Liberal Media Elite

I understand that you and your friends have a somewhat problematic relationship with the so-called fourth branch of government, unless you have it at your feet with a gag in its mouth or properly potty trained. Heck, you and your buddies have nothing but contempt for two of the other three branches, so what’s the big deal with a little media bashing, you might think:

Wolfowitz, who has announced he will step down June 30, denied suggestions that his decision to leave was influenced by an apparent lack of support from the bank’s employees.

“I think it tells us more about the media than about the bank and I’ll leave it at that,” he told the British Broadcasting Corp. “People were reacting to a whole string of inaccurate statements and by the time we got to anything approximating accuracy the passions were around the bend.”

Maybe I am just expecting too much finesse from the Prince of Darkness’ wingman, but doesn’t this make you look like you are, I don’t know, high? Wolfie, listen, you are beating the media horse that died by your clique’s hands years ago. Aldous Huxley was right, it’s not good for you if you smoke the hashish that you give out to others.

What got you in trouble was that you as the president of the World Bank, the supposed defender of tight budgets, accountability and the fight against corruption, were caught red-handed providing an unusually and unethically high pay raise for your sweetheart. And that greedy stupidity, bred from hubris, gave the World Bank’s employees and directors from other countries the long awaited chance to rid themselves of what they thought was an intolerable staff decision by the Bush administration from the get-go.

Other countries, there you have your cue! An international conspiracy, something, something, against US interests and Famiglia values. You have to come up with the details, I know you are good at it. But “it’s all the media’s fault”, that’s just lame.

Sorry for the buzz-kill, but I expect more from one of my favorite neo-cons. At least go down fighting like you promised.

“A” for effort on the “by the time we were done making shit up” “by the time we reached anything approximating accuracy”, though.

Currently in Australia, where my sister is in training to become a midwife. Got into a discussion with her about some of the political and legal ramifications of midwifery, and asked her if she’d contribute a few thoughts. I won’t post the full response here, since I don’t want to load down a snarky humor site with such a long essay, but I’ve posted it to my other site at Libertarian Rage. Highly recommended.

…which are essentially the same pet peeve, in, y’know, different contexts.

1) Smoking doesn’t cause cancer, because I smoke and I don’t have cancer!

You’ve got an argument? Fine. Bring it on. This isn’t an argument, it’s a fucking rationalization. You’ve smoked a pack a day since you were thirteen, and you’re in perfect health? That doesn’t mean that there’s no link, it means that you were fucking *lucky*. It’s like saying “I got shot and didn’t die, therefore bullets don’t kill people.” What the hell kind of science is that? You can’t map a trend from a sample of *one*.

2) Global warming is a hoax, because it’s a cold day outside!

…and let’s also add the left-wing “How can people say global warming is a hoax? It’s such a hot day outside!” Yes, I’ve heard both.

Now, look. I’m a global warming skeptic. There’s an argument to be had here. This is not it. Climatology means mapping trends over periods of thousands of years; you’ve gone ahead and made an assertion based on a study of *twenty seconds*. In one location. All argument like this does is serve to make the rest of us look stupid.

(Insert snarky “You don’t need any help for that! Ha-ha!” here.)

The Onion’s “What do you think?” column is consistently brilliant. We all know that. Well, their question Hillary possibly dropping out of Iowa is spot-on:

Neil Callahan, Leather Tanner: “Smart move. She needs to spend that time more judiciously continuing to reach out to her entrenched support base.”

Note to anyone travelling overseas: say you’re an American playwright, and nobody bats an eyelash. Say you’re an American *satirist*, and you’re a rock star for the evening.

(Just don’t mention that you’re a *right-wing* American satirist. That tends to clear the party out rather quickly.)

—

One of the books I brought with me was Stephen Mitchell’s “The Gospel According to Jesus”, one of those projects akin to the Jefferson Bible that attempts to take the Synoptic Gospels and form a single coherent text out of them, excising passages that are contradictory, historically unsupportable, or that the editor didn’t like. This seems like a perfectly acceptable process to me, since I suspect that this is how the Gospels were largely compiled in the first place.

Those who argue for the historical validity of the Gospels frequently say that they *couldn’t* have been fabricated, because there were still some people who were alive during the ministry of Jesus when they were composed. I actually found this a reasonably compelling argument — five years ago. I have since lived through two terms of the Bush administration, where they will say one thing, a year will pass, and they will then assert the complete opposite — and everyone will nod their heads and say “Yes, that’s correct.”

We’ll eat up any bullshit with a spoon if it’s said to us confidently by someone in a position of authority. That’s true of politics *or* religion.

You know, I’m a playwright. And director. With a video camera and not an inconsiderable amount of editing under my belt. Why am I not doing things like this?

By the way, people, when did Matthew Yglesias start writing under the Atlantic’s banner? Am I totally out of the loop or what?

Politico picked up on a terribly creepy piece of writing in the ultra-conservative NewMax. The author, some dude name of Ronald Kessler, is so painfully in love with Ann Romney (Mitt’s wife) he’s gotta be stalking her.

Ann is warm and very natural. She has the look of an outdoors woman bred to be an equestrian, which she is.

When she is not flashing her smile, she may lower her eyes demurely. But Ann Romney is not demure — she may be modest, but she isn’t meek. She is unpretentious, but she isn’t shy.

We’ll avoid the tortured nature of the prose and merely cringe at the love struck schoolboy of it that passage.

Sadly, the money shot is no longer in the online version (but go ahead and read it anyway…big time creepy factor going on)

She lowers her eyes, thinking, and then looks up directly at her interviewer and dazzles him with that smile.”

I’m pretty sure I’ve read that opening in Penthouse Letters.

According to a Hotline/Diageo poll, 64% of respondents always vote in their party’s primary.

Kinda tought to reconcile that with a typical 20% voter turnout in your average state primary.

Hmmm…people lie to pollsters to make themselves sound better? Nah. Not possible.

In a poll a few years back 25% of respondents identified themselves as being in the top 10% of income earners. 9% identified themselves as being in the bottom 25%. This particular poll (I cannot for the life of me remember who did it…it’s buried on an old computer that I don’t feel like digging out of the mothballs) was, from what I recall, rather well put together, large sample, unbiased, low margin of error, etc. I’m willing to accept that a bunch of us want to believe that we’re in the top 10%…we’re happy with how much we make and it feels like alot. Cool. It’s the other side that baffles me. I have weathered two prolonged stretches of poverty in my adult life. I damn well knew I was poor.

Hmmm…people have delusions of grandeur and it comes out in poll results. Nah. I’m sure we’re all terribly self aware.

Please forgive this mild bitch session. The author has recently returned to the business world where people put waaaaaayyyyyyy too much emphasis in surveys and it’s making him a little goofy.

“And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloak forbid not to take thy coat also. Give to every man that asketh of thee; and of him that taketh away thy goods ask them not again.”

-Luke 6:29-30

So shortly before I left the US, my car was broken into and a CD wallet stolen. This wallet contained 72 CDs, which I’d just spent some time sorting; I’d been collecting them since I was twelve; and I estimate their total value to be somewhere in the neighborhood of $1000.

I have two responses to this.

—

RESPONSE #1

It’s been said that the reason why we regard life, liberty, and property as sacred is because they represent temporal states: to steal your property is to steal your past, to steal your liberty is to steal your present, and to steal your life is to steal your future. If my current emotional response is any indication, this is a remarkably accurate characterization.

What really stings isn’t the financial loss, although that’s significant; it isn’t the loss of resources, although most of the music from my shows has been drawn from this library; it’s the loss of *history*. There’s music in there that I’ve picked up on my travels to other countries; music burned for me by friends and girlfriends; music that got me through some hard times, and some harder ones; music that played in the background as I composed scenes for plays. I’m a materialistic guy, and I get too attached to *things*: but those things carry part of my past with them, and their loss can’t help feeling like a violation of that. *That’s* the ultimate reason that theft is evil, and property is important: because you’re not just stealing an object, but its history, as well.

Which may well be my trying to rationalize how fucking pissed off I am right now.

—

RESPONSE #2

And yet — maybe as a product of just how chaotic my life has been for the past couple of weeks — when I realized it was gone, there was actually a moment of — serenity? I mean, I’d spent a lot of time sorting them, not alphabetically but in chronological order of the composition of the earliest song on each CD. I — ah — get wrapped up in certain, uh, rituals and patterns, and that turned out to be a big job. And suddenly — whoosh — it was gone. I’d been liberated of it.

I mean, there’s a big part of me that’s disgusted with myself for even owning that much stuff, y’know? And not just the stuff — the *history*, that I’m carrying around that much stuff *mentally*. I’m the kind of guy that keeps boxes of every letter, note, object I received from every terrible relationship I’ve been in, because I *can’t get rid of it*. I have pictures of most of my ex-girlfriends in my wallet, because I don’t know how to throw them away. And, yeah, the bulk of my response to the theft is anger.

But there’s a small, very small part of brain that wants to thank the thief for liberating me of my possessions. Does that make me crazy?

“Ryokan lived in a small hut at the foot of a mountain. One evening a thief broke in, only to find that there was nothing in the hut worth stealing.

Ryokan sat down naked and looked up at the sky. ‘Poor fellow,’ he said, ‘I wish I could give him this beautiful moon.’

-Paul Reps, Zen Flesh, Zen Bones

I’ve just come down from my third production week in a row, and since this time around I was directing, not performing, I haven’t shaved, permitting the rebirth of the Lovecraftian nightmare that is my facial hair. I staggered out of bed this morning, hung over and bleary-eyed, and peered into the mirror, to find a scruffy, olive-skinned terrorist peering back at me.

Ah, the joys of airline travel! I suspect I can look forward to being randomly selected for any number of searches over the next forty-eight hours.

—

Number of signs have posted that we’re currently on an “orange alert.” I guess my main beef with the color-coded alert system — and, I suspect, the real source of much of the ridicule that’s been heaped upon it — is the fact that you can’t really *do* anything — you don’t go to shelter or cancel your flights or stay home from work. It ultimately ends up feeling like the government jumping out form behind the bushes and shouting “Someone’s trying to kill you! Booga booga booga!” then running away.

—

Y’know, as much as the romance of airplane travel has worn off for me over the years — am I crazy for actually liking airports? I never get lost, and I actually don’t mind getting stuck in them. They’re almost like self-sustaining mini-civilizations, and I find in them much of what I love about city life in microcosm: they’re crowded, expensive, everyone’s in a hurry to get somewhere, and you’re constantly weighting your likelihood of being shot.

—

I have a habit of running my hand along the rails of the moving walkways, and it always comes up coated in filth, the source of which is not to be contemplated. The one exception to this rule? Japan, where they apparently hire someone to wipe them down multiple times a day. I am adding this to my long list of Reasons Japan is Fucked the Hell Up.

—

It seems to me that among the greatest casualties of tightened airport security must be chick flicks. How are romantic comedies to end now, when the jilted lover, running to prevent the object of his desire from flying out of his life forever, is gunned down by a bevy of trigger-happy air marshalls?

Come to think of it, I’m hard-pressed to think of many such movies that wouldn’t be dramatically improved by this treatment, so perhaps it’s all to the good.

A lot of the “Support our troops” rhetoric has been re-emerging lately, seemingly not unlike Prometheus’ liver in its ability to regenerate itself, and it’s continuing to do a very good job of the thing it was designed to do, which is shutting me up.

There’s a number of reasons why it leaves me scratching my head, slack-jawed and unable to respond, not least because it’s always seemed to be such an obvious straw man argument to me: nobody *doesn’t* support the troops. Nobody’s cheering at the idea of American soldiers getting shot at. People bring up the military men returning from Vietnam who were spit on: but I find it extremely difficult to credit that that’s going to happen now. The cultural climate’s changed, not least because of people yelling about supporting our troops.

Taking the argument at face value, I just plain don’t get it, and I’m the first to admit it: I don’t see how claiming that the invasion of Iraq was a horrifically bad administrative decision, a bureaucratic fuck-up for Blobby’s Big Book of Bureaucratic Fuck-Ups, is somehow an expression of contempt for the guys on the ground.

Probing a little deeper, I think it has to do with a differing concept of love: that for them, love of country must be composed of a kind of blind adulation, an unwavering support for everything it does. Let’s add this to the list of the things I fail to get. I mean, I love my family, but I can acknowledge that they’ve done some pretty fucked-up things. If I found out that, say, my nephew had murdered somebody, I would do everything I could to help: speaking in his defense, getting him a good lawyer, trying to get his sentence reduced, et cetera. I get the impression that the “Support-our-troops” camp would be helping him hide the body.

But we can get a little deeper than that, can’t we? Ultimately, the reason I have such a hard time responding to the slogan is because there’s a grain of truth to it: I *don’t* support our troops. I support the American people; in a broader sense, I support the human race, the species into which I was born, of which the military branch of the United States government comprises a very small percentage. As long as that percentage is doing work that I feel is beneficial to the rest of the species — including my favorite component of it, me — then, yeah, I’ll support it. When I feel that it’s doing work that’s actively harmful? I’d be nuts to.

None of which, none, is passing any kind of judgment upon the individuals inhabiting that percentage. I don’t have any issues, good or bad, with the individuals. It’s collectives I don’t trust: and that’s the case whether they’re parties, corporations, governments — or militaries. As James Madison put it, “A standing army is one of the greatest mischief that can possibly happen.” (His syntax, not mine.)

One of the better concepts drilled into me growing up was “Love the sinner, hate the sin” — and if we can sidestep for the moment how terribly loaded those particular word choices are, all it’s really saying is that people can do shit you don’t approve of without you passing judgment on them.

In my last political satire, Libertarian Rage, I made a conscious decision early on not to mention any politicians by name — because I wasn’t interested in ridiculing *people*, I was interested in ridiculing *ideologies*. I may object to just about every decision Bush has made since he was appointed to his office by the Supreme Court (including, y’know, that one) — and I will call him on every bullshit decision he makes — but I am singularly ill-equipped to pass any judgment on him as a person, as a human being, because I *don’t fucking know him*. I honestly can’t tell if he’s a bumbling puppet or brilliant con-man or a dangerously wide-eyed idealist. And even if I could, I don’t know what his private thoughts are in the dead of night, nor do I have any desire to. Not my job.

Christ’s injunction to “Love thy enemies” is one that gets thrown around pretty glibly, but its implications are terrifying: it means, well, loving your enemies. It means loving Osama bin Ladin and Saddam Hussein; it means loving both your military and political opponents; it means finding a way to love George W. Bush. Not letting them get away with shit. But not passing judgment on the contents of their hearts, either.

Vengeance is easier. Rage is easier. Hell, a lot of the time it’s useful, too — witness this site. But left unchecked, it leads to things like blood feuds, crusades — and wars. Compassion, mercy, forgiveness — they’re hard. They’re *fucking* hard. But if we entered this raging inferno in a state of grief and anger, we’re not gonna crawl our way out for as long as we’re clinging to the things that brought us here…

…e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.

The New Republic just sent out some spam to all their subscribers about a 28,000-word essay appearing in their June 4 issue. The subject: Tariq Ramadan. The TNR folks are très excited about it all—I’m sure it will be very exciting, indeed. But isn’t it just a little intellectually whorish to end an email heralding the Rebirth of Liberalism in the Face of Something with:

PS: In his research for this essay, Berman unearthed a fascinating exchange on the stoning of women in Islam between Ramadan and Nicolas Sarkozy. You will certainly want to read this.

Post-script? Oh, Marty Peretz. Stop. You’ll make my angina flare.

Murdoch’s Weekly Standard seems to be a little worried about Michael Bloomberg running for President as an independent candidate next year:

The Mystery of Michael Bloomberg
Why does a popular but mediocre mayor think he should run for president?

I would be worried, too: The man has more money in petty cash than all of the GOP candidates douches who publicly embarrassed themselves earlier this week combined.

That karma wheel sure makes a nice whooshing sound when it comes closer.

From the Washington Post…

The White House threatened yesterday to use the president’s veto to prevent Democrats from increasing spending on education, health care and other domestic programs.

In a letter to lawmakers, the president’s budget director, Rob Portman, said the administration opposed a spending blueprint nearing completion on Capitol Hill that is expected to authorize about $20 billion more for the fiscal year that begins in October than the White House has requested.

Yup…the Prezzz who has accumlated $3 trillion in additional debt while simultaneously gutting the effectiveness and radically underfunding things like emergency response, disaster preparedness, veteran’s care, and food safety to fund his dirty little war and his equally dirty subsidy programs for the wealthy (aka. The Bush Tax Cuts) has suddenly gotten all fiscally responsible. Whatever happens, let’s throw down over that $20 billion. Let’s make sure that this dollar figure that amounts to 2/3rds of a percent…that’s 0.67%…that’s a number that looks like 0.0067…of the debt he’s run up in 7 years completely devoid of fiscal responsibility…doesn’t get tacked on to the tally. Christ, that’d crush us for sure.

Get the veto pen out, baby. And finally, maybe, the Dems will become aware and adept enough to link the underfunding of critical infrastructure to the spectacular spending on Iraq. In the last week we’ve seen a town in Kansas taken off the map…literally removed from the map…after a tornado tore through it. There are volunteers working tirelessly to help those people, non-profit agencies, state agencies, even FEMA. Guess what ain’t there? The National Guard in any meaningful numbers and, most important, it’s heavy equipment critical to digging out. Know why? ‘Cause our National Guard units are now at right around 50% of their authorized equipment inventories. Know why? ‘Cause they’re shit is being shipped over to replace equipment in Iraq. The money that would be spent on taking care of us here at home is being spent in Iraq. The production lines that would churn out new equipment are clogged with backorders from Iraq. The Prezzz’s answer to this is to cut more domestic capability in the form of slashed domestic budgets to continue to bankroll his war.

But it’s the Dems who are fiscally irresponsible. Lucky for us, The Boy Who Would Be King is gonna protect us from this scourge. Lucky for us we will continue to be unable to mount anything resembling real Homeland Security as we pursue Bush’s vapor cloud of security by pursuing a losing effort in Iraq. Lucky for us he will continue to trot out “support the troops” and people will still buy it (though blessedly fewer on a daily basis) as a valid reason while continuing to underfund the care of those troops when wounded in his war. Lucky for us we will continue to throw money at an effort that amounts to nothing more than a weird death game for those heroic troops while New Orleans and the Gulf Coast continue to languish for lack of money and focus at the federal level.

You’re right, Mr. President. We need your protection from these Congressional meddlers. If someone doesn’t stop ‘em you won’t be able to keep doing such a bang up job of budgeting.

The FDA has a new “food czar”…some assistant deputy something or other who’s in charge of keeping our food supply safe. As the pet food debacle spreads and metastasizes into something truly ugly, critics of the government rightly point out that part of the problem is that we have two agencies, the FDA and the USDA, responsible for food safety for different kinds of food. There isn’t a single group with both the responsibility and the authority to regulate food safety.

As I said, they’re right…that’s a problem. In a beautiful illustration of a bueareucratic power grab, the USDA is quietly making noises and lobbying members of Congress to allow it to be the agency solely responsible for food safety. And, yeah, the FDA’s performance hardly fills you with confidence that it knows what it’s doing. The problem with giving it to the USDA is that it has done a uniformly deplorable job of monitoring food safety in those areas in which it has responsibility. The FDA has been atrocious and certainly going from atrocious to deplorable is an improvement but it ain’t much of one.

The real issue is that over the last 25 years regulation has been under attack. There is a fundamental difference between saying regulations are too restrictive and saying that regulation in all forms and at all times is bad. The Right has been saying the latter since Ronnie Raygun came onto the scene, and saying it with increasing ferocity and hysteria with each passing year. They’ve drilled the message home so often and so well that many of us believe it in that sort of mind numbed blind acceptance kind of way.

But it ain’t true. Nothing is so conveniently binary.

Here’s what this assault on regulation has done in terms of food safety. Regulations have been rolled back and repealed until we’ve reached the logically absurd conclusion…the agencies that regulate food safety cannot recall unsafe food without first going through the companies pimping the unsafe products. The budgets for inspections and monitoring have been consistently rolled back at the precise time that the food processing industry has exploded with an unprecedented number of players now on the scene, combined with the globalization of the food supply, meaning that more food is coming from more places that have even worse food safety policies and procedures than we do here. Regulatory agencies in this country cannot do surprise inspections of food manufacturers. They have to announce when they’re coming well in advance. They have almost no enforcement authority…so, they can see all sorts of unsafe and unhealthy violations of the law and can do very little in the way of fines and even less in the way of plant closures.

The fix for this problem isn’t a food czar or a PR campaign. It’s a thoughtful evaluation of the vulnerabilities of the food supply, the processes and policies in place to protect it, and the resources needed to continually monitor and enforce those policies and procedures. This will absolutely increase the cost of food. However, it will improve the safety of consumers. It will also spread the cost of reducing the risk of tainted food to all food consumers as opposed to the way the current broken system allocates those costs. Under the current system we all play a form of russian roulette and if the chamber comes up wrong for us then we get to see a son or daughter, grandparent, mom, dad, spouse, friend or even a pet become terribly and expensively ill or, worse, die.

The cost of regulation is, ultimately, a few pennies on the dollar. The cost of deregulation of a critical public safety function such as food safety is a relatively small number of illnesses and an even smaller number of deaths. Really…the numbers aren’t that large. And despite the eternal whining of the CEOs of regulated companies…the sudden care for the working man and the jobs that will be lost and all that crap…it is a frightfully simple equation we face as voters. The economic dislocation due to job loss in regulated industries is minimal. The question, then, is does the $0.05 you save on a can of dog food under the current scheme (as opposed to one that actually worked) worth the dead pets and the human emotional suffering that accompanies those deaths? Is the $0.25 you save on a jar of peanut butter a decent tradeoff for a few dead kids?

That’s it. That’s the entire debate. A quarter per jar. Or some dead kids.

Does this work or not? It’s funny… But does it work? I can’t make up my mind:

H/T: The steadily improving New Republic blog, especially with such a twee name, The Plank.

I’m way behind on the news these days. The work schedule has been grueling and then I took a little jaunt down to New Orleans last weekend. When I’m working I don’t have the time to keep up with events. When I’m in New Orleans I simply don’t care to keep up with events. “Laissez les bons temps rouler!”…and such.

Imagine my surprise to take a little time today to read the news and find out that Alberto Gonzales and Paul Wolfowitz are still gainfully employed. I figured Gonzales was gone back in March and Wolfy would hit the deck sometime last week.

What with the rising temperatures of late spring the rate of decomposition of their political corpses has got to be accelerating.

If nothing else you’d think the stench alone would motivate Bush to ask thenm to, you know, move on out of town ’cause it’s gettin’ all kinds a funky up in here.

This is what I just saw on my My Google homepage:

Keywords of the apocalypse!!! DEMOCRATS?!? WORLD—as in new world order that will HERALD PEACE?!? 666!

FIRES AND FLOODS, COAST TO COAST? That’s a sign, a sign! From 13!

We have to elect Fred Thompson immediately. He’s the only real Christian and the only one who might be able to save us and our money.

By the by: Installments. I just circled that one for any paranoid Muslims who wanted to be included. Something something prohibition against interest something. I dunno. Your taboo, not mine. I’m just trying to be inclusive.

I was sort of hoping the French presidential election would have had more fireworks than it did. Oh, sure, there were some… But they were all about domestic issues. Good for the French. Bad for snark-infested American hobby-pundits. Unless you live in or were raised in a country, there is little hope of understanding the intricacies of domestic issues. I’ve had to explain, for example, the electoral college to a huge number of Canadians. And Canadians oft pride themselves on knowing more about the United States than Americans do (of course, they also can pride themselves on deliberately knowing very little about the United States, as if to say, “See?!? We don’t know everything about you! We have our own stuff to do!”).

Anyway, I’ve been reading about the election results, etc., and, really, this is what it seems to boil down to, courtesy Froma Harrop’s incredibly balanced and hopeful column:

A conservative, Sarkozy has summoned the French to work harder and longer, but one has to understand the context. The French can work harder and longer without working particularly hard or long, by our standards, anyway.

So, my take is that Sarkozy, hein, maybe not so bad. My preference was still for Ségolène Royal but, ultimately, I think Sarkozy is not a fascist evil incarnate. Big of me, I know. But I get the feeling electing a law-’n'-order, work-harder candidate as president of France is about 30 years too late. I love the French but, Jesus H. Christ, they’re jumping on that bandwagon now?!? They should have been trying to save the welfare state and integrating immigrants in, oh, 1979. You know. When everyone else was thinking about it. Also:

Health care in France accounts for 10.5 percent of the gross domestic product, but in the United States eats up 15.3 percent. Of course, everyone in France is covered, while 46 million Americans go uninsured.

But ours is the most expensive. So it has to be better. I mean: Duh.

H/T: scrutinyhooligans.us