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Mon, May 13 | Tues, May 14 | Wed, May 15 | Thurs, May 16 | Fri, May 17 | Sat, May 18 | Sun, May 19
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Friday, May 17 CAN COUNTERPUNCH COUNT? In a Counterpunch attack on the Bush administration -- "Bush Fiddled Wile New York Burned" -- Michael Colby writes, "[Condoleezza] Rice declared that if the Bush administration wanted to do anything preventive in regards to the hijacking threats it would have resulted in a widespread disruption in commercial airline travel. Besides being rather callous towards the nearly 5,000 people who lost their lives, this excuse is just plain ridiculous." Come again? How many people died on 9/11? Thankfully, a few paragraphs later Colby provides a more accurate figure: "But as this nation lost 3,000 citizens, the 'crown jewels' of the Manhattan skyline...." Not exactly the kind of thing one wants to be inconsistent about. [posted 4:10 pm] BIZZARO-WORLD ALERT. Tapped gets accused of spinning for the Bush Administration. Enjoy it while it lasts, folks. [posted 3:45 pm]
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Wieseltier's thesis is that Jews have a tendency to see their history as being wrapped up in perpetual struggle with a constant enemy that changes in name only -- from the biblical terrorizers Amalek right through to the modern Palestinian terrorists. (Tapped is reminded of the Passover song, "Chad Gadya," which lists the historical enemies of the Jewish people one by one, in allegorical -- and humorous -- form.) As a result, Wieseltier writes, Jews from ancient times forward have been given to fearing that their generation will be the last, and have sometimes believed that a struggle to the finish with their enemies is therefore the only acceptable option. But, Wieseltier argues, that apocalyptic sense -- increasingly entertained by American Jews amid a tide of European anti-Semitism and Palestinian suicide bombings -- is a dangerous one, both because Arafat is not Hitler and because Israel's security and happiness will ultimately depend on its ability to make a distinction between the nearly-eschatological events of the Holocaust and the events of today.
Tapped finds these two pieces particularly refreshing because they sketch a welcome position that has too often been missing from debates over the Middle East: a stance that uses secular, pragmatic arguments to support the Jewish state's right to defend itself -- as it has in Operation Defensive Shield -- while eschewing those wingnuts (think Dick Armey and the Likud Central Committee) whose interests lie not in Israel's security but in never-ending struggle. [posted 2:10 pm]
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THE DECLINE OF INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING. Another result of the recent revelations: Now we know what Bob Woodward should have been working on all this time, instead of his 10-part ode to the Bush Administration tenacity, alacrity, and good judgment. Incidentally, the Wall Street Journal's front page has a Woodward-worthy tick-tock/kiss-up piece today -- you know, the kind where White House officials come up with a story, and then take turns feeding it to two gullible reporters. And we thought Paul Gigot could only assign stories for the editorial page. [posted 12:55 pm]
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WE'RE WAITING. Still no rebuke from a national Republican to Wayne LaPierre over LaPierre's atrocious comparison of Andy McKelvey and Osama bin Laden, as Chatterbox reports. [posted 12:15 pm]
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WHAT BUSH KNEW, PART III A few more thoughts on the intelligence failures of 9/11. First, maybe "unimaginable" isn't the right word to describe 9/11. Clearly, some people imagined, in a literal sense, the possibility of terrorist using planes as missiles -- including a couple of prescient FBI agents. And it's easy to wish, in hindsight, that they had been listened to. (Although pace InstaPundit, we're kinda glad -- on the whole -- that the CIA isn't taking direction from Tom Clancy, the Lone Gunmen, or "Flight Simulator" nuts.) Our broader point is simply that the country was unprepared, politically or imaginatively, for a terrorist attack of such magnitude. The obvious example is the widespread scorn and "Wag The Dog" jokes that greeted Bill Clinton's efforts to take out Osama bin Laden. Many people -- including those loathsome Republicans and conservatives who accused Clinton of trying to divert attention from Monicagate -- couldn't believe that Clinton was acting in good faith. We weren't ready to think seriously about the possibilities. And it's not unreasonable to think that Bush and his top advisers -- who get what Tapped imagines is a pretty scary intel briefing everyday, prepared and delivered by professional paranoids -- shared that blind spot.
Another result was that fighting terrorism just wasn't on the agenda. It wasn't a priority. There were no big constituencies crying out for intelligence reform (principally better information-sharing, which sounds easy but isn't) or better border security. That, more than anything, explains why neither the Clinton Administration nor the Bush Administration did much with the recommendations of either the Hart-Rudman Commission or the Bremer Commission. Historically, military reform -- sweeping changes in tactics, strategy, and equipment -- takes places after crushing defeat, because that's what it takes to force change on a big military bureaucracy. Maybe the same will be true for the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy after 9/11.
So what should happen now? The first thing is that the administration's critics need to consider their response very carefully. Cynthia McKinney is still wrong. (Buzzflashers, take it away!) Can any reasonable person doubt that, if George W. Bush could have foreseen that on September 10th that planes would crash into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center during the next 24 hours, he would have tried to do something about it? No.
But that doesn't get the Bush Administration off the hook. It's now pretty clear why the White House has been resisting an investigation into the intelligence failures that led 9/11: Although responsibility for the systemic failure is widespread, a couple of the specific failures happened on Bush's watch. What's damning is not the fact of those failures -- which we think probably would have happened on Al Gore's watch, too -- but the fact that the administration was willing to stall an investigation into the systemic failures so as to avoid being embarrassed over the specific failures. The White House's mania for secrecy led Bush and his advisers to put the administration's day-by-day political fortunes over the national interest. Instead of admitting the failure and moving on, they took the easy route: Blame Bill. And that's unconscionable. What the Democrats should be asking now -- because the American people deserve to know -- is why the Bush Administration sat on this information for so long. [posted 12:15 pm]
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SHAMELESS SELF-PROMOTION EDITION! Unique monthly visitors to The American Prospect Online are at around 450,000, and we're well on our way to the half-million mark for May. According to figures in the latest issue of Columbia Journalism Review, that puts us below NationalReview.com -- how much dough does Bill Buckley pour into that behemoth, anyway? -- but ahead of TheNation.com (367,000), TheNewRepublic.com (275,000), Reason.com (350,000-400,000), and even WeeklyStandard.com (247,000). We know, we know -- we were surprised, too! All we can say is: Thank you to our loyal readers. Thank you to our underpaid writers. And a special thank you to those who've been good about linking to the site. (Special mentions to BuzzFlash, Arts & Letters Daily, Jim Romenesko's Media News, and InstaPundit.) [posted 11:50 am]
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WELFARE DEFORM? E.J. Dionne Jr. uses his column today to admit that he's "happy that my worst fears about the welfare bill were not realized." Nevertheless, Dionne points out that welfare reform reauthorization should still have us worried:
The president and House Republicans are taking steps to dismantle the very reform they praise. By ratcheting up work requirements, they could force many states to abandon promising efforts that move the poor into good jobs in favor of make-work programs. Administration proposals to give states far more flexibility in spending money designated for the poor were too broad even for many House Republicans. But even in the modified form that emerged in the bill passed by the House yesterday, there is still a danger that these waivers will give states too much leeway to cut the very programs that helped welfare reform succeed as well as it has.
Must read. [posted 10:10 am]
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INVESTIGATION TIME. The clamor over what Bush knew may well spill over into a full-on congressional intelligence investigation. John McCain and Joe Lieberman say they are pushing for a 14 member commission to do the job. This sounds a lot like the famed Church Committee investigation of the intelligence community in the 1970s, the first time that our elected representatives really bothered to look into the secretive world of intelligence and its abuses. How interesting, then, that one post 9/11 reaction from those on the right, particularly Tom Clancy and James Baker, was to demonize Frank Church, claiming that he had weakened the intelligence community by casting light on its activities. Now it looks like the country awaits Church's successor. [posted 9:30 am]
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DAMAGING DAMAGE CONTROL. Dick Cheney just doesn't get it. Is this his idea of damage control?
At a fundraising dinner in New York yesterday evening, Vice President Cheney said the United States faces the threat of a new attack even worse than the Sept. 11 assaults. He condemned Democratic Party criticism of the White House's handling of the terror warnings as "thoroughly irresponsible . . . in a time of war."
It is precisely their arrogant unwillingness to come clean with Americans about what they knew prior to 9/11 that has the Bush administration up a tree right now. Cheney, with this aiding-the-enemy nonsense, apparently wants to make things worse. [posted 8:25 am]
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WHAT DID BUSH KNOW, PART II. Tapped stands by our observation yesterday that the outrage over Bush's having been briefed about Al Qaeda hijacking threats prior to 9/11 has been a bit overblown. Still, there are some observations to add. First, we should have been told sooner what Bush knew and when he knew it. The administration should have done this both for our sakes and for their own. As the Post's Howard Kurtz explains, "Damage control specialists say politicians fare better when they release bad or embarrassing information themselves rather than waiting for it to leak." The Bush adminstration's fixation with secrecy will be the death of them.
Another point is this: While it's unclear that Bush should have leaped from unspecific warning about hijackings to imagining the horror of 9/11 -- which was shocking precisely because it was so unimaginable -- it's growing increasingly clear that the FBI deserves no such exoneration. Reports of the agency's failing to share information that could have helped head off 9/11, and more or less ignoring a report suggesting that Osama bin Laden was trying to infiltrate U.S. flight schools, are piling up. As one "top official from another [intelligence] agency" told the Post: "I'm fit to be tied...People are saying we didn't connect the dots. It's awfully hard to connect the dots if people don't give you the dots."
A final point: We may be in store for more revelations like this. To quote from yet another Post story (guess what paper Tapped reads):
Members of the congressional committees investigating the pre-Sept. 11 warnings said yesterday that there is far more damaging information that has not yet been disclosed about the government's knowledge of and inaction over events leading up to Sept. 11."We've just scratched the surface," said Sen. Richard C. Shelby (Ala.), ranking Republican member of the Senate intelligence committee.
Shelby called the Phoenix memo [in which an FBI agent warned bin Laden might be using flight schools] "an explosive document" that, when combined with information from the Moussaoui case, amounts to a "botched opportunity" to stop terrorism.
"The FBI didn't serve the country well," said Shelby. "They were either asleep or inept."
All the more reason for a full-on investigation of the intelligence failings that made 9/11 possible. [posted 8:15 am]
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OUR SCHOOLS IN CRISIS. The Washington Post reports this morning that "[high] school administrators across the Washington area" are concerned about gyrating, grinding, and especially "front piggy-backing" as prom season approaches. Tapped is concerned as well -- concerned that we don't know what "front piggy-backing" is. We used to be cool. Now, we see a phrase like that and, instead of wanting to get jiggy, think to ourselves: "oxymoron." [posted 8:15 am]
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Thursday, May 16 DIFFERENT COAST, SAME PROBLEM. The University of South Carolina finds itself under fire today after revelations that a graduate-level women's studies course at the school required students to "acknowledge that racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism and other institutionalized forms of oppression exist" as a prerequisite for enrollment in the class. The story is eerily similar to the case of Snehal Shingavi, the Berkeley graduate student and anti-Israel activist who is in hot water for encouraging "conservative thinkers" not to take his undergraduate course on the Palestinian resistance. As TAP Online's Richard Just has argued, Shingavi's actions were a disgraceful betrayal of academic principles, and Berkeley's pro-Israel students should punish him by flooding his class and teaching him a lesson in the value of unfettered academic discourse. Tapped recommends that the University of South Carolina's conservative graduate students do the same to the offending women's studies course at their school. [posted 1:45 pm] A NEW MYTH. Brendan Nyhan of Spinsanity, a sometime TAP Online contributor, has caught another apparently self-replicating falsehood that's filtered out into the mainstream media. (He's done so with the help of Jonathan Chait and ABC's "The Note.") And this time, the source of the falsehood may be George W. Bush himself. It seems Bush keeps repeating the following claim, in various iterations: The only problem is, as Nyhan writes, "Bush may indeed have had the conversation he claims occurred in Chicago. But there is no record of him publicly telling the 'American people' what he says he did." The whole thing may as well have been spun out of whole cloth. [posted 1:25 pm]
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DEPARTMENT OF RE-EDUCATION. This past weekend, Tapped noticed that the Bush Administration had constructed little schoolhouse-shaped foyers around the entrances to the Department of Education on Independence Avenue -- schoolhouses emblazoned with the administration's education slogan, "Leave No Child Behind." Now it seems that the front page of the D.O.E. web site, www.ed.gov, has been turned into even more free political advertising: Instead of the department's main page, you get a "No Child Left Behind" propaganda page, complete with a photo of the spectacularly irrelevant education secretary, Rod Paige, standing with Bush. We guess this is part of the White House's effort to reinvigorate Bush's education agenda, which could use a boost now that Bush's own budget has consigned that agenda to the dustbin. [posted 11:00 am]
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DEPARTMENT OF WISHFUL THINKING. The New York Times editorial page, writing about the record-breaking $33 million Republican fundraiser held earlier this week, yearns for the days when soft money is banned, as if that's somehow going to eliminate big money from our political system. Give us a break. Surely the Times knows that soft money only accounts for a tiny percentage of the total money swishing around Washington. In the last election, big donors gave three times as much hard money as soft money. And this money is every bit as "interested" as soft money ever was. Editorials like these contributed to a campaign finance law that's little more than a classic Washington shell game. [posted 10:35 am]
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EXPLAIN YOURSELF. Finally, Army Secretary Thomas White is getting called onto the congressional carpet to explain what he knew and when he knew it as an Enron chief. We're hoping that Senator Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and his colleagues think of asking some tough questions -- like the ones raised here, here and here (all reports by The Nation) and by the folks at Public Citizen and The Campaign for America's Future. To use a Donald Rumsfeld phrase, there's no question but that White should be pestered with tough questions so the committee can compile the irrefutable record. Hey, can some of our Hill readers pass this message along? [posted 10:30 am]
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IS AL GONZALES A CONSERVATIVE? That's the question Ryan Lizza asks in his fascinating new Gonzales profile in The New Republic next week. Court wonks know that when it comes to the law, there are two kinds of conservatives: Ideological conservatives who advocate restraint, deference to Congress, and respect for precedent; and ideological conservatives whose judicial activism would make Earl Warren blush. (Think Antonin Scalia.) Gonzales' record on the bench in Texas indicates that he is closer to the former, which is apparently worrying social conservatives -- who require the appointment of a judicial activist willing to overturn Roe v. Wade. But his conduct as White House counsel -- as point man for the Bush Administration's arrogant drive for secrecy, for instance -- has embittered Democrats. So it's not at all clear that he's headed for the Supreme Court. [posted 10:05 am]
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WHERE'S JERRY FALWELL WHEN YOU NEED HIM? Tapped, like an obsessive nutcase, saw Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones at 12:01 am today. And we noticed something peculiar: The light saber wielded by Samuel L. Jackson's character in the film was purple in color. Um, does anyone remember Tinky Winky? Could it be a gay plot? [posted 9:30 am]
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DID GEORGE W. KNOW ANYTHING? The eternal question, n'est pas? But Tapped means it in a more specific context. News outlets are aglow this morning with more reports that George W. Bush was forewarned about 9/11, or should have been. At any rate, that's the obvious implication of these stories, and they wouldn't get published otherwise. The trouble is, all we're really being told is that Bush received intelligence briefings to the effect that Al Qaeda terrorists might try to hijack airplanes. Pardon, but isn't this a pretty perennial terrorist tactic?
So, we're a little underwhelmed. Nevertheless, we duly note that Instapundit -- taking Tapped to task -- says the possibility of flying airplanes into buildings should have been easy to imagine, and that the administration should have taken the next step in its thinking. Certainly it's tragic that those assigned to protect us couldn't think outside the box more. But Tapped doesn't want to push the charge much farther, if only because we ourselves were hardly clamoring about the threat of commercial jets used as missiles prior to 9/11. However, we were shouting at the television screen during last December's assault on Tora Bora: "Don't let the bastard escape!" If you want to get Bush on something he should have done but didn't, we think a far more damaging strategy would be asking why on earth he let Osama bin Laden out of the frying pan. [posted 8:55 am]
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ANN COULTER GETS A LITTLE FLUSHED. So it looks as though Ann Coulter, once again, must be singled out as Tapped's rhetorically excessive conservative du jour. She's likened those on the left to many things in the past, but we've never seen this out-house analogy before:
Indeed, the one guy the Times dredged out of the left-wing toilet willing to provide tepid endorsement to their bunkum was Stanford history professor Jack Rakove. Even Rakove the only academic still defending Michael Bellesiles' fraudulent anti-gun book "Arming America" wouldn't stoop to supporting the Times' preposterous claims.
Keep them coming, Ann. All we'll do is quote you. [posted 8:25 am]
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Wednesday, May 15 Tapped hates double standards, and that's why we're recommending this Star-Tribune op-ed by Syl Jones on mailbox bomber Lucas John Helder. Jones is understandably angry and overstates his case slightly, but his central point is an important one. By any reasonable standard, Helder is a terrorist. But many people seem loathe to say so. Why? Maybe it's because he's white:
People keep saying that Helder doesn't look like a terrorist. "He looks like the average college kid from the Midwest," opined Washoe County Sheriff Dennis Balaam. "He's a quiet, polite, well-behaved, well-mannered kind of kid. When I talked with him, he shook my hand and called me sir," the sheriff told the Associated Press in Reno, Nev. Twirling his thumbs around his suspenders, no doubt.
They said Mohammed Atta was polite and well-mannered, too. And such a nice boy. [posted 4:55 pm]
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FALSE ADVERTISING. Tapped was all ready to get fussy about this Fred Barnes piece in The (Daily) Weekly Standard when we saw its headline: "Domestic Drift: While the president is trying to conduct a war, the Democrats are trying to find a domestic issue they can exploit." Then we read the actual piece. And as it turns out, we have every right to be fussy, but the target of our ire is not Barnes but whoever writes his subtitles. (We're assuming they're different.) Barnes's article isn't really a swipe at the Dems at all; it's about voter apathy. Sure, there are a couple of digs. But for the most part, it's a smart, if unremarkable, short political analysis. So why make it out to sound like a Republican National Committee press release? [posted 3:40 pm]
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BLOGROLLING. Our friend Max Sawicky has joined the ranks of smart, liberal, usefully wonky bloggers. MaxSpeak will certainly rate a mention in our upcoming "Best Liberal Blogs" post, but since he's just launched, we want to make sure he got off to a good start. Welcome, Max! [posted 3:20 pm]
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MOVE OVER, NOSTRADAMUS. Some things are easy to predict. For example: that anti-research cloning interests would start to use the lamentable tag line "Attack of the Clones" to advance their case. We knew this would happen, which is precisely why this morning we published a lengthy and thoughtful article by Cornell University communications researcher Matthew Nisbet about how we can expect the latest Star Wars movie to be used -- and abused -- in the cloning debate. [posted 1:50 pm]
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CHEERING FOR RUMMY. The battle over the Crusader is a pretty bizarre inside Washington story, even for long-time denizens. Even though Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has decided to kill it, some members of Congress are continuing to go full-bore against his position. So is something called the "CRUSADER INDUSTRIAL ALLIANCE," which has a half page ad in the Washington Post today citing Paul Wolfowitz, Thomas White and other Defense Department luminaries in favor of the defense system. An Inspector General report details some of the pretty interesting infighting that's been going on inside the Defense Department. Rumsfeld has got to be a little paranoid: It was the government contractor that's responsible for building the Crusader -- United Defense Industries, associated with former Reagan administration defense official Frank Carlucci -- that first spilled the beans about the cancellation. [posted 1:30 pm]
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COULD JOHN ASHCROFT'S JUSTICE DEPARTMENT HAVE STOPPED 9/11? According to this story in today's New York Times, they seemed to have missed a chance to do just that. (The story follows up on a Newsweek exclusive this week that, at an internal FBI meeting last August, one agent actually speculated that Zacarias Moussaoui was planning to fly a plane into the World Trade Center.) Here's the latest: Last July, an FBI agent in Phoenix had sent a memo to headquarters urging the bureau to investigate Middle Eastern men enrolled in American flight schools; the agent mentioned Osama bin Laden by name and suggested that bin Laden's followers could be using the flight schools to train for terror operations. The memorandum, says the Times, has existed for months, but until now the Bush Administration hadn't let anyone in Congress see it. And it's not hard to see why. This happened on the Bush Administration's watch, albeit before FBI director Robert Mueller's confirmation last summer.
It's easy to play Monday morning quarterback on this sort of thing. Certainly it would have been hard, before 9/11, to take seriously the idea of terrorists flying a plane into the World Trade Center. But it would not have been hard to know that terrorists were using schools, including flight schools, as cover for terrorist operations. Eyad Ismoil, the Palestinian who drove a truck filled with explosives into the World Trade Center's underground parking garage in 1993, had done just that. That's why Congress mandated the creation of a computerized student tracking system in 1996. But as this article shows, the student tracking system got lobbied to death by a coalition of higher education lobbyists, libertarian ideologues, and internal opponents at the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Who were the chief opponents of the system? The main lobbying group was a group called the Association of International Educators, which represents foreign student advisers at universities, colleges, and vocational schools (including flight schools) around the country. The point man on the Hill was a congressional aide named Stuart Anderson, a former Cato Institute staffer who was immigration policy chief for Republican senator Spencer Abraham. Abraham was until late 2000 chair of the Senate immigration subcommittee; in February of 2000, he led a group of 21 senators who signed a letter to the INS in February 2000 asking INS commissioner Doris Meissner to delay implementation of the student tracking system. Among those senators was John Ashcroft.
Ashcroft is now attorney general in the Bush Administration and nominal boss of both the INS and the FBI. Abraham is now energy secretary in the Bush Administration. Anderson is now policy chief at the INS -- in effect, one of the two or three most powerful men at the service and the guy who, ironically, is now charged with getting the student tracking system back up to speed.
So you can see why the Bush Administration might have wanted to sit on those FBI memos. [posted 12:30 pm]
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PANDER ALERT. President Bush, speaking at a Miami fundraiser yesterday, announced plans to strengthen the embargo against Cuba. Meanwhile, the Cuba Working Group in the House -- most of whose members don't have to suck up to Cuban-American voters in Florida in 2004 -- stated the obvious: "For over forty years, our policy toward Cuba has yielded no results." You don't say? [posted 7:15 pm]
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THOSE PESKY DETAILS. There's been lots of applause for the new arms deal between the U.S. and Russia, but Bill Hartung, a long-time expert at the World Policy Institute at the New School in New York, has unpacked it in a way that deserves notice:
By taking ten years to make the proposed reductions, allowing both sides to keep thousands of their withdrawn warheads in "reserve" rather than destroying them, and giving either party the right to withdraw from the agreement on just 90 days notice, the Pentagon has preserved its ability to rapidly reverse the Bush administration's proposed reductions in the U.S. arsenal whenever it wants to, even as it continues to seek new types of nuclear weapons. Add to this the Pentagon's undiminished right under the accord to pursue a costly, multi-tiered missile defense system, and the outlines of a drive for unchallenged U.S. nuclear dominance become clear.
This kind of flexibility is not what ending the nuclear arms race is all about. And it's another example -- the consequences of which are gravely serious -- of how Bush says one thing and does another. The media's at fault here too, for not exploring the details. [posted 10:30 am]
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LIFE'S A GAMBLE.Tapped thought it was a little strange when Bush announced John Suarez, the commissioner for New Jersey's Division of Gambling Enforcement, as his top choice to head the Environmental Protection Agency's enforcement office. But it turns out the president isn't the only one to see a link between ecology and gambling. TheEnvironment News Service reported today that a new for-profit South African company called Wildlife Wins is offering online lotteries and contests, and donates up to 30 percent of the "drop" (the money that's left once prizes are paid out) to wildlife conservation organizations. Encouraging avarice and materialism while helping endangered species -- it leaves Tapped feeling a little queasy, but hey, whatever works. [posted 10:15 am]
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UNSETTLING. In his latest op-ed, the righter-than-right wing Don Feder actually defends Israeli settlements with Biblical injunctions. Scary. Read for yourself:
The prophet Ezekiel proclaimed, "But you, O mountains of Israel, you shall shoot forth your branches and yield your fruit to my people Israel ... and I will multiply men upon you ... and they shall, increase and bring fruit."Communities like Kfar Etzion are yielding their fruit. Men and women have been multiplied upon these mountains. Their presence is vital to the nation's survival. The "territories" are owner-occupied, and so they shall remain.
Feder explains, "Palestinian statehood would mean expelling 230,000 Jews, bulldozing homes, businesses, schools and synagogues, and handing over the land where the patriarchs walked and prophets preached to the suicide bombers' cheering section." Um, last time we checked there were 4 million Palestinian refugees. Feder doesn't mention that. [posted 10:05 am]
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"CARTER TO CUBA." Will it become a phrase? A saying? Like "Nixon to China"? Just wondering. If so, Tapped wants the credit. [posted 9:30 am]
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THE DUMBEST SECRET. Tapped just loves it when the issue of the so-called "black budget" for intelligence comes up. It's such a crock. Supposedly this budget total is a secret. The only problem is, everyone seems to know what it is. As The New York Times's Tim Weiner explained back in 1994: "For years, Government spending on intelligence programs and secret weapons projects has been deduced by researchers who reverse-engineer the Pentagon's budget, a pastime that is considered sport in the nation's capital. The researchers add up all the unclassified programs and subtract that sum from the total amount of defense spending. What remains is, more or less, the sum of all secret spending -- the so-called 'black budget.'" Well, it's happening again this year. Here's the Post:
The intelligence budget is not publicly released. But the Senate intelligence committee last week approved President Bush's budget request for fiscal 2003, which will increase the total amount spent by the Pentagon, CIA and other intelligence agencies to nearly $35 billion, congressional and administration sources said.
Hey, if this is so easy to find out, then maybe Congress should try a new strategy. Like, for instance, not trying to keep the way they spend money secret from the American public. Just a thought. [posted 8:30 am]
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THE BORE IS BACK. Yesterday Al Gore had an ideal opportunity to smack George W. Bush for his tasteless use of an Air Force One photograph from 9/11 to rake in big bucks. And what did Gore do? Resort to a lame, canned talking point of the sort that had everyone calling him a stiff in the last campaign. The Post has the quote:
"While most pictures are worth a thousand words, a photo that seeks to capitalize on one of the most tragic moments in our nation's history is worth only one -- disgraceful," said Gore...
What wit! Next please. [posted 8:20 am]
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Tuesday, May 14 RAINY-DAY FUND. The Village Voice has the latest on the descent of star Bill Clinton-basher and former Wall Street Journal editor John Fund. What does Fund's private life have to do with his public career as a journalist, you ask? That's the problem: Everything. As Joe Klein once argued about Clinton, Fund's personal life seems to have infected his professional life in particular, revealing, and ultimately very consequential (for the rest of us) ways. Read the piece and you'll understand. [posted 7:15 pm] SPEAKING OF JOE KLEIN. Our anonymous friends at Media Whores Online succinctly deflate Klein's oddly sour profile of Democratic strategist Bob Shrum. There are really only two questions to be answered about Al Gore's supposedly failed stab at populism in 2000. A) Was it populism? B) Did it fail? The answers, we would argue, are no and no. Let's take the first question. Certainly, as Klein argues, there have been ugly strains of populism in American life that amounted to a "witlessly reactionary bundle of prejudices: nativist, protectionist, isolationist, and paranoid." But it's hard to argue that Al Gore's 2000 campaign was any of these -- not even the last. That's because Gore's campaign wasn't really "populist." As Paul Starr wrote in TAP during the election campaign, Gore was neither broadly anti-establishment nor broadly anti-corporate. He took a few basic issues -- prescription drug benefits for the elderly, a patient's bill of rights, regulation of tobacco, and evironmental protection -- and argued, quite plausibly, that well-financed business lobbies had stymied policy initiatives broadly supported by the American public. That wasn't paranoia. That was a fact. (It still is.) Klein caricatures Gore's argument as "The country is being taken to the cleaners by wicked plutocrats" and calls this "a sweeping, intellectually lazy sentiment -- a rationale for nonparticipation." But in Gore's hands, it was exactly the opposite: A rationale for participation. So on to question two: Did it fail? Obviously, Gore does not occupy the White House today. But Tapped will observe that the only time Gore ever led George W. Bush in the polls was in the days after his "People Vs. The Powerful" convention speech. (Sure, candidates always get a boost after the convention. But from the complacent derision with which so many pundits greeted Gore's speech, you'd think he would have been headed for a nose dive.) We will also observe that Gore won more votes than Bush did in 2000 -- and more votes than Bill Clinton won in 1992, back when Klein still loved him. Finally, we will confess that we are the kind of people who believe that Al Gore won the election, period. [posted 7:15 pm]
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UPDATE ON LIBERAL BLOGS. Last week we posted a call for suggestions about the names of good liberal blogs. And, we were promptly deluged with e-mails. (Thanks!) Anyway, that's why there hasn't been any follow up yet, in case anyone was wondering. But we'll be on top of the matter shortly... [posted 1:35 pm]
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FINDING THEIR FORTUYN. Aaron Schatz of the Lycos 50 informs Tapped of a rather startling occurrence:
I thought it might interest you, and your readers, that Pim Fortuyn came out as the #32 most-searched topic on the Internet this week, according to the Lycos 50. That is quite astonishing, given that our user base is almost entirely English-speaking (mostly American, with a clear amount of Canada, UK, and Australia traffic) and news stories rarely make it onto the Lycos 50 because people go to specific news sites rather than searching for news topics in the search engine.Fortuyn received as many searches as Daniel Pearl's murder, for example, and Pearl only received that many searches after rumors surfaced that the videotape of his execution was available online (video, particularly video not available elsewhere, drives Internet news searches). Even the Andrea Yates case only peaked at #44 on our list.
In addition, Pim's assassin Volkert van der Graaf received more searches on Lycos last week than popular celebrities like Alyssa Milano and the Dave Matthews Band.
I think this is another demonstration that Fortuyn's murder was a very big story, even outside of Holland.
To which Tapped has only this to add: Perhaps these figures may also suggest that the debate over how Fortuyn was and is characterized politically has prompted people to search for information about who he really was. In other words, because Fortuyn's ideology did not fit into neat categories and he was difficult to compartmentalize, people are seeking to find out more. [posted 1:05 pm]
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LAND FOR FREAKS. The New Republic's Peter Beinart has an illuminating column on the nascent allegiance between the Christian Right and Israel supporters -- which he thinks is a bad thing. The reason? Beinart argues that Christian conservatives have a taken on Zionism that is messianic rather than pragmatic. This, he says, explains recent horrific suggestions by Dick Armey and others that the Palestinians should somehow be "transported" out of the West Bank. To wit:
The debate between Labor and Likud is largely empirical: How much land does Israel need to be secure? And that empiricism enforces moral restraint. It keeps Israeli politicians from succumbing to the religious and nationalist fantasies that animate the messianic wing of thesettler movement. Even for hawks like Netanyahu and Sharon, the land is a means to achieving security; it is not an end in itself.But for Christian conservatives like Armey and Parshall, Israel's interests cannot be defined pragmatically, because Israel's primary function is to clarify a larger worldview. Whether or not most evangelicals truly believe Israel's wars will usher in the Messianic Age, they are theologically conditioned to see its struggle as Manichaean....As Oklahoma's James Inhofe, one of the Christian Right's closest allies in the Senate, put it last December in a speech entitled "An Absolute Victory": "God appeared to Abram and said, 'I am giving you this land'--the West Bank. This is not a political battle at all. It is a contest over whether or not the word of God is true."
Must read. [posted 1:00 pm]
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PUNDIT SMACKDOWN! The Washington Post's eminent David Broder -- the rare columnist who still takes ideas seriously -- pooh-poohs Josh Green and Jon Chait's call for the Democrats to draft John McCain. Chait responds here. We're not sure whose side to take. Chait and Green are TAP alums -- but what have they done for us lately? Broder, on the other hand, plugged our "Politics of Family" special issue recently. Advantage: Broder. [posted 12:25 pm]
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DON'T CRY FOR AOL TIME WARNER. Recently we've been told by both The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal (subscription required) about the sad plight of two recently merged media behemoths. AOL TimeWarner and Vivendi have fallen on tough times, say the reports, unable to achieve the financial blessings promised by "synergy."
But both the Post's Frank Ahrens and the Journal's team of Bruce Orwall and Martin Peers unfortunately fail to identify for their readers the real media industry goal fueling merger frenzy. Jeff Chester of The Center for Digital Democracy tells Tapped that the "prize" that drove the AOL Time Warner merger (and the current AT&T-Comcast cable deal) wasn't synergistic dreams, as Aherns suggests, but the securing of an invaluable cable TV monopoly distribution pipeline. Only through its purchase of Time Warner and its cable systems would AOL be guaranteed key gatekeeper control over a significant slice of America's broadband Internet marketplace. The merger also brought with it lots of free digital TV spectrum, worth untold billions thanks to a TV industry lobbying victory in the 1996 Telecommunications Act. Vivendi -- which just purchased Universal -- is assembling a similar empire to ensure its own digital landlord status (especially in Europe).
What's really sad about these stories and other recent media industry coverage by major newspapers is what's routinely missing: An analysis of how media giants have created a political initiative designed to undercut the remaining federal safeguards on media ownership. Think about the consequences to our democracy, including the future of journalism, if a small group of companies are allowed to swallow up most the country's newspaper, broadcast and cable outlets, and control the future direction of the Internet as well. A better source of information about the dramatic changes transforming the media landscape might be found in the trade magazine Broadcasting and Cable's annual listing of the top 25 media companies. As a result of media mergers, twenty of this year's biggest media companies hadn't made the list last year. But don't despair. Poor little AOL Time Warner and Vivendi occupy the first two places respectively in Broadcasting's media powerhouse list. [posted 12:00 pm]
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SECOND TIERNEY. Tapped ventured to Andrew Sullivan's website again today. Let's just say that this Howard Kurtz story in the Post and our friend Nick Schulz's TechCentralStation.com column had inspired us to try to do a follow-up on Sullivan's getting canned from the New York Times. Tapped had a bright idea: Contrasting Sullivan with other conservatives who write for the Times, like John Tierney, a rising star at the paper despite his libertarian views (who, incidentally, doesn't make a habit of attacking his employer). We remembered that following on a TAP profile of Tierney by Chris Mooney, Sullivan had had something to say about Tierney's place at the Times, and how it was like his own. Here's the passage:
THE GADFLY OF THE TIMES: Regular fans of John Tierney's Big City column in the New York Times know what a star he is. Regularly pricking liberal platitudes and assumptions in New York's biggest liberal paper, Tierney knows he's out on a limb -- and that gives his column a certain edge. Maybe it's because I'm in a similar posiiton at The New Republic these days that I take such solace in the Times' benevolent attitude towards a thorn in their side. It speaks well of both Tierney and his bosses.
This goes back to our earlier comment about Sullivan: there's a difference between a thorn in the side and a pain in the ass, between thoughtful criticism and cheap shots. Schultz, for instance, argues that Sullivan was canned for his thoughtful, eloquent criticism of the Times. But we think he was canned for his cheap shots -- his whiny disquisitions on the Times' supposed vendetta against conservatives, especially George W. Bush. (Bill Clinton, among others, would be surprised to hear that Howell Raines has a brief for the left.) That's not to say we won't miss Sullivan from the pages of the Times. We will. But we wish he had stuck more closely to the serious, throughtful writing that made him famous.[posted 11:30 am]
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ANNALS OF RESUME-PADDING, PART I. Speaking of Debbie Schlussel, Tapped just got through reading her bio on TownHall.com. The right is expert at turning out prefab pundits by the barrelful -- people who look good on television, are ideologically reliable, and can speak in complete sentences -- and Schlussel is no exception. A few thoughts. First, note the circular credentialism: She's qualified to be a pundit because...she goes
