The Nation

Far from ending Bush-era policies of extraordinary rendition and torture that outraged liberals, Democratic President Obama has developed them further, Nation correspondent Jeremy Scahill said during the second part of a Democracy Now! interview about his new book, Dirty Wars.

"There are ways in which Obama pushed the Cheney agenda far beyond what a President McCain or a President Romney would have been able to do, because he had his base of supporters," Scahill said.

Robert Lipsyte has a reputation, largely built from his years at The New York Times, as one of the most fearless sportswriters and columnists of the last century. He has been a critic of jock culture, racism, sexism and homophobia in sports, and the over-corporatizing of our games. In his famous book of the same title, he coined the phrase “SportsWorld” to describe this stew of style with little positive substance. Now that same Robert Lipsyte is going to be the Ombudsman at ESPN: the great magnetic force at the heart of our twenty-first-century SportsWorld. Here, The Nation speaks to Robert Lipsyte about this stunning turn of events.

Dave Zirin: So let’s start with the question many readers might be afraid to ask: What the hell is an ombudsman?

Robert Lipsyte: In this case, the ombudsman, like the New York Times public editor (of whom I am currently an avid fan) is the representative of ESPN’s reading, listening and viewing audience. I will be happily wading through the e-mail bag to find out what that audience is concerned about, complaining about, loving, questioning. Then I will try to explain the background of what happened, demystify the process (through reporting) and offer my take. Transparency. ESPN is the world’s great window on sports. I’m the window washer.

Governor Andrew Cuomo. (AP Photo/Mike Groll.)

The last few weeks have seen an amazing move by New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. In response to a prominent set of arrests of high-ranking Democrats and Republicans, the governor has proposed a series of proposals to strengthen the power of district attorneys to investigate corruption. Okay, that seems like a reasonable enough response.

Not too long ago I saw, for the first time, the 1962 version of the film Cape Fear, directed by J. Lee Thompson. (You may know the 1991 Martin Scorsese remake.) It starred two men whose casting alone would have alerted early ’60s moviegoers about where their sympathies were supposed to lie. Robert Mitchum, famous for depicting characters of pure wickedness even at the risk of his status as a leading man (think 1955’s Night of the Hunter), plays an ex-con just out of prison. He’s convinced that one man is responsible for his incarceration: a lawyer played by Gregory Peck who saw him commit the brutal murder for which he went to prison. Peck played to type, too: a heroic, sweet, selfless lawyer, tough but fair, who would never cut a corner, even to restore order to a fallen world—just like the character he played in To Kill a Mockingbird, also from 1962.

I saw Cape Fear back when we were all discussing the meaning and ethics of Zero Dark Thirty. Remember that big old debate? Some, most prominently three senators in a position to know, argued the picture was “grossly inaccurate and misleading in its suggestion that torture resulted in information that led to the location of Osama bin Laden”—and was, thus, objectively pro-torture. Others, like Michael Moore, said the interrogation scenes were so off-putting that no one could but to conclude from them, Moore wrote, that “torture is wrong.” Others pointed out that the full plot, in its byzantine complexities, suggests that the tidbit of information that broke the case came investigators’ way before those interrogations happened—so the movie could not be read as objectively pro-torture. I disagree with both those latter two arguments. The reason is simple: ZDT is a genre piece, a police procedural, in which convention dictates that sweating the suspect—good cop, bad cop, and all that; an unpleasant job but somebody has to do it—is but one of the required stations of the cross to move the plot along to resolution, and justice.