Leslie Savan | The Nation
Bill de Blasio Hits Back at Joe Lhota’s ‘Commie’ Charge
Left, an August 6, 2013, file photo, of New York Republican mayoral hopeful Joe Lhota, and right a September 10, 2013, file photo of New York City Democratic mayoral hopeful Bill de Blasio. (AP Photo)
After more than a week of being painted as a commie and worse, Bill de Blasio hit back yesterday against his opponent in the NYC mayor’s race with: TOP 10 FACTS ABOUT JOE LHOTA’S ICON, EXTREME CONSERVATIVE BARRY GOLDWATER. Those include Goldwater’s infamous vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, wanting to use nukes in Vietnam, and his infamous maxim: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” And the de Blasio camp didn’t even get to the John Birch Society championing Sen. Goldwater in his presidential run against LBJ in 1964.
The ugly tit-for-tat began last week, when The New York Times detailed de Blasio’s support of the Nicaraguan Sandinistas in the 1980s. That spawned an outbreak of innuendo—that he somehow supported the Sandinistas’ alleged anti-Semitism (a charge designed to cut into the Democrat’s Jewish vote), that he was a “bleary, dreary”-eyed druggie in college, that he was an unreconstructed commie symp. “Mr. de Blasio’s class warfare strategy in New York City,” Lhota himself said, “is directly out of the Marxist playbook. Now we know why.”
It took a while, but yesterday the Times ran a profile of the young Joe Lhota. In college, he spent “nights in the gallery of the United States Senate, where he sat rapt as Mr. Goldwater, his boyhood hero, orated on the floor.” Lhota, the Times noted, was also accepted into “a right-leaning summer boot camp for undergraduates” that was “the brainchild of a group of conservatives, including William F. Buckley Jr.”
(De Blasio could as well have run the Top 10 Facts about Buckley, including his support for Senator Joseph McCarthy, whom he called “a prophet,” his admiration for dictators, like Chile’s Augusto Pinochet, and his notion of the “cultural superiority of white over Negro.”)
Yes, this sort of guilt by association is absurd. Because even though Lhota says, “I still am a virulent anti-communist,” and de Blasio still finds elements of democratic socialism appealing, in truth Lhota is no more a Bircher or white supremacist than de Blasio is a fellow traveler or anti-Semite.
And at first de Blasio shunned the whole approach. “It’s 2013. I’d like to note, I’m not going to stoop to Joe Lhota’s level here,” he said. “I am a progressive who believes in an activist approach to government. You can call it whatever the heck you want.”
But de Blasio has been forced to hit back; the media was keeping him on the defense, chasing him, asking did he ever agree with Marxism, why’d he honeymoon in Cuba? Even allies in the press wanted to know, was his support for the Sandinistas merely a “youthful indiscretion,” as someone at a New Yorker lunch asked him. “No, it’s not a youthful indiscretion,” he said, refusing to take the cowardly way out. “The reason I got involved, was because of United States foreign policy.”
But for some reason, the press isn’t on Lhota’s tail to explain his adulation of Goldwater, much less are they grilling him on if we should we nuke Syria or whether he’d vote against the Civil Rights Act (not a far-fetched question given the Supreme Court’s gutting of section 4 of the Voting Rights Act). The Times certainly didn’t ask him such questions, nor would it occur to most reporters to do so.
Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!
This is a case of the media not making false equivalencies but habitually failing to notice actual equivalencies. Politicians’ involvement in left-wing causes stimulates media hormones more than the right-wing ones do. Partly that’s because the center has moved rightward. But even if it hadn’t, America’s red-baiting, McCarthyite past still has the power to taint.
For whatever reason, ventures into lefty world are treated like a dirty bad act, and they produce a kind of slut-shaming. Maybe the body politic needs to believe that it contains something just too awful to fully accept.
De Blasio may become not just NYC’s most progressive mayor but the first big-name pol to break that bleary, dreary mindset.
Read John Nichols’s post on the ideological differences between de Blasio and current mayor Mike Bloomberg.
Bill de Blasio Hurls the ‘NY Post’ Into a Time Warp
(Screengrab from nypost.com)
Since Sunday, when The New York Times published a cover story about Bill de Blasio’s 1988 trip to Nicaragua to help distribute food and medicine, and noted his admiration for the Sandinistas, the right-wing press has been salivating: in the Democratic candidate for New York City mayor they think they finally have the “socialist” that they could only pretend Obama was.
And there’s a bonus: They can also get Bill de Blasio to play the Bill Ayers role. As a New York Post headline put it, “Obama to meet Sandinista-supporting de Blasio.”
Although the Times piece dug up details on de Blasio’s youthful non-indiscretions, none of it is truly “news” (as the Times’s Michael Powell later not>ed; nor was it hidden (de Blasio spoke publicly about his time in Nicaraguan just last December). But the Postis excitedly fishing with every bit of red-bait they can muster, no matter how much it may embarrass them.
The virulently anti-union tabloid has even had to make like they support unions. In “de Blasio’s beloved Nicaragua,” the Post writes (going on to quote the human-rights watchdog group Freedom House), “Employees have reportedly been dismissed for union activities, and citizens have no effective recourse when labor laws are violated by those in power.” Those may sound like the tactics of the right’s beloved governors Scott Walker (Wisconsin) and John Kasich (Ohio), but the chance to spark suspicion trumps principle every time.
Recounting the radical acts the young de Blasio was capable of, the Post says, “He also castigated the operators of the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor—three years after the accident—for being ‘ignorant.’”
Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!
The implication is not only that the operators didn’t deserve such harsh words, but that de Blasio failed to deliver them in a timely manner—something the Post, without a hint of irony, is reporting on three decades after the offense.
But by far the most embarrassing thing the Post has published (maybe ever) is a time-warped attempt to cast the college-age de Blasio as a druggy hippie and part of the “activist set.”
Far out, man—I might be your mayor soon.
City Hall hopeful Bill de Blasio was a much scruffier dude back in his college days, with a hairdo almost as distinctive as son Dante’s Afro, a beard to match and a far-away gaze.
This NYU yearbook photo…indicates that ties were not in style among the school’s activist set.
De Blasio was quite the whippersnapper, let me tell you.
But luckily, his Republican rival, Joe Lhota, provides a glimpse of his yearbook photo in this ad, and the Post should have nothing to complain about.
Morning Joe’s Week-long Whine Over Obama ‘Optics’
A 2009 photo of Joe Scarborough on the set of his "Morning Joe," show in New York. (AP Photo/MSNBC, Virginia Sherwood)
It started a while ago, but it may have reached an absurd peak this week: Joe Scarborough, Chuck Todd and the MSNBC morning crew’s whining about Obama’s ostensible tin ear and awful “optics.”
What so unnerved them this time was that Obama gave a speech on the economy in the aftermath of the Navy Yard shootings in Washington. That bad timing is proof, said Joe, that the president is facing a “lame-duck meltdown.”
In the Monday speech, long planned for the fifth anniversary of the financial collapse, Obama attacked the GOP for risking “economic chaos,” with its threats to shut down the government if Obamacare isn’t defunded (which the House just voted for today) and to refuse to raise the debt ceiling. Obama addressed the massacre, and he delayed the speech by an hour but no longer because, as he later told Telemundo, “Congress has a lot of work to do right now.”
That set off nearly three days of Morning Joe tsk-tsking, as if they were a swarm of media cicadas. Mika made sad faces, Joe went into his customary high dudgeon, and the other boys, including Mike Barnacle, John Heilemann and liberal Donny Deutsch, joined the concerned circle of consensus.
But it was frequent MJ guest and former George W. Bush aide Nicole Wallace who pointed out the faux pas’s true dimensions. It was, she said, as devastating a moment as when her old boss, asked what was the biggest mistake he made after 9/11, said he couldn’t think of one. “This for me is that moment for Obama,” Wallace said, “where he is publicly showing us he’s incapable of adapting and adjusting to events. It’s incredibly revealing and incredibly damaging to the White House.”
Wallace, a moderate Republican, may sincerely believe this, if only to remind herself that good people can make bad, career-crushing decisions. She’s no stranger to that problem, having worked as Sarah Palin’s adviser in the 2008 campaign—until she realized the Alaskan governor wasn’t fit to be a vice-president. (Wallace later revealed that she didn’t vote that year.)
But no such excuse exists for the rest of the Morning Joe gang or for Chuck Todd. Todd complained about Obama’s misstep all day Tuesday. He led The Daily Rundown the next day by asking, “Where’s the outrage?”—outrage not only that Congress, just blocks from the Navy Yards shooting, wasn’t stirred to debate gun control but outrage that the president didn’t change his plans.
Maybe Obama should have rescheduled. Waiting a day wouldn’t have hurt; and, sure, he should have anticipated the media carping. But the carping itself—not just from MSNBC, of course, but from the usual suspects like Maureen Dowd and Fox News—was way out of proportion. Especially given the outrage that the same media choose not to feel every day.
Just this morning, for instance, Morning Joe mentioned yesterday’s mass shooting on the South Side of Chicago. But that didn’t change the show’s plans, which included a deep discussion on the wonders of the latest iPhone.
Where’s the outrage?! (Well, Joe did briefly rage about the Chicago violence, saying that law-abiding citizens there were asking, “Do you know if there’s a version of stop-and-frisk you can import from New York to our neighborhood?”)
And Joe and company surely spent more time this week bewailing the timing of Obama’s speech than they spent covering another still-unfolding and deadly emergency, the Colorado floods. This selective finger-wagging can go on and on—why didn’t they obsess over the House’s vote to cut food stamps by $40 billion? Or the ongoing misery by sequester? Or anything that’s more important than whatever the media take on with self-intoxicating urgency? (Remember the IRS kerfuffle, the “worst scandal since Watergate,” as Peggy Noonan wrote?)
Of course, speech-timing-gate is just part of the larger Beltway consensus that Obama is a failure as a salesman, on issues from healthcare to Syria to Larry Summers.
Obama, Politico complained, was “incoherent,” moving from calling for intervention in Syria to asking for a congressional vote “to diplomacy [with] Putin, who had spent the summer humiliating him in the Edward Snowden case.”
By giving up on Summers’s nomination to head the Fed, Politico said, “Obama also allowed a vacuum to grow in which liberals in his own party felt no compunction about publicly registering their opposition, whatever their president’s preferences.”
So Obama is a sap who listens to his Democratic and lefty critics, and occasionally changes his mind. That’s pretty much the opposite, in fact, of Nicole Wallace’s slam that “he’s incapable of adapting and adjusting to events.”
He’s either too forceful or too weak, a tyrant or a dupe. He’s never Goldilocks. You can almost hear the Morning Joe crowd: if Obama had postponed his speech in light of the violence in DC, they’d say that means the terrorists have won.
On Morning Joe yesterday, Wallace took another stab at proving the White House is in as much disarray as it was when she worked there; she asked former Obama advisor David Axlerod, Isn’t there anyone who “can walk into the Oval Office and tell the president he just screwed something up?” (Yes, said Axelrod, naming three people off the bat.)
But then, with Joe and Mika absent from the set, guests Carl Bernstein and Lawrence O’Donnell indirectly but firmly critiqued the show’s hysteria itself. Look, said Bernstein, however he did it, Obama avoided war (for now). O’Donnell cited Obama and Kerry’s accomplishments in Syria—”And this comes after a week of everyone complaining about the zig-zag,” he said, adding, “the president is dealing with something as serious as Syria policy…and all you’re getting in the media is a theater review of the performance styles.”
Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!
Obsession with performance styles will lead journalists to say the darnedest things. Chuck Todd, the political director of NBC News, said it wasn’t the media’s job to present the facts on Obamacare, asserting, “What I always love is people say, ‘Well, it’s you folks’ fault in the media.’ No, it’s the president of the United States’ fault for not selling it.”
After getting criticized, Todd tweeted that he was misunderstood: “point I actually made was folks shouldn’t expect media to do job WH has FAILED to do re: ACA.”
Actually, isn’t it the job of the news media, a k a journalism, to find facts and report on their distortions? Isn’t it news when politicians lie? That’s a point CREDO is making in a petition to the NBC News president, saying, “Correcting Republican lies is part of your job.”
Read Leslie Savan's piece on John Kerry's recent, triumphant media gaffe.
John Kerry: Mr. Magoo or Machiavelli?
Secretary of State John Kerry waits to testify on Capitol Hill in Washington, Tuesday, Sept. 10, 2013, before the House Armed Services Committee hearing on Syria on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
Ever since Secretary of State John Kerry seemed to stumble into a diplomatic way out of the Syrian chemical weapons crisis, the media have had trouble deciding which cliché best describes his persona.
Is he a droning bore or a Biden-league gaffe machine? A Mr. Magoo, safely bumbling through dire dangers, or a shrewd strategist secretly in full control of the situation, his foot-in-mouth moments actually clever feints in the world’s largest poker game?
And depending on how the Syrian situation is resolved, they’ll be asking, Is he (like his boss) a world-class chump or champ?
However the diplomacy works out—Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov are talking in Geneva as Putin preens and Assad makes dead-end demands—you gotta give Kerry credit for getting the ball rolling. The Syrian crisis changed, literally overnight, when CBS reporter Margaret Brennan asked him at a London press conference on Monday if there was anything Assad “could do or offer that would stop [a US military] attack?” “Sure,” Kerry said, as we all now know. “He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week. Turn it over, all of it, without delay, and allow a full and total accounting for that. But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.”
The State Department walked that back, saying Kerry was merely “making a rhetorical argument.” So most media decided that his suggestion was just another gaffe—after all, he had just given them a real flub to snark at, his idiotic promise that any US strike on Syria would be “unbelievably small.” (Obama had to walk that back, saying, “The US does not do pinpricks.”)
But then of course Putin and Assad took Kerry up on the offer, more or less. As difficult as it will be to reach, much less enforce, an international plan to secure and destroy Syria’s chemical arsenal, the whole world sighed in relief. And Kerry-to-the-rescue surprised everyone.
Including himself, according to Andy Borowitz, who “quotes” Kerry saying:
“Whether as a senator, a Presidential candidate, or Secretary of State, I’ve devoted countless hours to thunderous and droning speeches that people have consistently tuned out,” he said. “So naturally, to be listened to all of a sudden came as something of a shock.”
Even after Russia jumped at Kerry’s proposal, most media continued to portray it as a faux pas. Maureen Dowd sniped, “The bumbling approach climaxed with two off-the-cuff remarks by Kerry.” Jon Stewart said Kerry’s “ill-thought-out hypothetical statement” was an act “of Magoo-esque accidental genius,” while Joe Scarborough called the whole thing “Mr. Magoo’s foreign policy.”
More biting, Andrew Sullivan scoffed that, “Kerry, who is already doing a huge amount to make Hillary Clinton’s tenure at Foggy Bottom look magisterial, winged it,” adding, “Sometimes, it seems, Kerry’s incompetence strikes gold.” (After Obama’s Tuesday night speech on Syria, Sullivan went back to favoring the president with a “meep meep,” as one reader complained he’d “gone from slamming Obama for being imperial, idealistic, bloodthirsty, foolhardy…to praising him for his subtlety, nuance, willingness to listen, and so on.” Sullivan hasn’t, however, extended the hosannas to Kerry.)
But as it turned out, Kerry’s statement wasn’t a gaffe or ill thought-out, and he didn’t entirely wing it. “This wasn’t an accident,” a top White House official told The Huffington Post.
In fact, as the Times reported, Obama had raised the idea of securing Syria’s chemical weapons with Putin as far back as June 2012, at the G-20 summit in Mexico. In May of this year, Kerry discussed it with Putin, who asked him to work on the issue with foreign minister Lavrov; Lavrov and Kerry spoke more frequently after the August 21 sarin gas attack that killed some 1400 Syrians outside of Damascus. And before committing his “gaffe,” Kerry was briefed on Putin and Obama’s conversation at the G-20 summit last week about how Syria might prevent US air strikes by surrendering its chemical stockpiles. That conversation was “more constructive than previous conversations on this subject,” an administration official told the Times. “But there was not yet an indication that this could be ripe enough for immediate action.”
Kerry made it ripe, and Putin plucked it off the tree. Whether Kerry intended to make the proposal public when he did is less important than that he consciously (not Magoo-like) let it leave his lips—unlike Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who when asked a nearly identical question by NPR two weeks ago, dodged the question (saying, “I don’t speculate on hypothetical situations”). Kerry, purposely, didn’t dodge.
So was this all planned out, Kerry’s words less slips than tricks-of-the-tongue, long-game moves to throw off foes from Fox News to Vladimir and Bashar? Maybe Kerry isn’t a doofus or a Magoo but a Machiavelli.
Of course, Kerry, like most people, can’t be so neatly packaged. What comes out of his mouth is the result of intention and impulse, foresight and blind spots. Let’s give him props, much as we did Joe Biden for revealing, apparently without White House approval, that Obama supported gay marriage—a revelation that, contrary to fears it would cost him votes in the 2012 election, helped set off waves of equal-marriage legislation and court decisions.
Obama critics can’t stop complaining that his Syria policies don’t follow a straight line. But with luck, the administration’s zig-zagging will lead to a Cuban missile crisis–like solution—achieved back then through a much messier process than the smooth version John and Robert Kennedy presented to the public.
Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!
Howard Fineman had it right, likening “America’s ever-evolving policy on Syria” to “Middle Eastern bazaars" where "it’s easy to get lost, haggling is the order of the day, and things are never quite what they seem.”
The way media gravitate toward either/or clichés parallels the either/or choices they’ve tended to present on Syria: either attack militarily or do nothing.
But now an idea has expanded the world’s imagination, making it thinkable that we’re not stuck between two untenable choices. We’ve crossed a blue line and discovered this third thing, diplomacy, which until this week was dismissed as unworkable. And whatever happens, it will be that much harder to go back to seeing this crisis, and maybe future ones, in blinding two dimensions.
Read John Nichols on Obama's decision to pursue a more dipolomatic path in regards to Syria.
'Quit' Isn't How Anthony Weiner Rolls
New York mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner is surrounded by opposing candidate signs. (AP Photo/Richard Dew)
Maybe Anthony Weiner really has quit his online sexual dalliances, however he defines or counts them, but he clearly hasn’t quit his more maddening tendency toward truthiness: he slides out of questions, twists meanings, plays the victim and otherwise pretends we’re all still hung up over his personal behavior, when it’s actually his public dishonesty that’s grossing people out.
Only weeks ago, Weiner had been polling in first- or second-place in the New York City mayoral race—proof that voters had gotten over the penis-pics scandal and even his cascade of lies about it. We believed, as he misled us to, that his sext life was “behind” him, that it had ended when he resigned from Congress, on June 16, 2011.
Oh, some old tweets might surface, he said, but the implication was that they were pre-resignation leftovers. But then, of course, “Carlos Danger” walked on stage, and we learned that Weiner had continued sexting for more a year after he left Congress, with Sydney Leathers, 23, and at least two other women. He’s sunk to fourth place and to asking for a third chance.
But despite the occasional out-of-control heckler, Weiner has been putting on some magnificent performances lately—throwing smoke bombs over the telltale timeline, wearing down interrogators and starting to look, almost, believable.
In an interview with WNBC’s Andrew Siff on Friday, Weiner seemed to be in such authentic pain that even I, wary of the victim shtick, started to feel sorry for him. But he lost me as he refused, yet again, to admit the obvious:
Siff: You don’t think that when you say, “I’ve been as honest with you as I possibly could be” that you weren’t as honest as you could have been when didn’t disclose the timeline—
Weiner: You may have wanted, you may have wanted me to say on this specific date I wrote this specific embarrassing thing—
Siff: Not a specific date, just that it continued beyond your resignation—
Weiner: You may have wanted me to say that, OK? What I did say was this has been going on for some time, that it’s behind me, and I’m moving forward.
His performance was most passionate, and wily, at a City Island Civic Association forum last week. The group’s president, Bill Stanton, tried to pin Weiner down, saying he lied and New Yorkers forgave him, but “then you go ahead and do it again. So the question is, When do you take a mirror” and ask yourself, “Is there someone better qualified than you to do this job?”
Weiner insisted that, like all his detractors, Stanton was hopelessly fixated on his “embarrassing personal behavior”: “If you believe that because you found out something embarrassing about my personal life it’s a reason not to listen to my ideas about improving housing, improving lowering taxes on the middle class, that’s your right.”
“You’re exactly right—I violated the trust to my wife,” Weiner said, instantly pivoting to misquote his challenger. “That was wrong and people have every right in the world to say that disqualifies me. But I’m not going to quit based on that.”
He pivots again: “And I’m a little curious: Why would you want me to?” This brings an “Amen!” and a few applause from the crowd. At different points, he has the room cheering him on: it’s him against the political establishment, the media and voters like Stanton who would “deny these people the right to vote for me if they want to.” (Watch the video here.)
It doesn’t always work, this willful muddling of issues, questions, subjects and predicates. Last week in Staten Island, Peg Brunda told Weiner that if she’d done what he did in her twenty-one years as a public school teacher and principal, she’d have been out of a job, no matter how many years had gone by. “I don’t quite understand,” she said, “how you would feel you have the moral authority, as the head administrator in the city, to oversee employees when your standard of conduct is so much lower than the standard of conduct that’s expected of us.”
Weiner’s response: “Are you not voting for me?” Having established she’s not, he ignores her legitimate question and practically accuses her of wanting to block the democratic process itself: “You’ve made your decision. You wouldn’t deny [your neighbors] the right to make theirs, would you?” This time, no one applauded, and a Fox reporter chimed in, “You didn’t answer her question.”
(A few days later Weiner did answer Brunda’s question, for at least one of his employees, communications director Barbara Morgan. After a former campaign intern wrote a tell-all in the Daily News, Morgan called the intern a “slutbag,” a “cunt” and a “fucking twat.” Asked if he’d keep Morgan, who apologized for her “inappropriate language,” Weiner said, “You bet.”)
Even when not challenged, as in his own web ad, Weiner can’t help but push his narcissistic narrative with a sleight of hand. He likens his struggle to be heard over the din he created with how New Yorkers must “fight through tough things.” Worse, conflating New Yorkers’ resilience over 9/11 with his own, he says, “Quit isn’t the way we roll.”
“No, no, no, no, no—you are not doing this. You are not 9/11-ing your dick pics,” John Oliver scolded him on The Daily Show. “No, no. There is a line and you just went over that line.”
Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!
Weiner’s been crossing lines and then trying to erase them for years now, and not just on sexual matters, but on political issues, too, domestic and international.
A pattern began to emerge as far back as 1991. Running for City Council, shortly after the racially charged Crown Heights riots, Weiner anonymously distributed a flier that targeted his most progressive rival as an ally of the “DAVID DINKINS/JESSE JACKSON COALITION” and their “agenda.” Weiner “played the race card, and at a very sensitive time,” Steve Kornacki wrote at Salon two years ago. “Only after the ballots were counted [and he won by a slight margin] did he admit that he’d been behind the leaflets, claiming that ‘We didn’t want the source to be confused with the message.’ ” Oh, that’s why.
Asked about this recently, Weiner essentially said he had apologized to his rival but that he had nothing to apologize for. (See it below or on “Up w/ Steve Kornacki.”)
The medium then was leaflets, not tweets; the subject race, not sex, but in each case Weiner owned up only after his anonymity was busted, and only with explanations that chase their own tail.
Sure, most politicians obfuscate, some more than others, as we all do at times. But with Weiner, it seems to be a habit much tougher to break than whatever it is he does online.
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
A Royal Pain
Tony Appleton, a town crier, announces the birth of the royal baby, outside St. Mary's Hospital exclusive Lindo Wing in London, Monday, July 22, 2013. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)
The royals and, more precisely, media coverage of the royals evoke in me a simple, blunt-force reaction: Stop. Turn off the TV, turn it off faster. I don’t care about the royals or anyone that cares about them. I don’t want to see adults who value royals’ lives more than others’ reaching through the gates of Buckingham Palace as if to get the cure for scrofula.
And I sure don’t want to see the already dumb-downed MSM gushing over the “news” of a baby. The headline of the British mag Private Eye had it right: “Woman Has Baby.” Call me a Kenyan anti-colonialist, if you must, but I don’t get the royal fixation. I have no insights into it. I just want it gone.
And yet if, like me in calmer moments, you might be open to more nuanced thoughts on the construct we call “royalty,” you should check out Hilary Mantel’s essay, “Royal Bodies,” in February’s London Review of Books. Her novels about the reign of Henry VIII, who beheaded two of his six wives and imprisoned two others for failing to produce a male heir, are hot stuff right now. But it’s the essay (which raised a rumpus in London when it first appeared) that takes on the absurdities of today’s royal fandom, while sympathizing with the actual humans who are its objects.
Mantel starts off before we learn that Kate Middleton was pregnant:
In those days she was a shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore. These days she is a mother-to-be, and draped in another set of threadbare attributions. Once she gets over being sick, the press will find that she is radiant. They will find that this young woman’s life until now was nothing, her only point and purpose being to give birth….
Royal persons are both gods and beasts. They are persons but they are supra-personal, carriers of a blood line: at the most basic, they are breeding stock, collections of organs.
As if on cue, British-born Tina Brown praised Kate, or rather her body, for producing a boy. “I mean, once again, she does the perfect thing,” Brown said yesterday on Morning Joe. “Although there’s the constitutional change that we can now have a girl as the first-born to be the monarch, nonetheless, she does the traditional thing, and she gives us a prince. She gives a king.”
CNN contributor Victoria Arbiter similarly hailed Kate’s organs for their smart marketing campaign: “My first thought, I have to say, this is how brilliant a royal Kate is. There are women throughout British royal family history that have panicked over not being able to deliver a boy, and here we are, Kate did it first time.”
As Mantel writes (of an author tickled to accept an award from the Prince of Wales), “This is what the royals have to contend with today: not real, principled opposition, but self-congratulatory chippiness.”
That can change into self-congratulatory “concern,” which it did, for instance, when BBC News devoted a discussion to whether it was safe for a pregnant Kate to “run a few paces” of hockey while visiting her old school. “It is sad to think,” Mantel writes,
that intelligent people could devote themselves to this topic with earnest furrowings of the brow, but that’s what discourse about royals comes to: a compulsion to comment, a discourse empty of content, mouthed rather than spoken. And in the same way one is compelled to look at them: to ask what they are made of, and is their substance the same as ours.
The flip side of such adulation is the desire to humiliate.
Along with the reverence and awe accorded to royal persons goes the conviction that the body of the monarch is public property. We are ready at any moment to rip away the veil of respect, and treat royal persons in an inhuman way, making them not more than us but less than us, not really human at all.
As Kate and William left the hospital Tuesday amid wild cheers and a million cameras, the press asked the usual dumb questions, like, How do you feel? After answering that “it’s very emotional” and a “special time,” Kate had the grace to add, “I think any parent will know what this feeling feels like.”
Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!
Right, but non-royal parents suspect that Kate and William feel the feeling differently. And the media likes it that way.
Charles Koch on the Poor: Let Them Eat Economic Freedom
Charles Koch. (AP Photo/Topeka Capital-Journal, Mike Burley)
Quit whining, American poor people and refugees from the middle class. You’re actually part of the 1 percent.
That’s the laughably misleading claim in a new ad from right-wing multibillionaire Charles Koch. The $200,000 ad campaign, now running in Kansas, starts off like one of those breathless infomercials: “Are you in the 1 percent?” a male voiceover asks. “Well, if you earn over $34,000 a year, you are one of the wealthiest one percent”—he pauses slightly before the kicker—“in the world.”
That’s right, all you have to do is to look at the very big picture, and count your blessings that you live in free-market economy. “People in the most economically free countries,” the narrator tries to explain, “earn on average over eight times more than people in the least free. The poor earn ten times as much.”
And what is this “economic freedom” that lets you imagine you’re clinking martini glasses with hedge-fund managers at their penthouse soirées? Simply, it’s freedom from government regulations, the kind that so constrain Charles Koch and his brother David, the sixth richest men in the world (net worth each: $43.4 billion). Watch:
But let’s get real. A household income of $34,000 for a family of two parents and two children in America is close enough to the poverty level to qualify that family for federal subsidies, like food stamps. And according to the Economic Policy Institute, that family would need an income of $48,144 to cover its basic living expenses in Marshall County, Mississippi, one of the cheaper places to live, while $53,721 would keep it above water in the more expensive Wichita, Kansas, where Koch Industries is headquartered.
By torturing the Occupy term “1 percent” until it’s forced to include America’s poor, Charles Koch is simply promoting the Reagan, Romney, Limbaugh, and Hannity dogma that poor people (the “takers”) never had it so good. Citing a 2011 Heritage Foundation report finding that many poor people own appliances, Fox News’s Stu Varney complained that “99 percent of them have a refrigerator. 81 percent have a microwave.” (Colbert: “ A refrigerator and a microwave? They can preserve and heat food? Ooh, la la! I guess the poor are too good for mold and trichinosis.”)
And those overly entitled refrigerator owners are undoubtedly the same folks who think they’re entitled to vote (to Supreme Court Justice Scalia, the Voting Rights Act is a “perpetuation of racial entitlement”) or to walk home with Skittles without being stalked and killed.
Of course, the Koch ad isn’t really directed toward the poor or the middle class. It’s geared to the corporate elite, lobbyists and legislators to help them better rationalize their crusade to kill minimum wage increases, voting rights, Obamacare, environmental protections and other nuisances. Shockingly, but not surprisingly, the GOP-controlled House voted Thursday to completely eliminate funding for food stamps from the Farm Bill. The right doesn’t just want to starve the beast, it wants to feel morally upright even if it starves hundreds of thousands of souls along the way.
Charlie Koch’s 1 percent solution is only the latest excuse for this politics of cruelty. It’s like the right’s fake fretting—cue the violins!—that deficit spending “steals from future generations” (even as they steal from non-hypothetical children today), or that government assistance creates “a culture of dependency” (even as Koch Industries, to take one example, receives federal oil subsidies, government contracts and bailouts).
The power to delude is apparently stronger than the power of economic freedom. Charles Koch told The Wichita Eagle last week that he’d be “raising up the disadvantaged and the poorest in this country” by ridding them of a minimum wage.
What we’re saying is, we need to analyze all these additional policies, these subsidies, this cronyism, this avalanche of regulations, all these things that are creating a culture of dependency.… [the government keeps] throwing obstacles in their way. And so we’ve got to clear those out. Or the minimum wage. Or anything that reduces the mobility of labor.
But let’s get to the ad’s dubious, underlying claim that “across the board we see a strong relationship between economic freedom and people’s quality of life.” Like “the 1 percent,” the meaning of “economic freedom” and “quality of life” depend on who’s defining them. From the corporate and libertarian point of view, economic freedom essentially means the absence of regulations. From the vantage point of workers and the unemployed, it means, among other things, the education to get a job, the transportation to get to a job, safe and nondiscriminatory working conditions, and a living wage. That’s economic freedom.
The ad, which Koch says might expand to other states, also has an odd way of defining “quality of life.”
As Think Progress points out, the Koch-funded Fraser Institute report the ad is based on “interestingly ranks Hong Kong, Singapore, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Chile ahead of the U.S. Those places all have government-run health care, which the Kochs adamantly oppose.” In fact, the Koch-funded, Tea Party–supporting Americans for Prosperity launched a $1 million ad campaign last week attacking the Affordable Care Act. Factcheck.org found its first ad out of the gate “misleading,” while David Firestone in The New York Times said it amounted to “outright lying.”
But when the Koch ad says that economic freedom helps promote a “clean environment,” well, that’s tar sands-toxic outright lying. The oil, gas, pipeline and chemical conglomerate Koch Industries is the world’s fifth-largest air polluter, according to the Political Economy Research Institute, and, with its multitude of front groups, it may be, says Democracy Now!, the single “biggest force behind the climate stalemate.”
Also toxic is the claim that “people in the most free countries have better protected civil rights.” That’s funny, because the number-one country in Koch’s economic-freedom graph is Singapore, which Phil Robertson of Human Rights Watch has said is “the textbook example of a politically repressive state,” where “rights are only for those who reliably toe the government line.”
Here, civil rights are too often for those who toe the ALEC line. “For decades,” John Nichols writes, “the Koch brothers and their foundation have funded ALEC and other groups that are now driving the attack on voting rights in states across the country.” ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) is the group that pushed “stand your ground” laws in more than two dozen states, including Florida. Last year, when other corporations were shamed into cutting their ties to ALEC because of the law’s association with the death of Trayvon Martin, Koch Industries refused to stand down. (ALEC has said it no longer deals with “non-economic issues.”)
Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!
One small way to protest the Koch way of reframing reality is to sign this petition, asking PBS stations to air Citizen Koch, a film exposing how big money rules American politics. Public TV execs were ready to run the film—until they freaked out that it might cost them funds from PBS-donor David Koch.
But now that you’re part of the 1 percent, PBS will surely cave to your influence, too.
Got Koch? “Seven Products Fueling the Brothers’Right-Wing Agenda.”
Will Crossfire ‘Hurt America’ Again?
Jon Stewart isn’t out of the country for more than a few weeks and already CNN, the most Stewart-whipped cable news channel of them all, has decided to sneak its old Crossfire debate show back onto the air.
Back in 2004, Stewart seemed to single-handedly force the news channel to drop the classic left vs. right TV shouting match. Stewart famously told the two hosts, then the bow-tied young fuddy-duddy Tucker Carlson and Clinton loyalist Dem Paul Begala, that they were “partisan hacks” whose constant bickering was “hurting America.” He ended his appearance by pleading, “Please, please. Please stop.” Three months later CNN’s president at the time, Jonathan Klein, axed the show, saying, “I agree wholeheartedly with Jon Stewart’s overall premise.”
But last week, with Stewart spending the summer in the Middle East filming a movie, CNN’s new president, Jeff Zucker, announced that CNN will resurrect Crossfire this fall. This time, conservatives Newt Gingrich and S.E. Cupp (who works for Glenn Beck and until last week served as the token Republican on MSNBC’s The Cycle) will take turns facing off against former top Obama aides Stephanie Cutter and Van Jones. Will these new odd couples have a mandate to argue better and louder than, say, Eliot Spitzer and Kathleen Parker did on CNN’s last, failed foray into frisson across the aisle?
Maybe CNN has figured out that as a programming chief for cable news, Jon Stewart is a total flop. Urging CNN to hush Crossfire and instead be a dispassionate teller of news stories can make for deadly TV. And one thing Stewart always tells CNN (and anyone aspiring to be half as cool as he is) is that they should listen to him because he knows what makes good TV.
But as Ian Crouch points out in The New Yorker, Stewart is not exactly the cable news-slayer of legend. Crossfire’s slide in the ratings began long before Stewart’s appearance and not because of “the public’s impatience with the tenor of its debates,” as Crouch says, but because that tenor was replicated on media all around them, including on Fox News and the rising MSNBC—not to mention The Daily Show itself:
Stewart’s basic premise—can’t you guys just be nice?—exaggerated the appetite of a wide audience for somber policy discussion, and skips over the fact that so many people turned to Stewart’s own comedy show as their only daily news source because of its subversive, cutting, and often cruel analysis.
That cruel analysis included savage mocking of CNN host Rick Sanchez, to the point where the man lashed back at Stewart and lost his job.
Stewart gave definition to his media critique in 2010, just as the Tea Party was about to take the equivalent of parliamentary rump power, at his Rally to Restore Sanity on the Washington, DC, mall, held three days before the midterm elections. He stood on stage in front of more than 200,000 people and portrayed Ed Schultz, Keith Olbermann, and MSNBC to be as extreme as Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Fox News. Pundits, he said, should be more like the drivers waiting at the crowded entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel, who know that the only way to get through is to patiently take turns. “You go. Then I’ll go. You go, then I’ll go,” Stewart said.
That sounds very civil. But it ignores the fact that one side of the political debate refuses to use the tunnel and just helicopters over it daily.
The basic frame Stewart puts on media politics tries to pretend that corporate journalism isn’t already advocacy journalism. He tries to split hairs about how this corporate journalist does a better job than that one, this one offers facts, that one lets himself be tasered on-air, this one wears an ascot, that one a bow-tie, etc. Some of these are worthy of ridicule, some aren’t. But a preoccupation with media style neatly takes the focus off of media ownership, where the real power resides.
The question of who pays to set the parameters of public debate has become a front-burner of an issue ever since government leak cases began bursting out this spring. Corporate journalists like David Gregory and Andrew Ross Sorkin have suggested that it might be legit to arrest advocacy journalist Glenn Greenwald for covering Edward Snowden’s NSA leaks. (Sorkin later apologized.) Somehow arrests are never suggested for members of their own tribe. David Sirota:
Why hasn’t David Gregory asked reporters at the Washington Post, the Associated Press and Bloomberg News the same question, considering their publication of similar leaks? Is it because Greenwald is seen as representing a form of journalism too adversarial toward the government, while those establishment outlets are still held in Good Standing by Washington?
Anyway, journalism should not be about making nice sounds—any more than it should be about letting one sound drown out all other news for days on end. (We’re talking about you, wall-to-wall cable coverage of the George Zimmerman trial, MSNBC included.)
What it should be about is tough questions to people about their policy views. CNN had at least one show that fit the bill in Soledad O’Brien’s morning show. Stewart himself has praised her dogged interviews. But the Atlanta-based net recently replaced O’Brien with a happy-face show, New Day. O’Brien announced on Monday that she’s joining Al Jazeera America, a move that takes guts in the first place.
The new Crossfire won’t be a substitute for fearless reporting, of course, but a bunch of lefties and righties arguing, obnoxiously or not, really won’t hurt America. Certainly no more than corporate media calls to arrest one of their indie competitors. All we are saying is give argument a chance.
Don't Try to Joke Around With Vladimir Putin
U.S. President Barack Obama meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin during the G8 Summit in Northern Ireland on June 17, 2013. (Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)
Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama were sitting a frosty six feet from each other when, at the end of their tense news conference at the G8 summit on Monday, Obama tried a little levity.
“We compared notes on President Putin’s expertise in judo and my declining skills in basketball,” he said, “and we both agreed that as you get older it takes more time to recover.” But rather than play along, Putin kept a straight face, saying, “The president wants to relax me with his statement of age.”
Well, that was awkward. But Putin’s statement was actually one of the more honest things a world leader has ever said at a major photo op, where light banter and bonhomie are as obligatory as mumbling about “frank discussions.” Unintentionally perhaps, Putin had just deconstructed a tactic basic to all public relations: if you want to sell people something, first disarm their defenses.
Of course Obama wanted to relax Putin with his statements, on age or anything else. Obama, like most politicians, tries to disarm and charm his audiences all the time; his specialty is the self-depreciating joke. (How many times has he told us he’s under Michelle’s thumb?)
But, spymaster that he is, Putin saw through all that and called the technique a technique. He blurted out that the emperor wears PR. And, as one emperor facing down another, Putin wasn’t going to barter for power with self-depreciating jokes, any more than he was going to cave on arming Assad or imprisoning Pussy Riot.
Exceptions like Dick Cheney aside, most politicians find the banal joke, or any form of comic relief, extremely useful. So do corporate execs, TV anchors, advertisers, teachers, cops and writers, including me—at times everyone tries to relax other people with light, quasi-entertaining BS; it keeps society running and smoothes over friction. Forced social laughter, smiley face emoticons, movie characters who crack wise while hanging by a thread over a vat of boiling oil—half of communication, it seems, is trying to relax us with humor, verbal or physical.
It’s an animal thing—a dog cowering before the alpha dog wants to relax him with his stance. As social animals, we’ve created infinite ways to say, “I won’t hurt you, so please don’t hurt me.” As Obama tried with Putin.
By pointing out that Obama was doing just that, Putin not only broke O’s mojo, he broke the unspoken taboo that warns against stripping away this social nicety. (This whole episode, in fact, reminds me of Putin stripping off his shirt to reveal his pecs, as if he wants to make people tense with his statements of prowess.)
Obviously, relaxing people can be used for good (to negotiate in good faith, for instance) and for bad (to sell lies).
Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!
I must say, I enjoyed Putin’s semiotics lesson. But would it really be so bad, Vlad, if you occasionally relaxed the world with a joke or two? And maybe relaxed that strongman grip of yours, too?
James Harkin chronicles the battle for Aleppo from behind rebel lines.
Media Yawn at Barbara Buono, the Only Dem Willing to Take On Chris Christie
Barbara Buono. (Wikimedia Commons)
State Senator Barbara Buono may be the only New Jersey Dem with the cojones to run for governor against the formidably popular Chris Christie, but she gets no respect from the media. And given the electoral chaos Christie’s whipped up with a $24 million special election to replace the late Senator Frank Lautenberg, she’ll probably be getting even less.
Buono, 59, a progressive who was the first woman majority leader in the state senate, is underfunded and thirty points down in the polls. And so for months, the national media have tended to bring up her name only to joke about how little they bring it up. When Politico’s Maggie Haberman said on The Daily Rundown, “Barbara Buono is barely registering in the polls right now against [Christie],” the substitute host Chris Cillizza cackled, “Barbara Buono thanks you for mentioning her on national television.”
The Beltway media have been so enthralled with Christie since he embraced Obama and barked at Fox News after Hurricane Sandy that they seem to wonder why Buono even bothers to challenge him when powerful players, like Newark mayor Cory Booker and state Senate president Stephen Sweeney, backed down. An emblematic interview came in April when Chris Matthews interrupted Buono fourteen times, mostly to ask about Christie, as the chyron at the bottom of the screen read “DAWN QUIXOTE.”
Still, you might think she would have gained some traction after Christie, angering both Republicans and Democrats, called for a special Senate election in October, just twenty days before he and Buono face off in the general on November 5. He could have simply merged the two elections and saved $24 million in taxpayer money—but that would put popular Cory Booker, the likely Democratic nominee, at the top of the November ballot and increase Democratic and African-American turnout, helping Buono and a whole legislature’s worth of down-ballot Democrats. Christie’s calendar so reeks of voter suppression—coming just weeks after he vetoed a bill to allow early voting, complaining of the $25 million price-tag—that you might think it would create a groundswell for a Christie-slayer.
In fact, just the opposite is happening. Right after doing a superb takedown of Christie’s special-election hypocrisy last week, Jon Stewart turned the punch-line on Buono:
The idea was to make Christie seem all the more absurd: You, tough guy, you’re afraid of this little lady? This lady who’s so low on the Jersey totem pole that to get name recognition she has to compare herself to a pop-culture clown like Sonny Bono? Stewart only has to make one of his I-can’t-believe-this-idiocy faces and the audience razzes her on cue. (Shades of Stewart bullying former CNN host Rick Sanchez for being uncool.)
Of course, if you watch Buono’s ad in full, you get a different message:
By equating herself with Cuomo, she suggests (as she details in other ads and her website) that the New York governor and she are in sync, while he and Christie are miles apart—on vital regional issues like climate change and transportation (she supported building the ARC tunnel and the thousands of jobs it would have created, while Christie made it the signature act of his first term to kill the project), as well as abortion rights, gun control, education funding, a minimum wage increase, a millionaire’s tax and marriage equality.
All good liberal issues, in line with the majority of voters in New Jersey, where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 700,000—and all good reasons for Christie to lose. But the media know he won’t, so all that disappears in wide-eyed amazement at Christie’s cojones.
Please support our journalism. Get a digital subscription for just $9.50!
He’s a showman who’s always given the media the good YouTube they want: melodrama, blood feuds, unhinged bullying and a sense, as long as they don’t dig too deep, of “bipartisanship.” As Star Ledger columnist Tom Moran writes, “National pundits who have obviously never been to New Jersey proclaim he has created a new heaven on earth where everyone works together under his wise leadership.”
And now, Moran adds, Christie’s timetable ensures that the media will ignore Buono even more. In the Senate primary in August, Democrat Booker and rival candidates Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver and US Congressmen Rush Holt and Frank Pallone
will be competing, all scooping up money from liberal donors that might have gone to Buono. They will buy TV ads, argue in debates and shake hands at train stations. And that clatter will make it even harder for Buono to send a clear message through the din.
To be fair, it’s not just the media that heart Christie. Democrats in and out of the Jersey statehouse do, too. Major Democratic donors are “flocking” to him, and, beholden and/or fearful of him, many of Jersey’s establishment Dems have sided with Christie against Buono’s pro-union politics. Others are only nominally supporting her. Today, powerbroker Essex County Executive Joe DiVincenzo outright endorsed him. (See them literally holding hands here.)
Still, Buono’s not as alone as it may seem. Saying the special election’s October date will suppress voter turnout in November’s gubernatorial election, Somerset County Democratic Party Chairwoman Peg Schaffer’s law firm filed suit to move it to November 5. And as John Nichols details, State Senator Shirley Turner is calling Christie’s bluff by introducing legislation to move the entire November election to October. UPDATE: A coalition of watchdog groups is now also trying to block the October election.
As for Cory Booker, who has campaigned with Buono, he admits he won’t be up in his good friend Chris Christie’s face over his very special election. After formally announcing his Senate run on Saturday, Booker told reporters that as a mayor he “obviously would have preferred” not to spend the money on an extra election, but that he doesn’t intend to do anything about it.
Ari Berman writes about John Lewis's long fight for voting rights.
Latest
-
October 1, 2013 - 6:32 PM ET
-
October 1, 2013 - 2:59 PM ET
-
October 1, 2013 - 1:02 PM ET
Blogs
Blog Roll
