Letters to the Editor
notre druide
Published Letters: 115 Editor's Choice: 5
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The Third Rail
[Read the article: Criminals of the world, unite and take over]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]the awkward question of global governance
"Awkward" doesn't half describe it. The slightest suggestion of "world government" brings screams or terror and outrage from the American right, comparable to the kinds of howls you can get by hinting that there might be a case for a more equal distribution of wealth. These are among the third rails of American public discourse (another being the role of current Israeli policy, and American policy towards Israel, in fermenting global unrest). Touch them, and anything resembling reasoned analysis flies out the window.
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Prevarication or Confabulation?
[Read the article: Mukasey dishonesty update]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There is simply no avoiding the fact, as Casey and Whitehouse make clear, that Mukasey simply lied in his speech in order to exploit the 9/11 attacks for political gain.
I wouldn't be quite so categorical. That the statement wasn't true doesn't make it a deliberate lie. It is possible that Mukasey shares the affliction of the Great Confabulator, who -- as Joe Conason reminds us elsewhere on Salon today -- had a "tendency to fabricate heroic stories that conflated movie roles and real acts of courage." Maybe Mukasey is similarly vague about the boundary between fact and imagination, and his belief that FISA somehow caused 9/11 leads him to inwardly rebuild the facts into something better serving that narrative.
I wouldn't mention this if I thought it were merely an abstract possibility. But I have a problem with the hypothesis of a deliberate lie, which is that it seems to impute to Mukasey a level of sheer stupidity I find hard to credit. Why would he go out of his way to make a provably false assertion of historical fact for no ponderable gain? By doing so, he foreseeably ran the risk of exactly what has occurred -- a serious tarnishing of his carefully crafted image, embarrassment in at least some quarters of the nation, and potential difficulties on Capitol Hill. I realize that he might have gotten away with it; indeed he apparently would have done so, but for the noble work of the progressive blogosphere, with Glenn at the fore. But he lives in a world where everything he says is probably being recorded and can be readily checked against an ever-growing base of readily available historical data. He would have to be mind-numbingly stupid not to realize this, or realizing it, to take the kind of chance he took.
Admittedly, this administration has exhibited a level of stupidity that continues to shock me even when I think I'm past shocking. And I don't mean gaffes, I mean hardcore pig-ignorance and wooden-headedness. So maybe Mukasey was dumb enough to think it was worth lying to make a point to a bunch of San Francisco businessmen. Part of me is just not willing to believe it.
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Not Any More
[Read the article: Media's refusal to address the NYT's "military analyst" story continues]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And those classic information-suppressing tactics are all being invoked by news organizations -- which claim to be devoted to disclosing, not concealing, scandals, corruption and facts about how our political institutions function.
Journalists surely claimed this once, and with justification. But do they really make such claims any more? And if they do, can we believe them?
I think the major media see and describe themselves, more and more openly, as vendors of a product. Leaving Fox aside as a special case, there's a pretty strong case to be made that the networks hired all these Pentagon-approved generals not because the networks supported Bush's policy as such, or even because they felt obliged to fall in line behind him, right or wrong though he might be. I think they figured, probably correctly, that the big "story" at the time was the gee-whiz just-like-a-movie rat-a-tat-tat drama of Shock and Awe, etc. They brought on cheerleaders and kept critics away because they wanted to keep the story clear and the audience comfortable about watching it. And of course, they all egged one another on, trying to see who could get the most vivid footage on air the fastest.
In short, they acted exactly the way anyone would act if his sole objective was to attract the maximum number of viewers. And I don't think that's a coincidence. The mass media are all about selling a story to us so they can sell our eyes to their sponsors. That's pretty much where it begins and ends, and protestations about their journalistic ethics, from either side of the aisle, seem more and more fantastic to me. I don't think they have any. I don't think they've had any since, I don't know, Walter Cronkite's retirement. They're just yellow journalists, and there's nothing yellower than a big ol' shootin' war.
I wish there something deeper and more nefarious involved, because at least then it wouldn't seem so banal. And of course it does have its even uglier sides, such as the delusional self-aggrandizement and pack mentality that seem to go along with commodification. The more news becomes a mere product, the deeper the denial in which newspersons must invest. But the bottom line is they'll go with whatever sells the best. And nothing sells better than war.
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@ Ché Pasa
[Read the article: Media's refusal to address the NYT's "military analyst" story continues]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Is FOX a special case? Or is it the Model?
I reserved the case of Fox because I think it's possible that the network really has an ideological agenda beyond the purely mercenary one. I don't know; I haven't studied the subject. It just seems possible to me that the degree of patent bias exhibited on Fox would still embarrass a lot of big-time newspeople. I mean, the folks at Fox aren't even pretending to do journalism, are they?
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@ Paul in KY
[Read the article: Interview with Aaron Brown on NYT "military analyst" story]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Maybe a Transcript?
It's right here (also linked at my sig).
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/4/22/pentagons_pundits_a_look_at_the