John McQuaid

Sorry for the light posting. It’s been a busy week, full of distractions.

I’ll just add a couple of things to the outpouring of commentary on Jon Stewart’s devastating interview with Jim Cramer. It was great television — entertaining, informative, bracing, and uncomfortable to watch all at the same time. Stewart is to be commended on his tight, unrelenting focus as well as his sense of humor: it’s very difficult to conduct a hostile, probing interview. And Cramer really had nothing to say – why did he even go on, a lamb to the slaughter? Oh yeah, ratings and money.

In a broader sense, you could almost see the political culture shifting – lurching, really – before your eyes. There is a great deal of anger out there right now, some of it manifesting on a political level, a lot of it still inchoate. Stewart crystallized a lot of things about the financial/economic meltdown – and those responsible for it – that many Americans are thinking and feeling: that there were a lot of shenanigans going on, and people getting very, very rich, but no real wealth being created.

Where is this going? Since the Reagan era, really, the rough political alignment of the business and middle classes has defined American politics. That alignment was undergirded by the idea that anybody could get rich and that the federal government was a kind of dead weight on the market system. Now, though, the whole business-middle class compact appears to have ended in disaster and betrayal. And a lot more people are going to be needing the government’s help. All of this is going to send shockwaves through the political system the likes of which we haven’t seen for decades.

Yesterday I twittered about Rick Hertzberg’s account of the strange political journey of Charles Krauthammer from liberal to neoconservative tribune. First, I was a little more judgmental than I usually like to be on Twitter, where it’s, er, hard to contextualize. So I then walked it back a little, saying Krauthammer was “a formidable thinker.” After each of these tweets, like clockwork, I lost several followers. Whatever you say about Krauthammer, he’s polarizing! But Hertzberg’s post raises some interesting questions. I was an intern at TNR in the 1980s when both of them were there. And it’s true: the pieces Krauthammer was doing back then were far more reflective and nuanced. These days, when he puts his mind to it he can still make an argument. (It’s often an odious one, such as his piece making the case for torture.) But more often it’s drive-by thuggery, as in his occasional “diagnoses” – scroll down to Gore post – of liberal political figures as mentally ill (Krauthammer has a degree in psychiatry).

What happened that drove him so deep into the neoconservative tank, and accepting of many, but not all, of its empirically unsupportable absurdities? Often intellectuals tell us about their ideological conversions, but as far as I know Krauthammer has never done so. Rick draws no conclusions. Andrew Sullivan (who graciously linked here yesterday) speculates it has something to do with the lure of the tank itself, with its clubbiness, its honors, group-think, etc.

There’s probably no single answer. Why did Cheney go nuts? But: obviously his chosen medium has something to do with it. A syndicated column is different from a piece in The New Republic. The incentives are to be both ideologically predictable and provocative. More important, the neocon temperament seems to suit Krauthammer’s bleak worldview – which seems to have only grown bleaker as the years have gone by, at the same time the movement was consolidating and then empowered by Bush. If you believe threats are everywhere and only force can effectively counter them, you are going to employ similarly blunt rhetorical instruments to advance your views, even if intellectual honesty is sometimes a casualty.

I’ve been an inconsistent viewer of 24 over its 7 seasons (there was that brief, ultimately disappointing “Heroes” phase) but I’m back now. The current season has been really good. Or rather, it’s been really … watchable. “Good” implies a certain level of artistic/dramatic consistency the show can never, ever reach due to its innate preposterousness. But it seems to work best when it acknowledges the very faint undercurrent of farce always present just beneath the noisy world-about-to end action. This is what worked so well in season 5, when the weaselly President Charles Logan and his wacky wife Martha managed to be crazy, unpredictable and kind of funny all at the same time. The same applies to the ever-present, socially-inept Chloe.

This season, the show has layered the earnest action and farce with something else – a straight-up advocacy of torture (at least in the “ticking time bomb” scenario, which is 100 percent of the show but in real life, exceedingly rare).

So last night the show went completely bonkers, featuring a) Jack Bauer torturing a guy – a traitorous aide to “Blaine Mayer,” the insufferably self-righteous senator who has been investigating Jack for torture – in the White House; followed immediately by b) a terrorist assault on the very same White House in which the president and Sen. Mayer are taken hostage, presumably to be rescued by Bauer.

Watching this, I was trying to figure out what the hell it meant, if anything. Obviously, Joel Surnow’s position is that torture is useful. But was the show saying the president should condone it? (She didn’t. Nor did that seem like a good option for her.) Or is it saying that only Jack Bauer – someone willing to cross any line to get the job done when necessary, then face the legal/moral consequences – should do it (implying those lines should remain in place)? That’s the impression you’re left with; Jack at one point urges good-guy Bill Buchanan to go start tasering the traitor again, and he won’t do it.

On the other hand, the show is reveling in its own transgressions. The torture-ee is a smarmy young asshole who obviously deserves it. So we’re rooting for it. And Jack’s doing it in the West Wing, maybe in Dick Cheney’s old office. It’s appalling. Sen. Mayer (a joke on writer Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side), is a terrible, nattering caricature of torture opponents. Yet his preening senatorial pompousness really is spot-on, so it’s hilarious to watch him get a comeuppance. So: appalling, hilarious, provocative, farcical: a solid hour’s entertainment – if you don’t take it too seriously. But not a particularly good guide for those devising Obama administration’s interrogation policies.