Salon
Monday, April 7, 2008
In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to “domestic military operations” within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.
Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:
“Yoo and torture” – 102
“Mukasey and 9/11″ — 73
“Yoo and Fourth Amendment” — 16
“Obama and bowling” — 1,043
“Obama and Wright” — More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
“Obama and patriotism” – 1,607
“Clinton and Lewinsky” — 1,079
And as Eric Boehlert documents, even Iraq — that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight — has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced above. “The Clintons are Rich!!!!” will undoubtedly soon be at the top of this heap within a matter of a day or two.
“Media critic” Howie Kurtz in the Washington Post today devoted pages of his column to Obama’s bowling and eating habits and how that shows he’s not a regular guy but an Arrogant Elitist, compiling an endless string of similar chatter about this from Karl Rove, Maureen Dowd, Walter Shapiro and Ann Althouse. Bloomberg’s Margaret Carlson devoted her whole column this week to arguing that, along with Wright, Obama’s bowling was his biggest mistake, a “real doozy.”
Obama’s bowling has provided almost a full week of programming on MSNBC. Gail Collins, in The New York Times, today observed that Obama went bowling “with disastrous consequences.” And, as always, they take their personality-based fixations from the Right, who have been promoting the Obama is an Arrogant, Exotic, Elitist Freak narrative for some time. In a typically cliched and slimy article, Time’s Joe Klein this week explored what the headline called Obama’s “Patriotism Problem,” where we learn that “this is a chronic disease among Democrats, who tend to talk more about what’s wrong with America than what’s right.” He trotted it all out — the bowling, the lapel pin, Obama’s angry, America-hating wife, “his Islamic-sounding name.”
Needless to say, these serious and accomplished political journalists are only focusing on these stupid and trivial matters because this is what the Regular Folk care about. They speak for the Regular People, and what the Regular People care about is not Iraq or the looming recession or health care or lobbyist control of our government or anything that would strain the brain of these reporters. What those nice little Regular Folk care about is whether Obama is Regular Folk just like them, whether he can bowl and wants to gorge himself with junk food.
Our nation’s coddled, insulated journalist class reaches these conclusions about what Regular Folk think using the most self-referential, self-absorbed thought process imaginable. The proof that the Regular People are interested in these things is that . . . the journalists themselves chatter about it endlessly. In Great American Hypocrites, I described the process as follows in the context of examining the three-week-long media obsession with John Edwards’ haircut (to the exclusion of a whole array of revelations about what the government was doing or planning to do) and how they justified that coverage:
Most certainly, the press will pretend to be above it all (“this is not something that we, the sophisticated political journalists, care about, of course”). But they yammer about Drudge-promoted gossip endlessly, and then insist that their own chattering is proof that it is an important story that people care about. And because they conclude that “people” (i.e., them) are concerned with the story, they keep chirping about it, which in turn fuels their belief that the story is important. It is an endless loop of self-referential narcissism — whatever they endlessly sputter is what “the people” care about, and therefore they must keep harping on it, because their chatter is proof of its importance.
Every day, it becomes more difficult to blame George Bush, Dick Cheney and comrades for their seven years (and counting) of crimes, corruption and destruction of our political values. Think about it this way: if you were a high government official and watched as — all in a couple of weeks time — it is revealed, right out in the open, that you suspended the Fourth Amendment, authorized torture, proclaimed yourself empowered to break the law, and sent the nation’s top law enforcement officer to lie blatantly about how and why the 9/11 attacks happened so that you could acquire still more unchecked spying power and get rid of lawsuits that would expose what you did, and the political press in this country basically ignored all of that and blathered on about Obama’s bowling score and how he eats chocolate, wouldn’t you also conclude that you could do anything you want, without limits, and know there will be no consequences? What would be the incentive to stop doing all of that?
UPDATE: One other point to note about all of this is that these fixations are as skewed as they are vapid. Barack Obama is an exotic elitist freak because he went to Harvard Law School and made $1 million from his book. Hillary Clinton can’t possibly have any connection to the Regular Folk because her husband, who grew up dirt poor, became quite wealthy after being President. John Kerry was completely removed from the concerns of the Regular People because his second wife was rich.
By contrast, George W. Bush was a down-home, salt-of-the-earth Man of the People despite being the grandson of a U.S. Senator, the son of a President (who greatly magnified his riches in his post-presidency), and the by-product of an extremely wealthy, coddled life. Ronald Reagan was pure Americana despite spending most of his adult life as a very wealthy Hollywood actor (and converting his post-presidency into far greater riches still). And John McCain is as Regular a Guy as it gets, even though he dumped his first wife (the mother of his three children) after she was disfigured and disabled by a near-fatal car accident so that he could marry his much younger, much prettier, and extremely wealthy heiress-mistress, whose family riches then launched his political career and sustained a life of luxury for almost three decades (that’s how McCain’s rustic “Sedona cabin” — i.e., his sprawling compound — came to be).
It would be bad enough if our political press were obsessed with such trivialities. The fact that they do so in such a Republican-leader-worshiping manner makes it only that much worse, particularly given that it’s this dynamic, more than anything else, that determines the outcome of our elections.
The Associated Press fails to reveal Mukasey’s favorite color
In the short time he’s been Attorney General, Michael Mukasey has become one of the most divisive political figures in the country. He’s been in the middle of numerous controversies, steadfastly defending even the most radical Bush policies — from torture to warrantless spying — and demonstrating himself to be as blindly loyal to the White House as his predecessor, Alberto Gonzales, and every bit as willing to subvert the powers of the DOJ for political ends.
Even political commentators who originally supported his nomination — including one of his own law partners — have changed their minds completely in a matter of a couple months, accusing him of “willful ignorance of instances of abuse” and “mischievous stonewalling to block proper Congressional investigation” and arguing that, under Mukasey, “the Justice Department has behaved and continues to behave not like a law enforcement agency, but like a white-collar criminal who has been caught in some very dirty dealings and is eager to obstruct the course of justice.”
In the midst of these swirling and growing scandals, The Associated Press yesterday distributed a lengthy profile of Mukasey, by AP writer Lara Jakes Jordan, that appeared, as most AP articles do, in numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and countless other papers. In it, we learn that Mukasey’s mom and dad taught him to keep his head down and work hard. He “grew up in a lower-middle-class Bronx family as the son of a Belarus immigrant.” As a child, he worked in a laundromat and as a messenger boy.
Also, his friends call him “Michael” more than “Mike.” He has a “dry and self-deprecating wit.” He loves to eat Ring Dings but is able to avoid gaining weight. One of his best friends is Rudy Giuliani, who explains that he’s “a very regular guy — no pretenses. He has a lot of humility for somebody who is as talented as he is.”
At first, Mukasey was sometimes sad about how hard his new job was, but now he’s come to understand and master it. Another one of his good friends is federal Judge Royce Lamberth, who reveals that Mukasey loves to parasail even though it can be quite a dangerous sport, but assures that he has more than enough skills to be an absolutely fantastic Attorney General.
Mukasey sacrificed a lucrative job at a large corporate law firm — where he made $2 million in 21 months — in order to serve the public and his country. But, sadly, even at the age of 66, he has to go back to work once he’s done serving because he has “creditors” to pay. Mukasey loves to spend time with his wife, Susan, and his grandchildren. The end.
No critics, criticism or controversies were mentioned or even referenced. The only people quoted about Mukasey’s performance were his two bestest friends — Rudy Giluiani and Reagan-appointee Judge Lamberth.
AP did reference the speech Mukasey gave last week where, in the Q-and-A session that followed, he spat out multiple lies about the 9/11 attacks, our surveillance laws and the pending lawsuits against the telecoms in order to demand warrantless surveillance powers and telecom amnesty. But this is what AP said about that episode:
In San Francisco the next day, he choked up mentioning the Sept. 11 attacks to illustrate what might happen if the government cannot eavesdrop on the phone calls of suspected terrorists. “You’ve got 3,000 people who went to work that day and didn’t come home to show for that,” he said, pausing first to compose himself. The federal courthouse where he served as chief judge at the time of the attacks is just blocks from ground zero in lower Manhattan.
Absolutely. That’s an excellent and very accurate description of what the current spying controversy is about — whether we should “eavesdrop on the phone calls of suspected terrorists.” Mukasey and the government think we should; Bush critics don’t want to eavesdrop on suspected terrorists; and that makes Mukasey really, really sad, because he knows first-hand the horrors of Terrorism. So much so that he almost cries when he thinks about those horrible people who, for some reason, want to stop him from eavesdropping on The Terrorists and who are trying to prevent him from protecting us all.
Finally, a psychoanalyst was quoted to explain how important it is that, after Alberto Gonazles, we have someone that we can really feel comfortable with — someone who is humble, honest, smart and a real family man. Someone just like Michael Mukasey, our new Attorney General whom we can both love and trust, someone who will protect us and humbly teach us about honor, just as he does with his own grandchildren, whom he loves so very much.
This is why the Founders bestowed constitutional primacy to a free press. Just think about what the Government might be able to get away with — the kind of creepy propaganda they would be able to disseminate — without our ornery watchdogs serving as a vigilant check on the behavior of high political officials.
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