blatham wrote:Meinn gott un himmel! (phonetic spelling with complete disregard for meaning...always loved the sound of this expression) I'm cavorting with the enemy. I resolve to shower twice this AM.
Goddamit Bernie, I give you a break every now and then. I am not your enemy! Neither is Thomas!
The war budget questions to Wolfowitz (and others) were anything but requests for information. They were obvious and sectarian attempts to score politicaL points and news headlines, deserving only of contempt. The various administration officials were absolutely right to ignore them.
blatham wrote:Meinn gott un himmel! (phonetic spelling with complete disregard for meaning...always loved the sound of this expression) I'm cavorting with the enemy. I resolve to shower twice this AM.
Goddamit Bernie, I give you a break every now and then. I am not your enemy! Neither is Thomas!
The war budget questions to Wolfowitz (and others) were anything but requests for information. They were obvious and sectarian attempts to score politicaL points and news headlines, deserving only of contempt. The various administration officials were absolutely right to ignore them.
I must really warn both GeorgeOb1 and Thomas. Both of you are intelligent and very well informed people who can write well but never get a Mountie angry. Even though Mr. Blatham who is now an expat from Canada appears to me to have learned little about the USA( He thinks Irving Kristol was a Trotskyite and therefore should not have received a medal from President Bush even though Kristol abandoned the idiot left wing hippies forty years ago).
It is amazing to me that, although Mr. Blatham is certainly erudite and learned about things Canadian, he knows very little about US conditions and traditions.
However, I do not wish to be too hard on Immigrants. Perhaps if Mr. Blatham will enroll in an Americanization course, there is still hope for him! He blithely talks about a DOD which is incapable admitting error. He has never served in the Military as I have and knows NOTHING about the operation of the DOD except what he may read in the New York Times and/or the Nation Magazine( formerly known as Pravda West).
Quote:Goddamit Bernie, I give you a break every now and then. I am not your enemy! Neither is Thomas!
The war budget questions to Wolfowitz (and others) were anything but requests for information. They were obvious and sectarian attempts to score politicaL points and news headlines, deserving only of contempt. The various administration officials were absolutely right to ignore them.
Everyone is my enemy! Either you are me, or you are not. I remain resolute.
Bernard,
Bernie an I only rarely agree about political matters. Thomas, I suspect is somewhere between us, Despite this there has never been any anger among us of which I am aware. The reason is mutual respect and friendship - not a bad concept for you to consider. I would never directly acknowledge being influenced by bernie's views on political and social issues, but I do consider them seriously and have indeed been influenc ed by them. That is how one learns.
georgeob1 wrote:Bernard,
Bernie an I only rarely agree about political matters. Thomas, I suspect is somewhere between us, Despite this there has never been any anger among us of which I am aware. The reason is mutual respect and friendship - not a bad concept for you to consider. I would never directly acknowledge being influenced by bernie's views on political and social issues, but I do consider them seriously and have indeed been influenc ed by them. That is how one learns.
Strings softly rising in the background...then, Streisand.
People, people who love people...
Actually I've always found that song to be painfully cloying. In fact everything Streisand dooes affects me that way. For background I'd prefer an organ rendition of kamenoi Ostrow.
For those of you who haven't bumped into this story yet...
A parody belittling Al Gore's film on global warming recently arrived on YouTube. It fit the mold of offerings there...amateurish looking as if done by some young fella on his Mac. But as the WSJ revealed a couple of days ago, it wasn't really what it appeared. It was actually produced by DCI Group, a Republican lobby and PR firm whose clients include Exxon.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06215/710851-115.stm
GeorgeOb1- I am afraid that Mr. Blatham is afraid to respond to my posts. He is entirely in his right to do so, but I find it curious that he allows someone to urniate on his shoes without responding. I will continue to urniate on his shoes when he posts ridiculous garbage.
What you do not mention, George Ob1, is that B. Latham did not grow up in the USA. He is a Canadian and, because of that, fatally biased against the US and US traditions.
I suggest he might feel more at home on a Canadian web site but I am afraid that he is of such a negatively morose nature that he will continue to libel the USA.
And I will continue to urinate on his shoes--to Okie's everlasting delight, I am sure!!!
blatham wrote:For those of you who haven't bumped into this story yet...
A parody belittling Al Gore's film on global warming recently arrived on YouTube. It fit the mold of offerings there...amateurish looking as if done by some young fella on his Mac. But as the WSJ revealed a couple of days ago, it wasn't really what it appeared. It was actually produced by DCI Group, a Republican lobby and PR firm whose clients include Exxon.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06215/710851-115.stm
You mean the far-left Wall Street Journal? Don't believe them, they're part of those librul mainstream media.
Seriously though, I am not surprised at all about what your article says. My father works in the pharmaceutical industry, where he started out as a small comany's chief of marketing. According to him, things like this have been a common marketing strategy for decades: Companies place content that promotes their products, but that viewers can't distinguish from genuine reporting. He is in no position to know if political organizations did that too, but I'd be very surprised if they didn't. Marketing agencies who are smart when working for the pharmaceutical industry won't turn dumb when they work for political lobbyists. So, content placement is not new.
What
is new in your picture is a change towards a less Orwellian landscape. Back in the 20th century, there was no way at all you could advance your political views through content placement in magazines and TV shows -- but DCI and the likes already could. Now, YouTube, Google Video and friends have dramatically leveled the playing field: You, the average citizen with a computer, can be your own political lobbyist now. Just fire up your Apple and upload. Sure, political lobbyists can still place content there and camouflage it for the casual viewer's eyes. But now they to adapt to the environment created by grassrootspeople like you and play by the same rules as you do. The oligopolies in the marketplace of ideas have been weakened. And this makes political lobbying today distinctly less Orwellian, more democratic, and freer, than it was just 10 years ago.
thomas
No, this isn't surprising in the marketing sense. Those folks can be quite creative as the annual TV ad awards always demonstrate.
But this instance has the further elements, relevant to this discussion, of covert authorship, covert ties to the Republican Party and covert ties to the energy industry.
As regards your other point, this modern media world clearly presents some positives re information flow, but that isn't the whole story and may not even be the most significant part of the story in terms of actual real-world consequences.
For example, let's say that the modern American citizen now has access to 1000 X the information sources which were available 20 years ago (of course, it is much much more than that considering TV stations and the internet alone).
But how much more informed are they? Are they more informed at all?
So what accounts for this huge incongruence? And if such an incongruence is so, can we rationally make the claim that more information sources must produce a better informed citizenry? If not, or if we have to add serious caveats to any such a seemingly intutitive relationship, what might those caveats be?
The Mounted Policeman says:
So what accounts for this huge incongruence? And if such an incongruence is so, can we rationally make the claim that more information sources must produce a better informed citizenry?
end of quote
Can we rationally make the claim that more information sources must produce a better informed citizenry?
Of course, all we need to do is to persuade Mr. Blatham to list the information sources he regularly uses. Then, those who have the intellectual mastery of issues Mr. Blotham possesses can indeed aspire to be truly better informed.
I know it is a lot to ask, but I do wish that Mr. Blatham would favor us with his wisdom!
But, ever eager to gain entrance to the Olympus of intellect, inhabited by only a few, but probably ruled by Mr. Blatham and his trusty Mounted Canadian steed, I decided to strike out on my own. I would plumb the depths of the information Mr. Blatham talks about by reading the book he has been touting on these posts--"The One Per Cent Decision".....however, since I do not read any book which does not pass muster, even though it was recommended by one of the finest minds of our time-The Mounted Policeman, I went to the source- A fine review, and to my dismay, I found:
Review by BRYAN BURROUGH
Published: July 23, 2006
For 30 years Bob Woodward has ruled the world of narrative nonfiction books set in Washington, especially those dealing with the inner workings of the White House. We read Woodward because we know that almost everyone in the book ?- almost everyone in Washington ?- will talk to him, each for his or her own reasons: self-interest, self-protection, self-aggrandizement. Woodward so dominates the genre that most would-be competitors have run up the white flag. Those books that attract wide notice today tend to be niche efforts, in-depth examinations of single subjects, like Steve Coll's "Ghost Wars," or tell-alls retailed by those who kept their juiciest tales out of Woodward's reach, like Richard A. Clarke's "Against All Enemies."
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Associated Press
THE ONE PERCENT DOCTRINE
Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11.
By Ron Suskind.
367 pp. Simon & Schuster. $27.
Readers' Opinions
Forum: Book News and Reviews
If Ron Suskind were an Olympic diver, I guess we'd say he has pulled off a quarter-Woodward with a twist. His new book, which focuses on the Bush-Cheney administration's shadowy "war" against Al Qaeda, is a valuable, if narrowly sourced, addition to the growing literature that attempts to explain why the president is doing what he's doing. In style and manner it is a sequel to the Clarke book, a breezy, anecdotal, altogether accessible effort aimed at readers who spend more time at the Waffle House than at the White House.
"The One Percent Doctrine" is very much in the mold of Suskind's previous book, "The Price of Loyalty," which told the story of the early months of the Bush administration through the eyes of the former Treasury chief Paul O'Neill. It was a fascinating exercise, essentially O'Neill's memoir under Suskind's byline, and suggested a new hybrid at work: the point-of-view narrative. Everybody won. Suskind was able to tell a fly-on-the-wall, insidery account of the Bush White House, never mind that he really possessed just one fly on the wall. O'Neill not only got to vent his spleen, he avoided the unpleasantries of the sour-grapes memoir ?- all those god-awful evenings with Larry King and Anderson Cooper ?- while his views gained credibility by passing through the typewriter of a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
This time, though he never comes out and says so, Suskind partners with a former director of central intelligence, George Tenet, along with members of Tenet's team and a few Rolodex Regulars, like the former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft. Tenet is a good horse to ride: the C.I.A. was at the center of the Qaeda fight, and there is plenty of new material here concerning the pursuit of the Khalid Shaikh Mohammeds and Ramzi bin al-Shibhs of the world. The problem is that Tenet, however central, was just one horse in a crowded field. President Bush is here, as are Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice. There's no hint, though, that any of them said word one to Suskind. There's no attribution, a concern magnified in the point-of-view format, but their every appearance clearly arrives through the eyes of Tenet or his men. It's not so much that the text is ill informed. It's just one set of hands on a very big elephant.
This is a book of moments and glimpses and impressions, of scattered scenes and Hollywood Minute characterizations, all stitched together in hopes they will form a whole. Had Woodward tackled this material, one suspects, the dark cavern of intelligence work would be bathed in cathode rays that penetrated its every crevice. In Suskind's hands the murk is pierced by random shafts of light, interesting where they fall but disappointing where they don't. Time and again his ambition outstrips his source base. Every hot button of the last five years is pressed ?- Tora Bora, torture, nuclear proliferation, Libya, Iraq, Valerie Plame, W.M.D. and many more ?- but what we get are narrative bits and pieces, inevitably scenes built around Tenet or an aide, rather than anything approaching a rigorous, detailed exploration of the issue, much less a rigorous, detailed retelling of what actually happened.
That it works as well as it does is testimony to the author's narrative skills. Suskind was a top-notch newspaperman, one of the best natural writers The Wall Street Journal (where I also once worked) ever produced, and he commands an authorial voice many journalists can only dream of. Give him an hour with a cooperative source, and he'll give you six pages of beautiful scene-setting, scissor-sharp dialogue and a nugget or two of insight; his discussion of Bush's view of the Iraq war as a global "game changer" is eye-opening. His prose, aimed at a general audience, is warm, rhythmic and conversational, sometimes too much so, as in references to the United States as "we" or spies as "guys."
As fine as the scene-setting can be, too often it doesn't lead anywhere. For instance, there is a wonderful anecdote about the F.B.I.'s taking delivery of a skull believed to be that of Osama bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri. But Suskind pads it with page after page of background and color about the life of the veteran agent who sticks the skull in the trunk of his Oldsmobile and ferries it to an F.B.I. lab for analysis. The agent pops up a time or two more, but is hardly a main character. Worse, after all the buildup, the eventual discovery that the head is not, in fact, Zawahiri's is kissed off in a single line. There is similar padding throughout. There are also frequent and lengthy sections of exposition in which Suskind muses on matters of import, ruminating, for example, on the intricacies of the Bush-Cheney relationship. These passages are silky, familiar, impressionistic and sometimes a tad strange, as when he imagines what it's like to be a post-9/11 spy: "You realize you're neck-deep in a global game of Marco Polo, in an ocean-size pool ?- but all of it deadly serious, winner take all. It's terrible in that pool. Especially when it's deathly quiet ?- the way it is in the months after 9/11 ?- and no one is answering when you yell ?'Marco,' and you only feel the occasional whoosh as your opponent silently passes, and you snap around while images of burning buildings and exploding planes dance behind your closed eyelids." It's certainly vivid writing, but every time I read a section like that I can't help thinking this is the war on terror as narrated by Dr. Phil.
The Bush and Cheney we glimpse here look and sound real enough. Suskind emphasizes how Bush makes just about everything personal, measuring the credibility of a briefing by his measure of the briefer. His Bush is thoroughly engaged, boundlessly confident and attentive to the detail of intelligence operations, if not always to intelligence policy and organization. Cheney comes off as Cheney ?- smart, steady and gruff, the grown-up who decides what the president sees and, in some cases, how he sees it. The "one percent doctrine" is his, a mandate that any threat that bears even a 1 percent chance of being real must be treated as real. This is a profound shift in thinking, Suskind tells us, and leads to American action, as in Iraq, in which force is deployed where there is only the slightest chance of a true threat.
To his credit, Suskind's portrayals, as sketchy as they can be, seem evenhanded. Avoiding the trap that sometimes ensnares Woodward, he neither deifies his principal source, Tenet, nor caricatures the easy targets who didn't cooperate, resisting the urge to portray Bush as vacuous or Cheney as Darth Vaderish. He has gotten a smattering of headlines for an anecdote or two where important intelligence intended for Bush's desk never makes it past Cheney's. At least it appears that way. We can't really be sure, since Suskind's sources are Tenet and company, not Bush and Cheney. And in the end, that's probably fine. For an administration as tightly controlled as this one, the mere suggestion of a genuine insight is welcome. The same could be said for the entire book. Even if Suskind is flank steak to Woodward's sirloin, "The One Percent Doctrine" is still an easy and worthwhile summer read.
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Suskind's book is clearly inferior to the tomes written by Woodward, according to Mr.Burroughs.
Given the fact that I have consistently quoted from Woodward's two books, Bush at War and Plan of Attack, I must regretfully conclude that Mr. Blatham's enthusiasm for Suskind is obviously overblown and misplaced.
I am astonished that such an intellect as Mr. Blatham would recommend such a mediocre book! Perhaps Mr. Blathm did not want to reveal his good sources and really tried to throw us off the track.
Won't you tell us about the font of wisdom you drink from, Mr. Blotham. It can't be "The One Percent Decision"
blatham wrote: For example, let's say that the modern American citizen now has access to 1000 X the information sources which were available 20 years ago (of course, it is much much more than that considering TV stations and the internet alone).
But how much more informed are they? Are they more informed at all?
Speaking strictly for myself, I find that the internet has greatly enriched the quality and quantity of information I get. It's much faster than libraries (which I'm still a partisan of), and much more useful than TV, which is mediocre whenever it isn't an all-out insult of my intelligence.
But that wasn't the point I was arguing in my last post. My point was that the internet democratizes propaganda-spreading by removing an oligopoly from the marketplace of ideas. In other words, my point was about the supply side of that market; it wasn't about its demand side, which may or may not have changed much.
Your point is very well taken, Mr. Thomas. I watch very little Television except the news and had formerly been a Library maven. I find that, rarely, I do like to wander in the stacks to pull out one book and then another and to sample the magazines. However, the internet, as you say has "greatly enriched the quality and quantity of the information".
I really don't think I could go back to the old days when CBS, NBC and ABC ruled the roost and when the written media was dominated by the New York Times, The Washington Post and Time Magazine.
Then you got only ONE viewpoint!!!
Thomas wrote:blatham wrote: For example, let's say that the modern American citizen now has access to 1000 X the information sources which were available 20 years ago (of course, it is much much more than that considering TV stations and the internet alone).
But how much more informed are they? Are they more informed at all?
Speaking strictly for myself, I find that the internet has greatly enriched the quality and quantity of information I get. It's much faster than libraries (which I'm still a partisan of), and much more useful than TV, which is mediocre whenever it isn't an all-out insult of my intelligence.
But that wasn't the point I was arguing in my last post. My point was that the internet democratizes propaganda-spreading by removing an oligopoly from the marketplace of ideas. In other words, my point was about the supply side of that market; it wasn't about its demand side, which may or may not have changed much.
thomas
Yes, I understand that. Though I'm somewhat embarrassed to say it, I've not previously thought about that non-correspondence element above.
My preference for maximal information sources arises out of a liberty principle (sources ought not to be restricted) and the utilitarian principle (political liberty and progress in ideas are more likely to thrive given maximal information sources).
But clearly, other factors can arise to thwart the end that these principles (and you and I) seek to achieve or advance. I don't have to hand the wonderful study on media I've referened a few times recently (the one where researchers found, for example, that PBS viewers were most likely to hold views on Iraq which were factually correct and the more they watched PBS, the more accurate their views would become...while in contrast, viewers of Fox would be most likely to have ideas that were factually incorrect and that got worse they more they watched Fox) so if you haven't seen that study, let me know and I'll link it again.
This all seems to present a significant problem for you and me and Mill as regards desired ends.
