Individual Liberty—Progress—Humanity—Ethics—Rule of Law
"...if by a liberal they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people—their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, their civil liberties—if that is what they mean by a "liberal," then I am proud to be a liberal."
I have finally finished reading the March 17th issue of Newsweek Magazine. It is, in its way, a special issue dedicated to the proposition foisted on an insecure press that the Hillary Clinton campaign has been getting short shrift ... because Hillary is a woman, a femme. The magazine is full of articles by notables, columnists, pundits, housewives, and mostly women (but not exclusively), and their opinions are not of one conclusion, by the way. But what we have concocted here is a self-fullfilling premise.
Horsefeathers! The lady called the candidate a "monster" and, suddenly realizing that it would be offensive to some, tried to withdraw it. Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com (republished in CommonDreams) thinks the comment would not have been published by an American journalist ... and he thinks this is a real problem, and I agree.
The idea that a good fellow, well met, like Tim Russert can hear the inner workings of politics and then not report them annoys the heck out of me. What makes Tim Russert the judge of what I need to know? Moreover, and more insidiously, when Tim gets a snootful of some politician how then does he communicate that to me? Ask Howard Dean. Ask John Edwards. Ask Biden, Dodd, Gravel, and especially ask Kucinich. Ask any politician whose fortunes sank on a pretext and then ask them would they have preferred the British system of journalism where the holds barred are few and far between, where adversarial journalism is plain old skeptical journalism. I don't have the final answer to that, but I believe that American politicians are okay with embedded journalists because they know that once in office they are basically home free. So much for the Fourth Estate!
The NYT article about John McCain and his staff back in 2000 has served to fill in the aching moments between primaries. It is amazing how stupid some of the comments have been, though. In this piece, which is so garbled you can barely tell who is saying what, the notion is proffered that the sources of the Times article are anonymous. Well sir, if you were a member of a group of a dozen people and your group were fingered as the snitches, then how would you feel about someone calling you anonymous? In science and surveys you have to have a large group to achieve anonymity.
There is no question that the news media in this country have gone astray. Some of the problem is that we are living in one epoch after another of rapid, disorienting change, and we need help figuring out how to land on our feet both personally and as a nation. We turn to people who make a business of reporting news for their opinions. Then we turn to people who make a livelihood issuing opinions when we believe that they are in close contact with news makers.
Last night on Bill Moyers Journal something happened that frosted me considerably. In an interview with "mass communications expert" Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Bill asked her for what her take is on the "conventional wisdom" in the media about the presidential campaigns so far. What does this question really represent? Is there such a thing as "wisdom" based on following one or two candidates around and then watching the results of one caucus in one fairly abnormal state like Iowa? Hasn't our urge to learn the future, to feel out the expectations of the "learned," gone too far? The answer to Bill's question of Kathleen was interesting. She said that something pernicious was happening, the media were taking votes to be "rejections" of other candidates, rather than "preferences" for one. So we get back finally to the meaning of voting in this country and even old hands like Moyers find themselves basking in the revelation that choice is discriminatory!
Much has been written about the Massacre at Virginia Tech, about the murderer and murdered. Almost immediately someone wrote about the difference between our feelings for 32 killed in Blacksburg, Virginia and twice or ten times that number in Baghdad. Much has been written about the sensationalizing of the media, and I will say that Keith Olbermann and his producers have just about sent me back to the Comedy Channel.
There seems to be a notion in the big media corporations like NBC-Universal that they are addressing a huge audience that craves information about Sanjaya and the goings on around Paula Abdul. It is as if the producers of Countdown believe they have an obligation to keep us "well-rounded" in cocktail conversation items, the implication being that politics is too toxic these days to discuss among "civilized" people.
Well, the question of being "civilized" is on the table. Impeachment will soon be on the table, too, btw. James Carroll in the Boston Globe has another in his long series of well-though out essays on our civilization, violence, warfare for its own sake, etc. This one is called "Two Types of Violence, and I heartily recommend it to you.
ABC/Disney is the corporation vying for leadership of the conservative, pro-Bush, pro-empire electronic media. This article from Media Matters describes the current scuffle going on behind the scenes ... since ABC is unlikely to report and the other networks don't want to give ABC any extra air time, of course. This is how the corporatists operate—at the mean levels, name-calling, bullying, and threatening.
The Washington Post today featured an article about the Democrats reneging on their campaign promise to include the Republicans in the deliberations of the Legislative Branch of government, something the Republicans were infamous for not doing, treating the Democrats at the time as if there were no real American voters behind them.
If "turn about" is not actually fair play, but rather retribution, then the Post's editorial explains some of the reasons for the Democrat's change of heart.
The fact is that the current breed of Republicans are corrupt. There is no trusting them with the toggles and levers of governance. If they vote correctly under the tutelage of the Democrats, then maybe some of them will be brought into the process.
It has been a wild ride this week. Historic! Full of promise and full of apprehension, too. George intends to define "bi-partisan" as what he can do with the lame duck Congress before the real one sits next January. Let him. Every damned thing he does to act out brings John Conyers closer to the table. Maybe that's what he finally needs.
You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq.
He was speaking to students at Pasadena City College. On the face of it, he was talking about education to students, "you know, education ..." so unless there is an immediately preceding and specific context that makes it completely unmistakable that he is "actually" talking about Bush, it has to stand on its own merits, its own declared subjects, verbs, predicate. Kerry was talking about students, education, and avoiding a trap, not about George W. Bush. No joke.
If you look at our current political situation from one of the other eleven planets, Ceres, perhaps, that soon-to-be former planetoid between Mars and Jupiter, our situation begins to make some kind of perverse sense. We need the distance and perspective.
I chose Ceres not because it is named for the goddess of cereal or harvest ceremonies, but because it is spherical, orbits the sun, and next week may become one of the major planets of our solar system, despite the fact that it is really only the largest of the planetoids, very much smaller than our moon, about the size of the period at the end of this sentence, if our moon is the size of this letter O. Not really in the same league with moons much less planets, you see.
In the midst of the world teetering on the edge of a full-fledged conflagration in the middle east, astronomers are arguing about whether Pluto is a planet and probably will keep it, despite the NYT advice to the contrary, thus promoting Ceres and some big iceballs out past Pluto to the status of planets. Redefining Ceres is just one of the latest examples of grown men and women redefining stuff to suit their fancies, rather than the facts. It is part and parcel of the pervasive, pathological TRUTHLESSNESS of our times.
