Blood in the water. That's the quality David Sanger's news analysis on A1 today has ("When Goals Meet Reality: Bush's Reversal on 9/11 Testimony")—and though it's BushCo that's bleeding, I can't say the article gives me any pleasure. Sanger's narrative today has it that the Bush administration is continually climbing down from "principle" when it finds that back is about to meet wall:

When George W. Bush and Dick Cheney took office three years ago, they made no secret of their intention to restore presidential powers and prerogatives that they believed had withered under the onslaught of Washington's cycle of televised, all-consuming investigations.

But time and again, that effort by the Bush White House has fallen victim to political reality. It did so once more on Tuesday, when the president made a four-minute appearance in the White House press room to announce that he was giving in to demands from the 9/11 commission that he had resisted for months.

His decision to reverse course, dropping his claim of executive privilege preventing public, sworn testimony by his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, was part of a distinct pattern that has emerged inside this highly secretive White House.

The first reaction to most demands for outside inquiries, or for details about energy policy decisions or intelligence concerning Iraqi weapons or Nigerian uranium, has been to build walls: Mr. Bush, or more often Mr. Cheney in his stead, asserts a clear, inviolate principle that the president and his advisers need the freedom to gather information, develop policy and exchange ideas in private.

But eventually other forces come into play. Gradually pressure builds until Mr. Bush's advisers — including Ms. Rice herself in this case, several officials said — determine that the cost is too high.

At its core, Sanger's analysis is almost limitlessly cynical. Notice the way Sanger maps White House secretiveness to defense of principle. He seems to find nothing troubling about the pervasiveness of secret, unaccountable government under Bush-Cheney; far from it, he's entirely willing to repeat the administration's own flattering spin on its "principled" conduct of its affairs. (Is there any sense in which the Bush-Cheney assertion that "presidential powers and prerogatives" had withered and needed restoration stands up to scrutiny? The way Sanger writes, it's almost self-evidently true. But take a look at FindLaw, which has a very strong 2002 article by John Dean arguing that the Cheney position tendentiously, and alarmingly, misreads recent history.)

What rouses Sanger's insider scorn is the suggestion of weakenss, pure and simple. Approvingly, he offers this anonoymous quote, pretty much the takeaway for the piece:

"I think it goes to a deep feeling, much of it surrounding Cheney and his office, that the powers of the presidency were eroded for years and that this administration has to claw them back," one senior American diplomat who has sat in on some White House strategy meetings said Tuesday. "Then the pressure grows. And grows. And now people know that if you keep it on long enough, these guys will give way."

(The word "pressure" appears more times in the piece than I care to count.) Excerpts really won't do justice to my disgust for the political amorality implied in Sanger's article. Read it, and while you do ask yourself if there's anywhere in the piece where Sanger acknowledges any such thing as a public interest (as opposed to "public opinion," which is simply another source of pressure), any such thing as the people's business. Is government anything more than a matter of elites jockeying for power, and do we really need "analysis" from reporters who appear to believe it isn't?

Update (Thurs., 4/1): A propos of the Bush-Cheney effort to expand presidential prerogative: I missed Dave Neiwert's long, excellent Tuesday post at Orcinus on the subject. He's spot-on in calling the Cheney's agenda "the revenge of the Nixonites," and recurs to the landmark executive-privilege ruling in U.S. v Nixon to provide context. Go take a look.

posted by michael  5:03:07 PM  
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Bottom of the barrel. In the small-favors department, at least David E. Sanger's embarrassing piece today, retailing yet another Administration attack on Richard Clarke, didn't make A1 ("Colleague of Ex-Official Disputes Part of Account"). [The A1 honors belong to Philip Shenon and Richard Stevenson, whose half-right, half-incredibly-wrong-and-beside-the-point article I just can't bring myself to bother critiquing. Have we really only been through a week of this nonsense?] Consider this post a form of score-keeping—remember it the next time Sanger (whose faith-based commentary on the Spanish elections I noted here) tries straining credulity.

A senior national security official who worked alongside Richard A. Clarke on Sept. 11, 2001, is disputing central elements of Mr. Clarke's account of events in the White House Situation Room that day, declaring that it "is a much better screenplay than reality was."

The official, Franklin C. Miller, who acknowledges that he was often a bureaucratic rival of Mr. Clarke, said in an interview on Monday that almost none of the conversations that Mr. Clarke, who was the counterterrorism chief, recounts in the first chapter of his book, "Against All Enemies," match Mr. Miller's recollection of events.

Ulp! Am I going to have to revise everything I've thought up to now about Clarke's veracity? Just what "central elements" of his narrative is Mr. Miller disputing?

In Mr. Clarke's account, in a chapter called "Evacuate the White House," he heads into the Situation Room at the first word of attack and begins issuing orders to close embassies and put military bases on a higher level of alert — not the kind of operational details usually handled by the National Security Council staff. He describes how Mr. Miller came into the room, squeezed Mr. Clarke's bicep, and said, "Guess I'm working for you today. What can I do?"

"I wouldn't say that," Mr. Miller said Monday. "I might say, `How can I help.' "

I can't even measure the depth of outrage that Miller must feel at Clarke's mischaracterization of this vital moment in our nation's history. But Sanger's report leaves me a little fuzzy: is Miller disputing the arm-squeeze, too? Because if that one's a lie—by God, I won't rest till I see Richard Clarke tarred and feathered!

And sadly, that's the countercharge that Sanger goes with first. That's as tough and as "central" as it gets. Here's the whimper with which the article ends:

While the book describes the Situation Room as sparsely populated, Mr. Miller and Mr. McCormack ticked off the names of at least a dozen people who came in to work the phones and help figure out the location of suspect aircraft.

Is there anything left to say about this sorry mess? Well, there's the fact that Miller is "a senior aide to Condoleeza Rice," something Sanger just kind of slides in there as an aside in the piece's fifth graf. So he's possibly less than completely motivated by a concern for violated truth. We might also notice that this horseshit occupies two columns, running three-quarters of the page, on A18 (the jump page for the Shenon and Stevenson piece). Think the Times has ever devoted that much space to any of the people who've corroborated Clarke? Or how about that FBI wiretap translator who told Salon's Eric Boehlert that the FBI had "detailed information prior to Sept. 11, 2001, that a terrorist attack involving airplanes was being plotted." Sanger or anybody else at the Times picked up on that yet?

I know ...stupid questions ...

Update (Wednesday 3/31): OK, one thing left to say about this sorry mess is said by antiphone at Enduring Friedman, who finds a reference confirming that David Sanger can't even be bothered to fact-check his stories by researching in his own damn paper ...

posted by michael  6:00:59 PM  
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Somehow, in the midst of all the killing and skin-eating, we forgot the love. Once in a while, it's healthy for my little blog to turn aside from anger and show some appreciation. So let me direct your attention to David Rohde's exemplary feature on A1 today ("G.I.'s in Afghanistan on Hunt, but Now for Hearts and Minds"), a keenly observed, sharply written report of three days spent with an American platoon on a hearts-and-minds mission in Khost Province, on the Pakistan border. Ignore the headline's suggestion that you're in for a steaming helping of infoganda. (I say that because it almost stopped me.) Here's the thematic takeaway:

As the effort to find Osama bin Laden and uproot the Taliban intensifies, the United States military is shifting tactics. A mission once limited to sweeps, raids and searches has in recent months yielded to an exercise in nation building. The hope is that a better relationship with local residents and a stronger Afghan state will produce better intelligence and a speedier American departure. But the tension between building schools one day and rounding up suspects at gunpoint the next makes the prospects for success far from clear. ...

The Americans hope their new approach will pry information about militants from reluctant Afghans. The battle, said Capt. Jason Condrey, Lieutenant Finn's company commander, centers on winning the allegiance of the population, which he called Al Qaeda's "center of gravity."

But the same American troops still use the standard tactics of military power to achieve their aims: intimidation, overwhelming force, hands tied behind backs and faces in the dirt.

Over the course of the three-day patrol, it was not clear whether they had won, or lost, more hearts and minds.

If anything in this suggests the standard, passive, "opinions on the shape of the earth differ" Times middle ground—it shouldn't. Rohde is doing exactly what you want a reporter to do: go someplace you can't, use his senses, talk to people, and come back with a vivid, unspun, un-preconceived rendering of his experience. It's tough to choose anything in the piece to excerpt, but here's a sample, of the end of a weapons raid on the patrol's Day 1:

A 16-year-old named Muhammad Rahman ... was caught in a lie. He told the Americans that he had no weapons, then later showed them where he had hidden two Kalashnikov rifles and a Chinese-made mortar round.

Visibly angry, the Americans tied the teenager's hands, placed a burlap sack on his head and pushed him down a steep hillside. As an American soldier knelt on the boy's back and pushed his face into the dirt, Sergeant Jarzab demanded to know if there were more hidden weapons.

"He's a liar, and he's going to Cuba," the sergeant shouted, although he later ordered the boy freed. The boy insisted he had found the mortar and planned to sell it.

As watching Afghan women wailed and recited prayers, one sergeant placed the mortar round on the teenager's back, and another held the captured rifles in the air. A soldier snapped a souvenir photo of the Americans and their quarry.

After his release, the boy did not complain about his treatment. Instead, as the soldiers stood nearby, he praised the Americans for stabilizing Afghanistan "I am very happy they came," he said. "I just request that they build a school for us."

Great work by Rohde, and fine judgement by the Times: not just in giving this story front-page prominence, but in giving Rohde the latitude to do it in the first place. When so few American news organizations can be bothered even to remember Afghanistan, much less devote real resources to it, this is the kind of thing that makes the strongest argument for the Times' continuing relevance.

posted by michael  3:16:38 PM  
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Assimilated. If you were wondering about an agenda behind the odd appearance on A1, in the same week and under the same byline (Dexter Filkins'), of two leadership-focused puff pieces from Iraq—a long hagiographic treatment of Jerry Bremer's proconsulship that I glanced at a week ago Saturday, followed last Friday by an apparent attempt to polish up the bruised apple of Ahmad Chalabi's reputation—let The Guardian and UPI clue you in, since God knows the Times won't:

The United States will transfer power in Iraq to a hand-picked prime minister, abandoning plans for an expansion of the current 25-member governing council, according to coalition officials in Baghdad.

With fewer than 100 days before the US occupation authorities are due to transfer sovereignty, fear of wrangling among Iraqi politicians has forced Washington to make its third switch of strategy in six months.

The search is now on for an Iraqi to serve as chief executive. He will almost certainly be from the Shia Muslim majority, and probably a secular technocrat.

Jonathan Steel, The Guardian (3/27/04), "US will tell Iraqi council to pick a PM"

With only three months to go before L. Paul Bremer trades in his Iraqi pro-consul baton for beachwear and a hard-earned vacation, the country's most controversial politician is already well positioned to become prime minister.

Ahmad Chalabi, the Pentagon's heartthrob and the State Department's and CIA's heartbreak, has taken the lead in a yearlong political marathon. Temporary constitutional arrangements are structured to give the future prime minister more power than the president. The role of the president will be limited because his decisions will have to be ratified by two deputy presidents, or vice presidents. Key ministries, such as Defense and Interior, will be taking orders from the prime minister.

Chalabi holds the ultimate weapons -- several dozen tons of documents and individual files seized by his Iraqi National Congress from Saddam Hussein's secret security apparatus. Coupled with his position as head of the de-Baathification commission, Chalabi, barely a year since he returned to his homeland after 45 years of exile, has emerged as the power behind a vacant throne. He also appears to have impressive amounts of cash at his disposal and a say in which companies get the nod for some of the $18.4 billion earmarked for reconstruction.

Arnaud de Borchgrave, UPI (3/29/04), "Commentary: Chalabi's road to victory"

[Thanks to Body and Soul for the Guardian link, and to Josh Marshall for the UPI piece.]

Clearly, the fix is in, the Times is aware of it, and our Paper of Record has been preparing the ground, as it were, to make this all seem as plausible as it can.

And by the way, what the hell has happened to Dexter Filkins? Well before I started this blog, and thus before I routinely noticed bylines, I remarked on Filkins (how could I not, with a Dickensian name like that!) as the author of a couple of pull-no-punches reports from the ground in Iraq that seemed unusually sensitive to the way our military presence there was brutalizing both Iraqis and our own soldiers. (Why-War reprints them here, and here: click on the author name to see more of his work, including a tough, skeptical report on the U.S. air war in Afghanistan.) But this same Dexter Filkins swallowed a big one reporting a phony "exclusive" on the infamous Zarqawi letter, and he seems increasingly inclined to lead cheers on behalf of CPA-sponsored events whenever required. These latest two pieces are just the saddest in a lengthening line. Have the Borg assimilated another journalist?

posted by michael  12:26:49 PM  
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Context watch (Florida voting rolls edition). Jeb Bush feels your pain. That's apparently the message Abby Goodnough wants us to get from her A1 article yesterday about the disenfranchisement of felons in Florida, and the process by which some get their voting rights back ("Disenfranchised Florida Felons Struggle to Regain Their Rights"). That's how she begins the piece:

Gov. Jeb Bush looked out over a roomful of felons appealing to him for something they had lost, and tried to reassure them.

"Don't be nervous; we're not mean people," the governor said as some fidgeted, prayed, hushed children or polished their handwritten statements. "You can just speak from the heart."

And they did: convicted robbers, drunken drivers, drug traffickers and others, all finished with their sentences, standing up one by one in a basement room at the State Capitol and asking Mr. Bush to restore their civil rights. Their files before him, Mr. Bush asked one man about his drinking, another about his temper, and so on.

And that's how she winds it up:

Things turned out better for Cecil Taylor, who had been convicted of driving drunk and whose college art teacher came to speak of his potential. After the board asked Mr. Taylor if he had drunk alcohol since his conviction, and Mr. Taylor said he had not, Mr. Bush restored his rights — with a caveat.

"I'm praying that you're not going to start drinking again," Mr. Bush told him. "When we make these decisions, sometimes it puts us in a little bit of a precarious position in that you could let us down."

Great-souled Jeb! How fatherly your concern for your wayward children!

Of course, there is the little matter of that fracas they had in Jeb's state back in 2000. Abby trots past it as quickly and as decorously as she can:

In one lingering puzzle from 2000, an unknown number of legal voters were removed from Florida's rolls leading up to the presidential election, after a company working for the state mistakenly identified the voters as felons. At the same time, some counties mistakenly allowed actual felons to vote or turned away legitimate voters as suspected felons. A lawsuit filed in January 2001 sought to prevent similar errors, while another, filed just before the 2000 election, charged that the ban on felons voting discriminated against blacks and should be overturned.

Yes, that is a puzzle, isn't it, that illegal disenfranchisement of legitimate voters? Glad to know it's just a matter of (by implication, innocent) "mistakes" and "errors," though. And that (again, by rhetorical implication) the fact of felons mistakenly being allowed to vote more or less cancels out the fact of legitimate voters (mistakenly, remember!) getting turned away from the polls. And clearly, since it's the whole burden of the piece, we should all be much more interested in the process of re-enfranchising felons than in a minor, four-year-old disenfranchisement incident, shouldn't we?

And yet ... that "lingering puzzle" that Abby briefly, half-interestedly scratches her head over? "A company working for the state" that for some reason remains nameless here, in its only mention? It's as if Ms. Goodnough actually doesn't want her readers to know one or two salient facts that might dim the Ward Cleaver-ish glow that she surrounds Jeb Bush with—as if her "lingering puzzle" charade were just that, a scrim placed disingenuously in front of the actual story. See, I know the name of that unnamed company, and if I know it then odds are so does Ms. Goodnough. In fact, the company is named ChoicePoint, it's a big, nasty, Republican-hive data-gathering and profiling company, and it's been much talked about—at least among those of us who've been paying attention—since that maliciously botched purge job it did for Jeb before the 2000 election. No mystery, no lingering puzzle—not even any genuinely disputable facts in the matter.

As a service, let me point Ms. Goodnough to Greg Palast's site: Greg's the investigative reporter who broke the Florida disenfranchisement story back in December 2000 for Salon. (Do a site search on "ChoicePoint," Abby—it's just that easy!) I'll go ahead and quote a couple of relevant paragraphs from a 2001 WaPo article reprinted at Palast's site, just to give you a feel for how little "puzzle" there is about motives and numbers (emphasis added):

Researchers from Salon.com who investigated the lists in 13 Florida counties found that at least 15 percent of the names should not have been there. ChoicePoint spokesmen subsequently told me they don't dispute that figure, and they consider it a reasonable rate of error.

However, the company also defends its scrub list as "accurate" -- because its standard is that the list accurately records all names found in accordance with the specifications devised by the state officials who supervised the work.

And that's the problem.

The reason so many wrong names ended up on the scrub list is that Florida ordered ChoicePoint to input questionably broad matching criteria into its sophisticated computer programs. ...

If Salon's 15 percent error figure is right -- and data like Leon County's indicates it is much higher -- almost 9,000 of the 58,000 names on the scrub list belonged to rightful voters. (Furthermore, 2,883 other names belonged to people convicted of felonies in states that restore voting privileges after a sentence is served. These people were also purged -- even though they should not have lost their civil rights merely by moving to Florida.)

Color me unpuzzled, anyway. About ChoicePoint, about the Florida voting purge, about Jeb ... About most of it, in fact, except for this question: Why does Abby Goodnough think she can abuse her readers' trust like this and get away with it?

posted by michael  5:01:55 PM  
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Salon's War Room helpfully suggests a few questions about Karen Hughes that the press corps might want to address, now that Hughes is embarking on a PR blitz for her new White House "memoir." Liz Bumiller and Richard Stevenson didn't manage to offer any of them in their kissy-face profile of Hughes yesterday. (Hughes "declined to be interviewed" for the piece—but Bumiller and Stevenson certainly did their best to persuade her to return their calls next time around.) Seems the Heroic Mother had a part of some kind to play in the less-than-heroic outing of Valerie Plame:

Karen Hughes and her actions have fallen under the scrutiny of the prosecutor. The Plame grand jury has subpoenaed records created by the White House Iraq Group in July 2003, the same month Plame was outed in the Novak column. Hughes was a member of the White House Iraq Group, an internal body that coordinated strategy for, among other things, selling the war here at home. Other members of the group were Karl Rove, Mary Matalin, James Wilkinson, legislative liaison Nicholas E. Calio and policy advisers including Condoleezza Rice, her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, and I. Lewis Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff.

A USA Today story from July 2003 also describes how Hughes was among a small group of strategists who devised the strategy to counter Wilson's Niger story. ...

On her media tour, there are many relevant questions Hughes might be asked: Were Plame or Wilson's names ever mentioned at the meetings of the White House Iraq Group? By whom? What is the relation of that group to any damage control group involving Plame and Wilson? Since Hughes wasn't officially on the White House payroll, did the order by the White House counsel not to destroy records in the Plame case apply to her? Has Hughes retained counsel in this matter? Has she testified before the grand jury or been interviewed by the FBI? Has she discussed Valerie Plame or Joe Wilson with anyone in the White House Iraq Group -- or any other White House officials -- at any time, before or after the publication of the Novak column? With whom has she ever discussed Plame or Wilson? Rove? "Scooter" Libby? Cheney? The President?

Think Liz (or anybody at the Times) will go back to follow up on Hughes, now that Salon has done the spadework? Let's all hold our breaths ...

posted by michael  1:04:24 PM  
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Heroic Mother. Elisabeth Bumiller and Richard Stevenson spend some time on A22 today purring and rubbing up against returning Bush advisor Karen Hughes, and Lizzy Boo actually outdoes herself in the humor department.

Ms. Hughes is stepping up her engagement with the president's re-election campaign just as she is beginning a six-week tour for a new book, "Ten Minutes From Normal," an autobiography that friends say paints a predictably glowing portrait of her longtime boss, the president of the United States.

To the relief of Bush aides who acknowledge that the White House has been on the political defensive since January, the memoir hits bookstores Tuesday, the week after a book by Richard A. Clarke that blasted the administration with the charge that Mr. Bush ignored warnings about the Sept. 11 attacks.

"A Trusted Bush Aide to Return, but Not to Washington"

Seriously—that one made me laugh out loud. Thank God for Karen Hughes's memoir, poised to sweep in like the cavalry and take the country by storm! Yeah, that'll turn down the heat on that whole they-weren't-paying-attention-before-9/11 flap.

I also found occasion for a wry smile in the next graf.

But advisers to the president say that Ms. Hughes's impending return to a more full-time role has stirred some unease within a campaign that has been wholly the province of Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's chief political adviser.

Some unease ... yes ... I think that counts as droll understatement.

This, on the other hand, is just kind of surreal and disorienting:

Unlike Mr. Rove, who has become a lightning rod for criticism of the administration's aggressive political operation, Ms. Hughes is the smiling, media-savvy White House representative whose book now wraps her — and, by implication, the president — in the heroism of motherhood. Its theme is clear by the identifying lines under her name on the book's front jacket: "Counselor to the President. Wife and Mother. The woman who left the White House to put family first, and moved back home to Texas."

OK, lightning rod (phallus) vs. motherhood—I get it, Karl's yin to Karen's yang. But a book wrapping Hughes in "the heroism of motherhood"? And doing the same for Dubya? Just what the hell is "the heroism of motherhood" anyway? And how does it magically get conferred on Bush—why is he wearing Karen's shawl? Do we have to add "Heroic Mother" now to his list of titles? I'm sorry, I'm just not sure I can go that far ...

By the way, with typical hagiographic fervor, Bumiller and Stevenson manage to contradict themselves without apparent awareness: Hughes's "heroism," we're given to understand from the way the graf above reads, is her fleeing the White House coop to "put family first." Equally approvingly, the writers note how constant an advisor to Dear Leader Hughes has been since retreating back to Texas, speaking to Bush "regularly," having "a major hand in drafting his most important speeches," and making contact with Rove, Dan Bartlett, and Bush campaign officials "up to several times a day." Thank God for the selfless, family-centered heroism of mothers like Karen Hughes!

posted by michael  5:42:34 PM  
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Displacement. In my last post I admitted, for fairness's sake, that it was basically a judgement call whether or not you decided to play John Kerry's stiff remarks about Condi and the rest of the Bush stonewalling crew as an A1 item.

But maybe not so much, not when this is the kind of thing the editors do consider worth fronting:

The casting of reality shows, once an intuitive, on-the-fly endeavor, has become much more of a science, with its own growing set of protocols and rituals. Several producers have hired psychologists to help them with the vetting process. And to avoid the unscripted scandals that could run afoul of the decency standards of an increasingly agitated public and the Federal Communications Commission, both producers and networks are investing more time and money into systematically investigating their contestants' backgrounds.

David Carr, "Casting Reality TV, No Longer a Hunch, Becomes a Science"

Now, there's nothing especially wrong with the article, though I personally find an account of the trials of a reality-TV casting director ("Casting for TV's new way of telling stories requires stamina") just a bit of a yawner. But what the hell is this lifestyle crap doing eating up A1 inches? Does the Times really value its front-page real estate that cheaply?

posted by michael  5:02:43 PM  
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When Democrats attack ... ... they don't make the front page of the New York Times.

Hard as it is to remember the pre-Richard Clarke news regime, cast your mind back to two weeks ago. Remember all the fuss A1 made about BushCo having a campaign strategy? Twice in four days we got big, above-the-fold stories about how the Rovians had always-already been prepared to take John Kerry down: said stories appearing at the same moment as David Halbfinger offered up (I'll take my cue for punning from him) a veritable blizzard of campaign memos (well, two, but that was two more than enough) in which Sen. Kerry's ski vacation read as something close to an admission of political and moral degeneracy.

Today, Jodi Wilgoren reports some strong words from Sen. Kerry, and reports it pretty much straight:

Joining a debate that has dominated Washington for days, Senator John Kerry on Saturday accused the Bush administration of "character assassination" against critics and said that the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, should publicly testify under oath about the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Every time somebody comes up and says something that this White House doesn't like," Mr. Kerry said, "they don't answer the questions about it or show you the truth about it, they go into character-assassination mode." ...

Mr. Kerry also accused the Bush administration of stonewalling the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.

"If Condoleezza Rice can find time to do `60 Minutes' on television before the American people, she ought to find 60 minutes to speak to the commission under oath," Mr. Kerry said, referring to Ms. Rice's scheduled interview on CBS Sunday night. "We're talking about the security of our country."

"Kerry Accuses Bush Camp of Intolerance for Criticism"

Hmmm—the presumptive Democratic nominee, whose supposed weakness in the face of the Rocket-Man Army was such a hot topic in the Times two weeks ago, unleashes a blast at Bush on the issue of the moment, inserting himself into the debate for the first time. Sound significant? Sure, says the Times—it's A22 significant. Hey, give 'em a break, that's two whole pages before the obits!

In case you think this is me playing gotcha with a single (and, I admit, debateable) news-judgement call: please take note of yesterday's campaign-trail article ("Economy Is the Star of the Campaign Trail"), co-authored by Wilgoren (on the Kerry side) and Robert Pear (on the Bush side). The opener:

The presidential race turned squarely to the economy on Friday, as Senator John Kerry courted this hard-hit state with a promise of new jobs, while President Bush promoted his tax cuts as an engine for growth.

After several weeks of advertisements by the Bush campaign portraying Mr. Kerry as a tax-and-spend liberal, the Massachusetts senator used his first major policy address of the general election battle to position himself as a moderate New Democrat on fiscal policy. He proposed an overhaul of corporate taxes that would provide a a 5 percent reduction in the corporate tax rate for most companies. ...

For Mr. Kerry, it was a critical moment of self-definition on the economy, which many political strategists see as the top issue in the unfolding campaign. He plans to outline a variety of economic proposals in a spring offensive under the new banner "Jobs First."

"First major policy address of the general election battle" ... Kerry planning "to outline a variety of economic proposals in a spring offensive" (emphasis on heretofore Bush-only war metaphor added) ... Yeah, that's just A12, bottom-of-the-page stuff.

Let's recap: Bush guys say they have a strategy and Bush surrogates about to execute it, and it hits the top of A1 twice in four days. Kerry guys say they have a strategy, Kerry himself delivers a speech to begin executing it: bottom of an inner page. Kerry follows up next day with sharp criticism of Bush administration on national security: bottom of an inner page. Now, I'm on record as endorsing Jay Rosen's hatred of the campaign-strategy story form. But, Jeebus, if you're going to do it, isn't a little parity in order?

posted by michael  4:23:36 PM  
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Context watch (special U.S. Senate edition, II). Reporting on A1 today about Tom Daschle's ultimatum on judicial nominations ("Democrats in the Senate Issue Threat to Block Court Nominees"), Sheryl Gay Stolberg doesn't seem to have room in memory for more than about two items of backstory.

Senate Democrats, turning up the heat in their long-simmering feud with President Bush over judicial nominations, vowed on Friday to block all new federal court appointments unless the White House promises to stop installing judges while Congress is in recess.

"We will be clear," the Democratic leader, Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, told his colleagues Friday morning in a pointed speech on the Senate floor. "We will continue to cooperate in the confirmation of federal judges, but only if the White House gives the assurance that it will no longer abuse the process."

In effect, the Democrats are retaliating against Mr. Bush for his recent decisions to bypass the confirmation process and place two nominees, Charles W. Pickering Sr. and William H. Pryor Jr., on the federal appellate bench while Congress was on vacation.

Well, yes, in effect that's true—if you're going for the narrowest possible effect.

Stolberg adopts a grave tone to write about the "increasingly hostile battle" over Bush judicial nominees, about an "impasse" that threatens to leave "dozens of federal judgeships ... vacant through this November's elections, and possibly longer." And her account of Republican complaints about Dem behavior in the struggle gives us the second and last bit of backstory that Stolberg allots:

Democrats have used filibusters to block six nominees, including Judge Pickering and Mr. Pryor, to the appeals court, the level just below the Supreme Court.

Republicans, who have been unable to muster the 60 votes they need to break the filibusters, complain that Democrats are also using other tactics to delay consideration of nominees. Last year, Republicans were so frustrated with what one aide called Democratic "foot-dragging" that they staged a 30-hour filibuster of their own: an all-night talk-a-thon on the Senate floor to denounce the Democrats for refusing to allow a straight yes-or-no vote on the nominations.

The Judiciary Committee chairman, Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, reiterated that sentiment on Friday.

"The Democrats should stop playing delay games and give all of the nominees the simple up-or-down vote the Constitution requires," Mr. Hatch said. "It is the unprecedented filibusters by the Democrats that necessitated the recess appointments that the Democrats are now criticizing."

Far be it from me to suggest that old Orrin should come in for a good Nit Picklering—but, like they say on the law dramas, Stolberg opened the door.

Seriously: if you're going to quote Orrin Hatch on the subject of judiciary-nomination shenanigans, isn't at least a bit of context in order? Here are two things I know right off the top of my head, which I have to presume Stolberg also knows—what's more, and just for fun, I can support them with the very first two Google hits I get off the phrase "Orrin Hatch judicial nominee hypocrisy." First is the fact that Orrin Hatch was the author, back in the Clinton day, of the notorious revision of the old Senate "blue slip" rule on the blocking of judicial nominations, a revision that led to the Republicans having a field day keeping Bill Clinton's judicial nominees away from confirmation votes and off the bench. Then let's add a second fact, that it was members of Hatch's own staff who stole a whole raft of memos and strategy documents—related specifically to fighting Bush judicial nominations—from Democrats on his committee. (The linked post is old—from last November, well before the full scope and venality of the thieving had been elaborated—but like I said, just for fun ...)

I want to emphasize that this isn't a question of Nit Picklering. Both those little Hatch-related facts are crucial for understanding how we arrived at the current state of play on the Judiciary Committee, which the article seems so concerned about, and for understanding why Tom Daschle should be issuing ultimatums about judicial nominees. Why doesn't Ms. Stolberg think she owes it to her readers to provide them that necessary context?

posted by michael  5:32:17 PM  
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Context watch (special U.S. Senate edition). Reporting on A1 yesterday about Senate passage of the "Unborn Victims of Violence Act," Carl Hulse drops in a little nod to the electoral context:

Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, voted against the measure and was criticized by family members of crime victims on hand for the debate.

Both sides anticipate such social issues will loom large this fall in a polarized presidential election, with the opposing campaigns seeking to galvanize their core supporters by highlighting stark differences on social concerns.

"Senate Outlaws Injury to Fetus During a Crime"

Ah, but there's context and there's context.

How do you think those family members managed to be conveniently "on hand for the debate"? And not just on hand, but in a place where they could address criticism of John Kerry to members of the press? Mr. Hulse, a Certified Professional Journalist, doesn't seem to think that's an interesting question. Though I do get the impression that the second graf I quoted stands rather in place of an answer to that question, as it were preemptively: "social issues" like this will "loom large this fall"—looming apparently from out of nowhere, just like the victim families—and both sides are going to be trying to "highlight [their] stark differences," so why bother thinking about how this particular issue made its appearance? It's just Kerry's turn to get criticized this time, that's all.

Except, of course, that only one side controls the Senate, the venue for this little charade, and that one side has broadcast some pretty definite thoughts about pressing its advantage:

Republicans plan to use Congress to pull Sen. John F. Kerry and vulnerable Democrats into the cultural wars over gay rights, abortion and guns, envisioning a series of debates and votes that will highlight the candidates' positions on divisive issues, according to congressional aides and GOP officials. ...

Republicans openly welcome the discomfort that votes on issues such as gun control might cause Kerry, Edwards and other Democrats, now and later this year. "The Senate floor is full of bear traps," said Eric Ueland, deputy chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.).

Jim VandeHei and Charles Babington, Washington Post 3/2/04 ("GOP Plans Votes to Put Democrats on the Spot")

What effort would it have cost Carl Hulse to have gestured toward the existence of an all-but-stated agenda operating here to use legislation as a platform for playing "gotcha!" with the Democratic nominee? Especially when it looks like that agenda is going to guide the course of Senate business throughout this session. Wouldn't he be serving his readers better by clarifying the political context, rather than veiling it behind that generic "both sides" crap?

posted by michael  4:42:41 PM  
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Jay Rosen is leading a discussion session at the upcoming BloggerCon, tentatively called "What Is Journalism? And What Can Weblogs Do About It?" In exemplary blogger fashion, he's posted a draft of a background essay at PressThink, along with a request that journabloggers help him formulate a list of twenty questions to prep the discussion and also to serve as items on the floor. Take a look, and if you do be sure to read the comments: the discussion there is shaping up to be pretty interesting.

I added a comment to Jay's post that I thought I'd share with the class here. It was prompted by a couple of other comment posts whose tendency was to treat "journalism" as a kind of static target, and to reify it in relation to blogging. "Genuine blogging 'journalism' happens when bloggers break their own news online," says Academy Girl, otherwise "blogging 'journalism' really amounts only to second-hand punditry, not journalism at all." On the other hand, Tony Matrullo says that "journalism is a largely conventionalized affair that has build-in resistance to experimenting with rhetoric, image, narrative, tone, etc.," and goes on to suggest that "blogs that aspire to be like journalism are less interesting than those that attempt to offer something less hackneyed."

From my perspective, "journalism" as such, as a categorical abstraction, simply doesn't exist. Journalism is a practice, or a set of practices, enabled by the creation of certain social technologies (hard technologies + social forms adapted to their use) for the distribution of information. As the social technologies that structure the practice of journalism change, so does journalism.

Which is what makes the emergence of public-affairs blogging so fascinating. My old teacher, Walter Ong (rhetoric and media theorist, important in his own right but probably remembered more as an associate of Marshall Macluhan—also a genuinely warm and inspiring man who I regret not having seen for some time before his passing last year) said something in a class ages ago that stuck with me: new media don't simply displace old media, Ong proposed, they reorganize them, they change the media ecology. (And, of course, organize themselves within that ecology.) The simple and provocative truth of the matter is that we don't know what "journalism" is in the blog era. We have a pretty good idea what mass-media journalism (print, broadcast) is, because it's been around for quite some time and is the product of a set of fairly stable social patterns. And we can make a good guess that the interoperation of old-media and new-media journalism will create new forms of journalistic practice, in the old as well as in the new location. [I think the real wild-card here is linking, as the defining technology of Web information distribution, and the ancillary technologies (Technorati, Blogdex, Memeorandum) that are being developed to, in effect, re-socialize linking (by creating means to measure the link network both qualitatively and quantitatively, and to feed that knowledge back into blogging).] As to what those might be, I can't claim to have any real clue. It's enough for me at the moment to just watch and learn, like everybody else who's doing this. The real measure of blogging as a journalistic practice, such as it is in this early moment, is that it's already set the concept of "journalism" in motion in a way that I imagine hasn't happened since at least the dawn of television news.

You know, there are times occasionally when I miss academic discussion. Makes me wish I were able to get up to BloggerCon.

posted by michael  2:28:55 PM  
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Back in the shadows again. Less than a week after she crawled out of her spider hole to take the Times' tentative first jab at Richard Clarke, Judy Miller seems to have been un-personed again. At least, that's one conclusion you could draw from Dexter Filkins' article today on "nimble and protean" Ahmad Chalabi ("Chalabi, Nimble Exile, Searches for Role in Iraq"). In a piece devoted to putting as plausible a face as possible on Chalabi's prospects for taking a lead political role in Iraq (prospect somewhat mixed, since three times as many Iraqis in a recent ABC News/BBC poll indicated they didn't trust Chalabi "at all" as said the same about Saddam Hussein), Filkins rather delicately notes that Chalabi's credibility has "come under assault" (it's quite a week for credibility assaults, isn't it?) here in the States:

Mr. Chalabi's star began to wane in Washington, as the Bush administration's claims about Mr. Hussein's weapons capabilities and his presumed ties to Al Qaeda — in no small part based on information provided by Mr. Chalabi — failed to be confirmed.

Nevertheless, the Department of Defense continues to pay his organization $340,000 a month to gather intelligence in Iraq.

Mr. Chalabi has no regrets about any information, however misleading, that he passed to the Americans before the war. "We are heroes in error," Mr. Chalabi told The Daily Telegraph of Britain in an interview last month. "As far as we're concerned we've been entirely successful. That tyrant Saddam is gone and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important. The Bush administration is looking for a scapegoat. We're ready to fall on our swords if he wants."

And Miller, the American media's chief enabler of Chalabi's WMD fictions? Doesn't come up: Filkins seems to have forgotten about her entirely. Poor Judy, a prophet without honor ...

posted by michael  6:29:22 PM  
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Condi-scension. Two reports, four reporters. That's how much it takes at the Times to get things wronger than not about l'affaire Condi: i.e., the will-she-won't-she hubbub about Rice appearing again before the 9/11 panel. Put another way, the Times is on this like ugly on Tom DeLay, with the emphasis on ugly. Key grafs, first from the sorry, half-coherent hash of the A1 story:

In a letter to the commission's chairman, the White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, said a return session would allow Ms. Rice to clear up "a number of mischaracterizations" of her statements and positions. Mr. Gonzales said she would not appear at a public session of the panel because, he wrote, it was critical that presidential advisers "not be compelled to testify publicly before Congressional bodies such as the commission." ...

Ms. Rice told commissioners that White House officials had told her she should not testify under oath. While the panel requires officials appearing in public to testify under oath, there is no such requirement for those testifying in private.

Adam Nagourney and Richard W. Stevenson, "Rice Is Agreeable to Return for More of 9/11 Panel's Queries"

Liz Bumiller and Philip Shenon spend inexplicable column inches on A12 duplicating the effort:

Ms. Rice has said repeatedly that if she had her way, she would testify, and late on Thursday she offered to be interviewed in private, as she was for four hours on Feb. 7. But President Bush, her close confidante, has been adamant, White House officials say, that any public appearance would violate longstanding precedent against incumbent national security advisers testifying before a legislative body.

Bumiller and Shenon, "Panel Hasn't Heard From Official It Wants Most"

A couple of salient, corrective facts seem to have escaped the grasp of these dual duumvirates: Condi is not offering, as Nagourney and Stevenson have it, to "testify in private," because it isn't testimony, by definition and by commission procedure, if you don't swear to it. Bumiller and Shenon also elide the distinction between testifying and being interviewed. MSNBC, on the other hand, managed to navigate the difference just fine in its report, and to note that it's not just a finical issue: Rice is trying an end-around (my conclusion, not MSNBC's), since "the panel has consistently required anyone rebutting sworn testimony to be similarly under oath." And Josh Marshall didn't have to sweat too much to learn, actually before Bumiller and Shenon glibly parroted it as fact, that no "longstanding precedent" against testimony from sitting national security advisers actually exists: as he reports from a 2002 Congressional Research Service study, "two of Rice's predecessors as National Security Advisor [have] given public testimony: Zbigniew Brzezinski in 1980 and Sandy Berger in 1997."

The two articles repeat criticism of Rice, some of it salient, but there's a line they simply won't cross: suggesting that maybe Condi isn't testifying (or otherwise appearing, yet) because she's possibly not that keen on having to speak under oath and in an environment she can't control. On the contrary. Nagourney and Stevenson are happy to spend a paragraph giving commission member Jim Thompson space to praise Condi's marvelous (in the Jane Austen sense) condescension:

"She said, `If you need me back at any time, I'd be delighted,' " Mr. Thompson said. "So my guess is that we will call her back."

And the graf quoted from Bumiller and Shenon's article, making sure we know that Dubya is Rice's good good pal ("her close confidant") and citing Dear Leader and his nice concern for precedent as the adamantine force in the equation—surely that betrays the touch of the master? Indeed, the next graf after it reads like an outtake from a White House [Love] Letter:

Ms. Rice is described by administration officials as being frustrated at having to remain publicly silent before the commission and as being eager to make her arguments against the case that Richard A. Clarke, her former subordinate, has marshaled against her.

The needless anonymity, the lap-dog repetition of gosh-darn-sincere Republican self-assessment: pure Lizzy Boo. I can just see Dubya holding Condi back (with maybe some stout support from Alberto Gonzalez) as she strains to bum-rush the door into the commission's chambers, ready to shout her story to the rooftops. Yeah, that's the ticket.

posted by michael  5:39:13 PM  
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Muddled, inept, tendentious summary of Richard Clarke's testimony before the 9/11 commission from Philip Shenon and Richard W. Stevenson (with the assistance of the Dread Bumiller) on A1 today. (This after Shenon, writing with Eric Schmitt yesterday, seemed to have things well in hand. Don't know exactly what that says about Shenon, or about Stevenson.)

President Bush's former counterterrorism chief, Richard A. Clarke, testified on Wednesday to the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks that the Bush administration had largely ignored the threat from Al Qaeda prior to the attacks. That prompted members of the commission to divide along sharply partisan lines as they questioned Mr. Clarke.

As Republican members openly questioned Mr. Clarke's truthfulness and Democrats defended an official who helped direct the nation's counterterrorism strategy for nearly a decade, Mr. Clarke testified that the Bush administration had not treated counterterrorism as an "urgent issue" before the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Ex-Bush Aide Says Threat of Qaeda Was Not Priority"

If you think those lead grafs suggest that the writers find equal gravity in Clarke's charges and in the more-or-less non-event of the commissioners "dividing along sharply partisan lines" in questioning Clarke—well, you'd be wrong, because the article is much more interested in Republican attacks on Clarke than on what the former counterterrorism adviser actually had to say himself.

The piece's third graf shows us a "hushed Senate hearing room" as the scene for Clarke's remarkable opening admission of failure ("Your government failed you. Those entrusted with protecting you failed you. And I failed you"), quoted in the fourth graf. After that? Cue the crickets. After the fourth graf, Shenon and Stevenson basically never again allow Clarke to occupy center stage.

They are kind enough to bring George Tenet, the "drama" of whose testimony was overshadowed by Clarke, out of the shadows: the article devotes four grafs to quoting his testimony, which the authors call "generally supportive of the Bush administration." After that it's on to "another furious round of denunciations from the White House," said denunciation repeated (as always) without context or critique, and then seven grafs follow retailing (Reagan Navy Secretary) John Lehman's discussion of Clarke's "credibility problem" and Clarke's rejoinder, the exchange excerpted to suggest a certain degree of weaseling on the witness's part:

Without detailing [Clarke's previous] classified testimony, Mr. Lehman said that there was "real inconsistency between what your promoters are putting out and what you yourself said" to the panel.

"I'd hate to see you shoved aside during a presidential campaign as an active partisan selling a book," he said.

Mr. Clarke insisted that he was telling the truth in his book and that he had told the truth to the commission. But he said that in 15 hours of private testimony to the panel, he was not asked about the American invasion of Iraq, an issue that he said framed his harsh criticism of the Bush administration.

"No one asked me what I thought about the president's invasion of Iraq," he said. "The reason that I am strident in my criticism of the president of the United States is that by invading Iraq — something I was not asked by the commission — but by invading Iraq, the president of the United States has greatly undermined the war on terrorism."

Throw in Jim Thompson waving the GOP-ballyhooed (and Fox-provided, though Shenon and Schmitt ignore that telling little detail) Clarke press backgrounder from 2002 for two paragraphs (nothing about Clarke's response to that, by the way), and three grafs that focus on Democrats defending Clarke's credibility, and you've got just under half the article devoted to what apparently remains, on A1 anyway, the issue of issues: just how much can you trust a nutball that criticizes Dear Leader?

In the Bizarro World of A1, it's not even imaginable that the day's events could justify a headline like the one over Fred Kaplan's piece in Slate: "Richard Clarke KOs the Bushies." Kaplan does what Shenon and Stevenson wouldn't stoop to: he offers a full account of the Republican commissioners' attacks and takes full measure of Clarke's entire success in repelling them. In the WaPo, vividly though in a more circumspect straight-news tone, Dana Milbank ("Clarke Stays Cool as Partisanship Heats Up") does the same.

posted by michael  4:23:46 PM  
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Ordinarily I don't like to post pointers to other things without some (horrible business-speak alert!) value-add on my part—guess today is the exception. I'd have written myself about Liz Bumiller's he-said-she-said piece covering—and tanking on—Dick Cheney's ridiculous assertion to Rush Limbaugh that Richard Clarke was "out of the loop" on counterterrorism: and I'm glad I didn't, because Brad DeLong has done a (out-of-place Britishism alert!) smashing job on it himself, so much better than I would've. He got Bumiller on the phone to ask her why she was such a bad journalist:

So I called Bumiller, and asked her why she had made it into a "she said, he said" article rather than into a Cheney-said-something-so-bizarre-that-nobody-else-will-endorse-it article. Her replies seemed, to put it politely, incoherent. The reasons that she didn't stack five contradictory quotes from five different sources against Cheney--and so make him look like the liar or idiot that he is (as Dana Milbank would probably have done)--appear to be that she "doesn't write opinion," that "the news was Rice contradicting what Cheney had said to Rush Limbaugh," and that she "only had 300 words." My assertion that whether Clarke was out-of-the-loop or was the loop itself is a matter of fact, and that a reporter has a duty to ascertain and to report to her readers such matters of fact, did not meet with a response.

Brad, Brad, you get so much love for this! Just wish I could make Radio trackback work to let you know.

posted by michael  12:59:32 PM  
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Raines pours. The late, largely unlamented (except by himself) Howell Raines has a feature coming in the May Atlantic Monthly on his tenure as Times executive editor. (The Atlantic website excerpts it here.) This is obviously in the nature of a homework assignment for me; as soon as the issue's on the newstands (or earlier—the piece is apparently available online now to subscribers) I'll see what I can glean from it, from my perspective as an interested lay reader of the paper. For reference now: Eric Boehlert in Salon ("Burning down his master's house") is mostly focused on what Raines suggests about institutional mediocrity in the Times' newsroom; Slate's Fred Kaplan ("The Autobiography of Howell Raines") is more concerned with Raines himself as a figure of "bitter, conceited" cluelessness. Romenesko features a letter from Jim McGrath of the Albany Times taking Raines to task for his suggestion that the Newspaper Guild was responsible for gumming up the works in his efforts to revamp the NYT staff—I expect there'll be a lot more discussion there over the next little while.


posted by michael  11:37:46 AM  
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I want Todd Purdum's job. A1 today does the public 9/11 commission hearings, and Philip Shenon and Eric Schmitt offer an surprisingly un-spun account of the proceedings ("Bush and Clinton Aides Grilled by Panel"), whose lead focuses on the "series of intelligence reports sent to President Bush in 2001 [that] warned of an imminent, possibly catastrophic" Al Qaeda attack, and on the panel's "harsh questioning of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other administration officials" about their failure to act on those reports. [If you've got the dead-tree edition you'll notice that the accompanying pull-quotes, one each from Powell, Albright, Cohen and Rummy, tell a different story: everybody did everything that could in reason have been done, and all in good faith, and everybody agrees about this across the board, so please can we all just quiet down now?] Given that there's an attempt to spin the commission staff report, released concurrently with yesterday's hearings, as working to shore up the BushCo position (see Billmon for more on this), it's especially worth noting that Shenon and Schmitt have grasped, and keep more or less firm hold of, the central point:

The reports, and some of the testimony on Tuesday, supported elements of the account offered in recent days by President Bush's former counterterrorism chief, Richard A. Clarke. He has said in a new book that President Bush and his deputies, including Mr. Rumsfeld and Ms. Rice, largely ignored the Qaeda threat in the months before the attacks and left the nation needlessly unprepared.

Never fear, though, because A1 enlists Todd Purdum to slap a fig leaf of "analysis" over the unaccustomed candor of the straight news piece ("For a Day, Terrorism Transcends Politics as Panel Reviews Failures"). Taken together with the page's festoon of pull-quotes, Purdum's article may be reflective of a fallback position for the Times: let's just focus on the warm glowing warming glow of democracy-in-action to get through the commission proceedings with as little ill feeling and inconvenient remembering as possible.

The setting was a nondescript Senate hearing room, but the scene was as singular as democracy itself: successive secretaries of state and defense with more than 14 years' combined service across Democratic and Republican presidencies being questioned by a bipartisan citizens' commission of familiar faces.

Yes, election-year politics crackled in the air. Yes, Republican panel members prodded and scolded Bill Clinton's cabinet members, and Democrats did the same to President Bush's. But the secretaries themselves often agreed with one other, regardless of party, and their public presence was a powerful sign that terrorism transcends politics — and that blame abounds for failing to fully face the threat in time.

I can sort of get from this that Todd thinks we should all have fuzzies from knowing that our democracy is strong, and that we're all pulling together like a family that buries its differences in a crisis—or like a family that takes a crisis as an opportunity for everybody to blame everybody. Or something. In what sense is democracy "singular"? What exactly does it mean to say that "terrorism transcends politics"? I have a Ph.D. in English literature, I know Paradise Lost backwards and forwards, and I confess I'm hard put to reduce Todd Purdum's writing to sense.

It's all here: opaque celebratory formulas, irrelevant historical asides, incoherent rambling. For sheer pitch of fatuity, though, not much can surpass this:

From the sinking of the Titanic to the bombing of Pearl Harbor to the presidential commission set up to study urban unrest in the 1960's and the 1970's Senate inquiry into intelligence abuses by the C.I.A. and F.B.I., public and Congressional panels have delved into some of the most calamitous events in American history. But usually after the fact. Tuesday's hearing made it clear that the threat of terrorism remains ever present.

Well, yes, Todd, one is rather hard put to set about investigating great public calamities before they've happened. Presumably he means that this investigation is different because "terrorism" continues to be a threat—except that the hearings aren't about "terrorism" as such, they're about a specific act of terrorism, now almost three years in the past, and the failures that may have enabled it. But for Todd Purdum, "terrorism" is simply an incantation, an abracadabra on whose utterance thought ceases.

It's not a long article, but I could linger over it for hours. I'll leave you with this last gem:

For relatives of the Sept. 11 victims, the hearing was a chance, finally, to get the public attention that they believe the commission's work has long lacked. They came with still-broken hearts and photographs of the dead, seeking answers they did not quite expect to receive.

"I want the truth," said Bob McIlvaine, whose son, Bobby, died in the attacks. He wore a green jacket and a pained look ...

Paul D. Wolfowitz, the deputy defense secretary, who was seated next to Mr. Rumsfeld, also wore a pained expression for much of the afternoon.

Really, does Purdum write this crap in his sleep? I suspect Mr. McIlvaine will find that "also" even more grotesque than I do.

posted by michael  5:16:08 PM  
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What we really need to know is, who took the last eggroll? A day late, and a bit more than a dollar short, the Richard Clarke story lands on A1. The lead tells you everything you need to know:

As the White House opened an aggressive personal attack against its former counterterrorism chief, Richard A. Clarke, a furious debate broke out on Monday about the credibility of his assertion that President Bush pushed him the day after the Sept. 11 attacks to see if there was a link with Saddam Hussein.

The White House dismissed the accusations, described in a new book by Mr. Clarke, by casting him as a disgruntled, politically motivated job seeker and a "best buddy" of a top adviser to Senator John Kerry. But Mr. Clarke defended his account, and several allies rallied to his defense.

Elisabeth Bumiller and Judith Miller, "Ex-Bush Aide Sets Off Debate as 9/11 Hearing Opens"

Remember the playbook? Dear Leader is never on the defensive. The initiative is always with Bush and his surrogates. Clarke's making accusations of non-feasance on the part of the President on vital matters of national security: charges which (in a different world than the one we appear to inhabit) might well be enough to run him from office. [The most significant failures to act, of course, are the ones in the period before 9/11. The two Millers, Judy and Bu, never acknowledge that that's what really puts the sting in Clarke's charges, as they acknowledge only midway through the piece, practically as an aside, the broad scope of his attacks. Instead their lead focuses on his claim about a single incident, "a conversation that Mr. Clarke said he had with Mr. Bush in the White House Situation Room on the night of Sept. 12, 2001," on which narrow synecdochic base the whole is apparently supposed to stand or fall.] And yet what "furious" national debate has been touched off by these accusations? Naturally, a debate about the accuser's credibility!

Notice, by the way, the rhetorical deftness of "a furious debate broke out": as if "debate" on Clarke's credibility were general, and had emerged disinterestedly and spontaneously—not as if, you know, the White House had immediately sprung up with an orchestrated attempt to discredit its accuser, an effort which the VRWC and the on-our-backs press is expected to amplify.

The real journalistic impoverishment of the article is in the last sentence of the quote above. What happens when you put two stenographers (Liz Bumiller, stenographer to White House flacks, and Judy Miller, self-admitted stenographer to neo-con securocrats and Ahmed Chalabi) on one assignment? Unsurprisingly, you get stenography. So the Millers type up some of Clarke's charges, and they type up a few quotes from his "defenders," (understood that the context is, whether or not Clarke can sustain his credibility), then they type up—no, of course not Administration response to the charges, but the efforts of Bush cutouts to smear Clarke:

The angry White House response to Mr. Clarke, which was authorized by Mr. Bush, reflects the administration's fears over the book's potential political damage. In a daylong assault on Monday, administration officials portrayed Mr. Clarke, a secretive, combative terrorism expert who spent more than three decades working in the Reagan, Clinton and both Bush administrations, as a bitter former employee who had been denied the No. 2 position in the Department of Homeland Security and who was now trying to help the Kerry campaign.

From here, we follow with a graf distilling Dick Cheney's conversation yesterday with Rush Limbaugh, in which he essentially calls Clarke a failure at his job who nobody should pay attention to, and then it's on to Scott McClellan letting us know that Clarke's "best buddy is Senator Kerry's principal foreign policy adviser." As always, the he-said-he-said form absolves the writers of having to do anything except type (though it's funny how the stenography inexorably skews to the GOP side): as they feel no real responsibility to evaluate or contextualize Clarke's accusations, they also seem to feel it's no responsibility of theirs to assess whether the BushCo counter-charges are true or fair or on-point. They slime, you decide.

By all means persist to the end of the article, because you don't want to miss this nya-nya comic highlight from Condi Rice's spokesguy:

Administration officials said that throughout his tenure in the Bush administration, Mr. Clarke appeared to be generally supportive of the president's policies, and never brought to Ms. Rice a broad critique of either the administration's approach to terrorism or its plan for invading Iraq.

Sean McCormack, Ms. Rice's spokesman, said that Mr. Clarke ate lunch with Ms. Rice in her West Wing office after he had left the administration, a month or two before the attack on Iraq, and gave none of the warnings he gave in the book.

He ate lunch with Condi in her office! See, they were pals—how dare he say all this bad stuff now! [That lunch would have been the perfect time to give her the warnings she'd completely fucking ignored on every other occasion that he'd tried to press them. I'm sure she'd have called the whole Iraq thing off if only he'd opened up to her over the moo goo gai pan.]

posted by michael  10:27:24 AM  
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Slow on the draw. Well, I never intended this to be a rapid-response blog: but it's kind of a pisser that I've had so much job-related work to do today, so little time to get in on the whole Richard Clarke extravaganza. Then again, with Billmon and Josh Marshall on the case, my little bloggy half-acre is pretty much put to shame, anyway. The particular news in Times-land is the assignment of neo-con blowup doll Judith Miller to write the paper's first, entirely buried (A19!) report on Clarke's accusations. I'm assuming anybody who makes it here has already been there, but just in case, and for the record, Billmon dissects Miller's piece in this post (scroll down, the Whiskey Bar always has great comments activity), and Josh Marshall says just about everything I would have said (dammit!) here. (By all means follow Josh's link to Slate, a piece I missed in its first appearance, where Jack Shafer takes Miller apart for her avoidance of the issue in the aftermath of her tendentious and almost entirely false reporting on the subject of Iraqi WMDs.)

Actually, one thing Josh Marshall doesn't say that I will, even though it may be obvious. Giving Judy Miller first crack at the Clarke story, and burying it back by the obits (strange feeling of déjà vu writing that): doesn't take a degree in Kremlinology to know that the Times is sending a message, and that the primary intended recipients of that message are Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie. This is more than just prophylaxis; it's all but a pledge of fealty. We'll have to report on this, says the Times, but we're not going to do anything to try to take you guys down. It's the kid-glove treatment the whole way with this one.

posted by michael  2:49:06 PM  
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"Strategy" and policy. Jay Rosen is as fed up with campaign-strategy coverage in the Times as I am. His post is a good read. Rosen's explanation for the tendency of campaign reporting to devolve into stragedy mode centers on what he calls (in a nice turn of phrase) "the seductions of the form," the seductive thing being that

journalists doing strategy stories get to be more evaluative, more like critics at a performance. They can bring in more knowledge on their own authority, and show how well they understand the game. They are "allowed" more room by their own codes.

I think this is an apt assessment of the sociology of the phenomenon. What it doesn't speak to, though, is what use the news organization itself makes of the strategy-coverage form: and this is where, in the case of the Times, we have to do a little Kremlinology.

If you want to get a measure of the bad faith in the Times' 2004 campaign coverage to date, you can't do much better than a compare-and-contrast between today's inner-page Political Memo by David Halbfinger and Adam Nagourney ("Some Democrats Say Kerry Must Get Back on the Trail"—even the headline writers are using Kerry's ski vacation for snarky puns now) and Jim Rutenberg's A1 piece yesterday ("90-Day Media Strategy by Bush's Aides to Define Kerry"), or the Wednesday strategy article before it ("Bush's Campaign Emphasizes Role of Leader in War"). As I've been suggesting for a while, the Times political staff routinely uses the strategy-coverage form as a license to dish up what amounts to raw, dripping hunks of RNC oppo fresh, freely printing smears and outright lies that straight reporting would prudentially have to at least place in context, if not actively critique. So is there a parallel when, as today, the strategy piece comes to us from the Democratic side? Are we going to get a round of unfiltered DNC oppo? Far from it.

Democrats were wondering if even Mr. Kerry had underestimated the ferocity of the White House attack. In particular, they expressed concern about the potency of the Republicans' use of his Senate voting record to lampoon him as vacillating and indecisive ...

"He has to come out forcefully and defend his record, because clearly the Republicans are trying to label him as a flip-flopper," said Gordon Fischer, the Democratic chairman in Iowa. ...

Senator John B. Breaux, Democrat of Louisiana, added: "He clearly is going to have to deal with that. But more important, he is going to have to talk about his positions ... When you get into Washington-speak, it's a dangerous business. You've got to keep it simple."

Democrats conceded that the past two weeks have highlighted some of Mr. Kerry's vulnerabilities, like his penchant for making politically unwise statements.

"This is a very important period, because it frames the candidates and the issues of the campaign," said Art Torres, the California Democratic chairman. "And I think that some of John's offhanded comments about foreign leaders are becoming a caricature for cartoonists and others. Once people start making fun of you, you're in real trouble and it's hard to move forward."

And that's the whole article: a parade of Democratic hand-wringers. (Except, that is, for the "senior Bush aide"—hello, anonymity policy?—who gets to tell us about the "treasure chest" of Kerry votes that the White House plans to pull smears out of all year.) Not only does nobody say a word about the other side, for good or ill—every Democrat quoted expressly repeats the anti-Kerry memes that the Times has been flogging at the RNC's behest for the last several weeks.

This goes beyond the Times' insistent stereotyping of Republicans as tough attackers and Democrats as self-conflicted whiners. I think it's fair to say, at this point, that we're looking at bias, and that this bias is something like a matter of Times policy.

[As an aside: Yesterday, Jim Rutenberg told us that the Bush campaign's strategy for this phase of the campaign "was planned weeks ago." Today, Halbfinger and Nagourney assure us that the White House "has devoted six months to preparing for this moment." In a couple of weeks, at this rate, we'll learn that Karl Rove knew by the end of 2000 that Dubya'd be facing John Kerry this year. Remember the alien-amnesty initiative? Remember going to Mars? Those weren't Bush campaign missteps, not on your life, and besides they never happened. We've always been in control!]

[Aside II: Given that Adam Nagourney is the Times' designated Representative to the Democratic Establishment, and knowing how much he loves telling Dem candidates how to behave, it's obvious that most of today's article is his work. Still, you can bet that that's David's Halbfinger thrusting up jauntily from these early grafs:

As the White House greeted Mr. Kerry's claim on the Democratic nomination with an avalanche of advertisements and attacks, the challenger seemed at least a little spent as he faced the challenges of raising money, building a staff, responding to all of what his aides called the "incoming," and retooling his campaign to appeal to a general election audience.

Après ski, of course.

Honestly, the depths of resentment here ... Does nothing embarrass this guy?]

posted by michael  4:32:42 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Free speech zone. A day of worldwide, coordinated antiwar protests in roughly 250 cities. More than half a million marchers in Europe, by news organization estimates. As Michelle Goldberg summarizes in Salon ("A day of grim vindication"):

Spain hosted some of the largest of the day's antiwar rallies, with the BBC reporting that 100,000 marched in Madrid and the AP estimating that 150,000 demonstrated in Barcelona. Even larger protests were held in Italy, a country that, like Spain, went to war against the will of the vast majority of its people. According to the BBC, 300,000 marched in Rome. Twenty-five thousand marched in London and 30,000 in Tokyo. There were protests in Thailand, Greece, Pakistan and Egypt. In Iraq on Friday, thousands of Shiites and Sunnis joined together to demonstrate against the occupation, a mordant tribute to the liberation touted by the Bush administration.

All this with no more urgent occasion than the first anniversary of Bush's assault on Iraq. And in New York, at least 30,000 demonstrators (in the estimate of a Republican mayor with reason to minimize turnout) marching for hours through midtown Manhattan, filling a dozen city blocks. Quick test of your editorial judgement: what position do you think such an event rates on the front page of the NY Times?

OK, that was a trick question. It doesn't rate a position on the front page. In fact, it doesn't rate a position anywhere near the front of the paper. Alan Feuer's story ("From Midtown to Madrid, Tens of Thousands Peacefully Protest War") barely makes it onto A20, the very last news page in today's A section, tucked there under the obits. A clearer signal of its attitude toward antiwar sentiment I don't think the Times could send.

Of course, there's also the fact that space needed to be cleared on A1 today for Dexter Filkin's hagiographic study of the Iraq proconsulship of Jerry Bremer ("Bremer Pushes Iraq on Difficult Path to Self-Rule")—a much more appropriate way to treat the Iraq war anniversary. (Did you know that Bremer is "a polished diplomat who does not want for self-assurance," that "many Iraqis" regard him as "earnest and hard-working, the benevolent despot they never had"—and that he's also a natty dresser whose combat-boots-with-suit look has "inspired something of a fad" in the Green Zone? Hard-hitting stuff, Dexter.) And besides, there's always a chance (O hope against hope!) that Dear Leader will see A1 with his morning coffee—and as we all know, it's a matter of high policy that the Happy Warrior is never, never to see the face of protest. Welcome to the Times front page, an official BushCoTM free speech zone.

posted by michael  1:54:03 PM  
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Full Gore II. After writing yesterday about David Halbfinger's latest campaign-trail atrocity, I felt like I hadn't really hit the ball out of the park. In fact, I felt like I'd erred in taking the piece to some extent on its own terms—as a kind of hazing exercise, utterly inappropriate but meant to be jocular, in a hamhanded way—and the more I thought about what was really going on the more my blood boiled. Fortunately, Brian Montopoli at CJR said much of what I'd have wanted to say in his post on the article: and the rest of it, the blood-boiling part, I can follow on with here.

Let's start with the central incident that Halbfinger reports, a small tumble Kerry took on the slopes of Mount Baldy:

The image-conscious candidate and his aides prevailed upon reporters and photographers to let him have a first run down the mountain solo, except for two agents and Marvin Nicholson, his omnipresent right-hand man.

His next trip down, a reporter and a camera crew were allowed to follow along on skis — just in time to see Mr. Kerry taken out by one of the Secret Service men, who had inadvertently moved into his path, sending him into the snow.

When asked about the mishap a moment later, he said sharply, "I don't fall down," then used an expletive to describe the agent who "knocked me over."

The incident occurred near the summit. No one was hurt, and Mr. Kerry came careering down the mountain moments later, a look of intensity on his face, his lanky frame bent low to the ground.

Let's add to this the piece's secondary incident, which finds Kerry "beating a retreat" from a ski-line heckler "to an upstairs, out-of-the-way dining area where he would be sure to draw even less attention"—illustration, says Halbfinger, that the candidate "could not entirely escape the hazards of the arena he had left behind." Let's further remember the piece's gratuitously needling lead: "John Kerry was in the air, approaching the Continental Divide, and the candidate often ridiculed as straddling both sides of political divides was wrestling with the big matter at hand"—a sentence that creates an incongruous, ungainly afterimage of John Kerry somehow aloft in a wrestler's pose over the Rockies.

Seeing a pattern? Halbfinger's writing rigorously, not to say programmatically, makes Kerry the butt of physical mockery. Every image Halbfinger offers of the candidate is meant to suggest retreat, cowardice, contortion, ineptitude. The article creates an almost subliminal satire on the notion of vacation, using it at every turn as an opportunity to impute physical and by extension moral weakness to Kerry. The undercurrent of the whole piece: John Kerry is a big, stupid dork who's trying to hide, stupid hiding dork! Halbfinger's like the school bully taunting the kid with a limp. (If Times articles came with sound effects, I'd expect to hear Nelson Muntz's "Ha ha!" more than once here.)

Given Kerry's record of physical bravery in his Vietnam service, it's possible that this sort of mockery is in fact programmatic—a subtle way of negating the force of that record. In which case, Halbfinger is carrying Republican water about as contemptibly as any journalist could. On the other hand, maybe it's just pathological. Maybe Kerry just really makes Halbfinger's skin crawl, somehow, and he can't resist the urge to let it show. Either way, the piece begs the question: is this the Times' assignment policy for Democratic Presidential candidates? Is it a job requirement that you have to actually loathe a Dem candidate to be allowed to cover his campaign?

posted by michael  6:11:58 PM  
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What we need here is a little stragedy. For the second time in the last four days, A1 brings us the big big story from the Bush campaign: There's a plan! That's right, the Republicans have a new innovation in Presidential politics, something they call ... what's that term they use? ... Oh yeah, a media strategy:

President Bush's campaign is following an aggressive and precise 90-day media strategy to define Senator John Kerry as indecisive and lacking conviction, with a coordinated blitz of advertisements, speeches and sound bites, senior campaign advisers said this week.

The goal, several campaign aides said, is to first strip Mr. Kerry of the positive image that he carried away from the Democratic primary contests and then to define him issue by issue in their own terms before the summer vacation season. The central thrusts will be national security and taxes, they said.

"90-Day Media Strategy by Bush's Aides to Define Kerry"

I predict this newfangled stragedy ... sorry, strategy thing is gonna revolutionize the whole game!

Do you think John Kerry's camp has got themselves a strategy, too? Guess not—otherwise, they'd have trumpeted it to the skies just like Bush's guys have done, and intrepid Times typist Jim Rutenberg would have subjected the Dem announcement to the same probing glare he's turned on the Reepubs today. Among the fascinating insights Rutenberg has uncovered through his fearless willingness to parrot whatever Republicans tell him: you know how the Bush campaign seemed completely out of touch and directionless just a week or so ago? All an illusion:

Aides said the strategy was planned weeks ago in coordination with Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's chief political aide, while Mr. Kerry was battling for his party's nomination. ...

The Bush aides pronounce their efforts a success so far, and point to polls showing that Mr. Kerry's ratings are dropping while Mr. Bush's are rising, a huge relief to a campaign that just a couple of weeks ago was criticized even by some Republicans as appearing flat-footed.

[Doesn't "Bush aides pronounce their efforts a success" just encapsulate the whole article for you?] The captain's hand has never been off the tiller! We never said Saddam was an imminent threat! The chocolate ration has just been increased again! We love you, Dear Leader!

Looks like this strategy news is almost too hot to touch, because despite a couple of attributed quotes, the aforementioned "Bush aides," along with "White House and campaign officials" and "a Bush adviser" are quoted directly and indirectly throughout Rutenberg's piece under the cloak of anonymity. Demonstrating again—as if we needed confirmation—that the Times' policy on anonymous sourcing is strictly for entertaining the rubes.

And while we're at it, the Times' intrepid assault on Kerry's "foreign leaders" pseudo-gaffe continues here, fourth day in a row. Rutenberg silently corrects the quote to what Kerry actually said, but—as always with this one—simply dishes it up from the RNC trough, without explanation or context or even an attempt at coherence:

The Republican National Committee, which works closely with the campaign on its message, fanned the flames with e-mail messages to reporters and supporters with the heading "John Kerry International Man of Mystery," making fun of his statement that "I've met more leaders" who wanted him to win, and followed with an Internet advertisement on the same theme.

Like David Halbfinger two weeks ago, Rutenberg seems to think that those RNC oppo guys are just so clever and cheeky—how can he resist giving you a look at one of their funny funny stunts?

Robin at Fact-esque (doing my Reading A1 job better and more succinctly than me today, thanks Robin!) thinks the BushCo stroking today is prophylactic: A1's repentance for fronting the news (in what Robin calls a "pro forma rundown of the skeleton of the story") that Clinton aides plan to tell the Sept. 11 commission how Bush ignored their warnings about Al Qaeda in 2001. Seems probable, but the recent pattern into which Rutenberg's piece fits goes further. It's as if the Times national political desk is desperately afraid that Bush will win, and will do anything to show that it's playing by Rove's rules. Look what good boys we are! Please, please Karl, be nice to us next term!

posted by michael  4:45:27 PM  
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The Gospel according to Microsoft. Sometimes, reading co-authored Times articles is a bit like doing source or redaction criticism. Who's responsible for which incompatible parts, and how did they wind up in this form? Today's article on the failure to settle in the European antitrust action against Microsoft ("Microsoft's Bid to Settle Case in Europe Fails") offers an ungainly hybrid of Paul Meller's Brussels-based reporting and John Markoff's from Silicon Valley. Whichever of them wrote the lead is working straight from the Microsoft playbook:

European regulators announced on Thursday that settlement talks with Microsoft had collapsed, leaving it virtually certain that an antitrust ruling would be issued against the company that could limit its ability to add new features to its software in one of the largest and richest markets in the world.

At this late date in the history of Microsoft litigation, how does anybody who isn't a paid Microsoft flack fall for this gag? That the issue is innovation? They don't even believe that in Redmond, for Jeebus' sake.

The article goes on to portray the failure to settle as something like European treachery, positioning a Steve Ballmer statement to imply that Microsoft's good faith has been traduced:

Both regulators and the company said on Thursday that they had made significant strides toward a settlement before the negotiations broke down.

"I believe we reached agreement on the issues of the case," Mr. Ballmer said in a statement.

But the two sides were unable to agree on a new demand [that EU antitrust chief Mario] Monti added in the final days of negotiations.*

Then, just a couple of grafs later, the focus shifts to American reaction to the news, and there's a sudden gain in clarity and in conformance to reality:

Donald M. Falk, an antitrust lawyer for Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw in Palo Alto, Calif., said that the European Commission "appears set on breaking the cycle of investigations and enforcement actions against Microsoft that have had little or no practical effect on Microsoft's conduct or on the markets it dominates."

Beyond any penalty it faces in Europe, a ruling exposes Microsoft to the risk that its strategy of bundling software applications with Windows will once again make it a legal target in the United States. Microsoft's power and financial success derive in part from its ability to integrate applications - including those in competition with the products of other software companies - as free features of the Windows operating system.

By which I'm guessing that John Markoff has a bit firmer grasp on the issues than his Brussels-based counterpart, who's apparently limited his research to reading Microsoft press releases. (We return to that territory at the end of the piece, which allows Microsoft's general counsel the last, transparently phony, word, to the effect that settlement talks failed because the EU wanted to "address all future integration issues for all time.")

Since Meller's name is first on the byline, does that mean he's responsible for mushing together his reporting with Markoff's? Shouldn't there really be some attempt at intellectual consistency in these co-authored pieces? Maybe even some deference shown to the reporter who (from appearances here, anyway) is the actual domain expert?

*Anonymity flag: The assertion that Monti surprised Microsoft by adding a late deal-breaker to the negotiations is sourced to "one person involved in the talks," who was also apparently capable of seeing far enough into Monti's soul to know that he was "emboldened" by unanimity among EU national regulators. Is that the same unidentified "lawyer close to the talks" who comments on settlement details at the end of the piece? Who can tell? No mitigating explanation offered for the anonymous sourcing, and no attempt—rather crucial in this case—to indicate to which side the source or sources owes (or owe) allegiance. So much for policy.

posted by michael  7:08:49 PM  
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Quick quiz: What's the difference between today's lightweight Kerry-on-vacation piece by David Halbfinger ("Amid Natural Splendor in Idaho, a Weary Kerry Gets Away From It All") and yesterday's patented Bumiller White House Love Letter ("Yummy, Yummy, Happy Bush", or something to that effect)? Give up? One of them's not a blow job:

John Kerry was in the air, approaching the Continental Divide, and the candidate often ridiculed as straddling both sides of political divides was wrestling with the big matter at hand.

Should he ski, or snowboard? Or maybe both? He gave no clue where he stood. But that was Wednesday night.

A longtime adviser recently suggested that there were two John Kerrys: "indoor John and outdoor John" — one who agonizes over decisions, and another who acts boldly on them.

Kerry may be on vacation, but Halbfinger's just a workin' stiff determined to earn his keep. In a perverse way, this makes me admire Halbfinger. It takes real commitment to refuse ever to give up a chance to reiterate the Official Operative Meme. Double bonus points for showing us how clever (well, for a Times hack, at least) you can be at Kerry's expense, David. Bet that "divide" thing earned you a few yuks on the plane!

But Halbfinger's not done with the horseplay just yet. This comes toward the end of the piece:

Mr. Kerry could not entirely escape the hazards of the arena he had left behind. He had just sat down for a bite to eat on the crowded patio near the lift line when a waiting skier, John Norris, shouted: "Hey, John! What foreign leaders talked to you?"

Mr. Kerry beat a retreat back into the lodge, to an upstairs, out-of-the-way dining area where he would be sure to draw even less attention.

Which manages to be gratuitously unflattering to the candidate (forget those medals he earned in Vietnam, the guy hasn't got enough stones to stand up to a heckler!) at the same time as it repeats (for at least the third consecutive day in the Times' columns) the witless, phony flap over the "foreign leaders" pseudo-quote.

But hey, all in fun, right? So like Dear Leader (aka the Happy Warrior), "insistent," as BJ Bumiller portrays him, "that the barbs he aims at Mr. Kerry are softened with humor."

posted by michael  5:28:33 PM  
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Cognitive dissonance. On Monday I suggested that David Sanger, firmly attaching himself to the fraidy-cat interpretation of the Spanish election (in which rejection of the Aznar government equals cowering before Al Qaeda), might want to read the front page of his own paper for some corrective reporting. Based on his latest approach to the story in today's Times, however, I now have to fall back to the suggestion that he might, perhaps, want to read his own goddamn article ("U.S. Official Says Spanish Government 'Mishandled' Reports on Bombing").

The Bush administration said Wednesday for the first time that the Spanish government had mishandled early information about the Madrid bombing when it played down evidence that Islamic extremists were behind the plot.

The strongest public statement came from Richard L. Armitage, the deputy secretary of state, who said in a television interview that the Spanish government initially "didn't get what information did exist out to the public." ..."I think the vote that propelled the Socialists into power in Spain, as I understand it, was a protest by the people against the handling of the terrorist event by the sitting government of Spain," Mr. Armitage told a Philadelphia radio station.

I'm guessing that this portion of the article was the product of Sanger's co-author, David Johnston—otherwise Sanger would seem to be suffering from some form of multiple personality disorder. Not even Armitage's example is able to dislodge Sanger from his (apparently) religious conviction that Spain has taken a dive:

Mr. Armitage's criticism was the first of how the government of Prime Minister José María Aznar dealt with the bombings. So far, no one high in the Bush administration has said how much was known about who was behind the attacks and when it became known. Nor, until Wednesday, had officials publicly criticized Mr. Aznar.

At the same time, the White House and its allies tried to halt any notion that other nations might be tempted to follow Spain's example of bending to terrorists.

But perhaps I'm being ungenerous to Mr. Sanger. What's a poor, hardworking Times political-desk hack supposed to do when the Republicans are reading from two different scripts at once?

posted by michael  6:08:37 PM  
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Dick Cheney and the wormhole. Those CO fumes continue to cause problems in the Times' offices. Yesterday they got Stevenson and Nagourney; today it's Nick Madigan and Katharine Seelye ("Cheney Attacks Kerry's Record on the Military") who've succumbed.

In a blistering critique of Senator John Kerry's record on military issues, Vice President Dick Cheney on Wednesday portrayed the Democratic presidential candidate as weak, inconsistent and a threat to the security of the nation. ...

Almost simultaneously, Mr. Kerry, speaking in Washington, denounced President Bush's foreign policy, which he said had left the United States "bogged down in Iraq" and its troops overextended and "with the target squarely on their backs."

Except ... wait for it ... Four grafs later:

Mr. Cheney's speech was scathing and was the White House's most detailed and pointed criticism to date of Mr. Kerry. ... Mr. Kerry's speech, delivered at George Washington University, came first and its tone was less acerbic.

And then after another eight grafs:

About 20 minutes before Mr. Kerry finished, Mr. Cheney began a half-hour defense of Mr. Bush's policy and a review of Mr. Kerry's voting record and past statements.

You wouldn't think it'd require quite so much effort, spread over quite so many column inches, to specify accurately when and in what relation to each other two campaign events occurred. Or maybe it's not fumes—maybe there's some rip in the space-time continuum above W. 43rd Street that morphs "almost simultaneously" into "first one speech then the other" into "one speech began not long before the other ended". [Makes you wonder if Dick Cheney could use the singularity to go back in time and lie about things that haven't even happened yet. That'd be cool.]

Of course, the notion of precedence is trivial in itself: two speeches given on the same day (in the same news cycle), both scheduled well in advance and clearly with knowledge of each other, who cares by how many minutes one has priority? But then why all the fumbling, Nick 'n' Kit? The answer, of course, is that they're struggling with the requirements of narrative: and the narrative in play here is, Republicans attack, Democrats defend. Madigan and Seelye's article is explicitly designed to place Kerry on the defensive—Cheney's the alpha dog here; hence his critique "skewers" Kerry, he is "blistering" and "scathing" where Kerry is merely "less acerbic," the only coloring adjective the piece offers the Dem candidate. [The writers also ladle on an entirely unrelated Kerry-must-defend incident at the end of the article, in which Kerry has to back away from a recent Dean comment, just to keep things moving in the right direction.]

The attack-and-defend narrative naturally requires the attacker to strike the first blow—otherwise, what's the defender defending against? And that's why Madigan and Seelye fudge the order of the two speeches with "almost simultaneously," before minimal respect for the record forces them gradually to expose their bad faith. They're trying to finesse a kind of contradiction in narrative terms: attack-and-defend is the structure that A1 absolutely demands for this kind of reporting (God forbid the Times should ask its writers to focus on any substance in these speeches)—and yet the Democrat spoke first! We can't have that, not when we know that those big macho Republicans always, always have priority on the offensive.

As a side note, Kerry's "foreign leaders" pseudo-quote continues to be reported on A1 as recognized fact. Dick Cheney, say Madigan and Seelye, "derided Mr. Kerry for suggesting last week that certain foreign leaders, whom he later would not name, wanted Mr. Kerry to win the election." Note that a twist has been added—not only is the pseudo-quote fact, but Kerry's unwillingness to respond to phony criticism has become a perverse refusal to step up and name the people we can't be really sure he was actually alluding to. Magically, Kerry's silence has become evidence of what was actually on his mind. Deft use of the subordinate clause there, Kit.

posted by michael  12:14:32 PM  
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Sleepy ... so, so sleepy ... Typing the long, long GOP press release about Bush's new ad offensive that is their A1 article today ("Bush's Campaign Emphasizes Role of Leader in War"), Richard W. Stevenson and Adam Nagourney seem to have gotten a little woozy. Or maybe they were having trouble with carbon monoxide fumes. Or possibly they were distracted by a shiny object, maybe a flag lapel pin. They manage to keep focused long enough to offer a punning compliment to Dear Leader in the article's lead—"A year after ordering the invasion of Iraq, President Bush is moving the war to the forefront of his re-election effort with a weeklong barrage" of speeches, interviews and ads—but after that their focus seems to wander ...

I mean, what other explanation is there for crap like this?

In the Oval Office on Tuesday, Mr. Bush showed a flash of how confrontational he planned to be on Mr. Kerry's foreign affairs record. With the Dutch prime minister, Jan Peter Balkenende, at his side, Mr. Bush demanded that Mr. Kerry provide evidence to support his suggestion last week that foreign leaders want to see Mr. Bush defeated.

"If you're going to make an accusation in the course of a presidential campaign, you've got to back it up with facts," Mr. Bush told reporters on Tuesday.

Kerry's suggestion last week that foreign leaders want him to beat Bush. Statement of fact. And it's not until, oh let's count shall we, fourteen grafs later, well after the jump, that Stevenson and Nagourney wake up just long enough to remember that, ummm, it's really more factesque what Kerry said than it is strictly speaking factual:

Mr. Kerry did not respond to Mr. Bush's call that he explain his suggestion about other leaders rooting for his victory. Although on Monday, it emerged that the suggestion was misquoted and that Mr. Kerry had said "more" leaders, not "foreign" leaders, the comments came in response to remarks about travel abroad and the White House continued to press the issue.

Bob Somerby has the lowdown on the Kerry pseudo-quote and its hardening into campaign lore, so like similar not-quotes not-uttered by Al Gore in 2000. Consider this one more exhibit. And note in particular how Stevenson and Nagourney only address the actual, untidy truth of the matter in a passive-voiced dependent clause ("Although it emerged ..."), raising it solely in order to defend Dear Leader's prerogative: see, there was talk about foreigners in the air, so we know what Kerry really meant, so it's really close enough to being an actual quote for us to make allowances for when Dubya, etc., and now the fumes have got me.

And remark, again, on the amber waves of type separating Bush's attack from even the grudging, partial admission of semi-error that Stevenson and Nagourney will allow us. Fourteen motherfucking grafs.

It's been disheartening enough to watch the Times declare that they'll go to A1 with whatever oppo the RNC feels like handing them. Now it appears that the standard of fact, too, is left to GOP discretion: when it comes to criticism of John Kerry, at least, it's a fact if Bush says it, even when it ain't.

posted by michael  4:06:09 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

President Obama. Just idle musing, from a Chicago progressive stunned to find that one of our own beat out both the machine candidate and one of those I-won-the-lottery-I'm-buying-me-a-Senate-seat millionaires—and with an absolute majority, no less. Has a nice ring to it though, doesn't it? If you've ever seen him speak, the thought will probably have crossed your mind, too. What's that thing—that thing we don't get to do on the left? Oh, yeah, win. So that's what that feels like.


posted by michael  3:26:38 PM  
tell me about it []  

 

Spanish bombs. David Sanger seems to agree with Condoleeza Rice, whom he quotes in his A1 news analysis this morning on the Spanish elections ("Blow to Bush: An Ally in Spain Is Rejected by Antiwar Voters"), that a vote for Aznar was a vote against "intimidation":

Before the election results were in, Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said on the NBC News program "Meet the Press," "I believe that the Spanish people understand that they've had strong and good leadership in President José María Aznar and his government, that fighting terrorism cannot allow one to be intimidated."

Sadly, the Spanish electorate seems not to have been ready to take the Bush challenge. Sanger assesses the damage to Bush from the upset Socialist victory in terms that are entirely flattering to our Young Churchill:

The Bush administration must now fight the perception, accurate or not, that acts of terror against America's allies can sway nations into rethinking the wisdom of standing too closely with Mr. Bush.

Don't stand too close to the steely-eyed rocket man if you can't take the heat, I guess is the message. "Perception" is such a useful journalist's weasel-word. Where exactly does such perception ("accurate or not") exist, David, except in your own mind and perhaps the mind of Bush's spinmeisters?

Sanger might do well to read his own paper for a corrective to his "perception." Those fraidy-cat Spaniards—who Sanger can't be bothered to remember have always been deeply against the Iraq adventure—might have a few other things on their mind, like, for instance, Aznar's having taken Bush's lead on more than just the Iraq war:

Spain's opposition Socialists swept to an upset victory in general elections on Sunday, ousting the center-right party of Prime Minister José María Aznar in a groundswell of voter anger and grief over his handling of terrorist bombings in Madrid last week.

Investigators reported Sunday that there was growing evidence of involvement of Muslim fundamentalists in the attacks. ... With each new bit of information about the investigation into the attack came accusations that Mr. Aznar's party may have tried to suppress evidence of possible Qaeda involvement by assuming that Basque separatists were responsible.

Elaine Sciolino, "Following Attacks, Spain's Governing Party Is Beaten"

Maybe, just maybe, Spanish voters were led to repudiate Aznar for the Bush-like way his government, shall we say, reasoned inductively about Basque complicity in the bombings from whatever conclusion was politically most convenient to them. Could they have been offended that Aznar, as Josh Marshall puts it, "deliberately withheld or obscured information about who was behind the attacks so as to avoid the backlash" that they expected from al Qaeda's being named responsible? Nah—if Americans don't mind that sort of treatment, why would the Spanish?

Update: Misread the Sanger piece a bit. He does, in fact, remember the general Spanish opposition to the war—I missed it because it's stuck in a (doubly) dependent clause in a paragraph that has Bush lauding Aznar's "courageous example" in ignoring popular opinion:

Time after time, President Bush has responded to critics who say he has alienated America's closest allies by pointing to Mr. Aznar as a courageous example of a leader who ignored poll numbers — upward of 90 percent of Spaniards opposed the war — and who acted in Spain's best interests.

If I were Sanger, I'd find a way to talk about Bush that didn't require some synonym for moral fortitude in every goddamn sentence.

posted by michael  9:57:05 AM  
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Morons on parade in the always-egregious Sunday Week in Review. (I think that deserves to be its own department in my little blog.) Here's famous ad guy (and Hamptons roustabout) Jerry Della Femina, quoted by the frequently egregious Elisabeth Bumiller in her miserable thumbsucker about the power of negative advertising in American politics ("If You Can't Say Anything Nice, Run for President"):

"People want something emotional and dramatic," said Jerry Della Femina, the adman. "You can say, 'I'm a nice person' just so many times. After a while you turn and say, 'The other guy's a louse.' People would like to think that they are thoughtful and not swayed by negative advertising, but the fact is, they are. We're verbally aggressive. It's the American way. If it wasn't this way, we wouldn't have hockey."

Got that? Americans are verbally aggressive (well, maybe New Yorkers, buddy, but have you spent any time west of the Hudson?), which is why we "have" a physically violent Canadian sport. Yeah, I can't make that make sense either. The really astonishing thing is not somebody saying something this brain-dead (though you do wonder how Della Femina powered a big-time ad career if this represents the quality of his marketing insights), it's Bumiller quoting it in its own paragraph as if it were a big juicy hunk o' wisdom. [I've got more to say about Bumiller's piece, and I'll post on it separately in a bit.]

On the same page, Gregg Easterbrook is given space to hype his recent book and its sole, rather pathetic "big idea" ("All This Progress Is Killing Us, Bite by Bite"), in an article pegged on last week's House legislation protecting the food industry from so-called "obesity lawsuits." [Easterbrook's intellectual style is characterized by Brian Doherty, reviewing The Progress Paradox (aka "Money can't buy happiness") in the WaPo, as making him sound "like the brightest sophomore in the quad."]

O.K., it's hard to be opposed to food. But the epidemic of obesity epitomizes the unsettled character of progress in affluent Western society. Our lives are characterized by too much of a good thing - too much to eat, to buy, to watch and to do, excess at every turn. Sometimes achievement itself engenders the excess: today's agriculture creates so much food at such low cost that who can resist that extra helping?

What a paradox, huh? Who'da thunk: Too much turns out to be a bad thing! But what's really stupid about this is the notion that appetite ("who can resist that extra helping?") is just somehow a natural consequence of production efficiency (itself just naturally an achievement: "so much food at such low cost"). The existence of a vast, multilayered enterprise that rationalizes food production by organizing and promoting consumption—the enormous apparatus of the social construction of appetite, in other words—seems to have escaped Easterbrook's notice. (Perhaps he missed this little book of a couple years back.) But then, if appetite isn't just something that happens in your gut, Easterbrook doesn't have his so-called paradox, does he?

Hmmm ... That reminds me, it's lunch time ...

Update: Robin at Fact-esque has her take on the Bumiller article already in place. Forgot to link to it earlier.

posted by michael  1:04:00 PM  
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Times does the DMCA. Op-ed watching isn't my beat—and I had some problems with the corrections offered on this parody Times correction page (mirrored, list of mirror-project sites here) that made the rounds earlier in the week—but this is just too fucking much. The Times has gone nuclear on Robert Cox, proprietor of The National Debate, invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to force his ISP to shut his site down, ostensibly for Cox's having infringed the Times' copyright by creating a standalone page mimicking its (freely available) online look-and-feel—but really, basically, for thoughtcrime:

You have copied numerous elements from a legitimate The New York Times on the Web page [says the cease-and-desist letter from Times counsel], complete with live links and actual advertisements, and have altered it to display and solicit criticism of The Times Op-Ed columns. ... And you are compounding the offense by encouraging others to follow your lead.

This is disgusting. Calpundit gets it about right: "You'd think the publisher of the Pentagon Papers would show a little more respect for free speech and a little more tolerance for criticism."

posted by michael  2:04:01 PM  
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Sloppy Oppel. Richard A. Oppel, Jr. commits several fouls in his piece on the current budget fracas ("Senate Approves Budget Intended to Curb Deficit"), which is focused on the rising tide of deficit dissent among Congressional Republicans. Actually, "focused" is way too generous: Oppel's report kind of swirls hazily around the story without ever managing to find a narrative line, either in the week's budget machinations or in the White House-Congress tug of war. The vagueness may be pre-emptive: strangely, in a piece that offers some remarkable instances of sniping between the Administration and the Thugs on the Hill (and delivers one full-on howler from Trent Duffy at the White House, to the effect that "President Bush has been the lever of spending restraint in Washington" for the last three years), Oppel is completely unwilling to address the most salient aspect of the budget story, namely the implications of a Republican uprising for Bush's political health.

Anyway, let's go to the videotape:

The Senate voted early Friday morning to approve a $2.4 trillion budget resolution for next year that could imperil President Bush's drive to make all his tax cuts permanent while it tries to shrink the federal deficit faster than the White House proposes.

The vote came hours after budget deliberations broke down in the House following a rebellion by Republicans who demanded that party leaders take tougher actions to control spending. Taken together, the moves reflected apprehension among some Republicans that the deficit is gaining new currency as an election-year issue.

"The budget issue is a very critical issue, and frankly, a defining issue for many members of Congress," Representative Jeb Hensarling, a freshman Texas Republican who has emerged as a leader in efforts by conservatives to rein in what they consider unsustainable spending growth, said in an interview this week. He added: "I didn't come to Congress to grow government."

Much as I love to see GOoPers discomfited, especially Texas GOoPers, that second graf is cheap and unfair. Nor is it supported by the quote that follows, which seems intended by Mr. Hensarling as a clear statement of principle. Of course, political calculation can hardly fail to enter into it, but Oppel offers nothing anywhere in his piece to substantiate the (implicit) claim that election-year apprehension rather than genuine concern over the deficit is the primary motivator of the mini budget revolt among Repubs.

The books get balanced, sort of, in the second half of the piece, which segues to Democratic critique of the Bush tax cuts (as the principle budget problem) by saying that "Democrats wasted no time capitalizing on the dispute" among House Republicans. Does Oppel really need to suggest opportunism here? Further, after correctly noting that this year's government receipts are expected to fall to a 53-year low (as a percentage of GDP), and that they'll be lower in actual dollars than they were four years ago, Oppel writes the putative Republican reply as a non-sequitur:

Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee, estimates that almost half of the decline in tax revenue as a percentage of gross domestic product has been caused by the tax cuts, and the other half by the state of the economy.

Mr. Bush and other Republicans say the tax cuts were needed — and still are necessary — to spur the economy. But some Republicans in Congress say they fear that the economic growth from the tax cuts will be frittered away over time by the effects of the deficit, unless it is more aggressively reckoned with.

How does "economic stimulus" answer the criticism about receipts? Did any Republican offer it as an answer, or did Oppel take it on himself to do the job for them? And just to add to the sins of commission here, notice the way the last sentence of that quote assumes "economic growth from the tax cuts" as a fact—it's capital in the bank that might be "frittered away"—and not as a highly debatable political assertion.

Lazy, sloppy Oppel. No soup for you!

posted by michael  1:33:32 PM  
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All praise for the triumphant work of the glorious security forces of our great homeland. Anybody remember that National Guardsman from Washington State who was ready to use the Internet to sell us out to his Al Qaeda buddies? Who was caught in the greatest intelligence sting since the cold war? Nah, me neither. Never mind, though, because we've got another one: sad, temp job-hopping, emotionally disturbed Susan Lindauer, whose crime appears to be her belief that she was a force for world peace ("Former U.S. Aide Accused of Working With Iraq"):

Federal law enforcement officials said that despite Ms. Lindauer's extensive contacts with the Iraqis, there was little evidence to suggest that she had harmed national security by passing any sensitive intelligence to the Hussein government.

Instead, she was largely perceived, even by some law enforcement officials, as a woman who fancied herself a peacemaker. "She thought maybe she could do more than she really could as an intermediary" between Washington and Baghdad, said a law enforcement official.

This perhaps, is another installment of that "Greatest.Sting.Ever" the Times' Sarah Kershaw was all breathless about last month:

Ms. Lindauer [allegedly] met last summer with an undercover F.B.I. agent posing as a Libyan intelligence officer seeking help in supporting resistance groups inside Iraq. She twice left documents for the undercover agent at designated spots in Takoma Park, the indictment said. It did not provide any details about the documents.

Yeah, we're so much more secure now that she's on ice. Next up, Ashcroft's goons start collaring random homeless people who think Bin Laden's controlling their thoughts via satellite.

At least the Times didn't give this the A1 treatment—though the paper did see fit to devote fully half an interior page, and two credulous reports, to the arrest. Me, I'm with Charlie Pierce on this one (scroll down): "I will bet all the money that Lucianne Goldberg gives to her worthless spalpeen as an allowance that the case of The Spy Who Was Andy Card's Cousin dries up and blows away the way the earthshaking case of The Muslim Chaplain Who Threatened Our Kids But Turned Out To Be Just An Online Perv has."

posted by michael  7:28:24 PM  
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Jumping on the corpsewagon. It's a world chock-full of news, but for the third day in a week A1 is devoting significant below-the-fold inches to CadaverGate, the body-parts-trafficking scandal at the UCLA Willed Body Program. Today, a look into the gritty world of "black-market" cadaver transportation: "In Science's Name, Lucrative Trade in Body Parts," written by John M. Broder (from his own and team reporting), the lead on what amounts to the Times' new corpse beat.

The society of those who deal in black-market body parts is a small one, said Vidal Herrera, who has logged more than 30 years in the business of death and dissection. It occasionally comes to light, as it did last November when Federal Express employees at a depot near St. Louis noticed a package leaking what looked like blood. Inside were a human arm and two legs packed in dry ice. The parts were addressed to a freelance body broker, Richard Leutheuser, who operated from his home in suburban Kirkwood, Mo.

"It's no secret," Mr. Herrera said while sitting at a dissection table in his gray, windowless storefront morgue in the San Fernando Valley, north of Los Angeles. "Everybody knows who to call — the buyers, the sellers, the disarticulators, the schools, the crematoriums. It's a lucrative business."

I like a good, gruesome tale of the dismemberment trade like anybody else, but I'm still going to have to throw a flag for roughing the cadaver. Three times in a week with this?

I thought it was a pretty borderline judgement that put the first story on the front page—the UCLA case, the result of a class-action suit brought by the aggrieved families of body donors, is basically an inside-page National Report item except for the whole thing about electric saws and human remains packaged for resale—but I let it slide. The longer I look at today's piece, though, the worse it gets. Broder carelessly tosses together the legitimate, necessary-but-indecorous business of supplying cadavers for medical training and scientific research, with documented recent instances of abuse of dead bodies, with the claim, attributed in the article to a single source (the aforementioned Mr. Herrera), that a "thriving underground market" exists in body-selling, "a direct descendant of the grave robbers who supplied cadavers to doctors and researchers." That last quote will tip you to Mr. Broder's sense of journalistic decorum—as will the fact that he makes it without acknowledging that a key part of the class-action claim against UCLA alleges that the school supplied a nationwide black market in body parts. (Is Herrera, a former director of the UCLA Willed Body Program who sued the university for wrongful termination in 1993, associated with the class-action suit?)

In several places Broder simply uses rhetorical tricks to blur the distinction between legitimate research and illegal traffic in parts. On no evidence, he insinuates that the understandable unwillingness of researchers to publicize what they do with cadavers is equivalent to ethical blindness with respect to a putative black market:

There is little controversy in the medical community about the use of donated bodies in teaching and research, although few discuss the topic openly and many prefer not to ask where the body parts they use come from.

The parts are supplied by a largely invisible network of brokers who make handsome profits for processing and transporting human remains

Notice how invisibility smears backward onto silence, making an almost subliminal accusation.

More egregious is Broder's account of what looks, from the reporting, like a wholly legitimate and even scrupulous Memphis-based supplier for medical experimentation, the Medical Education and Research Institute. He prefaces with a paragraph referencing the current Harper's and "books, movies and urban myths" for "chilling" aspects of the "grisly trade" in bodies and body parts. Having described the institute's procedures for accounting for parts (to allow for reassembly for cremation), the care it takes to assign staff to accompany body parts to research seminars, Broder concludes by saying

The Memphis operation and several like it, including a Philadelphia company called Innovations in Medical Education and Training and a cadaver transport company called National Anatomical Services, on Staten Island, are the aboveground sector of the industry.

Uglier than the pun is the implication made by "aboveground" that the legitimate operations are of a piece with, even camouflage for, the "thriving underground market" that Broder's very next graf insists on. It's the kind of rhetoric that might seem close to actionable to an interested party. Me, I just wonder why everything Broder touches has to turn lurid.

Even giving this piece every benefit of the doubt—is there anything like a genuine social problem here, one that requires A1 space for its airing? At best, this is moderately interesting magazine journalism. At worst, Broder and the Times are using a news peg to sensationalize a somewhat unsavoury business parasitic on the practice of medical research into a vast, "chilling," "grisly," criminal enterprise. To the extent that hyping a thing like this on its front page discourages people from donating to legitimate research programs—with the added possiblity of collateral damage to organ donation—the Times is making profoundly irresponsible use of the A1 franchise.

posted by michael  6:42:05 PM  
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Homer sleep now. Late night at the office last night, finishing up creative work and the presentation shell for a pitch our agency made this afternoon; we're in contention for a nationwide campaign to promote "progressive" as a political identity. Some significant organizations are behind the idea. Pitch seemed to go well, and we may have a decision soon. In any case, we've been in high gear for two weeks on this—lots of excitement here over the prospect of doing this work—and after not much sleep overnight, I'm beat. So, no dishing on the Times today for tired me: I'll get back into it tomorrow.


posted by michael  4:36:38 PM  
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Anonymous, schmanonymous. Gotta blow my own horn a bit on this one, since I posted several times last month (latest here, with links to the previous posts) on the ethics of anonymous sourcing, particularly focusing on the damage that the routine grant of anonymity does to the relationship of trust between writer and reader. Very happy to see that the Times, speaking in its corporate voice, agrees with me. Here's the stated, recently announced policy on confidential sourcing in news articles (thanks to Hellsheet for the link):

In routine interviewing — that is, most of the interviewing we do — anonymity must not be automatic or an assumed condition. In that kind of reporting, anonymity should not be offered to a source. Exceptions will occur in the reporting of highly sensitive stories, when it is we who have sought out a source who may face legal jeopardy or loss of livelihood for speaking with us. Similarly they will occur in approaches to authoritative officials in government who, as a matter of policy, do not speak for attribution. On those occasions, we may use an offer of anonymity as a wedge to make telephone contact, get an interview or learn a fact. In such a case, the reporter should press the source, after the conversation, to go on the record with the newsworthy information that has emerged.

Whenever anonymity is granted, it should be the subject of energetic negotiation to arrive at phrasing that will tell the reader as much as possible about the placement and motivation of the source — in particular, whether the source has firsthand knowledge of the facts.

In any situation when we cite anonymous sources, at least some readers may suspect that the newspaper is being used to convey tainted information or special pleading. If the impetus for anonymity has originated with the source, further reporting is essential to satisfy the reporter and the reader that the paper has sought the whole story.

I could hardly have put it better. Particularly like the bit about "energetic negotiation"—it emphasizes that anonymity is a transaction, that there's a cost borne (by writer, paper, and reader) for the "purchase" of information and that the cost should be mitigated where possible.

Hellsheet goes on to note that there's policy and then there's practice—and Elisabeth Bumiller has already managed to ditch policy in her White House [Love] Letter ("Bush Bursting with Bushy Goodness," or some such title) of just two days ago. And I'll echo Hellsheet's suggestion that you read the article (force yourself), then email Dan Okrent, the Times public editor (link's over there to the right, but it's here too if you're lazy) whether anybody's going to do anything about Bumiller's flouting the new policy. Is this the sort of thing that's only going to be honored in the breach?

posted by michael  1:22:23 PM  
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I've been looking for a balanced, rational account of the Aristide regime and of the causes of its failure. This article by Tom Reeves, though written last September and thus before the recent coup-that's-somehow-not-a-coup, is the best thing I've come across so far.

By the way, one keeps reading of "militant supporters" of Aristide, "street gangs," usually also described with the Haitian word "chimères," as the chief cause of violence in Haiti. Witness, for example, a piece I missed last Friday by Lydia Polgreen ("Day of the Vigilante Stretches On Outside of Haitian Capital"), which takes a kind of grim satisfaction in reporting the torture and death of one such pro-Aristide goon:

After what the thugs did to his son, no punishment seemed harsh enough to Roland Lysias.

Two months ago, loyalists of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide kidnapped his 21-year-old son, Junior, and tortured him, chopping off his hands and feet and poking out his eyes before burning his body, because he had supported a militant opposition group, Mr. Lysias said.

So on Wednesday, when an armed band of vigilantes found the man he said was responsible for his son's death, a pro-Aristide militant known as Tiroro, he watched with satisfaction, he said, as they beat him unconscious, threw gasoline-doused tires around his neck and set him on fire. He described how the chanting and cheering crowd threw rocks at the man's burning body, indifferent to his screams for mercy.

"I asked for justice for my son," Mr. Lysias said, recalling the incident on Thursday. "I feel that now I am starting to see that justice."

The American press is not just universal in its condemnation of the chimères, it's pretty much universal in reducing all support for Aristide to such elements, and in implying that nothing except corruption and thuggery sustained the former regime. I myself find that at least a bit of a stretch, but no matter. The point is: instead of just disapproving of and celebrating the death of thugs, how about some enterprising reporter actually makes an effort to learn directly about the sources of Aristide's support? Is there really nobody in all of Haiti except for violent criminals who regrets, or even has mixed feelings, about Aristide's departure? Why are none of our reporters showing the slightest interest in that side of the story?

posted by michael  5:54:26 PM  
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Spoiling the party. The article Dexter Filkins wanted to write about yesterday's signing of the interim Iraqi constitution ("Iraq Council, With Reluctant Shiites, Signs Charter") doesn't begin until page 2 of the online version:

For 90 minutes on Monday, the mood was high, betraying nothing of the quarrels to come. The 25 Iraqi leaders, many of them scarred by wars and traumas past, gave their names to an expansive document that enshrines human rights and democratic rule as firmly as any constitution in the region.

"This is a great and historic day for Iraq," Adnan Pachachi, a member of the Governing Council, told the crowd that had gathered deep inside the protected confines of the American compound. "This is an Iraqi constitution, made by Iraqis. We have produced a document of which we can all be proud."

With that, the 25 leaders moved to an antique table once used by King Feisal, Iraqi's first monarch, signed the charter and stepped onto a raised platform. As the stage filled, the council stood as the embodiment of the extraordinarily diverse nation, patched together 83 years ago from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, that the interim constitution is meant to hold together.

"An expansive document," the council as "embodiment of the extraordinarily diverse nation," the historical reminiscence of the ruined empire as context for a new democracy—well, God bless America Iraq, land that I love! When Filkins turns in his next couple of grafs to the moment in which Massoud Barzani, head of the Kurdish Democratic Party, switches in his address from Arabic to Kurdish, now one of Iraq's national languages—it's almost enough to make you forget, while you brush away a patriotic tear, that this charade, staged by an American-appointed body deep within concentric layers of American security in the so-called Green Zone, is being played over a document that appears essentially dead on arrival.

But, just as he manages to dictate political terms to Jerry Bremer's discomfort, Ayatollah Sistani's determined to make Dexter Filkins acknowledge reality. Here's the article's actual lead:

Iraq's leaders signed an interim constitution on Monday and agreed to embark on a common path toward democratic rule, but the celebratory mood was dampened by calls from the country's most powerful Shiite leaders to amend the new charter before it goes into force.

The signing ceremony for the interim constitution, delayed once because of terrorist attacks and again because of a political deadlock, unfolded without a hitch inside the fortified confines of the American compound

Filkins does manage to offer a high-flown "common path toward democratic rule," but I hear some pique in that next clause. Can't Sistani even let us throw a nice, phoney-baloney democracy party for ourselves? Just to feel good for a day? Filkins goes on to report that Sistani "released a religious decree later in the afternoon in which he declared that the charter would obstruct an agreement on a permanent constitution" and insisting, once again, on a popularly elected national assembly to approve the interim law. Not in view, still, is any attempt at an examination of the game Sistani is playing, first blocking the signing of the document, then unblocking, now condemning.

As is now typical, the article concludes by noting, in passing, a couple of the most recent and most notable instances of guerilla attacks. I guess it's a measure of the insurgency's success that the bar keeps getting set higher: it takes a good few score of dead now for Iraqi violence to get a story to itself.

posted by michael  3:20:10 PM  
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An Ayatollah's prerogative. According to the Times' Dexter Filkins, anyway, Sistani just plumb changed his mind. Reporting the Iraq Governing Council's approval of an interim constitution, in a version unchanged from the one that appeared blocked on Friday by Shiite demands for revision to the law's super-supermajority approval requirements, Filkins writes:

The change of heart by the Shiite leaders appears to represent a retreat by Ayatollah Sistani, who touched off the impasse last week by expressing his concerns to the Shiite leaders.

Until Sunday, the ayatollah had all but dictated to American officials the terms of such important political questions as elections. Comments by Ayatollah Sistani in January, for instance, scuttled an agreement by which a future Iraqi national assembly would have been selected in a series of nationwide caucuses.

Shiite leaders said Sunday that Ayatollah Sistani had dropped his objections to the interim constitution because he did not want to spoil the Iraqis' opportunity to get a constitution, even an imperfect one.

In other words, Filkins has nothing to explain the turnaround, so he's going to take as "optimistic" a line (in Jerry Bremer terms) about the thing as he can. Sistani has magically "retreated" from dictating terms to the Americans (in spite of there being no evidence on offer to support such an interpretation)—apparently his big ol' heart just got the better of him, and he decided not to "spoil" a nice little historical moment after all. Maybe he's finally coming around to us!

Call me a cynic, but powerful politicians don't simply "retreat" from shows of strength in order to make nice for the sake of the kids. Naturally, I have no insight into what may have changed over the weekend to have caused this reversal—but since it doesn't seem likely that Sistani is any less in a position of power now than he was three days ago, I have to think that somebody, American or Iraqi, who knows? gave him something he wanted. (Unless the holdup was never really intended to put the kibosh on the interim constituion, but was merely a demonstration of what levers Sistani can pull when he wants to. I have to think, though, that the Ayatollah's already amply demonstrated that to the satisfaction of anybody who's paying attention.) Juan Cole notes, from Az-Zaman, that Shiite members of the IGC convened with Sistani over the weekend, "and that 7 of those who supported the Basic Law made promises to him that caused him to relent." No information about those promises. Can't help wondering, though, does that mean that this was an occasion for Sistani to extend his authority over the Shiite political apparatus? That would be the opposite of a retreat, wouldn't it?

I don't think it's too much to ask that Filkins at least gesture toward the realities of whatever political gamesmanship got played out this weekend in Iraq. Or would skepticism diminish the Watershed Moment the Times seems to be anticipating here?

posted by michael  4:53:32 PM  
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Mouthpieces. Completing this weekend's Halbfinger Trifecta, let's note how Times reporters assert one of their privileges of office, namely the proffering of strategic campaign advice. Halbfinger, writing with Richard Stevenson ("Bush Defends 9/11 Ads as Kerry Hits Texas"), ends an otherwise unremarkable he-said-he-said attack-and-response piece by rounding up a pair of man-on-the-street cutouts to make some points John Kerry apparently needs to hear:

The most interesting voices [at a Kerry rally] were those of the smattering of people who said they voted for Mr. Bush in 2000. Jose Silva, 26, a Houston special education teacher and an independent, said he had been turned off by the president's conservatism in office.

"I felt like he ran on a centrist platform, and I thought we needed more integrity in the White House," he said, explaining why he voted for Mr. Bush. "But I don't feel like Bush has represented my interests. He's gone from center to pretty far right on most issues."

Mr. Silva was skeptical that Mr. Kerry could win Texas, but said he had "a chance for a good showing," particularly if he ran with a Southerner and did away with his Northeastern liberal image.

Michael Hatley, 28, a project manager for a local Web design company, said he had voted for Mr. Bush shortly after leaving the Army because he seemed "stronger on national defense, and steadier, and he made Gore out to be a vacillator."

He said he was voting for Mr. Kerry this time because of Mr. Bush's handling of foreign policy. And he described a simple formula for Mr. Kerry to appeal to Texans.

"He's going to have to look real strong, not vacillate on issues," Mr. Hatley said. "He's going to have to run the line between looking like a complainer and looking like a fighter. Texans are going to like strength."

There you go, Senator Kerry, David Halbfinger's given you your marching orders!

Notice also another instance of the inflexible attach-the-meme rule: even though in this case it's Bush's ox that gets gored (so to speak). Last Sunday Elisabeth Rosenthal, whose political reporting seems so far to specialize in the shabby "I've talked to twelve people so I know the state of mind of the masses" piece (sorry—in Rosenthal's psuedo-scientific lingo, that's "dozens of random interviews"), offered up a bunch of Ohioans claiming to be Bush-no-more voters (i.e., voted Dubya in 2000, never again). Is that a meaningful category in this year's electorate? Who knows? It seems like a nice script point, and if it helps Halbfinger make the case for holding Kerry in the center, why not run with it?

posted by michael  6:46:56 PM  
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Journalistic ADD. You might think that an hour-long, wide-ranging interview on foreign affairs given by the presumptive Democratic nominee for the Presidency—his first since becoming the presumptive nominee—might have enough news value to stand on its own. You might think that, if you were writing the interview, you'd do well if you quoted generously, gave readers enough context to allow them to understand the logic of the nominee's positions, and noted as necessary where he veered from fact or avoided issues, where he made dubious criticisms of his opponent, and what his opponent had to say in response. You, however, are not a Professional Political Reporter; David Sanger and David Halbfinger ("Kerry Condemns Bush for Failing to Back Aristide") know better.

First rule of political reporting: everything is always about campaign tactics. Second rule: if there's an unflattering meme currently operative—especially if we're talking about the challenger—always, always give it play. And, while it's not a rule, if you can toss in a sniggering, back-of-the-classroom sort of pun along the way, by all means go for it:

In his first in-depth interview on foreign affairs since effectively winning the Democratic nomination, Mr. Kerry hop-scotched around the world in the course of an hour. He took issue with Mr. Bush's judgment beyond their well-aired differences on Iraq, ... arguing that he would rewrite the Bush strategy that makes pre-emption a declared, central tenet of American policy.

Mr. Kerry is trying a bit of election-season pre-emption of his own, attempting to short-circuit the White House argument that he is too much of a straddler, too indecisive and too captivated by the nuances of foreign policy to defend American interests.

There's no information content in that second quoted graf—but it's not intended to provide information, it's meant to orient your attitude toward Kerry and to illuminate the superiority of the journalistic insider to all this grubby campaign posturing.

By my count, at least nine of the report's thirty-one grafs—almost a third of the piece, most of it a six-graf chunk smack in the middle of the article—are devoted to tactical speculation, all gravitating toward the complex meme: Kerry's suspect braininess, the ripeness of his voting record to Republican oppo.

Mr. Kerry clearly has not yet mastered the Clintonian knack of engagingly breaking down complex problems into simple, accessible terms, no matter his audience. On the campaign trail he regularly indicts the administration's "arrogant, inept, reckless, ideological" foreign policy and warns that "even the United States of America needs a few friends on this planet." ... But when pressed for details, Mr. Kerry can veer into the dry, Latin-heavy jargon of policy journals.

"Latin-heavy"! Jesus, Marge, this guy sounds like one a them intellectuals! What's the matter, Davids, couldn't keep your minds on the subject for that whole hour you had to listen to John Kerry talk?

posted by michael  5:41:34 PM  
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Shame. This is not what Americans do. Goddamn it, it's not what we do. We're supposed to be better than this.

In Abu Sifa, a sunbaked village north of Baghdad, entire swaths of farmland have been cleared of males — fathers, sons, brothers, cousins.

There are no men to do men's work. Women till the fields, guard the houses and hoist sacks of grapefruit on their backs. ...

Iraq has a new generation of missing men. But instead of ending up in mass graves or at the bottom of the Tigris River, as they often did during the rule of Saddam Hussein, they are detained somewhere in American jails.

Although the insurgency has cooled, with suicide attacks against civilians now eclipsing armed clashes with American troops, American forces are still conducting daily raids, bursting into homes and sweeping up families. More than 10,000 men and boys are in custody. According to a detainee database maintained by the military, the oldest prisoner is 75, the youngest 11. ...

Adil Allami, a lawyer with the Human Rights Organization of Iraq, said security detainees had essentially no rights. None have lawyers, and most are denied visits.

"Iraq has turned into one big Guantánamo," Mr. Allami said, referring to the United States military prison in Cuba where hundreds of terrorism suspects are being held, mostly without charges.

The Presidency of George W. Bush is a blight on our national conscience.

posted by michael  4:47:02 PM  
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Quick follow-on to Thursday's post about the coordinated, and foul-smelling, CPA/Centcom effort to score PR points off last week's Ashura bombings by pinning the violence on the newly ubiquitous Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Nice to find my take on the situation seconded by the left-coast Times (Sebastian Rotella, "U.S. Casts Fugitive as a Super-Villain"):

Although Zarqawi has been identified as a central figure in a multiethnic network whose tentacles reach across Europe and the Middle East, his anointment as an all-powerful kingpin troubles some investigators and experts, who say it distorts the nature of the insurgency in Iraq.

An Iraqi anti-terrorist police commander dismissed the claim in the purported Zarqawi letter that he has carried out 25 "martyrdom operations," which would encompass most major attacks here since the fall. "They are always exaggerating about Al Qaeda," said Col. Dhia Hussein of the Baghdad anti-terrorism unit. "No witnesses have come and talked to me about Zarqawi. The only thing is that he is mentioned in the newspapers. And a $10-million reward. Who is this man? … Maybe he exists — such characters exist. But to complete these operations and we don't know, it's impossible." ...

The focus on Zarqawi is part of a political strategy to portray the terrorism threat as essentially foreign and rooted in the Al Qaeda network, thereby downplaying the significance of Iraqi insurgents, critics say. But outsiders could not operate in Iraq's "hostile tribal environment" without local allies, said Mustafa Alani, an Iraq-born expert on terrorism.

And our own, beloved NY Times? Having sold out for a phony "exclusive" on the original, still much-disputed Zarqawi "sectarian war" letter, don't expect the paper of record to indulge any critical impulses. The NYT is a player—evidence and critique are for suckers.

posted by michael  2:09:40 PM  
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Politics of space. (Space as in, space on the front page, not the "mission to Mars" kind.) As an antidote to David "Kerry is the new Gore" Halbfinger's latest atrocity, you may want to take a look at the piece that sits immediately below it on A1: "How Industry Won the Battle of Pollution Control at E.P.A.," by Christopher Drew and Richard A. Oppel, Jr. This is a long, well researched, scrupulous article detailing the "two-year fight inside the Bush administration for dominance between environmental protection and energy production on clean air policy." Wonkish as that makes the piece sound, Drew and Oppel build a revealing, heavily documented case that a cabal of utility companies, major Republican contributors and employers of highly connected Republican lobbyists (Haley Barbour, David Racicot), was given license by the Bush (or should I say the Cheney) administration to essentially gut enforcement of the Clean Air Act:

One of the most important decisions [early in his administration] was Mr. Bush's reversal of a campaign promise to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, a gas that many scientists say contributes to global warming. The administration also has proposed looser standards for emissions of mercury — a highly toxic pollutant — than President Bill Clinton had sought. The most protracted fight concerned the administration's decision to issue new rules that substantially reduced the requirements for utilities to build pollution controls when modernizing their plants. The final policy shift may ultimately help the coal-plant operators shed the lawsuits.

The struggle within the administration, in skirmishes between Cabinet officers and volleys of memorandums, showed how the White House has transformed domestic policy through regulatory revision, rather than more contentious congressional debate.

I can't say this piece comes to me as news, nor will it, really, to anybody that's been paying attention to what's happened at EPA. Still, the care with which the piece is written and the level of inside detail is impressive.

It's that care, and the dispassionate tone of the article, that make it so damning. (It doesn't hurt, either, that the Times features a very large graphic on the jump page detailing the political contributions and emissions records of the six companies making up the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, a utility industry lobbying arm.) And it's clear that the Times editors understand it to be damning, because that's why Halbfinger's nonsense is given pride of place on the front page, above the fold, above the EPA story. It's a prophylactic, as always: our real reporting is going to piss 'em off at the White House, so by all means let's give Karl Rove something to show we're going to play nice on the side he really cares about, the campaign side. Message: The national political desk can be relied on to fling whatever monkey crap the GOPpo boys want to drop in its hand.

posted by michael  6:02:50 PM  
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My name is Michael and I'm a Cardinals fan, in spite of my being happily transplanted to Chicago, not to mention living three blocks from Wrigley Field. (It's eRobin's example at Fact-esque today that encourages me to out myself.) And I'm down with making Opening Day a national holiday, a suggestion Kos mentions. Though I can't help wondering whether the holiday wouldn't, if implemented, mark the official demise of baseball as the actual national pastime—the way that giving jazz a Lincoln Center showcase officially marked its disappearance as a genuinely popular music.

And you know what? Screw the Cubs and Red Sox fans—it's been a long damn twenty-two years since the last time the Cards won a World Series.

posted by michael  1:18:11 PM  
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Full Gore. Second Saturday in a row that A1 has made me do a spit take with my morning coffee.* Today it's David Halbfinger's turn to bow and scrape before the Presence, aka Ed Gillespie of the RNC ("Kerry's Shifts: Nuanced Ideas or Flip-Flops?"). "Throughout his campaign," Halbfinger types, "Mr. Kerry has shown a knack for espousing both sides of divisive issues."

Now with the general-election campaign under way, President Bush and Republicans are already attacking Mr. Kerry for precisely this characteristic. In California this week, the president said Mr. Kerry had "been in Washington long enough to take both sides on just about every issue." And on Friday the Republican National Committee e-mailed to reporters an Internet boxing game called "Kerry vs. Kerry" designed, the committee said, to highlight the senator's "multiple positions on multiple issues."

The e-mail included a list of Mr. Kerry's stances on 30 issues, including many of the examples that were researched in preparation for this article.

Halbfinger's stance today exactly matches Todd Purdum's last Saturday: if the Republicans make an attack, we'll print it. More specifically, we'll take their oppo research, add a little "objectivity," warm it up and serve it under a byline. Does it matter if the attack is true? Does it matter if the "issue" raised in the attack is serious, has any bearing on what policies the attackee will pursue or how we can expect him to bear himself in office? Not remotely. In a press culture where the only thing legitimately of interest in political campaigns is the campaigning itself—where politics is a tactical exercise pure and simple—then when one fighter throws a punch at the other it's news, self-evidently and self-justifyingly.

[It's pretty sad that Halbfinger finds stupid campaign geegaws like a Web-based Kerry "boxing game" charming enough to write about. Bet that one's a triumph of the Flash animator's art. The real travesty, though, is in the second graf of the quote. I was already working on it! Halbfinger protests. Apparently it's a professional point of pride with him that he didn't need any orders to come down from Conservative Command Central—he was all set to do the RNC's oppo work for it without further prompting.]

Just so we're clear: the public record of any Presidential candidate deserves thorough, impartial scrutiny. I expect the Times to subject John Kerry's long career to such scrutiny, to analyze the history of his approach to his public responsibilities, to expose if need be any self-dealing, any avoidance or compromise of those responsibilities. What I don't expect is hagiography, of the sort the Times has been happy to produce when the issue was plumping Kerry as the Establishment choice against Dean; nor do I expect the sort of mindless, contextless, GOP-mandated gotcha! games that Halbfinger descends to today:

When Senator John Kerry was speaking to Jewish leaders a few days ago, he said Israel's construction of a barrier between it and Palestinian territories was a legitimate act of self-defense. But in October, he told an Arab-American group that it was "provocative and counterproductive" and a "barrier to peace."

Is Halbfinger exposing an actual contradiction here? (Seems to me you could make both the reported statements without causing any serious mind-bending to occur, but then I'm not a Professional Political Analyst.) Should we expect a President Kerry to deal incoherently or incompetently or dishonestly with the Palestinian-Israeli conflict (as if that would differ from the approach of the current administration)? To channel Bob Somerby, I don't know, and neither do you. Halbfinger has no interest in asking, much less answering, those questions: he's nakedly playing the GOP hack here. Halbfinger leads his article with Kerry apparently two-facing Jews and Arabs because he knows his audience: Jews, after all, are a significant portion of the Times' readership (not to mention its ownership) and Halbfinger's going to pump up the emotional volume for them. If there's a scummier way to punch an article like this I can't think of it—I guess Halbfinger can't either, or he'd have used it.

There are a couple of points of rhetorical art in Halbfinger's piece that I think I want to highlight, but I'll save that for a later post. Right now I'm still too pissed off to be properly analytic. Let me just point out, before I leave off, that the headline is a perfect distillation of the article's tactics. Notice how "Kerry's Shifts" are offered as simple, acknowledged fact, about which there's nothing to do except determine what that fact implies. And given the family relationship between "nuanced" and the "complex" meme (the subject of last week's lesson), this is pretty much all the interpretive space Halbfinger holds open: "John Kerry: Shifty or Untrustworthy?" Really—at what point does A1 go all the way and adopt "We Report, You Decide" as its new motto?

*Free plug for Chicago's own Intelligentsia Roasters. Best. Coffee. Ever.

posted by michael  12:51:12 PM  
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Meet the new enemy, same as the old enemy. Under the happy-talk headline "Other Attacks Averted in Iraq, a General Says" (which is itself, bizarrely, placed beneath a disturbing photograph of the fully stretched-out body of one of Tuesday's bombing victims being washed for burial—go to Neela Banerjee's story and click in the Multimedia box if you want to see the full, gruesome photo essay), Dexter Filkins and Eric Schmitt give us the official word that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is poppin' out all over:

In Washington, appearing before the House Armed Services Committee, the commander, Gen. John P. Abizaid, said raids by American Special Operations forces and efforts by the Iraqi police against militants associated with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had thwarted a major attack in Basra and car bombs in Karbala and Baghdad, where suicide bombers struck during Shiite religious celebrations on Tuesday.

Mr. Zarqawi, a Jordanian, is suspected by American officials of involvement in several lethal terrorist attacks in Iraq. American officials said they had no hard evidence that he was behind the attacks on Tuesday, though General Abizaid said he suspected that he was. In January, American officials obtained a letter they say was from Mr. Zarqawi that outlined plans to provoke a "sectarian war" against the Shiites, who are in the majority in Iraq.

That "sectarian war" letter sure is popular with the military boys, isn't it? [One wonders whether the Times will take any notice of this NBC news story, from Salon's War Room, claiming that the Bush administration refused several chances to destroy Zarqawi's operation before the Iraq war because it would have undercut the anti-Saddam case. (Josh Marshall posts usefully at TPM about the logic of this.)]

The point is that Zarqawi is the current, officially designated proxy bogeyman for the Wanted-Dead-Or-Alive-One Whose Name Is Never Mentioned—no matter how much of a stretch it is to maintain Zarqawi as a bin Laden cutout. And it's nice to know that in the face of as many as 275 dead in the Tuesday attacks, the heightening of ethnic tension in Iraq, and the prospect of more violence to come, our warriors haven't forgotten their talking points:

In his statement on Wednesday, [L. Paul] Bremer said it was "increasingly apparent that a large part of this terrorism comes from outside the country." That was echoed by Iraqi officials and by officials in Washington. ... Senior American officials had pointed on Tuesday at Mr. Zarqawi as the main suspect in the attacks, a suspicion that General Abizaid amplified Wednesday. "The level of organization and the desire to cause casualties among innocent worshipers is a clear hallmark of the Zarqawi network, and we have intelligence that ties Zarqawi to this attack," he said. Speaking to reporters after the hearing, General Abizaid added, "I personally believe there is no doubt that Zarqawi is behind this."

Way to keep that al-Qaeda-in-Iraq flag flying, boys! It may be tattered, but if you can earn Dear Leader any points by holding it aloft, well, by God, you've done your job.

posted by michael  6:11:18 PM  
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Concussed. No, not actually. On the other hand, a ceiling tile did crash down on my head rather suddenly yesterday afternoon during a hallway discussion, and left me with a massive headache, now thankfully subsiding. I suspect that the tile dislodgement was the work of my nefarious Republican enemies—the discussion, after all, was about progressive politics. (I work for an ad agency, where I'm normally the Web software guy. As it happens, we're pitching a significant campaign focused on moving progressivism—thought of as a political tendency or identity—into mainstream discourse. I probably shouldn't say any more than that about it for the time being. Anyway, in spite of being tech boy here, I'm serving as our strategist for the pitch because I'm such a big big leftist. Possibly the only time in my life when having a training in Marxist theory will prove a business advantage.)

This is by way of apologizing in advance to my literally dozen of readers if posting here is light for the next few days. I'm going to try to keep a daily schedule, but the pitch work is moving into high gear and I may not be able to. That, plus the fact that I have to keep stuffing my brains back into that new soft place in my skull ...

posted by michael  9:27:34 AM  
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You say tomato. Once in a while, even a newspaper as powerful as the Times has to bend to the yoke of reality. In the case of Haiti, for instance: things just don't seem willing quite as yet to follow the Administration-approved line that A1 has been peddling the last few days, about how we've saved Haiti by securing Jean-Bertrand Aristide's "resignation." Yesterday, Lydia Polgreen and Tim Weiner offered a vividly skeptical account of the entry of Haitian rebels (think of them as reanimated Tontons Macoutes) into Port-au-Prince ("Haitian Rebels Enter Capital; Aristide Bitter"—the headline's diagnosis of Aristide's emotional state is laughable, but has little to do with the story):

The rebels, followed by throngs of cheering supporters, ... occupied the former headquarters of the Haitian Army, vowing to revive the military, a force known for brutality. Several rebel leaders are former members of the Haitian Army and affiliated death squads.

The army overthrew Mr. Aristide in 1991 and ran a violent junta until 1994. United States armed forces reinstated the president, who then disbanded the Haitian military. ... Mr. Powell told CNN: "We have ways of talking to the various rebel leaders. And I am pleased that at least so far they said they are not interested in violence any more, and they want to put down their arms."

They did not put down their guns.

Two rebel leaders, Louis-Jodel Chamblain, a former death-squad member and convicted assassin, and Guy Philippe, a former police chief, did thank the United States for moving to secure Haiti after the fall of Mr. Aristide. ... These men, whom Mr. Powell characterized last week as "thugs," and a few hundred of their followers are for now the domestic face of national security in Haiti.

Today, Polgreen and Weiner are back with a piece ("Rebel Says He Is in Charge; Political Chaos Deepens") claiming that Haiti is slipping into anarchy and possible military rule:

In the absence of any other authority, Haiti seemed to be falling into the clutches of a self-appointed armed junta. Although American officials denounced the armed rebels and said they should have no role in ruling Haiti, the Americans did not take steps to confront them.

Col. David H. Berger, the Marine Corps commander here, said his troops would not act as police officers. "I have no instructions to disarm the rebels," he said.

Polgreen and Weiner note the disappearance of the acting Haitian U.S. stooge President, Boniface Alexandre, and approvingly quote Robert Pastor, director of the Center for Democracy and Election Management at American University, as saying "There is no state" now existing in Haiti.

Contrast this honorable work with David E. Sanger and Christopher Marquis's lazy attempt at refuting the claim that Aristide was deposed by the U.S. at gunpoint ("State Dept. Denies Leader Was Forced Out of Office"). I'll spare you the details; enough to know that, based on extensive interviews with ... er ... the American ambassador and the depty chief of mission who "escorted" Aristide to the airport, we can be assured that nothing untoward happened. [Though on second thought I can't forbear quoting this touching moment of human contact in the chaos, in which Deputy Chief of Mission Luis Moreno offers his condolences to Aristide:

"I'm sorry this had to end his way," Mr. Moreno said.

The official described Mr. Aristide's reply as almost wistful: "That happens in life. That's the way it ends sometime."

Pardon me while a brush away a tear ...]

What's interesting about this piece is something you can't see online. In my dead-tree edition of the paper, the article is accompanied by a pull quote—except that it's not a pull quote, because the text that's pulled doesn't occur in the piece. It looks for all the world like a sardonic aside about the Times' semi-official "hard shove" line, as if some lonely voice of dissent had briefly hijacked the page:

What Aristide calls a coup, the U.S. calls forceful persuasion

Seems about right. You say tomato, I say coup d'état ...

posted by michael  9:55:20 AM  
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Dept. of WTF?? (Special Senate edition, part 2) Is there anyone, anyone at all, who can explain to me why Katharine Seelye is blowing a big wet kiss at "Viagra" BobDole today from A1? Flash: BobDole is working as an election-night pundit! And the "political cognoscenti" think he's just absolutely the bee's knees.

[Robert Norton] Smith, the former director of the Dole Institute, said it was important to Mr. Dole to stay relevant.

"For Dole, he has always wanted to stay contemporary," Mr. Smith said. "He's so square, he's hip. That's part of his appeal."

The article's just chock-full of unbiased, unclichéd insights like that!

Kit apparently wants us to admire Viagra Bob's vitality, "still career-hopping at age 80," offering us this breathless summary of his recent activity:

It is not clear where he finds the time to watch so much television. [That, she's just told us, is where Bob does all his pundit research.] He is special counsel to a Washington law firm, Alston & Bird. One of his clients is the president of Indonesia, where he has traveled recently. He was in Moscow last month, helping someone get a visa. That trip coincided with the Virginia and Tennessee primaries, so Mr. Dole was ready at 5 A.M. Moscow time for CNN to beam him back to the states.

Mr. Dole has also embarked on a speaking tour, underwritten by Pfizer, the drug company, to explain the new Medicare prescription drug benefit. He has scheduled stops in both Ohio and Florida, important states in the November election, but he says these stops are not campaign swings for President Bush. He is a consultant to Pfizer, maker of Viagra, which he has promoted in commercials.

What a feisty old guy, huh? Shilling up and down the country for Big Pharma at his age, and probably for no more than millions of dollars in fees annually. (Nice to see that Pfizer is out there helping explain that new drug benefit to seniors, so they don't get any wrong messages about it.) That's selflessness for ya! So much more admirable, isn't it Kit, than the stuff some ex-politicians are into ...

I repeat: why is this steaming pile of crap defacing my front page?

posted by michael  5:22:17 PM  
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It's true. I never see them trading jokes at the Senate water cooler or anything. Yesterday Adam Nagourney tried to read John Edwards' (still entirely speculative) Vice-Presidential fate in the angle of arch of John Kerry's eyebrow. Today, Sheryl Gay Stolberg has (if it were possible) an even more incisive, richly informed take on the whole raging do-you-think-they-don't-like-each-other? debate:

They live a block away from each other in Georgetown, the capital's ritziest address. They have the same job and the same first name. They have turned to the same political consultant and have strikingly similar voting records.

Yet in the clubby world of the Senate, John Kerry of Massachusetts and John Edwards of North Carolina have hardly become fast friends.

That's it. All that stuff about how a Kerry/Edwards ticket is currently beating the pants off Bush/Cheney? Those things us naive commoners tend to believe, about how Vice Presidential nominees are chosen based on geographic and demographic calculation, on what will and won't make a strong ticket? Out the window. Professional Political Analyst Stolberg has the distressing scoop: These guys not only work together, they have the same first name, for God's sake, and they're still not bosom pals! (I know I'm certainly fast friends instantly, myself, with anyone I meet named Michael.) How can they ever have the special love that only exists between a Pres and his Vice?

Of course, maybe all is not lost. Stolberg ends her piece wryly, almost but not quite resolving to the tonic major:

In May 2002, when the presidential campaign was just beginning, Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards traveled to South Carolina for a weekend of politicking, and were invited to spend the night at the home of Jim Hodges, then the governor. ... "There was some concern that if one of them stayed, the other one may not want to," recalled Mr. Hodges, who took pains to house the two senators in rooms at opposite ends of the 16,000-square-foot mansion. But, he said, he need not have worried.

Mr. Hodges said that he and the two candidates stayed up until 2 a.m., sitting in rocking chairs on the mansion's front porch, overlooking the palmetto trees and enjoying the balmy night air.

"We talked long into the night about a variety of different political topics, political interests that we had," Mr. Hodges said, adding that there was no evidence of tension between the two.

Then again, Mr. Hodges said, "I don't recall either of them saying when they left, `Gee, I really would like that guy to be my vice president.' "

Ah, the palmettos, the rocking chairs on the porch, the balmy night air! Mmmm, that's good scene-painting. Nice to know the two Senators didn't start hissing and spitting and spraying on the mansion carpet when they saw each other.

Is there any depth of triviality to which A1 doesn't plan to sink in 2004? From the looks of it, I'm guessing no.

posted by michael  3:18:24 PM  
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At the sound of the tone ... Reaction is available from a variety of quarters to yesterday's Dem debate—Fact-esque, watching Elisabeth Bumiller, offers a generously excerpted discussion of the show, and Wonkette has a briefer but sharper account of "the worst debate performance since Nixon sweated through his makeup" (she's talking about Bumiller, not any of the candidates). I don't usually watch debates, even the big general-election ones, because basically I've yet to see a candidates debate that wasn't just a lot of useless hoo-ha (to use a sophisticated critical term), so there's not much I can say directly on point.

But if anything substantial was on offer in the debate, you wouldn't know it from reading the Times. Two whole reporters—Robin Toner on the news side, Adam Nagourney on news analysis—are on the case, and neither of them can find a damn thing to say except that the debate was "feisty" and that there were "sharp exchanges" between Kerry and Edwards. That's Toner's lead:

Two days before the biggest round of Democratic primaries and caucuses this year, Senator John Edwards repeatedly challenged the party's front-runner, Senator John Kerry, on a variety of fronts yesterday in the most contentious Democratic debate in months;

and it's the center of Nagourney's piece, in which he reveals his "analytic" ability to read John Kerry's emotional state:

At first, Mr. Kerry smiled and shrugged off [Edwards'] attacks. They seemed in keeping with a debate that often verged on chaos, with questioners and candidates alike struggling for their moment on television. ... But by the end of the hour, Mr. Kerry could barely hide his irritation at Mr. Edwards, and relations between them seemed chilly as they said goodbye and headed out of the studio.

Nagourney seems to find this state of affairs worrying; presumably it undercuts his preferred script for the remainder of the Democratic nomination process:

Before this weekend, Mr. Edwards had managed to walk a delicate line of being a credible and respected candidate, even as he lost contest after contest. He was able to accomplish that as he displayed his considerable skills as a campaigner.

Mr. Edwards presented himself as a high-road candidate who was seeking to change the political dialogue by running an upbeat campaign, saving most of his attacks for Mr. Bush and helping the Democrats form a unified front against the Republicans.

If Mr. Edwards wants his party's vice presidential nomination — he said vigorously on Sunday that he did not, though those kind of assertions tend to be forgotten come convention time — the tenor of his attacks could make him a less attractive running-mate.

There's nothing Adam Nagourney likes to worry about more than "tenor," or "tone," at least when it comes to Democrats. Is Edwards going to turn out to be a divider, not a uniter? And what can he be thinking, actually challenging the frontrunner in a debate? A political analyst as astute as Adam Nagourney knows, of course, that Presidential nominees only ever pick running mates they like a lot personally, and who have never criticized them.

And while we're on the subject of tone, let's not forget Robin Tone-r. (OK, I had to do that.) Witness this lovely graf, which comes right after Toner admits that, yes, Kerry and Edwards found themselves in agreement rather often during the debate:

Still, the overall tone ... was a shift from weeks of relative civility in the Democratic field. And the other two candidates in the race, the Rev. Al Sharpton and Representative Dennis J. Kucinich of Ohio, pushed themselves into the fray, resisting any effort by the panel of questioners to focus the debate on Mr. Kerry and Mr. Edwards.

"Civility" is a word, much promoted of late by the disinterested likes of David Brooks, that's intended to be hard-wired to the "off" switch in reporters' brains, and it does its job here. Not only are we supposed to believe that candidates criticizing each other in debate is some kind of breach of civility—instead of, you know, being the reason you have debates in the first place—Toner doesn't give us even a moment to get a fix on that idiocy before suggesting that Sharpton and Kucinich were being "pushy" and thus by implication demonstrating incivility themselves. "Resisting any effort to focus the debate," that just sounds so unreasonable, so ...childish, doesn't it?

If Sharpton and Kucinich—particularly Sharpton, who gets in a few pretty good licks in his exchange with Bumiller—have to throw a couple of elbows to actually speak in a debate to which they were invited, and which they hope will win them votes: is that uncivil or indecorous behavior on their part? Or is it an artifact of the extraordinary, persistent disrespect that journalist debate moderators have shown Democratic candidates (major and minor) throughout the primary season? Shall we mention Larry "That's socialism!" King's recent performance, or Ted "Show of hands" Koppel's before him? But read Toner's report: you'd barely know there were any questioners present at this thing, much less that their behavior might be at issue. She's not writing a media story, after all.

posted by michael  6:59:51 PM  
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