Bush supporters' aftermath thread

Well, I'm not sure astute is the most appropriate adjective, timber. But finn certainly is earnest in all the above. He's is right though that the Newshour went a step down from Gigot to Brooks. And there was a similar descention earlier in moving from Gergen to Gigot. Of course, Chomsky was even earlier, and before that, it was either the Irish Catholic's God or the Spanish Inquisition, I don't recall now. Down, down...

Remember though, that when we are dealing with Finn, we are dealing with someone who has moved from New York to Dallas, a trajectory which which anyone but a fundamentalist would validly conclude to be clear evidence of devolution (leaving aside the possibility of an Intelligent Designer in Practical Joker mode).

Making or suggesting causal relationships in the manner I've done, or in the manner which finn does in his notions on children's programming (or as others do with portrayals of violence, etc) is a dicey move. At least, it is for us. One would think some statistical analyses could be brought to bear which would illuminate even if human systems are so complex (amazing article in todays NY Times magazine on analyses of the huge email data base from Enron). Of course, either of us might be right, we just ought not to be certain.

Finn assumes I am calling for, or would call for, some mandated solution for the problem I perceive. I don't. I would reinstitute the Fairness Doctrine immediately upon ascention to the throne which has mysteriously gotten under someone else's bum, but that doesn't solve my peeve - uncareful partisan yelling replacing careful and more objective discourse.

There's nothing for it but to continue pointing in the direction I point, suggesting that attention to detail and accuracy can be very important indeed.

You two, and others, suggest a categorical difference between 'entertainment' and 'news'. Sure, once you use those terms, the difference is already constructed. But let's look at a couple of things.

First, who gains from this shift away from 'talking heads' and towards 'yelling blondes with cleavage'? The corporations that compete for ad dollars. That the polity gains is unlikely. Consumer demand fulfilled isn't necessarily a good thing, as we might conclude considering the free-market demand for nuclear or biological weapons technologies.

Or let's look at engineering and careful attention to detail and accuracy. Does one want Ann Coulter checking off on the blueprints? Why not? Does one want Rupert Murdoch in charge overall? Well, for Rupert, his interests would lead him to build poorly, film the collapses, and pull in the ad dollars from all those deliciously excited viewers.

Less flippantly, consider the courts. Would the judge, or that court's community, prefer some strict and careful attention to detail and factual representation? Why? Why not set up the court out in the sun with big bleachers around and return to those heady days of justice as 'entertainment'? You'd get bigger crowds.

Or government. We demand - at least we bloody well ought to demand - that government speaks to us not in the Coulter mode but in the Gergen mode. We want them to tell us the truth, to be transparent, to be nuanced and careful. Or is it ok, for the broad polity I mean, for government to simply keep us preoccupied and 'entertained' with exciting wars and fictional accounts?

(Standing, clapping, tries to whistle but never mastered it, claps louder.)

Thankyou squinney, that's very nice. Any chance you're inspired enough to lift your shirt?

Nicely writ, blatham - and though you most likely will disagree, and fail to see the irony, I think your piece makes my point for me.


BTW, I think the best thing about NYC is that it is conveniently located to 4 airports with out-going flights. To be fair, as for Dallas, the most salient feature of that metropolis is its central location in the otherwise pointless landmass that protects Oklahoma from the violence of Gulf Coast weather.

I applaud your sentiment re the Fairness Doctrine, and I roundly applaud efforts being made to restore balance and order to the Liberal Hellhole that long has been PBS. Frankly, with the advent and near-universal adoption of television transmission facilities alternative to over-the-air broadcast PBS has outlived its design function; anyone with a video camera - The Real Public - has access aplenty to the Television Audience. To maintain PBS in any way any longer serves a vital public function is to perpetrate a fiction.

Now, I'm not fond of partisan news coverage at all - though I grit my teeth and watch The Alphabets from time to time just to keep track of what The Other Side thinks, while The Grey Lady serves me my morning dose of outrage, making certain bodily functions - typically performed while perusing the pages of the online edition - all the more gratifying. When she goes - as appears certain she will - to fee-subscription for internet access, I suppose I shall have to up my fiber intake.

That The Left might find dismay in, and The Right be comforted to note, the lessening of The Left's grip on the Propaganda Machine is not at all surprising. Not that its particularly thought to be a permanent good thing, as pendulums travel in an arc, repeating the described path incessantly, but at least the swing of The Media Pendulum has reached its Eastward apogee and has begun its Westward track. Balance, though it will be ephemeral, approaches. The less entertained The Left becomes by The Propaganda Machine's output, the happier - at least for a time - I shall be.

Interesting, too, to see from squinney's rousing endorsement of your piece, just how readily entertained some folks are.




I think your shirt idea has real merit, though. Thats something the likes of which we certainly could use more.

Timber writes


I second that. There is a second ointment however in that so many are willing to see any kind of profit motive as somehow immoral.

NYT announced it last week - PPV (at least for Krugman and a few others) effective Sept. 1.

Let me introduce you to a new word...amoral.

Ah, but timber, as your 'point' is to be seen evidenced in the set of all things at all times, all I write must necessarily be included.

Elbows rubbing, beers in hand, we await squinney.

There's much to be said for fellowship, the Brewer's Art, and real entertainment. Especially when enjoyed in concert.

We all wince at the often shrill excesses of the media shouters of both the left and the right who so regularly present themselves as the explainers of truth, of fair & balanced reporting, of that's the way it is, and all the rest. However they aren't the only purveyors of propaganda masquerading as reporters of truth in the media, and that may well be a redeeming difference for them.

The much more polite and reassuring formats for the same propaganda employed by PBS has the added fault of being quite insidious. The standard stuff of the traditional media are generally just as biased and distorted: Dan Rather was his normal "professional" self as he delivered his carefully developed lies., and the New York Times has perfected the technique of placing editorial material on page one, dressed up as "news".

Given the universal impulses of human nature toward self-interest and self-expression, it is unrealistic to assume that any voluntary, autonomous entity in the information business can long escape the the temptations to which all are subject. With that in mind I prefer my snakes with rattles to remind me of what they really are, and protect me from the delusion that they are something else.

Bush Country
The Middle East embraces democracy--and the American president.

BY FOUAD AJAMI
Sunday, May 22, 2005 12:01 a.m.

"George W. Bush has unleashed a tsunami on this region," a shrewd Kuwaiti merchant who knows the way of his world said to me. The man had no patience with the standard refrain that Arab reform had to come from within, that a foreign power cannot alter the age-old ways of the Arabs. "Everything here--the borders of these states, the oil explorations that remade the life of this world, the political outcomes that favored the elites now in the saddle--came from the outside. This moment of possibility for the Arabs is no exception." A Jordanian of deep political experience at the highest reaches of Arab political life had no doubt as to why history suddenly broke in Lebanon, and could conceivably change in Syria itself before long. "The people in the streets of Beirut knew that no second Hama is possible; they knew that the rulers were under the gaze of American power, and knew that Bush would not permit a massive crackdown by the men in Damascus."My informant's reference to Hama was telling: It had been there in 1982, in that city of the Syrian interior, that the Baathist-Alawite regime had broken and overwhelmed Syrian society. Hama had been a stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood, a fortress of the Sunni middle class. It had rebelled, and the regime unleashed on it a merciless terror. There were estimates that 25,000 of its people perished in that fight. Thenceforth, the memory of Hama hung over the life of Syria--and Lebanon. But the people in the plazas of Beirut, and the Syrian intellectuals who have stepped forth to challenge the Baathist regime, have behind them the warrant, and the green light, of American power and protection.

To venture into the Arab world, as I did recently over four weeks in Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan and Iraq, is to travel into Bush Country. I was to encounter people from practically all Arab lands, to listen in on a great debate about the possibility of freedom and liberty. I met Lebanese giddy with the Cedar Revolution that liberated their country from the Syrian prison that had seemed an unalterable curse. They were under no illusions about the change that had come their way. They knew that this new history was the gift of an American president who had put the Syrian rulers on notice. The speed with which Syria quit Lebanon was astonishing, a race to the border to forestall an American strike that the regime could not discount. I met Syrians in the know who admitted that the fear of American power, and the example of American forces flushing Saddam Hussein out of his spider hole, now drive Syrian policy. They hang on George Bush's words in Damascus, I was told: the rulers wondering if Iraq was a crystal ball in which they could glimpse their future.The weight of American power, historically on the side of the dominant order, now drives this new quest among the Arabs. For decades, the intellectual classes in the Arab world bemoaned the indifference of American power to the cause of their liberty. Now a conservative American president had come bearing the gift of Wilsonian redemption. For a quarter century the Pax Americana had sustained the autocracy of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak: He had posed as America's man on the Nile, a bulwark against the Islamists. He was sly and cunning, running afoul of our purposes in Iraq and over Israeli-Palestinian matters. He had nurtured a culture of antimodernism and anti-Americanism, and had gotten away with it. Now the wind from Washington brought tidings: America had wearied of Mr. Mubarak, and was willing to bet on an open political process, with all its attendant risks and possibilities. The brave oppositional movement in Cairo that stepped forth under the banner of Kifaya ("Enough!") wanted the end of his reign: It had had enough of his mediocrity, enough of the despotism of an aging officer who had risen out of the military bureaucracy to entertain dynastic dreams of succession for his son. Egyptians challenging the quiescence of an old land may have had no kind words to say about America in the past. But they were sure that the play between them and the regime was unfolding under Mr. Bush's eyes.

Unmistakably, there is in the air of the Arab world a new contest about the possibility and the meaning of freedom. This world had been given over to a dark nationalism, and to the atavisms of a terrible history. For decades, it was divided between rulers who monopolized political power and intellectual classes shut out of genuine power, forever prey to the temptations of radicalism. Americans may not have cared for those rulers, but we judged them as better than the alternative. We feared the "Shia bogeyman" in Iraq and the Islamists in Algeria, Egypt and Tunisia; we bought the legend that Syria's dominion in Lebanon kept the lid on anarchy. We feared tinkering with the Saudi realm; it was terra incognita to us, and the House of Saud seemed a surer bet than the "wrath and virtue" of the zealots. Even Yasser Arafat, a retailer of terror, made it into our good graces as a man who would tame the furies of the masked men of Hamas. That bargain with authoritarianism did not work, and begot us the terrors of 9/11.

The children of Islam, and of the Arabs in particular, had taken to the road, and to terror. There were many liberal, secular Arabs now clamoring for American intervention. The claims of sovereignty were no longer adequate; a malignant political culture had to be "rehabilitated and placed in receivership," a wise Jordanian observer conceded. Mr. Bush may not be given to excessive philosophical sophistication, but his break with "the soft bigotry of low expectations" in the Arab-Islamic world has found eager converts among Muslims and Arabs keen to repair their world, to wean it from a culture of scapegoating and self-pity. Pick up the Arabic papers today: They are curiously, and suddenly, readable. They describe the objective world; they give voice to recognition that the world has bypassed the Arabs. The doors have been thrown wide open, and the truth of that world laid bare. Grant Mr. Bush his due: The revolutionary message he brought forth was the simple belief that there was no Arab and Muslim "exceptionalism" to the appeal of liberty. For a people mired in historical pessimism, the message of this outsider was a powerful antidote to the culture of tyranny. Hitherto, no one had bothered to tell the Palestinians that they can't have terror and statehood at the same time, that the patronage of the world is contingent on a renunciation of old ways. This was the condition Mr. Bush attached to his support for the Palestinians. It is too early to tell whether the new restraint in the Palestinian world will hold. But it was proper that Mr. Bush put Arafat beyond the pale.

It was Iraq of course that gave impetus to this new Arab history. And it is in Iraq that the nobility of this American quest comes into focus. This was my fourth trip to Iraq since the fall of the despotism, and my most hopeful yet. I traveled to Baghdad, Kirkuk, Erbil and Suleimaniyah. A close colleague--Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations--and I were there to lecture and to "show the flag." We met with parliamentarians and journalists, provincial legislators, clerics and secularists alike, Sunni and Shia Arabs and Kurds. One memory I shall treasure: a visit to the National Assembly. From afar, there are reports of the "acrimony" of Iraq, of the long interlude between Iraq's elections, on Jan. 30, and the formation of a cabinet. But that day, in the assembly, these concerns seemed like a quibble with history. There was the spectacle of democracy: men and women doing democracy's work, women cloaked in Islamic attire right alongside more emancipated women, the technocrats and the tribal sheikhs, and the infectious awareness among these people of the precious tradition bequeathed them after a terrible history. One of the principal leaders of the Supreme Islamic Council for Revolution in Iraq, Sheikh Hamam Hammoudi, an elegant, thoughtful cleric in his early 50s, brushed aside the talk of a Shia theocracy. This Shia man, who knew a smattering of English, offered his own assurance that the example and the power of Iran shall be kept at bay: "My English is better than my Farsi, even though I spent 20 years in Iran." He was proud of his Iraqi identity, proud of being "an Arab." He was sure that the Najaf school of Shia jurisprudence would offer its own alternative to the world view of Qom, across the border. He wanted no theocratic state in Iraq: Islam, he said, would be "a source" of legislation, but the content of politics would be largely secular. The model, he added, with a touch of irony, would be closer to the American mix of religion and politics than to the uncompromising secularism of France.The insurgents were busy with their bombs and their plots of mayhem: Georgian troops guarded the National Assembly and controlled access to it. But a people were taking to a new political way. A woman garbed in black, a daughter of a distinguished clerical Shia family, made the rounds among her fellow legislators. Religious scruples decreed that she could not shake the hand of a male stranger. But she was proud and wily, a free woman in a newly emancipated polity. She let me know how much she knew about the ways and the literature of the West. American power may have turned on its erstwhile ally, Ahmed Chalabi. But his appearance in the assembly's gallery drew to him parliamentarians of every stripe. He, too, had about him the excitement of this new politics.

A lively press has sprouted in Iraq: There is an astonishing number of newspapers and weeklies, more than 250 in all. There are dozens of private TV channels and radio stations. Journalists and editors speak of a press free of censorship. Admittedly, the work is hard and dangerous, the logistics a veritable nightmare. But no single truth claimed this country, no "big man" sucked the air out of its public life. The insurgents will do what they are good at. But no one really believes that those dispensers of death can turn back the clock. Among the Sunni Arabs, there is growing recognition that the past cannot be retrieved, that it had been a big error to choose truculence and political maximalism. By a twist of fate, the one Arab country that had seemed ever marked for brutality and sorrow now stands poised on the frontier of a new political world. No Iraqis I met look to neighboring Arab lands for political inspiration: They are scorched by the terror and the insurgency, but a better political culture is tantalizingly close.

Women are getting the vote in Kuwait, the Lebanese clamor for the truth about the assassination of former prime minister Rafiq Hariri, and about the dark Syrian interlude in their history. Egyptians don't seem frightened of the scarecrows with which the Mubarak regime secured their submission. Everywhere, the order is under attack, and men and women are willing to question the prevailing truths. There is to this moment of Arab history the feel of a re-enactment of Europe's Revolution of 1848--the springtime of peoples: That revolution broke out in France, then spread to the Italian states, to the German principalities, to the remotest corners of the Austrian empire. There must have been 50 of these revolts--rebellions of despair and of contempt. History was swift: The revolutions spread with velocity and were turned back with equal speed. The fear of chaos dampened these rebellions.As I made my way on this Arab journey, I picked up a meditation that Massimo d'Azeglio, a Piedmontese aristocrat who embraced that "springtime" in Europe, offered about his time, which speaks so directly to this Arab time: "The gift of liberty is like that of a horse, handsome, strong, and high-spirited. In some it arouses a wish to ride; in many others, on the contrary, it increases the desire to walk." It would be fair to say that there are many Arabs today keen to walk--frightened as they are by the prospect of the Islamists coming to power and curtailing personal liberties, snuffing out freedoms gained at such great effort and pain. But more Arabs, I hazard to guess, now have the wish to ride. It is a powerful temptation that George W. Bush has brought to their doorstep.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/forms/printThis.html?id=110006721

'Tis from SFGate, of all places, but powerful nonetheless. Be sure to read it all.
___________________________________________________________

Leaving the left
I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity

Keith ThompsonSunday, May 22, 2005

Nightfall, Jan. 30. Eight-million Iraqi voters have finished risking their lives to endorse freedom and defy fascism. Three things happen in rapid succession. The right cheers. The left demurs. I walk away from a long-term intimate relationship. I'm separating not from a person but a cause: the political philosophy that for more than three decades has shaped my character and consciousness, my sense of self and community, even my sense of cosmos.

I'm leaving the left -- more precisely, the American cultural left and what it has become during our time together.

I choose this day for my departure because I can no longer abide the simpering voices of self-styled progressives -- people who once championed solidarity with oppressed populations everywhere -- reciting all the ways Iraq's democratic experiment might yet implode.

*snip*

True, it took a while to see what was right before my eyes. A certain misplaced loyalty kept me from grasping that a view of individuals as morally capable of and responsible for making the principle decisions that shape their lives is decisively at odds with the contemporary left's entrance-level view of people as passive and helpless victims of powerful external forces, hence political wards who require the continuous shepherding of caretaker elites.

Leftists who no longer speak of the duties of citizens, but only of the rights of clients, cannot be expected to grasp the importance (not least to our survival) of fostering in the Middle East the crucial developmental advances that gave rise to our own capacity for pluralism, self-reflection, and equality. A left averse to making common cause with competent, self- determining individuals -- people who guide their lives on the basis of received values, everyday moral understandings, traditional wisdom, and plain common sense -- is a faction that deserves the marginalization it has pursued with such tenacity for so many years.

All of which is why I have come to believe, and gladly join with others who have discovered for themselves, that the single most important thing a genuinely liberal person can do now is walk away from the house the left has built. The renewal of any tradition that deserves the name "progressive" becomes more likely with each step in a better direction.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/05/22/INGUNCQHKJ1.DTL

That is powerful JW.

I would guess that many of us, maybe all or most of us on the right, have walked away from an ideology that betrayed us. I did decades ago after the 1960's and early 1970's counter culture turned ugly and destructive. We took with us all that was good about classical liberalism and hold tightly to that yet today even as we cherish and defend those values that have stood the test of time and strengthen us.

The radical left has become as narrow minded, intolerant, judgmental, retalitory, and as unprogressive as any on the radical right have ever been.

I had been resisting it, but I'm almost to the point of adopting Ican's definitions for what used to be 'left' and 'rgiht'

That sounds good.

But: why don't you show/prove it here?

Would you clarify your question Walter? What is it exactly that you are saying? I happen to hold my ideological views because I think they are the most beneficial to me, to everybody I care about, and to humankind in general. But I will be happy to hear your version of what ideology you think I should have.

Well, I probably really posed the question the wrong way around.

Let me redefine it:

what idiology did you walk away that you had before and that betrayed you?

We could all do a lot worse than adopting any of Ican's definitions or attitudes. He's a ray of sunshine on the dark days

Walter writes


Ah okay Walter. That's very different and thank you for clarifying.

When I was growing up and during my college years and as a young adult, I was a starry eyed visionary expecting to make a profound positive influence on the world. I rejected most of my parents' values figuring as bad as they were, my generation simply had to do things better. I fully expected my generation to eliminate racism, sexism, religious judgmentalism, economic snobbery, war, crime, and poverty, while at the same time saving the whales and rain forests, developing absolutely clean forms of energy, and ensuring that all rivers again ran wild, free, and unpolluted.

But somewhere along the line, I began to see the muddle headedness of well intended efforts to make things better. Urban renewal was well intended, maybe even necessary, but it destroyed whole vital neighborhoods, uprooted neighbors and families, and created the projects and brand new ghettos. I was and still am a champion of women's rights, but the radical feminists introduced a toxic element into the effort with a corresponding increase in divorce, domestic violence, and paranoia in the work place resulting in broken homes, single parents, and an increase in poor, neglected, or poorly supervised children. Efforts to eliminate racism and poverty were noble and well intended, but we still have the poor with us along with more broken homes, single parents, neglected children, plus a sense of entitlement that has saddled the government into apparent infinity.

None of this is absolute, of course, and some things worked better than other things. You can find plenty of success stories among the chaos. but when some of us saw what had been wrought and started working to correct the errors made, we were condemned by our fellows as traitors, uncompassionate, selfish, hateful.

That's when I realized that the radical left had become its own self perpetuating, destructive, narrow minded, judgmental, intolerant mechanism more interested in promoting itself than in actually helping anybody. I came to see that I was no longer a part of it.

I took the best it had with me. And I now try to look for the right way to get things done and no longer buy into the mythology that if something is well intended, it is the right thing to do. I think the 'liberal' way is best in some things and that the 'conservative' way is best in others.

I am often criticized here for certainty in my convictions and beliefs. But I don't state a conviction or belief that I don't believe is worth having or that cannot be defended. I suppose that makes me look uncompromising and narrow minded. But I think just about everybody on the 'right' can articulate why they hold the convictions they hold, and they don't have to criticize or denigrate the left to do it. At the same time, I think many heads with different ideas working together on a problem will come to a better solution than anybody can do on his/her own. I can change my mind if given a good enough reason to do so.

The radical left no longer wants to see any idea or opinion other than its own, however, and it is willing to destroy anybody who disagrees with it, And that is why I walked away from it.

Well said, Foxy

Thank you JW. I'm guessing many of us right of center have similar stories.