Saturday, April 22, 2006

Autocrat-in-Chief: Bush Shuffles Titanic's Chairs, Maintains Course

Daytona Beach News-Journal/April 22, 2006

The economy, the White House tells us month after month, is performing admirably, growing for 17 straight quarters and adding 5.1 million jobs since August 2003. Consumer spending is still bingeing ahead despite jolt-a-gallon gas prices, and corporate profits in 2005 increased 16.4 percent, even better than the 12.6 percent increase recorded in 2004. Numbers like that should make a presidency glow.The Bush presidency does, but with that pale blue radioactive glow of the Cherenkov effect: Approach it at your own risk. As of today, just 36 percent of Americans approve of President Bush's performance, according to the conservative Gallup poll; 59 percent disapprove. The last time Bush saw better than 50 percent approval, the Red Sox were winning the World Series. Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon fared slightly in their worst days, but that's like using Mississippi's or Arkansas' poverty figures to make one's own state's pitiful figures look brighter. Asked about the state of the country in general, just 27 percent say they're satisfied; 71 percent are dissatisfied. The worst reading in that category was 84 percent dissatisfaction -- in July 1979, when inflation was in double-digits and the current Iranian president was cutting his fanatics' teeth on the cuffs of the 53 American hostages held in Tehran for 444 days. The Bush presidency, hostage only to its own incompetence, is in trouble. Read the full editorial ...

Friday, April 21, 2006

To Shill or Be Shrill: Pussy-Footing Around Bush Impeachment

That Bob Woodward continues to flack for the Bush administration from his knees is surprising only in light of Woodward’s distant past as the co-author of the Watergate story. But Watergate was his one-hit wonder. From then on he’s been the Sinclair Lewis of investigative journalism, or the Harlequin of Washington—re-applying the same formula and the same narrative methods on different themes: the Supreme Court, the CIA, John Belushi, the Pentagon. It’s no surprise that his best work (All the President’s Men and The Brethren) had the spine of co-authors. And even Nixon, it turns out, was a fish in a barrel. The Washington press corps just hadn’t dared look past the surface of the barrel until Woodward, Carl Bernstein and Mark Felt showed the way. These days almost every Washington reporter who’s aspired to be a Woodward has, on heaps of ironies, become Woodward—minus the all-access pass to he capital’s power boudoirs: Every reporter is a panderer, meek, pliant, as easy to deceive and manipulate as a mutt drooling for a bone. “Sources” know it. In a city flooded with reporters to whom competition is the virtue and truth-seeking a post-modern snicker, Washington’s Rovian mechanic is such that leakers and manipulators are the circus masters. Read the rest...

Wednesday, April 19, 2006

Iraq's Civil War: Semantics as Warheads

Last Thursday marked the 31 st anniversary of the beginning of Lebanon’s civil war, in 1975. April 9 th marked the third anniversary of the “fall” of Baghdad . For obvious reasons, neither date was commemorated. The Lebanese have yet to reconcile, even though hostilities there ended in 1990. Iraq has yet to know a day’s peace. But is Iraq in a state of civil war? Lebanon’s experience provides some answers. Read the full column...

Dispatches: Burka Pervs

Not a happy day for veiled womanhood. Saudi Arabia, our “friend and ally,” in the words of our own oily monarch, has been on a kick to employ some 200,000 women. “We want to make sure that women job-seekers get opportunities,” a minister of one trope or another told Arab News a week ago. A few days later the Saudi monarchy was all hot and publicly unbothered (robes come in handy in puritan societies) by the prospect of schoolgirls getting the physical education they’ve so far been denied. Further glimmers of progress from our pseudo-Taliban “friend and ally”? Not quite. Read the rest...

Tuesday, April 18, 2006

The Pulitzers: Degradation in Black and Print

It’s journalism’s annual paradox: the worst news is prized for its best renditions. The past year was equally bleak and fertile in scandals and repulsions, with this unhappy distinction: the United States, or rather Bush’s Estates of spying, rendition, repression, corruption and incompetence, stood as a city on the edge of a precipice for all the world to rue and mourn. The bleak and the shameful were as American as General Motors (and as encouraging as GM’s prospects). The year’s Pulitzers reflect the Great Degradation. (and its great foot-dragging: when will the prize committee wake up to the most original source of good writing in America today—in the world, rather—namely, blog prose?) Read the full story...

Monday, April 17, 2006

Human MIRV's: 40,000 Suicide Bombers

Not reassuring: While the Iranian leadership renews its promise that Israel's elimination is a matter of time, while the Bush administration continues its propaganda war over Iran's impending nukes, and while oil hits $70 a barrel again over the collective anxiety, the UK Times reports over the weekend that "Iran has 40,000 trained suicide bombers ready to strike at US and British targets if the nation's nuclear sites are attacked by the West. In Iran, the main force of suicide bombers, named the Special Unit of Martyr Seekers in the Revolutionary Guards, was first seen last month when members marched in a military parade, dressed in olive-green uniforms with explosive packs around their waists and detonators held high. Hassan Abbasi, head of the Centre for Doctrinal Strategic Studies in the Revolutionary Guards, said about 29 Western targets had been identified."We are ready to attack American and British sensitive points if they attack Iran's nuclear facilities," he said in a speech, a recording of which has been heard by London's Sunday Times newspaper. He said some were in Iraq, "quite close" to the Iranian border." See the full story...

Washington Putz: Left-Wing Profiling

It’s not quite clear what effect the Washington Post’s David Finkel was going for in his profile of My Left Wing’s Maryscott O’Connor other than some facile and condescending irony at the expense of someone, and something—namely, the blogosphere—he does not understand. Fair enough: it’s a universe out there. It takes a while to familiarize yourself with the thing, let alone skirt understanding. What’s clearer is that Finkel didn’t bother putting in any semi-curious reporter’s time into his story. It reeks of the quickie, of the shallow, of the smart-alecky by-line for its own sake, rather than for the sake of a piece worthy of a newspaper doing its best to transcend the provincial.

Three quick examples.

First, the amateurish reliance on blog comments. It’s one thing when a Salon blogger makes the mistake of judging an entire cross-section of the blogosphere by quoting from blog comments. As often as not Salon can slink to college-paper standards, in perspective if not in style. It’s quite another when the Washington Post falls in the same trap. So Finkel sat at his computer for a little while, skimmed a few scummy bits, cribbed them pour épater ses lecteurs bourgeois, and got himself seven or eight inches’ worth of padding for his article. Cheap trick. Read the rest...