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Tom Friedman — still waiting for Bush to do right

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New York Times columnist Tom Friedman returns from a book leave today with a column that roars its outrage at the Bush administration’s disastrous Iraq policy — and then, bizarrely, collapses into a quivering heap of divorced-from-reality bipartisanship.

First Friedman catalogues Bush’s catastrophic choices, in great detail and with the brevity and forthrightness that mark his best work — and minus the catch-phrase coinages that mar his worst. Bush failed to commit enough troops to secure post-invasion Iraq. He relied on the bad word of Rumsfeld’s “Iraqi pals.” He “never established U.S. authority in Iraq.” A “decent outcome in Iraq” is vital, but “this Bush team can’t get us there, and may have so messed things up that no one can. Why? Because each time the Bush team had to choose between doing the right thing in the war on terrorism or siding with its political base and ideology, it chose its base and ideology.” Bush couldn’t bring himself to fire “an evangelical Christian U.S. general who smears Islam in a speech while wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army,” or raise taxes on gas, or fire anyone who was responsible for the torture at Abu Ghraib. “Mr. Bush is president, charged with protecting the national interest, and yet from the beginning he has run Iraq policy as an extension of his political campaign.”

So, obviously, Bush must go, right?

No, I’m afraid Friedman’s conclusion is as follows: “We’re in trouble in Iraq. We have to immediately get the Democratic and Republican politics out of this policy and start honestly reassessing what is the maximum we can still achieve there and what every American is going to have to do to make it happen. If we do not, we’ll end up not only with a fractured Iraq, but with a fractured America, at war with itself and isolated from the world.”

I’m sorry, but this makes no sense. America is already deeply fractured — just look at the polls, or talk to your neighbors; at war with itself — look at how insanely close this election is likely to be; and isolated from the world. The nation’s leaders gave Bush bipartisanship in the days after 9/11, and again in the leadup to the Iraq war, and Bush abused and insulted those foolish enough to think he is actually the “uniter” he once claimed to be.

There are just about 30 days to the presidential election. Politics cannot, will not, should not stop at such a moment. Anyone who believes all the points Friedman makes in his column has no choice but to demand that Bush be booted out of office. Why can’t Friedman bring himself to say that?

Time after time in the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, we were subjected to the spectacle of this columnist — who’d made an agonizing-in-public call to support the war, but only if it was pursued in certain carefully defined ways — wringing his hands: “Bush said he was going to turn Iraq into a beacon of democracy. Why isn’t he doing all the things he promised to make that happen? Time is running out!”

At this late date, I fail to understand how Friedman thinks there is even an iota of possibility that Bush might suddenly wake up, alter course and salvage something out of his Iraq mess. Perhaps it is just desperately wishful thinking, an involuntary reaction to the awful pit-of-the-stomach queasiness of contemplating just how far off track Bush has led this still-imperilled nation.

However he arrived at his colossal non-sequitur, Friedman, I think, needs to brush up on that old saying about “Fool me once, shame on you — fool me twice, shame on me.” This line, of course, is probably best known today in its Texas Bushism variant, in which our president got his folklore all tangled up with his Who’s Next song titles. “We won’t get fooled again” are actually pretty good watchwords for anyone whose eyes have been open during the last four years. Tom Friedman, meet Pete Townshend.

BONUS LINK: Doc Searls posts on the same topic, framing the election as a “recall” of Bush.

The spirit of startups past

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Nine years ago, just about to the day, I left my job at the San Francisco Examiner — where I’d worked for, oh, nine years and a few months — to join the handful of people who at that time constituted Salon. We’ve been through a lot of different offices in our existence, starting out with rented space in a downtown architecture firm on Main St.; then to our first real digs in China Basin Landing, down the hall from Howard Rheingold’s Electric Communities and the old Well Engaged, but otherwise isolated from civilization by the vast tracts of empty space below Townsend Street that have since been crammed with development; then to the corner of Third and Mission, just upstairs from Rochester Big & Tall, a perfect perch from which to watch the dot-com bubble begin to inflate; then, aloft on that bubble ourselves, over to the top two stories of a fancier building on Fourth Street off Mission; then consolidating on one of those floors; then moving downstairs to our comfortable, slightly smaller digs in the same building.

During the bubble’s boom years we’d see, through the lenses of retracting elevator doors, the hustle of VC-inflated commerce on floor after floor of expensive office space. Then, from late 2000 on, we observed the gradual depopulation of those same floors, as one failed dot-com after another dismantled its cubicles and closed up shop.

In my current office, every time I lean back in my chair and stare at the ceiling I’m faced with a grim reminder of that era, a memento dot-com mori in black Smartie ink scrawled on an oh-so-fashionably exposed duct with the name of the company that preceded us in the space:

food.com on an air duct

I don’t know why it was important that these ducts be so labeled. It’s certainly not worth the effort to efface the writing. It’s just one of those little bits of office archaeology serving to remind you that we’re all just passing through. Still, I’m sort of grateful for it. As I read intimations of a new wave of speculative excitement in the industry, I lean back in my chair, let my eyes float up ductward, and vow, never again!

Bonus link: While we’re musing about the Internet Bubble, Paul Graham (of “Hackers and Painters”) has written a thoughtful essay on “What the Bubble Got Right.”

About those lectern lights

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As Salon’s War Room discussed earlier today, the Bush campaign insisted on those ridiculous recumbent traffic lights on each candidate’s lectern, hoping that the emphasis on the time limits would hurt the proverbially long-winded John Kerry.

So it only serves them right that, while Kerry stuck to the rules and confined his responses to the allotted time, those dumb lights only ended up emphasizing the multiple occasions on which George Bush ran out of things to say before his lights had flashed.

What was supposed to highlight one candidate’s verbosity ended up emphasizing the other’s vacuity.

Sigh me a river

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In the first Gore/Bush debate in 2000, as we know, viewers who actually watched the debate thought Gore won — but by the time the spinners were finished, and the media coverage was done obsessing over Gore’s sighing reactions to his opponent, the consensus was that Bush had prevailed.

I dunno, I just finished watching George Bush sigh at least a half dozen times — as well as grimace, pout and otherwise express his exasperation at John Kerry’s inexplicable failure to pontificate or gasbag beyond the 2-minute limit Bush’s handlers had insisted upon.

Will Bush get called on it? Or is sighing only culpable when it’s done by Democrats?

Speaking unblinking truth to power

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“Someone who blinks when things get hard is not the right person to win the war on terror.” That’s President Bush’s communications director, Nicolle Devenish, in this morning’s New York Times.

Now, maybe Bush doesn’t blink. But we know that the current president, “when things got hard” on 9/11, sat with a dull, vacant stare for agonizingly long minutes in a Florida classroom before waking up to the fact that he was commander-in-chief and the nation was under attack. And we know that Kerry fought in Vietnam, led troops in combat and saved comrades’ lives. Who would you rather have guarding your back?

But look how effectively the Bush team has cemented its message: Kerry is a wimp. That’s what this whole campaign has been about: Karl Rove’s sick but smart strategy punched Kerry in the groin with the Swift Boat Veterans’ lies, then used Kerry’s failure to punch back hard to demonstrate that the candidate has no guts. If he can’t protect his reputation, goes the subtext, how will he protect your children? (Josh Marshall applied the crude but accurate label of “bitch-slap” to this psychodynamic.) Depressingly, this neanderthal logic actually appears to be working: NPR reported this morning that “soccer moms” are turning into “security moms,” as Bush makes some inroads among female voters normally thought to lean Democratic.

Kerry really has only one big opportunity left to change the tide of this campaign: At Thursday’s debate, he needs to get in President Bush’s face. Since Bush has chosen to make this a showdown over the candidates’ masculinity, Kerry should take off the gloves. The Bush campaign has outrageously reframed all criticism of its failed policies as “aiding and abetting the enemy”; it has scandalously declared that if the nation elects Kerry, we’ll get the terrorist attack we deserve. This president has forfeited the decorum that normally prevails between candidates. Kerry should feel no obligation to civility.

For the sake of the country and the world, I hope Kerry and his advisers are preparing debate lines something like this:

“Mr. Bush, after 9/11 your job as president was to protect this nation, and you’ve failed. You didn’t bring the World Trade Center attackers to justice. Bin Laden is still on the loose, and the Taliban still operate in Afghanistan. Instead, you led the nation into a war on Iraq on false grounds. You botched the war, and thousands of Americans and Iraqis have died and are still dying because of your mistakes. In a time when America should have been a beacon of justice to Iraq and to the world, you allowed our troops to torture enemy prisoners. Despite all these mistakes, not a single official in your administration has ever taken real responsibility for them.

I know what responsibility means, Mr. President. Do you? I didn’t ask my daddy to find me a safe berth away from the fighting in Vietnam. I know what it’s like to have people’s lives depend on my split-second calls. I’ve made the choices that won battles and saved troops’ lives. Have you?

You’re a failure, Mr. President, and the only way this country can get back on track is by putting you on the unemployment line.”

I’m no speechwriter, but it seems to me that Kerry has nothing to lose and everything to gain by being blunt — by showing he’s not afraid to face Bush down. Bush is at his best following a script, and he’s at his worst when he’s confronted by the unexpected (like in that Florida classroom). Kerry ought to rattle him with the facts.

They can keep the angry demonstrators far away from Bush’s speeches. They can jack up the polls with deceptive ads. But, so far at least, they can’t stop the opposition candidate, if he has the requisite nerve, from speaking the truth on live television.

Joe Trippi and Mitch Kapor

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If you were paying attention to the political world last winter you probably already know who Joe Trippi is. And if you’ve been paying attention to the computer world for the last 20 years or so you probably already know who Mitch Kapor is. Both of these guys have spent a significant amount of time thinking about how technology can reshape the arena of democracy, and just possibly improve things.

Kapor will be talking with Trippi about his new book, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” in a live Webcast tomorrow, Friday, at 2 p.m. Pacific Time. More info here. It’s the start of a regular series at the Of, By and For site.

Bloggercon ahoy

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I spoke at the first Bloggercon last year and enjoyed it. Missed the second one last spring. Dave Winer asked me to moderate a discussion at the next one, on Nov. 6 at Stanford, and I was game. The topic is the next phase of the continuing dialogue on blogging and journalism. The previous discussions led by Ed Cone and Jay Rosen set high standards I’ll aim to match.

I’ve been a pro journalist for 20 years but I’ve always been on one fringe or another — first, as a writer for an alternative weekly; then, as a theater critic on the “wrong” coast, writing for the underdog afternoon paper here in San Francisco; then, as a migrant from the print world to the Web, here at Salon; most recently, as a pro editor turned blogger. Since I started my publishing career in my teens cranking out mimeographed Diplomacy and Dungeons & Dragons magazines in my basement, the new world of self-publishing makes me feel right at home.

I’ll do my best to steer us out of the shallow familiar waters (is blogging journalism? Of course! Much of the time, anyway) and toward what I feel are the more challenging questions about journalists’ and bloggers’ symbiotic relationship. I’ve tried to lay some of them out here. Feel free to join the discussion over on the Bloggercon site, or at the event, or right here.

Read any good terrorist books lately?

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Among many other unfortunate provisions in the Patriot Act, passed in haste and hysteria in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, there’s one that’s especially loathsome to American values: It gives the government an unprecedented and scary carte blanche to paw through library and bookstore records to see what you’ve been reading. If you believe that such records might actually help the government nail the next wave of al-Qaida terrorists, then you don’t have to do anything. But if you believe, as I do, that this particular power is useless for that goal — but might prove handy for John Ashcroft and successors should they decide that, for example, citizens who read too many books about subject X might warrant close surveillance — then you should go here and sign the petition by the Campaign for Reader Privacy, a coalition of booksellers, librarians and writers, to push Congress to change this un-American law.

This particular part of the Patriot Act is one of those stealth provisions that simply invites government abuse. Consider: “The FBI may request the records secretly; it is not required to prove that there is ‘probable cause’ to believe the person whose records are being sought has committed a crime; and the bookseller or librarian who receives an order is prohibited from revealing it to anyone except those whose help is needed to produce the records.”

This isn’t the sort of power we should trust in any government’s hands; given the current administration’s record, it’s even scarier.

Anchordammerung

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I haven’t posted much on the CBS Guard memos saga because it didn’t seem like there was much more to say. CBS seems to have had the essence of the story right, but allowed itself to get duped by some bad evidence. The White House evidently found it credible, too. The moment the documents hit the Net they were questioned and ultimately discredited. CBS compounded its error by failing to take its critics seriously and adopting a blustery, “we stand by our story” wagon-circling defense.

That’s pretty much it. On the one hand, no one seriously doubts that President Bush obtained his Guard posting through family influence, then used family influence again to bail out on the service he’d signed on for. (Today’s New York Times account puts this story together one more time.) On the other hand, CBS has provided the Bush campaign with a great gift of distraction.

I don’t view this saga as a demonstration of the power of the Internet’s fact-checking multitudes so much as a display of the network’s extended ineptitude. Everyone makes mistakes; professionalism lies not in perfection but in responsibility, responsiveness and openness. CBS’s “we know better” response was the opposite. Dan Rather and his colleagues have now stuck a fork in the tattered remnants of the blue-chip brand name they inherited from Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.

What really hurts, for CBS and the rest of the networks’ news operations, is that, at this late date in media history, trust is the only advantage the broadcast networks can claim. They no longer deliver the news faster than rivals, they certainly don’t deliver it in more depth or from more viewpoints or with more style. Their only remaining edge has been a sort of generic, fossilized authority. More people get their news from us than through any other channel, the broadcasters’ unspoken claim went. That makes us the arbiters of the news. And we take that responsibility seriously — you can count on us to get things right.

This claim was always problematic, of course, but it bore enough relationship to the truth, back in the days of Walter Cronkite, that when Cronkite turned against the Vietnam War in 1968, it actually meant something. Today’s network broadcasters simply glop together the mediasphere’s news judgments into boluses of headlines — and when they try to do original reporting, they slip on banana peels.

I don’t think CBS’s mishandling of the Guard memos story has much to do with left vs. right or Kerry vs. Bush; it’s about the passing of an ancien regime. The twilight of the anchors has been upon us for some time, but with the affair of the memos, the flames are now climbing up Black Rock.

In the end, it feels fitting that “60 Minutes’ ” vaunted TV news operation was taken in through its ignorance of the Selectric-to-software history of typography. The typed word — TV’s achilles’ heel!

Bonus links: Good reading on the subject from Reason’s Jesse Walker and, as always, from Jay Rosen.

Correction 9/21: It appears that, though the “Black Rock” building (a/k/a the CBS Building) is associated in the public mind with the network, it has not actually housed CBS for something like a decade.

Mission accomplished becomes mission impossible

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“Iraq’s once highly fragmented insurgent groups are increasingly cooperating to attack U.S. and Iraqi government targets, and steadily gaining control of more areas of the country.”

Defeatist spin from the slanted liberal media? Sorry; it’s the lead sentence of the lead story in today’s Wall Street Journal.