Archives for August 2010
Slinking Out Of Iraq: Schlock And Yawn
Watching MSNBC’s breathless ‘exclusive’, ‘historic’ coverage of one portion of the U.S. military slither out of Iraq, you’d never know there was a ‘Bloom Mobile’ during the yahoo! invasion. You’d never know that MSNBC fired Phil Donahue for being vocally anti-war during the run up. In fact, MSNBC and NBC collectively completely airbrushed away their own culpability peddling the lies, falsehoods and propaganda that helped launch America’s modern day Syracuse Expedition.
MSNBC, like Oceania, has always been anti-war. So we get Tweety, who only stopped fluffing Neocons, DeLay et al. and the Administration in September 2006. MSNBC’s fabricated narrative is every bit as insidious and corruptive as that peddled by the Neocons and the Bush Administration. If the MSNBC third stringers want to pose and pretend they are going to hold people accountable, how about starting with their own network? Why is is that Tim Russert was Dick Cheney’s favorite (easiest) interview as Mary Matalin let slip? How many retired generals – oops, Senior Mentors — did MSNBC put on to explain how painless it was all going to be?
It’s a bit astounding to see Laurence O’Donnell – who, if you didn’t know, once was a staff director on a senate committee – repeatedly interrupt Jack Jacob’s military critique not just of the occupation but the half-assed and almost calamitous Rumsfeld/Franks invasion plan itself. (We’ve talked about the operational and logistical near disasters at length elsewhere). MSNBC is comfortable with that distinction – the ‘war’ went great (as all the then media cheerleaders still broadcasting need to believe) but the occupation was a bungle. Jacobs wasn’t having any of it but was cut off. Instead, we get a former Senate staffer babbling about how Americans vacation in Vietnam today, and wouldn’t it be nice if that happened too in a future Iraq. (By the way, Jacobs went to Vietnam after combat troops were withdrawn and saw combat every day; he is also is the first to underscore Vietnam is not Iraq re above).
The entire night was stunt journalism pornography at its worst, devoid almost entirely of real insight. No effort at all to put in context if this is the sad, pathetic end to the Warlord’s Operation Iraqi Excellent Adventure, what was MSNBC’s role in getting it going? Who did they put on air? Repeatedly? If MSNBC wants to be the Obama Administration’s version of Fox that’s their business and ethical call. The American people, however, rightly should and must remember MSNBC and those who so lustily shouted down doubt and criticism during the run-up.
We’re just going to say it a bluntly as we can: MSNBC, you, too, have blood on your hands. You’re just too mindless and irresponsible to notice.
Was Lame Joke, Now Open Thread
Lame joke deleted. Strange how something can seem so entertaining until one clicks ‘post’.
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Apropos recent comments . . .
Newton Leroy Gingrich – Esquire Gets It Right
John Richardson’s Esquire piece ‘Newt Gingrich: The Indispensable Republican’ gets it right.
We liked Marianne when she was there intimately engaged during Newt’s rise. A sharp, quick mind and personality of her own, she was easily at home with policy thrust and parry dinner conversations. And provided a social grace very much in need.
Esquire’s quotes and details all ring true. Will it make a difference? Esquire hints at but doesn’t delve into the larger question. What of the weird state of Republican positioning Summer 2010? Those who loathe Palin flock to any signs of another Newt tease. Odd, because they mock Palin for being an air headed Neocon sock puppet while applauding Newt’s far more radical and dangerously incoherent ‘Camus’ blather at AEI.
He’s the walking University of Phoenix, sure. But his dilettantism at least comes with a faux degree in seriousity that Joe Klein accepts. In these de-stabilized times, Newt poses a far graver danger as either a pretend or actual presidential candidate than Palin ever could. His revels in expediency, destruction and irresponsibility are gasoline seeking a fire.
He wears the tight smile of a man who has very little room to move. He is known for his rhetorical napalm and is not accustomed to acknowledging that he often deploys it for its own sake, facts and gross exaggeration be damned. You don’t build a movement by playing fair. He didn’t single-handedly topple forty years of Democratic rule in the House by strictly keeping Marquess of Queensberry rules. And so in Newt’s world, putting Barack Obama in the company of Neville Chamberlain to win a news cycle is just the way it’s done. The grimace on his face says, What part of this game don’t you understand? His assistant looks at his watch. “We have three minutes.”
He will not relax, will not let down his guard, not this time around. He did that once when he was younger, spent three days with a reporter who got his staff to complain of his sexual adventurism and saw him yelling at an assistant. Afterward, he mentioned the episode to Robert Novak, who said, “What the fuck were you thinking?” . . .
After that, Gingrich started to deteriorate. There were times, Marianne says, when he wasn’t functioning. He started yelling at people, which he’d never done before, and he’d get weirdly “overfocused” on getting things done — manic, as if he was running out of time. He took to taking meetings while eating, slurping his food, as if he wasn’t aware or didn’t care how strange it looked. The staff responded with gallows humor: “He’s a sociopath, but he’s our sociopath.”
And this:
There’s a large part of me that’s four years old,” he tells you. “I wake up in the morning and I know that somewhere there’s a cookie. I don’t know where it is but I know it’s mine and I have to go find it. That’s how I live my life. My life is amazingly filled with fun . . . It doesn’t matter what I do,” he answered. “People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.”
Worth reading the whole thing.
Walking Down Corridors Of The Past Paying Tribute By Remembering
Today is largely offline. We set it aside to pay tribute to those no longer with us whose lives resonate so profoundly still. To see one’s memories of extraordinary people in all their richness memorialized with skilled, appreciative care of archivists and specialists proves to be at once re-assuring and dislocating. We expected an emotional reaction; its depth and intensity nonetheless surprising.
Apropos of nothing in particular we also came across this today in another context. 
Already being in a reflective mindset, many thoughts rushed by unbidden. Some recalling the era, others the panoply of history, and others the sad context of that anniversary and the wreckage.
Still couldn’t repress a smile imagining Percy Alleline as emcee. And then we heard Smiley say:
Peter Guillam: Why was Control always so hostile to Alleline? Percy wasn’t a complete fool.
George Smiley: Percy can flirt, Peter. And Control hadn’t reckoned on the power of the Alleline lobby.
Peter Guillam: Who were they?
George Smiley: Golfers. “Golfers and Conservatives.” That’s what Control said to me.