Friday cat blogging. Meet Nadine ...




posted by michael  11:25:13 AM  
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Imagine my surprise that a five-month-old post (after I've been all but AWOL for so long) should have generated a comment—and even more that the commenter should be an aggrieved NY Times reporter.

Back in July, I wrote about Kurt Eichenwald's Sunday A1 interview with Ken Lay, then just about to be indicted for Enron crimes and misdemeanors. I followed up, post-indictment, with Eichenwald's piece on Lay's appearance before the press in his defense. Yesterday, Eichenwald wrote the following in reaction to the second post:

I posted another comment on your other attack, which was so loaded with falsehoods it is ridiculous. But it didn't post because I didn't enter my email address. Oh, well. It is not worth going to the trouble again. I'll just make my point about your sloppiness here.

You attack me on this one for leading with Lay's defense on the day of his indictment. True, that is what we did. Why could that be? Hmmmm...

OH!! I KNOW!!! Because the morning of his surrender, anyone picking up the New York Times would have seen my 1,900 word exlusive story laying out in excruciating detail what ever charge was going to be, what meetings and statements they involved, what witnesses had said to the grand jury, etc, etc.

Now, my editors and I might be wrong, but we figured that readers might be interested in reading new developments on our second day story, rather than us simply reprinting what we had published the day before. But apparently, some readers don't bother to read the paper -- even those who analyze it.

And it wasn't like this first story was hard to find. It was above the fold on page 1 of the front section. You know, the page that you are supposedly analyzing?

Whoops.

Sorry for the snotty tone. But people in any profession who do lazy, half-hearted jobs on gathering the facts, then take out the blow-torch on the attack, really hack me off. That's why they call that blogging. And why what I do is called journalism.

[By the way, I want to make it clear that this is a comment posted to the site, and hence public, not a private email to me, which I would not have printed without permission.]

Here's my email in reply, which contains a minor apology, but which I post here mainly because it goes to the reasons I undertook this blog project:

Dear. Mr. Eichenwald:

I'm sorry for your initial difficulty with the comments feaure; I appreciate your providing me with an email address for response.

I've reviewed both of the posts in question. As to the first, responding to your interview with Ken Lay, my point was that you (and the Times) were practicing what amounted to celebrity journalism—a compromised form at best, which the context rendered odious. I am unaware of having written any falsehoods: as a way of illustrating the compromises intrinsic to the genre, I offered speculation about the circumstances of your interview with Lay based, as I stated in the post, not on evidence but on a calculation of the probabilities. If I speculated in error I am, of course, happy to be educated on what I got wrong, and will post any necessary correction. I doubt that I'm going to learn anything that will vitiate my main point, but I won't prejudge the case.

As to the second, follow-up post: I'm afraid you've misread, though I can see that I may have invited that misreading. I did not mean to suggest that the article in question was your or the paper's only coverage of the Lay indictment. I was not "attacking" the fact that you led with Ken Lay's press appearance in his defense on the second day of the indictment story. The point of the post was to indicate what I saw in the tenor of the piece—and still see—as seriously misplaced sympathy for a man who did enormous damage to people who didn't deserve it, and who appears entirely unrepentant. There's a hero-izing tendency in its focus on Lay that I find, well, icky. It seemed an object lesson in how the compromises which I read in the earlier interview might well ramify into news coverage. However, I partially made that point by contrasting your piece with a more by-the-numbers summary article in the Washington Post, which doesn't really make an apples-to-apples comparison. In that respect, I agree that my post can be called sloppy, and I apologize.

As for the moral superiority of journalists to bloggers: I make no claim to be practicing journalism, and never have, so I'll just sidestep that tiresome little debate. What I'm doing is a form of literary criticism, the discipline in which I am professionally trained. My effort has been to read the paper as it represents itself, in what it chooses to publish, in order to understand its place in our public life. I'm not engaged in a fact-gathering enterprise. I make no apologies for using a range of literary devices, including speculation and hyperbole, in developing my observations. As a critic, my sole responsibility is to read the text before me, and to report on what I find in it, as honestly as I can.

I will confess, I hesitated a moment or two before sending this reply, which contained my full name and email address and thus to that extent puts me at the mercy of Kurt Eichenwald's discretion. Maybe that was the intended chilling effect of the nasty business conducted a couple of months ago by Dan Okrent and Adam Nagourney. But I guess that's why they call what I do blogging, and what those guys do journalism.

posted by michael  3:30:43 PM  
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The conclusion seems inescapable: Bernie Kerik's not just an asshole, he's mobbed up.


posted by michael  11:00:05 AM  
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Coming a little late to this one, but Chris Suellentrop's Wednesday MoveOn-bash in Slate just demands a shorter version:

Having organized thousands of like-minded people over the last six years to donate time and money to phone-banking during elections, lobbying Congress on legislative and regulatory issues, and to getting issue ads on the air, MoveOn has conclusively demonstrated that it has no real interest in practical politics.

Suellentrop, of course, is just carrying water for the Joementum® Democrats—the DLC types for whom no politics can really be called politics if it doesn't involve parties with corporate donors, and who are currently waging a heroic post-election struggle to purge the Democratic party of all those nasty Democrats it's infected with.

posted by michael  4:05:15 PM  
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Danforth resigns; breaks with Bush over Sudan. No, that's not the headline you'll read over Warren Hoge's inner-page piece today on John Danforth's resignation after less than six months as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. ("Diplomats at U.N. Surprised by Danforth's Resignation"). But let's see if we can get to it by applying an appropriate hermeneutic of suspicion to the article. As in much of what the Times publishes about diplomacy, the key here is the principle that the truth of the matter cannot be spoken (to the extent that it would discomfit those in power), but must nevertheless be unspoken in such a way as to leave a clear imprint of its shape.

So, first we have the official fiction: Johnny D.'s in love. Stricken with a mysterious onset of uxoriousness, he's going back home to be with "the girl of his dreams" (Danforth's words, in his resignation letter): "there are many people who can be United States ambassador to the U.N.," his spokesman claims Danforth told him, "but there is only one person who can be Sally Danforth's husband." Notice the straight face with which Hoge demonstrates just how thinly motivated the official fiction really is:

The Danforths, who were childhood neighbors, married during Mr. Danforth's junior year at Princeton. Mrs. Danforth suffered a fall last year [i.e., well before Danforth was made ambassador], and on some of the social outings she was obliged to attend in New York, she sometimes wore a tennis shoe to cushion a slight limp.

And indeed, Danforth's explanation for resigning is obviously intended not to be believed. Then there's the official unofficial fiction, which occupies most of Hoge's piece. Hoge introduces it, a telltale sign of this sort of fiction, by sourcing the ether:

There was speculation that Mr. Danforth, a former Republican senator from Missouri and an Episcopal minister known for blunt statements, had become frustrated with the bureaucratic inaction of the United Nations and the need to clear statements with Washington. An acquaintance said Mr. Danforth's wife had often told friends, "Jack's not a yes man."

(It's a neat touch, that last sentence, quoting the wife of the official fiction to back up the unofficial fiction.) The fact that Hoge then brings on Danforth's spokesman to deny the "speculation" confirms, in the up-is-down style of these things, that this is the story that official Washington expects to be operative. Most of the article expands on the notion that the resignation is, at bottom, a protest about rhetorical style: blunt-spoken Jack Danforth just couldn't be comfortable in his U.N. role.

Mr. Danforth brought a refreshing directness to the convoluted conversational style of the United Nations. On Nov. 23 - the day after he had sent his resignation letter - he let his impatience with the United Nations show in an unusually brash denunciation of a move in the General Assembly to cut off a motion that would have criticized human rights violations in Sudan, which the United States has called genocide. ... In a speech last month in St. Louis, according to Reuters, Mr. Danforth said that as a former senator, he was not accustomed to having a policy statement vetted by State Department bureaucrats and transformed into "mush" before he could issue it. "It creates some practical problems," he said.

Other than on hermeneutic principle—and noting the convenience of both the U.N. and State serving as fall guys—why should we think this tale is false? Because it takes such pains to rewrite the Sudan portion of the story introduced in Hoge's lead paragraphs, which in fact tell you (by implication) all you really need to know:

The resignation of John C. Danforth as the United States ambassador to the United Nations came as a surprise to people at the world body who had witnessed Mr. Danforth in robust exchanges in the Security Council chamber and had noted his commitment to drawing attention to Sudan.

In a letter to President Bush dated Nov. 22, Mr. Danforth, 68, said he had decided to return to private life in St. Louis before the beginning of the president's second term on Jan. 20.

A few questions here: Why is surprise at Danforth's resignation situated with U.N. diplomats, people familiar with his presence in the assembly, if frustration with the U.N. is in fact to blame? Why has Hoge failed to elicit any Administration reaction at all in his article, even of pro forma praise for the ambassador? Why should the resignation—which, as Hoge fails to point out, is dated the day before the "no action" motion on the Sudan that so upset Danforth—be specifically timed with respect to the start of Bush's second term?

Here, as I've said, is the outline of the truth Hoge is responsible for writing around and over. The only story that fits this outline is that Danforth's resignation is a protest—not against the U.N. or State Department bureaucrats (the notion is falsified simply by Hoge's having supported it), but against the Bush Administration, against its unwillingness to expend any but rhetorical resources on the Sudan genocide and on what I expect (taking into account the date on that resignation letter) must have been its acquiescence or complicity in killing the Sudan resolution Danforth had worked so hard to pass. A good Republican soldier, Danforth—to his discredit, it has to be said—won't publicize his break with the Administration; but it's there to see, underneath the black and white, for anybody who cares to look.

posted by michael  3:50:42 PM  
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And I, for one, want to welcome our new insect overlords. Two days running, A1 has published big below-the-fold air kisses to Dear Leader. Today (the front-page scan is here) it's "A White House Postcard" (a caption that applies to the series), with Waura in Santa Claus red displaying her best come-hither rictus before some seasonal decorations. Yesterday, it was God's Own President himself, striding manfully at the front of a group (or pack) of advisers and his dog, Buddy (scan here, larger image here; see if you can tell which one's the lapdog), bearing the genuinely nauseating caption, "After a Visit to Good Friends in Canada, a Welcome Home from a Best Friend." I myself think that "Damnit, Condi, I Said Heel!" might have worked better.

More evidence of just how low the Times will go to suck around for Presidential favor when it's on the outs.

posted by michael  2:19:15 PM  
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The right man for the job. Still sort of in Devil's Dictionary mode, I'd describe the chief requirement for the job of secretary of homeland security as, hyper-vigilance toward any and all terrorism threats that could be promoted to advance Republican interests. Given his ability, as I noted in this post from April, to see the terror implications of low-cost drug reimporting from Canada, I really think that Bernie Kerik—the "street-savvy former New York City police commissioner," to borrow Richard Stevenson's hardboiled lead on today's A1—makes an inspired replacement for Tom Ridge. (By the way, Richard, how exactly does Kerik's "street savvy" play into this new post? Is he planning on splitting his time between his desk in D.C. and walking the beat in Peshawar?)

Also from the Times article, it's nice to see that Chuck Schumer, rapidly earning the title of the Great Oppositionist, gets it:

"If there were ever a state that deserved to have one of its citizens appointed head of homeland security it's New York," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, a Democrat, who spoke with Mr. Kerik on Thursday night to congratulate him. "New York should always be the focal point of homeland security activities, and Bernie Kerik is a tried and true New Yorker who understands our city, our state, our problems and our needs. We look forward to working with him to bring greater help in terms of dollars and security for New York."

Eyes on the prize, Chuck: the really crucial thing about Bush's homeland security pick is the opportunity it presents you to grab some pork.

posted by michael  11:29:55 AM  
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A useful adjective. I run Web development projects for a living, and it occurred to me the other day—looking at a proposed development schedule—that the disaster in Iraq may have given the world of planning and strategy a new term of art, viz., Rumsfeldian:

Rumsfeldian, adj., e.g., a Rumsfeldian plan. 1) Requiring an exquisite arrangement of best-case outcomes to produce success. 2) By extension, doomed to catastrophic failure from an unwillingness to consider worst-case outcomes.

posted by michael  2:02:07 PM  
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