SmartRemarks

David Brooks, throughout his long history as a pundit, consistently seems to love drawing sweeping generalizations from just a handful of anecdotal examples. Sometimes even just one. In his latest column, he’s resorted to using an imaginary one.

Brooks retells the fable of the ant and the grasshopper through an imaginary middle-American voter he calls “Ben.” Ben is the ant. Ben came from a broken home, but “worked hard” and got “decent grades” and went to a couple of mediocre colleges to study hotel management, in which field he’s worked for the past 20 years, only to find himself increasingly disenchanted with America’s political culture… in a fashion, Brooks imagines, that’s manifested in last Tuesday’s primary results, in which incumbents of both parties got a drubbing. (IMHO a well-deserved one; I was delighted to see Joe Sestak take down Arlen Specter, to see Bill Halter force Blanche Lincoln into a runoff. Even Rand Paul’s victory in Kentucky bodes well from certain angles. And the victory in PA-12’s special election, where Mark Critz (D) defeated Tim Burns (R) in a district that actually swung for McCain in ‘08, was a pleasant surprise that confounded lots of pundits.)

But since Brooks is making up the example to suit his predetermined thesis, he gets to ignore inconvenient realities. His little fable elides quiet a few along the way, some of them rather significant…

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: centrism, conservatism, David Brooks, media, voting

Just a quick observation prompted by events in recent weeks. These events are unrelated, yet they form a pattern. Together, they put Washington on the hot seat and shine a spotlight on its (questionable) ability to act in the public interest.

Specifically, if…

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Congress, Constitution, energy, government, immigration, media, Senate, Wall Street

And no one told me when to run… that’s for damn sure.

New Year’s came and went without me writing a blog post. I was preoccupied with other things at the time, as detailed to some extent in my last couple of entries bookending my computer headaches. But I did make some observations that I think are still worth mentioning, as both the year and the decade rolled over and restarted.

I’m well aware, of course, that both our calendar year and the decades into which we assemble them are completely arbitrary human constructs, and that there’s nothing metaphysically significant about the transition from one random chronological marker to another, despite all the cultural baggage we attach to them. Nevertheless, one of the central components of human consciousness is our capability for pattern recognition, and the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century definitely displayed some patterns that are, at the very least, psychologically meaningful.

To put it all in a nutshell… this past decade sucked. Big time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: 2009, 2010, climate, George W. Bush, government, internet, journalism, Mark Morford, media, Obama, progress, the future

The Chicago Reader is a local institution. It dates back to 1971, one of the oldest free weekly papers in the country (preceded by the Village Voice and perhaps one or two others). And it’s been near and dear to my heart since I first moved to Chicago in the mid ’80s. It always provided a reliable weekly dose of irreverent local commentary and, more importantly, it was the clearinghouse for information on what was going on around town where and when, and whether it was worth your attention.

Then, two years ago, it was sold to Tampa’s Creative Loafing media company. It’s been downhill ever since.

Yesterday, after a lengthy court battle, the Reader changed ownership again… in bankruptcy court. And what happens next… is anybody’s guess.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Chicago, Chicago Reader, internet, journalism, media

Chuck Todd is the White House correspondent for NBC News. He is, frankly, one of the smartest political analysts on network TV—certainly he was among the best covering last year’s elections.

And yet… events this week make it clear that Chuck Todd has no faith in the American justice system, has no confidence in the democratic process, and doesn’t even trust mass-media journalism—his own profession—to do anything for public discourse other than debase it. Apparently even a top-level practitioner of the Beltway media establishment still can’t help but embody its worst systemic flaws.

This all arose when Chuck was on MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Tuesday discussing AG Eric Holder’s possible appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate Bush administration war crimes (as I wrote about here). Salon’s Glenn Greenwald jumped all over Chuck’s casually dismissive remarks about the idea, and Chuck (to his credit) agreed to a detailed interview with Glenn. The results were very revealing, and very discouraging.

Here are excerpts (all emphases mine) from what Chuck said on Tuesday…

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Chuck Todd, DOJ, Eric Holder, Glenn Greenwald, John Yoo, journalism, media, torture

Where did we leave off? 

I was writing about the difficulty of finding something meaningful to say in the wake of all the full-time, professional political bloggers out there. Too often I feel like I’m just offering a synthesis of what others have said, rather than any new insight.

Perhaps I’m holding myself to an arbitrarily high standard. Posting seems easier on political discussion forums, where I can just spout off some quick impressions of the issue of the day without necessarily worrying about providing proper background and context for everything, and where the ebb and flow of responses from other posters guides the structure and flow of the discussion, rather than having to organize it entirely on my own. Nonetheless, I ramble on… 

Thus:  I was also writing about the political environment in which the Obama administration operates, and the political pressures that have led the president to make some decisions that are very disappointing in the eyes of civil libertarians, and indeed of concerned citizens in general. Which, in the wake of events this past week relating to the disposition of prisoners at Guantanamo and elsewhere, leads us to the perplexing questions:

Why has Barack Obama backtracked so quickly from so many of the progressive policy expectations of his supporters?

and, moreover,

WHY does the mass media keep treating Dick Cheney as a credible public figure?

One of these questions may seem deeply relevant, the other facile… but the answers are connected at a deep level.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: blogging, climate, Congress, conservatism, Constitution, Dick Cheney, energy, Guantanamo, health care, international, journalism, libertarianism, media, Obama, Reid, Republicans, torture

My recent posts on Star Trek brought me more readers than anything else I’ve written in months, but unfortunately I don’t have anything new to say about that right now.

My posts about politics, by contrast, usually draw markedly less traffic than the ones about pop culture. Nevertheless, I enjoy the topic, and certainly don’t intend to stop writing about it.

The problem with writing about politics, however, is perhaps the same one that leaves my readership diminished:  there’s already so much other good political analysis out there in the blogosphere. The conventional wisdom found in the corporate media punditocracy, especially on television, is seldom worth the attention of thinking people, of course… but while it’s easy enough to ignore David Broder or Chris Matthews, David Brooks or Joe Klein, there’s a lot of genuinely sharp, insightful political commentary being done online these days. It often seems that by the time I’ve informed myself sufficiently about some new development to form an opinion, Glenn Greenwald or Jane Hamsher or Digby or any of a dozen others has already said everything I could, in pithier style and with better documentation.

(And then there are the folks spouting off from the other side, whose arguments are seldom as thorough but frequently much more infuriating. They too make demands on one’s time. Or, as one of my favorite cartoons puts it…) ->>

So it’s hard to keep on top of breaking news… but looking back later to consolidate information and analysis isn’t necessarily easier (think “drinking from a fire hose”), and still leaves me wondering whether such reflections really offer any fresh insight.

—

Here’s a For Instance. For several weeks now, I’ve been meaning to write about the subject of the OLC torture memos, and the furor both before and after their release, in light of how it reflects on the Obama administration’s lamentable hesitancy to repudiate some of the worst excesses of the previous administration. Let’s review.

Way back on March 3, things were looking good. On the very same day it was revealed that the CIA, back in 2005, had deliberately destroyed 92 interrogation videotapes in violation of a court order… we also learned that Attorney General Eric Holder had not only formally denounced waterboarding but also released nine previously secret Bush-era memos, in which John Yoo and other OLC apparatchiks asserted remarkable expansions of executive power, such as (e.g.) that the president’s “power to suspend treaties is wholly discretionary,” and that the Fourth Amendment (prohibiting search and seizure without probable cause) does not apply to domestic military operations. 

The ACLU (which had filed FOIA requests on both the videotapes and the memos) hailed the release, but insisted that for a full accounting of the previous administration’s excesses, “dozens” of other even more incendiary memos still needed to be released. And less than three weeks later, it appeared that at least some of them would be forthcoming, as on March 21 Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball reported that

Over objections from the U.S. intelligence community, the White House is moving to declassify—and publicly release—three internal memos [from 2005] that will lay out, for the first time, details of the “enhanced” interrogation techniques approved by the Bush administration…

And that’s when the shit really hit the fan.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Dick Cheney, Eric Holder, international, media, morality, Obama, OLC memos, Republicans, torture

Dick Cheney’s been all over the mass media lately, defending the past administration’s record on torture in interviews on Sunday talk shows like “Face the Nation” and on Fox News, and in speeches at friendly venues like the American Enterprise Institute. When media outlets aren’t talking to him they’re talking about him, in numerous “think pieces” in the written press and today on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation.”

From the point of view of the Democratic party, of course, you could hardly ask for a better spokesperson for the opposition. He’s even less lovable than Rush Limbaugh. Short of enlisting Darth Vader, the GOP couldn’t find a better way to push its public approval numbers down toward the single digits.

But much of the public discussion seems to be focused around the question of whether it’s “appropriate” for a former Vice President to be so outspoken in criticizing the current administration. And that question fundamentally misunderstands what’s actually going on here.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Dick Cheney, media, Republicans

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Obama’s address tonight may well have been the first presidential speech I’ve ever seen that genuinely lived up to the full meaning of the word “presidential.” The first time in my life we’ve had real, effective leadership in Washington. So this is what it looks and sounds like!

It’s sincerely heartening these days, of course, just to hear a presidential speech delivered in complete, grammatical sentences, shorn of angry fearmongering and brazen paralogia. But Obama had to achieve far more than that. He had a tightrope to walk, having to avoid being too doom-n-gloomy (and thereby get accused of talking down the economy) but also avoid making unrealistically rosy promises (and thereby get accused of empty politicking). The times we are in are indeed, as he phrased it, “difficult and perilous,” yet he had to make clear that they are not insurmountably so.

He pulled it off.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: Bill Kristol, economy, education, energy, financial crisis, George Lakoff, health care, media, Obama, polling, Rachel Maddow, Republicans, State of the Union

It’s a nice refreshing tingly feeling, isn’t it, to watch a president who clearly not only understands complex economic concepts, but is even capable of boiling them down into simplified versions for the press? (Even if he’s occasionally visibly frustrated by the need to do so.) Bush always came across as just barely in command of the PowerPoint version of reality some adviser had walked him through, and painfully incapable of going into greater depth about anything.

The corporate media, of course (at least so far as I saw on NBC), was preoccupied with the fleeting meme that strategically speaking, Obama should have done this a week ago. That, however, utterly misses every point worth getting.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: economy, media, Obama, television