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November 25, 2007
A Stooge Figure Speaks"McClellan's specialty was not lying, or the traditional art of spin, but what I have called 'strategic non-communication.' Lying we understand; spin we have to come to grasp. Non-communication we still do not appreciate. Its purpose is to make executive power less legible."“I thought he handled his assignment with class, integrity…. One of these days he and I are going to be rocking on chairs in Texas, talking about the good old days and his time as the press secretary. And I can assure you I will feel the same way then that I feel now, that I can say to Scott, “Job well done.” —George W. Bush, April 19, 2006. Scott McClellan deserves to be remembered, not as the greatest but as one of the most effective stooge figures in the Bush Administration. (The greatest: Alberto Gonzalez.) Last week’s news from his publisher—that the stooge says he had unknowingly passed along false information provided to him by Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Dick Cheney, Andrew Card, “and the president himself”—would seem to suggest that McClellan may be waking up a bit to what his actual role was during the three years he served as White House press secretary. But I wouldn’t count on this awareness reaching very far. In fact, by seizing on a case where an outright falsehood was passed along to the press, we may overlook the meaning of McClellan’s tenure as the jerk at the podium, which is what I called him in my April, 2006 retrospective. You can read that post for the full interpretation; here’s the gist of what I want you to appreciate about McClellan, because it’s worse than lying. Athough he stood at the podium and managed the briefings, McClellan was not there to brief the press. He was there to frustrate and belittle it, and to provoke journalists into discrediting themselves on television. Choosing McClellan to be the president’s spokesman was a brazen act because it contradicted at least 40 years of received wisdom on how to manage White House communications. ((For more on this part, see the interview that PBS’s Frontline did with me.) From the the time of John Kennedy until Bush the younger, it was assumed that the President’s powers were not only the formal ones granted by the Constitution but the far greater powers granted by the modern media: the power to dominate the news agenda, to persuade the nation when Congress won’t go along, to influence world opinion from stages like the White House briefing room, and to present an image of a man in charge when others have to act through clumsy and faceless institutions. Power like that is actually kind of frightening because it obeys no Constitutional logic. To make it less scary—and to add legitimacy to the imbalance in media power that favors the executive over other actors in the system—we came to assume that the president, who clearly dominates the political stage, should occasionally have interlocutors on that stage. And so instead of just declaiming like a dictator, “this is the way it is,” the White House makes announcements, and then officials speaking for the president answer questions— or the man himself does. The briefing room is thus a stage for both projecting presidential power and making it appear more reasoned, more legitimate, more subject to an essentially democratic back-and-forth. (Academics have a word for it: dialogic.) Okay, now consider: Al Qaeda makes announcements, and like the president’s they instantly travel around the world. But Al Qaeda doesn’t have to answer questions. That gives Osama and company an edge. You have to start with something like that in understanding Scott McClellan because that is where Cheney started, and he influenced Bush in a direction Bush wanted to go anyway to conceal his own weaknesses. Cheney and company had a different view of presidential power. They equated it not with the outsized political presence the president gains with his command of the cameras and the public stage, but with the “absence of constraint,” as former insider Jack Goldsmith wrote in his book, The Terror Presidency. One of the constraints that Cheney and Bush wanted to obliterate was the interlocutor. To put it another way: they wanted to make presidential power less dialogic. Thus we got rollback. The whole idea that the executive ought to be questioned—by Congress, by the press, by allies, by members of his own cabinet, by the American people—was a premise they dared to question. They had a different idea, a truly radical one, which Goldsmith grasped only after David Addington, Cheney’s chief-of-staff, explained it to him. “We’re going to push and push and push until some larger force makes us stop.” Under this theory the president when elected has all the legitimacy he will ever need. His powers rightly overawe everyone’s unless the White House errs and grants legitimacy to those who would “check” and question him or seek elucidation. McClellan’s specialty was not lying, or the traditional art of spin, but what I have called “strategic non-communication.” Lying we understand; spin we have to come to grasp. Non-communication we still do not appreciate. Its purpose is to make executive power less legible. Only a stooge figure would be willing to suffer the very public humiliations that such a policy requires of the man in the briefing room. What I mean by a stooge figure was explained well by John Dickerson, Slate’s White House correspondent, after McClellan announced his resignation in April 2006: When Scott McClellan went to Karl Rove and Scooter Libby and asked them about their roles in the Valerie Plame leak, they denied any involvement. McClellan dutifully took up their defense with reporters and lied for them. Because neither Libby nor Rove nor anyone else stepped forward to rescue McClellan or provide a plausible explanation for his release of inaccurate information, his credibility was shot. Even reporters who wanted to think the best of him could no longer trust what McClellan said because they didn’t know if he was being given more bad dope. The episode also sent a signal to reporters about McClellan’s status in the administration. Rove and Libby could mislead McClellan and know that neither McClellan nor the president would make them pay. Actually it was worse than that. The way I read this note written by Dick Cheney, he was saying: Hey, if McClellan can be used to lie to the press for Bush’s boy Rove, then he’s also going to be used to lie for my guy, Libby. Fair is fair. And the stooge went out there to clear Libby too. McClellan was often described as “robotic” because he would mindlessly repeat some empty formula he had concocted in anticipation of reporters’ questions. The point here was to underline how pointless it was even to ask questions of the Bush White House. And reporters got that point, though they missed the larger picture I am describing. Many times they wondered what they were doing there. I will tell you: they were a constraint being made gradually more absent with every exchange they had with the thick-headed and graceless McClellan. The agenda was not to get the White House message out; it was not to explain the president’s policies. At both of these common sense tasks McClellan was awful, his performance a non-starter. No, he was part of something larger and far more disturbing; and it would have been disturbing even to loyal Republicans if they had bothered to understand it. The goal was to make the American presidency more opaque, so that no one could see in. No self-respecting man would take that job aware of what he was going to be asked to do. McClellan, I think, was unaware. And he remains so. Originally published at the Huffington Post in a slightly different, shorter version: A World Made More Opaque: Why Scott McClellan Had His Job. (Nov. 23, 2007)
Posted by Jay Rosen at November 25, 2007 1:20 AM
Comments
"Athough he stood at the podium and managed the briefings, McClellan was not there to brief the press. He was there to frustrate and belittle it..." Admirable! Since the press in the US now conceives itself to be the Opposition to the Bush administration, and does its utmost to frustrate and belittle and undermine it and turn public opinion against it, it would be proper for anyone so beset by this cabal of scribblers to fight fire with fire. If the press were serving its readers with balanced news, it would be a different matter. Since it's not, there's not much reason to take it seriously - as plunging subscription rates demonstrate. Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at November 25, 2007 9:36 AM | Permalink Just so. And the put-a-stooge-out-there strategy worked well too. Bush's approval rating was a respectable 59 when McClellan took over and an embarrassing 33 when he left. Go librul media, go! Posted by: Jay Rosen at November 25, 2007 10:00 AM | Permalink I enjoyed watching this, Jay, if you haven't already seen it: Presidential Press Secretaries Jay, I loved your article on Scott McClellan -- very well written and so right on the mark. BRAVO! When Scott was on the podium stooging away, I wrote him a note and sent him a copy of "On Bullshit," a real book. Here's my note to him in case you're interested. (I don't know how the formatting will come out sending it this way.) I look forward to reading more of your stuff! Walt Clayton
Enclosed is a small tome that I thought you would truly appreciate, and could put to good use in your oh-so-critical mission as White House spokesman. It's called On Bullshit, by Harry G. Frankfurt, and delineates the difference between outright lying and the circumloquacious drivel America hears almost daily at your press conferences. You are such a master of both that I sometimes wonder if you were a silent consultant on this work. Whenever you decide to retire from being a spokesman, or the self-righteous, self-serving, numbingly arrogant administration you aid and abet is run out of office, you should seriously consider a teaching position in journalism, perhaps for a Master of Glibness degree. Suggested courses you might personally spearhead (dare I say "trailblaze"?) would include: Stonewalling 101, 201, and Advanced General Mendacity: White Lies to Deep Deceit Advanced Mendacity: Deceiving the Whole World Covering for a Lying Boss: Pitfalls and Risks Evasion at the Podium: Skirting Irksome Questions Dealing with the Press: Mastering Aloofness & Disdain Lying to a Nation: Defending Needless Deaths Transparent Bullshit: When Obvious Lies Fail You're the point man of an insidious administration pathologically bent on deceiving the American public and exploiting it at all costs for its true constituency: Big Business. What a sorry career, fronting for even sorrier hypocrites. I only hope that someday you'll see the egregiousness of your actions and somehow make amends -- but I doubt that will ever happen. In the meantime, enjoy On Bullshit and maybe glean something from it. Careful to not choke on your own bullshit, Scott! Walt Clayton Posted by: Walt Clayton at November 25, 2007 10:45 AM | Permalink "Go librul media, go!" If the shoe fits, wear it. Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive Oh it fits, baby. It fits fine. I train people to destroy Republicans and promote a socialist agenda, and I am so proud that the White House press corps did just that with Bush. Plus, I didn't even have to train them! They just knew! So the shoe fits and it feels good to kick your butt with it, mister insufficiently insightful. Posted by: Jay Rosen at November 25, 2007 11:07 AM | Permalink "Plus, I didn't even have to train them! They just knew!" You have made my point exactly: groupthink in the media is a major problem in a democracy - it tends to silence half the debate. The 'ghost of democracy in the media machine' must refer to the few heretics who still report news without intent to bulldoze public opinion. Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive There is an alternate way to read Rosen's narrative, finding a comforting moral in the tale rather than a frightening one. Consider the "far greater powers" of the Presidency, those extra-Constiutional ones "granted by the modern media" of the second half of C20th. The mass media during that period conferred such clout on the office of the President, such an "imbalance," as Rosen puts it, that the White House was obliged to accept interlocutors in order not to appear illegitimate, antidemocratic, imperial. The phenomenon represented by Cheney-Addington-McClellan -- abandoning the "dialogic," seeking to act with the "absence of constraint" -- might be read as a reaction to the disintegration of the modern mass media. As the media universe grows fragmented, atomizied, user-driven and transnational, its second tier of casualties, following the first tier commonly known as the MainStreamMedia itself, includes those institutions that exploited the organs of mass communication. The Presidency of the United States was surely chief among these. Thus the aberrant, maximalist and self defeating tactics embodied by McClellan can be seen as last gasps in response to a dying order. Sure, the current administration has sought to seize unprecedented control over and to defang the independence of the media apparatus attached to the White House -- but it has been fighting for more power over a diminishing asset. Not only that, but accelerating that asset's devaluation in the process. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at November 25, 2007 2:20 PM | Permalink "As the media universe grows fragmented, atomizied, user-driven and transnational,... From your mouth to God's ear! "...its second tier of casualties, following the first tier commonly known as the MainStreamMedia itself, includes those institutions that exploited the organs of mass communication. The Presidency of the United States was surely chief among these." This is a good conjecture, but remains to be seen. In the second half of the 20th century, I can recall some 'exploitation' of the MSM by the Executive branch - but any channels of communication will in future be similarly exploited, simply because the Executive must act and set policy, and those items make news however it's conveyed. And the Congressional branch outdoes it in spades - think of all those myriad offices, spinning industriously on their own behalf. However, I can recall two Administrations that can hardly be called models of MSM 'exploitation': those of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. Rather, they became targets of the most concerted and public hatefests led by said media, which seemed to value the toppling of those administrations higher than any mere news reporting function. A fragmented, atomizied, user-driven and transnational media would ultimately present the public with a far less corrosive and biased menu of news than we see at present. And perhaps the readers and viewers would congregate where the most useful information appeared - that is, news - and the agenda-driven public could splinter at will according to the viewpoint of the purveyors. Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at November 25, 2007 2:48 PM | Permalink The WH press corps and anybody else who could get a hand up did not ask useful journalistic questions. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 25, 2007 7:28 PM | Permalink My word: the Bush dead enders never change a single note in their song. Anyway, where was I? Oh yes: damn right the press tried to make Bush look bad. That's because he is bad. He is bad because he's not librul. Axe-eee-oh-matic, baby! Doesn't believe in socialism like all good journos do, plus Bush is super competent and journos, they're all incompetent, so Bush by comparison makes journos look bad, so bad they had to go out and get him, couldn't inform, no, had to destroy, plus... Bush is dead set against big government, which (bless 'em) journos are strongly for, and he wants to defeat the terrorists, which the journos are secret fans of (well, not a total secret, Michelle Malkin knows...) so they tried to drag him down and it was a hatefest but a righteous one... and holy Grandma Moses they did it! They did it! Hail the conquering journos. Boo, Bush, bad Bush. If journos hadn't stepped in attacking instead of informing, he'd still be at 80 percent in the polls. My friends, I say it to you plainly: Librul media today. Librul media tommorah. Librul media forever! Tim: thanks for that, had not seen it. Andrew: very interesting thesis. This is quite amazing. I may have to write on it. Posted by: Jay Rosen at November 25, 2007 11:54 PM | Permalink Jay, from pre-Kennedy ... The National Commission on Presidential Press Conferences (1981) "Oh yes: damn right the press tried to make Bush look bad. That's because he is bad. He is bad because he's not librul..." This is a professor of journalism writing? The drunks in my neighborhood bar can make better arguments. Let him return to his frat-house buffoonery, and bathe in the praise of all the right-thinking brothers. Courage, Professor! Keep up the good fight, and we'll find our news where it packs more information than cant. Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at November 26, 2007 4:36 AM | Permalink The post I wrote has quite an intricate argument in it. To which you replied with: liberal bias. At this very late date I have nothing to say on that subject to an anonymous Bush dead ender waving the bias banner mindlessly around and still smarting from the downfall of Nixon. Did you get that? I cannot think of a single useful thing to say to you. (Neither can anyone else.) I have no arguments for you, no rejoinders, no interest. You may as well ask why I don't have a theological exchange with a trained seal. Words fail me, or I them. This is what I was attempting to say with my faux frat-house buffoonery, which I admit is dreck. As for the imperiled future of journalism, if you read PressThink consistently you would find that I address it quite a lot. If you think the press is biased against Bush and it burns you up, then you should by all means seek your news elsewhere. I think that is one thing--perhaps the only one--we can all agree on. Posted by: Jay Rosen at November 26, 2007 8:41 AM | Permalink Jay, I enjoyed your faux frat-house buffoonery/dreck (exhaustive Pressthink bias debates here). I think it helped me to think about the "librul/faux news" bias warriors in terms of our wiring toward first-order/automatic/intuitive thinking. Prof: I think your comparison of McClellan and Gonzales is extremely helpful in trying to understand the radical nature of what Bush and Cheney have been trying to achieve. I think you're suggesting, and I agree, that whether or not McClellan and Gonzales knew they were lying about any particular issue is really beside the point. In the case of McClellan and Gonzales in particular, even the substance of whatever statement they were making was not particularly important; what was important was their essential role in delegitimizing any questioning of the Executive's actions. To take their statements at all seriously undermines the questions being asked and indeed the questioners themselves. We have never previously elected a self-consciously Jacobin government in this country. The only possibly relevant prior example would be Lincoln, but it's reasonably clear that his Jacobins were only one of many other groups with which he had to contend, and he had one-third of the country at war with the other two-thirds, to say nothing of the phenomena of the United States Army streaming back into the streets of our capital twice after major defeats thirty miles from the White House. It is no accident that our modern Jacobins are so fond of referring to the President as "Commander-in-Chief", for their view of the Presidency is that of an elective dictatorship, memorably referred to Mr Bush as his "accountability moment" in November 2004. Congress and the Judiciary are expected to rubber-stamp whatever the Executive deems necessary to carry out its policies, and not to interfere if the Executive determines that even rubber-stamping is not required. The press should dutifully disseminate the "information" the Executive wishes to be transmitted to the public. Any independent inquiries made by the press should be quashed, and the reporters bullied into submission through manipulation of the publishers and broadcasters. The White House press corps has been "embedded" in the same way that the press has been "embedded" by the Pentagon in Iraq. In the Jacobin style, none of this has been particularly subtle, but the Establishment press continues to behave as if this is all business as usual, even hiring the Michael Gersons and Karl Roves. Even more puzzling has been the reluctance of the Democrats in Congress to resist, although Harry Reid's procedural checkmate of recess appointments suggests that there is at least some consciousness on Capitol Hill that this administration does not "play ball". What I still do not understand is why the Establishment media refused to accept Bill Clinton as elective King, but continue to accept the Younger Bush, who lacks Nixon's intelligence, Reagan's popular touch and "Hollywood glamour", or even his father's patrician good breeding coupled with alter ego Jim Baker's silky smooth iron-fist-in-velvet-glove power broking. I still think there is more here than meets the eye, and it goes well beyond the obvious "economic self-interest" arguments that simply don't add up when you compare the actual policies of the Clinton administration with those of the Younger Bush. There is an emotional and psycho-social dimension to this that goes well beyond CEOs. Posted by: HenryFTP The press' actions don't always burn me up. Watching them self-destruct is sometimes amusing. The WH press corps is portrayed as sitting around doing crosswords until a briefing. Apparently, being promoted to WH cabana boy meant never having to report again. As in, find out what's going on. If you can't get the straight scoop from the podium, find it out elsewhere. What the hell is the whining about? If what you say of McClellan and the admin is true (coming from a journalist, it probably isn't), then the bulging brains in the press corps should have known it. And quit bothering. Why should anybody show up? I know. In case McClellan has a heart attack and falls off the podium, anybody who isn't there is a bum. They should have been reporting. Given the media's views of the admin, the admin was, if not justified, easy to understand in deciding to stuff the journos. They did what they thought they had to do. Plan B is for reporters to act like reporters. What's the big deal? Notice the NYT getting busted again. Their "corrections" correct basic facts which, being true, ruin the original story, which could only survive being based on the incorrect facts. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 26, 2007 3:14 PM | Permalink > "This is quite amazing. I may have to write on it." also, in case anyone missed it, Cline on Seelye's defense of horserace journalism and more immediately relevant, via Etaoin Shrdlu, Teresa Nielsen Hayden on Boing Boing's "Insufficiently Sensitive" commenters - Posted by: Anna at November 26, 2007 3:56 PM | Permalink Jay: Your insights into the assignment the White House gave the hapless McClellan have been fascinating. But I'd like to challenge you to think about whether people like Cheney, Rove and Addington ever came to realize they had only harmed themselves, even on their own terms. After all, the people around Bush were finally persuaded to replace McClellan with Tony Snow, a far more formidable presence who apparently demanded and got access, and who sparred with the press in a more traditional way. What do you think that was all about? Posted by: Dan Kennedy at November 26, 2007 10:28 PM | Permalink The Talkative President: The Off-The-Record Press Conferences of Calvin Coolidge The briefings and skull sessions which preceded the Eisenhower and Kennedy press conferences were not for Mr. Coolidge. If such anxious preliminaries had been part of the press conference operation, Mr. Coolidge would have abandoned the whole thing. The rugged man from Vermont liked his comfort. Dan: You raise an excellent point. Near as I can tell, the situation was this: Rollback was a big gamble and with McClellan in particular they over-reached; it not only failed, it crashed as public support for Bush crashed. It weakened the Bush White House because they actually destroyed one of the best assets they had: the White House briefing room, which broadcasts American democracy to the world, as well as the president's arguments. The press is a minor impediment as part of a major microphone the President uniquely controls. A cold and realistic assessment would have told them that, but they actually listened to the "hot" voices of the culture war way more, satisfying a key constituency while putting into practice Cheney and Addington's "executive power as the absence of constraint." The results were miserable: The Bush Bubble was bad enough and made worse by Rollback. The doctrine of infallability set in. A weak press secretary emboldens denial-based strategies, because the belief is you can put anything over. What I have called the retreat from empricism gained another front. The realists lost another round, if you will. As I said above, when McClellan took over Bush was at a respectable 59 percent. When he left 33. And it's never recovered. Rollback was quietly declared a failed policy by Josh Bolton in replacing Andrew Card. I went into in Snow at the Podium, Rollback on the Rocks: During all of Scott McLellan’s time as press secretary, the Bush team charted an historically new course, which I have called Rollback, the decision to starve rather than feed the news beast, and wherever possible disengage from the press, treating it as either hostile or irrelevant, not a conduit to the nation but a special interest group begging for goodies it doesn’t deserve. And that was devastating to Bush's political strength. Rove, Card, Bush, Cheney, Hughes, Bartlett. They screwed up big time, Dan. The funny thing is, and something I did not appreciate at the time... "Rollback was tried and it failed hugely" was a story no one had an interest in telling. Think about it: who would want it out there for examination? The press was embarrassed that it got pushed around and never left the briefing room en masse. The Card-Rove-Bartlett White House was embarrassed that its innovation turned into a disaster. Bolton didn't want to start the job angering the culture warriors by advertising his rollback of rollback. That would be folly. The cultural right still thinks rollback was necessary and valid and just and right and good. The left thinks the press wimped out and allowed itself to be rolled back and of course Bush got away with it. They argue it was a success! There is no constituency for "...rollback was part of a grand strategic gamble that failed." Plus: The retreat from empiricism--which in my view happened throughout the government--is an embarrassment to the entire Washington elite, none of whom could prevent it, or even give it a name. Posted by: Jay Rosen at November 27, 2007 1:03 AM | Permalink The last I knew, Rove and Libby actually didn't have anything to do with the leak of Valerie Plame's name and position. Richard Armitage was the one who did that. So how can McClellan be blamed for saying Rove and Libby were not involved, when that was not just what they said, but the simple truth? Turning from facts to theories, in light of the White House press corps' shared delusion that access to the President grants knowledge of world politics that can't be had anywhere else, and the damage this delusion does to the general press' analytical skills ... is the WH briefing room, in fact, a net good to the public? Is giving the President the opportunity to reply to objections worth the cost of puffing up the self-importance of the objectors, and depreciating real knowledge and real intelligence across the whole trade of journalism? Posted by: Michael Brazier at November 27, 2007 8:56 AM | Permalink Brazier -- The Plame confusion is easily cleared up. Chronologically, Armitage was the first to violate her secrecy but the effort to spread that tidbit was a multipronged one and others -- Libby, Rove, Fleischer et al -- have been implicated in it. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at November 27, 2007 10:15 AM | Permalink Andrew. Being first would seem to be worst. Otherwise, the second, third, et al wouldn't have had anything to say. I liked watching Snow. He was absolutely brilliant at telling the journowhiners that the axioms planted in their questions were BS. That McLellan and the stooge strategy did worse for the admin than the journos would have done with a different spokesman presumes something nice about the journos which is not in evidence. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 27, 2007 10:48 AM | Permalink So how can McClellan be blamed for saying Rove and Libby were not involved, when that was not just what they said, but the simple truth? Andrew's answer is accurate. Mine would be: Why are you asking us, Michael? Ask McClellan: He's the one who's saying (in his book) that when he told the press Rove and Libby weren't involved, "There was one problem. It was not true." Check it out: The most powerful leader in the world had called upon me to speak on his behalf and help restore credibility he lost amid the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. So I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the senior-most aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby. As for why Armitage didn't get in a lot of trouble, I am just speculating here but it might have something to do with the fact that he not only didn't lie about his involvement but volunteered that information when he figured out that Novak had relied upon his tip. Posted by: Jay Rosen at November 27, 2007 11:07 AM | Permalink "As I said above, when McClellan took over Bush was at a respectable 59 percent. When he left 33. And it's never recovered." Indeed, McClellan was such a bad stooge that he personally led the Bush administration off a cliff. Meanwhile, of course, the countrywide MSM (except for the 0.26% of it that enjoyed the perks of attending WH bashings) was diligently spinning the Iraq war, the economy, John Bolton, global warming, 'international law', Old Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all, to inflict maximum damage on the Bush administration. This occurred throughout McClellan's entire 2003-2006 term, independently of McClellan's failure to engage in witty sparring matches with the WH reporters. And yes, the poll-driven opinion rating - surprisingly! - sank. McClellan was always a footnote in the bigger scheme of things, unless one is fixated on extracting all Administration news through the single micro-pipe of one man's throat - while enjoying the spectacle of a roomful of verbal bullies punching that individual in rotation. Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at November 27, 2007 11:55 AM | Permalink McClellan was such a bad stooge that he personally led the Bush administration off a cliff. I didn't argue that. Nobody did. And you are a clown--an anonymous, reductive clown--for arguing against it when no one made that point. What I said is that "power as the absence of constraint" plus the retreat from empiricism, plus the Bush Bubble, plus the hubris of "we make of our reality," plus the stupidity of rollback helped lead the Administration off the cliff. Posted by: Jay Rosen at November 27, 2007 12:18 PM | Permalink Jay. As regards Armitage. It's a kind of odd statement you make. He had a non-crime which he knew was a non-crime (or he'd have chased Armitage) and thought was a thing needing the full resources of his office and in which he could guarantee catching somebody misremembering what he said about the non-crime. Because you can always catch somebody stating something differently from somebody else or from an earlier statement. In fact, the FBI was forced to admit they couldn't really prove what Libby said before which was supposedly contradicted by what he said later. Lost the notes. Slam dunk. That anybody thinks this is legit is...not amazing.
Well, at least we know that outing Plame wasn't a crime, or even an offense. Or SOMEbody on your side would have a word or two about Armitage. Which, it goes without saying, nobody on your side does. Anyway, you can argue all you want with people like me. You should be arguing with the folks who are no longer paying attention to you. Hell, with me, you have somebody to talk to. Helps to pass the time. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 27, 2007 12:45 PM | Permalink > "... Helps to pass the time." maybe you should get a job, R. Posted by: Anna at November 27, 2007 4:00 PM | Permalink Thanks for the kind words, Anna. Goofy question. Armitage didn't get any crap from anybody for one of the worst betrayals of US intelligence in the last ten thousand years. He claims it was an accident. What if it wasn't? Why would he do it? Because he knew the dems and journos would pretend it was the WH and go hysterical for a year or so. Question: If Armitage had done it on purpose and the journos knew, would it have made any difference? Answer: Don't be absurd. Of course not. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 27, 2007 4:36 PM | Permalink Find somewhere else to retry the case. More posts doing so will be killed. Posted by: Jay Rosen at November 27, 2007 4:41 PM | Permalink Jay, I think your McClelland "grand strategy" theory may be a bit overdetermined. McClelland became Press Secretary when Ari left, because he was the number 2 guy in Ari's office. Could it not be that McClellan was chosen for the job because of his gifts, he got the job despite his lack of gifts -- that McClellan wasn't "rollback" of the press so much as "benign neglect"? Posted by: p.lukasiak at November 27, 2007 7:27 PM | Permalink Lukasiak -- Your "benign neglect" and Rosen's "stooge" may be two sides of the same coin. From the start, the Bush Administration's ruling strategy can be dubbed Government By Talking Points -- a technique that values word-perfect repetition and message discipline over subtlety, flexibility and responsiveness. It reached its apotheosis on that famous pre-war Sunday morning when all senior officials spoke simultaneously of their fear that the smoking gun might turn out to be a mushroom cloud. Here we saw creative political rhetoric rendered as nothing more subtle than a soundbite slogan. McClellan was caught in a situation where the Soundbite of the Day talking point he was hired to recite became more and more unhinged from reality. By the time Hurricane Katrina came along he was cast in the role of Bush's Baghdad Bob. Rosen's intimation, earlier in this thread, that Mark Halperin's recantation is a significant straw in the wind is significant here, I feel. The strategy of Government by Talking Points arises from the worldview of the Permanent Campaign, where generating wedge issues and gotcha moments is more valuable than the traditional tools of government -- persuading waverers, building coalitions and compromising with opponents. Halperin's best seller The Way To Win argued that adept campaigners make the best rulers. McClellan appears to be Exhibit A in the case against that. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at November 27, 2007 8:04 PM | Permalink Andrew: "The strategy of Government by Talking Points arises from the worldview of the Permanent Campaign ..." [links added] Agreed. "It reached its apotheosis on that famous pre-war Sunday morning when all senior officials spoke simultaneously of their fear that the smoking gun might turn out to be a mushroom cloud." ? Interview With Condoleezza Rice September 8, 2002 BLITZER: Based on what you know right now, how close is Saddam Hussein's government -- how close is that government to developing a nuclear capability?President Bush Outlines Iraqi Threat October 7, 2002 Some citizens wonder, after 11 years of living with this problem, why do we need to confront it now? And there's a reason. We've experienced the horror of September the 11th. We have seen that those who hate America are willing to crash airplanes into buildings full of innocent people. Our enemies would be no less willing, in fact, they would be eager, to use biological or chemical, or a nuclear weapon. Using a talking point from JFK. What's next? It's not as if JFK had it right or anything. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 27, 2007 11:01 PM | Permalink So, basically, having McClellan as Press Secretary was a major strategic blunder in the War on Terror, which is an Information War as much as anything else. They didn't lose only approval rating points -- they lost a lot of hearts and minds in the Arab world, and also a lot of American soldiers. Posted by: Richard B. Simon at November 28, 2007 3:26 AM | Permalink Tim -- yes, September 8, 2002: National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice on CNN's Late Edition All hit the same talking points about Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program -- but you are correct, I misremembered, only Rice envisioned a mushroom cloud. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at November 28, 2007 7:02 AM | Permalink I recall when Albright and others came out and publicly insisted that the First Horndog was not lying. Recent book by a guy who had a lot to do with debriefing Saddaam after his capture. Says the whole thing was a result of SH trying to convince Iran that he still had the stuff. He thought Iraq was still under threat. In the meantime, he was trying to convince the rest of the world he didn't. I don't know how, Richard Simon, the Bush information failures cost American lives. The implication is that more Americans would have gotten on board and, not giving the admin trouble, made the war safer. Or quicker. Which means some of the resistance in the US based, you say, on lack of bandwagoning by the WH, cost US lives. You really want to hang American deaths on the antiwar folks? And the idea that Iraqi hearts and minds could have been won by a more articulate WH spokesman is ...what's nuttier than fantasy? Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 28, 2007 7:50 AM | Permalink "It does, however, prove you should never talk to the FBI without fully recording the session and keeping several copies in different places. Or, more safely, never talk to them." -- Aubrey And how exactly does one blow off the FBI, Richard ? "Fuck off, I don't want to talk to you" ? That may work with UPS, or FedEx, or your friendly neighborhood census taker -- but the FBI ? I'm not so sure. I think you've been watching too much Tony Soprano. Posted by: Steve Lovelady at November 28, 2007 7:26 PM | Permalink Steve. The way it works is they take written notes of the conversation. If, later on, I address the subject somewhat differently from the handwritten notes, which means possibly word for word the way I spoke the first time---I join Scooter. Or, if I don't want to join Scooter, I tell them what they want to know. Even if it's not, you know, exactly true. One of the charges against Libby was based on no handwritten notes at all. The agent lost them and was forced to rely on memory. Or imagination. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 28, 2007 9:23 PM | Permalink It seems odd, Andrew, that you would choose this post to criticize the Bush administration for engaging in political persuasion by going in front of the public, Congress and UN in the Fall of 2002. Given the context of this post, wouldn't those be considered the heady pre-McClellan, pre-bubble, pre-rollback days? For those that want to hunt for "word-perfect repetition" of "talking points" and "soundbite slogans" matching Condolezza Rice linked above:
Transcript: Colin Powell on Fox News Sunday, Sunday, September 08, 2002 In these threads, Jay never acknowledges any bad faith on the part of the press. But yet again, we see that CNN allowed an ambush by Hillary stooge at tonight's Republican debate. Media bias, incompetence, or both? Posted by: Neuro-conservative at November 28, 2007 11:59 PM | Permalink Neuro. I don't believe the good professor has addressed the recent Harvard study. At worst, when pressed, it's a matter of journalists are generalists and they try, really, really try, to get it right and sometimes even correct errors. What more could you want? But being biased? Bite your tongue.
Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 29, 2007 7:39 AM | Permalink Tim -- I do not think we disagree. Those were indeed "heady" days in the fall of 2002. The word I used was "apotheosis." My argument was that Government by Talking Points turns out to be a powerful strategy when times are fair: when the majority already supports the President and needs minimal persuasion; when no contradiction is exposed between rhetorical claims and objective facts; when opposition is fragmented and demoralized. Even back then, however, it was a closed system. There was no "pre-bubble, pre-rollback" as you put it. My contention is that it was not until circumstances turned adverse -- when talking points became "more and more unhinged from reality" -- that the strategy's fragility becomes exposed. And McClellan was the luckless individual, the "stooge" in Rosen's words, caught holding the parcel when the music stopped. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at November 29, 2007 8:26 AM | Permalink Andrew: There was no "pre-bubble, pre-rollback" as you put it. I disagree, and so does Jay if I've been reading correctly. I would add that the Senate was controlled by Democrats before and after 9/11, and the No Child Left Behind, DNI, DHS, ..., are products of "bi-partisan" political persuasion. The Republicans regained control of the Senate in January 2003 after the 2002 elections. McClellan took over from Ari Fleischer in July 2003. I do agree that when rhetoric runs counter to reality, it's less persuasive. That's always been true. Jay, Your post made me wonder if you aren't implicitly working out a metrics of anti-democratic infamy in the White House. If democracy is ultimately a question of promoting the health of public dialogue and Scott McClellan's personal job description was to kill it, he effectively volunteered for service against democracy per se--against public accountability--entirely apart from whether the ends of the administration on behalf of which he worked have been laudable or not. I understand one of Andrew's comments to suggest an interesting question--if governing by advertising technique is a perversion of democracy and Scott McClellan's stooge routine delegitimated that perversion--the loss of Scott McClellan's robotic approach would seem to return us to the previously reigning perversion of democracy--rule by more sophisticated advertising technique. In other words, as I'm sure most would agree, moving past the McClellan model still leaves a considerable order of business yet to be done before we could consider ourselves to have recovered a democratic culture, even stipulating that rollback has failed and even assuming a more traditional pretense of White House accountability is one day restored. Posted by: Mark Anderson at November 29, 2007 1:58 PM | Permalink Steve. Well, then, that explains the tunnel vision. A novelist friend of mine considers the Sopranos "the most important literature of the past 25 years." Not easy for a print person to say of a TV show. But I think she may be on to something. The Sopranos, taken as a whole, certainly shines a (refracted) light on the Bush gang -- thugs, one and all. That's really the only explanation I've come across that embraces the whole sorry history of the past seven years. Once you accept that premise, all becomes clear -- from Gonzales, to Rove, to Cheney, to Libby, to Rumsfeld, and finally to the head thug himself. But that's a very difficult barrier for a reporter to hurdle -- the idea that thugs have been, are and will be in charge. Consequently, few do.
Posted by: Steve Lovelady at November 29, 2007 2:07 PM | Permalink Specious.. spurious, take your pick. Whether or not Armitage knew Plame was covert, he had a duty, along with anyone in this administration, to clarify Plame's status BEFORE blabbing his mouth about her. That he and everyone else following the Roverator's pronoucement that Plame was "Fair Game" did not exercise even a minimal due diligence to clarify Plame's status, tells me that her outing was intentional... more to eliminate the whole team of Covert CIA Operatives on WMD's in Iraq and Iran... to eliminate any reliable refutation of their Niger Forgery criminal complicity and God knows what else was in their Wall to Wall War Plan. Posted by: Kathleen at November 29, 2007 2:49 PM | Permalink How many times has our charming host gone to the well with the "rollback" meme? ZZZZzzzzzzz Time's a-wastin'---the Bush-haters shelf life will expire in January '09. Beyond that, they will look idiotic, petty and foolish. I hear the Clintons always tell the truth, don't intimidate the press and never spin. What will Pressthink talk about when a Democrat is in the WH? Love and happiness will rule the land! whoo!Hoo! Can't wait----I've been bored by Bush-hate since '00, at least. Let's hear it for the Democrat Dead Enders! Posted by: QC Examiner at November 29, 2007 2:57 PM | Permalink But the thing I remember most about Mr. McLellan is that he had a cute ass. Well, not that cute. And the ass happened to be president. Or resident. He was around there somewhere... tugging at Cheney's leash. Posted by: MrWondrous at November 29, 2007 3:39 PM | Permalink Novelist friend, huh? Sopranos = knowing stuff. Wow. Does explain some things, not to mention what to anticipate in the next generation of journos, presuming any of them can get one of few paying gigs left. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 29, 2007 6:55 PM | Permalink It might be a good idea to start pitching some of your less competent colleagues off the sled. Maybe you think that will do you good, or at least no harm. Their only fault, like CBS, is getting caught. Maybe they'll be sharper next time. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 29, 2007 7:22 PM | Permalink I think Hugh Hewitt puts it succinctly: No serious anchor would want to be where [Anderson] Cooper is today, at the center of a vast train wreck which cannot be explained away as the inevitable result of the sudden appearance of big news in a difficult setting, as with hysterical Katrina coverage of bodies stacked in freezers and gun fights in the Superdome, or the result of the input of bad data, as with the early call of Florida for Gore in 2000. No, this [was] premeditated mediocrity. The network had months to prepare and consider and execute. But even with all that time, it lacked the minimal talent necessary to produce a serious debate about important issues using new technology. All it could deliver was a carnival of bad taste, trick questions, and full frontal left wing bias. Posted by: Neuro-conservative at November 29, 2007 10:11 PM | Permalink CQ: How many times has our charming host gone to the well with the "rollback" meme? ZZZZzzzzzzz. Oh, I freely admit it's a theme I have tracked obsessively. I can do that; its my site. Readers know how to opt out. But the cure for your ZZZZ is to become a better reader. It started with "we don't think you have a fourth estate role..." via Andrew Card, and "You're Assuming That You Represent the Public. I Don't Accept That," which was W's idea. (April, 2004) Previous presidents had the same resentments, of course, and drew cheers in parts of the electorate for voicing them. Previous presidents avoided the press, or routed around it with TV and photo ops. All presidents try to manipulate the news. It took until Bush the younger for the imaginative leap to be made: Attack the claim that any public interest at all is served by “meeting the press.” Remove the press from the system of checks and balances. Deny that it’s any “fourth branch of government” (Douglas Cater’s idea, 1959.) Don’t just work around a troublesome crew. Be bolder. Reject the reporters’ claim to be channeling the public and its questions. But then I realized that these attitudes were part of something larger: de-certification of the press. (March, 2005) But then I realized that de-certification was part of something larger, and more aggressive: Rollback of the press. (July, 2005) But then I realized that rollback was part of something larger- larger than the press. The retreat from empiricism throughout the government. (Dec. 2006) Then I realized that the retreat from empiricism was part of larger development: executive power as the absence of constraint, including the constraint of reality itself. (Sep. 2007) You don't know how to read my Rollback Series, so you see only repetition, not development. I would add that both the warning about the retreat from empiricism and presidential power as the absence of constraint came from loyal and worried Republicans trying to describe what they had seen. At that point Bush had become a danger to the Republican brand. The besotted--some of who we find here--are still focused on Bush hatred in others, partly (I believe) to avoid facing their own, oncoming. Posted by: Jay Rosen at November 29, 2007 11:23 PM | Permalink "You're Assuming That You Represent the Public. I Don't Accept That." Or, just maybe, it's possible that even when the press attempts to "represent" the public, it only seems find paid Democratic shills. Posted by: Neuro-conservative at November 29, 2007 11:44 PM | Permalink I'm liking my theory more and more: the librul media as obsessive hate object--paid agents of the enemy party!--keeps "inappropriate" feelings of Bush hatred from rising in the throat. Posted by: Jay Rosen at November 30, 2007 12:09 AM | Permalink It isn't a biased media, I tell you! When CNN hosts a Democratic 'debate', it selects 'undecided voters' who turn out to be Democratic activists. And for the Republican 'debate', it selects 'undecided voters' who turn out to be Democratic activists. If that isn't equal treatment, what would be? I believe Professor Rosen, or maybe his frat-house cronies, would call those activists 'stooges', but his language and his thinking have run to the indelicate side recently and we must try to understand. Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at November 30, 2007 12:19 AM | Permalink I offer zero defense of CNN's debate production, which I do not care for in style, tone, selection, anchor "talent," or the politics on display. I think they have been terrible. Posted by: Jay Rosen at November 30, 2007 12:28 AM | Permalink Jay -- You're projecting again. You are the one with the obsessive hate object. You seem to believe that Bush and Cheney sat in the Oval Office and planned this policy of "rollback" out of sheer dictatorial malevolence and detachment from empirical reasoning. This is a childish fantasy born of too many '70s conspiracy movies --movies which the White House press corps probably should have avoided as well. Posted by: Neuro-conservative at November 30, 2007 12:36 AM | Permalink Not sheer. Opaque. Didn't you read the post? Posted by: Jay Rosen at November 30, 2007 12:40 AM | Permalink Republic of Denial: Press, Politics, and Public Life, by Michael Janeway, Yale University Press, 1999. Summary: Hard to top, "This book offers the most insightful critique of the decline of American journalism and politics in decades." Out of Touch: The Presidency and Public Opinion, by Michael J. Towle. 2004. Summary: Towle is an associate professor of political science. Based on comparative research, he suggests that administrations self-congratulate during popular times and engage in rationalization and cognitive dissonance during unpopular times. The thing is, Dr. Rosen, when Bush said the press doesn't represent the public, he was and still is empirically correct -- both at the level of partisan politics, and at the deeper structural level. The fact that over 90% of journalists vote Democrat proves the first. And for the second, you yourself have explicated the flaws of our political media better than anyone, when you're not thinking about George Bush -- remember the cult of savviness? (I'd still like a considered answer to the question I asked before: is the WH briefing room, in fact, a net good to the public? Is giving the President the opportunity to reply to objections worth the cost of puffing up the self-importance of the objectors, and depreciating real knowledge and real intelligence across the whole trade of journalism?) To me, Bush's conduct toward the media is fully explained by the media's biases in favor of rhetoric and against dialectic, combined with Bush's total incapacity for rhetoric; he retreated not from the empirical world, but from the world of image and fantasy where much of the US political class prefers to live. And what I see in the Rollback series is a man who was living in that world, who stumbled over some empirical facts hard to reconcile with that world, and who has now explained them away, and thrown the blame for all the troubles he's noticed onto a satisfactory scapegoat. What you say now about Bush reads as if you believe that Bush's sinking in the polls has brought the world back to its proper course -- that the many lacunae in the public's knowledge of the world, which exist thanks to the cult of savviness and other vices of the US media, are no longer a problem, because Bush's stratagem against the media has failed. Rather like a drunkard thinking he doesn't need to stop drinking, because this time the doctors managed to get his liver working again ... Posted by: Michael Brazier at November 30, 2007 4:42 AM | Permalink Uncertain Guardians: The News Media as a Political Institution In this book I build on the work of Cater and his successors, Leon Sigal and Herbert Cans in particular, to explain why the news media effectively constitute a political institution and why this fact matters to students of American politics.Governing with the News: The News Media as a Political Institution Instead, the news media share more with two other political institutions: the political parties, and the interest group system. Professor -- Acknowledging the recapitulation of your own narrative of your understanding of the ideological project of the current administration... Repeal of the Fourth Estate ...some of these stages intersect directly with PressThink; others address the administration's relationship to the entire body politic. Your quote of Ken Auletta back in April 2004 is germane because, ideology aside, its insight is accurate: “'The White House has come to see reporters as special pleaders,' an interest group 'that’s not nearly as powerful as it once was.' Bush thinks the national news organizations don’t have the influence Richard Nixon and other angry presidents saw in them." The so-called MainStreamMedia are indeed not nearly as powerful as they were in the second half of C20th. No institution of the mass industrial age is. Not the news media, not political parties, not labor unions, not Madison Avenue, not Detroit's Big Three, not metropolitan daily newspapers, not the entertainment-industrial complex. Any incumbent of the White House -- benign, malign or merely neutrally experimental -- would have been obliged to toy with new media strategies in the face of this fragmented and defanged press corps. Many of those experiments would have failed. Experiments mostly do. Both Anderson and Brazier hit the nail on the head, however, when they caution against reading too much into the particular failure of McClellan's brand of Rollback: Anderson: "Moving past the McClellan model still leaves a considerable order of business yet to be done before we could consider ourselves to have recovered a democratic culture, even stipulating that rollback has failed and even assuming a more traditional pretense of White House accountability is one day restored." Brazier: "What you say now about Bush reads as if you believe that Bush's sinking in the polls has brought the world back to its proper course -- that the many lacunae in the public's knowledge of the world, which exist thanks to the cult of savviness and other vices of the US media, are no longer a problem, because Bush's stratagem against the media has failed." Indeed the work of PressThink still has to be done. What about journalists? What do their experiments need to be to represent the interests of the body politic in a post-mass-media world? (As Insufficiently and Neuro and Aubrey all point out, journalists' sloppy experiments can make matters worse just as surely as sloppy experiments at the White House can) How do we citizens ensure that our government is accountable now existing monitoring mechanisms have lost clout? How can the public ensure that its lacunae of knowledge get properly filled? Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at November 30, 2007 7:41 AM | Permalink Andrew. I would think that, in other professions, the watchword would be, "Physician, heal thyself." or words to more specific effect. Jay thinks CNN screwed up. This time. He doesn't understand that people watch this stuff and incrementally lose their interest in what journos have to say. Or, if he acknowledges it, doesn't think that the accumulation of such increments, the reasons for which are provided daily by his colleagues (and daily defended by his colleagues) has no effect. According to Glenn Reynolds, various journalists' professional rags have failed to notice the botany at CNN about the debate. Nope. Nothing new here. Apparently, this is sort of like the plane landing safely or the dog biting the man. The really scary thing is what was done by the media we haven't yet found out about. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at November 30, 2007 8:36 AM | Permalink George Bush has run the f*ck you presindency. F*ck you empricism, f*ck you press, f*ck you liberals, f*ck you Saddam, f*ck you middle class. He treats his adversaries with contempt and his allies with bungling disrespect. Bush has amassed illegitmate executive power with macheavelian subversion of the rule of law - completely comprimising the office of legal counsel and subverting a succession of government agencies to serve his presidency politically in contravention of their founding purpose. Bush uses his presidency to circumvent a public debate of policy, circumvents the press while implementing the radical policies, and rolls the press back when they catch wind of his purpose - keeping us in the dark like mushrooms while he exercises illegitimate power with manufactured consent for the benefit of his constituencies and not for all of America. /rant over Posted by: Neil at November 30, 2007 11:03 AM | Permalink "Plus, I didn't even have to train them! They just knew!" You have made my point exactly: groupthink in the media is a major problem in a democracy - it tends to silence half the debate. The 'ghost of democracy in the media machine' must refer to the few heretics who still report news without intent to bulldoze public opinion. Posted by: Joern Puetz at November 30, 2007 1:51 PM | Permalink I haven't watched one of these debates since Nixon vs. Kennedy, so I'm a little bit in the dark about CNN's alleged sins. (Though I certainly wouldn't put just about any stunt past them.) I recommend this approach for keeping one's sanity. Much better to attend the next-door neighbor's chili party. Posted by: Steve Lovelady at November 30, 2007 2:49 PM | Permalink Steve, Probably a good idea. But many people do, and CNN's lock on "The most busted name in news." got another belt of steroids. So pretending indifference may suit you, but the people who watch can't figure out that CNN isn't hournalism. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 1, 2007 9:31 AM | Permalink I never said the American press was in its politics representative of the politics of the American people. I never believed it. I never considered for a second that it may be true, and so I don't feel obliged to "admit" that Bush was right when he made this idiotic point that Bush dead enders repeat endlessly. The observation Bush offered back then is significant only because it touched on something else: the White House press did represent at one time the American public's interest in having an interlocutor capable of questioning the President in an informed way. I would agree that this system is at an end. It has crashed, for a multitude of reasons, "rollback" being only one. Press behavior is another one. Change in the media universe a third, and changes in cultural authority a fourth. I agree with Andrew that any occupant of the White House would have had to confront alternatives to that (crashed) system; that will also be true for the next president. We are entitled to examine and criticize the alternatives chosen. In my rollback series I criticized the system that Card, Cheney, Bush, Hughes, Rove, Bartlett and company put in place of the old, disintegrating one. It was later that I realized that Bush and Cheney intended to destroy every single interlocutor the President could have as a means of expanding executive power and adjusting to Bush's massive personal weaknesses, which begin with the fact that more than most politicians he cannot handle being questioned. By anyone. Not good at rhetoric? No, Michael. Not good at handling any challenge to a pre-determined world view and more intellectually dishonest than any previous president we have had. I never said McClellan "caused" a damn thing. I said he was a clown, a stooge, a weak figure you could roll over. Such men do not move events. Rather, he shows the true colors of the Bush crowd: willing to harm itself if it can make another constraint more absent. So I don't feel obliged to admit that he didn't cause this, that or the other. The idea of McClellan as a "cause" is, again, idiotic. Posted by: Jay Rosen at December 1, 2007 11:04 AM | Permalink "But the cure for your ZZZZ is to become a better reader." Well, yeah, it wouldn't be your fault, or anything. Only "dead enders" are still obsessing about George Bush, his press secretary and rollback---a new day is dawning, except for those seriously invested in Bush-hate. All POTUS candidates from both parties have learned from "rollback" and who ever is our next POTUS will improve on rollback in ways journalism professors can't imagine. We already know the Clintons know how to play the press. If Hillary is elected, the national press will be her poodle----and it couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of canines. Those thinking that the world will be right when a Democrat is POTUS will be sadly mistaken, but unfortunately, many will not care, since they will be happy that "one of their own" is in the WH. That some thought the hostage situation in New Hampshire was set up by the Clintons and CNN shows how much trust there is for both politicians and their enablers in the press. Bashing George Bush is for "dead enders"---let's look to the future of "rollback" journalism----if it's not too painful! Posted by: QC Examiner at December 1, 2007 3:08 PM | Permalink I don't know whom you are arguing with CQ, but it's wacky and irrelevant to this blog. Who thinks things are going to be wonderful with a Democratic President? I don't. You're talking to and writing about phantoms: voices in your head. Go over to the DNC and write on their walls. From Tim's link: The balance between serving the President and serving the press is a problem that faces all presidential spokesmen, whether the President be Grover Cleveland or Bill Clinton. Marlin Fitzwater, of the Reagan and Bush administrations, said the press secretary enters into combat with the press with one hand tied behind his back because he must serve two masters. This is exactly what Bush and company wanted to wipe out: the "two masters," a situation that arises because the press secretary in the past was the person on the president's team who pushed for fuller disclosure of reliable information. It's like an accountant who has to serve the client and what are called Generally Accepted Accounting Principles. These are ultimately good for the client too (see Enron) but may interfere with various plans and schemes the client has (see Enron.) This tension is what Card, Rove, Cheney and Bush wanted to do away with. No more two masters; it interfered with their schemes. Marlin Fitzwater, a man of integrity, would have quit right there; he had the intelligence to see that wiping out the tension would be bad for him and for the president. McClellan was too dumb, too weak to see any of that, so he agreed: yes, master, one master. And that was his sole qualification for the job. Now he wants to recover some dignity with his book but it's too late, and he doesn't have the stomach for it. And that's what happens to everyone who works for Bush in a visible capacity. They all emerge with shattered reputations. Bush's intellectual dishonesty, a thing of epic proportions, stronger than anything else about him, becomes their style. It is also the style of the Bush dead enders we see here. I don't know why I have to even point this out, but in making these observations about the monumental, reality-destroying, party-wrecking dishonesty of the Bush inner circle I am not praising Hillary Clinton for her truthtelling nature. What a bizarre leap! I have no illusions about her, I do not support her, and I think she is by far the most likely of the Democratic candidates to continue those aspects of the Bush regime I find most revolting. Her press management so far suggests a continuation of rollback, but that's the least of it. Posted by: Jay Rosen at December 1, 2007 4:03 PM | Permalink The only help for the American system is turning it into the British system where the President become Prime Minister and is forst among eguals. Too many President have had too many scandals the past half century. When the President is elected he is not coronated. It is time to restructure the entire system. Too many unelected aides that run rough shod over elected representatives. The executive branch has become the biggest circus in town with the most clowns. Danny L. McDaniel Posted by: Danny L. McDaniel at December 1, 2007 7:57 PM | Permalink The observation Bush offered back then is significant only because it touched on something else: the White House press did represent at one time the American public's interest in having an interlocutor capable of questioning the President in an informed way. I frankly doubt that the White House press corps was ever such an interlocutor. I'm sure it hasn't been one since at least the Nixon administration. And the fact that it isn't one was the point of Bush's observation. He wasn't calling the young reporter's personal views unrepresentative, in the sense of atypical of Americans -- rather, he denied the reporter's assumption of authority, his claim to be the public's spokesman by virtue of his position as a reporter. At any rate, QC Examiner's point is valid: what McClellan's tenure as WH press secretary says about Bush will be of no interest after 2008. What it says about the press is quite another matter. The press isn't going away after the next national election ... The only help for the American system is turning it into the British system where the President become Prime Minister and is forst among eguals. Hardly. The Westminster system is rather less accountable to the public than ours, precisely because the PM is a member of the parliament. The British House of Commons holds all the powers of the government at once; that gives the MPs much more scope to conceal who is responsible for what. Because the President and the Congress in the US are independent, neither one can maneuver far without butting against the other. And that partly answers the question Dr. Rosen has implicitly asked: who ought to have the right and duty to question the US President in the public's name? Congress clearly has both, as an independent branch of goverment under the Constitution. Of course the President has the equal right and duty to question Congress in the public's name -- and being one person, not 435, he'll have an easier time of it. But Congress can't be summarily ignored. Why do we need reporters living in the White House, when we have Senators and Representatives in the Capitol? Posted by: Michael Brazier at December 1, 2007 9:47 PM | Permalink The observation Bush offered back then is significant only because it touched on something else: the White House press did represent at one time the American public's interest in having an interlocutor capable of questioning the President in an informed way.Jay Rosen: What appears to be a struggle between the White House and the press is always a triangular relationship among journalists, the Administration and the public. Each leg—the President and the American people, the White House and the press, the press and the public—counts. If we look at two sides without reckoning with the third we’ll always go wrong.Something to consider when the "Bush haters" and "Bush Dead Enders" meet. Thanks for posting that, Tim. I think the three cornered thing is true. So I can see how Rollback poses a danger of reducing it to two. And yes, one of the things we should be talking about is what the next president--either party--is going to do with this busted system for communicating with the American people. You're quite right, all of you, that Bush won't be a part of that, and what one thinks of Bush or a stooge like McClellan contributes not at all to that forward-looking discussion. I hope to make some contributions along those lines. Examining what happened during this debacle for representative government (W.'s years) I will continue to do. How the Clinton years prepared the ground for the degradations Bush visited on the land is, I think, an extremely important part of the story. Even more so given the polls in the current election. Still, I'm pretty sure I will be writing posts on things like the retreat from empiricism, and "from meet the press to be the press," and maybe even rollback, for quite a while, exhausting the patience of almost all readers. You guys are early in the oncoming wave of resignations. I study the press, and in my way of doing it that often means pursuing some small thing that is of scant significance to most everyone else. Like a story I heard about reporters "going out" with snipers in Sarajevo that may or may not have been true, and could only be treated as a fable. I started my book, What Are Journalists For? with this plaque on the wall at the National Press Club that journalists had rushed by a zillion times, viewing its boilerplate language as bad wallpaper and never really thinking about the words. To them, a vapid consensus statement like that doesn't signify. To me it does. And that plaque would be something I would study... really, really hard. Because it is their pressthink in almost subconscious form. The fact that they dismiss it makes it even more interesting. Blog storms I study for the same reason. They bring out the id in the press. Traumas too. If you look at the logo and header on the front page of PressThink you can see this idea represented in Bill Drenttel's design. Pressthink is in the ghostly background. Posted by: Jay Rosen at December 1, 2007 11:26 PM | Permalink I haven't watched one of these debates since Nixon vs. Kennedy, so I'm a little bit in the dark about CNN's alleged sins. (Though I certainly wouldn't put just about any stunt past them.) its alleged sin is left-wing bias -- actually, a conscious conspiracy to infest the GOP YouTube debate with "Hillary Stooges". Which is, of course, pure nonsense. CNN picked the questions they wanted to use, checked the campaign contribution databases as their primary means of determining whether someone was supporting a particular candidate, and as long as they passed that first test, their question went on.... As a result, some questions were asked by people who weren't rock-ribbed republicans. And because most of the candidates made themselves look like idiots (and the audience made Republican's in general look even worse), the wingnuts have gone on a rampage about the people who asked the questions. But the questions were no worse (and were actually better) than those asked in Democratic debates -- you can't blame the questioners for Rudy making an ass of himself with "sanctuary mansions", or Willard making an ass of himself on torture/waterboarding, or McCain making an ass of himself on "Hitler".... and you can't blame the questions for the audience booing every time a candidate didn't hew to wingnut orthodoxy. THe networks always run bad debates -- but in this case, it was the candidates themselves that made themselves look bad. (I mean, Democrats recognize that 'drivers licenses' isn't even a federal issue, but two debates wound up focusing on that irrelevancy, rather than the real question of comprehensive immigration reform. The GOP candidates have been making immigrant-bashing a centerpiece of their campaigns, but the wingnut right is complaining about how much time was spent on that issue..) It just more "bias wars" nonsense from people who can't differentiate between incompetence and bias. Posted by: p.lukasiak at December 2, 2007 8:41 AM | Permalink Tim Rutten, a liberal who is hardly a Bush dead-ender, does not believe for one second that CNN matches Jay's fantasy of the press as representing "the American public's interest in having an interlocutor capable of questioning the President in an informed way." Rutten believes that CNN should be decertified and rolled back out of the electoral process: CNN intentionally directed the Republicans' debate to advance its own interests...CNN has failed in its responsibilities to the political process and it's time for the leaders of both the Republican and Democratic parties to take the network out of our electoral affairs. Posted by: Neuro-conservative at December 2, 2007 4:24 PM | Permalink CNN's management of both the recent Republican and Democratic debates is worthy of examination. It has fetched an expression of distaste from Professor Rosen, but apparently no effort to examine and report on CNN's faux impersonation of "an interlocutor capable of questioning Presidential candidates in an informed way". However, other agencies more concerned than he have made such an examination. They've turned up at least six interlocutors, billed as 'undecided Democratic voters' at Las Vegas but actually Democratic activists, and at least eight (out of 33 total) interlocutors, billed as 'undecided Republican voters' but actually Democratic activists, at Saint Petersburg. This is not a mere pecadillo. Comparing the CNN-selected questions with recent poll results, it appears that the issues considered most important by those Democratic and Republican voters (sure, different between the parties) were not well represented by the selected questions. Jewelry for Hillary, indeed. During every precious second of time occupied by those faux 'interlocutors' and their responses, many undecided voters were defrauded by the network of a response that would actually be pertinent to their more important quesions. The system has shown one more strong signal of being broke and needing fixing. How to do so? Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at December 2, 2007 7:53 PM | Permalink "So.... CNN is journalism. You are journalism. Posted by: Richard Aubrey Naw, you're not going to tag me with that one, Richard. (If the chief PR man at CNN were to read your post, he would keel over from a stroke.) A cursory examination of the posts at CampaignDesk.org and then CJR Daily.org during the two and a half years I was editor would reveal that CNN was the media outlet we criticized most frequently for its abysmal coverage of the 2004 campaign and its two-year aftermath; the New York Times was a distant second. (The guys and gals we liked most, much to my surprise, were at USA Today and the Wall Street Journal -- that was a revelation.) You could look it up -- if looking things up were actually part of your repertoire. Posted by: Steve Lovelady at December 2, 2007 7:54 PM | Permalink Steve, you answered a question I didn't ask. I'm not interested, nor are many of the general public, who you criticized and who you lauded. Yo're not as important to the rest of us as you think. The question is whether the general public thinks CNN is journalism. If it does, then journalism just got a black eye. Along with several others provided by CNN. It might be useful to publicly read CNN out of the brotherhood, for your own self-protection. I see Plukasiak managed to (deliberately?) misrepresent the issue with CNN's planting. He probably thinks we believe him because he's a journalist or something. Wrong. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 2, 2007 9:04 PM | Permalink And the hits just keep on comin'... Posted by: Neuro-conservative at December 3, 2007 12:31 AM | Permalink And the hits just keep on comin'... well if N-C can cite the Britney Spears of questionable journalism, I guess I can cite Mozart (who, of course, because he doesn't have the right wing noise machine behind him, gets none of the attention that the fabricating military guy..) Posted by: p.lukasiak at December 3, 2007 7:46 AM | Permalink P. Lu. NRO did not cover up. No hook. Too bad, guy. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 3, 2007 9:36 AM | Permalink "I'm not interested, nor are many of the general public, who you criticized and who you lauded. Yo're not as important to the rest of us as you think." --Aubrey Posted by: Steve Lovelady at December 3, 2007 11:08 AM | Permalink I claim double standard. I sure as hell couldn't get away with that remark. Better get paranoid about your mouth, Steve. The Brotherhood of Inkstained Wretches you depend on to cover for you are not the only game in town. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 3, 2007 11:52 AM | Permalink Any more. Which is what so many have been trying with so little result to tell you. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 3, 2007 12:23 PM | Permalink "Better get paranoid about your mouth, Steve. The Brotherhood of Inkstained Wretches you depend on to cover for you are not the only game in town." -- Richard Aubrey Once again, Richard, you display your abysmal lack of research. I left print journalism in 2001, in favor of creating successful websites. (At some point, this confusion over facts has got to get embarrassing to you, but apparently we haven't reached that point yet.) May I introduce you to http://www.google.com ? You could find amazing things there -- though few corresponding to your own world view. See you around the campus, Ace. Cheers, Web Man
Posted by: Steve Lovelady at December 3, 2007 5:45 PM | Permalink NRO fessed up, straightened things out, and made no excuses. Did it pretty quick, too. hardly. Why don't you read Greenwald's breakdown of how NRO ignored the criticism it was getting.... more to the point, NRO's guy was writing about stuff that could not have happened without other journalists noticing it. He made stuff up out of whole cloth -- stuff that was not merely "embarrassing", but put other journalists in danger, and was designed to increase tensions in the region. Of course, now that we know that Bushco has been lying through its teeth about the Iranian nuclear non-threat, Beauchamp AND NRO look like small potatos... Posted by: p.lukasiak at December 3, 2007 8:44 PM | Permalink Plu. "Lie" is what you do when you know better. That remains to be seen. New intel means new conclusions. "Lie" is when dems insist Bush was selected in 2000. They know better. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 3, 2007 9:44 PM | Permalink Mr. Lukasiak, I realize that in your political circle it's axiomatic that, when Republicans say something that isn't true they are always conscious liars -- hence, for instance, "BUSH LIED" when he said Saddam had WMD. For people not in your circle, however, evidence of intent to deceive is needed to make the charge. Here is NRO editor Lopez' account of events. I remark that it took NRO three weeks, at most, to retract their story upon challenge, compared to TNR's five months; that NRO accepted fault just for publishing a story that couldn't be proven, while TNR continued claiming innocence long after Beauchamp's stories were known to be fictions; and that NRO has expressed gratitude to the reporter who challenged their story, while TNR still condemns those who challenged Beauchamp as political conspirators with evil motives. If you didn't know the magazines' political affiliations, which of the two would you take to be repeating a falsehood unwittingly, and which a conscious liar? As for the latest NIE estimate, 1) these are the same people who thought Saddam had WMD, so who knows whether they've got it right this time? and 2) even if they are right, Bush based his policy on an earlier estimate that said different, and it isn't lying to act on false information ... unless you're a Republican, I suppose. Posted by: Michael Brazier at December 3, 2007 10:41 PM | Permalink Michael. Your intent to enlighten Plu is laudable, but misplaced. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 4, 2007 7:30 AM | Permalink Michael... it took NRO six weeks before a correction was made -- just because there is no left-wing noise machine to hype every lie told by the NRO, doesn't mean that no objections were raised immediately (see greenwald for the details). And as far as Beauchamp is concerned -- the Army refused to allow Beauchamp to speak to his editors without "minders" present for months on end -- and even when Foer did get a chance to speak to Beauchamp, Beauchamp would not repudiate his story. It should also be noted that New Republic had no problem acknowledging that there were elements of Beauchamp's story that were clearly not true months ago. As for Bush lying -- even after the inspectors had concluded that there were no WMD programs in Iraq, Bush continued to lie about them -- including pushing the ridiculous lie about "mobile biological weapons labs." Literally EVERY claims Bush originally made about WMDs "stockpiles" and "programs" was proven false before the invasion, yet Bush continued to say that Iraq had WMDs. While it was prudent in September 2002 to maintain sanctions on Iraq because of the lack of knowledge of what was happening in Iraq - and perfectly understandable for people to suspect that there was something going on, by March 2003 literally every suspect site had been inspected, and nothing had been found -- but Bush continued to lie about WMDs... just as he has been lying all year about Iran's non-existent nuclear program. The intelligence community figured out there was nothing there a year ago --- but Bush continued to push the big lie. Posted by: p.lukasiak at December 4, 2007 10:52 AM | Permalink The person lying about WMD is you, pluk. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at December 4, 2007 1:54 PM | Permalink He's also lying about the NIE. They have "high" confidence that the process stopped in 2003 and "moderate" confidence that it hasn't started up sometime after that to continue now. They also had "high" confidence in 2005 that there was a process in process. To say there's nothing there is a lie. What there is is...insufficient information in any direction. pluk apparently doesn't think the rest of us can read, or, possibly, he's a journalist and thinks everybody believes him no matter what. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 4, 2007 4:48 PM | Permalink And as far as Beauchamp is concerned -- the Army refused to allow Beauchamp to speak to his editors without "minders" present for months on end -- Not true. Once the Army had finished its investigation of Beauchamp's stories, Beauchamp had the same facilities, and the same freedom, to talk with TNR editors as any other soldier in his unit did. And it didn't take the Army "months on end" to investigate; as I recall they were done in less than two weeks. If TNR couldn't reach Beauchamp, it was Beauchamp's doing, not the Army's. It should also be noted that New Republic had no problem acknowledging that there were elements of Beauchamp's story that were clearly not true months ago. Actually, TNR insisted that every word of Beauchamp's articles was true, except the one item (the burned woman in FOB Falcon) that Beauchamp himself later claimed really happened in Kuwait, before he'd seen battle. And TNR refused to notice that by moving the event to Kuwait, Beauchamp had undermined the thesis of that article that fighting brutalizes soldiers. TNR didn't, in short, admit that anyone could have good reason to doubt Beauchamp's veracity for "months on end". Now, let's look at the suggested parallel with W. Thomas Smith and NRO again. Our present ability to check Smith's veracity stands where our ability to check Beauchamp's was, before he was identified. At that point nobody on the right had claimed that TNR itself was dishonest when it printed Beauchamp's articles -- the worst that was said was that TNR had once again been duped by a fabulist. If TNR had retracted Beauchamp's articles then (as NRO has retracted Smith's now) TNR would now have a reputation for gullibility, but not one of dishonesty. Even if Smith does prove to be a fabulist like Beauchamp, NRO has already shown itself better than TNR. Posted by: Michael Brazier at December 4, 2007 6:04 PM | Permalink Michael, you are such a bad sport. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 4, 2007 8:59 PM | Permalink
Even Bush and Cheney have given up on that fiction. That's what makes Jason so reassuring. He'll go to his grave clutching an empty cannister of mustard gas. Posted by: Steve Lovelady at December 4, 2007 9:28 PM | Permalink Ah, perfect. Steve Lovelady is back with another intellectually dishonest argument. It's pretty clear that I was simply refuting the claim that "nothing had been found." Lovelady has no rebuttal, so, sloppy thinker that he is, he goes ahead and embraces an ad hominem argument against me without reference to the actual facts: At least 500 chemical munitions have been found. (517 by my count, actually, plus another 17 or so that were handed over to the Poles in 04). That's established fact. I make no representation as to the presence of other munitions beyond that in Iraq in serviceable form at this time, and never have. (Though anyone who clings to the notion that Saddam was pure as the driven snow on WMD in 2003, with no intention of developing them, pretty much demonstrates themselves to be a naive little useful idiot.) You regard those munitions as a fiction, but I've posted a primary document here establishing it as fact. You calling it a "fiction" while making no attempt to address the source doc itself is, well, pathetic. Have fun with your ad hominems, Steve. It's all you've got left. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at December 4, 2007 10:01 PM | Permalink Steve demonstrates the new--but not that new--journalism. Second, he pretends that Jason is the source of the chemical weapons intel, not the government. He also pretends that the stuff referenced has not been found--which is not true. It was. The result of which is...what? Steve looks bad, or worse, and Jason looks better. Even if Jason were wrong, Steve's sneering makes him a sympathetic figure. Good work, Steve. You deserve a bonus. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 4, 2007 11:13 PM | Permalink Concerning the back-and-forth about whether President Bush lied about an ongoing Iranian nuclear weapons program even after his spies hinted to him that it had been discontinued in 2003… …his curious choice of words in his October press conference now seems to make sense: “If you are interested in avoiding World War III it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [the Teheran regime] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.” As early as October, Bush’s problem with Iran was not an ongoing program but its “knowledge necessary” to launch such a program. It is such accepted wisdom that our President has “total incapacity for rhetoric,” to use Brazier’s words in an earlier comment in this thread, that we can blind ourselves to any artful use of language whatsoever. If the White House press corps had interrogated that “knowledge” as a serious form of words -- rather than hearing just the latest in a seemingly infinite series of clumsy locutions -- Monday’s NIE revelation would not have come as a surprise. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at December 5, 2007 7:39 AM | Permalink Andrew. The NIE tells us several things. One is that the Iranians lied about peaceful purposes only. Because the new NIE tells us they stopped their program in 2003. One cannot stop that which does not exist. Thus, they had a weapons program in action. Now, we have moderate confidence that their weapons program--which, see the NIE--really is a weapons program, is on hold. Not gone away. Not run into a dead end. Just on hold. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 5, 2007 11:32 AM | Permalink Aubrey -- Point taken. When I said earlier "Bush’s problem with Iran was not an ongoing program but its 'knowledge necessary' to launch such a program" I should have said "...relaunch..." Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at December 5, 2007 1:14 PM | Permalink Andrew. I don't see the wonderfulness here. The Iranians can start up where they left off with the advantage of whatever oddments of engineering and plumbing they've been able to acquire or learn to do since the suspension which,we have moderate confidence, continues. Then the limiting factor is fissile material. It no longer matters what they do, buy, manufacture, discover their own fissile material. No amount of evidence will ever be acceptable, ever again. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 5, 2007 1:26 PM | Permalink Precisely, Richard. Because "necessary knowledge" is what the President sees as the dangerous thing, it is absolutely irrelevant to him whether Iran's program has been inactive for four years or not. Hence his statement at his press conference yesterday: "I have said 'Iran is dangerous' and the NIE does not do anything to change my opinion." Once nuclear knowledge has been acquired, not operating a nuclear weapons program and operating one amount to the same thing, in the Bush view. You summarize his attitude precisely: "No amount of evidence will ever be acceptable, ever again." I imagine Professor Rosen would characterize that as his Retreat from Empiricism. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at December 5, 2007 1:55 PM | Permalink Andrew, set aside for the moment Bush's view of Iran. What is your view? Do you suppose Iran is not dangerous, simply because its nuclear weapons program has been suspended? It is established, by solid evidence, that Iran has all the equipment needed to build nuclear weapons. What isn't established is whether it has the skill needed to use that equipment; and whether it has the intention to use it. The evidence that would establish that is currently in the minds of people in Iran, and none of those people are going to answer questions from you or me. In fact, they won't even answer questions from the IAEA, which has the right to ask them. In light of what we do know, and of what we can't expect to learn, about Iran's capabilities and intentions -- what does the true empiricist do? Posted by: Michael Brazier at December 5, 2007 5:25 PM | Permalink A Crucial Estimate Relived, was written in 1964 by Sherman Kent, who as head of the Office of National Estimates was directly involved in an NIE that, in mid-September 1962, reasoned that the Soviets would not put offensive intercontinental ballistic missiles in Cuba. In less than a month, photographic intelligence proved the estimate wrong. In reflecting on the lessons learned, Kent discusses the estimative process in general as well as that erroneous estimate in particular. Do you suppose Iran is not dangerous, simply because its nuclear weapons program has been suspended? I do not subscribe to the view that there is no difference in the level of danger between an Iran with a suspended program and Iran with an active one. Obviously suspension is preferable and less dangerous. What isn't established is whether it has the skill needed to use that equipment; and whether it has the intention to use it. It seems significant to me that Iran suspended its program in the fall of 2003, according to NIE, immediately after the fall of its mortal enemy, the Baath regime of Iraq. Teheran had already used weapons of mass destruction against Baghdad. Its pre-2003 “intention” to develop nuclear weapons may have derived from the need to develop a deterrent against a renewal of the Iran-Iraq War. That need was apparently obviated by the US invasion of Iraq and the installation of a pro-Teheran Shiite-led government in Baghdad. In fact, they won't even answer questions from the IAEA, which has the right to ask them. In fact, they have answered the IAEA’s questions about uranium enrichment with the answer that its purpose is to generate electricity. What is at stake is whether that answer is credible. What does the true empiricist do? Trust but verify. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at December 5, 2007 6:27 PM | Permalink Andrew. I know. I know. "Useful and frank" negotiations. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 5, 2007 9:53 PM | Permalink Touche', Aubrey. Let me rephrase that: Jason will go to his grave clutching an empty cannister found in the Iraq desert that may or may not have once contained mustard gas. Or perhaps it only contained ... mustard. Hard to tell in Jason's world, where even the president and the vice president have turned their backs on really solid evidence that might have justified their misbeggton adventure in Mess O' Potamia. And for this -- one of Jason's tin cans -- we sacrificed over 3,000 American troops and 30,000 or so Iraqi civilians, and still counting ? Oy. Posted by: Steve Lovelady at December 5, 2007 10:35 PM | Permalink Steve, Once again, you fail to address the fact: WMDs were found in Iraq. Hundreds of them. I can only assume you're being deliberately obtuse. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at December 5, 2007 11:18 PM | Permalink I do not subscribe to the view that there is no difference in the level of danger between an Iran with a suspended program and Iran with an active one. Well, neither does George Bush, as far as I can tell. "Iran is dangerous" isn't a comparative statement; Iran can be less dangerous than we thought, and still pose a threat. Trust but verify. An unintelligent answer, in this context. Iran has broken the world's trust on several occasions, and at present (as I was saying) we have no means to verify its assertions. So again, when one cannot verify, and dare not trust -- what does the empiricist do? Posted by: Michael Brazier at December 5, 2007 11:34 PM | Permalink Jason. Steve will go to his grave believing WMD were found in Iraq but refusing to admit it. He will also continue to try to fool the rest of us that the sole reason for the invasion was WMD. He, being a journalist, thinks we believe him merely because he speaks. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 6, 2007 7:25 AM | Permalink Here's the other thing. Suppose the NIE has it exactly right, and Iran abandoned its nuclear weapons program in the fall of 2003, right along with Libya's. That is not in the slightest a blow to Administration policy in southwest Asia. That is an overwhelming vindication of it. Remember, Qadaffi said quite plainly that he abandoned his WMD program because "I saw what happened to Saddam Hussein, and I was afraid." The problem with people like SL is this: 1. He doesn't know how to construct a fact-based argument. But in this he follow's Rosen's lead, in that Rosen will frequently build an entire lengthy post based not on facts, but upon assertions and interpretations. For example, "rollback," and "retreat from empiricism." 2. He grasps price (casualties) but does not grasp value. 3. He doesn't grasp complexity: There can exist simultaneously a number of reasons to invade Iraq. And Congress made it easy by spelling out more than a score of them, which they considered, debated and voted upon. Moreover, he apparently does not grasp that if the NIE asserts something with "moderate confidence," then there is a substantial probability of that assessment being false, as well. That probability is translated thus: Contingency. And contingencies are planned for. 4. He thinks an ad hominem against me supports his argument, though it really serves to highlight the lack of factual information he can bring to bear, and 5. He doesn't know when to stop digging a hole for himself. Indeed, in this case, he continues to levy ad hominem arguments against me based on assertion - that no WMD were found in Iraq - that has just been completely falsified. Which of course brings us back to number one. I'm sure he and Franklin Foer could close down a bar together, comiserating in their beer. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at December 6, 2007 8:25 AM | Permalink Michael, set aside for the moment Bush's view of Iran. What is your view? Do you believe that, if it turns out to be true that its nuclear weapons program has been suspended for the past four years, Iran would indeed be, in your words, "less dangerous than we thought"? Iran has broken the world's trust on several occasions... If it turns out to be true that its nuclear weapons program has been suspended, the evidence for such a breach of trust would be much more ambiguous than your bald assertion. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at December 6, 2007 10:07 AM | Permalink Here's John Bolton's take on the NIE, which pretty much aligns with mine. Natch, I regard it as a must read ... not because I agree with it, but because it's an example of how they view these kinds of documents at the grown-up table. No, PressThink doesn't qualify. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at December 6, 2007 11:27 AM | Permalink Hey Jay! I am new to your blog, but I can already see I am going to enjoy it. Not because I agree with you about everything (in some of your comments, I find you to be rather dogmatic), but because you are well spoken and well informed. I look forward to future articles. As to the McClelland article, speaking as a person who voted for Bush, I , too have found his refusal to be forthcoming in the media to be among his largest failings. I would have much more respect for him, and his ratings would be much higher, if he had personally stood on that stage on a regular basis and fielded the questions that were being thrown at his press secretary. If not that, at the very least he should have had "fireside chats" with the public on a regular basis. Maybe a combination of those ideas would have been good. But, his isolation from the media and, by extension, the American public has damaged his credibility. As for the NIE, don't you guys realize the same report which says Iran's nuclear program halted in 2003 also says Iran will most likely have nuclear weapon capability by 2013? Clearly, things are not as desperate as Bush says they are. But, things are not as sunshine and rosie and some of you appear to think. Iran is still a very real threat in the area of nuclear weapons, and they must continue to be heavily monitored by the international community. However, I would agree that the sabre rattling President Bush has been doing has been over the line in view of the new intelligence reports. billyjacksblog Posted by: billyjacksblog at December 6, 2007 1:39 PM | Permalink Jeepers, van Steenwyk, thanks for the link to Bolton in the WaPo. It appears, by some twist of fate, that I have stumbled into agreement with him. Says Bolton: "The only event in 2003 that might have affected Iran was our invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein..." Says Tyndall earlier: "It seems significant to me that Iran suspended its program in the fall of 2003, according to NIE, immediately after the fall of its mortal enemy, the Baath regime of Iraq..." Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at December 6, 2007 1:55 PM | Permalink Over at Belmont Club, one careful reader noted the NYT says the source was notes from a discussion by Iranian military officials. The unclassified portion of the NIE does not mention sources, so this is either made up, or the classified sections have been leaked to the MSM. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 6, 2007 2:41 PM | Permalink Says Tyndall earlier: "It seems significant to me that Iran suspended its program in the fall of 2003, according to NIE, immediately after the fall of its mortal enemy, the Baath regime of Iraq..." well, since Saddam was overthrown well before the fall of 2003, its difficult to say 'immediately after." The most crucial thing to keep in mind is that the IAEA has never said that Iran had a nuclear weapons program. And given the nature of "intelligence" under the Bush regime in the past, one must take the assertion that Iran was working on developing nukes with a large grain of salt. And while wingnuts like to think that Iranian actions were based on the invasion of Iraq, a far more rational explanation is that Iran invited the IAEA to inspect its nuclear installations in February 2003 once it became clear from his inspections of Iraq that el Baradei and the IAEA were not in thrall to the USA, and would evaluate Iran's efforts impartially. Throughout the eighties and nineties the US had blocked ever effort of the Iranian regime to finish its nuclear plants at Bushehr -- the US convinced West Germany to not ship equipment that had already been paid for, for instance. As a result, it would appear that Iran clandestinely sought help from Pakistan -- the effort had to be clandestine because while Iran was a signatory of the NNPT, Pakistan was not. And, it would appear that included in the 'technology' information provided by Pakistan was some information related to weapons development -- and some equipment transferred to Iran had been contaminated with weapons grade uranium -- these things were discovered by the IAEA, and (after an ultimatum issued by the IAEA in September 2003) Iran has been providing credible explanations for these anomolies. It should also be noted that most of the "damning" information about Iran's supposed weapons program is coming throught the US backed, anti-Iranian terrorist group, the MEK. We've already seen this movie, starring the INC, and we know how that turned out.. In other words, Andrew, don't assume that Iran ever had a weapons program -- or at least one that was active until Fall 2003. The most likely explanation is that some changes occured with the way in which Iran's civilian nuclear power program was administered in Fall 2003 as a result of the "ultimatum" issued by the IAEA in September of that year. (The idea that Iran would shut down a clandestine weapons program in Fall 2003 is counter-intuitive in terms of what was happening in US neo-con policy circles at that time -- the big discussion wasn't about whether the US should invade another country, but which country (Syria or Iran) after the Iraq "success". Iran had watched as the US lied about the non-existent Iraqi nuclear program, so what point would there be in shutting down a weapons program knowing that the US would lie about it anyway?) Posted by: p.lukasiak at December 6, 2007 5:16 PM | Permalink Lukasiak -- If the threat that preoccupied Iran was its Baath arch-enemy in Iraq, the installation of a pro-Teheran Shiite-led government in Baghdad would make nuclear deterrence moot. It was around the fall of 2003 that it became clear that Grand Ayatollah Sistani had ensured the unity of a majority Shiite coalition to lead the next Iraqi government. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at December 6, 2007 5:59 PM | Permalink Andrew... while the Baathist as a threat may have disappeared, Bushco emerged to take its place in Iraq. (Bremer was still in charge in Fall 2003, and there was no sense that the US had any plans to leave Iraq -- unless it was through Syria or Iran). In other words, while Saddam may have been gone, the threat from Iraq (as a geographic entity) actually intensified, and I don't seen how one can assume that the elimination of a threat from Iraq as the proximate cause of Iran shutting down a weapons program makes any real sense. Posted by: p.lukasiak at December 6, 2007 6:35 PM | Permalink re: Iran Start with the 2002 SOTU and Iran's inclusion in the "axis of evil." Head on over to BBC's Timeline: Iran nuclear crisis which starts in August 2002. Then stop by IAEA's In Focus : IAEA and Iran where you can read the 6 June 2003 IAEA Board Report [pdf] all the way through their most recent reports and press releases. Here are the Findings from 2003: Iran has failed to meet its obligations under its Safeguards Agreement with respect to the reporting Lukasiak-- You are probably right that I am on thin ground here. Nevertheless, I will point out that the Security Council resolution requiring a post-Baath constitution and national elections was passed in mid-October 2003. So Bremer's days were numbered as early as that fall. By that time, Teheran must have been certain that SCIRI, Dawa, even the Sadrists, would hold together in a majority Shiite coalition. For the first time since 1990, there was no longer any chance of a revival of the Iran-Iraq war. Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at December 6, 2007 7:18 PM | Permalink Here are the Findings from 2003: Tim, none of that is being disputed, and in fact, what that report details is the results of IAEA inspections that took place after Iran acknowledged in February 2003 that it was involved in R&D for nuclear power plants.... and none of it is really relevant to a weapons program. There is a simple reason why Iran wasn't reporting any of this stuff -- the US was doing everything it could to prevent Iran from developing nuclear power plants -- which it had a legal right to do. Posted by: p.lukasiak at December 6, 2007 7:31 PM | Permalink Pluk. Your choice of which intel to believe is interesting. The NYT article indicates that "stop" means something narrower than we would prefer and would presume when wishing things would go well. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 6, 2007 7:40 PM | Permalink Iran: Nuclear Intentions and Capabilities We judge with high confidence that the halt, and Tehran’s announcement of its decision to suspend its declared uranium enrichment program and sign an Additional Protocol to its Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Safeguards Agreement, was directed primarily in response to increasing international scrutiny and pressure resulting from exposure of Iran’s previously undeclared nuclear work.NTI : Iran Profile : Nuclear Overview In response to Iran’s continued uranium enrichment program, the U.N. Security Council supplied Iran with an ultimatum on December 23, [2006] which stated that unless Iran ceased all enrichment activities it would face further sanctions. However, in February 2007 an IAEA report concluded that Iran had actually accelerated its uranium enrichment activities. The report detailed the continued construction of a heavy water reactor, the transportation of 9 tons of gaseous feedstock to the main facility in Natanz, and the planned expansion of centrifuge installations to 3,000 by May 2007.[40] This acceleration of enrichment activities caused the IAEA to approve the suspension of 22 nuclear technical aid projects to Iran as part of imposed U.N. Security Council sanctions.Security Council Committee established pursuant to resolution 1737 (2006) SECURITY COUNCIL TOUGHENS SANCTIONS AGAINST IRAN, ADDS ARMS EMBARGO (24 March 2007) Paul, I'm glad to hear you are not disputing the IAEA's 2003 findings. ... and none of it is really relevant to a weapons program.The primary concern with Iran has been it's refusal to suspend "all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development, as verified by the IAEA, to allow for negotiations in good faith in order to reach an early and mutually acceptable outcome." If your point is enriching and reprocessing isn't "really relevant" to a weapons program, I disagree. If your point is that enriching and reprocessing does not dictate the existence of a weapons program, I agree. There is a simple reason why Iran wasn't reporting any of this stuff -- the US was doing everything it could to prevent Iran from developing nuclear power plants -- which it had a legal right to do.Iran's violations of the NPT were the US's fault? Uh, no. Richard -- As you know, you are barking up the wrong tree in trying to find a logically coherent argument from p.luk. At a more meta level, though, you must admit he is entirely consistent. In each instance, he is always willing to think the best of the Iranian mullahcracy and the worst of the United States. That is a perfectly coherent position, and one that is no doubt shared by many -- Ahmadinejad, Khameini, Hugo Chavez, to name a few. Posted by: Neuro-conservative at December 6, 2007 9:50 PM | Permalink Neuro. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 6, 2007 10:18 PM | Permalink Culture warriors have to be a little disappointed with this. Why is Dan Bartlett saying these awful things? Journalists aren't ideologically driven? My answer: he doesn't want to be known as a yahoo among people who know politics. TM: Do you think the press corps is responsible for putting that word out—that the president was lying [about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq]? BARTLETT: I don’t think they’re purposely doing it. Look, I get asked the question all the time: How do you deal with them when they’re all liberal? I’ve found that most of them are not ideologically driven. Do I think that a lot of them don’t agree with the president? No doubt about it. But impact, above all else, is what matters. All they’re worried about is, can I have the front-page byline? Can I lead the evening newscast? And unfortunately, that requires them to not do in-depth studies about President Bush’s health care plan or No Child Left Behind. It’s who’s up, who’s down: Cheney hates Condi, Condi hates Cheney. Posted by: Jay Rosen at December 7, 2007 12:14 AM | Permalink Yeah. I get it. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 7, 2007 7:20 AM | Permalink Your choice of which intel to believe is interesting. Richard, its not a question of which intelligence I believe -- its a question of knowing what the facts are -- and knowing how this admistration has consistently twisted intelligence "to make the facts fit the policy." And its truly unfortunate that such skepticism is warranted, because while we have no credible evidence that Iran had a weapons program, absense of evidence is not evidence of absence. ********** Iran's violations of the NPT were the US's fault? Uh, no. Tim, prior to the Iranian Revolution, Iran was developing peaceful uses of nuclear technology with US cooperation, including the sale of 6 nuclear power plants agreed to in 1975. (The Shah also said, in 1974, that he intended to get nuclear weapons, btw). That program was shut down when the Shah was overthrown. In 1993, Clinton got Russia to shut down negotiations for "heavy water" reactors, and got Germany to renege on its contract to finish the Buhsher power plant -- and since that time, the Clinton administration (followed by Bushco) did everything it could to prevent Iran from generating electricity using nuclear technology -- including the blocking of sale/transfer of enriched uranium for use in power plants. Thus, the only way that Iran could exercise its right to produce electricity in nucler power plants was to do so clandestinely. And while I understand that the IAEA wants enrichment stopped so that 'good faith negotiations' can take place, do you honestly believe that the Bush administration would negotiate "in good faith?" Iran twice suspended all enrichment activities (in 2003 and 2004) but when the US and EU3 demanded that the shut down be permanent, the 'good faith' negotiations broke down. (I'd also like to suggest that the nations which currently produce reactor fuel want to maintain their monopoly --- and this plays a role in the EU3's actions) Posted by: p.lukasiak at December 7, 2007 9:21 AM | Permalink Yeah, I get it. Uh, no. Why did Batlett say those terrible things? "I’ve found that most of them are not ideologically driven." That's just mean. What would it have cost him to thrown you a conceptual bone? Nothing! Yet he wouldn't. Why? Because he thinks you're a yahoo, Richard, that's why. He's happy to have your vote, he loves the fact that you're out there beating on the librual media; it's great to have you helping discredit the interlocutor and wonderful the way you you hold the party line no matter what...That you are besotted with Bush pleases him greatly, I am sure. You can't get any more besostted with Bush than him. BUT, just like Karl Rove, when it's time for him to personally align his conclusions with yahoos like you and Jason and Nano Conservative, Dan Bartlett declines. Reason? Because it's embarrassing to him to have to sign on to what the yahoos think about the librul media. It would mark him as a rube who wandered into Washington fresh from the culture wars, and he's not going to do it. Posted by: Jay Rosen at December 7, 2007 9:40 AM | Permalink pluk misses the point that fuel can be supplied from Russia--I think they have a contract for same--and Switzerland has offered. If the Iranians wanted to get over the paranoia caused by people listening to them, they could accept fuel from an outside source, generate all the juice they want and everybody would be happy. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 7, 2007 9:42 AM | Permalink Jay. Bartlett can only piss off the guys he works with so far. That's how politics works. I can believe him or my lying eyes. The examples are, as the saying goes, too numerous to mention. Except for those which have been mentioned. But which make no difference to you. But my position is not to get your wrist up between your shoulder blades and force you to admit what we both know. You do not "win" the discussion because I do not force you, in one way or another, to acknowledge what we both know. If you want to see things like, oh, increased employment at news organizations, increased stock prices, and so forth, you might think about changing...something. If you like increased readership and viewership, you might want to change...something. I do admit to a bit of gloating when your footshooting results in a massive layoff here, or a ratings tank there. So, don't stop. I can use the laughs. What's funnier is your refusal to even think about it. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 7, 2007 9:49 AM | Permalink What's funnier is your refusal to even think about it Aubrey, what on Earth are you talking about? The entire PressThink effort is concerned with nothing except the changes required in journalism in the face of falling readership, tanking ratings and massive layoffs. Just because some of us think the phenomenon requires a more complicated explanation -- and more thoroughgoing solutions -- than correcting what you perceive to be ideological bias does not put us in the category of believing "not changing is more important." Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at December 7, 2007 10:23 AM | Permalink Andrew. You can look for the new model in Bill Roggio, Michael Yon, and Michael Totten, along with several less well-known folks getting down and dirty in Iraq--or in Totten's case, the ME generally. That stuff is ready made for the new model. Independent, self-supporting, expert at the business of war and reporting, connected to idunnohowmany other experts and practitioners. More guts than ought to be expected. Don't use stringers. Take lots of pictures. Sit in conferences with local leaders and US commanders. The result, outside of the wingnut blogosphere.... Nothing. It's not the package. It's the content. Got any idea of, say, breaking the world view away from the NYT? Gonna quit making shit up? Does it take a new model to consider that the problem of homelessness doesn't effing DISAPPEAR once a dem is elected? Does it take a new model to figure out that people noticed the MSM acted as if, once Reagan were out, everybody had a new home? Daily 6:30 reports on the problem went away. Think nobody noticed? Wrap it up how you want. But I haven't seen anybody interested in whether the public is going to buy it any more than they bought the old crap, which they are increasingly not buying. Well, this is the season for new wrapping paper and it seems to make people happy. Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 7, 2007 11:08 AM | Permalink Oh, yeah. To address credibility, which few around here seem to worry about, stop making readers play "name that party". Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 7, 2007 4:52 PM | Permalink Heh. Jay Rosen calling other people 'culture warriors' is like a rat calling a squirrel a 'long-snouted varmint.' Regarding Bartlett's point, the journalist class isn't driven by their shared center-left ideology that has been so conclusively demonstrated elsewhere in multiple surveys and studies. They are driven by the drive for status among BoBo's (c.f. David Brooks' "Bobos in Paradise." Rather, I would argue that rather than being driven by their set of assumptions, journalists are captive to them. They live in an ideological bubble and have no idea what lies beyond it. Instead, we get purple stars and Pauline Kael. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at December 7, 2007 6:34 PM | Permalink Paul, Thus, the only way that Iran could exercise its right to produce electricity in nucler power plants was to do so clandestinely.Uh, again, no. I agree that the US used diplomatic pressure in the 90s to prevent the completion of a heavy-water reactor at Bushehr along with enrichment and reprocessing capability in Iran. I don't agree that the Clinton administration's efforts in 1993, or any other time, left Iran with only the option to develop a peaceful nuclear power capability covertly. Iran has been offered generous packages in 2005 and 2006. The bad faith has not been on the part of the EU-3, United States, Russia, China or the rest of the world. I'll also note that you're unwilling to link to any support for your position. Jason. Posted by: Richard 'Aubrey at December 8, 2007 8:20 AM | Permalink Not as long as they're phony. Then the press loves 'em. Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at December 8, 2007 9:12 AM | Permalink This from Billyjack upthread cannot go unremarked upon: ...Speaking as a person who voted for Bush, I , too have found his refusal to be forthcoming in the media to be among his largest failings. I would have much more respect for him, and his ratings would be much higher, if he had personally stood on that stage on a regular basis and fielded the questions that were being thrown at his press secretary. If not that, at the very least he should have had "fireside chats" with the public on a regular basis. Maybe a combination of those ideas would have been good. But, his isolation from the media and, by extension, the American public has damaged his credibility. And further weakened him as a president. But as I have said many times here, Bush was too weak to do what Billy suggested-- too much pride, too little respect for the unpersuaded, too many dangerous gaps in his knowledge, too much dogma, too big a bubble--and the culture warriors mistook this weakness for sticking it to the librul media, which they loved as culture war theatre. When actually they were supporting Bush's worst tendencies. It's hard for his supporters to admit it, it's hard even for his critics to believe it, and it's hard for the American people to understand it, but Bush isn't an empiricist. At all. You have to go back to the englightenment to find the origins of what he rejects. The idea that a strategy for acting on the world must first ascertain what is happening in the world, this idea is what he rejects. Instead he feels he can decide what is happening and then devise a strategy that brings people around to his facts. And that is why Bush is dangerous to the military, which I believe many in the military now understand. That is what he was doing in "explaining" the NIE, as Andrew pointed out. Well, I've said all that a zillion times before. I am well aware that it has no effect. Thanks to all participants. Thread closed. Posted by: Jay Rosen at December 8, 2007 9:14 AM | Permalink |
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