot cheaper.

I suspect Kristol got where he is the same way George W. Bush did: family connections. Kristol’s father is the unspeakable neocon elder Irving Kristol, who was a longtime friend of the unspeakable former editor of the New York Times, the late Abe Rosenthal, whose son, Andrew Rosenthal, became editorial page editor of the Times a year ago.

I have friends, too, and one of them has a friend at the Times, and that friend told my friend who just emailed me “the delicious inside detail that (a) the editors told him, ‘Look, Bill, you actually have to write these by yourself,’ and (b) the copy editors decided to let him… speak in his own voice!”

(Incidentally, since I’ll bet you didn’t know, either — nep•o•tism: mid 17th cent.: from French népotisme, from Italian nepotismo, from nipote “nephew” (with reference to privileges bestowed on the “nephews” of popes, who were in many cases their illegitimate sons).)

Okay, I realize everyone’s trying to get the story posted immediately. Perhaps these three (consecutive) paragraphs slipped out, and the WSJ will edit them later.

Today former President Bill Clinton critiqued Mr. Obama’s record while stumping for his wife throughout the state, calling Mr. Obama’s candidacy “the biggest fairy tale I have ever seen.”

Yo! Is the Big Dog taking out his latent frustrations with his wife on the campaign trail?

In the end, it was Mr. Obama’s lack of experience that made many voters opt for the more seasoned Mrs. Clinton. “I like him and I think he’ll be ready in eight years,” said Allison Mundry, a 49-year-old real estate agent in Salem. But for now, she says “We have to vote for someone who can get the Republicans out of office.”

Okay, you’re voting for the candidate who polls the worst of the top three Democrats against the Republicans because we gotta get rid of those damned Republicans? Well, I can pretty near guarantee you they’ll absent themselves from any discussion of a Clinton. They always have.

The Illinois Senator will go on to South Carolina where half of all registered Democrats are African-American and could choose Mr. Obama, the first serious candidate to have a chance at the White House.

“The first serious candidate”? They can’t even bring themselves to say it openly.

I’ve long advocated throwing out our television, but Mrs. Batard says C-Span and Keith Olbermann are too important to let go of. I can agree with the C-Span part, but I’ve yet to hear Keith Olbermann cover any economic issues. But wait! This might change my mind, at least for one night sometime, someday.

At long last, Howard Zinn’s influential 1980 book “A People's History of the United States” is being turned into a TV miniseries called “The People Speak,” and it’ll be shot here in Boston next month. The series will star several Hollywood heavies, including Matt Damon, Marisa Tomei , Viggo Mortensen , Danny Glover, Josh Brolin, and David Strathairn, as well as actresses Kerry Washington and Q‘Orianka Kilcher, and singer Allison Moorer.

From what I’ve read, no network has signed on yet, so we might have to wait another hundred years. But I’m still wondering what Zinn thinks of all those multimillionaires being involved in the project. I think a very good argument could be made that the blogs have made an important contribution to our democracy and rather than use Hollywood actors, regular folks should be the real stars of the show. But at least leave that television in the closet for now. The trash collectors are busy this time of the year anyway.

Like other establishment media outlets, however, USA Today seems to have difficulty providing a level playing field to a candidate who consistently attacks corporate interests — otherwise known as the media’s owners and sponsors. An exercise in post-debate “fact-checking” by USA Today (12/14/07), for instance, took issue with this statement by Edwards: “One of the reasons that we’ve lost jobs, we’re having trouble creating jobs…is because corporate power and greed have literally taken over the government.”

The paper’s “reality,” as written by David Jackson and Fredreka Schouten, was this: “Edwards is wrong about job creation. There were 94,000 new jobs created in November, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Since August 2003, 8.35 million jobs have been created.”

Actually, as FAIR points out, the widely repeated rule of thumb is that the economy must create about 150,000 jobs a month merely to keep up with population growth; 94,000 doesn’t even meet the basic minimum, let alone improve the situation. Are the reporters at USA Today prevented from doing basic research by an outdated computer system? Or are the facts that put things in perspective consistently elided from the final edited version, and therefore eventually just not worth including even if you know them?

Way back when (in April, actually) I posted this:

Bush’s Iraq “war,” in the sense that most of us understand the word, ended in a few weeks. Our “enemy” didn’t fight, it is true, but our victory was beyond question.

Failure to call the occupation of Iraq by its proper name has been a powerful part of why Bush has been able to continue occupying that unhappy nation. If we can be deceived into believing that it is still a “war,” then we can be made to feel that pulling out would somehow “lose” it.

But occupations are not lost. They are simply ended, and by the victor at a time and place of his choice. It is beyond me why the Democrats do not grasp this simple point, and hammer on it every day. Reframe, idiots. Read Lakoff.

When Bush sets out to leave our public schools behind, he calls it Leaving No Child Behind. When the Democrats want to leave Bush’s Folly behind, they call it H.R. 1234 or some damned thing and stand by like fearful little children when Daddy Bush and Uncle McConnell call it defunding the troops.

How about the Stand Up Iraq Act? The Full Freedom Act? The Iraq Independence Act? The Democracy Restoration Act? The Iraq Sovereignty Act? The Iraq Liberation Bill? Iraq Stands Tall? Setting Iraq Free? The Iraq Self-defense Act? The One Last Chance Act?

But first of all the Democratic leadership, and I use the term loosely, must stop calling an occupation a war. For more on this, see the interview with Thom Hartmann from which the following comes:

If Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi were to stand up and say, “OK, everybody, we’re all going to use the same language. From now on, we’re all going to refer to what’s going on in Iraq as an occupation. We’re never going to use the word ‘war’ again.” It would be the smartest thing they could do, and probably 70 percent of their party would call a press conference and trash them for trying to put words in their mouths…

I actually wrote an op-ed about war and occupation a couple years ago, suggesting this, and for a brief period, for two or three months afterward, one of the liberal think tanks came up with the same idea and suggested this. Between the two of us out there beating that drum, there were a number of Democrats in the media who I noticed started to use the word “occupation” instead of the word “war.”

But the media was so in love with the word “war” because war is a powerful thing. It’s legalized mass murder. It is the most horrific thing that as a society we can sanction. So, the media just kept referring to it as a war no matter what …

Ultimately, the Democrats gave up and went back to using the word “war.” In fact, many of them found that using the word “war” over the short term was useful because it scares people. I think it’s bad policy and bad politics. But some Democrats are Republican lite, and some Democrats are worried about survival, and some Democrats are not thinking about this all that deeply.

…as we see here:

Within weeks, teams of executives and managers from the two companies were meeting to compare advertising strategies, look for joint ventures and to debate the future of The Wall Street Journal’s paid online subscription system, which Mr. Murdoch dislikes.

Terrific piece at The Smirking Chimp by Ernest Partridge dissecting and discarding the excuses of those — you know who you are — who joined in Bush’s rush to war out of cowardice or good old American bloodlust.

Hey, did you hear the big news? Iraq doesn’t want Bush and Cheney to go to war with Iran! No matter what our two boss warhogs keep saying, the prime minister of Iraq claims that Iran isn’t helping the insurgents kill American troops after all. Know what? Iran is actually helping the Iraqi government keep weapons away from the terrorists! Says who? The American military, that’s who!

What do you mean you didn’t know that? It’s been all over the news ever since the New York Times broke the story yesterday on page 20. Where have you been hiding yourself?

BAGHDAD, Nov. 17 — The Iraqi government on Saturday credited Iran with helping to rein in Shiite militias and stemming the flow of weapons into Iraq, helping to improve the security situation noticeably …

Speaking about Iran, he said that that government had helped to persuade the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr to ask his Mahdi militia to halt attacks. Mr. Sadr ordered his militia to stop using weapons in early September, and officials say that the militia’s relative restraint has helped improve stability. They say it also seems to have helped decrease the frequency of attacks with explosively formed penetrators, a powerful type of bomb that can pierce heavy armor.

Mr. Dabbagh’s comments echoed those of the American military here, who in recent days have gone out of their way to publicly acknowledge Iran’s role in helping to slow the flow of weapons into the country ….

Mr. Dabbagh said that the turning point came when Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki visited Iran in August and met with the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in the Shiite shrine city of Mashad. Mr. Maliki told the Iranian leader that “Iran had to choose whether to support the government or any other party, and Iraq will decide according to which they choose,” Mr. Dabbagh said. The Iranians promised to help and have done so, he said.

Newspaper owners have always blamed their troubles on competitors: radio, TV, shoppers, and now the internet. However the problem is not with others, but with publishers who for decades have been bleeding their papers to achieve obscene profit margins. Their method has been to replace whole departments with computerized machines, to bust unions, and then to pay rock-bottom wages.

My stepfather, Ralph Ingersoll, ran a chain of small and mid-sized dailies. My first job out of college was as a reporter for the Boston Globe; my next was at the Newark Evening News, a far superior newspaper, where I was a reporter and education writer.

Then I bought a small daily in Saranac Lake, New York, and a weekly in Lake Placid with money borrowed from my wife’s family and the papers’ owners. After 10 years I sold both papers to a large chain of small newspapers for which I worked 13 years before retiring.

I am close to many chain owners, having attended countless publishers conventions, and having been a guest in their homes where they talked freely — especially, of course, in my late stepfather’s three homes in Connecticut, New York City, and St. Maarten. Here’s what I learned—

It’s fair to say that all chains expect their papers (barring metros) to earn at least 20 percent of gross before taxes. A chain owner once told me with a gleeful smile that one of his papers returned 40 percent of gross. (For a little perspective here, the average for American corporations is seven percent.)

At daily newspapers everything is subordinated to maintaining those bloated margins, which can only achieved by delivering the smallest possible quantity and quality of news. As a consequence the products are mostly atrocious, written by raw reporters earning as little as $300 a week to start. Even today new staffers get 23 to 25 cents mileage allowance to drive cars they must own to get the reporting job in the first place.

I can tell you unequivocally that greed drives most chain newspaper corporate decisions. I’ve seen mom and pop dailies go from 10 percent to 30 percent profit in a year after being acquired by one of the chains that own most daily newspapers today. And even now, in their alleged distress, most chains keep 20 percent or more before taxes.

The fact is that if owners had settled for 10 percent net on gross after cold type and computers came in 30 years ago, that extra money could have insured a quality of product that would have made them strong in the face of challenges from TV and the net.

Now most papers are tight, offering poor and scant local coverage, very little national or international coverage, and pablum opinion pages to please the business community. It is no wonder subscribers have been fleeing since long before the web was a potent competitor. Yet still the publishers bleat about losing readers and advertising, especially classified, to the Internet.

I, for one, do not feel sorry in the least. I read all of my papers now on line and free. Just wait until my 14-year-old son (who loves the news) and his peers reach their 20s. They will get all their news from TV and the web.

These kids are used to the web and know how to find far, far better coverage, opinion or anything else than most newspapers offer even on their own web sites. The local newspapers have not found a way to replace their lost income with advertising on their web sites, or lost circulation income as readers flee to the web — many to the newspapers’ own free web sites.

The publishers have made this bed for themselves. Sure there are other factors, but the biggest is the overweening greed of the owners themselves.

Do you remember the almost total failure last month of our media to tell us what Osama bin Laden actually said in his most recent video? All we needed to know, apparently, was what we said about what he was supposed to have said.

Thank God, as usual, for the internet. FMArouet has actually read the transcript and written about it on Daily Kos with calm, intelligent objectivity. That sort of approach to our present struggle, although the author writes in English, is so unusual as almost to give the impression of being in a foreign language.

Below are just a few paragraphs from a much longer piece. I urge you to read it all.

One could reasonably argue that cheap oil (i.e., No. 5 above) is important to the U.S. economy. However, if we accept the increasingly convincing data supporting the concept of Peak Oil, the prospect of ensuring cheap oil supplies for very much longer seems to be beyond reach. The sooner we accommodate ourselves to this emerging reality of oil scarcity, the better.

So why not reframe the whole debate with an obvious question: is the current U.S. policy of interventionism to secure access to cheap oil (by invading countries to secure drilling rights for ExxonMobil, Chevron, British Petroleum, and Royal Dutch Shell) really less costly — in terms of treasure and of blood — than to refrain from military intervention (except as a very last resort to ensure freedom of transit) and to let the petroleum exporting countries and the petroleum importers arrive at mutually agreed prices for crude?

And could we take a portion of the literally trillions of dollars devoted to seizing and occupying countries possessing oilfields, natural gas deposits, and pipeline rights-of-way and instead invest it in more efficient petroleum technologies (encouraging a hybrid in every driveway) and better yet, in alternative and renewable sources of energy?

The U.S. would still need a robust Navy to discourage potential threats to vital shipping lanes and to prevent piracy (No. 2 above). Hence a naval (and likely air) presence in the Middle East would continue to serve U.S. interests. But are imperial police actions, air-launched devastations, and festering occupations really solving any of our problems?

The U.S. really is not very good at conducting such occupations successfully when faced with stiff indigenous opposition, as we have found out in Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, and in a rapidly deteriorating Afghanistan. The U.S. position in Iraq is deteriorating as well, with any conceivable satisfactory resolution no nearer now than in 2003 — no matter how creatively Gen. David Petraeus, Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno, and Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner have sought to cook and obfuscate the numbers since the “surge” began…

I never thought this day would come, but here I am defending Bill O’Reilly. Go here. Listen to the whole segment about restaurants in Harlem and so forth. What do you think? I think the son of a bitch is getting a bum rap.

I thought I’d see what everybody’s talking about, so I just signed up for free weekly columns by She Whose Name Must Not Be Spoken. Blogosphere regulations permit me to identify Her only as a middle-aged lawyer built like a stack of coat hangers whose college roommate later became a surgeon who—

— makes $380 for an emergency appendectomy, or one-ten-thousandth of what John Edwards made suing doctors like her.

By remarkable coincidence, a young architect I know also had an emergency appendectomy in our small local hospital several years ago. More remarkably than that his surgeon, too, was a woman. And even more remarkably — you’re not going to believe this — her bill was for $11,000, or twenty-eight and ninety-four-hundredths more than $380.

There’s a lot of buzz about the editorial in the New York Times today calling for what loyal Bushies would term precipitate withdrawal.

Indeed, there are some striking statements from this organ of pre-war lies.

At first, we believed that after destroying Iraq’s government, army, police and economic structures, the United States was obliged to try to accomplish some of the goals Mr. Bush claimed to be pursuing, chiefly building a stable, unified Iraq. When it became clear that the president had neither the vision nor the means to do that, we argued against setting a withdrawal date while there was still some chance to mitigate the chaos that would most likely follow.

While Mr. Bush scorns deadlines, he kept promising breakthroughs — after elections, after a constitution, after sending in thousands more troops. But those milestones came and went without any progress toward a stable, democratic Iraq or a path for withdrawal. It is frighteningly clear that Mr. Bush’s plan is to stay the course as long as he is president and dump the mess on his successor. Whatever his cause was, it is lost.

The editorial lists some of the harms the US has suffered as a result of what it calls “this unnecessary invasion and the incompetent management of this war”, and accuses the President and Vice President of using demagoguery and fear as weapons against American public opinion. It ends with a call to action.

This country faces a choice. We can go on allowing Mr. Bush to drag out this war without end or purpose. Or we can insist that American troops are withdrawn as quickly and safely as we can manage — with as much effort as possible to stop the chaos from spreading.

Executive summary: we thought it would be a cakewalk securing Iraq’s oil, but it wasn’t. So our advice is to cut bait; just don’t let it hurt Israel.

But the Times is ready to give up on the occupation, not the oil.

The bottom line: the Pentagon needs enough force to stage effective raids and airstrikes against terrorist forces in Iraq, but not enough to resume large-scale combat.

This seems to me patently silly, totally PR, and the colors aren’t even particularly happenin’.

How can one tell whether a given number of ground troops and a fleet of bombers, fighters, and support craft constitute a force whose size is sufficient for effective raiding but not for large-scale combat? Is there a UN agency that does such surveys, or is it an NGO? Sounds like rhetorical cover is being sought.

Plus, there’s an argument to be made that the force we now have in Iraq is not a large-scale combat force; we didn’t expect to see large-scale combat except for a brief period during the invasion. If that argument held up, the Times would presumably be happy simply to remove US troops to bases in Kuwait and the budding Kurdistan. Bringing them home, and getting the hell out of Iraq, does not seem to be the primary goal.

Most importantly, why does our military need to “stage … raids and airstrikes against terrorist forces in Iraq” if we’re no longer bogged down there militarily? Are we claiming that we have vital interests in Iraq?

Which is really the point. Whether true believer (Bush, Wolfowitz) or shameless profiteer (Cheney, Perle) or lying propagandist (most of the MSM, including the Times), it’s clear that for establishment types in the US, the war in Iraq is subtitled “Oil! And Israel”. The question is not whether the interests are vital, but how best to secure them.

To me, on the other hand, it seems that there are two points to securing the oil in Iraq. One is imperial: to have, as Chomsky says, our hand on the spigot that dispenses an ever more precious resource. The other is corporate: the profits being made in the oil business are nothing short of criminal, and should be treated as such.

We could use the billions we’d collect in fines to fund research into alternative energy and transportation.

Our relationship with Israel has a strong imperial tint as well; as Kissinger said, Israel is our lieutenant in the Middle East. And, given our actions in that area over the past few decades, damn near our only friend. Sure, our military might reinforces some monarchies that wouldn’t last a year without our support; but that’s a different sort of friendship.

Clearly we need a new plan for our forces in Iraq. But we can only make an intelligent one if we state our premises and assumptions. The problem is that my premises and those of the New York Times editorial board don’t match.

Seems to me there are three kinds of problems in Iraq.

• Resistance to foreign occupation
• Sectarian conflict
• Jockeying for government power and oil money

The last two overlap, of course, but it doesn’t matter, because we can’t solve either of them. All we’ve tried to do is buy the Iraqi government some time to get its act together and begin running the country.

Problem is, we know this isn’t going to happen. The Iraqi government did not win an election like those we (used to?) have in the US. Let’s not forget that candidates were often afraid to place their names on the ballot lest they be abducted, tortured, and killed. Campaigning was so dangerous that there was little of it, leaving people to vote for parties rather than individuals or clear positions on issues. As a result, the final tallies closely followed confessional lines.

Not to mention that the Saddam years provided a suboptimal training ground for up-and-coming Iraqi leaders.

In any case the Iraqi government has little real power to wield. It doesn’t control, in the classic sense, any territory at all in its own country. The US has the Green Zone, but even that receives mortar fire (which I don’t think is supposed to happen in an area you control).

The government cannot dispense those oil billions we were told to expect because of sabotage, part of the resistance to the occupation as well as the Sunni-Shia conflict.

It can’t even provide water and electricity — we’ve made sure of that by bombing the crap out of the infrastructure. And by creating a situation that killed or displaced many of the professionals needed to start anew.

Thus it seems that Cheney has succeeded in his plan: the establishment believes that to leave now would be to abandon our friends and give up on all that oil.

In the end, don’t you admire a man who persists in his plan in the teeth of resistance?

“He takes a range of medications that he and his doctors decline to detail. The extent of his atherosclerosis (hardening of the arteries, which, if it extends beyond the heart to the brain, can cause hard-to-recognize changes in cognition) is unknown. Bypass surgery itself has long been associated with subtle changes in neurological function.

”At age 65, Cheney is easily 30 or more pounds overweight, seems to have slacked off on what was once a more rigorous diet, and appears to suffer from recurrent bouts of gout. At a roundtable lunch with reporters a couple of years ago, two who were present say, he cut his buffalo steak in bite-size pieces the moment it arrived, then proceeded to salt each side of each piece.“

If four heart attacks (that we know of) aren’t gonna teach him to avoid salt, it’s unlikely that he’s capable of learning anything.

Is it Cheney’s hope to tie us down in Iraq for many years to come, giving no-bid contracts to Halliburton, consuming lives in a perpetual war, and allowing enterprising young men to have other priorities than serving in it?

News reports have for some time shown the Iraqi resistance growing in size and in public acceptance. It’s increasingly clear that the US presence is aggravating the resistance problem to the point that it’s dominating the stage.

Without the US military, Iraq may well descend into a nightmare of bloodshed. Power struggles often go that way, especially among populations whose previous regimes have left them ill-prepared for self-government. But we can’t stop that.

Some of those who supported the war are now cloaking their imperial aims in humanitarian rhetoric. Others use similar rhetoric to cloak their interest in what they think is best for Israel.

We won’t make effective plans until we state our goals honestly. And we can’t do that because we don’t agree on whether the US should be an empire with a lieutenant in the Middle East.

For many years, probably because of Watergate and the anti-McCarthy cartoons of Herblock, the Washington Post has been considered a liberal paper by those who don’t read it.

But even when I worked there, back when the world was young, its editorial page was for the most part reliably Tory. The editor of it was J. Russell Wiggins, whose shilling for the Vietnam War was rewarded by LBJ with an ambassadorship to the United Nations. Later, when the editorial page started to look a little pink to the union-busting publisher, Kay Graham, she turned it over to her conservative pal, Meg Greenfield.

These days the page is run by Fred Hiatt, about whom I know nothing. But by his works, presumably, ye shall know him. Here’s a prediction from one of his editorials that has held up particularly well since its publication in January of 2006:

Humility is called for when predicting how a Supreme Court nominee will vote on key issues, or even what those issues will be, given how people and issues evolve. But it’s fair to guess that Judge Alito will favor a judiciary that exercises restraint and does not substitute its judgment for that of the political branches in areas of their competence. That’s not all bad. The Supreme Court sports a great range of ideological diversity but less disagreement about the scope of proper judicial power. The institutional self-discipline and modesty that both Judge Alito and Chief Justice Roberts profess could do the court good if taken seriously and applied apolitically.

In line with my usual policy of giving credit where credit is at long last due, I congratulate the New York Times on its recent tacit admission (see previous posting) that decades, being plural by their nature, are properly rendered in text as “1960s and 1970s” rather than as “1960’s and 1970’s.”

The Times’s previous insistence on apostrophes incorrectly denoted possession. Thus the apostrophe would only be correct if one were to write something like “the 1960s’ most representative spokesman was Paul McCartney.” Purists of the most ethereal sort, such as myself, would even insist on writing “the 1960s’s,” which rhymes with “six teases.”

“The 1960s’s” is hard to say, true enough, but no harder than what the tinker said when the countess wondered how he intended to mend her pots:

“Are you copperbottoming ’em, my man?”

“No’m, I’m aluminiuming ‘em, mum,”

Getting back on track here, I await with baited breath for the Times to discover that one does not reign in one’s impulses any more than one reigns in a horse. But I am not so optimistic as to expect its editors ever to be disabused of the notion that children are not bussed to school any more than are they are bused by their loving mothers as they leave for it.

In a properly ordered world, the little tykes receive busses before boarding buses.

Here’s Alan Bisbort, correctly noting at The Smirking Chimp that:

…there are those who are considered more civil, thoughtful members of the Beltway Punditry Class, like Thomas Friedman, David Broder, Juan Williams, George Will and any of the interchangeable parts on the PBS NewsHour.

For the past three years or so, these pundits have insisted that the “nation is divided” and “the nation is torn.” But that’s a false narrative, on its face …

The truth is that never, in my lifetime, has the nation been less divided. Nearly eight of every ten Americans are against Bush and his war. That’s a landslide of consensus. The dangerous extremists are the ones in power.

“Divided” would be 50 percent for something and 50 percent against something. Bush’s approval rating is 28 percent and Cheney’s approval rating is, as Sen. Harry Reid recently said, nine percent. We Americans are pretty much on the same sheet of music here. We all agree that these two criminals — and the party that enabled them — comprise one of the worst blights in our nation’s history.

This story, on page A14 of today’s New York Times, is far and away the biggest one in the paper. Wait and see.

As a long-time critic of the New York Times, I have to say my first impression of their new public editor is positive.

Clark Hoyt, the third PE after Daniel Okrent and Byron Calame, was Knight-Ridder’s Washington editor from 1999; when McClatchy bought K-R last year, he became a consultant.

In the prelude to the Iraq war and the early days of the war, Knight-Ridder stood apart from most of the mainstream news media in raising doubts at times about the Bush administration’s claims, later discredited, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al Qaeda. Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, said that record contributed to his selection of Mr. Hoyt.

“There was a lot of work Knight-Ridder did that was prescient, that wasn’t easy to do,” Mr. Keller said. “It’s always hard to go against conventional wisdom. I think it probably brings him a measure of credibility that helps in getting started on a job like that — that he’s been associated with a brave and aggressive reporting exercise like that.”

Mr. Hoyt said that in 2002 and 2003 he had fielded a great deal of criticism “from angry readers who believed that we weren’t being patriotic, from government officials who said that what we were doing was wrong.”

So maybe the Times is finally starting to get a conscience. Or maybe they just realize how bad their public image is right now. And despite the Pulitzer I have to say I still believe Eagleton was a decent guy who would have made a good VP. But running against a feral Nixon is a dangerous job.

Times are tough out there in the land of newspapers, but the Wall Street Journal has a plan! No need to write the bullshit! Just let the readers smell it. And you thought those scratch and sniff cards were a thing of the past, eh? Gotcha!

Atrios says: “....maybe people are tired of reading right wing horseshit”. I would add that there’s a lot of elephant shit out there too. We on the blogs haven’t quite figured out how to do the smell thing yet, but we can direct you to an earful.

It’s hard to imagine that when the late James Brown soul-shouted, “Somebody open a window, it’s gettin' funky in here,” the phrase would ever apply to Wall Street.

But then came the news that The Wall Street Journal is planning to adorn its hallowed pages with Rub ‘n’ Sniff ads.

Such shenanigans might be expected from the tabloids, home to all things wack. But the stoic Wall Street Journal? Why, one can almost see the loosening of ties — which, just in case, also make handy nooses.

The idea behind this daisy-fresh experiment is to draw readers and advertisers back to the newspaper industry, which has seen better times, given the lengthening shadow of the Internet.

So perhaps the first smell that this scheme of schemes is emitting is the musty scent of flop-sweat desperation, masked as ingenuity. An article on the Advertising Age Web site is accompanied by a photo of a wad of greenbacks with the caption, “Ahh...that new money smell.” Bullish optimism at play.

The plan wouldn't have been feasible until recently, because the traditional scratch ‘n’ sniff olfactory experience was far too expensive for use in newspapers. But a company called Scentisphere (how Jetsons - and ridiculously close to Futurama’s “Smell-o-scope”) developed a much cheaper way to apply scent to ads and dubbed it Rub ‘n’ Sniff.

Here’s another encouraging trend that might in some sense be related to the anti-conservatism thing I was just talking about.

Although the Talking Heads were pretty popular, they were also serious enough to have their concert movie Stop Making Sense directed by Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs, Manchurian Candidate). They had enough of a cult following that bands were named after songs of theirs.

The most famous example is probably Radiohead, who were apparently asked by their recording company to rename themselves. The original name was On a Friday, because that’s when they could practice; but you can see how that name might be suboptimal from the promotion standpoint. (“When are they playing?” “Saturday.”) Inspired by the song of that name in David Byrne’s movie True Stories (John Goodman, Swoozie Kurtz, Spalding Gray, Pops Staples), they chose their current name. I recently watched the movie again after many years, and it’s just as weird as it was originallly. Not very much like any other movie I’ve ever seen. (Plus, I got my copy on eBay for $6.58 delivered. Yahoo! Or should I say, Google!)

David Byrne is certainly one of the weirder characters around. If you’ve seen either of the movies, you’ll know what I mean when I say I’d love to be in the courtroom if the RIAA tries to sue him.

He said he buys most of his music online via eMusic, or obtains it illegally, due to the file constraints on files sold on iTunes. Byrne predicated that once DRM is removed, iTunes will no longer “have a monopoly,” and labels will be better prepared to deal with Web sales.

In his presentation at South by Southwest he predicted that around 2012 downloads will pass CDs as a method of distribution, at which point manufacturing and distribution costs will approach zero. You’d think that would be a win for musicians.

…Byrne seemed to imply that labels are not changing as rapidly as they need to be. He pointed to the royalties artists receive on each CD sale, and put the number at about $1.60. He said the royalty rate is essentially the same with an iTunes sale.

“There’s no manufacturing or distribution costs,” Byrne said, “but somehow the artist ended up with the exact same amount.”

Imagine that.

In the end, the RIAA is an association of lying, cheating bastards. They don’t do squat, and they take most of the profits. The only functions they ever performed were marketing, what Byrne says is the only thing they have left, and controlling the recording equipment and studios, which used to be massively expensive. But if you’re gonna distribute MP3s freely over the net, you can set up a fine studio in your garage for a couple thousand. Then tear it down and put it away when you’re done. The workers own the means of production.

Hopefully more and more people are realizing what scum the record companies are. I’m all for paying the artists, who actually do something. I naturally include in that category everyone who works to produce the music: producers, engineers, programmers, everyone who does something to help create the product. I think most people would pay for music even if they didn’t have to, and be happy doing it, if they thought most of the money was going to these folks. The recording companies in general deserve nothing. (I’m willing to allow some exceptions to that general pontification.)

If you know anyone who is unconvinced about this, I highly recommend a summary of the best arguments I know on this topic. Tasha Costa, writing in the Nevada Appeal, starts with a winner of a story.

I’m not going to claim to be an expert in the area of parenting. I can’t even really claim to know anything about children. But I do know what I’d do if I opened my mail and found out that the Recording Industry Association of America was suing me over my stepdaughter’s downloaded music collection. I’d freak out (as would Mr. Tasha). Luckily for music lovers — and parents — everywhere, Debbie Foster, an Oklahoma mother, didn’t freak out, and she didn’t back down.

On Feb. 6, 2007, a U.S. District Court in Oklahoma ruled that Foster, who was sued for the alleged illegal downloading of her daughter Amanda, was entitled to an award of attorneys’ fees. This was after the RIAA battled her for a year and a half and then backed out of the suit. Incidentally, the RIAA is appealing the decision and generally acting like a spoiled child who got caught beating up kids for their lunch money.

Confronted with an almost comically villianous target, Tasha hits back at the bully.

…according to the MIT campus newspaper “The Tech,” the RIAA has suggested to students that they ought to drop out of college to be able to afford RIAA settlements. They’ve also sued people who don’t own and never have owned a computer.

[…]

And now we reach the crux of the matter. Those companies are part of a multi-billion-dollar-a-year business. They argue that people downloading music takes money away from the artists, but in reality, it takes money away from them, if anyone.

I don’t like people that hide behind lies. If the RIAA is going to do this, and they will continue to, I only have one request: Be honest with us. If you want more money, come out and say it. Don’t act like you’re protecting the artists. If you really were, would a huge group of them have formed a coalition (that would be the Recording Artists Coalition) aimed specifically at bringing change to the recording industry’s structure?

And did we tell you the name of the game, boys? We call it ridin’ the gravy train.

Keeping Bush’s poll numbers at the high twenty range is unquestionably the result of the efforts of that most illustrious of faux news sources, Rupert Murdoch’s preeminent ideological cable “news” channel, FOX News. Fox leads the market in propagandizing to those who are too senile to know better, those in the leftward most half of the IQ bell curve, and those persons susceptible to the “True Believer” syndrome. Except for the growing market for some of Rupert’s more legitimate news outlets, as some of my friends on the left coast who are True Believers in the genius of Bart Simpson have assured me exists, I assumed Rupert had just about reached market saturation.

Look out! In 2005, Murdoch purchased My Space, a web networking site, which is a favorite among the young, but also features such notable southern geniuses as Jasper Johns, another Simpson News Channel fan. Yesterday, Murdoch’s people announced that MySpace will promote its own news network, which will apparently get quite involved in the upcoming American Presidential race.

My thoughts? I think that Censorspace is on to something. The War on Propaganda is in its infancy.

Yesterday I blogged Paul Krugman’s reference to a study showing an astonishing level of partisan profiling in the investigation and prosecution of office-holders and candidates by those U.S. Attorneys who weren’t purged in Bush’s recent bloodbath.

The anti-Democrat bias seemed so overwhelming that I expected the MSM to be all over the story once Krugman had pointed the way. Good luck on that. No mention at all on last night’s network news. A Google News search this morning produced only four hits, three of which were citations of Krugman’s column and the fourth a February 14 column from the Philadelphia Inquirer dismissive of the study.

Very curious, or maybe not. Anyway, here’s a link to the study.

Go read this whole story and…

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — The most lethal weapon directed against American troops in Iraq is an explosive-packed cylinder that United States intelligence asserts is being supplied by Iran.

The assertion of an Iranian role in supplying the device to Shiite militias reflects broad agreement among American intelligence agencies, although officials acknowledge that the picture is not entirely complete.

In interviews, civilian and military officials from a broad range of government agencies provided specific details to support what until now has been a more generally worded claim, in a new National Intelligence Estimate, that Iran is providing “lethal support” to Shiite militants in Iraq.

Does the byline Michael R. Gordon sound familiar? It should. It appeared right along with Judith Miller’s on one of the most discredited stories in American journalism — the famous piece of drivel about dreaded aluminum tubes poised to create that dreaded mushroom cloud right over Main Street U.S.A. (See this from the Bad Attitudes archives.)

Does the technique sound familiar? That procession of unnamed Bush administration sources from undisclosed locations beating the drums for war? That almost total lack of opposing voices, and those buried near the end?

Is there the slightest reason to think that the very same crowd of Bush and his warhogs who lied us into Iraq are so prostrate with grief over heir former falsehoods that they may now be counted on to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about Iran?

Can pigs be taught to whistle? Cows to jump over the moon? Editors of the New York Times to detect the subtle difference between bullshit and chocolate chiffon cake?

The answer, sadly, appears to be no.

Many decades ago when Ted Turner announced he was starting a round-the-clock TV news operation. I dismissed the notion. Fast forward to the present—

Now Ted Turner says: “All you got to do is pick up the business section of any newspaper, and they’re reporting on it right now. I mean, I really hate to see it. I like newspapers. But you know, I’m 67 years old. When I die, the newspapers are going to die with me, unfortunately, for the most part.

“I mean, the information is available on the Internet hours sooner than your newspaper, and you don’t have to pay for it. I mean, it’s — you know, and if the newspapers don’t give their information in the Internet, they’ll die even faster.

“So it’s just — it is just an inefficient way to get information to somebody. They have to print it, hours later deliver it, by hand or by truck. When you can send the same information electronically, and people can get it instantaneously, it’s over for newspapers, unfortunately. I mean, I hate to see that happen.”

Turner’s prediction is not at all silly. I know many would-be journalists who are turning away from newspapers. Others have been either laid off or fear the ax. They are preparing to change careers in mid-stream. Meanwhile publishers are squeezing harder than ever for obscene profits, further discouraging their employees. Sounds like a death rattle. I began as a reporter at 15 and stopped at 67 years of age. Almost always it was enormous fun.

So it is sad.

So far 23 votes have been cast. Eight voters think Gravity’s Rainbow sucked; six don’t read fiction; four said “Thomas who?”? The remaining five claimed Powell’s had already mailed their copy.

Now, assuming that Powell’s was meant metaphorically, so that the choice in our poll would be legitimate even if the actual shipper were Amazon, which is what I meant, I think that’s a reasonable sample. Forty-three percent couldn’t care less; nearly thiry-five percent felt sufficiently unrewarded by Gravity’s Rainbow that 1,095 pages of Against the Day looks like a lot to swallow.

I can testify to the heft. Mine arrived in the mail this morning. I look forward to starting it this weekend — it’s too heavy to carry on BART.

In the end, nearly twenty-two percent claimed to have ordered first editions. Most authors would be pretty happy with that figure.

I expect everyone who’s interested has already found the following, and perhaps better (if so, email the editor and we’ll post the results):

• The Pynchon mailing list, which in its digest form only arrives a couple times a day
• The wiki for Against the Day
• Lous Menand’s review of the new novel in The New Yorker
• Thomas R. Pychon: Spermatikos Logos, a good resource
• The excellent work from Pomona
• And of course the obligatory Wikipedia entry on the reclusive author

Then there’s the Guardian review by a lifelong Pynchon fan forced to review a book he had not been allowed to read.

When rumours began to circulate concerning an impending novel from the reclusive American author Thomas Pynchon, I was sceptical. There had been rumours before: they are part and parcel of the parallel universe encountered in Pynchon’s work. But then a news release appeared, apparently written by Pynchon himself. The book would be around 1,000 pages long, appear towards the end of the year, and be called Against the Day. This was a cause for despair. It meant that once more I would begin to inhabit the shadowy, conspiracy-driven theatre of the absurd that seems to be Pynchon’s imagination. It’s a place that constrains and hypnotises the general reader, and exerts an even greater pull on the true fan. My wife and children would lose sight of me for as long as it took to read the book, and afterwards I would be shell-shocked, wide-eyed, and seeing everywhere around me the signs of another world, similar to the one I seem to inhabit, but darker, odder, and altogether funnier.

The press release itself is vintage Pynchon. Set in the first two decades of the 20th century, the author says of the book: “With a worldwide disaster looming … it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.” He goes on to admit that “the author is up to his usual business … it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two”, and ends with “let the reader beware. Good luck.”

It will be a challenging book — Pynchon’s novels are nothing if not challenging — and I’ll be first in the queue to buy it, because (in an all-too-Pynchonesque twist) the joint UK and US embargo on reviewing the book meant I was not able to read it prior to commencing this appreciation. Nevertheless, let us begin.

In case the mythical swing voter still exists in the matter of Thomas Pynchon as, in Colbertian terms, a great novelist, or the greatest novelist… If you’re interested in reading Pynchon for the first time, I was glad to see Ian Rankin agree in the Guardian with my view that a fine place to start is Vineland. It’s weird enough to be Pynchon (some purists complained about the conventionality of Mason and Dixon) but the story line is a lot more straightforward than Gravity’s Rainbow.

Many people who have read GR have only succeeded after failing one or more times. I made through the first eighty pages on the third try. At that point it was like I’d survived the crawl through many yards of tight caves at Lascaux to arrive in the hall with the paintings we still admire. The first eighty pages take place during the Blitz in London; those were pretty dark days. Most of the rest of the book takes place in Europe after the war is over; it’s a magical place without laws, where anything can happen. A perfect setting for a master. Much more of a dance of the imagination, and a lot less dark than the beginning.

To all those who haven’t read Pynchon and decide to try him out, I suggest starting with Vineland. It’s magical realism, it’s not supposed to be strictly believable. But it is hilarious, and understandable at a deep spiritual level. To me, at least.

But seriously, is this going to be a media-blogosphere event, or would explosion be more a appropriate term? I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say that this novel will be devoured by blogizens en masse, and deconstructed and investigated and acted out and ridiculed and probably loved. Can he do no wrong? Of course he can do wrong. But I bet he doesn’t. My bet’s in the mail.

Think there will be more bandwith available on the internet when the first copies arrive, in the next couple of days? Or will that be balanced out by all the fact-checking, and the gee-golly emails and blog posts? This could get outta hand.

It would be appropriate. This is going to be several million connected people reading a novel simultaneously and leaping onto the net to discuss and argue about it. Hope the servers are ready for the load.

It’s too bad, in a way, that American television cables are already crammed so full of fantastic programming. It might be interesting to get a different perspective. If that’s not illegal.

Al-Jazeera English will launch at midday and will be accessible in the UK to anyone with a satellite dish and via its broadband internet site. Yesterday it was revealed that the US cable network Comcast had pulled out of talks to carry the channel, citing lack of capacity.

It hopes to offer a new, Middle Eastern perspective on world events as an alternative to CNN and BBC World. But it will not be available in America via either EchoStar, Comcast or Rupert Murdoch’s DirecTV at launch, although US viewers will be able to tune in via the GlobeCast satellite.

We’ll miss the first installment of Sir David Frost’s new show in which he’ll interview Tony Blair. No, seriously, this is an Al Jazeera program scheduled for Friday. And yes, David Frost works for Al Jazeera. He claims to have satisfied himself, “with Whitehall and Washington”, that the channel is not connected with Al Qaeda, and that Qatar, whose emir funds Al Jazeera, is on excellent terms with Britain and the US.

The new TV channel is launching simultaneously in high definition worldwide. Except, of course, in the Land of the Free.

Horrible news for America from the Times. First, the silver lining in a black cloud: Yes, it will be great to have Gail Collins back as a columnist, unplugged and unmodulated, next summer. She'll continue to do a great service for the country as an op-ed writer, just as she did before.

But the real public service she performed for the nation – and it will prove to have been an historically important one – was behind the scenes, as the editorial page editor, in transplanting a spine into the most important editorial operation in the nation starting five years ago, during an era when media spine was in particularly short supply. Her stepping away from that post is a disaster.

In addition to a general tone of editorial good judgment and willingness to take on the powerful that was unprecedented for the Times, more particularly, Collins brought Krugman on board, and protected him. (I initially was irritated when David Brooks started writing for the Times, until I realized this was a shrewd way of protecting Krugman's job from the constant, vicious attacks the ruling party levels at him: bring on a conservative to insulate the Times from cries of partisanship, but pick the goofiest and least effective and serious conservative possible.)

Without Collins looking out for him, Krugman's days are certainly numbered, just as were Russell Baker's. A Times columnist simply can't be that right about the direction of the country for that long without needing to be pushed out. Our only hope is that Krugman can last through the 2008 election cycle. Given the gravitational pull Krugman has created around himself at the Times, it may take that long to bring him down.

I’m guessing that there isn’t too much overlap between Fox News viewers and Bad Attitudes readers, so most of you probably missed Bill Clinton’s smack-down of Chris Wallace yesterday. Here’s your chance to read it. Or you could watch it by clicking on the graphic below, except that Fox pulled its video from YouTube earlier tonight. But Crooks and Liars has saved it from the dustbin of history, as Lucy’s comment (below) just informed us. So now you can both