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Crimson reminiscence

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I decided not to schlep 3000 miles to attend my 25th college reunion which, shockingly, is happening right now. I’m not a big fan of such events and life is just too busy. However, the students currently running the place where I spent nearly all my time as an undergraduate, the Harvard Crimson, asked me to write an op-ed for the big issue they put out every year at graduation — known as the Commencement issue, because that is the name for the day-on-which-diplomas-are-granted at Harvard (which always has to name things just a little bit differently from the rest of the universe).

So I wrote something. It’s online now — a brief musing about the passing of the typewriter era, the transformation of media over the past 25 years, and a little political deva vu:

The nuclear fears of my graduating class were never, thankfully, borne out. Instead we have lived to see arguments we thought were well-settled reopened, and lessons we thought were well-learned ignored, by leaders whose careers we thought were well-buried. (Didn’t Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld get voted out of the White House when we were in high school?)

The Crimson’s Web site is pretty impressive, and it has done a great job of digitizing vast quantities of its archives back to the 19th century.

Bush isn’t crazy enough to attack Iran — is he?

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I remember hearing, during the run-up to the Iraq war in 2002, the following argument: They can’t be serious about invading Iraq. We still have a war to finish and a nation to build in Afghanistan, and we still haven’t found bin Laden. Besides, they’re moving on two tracks, and diplomacy is sure to resolve the whole WMD mess before things get out of hand.

Of course, we also heard reports of military preparations and looming no-return deployment deadlines, we also accumulated evidence that the Bush administration was twisting intelligence for political ends, and we also witnessed a ferocious disinformation campaign that left 70 percent of Americans thinking that Saddam Hussein was response for the 9/11 attacks. So fears of war as fait accompli weren’t totally unfounded. And as we now know, the “Relax, they can’t be that crazy” contingent were, alas, the ones who were disconnected from reality. Colin Powell was used as a dupe, the American people were deceived, and we’re still paying the price.

Today, we’re experiencing a note-for-note replay of the events of 2002, with only a single-letter change, from “q” to “n.” Sanity suggests we can’t be headed down the same road with Iran that we barreled down with Iraq. That’s the don’t-worry message of Helene Cooper’s Sunday Times Week in Review piece — “It’s Just Like Iraq, Only Different”:

  Was the administration again using public diplomacy for political cover while preparing to use military force? This time, all signs say no.

But if you read the Cooper piece closely, you will indeed worry. The carelessness of its language and the slantedness of its assumptions suggest that some journalists still haven’t learned the lessons of Iraq. Cooper writes: “A connection between the Sept. 11 attacks and Saddam Hussein was never proved.” That’s like saying, “A connection between phlogiston and fire was never proved.” There never was any connection. Everyone in the Bush White House knew that by 2002. But the administration did a great job of blurring the truth to suit its political needs. And its propaganda is still paying dividends.

Then Cooper writes about “the botched intelligence on Iraq’s weapons program.” This parrots the administration line: “We got bad intelligence.” It’s an easy way to brush aside everything we’ve learned since 2002 about how Bush appointees cherry-picked the most extreme bits of intelligence, even when U.S. and allied experts reported they were likely untrustworthy or fraudulent.

The Bush team knew what answer they wanted to start a war, and they kept pushing until they got the intelligence that supported that answer. Calling that “botched intelligence” is a grotesque but convenient act of buck-passing. And Congress, which avidly investigated the intelligence failures surrounding Iraq and 9/11, has never completed its long-promised inquiry into the policy side of the failure.

Cooper concludes that, this time around, Bush is really serious about diplomacy: “If Iran gets closer to acquiring — or acquires — a bomb, policy makers could one day be tempted to think that a military clash is worth risking. But that point hasn’t been reached yet.”

No, it hasn’t. It hadn’t been reached with Iraq in summer of 2002, either, we were then told. But today the intelligence distortion about Iran is already beginning, with the axis of Cheney/Rumsfeld promoting the message that Iran is a terrorist state led by a Hitlerian madman — and even perhaps exaggerating the imminence of Iran’s ability to build nuclear weapons.

Of course I don’t want to see a nuclear-armed Iran. But I don’t trust the Bush administration to assess the threat or be honest about the choice of response. Its record is too nightmarishly bad.

So every time you hear someone say, “They couldn’t be that crazy,” pinch yourself, remind yourself how crazy they’ve been already, and remember how reliably they have turned to international crises as circle-the-wagon moments to boost flagging poll numbers.

We aren’t supposed to say this, but it seems obvious to me: The easiest way for President Bush to transform the political environment domestically and kick over a chess board that’s now stacked against him would be to invade another country. That’s something for everyone to worry about.

The 1870s and today — another history lesson

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Here’s an example of a useful history lesson: Charles R. Morris’s op-ed in today’s New York Times points to the 1870s as a parallel for today’s economy, which shows a lot of strength by various yardsticks and yet has left so many Americans feeling glum.

  If one counts only the size of houses and cars, and the numbers of electronic gadgets stuffed into rec rooms, Americans are probably better off than ever before. But as the 1870’s suggest, economic well-being doesn’t come just from piling up toys. An economy has psychological or, if you will, spiritual, dimensions. A conviction of fairness, a feeling of not being totally on one’s own, a sense of reasonable stability and predictability are all essential components of good economic performance. When they were missing in the 1870’s, in the midst of a boom, the populace was brought to the brink of revolt.

(My bold-facing.)

In defense of Al Gore’s history lesson

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The Wall Street Journal kept up a group blog during the D conference. Here’s how it characterized my post below about Gore’s talk:

  “I went into the hour-and-a-half session hoping that Gore would run in 2008, and by the end I was hoping he wouldn’t,” Mr. Rosenberg wrote, adding that after Mr. Gore’s talk, he sees more potential for him as a media player than a politico.

Thanks for the link and all, but this is just wrong, distorting a positive posting into a negative review. I said that Gore’s critique of the media was so powerful and delivered with such passion that I thought it might be even more important for him to dedicate himself to “changing the very structure of the media landscape” than merely to run for president. In other words, I’m not talking about Gore as a “media player” but rather as a media game-changer. I think anyone who read my admittedly lengthy post could see that.

While we’re on the subject: It was amazing to hear how people — among the crowd at D and the Journal people covering it (like Alan Murray, here), and even the conference hosts, Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher — responded to Gore’s discussion of the history of media. What I found a familiar but valuable review of how we got into the media-political mess we’re in today was, apparently, unbearable to many others.

Let’s put this in perspective: Gore wanted to explain the motivation behind Current.tv, and to put today’s Internet-shaped changes in a historical context stretching back to the middle ages. He talked about how literally cloistered monastery libraries were, and how Gutenberg changed all that, making books and ideas accessible to a much wider slice of society, setting the groundwork for the great public arguments of late-18th century America that shaped the founding of this nation. He pointed out that the rise of broadcast TV in the mid-20th century limited the political conversation to a stifling, one-way communication, and described how the Internet — and, in a related way, Current.tv — offers some hope of getting more people involved once more in public dialogue and self-expression.

In other words, Gore spent maybe five minutes of a 90-minute conversation reviewing a little history. It wasn’t unique or earth-shattering, but neither was it inordinately detailed or arcane; it wasn’t that different from what you might hear from bloggers like Jeff Jarvis or Dan Gillmor. Maybe the manner was a little professorial, but so what?

And this, apparently, was taxing. This was intolerably dull. To Alan Murray, a writer whose normal beat involves the scintillating fluctuation of interest rates and stock averages, this was cause for “stacking Zs.” This was more, it seems, than the brains of the D crowd — an unabashedly elite concentration of the corporate and media class — should be asked to bear.

I don’t get it. Maybe we’ve grown so accustomed to brain-dead leaders, anti-intellectualism in high places and the assiduous scouring of historical knowledge from the corridors of power that when a public figure dares to display some actual perspective and tries to communicate it, we respond with a barrage of sarcasm and cynicism. Mocking politicians who talk about history may give some of us a little jolt of solidarity with the people we imagine as “regular folk” — and that commodity may be precious at a conference where an unusually high percentage of attendees arrived by private jet. But it doesn’t help us improve the quality of national leadership.

I, for one, would have felt a lot better, for instance, if a president who tried to lead us into a war in Iraq had been able to talk, extemporaneously, for five or ten minutes about the history of past interventions in Iraq, and how, exactly, ours was going to be different. History isn’t dead knowledge — it’s the best foundation we have for peering into the future. Making fun of Gore, or any other leader who tries to bring history to bear on our problems today, isn’t just unfair; it’s head-in-the-sand dumb.

Gore for president? He should aim higher

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The most interesting aspect of hearing Al Gore talk tonight here at the D Conference is that I went into the hour-and-a-half session hoping that Gore would run in 2008, and by the end I was hoping he wouldn’t.

Oh, he’s definitely in good form — impassioned and funny. Kara Swisher kicked off by asking him “Are you not not running?” and he parried, “That completely dismantles my defenses. I guess I have to resort to full candor now.”

He talked, of course, about global warming. He also talked at length about Current.tv, the cable network he started that focuses on videos submitted by the public. He delivered a mini-lecture about “information ecology and the structure of the marketplace of ideas” from the medieval monastery through Gutenberg and on to Tom Paine and the Founding Fathers, and argued that the broadcast TV era was an aberration, a throwback to a one-way media universe in which “the individual could not join the conversation,” and then pointed to the Internet as the next turn of the wheel, back towards the individual.

Of course it would be a refreshing, even astonishing thing to elect a president who actually understood all this and was capable of explaining it to people.

But as Gore talked more and began answering questions from the crowd it became clear that his analysis of today’s political mediascape is even deeper and angrier. Someone asked him why we couldn’t just kill the canard that “there’s still scientific debate about global warming” by getting the science faculties at 100 universities to sign a letter expressing their consensus. With weary determination, Gore explained that there have been lots of letters, including one signed by dozens of Nobel Prize winners, but few in the room would have heard of them, because they didn’t get covered. They didn’t matter — because truth (or what we might call consensus reality) in the Bush era has ceased to be a product of rational discourse and instead come under the sway of political propaganda.

Gore went on: On the eve of the Iraq war, something like 70 percent of American voters believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the 9/11 attacks. And when Sen. Byrd delivered his jeremiad on the Senate floor at that time, few of his colleagues were even in the chamber. Why? Because, Gore declared, no one pays attention any more to what’s said on the floor of the Senate — except for each senator’s political opponents, who might find some quotation to use against the incumbent. Meanwhile, the senators were out at cocktail parties raising checks to build war chests so they could purchase TV commercials during the next election cycle. Our reality is then shaped not by the deliberations of our elected officials, but by these TV barrages — “short emotional messages that are repeated over and over again by those who have enough money to purchase the time.”

I found Gore’s acid-sharp anatomy of this devastation of the political landscape even more terrifying than his now-familiar arguments about the environment. Because it’s this legislative paralysis and political bankruptcy that has left us utterly unable to respond to the warming crisis. How can we make smart choices when reality itself is a target of political subversion? What’s the point in repeating that there is overwhelming scientific consensus about global warming when we remain stuck with a media that’s still willing to publish nonsense like today’s Holman Jenkins column in the Wall Street Journal?

Jenkins says “it wouldn’t be too surprising if tomorrow’s consensus were that CO2 is cooling, or neutral, or warming here and cooling there.” That, Gore said, is like saying, “Gravity may repel us from the earth’s surface; it may repel us in some places and hold us down in other places. It’s an open question.”

Gore argues that the challenge of responding to global warming is this generation’s version of the World War II generation’s challenge of defeating fascism — and that we can, as they did, earn moral authority and find our strength by meeting it. “What I have on my side here is reality,” he said. In our denial of the evidence on warming, “we have been living in a bubble of unreality.”

Gore’s fierce dedication to his quest, which he rightly defines as a moral and spiritual issue rather than a political one, left me thinking that a run for president on his part would be a waste. Gore should take his anger and his understanding and dedicate it not just to the specific, overwhelmingly important environmental cause he has chosen to champion, but also to changing the very structure of our media landscape so that it can support a “reality-based community” once more. He’ll need to do the latter, anyway, if he is to get anywhere with the former.

Gregg Easterbrook’s global warming alarm — too little, too late

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Gregg Easterbrook has long been a foot-dragger in the global warming debate. He’s positioned himself as an optimist and a pragmatist and a non-alarmist. In practice that has meant knocking the Kyoto Treaty and, as an ostensibly liberal or at least centrist global-warming skeptic, providing cover for anti-environmentalists — sort of like how Joe Lieberman’s support of the Iraq war has provided the Bush administration with a fig-leaf of bipartisanship.

So on one level we should applaud Easterbrook’s piece on yesterday’s New York Times op-ed page declaring that, yes, he is finally now persuaded that global warming really is a problem, that all the returns are finally in and the weight of scientific evidence now overwhelmingly points to human activities as a major factor in the climate change we’ve begun to witness. “Based on the data, I’m now switiching sides regarding global warming, from skeptic to convert,” he wrote.

I’m glad Easterbrook has chosen to declare his change of heart so publicly. But, you know, one thing we expect from pundits is that they be just a little bit ahead of the curve. Easterbrook’s 11th-hour conversion may provide some useful fodder in the propaganda battle against right-wing ostriches. In my book, it also discredits his further pronouncements on this topic.

His early call on global warming — don’t worry yet, things will probably work out okay, there’s still hope it’s all just statistical noise — was dead wrong. The people he derided as alarmists were right. So pardon me for suggesting that it is now time for Easterbrook to hang up his hat as an expert on this subject. I don’t want to hear his latest recommendations against Kyoto or his endorsement of carbon-trading schemes as the only solution to the problem. There are other people I trust a lot more, because they made the right call on this issue when it was a lot harder to make.

Pundits make risky guesses all the time. Those that guess right over time gain credibility; those who guess wrong ought to lose it. To express this in terms the market-loving Easterbrook can understand, it’s the risk/reward mechanism as applied to information. For example: Saying “Google is important!” today, or any time over the last several years, doesn’t win you any points. Those of us who said it back in 1998 — when the conventional wisdom of the bubble-dazzled industry was that search engines didn’t matter anymore — perhaps earned a little extra credibility when the prediction proved correct. Observers who accurately predicted the likely outcome of the invasion of Iraq — like Thomas Powers — are going to get a fuller hearing from me than those who cheered the ludicrous “cakewalk” talk and pooh-poohed the difficulty of rebuilding the nation post-Saddam.

So, as we struggle to figure out how to deal with global warming, I will continue to ask, “Why should I listen to Gregg Easterbrook?”, and place my bets on the observers who put their careers on the line to sound an early alarm — people like Bill McKibben, and, yes, Al Gore.

Send the Marines

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Tonight President Bush will announce his plans to deploy National Guard troops on the Mexican border to rein in illegal immigration. In times of political difficulty and sinking polls, Bush has always found troop deployments a tonic.

But I’m thinking he’s not going nearly far enough. Consider all the creative ways the Bush administration could pursue its goals with a little help from the uniformed services:

  • For seniors who have been tardy about signing up for a Medicare drug plan, what could be more effective than a GI at the door? It may be that, as Bush has put it, “Deadlines help people understand there’s finality” — but gun barrels are even more persuasive.
  • Schoolkids across the U.S. know that their future depends on how they perform on a growing array of tests that are the Bush-era education system’s hallmark. But if you really want kids to understand a test’s gravity, there’s nothing like the impassive stare of a sergeant at the front of the room.
  • Under the Bush administration the I.R.S.’s army of auditors has focused its efforts on making sure that low-income filers claiming the earned income tax credit aren’t cheating. Surely this enforcement effort would prove even more effective with a little military muscle behind it. Suspect taxpayers could have their returns reviewed in the belly of an Abrams tank. If that’s not sufficient, Vice President Cheney could approve a Geneva Conventions waiver.
  • The Bush team has faced what it views as outrageous delays in obtaining Senate approval for its most conservative judicial nominees. Well, why wait for senators to achieve consensus or compromise? Why not just deploy a Marine battalion to Capitol Hill?
  • Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald may or may not be on the verge of indicting Karl Rove. But isn’t this endless Plamegate investigation distracting the government from its important national security mission? To end this threat, all it would take is a 3 a.m. visit from a Special Forces team.

Really, once you get going down the road of martial law, the possibilities are endless.

BONUS LINK: Tom Lehrer’s Send the Marines

Pentagon-run intelligence will be unaccountable

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The last time the world of U.S. intelligence was in this much disarray, it was the mid-1970s, and the American public was aghast at the sheer volume of revelations of dirty tricks, domestic surveillance and abuse of power that culminated in the nightmare crimes of the Nixon administration. In the wake of those scandals, Congress roused itself from its torpor and created a structure for oversight of intelligence. Never again would an arrogant, secretive administration be able to smuggle political reprisals and personal vendettas under a catchall “national security” umbrella.

Whoops. So 30 years later we have a parallel crisis — only this time around, the need for an effectively functioning national intelligence operation is only greater, given 9/11 and the continued possibility of attacks on U.S. citizens, yet the executive and legislative will to resolve the problem is even weaker.

We know that the CIA gave the Bush administration reasonably good intelligence pre-9/11 that it ignored. We know that in the run-up to the Iraq war the administration cherry-picked reports that supported its war plans and ignored those that didn’t. We know that in the wake of 9/11 and the Iraq disaster the administration found it convenient to scapegoat the CIA. And we know that, in the absence of effective congressional oversight — as Republican committee chairmen have hobbled any serious investigations into the political and policy-making roots of these intelligence failures — the Bush administration has so far gotten away with this approach.

The fact that — after the launching of a “global war on terror” — the central pillar of American intelligence has been gutted through a bureaucratic civil war, a personnel implosion and now a bribery scandal hasn’t seemed to worry the Bush team. They never liked a CIA that failed to tell them what they wanted to hear, and they’re happy to let it rot so they can erect a different intelligence structure more compliant to their political agenda.

That seems to be the primary motivation behind the decision by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld to place the U.S. military in the CIA’s former role of managing human intelligence and covert operations. Most coverage of this controversy, and the question of the appropriateness of appointing a military officer to run the CIA, has painted the story as a power struggle, in which Rumsfeld is seeking to expand his authority at the expense of the civilian CIA. That may well be the case.

But it seems to me there’s a separate aspect that most of what I’m reading has ignored. Military intelligence isn’t subject to the CIA oversights Congress mandated in the 1970s. Sure, that oversight has been ineffectual in a one-party government. But now the possibility looms of Democrats winning control of one or both houses in November. So the transfer of intelligence operations to the Pentagon looks like a tactical hatch-battening for a Bush administration that’s going to be increasingly desperate about hiding the extent of its extra-constitutional behavior.

MORE from Sidney Blumenthal. Thomas Powers’ perspective here in a New York Times op-ed, as always, is invaluable:

  What finally humbled and gutted the C.I.A. after decades of Washington bureaucratic infighting was a loss of support where it counted most: the refusal of the Bush White House to accept responsibility for the two great “intelligence failures” that prompted Congress to reorganize our services…. President Bush might have accepted responsibility for these two failures. He might have followed the example of President John F. Kennedy, who took the blame for the disastrous C.I.A. attempt to put a rebel army ashore in Cuba in 1961. Instead, the administration hid the existence of the pre-9/11 warnings for as long as possible and continued to insist for many months after the Iraq war that Saddam Hussein’s illegal weapons might still turn up, and it has blocked any official investigation of its role in exaggerating the slender intelligence that existed.

Colbert’s critics should put away their laugh meters

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Today the agenda for discussing Colbert at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner is, “Was he, or wasn’t he, funny?”

As any performer knows, humor is intensely subjective; it is brittle, circumstantial; it depends on the moment, what came before, who’s in the room, how much they drank. I wasn’t there in that banquet room. It seems that Antonin Scalia found Colbert’s jokes hilarious; President Bush, along with much of the crowd, apparently did not. Viewing the video after the fact, I happened to find much of it funny. So have millions of downloaders and Bittorrent-ers and Youtube-sters.

But none of that really matters. Evaluating this event on laugh-meter scores is absurd — it’s just one more way of marginalizing and dismissing what actually happened that night. Just for a moment, Colbert brought a heavily sheltered President Bush face to face with the outrage and revulsion that large swathes of the American public feel for him and what he has done to our country. He did so at an event in which a certain level of jovial kidding is sanctioned, but he stepped far beyond. His caricature of a right-wing media toady relied on irony, and irony rarely elicits belly laughs, but at its best, it provokes doubt and incites questions. The ultimate goal of Colbert’s routine was not to make you laugh but to make you think; it aimed not to tickle but to puncture.

In that sense, those observers who have criticized Colbert for being rude to the president are absolutely right. As I wrote yesterday, the performance was a deliberate act of lese majeste. That means it was meant to pop the balloon of protective ritual around Bush and let reality in, so we can see him — along with those in the press who have been complicit with him — for what he is.

Inside the Beltway, humor is supposed to be disarming, “humanizing.” Ever since Richard Nixon appeared on “Laugh-in” and said “Sock it to me!,” suggesting that he was not quite the conservative gorgon that he seemed to be, politicians have wanted to use comedy as a prop in their own campaigns of self-promotion. But that’s a late-20th-century degradation of comedy. There’s an older tradition — stretching back to the commedia dell’arte and beyond, into the medieval court and its “all-licensed” fools — in which the comic seeks the discomfiture of the powerful.

Colbert’s act had less in common with cable-channel comedy shows than with the work of Dario Fo, the Italian iconoclast who specializes in lese majeste (he likes to poke fun at the Pope). In this it resembled Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, but it was smarter than that propagandistic montage, and braver — delivered live, as it was, in the belly of the press-corps beast it was skewering.

So now we have the sad spectacle of the media desperately puffing air back into the popped balloon of the president’s dignity, pretending that nothing happened. The Bush impersonator was funnier! cry the pundits. Colbert bombed! Well, they can sneer all they want about whether or not he slayed ’em in D.C. Out here in the reality-based community that increasingly encompasses the American electorate, Colbert hit his targets. And they will never look quite the same.

Stephen Colbert and the Beltway disconnect

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Sunday and Monday the Net was abuzz with word of Stephen Colbert’s bracing, revelatory acts of lese majeste at the White House Correspondents’ dinner. Videos were posted. Emails were exchanged. Word spread. This was, or at least felt like, a watershed event, an emperor’s-new-clothes sort of moment.

That, apparently, is not how it seemed from inside the Beltway bubble. Colbert’s highwire irony apparently left the D.C. press corps cold. It didn’t even merit a mention in the New York Times coverage of the event. Colbert “fell flat because he ignored the cardinal rule of Washington humor: Make fun of yourself, not the other guy,” the Washington Post told us. It seemed that a silly routine that President Bush concocted with a Bush impersonator went over better with this crowd.

At Salon we’re well accustomed to this disconnection between the D.C. consensus and the view from beyond the Beltway. We felt it keenly during the mad Monica days, when capital insiders and mainstream media boffins puffed themselves up with outrage at an inconsequential presidential transgression while a significant portion of the rest of the nation sat there thinking, “Get over it — move on, and get back to work on the real problems we face.” Today, this dynamic is inverted: the outrage lies beyond the Beltway, where it’s almost impossible to believe how badly the nation has been run into the ground by the current administration and its allies.

In Washington, it seems, the emperor’s nudity remains a verboten topic, and our leader is to be feted with business-as-usual niceties. Meanwhile, beyond the corridors of power, the clothes vanished a long time ago, the folly is transparent, and we can’t believe the ugliness of the resulting spectacle. Our young people are dying in a war based on a lie, our national leadership reeks of corruption, our economic well-being has been sold out for a mess of tax-break pottage, the global environment is being wrecked for our children, the absence of a smart energy policy has left us powerless in the face of an oil shortage — and we are supposed to be nice?

Maybe the editors and reporters in that banquet room didn’t find Colbert funny. Watching his performance at home, I couldn’t stop laughing.

[Watch Colbert here (Videodog, Youtube 1, 2, 3); read Michael Scherer’s Salon piece; there’s a full transcript over at Kos.]

LATE ADD: Dave Johnson calls the absence of mainstream Colbert coverage an “intentional blackout.” Me, I don’t think it’s coordinated in quite that way; newsrooms independently reach the same (wrong) conclusion about what’s newsworthy — then see their choices reinforced by those of their colleagues at other outlets. Mostly I think they resented Colbert’s jabs at them — and cheered themselves up by telling themselves that he wasn’t really funny.