Lemkin

On Complexity

Dave Weigel (via two Tweets):

Anyone else bored with these campaign launch weeks that focus on tiny gaffes? […] You get more heat for flubbing a founder’s name than for saying tax cuts always up revenue.

Jay Rosen replies:

Of course you do. Why? The sweet spot is a mistake that allows the press to prosecute the error without sounding too political.

I think it’s a bit more than that. While I agree that the political calculation enters into it, there’s also a strong bias towards the simplest construction possible. John Wayne != John Wayne Gacy. Haw ha.
This is much easier to write than an explanation of exactly why it is that a certain package of cuts is more likely to impact poor and elderly than another, or to explain, with facts, figures, and charts just why it is extraordinarily likely that revenues will not increase subsequent to a tax cut in these United States using any current/future circumstance you wish to model. You’re just not going to fit that into a tweet, or even a 90 second NPR focus piece. The several sentences that emerge from the four paragraphs you wrote will, inevitably, come off as political shorthand. And the angry letters will pour in. Better just to do he-said, she-said and be done with it. Conservative message discipline in commercial media: achieved.

This is the fundamental GOP advantage. Death tax, death panel, tax and spend, short form birth certificate, taxed enough already! It’s hard to think of any conservative sloganeering in the past 20 years that a) is longer than 140 characters —and— b) actually holds up to intellectual scrutiny. Yet neither of these facts matters. In fact, it’s this emphasis on message simplicity that has ultimately captured the willingly compliant, stenographic impulses of the modern media. Who wants to do a bunch of research, after all? Stephanopoulos knew he was going to be asking about John Quincy Adams. Why not be ready to follow up? He receives a salary that is likely in the millions of dollars per year and has a staff, but (apparently) can’t be bothered to call up Wikipedia? Bob Schieffer, likewise quite well paid, also can’t be bothered to pick one issue on which Bachmann has notably lied and really hold her feet to the fire about it, not allowing a “well, we should really be talking about Obama…” dodge? Instead, we’ll just note the pattern of systematic lying on the website somewheres. Journalism!

This is precisely how George W. Bush ended up with the Oval Office. How’d that work out for everyone? Then why are we as a nation so desperate to repeat the experience?

Enemies List →

A former senior C.I.A. official says that officials in the Bush White House sought damaging personal information on a prominent American critic of the Iraq war in order to discredit him.

[…]

…the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who writes an influential blog that criticized the war.

Look, what I really want to know is: did Juan Cole knowingly or unkowingly ever text a picture of his wang to someone. Serious People must know. Why can’t we get serious answers to serious questions? If not: keep walking.

"Their happiness will turn into sorrow, and their blood will be mixed with their tears. We call upon our Muslim people in Pakistan, on whose land Sheikh Osama was killed, to rise up and revolt."

— al Qaeda, responding to and admitting the death of Osama bin Laden.
They are apparently unaware that he a) has been dead for years and kept on ice until Obama needed him for reelection b) is still very much alive c) never existed in the first place and/or d) never concerned us much anyway.

"In 2005, the Bush CIA actually closed its unit whose mission had been to hunt Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants. We don‘t know where Osama bin Laden was until 2005. But we do know that the home, that he was found in, was built for him in 2005. That same year that the CIA closed the unit that was hunting bin Laden.

Somehow that year, bin Laden got the feeling that he could settle down comfortably in a walled fortress in a Pakistan suburb."

— Lawrence O’Donnell

So Bush really did lay the foundation for bin Laden’s eventual capture…

(via squee-gee)

(Source: brooklynmutt)

"I don’t know where bin Laden is. I have no idea and really don’t care. It’s not that important. It’s not our priority."

— George W. Bush, speaking on March 13, 2002, whose policies are precisely why it took 10 years to track bin Laden down.
That Obama noted making this Job One for the CIA was no coincidence. He presumably mentioned this request so specifically because this was job 4,234,450 the day before he took office; Bush said as much. To Bush/Cheney, 9/11 was never anything other than a chance to pull some particularly exciting binders down off of Cheney’s darkside shelf.

We can only hope that their shortsighted and foolish “bogeyman approach” to bin Laden now nucleates into a national desire to put an end to everything that was rolled out in his name. Then, and only then, will this be a “victory” of any kind for America.

Otherwise you’re just changing the name and picture at the top of Our Forever-War Commemorative Playing Card Set.

O'Keefe and Journalistic Malpractice →

Gee, I’ve never been more surprised by a reveal of misleading editing:

If you watch the entire conversation, it becomes crystal clear that O’Keefe’s provocateurs didn’t get what they were looking for. They were ostensibly offering $5 million to NPR. Their goal is clearly to get Schiller and his colleague Betsy Liley to agree to slant coverage for cash. Again and again, they refuse, saying that NPR just wants to report the facts and be a nonpartisan voice of reason.

And this also falls into the utterly gobsmacking shock of the ages category:

James Poniewozik of TIME’s “Tuned In” blog admits that he reposted O’Keefe’s video without watching the entire two-hour exchange and suggests that many other reporters did the same.

Poniewozik speculates that O’Keefe posted the extended video because he was confident that “by the time anyone took the time to go over the full video, the narrative would be established, the quotes stuck in people’s minds and the ideological battle won.”

No shit. After all, one can’t expect journalists (and especially not millionaire pundits) to spend their time watching the thing they’re going to report on. They can’t even be bothered to force an intern to do it and report back. There’s just no time. People have to be fired. Now. After all, there’s no reason to believe this all might be purely manufactured horseshit. And, of course, one should never forget that we sorry rubes out here in our pajamas just can’t understand what it is to do journalism.
That aside, it’s almost like even serious people should begin to gather that this sort of pattern is their whole operation. They throw out a distorted narrative, claim some scalps, and move on. They haven’t even had to bother to find a new messenger, despite the fact that every one of these things has been utterly disproved as shamefully and willfully misleading. That would be bad enough, but you, the media, still misreport the ACORN business (among many, many other potential examples) as though no newer information ever emerged on that front. To this day and probably right now.

And, it’s worth noting (as the linked article does) exactly who due diligence in this sorry case fell to:

Glenn Beck’s website, “The Blaze,” ran a critique titled, “Does Raw Video of NPR Expose Reveal Questionable Editing & Tactics?” The short answer: Yes.

So it takes Glenn Beck’s folks to do what NPR and any other respectable journalistic outfit should have done immediately and for as long as it took before taking action: study the actual source data because we know this guy has a long, long history of purposefully misleading and creative editing. But do you come out immediately and say that? Eviscerate the messenger? Of course not. You fire people and strengthen their case against you by creating the implicit appearance of guilt.

Truly, truly the Republic is at an end. We have crossed the Rubicon once and for all and there is nothing left worthy of salvage. This is what the intellectual discourse has become. This is the level of intellect running the discourse in our public square…essentially that of a sad rube, caught out playing Three Card Monty. Again and again and again and again. Publicly. But I’m sure the Queen’s in there this time; after all, he keeps showing it to me!

The article concludes:

At this point, any news outlet that runs an uncorroborated James O’Keefe video is committing journalistic malpractice.

At this point?!? Anybody paying any attention to O’Keefe about anything several episodes ago was committing journalistic malpractice. That NPR merrily still fires people over this sort of horseshit is just flat out astonishing. Newsflash, NPR: they want to destroy you. Nothing you do, say, print, broadcast, or color favorably to the Right point of view is ever going to change that. Start acting like it.

Or, better yet, start acting like the responsible news organization you claim to be. As Dear Leader once said, “fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”

Accountability Free? →

Have to disagree with Greenwald’s take on Obama meeting Condoleeza Rice:

Still, the fact that Obama is not only shielding from all accountability, but meeting in the Oval Office with, the person who presided over the Bush White House’s torture-approval-and-choreographing meetings and who was responsible for the single most fear-mongering claim leading to the Iraq War, speaks volumes about the accountability-free nature of Washington culture and this White House.

Actually, I think it’s a positive sign that says that something about Obama realizing just how dim his administration’s prospects for passing the new START treaty through the Senate really are (which we’ve touched on before). As the Democratic majority in the Senate stands right now, they’d need at least 8 GOP votes in an environment in which it’s hard to see where even ONE GOP vote would come from.
After November I think it’s pretty clear they’ll need even more than 8. The only way to get those votes is to paint the GOP into a rhetorical corner, and to get as many GOP All-Stars as possible on board right now to help with said painting. If that means taking a meeting with Condi to get her onboard, then so be it. Prosecuting her for whatever her involvement was (or wasn’t) with the Darkside policies of Bush/Cheney strikes me as far less pressing than greatly reducing the likelihood of total (or even partial or substantial) extermination of the human race. The fewer nukes sitting around the better, and seeing as we have approximately a zero percent chance of ever prosecuting Cheney or any of the other prime movers, much less Rice (who is certainly associated with but not clearly even for these policies), then I’d call that a fairly good trade to make. But then, that’s just me. Guess I’m not shrill after all.