All Guns Blazing

Dan Froomkin, whose career with the Washington Post has ended under circumstances that bring considerable disgrace to the newspaper, has filed his final WaPo column. He is not, I’m happy to see, going gently into that good night:

When I look back on the Bush years, I think of the lies. There were so many. Lies about the war and lies to cover up the lies about the war. Lies about torture and surveillance. Lies about Valerie Plame. Vice President Dick Cheney’s lies, criminally prosecutable but for his chief of staff Scooter Libby’s lies. I also think about the extraordinary and fundamentally cancerous expansion of executive power that led to violations of our laws and our principles.

And while this wasn’t as readily apparent until President Obama took office, it’s now very clear that the Bush years were all about kicking the can down the road – either ignoring problems or, even worse, creating them and not solving them. This was true of a huge range of issues including the economy, energy, health care, global warming – and of course Iraq and Afghanistan.

How did the media cover it all? Not well. Reading pretty much everything that was written about Bush on a daily basis, as I did, one could certainly see the major themes emerging. But by and large, mainstream-media journalism missed the real Bush story for way too long. The handful of people who did exceptional investigative reporting during this era really deserve our gratitude: People such as Ron Suskind, Seymour Hersh, Jane Mayer, Murray Waas, Michael Massing, Mark Danner, Barton Gellman and Jo Becker, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau (better late than never), Dana Priest, Walter Pincus, Charlie Savage and Philippe Sands; there was also some fine investigative blogging over at Talking Points Memo and by Marcy Wheeler. Notably not on this list: The likes of Bob Woodward and Tim Russert. Hopefully, the next time the nation faces a grave national security crisis, we will listen to the people who were right, not the people who were wrong, and heed those who reported the truth, not those who served as stenographers to liars.

It’s also worth keeping in mind that there is so very much about the Bush era that we still don’t know.

Froomkin says he’ll take some time off before unveiling his next project. Best of luck to him.

Librul Media Bias

It’s just so insidious, I tell ya.

Twilight of the Clods

Far be it from me to stand back and keep a straight face when everyone else in the progressive blogger ranks is chortling about the woes of the wingnut web: Dignity Pants Media is switching from one losing business model to another, losier model (i.e., expecting people to pay for something they didn’t even want when it was free); and Culture 11 has proved to be a bad bet, as should have been expected from any venture launched with the help of Diamond Bill Bennett. Schadenfreude, do you say? Damn right it is.

The problem with right-wing blogs is not so much their crack-brained content or their delusional business plans, but the fact that they simply aren’t necessary. The progressive blogosphere grew directly in proportion to the insanity unleashed by conservatives, starting with the Clinton impeachment farce and the hijacking of the 2000 election  and continuing through the Iraq War fraud, spurred along by  the wingnut  infestation of mass-market punditry, and the cluelessness of respectable columnists like David Broder who mumbled about bipartisanship while the Visigoths ran riot in the halls of government.

 Daily Kos, Eschaton and Crooks and Liars,  as well as the lefty blogs that followed in their train, didn’t spring into being because some daddy wingbucks wrote them  phat checks. They developed and thrived because they trafficked in reality, and in a media realm dominated by the likes of Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh and Thomas Friedman, reality was and is  a scarce and valuable commodity.

Wingers have no shortage of propaganda spigots to sup from, and while they are a breed with a seemingly endless capacity for hearing the same nonsense over and over, there are only  so many hours in a day, and one cannot live at one’s computer. When the airwaves and op-ed pages are full of professional ranters, amateurs can’t expect much of a crowd for their flea-circus versions.  

That’s why the smart money is  betting on the amount of time it takesfor  Big Hollywood, the latest methane-pumped conservative ego balloon, to settle to earth with a long, flatulent hiss. No, I’m not going to link to it, but if you scout it out you’ll find a Web site devoted to . . . wait for it . . . complaints about liberal bias in the movie industry – a theme so tired  even Z-list wingers like Michael Medved resort to it only on exceptionally slow news days. The last time I checked, their spotlight post was a long whine about the revamped Battlestar Galactica from Dirk Benedict, a talentless refugee from the original series  who’s been  over-the-hill for so long that the hill itself has eroded away. Oh yeah — that’ll bring the masses in at a gallop.

Keep the Schadenfreude pot brewing, folks.

In Search of Soul-Searching

In the aftermath of the multiple conservative-engineered disasters on the financial, moral, military and electoral fronts that we are now struggling with, there was a great deal of talk about “soul searching” among “thoughtful” conservatives, who would try to find ways to bring right-wingers back to “true” conservatism.

It’s a laudable goal, but from where I stand, most conservatives seem less interested in coming to grips with their failures than in redefining them so that actions undertaken by Dubya with the enthusiastic support of conservatives suddenly become examples of liberalism, the sort of thing the sainted Ronald Reagan would never have dreamed of doing.

On the local front, Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine has been forlornly trying to redefine Bush’s invasion of Iraq as “liberal do-gooder internationalism,” while railing against ”the essentially left-wing views of Bill Kristol, John Podhoretz and the Fox News crowd,” thereby giving us a taste of what might have resulted if George Orwell had offered Groucho Marx a chance to rewrite Nineteen Eighty-Four.   

Now I see that one of Andrew Sullivan’s readers has decided to see Mulshine on the Iraq War and raise him:

A reflexive abhorrence of violence of all kinds (war, torture, even the death penalty and abortion) is inherently conservative – part of any meaningful definition of conservatism. 

Having spent the last couple of decades hearing conservatives grunt about liberals being a bunch of pacifist hippies, and the last few years being called all kinds of nasty things by drive-by wingers with “Whack Iraq” and “Kick Their Ass, Take Their Gas” bumper stickers, I can only laugh at this attempt to retrofit conservatism with dove’s wings, much less the notion that Bush has somehow degraded the Reagan legacy.

For the overwhelming majority of conservatives, and middle-of-the-roaders who never offered more than token objections, Bush’s invasion of Iraq was going to be Reagan’s invasion of Grenada writ large — a little dodgy in moral terms, sure, but hey it was all going to be over quickly and once the smoke cleared we’d have loads of oil to burn.

When it came to running up huge deficits, undermining public safety through deregulation, packing government positions with cynical operators and using American might to stomp on ninety-pound weaklings, Bush and Reagan were and are more alike than different.

Face it, wingers: When you got Bush, you got everything you’d ever dreamed of having, and the result was poison. Now be a bunch of dears and go play your word while the rest of us try to restore a measure of sanity and stability. Hey, why don’t you check in with Jonah Goldberg? He’s been redefining words in all kinds of interesting ways.

Weekend Bookchat

We begin the new year with an overwhelmingly important piece of old business to address: What should — and can — be done about the Bush torture cabal? This is the subject of three recent books: Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values by Philippe Sands; The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book by Michael Ratner and the Center for Constitutional Rights; and Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond by Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh. Writing about them in the New York Review of Books, David Cole reminds us that the Bush torture program has, along with fouling America’s moral standing in the world, created the first great challenge for the Obama administration:

In the long run, the best insurance against cruelty and torture becoming US policy again is a formal recognition that what we did after September 11 was wrong—as a normative, moral, and legal matter, not just as a tactical issue. Such an acknowledgment need not take the form of a criminal prosecution; but it must take some official form. We have been willing to admit wrongdoing in the past. In 1988, President Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, officially apologizing for the Japanese internment and paying reparations to the internees and their survivors. That legislation, a formal repudiation of our past acts, provides an important cultural bulwark against something similar happening again. There has been nothing of its kind with respect to torture.

We cannot move forward in reforming the law effectively unless we are willing to account for what we did wrong in the past. The next administration or the next Congress should at a minimum appoint an independent, bipartisan, blue-ribbon commission to investigate and assess responsibility for the United States’ adoption of coercive interrogation policies. If it is to be effective, it must have subpoena power, sufficient funding, security clearances, access to all the relevant evidence, and, most importantly, a charge to assess responsibility, not just to look forward. We may know many of the facts already, but absent a reckoning for those responsible for torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment — our own federal government — the healing cannot begin.

This is not an issue that can be fobbed off with Broder-level banalities about “national healing” and “putting the past behind us.” Healing cannot take place until the source of the infection has been cleansed. There will probably never be a full reckoning for the crimes committed in America’s name under George W. Bush, but at the very least there should be a full accounting of what was done and who did it.

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Marcia Angell reviews three books about the overlooked and ongoing problem of the cozy relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and the research physicians whose work certifies and promotes the value and safety of different drugs:

Take the case of Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of pediatric psychopharmacology at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital. Thanks largely to him, children as young as two years old are now being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with a cocktail of powerful drugs, many of which were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for that purpose and none of which were approved for children below ten years of age.

Legally, physicians may use drugs that have already been approved for a particular purpose for any other purpose they choose, but such use should be based on good published scientific evidence. That seems not to be the case here. Biederman’s own studies of the drugs he advocates to treat childhood bipolar disorder were, as The New York Times summarized the opinions of its expert sources, “so small and loosely designed that they were largely inconclusive.”

In June, Senator Grassley revealed that drug companies, including those that make drugs he advocates for childhood bipolar disorder, had paid Biederman $1.6 million in consulting and speaking fees between 2000 and 2007. Two of his colleagues received similar amounts. After the revelation, the president of the Massachusetts General Hospital and the chairman of its physician organization sent a letter to the hospital’s physicians expressing not shock over the enormity of the conflicts of interest, but sympathy for the beneficiaries: “We know this is an incredibly painful time for these doctors and their families, and our hearts go out to them.”

The potentially disastrous consequences of drug companies influencing and funding research into the safety of their own products should be obvious, but as Angell notes, even many medical schools hold equity stakes in the very companies that help fund their research.

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Will the prestigious Man Booker Prize be one of the literary victims of Bernie Madoff’s disastrous Ponzi scheme. The Man Group, a hedge fund that has supported the award since 2002, was heavily invested in funds linked to Madoff, but the word so far is that funding for the award — and its big cash prize — will not be affected. We’ll see.

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Upcoming book discussions at the TPM Cafe: Rose George’s The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters (Jan. 5-9); Randall Stross’s Planet Google: One Company’s Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know (Jan. 12-16).

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Science writer Chris Mooney reviews two new books about climate change and muses on the problem of explaining a long-term tragedy to a country (and journalists) preoccupied with short-term concerns. Axl Rose’s literary influences.  Wanted: Volunteers to help proofread over 30,000 titles in the Project Gutenberg digital library. Karl Rove reveals George W. Bush’s reading lists, which Mark Tran finds unexpectedly revealing. And a master crime novelist is mourned by his fans.

Top Ten Iraq Myths

From “Iraqis are safer because of Bush’s war” to “Bush invaded Iraq because of bad intelligence” and beyond, here’s your clip’n’save hit parade of lies and their corrections.

Zbig Fun

Let’s start the last day of 2008 with a bit of lowdown fun as former national security Zbigniew Brzezinski smacks around winger hack Joe Scarborough during a talk about the ongoing horror in the Middle East. Brzezinski, a courtly and diplomatic man, tries to school Scarborough in a gentlemanly fashion, but finally gets tired of the hack’s blowhard spinning and says, “You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it’s almost embarrassing to listen to you.” Scarborough’s petulant response is worth noting as well.

Shooting Fish In a Barrel

When Israel started carpet-bombing Lebanon two summers ago, the Woman Warrior hung up a banner that read KILLING CHILDREN IS NOT SELF-DEFENSE. That Saturday afternoon, we spent a couple of hours arguing with and getting shouted at by people leaving the synagogue nearby, who came up our driveway to call us terrorist-lovers and baby killers. A couple of nights later, some vandals trespassed on our property and cut down the banner.

When we spoke with the rabbi a few days later, he was sincerely upset by the vandalism and the possibility that it might have been the work of some of his congregants. “We can’t look for justice in unjust ways,” he said, a philosophy I can endorse wholeheartedly. I hope it soaks into the heads of some of his congregants.

During those endless, pointless driveway debates in which outwardly intelligent people said the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon was acceptable because the Israelis gave the Lebanese time to clear out before the bombs started raining down, I received an object lesson in the fact that it is more possible to have a rational talk about Israel with Israelis than it is with American Jews.  There are Israelis who are appalled by the generations-long misery of Gaza and the West Bank, by the farcical situation with the settlements, with the double-dealing and the bad faith, but their American counterparts are shouted down by political hysterics who see every situation involving Israel as a replay of Exodus, with Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint holding back the slobbering Arab hordes.

The atrocity being committed right now in Gaza has no basis in morality, practicality or even long-term Israeli self-interest. It is a naked exercise in force wielded by a nuclear-armed regional superpower in the name of fighting an enemy it created decades ago in order to undermine the power of other Palestinian groups. I would like to see the propaganda nonsense about targeting only Hamas operations, with any civilians casualties a matter of regret, get the contemptuous treatment it deserves, but that’s as pointless as hoping for a reduction, much less an end, to the American subsidies lavished on the biggest economy in the eastern Mediterranean. This is shooting fish in a barrel, and it ends whatever claim Israel may have to the moral high ground.

So, like the good people at 3 Quarks Daily, I’m running the flag of Palestine to offer some gesture of sympathy, however ineffectual, with the innocents being subjected to this terror. At least this is one banner those self-righteous creeps won’t be able to cut down.

Christmas in Hollis

Doing Christmas the Run-D.M.C. way.

Verdict with Cheese

So, as far as I can tell, the jury in the pizza jihadi trial has determined that five men were conspiring to kill American soldiers at Fort Dix, but that they didn’t really mean to hurt anybody.

Do I have that right? If you convict the accused men of conspiracy but acquit them of attempted murder, where does that leave us? If they were gathering up weapons and preparing to strike Fort Dix, that implies an intent to do something more than inconvenience the soldiers, right? But they weren’t guilty of attempted murder? Weren’t we told last year, when these men were arrested, that the feds had narrowly averted a bloody strike on an American military target? No wonder the jury asked the judge to read a statement saying, “This has been one of the most difficult things that we have ever had to do.” Maybe that’s so, but that’s nothing compared with the work the jurors have created for anyone trying to make sense of the logic of this verdict.

This case has smelled bad right from the start and the outcome stinks. We are left with an ambiguous verdict against five “terrorists” who invited a Philadelphia cop to join them on one of their “training sessions,” who were blatantly led into making provocative moves by a paid FBI informant, and who were leery of the guy egging them on.

Something tells me this case will spend the next few years unraveling in the appeals process.