The Whole Thing

...faellt mir nichts ein.

Regarding Saddam, now in custody, nothing occurs to me at all - at least nothing that won't already have been said or posted or shouted - or messaged from the barrel of an AK-47 aimed into the air. I'm happy to let the Iraqis, the CPA, the US military, President Bush, the anchors, the correspondents, the experts, and whoever else have the floor while I sit back and soak up the details that emerge about this long-awaited event.

A Modest Proposal

From Healing Iraq:

By the way, what the hell are news organizations trying to prove by putting terrorism between idiotic quotation marks like this? I've decided to put quotation marks myself on the following terms: 'news organizations', 'media', 'press', 'coverage, 'reporter', and 'journalist'. F*ing morons.

Let's try it out: "Reporter" Walt Rodgers of CNN recently criticized the way that the Iraqi Governing Council responded to "news organization" Al-Arabiya's airing of full, unedited audiotapes apparently from Saddam Hussein.

Or how about: "Reporter" Dana Milbank of the Washington Post seems downright upset that the turkey President Bush was holding in widely distributed photographs of his Thanksgiving Day Baghdad visit was not actually the same turkey that was served to American troops.

Works for me.

MORE BUSH LIES!

From President Discusses Trip to Iraq with Reporters:

THE PRESIDENT: ...They pulled up kind of a plain-looking vehicle with tinted windows and I slipped on a baseball cap and pulled her down, as did Condi. We looked like a normal couple. (Laughter.)
Q On your way to the Walmart. (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: To buy some Berkeley Power worms. (Laughter.)
Q Pulling a bass boat behind you? (Laughter.)
THE PRESIDENT: Yes, exactly.

I'm sure that the investigative reporters at our major news organizations are hot on the trail of new, explosive revelations: That Condi and Bush are not a "normal" couple, since interracial relationships especially in the Bush-Rice age group are still rare enough not to fit many definitions of "normal," and that there may well be no evidence that the President went anywhere near a Walmart, bought any worms, or hitched up a boat to the SUV. That would make four brazen lies, one after another. I can't believe Paul Begala or at least Democratic Underground hasn't been all over this.

Thanksgiving + Funerals = Balance

Though Jeff Jarvis at Buzz Machine, Donald Sensing at One Hand Clapping, and others have all taken turns exposing the artificiality of the "Bush doesn't go to soldiers' funerals" story, no one has been on it like our favorite ranting professor, even while she's been focusing even greater energy on media reaction to Bush's Thanksgiving surprise. Now, as her most recent "News Cycle Roundup" makes plain, the two themes have been joined together, with a big help from former Clinton spokesperson Joe Lockhart.

The soldiers' funerals story, which provides an easy way to "balance" the positive PR from the Baghdad trip, has been generated in somewhat the same way that the equally inflated uranium-Niger story was created over the Summer. First, an op-ed appears that makes the initial charge. Then, a series of follow-ups in the news pages, often in the form of oblique references rather than direct reporting or analysis, build a background buzz. By the time the narrow item has been broadened into some generalized assault - "Bush lied about Saddam's nuclear program" or "Bush avoids grieving families" - it can also be treated as common knowledge, especially by Bush's political enemies. It then falls to people like Professor Dauber to sort fact from fiction, and to try to force the mainstream media to do their jobs.

I think that in the past, before the existence of the blogosphere, the media must have gotten away with this stuff regularly, but were also much more concerned about being responsible: There were fewer outlets and fewer sources, and being exposed as biased and incompetent might have carried a heavier price. It is also generally believed that the press and public during the period between World War II and Vietnam were loathe to think the worst about our political leaders, and were at the same time more unabashedly patriotic.

This story has been told many times before, and, perhaps because it's usually told by the press itself, the moral is usually that we have all become more cynical, and wiser, but that journalists learned to revere the truth, however unpleasant. Yet in our own time, an alternative narrative is developing, one of media bias and politicization sometimes attributed to fragmentation and at other times, paradoxically, to overconcentration of ownership. Whether seen as corporate flunkies or the pampered products of liberal elite indoctrination, journalists are no longer trusted to tell the truth. As though to pre-empt the criticism, and simultaneously to lend their reporting an element of lively narrative tension, they constantly strive to give an impression that they are seeking to tell the "fair and balanced" truth - equally an impression that they would tell the truth even if it happened to be very unpleasant.

As we've seen over and over again in recent years, the result is that every hint of scandal is treated as a potential Watergate and every hint of a military setback recalls Vietnam. It also seems to mean that journalists are willing to spread ugly falsehoods when there's no other way to prove their willingness to tell ugly truths.

Blame It On Cronkite

Maybe it's all Walter Cronkite's fault.

Cronkite is, of course, the living icon of journalistic integrity, the once-upon-a-time "most trusted man in America," and there is much in his career, going all the way back to the 1930s, to admire. Yet what is by now his most famous gesture as a journalist had little or nothing to do with reporting controversial facts, but rather with choosing sides - when, following the Tet Offensive in early 1968, he turned openly against US policy in Vietnam in a just-back from the front commentary - the "We Are Mired In Stalemate" broadcast:

For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. This summer's almost certain standoff will either end in real give-and-take negotiations or terrible escalation; and for every means we have to escalate, the enemy can match us, and that applies to invasion of the North, the use of nuclear weapons, or the mere commitment of one hundred, or two hundred, or three hundred thousand more American troops to the battle. And with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster... To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion. On the off chance that military and political analysts are right, in the next few months we must test the enemy's intentions, in case this is indeed his last big gasp before negotiations. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.

Today, it is perhaps depressing enough to consider that this doubly, triply historical broadcast - a moment of cultural history that also affected political and military history - falls under a clumsy mixed metaphor, but at the time, for those fighting the war or struggling to reach judgments about it, the effect of having Mr. Trusted speaking out so unambiguously - and in terms of "cosmic disaster" and "the only rational way out" - must truly have been bracing. President Johnson himself is said to have been shaken: "We've lost Cronkite," he complained privately. Some historians go so far as to suggest that the broadcast was crucial to Johnson's strategic decision to press for negotiations with the North Vietnamese and not to seek re-election.

To be fair, the Johnson Administration and the Pentagon had done much to soften themselves up prior to the breakthrough on their media front, but no one was positioned better than Cronkite to lead the charge. Like so many present-day journalistic field marshalls, but after a Biblical generation before the public's eyes and ears whenever all eyes were focused and all ears attuned, Cronkite spoke as though qualified to render sweeping military, political, and historical judgments. He was in a unique position to vouch for himself, and his language implied - indeed, insisted - that these judgements were much wiser than those of "military and political analysts" whose opinions he gave only an "off chance" of being "right." But it is now a widely held, virtually consensual view among historians that those military and political analysts were much closer to the ground truth than Cronkite, and that the US and its South Vietnamese allies had achieved a major victory on the field, effectively neutralizing the Viet Cong as a military force. The setback to the US effort was political, not military, and would likely not have been exploitable without the active cooperation and intervention of homefront opinion leaders such as Cronkite.

As a matter of fact, even Cronkite's other most famous tele-journalistic act - though not one that anybody would criticize - was breaking journalistic objectivity to shed a tear for JFK. That other founding father of modern television journalism, Edward R. Murrow, is best remembered for humiliating Joseph McCarthy. And, of course, the great paragons of reporting, Woodward & Bernstein, were famous for bringing down a Republican. Now, I'm not about to suggest that these men were wrong or anything but scrupulously honest in their efforts. Nor do I believe that Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, and Aaron Brown spend their days searching for a way to advance their political agendas. Still, they and their peers from the top to the bottom of the news business have been taught and, more important, have been shown, that bias, though it should be suppressed and combatted, is unavoidable - and that, at a certain point and in a certain way, when the journalist moves from reporting facts to constructing them, it can become the highest expression of their craft. Furthermore, whether or not you're convinced of Cronkite's, Murrow's, or Woodstein's correctness, it's hard to escape the conclusion that the model for American journalism, the frame of frames, has been built on a left-tilting template, with Cronkite in particular having established the pattern of earning the people's trust, then pushing his own policy position.

As I've argued elsewhere, the war in Iraq gives America a chance to re-fight Tet symbolically - and this time to accept and exploit our victory, and at a much lower cost to all concerned. As far as the media are concerned, such an outcome - the final and conclusive contradiction of every self-assured mini-Cronkite's proclamation of "quagmire" or "disaster" - would be a new confirmation of Marx's first time as tragedy, second as farce rule. Increasingly, exposing all the "most trusted" media venues as not trustworthy at all - from the Howell Raines/Jayson Blair New York Times, to the Baghdad Broadcasting Corporation and the Saddam-coddling CNN, and on and on, wherever the words "quagmire" and "American military" have appeared together - appears to be essential to the restoration of America's credibility, not just to its enemies but to its friends and even to itself.

If it's an ugly job, blame it on Cronkite, or on the caveman reflex that attributes oracular powers to the demon in the box, but we must destroy the global village in order to save it.

Iraq's Dictator-in-Waiting

CNN's Walt Rodgers has made his triumphant return to Iraq. For now, Walt's greatest claim to fame remains his wartime reporting - offered as he sped through the sand with a phone-cam fixed squarely on a Bradley's tailpipe, keeping viewers worldwide awake only through his insistently staccato pronunciation of the word "Baghdad," which divided the city into two halves, Bag and Dad, something like historical Buda and Pest or contemporary Minneapolis and St. Paul. But he clearly has not wasted his few months away from the action, and is ready for bigger things. Indeed, he seems to be intent on leaving his press pass behind, and assuming simultaneous command both of the American military and of the nascent post-Saddam Iraqi judiciary. He was able on a Saturday Capital Gang segment, for instance, to explain in not too much detail that the current US counter-insurgency strategy is of a type that "never works." Today, he's passing judgment on the Iraqi Governing Council's decision to ban the TV station Al Arabiya, an action which Walt considers undemocratic. (He undoubtedly considers the decision to issue warnings to the BBC and, gasp!, CNN a crime against humanity, though he has yet to deliver his verdict publically.)

What's next for Walt? After US commanding General Abizaid has dutifully revised his strategy according to Walt's unstated precepts, and after the IGC's Jalal Talabani has reversed his terrible decisions, Walt may have a difficult choice to make. Should he satisfy himself producing the next tapes from Saddam Hussein advocating insurrection and murder, which CNN can share with its sister networks from the Arab world and beyond? Should he return to the United States and replace Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary? Or should William Rehnquist finally retire, and let Walt hand down the opinion establishing once and for all that the right to shout "Fire!" in a crowded nightclub shall not be infringed? Or should Walt move next to Germany, where he can personally lift the ban on the works of Adolf Hitler; to Japan, where he can ensure that Aum Shin Rikyo gains full, unfettered access to all media; or to Latin America, where numerous groups that have previously resorted to hostage-taking in order to get their tracts published and recruitment videos aired would benefit greatly from Walt's intercession?

Such a big world, with so many people so desperately in need of Walt's wisdom - but maybe he should give Iraq another month or two, just to make sure everyone gets things exactly right. One wouldn't want the place to fall immediately back into darkness after his light has moved elswhere.

Nurse Ratchet for President

I still find it hard to believe that Dr. Dean is the Dems' frontrunner. It's one of the strongest pieces of evidence - along with recent election results and declining voter identification - that the Democrats are making a bid for long-term minor league status. The frequent comparison to George McGovern is deeply unfair to McGovern, who, for all of his faults, was a man of substance and long service to his country when he ran for President in '72. He also was a helluva lot more congenial than the doctor.

Last week, Dean had one of his typical not-ready-for-the-Big-Show moments on CNN while being interviewed by Wolf Blitzer. Professor Dauber was also watching, and has already pointed out that Dean got the Al Qaeda-linked terrorist group Ansar al Islam confused with a very different group, the Mujahadeen al Khalq (anti-Iranian Marxist-Islamists who are so weird that even the French cracked down on them). What was typical about the rookie error was not only that it reflected Dean's lack of familiarity with the subject matter, but that it came in the context of a stubborn refusal to back down on a prior claim that Al Qaeda had "no" presence in Iraq prior to the war. Blitzer then brought forth part of the growing body of evidence that Saddam's links to Al Qaeda were in fact quite extensive prior to the war, focusing on long-standing Administration claims. As usual, Dean refused to give an inch, or even a millimeter: He seems to believe that conceding any evidence of links between Saddam and Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda-associated groups would be too much for his larger argument to stand (he may be right).

I felt while watching that Blitzer knew Dean was blowing it, but decided not to go in for the kill. Maybe he didn't want to appear argumentative. Maybe he thought he had already been argumentative enough in challenging Dean on the prior assertion. Still, whatever the explanation, it was disappointing, but it's business as usual at the new, touchy-feely CNN. I never thought I'd miss Bernie Shaw.

As for Dean, it's not just that he's so often wrong, but that he's so insistently, abrasively, condescendingly self-assured about it. To switch metaphors away from baseball, as a character type he seems to be the kind of doctor that the movies and TV have always hated - the egotistical surgeon unwilling to consider an alternative to a scheduled operation, the set-in-his-ways GP insisting on a fatal misdiagnosis. You'd think that at least the Hollywood Left would notice that their standard-bearer gazes down at those who disagree with him in the manner of "Rocket" Romano or Nurse Ratchet, but they just don't seem to recognize the bad guy when he's one of their own.

A Million Last Gasps

Andrew Sullivan has lately been pursuing a jihad against the endless "Bush lied" lies and other distortions that mark so much of current political discussion. I've sent him my own note of thanks, but a key question remains as to what mixture of dishonesty and brainwashing the various media and political figures who relentlessly mouth these misstatements are expressing.

When FRONTLINE producer Martin Smith, in the online chat Sullivan excerpts, tries to defend himself against hostile questioning by equating the words "grave and gathering" with the word "imminent," a statement which really is not very far from "2 + 2 = 5" or "We have always been at war with Oceania," I tend to think he's showing the symptoms of brainwashing (induced reflexive intellectual responses to external stimuli) more than of dishonesty. Most of the meme-mad false witnesses probably fall under this category, and their vulnerability to this peculiar form of left-liberal false consciousness is probably enhanced by the Peter Principle corollary that often makes people who are poor at questioning themselves more likely to succeed in highly competitive fields like journalism and politics. In the latter field especially, being able to believe one's own lies with unstinting fervor is practically a job requirement.

The resultant spectacle is loathsome, but is probably unavoidable. The war on terror and specifically the Bush approach to it represent strategic, possibly world-historical, turning points that, in political terms, in turn represent a crisis for the left, whose failures in the 2002 Congressional elections confirmed that the dangers to its political relevance were not just grave and gathering, but imminent as well: In a word, they were and remain immanent, as in emerging inexorably from within prevailing conditions, and in a manner accelerated by 9/11 and by Bush's necessarily aggressive response to the total geostrategic challenge. In this context, virtually the entirety of the left's post-9/11 political reaction to Bush - from initial patriotic unity to the more recent rather unpatriotic convulsions - has to be seen as originating in sheer existential panic. In the media, among the Democratic presidential candidates, throughout the anti-war movement, and everywhere else where regressive progressives gather, a fantasy world is conjured where left-liberal positions and beliefs are essential, important, and meaningful, and left-liberal ambitions remain within reach. Those who chant the left-liberal mantras and lash out at anyone who dares to interrupt them are like victims of terminal illness, pitifully relying on denial and grasping at quack medicine because the truth simply cannot be intellectually administered.

Under conditions of political crisis, the sick-to-political-death ideologues cannot open their mouths without releasing torrents of bile. As for the supposedly objective reporters, we've long known that the vast majority voted Democrat and held liberal views. Their latent biases and affinities are being forced to the surface, and cannot long survive the light. All their twisted utterances, all their ludicrously slanted headlines and relentlessly biased descriptions, from FRONTLINE to the New York Times to the AP to CNN, suggest a million or so last gasps.

Why Do You Hate George, Johnny?

I hate President George W. Bush. There, I said it.

These first two sentences of Jonathan Chait's current New Republic cover story would seem more appropriate to a confession than a polemic, and, in the rest of this introductory paragraph, which moves from a brief mention of policies to a series of petty and parochial, rather literally adolescent reactions to the person of President Bush, one can see why Chait might feel embarrassed:

[Bush] reminds me of a certain type I knew in high school--the kid who was given a fancy sports car for his sixteenth birthday and believed that he had somehow earned it. I hate the way he walks--shoulders flexed, elbows splayed out from his sides like a teenage boy feigning machismo. I hate the way he talks--blustery self-assurance masked by a pseudo-populist twang. I even hate the things that everybody seems to like about him. I hate his lame nickname-bestowing-- a way to establish one's social superiority beneath a veneer of chumminess (does anybody give their boss a nickname without his consent?). And, while most people who meet Bush claim to like him, I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more.

Chait seems to sense that there's something wrong with these remarks - that they may reveal at least as much about him as they do about George W. Bush - but, rather than facing the implications of his own words, he seeks refuge in numbers:

There seem to be quite a few of us Bush haters. I have friends who have a viscerally hostile reaction to the sound of his voice or describe his existence as a constant oppressive force in their daily psyche. Nor is this phenomenon limited to my personal experience: Pollster Geoff Garin, speaking to The New York Times, called Bush hatred "as strong as anything I've experienced in 25 years now of polling." Columnist Robert Novak described it as a "hatred ... that I have never seen in 44 years of campaign watching." [...and so on.]

"Why do you hate George, Johnny?"

"Cuz everyone does!"

Answering a challenge from Hugh Hewitt, who believes that Chait's principal though unstated motivation comes down to envy, other bloggers have analyzed the body of Chait's article in some detail (Hugh promises to provide links as the pieces are published). Their work is welcome, but it seems to me that Chait (even his name contains the word "hate," and would be indistinquishable from it for certain non-native speakers of English) has already fisked himself: He has made it clear that his feelings are irrational, crucially non-political, and altogether uncontrollable - that, in short, his judgments on any subject relating to Bush simply cannot be trusted, and are therefore unlikely even to be worth the time it takes to sort them out. Still, even if Chait disqualifies himself as an observer, the phenomenon that he both examines and represents remains deserving of attention - not least because a more probing analysis can lead to insights of the sort offered by Hindrocket over at Power Line. After working through the predictably tendentious, convoluted, and dishonest argumentation that Chait deploys in an inevitably hopeless attempt to justify Bush-hatred as "a logical response to the events of the last few years" - a "logical" hatred? - Hindrocket finds a more persuasive explanation of the phenomenon, even while taking Hewitt's theme a step further:

The ascendancy of President Bush and his popularity with the American people threatens to put the final nail in the coffin of liberalism. Millions of people whose self-images have been shaped by their conviction that they are better, more moral, and above all smarter than their fellow Americans are faced with the prospect that they have been, after all, on history's losing side. And that thought is, for many of them, too much to bear. Hence, I think, the hate. Bush is a criminal, a fraud and a liar. He has to be.

In other words, Chait could hardly be more wrong. Hatred is not, as it cannot be, a logical response to Bush either as a human being or as a politician, or even to whatever events Chait associates with him: It is not the logical but rather the only response left to those who in the very act reveal themselves to be incapable of responding logically - that is, with coherent analysis, effective proposals, the basis of a positive political vision. Instead, they choose a refusal of logic, the defiance of logic - a flight from a set of logical implications, and the hostile assertion of fantasy in their place. Logic applies only to the process, not to the content. It's a logic of desperation, one that compels the representatives of an empty, senescent, almost purely reactionary political movement, as they sense that all reason has turned against them, to commit themselves wholly to the irrational.