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Reflections on MoDo

Monday, May 18, 2009

Last year we learned that Maureen Dowd lets her assistants write her columns. Yesterday we learned that she lets her friends write them. Either that, or she is a plagiarist, take your pick.

Alisson Kilkenny of the Huffington Post suggests that all this is a kind of subconscious plea for help on Dowd’s part; a plea to be relieved of a job for which she is unfit. Kilkenny suggests that Josh Marshall, who Dowd (or her friend) plagiarized, should replace Dowd on the Times’ op-ed page.

I can understand Kilkenny’s argument, and I sympathize to a certain extent. But really, this is definitely not a good idea. Not everyone can survive the experience of writing for the NY Times with his or her brain intact. Sure, there are the outliers like Paul Krugman, Frank Rich and Bob Herbert (Hebert?), but consider Dowd herself, who was at one time a competent reporter until her editors decided that she had opinions that should at all costs be shared with the rest of us. It’s been many years since that transition took place, and some of us are still trying to figure out exactly what those opinions are. We know that she is ever so clever with the put down, that her inability to find a husband has something to do with the defects of all men everywhere, and that she did not act inappropriately at Barneys that time, but as to whether she has any principles or believes in anything, well the jury is still out.

But it’s not just MoDo. Look at Bill Kristol. Well, don’t look at him. Just think about him. No, that’s even worse. He wrote for the Times for a year (or was it longer? It certainly seemed longer). His first column was factually challenged. as was nearly every column thereafter. Wait, Kristol doesn’t prove my point at all. He had no brain to keep intact, since his fact free meanderings were totally consistent with his performance prior to his stint at the Times.

Well, then, consider David Brooks. He still writes for the Times, right? He’s the guy who presumes to channel and eulogize the mindset of the “real” America, while preferring to live securely within the beltway. It’s not his fault if he gets his red state/blue state facts all wrong. There’s only so many times you can hit the bulls-eye when you insist on shooting blindfolded. Surely he must have done something to establish his status as a perceptive cultural observer in order to earn the column in which he belies that reputation on a regular basis. I’m sure he must have, but like him, I’m too lazy to fact check.

So, maybe I haven’t proven my point. Maybe it’s just garbage in, garbage out. But no matter, I invoke my own privilege as a two bit pundit to bravely assert and let the facts catch up if they can. And I continue to insist that we should let Maureen stay where she is, cry for help be damned.

As for Josh, he’s fine where he is. Besides, given Dowd’s tendencies to phone it in, his work will probably be finding its way onto the op-ed page with regularity, if not with attribution.


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Propaganda for Bush’s eyes only

Sunday, May 17, 2009

This morning Frank Rich mentioned the fact that Donald Rumsfeld had larded his daily secret reports to George Bush with biblical quotes. The information comes from an article in GQ Magazine written by Robert Draper:

Draper reports that Rumsfeld’s monomaniacal determination to protect his Pentagon turf led him to hobble and antagonize America’s most willing allies in Iraq, Britain and Australia, and even to undermine his own soldiers. But Draper’s biggest find is a collection of daily cover sheets that Rumsfeld approved for the Secretary of Defense Worldwide Intelligence Update, a highly classified digest prepared for a tiny audience, including the president, and often delivered by hand to the White House by the defense secretary himself. These cover sheets greeted Bush each day with triumphal color photos of the war headlined by biblical quotations. GQ is posting 11 of them, and they are seriously creepy.

Take the one dated April 3, 2003, two weeks into the invasion, just as Shock and Awe hit its first potholes. Two days earlier, on April 1, a panicky Pentagon had begun spreading its hyped, fictional account of the rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch to distract from troubling news of setbacks. On April 2, Gen. Joseph Hoar, the commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1991-94, had declared on the Times Op-Ed page that Rumsfeld had sent too few troops to Iraq. And so the Worldwide Intelligence Update for April 3 bullied Bush with Joshua 1:9: “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified; do not be discouraged, for the LORD your God will be with you wherever you go.” (Including, as it happened, into a quagmire.)

That particular portion of Rich’s column provoked a strong reaction, but you have to see the accompanying photos to get the full, sickening effect. You can view a slideshow here (via Firedoglake)

Call me a cynic, but I refuse to believe that Bush is religious in the conventional sense of the world. The man is a sociopath. What this pitch to religiosity did, in Bush’s case, was reinforce his belief in his own infallibility and in the righteousness of anything that he chose to do. If God was with him, after all, who could be against him. Or, at least, why listen to anyone who was against him. For Bush, God “exists” only to affirm Bush. Rumsfeld apparently played him like a violin. It’s truly scary to think Rumsfeld and Cheney, Bush’s very intelligent fellow sociopaths, played their intellectual inferior like a violin.

Rich is right, by the way. We can’t turn the page on the Bush presidency. It’s not a book. It’s an infected wound. We either drain the pus, or die from the infection.


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A Challenger for Dodd

Sunday, May 17, 2009

It’s hard to decide what to make of this:

Merrick posted another video, which he’s since taken down. The old video was here. I’m not sure the two were much different. His website is here.

Oddly enough, we have at least two things in common. We both grew up in Hartford with single Moms (at least mine was single-widowed-for most of my life) and ended up moving to Southeastern Connecticut. We also both became lawyers, though Merrick had the good sense to get out of the practice of law.

As our Town Chairman, Betsy Moukawsher remarked to me, this sort of explains why Merrick has been evasive about running for Town Council, which we’ve been urging him to do. He has bigger fish to fry.

Merrick is on our town committee. I first met him several years ago, when I got the distinct impression that he was interested in running for the House seat that Joe Courtney now holds. He backed off, for whatever reason. That seat is now beyond the reach of any Democrat, so I guess if you’re a Southeastern Connecticut Democrat with lofty ambitions of a federal kind, Dodd is as good a target as any.

Merrick is, at least from my observation, a serious guy, and I would have thought he’s not one for quixotic endeavors. There’s no doubt that Dodd is a problem, but I doubt that anyone but a big gun can take him down on the Democratic side. I don’t know if Merrick can self fund a campaign, but if he can’t it’s hard to see that he’ll be able to raise much money. Even Simmons has had a problem raising cash, so the smart money must still be on Dodd, though I wouldn’t want to bet my life savings on him.

Getting back to Merrick, it’s hard to see how he wins a Democratic primary. If Dodd can’t bring his numbers up it is to be hoped that he will step aside and become ambassador to Ireland or something, in which case Blumenthal will probably step in. Merrick would need feet on the ground to win a primary; he probably won’t get 15% of the convention vote, so he’ll need to petition his way on. That means dedicated people, like the people that Lamont had working for him and I don’t see that there’s anything in Merrick’s message that is going to motivate those people. I don’t think that many hard core Democrats will be interested in taking part in a campaign that will, of necessity, involve nothing but attacks on Dodd, weakening him in the general election after he wins the primary, should Merrick qualify. This is not a Lieberman situation-Dodd has made some mistakes, but he hasn’t betrayed the party or his constituents.

Anyway, this is interesting, and who knows, since Merrick is from this neck of the woods, it might bring Dodd out here to talk to us yokels that he left back in 1980.


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A loss for Groton

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Now that Barbara Tarbox, Groton’s estimable Town Clerk, has made her intentions to retire official (I’ve known for a while of her intentions), I feel I can pay tribute to her on the pages of this humble blog

It is difficult to imagine how poorly the town would operate without a good town clerk. Besides the day part of the job (managing the land records, overseeing elections, etc.) there is the much more difficult part of the job where I have had most of my contacts with Barbara. That is not to imply that I have made her job more difficult, though I won’t say I haven’t. That is to say that there are very few nights when her presence isn’t necessary at a meeting of some sort, be it Town Council, RTM, or one of the commissions. I’ve been a member of (and been voted off of) every elected body in town. Barbara is there for almost every town council meeting and almost every RTM meeting. She is a woman of infinite patience. Not every member of every elected body is blessed with the gift of above average, or even average, intelligence. They often propose to do very silly things. Barbara is inevitably a voice of reason, which she backs up with a thorough knowledge of the Town Charter and the rules of procedure. She has, in her time, often deftly nudged the rowboat of town (compare: ship of state) away from the shoals of stupidity toward the placid waters of reason.

Besides my disastrous tenures in various elective positions, I have been on two charter commissions, the first of which had a high percentage of low wattage individuals. Barbara attended all the meetings, taking care of the record keeping, helping us with the rules, and steering us away from those ever present shoals. Barbara has the ability to advocate for a position without seeming to do so. I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that folks from both sides of the aisle hold her in high regard.

Besides being a great town clerk, she’s a great person, which I assume she’ll continue to be even after she’s not town clerk anymore. She’s a loyal Democrat and a regular at our Drinking Liberally meetings, though she does, in fact, not drink all that liberally. Nobody’s perfect, however, and sad to say that despite the fact that she hasn’t got that much time on her hands, she wastes some of it reading this blog.

Barbara will be hard to replace. The job requires a rare combination of talents, which Barbara has in spades. If there’s anyone out there with good organizational skills, boundless patience, and excellent judgment there’s a job opening for you in Groton.


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Friday Night Music-A Tribute to a Fine Institution

Friday, May 15, 2009

A few weeks ago I shared my grief at the prospect of the imminent closing of the Norwich YMCA. Today, the final nail was driven in the coffin as news came that the Hail Mary fundraiser to keep it open feel far short of its goal. So the Y will remain closed, and the pool I swam in every day will remain empty. That is a particular shame, since this area has a dearth of indoor pools, and the pool at the Norwich Y was a good one.

What better way to bid the Y good-bye then to showcase this tribute to the many opportunities that the Y affords, particularly our big city Ys. I’ve had to break a rule here (definitely lip-synched) in service to a higher cause. What’s particularly great about this video is that the band perfectly symbolizes the Y and its mission, flaunting the racial and occupational (not to mention other forms of) diversity of those the Y serves. This song, as everyone knows, has become a standard at ballparks everywhere, certainly generating more enthusiasm than Take Me Out to the Ballgame or God Bless America (can’t someone stop that hideous post 9/11 practice?).

Anyway, one final tribute to the Norwich Y, before it becomes just a distant memory.


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Setting the terms of the debate

Friday, May 15, 2009

One of my pet peeves is the fact that even people who favor abortion rights have allowed the anti-abortion crowd to call themselves “pro-life”. Those who favor abortion rights, rather than just insisting on the term “anti-abortion” have simply opted for calling themselves pro-choice. In my own humble opinion, this has meant that the anti-abortion crowd (which happens to be distinctly anti-life on issues like the death penalty, war generally, and torture) has been allowed to claim the rhetorical high ground. After all, how many people are willing to consider themselves “anti-life”. This widely accepted nomenclature allows pollsters to frame questions like this:

With respect to the abortion issue, do you consider yourself to be pro-choice or pro-life?

Assuming a representative sample, what percentage of the respondents comes down as “pro-life” out of sheer ignorance. I consider myself pro-life, though I would know well enough what they are getting at in this question. This is not an isolated case. I wrote a couple of years ago about an exit poll question to which I was asked to respond that implied that conservatives had a lock on moral values.

The above poll question yielded a 51% anti-abortion response rate, while a somewhat more neutrally worded question:

Do you think abortion should be legal under any circumstances, legal only under certain circumstances, or illegal under all circumstances.

yielded a response rate of 76% who feel that abortion should be legal under any or certain circumstances, with the extremes (legal “under any” and “illegal under all”) polling about even.

The right is usually wrong on the issues, but they have read their Orwell, and are quite adept at distorting language to suit their ends. From pro-life, to ethnic cleansing to enhanced interrogation techniques, etc., they know how to turn a phrase, and too many otherwise reasonable people adopt their phraseology.


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Ramblings on torture

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Others have written about the fact that Lindsay Graham has his facts wrong about the efficacy of torture, relying as he has on since recanted claims by a person who did not even witness the torture.

In the same exchange with the man who actually interrogated Abu Zubaydah-the guy who got valuable information without torture- Graham asserted that torture must be effective because it’s worked for 500 years. Actually, of course it has “worked” for thousands of years, in the sense that it has elicited false confessions since the dawn of time, or at least the dawn of “civilization”. Did you ever think that a U.S. Senator would be justifying U.S. policy by implicitly citing the Spanish Inquisition? No one could have expected that. Parenthetically, by Graham’s logic, bleeding and blistering must be effective medical procedures.

Graham routinely makes much of the fact that he is a former JAG lawyer, and as a lawyer he should know that you are not supposed to make assertions without evidence. But let’s concede that torture works, if we define “working” as eliciting responses to questions. Usually those responses are the answers the interrogator wants to hear, with the truth content being entirely irrelevant. In the case of our torture, it appears that the whole point was to get just that sort of bogus information. All Cheney wanted was for one of these guys to tell him that Sadaam and Osama were in cahoots. It speaks volumes that they were obviously going to use that information to push that meme, knowing the unreliability of the source. Torture for propaganda, pure and simple.

But isn’t it about time this talk about the efficacy of torture ended? This justification is bottomed on the idea of American exceptionalism, that somehow it is okay when we do it-that we and only we are capable of making these fine moral distinctions. The law against torture presupposes that it may “work” on some occasions. Nonetheless, there are no exceptions in the law for Jack Bauer, or for anyone else.

But let’s go a step further. We’ve heard a lot about the ticking time bomb scenario-the scenario that never happens. You can come up with all kinds of scenarios that pose moral quandaries. The right insists that there may be situations in which morally dubious actions may be justified, even if those actions are illegal. (Odd how a group of people who otherwise deal in absolutes, see. e.g., abortion, stem cell, etc., get all relativistic when the subject is torture) In that case, a morally informed perpetrator should be more than willing to let his or her actions be judged by a fully informed jury of his or her peers.

There was a time when military men of honor demanded courts martial when their actions were questioned. Cheney has half stepped forward. He has insisted that he has done nothing wrong. Indeed, he has insisted that what he did was the only morally correct thing to do. But he hasn’t gone the distance. He should be demanding a court martial or its equivalent. He should be telling the absolute truth about what he did, instead of dealing in half truths and obfuscations. If he feels he can justify his criminal behavior, a courtroom is the place to do it, so long as all the evidence is available to the jury.


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Part of the plan

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Via Firedoglake, this quote from Lindsey Graham:

Now. I don’t know what Nancy Pelosi knew and when she knew it. And I really don’t think she’s a criminal if she was told about waterboarding and did nothing. But I think it is important to understand that members of Congress, allegedly, were briefed by … about these interrogation techniques. And again, it goes back to the idea of what was the Administration trying to do. If you’re trying to commit a crime, it seems to me that’d be the last thing you’d want to do. If you had in your mind and your heart that you’re going to disregard the law, and you’re going to come up with interrogation techniques that you know to be illegal, you would not go around telling people on the other side of the aisle about it.

The blogger (emptywheel) at Firedoglake argues that in fact the Democrats were not being told about the program. I think it was more nuanced than that. Remember, this crime was very well thought out. At every step of the way they took steps to shield themselves both from exposure and from criminal liability. This was part of that plan of action. I think Nancy Pelosi is basically telling the truth, that the subject was alluded to in such a way that alarm bells were not set off in the minds of the cowed Congresspeople, who, recall, were constantly told they could not reveal anything they were told. If the proverbial waste matter ever threatened to hit the fan, the Bushies would be in a position to intimidate those same Congresspersons by threatening to expose their complicity, which they could easily prove by producing memos of the meetings that only they were allowed to keep. Remember, at the time this was happening, the Republicans were operating under the delusion that they had at least a generation of hegemony ahead of them. They weren’t worried about the executive branch investigating them; all they needed was cover; both from their lawyers and from a compliant Congress. What better way to assure that Congress remained supine than by compromising powerful members of Congress? So, in my view, it was precisely because they were committing a crime that the Bush folks broached these subjects with these people. What better way to keep them silent than to ensnare them in your crime?


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Re-branding

Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Stephen Colbert on Republican rebranding:

Speaking of rebranding, not content with making a mess of their own brand, the Republicans are about to pass a resolution demanding that the Democrats re-brand themselves, by changing their name to the “Democrat Socialist” party. (The just can’t get enough of dropping the “ic” on the end of the adjective. That’s what focus groups can do for you.) They have now reduced themselves to a party that can do nothing but call the other guy names. They’re even having trouble finding names that resonate. The only thing calling Obama a socialist has done is make socialism more popular. The Republicans are so yesterday that they’re even using yesterday’s bogeymen.


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Lobbyists dollars at work

Tuesday, May 12, 2009

I have to pass this along because I don’t think I’ve ever seen the sink of corruption that is Washington so blatantly acknowledged. Via Firedoglake, this is language that a Washington bribery lobbyist firm uses to promote its services:

The C2 Group, recognizing the increasing reliance and need for campaign funds, has stepped into this fundraising void to assist party leaders and specific candidates. Unlike many firms, the partners of the C2 Group, working closely with their clients, host and co-host dozens of fundraising events each campaign cycle raising hundreds of thousands of dollars for select candidates and Members of Congress. Our high profile in this area has secured critical recognition from party leaders and Members of Congress as a “go to” firm that responds on behalf of those Members of Congress that are critical to our clients.

Like a bikini, this doesn’t leave much for the imagination. The thrust of the piece at Firedoglake is that this firm has a very close relationship with the so-called Blue Dog Democrats, a group of politicians who give dogs a very bad name. But the problem obviously goes beyond that group, as grasping as some of them seem to be. There’s something fundamentally broken about a system in which bribery need be so thinly disguised.

We’ve all heard the old saying that “money talks”. It’s both figuratively and literally true. This legalized bribery is hard to stop because the Supreme Court has too often equated the right to speak with the right to spend. Publicly funded campaigns are the only solution, but the corruption is so ingrained that there’s no chance that will ever happen


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