My lovely wife points me to an article by Tim Hutten of the LA Times. She says:

“This writer eloquently captures many of my thoughts about politicians and pundits of late. Thought it may have a place somewhere in your blog.”

You got it, babe. Hutten writes of the polarizing polemics which are gaining ground today at the expense of persuasive arguments. It’s a good article and very… persuasive. Read the whole thing at the Seattle Times’ site.

I’m picking up a few disturbing signs of stress in liberals lately, and I just thought I’d point them out. I don’t think any of these incidents on their own are significant, but taken together they might signal foundational cracks in the structure.

First item: I just watched the Daily Show for August 2nd, the one in which Jon Stewart grilled Congressman Bonilla (R-TX) over the source of the “Kerry is most liberal, Edwards is 4th most liberal” spin that the Republicans have been spouting ad nauseum. (The Angry Bear has a partial transcript) Jon Stewart got kudos ‘round the blogosphere for ripping this apart. Granted, Stewart did have his facts straight, and the Congressman was sadly mistaken if he thought he could just parrot the talking points and survive the Daily Show buzz saw.

But here’s the thing: Stewart kind of baited the guy. He didn’t let the Congressman talk and pounce when there was an opportunity. Instead, Stewart—rather inartfully—got the Congressman to talk about what Stewart wanted to talk about. It was kind of a one-way conversation, not a fair fight. Not that Bonilla didn’t deserve it, but that’s the kind of thing I expect from Bill O’Reilly, not Jon Stewart.

So here’s thing number two: Digby links to a report from Salon where the reporter claims that a Secret Service agent ordered him to stand during the presentation of the colors at the Democratic National Convention. It seems like the agent knew that he’d gone over the top, but he didn’t back down and came off being kind of a prick.

So, okay. Fine. Here’s the problem. Digby says “Totally unprofessional, totally out of line and totally unamerican. When exactly did the Secret Service become the guardians of patriotism?” Well, never, of course. And it wasn’t the entire Secret Service. It was one guy, but Digby is ready to proclaim that this is the beginnings of a new Police State. This guy should’ve been given a tongue-lashing by his superior and maybe a suspension, but to smear the whole Secret Service with the same brush based on what this guy did is way over the top. Plus, when the agent says he was a Marine and he doesn’t like when people show disrespect for the flag, you can kind of see where his anger and misplaced patriotism might have gotten the better of him.

And here’s the third thing, and this really set me off: Under the headline Bush Blog Attacks Firefighters, Atrios quotes an adolescently stupid slam on firefighters written by a Republican police officer. The title of Atrios’ post makes it look like the Bush Blog uses this quote, but in fact the Bush Blog quotes a different part of the article and only links to the original National Review piece without further comment.

So later I see that TalkLeft and Seeing the Forest have more-or-less copied and pasted the story from Eschaton, echoing the outrage.

In the comments at Seeing the Forest, I wrote:

The smear you quote is unbelievable, but it’s not the Bush Blog that makes the smear, it’s the person who wrote the article which is linked from the Bush Blog. Is there something I don’t understand about this? Is linking to a smear article the same as smearing something yourself?
Stumax | Email | Homepage | 08.04.04 – 12:19 pm | #

To which the original poster replied:

“Is linking to a smear article the same as smearing something yourself?”
Yes.
Dave Johnson | Email | Homepage | 08.04.04 – 12:33 pm | #

Really. So if I quote from Mein Kampf, that’s the same as saying I want to exterminate the Jews?

The frustrating thing about this is that this is the same kind of fuzzy logic that gets Democrats up in arms in the first place. “Linking to an article with a smear is the same as smearing” is the same kind of logical construction as “Saddam having talks with al Qaeda is the same as Saddam bombing the World Trade Center.” Or “Saddam has aluminum tubes, therefore Saddam has nuclear weapons.” This leaves our side vulnerable to attacks from their side, and they’re much more skilled fighters than we are.

These three incidents represent a—potential—collective Liberal problem, and the problem is that outbursts like these, attacks like these, are born of righteous frustration, of a feeling of impotence. Liberals feel disenfranchised, lied to, manipulated, and powerless, and they’re starting to strike back. This is not a bad thing in and of itself, but going down into the gutter with these guys, fighting illogical, emotional slander with illogical, emotional slander is going to be the Democrats’ undoing. The Republicans will seize on these missteps and turn them to their advantage.

It’s been a long slog already. I sympathize. Between the blatant lies of the Administration, the war, the economy, the shredding of the Constitution, the vicious personal attacks, Fox News and the rest of the Conservative Media… it’s been really tough for Liberals to have a moment’s peace. But it’s crunch time now. Between now and the election, Liberals have to be at the top of their game. We cannot stoop to these kinds of inelegant attacks, because all we have going for us right now is that truth is on our side. If we start bending that, we’ll muddy the waters so much that the photo-finish horse race everyone is predicting will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Courage, Democrats.

This is mystifying on many levels: so… and stick with me for a second here… Bush makes a speech earlier in the month about how Castro’s government encourages prostitution. And Castro makes a fiery speech denying the charges and denouncing Bush. The MSNBC article about the flap reports all this and analyzes Castro’s attack on Bush’s mental health and whether Bush’s Cuba policy is slanted to activate the Republican base in Florida.

But… here’s the kicker… the MSNBC article devotes precisely one brief paragraph to the most bizarre and howlingly embarrassing detail of the whole incident:

Three days after Bush’s remarks, the Los Angeles Times reported that the White House found the comments in a Dartmouth undergraduate paper posted on the Internet and lifted them out of context. “It shows they didn’t read much of the article,” commented Charlie Trumbull, the author.

Did you get that?! Bush’s speechwriters plagarized an undergraduate essay that they lifted from the Internet and that they apparently didn’t even bother to fully read. And MSNBC devotes a paragraph to it.

Fortunately, the LA Times did cover the real story. The White House response?

On Monday, administration officials acknowledged that they did not have a source for the wording of the president’s citation other than Trumbull’s paper. A White House spokeswoman defended the inclusion, arguing it expressed an essential truth about Cuba.

Well, there you go. As long as something expresses an essential truth, it really doesn’t matter if the source is factual or accurate. Aren’t they the least bit embarrassed? I mean, they’re the White House, for godssake. Don’t they have access to actual information?

Maybe it’s hard. You know? Maybe, when you’ve been caught in as many embarrassing lies and distortions as this administration has, maybe it’s just hard to be embarrassed anymore. It’s like when you’re so behind with cleaning your house that you start accepting the mess as a virtue. You just pile more crap anywhere and say, “it’s my house and I can live however I want.”

Aaaaaaaaaagggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

That is all.

(via Boing Boing)

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From the President’s remarks on the Senate Intelligence Committee Report

[L]isten, we thought there was going to be stockpiles of weapons. I thought so; the Congress thought so; the U.N. thought so. I’ll tell you what we do know. Saddam Hussein had the capacity to make weapons. See, he had the ability to make them. He had the intent. We knew he hated America. We knew he was paying families of suiciders. We knew he tortured his own people, and we knew he had the capability of making weapons. That we do know. They haven’t found the stockpiles, but we do know he could make them. And so he was a dangerous man. He was a dangerous man. The world is better off without Saddam Hussein in power. America is safer.

Let’s get this straight: we don’t invade another country, destroy its government, kill innocent civilians, endanger our troops, and ruin our military’s ability to respond effectively to additional crises just because some tin-pot dictator could make a WMD. I could make a WMD… theoretically… but I’m not going to make a WMD. Saddam Hussein apparently didn’t make a WMD, or he destroyed his stockpiles. Saddam Hussein wasn’t a dangerous man, he wasn’t capable of putting the US or our allies in grave peril, and the world is not safer because he’s not in power.

I wonder… how many Iraqi civilians would Saddam have killed by now had he stayed in power? Would it have been more than the over 11,000 we’ve killed since January of ‘03? How many of our troops would still be alive or in one piece if Saddam were still in power? How many terrorists have we created because of our reckless actions? By what measure does anyone assert that we’re better off now than we were two years ago?

The (soon-to-be) wife and I went to see Fahrenheit 9/11 tonight. It was a 10:30 showing on a Friday night in Seattle on a holiday weekend. The movie was running in two theaters. The 10:00 showing had been sold out, and our theatre of about 200 seats was full, mostly of 20-somethings. Now, we were at a theatre in downtown Seattle, a city which I would suspect tends to be a little more politically aware than some others, but I was still heartily encouraged to see a full house of young folks attending a movie like this.

The movie is very effective, and raises more than a few compelling issues. Perhaps the most impactful images of the film were of wounded, dead, and dying American soldiers, and of the grief experienced by the mother of a soldier killed in action. It seems to me that we have seen very few images of soldiers in Iraq at all, much less images like these. The realization of just what kind of media manipulation and media complicity has been involved in hypnotizing Americans into thinking we’re not even really fighting a war hit me like an RPG. I am sick to my gut with the cynical way this war has been prosecuted by the administration.

The film has its flaws. Spinsanity lists some errors, though I take issue with the tone of the piece and disagree with some of their interpretations. The important thing is that , flaws aside, Moore is finally giving us an alternative lens through which to view the last two years. If he sometimes uses innuendo and insinuation to get his point across, I, for one, can forgive him. Moore is a filmmaker and the language of film often eschews the verbal and explicit in favor of drawing connections in the viewer’s mind. Innuendo and insinuation are Moore’s province and right as an artist, as long as he shows us the essential truth. (Digby makes my point here.) Innuendo and insinuation are not the right of the politician, though, and Fahrenheit 9/11 shows us exactly why we must never again allow our country’s public servants to use these weapons against us. We must demand truth and accountability.

Lots of folks have weighed in on the film. This post from The Talent Show sums it up as well as any – “In the end, regardless of which side of the aisle you sit on, this movie should provide something to piss you off and make you cry. Considering how crucial this upcoming election is, that’s exactly what moviegoers need right now. If you haven’t seen it yet, you’re missing out on one of the most rewarding moviegoing experiences that’s come along in a long while.” Fahrenheit 9/11 does its job by puncturing the antiseptic bubble of rhetoric that we have been sealed in for the last couple of years. Guess what? An alternate viewpoint isn’t going to kill us. It might just make us stronger.

Michael Moore’s website addresses some of the criticisms of the film, and publishes some of the reactions from around the world, like that of Canadian writer Bill Doskoch of CTV.ca, who ends his column with the following

I’ll leave you with a snippet of an interview of Morgan Spurlock, director and star of the fast food documentary Super Size Me, with Salon.com:

Salon: With the success of Michael Moore’s films and others, it seems like there is a growing trend of left-leaning, progressive, anti-corporate documentaries. Why is that?

Spurlock: I think that documentary is your last bastion for any truth today. It’s the one place where you have no media conglomerate telling you what to say, the one place where people aren’t going to put a vice on opinion and on fact. You can put something out that takes a stand and says, ‘Listen, you need to know this.’

Right on. Keep talking, Brother Michael

David Corn engages Nicholas Kristof on the issue of lying. Kristof had taken Corn to task in a recent column for using the “L-Word:”

“I’m against the ‘liar’ label for two reasons,” Kristof writes. “First it further polarizes the political cesspool, and this polarization is making America increasingly difficult to govern. Second, insults and rage impede understanding.”

True enough. Labels are always misleading and carry no nuance or explanation. It’s easy enough for the label to become convenient shorthand for points that then fail to be discussed. However, as Corn responds:

These are tactical points—which Kristof is certainly free to make. But they are unrelated to the basic issue: is the charge true? More on that below. But even if we accept Kristof’s desire for a high-minded political discourse, consider this: if the president of the United States is not telling the truth about critical matters (war, taxes, global warming, stem cell research), isn’t he the one poisoning the cesspool and inhibiting effective governance? And if he is being dishonest on these fronts, wouldn’t illumination of that enhance rather than detract from the debate? The president of the United States has a bully pulpit; he has the largest megaphone in the room. If he is falsely describing the terms of the discussion, he is rigging the national debate. And if that is his M.O., why should it not be criticized?

Read the whole article. Both men make fair points, in my opinion, but I do tend to side more with Corn’s point of view: speak plainly and honestly and let the chips fall. The President, of all people, shouldn’t be given latitude even to stretch the truth when American lives and freedoms are at stake.

[UPDATE: Read Bob Somerby’s Daily Howler for more. He says better what I was trying to say about the “liar” label. Plus, he howls.]

A comment I left at Rhetorica: Press-Politics Journal: Story time…

I don’t have much to base this on other than a couple of things that have crossed my field of view lately – and perhaps you’ve already talked about this elsewhere – but it seems to me that, in addition to making up a narrative about particular events, members of the media also create a meta-narrative which defines the role they play individually as newsmakers.

I have contemplated this lately because of two things: First is this post by Kevin Drum at Washington Monthly. Drum takes Jonathan Alter to task for writing gentle critiques, laced with optimism, of the Bush administration, while outside of the confines of his Newsweek column, Alter is willing to espouse a much more vitriolic and pessimistic view of Bush, as he apparently did on Air America Radio.

The other item that struck me was a story related by Ariana Huffington during a speech in Seattle last month. Huffington described being on a talk show and describing Bush as a “dry drunk.” When she explained what she meant, her fellow panelists all gave non-committal looks, yet as soon as the show went to commercial they all piped up firmly in agreement.

We all make up a face for the public, one that allows us to get along in the world, yet if these anecdotes point to common behavior among journalists I find it a bit worrying. I don’t see how we can properly push discussion of critical issues forward if the media are unwilling to say what they really think. Of course reporting should be tempered with judgment and respect for all points of view, but if you’re writing only to fit a narrative, how does that contribute to informed discourse?

Perhaps this relates to your “Glory Bias.” The media are aware of the characters they play on the stage of world politics and, like good actors, will play those parts to the hilt, regardless of their personal views. The media are not writing from what is known, they are writing a script that fits an idealized world view. The effect is that no matter what the policies or who the policy makers, the public gets the same bland, recycled narrative. That is a dangerous state of affairs.

Ah, yes, Medium Lobster. I see the truth now. you are wise in the ways of war.

Fafblog! the whole worlds only source for Fafblog.

Remember that the thing that will win this war is not “acknowledging mistakes” or “changing a doomed strategy.” It’s strong resolve, which will be magically channeled by Coalition mystics to create a strong, stable, and democratic Iraq, which in turn will save Freedom in the United States from falling to the forces of Islamist Rage. For those who value freedom and democracy, the restriction and manipulation of information as part of a wartime propaganda campaign is a small price to pay.

Thanks in part to Robert Cox at The National Debate, there’s progress on the New York Times Columnist Correction Front. Daniel Okrent released a column today entitled The Public Editor: The Privileges of Opinion, the Obligations of Fact

[S]everal days ago, editorial page editor Gail Collins handed me a memo in response to my inquiries. (You can read it in its entirety at www.nytimes.com/danielokrent; look for posting No. 22.) Less a formal statute than an explanation and justification of practice, the document lays out the position of both Collins and her boss, Sulzberger, who bears ultimate responsibility for hiring and firing columnists. Collins explains why columnists must be allowed the freedom of their opinions, but insists that they “are obviously required to be factually accurate. If one of them makes an error, he or she is expected to promptly correct it in the column.” Corrections, under this new rule, are to be placed at the end of a subsequent column, “to maximize the chance that they will be seen by all their readers, everywhere,” a reference to the wide syndication many of the columnists enjoy.

Okrent makes a good point about the difficulty of determining Facts; interpretations of a fact can vary widely from people with different perspectives on the context of a fact. However, the new policy instituted by Collins is a step forward to ensuring accountability on the op-ed page.

And, since I was on the bandwagon when the Times lawyers hit Mr. Cox with the DMCA sledgehammer, it’s only fair to give credit when it’s due. Here’s the email I sent to Daniel Okrent this morning:

Well said, sir, and kudos on the new resolution regarding columnist corrections at the times. Harlan Ellison once argued with those who claim “I’m entitled to my opinion.” “You’re quite wrong,” he replied. “You’re entitled to your informed opinion. You’re uninformed opinion isn’t worth s—-.” To which I would add, neither is an opinion based on an inaccurate accounting of fact. I hope that the Times’ new policy will do much to enhance the credibility of its columnists.

It’s important that opinion pieces are accurate when they recount quotes, figures, and details of events. William Safire’s assertion that an opinion can never be wrong may be technically true, but it’s a bit of a dodge. We expect that those who hold the nation’s attention as shapers of opinion will be informed and precise. If they are at least that, then they can be as wrongheaded as they want to be and still provide a valuable public service.

And that’s a fact. Maybe. Don’t quote me on that.