Tag Archives: News Media

Wow! Could This Be the Beginning of a Movement?

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Shepard Smith works for Fox News but sometimes doesn’t sound like it.

It was still quite a surprise to see what he said about Pope Francis and President Obama today:

I don’t know — I think we are in a weird place in the world when the following things are considered political. Five things, I’m going to tick them off. These are the five things that were on his and our president’s agenda. Caring for the marginalized and the poor — that’s now political. Advancing economic opportunity for all. Political? Serving as good stewards of the environment. Protecting religious minorities and promoting religious freedom globally. Welcoming [and] integrating immigrants and refugees globally. And that’s political? I mean, I don’t know what we expect to hear from an organization’s leader like the Pope of the Catholic Church, other than protect those who need help, bring in refuges who have no place because of war and violence and terrorism. These seem like universal truths that we should be good to others who have less than we do, that we should give shelter to those who don’t have it. I think these were the teachings in the Bible of Jesus. They’re the words of the pope, they’re the feelings of the president. And people who find themselves on the other side of that message should consult a mirror, it seems like. Because I think that’s what we’re supposed to do as a people, whatever your religion. I mean, it seems to me and I think to probably, as Bill O’Reilly would put it, most clear-thinking Americans — that that’s how we’re supposed to roll.

Yes, that’s how we’re supposed to roll! 

The remarkable video in which Mr. Smith states the obvious (at around 0:36) is available here.

One of These Characters Could Become President

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Summer is almost over in this hemisphere, so we have 4 1/2 months until a small number of voters, in a few lightly-populated, semi-rural states, start letting the rest of us know who America’s 2016 Presidential candidates will be. As of now, however, I’m still trying to follow my own advice and ignore political coverage as much as possible.

That’s even though, in retrospect, it wasn’t great advice. The Democratic contest became much more interesting when Senator Bernie Sanders, the democratic (small “d”) socialist from the state of Vermont, received such a warm welcome. One might even grant that the Republican contest became more interesting as it became even weirder than expected.

The Republican struggle to choose a Presidential candidate is like a terrible movie you’re being forced to watch. It’s not funny enough to be comedy and isn’t serious enough to be tragedy. It certainly isn’t a musical. Let’s say it’s a fantasy with both comedic and tragic themes, kind of like a scarier version of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

To me, the funniest part of the Republican race is how observers keep trying to explain why Trump is popular among Republican voters (remember, these are the voters who helped elect George W. Bush not once but twice). The saddest part is that millions of Americans would be pleased if one of these Republicans became President. But maybe it will work out for the best. If the Republicans pick an extraordinarily terrible candidate, the Democrats should do well, even in the Congressional races. That could happen, even in 21st century America.

I wasn’t going to write about any of this (I’m still trying to follow my advice, if only because it’s still 2015), but there was a nice Salon article today. The author, Chauncey Devega, is a black American who loved Rambo, Reagan and Rush Limbaugh when he was too young to know any better. He also read “Soldier of Fortune” magazine and hoped to be our first black President. He doesn’t explain what made him reconsider his right-wing views, either for lack of space or because it’s obvious – he grew up and looked around.

An excerpt from the article:

…what if [a political party’s] “base” consists of people who live in an alternate world where facts, empirical reality, and scientific reason and truth operate according to a different set of rules? What happens to a supposedly mainstream political party’s internal dynamics when the most extreme elements are given control over it? And what if these voters have been socialized into a bizarro reality by a media machine that has created a literal and virtual bubble of information for its viewers and listeners, one where the “news” actually misinforms, thus leaving its public less knowledgeable about current affairs than before?

This alternate reality is the world in which the Republican Party and its candidates for president in 2016 exist. It is utterly impenetrable to outsiders. “Normal” politics do not exist there. This cult-like world is vexing, confusing, headache inducing, disorientating, and enraging for those in the “reality based community” who try to process the 2016 Republican debates. Ultimately, if one is not initiated into the right-wing movement’s rites and rituals, you will not be able to translate its political acts of magic and speaking in tongues that masquerade as serious political discourse.

As a political cult, today’s Republican Party uses faith, a belief in that which cannot be proven by ordinary means, to create a coherent worldview for its public. In this world there are no verifiable truth-claims that can be confirmed or rejected based on empirical evidence. Here, something is “true” because a trusted source, elder, elite, or media personality tells you so. Opinion is transformed into a substitute for facts.

Shorter version: Lies are made into truths for those in the cult and disbelievers are cast out as enemies and heretics.

The only modification I’d make to this is that the word “cult” usually refers to a relatively small group. When a cult gets big enough, it’s no longer a cult. At that point, it’s a movement or, as with the specimen under discussion, a political party that’s gone haywire.

PS – Paul Krugman had some things to say about the most recent Republican “debate”. Basically, he’s terrified.

Bernie, Hillary, Emails, Decisions, Decisions

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New Jersey will hold its Presidential primary election nine months and fifteen days from now. By that time, we will almost certainly know who the Democratic nominee and the next President of the United States will be (she used to be Secretary of State). June of 2016 might sound like a long way off, but we in New Jersey, along with our friends in California and a few other states, always wait for everyone else to hold their primary elections first.

Aside from the fact that we’re naturally considerate (“Please, I insist.” “No, no, after you.”), this means we don’t have to spend much time deciding which Democrat or Republican should be President. Unlike Iowa, Vermont and South Carolina, we have more important things to do.

Anyway, if I had the opportunity to vote sooner than next June, like maybe tomorrow, I’m not sure who I’d choose. From a policy perspective, I’d go with Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist Senator from Vermont. Voting for Sanders would make me feel good. I even think he could beat a Republican in the general election, because most Americans, whether they realize it or not, agree with his positions. (See “How Mainstream Is Bernie Sanders?” and “Why Surprising Numbers of Republicans Have Been Voting for Sanders in Vermont”).

Despite the popular appeal of Sanders’s positions, however, Clinton might do better in a general election. It would be harder for the Republicans to falsely portray her as a wild-eyed radical. And despite some of her hawkish views on foreign policy and military spending, Hillary Clinton might end up being a very progressive President. She seems more aware of our country’s increasing inequality and more likely to do something about it than she used to be. Further, she might be able to get more done than Sanders, since the politicians, bureaucrats and plutocrats she’d have to work with would be more likely to consider her “one of them”. 

(Every time I imagine President Sanders taking office, I’m reminded of A Very British Coup, in which the election of a proud Labor Party socialist as Prime Minister leads to army helicopters descending on Downing Street and Parliament. See also Seven Days in May. All fiction, of course.) 

But since I’m a proud resident of New Jersey, I don’t have to make a decision about this any time soon. Meanwhile, our national nightmare (i.e. our Presidential campaign) will continue.

That brings me to a perceptive article by Heather Digby Parton called “Anatomy of a Hillary Clinton Pseudo-Scandal”. She writes:

… the press can pass judgement about anything once it’s “out there” regardless of whether or not what’s “out there” is true. This allows them to skip doing boring rebuttals of the facts at hand and instead hold forth at length about how it bears on the subject’s “judgement” and the “appearance” of wrongdoing without ever proving that what they did was wrong.

You see, if the person being discussed were “competent,” it wouldn’t be “out there” in the first place, so even if it is based upon entirely specious speculation, it’s his or her own fault for inspiring people to speculate so speciously. It all goes back to their “character”… 

And even if the charges are patently false, they are always far too complicated to rebut in detail; and, anyway, the other side says something different, so who’s really to say what’s true and what isn’t?  [Note: that’s what Paul Krugman calls “Shape of Earth: Views Differ” journalism.]

It’s still the responsibility of the target of those charges because he or she shouldn’t have allowed him or herself to be in a position where someone could make false charges in the first place.

From this perspective, it’s irrelevant whether any of those famous emails were classified at the time (apparently they weren’t, besides which lots of stuff the government classifies shouldn’t be). It’s also irrelevant whether it was forbidden to use a private computer then (apparently it wasn’t). 

I agree about the irrelevance in one sense. It’s irrelevant as to whether Clinton or Sanders or some other Democrat should be our next President.

Terrorists Like Us

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From President Obama’s statement regarding the terrorist attack in Charleston:

This is not the first time that black churches have been attacked.  And we know that hatred across races and faiths pose a particular threat to our democracy and our ideals.

The President could have used the active voice instead of the passive. He could have said “This is not the first time that racist white men have attacked black churches”. That would have been more descriptive.

But it would have sounded unnecessarily inflammatory. Unnecessary, because who else would murder nine black people while declaring that “You rape our women and you are taking over our country”. Inflammatory, because calling attention to the killer’s color would upset people who say or want to believe that white racism isn’t a problem anymore.

Britt Bennett’s brief article in the New York Times does an excellent job of explaining how and why white terrorism isn’t called that:

This is the privilege of whiteness: While a terrorist may be white, his violence is never based in his whiteness. A white terrorist has unique, complicated motives that we will never comprehend. He can be a disturbed loner or a monster. He is either mentally ill or pure evil…. Either way, he is never indicative of anything larger about whiteness, nor is he ever a garden-variety racist. He represents nothing but himself. A white terrorist is anything that frames him as an anomaly and separates him from the long, storied history of white terrorism.

I’m always struck by this hesitance not only to name white terrorism but to name whiteness itself during acts of racial violence. In a recent New York Times article on the history of lynching, the victims are repeatedly described as black. Not once, however, are the violent actors described as they are: white. Instead, the white lynch mobs are simply described as “a group of men” or “a mob”…. [Obama’s] passive language echoes this strange vagueness, a reluctance to even name white terrorism, as if black churches have been attacked by some disembodied force, not real people motivated by a racist ideology whose roots stretch past the founding of this country.

In America’s contemporary imagination, terrorism is foreign and brown. Those terrorists do not have complex motivations. We do not urge one another to reserve judgment until we search through their Facebook histories or interview their friends. We do not trot out psychologists to analyze their mental states. We know immediately why they kill. But a white terrorist is an enigma. A white terrorist has no history, no context, no origin. He is forever unknowable.

Like South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley said this week: 

While we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we’ll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another.

But the thing is, in this case, we do know. 

We Can All Ignore the Next 18 Months

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Thousands of articles will be written. Hundreds of millions of dollars will be spent. There will be interviews and debates. There will be speeches and rallies. There will be polls and predictions. Strategies and personalities will be analyzed. Policies will even be discussed.

We can safely ignore it all.

The only question regarding the presidential election in November 2016 is whether we should elect a Republican or Democrat. If you’ve been paying attention at all, you already know how to vote.

Paul Krugman explained why last month:

As we head into 2016, each party is quite unified on major policy issues — and these unified positions are very far from each other. The huge, substantive gulf between the parties will be reflected in the policy positions of whomever they nominate, and will almost surely be reflected in the actual policies adopted by whoever wins.

To paraphrase the differences Krugman points out:

Any Democrat elected will try to maintain or strengthen Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act. Any Republican will try to do the opposite.

Any Democrat will seek to maintain or increase taxes on the wealthy. Any Republican will do the opposite.

Any Democrat will try to preserve regulations on Wall Street and the big banks (she or he might even try to break up banks that are “too big to fail”). Any Republican won’t.

Any Democrat will try to limit global warming and make it easier for immigrants to become citizens. It’s pretty clear that any Republican won’t.

I’ll add that any Democrat will try to stimulate the economy and create jobs by increasing infrastructure spending. You can count on any Republican to protect the wealthy at all costs.

And any Democrat will nominate reasonable people to the Supreme Court. On the other hand, well, how do you feel about Scalia, Alito, Roberts and Thomas? 

Professor Krugman continues:

Now, some people won’t want to acknowledge that the choices in the 2016 election are as stark as I’ve asserted. Political commentators who specialize in covering personalities rather than issues will balk at the assertion that their alleged area of expertise matters not at all. Self-proclaimed centrists will look for a middle ground that doesn’t actually exist. And as a result, we’ll hear many assertions that the candidates don’t really mean what they say. There will, however, be an asymmetry in the way this supposed gap between rhetoric and real views is presented.

On one side, suppose that Ms. Clinton is indeed the Democratic nominee. If so, you can be sure that she’ll be accused, early and often, of insincerity, of not being the populist progressive she claims to be.

On the other side, suppose that the Republican nominee is a supposed moderate like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio. In either case we’d be sure to hear many assertions from political pundits that the candidate doesn’t believe a lot of what he says. But in their cases this alleged insincerity would be presented as a virtue, not a vice — sure, Mr. Bush is saying crazy things about health care and climate change, but he doesn’t really mean it, and he’d be reasonable once in office. Just like his brother.

There are a lot of big books around the house I’ve been meaning to get to. If you have any time-consuming projects you’ve been putting off, the next 18 months will be a great time to get going.

Krugman’s whole column is here.