The 9/11 world is back with full force as Barack Obama makes the case for a judicious approach to terrorism, Dick Cheney argues that only bare knuckles can keep us safe and New York police stage a perp walk of petty criminals scammed into believing they could bomb synagogues and shoot down Air National Guard planes.
It's one of those wake-me-when-it's-over days as the overloaded mind wants only to watch an old movie on TV or hide under the covers, but the dueling speeches and the terrorist bust are part of the way we live now. There is no escape.
For someone of advanced age, there are powerful echoes of the 1950s in all this--another era of anxiety about threats to "our way of life" from evil forces and politicians eager to exploit them with an easy sell of fear.
Dick Cheney is no Joe McCarthy, but here he is attacking the Obama Administration for closing Guantanamo with a desire "to bring some of these hardened terrorists into the United States" and praising Congressional exploitation of fears that "the terrorists might soon be relocating into their states," as if they were going to be walking the streets rather than being held in maximum-security prisons.
But Cheney's retroactive paean to torture, which has raised his approval ratings a few points from abysmal to awful, is less relevant than the President's attempt today to reconcile national ideals with what has to be done "to keep the American people safe."
Obama reviewed what he called the Guantanamo "mess--a misguided experiment that has left in its wake a flood of legal challenges that my administration is forced to deal with on a constant, almost daily basis, and it consumes the time of government officials whose time should be spent on better protecting our country."
Along with a dissection of the legal and moral issues involved, the President, who prefers to focus on the future, nevertheless acknowledged the demagoguery of "fear-mongering" surrounding the issue.
"Listening to the recent debate," he said, "I've heard words that, frankly, are calculated to scare people rather than educate them; words that have more to do with politics than protecting our country."
As this rhetorical duel was going on, New York Police were illustrating the complexities of the post-9/11 world by arresting four would-be jihadists for an "aspirational" plot (translation: they had the desire to bomb and kill but apparently neither the brains nor means until authorities provided them with harmless "explosives" and fake surface-to-air missiles).
The sadness in all this what used to be "The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight" comedy is that it now has to be treated with dead seriousness since Osama bin Laden took away our innocence almost eight years ago.
Showing posts with label McCarthyism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label McCarthyism. Show all posts
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Monday, October 29, 2007
Listening to the People
The man who gave a voice to unheard Americans is speaking up today against illegal listening in on them.
In a New York Times Op Ed, 95-year-old Studs Terkel recounts the history of illegal wiretapping during the Red Scare day of the 1920s, McCarthyism in the 1950s and now the Bush Administration's dismantling of the protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment.
A Pulitzer Prize winner, Terkel became famous for taping and airing conversations that, in his words, "celebrated the lives of the uncelebrated among us, for lending voice to the face in the crowd."
In a new memoir, the once-blacklisted liberal compares himself jokingly to Richard Nixon, saying both "could be aptly described as neo-Cartesians: I tape, therefore I am," or in his own case, "I tape, therefore they are." Terkel's oral histories brought so-called ordinary Americans into history.
Now he is enraged at an executive branch that listens to them too much against their will and at a Congress "moving in a haphazard fashion to provide a 'get out of jail free card' to the telephone companies that violated the rights of their subscribers.
"Some in Congress argue that this law-breaking is forgivable because it was done to help the government in a time of crisis. But it’s impossible for Congress to know the motivations of these companies or to know how the government will use the private information it received from them."
The man who taught us how to listen to America deserves to be heard on a subject he knows well.
In a New York Times Op Ed, 95-year-old Studs Terkel recounts the history of illegal wiretapping during the Red Scare day of the 1920s, McCarthyism in the 1950s and now the Bush Administration's dismantling of the protections afforded by the Fourth Amendment.
A Pulitzer Prize winner, Terkel became famous for taping and airing conversations that, in his words, "celebrated the lives of the uncelebrated among us, for lending voice to the face in the crowd."
In a new memoir, the once-blacklisted liberal compares himself jokingly to Richard Nixon, saying both "could be aptly described as neo-Cartesians: I tape, therefore I am," or in his own case, "I tape, therefore they are." Terkel's oral histories brought so-called ordinary Americans into history.
Now he is enraged at an executive branch that listens to them too much against their will and at a Congress "moving in a haphazard fashion to provide a 'get out of jail free card' to the telephone companies that violated the rights of their subscribers.
"Some in Congress argue that this law-breaking is forgivable because it was done to help the government in a time of crisis. But it’s impossible for Congress to know the motivations of these companies or to know how the government will use the private information it received from them."
The man who taught us how to listen to America deserves to be heard on a subject he knows well.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
The Case for Clobbering Candidates
Talk about “media bias” has a pornographic appeal for politicians and bloggers. Revealing MSM hypocrisy is as irresistible as finding Sen. Vitter on the D.C. Madam’s phone records.
Today’s “dirty little secret”: “America's political reporters don't like John Edwards, and have tried to destroy him,” according to Jamison Foser of Media Matters, quoting a piece from Atlantic Online by Marc Ambinder, one of the founders of ABC's The Note and a contributing editor to the National Journal's Hotline newsletter.
(Attribution nosebleed is a side effect of polemical reporting--anyone who agrees or quarrels with this post will be quoting me quoting Foser quoting Ambinder and will then be quoted until it all sounds like “A Partridge in a Pear Tree.”)
The main evidence for Edwards-bashing is the harping on his $400 haircut and working for a hedge fund while warring on poverty in his campaign, an assertion that leads to comparisons by another blogger to “the media's War Against Gore” that “gave us President Bush. It is why we are in Iraq today.”
Time out: Jokes about John Edwards’ haircut are unlikely to lead to another catastrophic war, but if the children will leave the room, we can talk graphically about “media bias.”
That journalists are human is not news and that they may, consciously or not, let their feelings color their reporting is indisputable. But from a lifetime of working, teaching and writing about that enterprise, another perspective:
It may very well be that reporters don’t like John Edwards. They may be put off by his over-acted sincerity, as I am (follow the links to my confession). But there is nothing new in letting that kind of reaction seep into their stories. In fact--and down comes the last veil in this stripping--that may have value for the public the media serves.
In the McCarthy era, we learned objectivity is not enough. If reporters who covered the Senator had done more probing about his methods and motives, it wouldn’t have taken Edward R. Murrow’s “biased” documentary to bring him down.
That kind of drama is rare--only Woodward and Bernstein’s Nixon takedown is comparable. But in subtler ways, the process goes on all the time.
Mitt Romney’s father comes to mind. In 1968, George Romney was the front runner for the Republican nomination. Reporters covering his campaign with a straight face were frustrated by not being able to communicate that the amiable car salesman-Governor was, to put it kindly, a lightweight. When he gaffed about being “brainwashed” in Vietnam, it unleashed headlines and commentary that ended his campaign.
His son and heir is following in that tradition. After his repeated fudging of issues, his defecating dog story and his pathetic swipe at Obama over sex education, yesterday this Governor Romney is pictured smiling over a sign reading “No to Obama, Osama and Chelsea’s Moma.”
Are the media trying to tell us something? I hope so. A little more “bias” in showing Bush the boob in 2000 might have spared the country a lot of grief.
If this sounds arrogant, sorry. Journalists spend their lives trying to be fair and honest--they don’t start out looking for money and power. If they sometimes slip and slide along the way, cut them some slack.
It’s easy (and attention-getting) to carp from the grandstands while they try to do their work of letting us know what the politicians and power brokers are really doing.
John Edwards and Mitt Romney are grown men who made a lot of money and now want the most powerful job in the world. All this attention goes with the process of trying to get it.
Today’s “dirty little secret”: “America's political reporters don't like John Edwards, and have tried to destroy him,” according to Jamison Foser of Media Matters, quoting a piece from Atlantic Online by Marc Ambinder, one of the founders of ABC's The Note and a contributing editor to the National Journal's Hotline newsletter.
(Attribution nosebleed is a side effect of polemical reporting--anyone who agrees or quarrels with this post will be quoting me quoting Foser quoting Ambinder and will then be quoted until it all sounds like “A Partridge in a Pear Tree.”)
The main evidence for Edwards-bashing is the harping on his $400 haircut and working for a hedge fund while warring on poverty in his campaign, an assertion that leads to comparisons by another blogger to “the media's War Against Gore” that “gave us President Bush. It is why we are in Iraq today.”
Time out: Jokes about John Edwards’ haircut are unlikely to lead to another catastrophic war, but if the children will leave the room, we can talk graphically about “media bias.”
That journalists are human is not news and that they may, consciously or not, let their feelings color their reporting is indisputable. But from a lifetime of working, teaching and writing about that enterprise, another perspective:
It may very well be that reporters don’t like John Edwards. They may be put off by his over-acted sincerity, as I am (follow the links to my confession). But there is nothing new in letting that kind of reaction seep into their stories. In fact--and down comes the last veil in this stripping--that may have value for the public the media serves.
In the McCarthy era, we learned objectivity is not enough. If reporters who covered the Senator had done more probing about his methods and motives, it wouldn’t have taken Edward R. Murrow’s “biased” documentary to bring him down.
That kind of drama is rare--only Woodward and Bernstein’s Nixon takedown is comparable. But in subtler ways, the process goes on all the time.
Mitt Romney’s father comes to mind. In 1968, George Romney was the front runner for the Republican nomination. Reporters covering his campaign with a straight face were frustrated by not being able to communicate that the amiable car salesman-Governor was, to put it kindly, a lightweight. When he gaffed about being “brainwashed” in Vietnam, it unleashed headlines and commentary that ended his campaign.
His son and heir is following in that tradition. After his repeated fudging of issues, his defecating dog story and his pathetic swipe at Obama over sex education, yesterday this Governor Romney is pictured smiling over a sign reading “No to Obama, Osama and Chelsea’s Moma.”
Are the media trying to tell us something? I hope so. A little more “bias” in showing Bush the boob in 2000 might have spared the country a lot of grief.
If this sounds arrogant, sorry. Journalists spend their lives trying to be fair and honest--they don’t start out looking for money and power. If they sometimes slip and slide along the way, cut them some slack.
It’s easy (and attention-getting) to carp from the grandstands while they try to do their work of letting us know what the politicians and power brokers are really doing.
John Edwards and Mitt Romney are grown men who made a lot of money and now want the most powerful job in the world. All this attention goes with the process of trying to get it.
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