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The art of finger-pointing

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So President Bush will now back the creation of a commission to investigate intelligence failures preceding the Iraq war. But look closely and you’ll find that the administration’s game-plan is an astonishingly Machiavellian exercise.

Before the war, Bush’s Iraq hawks, dissatisfied with the weasely intel they were receiving suggesting that Saddam Hussein was not an imminent threat, browbeat the CIA and zeroed in on a passel of dubious reports that indicated the dictator in fact possessed weapons of mass destruction. All indications suggest that the intelligence agency’s best people looked on in horror as their procedures for vetting and verifying information were ignored by the war-or-bust crowd, and impossible-to-verify accounts were touted as gospel. (Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker pieces on “stovepiping” provide the most thorough background here.)

With the WMD having failed to turn up, Bush and his men now have the gall to turn on the CIA and say, “Well, maybe we do have a problem here. We were misled by bad intelligence before the war. Better start an investigation into why our intelligence services screwed up so badly.”

If U.S. intelligence is broken, it’s clear that the Bush White House broke it. Any investigation that fails to have a full mandate to explore not only the failure to collect intelligence properly at the C.I.A., but the failure to make appropriate use of it at the White House, is castrated from the starting line.

For more good detail, Josh Marshall is blogging up a storm.

Late to the party. What are we celebrating again?

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I’ve read a bit of the vast outpouring of posts in the blogosphere about Orkut, Google’s new (and “still in beta”) social-networking software system. I’d never taken the dive into Friendster, Tribe or any of the other vaguely or not-so-vaguely similar systems out there. So when I received an invitation from a long-time online correspondent to join Orkut and take a look, I thought, hey, why not? See what all the fuss is about.

So I signed up and I’m still trying to figure out what all the fuss is about.

Orkut signs you up, lets you post as little or as much info about yourself as you feel comfortable providing, and then opens the door for you to cross-link yourself with anyone else on its network who you might consider a friend, assuming the feeling is reciprocated. The end result is a sort of six-degrees-of-separation chart, a digital map that should let you explore “who’s friends with my friends.”

As many observers have already pointed out (see Dave Weinberger’s critique here), this approach has its weaknesses and limitations. There’s a forced, binary choice in the “friend/not friend” classification, when in real life we all have a lot of “sort of” friends. The connections the service elucidates are really more typically acquaintances and not close friends, anyway.

The larger question for me is, why take the time? I’ve already got a pile of contacts in my address book for people who are genuine friends. This blog has a loose network of people it links to and people who link to it. Assuming one is not in the market specifically for dating and mating — which creates its own powerful motivations — then Orkut seems to exist pretty much as a self-referential proof-of-concept.

I think I’m supposed to be interested in it because social software is hot right now and people are generally aware that software which connects people is a Good Thing. But where Meetup has the specific purpose of coordinating real-time and real-space events, where blogs have the specific purpose of allowing individuals to publish news and ideas to the whole Net, where venerable online environments like The Well have long had the specific purpose of engendering group conversation, Orkut seems strictly omphaloskeptic: I just don’t see how it reaches outside the framework of the relationships it traces to accomplish anything once it makes those relationships explicit.

Maybe I just haven’t delved deep enough into the phenomenon. This reaction is based on one evening’s exploration of the service, so if I’m missing something — obvious or subtle — tell me, please!

Dean: More than a political sock-puppet

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It was inevitable and unavoidable that the Dean campaign, which came out of nowhere to wow the world with its Internet strategy, would, in the wake of its precipitous fall in the polls (and the emptying of its coffers), face being likened to a bankrupt dot-com.

The comparison isn’t entirely unreasonable. Dean raised a lot of hopes and inspired a lot of idealistic enthusiasm; his failure to carry Iowa or New Hampshire — like so many dot-com companies’ failure to deliver financial results — burst that bubble and led to the cascading problems his presidential bid now faces.

But the at least partial validity of this comparison should not be taken by Dean’s enemies as a cue to dance on the grave of his campaign. The collapse of the dot-com stock bubble was a disaster for many investors, but it never invalidated the fundamental accuracy of the insight that fueled it — that the Internet would spark powerful changes in the way the world does business. Those changes have proceeded apace, even as the dot-com era recedes into memory as a spasmodic folly: Online sales boom. Internet use eats away at network TV viewing. Broadband and wireless extend their reach. New possibilities for self-expression beckon. Many dot-coms flamed out — but the Internet is still reshaping the world.

Similarly, whatever happens now to the Dean campaign, it already achieved a great purpose — and no, I don’t mean that it taught a new generation of political operatives how to raise money online. Anyone could have done that. The real achievement of Dean’s movement was something different and more radical.

At a time when too much of the Democratic party, and too many of its candidates, lay supine before the travesty of President Bush’s policies, Dean used the Internet to punch a hole through the big-media blockade and get the true opposition message out: That Bush and his administration lied to America to start an unnecessary war, a war that has hurt rather then enhanced the nation’s security. While other candidates hedged their bets, Dean spoke the truth, and when the mainstream media tried to marginalize his voice, the Net allowed the breadth and depth of the support for his message to be felt. Today, every Democratic candidate, including frontrunner John Kerry, embraces this position: They are all Deaniacs now.

Internet enthusiasts had long theorized that the Net could help route around the broadcast media’s headlock on both the electoral process and the broader definition of the acceptable boundaries of political discourse; Dean and his supporters made it happen. Whether Dean’s campaign somehow manages a comeback or, more likely, fades in coming weeks is utterly irrelevant to this accomplishment.

Dean supporters, like dot-com true believers, can take solace in this: The horse they backed may lose the race, but thanks to their efforts, it’s a whole different race, on a transformed track.

Talking to the tax man about slavery

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First we had Grover Norquist insisting that if you’re opposed to repeal of the estate tax, you’re thinking like a Nazi. Now we have Paul Craig Roberts (former Reagan Treasury Department official) telling us that the slaves of the Old South had it easy compared with those of us living today under the savage whip of the Internal Revenue Service. Roberts’ argument is wacky enough to deserve extensive quotation:

  Compare an American taxpayer’s situation today with that of a 19th century American slave. Not all slaves worked on cotton plantations. Some with marketable skills were leased to businesses or released to labor markets, where they worked for money wages. Just like the wages of today’s taxpayer, a portion of the slave’s money wages was withheld. In those days the private owner, not the government, received the withheld portion of the slave’s wages.

Slaves in that situation were as free as today’s American taxpayer to choose their housing from the available stock, purchase their food and clothing, and entertain themselves.

In fact, they were freer than today’s American taxpayer. By hard work and thrift, they could save enough to purchase their freedom.

No American today can purchase his freedom from the IRS.

Slaves could also run away. Today, Americans who run away are pursued to the far ends of the earth.

One’s first impulse is to drive a rhetorical truck through the many vast logical and historical lapses in Roberts’ thinking. But I’ll leave that to the reader (or to Eugene Volokh, who does a fine job), and simply marvel at the expansive chutzpah of today’s extremist right.

Let’s see: We’ve now heard taxation likened to Nazism and slavery; what other provocative and tasteless comparisons await us? Is the IRS commissioner more vicious than Charles Manson? Do you feel raped every April 15? Is the form 1040 more repugnant than child pornography?

Why so bitter?

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Economist Brad DeLong has been a consistent voice of reason as the insanity of Bush administration fiscal policy has mounted. Today he justifiably allows himself to get just a little less reasonable, summing things up in an impassioned, must-read post:

  Why do so many of us who worked so hard on economic policy for the Clinton administration, and who think of ourselves as mostly part of a sane and bipartisan center, find the Bush administration and its Republican congressional lapdogs so… disgusting, loathsome, contemptible? Why are we so bitter?

After introspection, the answer for me at least as clear. We worked very hard for years to repair the damage that Ronald Reagan and company had done to America’s fisc. We strained every nerve and muscle to find politically-possible and popularly-palatable ways to close the deficit, and put us in a position in which we can at least begin to think about the generational long-run problems of financing the retirement of the baby-boom generation and dealing with the rapidly-rising capabilities and costs of medicine. We saw a potential fiscal train wreck far off in the future, and didn’t ignore it, didn’t shrug our shoulders, didn’t assume that it would be someone else’s problem, but rolled up our sleeves and set to work.

Then the Bush people come in. And in two and a half years they trash the place. They trash the place deliberately. They trash the place casually. They trash the place gleefully. They undo our work for no reason at all–just for the hell of it.

Slate RSS-less?

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Is it possible that Slate has no RSS feed? I know Salon and Slate are always cast as competitors and all, and Words have been said in the past twixt them and us. But really, there’s lots of good stuff to read there. As I move more and more of my attention away from my bookmarks and to my RSS reader, though, I find that I’m just not keeping up with RSS-less sites.

It would seem awfully strange to me for Microsoft — a company that has said it is going to weave RSS through its next-generation operating system — not to provide this basic service for its flagship content property. But if Slate has a headline feed, boy, it’s well hidden! (Salon’s, which we should probably do a better job of promoting, and which still needs some tinkering, is here — caveat: If you’re not using an RSS reader that link will probably look like a bunch of jammed together text — and the War Room ’04 feed should be up by tomorrow.)

Maybe Robert Scoble has the answer — or can find one…

Nazis and Norquist

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The ad entries in MoveOn’s Bush in 30 Seconds contest that likened Bush to Hitler sparked a national campaign by the Republican party, evoking pained expressions of outrage and horror that anyone would dare liken the perpetrator of the Florida putsch to the perpetrator of the Beer Hall Putsch.

Meanwhile, the arch-conservative anti-tax lobbyist (and close ally of the RNC) Grover Norquist gleefully continues his absurd campaign arguing that opponents of the Bush estate-tax-repeal giveaway are motivated by the same thinking that motivated the Holocaust. The full account in the Forward is here. (Thanks to Dan Gillmor for the link.) Read it — it’s hilarious. To Norquist, it seems that anyone who believes in fair taxation is a socialist, and anyone who is a socialist might as well be labeled a national socialist (never mind that the Nazis rounded up the real socialists when they rounded up the Jews, the gypsies, the gays and everyone else they didn’t like).

Norquist’s philosophy is, “kill the taxes and you kill the government” — so why don’t we all shut up and stand aside so he and his allies can “starve the [government] beast” until it is small enough “that it could be drowned in a bathtub”? (These are all actual quotes.)

I don’t think Norquist, any more than Bush, is a Nazi. But I’ll tell you: the guy’s rhetoric suggests a seriously disturbed mind. You’d think the Secret Service might want to haul him in for making threats against the government. Unfortunately, in today’s Washington, he practically is the government.

Is there an audio doctor in the house?

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Some posters in the comments have raised questions about the video link I posted on Friday, suggesting that it was somehow doctored. I think they’re wrong.

I just compared an “official” video (this one, from the L.A. Times) to the amateur, “from the crowd” video, and there’s no sign of any difference betwen the two. It’s the same exact speech, viewed and heard from a different vantage point. Of course, from the second vantage, the picture looks different; the audio sounds different, too — such that Dean’s famous scream seemed like an almost inaudible coda, not a Yawp Heard Round the World. But there’s no difference in the text of what Dean says, contrary to what one comment suggests.

You want to argue that this audio has been tampered with to “underplay” the scream? Go ahead. You could just as easily argue that the “original” audio that Drudge linked to was tampered with to crank up the volume on the scream.

In fact, what all this most likely represents is the difference between the TV networks’ audio feed, direct from the mike onstage, and the in-the-room PA system. I’m going to assume that no one is doctoring anything here until someone can offer some actual evidence.

Can we, uh, move on now?

Dean Scream remixes

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This site, Deangoesnuts.com, from a Dean supporter, collects a plethora of Dean Scream remixes. That’s fun. Also interesting is the link it provides to this video, shot from the crowd’s perspective at the now infamous event. If you watch this, interestingly, the famous YEAAARGH is nearly inaudible, and certainly not the Yowl Heard Round the World.

Screaming media

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The media’s view of the American electoral process seems more and more built around the notion of the “defining moment” — those stop-motion, flash-bulb instants when a candidate’s true self is supposedly revealed, his real personality exposed. Given how much of political campaigns is pre-scripted and post-spun, our hunger for such epiphanies is understandable. Reagan’s smiling “There you go again.” Dukakis in the tank. And now, the Dean Scream.

But do defining moments really give us the key to understanding a candidate? Sometimes the moment the media etches into our consciousness — whether it’s papa Bush supposedly gawking at a supermarket scanner or Al Gore supposedly claiming to have invented the Internet — is simply inaccurate. Sometimes it’s a genuine revelation of a candidate’s inadequacy (like Gerald Ford’s 1976 statement that Poland and Rumania weren’t Soviet-dominated — how did that guy get into the White House, again?). Sometimes it’s a cruel and, in retrospect, unwarranted media pile-on (Ed Muskie’s tears). And sometimes it’s just plain trivial. Now that this process of defining the Defining Moment has become ritualized, instead of being a means of cutting through scripting and spinning, it has become a highly targeted object of the scripting and spinning.

It is, in other words, just as likely to be a part of the bullshit as to be an antidote to the bullshit.

So before the Dean Scream gets cryogenically frozen in the collective memory as the candidate’s defining moment, perhaps we have one last chance to put it in perspective. Garance Franke-Ruta of the American Prospect reports that the room was deafening and you had to scream to be heard. Dave Winer, at Dean’s New Hampshire HQ that night, tells of hearing similar battle-cries from the Dean volunteers there, and suggests that they have been part of the campaign’s “motivational culture.”

Whatever the story, it was a weird, funny moment, and now everyone knows about it, and the only important question is, does it really define the Dean campaign? Those who have maintained that Dean and his supporters are fueled by anger apparently found a potent symbol to support their argument; they don’t seem to care that Dean was actually smiling when he was shouting. But for the rest of us, this defining moment doesn’t define much of anything. It tells us nothing we didn’t already know about Dean and his campaign: The candidate has a close bond with his young supporters. Things got rowdy. Who cares?

If the Scream goes down in the history books as the moment that destroyed Dean’s candidacy, I have only one thing to say: YEEEAAARGH!