…and the new civility.
Category Archives: Media Criticism
Two Nazis
The differences between communism and fascism are pretty much transparent to the user, and yet while no one would be allowed to be a Nazi on campus, its perfectly acceptable, and even applauded, to be a Marxist.
An Ever-Green Headline
“Paul Krugman is wrong and I am right.”
Our Leaders Are Found Wanting
The world’s leaders have been on trial these last few months. In Europe, a long running currency crisis has tested the commitment of Europeans to the social ideals they so often speak of, and to the community of nations they have worked to build since the 1940s. TEKEL: weighed in the balance and found wanting.
In China they have been on trial as the accumulating evidence suggests that corruption, incompetence and malfeasance damaged the country’s vaunted high speed rail project and led to the deaths of dozens of passengers. TEKEL.
In Japan they have been on trial since the tsunami last spring. Would Japan’s bureaucracy tell the truth to the public? After a lost generation of stagnation would Japan’s government come up with an effective plan to reconstruct the north and rebuild the country’s economy? TEKEL.
And in the United States we have a stagnant economy, a mounting debt and no real idea of the way forward. Would Washington come up with a constructive, future-oriented program to move the economy forward and start the adjustments necessary to prepare us to live within our means – and to grow our means so it wouldn’t be hard? TEKEL again.
Europe, China, Japan, the United States: the leaders of the world’s four largest economies are nowhere near passing the tests that history has set them. In all four places the instincts of the politicians are the same: to dissemble, to delay, to disguise and to deny.
The problem is that we want them to lie to us, and want to see our hopes in them, even when there is nothing behind the curtain. It’s a failure of the political class, but they in turn are the result of a failure of the electorate. Perhaps the last elections was the beginning of a turn around. We’ll see next year.
Bam’s Glam
…is gone. Thoughts on the loss of the president’s glamour, from the glamour expert:
What happened? In 2008, after all, not just political pundits and regular folks were expecting big things of Obama. So were certified leadership gurus. Warren Bennis of the University of Southern California and Andy Zelleke of Harvard praised Obama for possessing “that magical quality known as charisma.”
This charisma, they predicted, would give Obama “the transformational capacity to lift the malaise that is paralyzing so many Americans today” because “a charismatic leader could break through the prevailing orthodoxy that the nation is permanently divided into red and blue states … and build a broader sense of community, with a compelling new vision.”
There was only one problem. Obama wasn’t charismatic. He was glamorous — powerfully, persuasively, seductively so. His glamour worked as well on Bennis and Zelleke as it did on voters.
What’s the difference? Charisma moves the audience to share a leader’s vision. Glamour, on the other hand, inspires the audience to project its own desires onto the leader (or movie star or tropical resort or new car): to see in the glamorous object a symbol of escape and transformation that makes the ideal feel attainable. The meaning of glamour, in other words, lies entirely in the audience’s mind.
That was certainly true of Obama as a candidate. He attracted supporters who not only disagreed with his stated positions but, what is much rarer, believed that he did, too. On issues such as same-sex marriage and free trade, the supporters projected their own views onto him and assumed he was just saying what other, less discerning voters wanted to hear.
Even well-informed observers couldn’t decide whether Obama was a full-blown leftist or a market-oriented centrist. “Barack has become a kind of human Rorschach test,” his friend Cassandra Butts told Rolling Stone early in the campaign. “People see in him what they want to see.”
It was pretty obvious to me what he was from the get go. His faux pas with Joe the Plumber was a big tell.
[Update a while later]
Isn’t it time we grew up?
I want to underscore the fact that it is not just Barack Obama who is living in la-la land. It’s the whole apparat. The suits in Washington have ingested and then regurgitated the neo-Keynesian socialist pabulum that mesmerized elite opinion some time in the 1960s and has never let go.
But we are letting go. By “we” I mean the people who these fools and scoundrels in Washington have misled. They couldn’t help it. They don’t know any better. How cruel it is going to be when the mentally-challenged Joe Biden is exposed as the Grecian formula empty shell that he is. And Barack Obama . . . It was a good show while it lasted. If you closed your eyes and said “spread the wealth” he might have seemed, for a moment, like a serious politician. Really, as everyone sees now, he is a Gatsby-like figure who smiles and smiles but is imploding before our eyes.
On a summer-stock stage, it might have been an illuminating melodrama. Alas, we threw caution to the winds and elected someone who resented this country, was suspicious of wealth, and whose reflexive commitment to left-wing nostrums would gravely damage the most productive economy the world has ever seen. Tens or hundreds of thousands of people will suffer because of our naïveté and Barack Obama’s malevolent stupidity.
It is deeply ironic that so many in the media have referred to the president as “the adult in the room.”
Rich Man, Poor Man
The latest (and renewed) Afterburner from Bill Whittle.
Do As I Say
Not as I do — “Spare us the sermons, Mr. President“:
Obama’s partisan rhetoric has always been rough. He called his political adversaries on taxes and the debt “hostage takers” who engaged in “hand-to-hand combat,” and needed to be relegated to the proverbial back seat. Obama even suggested that AIG executives were metaphorical terrorists: “They’ve got a bomb strapped to them and they’ve got their hand on the trigger.”
In an appeal to voters, Obama urged that they not act calmly, but get angry: “I don’t want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry!” The polarizing talk was the logical follow-up to his campaign hype of 2008, when he ridiculed the “clingers” of Pennsylvania, called on his supporters to confront his opponents and “get in their face,” and at one point even boasted, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun.” His jokes about Nancy Reagan and the Special Olympics were needlessly tasteless and crass.
Obama’s inflammatory language and tough metaphors are not all that unusual in the American political tradition. But what is odd is that a habitual participant in brass-knuckles political combat should call for the sort of civility that he himself did not and will not abide by.
Civility is for the little people. You know, the bitter clingers.
I was never that enamored with him, but he really becomes more unlikeable by the day. I think that fifteen months from now, people are going to decide they don’t want another four years.
Does CO2 Cause Warming?
…or does warming cause CO2?
Darn that pesky “correlation is not causation” thingie.
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems sort of related — does iron-rich dust cause ice ages?
The thinking goes that, during warm periods, much of the Southern Ocean is an oceanic desert because it lacks the iron crucial for plankton growth. That changes at the start of ice ages, when a wobble in the planet’s orbit causes an initial cooling that dries the continents, generates dust storms – particularly in central Asia – and sends dust onto the surface of the Southern Ocean.
The plankton that then bloom take the carbon they need from the water, causing the oceans to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to compensate. This cools the atmosphere further, creating yet more dust-producing regions, and the cycle continues, sinking Earth into an ice age.
When the planetary wobbles, known as Milankovitch cycles, eventually choke off the cooling, the feedback goes into reverse: continents warm, dust storms subside, the Southern Ocean is starved of iron, and CO2 levels in the atmosphere rise again.
Emphasis mine.
Count Me In
Rasmussen says that almost 70% of adults think that scientists have been falsifying data in climate change research. A bit of good news amidst the coming economic apocalypse.
Homecoming
Just a few months after that December 2001 raid, The New York Times mentioned Maye, Jones and Prentiss in a front-page story about how the drug trade was wreaking havoc on the poor and rural south. That article, in contrast with my own reporting, shows how drastically a journalist’s own perspective can alter a story’s narrative. Certainly there’s no question that two families were devastated as the result of a drug raid gone wrong. But when I first came upon Maye’s story, it immediately struck me as an example of collateral damage from the drug war, not of the drug trade. One family lost a young, likable son and brother forever; another family had a young, likable son, brother and father taken from them for a decade. And the pile of bodies resulting from the policy of sending cops barreling into private homes in the middle of the night to stop people from getting high has only grown since the night Cory Maye shot Ron Jones.
I found Maye’s story while researching a paper about the overuse of SWAT teams and paramilitary search tactics. And so where the Times saw another cop killed by a drug dealer, I wondered why a guy who had no criminal record and no real drugs to speak of in his home would knowingly take on a team of raiding police officers, kill one of them, then surrender with bullets still remaining in his gun. It seemed much more like a series of mistakes resulting in a tragedy — a tragedy compounded by Maye’s subsequent conviction and death sentence.
The evil and societal damage of the drug war vastly exceeds that of the drug sellers (let alone users) and drug trade, all the more because it is well intentioned.