John McQuaid

This weekend the Washington Post reported that Abu Zubaida, the alleged al-Qaeda operations chief who was waterboarded and subjected to other forms of torture was neither a particularly important terrorist nor revealed much useful information. Interestingly, Ron Suskind had already reported this three years ago in his book The One Percent Doctrine. As Dan Froomkin notes, “mainstream news organizations, unable to match Suskind’s sources, largely refused to acknowledge his reporting.” And Bush continued to cite Abu Zubaida as an example that “enhanced interrogation techniques” work.

There’s an interesting lesson here on how history – both unfolding events and our collective interpretation of them – works. Suskind went out on a limb in his book – getting a source or sources to give an account completely at odds with the official line. But why did it take so long to confirm? Why were reporters for the Post, the New York Times, and other outlets unable to persuade their sources in the intelligence community to go on the record? There are a number of reasons for this: the threat of discovery and retaliation has lessened considerably; they want to discredit a dishonorable and defective technique; they want to be on the right side of history. In other words, the oddly pragmatic mixture of conscience and opportunism always at work in leaks of this nature.

Jonathan Rauch makes the argument that Barack Obama may be overreaching in some of the same ways that George W. Bush did post-9/11:

But new eras don’t always last as long as expected. When the 9/11 tide subsided, Bush found himself far out at sea. He spent the last few years of his presidency forlornly paddling back to shore. He never did re-establish his shattered credibility with the broad American center. In the end, ironically, he inspired unity in only one regard: Most of the country disliked him.

Another accidental polarizer, another crisis-exploiting presidency, another well-intentioned overreach — all, perhaps, to be followed by another public backlash as the promise of consensus is broken and the center once again proves elusive: These are the last things the country needs. The hardest part of being an ambitious president at a moment of crisis and opportunity is contriving not to overshoot. After 2002, Bush never rose to the challenge of moderation. Can Obama?

He’s of course right that historical moments often turn out to be less profound than first thought. It’s also logical to assume that Obama won’t succeed at everything he’s trying. But I think he exaggerates the symmetry between the post-9/11 political environment and today’s.

First, the potential for bipartisanship was much greater after 9/11. There are no events more unifying than terror attacks and war. And at the time, the Democratic Party was a) more cowed and b) far more reasonable than today’s Republicans. The Iraq War had bipartisan support. The conventional (and politically sensible) approach for a leader in the U.S. system would be to try to leverage that broad support to accomplish other things. Instead, Bush and Karl Rove decided to demonize the Democrats for short-term electoral advantage, which they imagined would be the foundation for a long-term GOP majority. It’s this obsession with electoral politics at the expense of policy and governance – not overreaching – that doomed the Bush presidency.

Today, there’s virtually no potential for broad bipartishanship. House Republicans are unified against Obama, Senate Republicans very nearly so. And in the midst of a giant crisis on which they might have an impact, they’ve disengaged themselves from any meaningful involvement in the economic policy debate. The Democrats ca. 2001-2003 were hardly geniuses, but the party at least openly wrestled with the issues of terrorism and war. Today’s GOP is in full flight from reality. To put it another way: the Democrats who opposed the Iraq War were largely vindicated by events – and at the time, anyone could see there was a not-insignificant chance it would turn out that way. How likely is it that we’ll look back on our current mess in five years and say “John Boehner was right. If only we’d frozen federal spending, we’d be much better off”?

The result is that Obama now has a monopoly on pragmatism. In a crisis demanding government action, that makes him far more likely than Bush to be politically successful.

I finally saw Watchmen, which is really good, though falls short of great. (Great: the setup sequence near the beginning, with its evocative diorama-style tableaux; Rorschach. Good: Dr. Manhattan, Nite Owl, the Comedian. Bad: Silk Spectre II, Ozymandias, over-the-top sadism and gore. Ridiculous, yet somehow aware of its own ridiculousness: the “Hallelujah” sex scene.)

The sadism and gore were especially jarring, going well beyond what is depicted in the book, which is R-rated to begin with. Limbs are sawed off, bones are broken in two, a criminal’s head cleaved nearly in two, all onscreen. This has nothing to do with the themes of the book or the movie – it’s just what’s expected today in an action film pitched to a mass audience of teens and adults, especially one with pretensions of realism. And not just realism: graphic violence is supposed to convey authenticity. Except it’s not authentic at all. It’s the bastard descendant of films like Bonnie and Clyde and Taxi Driver (in which graphic violence served the plot/themes), filtered through a couple dozen generations of studio execs, the Die Hard movies, CSI’s autopsies, and the “torture porn” genre. There’s some evidence that torture porn has finally jumped the shark, but Watchmen still seems to be participating in a perverse, can-you-top-this race for catharsis via onscreen violence and vengeance, up to and including vivisection.

This undermines the film. In the book and onscreen, Rorschach (who’s responsible for most, but not all, of the gore) takes no pleasure in what he does. He is utterly joyless. He cares only about carrying out his own idea of justice. He operates via both cold logic and bottomless rage. The degree to which he’s in control, or a twisted agent of his own rage and violent impulses, is ambiguous – one reason he’s a great character. But by presenting the gore in glorious slo-mo onscreen, in a movie that’s obviously a fantasy, Zack Snyder is giving us explicit permission to revel in it in a way Rorschach never does. Splattering blood! Revenge! Ew! This takes you out of the complexity of the story and dumps you into Saw IV. (Of course, in the book Rorschach sets up a Saw-like scenario. But no actual sawing is depicted.)

One grace note: I’d never noticed the echo of World War II in the plot. The antagonist is a German-American megalomaniac (Adrian Veidt). The protagonists are all – apparently – of Jewish and/or Eastern European extraction (Dan Dreiberg, Laurie Juspeczyk,  Walter Kovacs, Jon Osterman – “Osterman” could be Swedish, but Pa Osterman is an ethnic watch repairman in 1940s-era New York City, so the name is more likely German-Jewish.) The one non-ethnic costumed adventurer, Edward Blake, is played for a sap and killed, setting the plot in motion. The megalomaniac “wins” by killing millions of innocents.

When defenders of the traditional newspaper say “bloggers can’t replace journalists!” they overlook the fact that in Hollywood they already have. I don’t know much about the entertainment industry, but I know a lot more than I did a year ago thanks to Nikki Finke, whose Deadline Hollywood Daily blog is a fascinating window into that subculture.

Obviously, a one-person operation can’t cover the entire entertainment industry. But Finke has still managed to turn her site into a major information node. What’s interesting in the future of news debate is that Finke is thriving while the trade publications she competes with – Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, the LA Times – are in deep trouble. Tellingly, the two trades are subscription-only publications, with swaths of their websites behind pay walls. So as one model erodes, another is filling the void, and even having an impact on how business is done. (Another entertainment site, Sharon Waxman’s The Wrap, recently debuted.) Newspapers’ claim to uniqueness stemmed partly from the breadth of their coverage – local news, business, sports packaged together. Niche publications are saddled with a business model based on newsprint, display ads, and, sometimes, pricey subscriptions. In a clubby, information-driven field like entertainment, they are particularly vulnerable to competition from well-sourced upstarts, whether independent journalists or experts who blog.

And the legacy media doesn’t like this one bit. Variety talked with Finke about buying her site. When the talks broke down, they published a belittling piece about her and other Hollywood bloggers.

The finale of Battlestar Galactica is proving to be quite polarizing, and I have to agree with the critics that the whole “God did it” explanation for various elements of narrative was criminally weak. [Spoilers follow.] Ron Moore and company threw up their hands and said, “we don’t give a damn about the plot making sense – we care about other things.” Okay. But this led to several really stupid developments. Most notably, Starbuck turned into into a Jesus figure, or an embodiment of karma or destiny (or something), who simply evanesces right out of her final scene. Absurd. Even if this was a sincere attempt to wrestle with the notion of fate or the hand of God in human events, it was crude and arbitrary.

That said, I liked the finale. However annoying or self-indulgent it was in spots, it was gripping TV, as always. And you can’t fault it for lacking audacity. As Todd VanDerWerff of the House Next Door noted, last week Lost had a title card that said “Thirty Years Earlier” that sort of made you appreciatively say, “whoa.” BSG took that and multiplied it by 5,000 with its “150,000 Years Later” ending. The high concept of the conclusion – that the remnants of humanity arrive on our earth in prehistoric times, give up their technology, go native, and somehow meld or subsume their own culture into that of our ancient ancestors – is clever and thought-provoking. Some have read it as a declamation against technology itself, as in: robots are evil, or “technology creates the cycle of violence” that the characters wrestled with for four years. But after years cooped up in space freighters eating algae and being pursued by vengeful robots, the choice to live off that impossibly verdant land didn’t seem all that radical.

What does seem radical wasn’t giving up faster-than-light travel or microwave ovens, but the other achievements of culture. Though you have to assume most of the cultural legacy of the 12 colonies – the museums, libraries, great art – was destroyed by the Cylons, presumably a good deal of it is preserved – some in the books on Adama’s shelves, some just in people’s heads. But then those 39,000 people are scattered around the planet, making cultural preservation all but impossible. It’s implied that the colonials then impart language and culture to the natives, and that its imprint thus lives on in the human collective unconscious. But if you’re trying to survive on a new planet and making sure your descendants know who they are and where they came from, that seems like a pretty abstract goal by comparison.

It’s also a bit strange given the themes the show has wrestled with over its 80-plus episodes – the virtues and imperfections of democracy, the impulse to violence, the efficacy of suicide bombing – which made the fate of post-Fall human society a fascinating, often appalling experiment in political philosophy. (Lost has all the characters named for political philosophers, but BSG actually put their theories to the test.) “Evolved” political/social institutions – the law, for instance – exist to restrain violence and render justice. But if the colonials just drop all their institutional baggage along with the technology, as seems to be the plan, what happens?

There’s also an obvious reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The colonials are like the black monoliths – they bring the seed of culture to the pre-humans. But in 2001, culture, in the form of tools (that awesome jump-cut!) leads inevitably to murder. The colonials, having given up high technology and having lived through a purging cycle of violence, choose to blend in rather than dominate the planet. Which, I guess, buys humanity a good 150,000 years.

Katha Pollitt is wrong-headed on the composition of the columnist lineup at the New York Times:

So who would I like to see in the Kristol slot? Actually, Kristol. I was livid when they gave him the job, but he was perfect: a dull, complacent apparatchik who set forth the Bush line in all its fact-free glory. His columns were like press releases–you could hardly remember them two minutes after reading them. But his presence on the page reminded readers that David Brooks is not really what Republicanism is all about. Frankly, though, I don’t see why there must be two conservatives on the page. Does the Wall Street Journal, the Times‘s national competition, have two liberals? That the Times, the closest thing we have to a liberal paper, cedes so much turf to the opposition, as progressive bloggers applaud, shows the truth of Robert Frost’s quip that a liberal is someone so open-minded he won’t take his own side in an argument.

I agree with Pollitt that Ross Douthat has some eccentric positions, some of them based on faith at the expense of logic. But he’s about 100 times more interesting than Bill Kristol, and being interesting is what column writing is all about. And one virtue of liberalism – one that modern conservatism seems to have lost, to its detriment – is that it does hear and weigh what the other side is saying, and engage it, and sometimes borrow or co-opt it. You don’t win the argument by showcasing the other side’s stupidity (though it sometimes helps, obviously!). If the Times editorial page were to become like the Wall Street Journal’s (and, let’s face it, the masthead editorials themselves are already just as predictable) it wouldn’t help the cause of liberalism a whit. It would only confirm the lame-brained “fair and balanced” rationale behind Fox News and the Conservopedia, the notion that the only way to make sense of the world is to ideologically bifurcate it. Via The American Scene.

E.J. Dionne comes out today and says yes, populism works!

The sound you are hearing in response to the AIG payoffs — excuse me, bonuses — is the rancorous noise of their arrogance crashing to earth.

Yet there is much hand-wringing that this populist fury is terribly perilous, that the highfliers who could not control their avaricious urges have skills essential to repairing the damage they caused in the first place.

Beware populism, we are told. Honor those AIG contracts. Forget about any moral reckoning and just fix the economy.

This view is wrong on almost every level, especially about populism.

Huey Long, 1935

Dionne is referring in part to some of his own Post colleagues, liberals who regard the populist outrage against AIG with disdain. And he’s right that their argument – that Congress and the Obama administration should swallow their outrage, forget the bonuses and move on because “the law’s the law” – does indeed seem not only politically unwise, but far from the realist, pragmatic course they think it is. Politics isn’t just about making bureaucratic gears mesh, delivering services, and the like. Political leadership is about justice, equity, morality.

In America, capitalism has been effectively divorced from either concept for the past generation because, well, it was a huge cash cow and thus ideologically unassailable. But as Dionne points out, that masked a lot of problems, both practical ones and political ones. Today’s outrage isn’t just about some bonuses (a pittance in the overall scheme of what’s going on) but an expression of anger and frustration at the ridiculousnessness of this business as usual approach. And hence, entirely legitimate as a political and policy issue. The idea that the law is the law and the bonuses are untouchable is absurd. The “law” under fire in this case isn’t the provisions of contracts (which are, of course, almost always conditional and negotiable one way or another). It’s the ridiculous system of compensation that has enriched the financial sector beyond anyone’s wildest imagination and put us all in the ditch.

Populism can be ridiculous, an appeal to emotion to move votes (Joe the Plumber, or the technocratic Al Gore’s 2000 stump appeal, “the people vs. the powerful”). Now, though, it can be an effective fuel for reform. However, it doesn’t look like the Obama administration, which clearly regards the issue as a headache and distraction, intends to exploit it as such, which seems a misreading of the public mood.

During his failed – but seminal – 1976 run for president, Ronald Reagan popularized the idea of the “welfare queen”: a Chicago inner-city resident living it up by defrauding the government’s poverty programs. “She has fifteen names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands,” he declared in one speech. “And she is collecting Social Security on her cards. She’s got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names.”

Reagan’s welfare queen was an ugly and not-very-coded racist symbol, and as presented, a gross exaggeration of the actual problem (the budgetary impact of welfare fraud was quite small). But it still resonated among a public that had grown skeptical the federal government’s long reach. There was a lot of social dysfunction in America’s cities, and the nation was effectively subsidizing it. Eventually, under Bill Clinton, welfare was overhauled: time limits and work requirements were imposed. The welfare rolls shrank and the issue faded (even if poverty did not).

But it’s still hard to underestimate the damage that Reagan’s potent political symbolism did to the Democratic Party, which only now, more than 30 years later, seems to have recovered from it. Reagan and the then-resurgent Republican Party used welfare as a cudgel to destroy the Democratic governing majority, which then depended on an uneasy alignment between African Americans and culturally conservative middle- and lower class white voters. Suddenly, the interests of these two groups were placed at loggerheads. “Reagan Democrats” in the beleaguered industrial Midwest abandoned the party of their parents. And the South, once a Democratic redoubt, went almost completely Republican in a generation.

AIG’s credit default-swap writers and executives are today’s version of Reagan’s welfare queen: a symbol of an era’s bad bets. And, unlike welfare, which was a small program that became a proxy for a lot of brewing social resentments, AIG’s transgressions are having significant impacts on the budget and economy. Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the principal federal welfare program, cost about $25 billion per year, and whatever its flaws, addressed an endemic problem. The taxpayers are already on the hook for $170 billion for AIG, whose excesses arguably didn’t have to happen. Moreover, people scamming the welfare system were often caught and prosecuted. AIG executives’ scam is written into their contracts.

I’m not a big fan of populism, whether it’s the cultural variety favored by Republicans or the economic outrage Democrats prefer. But the AIG bonuses, and the unapologetic attitude of the company’s executives, are indisputable outrages. No one who has a hand in plunging the world economy into a horrendous tailspin should then be handsomely rewarded by the U.S. government for his trouble. Obama’s technocratic approach to governing is refreshing after the policy-poor Bush years. But his and his aides’ apparent, un-Reagan-like diffidence toward AIG is baffling. This is one of those times when we need a president to be a politician first, one who’s willing to inconvenience the technocrats for the greater principles at stake.

Obama may be fumbling, but it’s the GOP that will suffer long-term damage here. Republicans may protest they have no interest in helping AIG or bailing out the banks. Just as welfare divided the Democrats, corporate welfare for failed banks and their insurers threatens to sunder the already-fragmenting Republican coalition. It’s a basic rule of small-d democratic politics: Whether you’re an insurance executive or a welfare recipient, if people who are struggling economically believe you are absconding with their hard-earned tax dollars, watch out.

The political genius of Reagan-era Republicanism was to align the interests of the business class with those of the working class, leaving the Democrats to tend to the needs of the poor and economically marginal, whose very lack of success was a political negative. The GOP’s basic principles – that government is the problem, never the solution, that regulatory oversight kills growth, that the rich, as the engine of that growth, should be endlessly rewarded – today read like a list of bullet points for “how to destroy prosperity.” And the ranks of the economically marginal – of people who now have little reason to believe they will get rich and every reason to hope for government aid – are growing.

Printing press ca. 1811

Human beings are afflicted with a certain bias about the world: we don’t expect it to change, at least not radically. When things are going well, this bias is amplified. Blessed with prosperity and stability in America over the past couple of generations, we’ve trained ourselves to expect a certain level of technological progress. We expect that living standards will gradually rise over time. We don’t expect revolutions. (And even when they occur in the political world, things often settle back down to a semblance of how they were before. Meet the new boss, et al.)

But complete revolutionary transformations do occur with some regularity in history. And when they do, we’re gobsmacked.

Old structures – the way people organize their lives – are swept away. Something very different emerges and consolidates over decades or centuries. Think: the invention of agriculture. The Industrial Revolution. The printing press. It’s this final example that Clay Shirky focuses on in this cogent essay. The invention of the printing press and the emergence of printed books altered reading habits, literacy, politics, religion, the whole shape of society. They were used to things being one way. That way was dissolving around them. The “new way” had not yet taken shape. So people couldn’t really comprehend what was going on:

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

And so it is today. When someone demands to know how we are going to replace newspapers, they are really demanding to be told that we are not living through a revolution. They are demanding to be told that old systems won’t break before new systems are in place. They are demanding to be told that ancient social bargains aren’t in peril, that core institutions will be spared, that new methods of spreading information will improve previous practice rather than upending it. They are demanding to be lied to.

Indeed, “what’s the new business model for news?” is almost always a conversation stopper, not a starter. It’s usually meant as a bitter rejoinder from old-school journalists to innovators and dreamers touting unproven, and probably not profitable, news technologies. But let’s face it: “unproven and probably not profitable” is far better than “disastrously unworkable,” which is the state of the newspaper model today. As Shirky notes, nobody knows what’s going to “work” ultimately. We are not going to “replace newspapers.” Instead, we’re going to keep doing journalism using the increasingly powerful, proliferating tools at our disposal and see what happens. That’s all we can do. And we live in a vital, freewheeling democracy. Something will happen.

I also like the ecosystem metaphor Steven Johnson employs in this SXSW speech (indeed, I’ve used something similar myself). Newspapers used to be culturally important because they filled an information void. Now that void has been filled to overflowing. It is true that traditional, dead-tree investigative and foreign reporting are both needed and uniquely difficult to replace. But nothing so far has stopped the relentless effusion of rich content in (as Johnson notes) technology and politics. That trend is likely to spread and unlikely to simply, or ever, stop.

Trying to understand the mindset behind this piece, which argues that because Barack Obama makes references to inheriting a giant mess, he is not keeping his promise to eschew partisanship. Here is a representative quote:

“What the administration is involved in now is the politics of attribution,” said Lawrence R. Jacobs, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota. “Each week that goes by with falling job numbers and Republican criticism of the administration’s flaws means falling approval ratings. What’s the antidote? That the guilty party is George Bush.”

“The trick,” Jacobs said, “is how do you shift blame to George Bush and retain any credibility on the idea that you are looking past partisan warfare? This looks like a doubling down on a very partisan approach.”

Every president does what he can to take credit for good stuff and place blame on others for bad stuff, and there’s some of that going on here. An important distinction, though, is that Obama is stating the obvious. He did inherit a giant mess. His statements, contrary to the implication of the story, seem pretty anodyne. They are also usually carefully worded to avoid blaming Bush specifically, which is also in keeping with reality – the global financial meltdown isn’t really Bush’s fault, but Obama did inherit it. Instead of acknowledging this mundane set of facts (which would destroy the premise of the story) the reporter creates a kind of rhetorical Chinese box from which Obama cannot escape: if he wants to be bipartisan, he will not say anything about how the country arrived in its current state. He must only look forward, never back. He must take full responsibility, explicitly or implicitly, for everything that has gone wrong. (Of course, if he did do those things, his opponents would simply use a different line of attack.)

The media already cover campaigns as games of arbitrary, shifting perceptions. Treating the presidency itself that way tells us almost nothing about what’s actually going on – and there is quite a lot happening – either inside the White House or within the Republican Party.