Michael Reynolds/Pool via AP
The media’s validation of Barr’s lies was ultimately what made those lies largely successful.
I had initially planned to write a feature about the fact that, as this Times report noted (as did this report in the Post), “Judge Amy Berman Jackson of the United States District Court in Washington said in a ruling late Monday that the Justice Department’s obfuscation appeared to be part of a pattern in which top officials like Mr. Barr were untruthful to Congress and the public about the [Mueller] investigation.” The Times further noted that Jackson “also singled out Mr. Barr for how he had spun the investigation’s findings in a letter summarizing the 448-page report before it was released, which allowed Mr. Trump to claim he had been exonerated,” and further decried the manner in which Barr’s “characterization of what he’d hardly had time to skim, much less study” defined the reaction to the much-anticipated report. I wrote about this episode extensively in Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie—and Why Trump Is Worse, but was struggling with how to boil down my point to a manageable length for this post. The point was that the very same media companies that are reporting on this now were more than happy to play along with Barr’s strategy at the time, failing more often than not to point out the obvious dishonesty involved in Barr’s spinning of the strategy. The media’s validation of Barr’s lies was ultimately what made those lies largely successful. (Here is a typical example of the Times’ tendency to bury the truth beneath a mountain of both-sidesism bullshit.)
Thankfully, I suppose, my friend Eric Boehlert beat me to the job. Read him here. The larger point, however, is that so many in the media treat politics as if the media play no role in creating the perceptions they report on in voter surveys and elections. But they clearly do, and countless academic studies have repeatedly demonstrated this. Here’s one.
According to this item, three Democratic representatives are hoping to talk Joe Biden and Tony Blinken into picking their former colleague Robert Wexler to be U.S. ambassador to Israel over the recently floated favorite, Tom Nides. I hope they succeed. Wexler inches toward the left side of Democratic debates on Israel, while all I need to know about Nides is that he used to work for Joe Lieberman (who is perhaps only the second-most hawkish person named “Lieberman” when it comes to Israel, but it’s close).
What I really want to talk about, however, is this related Jewish Telegraphic Agency item by Ron Kampeas about the fight over the potential pick for the top human rights role at State. I have no opinion about the likely nominee, Sarah Margon. What interests (or should I say “infuriates”) me is Kampeas’s decision to rely on Elliott Abrams as validator for her bona fides. In picking Abrams, Kampeas is continuing the decades-long whitewashing of not only a man convicted of lying to Congress (and recommended for disbarment in the District of Columbia), but more importantly one of the few ex–U.S. officials who can be said, without qualification or ideological impetus, to have worked (in Ronald Reagan’s State Department) purposely to enable and defend “acts of genocide” (in the words of Guatemala’s United Nations–backed Commission for Historical Clarification) in Central America. Now, Abrams has somehow become a validator of people’s human rights credentials? I have written about this issue, one might say obsessively, here, here, here, here, here, and elsewhere. (I have been covering Abrams’s career for literally 34 years, beginning here.) I am not exactly Seymour Hersh; all of this information is widely available. Yet Abrams is still treated as a totally respectable fellow, with a fancy appointment at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a go-to source by the mainstream media. This says many things about our media, about what remains of the foreign-policy establishment, and about the pre-Trump Republican Party, all of them deeply depressing from the standpoint of America actually caring about human rights, let alone the prevention of mass murder by the nations we armed during the Cold War.
Speaking of Human Rights Watch (and depression), here is the depressing piece I wrote about the HRW report on Israel and apartheid.
And speaking (yet again) of Jews, if your concerns in life include “decolonizing racism … cisheteronormativity, ableism, and classism” (and neoliberalism) in relation to “uninterrogated categories beyond overdetermined, conventional paths of thinking, positioning us to provincialize (be attuned to the contingency of) rather than naturalize (unquestioningly reiterate) contemporary assumptions and ideas” in the field of Jewish studies, then this is what you will want to read next (though perhaps also this is what you will want, as suggested, “for starters”).
Back to Baseball: How heartbreaking it must have been for Orioles pitcher John Means to have lost his perfect game to a catcher’s dropped third strike. I was already thinking about dropped third strikes when the Phillies beat the Mets, 2-1, and scored both runs on another one last week. Talk about So Many Ways to Lose …
I’m taking this opportunity to plug that wonderful book a second time. Way back in 1975—and here is the real justification for this item—I read a New Yorker profile of Cary Grant by Pauline Kael, called “The Man from Dream City,” and it made me want to become a writer. I reread it every few years and it makes me sad to feel how short I’ve fallen. Now, I can’t believe I’m saying this, but that Mets book by Devin Gordon (whom I’ve never encountered before in print or in person) reminds me of Kael’s magnificent profile in its sharp and knowing humor and the implicit conspiracy it succeeds in creating between writer and reader. I don’t know if it would work for a non-Mets fan, but I’m willing to recommend it as a stellar example, along with Kael, of a certain kind of wise guy/wise gal prose that makes one feel less alone in the world and maybe even makes one want to be a writer (though I am definitely not recommending the latter).
On the Jacob deGrom watch, meanwhile, baseball’s best-pitcher-in-a-generation (and worst-supported-by-his-team’s-offense, possibly ever) era has risen to 0.51 because he gave up one run in yet another game in which the Mets were shut out. He’s now 2-2. DeGrom also tied Nolan Ryan’s record for the most strikeouts in his first five games. This is yet another “way to lose.” Jake is also batting .462, by the way. It’s a wonder that the Mets have not traded him for a lifetime .265 hitter who does not even know how to play the position they traded to put him at.
Finally, if you were wondering what kind of mood private citizen/criminal Donald Trump is in at the moment, according to “sources,” The Washington Post is only one of the many mainstream media institutions that is all over that extremely important beat.
The below was written for Altercation by my friend Danny Goldberg.
Bob Fass died at the age of 87 on April 24th, and given his lifelong rebellious persona, I was pleasantly surprised that there were extended obits in both The New York Times and The Washington Post.
From 1965 to 1967, while I was in high school, Fass’s show Radio Unnamable was broadcast every weeknight from midnight to 4:00 a.m. on New York’s WBAI. He defined hipness for me and I wasn’t alone. That was the point. Fass was at the epicenter of both the anti-war and psychedelic movements, and he embodied the most idealistic aspects of the era. He called his listeners “the cabal,” and thousands came to any hip event he believed in. There was no such thing as “rock radio” in those years. “There was just Bob’s show,” Wavy Gravy told me after Fass’s passing. “Bob was the mother of the hippies in the Concrete Apple.”
Fass was also a patron of musicians. Bob Dylan was a frequent guest, sometimes playing a new song but often as a prankster using pseudonyms like “Elvis Bickel.” Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant and Jerry Jeff Walker’s Mr. Bojangles got their first broadcast exposure as live performances on Radio Unnamable before either artist had a record deal.
Abbie Hoffman called the show regularly during the Chicago Seven trial, but my favorite Radio Unnamable moments were the sarcastic, cosmic conversations Fass had with fellow broadcaster Marshall Efron, Wavy (using his original name, Hugh Romney), and Realist Editor Paul Krassner. I thought they were as cool as the Beatles.
Odds and Ends
Everybody who wants to, I imagine, has seen Prince’s incredible Rock & Roll Hall of Fame performance during “While My Guitar Gently Weeps,” but did you know there’s a brand-new (and better) director’s cut?
Also, to put all of us in a better mood after all that depressing stuff above, here’s a video of George Harrison and Paul Simon singing “Homeward Bound” on Season 2, Episode 8 of Saturday Night Live, on November 20, 1976. (And Paul, if you’re out there, I’m sure you know by now that it should have been “I wish I were,” not “I wish I was.”) Here they are doing “Here Comes the Sun.”
