I think it is possible for the views of grassroots conservatives and insider GOP partisans to both be true if you understand that they're looking at different parts of the media beast.

Consider that Carl Rove and Dan Bartlett want the press to write favorably about them when they are trying to enact a conservative policy (say restricting the size of government through social security privatization) and write favorably about them when they are trying to enact liberal policy (working with Ted Kennedy to expand the role of the feds in education). Rove and Bartlett view their media experience through the prism of partisanship not ideology.

Whereas folks like the PowerLine guys or your typical conservative talk radio host see the world far more through the prism of conservative policy. Giving Bush a fair shake on No Child Left Behind just proves that the press is liberal.

I think another way to look at this is by understanding how the press chooses to be oppositional. Sure my experience has been that the press is always oppositional to those in power. The preferred form of that opposition is non-partisan -- catching pols lying, being hypocrites, being unethical etc ... but when the press critiques on the basis of policy that critique tends to come with a good dose of liberal baggage.

Posted by: David Mastio at December 29, 2007 9:38 AM | Permalink

You've written many times about the administration's efforts toward marginalizing the press, and the contempt in which Bush especially and the administration in general appear to hold the press. Rove's comments in particular, and Bartlett's to an only slightly lesser degree, pretty well reflect that contempt more than any dissing of the "liberal press" bloodhounds on the right.

Consider the portrait Rove and Bartlett jointly paint: reporters are narcicisstic obstructionists whose interests lie only in self-aggrandizement ("can I have the front-page byline?") and the satisfaction that comes from being primarily a nuisance ("to be a constant thorn of those in power") rather than a reporter ("discovering facts and fair-mindedly reporting the truth"). And then consider that Milbank, at least, seems to find some redeeming value in that portrait.

(Although the grammar in that 'thorn' quote suggests, no doubt inadvertently, that reporters are thorns wielded by those in power rather than ones stuck in the powerful's paw, which as it happens is all too often closer to the truth.)

You and I have discussed the lack of institutional memory on the part of the press—that inability or unwillingness to "connect a lot of dots, keep at it for years". This administration's penchant for generating dots, piling scandal upon disaster upon scandal, has ameliorated the failure of the press to recognize the pattern because the landscape is now all dots, all the time, and readers, the public, have made Bush the most enduringly unpopular president in history as a result.

But Rove and Bartlett and others involved in handling the press can't ultimately be unhappy about their results: the fact that no important newspaper has called for the impeachment of Bush or Cheney speaks ever so loudly to the unwillingness of reporters, and certainly editors, to synthesize a pattern from hundreds of similar stories about hundreds of similar excesses or incompetencies.

A case in point is Robert Wexler's stunningly successful and all but invisible effort to gain support for impeachment hearings aimed at Cheney. Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post would publish an op-ed from Wexler and fellow representatives Luis Gutierrez and Tammy Baldwin laying out the case for impeachment. (It was finally published by the Philadelphia Enquirer, nearly two weeks after the three members of Congress wrote it). And neither paper has done a story about the effort, which has attracted some 250,000 signatures in support; the only paper that has written a story on the drive is Wexler's home district Miami Herald (appropriately, part of the McClatchy chain, which still favors skeptical, analytical reporting).

Rove and Bartlett have to love that.

I don't see contempt in Bartlett's comments about right-wing blogs or talk radio; he's simply describing the ideal reporter/analyst, a la Judith Miller and Michael Gordon at the Times, or Joe Klein at Time magazine: someone with whom you have a relationship and who trusts you enough to repeat uncritically what you tell them. And who gets the front page anyway.

Posted by: weldon berger at December 29, 2007 2:52 PM | Permalink

I think the media bias hunting yahoos on the bus but not allowed to drive is a good analogy found on the Right and Left.

I would note that the bias hunters on the Left have been successful lately driving.

Whereas the bias hunters on the Right see a liberal media, the bias hunters on the Left see a corporate media. Whereas the bias hunters on the Right can name people and news organizations as ideological friends to Democrats, the bias hunters on the Left can name Scaife, Murdoch, Sinclair along with Clear Channel Communications and Fox News as ideological friends to Republicans.

The direct pipeline of the Progressive Media, plays a similar role in exploiting distrust of the press among the base.

I also think there is a corollary in The Note's observation: "One party knows the press is its 'enemy'; one party mistakenly thinks the press is its 'friend.'" An anti-authority "opposition" press is a player in the Culture War: Institutions vs. Media.

I do think there are better critiques of the press, along with headline-grabbing, the production of innocence and the ideological self-portrait as muckraker and watchdog.

Posted by: Tim at December 29, 2007 6:48 PM | Permalink

You don't go far enough. The media have been discredited in the eyes of the right wing activists -- they actually think the media are lying to them. So the "direct line" actually takes the place of the media.

Posted by: bonyfingers at December 29, 2007 10:05 PM | Permalink

I've always thought it strange and somehow a bad business practice for the conservative owners and stockholders of big media to allow so many liberals to report and support the news and opinions of the liberal elite over those of the right leaning mainstream masses.

Then again, maybe that's just their way of instilling fear and pointing fingers at a supposed "enemy of the state" in hopes of keeping their base energized.

Rule #1 in the fascist handbook: "Control the message."
Rule #2 "Appoint someone the enemy."

I guess since Communists are no longer a serious threat liberals are the next best thing.

Posted by: Billy The Blogging Poet at December 30, 2007 12:41 PM | Permalink

Yahoos

The 'press' doesn't 'expose' ANY truth! Referee, my freaking ass! Their agenda is the agenda of their corporate overlords - maintain corporations free from oversight, rolling in tax breaks, and keep the wars rolling cause it's god for the fat cats. That means defend war-mongering presidents and bought-off Congressman, condemn populist candidates (Edwards) as 'poofy faggots', condemn anti-Occupation candidates as 'extremist', etc, etc. The MSM should be regarded as 'collaborators' at best, by no stretch are they 'referees' - wake up jack!

Which is of course followed by the obligatory fear-mongering finger-pointing reference to fascists. [sigh]

Posted by: Tim at December 30, 2007 1:33 PM | Permalink

Wrt Huckabee:
He's one of what is known as a Walmart Republican, tough on high-profile social issues and in favor of government programs. Social conservatives in favor of receiving government largesse.
For most conservatives, social conservatism is part of the package, but not the biggest, and Huckabee has dropped the biggest.

Washington insiders have to butter each others' bread, so they can't very well say what they think in some cases.

Roggio has no proof for the MSM's motivation. He does have, however, on-the-ground experience about the MSM's consistent misreporting. He wonders, as do many, what the motivation for misreporting is. Occam's razor points at a desire to bring down the Bush administration. TO put it another way, if they wanted to bring down the Bush administration, what would they do differently?
Neo-neocon thinks it's because the MSM sees themselves as Woodsteins and everybody above the rank of assistant dogcatcher as Nixon.
One poster spoke of doing some adjunct work at a J-school. He asked the Kids what their goal was. To a person, the answer was, "to make a difference". Which means, if the facts don't exactly fit the needed narrative, you fudge. That hasn't happened hardly at all.

"oppositional" is all very well, but the degree is in question. Even-up?

What you don't understand is that, from the outside, one journo's crime taints you all. You don't get to pretend Dan Rather never happened and so nobody is allowed to view the rest of you with distrust.

Jason, our sometime military commentator, is not going to be on any social-network-reporting Rolodex any time soon. Because he knows stuff the journos would rather not get into the story. Ditto anybody else who actually knows things that might screw the narrative.

The horse is long, long out of the barn. Incestuous chin-pulling isn't going to make the public any more likely to trust you.

You have to start doing real journalism again.

Ooops. I mean you have to start doing real journalism.

Maybe you could start with a copy of Until Proven Innocent.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at December 30, 2007 11:04 PM | Permalink

I think another way to look at this is by understanding how the press chooses to be oppositional. Sure my experience has been that the press is always oppositional to those in power. The preferred form of that opposition is non-partisan -- catching pols lying, being hypocrites, being unethical etc ... but when the press critiques on the basis of policy that critique tends to come with a good dose of liberal baggage.

On domestic issues I would agree that when it comes to domestic/social policy, press reporting comes with a "good dose of liberal baggage"....aka, facts.

But this is simply not the case when it comes to foreign policy, where the nature of the "oppositional" press is opposed to progressive ideas -- and where facts can be safely ignored. One need only look at the media's willingness to spout whatever anti-Iranian nonsense anonymous "administration figures" were willing to spout to see that --- or to note the worship of David Petraeus, despite his abject failure to accomplish his mission (and his demonstrated incompetence in his previous Iraq assignments), and the media's obsession over the 'Move-on' ad.

And, when it comes to coverage of "scandals", there is simply no comparison in how the two parties are treated. Sure, give 'em a good sex scandal, and it doesn't matter what party the perpetrator is from. But when it comes to personal financial "scandals", well we need only compare the obsessive coverage of Whitewater (a "scandal" in which the Clinton's lost money) with the way in which Bush's own insider trading (in which he pocked large sums) was (not) covered.

And Democrats are criticized much more viciously on the personal front. The vast majority of Americans stll think they know that John Edwards pays $400 for a haircut (of course, that isn't what he paid for the haircut --- what he paid for was the time that the barber spent in getting to and from Edwards because the barber could have been cutting other people's hair instead of travelling, but few Americans know that.)

Posted by: p.lukasiak at December 31, 2007 10:00 AM | Permalink

The obvious (to me, anyway) interpretation: Rove, Bartlett et al have ridden this particular political wave as far as it will go. They behaved very badly while they were up, but now that the wave is receding they're simply in survival mode. They didn't need the press when they were dominant, so they bullied it. Now that they're each looking to make their individual soft-landings, they need the press again, so they're playing to their new audience.

As for Huckenfreude (agreed: It is fun to say): There's generational fallout at play here. It used to be OK to play footsies with the 25 to 35 percent of the population that doesn't believe in evolution, global warming and civil liberties, but the Bush years have made the world a more serious place. Denial of the obvious is losing its appeal, particularly among the younger voters I talk to. The GOP is becoming the annoyed old people's party.

The GOP coalition had a fantastic run, but its run is ending. Now it will fracture, just like the Democratic base began fracturing into its discordant constituencies in 1980.

Huckabee represents people who feel threatened by the new culture because they refuse to participate in its creation. That's not a particularly effective marketing meme if you're trying to attract coalition partners and young voters. The next wave of American politics -- whatever it winds up being -- will bypass them and try to present itself as being practical and forward-looking.

Final note: A good friend of mine who is an avowed (and sincere) conservative blogger recently joined Facebook, and when I looked at his profile I noticed that he listed his politics as "Moderate." When classic conservatives have to describe themselves as "moderate," then there's a cultural change afoot. "Liberal" became an epithet in the 1980s. I suspect "conservative" is about to undergo the same transformation.

Posted by: dan at December 31, 2007 11:06 AM | Permalink

Teaching journalism (part 2)...

Here's Rosen's take:

...For the liberal journalists and professors who were the believers in make-a-difference journalism were babied by their profession, and their J-school training, which allowed them to believe in agenda-less journalism at the same time.

And in fact, they wanted the innocence (we do just the facts journalism) and the power (we do make a difference journalism) but this could never be....

Posted by: Tim at December 31, 2007 1:04 PM | Permalink

weldon berger: Consider the portrait Rove and Bartlett jointly paint: reporters are narcisisstic obstructionists whose interests lie only in self-aggrandizement ("can I have the front-page byline?") and the satisfaction that comes from being primarily a nuisance ("to be a constant thorn of those in power") rather than a reporter ("discovering facts and fair-mindedly reporting the truth"). And then consider that Milbank, at least, seems to find some redeeming value in that portrait.

That's the thing which should disturb Dr. Rosen; not that Bartlett and Rove hold this opinion of the media, but that Milbank, a representative of the media, endorses that opinion -- without appearing to realize that it's a criticism.

Huckabee's candidacy is a sign of fractures in the GOP coalition, to be sure, but nothing Bartlett or Rove said was a break with the GOP base. Most of them are well-acquainted with the "cult of savviness"; they know there is nothing less "savvy", to a new-minted J-school graduate, than voting a straight Republican ticket and going to church on Sunday. Among the GOP base it's generally assumed that the media's worship of technique and process, sensationalism, and incapacity to see beneath the surface of events -- all the things Dr. Rosen wants to reform -- cause its bias to the Left, or more precisely against the Right; that if you are a superficial and half-educated narcissist, then of course you will hate the GOP and vote Democratic, for shallow calls to shallow. Thus Rove's remarks form part of the argument for liberal media bias; they weren't at all a rejection of the thesis.

Posted by: Michael Brazier at December 31, 2007 10:55 PM | Permalink

Weldon (welcome back to PressThink, man!) writes:

Consider the portrait Rove and Bartlett jointly paint: reporters are narcicissistic obstructionists whose interests lie only in self-aggrandizement ("can I have the front-page byline?") and the satisfaction that comes from being primarily a nuisance ("to be a constant thorn of those in power") rather than a reporter ("discovering facts and fair-mindedly reporting the truth"). And then consider that Milbank, at least, seems to find some redeeming value in that portrait.

Michael:

That's the thing which should disturb Dr. Rosen; not that Bartlett and Rove hold this opinion of the media, but that Milbank, a representative of the media, endorses that opinion -- without appearing to realize that it's a criticism.

I didn't make it explicit, but I do think that Milbank's embrace of Rove's description of the press was disturbing-- and unintentionally revealing. You can call us narcissistic and self-aggrandizing and we'll accept that and maintain our self-respect, just don't call us ideological, for we cannot accept that and maintain who we are.

Dana Milbank in not someone I trust with interpretations of what the press is actually doing. But he is a very representative figure for the Washington press tribe.

Michael, Sir: if the "voiced" GOP base--activists, talk radio, right wing blogs, conservative opinion writers--does not believe that the press is ideologically driven to assist Democrats, well... (trying to think of how to put this...) it has kept this belief very well hidden for the last six years while loudly proclaiming the opposite. Why would it intentionally mislead us?

In short, I find your contention counter-factual in the extreme. And I repeat what I said in the post. Hinderacker's imagery, describing journalists' "commitment to the well-being of the Democratic Party," is an accurate representation of some extremely common attitudes among the base. And it's an intellectual embarrassment, as well-- perhaps to you?

He didn't say, "the journalist's occupational tendency toward superficial reactions ends up benefiting the Democrats." He could have made a argument about "indirect" bias, but he didn't. He played the "ideologically driven" card. And that is the overwhelmingly popular choice on the right.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 1, 2008 1:00 PM | Permalink

Tim: I stand by everything I said in this post. I don't quite get your intent. Are you trying to suggest some sort of inconsistency?

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 1, 2008 1:26 PM | Permalink

Call it "Rosenfreude," but Rosen has once again penned a lenghty essay full of anecdotal quotations from articulate people while simultaneously wishing away a mountain of hard, quant evidence.

See also Lichther, Lichther and Rothman' The Media Elite (1986) and Kuyper's 2002 study, Press Bias and Politics, in which the author finds that pro journos tend to operate within a comparatively narrow ideological bandwidth.

This Wiki site isn't a bad overview (although they get certain things wrong, such as the "misperceptions" of the Iraq war on the part of Fox News viewers that are actually true, but our inane media class is too inbred to realize that.

The bottom line, though, is that every single large-scale survey of the personal politics of national media figures confirms the overwhelming bias towards liberal points of view.

The only thing left to argue is their ability to keep their own views from affecting the news coverage. But don't ask Rosen, or most other journalists to see it clearly. It's like a fish trying to write about water."

The thing is, Jay, for every Karl Rove quote you come up with, I've got one from people like Pauline Kael. So let's don't bother with trading trees, and look at the forest as a whole.

In the aggregate, the national media is overwhelmingly liberal.

You can argue that it doesn't affect their coverage. But nobody who lives and works outside of that inbred, shared media culture can perceive that bias.

Duh. That's why it's bias.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 1, 2008 4:47 PM | Permalink

In other news, apparently nobody at the New York Times realized there's no such thing as a U.S. Marine Academy.

When was the last time the NY Times set up a recruiting table at a military job fair?

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 1, 2008 4:49 PM | Permalink

In order to provide a year's worth of tasty fisking in one place, like the Old Country Buffet and Cardiologist Full Employment Agency, see Patterico's Pontifications. He's an attorney in the LA area whose hobbies include careful, in-depth, well-researched work on the LAT. His year-end post on the subject includes responses from some LAT folks, including their public editor. Or non-responses.

Note the direction.

I keep saying: You can complain to each other all you want. What you do, how can I put this, has more weight.

Also, I found a wonderful essay on how the MSM no longer can keep the troops from knowing how much the nation supports them. It's the technology combined with the memory of the Viet Nam era. During GW I, it took no time at all, talking to somebody putting up yellow ribbons, to find that part of the motivation was to get ahead of those *** hippies.

You really ought to see what you look like from the outside.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 1, 2008 5:42 PM | Permalink

WRT getting on the front page:

You think there are certain subjects more likely to not get on the front page? Like, where Norman Hsu's money came from and went to? That's been a non-story for a long time. Suppose a reporter got a big story on that, vs. a big story on, say, one of the Bush kids using a false ID in a bar....

Right. Pull the other one.

It appears reporters have a pretty good idea of what kind of story will get them on the front page.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 1, 2008 5:45 PM | Permalink

Jay: Certainly the GOP base believes the press is driven to assist Democrats; they have thought so not just for the past six years, but for more than thirty. But the thing is, the GOP base has come to believe that the Democrats are, in Weldon's phrase, "narcissistic obstructionists whose interests lie only in self-aggrandizement and the satisfaction that comes from being primarily a nuisance" -- that the cult of savviness is what passes for an ideology among their political opponents. Rove drew a distinction between "liberal" and "oppositional" because to him "liberal" means supporting the New Deal and Great Society platforms, and he doesn't want to claim the press is interested in that. But since the Democrats aren't much interested in that either, Hinderaker sees no point in making Rove's distinction; "liberal" to him means what the Democrats are interested in, which is just the same as what the press is interested in. Examine Power Line's archive, and you'll find that Hinderaker and his co-bloggers describe Democratic politicians in terms very like those Rove used for the press. Hence the "break" between Rove and the GOP base is quite minor; a matter of vocabulary, not a disagreement on any point of substance. A nuance, in fact.

Posted by: Michael Brazier at January 1, 2008 6:23 PM | Permalink

I do not understand your reply. "Liberal" equals "savvy?" Democrat=journalist? The Republicans are the party of depth and the Dems the party of surface? You lost me.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 1, 2008 6:56 PM | Permalink

Jay Rosen: "Are you trying to suggest some sort of inconsistency?"

No. Richard Aubrey wrote:

One poster spoke of doing some adjunct work at a J-school. He asked the Kids what their goal was. To a person, the answer was, "to make a difference". Which means, if the facts don't exactly fit the needed narrative, you fudge. That hasn't happened hardly at all.

Posted by: Tim at January 1, 2008 7:13 PM | Permalink

There is nothing inconsistent in what Jay is writing. Like many pseudo-intellectuals, it makes him feel better to think of the rest of us as "yahoos."

Jay -- you should be careful -- you might sprain your arm from patting yourself on the back so much.

You should also be careful quoting Karl Rove. If you think he regards us as useful idiots, what do you suppose he thinks of you?

Posted by: Neuro-conservative at January 1, 2008 11:25 PM | Permalink

And, since Jay is so fond of citing the expertise of conservative luminaries such as Karl Rove, I wonder how he responds to the catch-phrase coined by yahoo-in-chief, Rush Limbaugh:

Drive-by media

Rush Limbaugh's term for the sensational, scandal-seeking, and agenda-driven coverage that is typical of the national press corps in America. Limbaugh draws an analogy between the media who cover a story with a barrage of unfair cheap shots before moving on to the next flavor of the month and an inner city gang that drives by and sprays a target with gunfire and then moves on to their next target.

Rush Limbaugh predicted that the response to the alleged murders at Haditha from Democrats, the left, and the media would be a "gang rape ... to finally take us out in the war against Iraq." Limbaugh stated: "This Haditha story ... this is it, folks. This is the final big push on behalf of the Democratic Party, the American left, and the drive-by media to destroy our effort to win the war in Iraq." Limbaugh added: "Let me just put it in graphic terms. It is going to be a gang rape. There is going to be a gang rape by the Democratic Party, the American left, and the drive-by media to finally take us out in the war against Iraq. Make no bones about it."

You see, Jay, there is no contradiction between Rove and the yahoos, nor Limbaugh and the yahoos. The press can be self-aggrandizing, narcissistic, petty, foolish, sensationalistic, uninformed, cliquish, lazy, under-educated, and liberal all at the same time.

Posted by: Neuro-conservative at January 1, 2008 11:36 PM | Permalink

I thought I was quite lucid, Jay, but I'll try again. Rove's statement in part was "Reporters now see their role ... as being put on the earth to afflict the comfortable, to be a constant thorn of those in power ...". The GOP base firmly believes this is true, and remains true if you substitute "Democrats" for "reporters". Further, the base explains the perceived alliance between Democrats and the press by referring to this shared concept of their role in the world; if the press exists to oppose and obstruct, and the Democrats exist to oppose and obstruct, they have an enemy in common and thus are natural allies.

By the way, the vocal GOP base doesn't see Karl Rove as a great genius to be revered, or even as a spokesman for them. He's just a technician, a master of a rare and valuable skill. I doubt that the average Republican voter had any opinion of him at all -- he wasn't drafting laws or setting policy, so he wasn't relevant to them. And before you ask, I doubt the average GOP voter cared who Bill Clinton's political consultants were either, though they passionately hated Clinton himself. (The contrast with vocal Democrats, who turned Rove into Beelzebub to Bush's Satan, may be instructive ...)

Posted by: Michael Brazier at January 2, 2008 1:05 AM | Permalink

Okay I think it's clearer now. Thanks!

Now that he's out of the Senate, maybe we can get Trent Lott to write a tell-all on obstructing the obstructionists, 2006-2007. He was there when it happened.

I can definitely see how from the point of view of the endless expansion of executive power Democrats and the press would both be seen as obstructionist and narcissistic, and therefore look like "wings" of the same beast.

I didn't lionize Rove, or describe him as some kind of genius, or claim for him some big constituency in the conservative base. I don't know where you got that.

I told you what he said, and how it resembled self-definition in the press. I interpreted what I thought it perhaps meant, giving several views supported by the evidence. My point was that Rove won't speak for the base or even to them on this issue. He rejects their categories and their truth claims.

You say no such thing happened. Fair enough. I say it did.

Of course I am making a bigger deal out of it than he did. Rove's statement was a casual rejection of a form of pressthink popular within the coalition he was a part of.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 2, 2008 1:27 AM | Permalink

I can definitely see how from the point of view of the endless expansion of executive power Democrats and the press would both be seen as obstructionist and narcissistic, and therefore look like "wings" of the same beast.

If you were to ask one of the GOP base -- especially the vocal ones, the Power Line bloggers for instance -- if they thought the press is allied to the Democratic party because both oppose the expansion of executive power, they would say you had gone mad. What I say is, it's rank presentism. You ought to remember that between 1992 and 2000, when the President was a Democrat, the press focused on Congress' exercises of power, not on the President's. Both the GOP base's belief in the press' "liberal bias", and the press' actual "oppositional bias", were firmly established long before January 2001; Bush's actions can't possibly have caused either one.

So now I'll unpack the other idea in the comment that confused you, namely that what you call the "cult of savviness" is the guiding principle of the Democratic party. If I may paraphrase you, the core belief of that cult, to which much of the press subscribes, is that the crux of politics is mastery and ruthless use of technique, preferably by trained experts; that the correct way to interpret any policy proposal is to consider its effect on public opinion at the next election, which only a trained expert can do; and that learning what the trained experts are thinking gives one the key to all current events, which makes access to them imperative. Now this faith in trained experts is not confined to journalism. For much of the 20th century it was an unquestioned assumption among the educated classes of the Western world; within the academy it remains the dominant view. The base of the Democratic party, as everyone knows, the vocal, the opinion-formers, the activists, are drawn from the academy and the professions that look to it; from, that is, devotees of expertise and idolaters of savviness. Journalists come from the same class, swim in the same pond; naturally, they hold the same faith.

How, I hear you ask, does this fit with the idea that the press and the Democrats now exist to oppose and obstruct? It fits because a critical mass of American voters have lost faith in trained experts, and in the class that venerates them, making it impossible for that class to govern as it once did. Like other classes in the process of losing power, this one uses the power it still has to block the path of its successors. And, again like other such classes, this one interprets its successors' actions by the same cynical strategy of power seeking that has come to guide its own. Hence, for instance, a professor of journalism can suppose that a President who openly holds the press in contempt, and acts on that contempt, does so because he wishes to become a dictator ...

Posted by: Michael Brazier at January 2, 2008 6:45 AM | Permalink

Even Bill Clinton thinks "the press and the Democrats exist to oppose and obstruct."

In an October 2006 news article in the Washington Post titled New Media A Weapon In New World Of Politics, John Harris reports that Clinton "said Democrats of his generation tend to be naive about new media realities. There is an expectation among Democrats that establishment old media organizations are de facto allies---and will rebut political accusations and serve as referees on new media excesses."

Harris goes on to quote Clinton: "We're (Democrats) all that way, and I think a part of it is we grew up in the '60s and the press led us against the war and the press led us on civil rights and the press led us on Watergate...(t)hose of us of a certain age grew up with this almost unrealistic set of expectations."

Which would explain the non-response of Clinton to the Lewinsky thing and Kerry to the charges of the Swift-Boaters.
Both expected the establishment press to protect them against the information that was percolating up through the new media.

I'm pretty sure George Bush expected no such protection from the press.

Posted by: QC Examiner at January 2, 2008 11:46 AM | Permalink

Actually, QC, wrt the TANG memos, Bush played the press expertly.
You will recall no response but one of befuddlement and asserted lack of knowledge while the press sawed and sawed and sawed at the limb.
Clever, says I.
But, as you imply, it was using the press as it actually is, not in any way presuming its integrity. In fact, it was using the press' lack of integrity against it. While keeping hands off.
Reminds me of some of the more apocryphal stories about the arcane oriental martial arts. Some guy said, when a new black belt in judo, an aikido master threw him off the mat without touching him. Rove is a magnificent bastard, sure enough.

I mentioned Patterico earlier. He has a post on the McClellan epiphany about having been lied to. He puts it in the context of the other things Mac said about the issue, demonstrating Mac didn't say the things the liberals claim he said, using the short quote.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 2, 2008 3:01 PM | Permalink

Both expected the establishment press to protect them against the information that was percolating up through the new media.

If by information, you mean disinformation, then you are probably right.

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 2, 2008 7:17 PM | Permalink

JJWF. Such as?

I recall Newsweek trying to protect Clinton from the Lewinsky story Isikoff did. They spiked the story.
Then it got out.
So it wasn't disinformation.
Forged docs for CBS?

How about some examples? Then we can talk about the new media--bloggers--protecting the public from disinformation peddled by the old media.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 2, 2008 7:54 PM | Permalink

Man, these guys are still ticked off at the Swift Boat Vets. They HATE it when veterans speak their minds.

So much so that the Nation is still fuming over it.

But that just shows you how arrogant and out of touch they are. Out of two million Viet Nam veterans, they managed to nominate the ONE Viet Nam veteran that would actually alienate Viet Nam veterans.

And then blame veterans when they lose.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 2, 2008 8:57 PM | Permalink

My favorite part about this thread is Jason trying to equate Karl Rove with ... Pauline Kael ??

I'd buy that, Jason, if Pauline Kael had been instrumental in getting her candidate of choice elected to eight years in the White House.

But, alas, all she did was to review movies (sometimes badly) for The New Yorker for a few years. Not exactly comparable to the Rovester, who set an entire nation off on the wrong path at the start of a new century.

Meantime, Jay, this thread is worth the price of admission just to see the Tinfoil Hat Brigade return in force. They have been sorely missed.

Congratulations ! (I knew you could do it.)

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at January 2, 2008 9:30 PM | Permalink

Gosh, Steve. You have a point. Or you WOULD have had a point, had you actually understood the argument. And chosen an entirely different response.

Here's a hint: When people refer to Pauline Kael's most famous line, they're not really referring to Pauline Kael.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 2, 2008 9:53 PM | Permalink

Here's a hint: When people refer to Pauline Kael's most famous line, they're not really referring to Pauline Kael.
Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk

Umm, okay.

And when people are referring to Karl Rove's most famous line, they are not really referring to Karl Rove ?

And when people are referring to Jason Van Steenwyk's most famous line, they are not really referring to Jason ?

And when people are referring to Steve Lovelady's most famous line, they are not really referring to Steve ? (I'll buy that part.)

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at January 2, 2008 10:05 PM | Permalink

Oppositional?
As in ignoring all the patent dishonesty of the Clinton crime family?

Give me a f***ing break!!!

Maybe the Bush administration had such an awful PR track record because it was being advised by a gross incompetent like Dan Bartlett?

It's nice to sound sophisticated and see beyond the "right-wing yahoos" and have a purist view of a "4th estate" - who in reality are a bunch of politician wannbes on the FAR, FAR left; doing everything they can to harm this country.

If there's another 9/11, you can bet there will be a bounty on their worthless treasonous asses -and their bosses, the dem cong.

Liberal? That's a compliment.

Posted by: graywolf at January 2, 2008 10:45 PM | Permalink

Maybe he means Susan Sontag.

Michael: If you want to go back to the cult of the expert and the belief in neutral professionals who bring "sophisticated" knowledge to bear, which is 100+ years old, I would certainly agree that modern journalists, modern bureaucrats, academic professionals, government professionals, and other techocrats including political tacticians (but also including civil engineers and the people in the war colleges that educate the American military)... these all share a "rationalist" way of thinking and "progressive" worldview that has many built-in biases... and also great strengths.

I am not exactly sure why you associate this cluster with the Democratic Party. Spreadsheet analysis knows no political tribe. Think tanks giving rationalist arguments for desired policiies are not a one party state. Plenty of technocrats who think we can do better with the right policies in the modern GOP. Hinderacker is a graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard Law. Do you imagine him outside the modern cult of expertise? I don't see how.

Overestimating what the best and the brightest can do to solve the world's problems is an error, or conceit, I can see journalists and Democratic party types sharing, yes.

The headwaters for the entire argument, in my view, is Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922). Part of my dissertation (The Imnpossible Press, 1986) is about that book, where you see the press, the culture of expertise, the maker of political symbols and the practical politician all vexed by the same problem: the big public world is complicated and unknowable except through symbols and they can be manipulated.

What should we do?

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 2, 2008 11:00 PM | Permalink

What’s going on here? (You tell me; that’s what comment threads are for.)

Here's my theory. This is from an interview with Paul Krugman:

We have a situation right now in which there are several major parts of the news media that are for all practical purposes part of "movement conservatism" -- Fox News, the New York Post, the Washington Times -- and in which other news organizations are intimidated, at least to some extent. I sometimes talk about what I call "asymmetrical intimidation." If you say a true but unflattering thing about Bush or in fact about any other prominent conservative, oh, boy! People are going to go after you. I mean, I've got people working full-time going after me, right? But if you say a false, unflattering thing about a Democrat or a progressive, no risk ... And that shapes coverage, no question about it. It's better now, but it's still very asymmetric.

And at a recent National Press Club event, David Gregory said both the body politic and the press were now bitterly divided. Interestingly, he blamed the Internet for this. Notice that he didn't blame Fox News or right wing talk radio. So is the liberal blogosphere starting to apply the pressure that Krugman is talking about? Debunking falsehoods when there was no one playing that role before? Quickly connecting dots that a non-partisan press couldn't connect on its own, without appearing partisan?

If the press is starting to have these internal debates, maybe they have connected some dots. And now the struggle for the GOP elites is to appear intellectually honest and try to influence the press's internal debate. They're even willing to do this even at the risk of making their footsoldiers uncomfortable (they know they'll be loyal in any case).

Anyway, my theory for what it's worth...

Posted by: JJFromME at January 2, 2008 11:55 PM | Permalink

Here's some more food for thought. David Frum (Mr. "Axis of Evil") did a recent Huckenfruede-worthy mia culpa. Frum nervously dips his toes in the water of what liberal bloggers have called the reality based community (and Kevin Drum of course can't resist doing the snark thing).

Four days later, Frum writes this post for the National Interest. Why is Bush's former speechwriter engaging the likes of Glenn Greenwald? He must be concerned. He notes (like David Gregory does?) that the blogosphere has had a significant impact on the Democratic party, and that even Joe Klein is sounding partisan like a blogger. He cites Steve Clemons saying that Washington is a "corrupt town," and then doesn't really respond to that criticism, but seems to be passing it along as useful information to pass along to his colleagues.

Maybe he realizes the game is changing, and is trying to give everyone a heads up? Is George W.'s former speechwriter trying to rally the troops or what?

Posted by: JJFromME at January 3, 2008 12:22 AM | Permalink

If you want to go back to the cult of the expert and the belief in neutral professionals who bring "sophisticated" knowledge to bear, which is 100+ years old, I would certainly agree that modern journalists, modern bureaucrats, academic professionals, government professionals, and other techocrats including political tacticians (but also including civil engineers and the people in the war colleges that educate the American military)... these all share a "rationalist" way of thinking and "progressive" worldview

Well, no they don't. Some academic professionals do, but not the ones in the humanities and social sciences. Or at least, not the ones with any influence. Engineers do, by and large. Some of the people in the war colleges do. But I wouldn't include most journalists in their number. They'd like to share a "rationalist" way of thinking, but they aren't academically or intellectually equipped to do so. They admire those in the groups you mentioned. They admire experts. But only a very select few are genuine, sober and fair-minded experts themselves.

If they were, you would be forced to deal with actual evidence in your own essays instead of your usual practice of argument by name-dropping...an extended exercise in the logical fallacy of appeal to authority that has become your standard operating procedure.

Your colleagues in journalism and academia would demand nothing less.

The reverse pyramid is part of the craft of journalism. But it is no substitute for a disciplined mode of inquiry.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 3, 2008 12:26 AM | Permalink

OK, one more. It appears there's some introspection happening. Here's Jim Sleeper at TPM Cafe describing a recent talk at AEI:

New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus put his finger on American conservatism’s original sin inadvertently last month at the American Enterprise Institute. He noted that while conservatives once chafed under the soulless leftist managerialism of the New Deal, they let ex-leftist conservative guides such as James Burnham and Irving Kristol lead them on a long march through the institutions they despised to build a managerial class of their own.

In Tanenhaus’ telling, Kristol showed conservative business and political leaders that New Deal managerialism had bred a liberal “new class” of academic, think-tank, and media experts who trafficked in words more than in deeds or missions accomplished. He counseled conservatives to outdo liberals at this game in order to rescue liberal education and liberal democracy for the kind of capitalism and politics conservatives can profit from and enjoy. They might even restore virtue that way to Progressives’ necessary reforms and secure the enlightened “national greatness” conservatism of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, whose American admirers would soon include Kristol’s son Bill, David Brooks, and Tanenhaus himself...

Through lavishly-funded initiatives such as those I encountered in New York City’s Manhattan Institute and on college campuses, and in vast private ventures such as Rupert Murdoch’s “journalism," conservatives generated a parody of the liberal “new class,” an on-message machine of talkers, squawkers, power brokers, and greedheads which Slate's Jacob Weisberg dubbed “the Con-intern.”

Yes, that AEI.

Or how about David Brooks' recent column on "The Republican Collapse?"

Posted by: JJFromME at January 3, 2008 12:38 AM | Permalink

Only someone blinded by ideological prejudices could seriously claim either that Fox News, the New York Post, and the Washington Times are a major part of the American media, or that other organs of the press censor their coverage out of fear of any of those. And while there are people who spend their days dissecting Krugman's column in the New York Times, Krugman isn't in peril from them, because the NYT editors regard criticism from that quarter as no more than the screams of pain from a wounded predator -- it just proves the latest blow drew blood.

Overestimating what the best and the brightest can do to solve the world's problems is an error, or conceit, I can see journalists and Democratic party types sharing, yes.

Good; that's a large part of what I meant. Further, there's a related error of underestimating what the non-best and non-brightest are capable of, also characteristic of both the Democratic party and the press; and a consequent political judgement, that the best and brightest have a natural right to govern. (I doubt very much that Hinderaker believes his law degree from Harvard gives him moral authority, or that any other vocal members of the GOP base would see their credentials that way.) You don't often find these errors in colleges of engineering or military academies -- engineers and soldiers respect expertise, but they have too much acquaintance with the complexities of the world to idolize it.

Moreover, the rejection of both those errors, and of the resulting judgement, is equally characteristic of the Republican party; see Bill Buckley's remark that he'd prefer to be governed by the first 200 people listed in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard, or Thomas Sowell's book The Vision of the Anointed, an extended polemic linking those errors to a number of disastrous policies.

Oh, and Steve? When people refer to my most famous line, they're really referring to Rev. Charles Dodgson.

Posted by: Michael Brazier at January 3, 2008 1:23 AM | Permalink

And when people are referring to Karl Rove's most famous line, they are not really referring to Karl Rove ?

I don't know that he has a 'most famous line.'

And when people are referring to Jason Van Steenwyk's most famous line, they are not really referring to Jason ?

Same there. If I have a most famous line, I have no idea what it is, nor do I know how it's used.

And when people are referring to Steve Lovelady's most famous line, they are not really referring to Steve ?

I don't know that you have a 'most famous line,' either, though "tell it to the limbless" comes to mind, to me personally. But your most famous line in the blogosphere probably had something to do with your rabid hyena attack on Mark Yost...what was the term you used? Ah. "Lying sack of shit," which was picked up by Buzzmachine, whose proprietor, Jeff Jarvis, you called "an intellectually dishonest schmuck."

So when someone quotes you on that, that doesn't tell you much about Jarvis or Yost. So of course, if they mention it, they're referring to you, because those quotes tell the reader more about you than the object of your vitriol.

In Pauline Kael's case, though, her quote tells us nothing about her own character. But it does tell us a lot about the people she knew, in the New York-based high-gloss media circles, the lunches at Michael's etc.

And so when a conservative brings up Kael, it's not Kael he's evoking.

It's everybody she knew.

But

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 3, 2008 1:30 AM | Permalink

By the way, just for the record, I think David Gregory is mischaracterizing the blogosphere's criticism the press. I think some of the criticism is as he characterizes it--very quick to assign motives, etc. But a lot of it is very well informed, and he doesn't want to acknowledge that. My guess is that the polarization he sees is due to the fact that this criticism is a new thing, and also due to the facts of recent history in this country (Thinkprogress's quote from Greenwald speaks to this).

Posted by: JJFromME at January 3, 2008 7:20 AM | Permalink

New report--linked at Instapundit--that the media was the primary cause of losing the first battle of Fallujah.
Check it out.
Presume, for the moment, that it's right.
Is this a good thing?
A bad thing?
Is this "making a difference"?
The proper role of journalism?
Would you prefer the report had remained secret?

Incestuous chin-pulling is meaningless, guys. It's what you look like from the outside that will affect your future. And your work product--and the discovery that it's often screwed up--is what affects what you look like from the outside.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 3, 2008 7:58 AM | Permalink

Incestuous chin-pulling is meaningless, guys.

Hardly. I just linked to two Republican sources, one Democratic blogger linking to a Republican source, and one source quoting a speaker at a major Republican think tank. These are all Republicans pulling their own chins and talking about themselves.

Posted by: JJFromME at January 3, 2008 8:15 AM | Permalink

JJ.

Sorry. I was referring to the journos' frequent discussions about why people distrust them. Not the doubly-incestuous chinpulling among the insiders.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 3, 2008 9:37 AM | Permalink

Well, one reason they are distrusted is that insiders manipulate them and journos allow themselves to be manipulated. Now, the manipulators are starting to say some interesting things.

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 3, 2008 9:44 AM | Permalink

Steve's most famous line is (by far), “The salivating morons who make up the lynch mob prevail."

Krugman doesn't feel imperiled from critics, Michael. He knows his position is secure. Nor did he say that the rest of the media is intimidated by Fox News, the Washington Times or the New York Post. (The rest of the press cheerfully condescends to or dismisses them.) He was referring to the "hassle cost" and the "think twice" factor when the salivating morons who make up the lynch mob on the Right decide to storm you for saying something unflattering but true about one their heroes or causes. That's the intimidating part, he says.

I don't really buy his complaint myself--the press is strong enough to withstand such storms--but that's what he was arguing.

I also don't buy that Democrats (and journalists) feel they have a natural right to govern because they have the knowledge and you don't. Hey, who wrote that caustic book on the folly of the best and brightest screwing things up in Vietnam? Why, it was liberal journalist David Halberstam of the liberal New York Times. How odd, huh?

I think you are missing a factor that could account for the defections we are seeing from base-speak on the Republican side. That factor is the bizarre anti-empiricist "streak" within the Republican coalition. Prior to Bush the best symbol for it was supply side economics, and the fairy-tale that cutting taxes raises revenue. By actually putting into practice policies that replace observables from the world with wishes from the Republican heart, your modern GOP took a disastrous step away from the sort of sober, everyday empiricism that is needed to get any policy bearings at all.

Still, this radical step--dissolving the hardness of reality and replacing it with Republican desire, which is just about the most un-conservative thing you can do in politics--appeared to be confined to a few critical areas likes taxes until Bush the younger took over, a radical whom the real conservatives were unwilling to oppose. With him the anti-empirical streak took control of the government and a massive war was started with the wishers in charge.

National security conservatives, to their shame, did nothing about the threat. Now they're picking up the pieces. Smart, educated people in the military (to their shame) went along, as well, even though--empiricists to the core--they had real reservations. It took them a long time to realize that Cheney and Bush could and would wreck everything they had done to re-build the military after Vietnam.

Only now are the regrets starting to surface. For years it was all jokes and jeers about the "reality-based community." Now we are starting to see the first signs that this is actually a fault line within the GOP itself. There are people in the Republican coalition who don't want to leave the reality-based life, but there are powerful forces saying they must to remain loyal and win elections (and, not incidentally, keep the big accounting for 2001-2007 at bay). It's still a big joke to the bloggers but to people like Frum, for whom intellectual respectability matters, that is no joke.

You seem to think, Michael, that the natural alternative to trust in the decisions of Ivy-educated experts is trust in ordinary Americans and their decisions or the invisible hand of the market, which makes better decisions than Robert Reich or Ira Magaziner could. But there's a darker possibility: faith-based reasoning, the politics of denial, the retreat from empiricism and culture war against "hard" observables become hallmarks of the modern GOP. Post-Bush, that's where the party is right now. And it's too frightened by the prospect of its own crack-up to allow the tension to be discussed and settled during the 08 campaign.

That's the subtext of developments like this. Rudy is saying to the party: folks, we can still win with the politicized denial of checkable fact, and I am going to pick up where Bush left off.

I think that's what straining the coalition, and the ability to shout "bias" at anything in the news media you don't like is definitely a part of it. That's how the base indulges itself, lets itself go, gives itself a break from the strain of reconciling political imperatives with actual events.

One of the strongest critiques that (genuine) conservatives made about the post-60s Democrats was that the politics of victimhood had infantalized the party and led it to ignore all the proud Americans who refused to think like victims. That was an excellent point.

Well, today, right wing media theory is the crossing point where victimology became a Republican disease, with exactly the same crippling and infantalizing effects, the same self-righteous grandstanding. Big bad media is to blame, not wish-based war mongering. Climbing down from that is going to be difficult and ugly.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 3, 2008 11:46 AM | Permalink

"I would certainly agree that modern journalists, modern bureaucrats, academic professionals, government professionals, and other techocrats including political tacticians (but also including civil engineers and the people in the war colleges that educate the American military)... these all share a "rationalist" way of thinking and "progressive" worldview that has many built-in biases... and also great strengths."

Us civil engineers who apply rational thinking to the design of better upholstered caves do so because you can’t bullshit nature, or the laws of physics or of behavior of materials or of compound interest. Whereas the “progressives” live and breathe their narratives with which they do their best to bullshit the electorate into steering social history leftward – and if you choke on that idea, just remember Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party. Civil engineers are so suspect on campuses for that same rational thinking that in the wild efflorescence of 70s campus politics, certain Universities started up programs for the Social Management of Technology, just to rein in those misguided engineers and impose some sort of party discipline on them. Unfortunately this theology succeeded – you cannot read a page in the flagship organ of the American Society of Civil Engineers without gagging on strings of politically correct platitudes, remarkably similar to those spewed by journalists in their ‘news’ stories, having very little to do with how to design a better bridge but everything to do with a “progressive” approach to living on the earth.

So I reject your AND between rationalist and progressive. Those are far from shared approaches, in fact are usually opposites.

Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at January 3, 2008 12:56 PM | Permalink

Us civil engineers who apply rational thinking to the design of better upholstered caves do so because you can’t bullshit nature, or the laws of physics or of behavior of materials or of compound interest.

Too bad the Republicans weren't much interested in your kind of thinking over the past 7 years.

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 3, 2008 1:29 PM | Permalink

JJWfromME

The meaningless non-sequitur on Republicans isn't worth a reply, but have you any relatives bearing initials JUW who write about civil engineering?

Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at January 3, 2008 1:52 PM | Permalink

have you any relatives bearing initials JUW who write about civil engineering?

No.

Seriously, though. It's not a non-sequitur. I wish the Bush administration had been better at planning things with hard realities in mind instead of just going on a wing and a prayer. Frankly, it could have saved lives.

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 3, 2008 2:11 PM | Permalink

In Pauline Kael's case, though, her quote tells us nothing about her own character. But it does tell us a lot about the people she knew, in the New York-based high-gloss media circles, the lunches at Michael's etc. -- Jason

Ummm, Jason -- I've been at Michael's a few times over the past several years. But I never ran into Pauline Kael there. Perhaps that's because she DIED seven years ago.

Research -- it's a bitch, isn't it ? But you might try it out for once. It could change your life !

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at January 3, 2008 3:52 PM | Permalink

Steve,

You might check the syntax of the passages you quoted. You will note that I did, in fact, use the past tense of the verb "to know." This indicates pretty clearly that I was and am aware of her passing.

You may also note that I never once intimated that she was still alive.

In making your point, however inept you may be, you actually prove mine: You are part of the same Manhattan media fever swamp that Kael was.

You're also more in love with your own snark than in dealing honestly with the issue of reflexive liberal bias in the media.

The funniest part was you trying to catch me in not doing my research. I was way ahead of you. As usual.

I'z in ur OODA-loop, short-sirkutin' ur argumentz.

Literacy. Catch the fever.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 3, 2008 5:01 PM | Permalink

Here's a passage from the Wiki on Pauline Kael:

Nixon "quote"

Kael is frequently quoted as having said, in the wake of Richard Nixon's landslide victory in the 1972 presidential election, that she "couldn't believe Nixon had won," since no one she knew had voted for him. The quote is sometimes cited by conservatives (such as Bernard Goldberg, in his book Bias), as an example of allegedly clueless New York liberal insularity. There are variations as to the exact wording, the speaker (it has variously been attributed to other liberal women, including Katharine Graham, Susan Sontag, and Joan Didion), [1] [2] and the timing (in addition to Nixon's victory, it has been claimed to have been uttered after Ronald Reagan's re-election in 1984.) [3]

There is, in fact, no record of Kael making such a remark. The story may have originated in a December 28, 1972 New York Times article on a lecture Kael gave at the Modern Language Association, in which the newspaper quoted her as saying, "I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don't know. They're outside my ken. But sometimes when I'm in a theater I can feel them."[30]

So maybe Jay actually heard it attributed to Sontag, and I heard it attributed to Kael. Sontag later went down to much ridicule as feeling oppressed by the display of American flags after 9/11.

At any rate, even Pauline Kael had the presence of mind to admit that she lives in "a rather special world," where Nixon voters were "beyond her ken."

Why is that such a problem to recognize?

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 3, 2008 5:09 PM | Permalink

Remark about Sontag withdrawn. I think I'm conflating her with a different morally blinkered twit.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 3, 2008 5:26 PM | Permalink

Meantime, Jay, this thread is worth the price of admission just to see the Tinfoil Hat Brigade return in force. They have been sorely missed.

I could not disagree more.

I really missed reading Jay's observations during his "hiatus", but I haven't missed the mind-numbing, soul-crushing stupidity of the "Tinfoil Hat Brigade".

There was actually a good discussion about media issues over at Time's "Curious Capitalist" blog last week -- and while it included some 'right wingers' the discussion did not degenerate into the kind of mess we see above.

I'm afraid that Jay would just be better off killing his comments section at this point (at least when the subject comes anywhere close to 'politics'); his time would be far better used observing and reporting on media trends
than reading and responding to the tsunami drivel that appears above.

(For instance, I'd love to hear Jay's take on the sudden media concern with how "democratic" the Iowa caucuses are, given that it is the media that has made what was once considered a minor preamble to the New Hampshire primary into the most crucial state in the process....)

Posted by: p.lukasiak at January 3, 2008 6:31 PM | Permalink

True enough, Paul.

But you have to concede that they are such easy targets.

I admit, I'm like the guy who can't resist poking a stick through the fence at the idiot bulldog on the other side.

But I promise, I'll try to be better.

Cheers,
Steve

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at January 3, 2008 6:48 PM | Permalink

Steve.
You think you're having fun.
Checked circulation and stock prices lately?
Not to mention employment?
Why isn't the buying public buying?

I know. It's fetal alcohol syndrome among the great unwashed. Nothing you did.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 3, 2008 10:11 PM | Permalink

Kael's supposed remark has been attributed to a number of people. Apparently it is a bastard. Still, you can hear variations from time to time.

You'll note that Jason corrected himself. Just like the NYT admitting there is no such thing as a Marine Academy.

Difference is, there never has been a Marine Academy, the first mention of it I've ever heard is in the NYT, while Kael is widely, correctly or not, believed to have made the famous statement.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 3, 2008 10:14 PM | Permalink

Anyone interested in actually reading and learning about topics that Jay Rosen and JJW pretend to know can stop by Xark's Reading List:

"Phase IV" CFLCC Stability Operations Planning (pdf)
Thinking Beyond War: Civil-Military Planning in Northern Iraq (Web site)
Phase IV Operations (pdf)
OIF Phase IV (pdf)
Interview with COL Kevin Benson (pdf)

Posted by: Tim at January 4, 2008 12:12 AM | Permalink

Three points, Jay:

Citing today the failures of the US armed forces in Iraq from 2003 to 2006 as an instance of Bush's "anti-empirical" tendencies bears a strong similarity to someone in 1864 citing the failures of the Union Army from 1861 to 1863 as an instance of "anti-empirical" tendencies in Lincoln. Indeed, if I recall the history correctly, there were a lot of people in the North making that argument in 1864. There is a wide gap between ignorance and false certitude.

The chief contention of the supply-siders was that tax rates, if set high enough, erode the base from which tax revenues are collected; that therefore an optimal tax rate which maximizes revenues exists; and that US federal tax rates in 1980 were higher than the optimum, so lowering the rate would increase revenues. To the best of my recollection, after Reagan lowered the federal tax rate, the federal government collected more revenue than it had before. Had it collected less, that would have been an empirical refutation of supply-side theories -- but that didn't happen. You may argue that the supply-siders were wrong in principle, that their argument was fallacious; but not that the facts proved them wrong.

Finally, if you were correct that the GOP is splitting into fideist and rationalist camps, and also that Bush has governed as a fideist and anti-rationalist -- then Bush's position in the polls would be far higher than it is, his choice would be the front-runner in the GOP primaries, and Huckabee's insurgent candidacy would not exist.

Posted by: Michael Brazier at January 4, 2008 1:53 AM | Permalink

On wrecking the post-Vietnam military ... some history:

THE ARMY OF DESERT STORM

"On Point"
The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom
Operation DESERT STORM to ENDURING FREEDOM
The Army's Continuing Evolution

Posted by: Tim at January 4, 2008 2:38 AM | Permalink

To the best of my recollection, after Reagan lowered the federal tax rate, the federal government collected more revenue than it had before. Had it collected less, that would have been an empirical refutation of supply-side theories -- but that didn't happen. You may argue that the supply-siders were wrong in principle, that their argument was fallacious; but not that the facts proved them wrong.

Actually, Michael, revenues went down after Reagan cut taxes. In a couple of years (and after Reagan increased taxes) revenues were higher than in the last year of Carter's term, but no serious economist thinks that the increase was due to the tax cuts.

(Indeed, even the people who designed the Reagan tax cuts assumed that only about 1/3 of the revenue "lost" would be recovered.)

The causes for the increase in revenues in Reagan's later years can be attributed to a number of factors --- primarily, "normal" growth that is to be expected as a result in population increases, and the "keynesian" effect of huge increases in government spending.

But don't let facts get in the way of your theories...

Posted by: p.lukasiak at January 4, 2008 8:45 AM | Permalink

"...topics that Jay Rosen and JJW pretend to know..."

I suppose that every military source that Thomas Ricks quotes in Fiasco saying there was no phase IV plan is also "pretending to know."

You can search for yourself.

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 4, 2008 9:46 AM | Permalink

Tim can and will speak for himself. It is my impression, however, that he believes there was adequate Phase IV planning and the entire "invade without a workable plan for the peace" narrative is wrong-headed, ill-informed and dumb. Thus, Ricks in Fiasco, George Packer in Assassin's Gate, Gordon and Trainor in Cobra II, and James Fallows in Blind into Baghdad are, in his view, quite wrong in the portrait they paint. I guess the press gave inadequate scrutiny, Congress gave inadequate oversight, the intelligence community had bad intelligence, the Bush team made some poor decisions, but the military did great!

There really is no reason to argue this out now. Over the next few years the people in the service academies and war colleges will be asking themselves agonizing questions about how they could have allowed Bush and company to bring this debacle on the military, and they will confront one another over the duty to speak out when civilian leadership is deluded, incompetent, hyper-politicized, and in a state of denial or.... there will be no painful introspection along those lines--it will not be needed--because, after examining the history, smart and responsible people in the military will be comfortable with the planning record, confident that they prepared well for what met them in Iraq, and satisfied that they did all they could to warn the nation, its leadership and each other of potential problems.

We'll see.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 4, 2008 10:46 AM | Permalink

Hang in there, Jay.

There may a catastrophe yet.

If things are so bad in Iraq, we ought to be hearing more about it.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 4, 2008 11:05 AM | Permalink

If things are so bad in Iraq, we ought to be hearing more about it.

Iraq has gone great!

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 4, 2008 11:08 AM | Permalink

Turning Victory into Success: Military Operations after the Campaign (p. 176)

In an article that appeared in the Washington Post on Christmas Day 2004, Thomas Ricks quotes a paper by US Army Major Isaiah Wilson III as saying, "'There was no Phase IV plan' for occupying Iraq for occupying Iraq after the combat phase ...." At the panel where I presented an early version of this essay, I argued in a similar vein that I could find no evidence that a Phase IV plan had been developed by the US Central Command (CENTCOM). My fellow panelist, Colonel Kevin Benson, who had been responsible for Phase IV planning at the CFLCC, indicated that the CENTCOM plans shop was very much engaged in Phase IV planning.

Read the rest. Also read Wilson's paper linked above and decide for yourself how well Ricks summarizes it.

Phase IV in Iraq did not go well. Rosen's welcome to his guesses about why or what I think. I'm offering an empirical method to find out.

I don't expect Rosen or JJW to be moved from the 2004 narrative.

Posted by: Tim at January 4, 2008 11:39 AM | Permalink

There's no doubt that planning of some sort did occur, but the Keystone Kops factor was off the charts. Pieces of paper don't necessarily constitute a valid plan. So by the time the "plan" hit the ground, it went the way of the pallets of money sent over there.

Hence, the comments that Ricks gathered in his book from the military professionals...

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 4, 2008 12:25 PM | Permalink

"Over the next few years the people in the service academies and war colleges will be asking themselves agonizing questions about how they could have allowed Bush and company to bring this debacle on the military, and they will confront one another over the duty to speak out when civilian leadership is deluded, incompetent, hyper-politicized, and in a state of denial..."

How they could have ALLOWED Bush to do so-and-so? Those guys are all in the chain of command, and understand the Constitution far better than you appear to. They have no powers over their supreme commander, and many duties of obedience. They are free to communicate their opinions up the chain privately, and it's inconceiveable that at least some did not - the President would be honored should they do so.

Oh, you wish them to put on dramatic productions for sympathetic media, and denounce the administration from their 'professional' pulpits. General MacArthur tried that one, and got just what he deserved.

Journalism professors, of course, are wholly free to declare that 'civilian leadership is deluded, incompetent, hyper-politicized, and in a state of denial' - or that the earth is flat, or that global warming is decided science. The rest of us, thank God, are free to choke, sneer, snicker, chortle and guffaw. I now do so.

Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at January 4, 2008 12:38 PM | Permalink

The rest of us, thank God, are free to choke, sneer, snicker, chortle and guffaw. I now do so.

That's where audio blogging would be far superior. It's the kind of thing, you wanna hear it.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 4, 2008 12:59 PM | Permalink

...or that global warming is decided science.

Sounds like you're one of the footsoldiers, Insufficient. I'm not going to get into the details, but you should look up the NAS report that George Bush commissioned in 2001, to start.

More from David Frum coming this Sunday:

NEW YORK David Frum, the conservative writer and former Bush White House speechwriter -- currently working for Rudy Giuliani -- tells The New York Times Magazine this coming Sunday, "What I am terrified of is that the Republican Party is heading into a period of political defeat....I am terrified that we can lose the election in 2008. We can lose in 2012, and it will take us half a dozen years to do the rethinking we need to you."

He also tells Deborah Solomon, "What I am saying is that there is exhaustion, intellectual exhaustion on the part of Republicans and conservatives."

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 4, 2008 2:48 PM | Permalink

And that establishes that global warming is caused by man exactly how?

Republicans would have to be pretty damn exhausted to be able to match the longstanding idiot surplus the left has maintained for decades.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 4, 2008 3:37 PM | Permalink

Mr. Van Steenwyk, I'm not stupid enough to think that you're actually going to read this page, the studies it cites, or that you're going to take the NAS, IPCC, or any other scientific institution seriously, no matter what its reputation is, how it conducts itself, who participates, what its methodology is, etc.

As you taught me before, this kind of thing isn't debate, it's culture war theater.

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 4, 2008 3:52 PM | Permalink

"..you're going to take the NAS, IPCC, or any other scientific institution seriously..."

The IPCC is a political institution, not a scientific one. Its cogent scientists - the ones who still remember that science is skepticism - resigned by brigades when it became apparent that the UN was pretending that a temporary plurality of opinions was scientific proof, decided once and for all, not subject to challenge.

Sort of like the New York Times foisting its 'news' articles larded with opinions and selective omissions as tablets of truth handed down from Mount Sinai.

Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at January 4, 2008 4:14 PM | Permalink

The IPCC is a political institution...

Of course it is. Those radical scientists. Who else is it on your list of suspect professions? Let's see teachers, diplomats (especially at the UN), academics, journalists... I can't remember them all. What was the latest? CIA employees was it? Yeah, they just want to bring America down. Imagine. Doing their jobs. What's wrong with them?

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 4, 2008 4:26 PM | Permalink

Richard, if you want to compare how each of us did with buying and selling media stocks, I stand ready to offer details.

I have been very fortunate -- and it has nothing to do with politics. (So little does.)

Posted by: Steve Lovelady at January 4, 2008 5:08 PM | Permalink

Richard, if you want to compare how each of us did with buying and selling media stocks, I stand ready to offer details.

I have been very fortunate -- and it has nothing to do with politics. (So little does.)

don't look now steve, but Jason Von S. has just gotten off the phone with a Bush hack at the SEC, and you are going to be investigated for insider trading. ;-)

Posted by: p.lukasiak at January 4, 2008 6:11 PM | Permalink

JJW: "There's no doubt that planning of some sort did occur ..."

Hey, progress! I wasn't clear from the linked outline what constituted in your mind the "Keystone Kops factor" that "was off the charts." Was it the typical "Keystone Kops factor" of the intellectually-embarrassing yahoos or something more describable? Something different from Afghanistan, Kosovo or Panama?

I also wanted to let you know that Ike has a website: ThinkBeyondWar.

Jay Rosen: So did you read those links? It's only been a year since you said you would. Since your references haven't evolved past "Ricks in Fiasco, George Packer in Assassin's Gate, Gordon and Trainor in Cobra II, and James Fallows in Blind into Baghdad," I assume you haven't.

Posted by: Tim at January 4, 2008 6:36 PM | Permalink

No, and I don't expect those sources to evolve anytime soon.

My point all along is that the media world inhabited by Rosen is incredibly self-referential. And Rosen simply continues to prove my point.

Obviously, a good deal of Phase IV planning did occur. (All plans need assumptions, and some of the assumptions the Phase IV planners didn't pan out. That's life in military circles, though.)

It seems ...and one of the colonels Tim referenced who was one of the planners flat-out says that it wasn't CENTCOM who did it. That planning was delegated to CFLCC, which was the command in charge of Iraq specifically. The colonel says it should have been done at CENTCOM, though I think it should have been done at CFLCC and resourced by CENTCOM, which was a big difference.

The colonel also writes that he didn't get enough bandwidth with his boss, who was preoccupied with COBRA II, rather than ECLIPSE, but I've never met a staff planner who did think he got enough face time with a commander.

There's a big difference between a full-bird colonel and a major. Ricks using a major as a source to say "there was no Phase IV planning" in Iraq is pretty laughable when there is a colonel on record saying that there was, because he was in the planning cell actually doing it for months.

If one were to be empirical about it, one would say that the major (and Ricks, by extension) was falsified by the colonel.

I wouldn't hold out hope for any kind of critical reasoning process here. This is the home of the escalating media feedback loop.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 4, 2008 7:00 PM | Permalink

van Steenwyk --

point of clarification please...

The quote Tim cited earlier -- "My fellow panelist, Colonel Kevin Benson, who had been responsible for Phase IV planning at the CFLCC, indicated that the CENTCOM plans shop was very much engaged in Phase IV planning" -- is ambiguous in its use of tense...

How should we interpret "was very much engaged"...

Does it mean "is at the moment engaged in preparing plans" implying that the plans are incomplete?

Or does it mean "had been engaged in plans" at some previous point, leaving the plans' status -- complete or incomplete -- ambiguous?

You say "obviously" planning "did occur." Do you mean that it is obvious that planning was initiated or that it is obvious that the plans were actually drawn up?

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at January 4, 2008 7:23 PM | Permalink

all I know is that i've never seen a plan to secure and maintain order in Baghdad upon the overthrow of the iraqi government.

(Unless securing the oil ministry, and knocking over a statue of Saddam to the applause of Chalabi and his crew for the benefit of the media constitutes a "plan".)

Ultimately, I think the distinction here is that while Phase IV planning occurred, there was never any actual Phase IV plan -- certainly none that had been subjected to the kind of rigorous review by all the necessary parties that would have to occur prior to the adoption of such a true "plan".

Finally, it must be noted that the treatment of Shinseki made it abundantly clear to the people capable of formulating a workable plan that working in an intellectually honest fashion would be a career-threatening move. Military planners were signalled that their job wasn't to plan for the various contingencies that could be expected, but to "plan" based on the absurdist assumptions of neo-conservative hacks. Basically, what the military was told to do was the equivalent of telling NASA to plan lunar missions based on the assumption that the gravity on the moon was the same as that on earth.

Posted by: p.lukasiak at January 4, 2008 7:47 PM | Permalink

Lukasiak -- speaking of Shinseki, it might be appropriate to examine Insufficiently Sensitive's comment above about the Constitutional duty of those in uniform to subject themselves to civilian authority.

Insufficiently said: "Those guys are all in the chain of command, and understand the Constitution far better than you [Professor Rosen] appear to. They have no powers over their supreme commander, and many duties of obedience. They are free to communicate their opinions up the chain privately..."

Do not those in uniform also have a duty to communicate their opinions openly when called upon to testify before Congress? Surely their Constitutional duties include an obligation to be frank to their Congressional overseers no less than to be obedient to their Commander in Chief?

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at January 4, 2008 7:59 PM | Permalink

Was it the typical "Keystone Kops factor" of the intellectually-embarrassing yahoos or something more describable?

It's not that hard to understand.

It's obvious that the planning was poor. Maybe it wasn't poor on everyone's part, but the overall planning was poor. There are multiple sources saying this.

The "intellectually-embarrassing yahoos" are ideologues, often more interested in "winning," bearing witness to their own righteousness, etc. than they are in actual reality, reasonable discourse, etc. As Jay said, it's easy to discard reasonable discourse if you feel specially victimized, marginalized somehow, etc. as ideologues often do.

A number of the people in the Iraq War effort were also interested in winning, getting their Mideast plans enacted, than they were in actual careful planning and taking hard realities into account. They also had trouble having reasonable discourse with people who they didn't identify with ideologically.

Again, it's not that hard to understand. It involves ordinary critical thinking, due process, taking reality into account, and changing what you think when different facts present themselves.

Posted by: JJFromME at January 4, 2008 8:33 PM | Permalink

Andrew Tyndall is on to something:

"Surely their Constitutional duties include an obligation to be frank to their Congressional overseers no less than to be obedient to their Commander in Chief?"

Grey area. Congress is not in the chain of command. Certainly it would have powers of fact-finding, and we saw that reflected when it summoned General Petraeus. Congress may certainly opine for the cameras at will (Senator Clinton, pissing disbelief on the military successes unfolding as she spoke). Perhaps (grey area here) military officers could properly opine on military operations within their competence (Jason?); but for them to be asked to opine on decisions properly taken by their civilian superiors would be flat wrong. Not that cynical Congresscretins wouldn't like to demand it for the media circus, but a refusal to answer would be proper.

Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at January 4, 2008 9:02 PM | Permalink

JJW: Without disagreeing about the quality of the planning, in what way was the planning poor? It would be easy for me to say that it is obvious that the media has a liberal bias and there are multiple sources saying that (there are, including journalists), but I find that inadequate.

Was the Phase IV planning poor at the strategic (multinational/interagency), operational (CENTCOM/CFLCC) and/or tactical level? Does that hierarchy still make sense in hindsight given Iraq?

Was it poor because the planning process developed post-Vietnam (from Active Defense thru Airland Battle to Joint, Interagency and Coalition) no longer works? Does it work for some operations (Afghanistan?) but not for others (Iraq?)?

Ike Wilson argues that the current hierarchical, phased planning process needs to be overhauled for 21st Century warfare. Do you agree?

Do we need a new Goldwater-Nichols Act for Interagency training, doctrine and operations? Should we establish a "National Security Service Corps" to avoid future poorly planned/executed Phase IVs?

Andrew Tyndall: "Do not those in uniform also have a duty to communicate their opinions openly when called upon to testify before Congress? Surely their Constitutional duties include an obligation to be frank to their Congressional overseers no less than to be obedient to their Commander in Chief?"

For clarification, Shinseki was called upon to testify on the Defense Authorization Request for Fiscal Year 2004 and the Future Years Defense Program. If you read his prepared statement, he never mentions Iraq. His response was to a question unrelated to the Authorization Request or FYDP.

I think all military have an obligation to be "frank" with Congress as well as the President. They don't always have an obligation to be frank publicly. They also have to answer with an understanding of their role (CSA Shinseki vs. CJCS Myers and the Combatant Commander Franks).

I have no problem with Shinseki answering the question, but I do think he had other options without violating any obligation.

Posted by: Tim at January 4, 2008 9:08 PM | Permalink

FWIW: Salute and Disobey?

Posted by: Tim at January 4, 2008 9:22 PM | Permalink

All of them very important. And all of them clearly beyond the ability of the usual fatually-challenged crew here.

Case in point: Trotting out the career of General Shinseki...the SAINTED General Shinseki of the Crusader and the Chinese black-berets, his career tragically cut short at the rank of Chief of Staff of the Army - a lowly four star General, and at the very budding end of his term, no less!!! Such injustice!

Every time someone tries to bring that up, they pretty much establish their cluelessness and their ability to "fix the facts" around their narrative.

They also demonstrate that they're listening to a media feedback loop rather than examining the actual facts and timeline, which reveals pretty clearly that Shinseki had been informed that he would NOT be the first CoS in decades to serve more than one tour in that billet, months prior to giving his "several hundred thousand" testimony to Congress.

Wow. How in the world did the Administration magically know he was going to do that? And pluk..How did you magically manage to reverse the order of cause and effect and get time to run backwards?

Then again, you yourself have had your nose rubbed in this particular lie before, on this very blog.

And yet you continue to cling to the lie that Shinseki's career was harmed when he made that testimony to congress.

Well, sorry. You don't get to sing the praises of critical thinking, due process (I don't think this means what you think it means, in this context anyway) taking reality into account, and changing what you think when different facts present themselves.

You've demonstrated yourself to be among those who can't or won't do it.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 4, 2008 9:25 PM | Permalink

Andrew,

When I mentioned COL Benson's reference to CENTCOM not taking a direct role in the planning, I'm referring to something he wrote or said in one of the articles Tim linked to. I don't recall which one, and the pdf will eat my computer if I look for it now. But what Benson said was that the Ph IV planning didn't take place at CENTCOM but at CFLCC, and he said it should have taken place at CENTCOM.

I respect his opinion, naturally, but I'm not sure I agree. CENTCOM's authority spans nearly the entire continent and into Africa, and encompasses a couple of dozen countries. The Iraq-specific stuff quite rightly belongs to the commanding general in Iraq, rather than CENTCOM. CENTCOM's role is to support it, and coordinate with FORSCOM to support it, and ensure the CFLCC or JCTF-7 Commander gets the resources he needs to accomplish his mission.

Here's a vignette, from my own personal observation and experience (Ah, there's that damn empiricism, raising it's ugly head, eh, Jay!):

In mid-May of 2003, I had just rolled in to Al Asad Air Base, out in the middle of the Al Anbar Province. Baghdad airport fell just a couple of weeks or a month prior. The Iraqi Army had just been routed, but there was not yet a significant and organized insurgent presence like we saw arise in 2004-2005. Mostly, the situation was chaotic, and nobody really knew how would be received in the towns out there. At the time, my unit, the 1-124th Infantry, was focused on the area around Haditha. I was the acting S-4, and as such was responsible for coordinating logistics and organizing convoys back and forth between Haditha and Al Asad (about a 1-hour to 90-minute convoy with the trucks I had available).

My job took me to the support squadron headquarters for the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment on a near daily basis. And while I was there I encountered a civil affairs officer. He was out there to ensure that rebuilding operations were going ok, and to provide local commanders with advice on Ph. IV operations from a Civil Affairs perspective. Consider it to have been a civilizing influence on the bruising combat arms types that us infantry and cavalry officers are, by nature.

I recall our conversation very well, because I was a financial/economics journalist in civilian life at the time (when I wasn't mobilized), and we spoke at length about the severe inflationary pressures the local economy would face once the United States started throwing money around in earnest. We talked about what constituencies would be hurt by hyperinflation, and he told me he was aware of that issue, and one of the things he was doing was collecting information on what prevailing wages were for different occupations prior to the war, so that we could calibrate our payments to interpreters, contractors, etc. accordingly, while keeping economic dislocations to a minimum.

Bear in mind, this was in the very early stages of the transition from mass maneuver war to an occupation/maintenance/rebuilding mode, and this guy was already there.

Now, you can believe that he was there because someone, somewhere:

1.) Anticipated the need for a civil affairs team in and around Khan al Baghdadi and Hadithah and the surrounding environs

2.) Cut the guy's mobilization orders

3.) Bumped needed supplies or fighters to put this guy and his civil affairs team on a flight manifest at some point

4.) Flew the guy to Iraq

5.) Allocated him and his team a desperately needed four Humvees in an environment where transportation was scarce.

6.) Cut him the orders to report to the 3rd ACR in the backwater Al Anbar province

7.) Put them in a convoy manifest

8.) Included a paragraph in the OPORD to give this guy and his team a task and purpose in the Execution Paragraph.

I'm pretty sure, based on my own understanding of how that stuff works, that that's how it went down. That's how I got there. And that's how every other swinging richard got out there, as well.

Then there's the alternative hypothesis, proposed by JJ from ME and Jay Rosen, and others who have no idea how the MDMP works, that he sort of formed out of the ether like magic.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 4, 2008 10:18 PM | Permalink

An important thing to remember is that it's not just "liberals" in the United States that you're antagonizing (I put that word in quotes, because often it seems to be an epithet for anyone--no matter who they are--who doesn't buy movement conservative arguments):

The mood had been building all week at the negotiations in Bali on a replacement to the present arrangements under the Kyoto Protocol which run out in 2012. For months the United States, and President Bush himself, had been insisting that it would not block progress. Spin-doctors were dispatched to assert, ludicrously, not only that the President was as committed as anyone to avoiding catastrophic global warming, but that the man who had spent years trying to destroy any attempt to tackle it had always really been on the side of the environmental angels. But once his hard-faced negotiators took their seats in the steamy conference centre at the Nusa Dua resort the pretence slipped away. They blocked virtually every constructive proposal put on the table, refusing any suggestion of concrete action by the US, while insisting that other countries do more and more. Ever since Bush first rejected – and set out to kill – the Kyoto Protocol, he had cited as his main objection its exclusion of big developing nations such as China and India. More recently he has indicated that the US would move if they took the first step. Sure enough, they came to Bali ready to take action on their own emissions – and still the US refused to budge.

It is simply not done in international negotiations for one country to single out another for criticism; it's the equivalent of calling someone a liar in the House of Commons. But from early last week other delegations were publicly, unprecedentedly and explicitly blaming the US for the lack of progress. Worse, they were beginning to point the finger at President Bush himself, suggesting that things would improve once he was gone. That is the kind of humiliation reserved for such international pariahs as Robert Mugabe and Saddam Hussein. But even they were never subjected to the treatment that America received yesterday morning. When it tried, yet again, to sabotage agreement the representatives of the other 187 governments broke into boos and hisses. When Papua New Guinea told the US to "get out of the way", they cheered.

Here's what was said:

In a hushed conference hall, as envoys from almost 190 nations looked on, the delegate from Papua New Guinea leaned into his microphone.

"We seek your leadership," Kevin Conrad told the Americans at the UN conference on climate change. "But if for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way.''

The conference exploded with applause...

Posted by: JJFromME at January 5, 2008 9:38 AM | Permalink

And pluk..How did you magically manage to reverse the order of cause and effect and get time to run backwards?

Then again, you yourself have had your nose rubbed in this particular lie before, on this very blog.

Two things Jason.

First, as a bit of general advice, its possible to link directly to specific comments, rather than threads.

Secondly, in the thread to which you linked, I had a total of one comment, on December 18th, that made no mention (either directly or indirectly) of Shinseki. The first time that Shinseki is mentioned is five days AFTER the sole comment I made in the thread you linked to.

Finally, I referred to "the treatment of Shinseki". I never claimed that he was somehow denied a second tour as CoS of the Army based on his testimony. Shinseki testified forthrightly and honestly in front of Congress, and for doing so he was publicly humiliated by Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld -- and not a single civilian official attended his retirement ceremony.

Perhaps more to the point, Shinseki was punished by Rumseld's DoD for his honesty within the Pentagon prior to his remarks to Congress -- leaking to the Washington Post that Shinseki's replacement had already been selected 14 months before he was scheduled to retire -- significantly undercutting Shinseki's authority as Army CoS.

Posted by: p.lukasiak at January 5, 2008 9:47 AM | Permalink

pluk: "Perhaps more to the point, ..."

Two things, Paul.

1. Jason did link directly to his comment and not to the tread.

2. It's waaaay past time (5 years!) to drive a stake through this myth that Shinseki's announced replacement was something unusual.

In April 2002, Rumsfeld put together a list of his 4 star nominees for 2003. That list included SACEUR, NORTHCOM, SOUTHCOM and CSA.

Ricks found out and WaPo published a page A1 story on the nominations. The NYT followed with their own story. The only thing newsworthy was the traditionally Army SACEUR position was going to a Marine. No complaints about undercutting the authority of the current SACEUR or SOUTHCOM commanders, much less Shinseki.

Posted by: Tim at January 5, 2008 10:56 AM | Permalink

Tim...

The articles were published in april. Jones took over his new job in September. Eckhardt assumed his Northern Command duties in October (and this was a "new" command...he wasn't replacing anyone.) James T. Hill took over the southern command in August. In other words, these announcements were made no more than six months prior to the vacancy in question.

The announcement of Shinseki's replacement, which happened at the same time, was FOURTEEN MONTHS before his tour in that position was scheduled to be over.

Then, there is this little factoid. Shinseki was replaced by Shoomaker, who served until April 2007...and whose replacement (Casey) was announced in January 2007... three and a half months before Casey took over.

In other words, unless you can find me some evidence that the naming of a replacement well over a year and before a high-level military officer is NOT unusual, I kinda have to assume that it is.

Posted by: p.lukasiak at January 5, 2008 11:33 AM | Permalink

Jones took over in January 2003.

Eberhart, not Eckhardt.

Posted by: Tim at January 5, 2008 1:29 PM | Permalink

JJ:

I'm going to call you on propagating another lie.

Bush didn't reject Kyoto. He never got a chance to. That's another lie ricocheting around the media feedback loop.

The entire US Senate rejected Kyoto, and did so three and a half years before Bush was even in office.

The vote was 95-0.

Oh. Kerry voted against it, too.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 5, 2008 2:45 PM | Permalink

Tim:

You are correct in that Jones took over in January... but he was originally slated to take over in September, according to the Times article that you yourself linked to. (Best guess is that there was a delay in Jones getting the necessary approval from NATO to take over.)

In other words, the point still stands in terms of the time between the announcement of someone taking over a major command, and when that takeover is supposed to happen.

(BTW, do you know what happened to the Keane nomination to replace Shinseki? Given that Keane was one of "the surge"'s strongest advocates, is it possible that Keane expressed an opinion regarding appropriate troop levels in Iraq that was inconsistent with Rummy's --- and found himself unappointed?)

Posted by: p.lukasiak at January 5, 2008 5:57 PM | Permalink

There was no problem appointing Jones, he was approved in July.

He was never "slated" to take over in September. There was no supposed change of command in September. The NYT made it up then reported in July date TBD.

Replacing Ralston before the Prague NATO Summit in November would have made no sense.

Posted by: Tim at January 5, 2008 6:55 PM | Permalink

That's another lie ricocheting around the media feedback loop.

Sorry, Mr. Van Steenwyk, I guess the Heritage Foundation lied when it told me, "Why President Bush Is Right to Abandon the Kyoto Protocol." And that Clinton's economists were lying when they said that "the Europeans would likely go along with an unlimited trading system if the Bush administration would return to the negotiating table to produce a revised treaty it could sign," and that "Bush could have tried to revise the treaty to reflect [the] new realities."

But you're more interested in finding "facts in dispute" that have little or no relevance to the main points of discussion, instead of having any reasonable discourse.

That's the way it goes with culture war theater.

Posted by: JJFromME at January 5, 2008 7:30 PM | Permalink

Wow. So in addition to the 95 Senators who voted that the Kyoto treaty was a dog with fleas, you're also pointing to two links that also say the Kyoto treaty would have been a dumb idea. One of them is headlined "Ex-Clinton officials admit Kyoto was flawed."

(Still trying to figure out how Bush managed to "abandon" a protocol he never supported in the first place).

So if 95 of 100 senators voted against it, and even the Clintonistas are saying it's a dog with fleas, then your criticizing Bush over his refusal to implement a treat that HE COULD NEVER GET THROUGH THE SENATE TO BEGIN WITH is just asinine.

Why would ANY president want to waste political capital on a treaty that nobody...NOBODY in the country supported?

Why would he want to put American industry at such a disadvantage to China? That's just stupid. All 95 senators...even stupid ones like Kerry...could figure that out.

I guess everyone in the country has figured that out except...except... except you, JJ!!!

No, Kyoto itself isn't germaine to a discussion of media bias (so why did you bring it up?) But your faulty factual grasp of the information sure is.

I wouldn't have to pound on facts so hard if your thought processes were disciplined enough to be grounded in them, and in a culture of verification. Isn't that one of the prime directives of professional journalistic ethics? To ground ones reporting in a culture of verification? That's what my copy of The Elements of Journalism says.

But you can't be bothered. You're too caught up in the feedback loop.

This blog has unfortunately become a case study in what happens when a culture of assertion trumps a culture of verification. That's what happens when someone like Rosen adopts a paragraph-to-fact ratio of five-to-one, and no one else notices.

That's not building an argument. That's creating a Frankenstein.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 5, 2008 8:01 PM | Permalink

Put another way, why would any rational person willingly choose to go along with a discussion founded on false pretenses?

You're really too accustomed to dealing with muddleheaded libs, too in love with their own snark and ideas, and the ideas of other muddleheaded libs in media - members of the club, and grand wazoos in the cult of savviness - to check your ideas against the reality where facts can be verified, or at least the valid perceptions of people outside of it.

Get your postulates right. Then you can move on to analysis.

But if you're getting your head handed to you on a regular basis because you keep getting the facts underpinning your argument wrong - and getting your head handed to you so damn frequently on poor grasp of facts, screwed up timelines, that you are actually tired of it, well, that's really not something that bothers me. I regard that as progress.

This is a forum about reporters and reporting. So become a better reporter.

And get your facts straight.

Then we can talk.

Until you do that, your analysis isn't worth much, except as an exercise in target practice.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 5, 2008 8:16 PM | Permalink

It is simply not done in international negotiations for one country to single out another for criticism

Whoever wrote that is criminally ignorant. At conferences sponsored by the UN, like the one at Bali, America and Israel are singled out for criticism all the time. Remember, for instance, the Durban World Conference against Racism, which turned into a Two Minutes' Hate of Israel? The delegates at Bali weren't doing anything unusual for a UN conference when they abused the USA; it'd be much more unusual if they hadn't done so.

Since the author gets that wrong, I don't trust his assertions about the reasonableness of the proposals made by anyone present at Bali.

Posted by: Michael Brazier at January 5, 2008 10:45 PM | Permalink

One of them is headlined "Ex-Clinton officials admit Kyoto was flawed."

To make a painfully obvious point: I tell you it's raining outside. And I tell you that you better use an umbrella. You point to a hole in the umbrella. Does prove that it's not raining outside?

Why would ANY president want to waste political capital on a treaty that nobody...NOBODY in the country supported?

Yes, as it was then written. And here's another painfully obvious point: As it was written (as the article mentions) didn't have to be the final product.

As for China. (Some of the facts in this article are now slightly out of date and could be disputed. Have at it, Mr. Van Steenwyk.)

Posted by: JJFromME at January 5, 2008 11:04 PM | Permalink

I tell you it's raining outside. And I tell you that you better use an umbrella. You point to a hole in the umbrella. Does prove that it's not raining outside?

It proves that, if my goal is not getting wet, there's no point to using that umbrella. And if you're giving me the umbrella, I want a second opinion on whether it's raining, because to miss that hole in the umbrella you'd have to be blind.

As it was written (as the article mentions) didn't have to be the final product.

JJ, do you have any notion just how much world energy production would have to be cut, under the assumptions of the IPCC, to stop the earth's temperature from rising? According to figures I've seen, Western civilization would collapse if the thing were seriously tried.

Frankly, you should be hoping the IPCC is wrong, because if they're right nothing we can do now can avert disaster; the only rational response is to make sure you're not living next to the ocean. The policies the Greens advocate are not rational responses to the threat they describe; they're akin to praying and sacrificing to the gods in hopes that they will set aside the laws of physics because they approve of our newfound humility.

Posted by: Michael Brazier at January 6, 2008 1:28 AM | Permalink

JJ, of all the stupid links you've offered, that GRIST site is by far the stupidest.

Thanks for the 7th grade exercise in apologetics.

And you're accusing ME of being a culture warrior?

ROFL!!!!

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 6, 2008 1:47 AM | Permalink

As usual, none of the substantial points made were addressed. Reality doesn't care whether Jason Van Steenwyk is "ROFL". It doesn't care if Mr. Brazier calls people "Greens" or whatever.

The following people are Republicans:

"The evidence, in my view, is more compelling than ever," McCain said in an interview, professing a "respectful disagreement" with his GOP colleague on the issue.

"The scientists have become more and more definitive. ... Sooner or later we will recognize that climate change is taking place and it's serious and it's generated by human activity causing greenhouse gas emissions," McCain said.

Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, R-Md., who has joined McCain in sponsoring legislation to cap U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, said he was aghast at Inhofe's latest comments.

"How do you say, ridiculous? How do you say, failing future generations?" Gilchrest said.

"I don't mean to defame anybody, but the state of the science on global warming is top-notch... This is not Chicken Little, this is not 'The sky is falling.' The fundamental physics of the atmosphere as it has been degraded by human activity and the burning of fossil fuels is clear."

Unfortunately, though, this is from the empiricist wing of the Republican party. The wingnut wing doesn't want to give up its Two Minutes Hate for Al Gore.

There are, however, at least some Republicans who want participation in the reality based community:

Your mother, Barbara Frum, was a well-known Canadian journalist and broadcaster for the CBC whose politics were left of center. What did she think of your views? She certainly didn’t agree with my politics. But her example is one of my profoundest inspirations. My mother cared more about how you reasoned than about the conclusions you reached.

Listen Frum, how the commie scientists reason at the NAS, the IPCC, NOAA, NASA, or or any of the institutions where scientists wrote these 928 research papers, don't matter. If they all came to the same conclusion, it doesn't matter what reasoning or methodology they used. Obviously they are just consorting with the Bavarian Illuminati and Al Gore to position themselves for World Government Utopia under latte-drinking Socialist and Commie Hippies ruling out of their New England welfare mansions.

Posted by: JJFromME at January 6, 2008 9:34 AM | Permalink

JJ,

Dude... who in the world are you arguing with?

Further, if you're going to use the appeal to authority fallacy, you've got to appeal to someone other than a politician on the basis of he's a republican. That's just stupid.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 6, 2008 9:40 AM | Permalink

Dude... who in the world are you arguing with?

You tell me. In this argument, I'm taking the side of the reality based community, which exists in both parties--but as Jay argues, not in certain parts of the Republican party. And someone like David Frum is obviously worried about this.

As for arguing by authority, as I told you before. I'm not stupid enough to believe that you're going to actually read or take seriously any scientific studies I link to, even if I describe them in detail. Because consistently, you haven't shown that you couldn't care less about that sort of thing.

David Frum wrote that this sort of thing is about a basic respect for expertise:

Liberals have used their influence in the courts and government bureaucracies to win political victories they never could have won at the ballot box. Conservatives have reacted by turning to populism -- to a defence of the commonsense wisdom of ordinary voters against the pretensions of know-it-alls.

Conservatives have drawn strength from populism. But you can overdo any good thing --and I am beginning to think that on this one, we've zoomed the car into the red zone.

The currently front-running candidate in Iowa, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, has built his campaign on a plan to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and replace the federal income tax with a national sales tax.

Economists and tax experts virtually unanimously agree that the plan is beyond unworkable -- that it is downright absurd. (It does not help that it was originally drafted by the Church of Scientology.)

The idea was taken up by the radio talk-show host NeilBoortz ("the mouth of the South"), who published a book called The Fair Tax in 2006. Governor Huckabee read the book--and was sold on the spot.

Now you might expect a presidential candidate to do a little more thinking about his top domestic policy proposal than reading one pop best-seller. But you'd be wrong!

Just a little lower down in the polls is a libertarian candidate named Ron Paul. Paul is best known for his vehemently isolationist foreign policy views. But his core supporters also thrill to his self-taught monetary views, which amount to a rejection of everything taught by modern economists from Alfred Marshall to Milton Friedman.

Huckabee and Paul have not the faintest idea of what they are talking about.

The problem is not that their answers are wrong -- that can happen to anyone. The problem is that they don't understand the questions, and are too lazy or too arrogant to learn. But say that aloud and their partisans will shout back: Elitism!

...[It] has to be admitted: Many of us on the conservative side have fed this monster. (Rightly) aghast at the abuse of expertise by liberal judges, liberal bureaucrats and liberal academics, we have sometimes over-reacted by denying the importance of expertise altogether.

Now I can't tell you each and every detail about proxy samples, climate modeling systems, ice core samples, or procedures for temperature gathering. But I can tell you that the science that went into building the computer I'm typing on, or the antibiotics I took to make my ear infection go away, is pretty good. So the institutions that produced those sciences and technologies are pretty good too, and those are basically the same institutions that are producing climate change science.

But if you lack a basic respect for expertise and that expertise's ability to discern reality, then you'll be immune from anything they say.

Posted by: JJFromME at January 6, 2008 10:24 AM | Permalink

You know, if I were a Huckabee or Paul supporter, you might have a point.

But I'm not.

So why don't you go back to arguing with some six-foot tall imaginary rabbit named Harvey?

You'll appear less crazed that way.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 6, 2008 10:56 AM | Permalink

None of this matters. (And Jason: all you know is culture war; I have never seen you engage in a discussion, period. You like to laugh at people and--in your mind--"demolish" them. If you can't demolish, you have nothing to say, so you pretend to demolish. You're not a warrior, but a troll enjoying what you call "target practice." You just love culture war and aggression for its own sake and the funny reactions you get. You remind me of the jocks I knew in high school laughing at struggling kids in gym class. It is a deeply ugly performance.) None of this matters because the proof, such as it is, is not in any of these links.

About Shinseki what matters is whether within the military people interpreted those events as a warning not to speak up. If they did we will hear about it and continue to hear about it as the record of those years is written.

With global warming, what matters is whether Republican candidates begin speaking and running against the politics of "dispute the data, treat it as a phony problem." There are already big cracks in the coalition as more and more corporate leaders get concerned about the warming trend and absorb the data. It's the tension between them and the "denial works" crowd within the Republican coalition that will settle the matter, not the sound and fury of the culture war.

On the anti-empirical wing of of the GOP--about a third of the base, I say--what matters is whether others in the party take on those attitudes, or continue to co-habitate with them. I agree with JJ that figures like Frum are important to watch. They provide some clues to the coming crack-up.

And as I said above... Over the next few years the people in the service academies and war colleges will be asking themselves agonizing questions about how they could have allowed Bush and company to bring this debacle on the military, and they will confront one another over the duty to speak out [or] there will be no painful introspection along those lines--it will not be needed--because, after examining the history, smart and responsible people in the military will be comfortable with the planning record, confident that they prepared well for what met them in Iraq, and satisfied that they did all they could to warn the nation, its leadership and each other of potential problems.

Everyone who went to work for Bush or went along with Bush is going to be doing the work of regret and re-appraisal as the full scale of his delusion, destruction and corruption of government continues to come out. The chances of the military escaping that ordeal seem to me quite slim.

My guess would be that it's already happening.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 6, 2008 10:57 AM | Permalink

Shorter Rosen: ? + ? + ? + ? = !

I'm not giving you hell, Jay. I'm just presenting you with a series of known facts, or at least quantifiable data that would form a reasonable basis to draw a conclusion from (e.g., the Groseclose study, WRT press bias) and you think it's hell. Because I'm not in the same media feedback loop as you are.

Thus far in this particular thread, I'm the only participant to have done so.

Meanwhile, true to form, your last post at 10:57 consists of seven paragraphs of assertions and not one data point on which to anchor them.

In other words: ? + ? + ? + ? = !

Oh, not to mention the paragraph-long ad hominem. Good going, professor!

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 6, 2008 11:31 AM | Permalink

Jay Roseen: My guess would be that it's already happening.

As a reader, I would ask that you not only advocate empirical methods, but engage in them when discussing the military.

Don't tell your readers what smart and responsible people will do without telling them what they've already done and are doing. Don't write link-free comments, giving yourself a Free Pass, and then claim that none of this matters and the proof, such as it is, is not in any links.

Advocate being a custodian-of-fact practicing a discipline of verification and giving people the information they need to be self-governing, de-emphasizing prose and "good" story-telling.

Posted by: Tim at January 6, 2008 11:31 AM | Permalink

This is obviously a time waster. I've said everything there was to be said for this thread.

Posted by: JJFromME at January 6, 2008 11:39 AM | Permalink

But if you lack a basic respect for expertise and that expertise's ability to discern reality, then you'll be immune from anything they say.

Kinda like Hillary's "suspension of disbelief" idiocy during Petraeus's testimony, no?

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 6, 2008 12:18 PM | Permalink

Shall I quote to you to dictionary definition of "guess," Tim? We guess when we have no empirical basis for saying one way or the other. I am not privy to what's going on right now within the intellectual culture of the military as it confronts the devastation of the Bush years. Therefore I label what I have to say a "guess," and readers can weigh and discount accordingly. You, however, do know something about the subject. So why don't you tell us whether that agonized re-appraisal is happening?

And I didn't tell readers what smart and responsible people within the military will do; I said it remains to be seen, and we should watch the debates within the military intelligentsia. Shall I trot out the dictionary definition of the word "either?"

I read your links when you first posted them back in a PressThink thread some time ago. (I don't know if they were exactly the same as the Xark set but substantially so.) My conclusion from reading those materials and from reading Ricks, Packer, Fallows, Gordon and (retired Marine Corps lieutenant general) Trainor, was that there was someone and an office within the military responsible for post-invasion planning; he thinks he did a great job, given the difficulties of the task, which included trying to guess what kind of problems would confront the US after Saddam's fall. Mostly, that work was ignored and the invasion happened without a workable plan for the peace, or enough troops to prevent the chaos.

Why? My answer would be a global one, even though you can drill down on the details of any one failure and get a different explanation. It happened because there was no intellectual integrity throughout the entire decision-making and war preparation process from the earliest stirrings that Iraq was "next" through to the Baker Report. Individuals acted honorably and responsibly, but they also saw that a train was moving and gathering momentum and nothing they could do was going to stop it.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 6, 2008 12:32 PM | Permalink

Meanwhile, nearly four out of 10 Democrats (39%) don't think the world would be better off with a victory in Iraq.

But don't you dare question their patriotism!

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 6, 2008 12:33 PM | Permalink

Jay Rosen: "I am not privy to what's going on right now within the intellectual culture of the military ..."

Why not? Because you choose not to read the publicly available, peer reviewed publications? You have to guess because you'd rather do that than read? Are you concerned that reading might conflict with what you already know? Should I trot out the definition of empirical method and empiricism? How can you possible say to your readers to watch the debates if you're totally ignorant of where they take place?

How can you possibly ask me to tell you whether that agonized re-appraisal is happening when I'm providing you links to the actual debate?

Benson's work wasn't ignored. I'll ask you the same questions I asked JJW:

Was the Phase IV planning poor at the strategic (multinational/interagency), operational (CENTCOM/CFLCC) and/or tactical level? Does that hierarchy still make sense in hindsight given Iraq?

Was it poor because the planning process developed post-Vietnam (from Active Defense thru Airland Battle to Joint, Interagency and Coalition) no longer works? Does it work for some operations (Afghanistan?) but not for others (Iraq?)?

Ike Wilson argues that the current hierarchical, phased planning process needs to be overhauled for 21st Century warfare. Do you agree?

Do we need a new Goldwater-Nichols Act for Interagency training, doctrine and operations? Should we establish a "National Security Service Corps" to avoid future poorly planned/executed Phase IVs?

Posted by: Tim at January 6, 2008 12:45 PM | Permalink

Jay Rosen: "Mostly, that work was ignored ..."

Nice edit, Jay.

Posted by: Tim at January 6, 2008 12:51 PM | Permalink

Sorry, one more, just for fun (I couldn't resist)--our Enlightenment-era founding fathers as imagined by Van Steenwyk and his wingnut fellow travellers.

Posted by: JJFromME at January 6, 2008 1:29 PM | Permalink

How can you possibly ask me to tell you whether that agonized re-appraisal is happening when I'm providing you links to the actual debate?

Because you are a sophisticated observer, and so I asked for your opinion, taking in everything you know. You act like that is some kind of outrage, which can only mean your outrage meter is broken.

If you asked me whether there are agonizing re-appraisals going on within the press over coverage of the Iraq War, I wouldn't get all huffy or just substitute links for my opinion, though I might provide some links if I had them. I would give you my read without all the drama.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 6, 2008 2:40 PM | Permalink

Jay,

I apologize. I misunderstood your intent when asking if you needed to quote/trot definitions of common words for me ... you were telling me I was a sophisticated observer and asking my opinion!

[/drama]

Here's my opinion, especially as I consider my role as a citizen and voter ....

Politicians keep running on their ideologies! Why can't we ever get a political candidate who doesn't have an opinion of his/her own and would defer to a collection of experts! 'Cause experts are always right!!!!

[whoops, //drama]

There is an agonized debate, an old and unending one, about civil-military relations during war and peace. This is especially true for "post-combat" and "other than war" operations. Part of the debate is "why does this keep happening to us!?!"

The questions I asked above are real questions that have real consequences for today and the future. The debate is not exclusive. It (could) have consequences for coming election (Thompson sponsored a bill that included a National Security Service Corps).

Also try to understand that in the military culture, it is not acceptable to identify a problem without offering a possible solution (or more than one).

Posted by: Tim at January 6, 2008 3:01 PM | Permalink

Splendid thought! Since you mention it, Professor Rosen, please let us have your thoughts on whether there are agonizing re-appraisals going on within the press over coverage of the Iraq war. Our local paper hasn't seen fit to let us paying subscribers in on any such debates; since they aren't reported, may I conclude that there aren't any? Or are they merely another bit of information that the reading public would simply misinterpret, in a politically improper direction, if given access to them?

Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at January 6, 2008 3:02 PM | Permalink

There are none of note.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 6, 2008 3:09 PM | Permalink

Yep. I guess that's because they think everything is hunky-dory.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 6, 2008 3:21 PM | Permalink

No, because they have a weak culture of debate, because they were overwhelmed by the challenge of Iraq, GWOT and the Bush furies and because the thing, the war, is still going. Reflection tends to follow punctuation in journalism: end of, anniversary of, man of the year.

Those who stayed and maintained bureaus in Iraq are proud of sticking it out, and of what they reported. Those who didn't stay feel guilty, especially because of the sacrifices-- journalists, photographers, Iraqi stringers killed or hurt. Neither of those emotions leads to critical reflection.

And in journalism there's always the next big story to come along and make you forget the failures in narration and information during the last one.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 6, 2008 7:43 PM | Permalink

Tim,
In your link to Phase IV planning, Col. Benson says, "We expected to be able to recall the Iraqi army. Once CPA took the decision to disband the Iraqi army and start again, our assumptions for the plan became invalid. p.189

Isn't this just another way of saying that Rumsfeld and the Pentagon made Benson's planning almost as irrelevant as Jay Garner and the State Department's similarly extensive planning? What's your take-away from this? Why and how are we impressed by evidence of planning that Pentagon action almost immediately rendered invalid? How is this significantly related to the issue you keep pushing--reforming and revising the process by which the planning took place--if it was almost immediately rendered inoperative by the CPA on orders from civilian leadership in either the Pentagon or the White House?

Posted by: Mark Anderson at January 6, 2008 8:36 PM | Permalink

JJ: I said, if the IPCC's science is right, catastrophe is unavoidable. You -- and, I see, Dr. Rosen -- reply that the IPCC's science is certainly right, and it is proof of irrationality to deny it. I would be happy, at some other time, to argue the scientific question, but that's not what I was arguing. I took up Bjorn Lomborg's position: "Bjorn Lomborg argues that many of the elaborate and expensive actions now being considered to stop global warming will cost hundreds of billions of dollars, are often based on emotional rather than strictly scientific assumptions, and may very well have little impact on the world's temperature for hundreds of years. Rather than starting with the most radical procedures, Lomborg argues that we should first focus our resources on more immediate concerns, such as fighting malaria and HIV/AIDS and assuring and maintaining a safe, fresh water supply-which can be addressed at a fraction of the cost and save millions of lives within our lifetime."

But I can tell you that the science that went into building the computer I'm typing on, or the antibiotics I took to make my ear infection go away, is pretty good. So the institutions that produced those sciences and technologies are pretty good too, and those are basically the same institutions that are producing climate change science.

No, those aren't basically the same institutions. Meteorology, as a scientific field, isn't even close to electrodynamics or microbiology, and the institutions devoted to them don't interact. The most that can be said is that they look similar from the outside; that they hold conferences and publish papers in journals, for instance. And unfortunately these outward resemblances are no proof that one institution can claim the authority that another has.

It is not rational respect for expertise to say that, because A is a scientist and says X, and X is right, therefore when B is a scientist and says Y, Y must be right -- especially not when A and B are in different fields, trained in different methods of reasoning, and examining different sets of facts.

Posted by: Michael Brazier at January 6, 2008 8:59 PM | Permalink

It would be nice if we could find some sort of middle position, which acknowledged anthropogenic climate change, but reassured us that we didn't have to do anything about it after all. But unfortunately, Lomberg's conclusions are still not in line with the empirical data and expertise. This is from Scientific American:

Lomborg's intention was to reanalyze environmental data so that the public might make policy decisions based on the truest understanding of what science has determined. His conclusion, which he writes surprised even him, was that contrary to the gloomy predictions of degradation he calls "the litany," everything is getting better. Not that all is rosy, but the future for the environment is less dire than is supposed. Instead Lomborg accuses a pessimistic and dishonest cabal of environmental groups, institutions and the media of distorting scientists' actual findings.

The problem with Lomborg's conclusion is that the scientists themselves disavow it. Many spoke to us at Scientific American about their frustration at what they described as Lomborg's misrepresentation of their fields. His seemingly dispassionate outsider's view, they told us, is often marred by an incomplete use of the data or a misunderstanding of the underlying science. Even where his statistical analyses are valid, his interpretations are frequently off the mark--literally not seeing the state of the forests for the number of the trees, for example. And it is hard not to be struck by Lomborg's presumption that he has seen into the heart of the science more faithfully than have investigators who have devoted their lives to it; it is equally curious that he finds the same contrarian good news lurking in every diverse area of environmental science...

The rest of the piece is different scientists' take on Lomberg's mistakes and misrepresentations.

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 6, 2008 10:17 PM | Permalink

Presume that global warming is happening.
Presume the evidence is that it is entirely natural.
What should we do to prepare to live with it?
Would that be cheaper than the proposals to fight AGW?
Less disruptive?
Promote more or less power to government?

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 6, 2008 10:36 PM | Permalink

Mark,

I agree that the pre-war Phase IV plan called for using the Iraqi Army as a security and reconstruction force. From what I've pieced together, this planning assumption was based on the performance of the Iraqi Army during Desert Storm and that large portions of the army would surrender to the advancing coalition forces, remain in garrison or be could be later recalled.

It seems apparent that Garner was not able to recall the forces quickly (~6 weeks) and the country was largely sans the Iraqi police and Army while he was there. He does claim to have been negotiating recalling the Army.

I agree that Bremer's order (there's a lot of finger pointing about who knew/authorized it) officially disbanding the Army and starting anew was counter to the pre-war plan.

I'm torn on how the decision will turn out in the long run. Retraining and rebuilding the Army might turn out to be the best thing that happened in Phase IV, although the most painful in the short term (short being 4 years!).

One of the issues that I'm pushing for your (and anyone else's) feedback is the value of having a statutory interagency framework and National Security Service Corps to remove the ad hoc planning at the strategic level and formally integrate combat and post-combat planning. Is that what's needed?

Here's a weird idea, given the current CW: What if the most (and best?) post-combat planning since the Marshall Plan (two years after major combat ended in Europe) occurred in planning for Iraq ... and it was still woefully inadequate or in significant ways wrong?

Posted by: Tim at January 6, 2008 10:57 PM | Permalink

Presume the evidence is that it is entirely natural.

But it's not. Agency is involved. There are human creators of the problem and also human impacts. (And probably not the same humans.)

Promote more or less power to government?

Hey, if AEI or CEI comes up with genuine, credible solutions, then great. May the best solution to the problem win.

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 6, 2008 10:59 PM | Permalink

"You -- and, I see, Dr. Rosen -- reply that the IPCC's science is certainly right, and it is proof of irrationality to deny it."

Nope. I didn't say anything about the IPCC's science.

I said the matter would be settled when the corporate wing of the GOP becomes convinced that global warming is real and actionable. If that doesn't happen the matter will remain unsettled-- as a political issue, that is.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 6, 2008 11:02 PM | Permalink

My apologies, Dr. Rosen.

Er, you didn't mean to imply that, even if the scientific evidence ends up saying that AGW is in fact not real, or not actionable, the political issue will not be settled? After all, that would mean the people working for CO2 emissions controls, ala the Kyoto Protocol, are not empiricists ...

Apropos of which, A cold spell soon to replace global warming:

Astrophysics knows two solar activity cycles, of 11 and 200 years. Both are caused by changes in the radius and area of the irradiating solar surface. The latest data, obtained by Habibullah Abdusamatov, head of the Pulkovo Observatory space research laboratory, say that Earth has passed the peak of its warmer period, and a fairly cold spell will set in quite soon, by 2012. Real cold will come when solar activity reaches its minimum, by 2041, and will last for 50-60 years or even longer.

Picking up another thread, isn't the press corps' consistent failure to remember and analyze its past errors reflecting a general inability to remember the past, or to analyze the present? And if so, how can any belief which is widespread among the press corps (that George W. Bush is subverting American liberties, for instance) be considered reliable? How can one spot motes in a neighbor's eyes, if one always misses the beam in one's own?

Posted by: Michael Brazier at January 6, 2008 11:56 PM | Permalink

JJ.
You don't reply to a hypothetical by pointing out it's hypothetical.
So let me break it down for you.

There are two ways to deal with global warming. One is to end the A part of the GW. Does that have a cost? Yeah, but our betters (see Kennedy and wind farms and Martha's Vineyard) won't be paying it.
The other is to deal with it in detail. Does that have a cost?
Which cost is higher and less disruptive?

Which is preferable in other terms? Do you like sticking it to consumerism and corporations and capitalism? Then one way is better. Do you like forcing Joe Lunchbucket to live the way you think he should? Then one way is better.

But the hypothetical leads to the question of which is the cheapest way to deal with AGW for the next few years until we hit another cooling period.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 7, 2008 6:35 AM | Permalink

Happy new year, Jay.

I just wandered back here to find this thread still going on, having veered significantly from the initial post's content, and I'm disappointed.

I'd like to see a discussion of what everyone thinks a press that doesn't tilt to one side or the other would actually look like. What would be the important stories? What would the assumptions be? What would be in the press that isn't there now, and what would be absent that we do see there now?

(But I'd like even better to see it in a new thread.)

Posted by: Avedon at January 7, 2008 7:25 AM | Permalink

...the cheapest way to deal with AGW for the next few years until we hit another cooling period.

I think this thread is about acknowledging basic realities, not about any specific responses to it.

And the basic reality is that global climate temperature rises with the level of CO2. If you know anything about the science, we won't "hit another cooling period" while the level of CO2 (and other GHG's) in the atmosphere is at a certain level. (I'm talking about global climate, of course, not weather or local variations in climate.)

And there are many ways to deal with this. Take a look at this speech by David Cameron, the head of UK's conservative party, for instance.

I don't favor any particular solution. Just one that works and is fair.

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 7, 2008 9:46 AM | Permalink

From the article Michael linked to: Hothouse gases may not be to blame for global warming. At any rate, there is no scientific evidence to their guilt.

Simply false. See the list of studies I linked to earlier in the thread.

Climate scientists didn't pull this stuff out of their posteriors, folks.

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 7, 2008 10:31 AM | Permalink

So back 30 years, when they were predicting a global cooling, and it was on the cover of Newsweek, were they pulling it out of their posteriors then?

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 7, 2008 11:02 AM | Permalink

So back 30 years, when they were predicting a global cooling...

That's a popular one with the echo chamber rumor mill, where discredited notions seem to last forever. And of course it never gets any close inspection by the people spreading the rumors...

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 7, 2008 11:18 AM | Permalink

Apparently, according to Helen Thomas, journalists suck, and it's the fault of bloggers.

? + ? + !

“What I really worry about is that I think the bloggers and everyone, everyone with a laptop thinks they’re journalists,” Thomas said. “And, they certainly don’t have our standards. They don’t have our ethics, and so forth."

Thank God for that.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 7, 2008 11:36 AM | Permalink

Er, that should have been "? + ? = !."

I shouldn't blomment precaffiene.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 7, 2008 11:45 AM | Permalink

JJW.
There was a book published in, I think, 1976. "The Coming Ice Age". Had all the facts lined up and a senator named Malcolm Wallop, head of something called the Senate Science Committee, blurbed it.

One of the gurus of global warming, Stephen Schneider, (drama vs. facts? Pick drama) appeared on the old "In Search Of" pushing the next ice age.

What I've read tells me the CO2 levels lag warming periods. There's the cause/effect thingy which generally requires the cause to come first, or it turns into an effect.

Also, somebody's going to have to explain what was so bad about the Medieval Warm Period and so wonderful about the Little Ice Age. Also, how they happened, absent SUVs.

Also warming on other members of our solar system, absent SUVs.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 7, 2008 11:58 AM | Permalink

I suspect it had something to do with temperatures getting warmer or cooler.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 7, 2008 12:00 PM | Permalink

You guys are journalists and are always on the watch for sinister motives--of conservatives.

You might want to follow up on NASA Hansen receiving a huge amount of money from Soros. Got to mean something, 'cause it can't mean nothing. Except, apparently, to you.

Hell, if I had half that appear in my inbox, my retirement plan would be moved up to yesterday.

Not a newsworthy item?

Somebody asked what a truly unbiased press would have in it....

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 7, 2008 12:01 PM | Permalink

Hansen and Soros.

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 7, 2008 12:07 PM | Permalink

There was a book published in, I think, 1976. "The Coming Ice Age".

It helps if you click links.

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 7, 2008 12:14 PM | Permalink

"The problem with Lomborg's conclusion is that the scientists themselves disavow it. Many spoke to us at Scientific American about their frustration at what they described as Lomborg's misrepresentation of their fields..."

To those of us who actually read the Scientific American articles that Lomborg's book provoked, the shameful behavior of the SA editors established that their concept of the scientific method was wholly lacking.

Rather than pursue an honest debate with Lomborg, SA selected four thugs with sort of scientific credentials and invited them to attack Lomborg's work. This they eagerly did. The magazine allowed Lomborg a reply, but limited the space available - and when he took the argument to other publications to refute his opponents item by item, SA hired legal thugs to suppress those refutations, by using copyright laws to prevent his quoting of the 'scientists'.

Then Scientific American declared victory, wholly on the basis of its appeal to authority - the four 'scientific' hired guns. This proved the magazine's ignorance of the scientific method, which utterly rejects appeals to authority in favor of permanent skepticism of any hypothesis (AGW in this case) which may be overturned by better evidence. The votes are never all in, and better evidence is recognized when it turns up. Lomborg had cited other scientific results in his arguments - and SA simply rejected his arguments since he himself wasn't an Authority: a 'scientist'.

Cheap tactics, perfect for political hacks like the IPCC, but wholly unworthy of science. Scientific American no longer is.

Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at January 7, 2008 12:38 PM | Permalink

"Here's a weird idea, given the current CW: What if the most (and best?) post-combat planning since the Marshall Plan (two years after major combat ended in Europe) occurred in planning for Iraq ... and it was still woefully inadequate or in significant ways wrong?

Tim -- I am not convinced that this notion is either weird or against the conventional wisdom. Many propagandists arguing against using the US military to achieve regime change in Iraq cited precisely this worry...not that the US military would be inadequate to accomplish its mission but that the mission itself might turn out to be fatally flawed.

Thus the simplest, least radical, most conservative argument against going to war was that war should be avoided if at all possible and initiated only as a "last resort." In fact it was an argument George Bush, the Commander in Chief, made repeatedly and publicly until he disregarded it.

This contradiction belongs to a litany of mismatches between words and actions, stated principles and implemented policies -- advocating a "humble foreign policy," declaring "mission accomplished," praising a "heckuva job," pledging an end to "tyranny," "we do not torture"-- that adds fuel to the conclusion made by PressThink and elsewhere that this administration has abandoned empiricism.

I call it the tactic of Governing by Talking Points, under which saying something often enough can seem, by an act of will, to make it so. For me, it is its use of language -- not its policy on global warming or its openness to intelligent design or its overvaluation of the zygote or its supply side fiscal dogma -- that most tellingly sets the Bush Administration on the wrong side of empiricism.

This Humpty Dumpty style of governing -- “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less…the question is: ‘Which is the master?’” -- is very difficult for journalists to cover. Much of the time, news consists of reporting on our rulers' words rather than their actions, and that function depends on the assumption that there is a referential relationship one to the other.

The Bush Administration has taken the exquisite Jesuitical parsing of meaning perfected by its predecessor and liberated that pinched Clintonian use of words to a new post-modernist level, where signifiers can exist autonomously, deracinated from the signified.

Brent Cunningham in the Columbia Journalism Review has proposed that an appropriate innovation in response would be to establish Rhetoric as its own journalistic beat -- reporting on how words are used in the public sphere to create meaning. It is a step in the right direction. Unfortunately Cunningham’s vision is confined to such literal devices as framing and vocabulary choices, not to the unhinged excesses of full-blown post-modernism.

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at January 7, 2008 1:17 PM | Permalink

Here's the Cunningham link.

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at January 7, 2008 1:22 PM | Permalink

Totally dead on, Andrew.

Conservatives got a taste of it during the Harriet Miers nomination. There were no remotely empirical grounds, in the degree that there are such, on which she was well qualified, and that's before you even get to whether it was a wise choice politically, judicially.

It must have seemed surreal to them how Bush in effect said: "If I say she's qualified, that means she's qualified, so what is your problem, base?..." He relented because he had to, but even conceiving of her nomination shows how concave the vision was.

The press simply isn't up to covering a presidency like that. And your point, that Bush "liberated that pinched Clintonian use of words to a new post-modernist level, where signifiers can exist autonomously, deracinated from the signified," is an extremely important one.

Lots of things that Bush pushed to stunning extremes had roots in Clinton's political style, but when I first started writing about "rollback" I was not as aware of them as I am now. This is one reason I don't support the Clintons return to the White House.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 7, 2008 2:41 PM | Permalink

JJW. What do you want links for?
Presume that the "coming ice age panic/hype' was as described.
Will that mean a millimetric change in your views?
Of course not.
So why waste my time or yours?

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 7, 2008 3:46 PM | Permalink

For me, it is its use of language...

There's tons of examples of this. Here's one concerning climate change. And here's Dick Cheney just a couple weeks later.

Here's Froomkin on the subject of Iran WMD intelligence:

Bush yesterday said he was only briefed about the new estimate last week.

But a close examination of his word choice over the past year suggests that he learned something around August that got him to stop making claims that were apparently no longer supported by American intelligence.

Instead of directly condemning Iranian leaders for pursuing nuclear weapons, he started more vaguely accusing them of seeking the knowledge necessary to make such a weapon.

Even as he did that, however, he and the vice president accelerated their rhetorical efforts to persuade the public that the nuclear threat posed by Iran was grave and urgent. Bush went so far in late August and October as to warn of the potential for a nuclear holocaust.

Indeed, a careful parsing of Bush's words indicates that, while not saying anything that could later prove to be demonstrably false, Bush left his listeners with what he likely knew was a fundamentally false impression. And he did so in the pursuit of a more muscular and possibly even military approach to a Middle Eastern country.

It's an oddly familiar pattern of deception.

It sounds like something right out of Marcy Wheeler's book...

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 7, 2008 5:18 PM | Permalink

Meanwhile, back on topic.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 7, 2008 5:30 PM | Permalink

Wow. Don't you think Froomkin might be stretching, just a tad?

But then, it's par for the course here.

? + ? + ? = !

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 7, 2008 7:42 PM | Permalink

What Bush never realized and his base to this day does not know. You need confidence in yourself to answer questions from the press, and the effort to do so keeps you in touch with live argument and with political reality, even though many of the questions are dumb. McCain has that confidence, and he emerges from it stronger-- stronger than the press, in fact.

From The Plank:

There’s no denying that the media absolutely loves McCain, and I’d imagine many readers wonder why that is.

The simple explanation is: McCain affords the press access like no other candidate. In the McCain campaign, there’s no barrier between candidate and reporter. If you have a question for McCain, you don’t have to bother going to his press secretary; you simply go ask him. On some days, you literally spend eight hours with the candidate, just riding with him in the back of his bus peppering him with questions on everything from Pakistan to his philosophical thoughts about suicide. Toward the end of the day, this amount of unfettered access to the candidate can actually be a bit of a problem, when you start to run out of questions for him and there are awkward silences. But, on the whole, it’s hard to overstate the sort of goodwill this access engenders among reporters.

Still, I do wonder why McCain allows this sort of access, given all the risks it entails. Today, on the ride from Salem to Nashua, a reporter basically asked McCain that question, and I thought his answer was fairly telling. McCain said:

Because we’ve always done it. And if I had stopped it, we would get crucified. I enjoy it. Believe it or not, I enjoy it. I enjoy the back and forth. We can fully explore issues that way. I’m not going to be standing up in a room just giving five- and ten-second answers. . . . I really believe that presidents run into difficulties when they don’t communicate all the time with the American people, and I believe that the media is obviously a prime way of doing that. . . . And also I learn, these questions make me think. . . . I think it’s intellectually stimulating to me.

I’d imagine there’s some truth in the second part of that answer and McCain wasn’t just flattering his interlocutors about how they stimulate him. But I also think that the first part of the answer—that McCain would be crucified if he suddenly cut off access, as, in fact, he sort of was back when he was the frontrunner and was running an incumbent’s campaign with a more buttondown approach to media relations—may be more true. In a way, McCain may be trapped in his love affair with the media.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 7, 2008 10:53 PM | Permalink

Do the media love McCain or do they love the access?

Is McCain rolling the journos by giving them access? Can he count on protection?

Is it a cunning reversal of savviness?

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 7, 2008 11:24 PM | Permalink

The simple explanation is: McCain affords the press access like no other candidate. In the McCain campaign, there’s no barrier between candidate and reporter. If you have a question for McCain, you don’t have to bother going to his press secretary; you simply go ask him. On some days, you literally spend eight hours with the candidate, just riding with him in the back of his bus peppering him with questions on everything from Pakistan to his philosophical thoughts about suicide.

What this says to me is, McCain largely shares the basic view of the world characteristic of American reporters; he is no farther from it than, say, Dr. Rosen is. And I find that alarming, because that view of the world comes from a subculture that doesn't often recognize or correct its errors, has a dim memory of the past in general, and is distracted by every passing sensation. McCain, as a President, would be an author of confusion and nonsense, as the press now is.

That's also why Cunningham's proposal is, at the least, premature. The press is in no condition to analyze anyone else's use of language; if it tried, in its current state, it would only be captured by the professional purveyors of nonsense and made into another weapon against reality. The first order of business must be, instead, for the press to tend to itself -- to learn how to sift and weigh evidence, to recognize patterns in data instead of forcing data into narratives, to think up ways of testing a hypothesis.

And I very much doubt that the US media, as an institution, will ever learn to be scholarly.

Posted by: Michael Brazier at January 8, 2008 5:04 AM | Permalink

Andrew / Jay,

Much of the time, news consists of reporting on our rulers' words rather than their actions, and that function depends on the assumption that there is a referential relationship one to the other.

To which I'll defer to Andy.

I'll also offer that what the Bush administration has lost since 2004, rhetorically, is ethos. Jay and Andrew seem to be tying this loss of ethos to a lack of empiricism reflected in political rhetoric.

Posted by: Tim at January 8, 2008 6:57 AM | Permalink

Tim --

It is ironic that you should use that link to Rhetorica to argue against the assumption of “a referential relationship” between words and actions. I assume that you were doing so to underscore James Berlin’s assertion that language is “never innocent” since there is no “one-to-one correspondence between reality and words.”

I say your link is ironic, because the conclusion of Rhetorica’s post contains a recommendation to be on guard against Strawman arguments.

Your use of Berlin, I insist, is such a straw man.

The post-modernist world view takes that accurate insight about the lack of innocence of language -- that the signifier and signified are in tension and that meaning is produced by the activity of the listener on that tension -- and overstates it so completely as to contradict it. In a post-modern understanding, the signifier stands alone, unrelated to its referent.

In my view this breakage turns out to restore a word’s innocence, innocent as a sociopath is innocent, having no moral sense.

That is the use of language I perceive when the Commander in Chief of the world’s greatest military superpower asserts that it is his policy to go to war “only as a last resort” while simultaneously launching an unprovoked preemptive invasion and interminable occupation.

Others describe George Bush’s rhetorical behavior as “lies.” I am not convinced that he is lying. To me he sounds as if he is speaking in a radical post-modern way -- as Humpty Dumpty would -- merely indifferent to referential usage.

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at January 8, 2008 9:41 AM | Permalink

Here's the relevant section in Marcy Wheeler's book regarding the administration's pre-Iraq War rhetoric...

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 8, 2008 9:51 AM | Permalink

Well, you could say it was "unprovoked" if Saddam Hussein had never had his anti-aircraft batteries lock on or fire on a US Aircraft enforcing a no-fly zone.

Unfortunately for your position, Andrew, that happened. Not once. Not a dozen times. But hundreds of times.

You could also say it was "unprovoked" if Saddam was living up to his agreements under the UN Security Council resolutions and, more especially, the cease fire agreement of 1991.

Unfortunately, not even the UN Security Council agrees with you. After all, the UNSC didn't warn Saddam of "serious consequences" for steroid use.

And Bill Clinton didn't mount Operation Desert Fox, an extensive campaign of air strikes against Iraq, because he didn't like the cut of Saddam's mustache. (If you'll recall, that wasn't even the first time Clinton attacked Iraq).

Further, as the 9/11 council found, there were indeed "all kinds of ties, all kinds of connections" between Saddam's regime and Al Qaeda.

No, this notion that Saddam had not provoked the U.S. is simply false. A trope. Liberals throw it around as if it's generally accepted, but it is not. It does not withstand a sober analysis of the facts.

P.S., Since when are sociopaths "innocent" by virtue of being sociopaths? That's ridiculous. Is there nothing a liberal can't find a way excuse?

Ted Bundy. Innocent. Because he had no conscience. Good luck selling that.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 8, 2008 10:47 AM | Permalink

Here's another good example. In this case there is clever wording, but there's also outright fabrication (for instance, I doubt the administration shared this particular bit of intelligence with congress).

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 8, 2008 10:48 AM | Permalink

I'm bet everyone has read this Karen Kwiatkowski piece from 2004, but this part seems relevant to this discussion:

After August 2002, the Office of Special Plans established its own rhythm and cadence separate from the non-politically minded professionals covering the rest of the region. While often accused of creating intelligence, I saw only two apparent products of this office: war planning guidance for Rumsfeld, presumably impacting Central Command, and talking points on Iraq, WMD and terrorism. These internal talking points seemed to be a mélange crafted from obvious past observation and intelligence bits and pieces of dubious origin. They were propagandistic in style, and all desk officers were ordered to use them verbatim in the preparation of any material prepared for higher-ups and people outside the Pentagon. The talking points included statements about Saddam Hussein's proclivity for using chemical weapons against his own citizens and neighbors, his existing relations with terrorists based on a member of al-Qaida reportedly receiving medical care in Baghdad, his widely publicized aid to the Palestinians, and general indications of an aggressive viability in Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program and his ongoing efforts to use them against his neighbors or give them to al-Qaida style groups. The talking points said he was threatening his neighbors and was a serious threat to the U.S., too.

...Both OSP functions duplicated other parts of the Pentagon. The facts we should have used to base our papers on were already being produced by the intelligence agencies, and the war planning was already done by the combatant command staff with some help from the Joint Staff. Instead of developing defense policy alternatives and advice, OSP was used to manufacture propaganda for internal and external use, and pseudo war planning.

Staff officers would always request OSP's most current Iraq, WMD and terrorism talking points. On occasion, these weren't available in an approved form and awaited Shulsky's approval. The talking points were a series of bulleted statements, written persuasively and in a convincing way, and superficially they seemed reasonable and rational. Saddam Hussein had gassed his neighbors, abused his people, and was continuing in that mode, becoming an imminently dangerous threat to his neighbors and to us -- except that none of his neighbors or Israel felt this was the case. Saddam Hussein had harbored al-Qaida operatives and offered and probably provided them with training facilities -- without mentioning that the suspected facilities were in the U.S./Kurdish-controlled part of Iraq. Saddam Hussein was pursuing and had WMD of the type that could be used by him, in conjunction with al-Qaida and other terrorists, to attack and damage American interests, Americans and America -- except the intelligence didn't really say that. Saddam Hussein had not been seriously weakened by war and sanctions and weekly bombings over the past 12 years, and in fact was plotting to hurt America and support anti-American activities, in part through his carrying on with terrorists -- although here the intelligence said the opposite. His support for the Palestinians and Arafat proved his terrorist connections, and basically, the time to act was now. This was the gist of the talking points, and it remained on message throughout the time I watched the points evolve.

But evolve they did, and the subtle changes I saw from September to late January revealed what the Office of Special Plans was contributing to national security. Two key types of modifications were directed or approved by Shulsky and his team of politicos. First was the deletion of entire references or bullets. The one I remember most specifically is when they dropped the bullet that said one of Saddam's intelligence operatives had met with Mohammad Atta in Prague, supposedly salient proof that Saddam was in part responsible for the 9/11 attack. That claim had lasted through a number of revisions, but after the media reported the claim as unsubstantiated by U.S. intelligence, denied by the Czech government, and that Atta's location had been confirmed by the FBI to be elsewhere, that particular bullet was dropped entirely from our "advice on things to say" to senior Pentagon officials when they met with guests or outsiders.

The other change made to the talking points was along the line of fine-tuning and generalizing. Much of what was there was already so general as to be less than accurate.

Some bullets were softened, particularly statements of Saddam's readiness and capability in the chemical, biological or nuclear arena. Others were altered over time to match more exactly something Bush and Cheney said in recent speeches.

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 8, 2008 11:04 AM | Permalink

van Steenwyk --

Point taken. I misspoke when I used the word “unprovoked.” What I should have said was that the trivial provocations offered by Saddam Hussein’s Baath regime did not rise to President Bush’s grave -- and admirable -- litmus test of the “last resort,” a casus belli for invasion and occupation. I stand corrected.

As to sociopaths, it is clear that I was referring to the legal category of criminal insanity, defendants who are found not guilty of committing crimes because they are diagnosed as operating outside of the categories of right and wrong, guilt and innocence. They cannot be found guilty, since the concept is meaningless to them. You are being obtuse if you construed that as a defense of Theodore Bundy.

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at January 8, 2008 11:05 AM | Permalink

Clinton didn't find them so trivial. Hence "Desert Fox." (undertaken with the unanimous recommendation of the Clinton security team, no less!)

The UNSC didn't find them so trivial. Hence "serious consequences."

Congress didn't find them so trivial. Hence the authorization for the use of force (which Hillary, being no dummy, voted for!)

NATO didn't find them so trivial. Hence the majority of NATO nations committed troops.

The G8 didn't find them so trivial. Hence the majority of G8 nations committed troops.

Read the Clinton transcript linked above.

Precisely how many "last chances" did Saddam have a right to expect?

Answer: None, with a Dem in the White House, Infinite with a Republican in the White House.

Your ability to overlook the historical record of decision under three administrations of both parties and several congresses going back 18 years , in order to focus on trivia and Suskind's absurd word parsing (and by extension, Rosen's) is simply astounding.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 8, 2008 11:20 AM | Permalink

as to sociopaths, it is clear that I was referring to the legal category of criminal insanity, defendants who are found not guilty of committing crimes because they are diagnosed as operating outside of the categories of right and wrong, guilt and innocence.

You're confusing a psychotic with a sociopath.

Either that or you've got a copy of Also Spracht Zarathustra by your bedside. ;-)

Bundy is the classic sociopath. He is the very model of a modern murdering sociopath. I was not being obtuse. I was simply taking your words at face value.

Sociopaths are walking arguments for the death penalty. You probably meant to refer to psychotics like people with schitzophrenia.

The distinction between a psychotic and a sociopath is like the difference between a tire and an eggplant.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 8, 2008 11:32 AM | Permalink

Chris Hedges' The Evangelical Rebellion is fairly essentialy reading on the Huckabee phenomenon, and fits pretty squarely with the discussion here.

The corporate establishment, whose plundering of the country created fertile ground for a radical, right-wing backlash, is sounding the alarm bells. It is scrambling to bolster Mitt Romney, who, like Rudy Giuliani or Hillary Clinton, will continue to slash and burn on behalf of corporate profits. Columnist George Will called Huckabee’s populism “a comprehensive apostasy against core Republican beliefs.” He wrote that Huckabee’s candidacy “broadly repudiates core Republican policies such as free trade, low taxes, the essential legitimacy of America’s corporate entities and the market system allocating wealth and opportunity.” National Review’s Rich Lowry wrote that “like [Howard] Dean, his nomination would represent an act of suicide by his party.”

Huckabee spoke of this revolt on the “Today” show. “There’s a sense in which all these years the evangelicals have been treated very kindly by the Republican Party,” he said. “They wanted us to be a part of it. And then one day one of us actually runs and they say, ‘Oh, my gosh, now they’re serious.’ They [evangelicals] don’t want to just show up and vote, they actually would want to be a part of the discussion.”

Posted by: Richard B. Simon at January 8, 2008 1:26 PM | Permalink

van Steenwyk --

Following your advice, I reread Bill Clinton’s speech justifying his airborne attacks on Iraq in the midst of the drive to impeach him in 1998 -- its operational name may be Desert Fox but the colloquial reference is Wag The Dog.

I must say I am mystified. In what way does Clinton’s argument demonstrate that President Bush was acting in “the last resort” when he decided to launch a ground invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime?

1.Clinton launched a series of air strikes -- not an invasion.

2.He insisted that economic sanctions be maintained -- not that they were ineffectual.

3.His goal in attacking by air was to pressure Saddam to readmit United Nations weapons inspectors -- not to treat their findings with disdain.

4.He returned to the Security Council to receive a unanimous vote to deploy his air power -- not relying on ambiguous previous motions in the face of a certain veto for new authorization.

5.His strategy for regime change was political -- not military.

On regime change, this is what Clinton said: “Bringing change in Baghdad will take time and effort. We will strengthen our engagement with the full range of Iraqi opposition forces and work with them effectively and prudently.”

I do not know how much clearer this can be: the “historical record of decision,” in your words, shows that the agreed appropriate response to Saddam’s provocations should be containment, sanctions and internal political mobilization -- not invasion and occupation. Yet you imply that George Bush’s invasion is a continuation of his father’s and his predecessor’s policy of non-invasion. Please elucidate.

By the way, thanks for the correction on tires and eggplants. I stand corrected by you for the second time today. Thus the post-modernist restores “innocence” to language by liberating the signifier from its signified in the way that a psychotic (not a sociopath) is "innocent," having no notion of guilt.

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at January 8, 2008 1:28 PM | Permalink

The piece about Atta in Prague is classic intel.
IOW, the reason the US dropped it is that they found his phone in use in Florida at the time. Could have been him. Could have been somebody else. But they couldn't prove it was/was not him.

The Czech government, or at least its intel guys, continued to say Atta had been seen in Prague.

So we have an assertion unproven, unprovable, but promoted by the left as provably false. And asserted by the guys who claimed it in the first place, the Czechs.

The usual kind of mess intel finds itself dealing with much of the time. It has no bearing on whether the admin was deceitful in its first statements, or naive in its later statements. It simply supports nothing.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 8, 2008 1:31 PM | Permalink

Six years into the "War on Terror" the White House starts a blog.

Posted by: Richard B. Simon at January 8, 2008 1:41 PM | Permalink

On point 1:

Correct. Clinton launched pointless airstrikes.

2: 1998 != 2003. Five years had passed. The sanctions were falling apart. The Oil for Food program was hopelessly corrupt. (Thanks, UN!!!) In fact, it was so corrupt that the head of the program, Benon Sevan, was sacked by the Secretary General for his egregious role in the bribery scandal. The UN granted him diplomatic immunity. But an investigation and report led by former Fed chief Paul Volker recommended the immunity be lifted so the son-of-a-bitch could be criminally prosecuted. So the head of the Oil for Food program fled to avoid going to jail.

The sanctions were leaking like sieves, its administrators hopelessly corrupt, and what sanctions there were in place harmed no one except the Iraqi people. In fact, the UN itself estimated that the sanctions, such as they were, led to the deaths of 5000 Iraqi children per month.

What's more, the libtards didn't even want to enforce sanctions!

While at Saddam Hussein Airport in May of 2003, I personally saw heavy equipment - entire elevator assemblies, still wrapped in plastic, awaiting installation, for example, with French shipping labels still on them. (Wow. I'm relying on personal experience. There's that empiricism again, Jay!)

Last time I checked, you couldn't eat an elevator. So much for "oil for food," eh?

Then there's this.

Yeah. Sanctions were corrupt and stupid and counterproductive for each of the last five years we tried them. Maybe the empirical thing to do would be to try them again.

3. Absurd. You think Iraq was actually complying with the inspectors? What could they have reported on to even have findings? Further, you're speculating on motives again. More ? + ? = ! thinking.

4. There was nothing whatsoever ambiguous about the terms of the cease fire. We had all the authority necessary to enforce those terms. And we did. The next entity to violate the terms of a cease fire with the United States take note.

Libya did.

5. Well, obviously the political strategy didn't work, did it? All it got was our people in Iraq killed as Saddam's mukhabarat smoked them out, tortured and killed them.

If you think that was ever going to change absent a military intervention, you're in fantasyland. Empirically, the brutal suppression of the 1991 rebellion should have confirmed that.

Then again, empiricism doesn't count for much among the dreamy left these days. The left can't retreat from empiricism, because they never embraced it in the first place!

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 8, 2008 2:20 PM | Permalink

Is it me, or does Bush seem startled when he bashes bloggers in front of the Heritage Foundation and gets a standing ovation? (Some pent up frustration with a media they can't dominate?)

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 8, 2008 2:26 PM | Permalink

"A medium," that should be.

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 8, 2008 2:28 PM | Permalink

Jason --

You direct me to Clinton's Desert Fox speech in order to demonstrate how George Bush's policy of invasion and occupation of Iraq was a continuation of his predecessor's.

I point out five ways in which Bush's policy was a radical departure from Clinton's -- not a continuation.

You agree that it was indeed a radical departure, calling the Clinton policy "pointless...corrupt...stupid...counterproductive...fantasyland."

In what way does my pointing out the radical difference between Bush's policy and Clinton's consist of "dreamy left" thinking and a "retreat from empiricism"?

To be honest, your insistence that the two policies are part of a unified "historical record of decision under three administrations of both parties and several congresses going back 18 years" seems to be the thinking based in dreamland.

Plus...when you ask me to look at a speech and offer me a link and I read the speech and refer to the argument it made, it is not right to accuse me of "speculating on motives...? + ? = ! thinking." If you did not want what Clinton said about the inspectors to be paid attention to, why did you link to it?

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at January 8, 2008 2:35 PM | Permalink

My reference to speculating on motives was specifically meant to refer to point 3, where you wrote, somewhat astonishingly, that Bush's motivation was to treat the inspector's findings he didn't even have yet with disdain.

As for the rest, yes, Bush's policy was a continuation of Clinton's, in that it was the official policy of the Clinton administration to pursue regime change in Iraq.

Apparently, though, another aspect of Clinton Iraq policy was a touching dedication to failure. Hence, the Clinton administration embraced a course of action that empiricism would suggest would never succeed at accomplishing US objectives.

When, in the course of U.S. history, have sanctions ever been effective at doing anything other than harming the common people? Certainly sanctions have been ineffective at accomplishing US policy objectives. C.f., for example, Cuba and North Korea, in addition to Iraq.

The Bush Administration, having adopted an empirical decision making process, took notice that sanctions were ineffective in Iraq and ineffective everywhere else they've been tried, and discounted the policy of trying to continue them without military intervention.

The Clinton Administration, having treated the mountain of empirical evidence that establishes the pointlessness of sanctions with disdain, argued that "well, the last fifty times we've tried sanctions, they've failed. Maybe this time will be different."

The Clinton Administration's failure contributed to the mountain of empirical evidence.

Even Clinton tacitly recognized that sanctions were ineffective, simply by virtue of bombing Iraq. More than once. If sanctions were worth a damn, Clinton wouldn't have had to bomb them.

Bush simply decided to carry the Clinton policy of bombing Iraq beyond Clintonian pointlessness.

"I'm not going to fire a million dollar missile at a ten dollar tent and hit a camel in the butt. It's going to be decisive."

Thank God for that.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 8, 2008 3:16 PM | Permalink

Jason -- thanks for the clarification. You see a continuity of policy; I see a transformation. Fair enough

On the tiny point of "findings"...it is my memory that Hans Blix reported to the Security Council that he had so far found nothing in his inspections and asked for more time to confirm his initial report. My use of the word "disdain" referred to Bush's rejection of that request in order to go to war without delay, despite his stated policy that war would be his "last resort." In this particular, Bush and Clinton are in categorical disagreement: Clinton's stated goal in his use of force was the reinsertion of the inspectorate; Bush's use of force truncated the very reinsertion that his diplomacy had so successfully enforced.

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at January 8, 2008 3:59 PM | Permalink

Andrew Tyndall: "Your use of Berlin, I insist, is such a straw man."

My use of Berlin? No, not my use. And I wasn't arguing "against the assumption of 'a referential relationship' between words and actions."

That would be ethos.

I do think that journalists don't understand rhetoric.

Posted by: Tim at January 8, 2008 5:12 PM | Permalink

I'll add one more ... where is it written that journalists should think that "news consists of reporting on our rulers' words rather than their actions."

Why don't they think that news consists of reporting on our rulers actions and let rulers speak for themselves? Wouldn't you prefer stenography in the form of transcripts/audio/video instead of soundbites?

Posted by: Tim at January 8, 2008 5:18 PM | Permalink

re: "4.[Clinton] returned to the Security Council to receive a unanimous vote to deploy his air power -- not relying on ambiguous previous motions in the face of a certain veto for new authorization."

Link please. There was no unanimous UN vote in support of Desert Fox that I'm aware of. There was not UN or US Congress support for Kosovo.

Clinton (January 21, 1998):

Well, the United States does not relish moving alone, because we live in a world that is increasingly interdependent. We would like to be partners with other people. But sometimes we have to be prepared to move alone. You used the anthrax example. Think how many can be killed by just a tiny bit of anthrax, and think about how it's not just that Saddam Hussein might put it on a Scud missile, an anthrax head, and send it on to some city he wants to destroy. Think about all the other terrorists and other bad actors who could just parade through Baghdad and pick up their stores if we don't take action. I far prefer the United Nations, I far prefer the inspectors, I have been far from trigger-happy on this thing, but if they really believe that there are no circumstances under which we would act alone, they are sadly mistaken.

Posted by: Tim at January 8, 2008 5:47 PM | Permalink

journalists don't understand rhetoric.

The average journalist probably doesn't understand rhetoric as well as administration officials. But this is one of those cases where a particular kind of expertise is not a flattering thing to have...

One thing I'm interested in is the training grounds. These people who write the way Humpty Dumpty speaks, where do they come from? Are there common backgrounds? If so, please excuse my non-savviness, but why weren't people onto the fact that this administration was being populated by these types? Or did this behavior have a sui generis quality for this administration? (I know Jay mentioned Clinton's use of language.)

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 8, 2008 5:47 PM | Permalink

But this is one of those cases where a particular kind of expertise is not a flattering thing to have...

Disagree completely. A journalist without a functional understanding of argument is worse than useless. We're better off with an army of stenographers than with a corps of journos who don't understand rhetoric.

You know, like too many of the ones we have.

I suspect it's the absence of intellectual rigorousness in J-schools. As evidenced by the level of critical thinking on this forum.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 8, 2008 6:20 PM | Permalink

Yeah, but I'm thinking of the kind of expertise that might be developed at movement conservative institutions such as think tanks and publications...

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 8, 2008 6:29 PM | Permalink

Tim, a trio of loose ends...

First, I am so glad that you were not arguing "against the assumption of 'a referential relationship' between words and actions." My apologies for the misunderstanding.

Second, I only said that much of the content of news "consists of reporting on our rulers' words rather than their actions" not whether that should be the case. Personally, I happen to think that yours is a false choice -- "Wouldn't you prefer stenography in the form of transcripts/audio/video instead of soundbites?" -- as a combination should be available.

Third, the link on Clinton's Desert Fox claims was van Steenwyk's not mine.

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at January 8, 2008 7:16 PM | Permalink

Andrew,

I would prefer a combination of reporting on actions and transcripts of political rhetoric. I find the current structure of soundbite news reporting damaging to both the credibility of news journalists and politicians.

You need to read Clinton's claims again. Also, this:

But although the U.N. resolution is considered legal and binding, it spells out no consequences should Iraq continue to refuse to comply with inspections. And the resolution does not authorize the use of military force to get compliance from Baghdad.

The original text did call the Iraqi non-compliance a threat to international peace and security. The U.N. charter allows action in such a case. But that reference to any threat was removed after lobbying by Russia, France and China.

Posted by: Tim at January 8, 2008 7:29 PM | Permalink

Tim -- I was relying on this paragraph in Clinton's 1998 Desert Fox speech:

"Faced with Saddam's latest act of defiance in late October, we built intensive diplomatic pressure on Iraq backed by overwhelming military force in the region. The UN Security Council voted 15 to zero to condemn Saddam's actions and to demand that he immediately come into compliance."

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at January 8, 2008 7:38 PM | Permalink

Andrew,

I understand what you were relying on.

How do you compare the action taking by Clinton re: your point 4 and the action taken by Bush to get UNRes1441 and then attack Iraq?

Posted by: Tim at January 8, 2008 7:46 PM | Permalink

Tim -- my personal comparison emphasizes the geopolitics of the tactics in the United Nations rather than international law. I understand that Bush was following Clinton's precedent when he chose not to seek from the Security Council an explicit revalidation of his plan to invade Iraq. Clinton's decision to bomb Yugoslavia without UN authorization -- certain in the knowledge that Russia would issue a veto -- offered a legally dubious blueprint for his successor to follow.

I argue that Bush handled this problem with less sophistication because he -- and, even more so, his ally Tony Blair -- gave every indication that they would not go to war sans a second resolution, and then fell back of the legalism of not requiring one in the first place only after France's veto was inevitable. This gave the appearance of blatant disregard for international norms. Worse, apparently they did not have even a simple majority on the Security Council.

As global political leadership, the Bush-Blair decision to go to war regardless had a complete tin ear, even though legally speaking it was probably no more indefensible than Clinton's air war against Yugoslavia.

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at January 8, 2008 8:04 PM | Permalink

Andrew,

Bush less sophisticated (rhetorically) than Clinton? OK, I agree.

Let's move to point 5: "His strategy for regime change was political -- not military."

Anti-Saddam Operation Cost CIA $100 Million

Posted by: Tim at January 8, 2008 8:16 PM | Permalink

Bush less sophisticated (rhetorically) than Clinton? OK, I agree.

Bush's rhetoric sounds unsophisticated. But if you read the material I linked to above, that's just a surface impression.

Posted by: JJFromME at January 8, 2008 8:24 PM | Permalink

A reflection which, I hope, will be disturbing to the "empiricists" posting here: Consider the few occasions in the last 7 years when Bush tried to make policy and was forced to reverse. Dr. Rosen has mentioned nominating Miers to the Supreme Court; there was also the immigration bill just last year. In each and every case I can think of it was conservatives who applied the force. I don't recall a single occasion when either Democrats or the press stopped Bush from doing something he was set on doing.

The fact that there are occasions when Bush has been stopped shows that it can be done. Moreover, on both the occasions I listed, it was done strictly by empirical methods: pointing out that Miers was neither a federal judge nor a legal scholar; pointing out that the immigration bill was a copy of the law passed in 1986, and that bill had if anything encouraged illegal immigration after it was passed. So the fact that Democrats have never stopped Bush can't be explained in terms of Bush's refusals to face facts. Nor can it be explained in terms of the Democrats' inability to communicate facts; the preeminent media outlets will pass on, unedited, anything a Democratic politician or activist chooses to utter. What, then, is a rational explanation for all this? Andrew, JJ, I would value your theories in particular.

Posted by: Michael Brazier at January 8, 2008 9:54 PM | Permalink

Michael.
Would you include the Dubai ports fiasco?

I suppose the fallback position is that someone involved in empiricism wouldn't need to be forced to back off. He'd get it right the first time. But that would be Bush, not the conservatives in general who, as you point out, did the work.

Ref the UN Sec Cncl votes: It may be a legal matter to get the votes and a resolution, or not, depending on the situation. But to think that being opposed by France, China, and Russia means something on the moral side is insane.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 8, 2008 10:31 PM | Permalink

Who said Bush could not be stopped? I don't believe that.

A major agony within the Republican coalition, and a source of lifelong regrets for some, will be why more establishment and "movement" Republicans didn't try to stop him, as they eventually did with Richard Nixon. Bush is a brand destroyer, and when that becomes clear the custodians of the brand will wonder what they were doing while he was allowed to wreck it.

It was done strictly by empirical methods.

No, it was done by strictly political methods-- a calculation based on how much angering your friends and supporter costs you, coupled with whether you have the votes on the Hill. Bush still believes Miers is qualified; the base didn't enlighten him about a thing. I am surprised you don't get that because if you don't get that you don't get anything about Bush.

Yes, he made a prudential decision that it wasn't worth fighting for and he would probably lose. That's very different from realizing that simply on paper she could not be a Justice. Her sole qualification was his endorsement; what he said publicly about her was meaningless gibberish written by aides and read out by Bush. He didn't disavow it. That would be like disavowing the confetti that flew before the votes were counted.

On immigration he simply didn't have the votes. That level of reality he is capable of recognizing. But this is only because others have a part in the process that Bush and company cannot override, ignore or read out of the Constitution. The Senate has to confirm appointments, the Congress has to pass immigration reform. Were it not so, Miers would be on the court today.

I agree with Andrew that Bush doesn't knowingly lie, or not very often. He simply accepts that there is no necessary connection between his words and their conventional referents, no binding agent between his statements about the world and conditions in the world. And he intuited that publicly to behave as if you felt no such connection, not to cover it up and show a bad conscience about it, but to openly parade your liberation within language, would cause a cultural reaction that would unleash a lot of political energy, which he could ride to success.

What a gamble!

The preeminent media outlets will pass on, unedited, anything a Democratic politician or activist chooses to utter.

Right, and even some things they didn't utter, like Al Gore invented the Internet. Sorry, Michael, that statement is mindless right-wing cant. What's it doing in your comment?

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 8, 2008 11:17 PM | Permalink

re: like Al Gore invented the Internet

Heh, or George Bush was amazed by a grocery scanner.

Posted by: Tim at January 8, 2008 11:54 PM | Permalink

Fascinating. A "brand destroyer" who gets reelected with a higher percentage and more votes than he got the first time! (rolling eyes)

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 9, 2008 2:14 AM | Permalink

Dr. Rosen, Bush's moral character is your present obsession, but it was not the point of my comment. The point was the clear difference in results between left-wing opposition to Bush's policy, and right-wing opposition. My question was how this difference can be explained.

To refine the point, to say Bush reversed on Miers and immigration because he couldn't find the votes misses the real question, which is: why couldn't he find the votes? Compare that to the surge. Bush managed to find enough votes to reinforce the troops in Iraq, and send Petraeus to command them, in a Congress run by Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, who had promised their constituents that all US troops would be withdrawn from Iraq in 2007. How could he do that, yet not pass an immigration bill that he, Reid and Pelosi all favored?

Posted by: Michael Brazier at January 9, 2008 4:42 AM | Permalink

Brazier --

"I don't recall a single occasion when either Democrats or the press stopped Bush from doing something he was set on doing."

How about the defeat of the major plank of Bush's domestic platform in the wake of a re-election that van Steenwyk correctly notes had a higher percentage and more votes than four years earlier?

The President's Social Security plan was blocked by Democrats even while they were in the minority in both houses of Congress.

In this case, too, I agree with the professor: the defeat of the Social Security plan was grounded in political power not empirical analysis.

Aubrey --

"...to think that being opposed by France, China, and Russia means something on the moral side is insane."

I have already slipped up once in this thread on the "insane" part so I'll leave that alone. As for "moral"...for what reasons are you introducing that concept into the thread?

van Steenwyk --

"If you think [the Baath regime] was ever going to change absent a military intervention, you're in fantasyland.

Your statement may be correct, but that does not make it persuasive. Mere regime change is not a legitimate casus belli.

It is no justification for war to argue that a given policy end can only be accomplished by military means. In almost all cases, if a goal cannot be reached sans war the right thing to do is to fail to reach that goal, even if that goal happens to be a desirable one, such as ending the Baath dictatorship in Baghdad.

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at January 9, 2008 7:05 AM | Permalink

Your statement may be correct, but that does not make it persuasive.

Hilarious!!!

Mere regime change is not a legitimate casus belli.

That's right. Iraq was drawn at random out of a hat!

In almost all cases, if a goal cannot be reached sans war the right thing to do is to fail to reach that goal, even if that goal happens to be a desirable one, such as ending the Baath dictatorship in Baghdad.

Well, that's never been true. That's yet another ? + ? = ! statement. That's why you had to throw in the "almost" hedge. Which, of course, makes the statement useless when applied to any particular.

After all, if it's almost all cases, then there are exceptions from time to time. And if there are exceptions, then when we try to apply that statement to a particular, then we're back to figuring out whether it's an exception. Which means we're back to the discussion we started.

So the statement is useless. All it's good for is to make whoever says it feel good about themselves. But it's really quite a muddle-headed thing to say. I suppose it goes down ok at liberal wine and cheese parties where no one has to think to hard.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 9, 2008 7:32 AM | Permalink

van Steenwyk --

So glad to be the source of hilarity. Your vicious attack on the pleasures of wine and cheese is unwarranted and should be retracted immediately, especially the wine part.

You appear to see a greater disagreement between us than there is.

You are right: the force of my “almost” modifier was to argue that the presumption must always be that it is best not to go to war and that it is up to the would-be warrior to make an unassailable case that war has to be launched as a last resort. That does not make the statement “useless” as you argue. All it means is that your stated rationale -- regime change, even desirable regime change -- falls short of that strict test.

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at January 9, 2008 7:52 AM | Permalink

Andrew.
I was referring to the planted axiom--or sometimes the outright assertion--that without the UN's permission we can do nothing, based on the imputed morality of the UN.

To presume the three nations I mentioned hold any moral high ground is nuts.

The reason I brought it up is that many times you'll hear that Bush ignored the UN--as if it's a huge moral failing. Ignoring the UN can be a moral failing or an illegal act under international law, or imprudent. Depending on the circumstances. But that faux outrage that Bush ignored the UN (or Kyoto or Helen Thomas)is always promoted as a moral issue, even if unstated.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 9, 2008 8:07 AM | Permalink

Or a damn' fine idea. I forgot that part.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 9, 2008 8:10 AM | Permalink

the force of my “almost” modifier was to argue that the presumption must always be that it is best not to go to war and that it is up to the would-be warrior to make an unassailable case that war has to be launched as a last resort. That does not make the statement “useless” as you argue. All it means is that your stated rationale -- regime change, even desirable regime change -- falls short of that strict test.

Heh. Well, obviously, Congress didn't think so.

Nevertheless, regime change is not the rationale. You're confusing the rationale with the objective. Regime change was the objective. The rationale refers to the reasons for pursuing that objective. War was the method chosen after Clinton's methods had been demonstrated to have failed, and after it became clear that Al Qaeda was determined to acquire chemical, biological, or radiological knowledge and hoped to use them in jihad against the U.S.

Prior to that the Al Qaeda threat had been grossly underestimated. For some reason.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 9, 2008 9:26 AM | Permalink

van Steenwyk --

"War was the method chosen after Clinton's methods had been demonstrated to have failed."

Failed to do what?

Earlier you yourself insisted the failure concerned regime change not disarmament: "...yes, Bush's policy was a continuation of Clinton's, in that it was the official policy of the Clinton administration to pursue regime change in Iraq."

I agree with your earlier focus on regime change rather than your later emphamsis on WMDs. Disarmament seemed more like a pretext for war -- one that would pass muster under international law -- than an authentic rationale.

...but to more important matters. Please apologize for your unprovoked slur against drinking wine.

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at January 9, 2008 9:43 AM | Permalink

I have nothing against drinking wine.

Particularly when it involves drinking it out of a bottle in a paper sack.

In an alley.

Lying on broken glass

While having sex with an aspiring porn starlet.

While someone with a minicam films it for whackedsexvids.com

But drinking it among like-thinking liberals in the media feedback loop cheese at a Manhattan party like David Denby's friends in American Sucker?

I'll pass.

At least with the former I'll have something to show my kids.

And the company is better.

Besides. Lately I'm more partial to a good schwartzbier.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 9, 2008 10:04 AM | Permalink

But back to the question of language...

If I read Jay Rosen right, Bush's attitude toward his speeches was that they weren't intended to communicate reality and policy, but in important respects they consisted of things he could get away with saying.

An important contribution to these speeches were the bureaucratic fights that dictated their contents. Bush gave the bureaucracy a game look and said, "I have no problem whatsoever saying something completely and utterly glib. So deliver what I want to my desk, and then I'll mark you down as a true believer and I'll remember you." [I'm sure of the first part, but is the second part right?] So at that point the race is on between movement conservatives and "the reality based community."

After all, as John Bolton says in this interview on the Daily Show, this is what movement conservatives were elected to do. The alphabet soup of largely-New-Deal-created bureaucracies was not elected. They were. And they were trying to change reality, not letting it hold them back.

And the way to change it, was to game the system:

“They were just relentless,” Mr. Wilkerson says of the vice president’s staff. “You would take it out and they would stick it back in. That was their favorite bureaucratic technique — ruthless relentlessness.” According to Mr. Wilkerson, Mr. Cheney’s office continued the night before and the morning of the speech to insist that Mr. Powell tie Saddam Hussein to 9/11.

It was a game. If the intelligence community tells you that the Niger story is bunk, say you'll take it out of the speech, but then at the last minute, slip in the part about the British intelligence community saying it. Because technically it's true. You've satisfied the minimum requirements. And you've slipped it in at the 11th hour, before the bureaucracy can object.*

* There's trouble though, when the bureaucracy actually gets to speak on its own. Then the movement conservatives don't have a chance to work things over. Eventually, though, when you've got the "unitary executive" you want, then the whole executive will be movement conservative, and then you won't have to worry about this sort of thing.

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 9, 2008 11:10 AM | Permalink

"I argue that Bush handled this problem with less sophistication because he -- and, even more so, his ally Tony Blair -- gave every indication that they would not go to war sans a second resolution, and then fell back of the legalism of not requiring one in the first place only after France's veto was inevitable. This gave the appearance of blatant disregard for international norms."

If international norms include forbearing to act in the nation's best interests when under threat of serious violence - as determined by its elected leadership - then blatant disregard of them is exactly the right policy.

I realize that our media by and large would love to see the US governed by 'international law' and 'international norms' and the lofty (and self-interested) blatherers in the UN General Assembly. This mindset drips from enough media criticism of the Bush Administration that it pretty well typifies the MSM, certain exceptions not predominating.

However, per Judge Jackson: the Constitution is not a suicide pact. And per Thomas Jefferson: "strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means."

And if President Bush prefers the thought of President Jefferson over the thoughts of the goodthinkers of the MSM and the UN, then more power to him.

Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at January 9, 2008 12:02 PM | Permalink

[I]f President Bush prefers the thought of President Jefferson over the thoughts of the goodthinkers of the MSM and the UN, then more power to him.

Yeah, those are the usual movement conservative boogiemen. But the MSM and the UN are just two of the many parties gamed by this administration.

And I'm certain that Jefferson would have said the way things were pursued was not the legitimate way to bring the United States to war, let alone an out an out invasion of another country.

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 9, 2008 12:45 PM | Permalink

And speaking of Jefferson, how does the rhetorical tactics described above show a basic "decent respect to the opinions of mankind"?

The object is to manipulate those opinions, instead of laying out the facts and trusting them enough to form their own.

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 9, 2008 1:02 PM | Permalink

JJ: In a kind of thought experiment, Bush and Cheney sent word out to possible partners in the government: suppose you didn't have to take legitimate actions, what actions would you take?

(The rest of it went like this...) Because our greater legitimacy is such that it includes the legitimate, by the book means, and also a good number of the illegitimate means. Our language code--and Bush as a speaker--can handle the job of confusing one category with the other, while our Constitution squad is busy re-interpreting the law to allow us maximum leeway. The wine and cheesers will shout "Orwell" at us and--we promise you!--we'll ignore them. We can go it alone, without any broader legitimacy, and we can take the heat that comes from that. So what have you got?

Meanwhile, anyone in the government (like Jack Goldmith) who said... "I agree with those steps, Sir, and to make our action legitimate, we need to..." was on the target list for Cheney's office, and this is where the stealth, intimidation, relentlessness and intimations of a parallel government came from.

It was to that sort of statement ("to make our action legitimate...") that Addington gave his crisp and on-point reply, "Why are you trying to give away the president's power?"

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 9, 2008 1:15 PM | Permalink

Oh, spare me the Jefferson reference. Jefferson had no problem whatsoever going after the Barbary pirates. And he didn't have to ask Europe to cut his meat for him, either. While "international norms" were to pay tributes and bribes to the Barbary pirates, even as the pirates were capturing and enslaving thousands of sailors, Jefferson's response was to send some ordnance downrange. And he didn't bother to check with the Europeans.

Why? It was useless to do so. They were knuckling under by paying annual tribute, terrorized by the Barbary Pirates. (Funny how they're so easily terrorized!).

The Portuguese were supposed to patrol the Straits of Gibraltar and prevent the pirates from venturing into the Atlantic. But they sold out, too. They cut a side deal with the pirates, and sure enough, the Barbary pirates were soon merrily raping and pillaging their way through life. Johnny Depp, Burt Blyleven, Kent Tekulvie, Willie Stargell and the whole lot of them.

After the second Barbary war, the power of the Barbary pirates was broken. Not by sanctions, but by American leathernecks.

Today's libtards, had the lived in 1802, would march the streets protesting Jefferson's illegal, racist war, and they'd STILL be arguing that we should have given the sanctions a chance to work.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 9, 2008 2:04 PM | Permalink

Thank you, Mr. Van Steenwyk, for changing the subject to an irrelevant topic. As usual.

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 9, 2008 2:07 PM | Permalink

Here's the Al Gore attitude toward international norms:

Snatches, or more properly "extraordinary renditions," were operations to apprehend terrorists abroad, usually without the knowledge of and almost always without public acknowledgement of the host government.... The first time I proposed a snatch, in 1993, the White House Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, demanded a meeting with the President to explain how it violated international law.

Clinton had seemed to be siding with Cutler until Al Gore belatedly joined the meeting, having just flown overnight from South Africa. Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides for Gore: Lloyd says this. Dick says that.

Gore laughed and said, "That's a no-brainer. Of course it's a violation of international law, that's why it's a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass."
--From Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies.

Of course, that was when a Democrat was in the White House. The double standard is clear.

That was also before the idiot wing of the Democratic party sunk their zombie claws into the guy.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 9, 2008 2:20 PM | Permalink

Irrelevant again. What I've been discussing is about the way the US government operates, and it's laws.

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 9, 2008 2:28 PM | Permalink

"It's laws"? Splendid journalistic English, there.

It's laws, laws alone, that
caused ol' Saddam to leave the throne?

No, just good old Jeffersonian democracy, enacted by the US Government.

No thanks to the media who have used their powers to the utmost to undermine that very government.

Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at January 9, 2008 4:08 PM | Permalink

Thanks. You corrected my spelling, but overlooked every point I made.

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 9, 2008 4:21 PM | Permalink

Sorry guys. What did I miss?

I was out drinking some wine with some friends.

And making a video. ;-)

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 9, 2008 4:35 PM | Permalink

"And I'm certain that Jefferson would have said the way things were pursued was not the legitimate way to bring the United States to war, let alone an out an out invasion of another country."

Even with the punctuation right, the ideas bust all to flinders when they run into actual, you know, history.

Jefferson's 'decent respect for the opinions of mankind' took a back seat to his quote above, regarding the laws of self-preservation. Opinions be damned, he preferred survival. And so does the US Government, to its great credit.

We'll leave the manipulations of opinion to the goodthinkers of the MSM, who spend almost every waking minute doing just such exercises in fear that their preferred politicians might not attain and keep power over the rest of us.

Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at January 9, 2008 4:39 PM | Permalink

JJ, here's you:

I'm certain that Jefferson would have said the way things were pursued was not the legitimate way to bring the United States to war, let alone an out an out invasion of another country.

And yet when you're confronted with exactly HOW Jefferson brought the country to war - wow...there's that empiricism again! ... - and that Jefferson went to war with far less of an international imprimature than Bush did, AND invaded a foreign Arab country in the process, all of a sudden now you think it's irrelevant.

If it's irrelevant, then why on earth did you evoke Jefferson to demonstrate your point in the first place?

Did you just not know what you were evoking?

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 9, 2008 4:42 PM | Permalink

That's right, I forgot. It was crucial to US self-preservation to run roughshod over the National Security Act of 1947, misinform congress, say plainly distorted things during presidential speeches, and invade, conquer, and occupy Iraq.

Like I said, it helps to actually read my points and click links. (Since I'm not dealing with people who do that, why should I keep answering you guys? I shouldn't.)

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 9, 2008 4:51 PM | Permalink

Come to think of it, Jefferson also didn't get hung up on strict constructionist legalism when he made the Louisiana purchase, either.

George Bush: The Thomas Jefferson of our time.

I like it.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 9, 2008 4:56 PM | Permalink

George Bush: The Thomas Jefferson of our time.

Van Steenwyk--Quick, get on the horn! Call the Republican presidential campaigns!!! They're missing out on your brilliant campaign slogan!!

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 9, 2008 5:20 PM | Permalink

? + ? + ? = !

You have not established thing one to the left of the equal sign. Whenever you try you run aground on factual shoals.

Yet you are still willing to draw the broadest possible conclusions from your limited grasp of history, rhetoric and law.

I guess one could accept the assertion that the US invaded and occupied Iraq. And Bush made his case to Congress. Congress considered it. Bush won, obviously.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 9, 2008 5:35 PM | Permalink

Yes the results of what I described and linked to above (which you haven't read due to an apparently short attention span) have been stellar. For your party, the nation, and the world. Obviously.

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 9, 2008 5:55 PM | Permalink

A fun blast from the past, panopticon:

But it's possible to conceptualize Bush's disdain for experts without referencing either conservatism or postmodernism: he's a politician. Politics requires action, risk and imagination; science requires observation, caution, and analysis. It's just the disdain of someone who wants to get something done and fast.

Posted by: Tim at January 9, 2008 8:50 PM | Permalink

Oh, I read them. You linked to a book reviewer at the Times, not an expert on anything except the book in front of her. Oh, and you linked to the Daily Show.

So I read them and discounted them as something that's not coming from anyone who's serious about a disciplined approach to analysis.

The link to Kakutani is especially damning, in that it represents the Cult of Savviness gone malignant. You can't link to point out a fact. Only an assertion by another journalist. Except you don't even link to that. You link to what a book reviewer says about what a journalist reports that other people believe.

To further underline the crappy thinking going on here, the author of the book Kakutani reviews, argues that nine intelligence officials believe X.

Now, I don't know how many intelligence officials there are total. But I command a military intelligence company right now and I can tell you that there are rather more than 18 "officials" in it - including a number of credentialed CI specialists.

I can extrapolate that to establish that the fact that nine intelligence officials believe anything is dispositive of nothing, except to establish the stupidity of anyone relying on that logic to demonstrate a point.

It is precisely what I mean by ? + ? = ! thinking. The left side of the equation, in this case, is represented by the questionable assertion that the administration actually had the memo forged (A bipartisan commission basically found that nearly everything Wilson claimed was a lie).

It is therefore absurd to attempt to base any claim upon the assertion. But the reasoning error is compounded by the appeal to authority stating that nine intelligence officials (unnamed, natch, as far as I can tell from Kakutani's review) believed the conspiracy.

Well, you can probably find nine intelligence officials who believe almost anything. But without a clearheaded examination of the evidence underlying that belief - and placing these nine outliers in the context of the hundreds and thousands of intelligence officials that DON'T agree with them, well, that's just another questionable, dubious, or false argument.

Nevertheless, on the left it is to somehow acceptable to combine False Statement A and Questionable Statement B to form a firm conclusion about what that means.

Just ridiculous.

And yet you fall for it again and again. You are a sucker for a culture of assertion, rather than verification. Combine that with membership in the high-gloss media feedback loop and the result isn't pretty.

Here's the thing: Argument with capable, educated and reasoned individuals builds up antibodies, over time.

It's easy to spot people who have inhabited the media feedback loop too long: They lack antibodies. As a result, you wind up relying on tropes that are frequently demonstrably false upon examination - after more than six years into the war. Really, nobody called you on the notion that Bill Clinton went and got an additional authorization for Desert Fox before now?

You need to get out more.

Posted by: Jason Van Steenwyk at January 9, 2008 9:03 PM | Permalink

Subtlety has failed me. I may as well say outright why I think Dr. Rosen's focus on Bush is wrongheaded:

The question we are here to debate is, how ought the press to respond to the events of the past 7 years? By analyzing those events as "Bush destroying constraints on presidential power", Rosen argues that the press' proper response is to reinforce the constraints they once applied to the presidency, or to weave new ones. But while this would mean changing some of the press' habits and customs (downgrading the White House press corps, giving less weight to inside access) it doesn't put the adversarial bias of the press into question. Guided by this analysis, the press would seek to become a more effective opponent -- but not, save by accident, a more effective discoverer of truth. "Making a difference" would still be the press' conception of its role.

And that would mean, I believe, that all the flaws of the press today would return. For the specific habits and customs Dr. Rosen wants to change, the press fell into through the adversarial bias, and through similar, pervasive intellectual errors, the cult of expertise for instance. And as long as the press is thinking about Bush, and vowing to break through the next attempt to exclude them from the councils of the mighty, the notion that all those people in the GOP base might be on to something, that the basic worldview prevalent among one's co-workers could be unfounded in facts -- won't be entertained.

In short, the theory of Bush' iniquity Dr. Rosen now maintains will serve to keep reporters from the self-knowledge they badly require, and confirm them in the vices typical of their trade.

Posted by: Michael Brazier at January 9, 2008 10:46 PM | Permalink

Not sure I can meaningfully relate it to this thread, but Dan Rather's lawsuit has, as a few have predicted, made it past the motion to dismiss and is proceeding to discovery. Let the fun begin.

Posted by: bmaz at January 10, 2008 12:51 AM | Permalink

Oh, I read them. You linked to a book reviewer at the Times, not an expert on anything except the book in front of her. Oh, and you linked to the Daily Show. So I read them and discounted them as something that's not coming from anyone who's serious about a disciplined approach to analysis.

Ignores most of my links and says irrelevant things about the others. Mute the sound when Jon Stewart speaks. It's Bolton speaking. Ignore the book review. It's the quote from Powell's right hand man Wilkerson that counts. But as Jay Rosen reminded me, I'm expecting too much. This is obviously a waste of time.

Posted by: JJFromME at January 10, 2008 7:23 AM | Permalink

By the way, someone in the thread above criticized my arguments and mentioned journalism. For the record, I'm not a journalist. A professional journalist wouldn't have time for this back-and-forth silliness we've been doing.

Posted by: JJFromME at January 10, 2008 7:36 AM | Permalink

Linking together threads, not implying inconsistency ...

Jay Rosen:

The headwaters for the entire argument, in my view, is Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion (1922). Part of my dissertation (The Imnpossible Press, 1986) is about that book, where you see the press, the culture of expertise, the maker of political symbols and the practical politician all vexed by the same problem: the big public world is complicated and unknowable except through symbols and they can be manipulated.

The question that puzzles us: if objectivity is possible in life, where is it not possible in journalism? What about politics? Or social policy? How's about war? It is then we discover the limits of objectity, the dangers of pushing it too far, it's total unsuitability to many situations. The myth.

In fact, we learn other, more confusing things, such as that "objectivity, claim to be" has one of the longest headings in the Daily Encylopedia of Propaganda. Meanwhile, "we're objective, you're not" has the worst track record for any argument in journalism for convincing anyone but the professional journalist. And so on.

Posted by: Tim at January 10, 2008 8:10 AM | Permalink

"A professional journalist wouldn't have time for this back-and-forth silliness we've been doing."

I fear that's correct. Most journalists that I find in my daily papers are programmed to transmit, NOT to receive.

They appear to be driven by Professor Rosen's headline: "Most of them are not ideologically driven; they just want to get on the front page."

And you're not going to get on the front page by addressing your critics with reasoned arguments.

Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at January 10, 2008 10:31 AM | Permalink

If this forum is at all representative, "reasoned arguments" don't hold much weight with certain people. If someone has an inherent, overriding resentment toward you, and that's their beginning and end point, it won't matter what you say. At a certain point trying to have a reasonable discussion wastes your time.

Especially if you're a busy person, this goes without saying.

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 10, 2008 11:37 AM | Permalink

Brazier --

What a long and winding road it has been but by some miracle you have guided us back to the true theme of this thread! Congratulations.

You argue that the good professor’s analysis “doesn't put the adversarial bias of the press into question. Guided by this analysis, the press would seek to become a more effective opponent -- but not, save by accident, a more effective discoverer of truth. ‘Making a difference’ would still be the press' conception of its role.”

Contrast that with the title of the thread from former Bush aide Dan Bartlett: “Most of them are not ideologically driven; they just want to get on the front page.”

So what is it? Journalists as…

…effective opponents?
…discoverers of truth?
…makers of difference?
…hoggers of the front page?

I argue none of the above.

At root, the job of journalism is to find those elements that are newsworthy in a set of circumstances or a given controversy. The technique to do this may involve adopting an oppositional attitude…it certainly involves separating what is true from what is misleading…it may or may not result in changing those circumstances…if it happens to be interesting enough it may end up on the front page or in the lead of the nightly newscast…

However, journalism is not the same as political partisanship or objective research or social activism or public relations. It has its own prism of inquiry, its own ideology, if you will. What is newsworthy about the things that are happening? What has a compelling narrative? What is controversial? What is innovative? What are the elements that dramatize or personalize or epitomize dry abstractions?

This does not imply that journalists are not interested in discovering the truth of things. However truth is a necessary but insufficient quality. Something that is true also has to be newsworthy. Similarly, being an adversary, in some circumstances, is a valuable technique for teasing out what is newsworthy in a certain policy or controversy. But that is all that is -- a journalistic technique -- not the role itself.

So Bartlett’s insight is correct in as far as it characterizes the ideal end result of the journalist’s mission -- to unearth a headline story. It is incorrect in as far as it insinuates a motive of vain self-aggrandizement. That motive may be accurate, goodness knows, in the case of some of the White House correspondents Bartlett may have had to deal with. But it is a slur when applied to the activity of journalism in general.

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at January 10, 2008 11:47 AM | Permalink

Andrew,

What is newsworthy? I would argue that Andy's got a pretty good model. [And here, it would be appropriate to argue my use.]

I think the "front page" bias is the print journalist's glory bias. Do you disagree?

Posted by: Tim at January 10, 2008 12:48 PM | Permalink

Tim --

I agree with Rhetorica himself that his use of “bias” is inaccurate to characterize the protocols used by journalists to determine what is newsworthy.

With that caveat, what I call…

Controversy he calls Commercial Bias
Innovation he calls Temporal Bias
Actuality -- concretizing abstractions -- he calls Visual Bias
Dramatization he calls Narrative Bias
Sensation he calls Glory Bias

All five of these filters are used to identify events as newsworthy.

I would reject the idea that his remaining categories -- Bad News, Status Quo, Fairness, Expediency -- are criteria that contribute to newsworthiness.

In addition there is an explanatory function -- seen in feature journalism rather than hard news reporting -- which I do not see being identified by Rhetorica. An onging, static, dry abstraction can be rendered newsworthy by the very activity of making it understood clearly or in a new light.

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at January 10, 2008 1:21 PM | Permalink

Whoops, forgot an obvious and crucial aspect of newsworthiness...

Consequence -- does an event affect many or just a few? -- the positive flip side to the pejorative "Sensation" in Rhetorica's Glory Bias.

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at January 10, 2008 1:50 PM | Permalink

So what is it? Journalists as…

…effective opponents?
…discoverers of truth?
…makers of difference?
…hoggers of the front page?

Journalists ought to be discoverers of truth, always; effective opponents, only as needed to discover truth; and self-aggrandizers, never. US journalists generally aspire to be effective opponents, a corruption of their proper goal. Once the goal of discovering truth has been forgotten, the further corruption to mere self-aggrandizement becomes easy. Dan Rather's lawsuit (thank you for the reminder, bmaz) is a good example of the process: it started with a propaganda piece, and has sunk to merely shoring up the propagandist's reputation.

At root, the job of journalism is to find those elements that are newsworthy

Ha. Truth is always newsworthy, or interesting. But those who put "interesting" first don't find any truths they didn't know already.

Posted by: Michael Brazier at January 10, 2008 2:41 PM | Permalink

US journalists generally aspire to be effective opponents, a corruption of their proper goal.

Really?

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 10, 2008 2:47 PM | Permalink

"Fitzgerald has consistently shown more interest -- and determination -- in uncovering the facts of the Plame scandal than most Beltway journalists, including the often somnambulant D.C. newsroom of The New York Times."

That was sorta true, but Fitzgerald had 'uncovered' the Armitage source to start with, and then continued posturing and strutting and fretting about the stage until he'd provoked and selected a suitable victim who WASN'T the source. He wasn't looking for the source at all.

That's aggrandizement worthy of all those alleged reporters, who simply missed the story.

Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive at January 10, 2008 4:01 PM | Permalink

Andrew: "I would reject the idea that his remaining categories -- Bad News, Status Quo, Fairness, Expediency -- are criteria that contribute to newsworthiness."

OK, is Bad News a subset of Commercial? The planes that land safely are not newsworthy because it doesn't sell? Is Expediency also a subset of Commercial?

Is Fairness a subset of Narrative?

Status Quo (i.e., "The mainstream news media never question the structure of the political system.") filters out the "fringe," "conspiratorial," "apocalyptic" and "noise" does it not?

One of the filters of news that I have considered is the simplicity protocol (bias) which filters out complexity and explanatory news. It's not that you never see such stories, but they are expensive, time-consuming, difficult to get right and often don't draw viewers for the "features" that take up an hour or more of air-time or pages of print.

Posted by: Tim at January 10, 2008 7:10 PM | Permalink

Tim --

Do not take my argument too far. When I insist that it is impossible to understand the job of journalism without first seeing its product as determined by the category newsworthy, I do not make the claim that newsworthiness accounts for the totality of what is seen, heard and read in the news media.

Clearly, in practice, the news ends up flawed, peppered with content that turns out to be uninteresting or inaccurate or expedient or sensationalistic or conventional or what not. Yet these would be instances where journalism fails to do its job rather than examples of its intrinsic characteristics.

To put it simply, I assert that journalism, done properly, is inherently interesting and stimulates social discourse. If I did not, I would not find PressThink worth thinking about.

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at January 11, 2008 7:06 AM | Permalink

Michael writes, "Subtlety has failed me. I may as well say outright why I think Dr. Rosen's focus on Bush is wrongheaded..."

I didn't think this...

The preeminent media outlets will pass on, unedited, anything a Democratic politician or activist chooses to utter.

... was so subtle, Michael. In fact, I would say it was downright unsubtle, not just crude, but Powerline crude. (Also incorrect.) The idiocy of culture war talking through an otherwise intelligent person.

On the other hand, I agree with most everything you said here:

that view of the world comes from a subculture that doesn't often recognize or correct its errors, has a dim memory of the past in general, and is distracted by every passing sensation. ... The press is in no condition to analyze anyone else's use of language; if it tried, in its current state, it would only be captured by the professional purveyors of nonsense and made into another weapon against reality. The first order of business must be, instead, for the press to tend to itself -- to learn how to sift and weigh evidence, to recognize patterns in data instead of forcing data into narratives, to think up ways of testing a hypothesis.

Here's an example of two journalists--John Harris and Jim VandeHei of The Politico--trying to tend to the press itself and talk about forcing data into narratives... but not getting very far, despite some brave words of self-criticism. Why reporters get it wrong.

Comments will close this afternoon.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 11, 2008 10:09 AM | Permalink

Interesting. David Brooks today says:

Supply-side economics had a good run, but continual tax cuts can no longer be the centerpiece of Republican economic policy. The demographics have changed. The U.S. is an aging society. We have made expensive promises to our seniors. We can’t keep those promises at the current tax levels, let alone at reduced ones. As David Frum writes in “Comeback,” his indispensable new book: “In the face of such a huge fiscal gap, the days of broad, across-the-board, middle-class tax cutting are over.”

Maybe they really are starting to question the kind of economic dogma Kevin Drum mentions near the end of this post. Maybe things are starting to come down to some political realities...?

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 11, 2008 10:56 AM | Permalink

Note Politico's third graf:

The only defense against being thought a fraud is to insist they're fools.

As I've said before, that may work in the one and only case where you're busted.
There are, as it happens, considerably more than one and only and a unique and never-happen-again-and-never-happened-before cases as you like to pretend
So the defense that you're not crooks, you're stupid, results in a lot of evidence that you're stupid, presuming that you're not crooks.

It would be better to get it right the first time. Neither defense is very good for you.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 11, 2008 11:11 AM | Permalink

Aubrey --

I think you misconstrue the sense of the word "fraud" by Politico. You take it to mean the deliberate fabrication of untrue information. In context, it seems they are referring to their own rashness in purporting to be able to foretell the future.

That rashness was actually foolish not mendacious. I blame sloppy writing for implying anything more than that. In the case of fortune telling there seems to be less of a distinction between a fraud and a fool than meets the eye.

Posted by: Andrew Tyndall at January 11, 2008 11:34 AM | Permalink

Andrew. In your reading, the mendacity is the journos claiming they have an idea of what's going on and that people should pay attention to them.

However, in the NH case, Politico is opting for the "fools" defense. No journo eschews "fools" for admitting he screwed the pooch when he's busted. Nobody says, "I made this shit up for a reason, dammit."
To put it another way, Politico is saying that the only alternative for "fools" is "frauds", which is probably not desireable.

My position has been for a long time that the "we got fooled" defense, which means you didn't do your homework for whatever reason, is a legitimate reason--but not excuse--for a single misstep.
But when you get busted on a regular basis, and insist you're not making shit up, just that you effed up, the cumulative effect is that you eff up a lot.

Point is, if you get it right, you don't need either defense. If you see my point, which seems to generage some defensiveness among certain folks.

Posted by: Richard Aubrey at January 11, 2008 1:10 PM | Permalink

Here's something from the Politico story:

Check out the nicer restaurants in Manchester, N.H., or Des Moines, Iowa, in the political season and you will see the same group of journalists and pols dining together almost every night. We go to events together, make travel plans together and read each other's work compulsively. We go to the same websites — the Drudge Report, Real Clear Politics, Time’s “The Page” — to see what each other is writing, and it’s only human nature to respond to it.

Drudge, RealClearPolitics, Halprin (formerly of The Note, now "The Page")--these all clearly lean right. Why are these their "go to" websites?

Posted by: JJWFromME at January 11, 2008 4:17 PM | Permalink

Writer Says Media is Election's Big Loser: 21 Times

Good thread, Jay. Thanks!

Posted by: Tim at January 11, 2008 4:38 PM | Permalink

And thanks to all participants. Thread closed.

Posted by: Jay Rosen at January 11, 2008 10:21 PM | Permalink