On the Contrary

If you want to be frustrated, watch the Sunday talk shows as we continue to miss the point and discuss the trivia.  The newspapers weren’t much better.  So for better or worse here are my Sunday thoughts:

• Howard Kurtz of CNN’s Reliable Sources was working hard again at missing the point.  The first thing they discussed was whether the White House criticism of Fox as no longer a news channel was effective, instead of a real examination of how Fox manipulates the news.  Howard criticizes the lack of fact checking and he doesn’t do his own.  See The Fox Propaganda Network.
• On the same program they discussed how the bogus story about the Chamber of Commerce reversing their stand on global warming and climate protection tricked the mainstream media.  I listened to a journalist whine about the pressure to get the news out fast.  Well, sweetheart, it isn’t news if it’s false.  They have yet to examine their role in this problem.  Their job is not to megaphone what other’s say, but to provide us with relevant stories that are fact checked.  The operative words here are relevant and fact checked.
• The New York Times reported that small businesses are facing up to 20% increases in their health insurance costs with no real reason why.  Meanwhile that moron Mitch McConnell says he won’t vote for the health care reform bill because it would raise rates.  Let’s see, rates are going out of sight without reform, and he won’t support reform because it will raise the rates.  Hmmm.  Sadly the public option the glacial Congress is considering will not allow private business to be part of it.  This is such a no-brainer yet we just refuse to face a single payer system.  (Small Business Faces Sharp Rise in Health Care)
• The Huffington Post (Leaderless) reported that our gutless President has decided to go with a Public Option that would only be available with a trigger mechanism.  Talk about failure to lead.  Meanwhile others talk about a public option with a “level playing field”.  What that means is raise the cost of the Public Option so the insurance industries are still able to rake off large profits.  When oh when will we figure out that providing health care is not appropriate to the profit motive, just like police and fire protection?
• Meet the Press today did highlight one important fact and that is the Administration’s focus on executive pay in the banks is just eyewash and is not real reform.  Until they structurally reform the system so that nobody is too big to fail, the government will always be the lender of last resort.  See Regulating Banks.
• In a really scary story, the New York Times (Prosecutors Turn Table on Student Journalists) reported that in Illinois, local prosecutors have subpoenaed the grades, grading criteria, class syllabus, expense reports and e-mail messages of the journalism students from Northwestern’s Medill Innocence Project, which has helped lead to the release of 11 inmates.  You can read the article, but what we have here is shoot the messenger, not examine the message.  To me it is clear they are trying to stifle this kind of embarrassment by trying to sully the program instead of dealing with the factual findings.  If you don’t see the connection to this and the State’s Secret Act and the problems with it, then call yourself a Republican.
• Finally on a positive note, it was nice to see Frank Rich echo my sentiments about the media and the balloon incident (The Fox Propaganda Network), while Maureen Dowd echoed my sentiment that the Catholic Church is trying to recruit the small minded from the Anglican Church (Bashing Organized Religion).  Every now and then I actually hit on something.

Another week where the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, our President fails to lead, and the media and the nation continuing their glide to oblivion shunning critical thought.  All in all not many cheery thoughts.

I watched some of the news shows on Sunday as I returned from my consulting trip this last Sunday afternoon, and I was amazed to see how the Press is once again focused on the wrong thing.  This is the play for pay scandal in Illinois.  One reporter on CNN basically said that Obama should get the facts out as quick as possible to prevent being tarnished in this scandal.  I listened to Rick Sanchez on Monday repeat President-Elect Obama’s statement that he had reviewed the interactions between his staff and Blagojevich and found no evidence of “inappropriate discussions”.  Mr. Sanchez then questioned what inappropriate meant.  One paper said, “The “pay-to-play” scandal threatens to dog Mr. Obama through the opening months of his administration and undermine his campaign message of change.”

It will only dog him if the press doesn’t stop trying to create what isn’t there and there is no evidence anything is there.  I hate to break it to them, but nobody cares about this other than the press hoping for some titillation and ratings raising disclosures, and Republicans who are still focused on winning in 2008.  The rest of us want him to succeed, we believe Patrick Fitzgerald when he said there was no evidence that Barrack was involved.  Blagojevich himself, in taped conversations cited by prosecutors, suggested that Obama wouldn’t be helpful to him. Even if the governor were to appoint a candidate favored by the Obama team, Blagojevich said, “They’re not willing to give me anything except appreciation.”  It is a soap opera and the press is once again running amuck.  Let the Attorney do his job.  In the meantime, the rest of us are really worried about keeping ours.  Could we focus on our problems?

Here are some things that were in the news this week that are much more important about our way forward and help us learn from our mistakes:

• First there was the report, “Hard Lessons:  The Iraq Reconstruction Experience”  which was leaked to the press.  It quoted Colin Powell as saying the Department of Defense was making up numbers on Iraqi security forces to show progress, basic services are now back to the level before the war, but no better, and the finding that as the US started down this road to the largest rebuilding program since the Marshall Plan in Europe with no real plan, policies, or technical capacity to perform it.  Now does this surprise anybody in the mental world of Republicans who think any planning smacks of big government?  We have entered a world where we worship the military and we forget the lessons of Viet Nam:  They all lie.
• We all have heard about the shoe throw in Baghdad (YouTube).  If only our own press had the courage to stand up to the King like a poor Iraqi.  Actually what is sad is that most of the press has once again missed a golden opportunity to explore just exactly what was accomplished and at what cost.  According to the gentleman who threw the shoe, not much at way too high a price.
• In the New York Times it was reported in a report by issued jointly by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the Democratic chairman of the panel, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, the top Republican, “that top Bush administration officials, including Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, bore major responsibility for the abuses committed by American troops in interrogations at Abu Ghraib in Iraq; Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; and other military detention centers.”  No fooling.  Yet many of our good Republican friends continue to blame it on a few bad apples and live in total denial.  This was a failure of the moral leadership of George Bush and Republicans who could not see that they became the enemy.
• But probably the best summary was Sunday from Frank Rich in the New York Times where he said about Governor Blagojevich, “Blagojevich’s alleged crimes pale next to the larger scandals of Washington and Wall Street. Yet those who promoted and condoned the twin national catastrophes of reckless war in Iraq and reckless gambling in our markets have largely escaped the accountability that now seems to await the Chicago punk nabbed by the United States attorney, Patrick Fitzgerald.”  His point is that Blagojevich is a small town crook and fool compared to where those “Giants of Wall Street”, and the arrogant Neocons have taken us.

What is the thread through all of this?  It is that we check our brains at the door over the last eight years and now there is a piper to pay.  Small town values are nice, but if they don’t stand up to reason, they need to be tossed.  Economic theories that promise us free rides (lower taxes and the world will be saved) need to be jettisoned also.  Government only does bad when the men and women who lead them do bad things and they need to be held accountable.  We can’t just push this behind us as though it did not happen.  We need to face what we have become before we can begin to become what we can.  Probably our saving grace is that through all of this there were some who were raising red flags.  What we need to find out is why didn’t we listen to them.

With the invasion of Georgia by the Russians we have heard the media anoint John McMean as the candidate with foreign relations experience.  It comes as an almost self-evident truth that he has the experience to deal with these events.  This in my mind is like saying, let’s stay with George Bush.  After all he is experienced.  The trouble is his experience is the last thing we want to leverage.  The other “self-evident” truth is that this crisis helps John McMean politically.  I would challenge the first, but not the second.  Sadly when people are afraid they slip into old authoritarian ways of thinking.  Let me explain.

George Lakoff in his “The Political Mind” points out that most of us think in two modes: Empathy and cooperation, and fear and obedience to authority.  In the first case it has to do with understanding and taking responsibility for those around us, and in the second case, it has to do with following rules that give order and moral authority.  Which mode we think in to reason out the problems depends on the framing of the issue and the attendant emotions attached to it.  The Russian invasion of Georgia activates the latter here because it raises the specter of the old confrontation with Russian and we need a tough disciplined approach.  Think of it another way:  Be afraid, go with something you know.  Let me find a nice father figure who acts tough and the world will be set right again.  This is exactly how George Bush won a second term.  So from this point of view the current situation with the Russians frames the whole understanding of the problem in John McMean’s favor.  His bellicose and presumptive policy statements were feel good moments for striking back, but they are toothless and in the end counterproductive.  They also demonstrated that he thinks in old ways and respond without clearly thinking through what is possible.  In other words if by experience we mean applying old approaches to new situations, I truly fear an “experienced old hand”.

There were two articles which pointed out John McMean’s thinking on foreign policy.  The first was an article in the New York Times called “The Long Run Response to 9/11 Offers Outline of McCain Doctrine”.  As pointed out in this article he was leading the pack that we should attack other countries besides Afghanistan, including Iraq to extend our sphere of influence.  Within several months of 9/11 he was quoted on MSNBC as saying, “I don’t think if you got bin Laden tomorrow that the threat has disappeared.”  Quoting from the article:

“Within a month he made clear his priority. ‘Very obviously Iraq is the first country,’ he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: ‘Next up, Baghdad!’”

The point here is that McMean was making the case for hitting Iraq long before the White House was.  Some of his former supporters have indicated how reactionary he is without deep thought or the ability to listen to dissenting views.  Remember that he was a supporter of Ahmad Chalabi, pushed the untrue statements about Iraq’s WMD and connections with al-Qaeda, was a big supporter of Cheney and Rumsfeld before and during the invasion, and never called for Rumsfeld’s resignation as it is now claimed.

In the second article, an Op-Ed piece by Frank Rich, “The Candidate We Still Don’t Know”  Frank points out that what we know about John McMean is his “skin-deep, out of date McCain image.”  Then he lists what we should know:
➢    He didn’t start criticizing the war until almost 3 months after “Mission Accomplished” when the growing insurgency was no longer deniable
➢    The day Hurricane Katrina hit McMean spent the day with President Moron at a birthday bash, didn’t visit the area for six months and only started criticizing the response when he started to run for president
➢    McMean, who once stood up to “agents of intolerance” now is embracing them and was at fund raiser with Ralph Reed who one of Abramoff’s associates once described as just like us, only worse.
➢    He has surrounded himself with advisors who are part of the lobbying problem from the oil industry, Enron (Phil Graham), Fannie Mae, to Blackwater
➢    He frequently forgets key elements of policies or simply gets them wrong.  He can’t seem to remember if the Iranians are Shiites or Sunnis and that might make a big difference
➢    He forgets what he said the day before or contradicts himself
➢    And who can forget his memorable walk around a market in Baghdad claiming it was safe.  Then the next day many of the people he was talking with while he was being protected by half the American Army died in a bomb blast

Meanwhile the press continues to give him pass on most of this behavior and does not let the public see who they are really considering electing.  Ask yourself why many Republicans are joining Republicans for Obama?  The answer is they fear his reactive behavior and his inability to listen to other people and make reasoned judgments.

So here we are thinking this guy brings us the experience in these trouble times.  The only experience he brings us is one bad decision after another that he has not been held accountable for.  He is a nice guy (actually he isn’t) and the press gives him a pass.  My thought is if this is the kind of experience we are looking for, we are in real trouble.