Eric Alterman | The Nation

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.

My new “Think Again” column is called “Is Contemporary Conservatism Just ‘Payola’?” and it’s here. (Hint: it’s yes….)

A blast from the past: Journalists traveling on National Review cruises and writing articles about the funny people they encounter there have appeared in the past month in New York magazine and a couple of years ago in The New Republic. I did one in 1997, and since David Foster Wallace's famous cruise piece turned out to be largely fictional (according to Jonathan Franzen) I nominate it as the funniest (true) cruise piece, (though others may differ, as they so often do...). It’s called “Heart of Whiteness”—as we went to Alaska—and you can read it here.

Alter-reviews
Jazz now and then, live and not: The New York Winter Jazz Festival, The David Murray Big Band with Macy Gray at the Irridium; The Clifford Brown & Max Roach Emarcy Albums on Mosaic (vinyl only.)

I caught night one of the New York Winter Jazz Festival last weekend and saw three terrific sets. The first was by Cat Russell, whom I discovered, I imagine along with many others, because of Terry Gross’s enthusiasm for her, and she’s a wonderful throwback to what was, in most respects, a better time. Great voice. Great taste. Real presence. You can read about her here. (I also saw her in the band with Donald Fagen, Boz Scaggs and Michael McDonald, and she really helped make that night, especially the closing vocal on “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Again)” however it is supposed to be spelled. Next came the Monty Alexander Harlem-Kingston Express who I now see have a live album I have to buy as soon as I finish writing this. Monty’s had a long career, but I just got back from Jamaica, and while there is nothing like Bob Marley, I heard enough Marley while I was there to last a few months at least. Anyway, Monty’s got some Marley, some Harry Belafonte and everything in between. And what a party the band was having onstage, defying category or else defining a new one. That was followed by Don Byron who has also made a living defying category—my favorite set of his was a tribute he did one night to Sly Stone—but Friday night was pretty straight-ahead. (Le) Poisson Rouge was full by this time and it made one, temporarily, optimistic about the future of live jazz, though if you read Ben Ratliff in the Times, you’ll see that it’s a bit easy to fool oneself. For more on Don Byron, go here. (Hey wait a minute, how crazy is this? I want one of these too. Look up Mickey Katz if you’ve never heard of him) some wonderful shows. 

Sunday night I caught a really weird show. I tend to feel guilty about how little attention I give to contemporary jazz musicians in favor of the ones upon whom I was originally schooled. One of the few exceptions to my failure, however, has been the amazing career of David Murray, who reminds me (and I suppose a lot of people) more of John Coltrane than anyone alive with the exception of Ravi Coltrane, both in regard to his originality and audacity. He does so many different things, many of them at the same time, it’s impossible to keep up with all of them. (I see 150 albums, are only the ones under his name.) At the Iridium on Sunday night, he had not only an amazing big band, but also Macy Gray. Ms. Gray is what she is. Fortunately, Sunday night she was in a pretty good mood, and the band was loose and in a good mood, and the Iridium is nice, intimate venue; it was a night like no other, save perhaps the shows on Friday and Saturday. There was some jazz, some funk, some R&B, and some stuff I’d hate to try to describe, though it apparently included lyrics by Ishmael Reed. But it was all pretty fun. 

(And by the way, Lou Reed was sitting across the room a bit from me with Hal Wilner. The last time I saw Lou at a jazz show, it was at the Village Vanguard for a Marcus Roberts show, and his dates were Henry Kissinger and Vaclav Havel, who was still running that country of his at the time. When they left, Vaclav and Kissinger got into one car and Lou had to get into another one, so I don’t know how much they all three actually hung out together.) 

Back to my retro-emphasis, the good news is that the folks at Mosaic are back on track.  A few weeks ago I reviewed the marvelous new Mingus concert collection on CD, and now, on vinyl, we’ve got a beautiful new collection of the marvelous Clifford Brown & Max Roach Emarcy Albums. It is not uncommon for people to say that if “Brownie” had not been killed in the car accident at age 26, we might be speaking his name in the same hushed tones we say “Miles.” This is his best work and most important work and Mosaic has done its usual fine work. It’s four LPs and limited to 2,500 copies based on the original analog masters, which were remastered and pressed on 180-gram vinyl. The sessions included Sonny Rollins and Sonny Stitt, but the focus is on Brownie and Roach. As the (terrific) liner notes by Bob Blumenthal note, "the Clifford Brown/Max Roach Quintet created one of the very greatest string of small-group recordings in jazz history, worthy of consideration alongside the Hot Fives and Sevens of Louis Armstrong and the quintets of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis." Really people, I lack the words. Nice photos by Chuck Stewart and Francis Wolff, too. More here. 

Now here’s Reed:

Grand Bargain Hunting
by Reed Richardson

A lot of what passes for political punditry in Washington these days amounts to what I’d call intellectual big-game hunting. This tendency manifests itself through a compulsion to seek out the largest prey imaginable when trying to solve our nation’s problems. Chasing down more plentiful, more manageable, and more readily available quarry simply doesn’t hold much appeal, not when there are vague hints of an elephantine “grand bargain” lurking somewhere far off in the distance. The not so subtle implication: the bigger the game, the better the hunter, the broader the mind.

But there’s a critical flaw in relying upon this trophy-hunting approach time and again. Grand bargains, like elephants, are actually quite rare for good reason. The many disparate elements that naturally comprise them make them a) difficult to fully comprehend—as this old Indian fable about six blind men and an elephant illustrates—and b) vulnerable to accomplishing a lot of things poorly instead of one or two things well.

Thus, we can’t be allowed to simply raise taxes, extend unemployment, or authorize the paying back of our debts without this cohort shoehorning massive cuts to the social safety net into the debate. Thus, we can’t simply implement common sense limits on guns without wrangling video games and armed schools into the mix. Thus, when it comes to climate change, we don’t even consider a straightforward carbon tax and have instead settled on the worst of all grand bargains—doing absolutely nothing. No doubt, right now we’ve arrived at a moment where a preponderance of our national media elite believes that only great, big, all-encompassing policy fixes can save us. And pity the politician who doesn’t agree.

Pick a recent David Brooks column or something from the op-ed pages of the Washington Post and you’ll encounter this grand bargain obsession close up. But perhaps no one has better embodied how this fetish for complex, comprehensive solutions can morph into convoluted, even contradictory advice from National Journal’s editorial director, Ron Fournier. This is from a Fournier column this past week where he calls upon President Obama to step up to the plate:

First, the political landscape is ripe for bold ideas and big change: The public is overwhelmingly discontented with the direction the country is headed, and is craving outside-the-box leadership. In times of tumult, voters are likely to forgive a president, if not reward him, for compromises made in service of solutions. And if Americans can ever again be summoned to a spirit of shared sacrifice, this would be that moment.

Just two months ago, though, with Obama’s re-election literally just hours old, Fournier was singing a decidedly different tune:

First, lower expectations. Obama promised voters he would change the nature of politics in his first term. He failed. Rather than promise the unattainable, Obama needs to acknowledge the difficulty of tasks ahead, starting with curbing the nation’s debt.

Mandates are rarely won on election night. They are earned after Inauguration Day by leaders who spend their political capital wisely, taking advantage of events without overreaching. Obama is capable—as evidenced by his first-term success with health care reform. But mandate-building requires humility, a trait not easily associated with him.

The intellectual tension between these two bits of insight from Fournier is sufficient to replace a main support cable on the George Washington Bridge. (And, not for nothing, but Fournier’s sideways suggestions of Obama’s arrogance reach back years.) Setting aside his clichés and shopworn themes, though, there is a common thread to Fournier’s thinking here that is seen in other pundits of the same ilk. To me, it lays bare the glaring inconsistencies and oxymoronic logic involved in grand bargain hunting. It also begs some questions. So, I engaged in a Twitter conversation with Fournier:

Me: In same graf, ‪@ron_fournier article says US “ripe for big ideas and bold change” then espouses “compromise” #whichisit? ‪http://bit.ly/XWetOW

Fournier: both

Me: @ron_fournier I'd be interested to hear a specific policy position on ‪#debt, ‪#guns, ‪#climatechange, etc. that you think meets those criteria

OK, not much of a conversation, really. That follow-up question went unheeded. That’s too bad, because I am genuinely curious to hear Fournier’s response. Judging by the rest of the article and his curt, somewhat dismissive one-word Tweet, though, I suspect it’s difficult for him to answer because he, like many other Beltway pundits, is essentially reverse engineering political policy. He/they start by outlining the mechanics and maybe some broad characteristics of their grand bargain ideal and then try to work backwards to figure out the corresponding policy elements. Actually, that’s not quite true, because all too often these Beltway pundits don’t really bother with the heavy lifting of figuring out how the concomitant parts of these grand bargains would work, or if they would work at all.

In Fournier’s column from last week, when tiptoeing up to the point of having to advocate specific policy prescriptions, he, like many other Beltway pundits, suddenly starts shoveling warmed-over platitudes that mean nothing:

[P]olls show a majority of voters want Washington to address guns, debt, and the climate. True, there's no easy agreement on exactly how to solve the problems, but events of the past few weeks have at least galvanized the country behind the need for answers.

This section, which follows hard on the heels of Fournier’s whiplash inducing “big change” and “compromise” paragraph might best be described as the editorial equivalent of the meatpacking industry’s pink slime. That is to say, a lot of it is merely filler, and is so overly processed  that it holds no intellectual value anymore for his audience. On complicated issues like these, to essentially say “people disagree” with little to no context is endemic to this strain of facile punditry, however.

To be fair, Fournier does finally come close to endorsing one actual example of policy solution later in his piece:

Banning semiautomatic guns known as assault rifles is favored by a minority of voters, just 44 percent, making it a test of Obama's ambition: The way to leave his mark on the guns issue is to support an assault-weapons ban and use the bully pulpit to shift polls in favor of it.

The jig is up here. Alighting on a warmed-over policy reform that was already the law of the land for ten years before expiring almost ten years ago—one that was so riddled with loopholes to ensure passage that it was rendered completely ineffective, I might add—hardly qualifies as big, bold change with compromises in service of solutions. Indeed, the latter rendered any chance of the former moot.

Now, Obama does seem intent on avoiding the law's previous mistakes and bolstering any new ban’s potential effectiveness through a package of accompanying reforms like high-capacity magazine bans and universal background checks. But real political courage wouldn’t stop there. Instead, the president would seek to not just slow the growth of guns in our nation but shrink it altogether, by, say, refusing to grandfather in the millions of rapid-fire, military-style rifles currently in the US and buying them up to take them out of circulation permanently. But these details aren’t what grand bargain hunters are really about, despite their rhetoric, because such a policy, though proven to be quite effective in Australia, wouldn’t provide the Republicans to chance to achieve what Fournier says should preferably be a “win-win” solution for both sides. 

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Of course, the notion that a party sworn to defeating the president the day he first took office would ever entertain anything other than a zero-sum approach to legislative battles with the White House is laughable. I mean, there’s now a faction of the House GOP that is so entrenched that its members reflexively vote no against their conscience. There’s an advantage to pundits for maintaining a certain naivete, though. If one doesn’t get lost in the weeds of the how and the why political actors disagree, then it’s much easier to make a supercilious appeal for everyone to just, you know, stop disagreeing so much.

Perhaps not coincidentally, Fournier and other grand bargain-loving pundits have warmed to the recent, PR-driven resurrection of the No Labels bunch. (Fournier, doing his part, has written three rather fawning stories on this group in the past week alone.) Founded two years ago, No Labels says it wants to “move America from the old politics of point-scoring toward a new politics of problem-solving.” Just last week, it announced as members 25 Congressional backbenchers (no one from a party leadership position and there’s only one subcommittee chair among them) plus former Utah Governor Jon Hunstman. Its “problem-solving” agenda, however, is noticeably light on discussing anything other than structural reforms and mostly its members seem to be motivated by the lonely, unhappy existence brought on by their career choice.

Fournier’s affinity for No Labels is no doubt strong because he attempted something similar in 2006, becoming the co-founder of the short-lived, bipartisan political community site HotSoup.com. Like No Labels, HotSoup and the other bi/non-partisan group Americans Elect, which crashed and burned last spring before it could nominate a presidential candidate, are notable for looking at our policymaking process and fixating mostly on process at the expense of the policymaking. Fond of the old Tip-and-Ronnie-drank-together-after-work approach, these groups find common cause with grand bargain hunters in the media because both willingly mistake better comity for better polity. 

For example, here’s Fournier’s latest take on a No Labels gathering—“In Congress, Compromise is a 4-Letter Word.” (Compromise about a specific issue, of course, is never mentioned. The concept is treated more as an amorphous end-all, be-all in itself.) This bipartisan portrait is equal parts faux outrage and why-can’t-we-all-get-along kvetching and no doubt sounds a lot like a group of compromise-happy DC pundits convening to talk shop and BS at a Georgetown cocktail party. At times, I almost think Fournier, too, might have caught on to the pomposity of the proceedings, especially when he gives this group more than enough rope to hang their egos with:

Most lawmakers want to change Congress, at least in the abstract, [Rhode Island Democratic Rep. David] Cicilline says. But real reform on issues such as redistricting, filibusters and campaign spending are harder won. Like an unwelcome guest, reality silences the table—until Cicilline jump-starts the conversation with the smallest measure of optimism. “By the way,” he says, “just having a chat like this is monumental.”

God love ya, Representative Cicilline, but let’s be clear here—just having some very expensive drinks with other House members, some of them Republicans, at a tony restaurant on Central Park South is in no way shape or form monumental. It is conceit masquerading as sacrifice. It is not going to improve the lot of the American people tomorrow, or the next day, or even ten years from now. Like it or not, that has always and will always come from performing scutwork like winning elections and leveraging that political power bestowed by the voters, both inside and outside Capitol Hill.

This is perhaps the most important lesson Fournier and many others in our opinion media firmament need to learn. To routinely bemoan our messy exercise of partisan politics in relentless pursuit of some contrived, chimerical bipartisan solution that bundles all our problems up into one neat package is to present the public with a false choice. In the end, the institutional arrogance of grand bargain hunting not only shortchanges the very real impact politics has on people’s lives, it ignores the growing ideological extremism of this country’s right wing. And worst of all, it undermines the very foundations of democracy itself.

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.

My Think Again column is about Politico’s choice of the top ten media stories of 2012. I find Politico to be quite silly for any number of reasons, but here is just one of them.

My Nation column is called “Putting Stories Into the World.” It’s about about Nathan Englander, Nora Ephron, and the Night of the Murdered Jewish Poets, under Stalin, in 1952 and it’s here.

I also wrote a letter to the editor of The Nation, as I sometimes feel compelled to do, even though it is a blockhead move. It’s behind a paywall and so you can’t read Phyllis Bennis’s reply, but I did, and it’s my considered opinion that you’d be doing both Phyllis and yourselves a mitzvah by skipping it. Anyway, here’s my letter:

To the editor:

There is something I don’t understand about Phyllis Bennis’s editorial regarding Israel and Hamas, The latter, I would note is a totalitarian organization devoted to terrorism, Jew hatred, kidnapping, the oppression of women etc, and the destruction of Israel, and was lobbing hundreds of rockets into Israel proper (not the West Bank). This led, as we all know, to Israel’s attack on Gaza, where Hamas rules.

Now, one may not approve of Israel’s reaction to these facts, I sure don’t. Indeed, I believe them to be profoundly counter-productive just as believe Israel’s entire occupation policy to be so. But in Bennis’s editorial you will find no mention of any of the above. Israel, once again, appears to be attacking and oppressing Palestinians for no good reason. Or perhaps because it’s just fun. Who knows, as the issue is never engaged.

I have to wonder. Just who are such editorials supposed to convince? Certainly nobody in Israel is going to listen to voice that evinces no concern whatever for the safety of its citizens. And why is Hamas given a pass for its horrific behavior and rhetoric? A recent report by Human Rights Watch, for instance, details cases of alleged torture and deaths in detention, a lack of due process and trial of civilians in military courts. A Mr. Abdel Karim Shrair, was executed in May 2011 for allegedly collaborating with Israel, based, according to HRW, on confessions apparently obtained through torture. In the words of Stork, HRW's deputy Middle East director, “After five years of Hamas rule in Gaza, its criminal justice system reeks of injustice, routinely violates detainees' rights." Where, pray tell, is the outrage?

And what of what its leaders say about Jews—not “Israelis” Jews. I could give literally thousands of examples but how about this one: “Our struggle against the Jews is extremely wide-ranging and grave,” the according to the organization’s charter. “Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims.” Does that sound like a party with whom one might negotiate a lasting peace?

One can disagree with the degree of importance one attaches to such statements, but to completely ignore them entirely is to ignore reality and in this view, at least, morality. Just what practical value it has also escapes me.

Sincerely,
Eric Alterman
Nation columnist

And look: The Guardian asks a good question: On New Year's Day, artist Yoko Ono took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, saying simply 'Imagine Peace'. Money well spent? Will Yoko Ono's New York Times ad help bring world peace?

Alter-reviews: The Rascals at the Capitol in Port Chester (12/21) and the Fab Faux at City Winery (12/27).

Just before Christmas, I took the train out to Port Chester to meet Petey to see one of six Rascal reunion shows at the new, beautifully restored rock palace of my youth, the Capital Theater. Conceived, produced, kick-started and promoted by Steve Van Zandt, the show, called The Rascals: Once Upon a Dream Reunion Project,” is what they are calling a "BioConcert"

The Rascals must have really hated one another when they broke up, because it took 40 years for them to even consider playing together. This production (co-produced, and with lighting by Marc Brickman, is not exactly a play—rather it’s a chronological concert with filmed reminisces by the members of the band appearing on the screen behind them—tells the story of the band and covers every significant musical moment. It recalls the Four Seasons Broadway musical, Jersey Boys, but reflects a sixties sensibility rather than a fifties one. It also has a great deal in common with the new David Chase movie, Not Fade Away.

Anyway, the Rascals made some great music and all of it, and more, was here. They were a hybrid of working-class soul, blues and pop, together with fun and political idealism. Drugs and egos, naturally got in the way, and while the breakup is skirted over, this concept of the “bioconcert” is a good one. Stories help. Meanwhile, the band played and sang quite well, though Petey and I were both quite partial to Felix Cavaliere’s songs over those sung by Eddie Brigati. I think it may return, perhaps, one day on Broadway, but in the meantime, it’s good to remember to “shout it from the mountains and out from the sea. People everywhere just gotta be free.”

Fun fact: In 1997, The Rascals were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Steve Van Zandt. David Chase saw it and decided to cast him on "The Sopranos."

In keeping with my commitment to nostalgia at the close of 2012, I also caught a show by the Fab Faux at City Winery. It was the first of four nights, and while I assume they get a little tighter with each show, they nevertheless did the music proud. Every time I see the band, I am bowled over by how many great (and interesting) songs the Beatles composed. And of course these guys are not an imitation band—they are not even really a tribute band—they are more like the Dark Star Orchestra and The Dead. The exception being that most of these songs were never played live by the Beatles or any combination thereto. The songs are the same and the arrangements quite similar, but there is plenty of room for innovation inside of them. I’d say it’s all but impossible not to have a good time when they’re up there, particularly if you are lucky enough to see them at a venue as intimate and well-stocked, food and wine-wise, as City Winery. You can read more about them here

Now here’s Reed:

Comforting the Comfortable, Afflicting the Afflicted
by Reed Richardson

It’s long been accepted as an unofficial motto of our nation’s press that journalism should look to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” But what’s often overlooked is that this rather high-minded phrasing originated within Finley Peter Dunne’s satirical criticism of the arrogant exercise of power that characterized the “yellow press” a century ago:

The newspaper does everything for us. It runs the police force and the banks, commands the militia, controls the legislature, baptizes the young, marries the foolish, comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable, buries the dead, and roasts them afterward.

This, of course, is not the world we live in right now, for good and for ill. As a whole, our country’s media environment is now undoubtedly far more professional, diverse, and egalitarian. Yet, with big-city newspapers radically scaling back or barely surviving in a diminished digital form, once-great national magazines disappearing from the newsstands, former powerhouse cable TV news networks struggling mightily, and the media, as a whole, suffering from record levels of mistrust by the public, Dunne might not even recognize the denuded, defanged, and detached American press corps of today.

Indeed, rather than being known for muckraking run amok and stoking a war based on scant evidence and false pretenses, our current media elite is now most notable for an objectionably false objectivity, one that rendered it too feeble to stop a war based on scant evidence and false pretenses. The past election, wherein one presidential campaign openly declared war on reality, proved to be yet another example of how far the pendulum has swung away from Dunne’s era. And though one of the breakout journalism themes of the past year was the so-called rise of fact-checkers, it’s worth tempering any optimism in these pursuits after reading this post-election review by Glenn Kessler, who writes “The Fact Checker” column at the Washington Post:

"Some commentators said after the election that fact checkers had failed because politicians kept saying misleading things. That’s ridiculous. Fact checkers are not trying to change the behavior of politicians. We are simply trying to inform voters." [emphasis mine]

Excuse me, but isn’t a free press holding those who are governing accountable and ensuring they then act in accordance with the wishes of the governed the ever-loving point of the First Amendment? And why bother with “Pinnochio” analogies in the first place if the goal isn’t to shame public officials who lie and exert some influence on their future rhetoric? This is, by definition, is the press’s role in keeping our democracy healthy and to foreswear it is “ridiculous.” But don’t just take my word for it, here’s a fairly smart guy named Thomas Jefferson:

The only security of all is in a free press. The force of public opinion cannot be resisted when permitted freely to be expressed. The agitation it produces must be submitted to. It is necessary, to keep the waters pure.

To learn of this kind of backward, timid thinking on the part of a prominent member of the Washington press corps not only suggests a dereliction of one’s constitutional duties, it speaks to a tacit endorsement by the media elite as a whole. Its corrosive effect is then compounded when coupled with the by-now standard “both sides do it” trope that colors so much of modern political journalism. Again, Kessler:

Indeed, after more than 30 years of writing about Washington institutions, we believe there is little difference between Democrats and Republicans in terms of twisting the facts and being misleading when it suits their political purposes. So if a politician believes he or she has a winning argument that moves voters—such as attacks on Romney’s Bain record—then there is little motivation to drop that argument simply because a journalist says it is misleading.

This last sentence should trigger alarm bells inside the head of every political journalist—most certainly someone like Kessler, who believes he enjoys such a regal perch in the Beltway media that he gets to pretentiously employ the first person plural—and begs the question: And why is that?

But as Kessler’s comments strongly suggest, he doesn’t really seem troubled by the press’s perceived toothlessness in stopping the deluge of talking points, political misinformation and campaign spin that warps our discourse. It’s simply not his job to fix that. He merely delivers information to voters, and what they do with it, well, that’s up to them. But it’s all too convenient that he only chooses to mention and then defend himself against “some commentators,”—whom, in a classic, intellectually cowardly move, he declines to identify by name—whose supposed critiques fault him for something he doesn’t even think is his job.

Contrast this passive attitude with the principles outlined in the “Misinformation and Fact-checking” study from the New American Foundation’s Media Policy Initiative last year. In it, authors Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler document, over and over, that simply providing the public with the facts regarding an issue—“informing voters” as Kessler put it—is frustratingly ineffective and, sometimes, makes things even worse. So, they propose using fact-checking as more of an assertive corrective, one that doesn’t rely upon a proxy—the public—as its lever of action.

The existence of media watchdogs and fact-checkers may reduce the incentives for political elites to promote misleading claims. In this way, fact-checking can both increase the reputational costs of creating misinformation and limit its dissemination.

The failure to do precisely this is the real, substantive criticism that was leveled at the mainstream media (and at fact-checking sites like Kesslers) during the past year. In a lengthy essay, Huffington Post’s Dan Froomkin recently called out the press for its stubborn unwillingness to make any honest, contextual distinctions about the asymmetric dishonesty of the Romney campaign. Quoting Congressional scholar Norm Ornstein, Froomkin writes:

"If voters are going to be able to hold accountable political figures, they've got to know what's going on," Ornstein said. "And if the story that you're telling repeatedly is that they're all to blame—they're all equally to blame—then you're really doing a disservice to voters, and not doing what journalism is supposed to do."

Ornstein said the media's failure led him to conclude: "If you want to use a strategy of 'I'm just going to lie all the time', when you have the false equivalence meme adopted by a mainstream press and the other side lies a quarter of the time, you get away with it."

A small-bore, context-free, artificially balanced press corpse really only serves the interests of the powerful, though. In effect, it’s a long-term recipe for mostly preserving the status quo. Occasionally, it might allow for tweaking the stakes just a bit. But as the fiscal cliff deal just demonstrated, even when the well-off are—finally, barely—asked to pitch in a bit more after decades of enjoying all the gains in our society, some in the media—OK, Fox News—can’t help but fear we’re not doing enough to comfort the comfortable.

The next few months of press coverage leading up to yet another fiscal deadline will be all about the other half of this equation—how to afflict the afflicted. With Obama having admirably pried loose some (but not near enough) extra revenue for the unemployed and poorest Americans in this week’s fiscal cliff deal—all without having swallowed counterproductive austerity measures or entitlement cuts—you can bet Beltway pundits are now hellbent on not letting him get away with this a second time. Hence, as a harbinger of memes to come, you’ll see more columns like this one from the Washington Post’s David Ignatius.

Full of condescending bombast and Washington insiderese like “fiscal reforms that every thoughtful member of [Obama’s] team knows are necessary,” Ignatius’s writing reads like a dispatch from an alternate universe where Obama commands almost dictatorial powers and an extremely right-wing, intransigent House Republican caucus doesn’t exist.

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Here, only fixing the deficit and slashing entitlements through grand bargains matter. So much so that Ignatius has the temerity to churn out a breathtakingly obtuse statement like: “Unfortunately, Obama has been playing a waiting game on fiscal issues ever since he became president.” Yes, “unfortunately” is right, as tens of millions of Americans still suffering through a wounded economy can attest, although you won’t be confronted with inconvenient realities like “recession” and “unemployment” by Ignatius. No matter that the recovery is still perilously fragile, unemployment is still historically high, and many Americans are relying upon our social safety net for their very survival: “It’s Obama’s job to lead the party toward entitlement reforms and other policies that will be painful but necessary.”

These “entitlement reforms” and “other policies” as Ignatius euphemistically calls them, are by and large spending and benefit cuts that will—no surprise—be “painful” mostly just for disadvantaged Americans and a besieged middle class. Still, it has become an article of faith among the upper echelons of the media elite that Medicare, Social Security, and the federal debt are imminent crises that demand—hence the use of “necessary”—sacrifice from every American.

Never mind that countless, contemporaneous examples from Europe—the United Kingdom, Ireland, and Spain—have shown that piling painful austerity measures on top of a smoldering economy only douses the flames of demand and increases the misery of the least well-off. Never mind that thYesterday, we swore in the most diverse Congress in American history. The 113th Congress includes 101 women, 45 African Americans and 31 Latinos. Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) became the first ever openly gay Senator, and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), the first open bisexual elected to the House. Also, Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) became Congress' first Hindu American, and Mazie Hirono (D-HI) is now the first Buddhist to serve in the Senate. 

But diversity doesn't necessarily translate to action. John Nichols appeared on Democracy Now! this morning to lay out what our lawmakers needs to do to escape gridlock and become productive once again—from filibuster reform in the Senate, to presidential pressure in the House.e pundits’ ominous warnings, year after year, that we are “turning into Greece” and that our national debt will spike inflation are so much hyberbole. Never mind all this evidence, in other words, the Washington press corps just knows that things like food stamp and welfare program cutbacks, smaller Social Security cost-of-living adjustments, and hollowing out Medicare are the fastest pathway back to economic health. And if we ever do manage to get back to a point of a robustly growing economy despite the damage that will likely be done to the poor and middle class along the way, I have few doubts that the Beltway media would join right in the chorus that demands we restore the tax cuts for the 1.5 percent of Americans who just had them raised.

Sadly, I think Mr. Dunne would agree with me.

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

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

It’s “on the road” week here at Altercation. As your pinch-hitter—Reed here—I’m posting from wintry Minneapolis, where despite a recent record heavy snowfall for December, they’ve been enjoying a far-warmer-than-average fall. This, after the Twin Cities experienced the fourth-warmest winter on record last year. But, you know, Al Gore is fat or something.

As for Eric, he’s enjoying the sunny climes of the Caribbean on the Nation cruise. But there’s no resting on our laurels around here. He’s written a new Think Again column on the mendacity of perhaps the world’s most powerful media mogul entitled “Murdoch, Murdoch, Everywhere.” One addendum I’d add to his thorough, Rupertian roundup. Right after this column came out, the New York Times reported that yet another editor within Murdoch’s empire embroiled in the phone hacking scandal, James Harding of The Times of London, will also step down. But that wasn’t even the most outrageous piece of news from that Times story. Instead, that had to be the revelation that Murdoch gave his former News of the Worldeditor, the disgraced Rebekah Brooks, who is currently facing conspiracy charges, a whopping $17.6 million severance package. Dick Armey, it seems, has nothing on Brooks when it comes to being handsomely rewarded for spectacular failure.

Debugging Our Democracy
by Reed Richardson

If there’s one broader lesson we can draw from the ridiculous posturing around the manufactured “fiscal cliff” crisis that has gripped all of Washington these days, it is this: our democracy can no longer effectively handle the basic task of responsible governance. And a not insignificant portion of the blame can be laid at the feet of a easily manipulated press. Of course, this diagnosis is by no means revelatory. Many have come to the same conclusion. Almost two years ago, Eric wrote at length about our “Kabuki Democracy” and deconstructed how our “maddeningly complex” political system, as currently constructed, routinely fails our citizenry, thanks, in part, to a complicit media that makes little attempt at honest, clear reportage of policy and process issues.

Coincidentally, this week, I stumbled across a very engaging essay by Johns Hopkins political science professor Steven Teles that offers up a similar critique—that our governing mechanisms and policy solutions almost invariably involve counterproductive, Rube Goldberg contraptions that only obliquely address the issue at hand. I admit that I discovered the essay only after it caught the attention of some conservatives on Twitter, who seemed to appreciate its insightful observations even though Teles, as one Cornerite claimed, was “of a center-left bent.” (Admittedly, this ideological appellation is of little relative value based on the extreme right-wing positions around which conservatives are now encamped­­.)

Anyway, Teles’s essay is quite good and worth a full read. It only stumbles in a few, rare spots, like trying too hard to nitpick liberal policy strategy. And though he makes an awful lexical choice as part of analogizing what plagues our democracy—which has transformed into something he calls a “kludgeocracy”—his big-picture view is spot-on:

The dictionary tells us that kludge is “an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a particular purpose…a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem.” […]
 

“Clumsy but temporarily effective” also describes much of American public policy. For any particular problem we have arrived at the most gerry-rigged, opaque and complicated response. From the mind-numbing complexity of the health care system (which has only gotten more complicated, if also more just, after the passage of Obamacare), our Byzantine system of funding higher education, and our bewildering federal-state system of governing everything from the welfare state to environmental regulation, America has chosen more indirect and incoherent policy mechanisms than any comparable country.

Simple, elegant solutions have been rendered increasingly extinct, in other words. As an example, Teles points to the remarkably efficient, almost frictionless policy mechanics of Social Security and compares that to increasingly complex, time-intensive, and financially less efficacious private sector savings tools, like 401(k)s and IRAs. And yet, among lawmakers and thinktank policy wonks, we have witnessed an almost unceasing assault on the former and preference for the latter over the last two generations. Playing along with this inversion of what works for what doesn’t work as well (or at all), lobbyists that obfuscate the real impact of policy, an incestuous thinktank culture that profits from selling ever more complex policies, and, not least of all, Teles notes is a news media that feeds its newshole covering all these policies:

Entire networks like CNBC, the financial planning industry, and a small army of financial publications have sprouted up to profit off the public’s confusion—and to waste time that would be better spent on almost anything else.

That the media willingly, if often subconsciously, marches in lockstep with this drumbeat for bank-shot policymaking isn’t surprising. Having been stripped of its much of its authoritative voice because the rise of the Internet, the Washington press corps has tried to find a new, comfortable home in interpreting the impenetrable horse-trading that colors Washington now. As a result, we encounter breathless insider journalism about reviving the stumbling economy that just “know[s]” the age of Social Security retirement and Medicare eligibility need to go up and that benefits from both programs need to go down. Or we see self-absorbed pundits bemoaning our federal deficit while, in the same breath, they vociferously object to the deficit reduction mechanisms of the fiscal cliff while championing debt-ballooning tax cuts for the rich.

This wrongheadedness exacts a toll on our democracy, however, Teles argues. It begins to create an intellectual construct that holds any simple solution up for ridicule and dismisses any policy that would provide a direct benefit to the public as unserious. Hence, the recent financial crisis and housing bust occasioned various end-around bailouts that had to pass through numerous private-sector actors before any assistance ever reached regular citizens.

Blogger Duncan Black—Atrios—often spoke of how “helicopter drops” of money right into the hands of the unemployed or struggling homeowners would have been more effective than the convoluted solutions the federal government settled on. And it’s hard to argue he’s wrong. No wonder, then, that this built-in inefficiency begins to corrode the public’s faith in the government in the first place. And on those rare occasions that the policies do work, the message has been muddied, playing right into conservatives’ hand. Again, Teles:

Ms Suzanne Mettler argues in her important recent book The Submerged State, our complex, hidden welfare state conceals the presence of government action, leading citizens to mistake as “private” market structures those programs that are in fact pervasively shaped by government. Mettler’s research shows that Americans who benefit from educational savings programs through the tax code (like 529 plans) do not experience them as government at all, despite the fact that they redistribute huge sums of money. The same is true for the deduction for employer-provided health care, and a variety of other pieces of the welfare state hidden in the tax and regulatory codes. This facilitates the myth of independence and rugged individualism upon which modern conservatism is based.
 

Kludgeocracy is also bad for liberalism by creating both the reality and image that government is incompetent and/or corrupt. The complexity of the tax code, for instance, facilitates tax cheating and creative accounting, and along with it the impression that tax compliance is actually lower than it is. Much of the legitimacy of the law, and the willingness of citizens to contribute to public goods, rests on the perception that others are doing their share. Complexity helps eat away at that perception, which is crucial to support the expansion of beneficial state activity.

This is why even nominal legislative successes, like the Medicare Part D expansion, can have negative repercussions. When the Bush administration passed (completely unfunded, I might add) the law, it also intentionally kept its administration in the hands of private insurers, despite the fact that letting Medicare officially run the program and, more importantly, negotiate the rates for prescription drugs, would have unquestionably been simpler and more cost effective. Even when government does get something done, conservatives are adept (and more than willing) at undermining its long-term efficacy.

Again, the same dynamic is evident with regard to climate change legislation. Rather than adopt the fairest, simplest program—a carbon tax—the Obama administration tried (not very hard) to stand up the more contrived cap-and-trade scheme. Having failed, it left us with the status quo, which is probably the least best of all policy choices, individual tax subsidies for renewable energy companies.

That our sticky, rickety ability to govern forces us to incessantly choose policy choices from the bad/dumb end of the solution continuum doesn’t come across in the media coverage, though. Indeed, even a mild progressive victory like ObamaCare, which took a Herculean effort to get passed, can be characterized in the op-ed pages of the mainstream media as having been something that deserved  “more careful consideration” because “no one has read it” before it was “jammed” through Capitol Hill. That’s right, a mildly conservative healthcare bill that had to pass five separate Congressional committees before several contentious full floor votes were spread across several months was actually indicative that our government moves too fast. (If you want to see a real example of ramrodding unpopular legislation, check out Lansing, Michigan.)

So, why does our democracy suffer from Lincoln’s famous critique of McClellan? Because, as Teles explains, there are innumerable veto points now built into our policymaking system, every one of which extracts a kind of transactional toll. But while many of these waypoints are embedded too deeply in our Constitution to be streamlined or improved upon, there are some roadblocks that enjoy no such protection. One of these is the filibuster, which has been abused so egregiously in recent years by Republicans that, just maybe, it will be rightfully rolled back to its original, rare intended use. (It's reform is the number one item on Teles's agenda.) But perhaps the most prominent obstacle in need of change is our press corps, which often engages in hypocritical double-dealing rather than truth-telling. For instance, its bemoaning of the ineffectual nature of the Senate while simultaneously inculcating and normalizing the notion that a 60-vote threshold is needed to get anything done.

Teles concludes his essay with a sober assessment of how difficult changing our democracy for the better will be. And he assigns some responsibilities to all parties involved, including regular citizens and policymakers. But the greatest burden for progress, he sees, really rests upon those who serve as the connection between the former and the latter and that help shape the expectations of both. But before they can start fixing our broken democracy, the shapers of public debate—the press and pundits—need to recognize that they’re already part of the problem, too.

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

Also, I’m doing the Twitter thing here—(at) reedfrich. Speaking of which, Lord knows I don’t agree with David Frum too often, but after yet another senseless shooting spree took the lives of innocent Americans this week, he took to Twitter to argue once again about the folly of our nation’s gun obsession. (He did two columns on this topic for CNN earlier this summer here and here.) Since, on this point, we’re of like minds, I pointed him to a 1997 study that fully debunked the methodology behind one of the gun lobby’s favorite talking points—that Americans engage in more than two million “defensive gun uses” every year. To his credit, he wrote a post on the study over at The Daily Beast (and was nice enough to give me a hat tip as well).

The Mail:

Chuck Gribaudo
Re you recent article [“Lie of Omission”]

The sun neither rises or sets.

The earth rotates.

Reed replies: Sorry, Chuck, but I’m not having your too-cute-by-half attempt at pedantry here. While I didn’t take the time to fully explain the physical science behind the frame-of-reference phenomena we colloquially call the earth’s “sunrise” and “sunset,” I did so because I wasn’t going to waste my reader’s time or insult their intelligence, a courtesy you seem uninterested in extending to me. Ironically, your comments miss the point in much the same way the fact-checking sites do. For, the salient part of my analogy was not about the celestial mechanics that produce our sunrise, but that this mechanism is incontrovertibly fixed in one direction and so the location of the sunrise is an unquestionable, easily provable fact, one that anyone drawing breath on the planet, even a journalist, is qualified to defend from “lies” that say otherwise. It’s precisely when the willingness to obsess over the semantics of an argument obscures understanding the foundational lie or truth therein that journalism fails its professional duty.

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