Eric Alterman | The Nation

My new Think Again column is called “The Terrible Power of Purposeful Ignorance.” It deals with the decision to invade Iraq together with arguments over the sequester and it’s here

I wrote (what is for me, an oddly) confessional piece about my career of being made to feel like an idiot by William F. Buckley Jr. for the Columbia Journalism Review. They called it “Aspiring Line,” and it’s here.

Also, I gave a talk on liberalism at  All Souls Unitarian Church on the Upper East Side this past Sunday. They videotaped it and it’s here.

Whose reputation will this hurt the most? Victor Navasky and I had dinner with William Kristol last week after the latter’s Delacorte lecture at the Columbia Journalism School. It was pleasant, insofar as I could tell, for everyone concerned.  I sense this would be impossible with anyone with the last name (or married to anyone with the last name) “Podhoretz,” but that has always been the Kristols’ secret, I think: self-confidence, which breeds good manners.

But speaking of Neocons, remember when that Josh Block fellow told Politico that what I had written was “borderline anti-Semitic” because I insisted that AIPAC and its allies were hoping for a US attack on Iran. This actually caused me a lot of trouble and led, ultimately, to my resigning my column from the Forward.  

Well, as Ali Gharib noticed, Neocon pundit and newly minted anti-Semit, Max Boot just said the same thing regarding the approval vote for Chuck Hagel. Look here.  

Boot writes: "This is a far cry from what Israel—and for that matter America’s Gulf Arab allies—would like to see, which is American air strikes to cripple the Iranian nuclear program." He then keeps digging, adding that "if the 'Zionist Lobby' actually ran American foreign policy—as so many seem to imagine—it is puzzling why such strikes have not yet been undertaken." I'm old enough to remember when saying that pro-Israel groups (and indeed Israel itself) want war with Iran was enough to get right-wingers to accuse you of anti-Semitism. Of course, AIPAC is busy itself pushing (non-binding) hawkish resolutions on Iran, but it's always helpful to have Max Boot clarifying the pro-Israel lobby's goals for us

The next stop on this train will be the attack on that anti-Semite Dick Cheney for using the term “Jewish lobby.”

Alter-reviews:

In between Allman shows, I got out to the Iridium last weekend to see  Nicholas  Payton joined by Vicente Archer on bass and Lenny White on drums. I was happy to see White, who I first caught as a teenager in the Corea/Clarke iteration of “Return to Forever,” among my first jazz shows at the old Palladium. It was around that time that Miles Davis could be spotted playing trumpet and keyboards simultaneously, something that Payton is now doing on his Fender Rhodes. It was a pretty interesting evening with what felt to me like a decidedly “Bitches Brew” kind of vibe. Anyway, if you live in the city, Sunday nights are a great night to see jazz in the clubs because the bands are held over from the weekend but only the serious fans are out there seeing them. A place like the Irridium when it’s not crowded is almost ideal.  

At the other end of this spectrum of course is Rose Hall, Jazz@LC’s “house of swing.” This weekend, I’m excited to be going to see the great Jon Faddis pay tribute to his mentor, Dizzy Gillespie, with special guests Ignacio Berroa, drums; NEA Jazz Master Jimmy Heath, tenor saxophone; Pedrito Martinez, congas; and Steve Turre, trombone and conch shells (3/8 only). You can look it up.

And speaking of Miles, I think Eagle Rock has issued the first bluray of a live performance by the man. ].  This concert from July 8, 1991 was his last many appearances at the Montreux Jazz Festival and took place only a few months before his death  Happily, while it’s quite late in his career, its not “late Miles” funk etc. Instead, persuaded by Quincy Jones and Claude Nobs to take part in this tribute to his great friend Gil Evans, who had passed away in 1988 and with whom he made such wonderful and beautiful music. Not many pyrotechnics—save sartorily, but we get Miles plus Kenny Garrett (saxophone) & Wallace Rooney(trumpet, flugelhorn). Quincy Jones conducting the Gil Evans Orchestra and the George Gruntz Concert Jazz Band with the addition of Benny Bailey (trumpet, flugelhorn), Carles Benavent (bass) and Grady Tate (drums).

Here’s a video of Summertime.

Speaking of Europe, we are also in the middle of the Lincoln Center Film Society’s Rendezvous with French Cinema. I saw a bunch of movies while the rest of you were working and stuff. What did I think was great? The Girl From Nowhere/La fille de nulle part was great. Here’s a description: “Lost in a maze of his philosophizing while trying to write a book, a retired math teacher is forced to deal with the real world when he must rescue a young woman from the clutches of a thug outside his Paris apartment. What the teacher doesn’t know is that this woman may be his muse, a mystical agent or an angel of death."

Granny’s Funeral/Adieu Berthe: L’enterrement de meme was pretty fun, as was You Will Be My Son/Tu Seras Mon Fils. Meanwhile, Renoir, about the final years of the painter’s life, was beautiful.

I think these will all see releases in the coming year

OK, back to music, People who only know me through the blog think I go out an awful lot. I don’t actually agree and, and in my defense, I will point out that I would have been really happy to see Buddy Miller and Jim Lauderdale at the Bowery Ballroom, Corb Lund at Joe’s Pub, James Hunter somewhere hipsters go in Williamsburg and Emmylou Harris and Rodney Crowell, together with Richard Thompson at the Beacon.  With regard to all of the above, I stayed home and listened to the new albums. And I liked each one of them. They are all kind of comfortable--Hunter rocks a little more, Emmylou and Rodney are a bit more earnest, Lund is pretty damn funny and Miler and Lauderdale just have a good time together.  You can look up the details but if you are familiar with any of the above, this is good stuff compared to their other stuff and so you have my permission to go ahead and press “buy.”

As for reading material while you’re listening to your new music, I came across this new nearly 900 page Biographical Dictionary of Popular Music: From Adele to Ziggy, the Real A to Z of Rock and Pop by a fellow named Dylan Jones and it’s really smart and funny. It’s almost crazily personalistic but the voice is an engaging and knowledgable one, despite the inevitable disagreements his taste will inspire. Apparently he’s the editor in chief of British GQ, and so he’s wants to get all this useless knowledge off his chest and into your head.  You can guess in which room it belongs. It’s also pretty funny, and not only because he devotes 12 full pages to Ringo.

Over at the Library of America site, they are offering free (!) downloadable audio versions of ten selections by Sherwood Anderson stories, read by acclaimed storywriters Charles Baxter, Robert Boswell, Deborah Eisenberg, Patricia Hampl, Siri Hustvedt, Ben Marcus, Rick Moody, Antonya Nelson, and Benjamin Taylor. (I actually spent quite a bit of time downloading them, but they never found their way into my iTunes file, for some reason. Anyway, they have just published a volume of Anderson—surprising how long it took—as the former Mad Man and small businessman wrote some of the best and most influential work of his era and beyond. This volume collects for the first time all the books of stories he published in his lifetime—Winesburg, Ohio (1919), The Triumph of the Egg (1921), Horses and Men (1923), and Death in the Woods (1933)—along with a generous selection of stories left uncollected or unpublished at his death.

The Library has also finished up its Philip Roth collection, with two books. One is called Nemeses and features Everyman, Indignation, The Humbling, Nemesis. The other is Novels 2001-2007 and features The Dying Animal, The Plot Against America, and Exit Ghost. To be honest, this is some of Roth’s weakest work. I liked, though many hated, The Dying Animal. I did not love, though many did, The Plot Against America. As for the rest all have especially strong moments, but also some painful to read, weaknesses. And none can be compared to the Roth masterpieces that began with Goodbye Columbus over a half century ago. (That book reads as if brand new by the way.) Anyway, completists will want these two books. Otherwise, I would suggest you begin much, much earlier.

Finally, there is also an LOA book of writings about the War of 1812. This strikes me as an odd notion, but I’m sure will reward further study….

You can start with Sherwood Anderson, here.

Inspired by last weeks listapalooza, I decided to add a regular feature of one list of things about which I care, but it’s hard to imagine anyone else does.

Today's List: Songs that if I'm at the Beacon, and the Allman Brothers start playing them, I’m in a good mood, in order:

"One Way Out"
"You Don't Love Me"
"Ain't Wastin' Time No More"
"Statesboro Blues"
"Soulshine"
"Jessica"
"Midnight Rider"
"Revival"
"Into the Mystic"
"Lovelight"
"Move to the Outskirts of Town"
"Stormy Monday"
"Trouble No More"
"Whipping Post"
"Mountain Jam"
"Nobody left to Run With Anymore"

And if they're stretching;
"Layla"
"Franklin's Tower"
"Dazed and Confused"

Phew: Now here’s Reed:

Looking Back, Moving Forward

by Reed Richardson

We in the media like to think of ourselves as hardy souls, out there lustily exercising our First Amendment rights in search of truth and in defense of democracy. In reality, we tend to be a tetchy, moody, thin-skinned lot. Whoever first said “nobody likes a critic” left off the other, more precise half of the adage: “least of all a journalist.” Indeed, asking a reporter to run a correction on an article of theirs typically ranks right up there with inquiries as to how much money they make and questions about the frequency of their spouse’s libidinal gratification in terms of thoroughly unwelcome newsroom solicitations. But if we’re all in the business of producing the first draft of history, why is there so little interest in reviewing and revising the draft?

Human nature is the short answer. We all build psychological constructs to help make sense of the world around us. But journalists, who must compile facts and contact sources and conceive narratives for every story, perform this kind of how-it-all-fits-together thinking every day. No surprise then, that we get pretty good at it. Or, more accurately, we think we’re pretty good at it—much better than the public. That confidence, though, becomes its own insidious trap, one that can easily propagate through a news organization. Gather all these individual cases of self-regard together, add on top of them another set from folks even more stubborn and self-assured—let’s call these people, I don’t know, editors—and then top it all off with thin layers of institutional rigidity and executive arrogance from the masthead; when you do, it’s a wonder the press even runs corrections at all.

Sadly, this is only a slight exaggeration. In 2007, the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism examined 3,600 metro newspaper articles and contacted one source for each, looking for errors. Not only did the study find these articles riddled with inaccuracies, they went nearly untouched by admissions that this was so. As Jack Shafer of Slate wrote at the time: “[A]bout half of the stories for which a survey was completed [69 percent of the 3,600] contained one or more errors. Just 23 of the flawed stories—less than 2 percent—generated newspaper corrections. No paper corrected more than 4.2 percent of its flawed articles.” (italics mine)

Getting these facts right obviously matters, even if it’s just spelling someone’s first name properly, as the New York Times repeatedly failed to do while Madeleine Albright was the then Secretary of State (49 errors produced 3 corrections). The press’s woeful track record here should set off warning bells, though. Consistently fumbling the little, easily verifiable stuff suggests big, tough-to-confirm points are even more susceptible to laziness and willful disregard for the truth.

All of which brings me to the topic of media ombudsmen. I know, I know. Listening to a media critic opine about ombudsmen, whose job also involves critiquing news organizations, has all the trappings of some kind of meta-navel-gazing experiment gone awry. Akin to trying to understand those impenetrable collateralized debt obligations—a bet on a bet on a bet—that sent our economy spiraling into crisis four years ago. But if you care about the state of the press in our country, you should care about the perilous state of ombudsmen too.

Don’t get me wrong, theirs mostly is a rarefied existence, of which I understand. Due to the exigencies of an increasingly cutthroat news business, regional metro newspapers and local TV news channels can’t and, honestly, shouldn’t be expected to dedicate a full-time salary to the luxury of having an independent critic poring over their coverage. On the other hand, if yours is a newspaper or TV network with a national or international reach and especially if you have aspirations of charting the nation’s policymaking and political process, then the cost of employing one person who can offer honest, real-time feedback on your reportage is an investment in your reputation that, if done right, more than pays for itself.

That is not how Washington Post published Katharine Weymouth sees it, clearly. Her recent announcement this past week that she was not replacing outgoing ombudsman Patrick Pexton was telling, not just the decision itself, but in how she justified it.

Those duties are as critical today as ever. Yet it is time that the way these duties are performed evolves.

 

We will appoint a reader representative shortly to address our readers’ concerns and questions. Unlike ombudsmen in the past, the reader representative will be a Post employee. The representative will not write a weekly column for the page but will write online and/or in the newspaper from time to time to address reader concerns, with responses from editors, reporters or business executives as appropriate.

Curiously, while the American news media cowers and pulls back, unable to believe in itself, the increasingly free press in so many other parts of the word are adding ombudsmen and improving standards. Even in some places without a long tradition of free press, there is a growing recognition of the link between good public information, on the one hand, and economic development and democracy…

 

I am on the board of the international Organization of News Ombudsman and have watched with delight as the number of ombudsmen has taken off in countries such as India, Bangladesh and South Africa. According to Stephen Pritchard, the president of ONO, Colombia now has 14 ombudsmen working just in television — each with a weekly half-hour show—and Mexican television has five. When Lord Justice Leveson issued his report last November on the phone hacking scandal in Great Britain, he cited having an independent ombudsman as a "best practice" to respond to public complaints.

The editors' note to readers will have served its apparent function only if it launches a new round of examination and investigation. I don't mean further acts of contrition or garment-rending, but a series of aggressively reported stories detailing the misinformation, disinformation and suspect analysis that led virtually the entire world to believe Hussein had W.M.D. at his disposal.

This is journalism’s day-in, day-out burden. We get almost as many things wrong as we do right. Often, it helps to have someone else there to remind us that in those mistakes is yet another important story to tell. Only by looking back, though, will we ever be able to tell it and, this time, get it right.

Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com. 

Also, I’m on Twitter here—(at)reedfrich.

Editor's note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.

For more Alterman best-of lists, see last week's post, "My Favorite Things: God Bless America Edition."

My Think Again column is called "The Mainstream Media Is Missing the Point." It attempts to contrast the obsession with Tiger and Barack's golf game, with say, the lack of attention shown to the conservative billionaire/corporate purchase of the think tank world to spout the nonsense that keeps them rolling in dough. It's here.

And it's taken me thirty-seven years to build a column around my favorite Bruce song, but here we finally go. It's called "They've Got the Fever..." and it's here. (It's a long story, but I do feel responsible for getting Bruce to include it on "18 Tracks," ["The Promise," too, as it happens] though the version on my funeral playlist is the one from Winterland in 1978.)

Now here's Reed:

Not in Its Right Mind

by Reed Richardson

Journalism in this country has a problem. OK, it has lots of problems, which just this past week ranged, alphabetically, from Allen, Mike all the way up to zone coverage, flood the. But it was the Beltway media’s all too predictable hand wringing over the looming sequester and the inability of the two parties to come to a “grand bargain” that reminded me of one of its most important—and most overlooked—failures. Our political press simply does not understand how the American right-wing thinks, or to be more accurate, how differently it thinks.

This is no mere rhetorical flourish. There’s now a critical mass of scientific evidence that shows the minds of conservatives are literally structured differently than liberals. While neither ideology is immune from psychological phenomena that can muddy reality and cloud judgment—effects like motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and selective exposure—study after study finds that conservative thought processes are measurably more rigid and inflexible. In addition, surveys show that conservatives are noticeably more likely to embrace flawed, irrational arguments to bolster their beliefs and they’re more resistant to encountering or trusting any new evidence that might contradict said beliefs. This fundamental, cognitive disparity between liberals and conservatives can’t help but ripple through our political discourse, affecting every electoral campaign, every legislative battle, every committee meeting. And yet the Washington press corps, whose explicit job it is to tease out and explain the motives behind our government’s political stakeholders, demonstrates almost no curiosity or comprehension of how ideology and psychology interact with one another.

In his fantastic recent book, The Republican Brain, Chris Mooney addresses this very disconnect. In it, he explains how the failure to take into account these psychological differences amounts to a kind of professional negligence on the part of the press:

[T]hat response, too, is a form of denial—liberal denial, a doctrine whose chief decision is not so much the failure to accept facts, but rather, the failure to understand conservatives. And that denial can’t continue. Because as President Obama’s first term has shown—from the health-care battle to the debt ceiling crisis—ignoring the psychology of the right has not only left liberals frustrated and angry, but has left the country in a considerably worse state than that.

That the press would almost uniformly suffer from its own cognitive blind spot on this issue is perhaps understandable. Objective journalism’s ethos, after all, is rooted firmly in the Enlightenment ideal, which holds that the presentation of facts and revelation of truth represents the best pathway to winning an argument and/or gaining a consensus. Unfortunately, a wealth of political science has proven that people think and process information in a much more complicated, nuanced, and self-interested manner. Worse yet, we now know that dedicated attempts to highlight a myth or conspiracy theory in order to debunk or disprove it can actually backfire and end up reinforcing the falsehoods instead.

Needless to say, these observations present a rather awkward dilemma for mainstream media newsrooms. Well-meaning, overworked journalists already have enough to worry about without piling on the uncomfortable notion that, even if they do their jobs well, they might actually be making the public more, rather than less, misinformed. Nevertheless, Mooney points to plenty of evidence of what he dubs the “smart idiots” effect, where the “politically sophisticated or knowledgeable are often more biased, and less persuadable, than the ignorant.” Out of its own moral self-interest, the elite political press rejects or ignores this potentiality. Instead, it operates from an a priori Enlightenment bias—a somewhat ironic (and misplaced) faith in the rationality of its audience.

Once you understand that this is the media’s foundational belief, it’s much easier to understand why, from the perspective of conservatives, the establishment media has a perceived liberal bias. Because the journalism profession shares the same tendency toward Socratic exploration and logical persuasion that liberals do, they both think the same way. In other words, the shared bias between the establishment media and the American left-wing isn’t one that is accurately measured along a political spectrum but rather a cognitive one.

This is not to say other elements of society don’t have a cognitive tendency more aligned with conservatives—the military, speaking from experience, certainly does. But the press, and the political press especially, routinely misses this important disconnect when covering debates like the sequester. Hence, readers get served up over-simplified analysis that treats politicians from the left and right almost as commodities, heaping equal scorn on both as “unserious” about compromise. Sure, their ultimate goal—policymaking and power—is the same, but the way the two sides go about it is completely dissimilar.

Conservatives, scientific studies show, perceive the political world in a more black and white way, where ideologies engage in zero-sum battles for resources and dominance. But as moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt notes of this worldview: “If you think about politics in a Manichaen way, then compromise is a sin. God and the devil don’t issue many bipartisan proclamations and neither should you.” Time and again, the Beltway media glides right past this basic tenet of conservative thinking only to blame Democrats and Republicans equally when yet another grand bargain that one side never sought in good faith in the first place fails to materialize.

Likewise, this myopia also involves misinterpreting the relationship between the parties and the stakes involved in political negotiations. In the current sequester fight, for instance, brute-force deficit reduction was the claimed policy prize, but the way Democrats and Republicans have approached refining it to be more fair belies the vastly different motives driving their actions.

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Democrats, who hold a more ambivalent view of deficit reduction, floated what they saw as a reasonable meet-you-more-than-halfway offer to Republicans. The GOP, though, displayed zero willingness to accept a deal that, by any logical measure, would be mostly a win for them. Instead, they’re proposing an all-or-nothing deal that gives no quarter to Democrats. Why? “Who really knows?” and “Arggh, same old gridlock!” seems to be the some of the popular mainstream media conclusions. But what’s never mentioned is that the Republicans’ intransigence—on this and almost every other fiscal issue—is wrapped up in a complete myth. That is, they believe keeping tax rates low somehow magically pays for itself, increases net revenues and reduces the deficit over time. Of course, this is absolutely false and even President George Bush’s main economic adviser, who called its adherents “snake oil salesmen” pushing a “miracle cure for what ails the economy,” has acknowledged this.

Nevertheless, this lower taxes=higher revenues fallacy has become an article of faith among Republican party leaders, and damned if they’ll violate the sanctity of it again (as is obvious from Speaker Boehner’s recent “the President got his higher taxes” rhetoric, they feel they already betrayed it in the fiscal cliff deal). So, the reason the sequester cuts will happen can be summarized by a fairly basic psychological explanation: Republicans hold low taxes for the rich as too sacred to compromise, whereas Democrats don’t hold deficit reduction sacred enough to cave completely. The former is predicated on falsehood and irrational certainty, however, whereas the latter is redolent of pragmatism and unabashed self-preservation.

Once you start to view political negotiations through the prism of how the ideologies shape each side’s thinking, their behavior becomes less of a frustrating mystery. But to bring this kind of scientific nuance to political coverage is to no doubt attract an outpouring of criticism from conservatives, many of whom already have a tenuous relationship with established theories like evolution and climate change. To accept that conservatives really do think differently does not, as Mooney explains, mean that “Republicans are somehow bad people or less intelligent.” But, by the same token, it does allow journalists to take seriously the prickly reality that today’s “Republicans really are more doggedly misinformed” about the major issues confronting our country. As he sums up in his book:

Republicans and Democrats really think about facts, about reality itself differently…[this] has dramatic consequences for policy; but perhaps even more momentous implications still for the tone and the assumptions we bring into political ‘debates.” In particular, an ‘on the one hand, on the other hand’ approach to journalism and the adjudicating of facts may simply be intellectually irresponsible. It may be just a ruse to go about this in a bipartisan way.

In the end, the media owes it not just to the country, but to intellectually honest conservatives, to gain a better understanding of how psychology bears down on political ideology. Especially if it’s to point out how often the right gets things wrong.

Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com. 

Also, I’m on Twitter here—(at)reedfrich.

The Mail:
Frank Moraes
Santa Rosa, Calif.
Hi Reed-

I really liked your column this week and I think it is important stuff. The Progressive Caucus puts out a lot of good policy proposals and they are systematically ignored by the major media—this has been especially appalling regarding their budget. The argument is always the same: they are out of the mainstream; their ideas can't become policy. But the same is true of, say, Paul Ryan's budget. And yet things like it get blanket coverage.

I think the reason for this is that journalists are generally socially liberal but economically conservative. (This goes right along with What Liberal Media? where Eric even notes that a much stronger case can be made that the media is socially liberal.) My thinking (for what it's worth) is that if a country has relative economic equality, all of the social issues tend to fall in place. And if you don't have this, you're going to have major social issues, regardless of what the law is. In other words: raising the minimum wage is far more important than repealing DADT, even though I hated that policy.

It was strange that there was a Tea Party Response to the SOTU address when Marco Rubio is a favorite of the Tea Party. But I think it is wrong to say that he is not a moderate Republican. Rubio is not an outlier in his Party. We can say that moderate Republicans are in no sense moderate. Or we can say that the modern Republican Party banished all moderation from itself. But the really scary thing about modern American politics is that Marco Rubio is typical of one of the two major political parties.

(Last week Jonathan Bernstein [I think!] asked if liberals would rather have a reasonable Republican Party or if they'd rather it continue on and allow the Democrats to win more elections. Who could not be for a reasonable Republican Party?! Does anyone doubt that no matter how crazy the party gets that the major media will continue to treat them as if they are reasonable?)

Editor's note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.

Sure, we should hold Israel to certain standards on human rights, but don't forget about the human rights violations of Hamas, Eric Alterman writes.

This morning I received an e-mail from a Mr. Richard Behar, who says he is a contributing editor to Forbes and who, like apparently hundreds of people (most of whom were anti-Zionist but be that as it may), objected to something he read in the piece published on the Open Zion website yesterday, "Brooklyn College And The BDS Debate."

As you can see from the below, I tried to answer his question politely and get rid of him, repeatedly, until he informed me (after publishing my e-mails without even asking permission) that he planned to write a column about them. Since I have nothing to hide in this respect, but do not believe that Richard can be trusted to treat the exchange fairly and honestly—and moreover, he has already demonstrated that he does not believe in the privacy e-mail communication—I thought I'd put up the entire exchange here, so that (in the unlikely event that) he really does waste even more time writing about me, interested parties—again, I imagine that the existence of such a person might be a stretch—can judge for him or herself. Eric Alterman.

Dear Eric,

I just read your column (from yesterday) in the Daily Beast, and—as a longtime investigative reporter—was quite surprised to see that you could make such a sweeping indictment of a country without providing any backup to readers. Specifically:

"It is true, of course, that Israel's brutal treatment of the Palestinian people breeds hatred rather than a desire for cooperation with their oppressors..."

WOW. Please see my attached Comment if/when you get a chance, and I hope you will consider taking me up on my challenge.

In my view, you should have backed this up to begin with.  But it's hardly too late.

Thanks and all best regards,

--Richard Behar

Eric to Richard:

Here you go, sir.

http://www.hrw.org/world-report-2012/world-report-2012-israeloccupied-palestinian-territories

http://www.amnesty.org/en/region/israel-occupied-palestinian-territories/report-2012

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=42527#.URUhYh1m68A

For a "longtime investigative reporter," this shouldn't have been so hard to find.

but happy to be of service,,,,

Richard to Eric:

Wow, that's quite nasty of you.

Happy to read, but it's not what you've written previously -- it's the backing up of a sweeping indictment in a current column.  I should think any "distinguished" journalism professor would know that.

Then again, the Nation has been anti-Israel in almost a knee-jerk way ever since the early days of Navasky, and it looks like you are a regular columnist there.

Eric to Richard:

Yes, well, as you might have guessed, I don't really believe I need any lessons in good journalism from you.

Or if I do, there's no evidence of it from your comment.

But I do wish you all the best life.

Now let's both move on, shall we?

Richard to Eric:

Oh, gosh. LOL. And I now see you are quoting the UN and other groups that are so provably biased against Israel that one could demonstrate that with one's eyes closed. Suggest you read the speeches of HRW's founder and longtime head, Robert Bernstein, who split with the group specifically over its obvious and over-the-top bias against Israel.

You're on the wrong side of history.

Eric to Richard:

Again, thanks for the advice.

Can I get back to work, now?

Or do you have additional instructions for me?

Richard to Eric, headline:

Yes, moving on, sir... you're a fool, a coward, and deceptive toward readers

Eric to Richard:

Yes, well, at least I don't bother people I don't know by calling them names like a second-grade school child.

but how about fucking off now, ok?

I've got work to do....

Eric to Richard (upon seeing that Richard had published my correspondence on the Daily Beast comments without asking permission):

I see you published my e-mails without asking my permission.

Any more lectures you might like to offer on journalistic ethics, sir?

If I gave a shit, I'd have them taken down. But since they reveal you to be such a moron, I'm happy to leave them there.

Let's hope we're done now.

Richard to Eric:

Take them down if you want. I may be doing a Forbes column on it/you anyway. The e-mails were not off-record, AND since you were so dismissive and insulting of me, I thought they should be published. I pity your students, "proud" professor.

Eric to Richard:

All my private correspondence is off the record. You did not write me for my comments for Forbes magazine. You wrote me asking for evidence for something I wrote and I was kind enough to waste my time responding, (since it turns out, you are, alas, a moron).

But do me a favor. Send this e-mail to your editor and see if he or she thinks it appropriate to publish my private e-mails (or even characterize them) without my permission and against my instructions.

Eric adds:

I guess that’s moot now. Publish away, sir.

Eric Alterman and Reed Richardson discuss Bruce Springsteen, Fox News and more in their latest post.

My new Think Again column is called “It’s Not Really ‘Krugman vs. the World’” and it’s rather critical of Joe Scarborough and his fellow Villagers, here.

I also thought I’d recommend Thomas Mallon on Richard Nixon in The New Yorker.

And in the “Well Said” department, there this:

Rolling Stone speaks with My Morning Jacket's Jim James, who recently "came to [a] realization."

RS: You're a big Neil Young fan. Are you into his current work?

JJ: The last Neil Young record I really enjoyed was Prairie Wind. I thought that was a fucking beautiful record. I like everything that Neil does. Neil's a big hero of mine, but I really came to this realization: I saw Springsteen in Louisville, and I've never been giant Springsteen fan. I only liked things here or there and I wasn't like a giant fan. I saw him in Louisville and he was fucking phenomenal! It was like seeing the sun shine for the first time or something. It was like he was so positive and it felt like every motherfucker in that place was his best friend. You know he touched everybody. He was crowd surfing. He was fucking running around and shit. When you see Neil [Young] and Bob [Dylan], they're, like, all pissed and you feel like they don't give a fuck if you're there or not. I'm so sick of that, and seeing Bruce I was like, "Fucking-a, man! Thank you! I paid a lot of money to be at this fucking show and you care I'm here." It was just, like, such a revelation.

If you’ve not yet discovered Foyle’s War, well, then I rather envy you. Acorn media is ready with six dvds they are calling The Home Front Files, Sets 1-6 Michael Kitchen stars as Christopher Foyle, the laconic detective chief superintendent of a coastal English town, investigating crimes on the home front as World War II rages. The 22 mysteries in this collection follow the course of the war and its aftermath from 1940 to 1945. It’s really charming and lots of fun and never insults your intelligence. Every one of these episodes can be watched more than once after you’ve learned who did it (and if you’re my age, forgotten). Acorn has also released Maigret Complete Collection I n which the great Michael Gambon stars in PBS’s Masterpiece Mystery! Adaptations of Georges Simenon’s classic detective novels, originally broadcast on in the early 1990s. Minnie Driver is in it too. It’s four dvds. And finally the Acorn people have also re-issued the Wodehouse Playhouse Complete, three series of the BBC show based on the great writer’s silly stories. I’ve not watched it yet but it’s six cds and the reviews give it high marks. You can find more information about all of them here and I think you can sign up to stream them as well.

Now here’s Reed:

A Lonely Spot in a Lonely War
by Reed Richardson

When trying to gain historical perspective on any event as vast and complex as a war there are a number of narrative structures that an author can use. The wonkish approach might focus on legislative and administrative aspects, digging into the seemingly endless documentation that accompanies every nation’s entry into major conflict to get the insider view. The biographical take—a popular one—establishes a dramatis personae and then follows these characters throughout, similarly using their experiences and utterances as a prism through which the reader can view the unfolding story. And then there’s the less common strategy of planting one’s narrative flag on a piece of ground, taking up residence, and letting the story eventually occupy it.

This last idea, that sometimes a place can more powerfully tell a tale than the people or policies or ideas that do battle there isn’t new. Asking a hill, a valley, a beach, a town to carry a broader perspective on a war can easily devolve into an exercise in forced symbolism, of trying to make too much about too little, all of which is to say that it is not an easy thing to pull off successfully. Jake Tapper, in his exhaustively detailed book about one lonely corner of the War in Afghanistan, The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (Little Brown, $29.99), manages to do it with aplomb, however.

The funny thing is Tapper, a longtime member of the DC press corps who just became CNN’s chief Washington correspondent, might not necessarily agree. It’s clear from his book tour interviews that his interest in tale of Combat Outpost Keating arose when his veteran journalist’s curiosity unexpectedly collided with his newfound sense of life’s fragility. (As he tells it, he was literally holding his one-day-old son, Jack, while still in the hospital, when he first saw TV news reports of the massive, bloody battle where hundreds of insurgents nearly captured COP Keating.) His intentions, in others words, didn’t begin with the idea of detailing the intelligence failures, strategic stubbornness, tactical arrogance, and historical ignorance that has colored (and still colors) our messy,12-year-plus endeavor in Afghanistan.

This hesitancy on the part of Tapper to embrace his own book’s larger critiques remains. After all, one does not spend years researching and exploring the ponderous reasons why a dozen-plus men died and many more were wounded over several years at an exposed location like COP Keating and then slap a rather clichéd, gung-ho subtitle on the book without some forethought. As a marketing decision, I get it, but as an honest description of the larger lessons a reader might learn from reading it, Tapper is pulling his punches here.

This is perhaps not surprising. Tapper has a track record of being an at times pious, self-flagellating member of the media-is-liberally-biased club. (I took him and fellow self-confessor Mark Halperin to task for their baseless assertions here in this space last August.) More recently, Tapper took umbrage at Obama’s rather obvious criticism of the Beltway media’s facility for false equivalence. His rather facile response: “False equivalency is a thing, sure. But so is false ‘false equivalency,’” was a classically dismissive retort. Later, he claimed the comment was a “joke” and that “pols don’t make the best media critics.” Again, what Tapper didn’t do was try to engage the argument in an intellectually honest way.

In The Outpost, though, you can tell that, through the hard work of reporting COP Keating’s story arc across three-and-a-half years and through the eyewitness accounts of hundreds of regular soldiers, Tapper’s tetchiness about bias and Beltway instincts for hidebound objectivity aren't driving the story structure. So, from the book’s very first scene, from its very first sentence even, it’s clear that Tapper isn't merely serving up glorious patriotic shades of red, white, and blue. From the get-go, he foreshadows the violent climax that was ultimately going to befall the 53 soldiers stationed on a tactically disastrous piece of ground in a dangerously remote part of Afghanistan: “It was madness.”

From here, the reader is treated to literally hundreds of pages of the history of COP Keating leading up to the final fateful attack in October 2009. He tracks the ebb and flow of four different cavalry companies into and out of Nuristan, a rugged, punishing province in northeast Afghanistan where Keating and several other small American outposts have been set up to stem the tide of insurgents oozing back and forth across the nearby border with Pakistan.

Tapper does yeoman’s work trying to keep the constantly rotating cast of characters straight as the years pass by, but at times there are so many names being bandied about, both American and Afghani, that it becomes hard to focus. Likewise, the intense combat set pieces he describes leading up to the final battle, of which there are many, are often impossible to visualize. This down-to-the-man detail is impressive—as is his unflinchingly visceral, sometimes clinical, description of battlefield wounds and death—but it is in service of what larger need to the story, you find yourself asking occasionally. His granular exposition no doubt shows off his reporting chops, but too much of it can become trap, a quicksand of data that buries and disorients the reader.

Even so, Tapper slowly introduces a larger context into what will finally shape the fate of COP Keating. As one company replaces another, the outpost’s efficacy erodes, as it becomes harder and harder to sustain and protect it. Certainly, the numerous schisms and centuries-old grudges that plague Nuristan (a place so stubbornly riven with clannish feuds that Tapper dubs it: “the Afghanistan of Afghanistan”) contribute to the ever-evolving insurgent resistance that can’t abide the outpost’s presence. But time and again, Tapper demonstrates how another antagonist is working against the troops’ mission and their very survival: the war in Iraq.

For a good portion of the book’s scope—from early 2006 to early 2009—it’s evident that whatever our intervention in Afghanistan ever accomplished was in spite of the Bush administration not thanks to it. Throughout most of Bush’s time in the White House, Iraq was assigned four to five times more combat brigades. (To put this in context geographically, Tapper notes that at one point an ISAF brigade of a few thousand soldiers was responsible for a piece of Afghanistan roughly the size of Virginia.) The helicopter shortage, still not corrected 10 months into Obama’s administration, actually contributed to the demise of COP Keating—with not enough air assets available to evacuate the base earlier, it gave insurgents time to amass a huge stockpile of men and materiel.

Indeed, by the time George Bush makes a brief, personal cameo in the book, to comfort a wife of a company commander severely wounded during an 2008 IED attack just outside the outpost, there’s an justifiably earned sense of outrage on the part of the reader (if there wasn't one already). Bush’s sunny optimism: “Rob will wake up and when he does, I will meet him in person again,” to an emotionally fraught spouse of a wounded soldier is, on the one hand, understandable. In war, things rarely work out happily, though. Three weeks after meeting the president, Capt. Rob Yllescas’s wife watched her husband suffer a massive stroke. She decided to take him off life support. He died quickly.

By the time Obama takes office, the outpost’s high toll in lives lost and energy expended to keep it is obviously not worth the cost, to everyone involved. Yet a combination of theater shortages and military inertia conspire to keep it hanging around, even after its usefulness to the local population is thoroughly spent. This inertia, Tapper rightly points out, has several causes, one of the most mundane, but psychologically potent, is the U.S. military’s counterproductive habit of posthumously re-naming its combat facilities after fallen soldiers. As a result, the idea of closing or pulling back from a place like COP Keating (named for a popular first lieutenant who died in a driving accident during a perilous resupply mission), in conversation, effectively sounds like a discussion about abandoning a fellow soldier on the battlefield. Such emotional reasoning surely wouldn’t affect military decision-making, but Tapper demonstrates otherwise.

But Tapper’s book finally delivers on its full promise—not just the one on its cover—in the final 150 pages. Here he marshals a more even-handed balance of gritty, day-to-day outpost life with the high-level strategic back-and-forth of the new Obama administration and new ISAF Commander, Stanley McChrystal. By demonstrating how McChrystal’s initial public politicking (or bumbling, take your pick) created friction between him and the White House, Tapper follows these ripples all the way back down to COP Keating, which is forced to stay in place still longer as a PR move to appease Afghan President Hamid Karzai in the run up to national elections. Finally, after numerous false starts and missed deadlines, the official date was set to pull Black Knight Troop of 6-4 Cav out of the outpost: October 4, 2009.

The insurgents attacked at dawn on October 3^rd.

Tapper’s account of the horrendous, 12-hour siege of COP Keating is well done, almost cinematically so. Indeed, if Hollywood is able to sell a tactical-heroism-within-a-larger-strategic-failure movie like “Black Hawk Down,” then someone is probably already looking to option this book. Outnumbered eight to one, 53 Black Knight soldiers fought for more than an hour with no artillery or close air support cover. Even after that support arrived, the battle dragged on till nightfall, and the enemy, at times, overran the outpost. Only through the sheer force of will and numerous acts of bravery did the Americans push out the insurgents and recover the eight dead US soldiers. (In all, seven soldiers earned Silver Stars for their actions that day, and SSG Clint Romesha is due to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor from President Obama in two weeks.)

Of course, the tragic irony is that all this blood and treasure was finally spent to merely survive at a lonely place the US military was planning on abandoning 24 hours later. (After an expedited evacuation of the outpost, B-1 bombers destroyed the rest of COP Keating in the days following.) If this isn’t a microcosm of the contradictions plaguing our nation’s current plan to hang around in Afghanistan, to little discernible positive effect, for another two more years I don’t know what is. In the book’s “Epilogue” chapter, Tapper tiptoes up to endorsing the same frustrations. In what, one suspects, serves as a kind of proxy for his own feelings, he quotes a “recently retired general” with experience in Afghanistan:

“The wars of the twenty-first century have been outsourced by the American people to our government in D.C. and to our military,” he said. “With an all-volunteer force, the American people are no more connected to our armed forces than the Roman citizens were to the legionnaires. And now we even pay for wars with tax cuts. So, whose war and whose Army is it?”

The general hoped that at least some members of the public would, through reading this book, come to a greater understanding of just what war entails, just what sacrifices mean. “I worry it is becoming too easy for the United States to use force,” he added. “There are not enough domestic constraints.”

I’m not one to say Tapper is so sly as to use an off-the-record comment by a U.S. military general to precisely endorse the liberal military policy critique offered by Rachel Maddow last year in her excellent book, “Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power” (Crown publishing, $25), but damned if that isn’t exactly what he did. Indeed, “drift” might best describe the aimless, overlooked strategic operational posture of most of the Afghanistan War during Bush’s tenure. Obama’s leadership, which bought into its own surge myth, has certainly had more direction, but suffers from “haste” and “sloth” in exactly the wrong directions. For reference, here’s my review of Maddow’s book from last April, which included this pertinent quote from her book, which is strikingly familiar:

The ropes we had used to lash down presidential war-making capacity, bindings that by design made it hard for an American president to use military force without the nation’s full and considered buy-in, have been hacked at with very little appreciation about why they were put there in the first place.

Maddow took more of a hybridized, policy-and-people approach, Tapper stuck to a place, but what’s notable is that their different intellectual paths both arrived at the same conclusion. Like COP Keating, too much of our country’s military policy today is tactically defendable but not strategically or even morally defensible. Sure, we can drop bombs on just about anybody anywhere in the world, but too often we don’t bother with much forethought about why or the long-term aftereffects of who else might suffer.

So, yes, you might say this book about a lonely place in a lonely war serves as a record of the oft-ignored, valorous sacrifices made by the men and women in our armed services in Afghanistan. But for anyone—even the author—to stop there, and merely think of it as a lengthy paean to military bravery and all those who paid the ultimate price would be a real mistake. For, this book’s real, unstated value should be to stand as an indictment of how cheaply we hold this precious national resource and how cavalierly our national leaders behave in their continued willingness to spend it.

Contact me directly at reedfrichardson (at) gmail dot com. Also, I’m on Twitter here—(at)reedfrich.

Editor's note: To contact Eric Alterman, use this form.