That Damn Hippie Pope

My guess is that Pope Francis was well aware of the appalling orgy of fevered consumerism — Black Friday and the onset of our sacred “Holiday Season” — when he dropped his 50,000 word rip job on “trickle down” economics and our “idolatry of money.” The timing was just too ideal to be a coincidence. And that, you have to hand it to him, demonstrates some shrewd marketing chops, along with a bona fide Christian conscience.

I am not expecting it to do much good though, unless he requires his “shepherds” in local parishes to hammer that message … to the dwindling audience that still sees moral authority in a church degraded by medieval sexual politics.

Coincidentally, news of the Pope’s hippie-like attack on the foundation of American exceptionalism — i.e. unbridled acquisitiveness and status through possession — came on the same day I caught a nakedly cynical Christmas-y ad that began with a lament for the sad state of Christmas today.  (Open with: A montage of Norman Rockwell-like imagery; happy nuclear families, cherubic kiddies, fresh snow, tree trimming). The clear inference being that we’ve fallen a long, long ways from “the true meaning of Christmas”.

Where, I wondered, was this leading?

Cut to a scene from today … inside some tricked out big box super store, with … you know t, a fake Santa and excited shoppers stockpiling massive amounts of crap (excuse me, “gifts”). It was an ad for Gander Mountain or Cabela’s or some much enterprise, which, I think you can see the irony here, has nothing whatsoever to do with the “true meaning” of Christmas and everything to do with what’s wrong with this blessed season and what the Pope was getting at.

Popes routinely bemoan crass consumerism and exploitation of the lower classes. But soon they move on … to negotiating Vatican politics, managing the church’s vast real estate holdings, meetings with attorneys fending off sexual abuse claims and battling homosexuality. The priority stuff.

Maybe Francis, who is off to a good start, will be a transformative figure. Maybe he’ll push this them, especially when he makes his first visit to the United States. But the odds are against him.

Especially here in America, where to watch the network and local news there is no greater unalloyed good than storming the mall — or WalMart — in support of the economy. Sure they all reported the fistfights over 40″ Funai TVs and laughed at the video of the guy loosing his drawers in a WalMart brawl and flashing plumber butt — but nowhere did I see anyone come back from any of this and say, “This is nuts.”

Obviously, TV news has an enormous stake in shilling for any excuse to spend money. But, Barry Ritholtz in the not exactly hippie-dippy Bloomberg View tells us again, it’d help if “news” was actually based in some semblance of fact instead of junk numbers made up by random shoppers and repeated endlessly everywhere you looked.

I still think it’d be interesting to get someone like Barack Obama into a candid conversation about values. Not just the usual platitudinal stuff about “democracy” and “a thousand points of light” but the essential message leaders have an obligation to convey to their citizens.

Once away from the White House (and you know he’s got scratch marks on the cell wall counting off the days ) I suspect he’d agree with the Pope. There’s almost nothing about inciting mass psychosis and the constant pornographic exultation of the super rich that meshes with actual Christian (or Jewish, or Muslim) values.

JFK 50 Years Later: It’s Still … Means, Motive and Opportunity

With the 50th anniversary of JFK’s assassination comes a lot of predictable commentary.

We’re getting the inevitable re-resurgence of Camelot-era hagiography. “Oh, the glamour!” “Oh, the grace!” “They were our royalty!”, “They were so rich and so beautiful!” Likewise we’re enduring the usual musty, journalistic eulogizing about the immensity of the tragedy and how it was a “turning point” for American culture, our “loss of innocence”, the beginning of our distrust of authority, etc. Ditto another round of conclusive-sounding assertions of the veracity of Warren Commission’s ruling on who-dunnit, assertions that, like the Commission itself, seek to reassure us in the absence of any kind of real certainty.

I was 12 when Kennedy was killed and as stunned as everyone else. (The old Vaughn Meader comedy record was a staple at the Lambert boyhood manse.) A lot of people were still on edge after the previous autumn’s Cuban missile crisis, so word that the accused/likely assassin was a “communist sympathizer” … kicking around 1963 Dallas … had almost everyone fighting back fears of another nuclear showdown.

… and then Jack Ruby killed “the killer.”

I watched it happen that Sunday morning and when it was announced that Oswald had died my first thought was, “Now we’ll never know why he did it.” And we don’t. And there are good reasons to believe that’s why Ruby did what he did.

Respectable, responsible journalism venues, your Time and Life magazines, your New York Times and Washington Posts and your network newsrooms have accepted Oswald as the assassin since the moment he was collared in the Texas Theater. I’d like to say that appropriate, intense skepticism was applied at some point over the past 50 years, but I really can’t. Oswald has always been the one and only.

In my personal experience, discussions with other journalists on the minutiae of JFK killing have been a bit underwhelming. Few if any could explain what Arlen Specter’s Magic Bullet Theory was all about. Most had heard of it, but after that their eyes got pretty glazey. And the glaze got even thicker once I wandered off the plantation and started talking … means, motive and opportunity.

Mainstream journalism runs on conventional wisdom, and after the Jim Garrison meltdown in New Orleans in 1967 every theory counter to the Warren Commission’s became professionally toxic. The accepted default in newsrooms was, and remains, that Oswald acted alone, the government said so, it’s yesterday’s news  … let’s move on. To suggest you remained skeptical, to suggest that the 24 year-old Oswald’s associations in  New Orleans and Dallas were exceedingly odd and that there were parties with far — far — higher levels of … means, motive and opportunity … who might find it useful to manipulate a guy like Oswald was/is pretty much like saying, “I just saw Elvis, Janis and Jim Morrison land a flying saucer in front of the White House.”

So, about 20 years ago, or soon after Oliver Stone’s loony-but-provocative “JFK”, I finally let it go. I’ve rarely talked about it since. Certainty will never be achieved. I’m not interested in convincing anyone of anything. Believe what you want. The ratio of skepticism-to-acceptance we have today is, I’m guessing, pretty much what it’ll be 500 years from now. Moreover, it no longer matters. Where maybe something could still have been accomplished 10 years after the assassination, or even 15 — when the House Select Committee on Assassinations asserted that there was a conspiracy, and even ID’d those with means, motive and opportunity — at 50 years out the horses have long since left the corral and been reduced to glue.

G. Robert Blakey, counsel to the 1978 House Committee has often said that the JFK murder has become a kind of Rorschach test for those looking at it. What we see is in many ways more illuminative of our individual prejudices and beliefs than the reality of the event itself.  There’s a hard truth in that, that I accept.

Just as I accept that I’ll remain a skeptic of the Warren Commission theory for a long time to come.

Without re-litigating the whole case, here’s why:

Over the years CBS, ABC and most recently PBS’s NOVA have argued in favor of the Commission’s view based on the only aspect of the crime testable by science — namely the forensics of the shooting in conjunction with the Zapruder film. Each has hired experts, staged reconstructions, fired rifles, extracted bullets and established in ways that would be convincing in any courtroom that it is possible for one bullet to do everything Arlen Specter and the Commission said it did.

… and each therefore concluded that … Oswald did it.

To which I always say … wait a minute.

It’s one thing to make a case that it is possible for one man to have done all the damage recorded on camera (and in the mangled autopsy) and a whole other thing to say that man was Lee Oswald. But the two are almost invariably mashed together as inseparable conclusions … based on a problematic palm print on the rifle found stashed at the Book Depository and the circumstantial evidence collected and vetted by the Commission.

Comedian-actor Richard Belzer (“Homicide”, “Law and Order: SVU”) has had a second career for years as a kind of Howard Zinn  of contemporary American politics. He has churned out several books on the JFK hit and when interviewed invariably returns to one moment that for him most undermines the Oswald-as-shooter scenario (as well the Commission’s choice of who and what evidence to accept as most accurate). The moment was when a Dallas motorcycle cop dropped his bike in front of the Book Depository seconds after the motorcade gunned it for Parkland hospital, ran in, yelled for the boss, a guy named Roy Truly, and ordered him to accompany him upstairs. Upon reaching the second floor cafeteria they encountered a guy at a vending machine. The cop asked Truly to identify the man, which Truly did as Oswald, an employee, and they continued on up.

What it means is that within 90 seconds of shooting … the President of the United States, kind of big deal for which a person might both be (and look) a little excited, a not so great a marksman has run across to the opposite end of the sixth floor, stashed the rifle behind some boxes, run down four flights of stairs, dropped coins in a vending machine and appeared composed and unflustered when confronted by a cop. While the speed required to accomplish those actions hasn’t been recreated without signs of obvious exertion, I suspect it is, like other aspects of the Commission’s case possible under a certain set of circumstances.

But it is means, motive and opportunity that carries the day for me. Oswald barely had the first (a for-shit rifle and very limited skills as a marksman), is deep into dime store psychology on the second (“he was a nobody who wanted to be a somebody”) and, were it not for his second floor cafeteria appearance, has indisputable credibility only on the third. He was employed right there on the motorcade route.

As Daniel Schorr, the bete noir of the Nixon White House once told me when I asked about his interest in the JFK killing, “I like stories that are ascertainable”, which the JFK saga most definitely is not. The unascertainable, reputation-sullying quagmire of every theory other than the Warren Commission’s may explain why so few news organizations have aggressively pursued the most tantalizing of the “means, motive and opportunity” angles.

Oliver Stone lost me with his “LBJ gave them their damn [Vietnam] war” angle. Not even in 1963’s subservient media culture would there be a way to keep chatter of an assassination cabal from leaking out of government offices. Governments keep paper records (and recordings). Every reporter has sources of some sort within or close to the CIA and the White House. Ascertainability is possible.

Not so with organized crime.

If you want a practicing, professional journalist to glaze over in disdain, bring up the role of the mob in anything that went on in 1963 or even today. As limited as my press colleagues’ knowledge has been on the topic of JFK forensics, the first mention of Carlos Marcello and the mob always has them scanning over my head for an emergency escape. Since almost none of them has even heard of Marcello, the longtime head of the New Orleans mob … I’m another whacked out “grassy knoller” counting UFOs in the Rose Garden.

I have found very few journalists who know that Bobby Kennedy, prior to becoming Attorney General vowed and immediately upon being sworn in made a top priority of throwing Marcello out of the country … and that he actually did it. RFK literally had Marcello kidnapped off the streets of New Orleans and dumped in Guatemala, simultaneous with an unprecedented, coordinated effort to take down his sprawling operation … which besides the usual racketeeering included seedy strip clubs across the South and Texas. In fact, the 1978 House Committee specifically ID’d Marcello, along with Jimmy Hoffa and Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana as people with … means, motive and opportunity to kill JFK.

But — a reality check here — no ink-stained newsroom beat reporter does ascertainment on the Mob. As I say, to follow the news even today you’d be inclined to believe organized crime has ceased functioning in the United States … a turn of events which truly would make us exceptional in human history. Crime kingpins are brown, scarfaced, moustachioed guys like Pablo Escobar. They operate in sweaty Latin American countries. Based on the lack of reporting we could easily believe they have no peers within our borders. No stateside kingpins. Just street level distributors like Stringer Bell and Avon Barksdale in “The Wire”.

More to the point in the JFK era, it was the official view of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI that organized crime was a non-factor in the United States, a view that infuriated Bobby Kennedy especially since the FBI’s “investigations” of Marcello’s New Orleans operations were consistently misdirected and thwarted.

For me this is, ironically, the Occam’s Razor phase of the story.

In order to accept that Oswald acted alone you have to ignore/outright dismiss his very strange associations with Dallas’ very right-wing “White Russian” community and the crowd he assorted with in New Orleans, as well as his lack of expertise as a marksman, his jailhouse assertion that “I’m just the patsy” [an interested choice of words] and accept as his motivation that he was … suffering from low self-esteem. It’s not what you call a neat scenario.

By stark contrast, in the Marcello-driven version of events you have a bona fide, serious-as-a-heart attack adversary, requiring by far the fewest assumptions to reach a conclusion … if …  if it is a conclusion you’re comfortable making.

Means: Organized crime, should you choose to believe it exists, has professionals it can call upon to kill anyone. (Ask Whitey Bulger’s FBI compatriots.) And you don’t need an Oliver Stone-sized conspiracy. Just maybe a half dozen guys doing what they do.

Motive: Not only is this little prick Bobby Kennedy coming after one of the leaders of the American mob in that era, he’s a damned Kennedy who appears to have forgotten all the business the Mob and his father did back in the day. Getting harassed and dumped in Guatemala is not a way you treat friends. More to the point, by hitting the brother, you neuter the Attorney General.

Opportunity:  Open car. Parade. Plenty of cover … and a chump, set up to think he’s a player in some spy game, primed not only to take the fall, but be killed off in quick order. (By the mobbed-up owner of a seedy strip club … who did it, we are asked to believe, in order to spare poor Jackie Kennedy a return to Texas for Oswald’s trial.) The hand-the-cops-the-dead-patsy ploy is classic mob architecture. Plus, as a plot, it understands quite well the cultural climate of that era. The “communist sympathizer” angle virtually guarantees  that responsible elder statesmen like Gerald Ford, CIA Director Allen Dulles, segregationist poster boy Richard Russell, and all-purpose Cold War counselor John McCloy will see the peril of super-power confrontation and gravitate to the lone, glory-seeking-nut explanation, which is infinitely easier to make with that particular guy dead.

Also, should there be even the faintest interest in pursuing an organized crime angle, those same statesmen will quickly appreciate that an aggressive mob inquiry means a wholesale re-write of the “fallen King of Camelot” narrative, with the shocked public getting a highly disillusioning education in how Joseph Kennedy made his fortune and how cozy the sexually compulsive JFK was with the seamier side of the show biz-Vegas interface. Bobby Kennedy seemed to grasp the dilemma.

Given the low likelihood that courtroom-worthy evidence would ever to spill out of the mob — no files, no recordings, and no witnesses — the choice for the Commission was actually pretty easy. Build a credible-enough case that sets the long-dead Oswald as the lone shooter, calm the country, let everyone mourn and savor a fallen hero and move on. It’s what patriarchal leaders are supposed to do.

But as Rorschach tests go … this version of the story paints an exceedingly different view of the United States than most people care to entertain.

Lara Logan Has it All Over Dan Rather

If there was ever an example of the quantitative difference between the rage-stoking machinery of the right and the left its in the reaction to Lara Logan’s big Benghazi blockbuster on “60 Minutes”.

Where literally within minutes of its airing nine years ago, “60 Minutes II’s” story about George W. Bush’s essentially non-existent National Guard “service” was under fire from right-wing bloggers pointing to a specific fake document, Logan’s far more amateurish blunder, in using an oddball mercenary’s story as the sole source of a startling new perspective on the Benghazi incident, is fast receding from public attention. Internally, CBS, which can not be pleased with the transparent inadequacy of  Logan’s reporting, may eventually take further action. But lacking a sustained furor, it has the luxury of doing so quietly and in a way it can manage, and … without explaining how it happened.

Lacking any serious of level of heat from outraged liberals — beyond David Brock and Eric Boehlert at Media Matters — this botch, which smells at least as politically inspired as “60 Minutes II” producer Mary Mapes’ shot at Bush — is going nowhere.

People like Kevin Drum at “Mother Jones” and Jay Rosen have already laid out the fundamental complaints with Logan’s story, and CBS has endured the inevitable round of ridicule from comics. For me though the most egregious error — the brightest flare in the sky — was Logan basing her story on a guy who was about to publish a book through CBS’s sister company, Threshold Editions, which exists solely as a distributor of (often) paranoid, fact-deprived righter-than right-wing screeds. How was that allowed to happen?

Worse, Logan didn’t disclose that illuminating little detail either in her original story or in her explanation-free apology last Sunday night. As a consequence we have an episode that walks and quacks very much like something cooked and contrived by the producer/reporter.

And that is different — and worse — than what Mapes and Dan Rather got into in 2004. The tragic irony with CBS’s Bush Air National Guard story is that the central assertion — that Bush was all but officially AWOL from a cushy stateside service slot and far from combat during Vietnam — was all but “smoking gun” provable without the tarted-up memo that persons still unknown used to intentionally deceive CBS, Rather and Mapes. (I believe Doonesbury-creator Garry Trudeau still has the $10,000 he offered to anyone who could prove they saw Bush with his National Guard unit at any time he says he was there.)

With Logan, the rapidly-evolving view is that she was the driving force of the bogus Benghazi story, and that to make her story she consciously violated a basic tenet of Journalism 101. Namely, she allowed a single source, one with obvious personal motivations, to push a startling counter narrative with rabid appeal for a specific fringe audience. A stringer for Eagan Patch couldn’t get away with that.

While the controversy will soon evaporate among the general public, media-watchers who suspect Logan pushed the story far beyond what the facts could support will continue to believe she did it to curry favor (for herself?) with a conservative audience that normally sees “60 Minutes” as a threat to their intensely partisan world view. Her now famous, gung-ho, “let’s go get the bastards speech” isn’t doing anything to refute that suspicion.

We are living in a moment where celebrity reporters are routinely carving out brands (and fatter paychecks) for themselves beyond the walls of their day jobs. And Logan, who looks much better in a low-cut dress than Morley Safer, (and did you notice how much more demure her attire was for the “apology”), has all the ingredients for full-tilt, anchor-level stardom.

But since there is a vast difference in the rage machinery of the right and left, I doubt many will notice when Ms. Logan announces a year from now that she has decided to leave CBS and pursue “new opportunities”.

Finally, you can only laugh that FoxNews, which rarely if ever has something good to say about a story produced by actual professional journalists — and rushed to hype the “60 Minutes” piece —  is pretty much alone now in “standing by” the “facts” of Logan’s botched tale.

 

 

Hope and Branding

Before getting to the important stuff, as a member of “the single-payer left”, but also someone sees Obamacare as a substantial step forward, can I just say that I’m delighted to see a resurgence of skepticism among the “lamestream” press over the hysterical claims coming from Obamacare’s entrenched opponents?

First there was Eric Stern’s instant classic, “Inside the FoxNews Lie Machine”, where Stern fact-checked three sets of guests in a Sean Hannity interview. Then a couple of days ago Jim Tankersley of The Washington Post reported a story out of Rome, Georgia on a guy convinced his small business failing was entirely Obama’s fault.  (By all means read through the comments section on that one.) Then yesterday we had Michael Hiltzik in the Los Angeles Times doing the same thing as Mr. Stern in a piece titled, “Another Obamacare horror story debunked”.

The LA Times Applies a Factual Standard

Talk about setting dangerous precedents.

The Los Angeles Times recently declared that it was no longer going to run “factually inaccurate” letters about climate change. Anyone who follows the, uh, “debate” on that issue knows what the paper is talking about. Climate science is up there with abortion and gun control in terms of setting off an irrational, emotional explosion among a certain faction of the public … with the notable difference that there is actual science involved in the mechanics of human-caused climate shifts.

A reporter at Mother Jones then called around to nine other big mainstream papers to see what their policies are regarding … reader opinions that have no basis in fact. He got some great weasel-word quotes. The best/worst came from the Denver Post, who said:

It’s the “Hysterical Delusional Affirmation” Syndrome

This was pretty good from Charlie Cook’s National Journal column today …

“Driving in to work Tuesday morning while listening to WTOP, Washington’s excellent all-news radio station, I heard my friend, the extremely able congressional reporter Dave McConnell, relate a conversation he had with a Republican House member. This member told McConnell that allowing the debt ceiling to be breached might “get the leadership’s attention.” That sounded like a kid saying if he threw his mother’s priceless vase against the wall, she might start letting him do what he wants. Political judgment this bad, coming from members of Congress, is a dangerous thing for a party. When it comes to dealing with something with enormous consequences, such as intentionally creating a situation that could lead to default on our national debt, we are no longer quibbling about minor differences of opinion.

A Rowdy Crowd Pop Quiz

What father of what politician preached this … ?

“There are some of you, as a matter of fact I will dare to say the majority of you, that your anointing is not an anointing as priest. It’s an anointing as king. And God has given you an anointing to go to the battlefield. And what’s the battlefield ? The battlefield is the marketplace. To go to the marketplace and occupy the land. To go to the marketplace and take dominion. If you remember the last time I was in this pulpit, I talked to you about Genesis chapter 1, verse 28, where God says unto Adam and Eve, “Go forth, multiply, TAKE DOMINION over all creation.” And if you recall, we talked about the fact that dominion is not just in the church. That dominion is over every area – society, education, government, economics…

Not Just “Unconditional”, A Faceplant Surrender

So, it has come to this. A complete, unconditional, unequivocal faceplant surrender by John Boehner. I should feel more Schadenfreude and vindication than I do.

A few thoughts on the truly ridiculous debacle we’ve just lived through (and may have to live through again in January).

1:  Can a major political party get any closer to the life-or-death decision of whether to self-amputate a body part than the Republicans are today? I keep thinking about Utah hiker Aaron Ralston, sawing off his own arm from under an immovable boulder in order to live to hike another day. The Tea Party has made the Republican party an object of ridicule and contempt with truly perilous consequences for even “moderate”-but-enabling characters like John Kline and Eric Paulsen here in Minnesota.

End of Days for the Bubble-Saurii.

Along with the strategies, tactics and rhetoric, this whole shutdown/default crisis is a fascinating moral drama, at least for President Obama.

His level of exasperation with Republican malfeasance and ineptitude was pretty evident in his press conference yesterday, and mirrors what the public is saying in polls. You saw today’s? Where Congressional approval has hit … 5%? Scrape away a bit and you’ll find that number is an overwhelming condemnation of the Tea Party factor.

Obama certainly knows — and said — that we can’t go on like this, with the same bunch of “neo-confederates” (TM former Republican staffer Mike Lofgren) ginning up a national crisis every three months. I suspect he is factoring that into his thinking talk of a “deal” that kicks this can a month down the road. Why do that? What does that really serve? At some point enough has to be enough, and the public at large is clearly on board with that line of thought.

Shutdown and Default: Let Their Will be Done!

I gave some thought to whipping up a super-clever comparison of Walter White, “Breaking Bad’s” abused-ego-driven meth king and Ted Cruz, he of the guffaw-inducing narcissism and putative leader of the Republican nihilist caucus. But the concept fell apart so damned fast.

Walter White, trail of bodies, ruined lives and psychic mayhem aside, was at least intelligent enough to remain respectful of science, the inflexible boundaries of hard mathematics and in the end … the very end … even managed to achieve the self-realization that he did it all “for me”. Because he was good at it and it made him feel “alive”.

Ted Cruz, by comparison, doesn’t appear to have respect for anything, other than himself, while still posing as a guy who like the early-Heisenberg, believes himself immune to the consequences of his nefarious actions.

Building a Better American Male

During Sen. Ted Cruz’ 21-hour fili-fake-buster against … health insurance, I fell down the rabbit hole of a(nother) conversation about what a godawful mess men are today.

Frankly, it is still tough to figure where exactly this one started. But somehow the news that Esquire magazine is launching a TV channel collided with news that Maxim magazine has lost its mojo and ran into Hanna Rosin’s year-old piece titled, “The End of Men” before ricocheting off news that Popular Science magazine (large guy readership) is axing its comment section because of witless brawling by (likely male) trolls determined to shout down liberal believers in mushy-headed ideas like … evolution and human-caused climate change. It was a tornadic tumble.

Jim Souhan Isn’t the Problem

I don’t know Jim Souhan, the Star Tribune sports columnist who kinda stepped in it by saying that the University of Minnesota should, at the very least, keep epileptic seizure-prone football coach Jerry Kill out of public view. But I have some idea how he got himself into a predicament that unleashed a hailstorm of blowback.

But first, let’s be clear, risking and then taking a hammering in the court of public opinion is not always a bad thing. Often enough it is quite the opposite. If no one ever cares enough to complain about you or argue against your point of view you’re really just writing Chamber of Commerce ad copy … which, unfortunately, is what a lot of today’s news managers regard as responsible journalism. The irony with this incident is that Souhan, filing from the sports/entertainment department, over-exercised one of the last remaining licenses left to push an informed, personal point of view in regional newspapers. He over-played a license the Star Tribune and other papers have steadily hobbled in their metro and opinion pages.

Boiled to its essence, the criticism of Souhan is that his tone was cloddish, an affront to both epileptics and common decency. And it’s easy to see how readers got that impression.

Here are some of the problematic lines and why:

” … where the University of Minnesota’s football program, and by extension the entire school, became the subject of pity and ridicule.” (Is “ridicule” really the word you’re looking for here? “Ridiculed” by who? What sort of thoughtless yob sees any level of humor in an epileptic seizure? What percentage of even our local, get-a-life football fandom engages in that kind of “ridicule”?)

“Kill suffers a seizure on game day as the coach of the Gophers at TCF Bank Stadium exactly as often as he wins a Big Ten game. He’s 4-for-16 in both categories.” (Souhan’s working a context where Kill’s health issues are bad for the football program. But by elevating Kill’s winning percentage to the same level of concern as his health diminishes the appearance of concern for the latter. It’s what you call “playing too cute for your own good.”)

“No one who buys a ticket to TCF Bank Stadium should be rewarded with the sight of a middle-aged man writhing on the ground. This is not how you compete for sought-after players and entertainment dollars.” (College sports’ money issues are legendary and scandalous, even in a football wasteland like Minnesota. But again, mashing the two together — money and a man’s health — is callous, at best, and asking for trouble. Besides, as at least one commenter noted, fans pay top dollar every weekend with some expectation that they’ll see a 20 year-old kid carted off the field with shredded knee or worse.)

“Kill is unable to fulfill his duties.” (Really? I don’t think Souhan came close to proving that point. Or even trying.)

What I mean by the special license sports columnists have is this. They are writing for a heavily male audience that enjoys provocative writing reflective of a “man’s world”, i.e. a place where you call ’em as you see ’em, where lousy performance and incompetence are ridiculing offenses and where everyone’s tough enough to play again tomorrow after getting their feelings hurt. Look around the sportswriting landscape today. It’s one of the more talent-rich and compelling landscapes in the mainstream press because writers aren’t pulling punches, slathering their copy with consensus-conscious euphemisms and turning a blind eye to hypocrisy and incompetence. The contrast, as I say, with most papers’ metro and opinion columns is pretty damned stark.

But every provocateur risks going steps too far. It’s very much the nature of the broader media world today, outside stodgy daily newspapers. There’s career traction in upping the ante on “calling ’em, as you see ’em.” Hell, push it further and there might even be another paycheck in it, from sports radio, which is far less concerned with hurting feelings and sounding cloddish than mom and dad’s morning paper.

Souhan, who is still living in the shadow of Dan Barreiro, a guy who flexed a dagger with the best of them and has been well rewarded for it, simply “over-exploited” his provocateur license. It happens when you try to push itr “to the next level” to borrow a tired sports cliche. But there was no need to flex tough with an epileptic.

But my larger point here is the irony that Souhan style calling-out of sacred cows is now entirely the province of the sports department … where adults write about games.

The Star Tribune, which memorably prohibited its columnists from writing about the final stages of the presidential campaign in 2008, has taken a route much like every other regional, second-tier paper, avoiding partisan controversy by focusing on stories and themes with much higher levels of consensus. This, as I’ve said before, despite the presence of Michele Bachmann, and to a (slightly) lesser degree, Tim Pawlenty, people who should have been to any healthy “call ’em, as you see ’em” newspaper columnist what Les Steckel, Norm Green, Mike Lynn, Ron Davis and J. R. Rider have been to the sports department.

The fair question has always been, “Are you exercising journalistic responsibility by ignoring or grossly under-playing flagrant, unprecedented dysfunction and dishonesty by the highest-profile characters on your beat?”

It’s hard to get too upset over an outburst from the toy department, when the adults are hamstrung by their unwillingness to get seriously tough with people who actually matter.

It’s a Tough Moment for Liberals

This is a tough and perhaps evolutionary moment for liberals. Meaning the intramural conflict over what if anything to do about Syria.

It is fair to describe the standard progressive-liberal attitude towards American military intervention as one of intense if not intractable skepticism … to the point of knee jerk pacifism. And the rationale for that attitude is pretty solid.

Liberals, with a more nuanced view of history, aren’t just suffering from a Cheney-Bush Iraq hangover, where we were flat-out lied to and thrown into an incompetently managed war that when all is said and done (with veterans’ benefits and interest) may end up costing multiple trillions of (unbudgeted) dollars, but we also remember and continue to process the Tonkin Gulf charade that got us into Vietnam, followed by the atrocities of indiscriminate carpet bombing, napalm and white phosphorous attacks. And sliding further back, having studied history, we haven’t forgotten the blanket fire-bombing of not just Tokyo but four dozen other Japanese cities by Gen. Curtis LeMay/FDR in WWII, followed by two nuclear bombs.

After that we factor in all of this country’s nefarious, frequently counter-effective intelligence activities.

Point being; on a strictly historical basis, the United States stands on a very shaky pedestal from which to claim a moral prerogative to punish someone else for gross abuses of “accepted norms”.

But as much as those who fail to learn from history are destined to repeat it, history is never a precise mirror on the present. Time, social evolution and technology wear away at the perfect echo from then to now. 2013 is not 1943. Great nation states have not fought a war against each other for almost 70 years, the longest “peaceful” interlude in recorded history, and are unlikely to engage in one for the forseeable future, given the tight interdependency of the world economy. The respective populations of the United States, Russia, China, etc. are simply too well-informed about each other to accept the easy, jingoistic demonization of “the enemy” corrupt governments served up in the past, much less the likelihood of total annihilation.

Those are key facets of the liberalizing effect of technology.

Closer to the moment, Barack Obama bears no imaginable kinship to Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, the architects of the Iraq fraud and disaster. There is no case to be made that Obama is eager for military conflict. On the other hand he is not naive about the presence of abominable cruelty in human nature.

The split among liberals over Syria seems to break along the lines of those whose cynicism toward American motives is complete, and those who believe every new situation, with new characters in leadership in a different era is unique and must be dealt with in a way unburdened by the frauds, failures and genocidal slaughters of those who made military decisions in the decades before them. An irony is that a group for whom “nuance” is regularly embraced as a virtue is engaged in an internal debate over whether there are shadings and distinctions in a chemical weapon attack by a desperate dictator that make Syria distinct from … Iraq, Vietnam and so on.

The former say, “No. Our motives in this situation are no more pure or moral than Cheney-Bush’s in Iraq. No American president or administration can ever be trusted again. War of any kind at any time is wrong. So, no. Never.”

The latter argue that intervening against indiscriminate slaughters like Rwanda and Kosovo and like what Assad is perpetrating on his civilian population are actually far closer to having moral standing in the liberal concept of such a thing, than reacting with the full, profit-pumping apparatus of the military-industrial complex to the “Red Menace” in Vietnam or the oil-tainted imperative in Saddam’s Iraq.

For the latter group, and I count myself among them, the immorality of American/international inaction in Rwanda is still one of the most guilt-inducing memories of the last generation. By what standard was ignoring that “moral”? And how is that different from what Assad is doing in Syria? in the potential consequences to us? The price of gasoline?

And to be sure, the vitality of the debate is almost entirely among liberals. Conservatives, having long since sold their souls to reflexive, unexamined partisanship have, for all intents and purposes, no role in the current debate. They continue to say only whatever they need to say to weaken Obama and stay a step ahead of the next far-far right conservative primary opponent. Consequently, they have no credible standing in matters of practical morality. They are noise without signal.

Obama is going to have to make his case over the next few days, and make it far better than Colin Powell and George W. Bush made their’s for Iraq. Regardless of your views of the moral obligations of the lone mega-state in slaughters like this one in Syria, every liberal is well-advised to bring all the skepticism they can muster to whatever Obama says. And I believe he welcomes both the skepticism and the debate.

But … if they’re being intellectually honest, liberals also have to fully and honestly process the morality of inaction. As Obama said in his press conference in Russia the other day, there’s no one else the entire planet turns to in moments like this. Ever. We are the whole game, and therefore, the moral debate goes, we have a special responsibility to do what is reasonable to destabilize blatant state-sponsored homicide.

If progressive liberals want to sustain and build on their viability as effective leaders — not just on economic and social matters where they are clearly more far-sighted, but the whole range of leadership responsibilities — they/we are going to have to accept that episodes like Syria are a fact of life and may have to be dealt with in very unpleasant, antithetical-seeming ways when dialogue and diplomacy simply are not an option.

Syria: At Least Someone’s Actually Thinking About It

My good friend Jim Leinfelder kicked over this “dialogue” on what to do/not do with Syria, wrItten by the New Yorker’s George Packer.  It’s intended to engender a rational conversation about the situation, our “responsibilities”, morality, etc. Allow me to jump in …

It begins …

So it looks like we’re going to bomb Assad.

Good.

Really? Why good?

Did you see the videos of those kids? I heard that ten thousand people were gassed. Hundreds of them died. This time, we have to do something.

Yes, I saw the videos.

And you don’t want to pound the shit out of him?

I want to pound the shit out of him.

Pop Tarts and No-Shows

August is the month when most people take a break. Here in the exceptional US of A, where the average Jack and Jill have only a fraction of the paid vacation of their counterparts living European Socialist hellholes, (and are told to be proud of it), the working class isn’t packed up and idle on a beach so much as it is making the appearance of productivity while mouldering in their cubicles not really doing much of anything worthwhile.

August is the time of year when adult-level critical synapses are so muted that the annual ritual of a bratty pop tart running nearly naked around the stage at a video award show is not regarded as the time-honored rite of passage it is. It is not seen as the moment when the flirtatious rebel tweener singer/stripper formally morphs into contender for hot mess vixen of the year. Rather it is embraced as a cultural scandal.

A regularly scheduled cultural scandal for which the tart’s publicists and manager will all receive high fives and bonuses for getting cultural watchdogs like … Matt Lauer and every “Good Morning, Dubuque” chat show in the country  … to express shock and paternal outrage … again this August, just like last August. (Meet the new boss … .)

Welcome to the First 2016 Republican Debate

And … welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to the first debate of the 2016 FoxNews/Clear Channel radio Republican Presidential candidates, live from the Federal Premium Ammunition grandstand on the Neshoba County Fairgrounds in beautiful, well-defended Philadelphia, Mississippi.

I’m Ted Nugent. Y’all know me, and I’ll be your MC this evening as we introduce an entirely new format, flushed clean of liberal bias and BS. A format that gets right to what you want to hear.

As all of you know, because we’ve told you, Republicans haven’t been able to get a fair shake from bought-and-sold New York-elite debate moderators for a good 20 years. Over the years too much time has been wasted talking about crap in 2000-page boondoggles and what a bunch of moochers in some damned ghetto needed you to pay for.

A Little Transparency Please for the “American Experiment”

Here in Minnesota, there’s an organization called The Center of the American Experiment. It describes itself as ” a nonpartisan, tax-exempt, public policy and educational institution”, which means it must live by a fairly strict set of guidelines to avoid taxation. Despite being “non-partisan” the Center is an avowedly conservative collection of people formed into what is commonly described as a “think tank.” The best known face of the group is Katharine Kersten, former full-time, now part-time Star Tribune columnist.

The principal executive and flesh-presser is founder and president, Mitch Pearlstein, an affable, engaging character who has managed to keep the group’s visibility higher than most of its ilk for 25-odd years. Well, Mitch is currently engaged in and I suspect enjoying a public tussle with one of the great conservative betes noires of his time, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, he of stifling-the-freedom-of-our-money-lenders-to-do-what-they-need-to-do-on-behalf-of-The People fame.

In a nutshell Durbin wrote Mitch a letter asking him to reveal, publicly and transparently, the Center’s financial relationship with the, some say, (hell, I say), notorious American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Durbin correctly smells the ALEC’s territory markings all over the “Stand Your Ground” laws that suddenly/simultaneously blossomed in practically every state in the country, red states first.

Mitch is outraged! So much so he fired off a commentary in the Strib this past week accusing Durbin of everything short of being an agent for the Stasi. (As I say, this sort of “heavy hand of big government” is red meat for The Center, so you can hardly blame them for making an assault on their fundamental freedoms a cause celebre.)

A couple of choice moments from Mitch (and COO Kim Crockett’s) piece.

The Greatest Ever? “The Wire” or “Breaking Bad”?

In the pantheon of great, conclusion-defying debates this one ranks up there with “Who’s Better, Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle?” from my Little League days,  “The Beatles or The Stones? ” from high school, and, shifting criteria a bit to contemporary matters, “Who’s More of an Embarrassment to Their District, Steve King or Michele Bachmann?” There are no definitive answer. Everything is subjective. The only thing to agree on is that in each case peerage is close enough to warrant a discussion.

So too is the argument over “The Wire” and “Breaking Bad”, the latter of which begins closing out its run as “the best show on television” this Sunday night.

The case I make for “The Wire” is that like anything aspiring to art it made a conscious decision push beyond established convention. It pulled its audience into places, points of moral perspective and reflection that others of its type had not, could not and would not. Specifically, the authentic, unhygienic, street-level culture of the black inner city.

The running joke is that “The Wire”, created and frequently written by crusty, cynical, ex-Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, is every white liberals’ favorite series, mainly because it is as close as any of them will ever get to scoring crack in the hood and the way it confirms everything we/they’ve ever wanted to believe about why hellholes like that exist. I.e. massive, chronic corruption up and down the political system, resulting in futile-to-non-existent social services, wretched schools, little to no community investment, counter productive police work and a gangland hierarchy that maintains its control by mimicking white-collar criminality.

Give the Women the Keys, Please

The gist of a “Daily Show” bit last week was, given the open sewer of fake rage, naked opportunism and incompetence that is Congress today, what sort of person even wants the title of U.S. Representative? “Reporter” Aasif Mandvi began with a personable state legislator — a woman — out in California who is resisting pleadings from state Democrats to run for Congress. As I translated her explanation it was, “Oh good lord, the place is an open sewer of … “.

So no, she isn’t interested, today. Smart gal.

Cut to GOP Cong. Steve Latourette, a kind of go-to guy for Capitol reporters looking for something crusty, cranky and vaguely wise from a Republican currently serving on The Hill. (That last one takes some doing.) The conclusion of that conversation? The only people running in the present environment are “ass[bleeps]”. In fact unless you’re an ass[bleep], don’t even try because you’ll be forced into connecting with your inner ass[bleep] by an opponent way more of an ass[bleep] than you can ever be.

(My wife tells me I cuss too much on this blog, and that I’m polluting a thoughtful environment populated by bona fide communications professionals, real adults, who instinctively no better than use harsh or inflammatory language where they might be quoted. Hence the [bleep].)

Sociopaths. American Royalty.

The best thing about the Anthony Weiner/”Carlos Danger” circus is that it gives American media something new to concentrate on other than “the royal baby”. Newsrooms make editorial decisions based largely on what they believe their audience is most interested in. That said, the assessment that Americans can’t get enough medieval/celebrity pageantry affirms the worst cynic’s view of our “lamestream” information-delivery system. More specifically, the gooey, fawning coverage of everything “royal” is a calculation on the interests of American women who are far and away the primary audience for morning TV, where the most shameless fawning always takes place. One of my fonder hopes is that some day there is an insurrection among the “Lean In” crowd against this kind of pandering.

But until then … we have the latest episode of shameless sociopathy in Anthony Weiner/”Carlos Danger’s” sexting escapades. As summer news fodder goes, this thing is a chartbuster. Once again, tabloid headline writers and late night comics fall to their knees thanking whoever/whatever they worship for the gift of something so right into the wheelhouse of what the public eats up … sex, the lust for fame and power, hypocrisy and, for the female demo, a beautiful, poised wife. This particular episode is so over-the-top, hilariously squalid it will live in infamy until the sun implodes. I mean … “Carlos Danger” … and the dialogue of those texts … in New York City?

Weiner/”Danger” is obviously one seriously screwed up, pervy dude. To the point, where I think sensible women are quickly moving toward the question of why the lovely Huma bothers with him at all? Yes, there’s the Hillary and Bill precedent, and that’s entirely plausible explanation. You have to know Hillary has offered counsel. But does even Huma believe Weiner/”Danger” has Bill Clinton’s political prospects? If she does, her standing among the “Lean In” ladies drops by about 80%.

But more interesting to me is the sociopathy of Weiner himself. There’s a book out, “Confessions of a Sociopath: Hiding in Plain Sight”, purportedly authored by a Mormon woman — writing under an alias — partly explaining, partly defending her status as a sociopath, which as I’m led to understand it, is the preferred, 21st century name for what we used to call a “psychopath”. Her definition of herself is this: “I am generally free of entangling and irrational emotions, I am strategic and canny, I am intelligent and confident and charming, but I also struggle to react appropriately to other people’s confusing and emotion-driven social cues.”

Weiner/”Danger” is a textbook “sociopath”, at least if you can contort being free of “irrational emotions” to explain a near complete lack of impulse control. But as I got into in a recent post on Eliot Spitzer, there’s a much broader realm of this kind of behavior than guffaw and snicker-inducing sexual hijinks. A number tossed around by psychologists in the context of sociopathy is 4%. As in 4% of us can be described as having a chronic, “lack of remorse, a penchant for deceit, and a failure to conform to social norms.” A heavy proportion of the prison population qualifies as sociopathic. But “Confessions” (which hasn’t been all that well-reviewed, in part because of the author hiding behind an alias), is about the sociopaths among us and the weird allure sociopaths have to the general population.

Again, this is way … way … too deep for the morning chat shows or the headline media to get in to. The newsroom assessment being that their viewers are busy people getting their families out the door. They don’t have time for turgid psychological babbling, because … “Oh, look … Buckingham Palace … the Queen’s beautiful horses … and the window … where any minute now the Princess will appear with her baby … .”

But the cult of sociopaths in the context of contemporary political and celebrity figures hogging the spotlight, blotting out rational conversation and clotting the public narrative to their own selfish ends (Michele Bachmann, Donald Trump, the Kardashians, etc.) is something that ought to prey on the newsroom conscience a lot more than it does. Moreover, as I said in Spitzer piece, a savvy media consumer, like the “Lean In” audience, should exercise intense skepticism over the scant attention paid to forms of sociopathic behavior other than sexual buffoonery.

Pop quiz: Can you identify Dennis Kozlowski? Joe Cassano? Angelo Mozilo?

Local media tycoon Stanley Hubbard will never be mistaken for a hand-wringing liberal, but several times in conversations with him he’s asserted his belief that “5% of CEOs are sociopaths”.

5% … 4%. The similarity is striking. But like Bachmann, Trump, the Kardashians and countless others, as long as that 5% produces the right numbers they can be assured treatment fairer than they deserve.

Hell, they’ll be treated like royalty.

Blame the NRA for George Zimmerman

It’s not difficult at all, and I believe pretty valuable to draw a direct line from the killing of Trayvon Martin and the acquittal of George Zimmerman to the work of the National Rifle Association.

Since last Saturday night’s verdict there have been demonstrations, hand-wringing over our racially distorted (i.e. racist) justice system, punditry excoriating Zimmerman, jurors, the defense, the prosecution, and even Martin himself, the dead kid … for looking too much like the sort of menacing guys insulated, law-abiding white folks have every damn good reason to be afraid of. (It’ll be a long while before the Washington Post lives down the racial/classist reek of columnists Richard Cohen and Kathleen Parker. Lord I hope their limo never breaks down in Anacostia.)

But no one to date that I’m aware of has made a point of fingering the NRA for being the heavy it is, from the roots up, in this tortured drama. My guess is that since we are now seven months past the Newtown slaughter and the NRA has prevailed in Congress again, the four million member fire-arms lover/super patriot organization is old news … again.

Same old same old. Boooring. Must have fresh villains.

Never mind that it was the NRA in Florida pushing, excuse me “extorting”, votes to pass the state’s Stand Your Ground law, as it was after  that when Florida adopted Conceal Carry.

Lacking either, young Mr. Martin would still be alive, although given his record for domestic abuse and other outbursts of violence Mr. Zimmerman might likely be incarcerated somewhere. (In fairness, the deceased was a known pot smoker.) Under standard NRA lobbying, a record of violence is not a disqualifier for purchasing a gun, hell several guns, and gobs of ammunition, over the Internet. With over half its funding coming from the country’s gun manufacturers, the NRA is and has been for a generation the marketing arm for the likes of Smith & Wesson and rent-a-mercenary companies like Xe, formerly Blackwater. With that in mind you’re going to say and do everything possible to get a gun in the hand of every one who can still pull a trigger, and they do.

I always pity the poor dumb cracker, sitting down the bar from me at my favorite northern Wisconsin watering hole, proudly telling everyone in earshot, (but mainly the two low-lidded gals sucking down Marlboros and playing penny video poker) how he wrote the NRA a check for $100.

“And why”, I ask? “Well … ” and then the story starts to spin-off into the time two black guys in Superior — 25 miles through the woods and down the hill — looked at him funny while he was picking up a prescription at Walgreens, and how “with that crowd that’s in there now” the NRA’s the only people stopping the Feds from breaking down his trailer door, grabbing his guns and leaving him defenseless … most likely against blind drunk white guys careening down the dusty back roads blasting away at Deer Crossing signs.

The fear a yob like that feels is also an effect of NRA marketing. Every politician who votes against Conceal Carry, Stand Your Ground/Castle Doctrine, registration, whatever == assault rifles for psychopaths — has to have a salable reason,  and the talking points the NRA has used since it dropped that silly Boy Scout shit about firearm safety and realized that the real dough was in regular checks from the manufacturers, is the pitch they use. “it’s damned terrifying out there and as an exceptional American who loves John Wayne, Dirty Harry and the Constitution you owe it to your family to pack heat. That is if your family left a forwarding address.

So it is when your average terrified-of-the-next-nut-in-the-next-primary Congressman/state legislator gets back in the district in front of “outdoors” activists . Out rolls all the paranoid NRA verbiage about the vulnerability, threats and carnage of modern American life, usually in code language with the unmistakable inference that they’re referring to black guys, young black guys in particular. (The flab and paunchiness of the paranoid crowd contrasts pretty vividly with the young buck-ness of the black guys that scare them the most.)

There’s zero chance the Justice Department is going to launch a racial case against George Zimmerman, and not because it’d fry the tin foil antennae of the black helicopter crowd. Proving racist intent would be all but entirely impossible. More likely is that Trayvon Martin’s family will file a civil suit against Zimmerman, who, like most sweaty-palmed pistol-packers, is not anyone’s idea of a genius with money. So good luck with a pay-day.

Maybe Mike Bloomberg will take this opportunity to hire David Boies and make the NRA a co-defendant in a suit against Zimmerman.

Ruthless Egomania and Sex

The very high moral dudgeon directed at Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner, (but mostly Spitzer) for attempting comebacks is duly noted. Both gentlemen were bad boys. They are also big boys who have thick enough skin to take headline punning, jokes by late night comics and insults hurled at them by yobs on the street as they press the flesh … oh, sorry … “campaign” for a second act, as the media has been describing it.

The Strib picked up John Dickerson’s rant from Slate, in which he writes, “[Spitzer’s] appeal based on forgiveness asks voters to demonstrate a quality he has never shown in public life and which he implicitly promises not to show in the future.  Before Spitzer became known as Client No. 9, he was known for his brash, hardball tactics. As New York’s attorney general, he built a reputation as a fierce opponent of Wall Street, which created a successful platform for his gubernatorial bid. … Spitzer may be asking for forgiveness of his sexual indiscretions, but he’s running on his reputation as attorney general, which was built on ruthlessness.”

Right.

Based entirely on what I’ve read  — which is to say that like practically all of us I’ve never met the man and can only try to cull of realistic portrait from the usual heavy-breathing coverage — I accept that Spitzer is a serious piece of work. Rapaciously ambitious. Egomanical. Ruthless. Monomaniacally focused, and vain. Then you get to the softer virtues, which are compromised by all the above, like a shrewd tactical mind, relentless energy and, I’m inclined to believe, a unique determination to apply equal justice to, as Dickerson says, some of the “venerable” masters of Wall Street.

Oscar-winner Alex Gibney’s documentary on the Spitzer story, “Client No. 9″ has its critics. But the film, in my humble opinion, offers more balance and nuance than most of what passes for reporting and expert punditry today. Spitzer’s faults are there for everyone to see, but so also are his legal and political objectives. Did he see aggressive prosecution of heretofore impregnable Wall Street banks, brokerages and insurance titans as a pathway to (much) higher public office? Yes. And who wouldn’t?

Did it mean making potentially lethal enemies with not just some of, but the most influential (i.e. wealthiest) people on the planet? Yes it did, and he was not naive about who he was going up against.

Could all that legal threatening have been a cynical ruse in which he accomplished nothing but looked good enough to be congratulated for the fight? I suppose. Stranger things have happened. But you don’t get that feel from Gibney’s movie or from the titans with whom Spitzer locked horns. They hated the bastard, and said enough publicly and on the record to powerfully suggest they were fighting him off with every tool at their disposal, which when you’re talking AIG, (read this Wall Street Journal commentary — and note the publication date for the raw irony of it all), and Goldman Sachs is every tool any of us can ever imagine.

Dickerson and Spitzer’s other morally aggrieved critics argue that his sin is much more hypocrisy than sex. He was simultaneously prosecuting prostitution rings while dialing up pricey hotties for tension relief. But as Dale Bumpers said defending Bill Clinton in his impeachment trial, “You’re here today because the president suffered a terrible moral lapse, a marital infidelity. Not a breach of the public trust, not a crime against society, the two things Hamilton talked about in Federalist Paper No. 65 — I recommend it to you before you vote — but it was a breach of his marriage vows. It was a breach of his family trust. It is a sex scandal. H.L. Mencken said one time, “When you hear somebody say, ‘This is not about money,’ it’s about money.” And when you hear somebody say, “This is not about sex,” it’s about sex.”

Hypocrisy about sex is still about sex, even as, like Clinton, Spitzer was reckless enough to hand his powerful enemies the sharpest of daggers.

“Sharpest” because I fail to see how Eliot Spitzer’s “violation of the public trust” even begins to compare to the violation done to Americans’ (and damned near everyone else on the planet) actual damned lives by the titans he was attacking. Spitzer is the glowing example of the double standard for public violation. Abuse our quaint-to-voyeuristic concept of sexual propriety and you forever wear the scarlet letter, disqualified from serious consideration for serious work. Abuse our muddled-to-pornographic notions of success and stature and … well, life is a complicated process where the means often have to justify the ends. Or, as the mob likes to say, “It’s just business.”

I continue to say that nothing … nothing … is more important to the pursuit of happiness of everyone from the 90th income percentile down than re-balancing this country’s truly grotesque mal-distribution of wealth. Three successive administrations have either abetted the distortion that continues to expand or have proven feckless at combating it, in each case largely out of fear of counter-strikes from parties at least as influential as the U.S. Justice Department.

Eliot Spitzer — like a half-dozen other prominent politicians I have actually met — is not someone I’d want to be trapped with on a long road trip. But I’m not looking for a drinking buddy in people like that. I just want them to do their damned job. And in prosecutors genuinely protecting “the public trust” I’ll take a ruthless egomaniac (capable of focusing and sustaining public indignation) every day over a cautious, pennies-on-the-dollar conciliator.

 

 

What I Didn’t Miss During a Long Walk in the Woods

Here’s a list of things I didn’t miss during a week hiking down Isle Royale.

1:  Senate Republicans failing to come up with the 70 votes supposedly needed to give Speaker John Boehner “cover” to support immigration reform without the support of the majority of his neanderthal caucus. This was the presumption as we boated away from Grand Portage 12 days ago and nothing much changed, so what’s to miss?

There are only so many times I … you … paid pundits … the drunk on the next stool … can belabor the head-slapping destructive/self-destructiveness of this current crop of Republicans. And as much as road-blocking immigration reform is perhaps the single most damaging thing they could do to their election chances (in 2016, but very likely in 2014 as well) it just isn’t news anymore that these characters really are so … well, stupid is perfectly adequate word … that they will drive a stake through the heart of the one piece of legislation that might give them standing with the fastest-growing ethnic group in the country. A group big enough to turn … Texas for crissake … blue in another couple of election cycles.

It also isn’t worth mincing words about “why”. This isn’t another exercise in the hyper right-wing’s phony pursuit of Constitutional purity. It’s racism, pure and simple. The hillbilly sensibility of the Republican base has no time or sympathy for intruder factions unconnected by origin to new conservatives’ cockamamie mash-up of Hollywood westerns/xenophobia/Ronald Reagan hagiographies and snake oil punditry.

The fog that rolled up and over the Greenstone Ridge had the effect of blotting out a lot of toxic buffoonery.

2:  Even though I predicted it, I did not miss the minute-by-minute updates on where Edward Snowden was and might be going. Commercial media are incapable of engendering and sustaining a national conversation about anything of genuine importance … unless there’s a celebrity sex angle. The fact they’re treating Snowden the fugitive as “the story” and not the still-emerging details of the US’s multi-multi billion dollar cyber systems is too dismaying to “miss”. A hot shower after 50 miles of sweat, DEET and black flies, yes. A cold beer, yes. CNN, no.

3; Speaking of … I hadn’t been giving George Zimmerman a lot of thought, frankly. Although news of his trial start did make the crawl on a screen in the bar at the casino where we stayed the night before leaving. But upon return … I mean, WTF? Zimmerman is a bigger story than a military coup in Egypt? Even MSNBC has gone monomaniacal.

The Zimmerman trial is several rungs of significance up the ladder from the latest Jodi Arias/Casey Anthony sluts-who-slaughter convulsion, but round-the-clock?

Yes, I understand it’s far, far cheaper than sending crews to Cairo. And yes, I understand that certain key demographic groups will devote obsessional amounts of time watching a murder trial. But are we really at the point where we don’t even pretend “our viewers” have an interest in the meltdown of democracy in the anchor nation of the Middle East?

Don’t answer that question.

I get that CNN’s new boss, Mr. Early-Morning-TV-Works-in-All-Dayparts, Jeff Zucker sees an audience of attention-span deprived emotional adolescents, people who need a cooking segment and celebrity hype-chat to break the monotony of revolutions, car-bombings, cyber-warfare and legislative gridlock … but … passing mention? Imagine if another Carnival cruise ship flipped over in Miami harbor? You’d never hear of John Boehner again.

4:  Finally, I didn’t miss the story and intense local discussion about old Carl Pohlad’s tax troubles with the IRS … because they weren’t reported in the local press. Forbes magazine put out the story of the old man’s serious Mitt Romney-like gaming of the tax code … to the advantage of his heirs, a couple of whom at least have done some commendable things with the loot … they didn’t turn over to the common coffers.

Now that I’m back, after trying to cook my fabulous tuna schmeckler under a raggedy pine tree in a steady rain, would it be okay for someone in this town to get impertinent with one of the Pohlad boys and ask how exactly they justify the fantastical level of accounting magic that took their family off the hook for their “fair share” of taxes?

I understand every media outlet wants to be the Pohlads’ BFF. But now that this is “out there”, perhaps some tough-as-nails, take-no-prisoner reporter could “request” a first person comment from one of the boys.

I know, I know, it doesn’t have the reader interest of a list of “10 Great Places for Patriotic Dining”, but it is kind of like … news.

BTW … The beach at Siskiwit Bay was … idyllic. I’m already missing it.

“Quiet” is the Outlier in a Huckster World

I finally got around to reading Susan Cain’s book, “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking”. And I’ve actually had people guffaw when I told them.

“You!?”, they asked … with a real off-putting mix of accusation and incredulity. The point of their reaction being that I’m some kind of hopeless, congenital extrovert, the sucker-of-air from every room I enter and a human emblem for the Anthony Robbins’ system of awakening my giant within by force of unmodulated personality and raw dominance of personal interactions. From in here looking out, that’s an alien image. But their response is so definitive I haven’t even bothered to counter it. (How would you go about arguing that you you are not the sort of person who dominates-to-win social encounters?) But the fact that I’m pretty much post-caring what the unintuitive think confirms my self-diagnosis as an introvert. I feel no need to “sell” myself 24/7, never have and I’m embarrassed for those who do. (Born and raised in Minnesota, you know.) And the aversion to self-selling is at the root of Cain’s point about “the power of the introvert”.

She gets a little touchy-fuzzy for my tastes in parts, making her case for how the world’s listeners and mullers and methodical analyzers eventually exert their influence in society. There’s a lot of wishfulness in the case she lays out. But she’s definitely on to a malaise in our social media-connected, perpetually-interactive, sell-or-be-sold world.

When she describes studies demonstrating how test groups of strangers will invariably identify those who talked the most as “the smartest”, it rings a familiar bell. How many times have you watched someone, usually a male, (since bloviating women suffer an annoyance penalty that men of their kind rarely do), gas on … and on … doing everything short of holding a gun on the rest of the group just to sustain themselves as the center of attention … and are then rewarded with group approval for being “so bright”, “so intelligent” … when all you could think was, “Is this moron ever going to shut up?”

Cain makes only passing comments on our media culture. But her indictment is so explicit she hardly has to belabor it. Pick a medium and it is dominated by … those “who can’t stop talking”, by people who are (and probably always have been) compulsive about selling themselves; what they know, what they think, what you should think of them and what advice of theirs you need to follow. The familiar encouragement to pundits before going on air, to “be passionate” about their opinions and “feel free to engage” their fellow panelists is part of the same syndrome. Authoritative and loud equals winning. You can quantify it.

Over the years I’ve frequently been amazed at self-professed journalists who seemed incapable of shutting-the-fuck-up. The old line about how, “I never learned anything listening to myself talk” apparently never resonated with them. Interviewing subjects for stories involved 10-minute questions larded with anecdotes demonstrating mastery of all matters at hand, followed by barely enough patience to listen to a fifteen second answer. And that’s when they’re on the job. Over drinks these characters fall of a cliff of self-absorption. Or so it seems to me … because I generally detect yawns and wandering eyes 15 seconds into anything I say, even if I’m ordering lunch.

There’s no superficial pop test for determining introversion or extroversion, as Cain sees it. (The book is structured around her travels from researcher to researcher on the subject). We all embody aspects of the furthest poles ends. We all have our immobile, mute fetal tuck moments and our Russell Brand moments. But the surest test of your essential nature is understanding where you go to charge your batteries to do what most satisfies you. “Natural extroverts” need a fresh audience. “Natural introverts” need time alone.

She even makes the claim that Barack Obama is more introvert than extrovert, in that he is clearly someone who does his best thinking away from the spotlight and microphone and has visible distaste for engaging in cheesy bon homie and rabble rousing.

My broader cultural point — as opposed to Cain’s — is that this reflexive, mass celebration of those “who can’t stop talking”, of the compulsive super-salesmen/pitchmen is an environment saturated in superficiality and contrived conflict. “Stars” are those capable of drawing and holding attention, usually far beyond the intellectual value they provide, and the conflict of competition for attention (and ratings, and money) distorts the actual divisions between people and groups. Meanwhile, those who have run the numbers, done the math, tested the waters and read the footnotes are ignored, or need “encouragement” (i.e. a kick in the ass) to stand up and politely say, “Uh, excuse me. I’m sorry. But what you said is complete and utter bullshit.”

As Jack Abramoff  — a sociopathic extrovert — once said, “Washington is Hollywood for ugly people”. Susan Cain presents an underlying explanation that probably never occurred to old Jack.

Eddie Snowden’s Girlfriend is the Key

Maybe the “celebrity-fugitive-with-hot-girlfriend” aspect of the massive NSA spying “scandal” is what will keep it alive long enough to have an intelligent national discussion of what it all means, how we want to conduct our war-without-end on terror … and how much we’re willing to pay for it.

Because, as it is, this one is disappearing faster from radar contact than Darrell Issa’s IRS investigation.

The NSA/PRISM/Snowden story has a lot of interesting facets, few of them all that surprising to me.

My first reaction to the SHOCK!!! of the Guardian/Glenn Greenwald story was, “Well, what do you think they’ve been doing with all that money?” But then I’ve never quite gotten over the collective freak-out in the aftermath of 9/11 that so seamlessly transitioned the country’s military-industrial complex (beatin’ on the Rooskies) to the intelligence-industrial complex (beatin’ on the jihadiis). America’s warrior lobbyists fully exploited a national disaster and over the course of the decade that followed turned five of the counties surrounding Washington DC into the most affluent in the country and sucked thousands of whip-smart kids into “top-secret” jobs, not as lowly-paid, grey gummint employees, but as quite nicely remunerated for-profit junior executives, with stock bonuses from their work in The War on Terror for Shareholder Value.

While there just might be a hint of disingenuousness to the Obama administration’s claim to “welcome a discussion”, I think it’s abundantly clear that this program, PRISM, far exceeds anything Team Obama could ever assemble. In fact, this is a classic view into the country’s permanent government, the agencies and contractors who outlive all but the hoariest, senile Dixie legislator. The staggering amount of money freaked-out Congress threw at “national intelligence” after 9/11 — as much as an additional $80 billion a year (or closing in on $1 trillion for 12 years … plus of course the cost of Iraq and Afghanistan) — reinvigorated a contractors-at-the-trough feeding frenzy that hasn’t stopped since Word War II.

Hell, I doubt you could win in a district as blue as Manhattan’s Upper West Side if you were accused of being “soft on terrorism”.

Overall, I’m pleased young Ed Snowden connected with Greenwald and all this spilled out. Pleased, because I seriously doubt the revelation that the US can track patterns in phone and internet connections is news to any terrorist mastermind, and might … not likely, but might … lead a few courageous voices to demand the same kind of efficiency and reduction in fraud and waste in intelligence-gathering that so many in Congress routinely demand for food stamps, Head Start and college loans.

The classic line about the Pentagon is that its in-breeding with defense contractors has created a “self-licking ice cream cone”. Ditto, with the NSA, the CIA and the blizzard of corporate spooks nuzzled up against them just outside the DC Beltway. This is a system that creates and sustains itself, with every cycle of fear-mongering adding octane/tax dollars to the tank.

One way to judge Obama’s commitment to an open discussion of how we protect the country against stateless villains is if he issues a blanket pardon to Snowden. The kid’s been fired by his private contractor firm. That’s good enough for me. That precedent alone will chill any further “disclosures” from those thousands of young brainiacs now paying on fat mortgages, BMW payments and booking kids into private schools in the rolling hills outside DC.

The better move is to bring an immunized Snowden up on Capitol Hill and have him (and his former employer) explain how exactly he got into a position to have access to what he did, and what he really knows.

Better yet, set up a Booz, Allen terminal in the Congressional hearing room and let Snowden access the phone and internet records of a couple of Senators sitting right in front of him  — (come on, you want to know what Ted Cruz downloads after a tough day at the office) — and a couple of media news stars, too. I’ll suggest Sean Hannity and Lou Dobbs. Let him show the country how this stuff really works, and what we’ve paid (another) trillion bucks for.

But the way our media culture operates today, it’ll take racy pictures of his dancer girlfriend to sustain this story at the supermarket checkout lane.

Emmer Guarantees More of What Made the GOP What It Is

It was a tough enough week for our fringy conservative friends even before Tom Emmer decided to leave talk radio and make a run for Congress.

I saw Emmer up close only once during his dare I say “clumsy”, (but nearly successful), run for Governor. It was at a Sixth District rabble-rouser at some sports bar up in Big Lake in late 2009. The assembled faithful had mainly come to see Michele Bachmann, so Emmer and fellow candidate Marty Seifert (and ex-House Speaker Kurt Zellers) were merely the warm-up acts.

This was the event where Zellers warned the choir that if Obama had his Kenyan/muslim/European/Socialist way with high-speed trains they (the audience of farmers, small town businessmen and spooky apocalyptics mumbling about “righteous reckonings”) would be “astonished” by the flood of welfare cases pouring into Minnesota from Chicago. To diagram the inference (which was lost on no one): Spendthrift black guy in White House provides express train service for a lot of high-crime, low-cash types who don’t look much like anyone in the Sixth District to ride up and squat in Minnesota.

And that was one of the classier moments of the evening. (I was eventually kicked out by the sports bar owner, despite having paid the $10 to get in.)

What Emmer guarantees is another competition to see who can out-crazy the other for the hearts and alleged minds of the Sixth District’s rabid, caucus-going base. To be sure, if you’re him, it’s worth saying whatever it takes. Because the winner, almost certainly a Republican, unless Bud Grant or Ron Schara (or Raven the dog) decides to play Democrat and run for office, is guaranteed a sweet and easy ten-year run, at minimum. Do the math: $140, 000 a year plus federal pension. For Emmer it sure beats a Clear Channel talk radio contract. (Believe me, I know).

So … prepare yourself for a fresh outbreak of grim, hellfire warnings of “socialist havoc”, “government controlled health care”, “godless liberalism” and “reckless government spending”.

That last one is always fraught with irony, since Emmer is another one of these local Republicans who seems to have a very hard time conserving their own money. (How do you borrow $1.6 million against a house you bought for $425,000? Only a fiscally responsible quasi-Libertarian knows for sure. )

But as I say, Emmer’s return comes at the end of a tough news week for the Grand Old Party, which I would have thought would be all about cleaning up its act from the mess it made last fall.

In order of embarrassments we had:  The Lou Dobbs/FoxNews sausage fest conversation about that study showing 40% of women are the breadwinner in American households with children. Lou and the boys couldn’t paint a darker picture of cultural collapse. Clearly, gals out there picking up a bigger paycheck than their boy toy (if they have one) is a descending peril along the lines of a sun-blotting swarm of pecker-picking turkey vultures. The classic among them was blogger Erick Erickson — a bona fide voice of influence to the literate among the Sixth District base.

Said Erickson, who is also a talk radio host:  “I’m so used to liberals telling conservatives that they’re anti-science. But liberals who defend this and say it is not a bad thing are very anti-science. When you look at biology, when you look at the natural world, the roles of a male and a female in society and in other animals, the male typically is the dominant role. The female, it’s not antithesis, or it’s not competing, it’s a complimentary role.”

This set off an internal kerfuffle lead by FoxNews’ main female personalities Megyn Kelly and Greta van Susteren, both of whom were, like Captain Renault, “shocked, shocked” that 1950s-style troglodyte sexism was alive and walking the corridors of Roger Ailes’ and Rupert Murdoch’s FoxNews. (All you could do was roll your eyes at their “indignation”, which really was poorly disguised embarrassment at “the boys” being so crass and obvious about their innate sexism, thereby forcing the women to say something.)

Finally, (and by that I mean before Emmer), we had the really kind of astonishing report from … the frickin’ … College Republican National Committee … describing the party as it is today — led by talk radio jocks, FoxNews pundits, self-aggrandizing mega-church pastors and palpably sociopathic bloggers — as, “closed-minded, racist, rigid, old-fashioned.” (At least that’s how young “winnable” voters described the party.)

Rolling Stone summarized nine other points in the report. Including these tough-to-dispute gems:

3. “For the GOP, being thought of as closed-minded is hardly a good thing. But if the GOP is thought of as the ‘stupid party,’ it may as well be the kiss of death.”

5. “An outright majority of young people still think those Republican policies are to blame [for the Great Recession] – hardly an encouraging finding.”

8. “Perhaps most troubling for Republicans is the finding from the March 2013 CRNC survey that showed 54% of young voters saying ‘taxes should go up on the wealthy.'”

The point to all this is entirely obvious, I guess.

Namely, if someone beats Tom Emmer to the bile-marinated heart of the Sixth District it will be by confirming every appalling, out-of-touch, discredited thing young people (by and large), immigrants, minorities and the mooching 47% find reprehensible about the Republican party … today.

Worse, the party’s economic message, supposedly its intellectual anchor amid storms over “legitimate rape”, working mothers and blocking gun and immigration reform, is clearly a non-starter among a majority of younger voters. And I’m guessing most of them aren’t even aware of the collapse of the vaunted Reinhart-Rogoff theory, the “intellectual foundation” for the Darwinian economic ideas of Paul Ryan, the party’s designated “brain guy”.

In other words, to beat every other Republican for the Sixth District nomination, the winner is going to have to say and be everything that has the party on the brink of collapse … outside the Sixth.

Michele, My Belle …

Michele Bachmann announcing she’s bailing on her beloved Sixth District completes a neat triptych of synchronicity. First there was old Bob Dole saying the current Republican party is such a godawfiul mess Ronald Reagan couldn’t make it out of a primary and that they ought to hang a “Closed for Repairs” on the party’s office door until they get an act together. Next came the study of the Tampa Bay Times PolitiFact archives that conservatives have a rate of flagrant lying three times higher than your average prevaricating liberal. Then … came Michele, my belle, a woman who like Richard Nixon, I’ll miss more (as a piece of street theater) than I dare say outside a confessional.

The connection is fairly obvious, especially when you consider how heavily Bachmann’s routine abuse of fact and logic skewed the PolitiFact numbers and that what Bob Dole was alluding to was the contempt for legislation and government that is the primary feature of the Congressional Bachmanns’ of the world.

Benghazi, We Hardly Knew Ye …

And then a big wind came and blew it (almost) all away … .

Republicans can’t catch a break. Just when it felt like they were getting somewhere in their now five-year campaign to neuter Barack Obama, another giant tornado rips through Oklahoma and the national press pretty much drops three mega “scandals”  — Benghazi-gate, IRS-gate and AP-gate — and rushes off to do its professional public comforter thing for the storm victims. “How did you feel?”, “We’re sorry for your loss/thankful for your survival”.

Meanwhile, the effect on the “ten times worse than Watergate” episodes left behind in DC will vary, as they should.

A Gay Day is a Good Day

Any day 20% of the population has a basic right affirmed — otherwise known as a “freedom” by our conservative friends — is good day. So it’s easy to appreciate the enthusiasm and celebration taking place over a law putting to rest decades of legal prejudice against gay people in Minnesota.

But I have to confess to a certain emotional detachment. While this may be another symptom  my chronic, morbid, sociopathic tendencies, (I should probably drink more to modulate them), an easier explanation is that as a straight male I’ve never had a direct personal investment in the gay rights campaign.

As a squishy liberal it’s not like I had to be educated in the fundamental injustice at play in the treatment of gays. But since it wasn’t me, it was simple enough to consign gay prejudice to the sloshing bin of intractable cultural malignancies doing their rotting work on the American promise. The same applied, I guess, to the civil rights movement of the Sixties, when all I could do as a kid was watch from a small Minnesota town. (The highest pitch of anti-Semitism was before my time.)

“Terror”, Right There in My Hometown.

Back in the day, terror in my hometown of Montevideo was pretty much confined to the cops cleaning the last drunks of the night out of Sarge’s Bar or chasing my buddies and me through alleys for throwing water balloons at trucks. But now the old town has real knucklehead poster-boys for the over-armed, paranoid, anti-gummint trailer park militia movement. And they’re feeling the wrath of the Monte cops … and FBI.

The laugh line in this past week’s news out of “Mo-Town”, as we locals refer to it, was that Buford “Bucky” Rogers, his garage full of molotov cocktails and ample reserve ammo withstanding, was not believed to have any “overseas” connections. Riiight.