Letters to the Editor
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"Rumsfeld pulled out a pencil . . .
. . . and drew a simple chart." Yes, I'm getting an image of this and it's not pretty. It looks like foreign policy scrawled on cocktail napkins.
You make a solid case for the Broder prop-up, but that was a lot of Broder for the average reader to take in on a Saturday morning. I'm overwhelmed.
I think the paragraph beginning: "Let me disclose my own bias in this matter. I like Karl Rove." really says it all.
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maybe broder just forgot
I think Broderella deserves a break. He's pushing 80, and perhaps he's lost some of his faculties.
His recent columns certainly indicate that he's more than a little out of touch.
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Now I know
why they don't give Lexus accounts to just anybody. Those things are dangerous! While reading your quotes (Full disclosure: My short attention span didn't allow to read them all), I was reminded of Chris Matthews and his reaction to the codpiece moment on the USS Abraham Lincoln.
Maybe Broder just flat-out LIKES Bush on a personal level and is hence unable to separate his personal feelings from those of a responsible journalist.
I see after all that USA Today has finally come out and admitted that contrary to their earlier view, GW is indeed the worst President in history.
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Now, children....
Broder sounds reasonable when he's the only one speaking, much like the preacher at the rescue mission. Listen, or at least look like you're listening, and you eat. Don't listen, or disrupt the sermon, and.... As Mr. Gaffney is wont to say, dissent has consequences.
Broderizing is a much less effective tactic when employed in a crowd of people with pitchforks and torches. He's forgotten his Latin, poor old Mr. Broder. Vox populi, vox dei. What a pleasure to see Glenn refreshing his memory.
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The end of one-way communication and the pundit oral tradition
The internet has completely changed the world of politics and political jounralism is several different ways.
1. The designated opinionmakers do not have the last word any more. Anyone who wants to can go to Digby, Billmon, Firedoglake and get better stuff, and anybody who wants to can talk back.
2. The anonymous editors who put the newspapers together have lost their power to bury stuff on page 16. These men (are there women?) were really more important than the bylined writers because they controlled the flow of news. But now anybody can re-edit the Times and pull stuff to the front page. (That was I.F. Stone's specialty, BTW).
3. No more oral tradition. Oral traditions are malleable. A leader of an oral society says what sounds good at the time, and people believe him. They can forget what he said a year or two ago, or ten years ago, and even if they remember, they have no hard-copy way of proving anything. Pundits and TV and radio people have fattened up on this kind of irresponsibility, but now someone like Glenn can pull up the record in a few seconds and nail someone like Broder.
I might add: ours is a decadent oral tradition. Traditional oral societies had ways of holding people accountable which we haven't had until recently, but even so, they were dependent on individual memory without any hard documentation.
A hefty chunk of US public opinion still is formed by the passive, uncritical reception of the Limbaugh-Fox-Bush line without any fact-checking or accountability, but that chunk is hopefully dwindling.
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It would be hilarious if it wasn't so damaging
And that's all I've got to say about that.
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Underneath the Fog of Civility
A couple of nights ago, I attended a MoveOn showing of The Ground Truth. For those who don't know the film, it consists largely of the narrative of a group of young soldiers returned from Iraq, some with horrible injuries, all with psychological disfigurements which were painful to listen to. For someone like myself, who lived through the Viet Nam era as a young adult, the sense of déjà vu was almost overwhelming.
If daleyrocks is listening, I should also say that there was ample testimony of atrocities committed against Iraqis -- civilian as well as combatants -- and of the reasons for those atrocities, including the systematic and intentional dehumanization of the teenagers who committed them by the institutions which Mr. Broder thinks such wonderful expressions of the national will.
While Mr. Broder was dining on quail with Mr. Rove, these kids were shooting women and children and getting their limbs blown off in Baghdad, in Fallujah and Najaf and Mosul. Now that they're back home, there's no quail for them, no nothing, in fact except the love of their families who can barely comprehend what has happened to them. The most moving testimony of all was from the young wife of a soldier who returned missing a hand and a leg. It consisted mostly of the small details of daily living, what had changed, and ended with a declaration that she would never leave him, that we're in this together.
Is it too much to ask that we keep as much faith with these instruments of the national will as this admirable young woman has? Is it too much to ask that we hold the Roves and Broders of the country accountable for their part in all this misery? After all, no matter how misguided the policies which sent these kids in harm's way, we as a country now owe them more than we can ever repay.
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Records can't talk
I think that record speaks for itself.
No record speaks for itself. Facts do not speak for themselves. These things require interpretation--context--to become meaningful, and at least enough parsing to distill the writer's (GG's) thesis into digestible form. This piece is over 4,000 words long. Over 80% of it is unmodified text-dump from Broder's published work. The intent here is abundantly clear, but the writing is not.
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"leader worship"
It has been a long road to this moment of decision on Iraq, but the inevitability of the destination has been clear….Skeptics may argue that the United States has yet to produce convincing evidence of a link between the Baghdad regime and the al-Qaida terrorists. But the link exists in the mind of the commander in chief and he is prepared to act on that conviction. (Broder March 19, 2003)
But the “inevitability of the destination” was only inevitable because Broder wasn’t doing his job. Can you imagine the difference it would have made if he had had the courage to be skeptical of the evidence Bush was giving us?
What if Broder had asked tough questions about the supposed links between Al Qaida and Saddam instead of questioning the patriotism of those who did?
Sadly, no one in a position of influence (like his) did their job - they failed us. Broder failed us.
In this column, Broder seems to say that if Bush believes the evidence, it doesn’t matter whether that evidence is true or false, his conviction is all that matters. What authoritarian nonsense and mindless “leader worship” this is.
But that sums up exactly what happened. The “Broders of the Beltway” were so busy worshiping the leader that didn’t question whether his “convictions” were based upon fact or fantasy. And we’re paying a heavy price for that leader worship today.