Let me preface this by saying that I like Keith Olbermann, that I think he often does great work, with Monday’s special comment, “There is no ‘Ground Zero Mosque’” standing as a shining example.
But while I was watching the show last night, he said something that made a few synapses in my brain burst. He brought on Eugene Robinson (whom I also like) to discuss the mosque issue and he opened with this question:
“What have we not been talking about during these 24-hour news cycles that have been commandeered by the so-called mosque controversy?” he asks.
Robinson responds by listing a few of the more important issues that the media should be talking about, including the economy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or the upcoming mid-term elections.
I felt like shouting, “Well, why don’t you talk about these things? You have a television show! You can talk about whatever you want. You decided to devote the first fifteen minutes of your program to talk about something that you don’t think is worth talking about, and then complain about how this is all the media is talking about!”
In all fairness, Keith Olbermann doesn’t determine the news cycle any more than I do. He just reports and comments on whatever happens to be in the news cycle, and he does do a great job of keeping certain stories like the BP oil catastrophe in the headlines long after the rest of the media has lost interest.
But in the words of Eric Cantor, “Come on.” Seriously—you are obviously aware that this whole controversy is just a strategic political move on the part of the right-wing to divide the country, get the left and right to yell at each other, and distract people from the important issues. So why be a part of it? Why not decide that you’re not going to fall into that trap—that you’ve said your piece on the controversy and now you’re going to focus on more important matters like what the government is or is not doing to help the economy and what we are or are not doing to bring the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to a responsible end.
Oh, and did you know that Pakistan is quickly turning into the lost city of Atlantis? Yes, millions of Muslims are suffering while America is too stuck in this anti-Muslim tizzy to notice or care.
Even I am somewhat guilty of my own charge here, as I could be writing about Pakistan but instead I’m bitching about the media bitching about itself. My only excuse is that I’m a blogger that nobody reads, so it’s not my responsibility to determine the news cycle. Still…just…come on.
If you happen to live in the U.S. and you happen to own a TV and you happen to find yourself available to watch it at 6 p.m. Eastern this week, I’d highly recommend turning on MSNBC, as the host of The Young Turks, Cenk Uygur, whom I’ve mentioned on this blog countless times, will be guest-hosting The Ed Show all week.
The appeal of The Young Turks isn’t just that Cenk is entertaining, likable, a master communicator, and right about almost everything, but that he doesn’t buy into any of the Washington establishment conventional wisdom bullshit that you find almost everywhere else on cable news. He fights for progressive causes and goes after anyone standing in the way regardless of which party they’re from.
Here’s a sample from yesterday’s show, in which he demolishes the myth that Social Security is in trouble and goes after a democrat for not committing to vote against any bill that will make cuts to the program:
Ironically, more people watch The Young Turks every day on YouTube than any cable news show, but the establishment doesn’t pay any attention because they think opinions don’t count if they’re online. When Cenk takes his message to the TV airwaves, the establishment pays attention (one can even speculate that Robert Gibbs’ “professional left” comments were sparked by Cenk’s unrestrained criticism of the Obama White House when he hosted the 3:00 hour the week before last). Watch the show, boost the ratings, and send Washington the message that this is the kind of message that resonates.
I have reason to believe that some readers of my blog are conservatives who watch Fox News and are fans of Bill O’Reilly. Since they know I’m a fan of Rachel Maddow, the fact that Bill O’Reilly has recently taken to criticizing her might make them feel that they can more easily dismiss what I have to say, seeing as how she’s just a “far-left loon” who engages in “paranoid, dishonest rants” based on no evidence.
Now while I do think Bill O’Reilly genuinely believes what he says and that he has been somewhat unfairly demonized on the left, he just refuses to see the truth here. The accusation that Rachel has been making against Fox News and which I’ve been making on my blog is that Fox News deliberately hypes up stories—often based on misleading evidence—in order to push a false narrative that black people are trying to redistribute money from white people to minorities.
Rather than insist that black people really are trying to take money from white people, O’Reilly simply claims this is ridiculous and Fox News would never report negatively on black Americans.
O’Reilly viewers: if you want to be intellectually honest, you have to watch Rachel Maddow’s rebuttal:
This is how media works. Conservatives spend decades accusing the media of rampant liberal bias, so the mainstream media moves to the right in order to deflect those accusations. Now that liberals are finally fighting back and calling out conservative media for its bias, they’re not sure what to do with themselves.
If Bill O’Reilly is as intellectually honest as he claims to be, he probably recognizes somewhere deep inside himself that Maddow is right. Hopefully, he’ll catch himself before he pushes another “the blacks are coming for your money” story.
I’ve had some trouble figuring out how to approach this story. With over 90,000 previously classified documents from the war in Afghanistan having been posted on WikiLeaks, an online state-independent organization dedicated to fighting power through truth, most of the media coverage thus far has been either about WikiLeaks itself or about how there is nothing contained in these documents that we didn’t already know. I’ll touch briefly on what I see as the three main elements to the story—what it says about the wars, how the media has covered it, and the larger implications of the existence of an organization like WikiLeaks in terms of humanity’s future.
The War
I confess I haven’t read all 90,000 documents, so I can’t offer too much analysis of what they actually contain. What I do know from reading articles about the documents is that they contain details that basically confirm everything critics of the war have been saying for years—that it looks to be going very badly, that Pakistan’s interests aren’t exactly aligned with ours and they may be working against us in some cases, and that far too many innocent civilians have been killed by the U.S. military either through recklessness, carelessness, or honest errors of judgment.
Those of us who have been critical of the war from the very beginning can point to this and say it supports the arguments we’ve been making. Most importantly, these documents should highlight the fact that what we’re doing in Afghanistan (and Iraq as well) is not ‘warfare’ in the sense that most Americans still think of the term—two opposing armies meeting on the battlefield with the intention of doing as much damage to the other side as possible—but is more of an occupation. When you’re looking for historical precedents, this is far more like the British occupation of [insert name of third-world country here] than it is like either of the two World Wars.
Ironically, we may have Rush Limbaugh to thank for helping us drive this point home. His completely outrageous misunderstanding of the nature of this war, deliberate or otherwise, perfectly exemplifies the problem with the war hawks’ thinking:
“The documents cover some known aspects of the troubled nine-year conflict. US Special Operations Forces have targeted militants without trial.” Afghans have been killed by accident. Why, that is unheard of. That is unheard of, in any war, anywhere in the history of the world, that civilians have been killed by accident?
That’s unheard of! Do you realize what this says about us? How guilty, how rotten-to-the-core can this country be? Innocent Afghan citizens killed by accident! In the old days it used to be on purpose (i.e., Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden). In the old days the definition of winning a war was killing people and breaking things. In the old days, there was no such thing as a “surgical strike.” In the old days, you purposely killed innocent civilians. That’s what war was all about. That’s how you won it! But now all of a sudden these big WikiLeaks documents say that Afghans have been killed by accident. Whoa, the incompetence of the US military!
By completely missing the point, Rush has actually confirmed the point we’re making. This is not WWII, in which victory can be secured by carpet-bombing cities and devastating the enemy to the point where his will to fight is broken—in this kind of conflict ‘winning’ involves actually helping the civilians, providing them security and infrastructure in order to win their hearts and minds so that they would rather support their government and fight the Taliban instead of joining the Taliban to fight their government. If people like Rush Limbaugh—who seem to relish the idea of indiscriminate destruction—want that kind of war, they need to rethink their support of this one.
If we decided to do a Dresden-style carpet-bombing of Kabul, it would be like kicking the ball through our own goal-posts a thousand times over. Every last able-bodied Afghan civilian would take up arms against us, and the rest of the Muslim world would join them. The war would be over. The victory would belong to the Taliban, to Al Qaeda, and to every other militant or insurgent group that we’re supposedly waging ‘war’ against.
The fact is, ‘war’ as we know it seems to be coming to an end. This piece by Andrew Bacevich lays out this case perfectly, and it’s the biggest lesson that we could potentially learn from these leaked documents if our nation were to actually have a serious discussion about it.
The Media
Unfortunately we’re not going to have a serious discussion about the nature of war in the 21st century any time soon, thanks to the nature of the American mainstream media in the 21st century. The reaction to this leak has been every bit as pitiful as one would expect, and the media’s extreme deference to the established power-structure has seldom been more apparent. It’s as if every corporation within the military-industrial complex got together to feed their talking points not just to the White House but directly to the media organizations themselves.
“This is not news” was the headline from nearly every front. “Nothing to see here. No big revelations. This is only stuff we already know.” Jason Linkins and Ben Craw at the Huffington Post did a superb job of mashing together the reaction to the leaks from the White House and the media, which are barely distinguishable:
To be [extremely] fair to the White House and the media, this is a legitimate point. What has been revealed by the documents are merely the details behind the broader facts that we already knew if we’d been paying any attention.
But the best points are made right at the end of the clip, as Jon Stewart says “I’m not reacting to the newness of it, I’m reacting to the fucked-uppedness of it,” and Dennis Kucinich wonders why—if we already knew all of this—we haven’t been debating it for the last six years. This may not be new, but it’s fucked up stuff that calls for debate and frankly should have been debated every step of the way.
But these leaks don’t fit the proper time-table for the White House and the media. This is supposed to be election season, when everyone is talking about the economy and the impact it will have on the upcoming mid-terms. Afghanistan is not supposed to be among the election issues this year. The debate is supposed to happen next year when we approach the July 2011 deadline that Obama said would be when we begin our withdrawal.
But if things really are going as badly as the documents suggest, there’s no excuse not to have the debate right frickin now. This has been the single deadliest month of combat in Afghanistan since the war began. If we know the war is un-winnable, why let our soldiers continue to die for a lost cause? The sad truth is, our brave men and women overseas aren’t dying for national security or even for Afghan liberation anymore—they are dying for politics.
The Future
This is why organizations like WikiLeaks have such tremendous potential for the future of humanity on this planet. I’ve written extensively about the current precipice on which we stand, from which we can either sit idly by as civilization collapses and the human species faces extinction, or wake up and do what needs to be done to tear down the existing power structures and put something in their place that will allow for a peaceful, sustainable existence worldwide.
One of the biggest tools of the powerful is secrecy. The less the masses know about what the power-elites are doing, the less chance there is that we’ll be able to stop them. Certainly, as long as no one is held accountable, they won’t be afraid to make decisions that benefit the few at the expense of the many.
Case-in-point—we’re just now learning about what was said in behind-closed-door meetings regarding the escalation of the Vietnam War 40 years ago. Because the transcripts of these meetings were classified and everyone in the room knew they would remain classified for the next four decades, they didn’t have to worry about making mistakes or doing the right thing. They needed only do what they wanted to do or what it was in their best short-term political or financial interests to do—by the time anyone found out they’d either be dead or too old to bother prosecuting. Currently, the White House can make any decisions it wants with impunity because they don’t have to worry about being held accountable for another forty years.
WikiLeaks has the potential to change that. Had the person who leaked these documents online gone to an actual mainstream news organization, it’s likely the editors would have sat on the story. By putting it on WikiLeaks, they guaranteed that the story would get out there. WikiLeaks itself can’t be prosecuted for leaking the documents because it doesn’t exist within the jurisdiction of a particular country.
As Janine R. Wedel and Linda Keenan write, WikiLeaks can serve as a counter-weapon to the “Shadow Elite” who direct the course of world events. The people who benefit from the existing power structures, who profit from war and by sucking money from the middle class, can only get away with it as long as nobody is paying attention. If somebody at the highest echelons of power suddenly develops a conscience, WikiLeaks will be waiting.
Yes, there is the potential for some innocents to be harmed if leaks are made irresponsibly, but it’s a small price to pay for a much greater good.
I keep saying that the internet is the best chance we have to come together as a species and really change the way the world works from the ground up. So far we haven’t even come close to realizing that potential, but sites like WikiLeaks could go a long way towards bringing us to that goal. It can be one of the most powerful tools we have to fight back against the powerful, and I hope its influence continues to grow.
At the very least, it can help make up for what the mainstream media is missing, and force us to examine facts that would not have otherwise been reported. The facts about the war in Afghanistan almost all lead to the conclusion that our nation is doomed unless it starts withdrawing, so the more facts that come to light the more pressure there will be to do so. Neither the White House nor the leadership of either political party wants to deal with that pressure right now, but that’s too bad. The lives of our soldiers, the security of the Afghan people, the health of our economy, and the long-term interests of the human race depend on keeping that pressure as high as possible for as long as it takes.
Due to some unexpected social activity (Tuesday night in Celle) I’m a little behind on my news-intake schedule. I don’t want to write about Wikileaks and the Afghanistan documents until I’ve gotten a bit more analysis, so today I’ll just make the quickest comment I’ve made so far and save the heavier stuff for the weekend.
A small opportunity now exists for Obama to push back against the perception that his administration has Foxnewsophobia. Helen Thomas was a member of the White House Press Corps (all those journalists who sit in on the daily briefing and press conferences) for decades and had a prime seat in the front row until controversial comments about Palestine forced her to step down. Now that seat is empty.
The two biggest contenders for who to take that seat are a reporter from National Public Radio or a “reporter” from Fox “News”. Given all the backlash from last week’s Shirley Sherrod debacle, you’d think it would be a no-brainer to give the seat to NPR.
My guess is they give it to Fox News and continue with their bullshit strategy of trying to appear as centrist and moderate as possible by constantly lending credibility to the network that spends nearly all of its time attacking them. After all, if they give it to NPR instead of Fox News, what would Glenn Beck say?
Luckily, you can make your voice heard. Signing this petition will basically say to the White House: “If you give the seat to Fox News, you suck.”
I don’t know about you, but I don’t remember voting for Glenn Beck for president. I don’t think many Obama supporters, upon casting their vote in 2008, were hoping that once president he would bend over backwards to do everything he possibly could to appease Fox News. I could be wrong—maybe Obama voters were really hoping for a president who would ignore progressives and listen only to the likes of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity—but somehow I find that hard to believe.
Excuse me for ranting but I’ve got the need. Cenk Uygur’s epic rant over the Shirley Sherrod debacle on Wednesday’s Young Turks got me fired up. Between that and a dozen other columns and blog entries I’ve read these last couple of days, it’s clear that this story is far more significant than I initially realized.
At first my anger was directed almost entirely at Fox News. I couldn’t believe how so many people can still see them as an actual news organization when they clearly have a political agenda and will rush to broadcast any story that fits their pre-existing narrative with a deliberate disregard for what the actual facts are. Their #1 agenda is to do political harm to Obama. When presented with a heavily-edited video that seemed to show an employee of Obama’s department of agriculture boasting about how she discriminated against a white farmer, they didn’t waste a single moment checking to see whether it was what it appeared to be.
They could have found the entire unedited video but didn’t. They could have tried to contact Sherrod for her side of the story but didn’t. Most egregiously, they didn’t even try to contact the white farmers who were supposedly the victims of this discrimination, as if they had they would have learned—as the rest of the country learned when actual journalists stepped onto the scene—that Sherrod actually helped them save their farm, and that the story she’d been telling in that video was about how she learned that it was wrong to discriminate based on color.
But the Obama White House fired Shirley Sherrod before any journalism was done—before any basic questions were even asked. Sherrod told reporters that she actually had to pull over to the side of the road and submit her resignation via text message because she had to be gone by the time Glenn Beck went on the air.
Brillliant move on the White House’s part. Obviously they learned their lesson from the Van Jones fiasco, when they let Fox News hammer them for days before finally getting rid of him. No doubt they were patting themselves on the back for swift, decisive action when they got rid of Sherrod within a single news cycle.
Surely they had fixed everything. Fox News, upon seeing how quickly the administration caved in to them, would undoubtedly give him all the credit in the world and begin reporting how they’d been wrong about him all along—that he’s really not a reverse-racist and that he should be applauded for getting rid of Sherrod.
Of course not. Their number one agenda, remember, is to harm Obama politically. So when he did exactly what they wanted him to do, they hammered him for that! How could he fire her so quickly before checking all the facts? I can’t believe he just threw that poor woman under the bus like that. I mean, we’re Fox News so it’s not our job to check the facts but surely the White House has a responsibility to get the whole story before taking action.
And on that, they’re absolutely right. It’s not Fox News’s responsibility to report the truth—they are a propaganda network, not a news organization—but the White House does have a responsibility to make sure that the actions they take are based on hard facts and solid evidence.
But apparently that’s not how they operate. It would seem that they’ve got their eyes on Fox News at all times and stand ever poised to deflate whatever criticism that network might be leveling against them. They say Van Jones is a communist? Get rid of him. They say ACORN is full of criminals? Cut off its funding. Just please don’t hate us, right-wingers. We swear we’ll do whatever you say, Glenn Beck. Just stop saying mean things about us. What is it you want us to do? Just tell us who to fire and they’ll be out of here by 5 p.m.
Last year, in the midst of the health care debacle, I asked whether Obama was a pussy or a sell-out. I keep going back and forth on that question, but this drove me firmly back to the pussy side of the equation. Running the country based on Fox News talking points? How weak and pathetic can you possibly be?
What the hell do you think you’re actually accomplishing with this strategy? You think that if you keep caving in to Fox News, one day conservatives are suddenly going to change their minds about you? That if you keep compromising on all your progressive ideals and delivering watered-down, industry-friendly legislation, that right-wingers are going to start saying, “You know, maybe we were wrong about him. He might not be a radical socialist after all.”
News for you: That. Will. Never. Fucking. Happen.
So deal with it. Give up this absurd act of chasing your own tail all day long, turn off the goddamn Fox News channel, and run the country the way you would run it if there were no such thing as the Glenn Beck program.
Or better yet, listen to both sides. Progressives have criticisms too, and theirs are actually based in reality. Instead of only taking Bill O’Reilly’s advice, try listening to Rachel Maddow for once. Her advice is actually designed to help you.
The Shirley Sherrod thing, in itself, is just a small story. But taken in the larger context of the way Barack Obama has been conducting his administration, it’s one of the most important political events of his presidency. It’s one of those Wizard of Oz moments when the curtain is drawn back and you see who’s really running the show.
The strategy is clear: Don’t waste any time worrying about what liberals and progressives are saying because liberals and progressives don’t matter. They will never vote for republicans, so you gain nothing by doing anything more than the bare minimum to appease them. You win elections by appealing to swing-voters, to the moderate center, to the people who want to see both parties working together in a bipartisan fashion to accomplish things in Washington. When conservatives criticize you, you should immediately respond to that criticism in order to show how much of a centrist you are and how much you’re willing to listen to the other side.
The strategy is also dead wrong. I don’t know who this imaginary moderate centrist voter is, but I’ve never met him. Is there a single American voter who wasn’t sure about Obama until he dropped the public option, watered-down financial reform, called for more offshore oil drilling, fired Van Jones and de-funded ACORN? Seriously, I want to know how many people will go to the polls and vote for democrats this Fall because Obama proved to them that he’s not ‘too liberal’.
It’s complete and utter bullshit, and it’s so frustrating that Obama is so wrapped up inside his Washington bubble that he can’t even see it. He thinks that Bush’s approval ratings were so low because he spent too much time appeasing his base and never compromising with the other side. Wrong—Bush’s approval ratings were so low because everything he did as president was a total disaster. But at least he got shit done.
Why don’t you try that strategy for awhile, Obama? Why don’t you take a “Bring ‘em on” approach to Fox News and let them say whatever the hell they want to say while you deliver on the Change you promised? The Washington punditocracy will no doubt say you’ve gone off the deep-end, that you’re drifting perilously to the left and that this center-right country won’t stand for it. But you know what? You might find that in the Fall, liberals and progressives will actually come out and vote instead of staying home. You might even find that these all-important centrist-moderates you’re so concerned about actually come out and vote for democrats as well because…golly gee…it turns out they didn’t actually care about bipartisan posturing as much as they cared about government actually getting shit done.
Wake up, Obama. You’ve handed control of the country over to Fox News and you wonder why you’re heading for a failed presidency. In 2012 you should just let voters write in Glenn Beck’s name instead of yours so he can run the country directly without a middle-man.
So much has been written about the Shirley Sherrod saga that it’s almost not worth it for me to put my two cents in, but here goes.
For those of you who don’t watch cable news, here’s the basic run-down of the story. Conservative activist Andrew Breitbart posted what he claimed was video evidence of reverse-racism in the Obama administration. It was from a speech given by Shirley Sherrod, who until yesterday worked in Obama’s department of agriculture, in which she talked about not wanting to help white farmers keep their property because she didn’t think any white people deserved her help.
At the drop of a hat, Fox News picked up this story and ran with it, hyperventilating all day long about this vile racism and what it says about Obama’s back-door reparations agenda—the completely bogus narrative the network sells to its viewers. Other networks followed suit and before you knew there was so much pressure that Shirley Sherrod was fired by the Obama administration before she even knew what hit her.
Later in the day, the entire video came out. It turns out that what was previously released had not only been taken out of context, but edited so heavily that the entire message of her story had been completely reversed. Sherrod was talking about how her first inclination upon seeing this white farmer was that she didn’t owe him any help, but upon delving deeper into his situation she realized that he was just as much of victim of the broken system as black people—that it’s not about black vs. white but rich vs. poor—and that from that day on she no longer judged people purely based on race. The whole point of the story was completely anti-racist—the exact opposite of what Brietbart and Fox News were saying it was.
Not only that, but upon contacting the supposed “victims” of her racism—the farmer and his wife—the news media learned that they are eternally grateful to Shirley Sherrod and consider her a friend for life.
This is not just a harmless mistake on the part of a news organization. This was a deliberate, calculated effort to add to the perception that Obama and his administration are racist and that they’re out to financially harm white people. There was a definite agenda behind this reporting, and that agenda was not to report the “fair and balanced” truth.
There used to be something called journalism in this country. It used to be that a news organization didn’t run with the story until they looked into it and made sure they knew the facts. When presented with an edited video clip, there are a number of steps that an actual journalist would take before jumping to conclusions and ranting about it on the air. For one thing, you could look for the entire video—it was available. You could contact Shirley Sherrod herself—she was available. You could contact the farmers who were the supposed victims of the racism—they were available too.
But instead of doing any of this, they leapt on the air and hammered home the “Obama is a racist” point as much as possible before real journalists could do their job and they’d have to quietly issue their corrections—but not until the damage was done. Shirley Sherrod, as of the time of this writing, is still without a job.
You can not consider Fox News a “news” organization. It just isn’t. It’s not a real news organization. Yes, other networks are blameworthy for picking up on the story before all the facts had come to light, but Fox News deliberately ran with it because it was exactly the kind of story they needed. Fox News is not news at all. It’s corporate-conservative propaganda. It’s a tool for the power-elites to keep the people under control by misdirecting their anger away from those truly responsible for their suffering—multi-national corporations—and towards fake boogeymen like a racist president hell-bent on taking money from white people and redistributing to black people. No such president exists—it’s a fictional character dreamt up in corporate think-tanks—but if all you watch is Fox News you’d have no way of knowing that. You’d really think some angry black politician is gunning for you.
ACORN, Van Jones, and now Shirley Sherrod have fallen victim to this despicable game. The Obama administration ought to be ashamed for just buckling at every turn and throwing these people and organizations under the Fox News bus before even checking to see what the actual facts are.
But it’s supposed to be the job of news organizations to check facts. They could have easily done it, but Fox News didn’t check the facts, and for that reason no serious, honest, objective person could possibly consider it a real news organization.
UPDATE: Living in Europe means I’m usually about 24 hours behind the news cycle. Since writing this I’ve heard some new insight, particularly from the Rachel Maddow show, that present this incident in a broader context than conservative perceptions of the Obama administration. This is primarily about the effectiveness of the southern strategy—the idea of the angry black man coming for the white man’s privilege—which has been used by politicians to win elections long before the world was controlled by multi-nationals. However, corporations no doubt recognize the benefits of this idea in terms of its divisiveness and power of misdirection, and they are consciously keeping it alive by using Fox News as their tool.
The other night I was watching an episode of a TV show (Breaking Bad—outstanding show) and there was a scene in which the president of a small company had a birthday party and one of his employees sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” in the voice of Marilyn Monroe. I thought about how every single American above the age of 13 must get that reference—how it’s such a famous bit of American culture—and then I thought about how we might be past the time when events of such huge cultural significance can take place.
During the Marilyn Monroe era, there really seemed to be one over-arching “American Culture”. There were only three TV channels. Nearly everyone watched “I Love Lucy” and got their news from Walter Cronkite. When Neil Armstrong took those first steps on the moon, the entire country was watching.
These days there are thousands of channels as well as the internet, and the only thing that most of America gathers together to watch is the Super Bowl, and even then it’s barely half the country. I suppose you could say the final episodes of “American Idol” are today’s moments of cultural significance, but it’s nowhere near the way it used to be.
Instead of one, mostly homogenous “American Culture” and a few scattered sub-cultures, today we seem completely divided into a slew of non-overlapping sub-cultures. Whether it’s hippies, gangstas, tech geeks, tween girls, college frat-guys, liberal bloggers, or what have you—there’s enough entertainment and news targeting each specific group that each can remain relatively isolated from one another. A moment of cultural significance to one group—say, basketball fans watching LeBron James announce the next team he’ll play for, or tween girls watching the latest escapade of Miley Cyrus—the other groups couldn’t care less. Each culture seems to operate in its own individual sphere, more or less separate from the rest.
Has the drastic change in the media landscape completely undermined the concept of “American Culture”? Are we now just a nation of many cultures with almost nothing to do with one another, or is there anything that still binds us all together?
The question is significant if we’re going to say, as I like to say, that we’re fighting for a better America. Anyone can just look at us and ask, “Better for who?” At best, we can say “the majority of average Americans” but what is an “average American” these days? And considering how polarized we are, is there any majority significantly greater than 50 percent?
At the very least, we should recognize this issue and consider its effect on national discourse. Indeed it threatens the very notion of “national discourse” as it’s really only one segment of the population that pays much attention to matters of national significance in the first place, while everyone else is off in their own little world, remaining within whatever niche within sports or entertainment that most appeals to them.
The only remedy I can suggest is for those of us who do care about political issues to try and draw more people in. News and entertainment have become so intermingled that we lose sight of the fact that beneath all the surface layers of ratings-driven talk-shows, bloviating radio hosts, and gimmicky-blogs, the subject matter actually does matter, and we’d be much better off if everyone from every sub-culture paid attention to it.
Among the many pundits and news organizations that peddle vague and shallow observations as ‘conventional wisdom’, Politico is near the top of the heap. This week they published a piece called “Why Obama loses by winning” which is the epitome of the kind of garbage that Washington insiders consider brilliant analysis.
When Obama came into office, the assumption even among some Democrats was that he was a dazzling politician and communicator who might prove too unseasoned at governance to win substantive achievements.
The reality is the opposite. You can argue over whether Obama’s achievements are good or bad on the merits. But, especially after Thursday’s vote, you can’t argue that Obama is not getting things done.
Um…yes we can. And we are. Obama may be pushing lots of legislation through that address big issues like health care and financial reform, but when you scratch the surface you don’t see much actually getting done. Other than an individual mandate and some extra subsidies for poor people, not much has changed about this country’s health care system. And other than the creation of a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and a one-time-only audit of the Federal Reserve, financial reform hasn’t changed a thing about the way Wall Street operates.
Obama’s strategy is to make it look like he’s achieving all kinds of great, historic accomplishments, and it would seem that the Washington punditry has taken the bait.
But the truly egregious thing about this article is this tired old nugget:
But on the issues voters care most about — the economy, jobs and spending — Obama has shown himself to be a Big Government liberal. This reality is killing him with independent-minded voters — a trend that started one year ago and has gotten much worse of late.
Right, we all know how everyone is so upset that Obama is such a Big Government spendaholic liberal. Never mind that the single biggest factor behind this perception is the economic stimulus plan which prevented the current recession from being much worse than it is. It’s Economics 101 that in a recession, you spend more money to get the economy moving again. It’s how we pulled out of the Great Depression. It’s necessary to spend more if we’re going to pull out of the recession we’re in now. Many economists think Obama should do much more stimulus spending—but thanks to right-wing media spin and total ignorance of basic economic principles, many people think that Obama’s excessive spending is responsible for the recession.
Hence the god-awful title of this piece, “Obama loses by winning.” As in, “Even though Obama was swept into office on a message of change and even though he’s addressing every issue he said he would as a candidate, voters would rather he not get all this legislation passed because it costs too much money.” Apparently, voters would like him a lot more if he didn’t do anything on health care, finance, energy, and so on. What Obama should be doing is spending all of his time working on things like Flag Appreciation initiatives and honoring America’s great baseball players.
America is so fucked if this is the conventional wisdom in Washington. Our country is in serious trouble and the only thing that can prevent a monumental fall-of-Rome level catastrophe is radical, fundamental reform. Obama won’t even go near the level of reform we actually need, but the Washington media elite still insist that he’s going too far. He wants to get out the oars and row very softly against the current, but the media wants him to sit back and let the current take us where it will—which in this case is over a waterfall.
On a less important note, the piece also has some fun things to say about liberal bloggers:
The liberal blogosphere grew in response to Bush. But it is still a movement marked by immaturity and impetuousness — unaccustomed to its own side holding power and the responsibilities and choices that come with that.
Ha HAH!!! Yes, it’s we liberal bloggers who have all the power now! We have so much power we literally don’t know what to do with it. Obama, who is totally on our side and listens to everything we say, is driving his presidency into a ditch because he just keeps taking our immature and impetuous advice! Damn, that’s rich.
Regarding our “immaturity and impetuousness” I suppose it’s of little use to compare us to right-wing bloggers, whom we all know are the pinnacle of sophistication. It’s not like they’re saying things like Obama’s birth certificate is fake and he was actually born in Kenya, that his health care reform bill was a plot to set up death panels to ration care, that he purposefully caused the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill in order to get climate legislation passed, that he’s a secret Muslim who sympathizes with terrorists, or that he’s an angry black radical who is redistributing the wealth to his black friends as back-door reparations for slavery. No, right-wing bloggers would never be so immature.
So many liberals seem shocked and dismayed that Obama is governing as a self-protective politician first and a liberal second, even though that is what he campaigned as. The liberal blogs cheer the fact that Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s scalp has been replaced with that of Gen. David Petraeus, even though both men are equally hawkish on Afghanistan, but barely applauded the passage of health care reform. They treat the firing of a blogger from The Washington Post as an event of historic significance, while largely averting their gaze from the fact that major losses for Democrats in the fall elections would virtually kill hopes for progressive legislation during the next couple of years.
Seriously, have these guys ever actually read a liberal blog? 1- There’s nothing shocking about the fact that Obama cares more about self-preservation than liberal principles—we’re just pissed off that he pretended otherwise. 2- Just because we’re happier with Petraeus than McChrystal doesn’t mean we support the war in Afghanistan. Personally, I only applauded the change because with Petraeus in command it will be politically easier to end the war and bring troops home. 3- Damn right we barely applauded the passage of health care reform. It wasn’t worth applauding. 4- How many people characterized Dave Weigel’s firing from the Washington Post as an event of historic significance? I never mentioned Dave Weigel, but I highly doubt that those who did lost focus on 5- the prospect of major losses for Democrats in the fall, making it even more impossible to get progressive legislation passed.
Regarding this final point, nothing pisses me off more than the argument that progressives are shooting themselves in the foot by being too progressive. Apparently, if we want progressive legislation, what he have to do is let them water-down the legislation until it’s not progressive at all. Only then can it pass, thus securing a political victory for democrats, thus allowing them to win their re-election campaigns and thus return to Washington where they can…what? Are they suddenly going to start passing progressive legislation after the mid-terms?
What these media elites never recognize—either deliberately or out of ignorance—is that America needs big reforms. We tried things the conservative way for the last thirty years and it’s led to economic stagnation, the destruction of America’s reputation abroad, the slow death of the middle class and the catastrophic redistribution of power from sovereign nation-states to multi-national corporations. Progressives aren’t advocating progressive legislation as some kind of culture war battle—most of us spend little or no time at all talking about things like abortion or gay marriage. We’re advocating for progressive legislation because that’s what this country needs, because it’s what the world needs, because it will help everyone, including people who treat the word ‘progressive’ as if it’s worse than ‘nazi’.
We will continue to push our ideology in spite of the political consequences for those in Washington because short-term political interests should never trump long-term national interests. It may take a few election cycles, but hopefully our influence will grow, we’ll sway more independents through the force of our arguments (which have the virtue of being supported by facts and by history). The goal is not to help the Democratic Party, but to make the Democratic Party help us, and thus help everyone. If they have to lose a few elections before they finally get the message, so be it.
This story is small potatoes, but it got me angry enough to want to launch into a quick rant. Chez Pazienza’s rant on the Huffington Post is better, but mine will be shorter.
CNN’s well-respected Middle Eastern affairs editor, Octavia Nasr, was fired last week for something she tweeted. A member of Hezbollah, “Shiite cleric Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah” (with a name like that he must be pure evil) died last Sunday and Nasr tweeted that he was “One of Hezbollah’s giants I respect a lot”. This is poorly-worded to be sure, but that’s the nature of Twitter—you are limited to 140 characters so there’s not much room for attaching caveats and explanations.
After being pounced upon by neoconservatives, Nasr wrote an article explaining that she was referring to the cleric’s liberal views on the treatment of women in Islamic culture, e.g. that honor killings are wrong. But by then it was too late and CNN fired her because she was now tainted as a terrorist-sympathizer.
More infuriating than the story itself was the comments section. The Huffington Post is pretty liberal, but plenty of conversatives go to comment and I couldn’t believe how many people were blasting her for saying anything positive about anyone associated with Hezbollah—they were quite literally accusing her of treason.
This is what’s wrong with so many Americans—they have this overwhelming need to classify everyone as either good or evil, and will tolerate absolutely no nuance. This Muslim cleric, because we was involved with Hezbollah—classified by the US and the EU as a terrorist organization—must be completely evil and anyone who says anything positive about him must be evil too. It doesn’t matter that he was also a champion of women’s rights and that this is what the positive comment was for. Terrorist = Evil and that’s all there is to it.
These ignorant assholes have to realize that there are fucking shades of gray in this world, and that as soon as you demonize a person or group of people as “pure evil” you lose any chance of actually working with or influencing them. This cleric was exactly the kind of Muslim leader those of us in the West need to work with: an open-minded guy who we may disagree with on 95% of the issues, but who is at least willing to stand up to his own religious organization for what he believes is right.
But some think the only way to deal with “these people” is just to kill them, never mind the fact that you’re just making martyrs and new terrorists. CNN had a perfect opportunity to raise consciousness about this kind of thing, and instead they buckled under the weight of conservative pressure and ran scared. They are pathetic.
Just a guy sharing his thoughts and experiences as he wanders his way through life and the world. Here you'll find stories from the life of an American living overseas, politics from a liberal point of view, and philosophical thoughts about man's place in the universe.
