John McQuaid

Conor Friedersdorf has been tireless in pointing out the various hypocrises among conservatives in countenancing rhetoric that is either offensive or just plain stupid. Here he picks apart the odd relationship that many conservatives have with Glenn Beck, who has a lot of nominally conservative opinions, but is not an establishment or movement figure:

On reading Mr. Beck’s defenders, I can’t help but think that their judgment and integrity are being corroded by politics. The ideological battle between conservatives and liberals has become for them the most important struggle in American life — in order to win it, they are willing to defend and count as allies anyone in their insular world who advances the appropriate side in what they regard as a two-sided battle for the country’s soul. The most honest among them are explicit in arguing that their ends justify whatever rhetorical means it takes to achieve them. Even worse, they are using this total political warfare as a litmus test — temperament and political philosophy are insufficient to be a conservative in their minds, because they’ve redefined the term such that it demands loyalty to a political coalition and even the particular tactics it employs.

But shouldn’t this be a “shocked, shocked” kind of situation? People in politics, whether they’re politicians or activists like David Horowitz who are devoted to advancing a particular movement, are often ready to test the outer limits of sense and credibility to advance their goals. For them, the stakes are simply too high, perhaps in the ideological or the wheeling-and-dealing sense, and/or because their livelihoods, reputations, and self-images depend on the fight. And politics is all about ends – hashing out interests, apportioning tax and regulatory burdens and benefits. In some sense the ends are, frankly, all that there is.

This is why politicians and pundits (at least, the partisan ones, which is to say, most of them) lie all the time. That’s what they do, because they must, because it’s a proven method for getting what you want. Thus, Jonah Goldberg and David Horowitz supporting Glenn Beck’s craziness because it supposedly advances conservative interests in the long, twilight struggle against American liberalism strikes me as unremarkable. What else are they going to do?

What’s really striking about the conservative meltdown isn’t the cynicism of right-wing pundits. It’s the degree to which those pundits have become disengaged from the system. When we talk about ends and means in this case, the “means” are of course the American political system itself, which allows for a great deal of crazy behavior. But what if you no longer believe the system is working, that we’re reliving the Weimar Republic, that Obama is a traitor of some kind? These are the kinds of things we’re hearing from Beck and other precincts on the right. If you cynically support that, it’s not just cynicism but a kind of nihilism – you think on some level, the political system has failed and no longer accept its basic premises – i.e., that power changes hands constantly, that policies are crafted by give and take, that the president cannot impose a new system of government by fiat, that your opponents have some claim to legitimacy.

If you don’t believe those things, then you shouldn’t be in politics. Because there can be no politics – at least not in America – without them. If you do believe in them but pretend you don’t to rev up your “base,” well, that’s just as bad, and maybe worse. And on a practical level – again, the ultimate test in politics – this path leads nowhere. In a country where most people don’t pay close attention to politics, behaving like a bunch of nuts isn’t a ticket to electoral or policy success – that is, the normal way that you put your political ideas into effect. And the way political coalitions are built and power is accumulated in a democracy is by engaging the other side. If all you’re able to do is demonize it, you’ll never get anywhere.

American newsweeklies are at a dangerous pass, treading close to irrelevancy. Like newspapers, they’ve seen their ad revenue and readerships plummet. And even more than newspapers, they don’t know what they want to be. This uncertainty shapes everything they try to do, and makes for a strange reading experience. Once, you knew where they stood – and in the Henry Luce era that was sometimes appalling. Then, you didn’t really know where they stood, but the reporting was pretty solid. Now, you still don’t know where they stand, and the reporting is becoming irrelevant. The latest example of this is the current Time cover story on Glenn Beck, headlined Mad Man: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America? The writer is the talented David Von Drehle, formerly of the Miami Herald and Washington Post.

Sounds promising, doesn’t it? Yet on so many levels, this piece disappoints. It has justifiably been criticized because it immediately falls into a false equivalency trap from which it never escapes, attributing the estimates of 70,000 marchers at last weekend’s 9/12 protest to “liberal sources” and much higher, fantastical estimates of “perhaps as many as a million” to “conservative sources.” You see what he’s trying to do – people on the left and right choose to live in hermetic, separate realities constructed by biased media, etc. Except that the 70,000 estimate was almost certainly in the ballpark, and that number wasn’t ginned up by “liberal sources.” It’s nutty to juxtapose it with the “1 million” figure. Liberals and conservatives may live in separate realities, but one of those realities is, at the moment, way out of whack.

All summer long we’ve been treated to the spectacle of the American right seething about … what? The ratio of the federal deficit to GDP in 2013? Incipient communism? A presidential cult of personality? An American Gestapo? I still don’t know exactly, but a lot of people on the right have made it clear they really, really don’t like Barack Obama. There’s a lot of anxiety – economic, social, cultural – loosed on the land right now, and conservatives, so ill-served by the Bush administration, are effectively leaderless and ideologically adrift. Beck fills that void – with a lot of crazy nonsense, but he fills it. How can a story claim give us a thoughtful perspective on Beck without acknowledging that reality? Instead, the piece employs a triangulating, politically agnostic approach so that no one, including Beck, is offended.

With its breezy tone and above-it-all point of view, the piece lacks any discernible analytical bite. It’s all pretty silly, Von Drehle seems to be saying. Those paranoiac Americans on the left and right, they can’t get enough of this stuff, and they buy a lot of books and watch a lot of TV ads, so it’s big money for Beck. But why is Beck popular right now? Why is the right in such a tizzy, and where is this going? These are the core conclusions:

We’re in a flood stage, and who’s to blame? The answer is like the estimates of the size of the crowd in Washington: Whom do you trust? Either the corrupt, communist-loving traitors on the left are causing this, or it’s the racist, greedy warmongers on the right, or maybe the dishonest, incompetent, conniving media, which refuse to tell the truth about whomever you personally happen to despise.
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We never find out what happens to the people watching [Howard "I'm Mad As Hell"] Beale. Do they stay mad forever? Does their screaming ever lead to something better? Does the rage merely migrate, sending new audiences with new enemies to scream from more windows? And if the time comes when every audience is screaming, who, in the end, is left to listen?

Even if you take this as it’s apparently meant to be taken, as a meditation not on politics but on popular culture, these are just empty generalizations: There’s universal mistrust. Nobody ever stops shouting. What a shame. A piece about anger, politics and mass media ought to show some passion itself. Instead, its Olympian musings are cautious and noncommittal.

Beck is an interesting character. Time could have gone in several directions with a cover story. It could have taken a stand (“Beck Is Bad For America,” no question mark), like it did with Joe McCarthy. Newsmagazine editors keep citing the Economist as a model – this was a perfect opportunity, passed by. Or, without being judgmental, Time could have taken Beck’s influence and the sorry state of political discourse seriously. Why this guy, now?

Time aspires at minimum to be water-cooler fodder, and ideally to help set the nation’s cultural/political tone, as it once did. But it needs to earn that all over again. That requires taking risks.

The George W. Bush presidency brought both the Republican Party and the conservative movement low, and it’s distressing to watch the GOP base get whipped into a frenzy by cynical demagogues, while its politicians do the only thing they know how to do – pander to the people making the loudest, most aggrieved noises.

Demagoguery and aggrievement are nothing new in American politics. But what’s strange is the scattershot nature and incoherence of the attacks on Obama. Usually, politicians – even demagogues – summon a sense of history, shared experience, and cultural traditions to move people. But there’s little evidence of those things in most of the critiques of Obama’s policies by Republican politicians or tea party activists, little evident understanding of what the president is doing or how it might be improved upon, changed, or replaced. Scare words and phrases have supplanted arguments. Those words have historical meaning. Once, history gave those words power. But now they’ve been shorn of all context. It’s a communist-fascist-socialist word salad.

One of the sillier examples of this is the crusade, by Glenn Beck and others, against Obama administration “czars.” They already got the scalp of “green jobs czar” Van Jones, and now the attacks continue. “Czar” sounds scary, I guess, because it’s a Russian word. Communists are taking over the government! Of course, the last real Russian Czar, Nicholas II, was executed by communists in 1918, so the historical reference is nonsensical. So is the substance of the attack. “Czar” is an informal – and semi-ironic – title that connotes a certain policy portfolio. It has been in use since at least the 1970s. As Dave Weigel noted in the Washington Independent, many “czars” actually occupy pre-existing jobs. Some of them been approved by the Senate. Some are mid-level appointees, and don’t require Senate confirmation. A few have been appointed to new positions, such as “Afghanistan czar” Richard Holbrooke – but most of them are well-credentialed.

So: Obama, the president, is appointing people to government positions that have certain policy coordination responsibilities. That’s what presidents do. There may be questions to be raised about their job performance or past activities, but in that respect they are no different from hundreds of other political appointees. Yet, exploiting the notion that Obama must be up to something sinister, Republicans have seized upon the czar issue. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, who is running for governor of Texas, attacks the “czars” in today’s Washington Post as an affront to the Constitution. It’s bizarre. (And also sad that the Washington Post provides a forum for a specious argument.)

During the 1980s and 1990s, many conservatives had credible, coherent arguments to make about government policies and the nature of government itself. I sometimes agreed, more often disagreed. But their arguments had some heft: the liberal welfare state actually did have a lot of serious problems in the overlapping realms of policy and politics. Now, if I’m looking for a meaningful critique of Obama’s policies and appointments, (with some exceptions of course) I’m just not going to find it on the right. Conservatism has, effectively, gone AWOL from the policy debate – which is a great boon to Obama, but probably not so good for the American system.

I’m a bit slow on the uptake this week: on Sunday, the New York Times Book Review corrected (scroll to the bottom) those factual errors in Timothy Egan’s review of “Zeitoun” by Dave Eggers. Instead of incorrectly stating the New Orleans levees were “overtopped,” the review now plainly says that the day after the storm hits, “the levees have failed.” Because of – I’ll say it one more time – the sloppy work of the Army Corps of Engineers.

It took a while, but the record has been set straight – at least in this little corner of the media universe. Props to Egan and his editors.

Yesterday’s now-disappeared New York Times Media Decoder blog post outing the wrong person as the writer of the NYT Picker blog “raises questions,” as the NYT itself might say.

The NYT Picker covers the New York Times, making ample use of sources on the inside. It’s interesting and entertaining. No doubt many at the NYT would love to know who’s behind it. But except as the topic of a New York media gossip parlor game, we don’t need to know, and we probably benefit more from not knowing. Attempting to out the author(s) serves no journalistic purpose.

In the blogosphere, you don’t out an anonyous blogger just because you don’t like him. In June, NRO’s Ed Whelan outed Publius, who blogs on Obsidian Wings, because of a heated ideological disagreement over the Supreme Court. He thought better of it and apologized. The NYT’s Opinionator blog handily summarized what happened and explored the issues of anonymous and pseudonymous blogging. Personally, I prefer transparency wherever possible. But bloggers can have many reasons to shield their identities – personal, professional. If the blogging itself is good, and anonymity not used as a vehicle for scurrilous attacks, clearly the benefits outweigh the costs.

Is it now NYT policy that if you’re blogging anonymously, it’s fair game for Times journalists to try to ferret out your identity? There’s apparently not much sympathy for anonymity in the NYT ranks. Randy Cohen, the Times’s “Ethicist” writer, recently argued that the online environment has become so toxic that anonymity should be discouraged. And referencing the NYT Picker issue, Times social media chief Jen Preston tweeted that “Reporters embarrassed by their work remove their bylines and hide: cowards.”

The NYT owes us an explanation of what happened here (the Media Decoder’s flippant response – “What will NYTPick.com say about using anonymous sources to out anonymous bloggers? We may find out” – won’t cut it). Especially: is outing anonymous bloggers a legitimate journalistic pursuit, and if so, why?

For some time Verizon has cultivated an image as a green company. It’s smart policy, good corporate citizenship, and good PR. Here’s what the Verizon website says:

Environmental stewardship is ingrained in Verizon’s heritage, and the company prides itself on having a positive influence on the environment in which it operates.

Verizon, which owns one of the biggest private fleets of vehicles in the U.S. and occupies more than 30,000 facilities around the world, is continually looking for ways to reduce the company’s environmental impact and improve efficiency. Verizon’s energy-conservation initiatives range from operating the nation’s largest fuel cell site of its kind, to using solar panels, to requiring suppliers to provide equipment that is more energy-efficient.

The information, communications and technology industry, of which Verizon is a part, accounts for only about 2 percent of global CO₂ emissions.

Last week the Verizon Foundation announced it had underwritten a documentary produced by the American Museum of Natural History to educate students on the hazards of climate change:

“We are proud to partner with the American Museum of Natural History and NASA on this important project,” said Andrés Irlando, president of the New York region for Verizon. “Climate change affects all of our lives and the life of our planet, and through this research thousands more people will become aware of its increased impact.”

So why is Verizon Wireless sponsoring a rally to support the coal industry, its massively destructive and carbon-unfriendly practice of mountaintop removal, and to gin up opposition to limits on carbon emissions? The Friends of America Rally, organized by coal giant Massey Energy, is set for Labor Day in Holden, West Virginia. The website urges attendees to wear red, white and blue, “stand up for American jobs” and sign a petition against the American Clean Energy and Security Act, the cap-and-trade bill to limit carbon emissions now pending in the Senate. The rally features a speech by Sean Hannity and performances by Hank Williams Jr., Ted Nugent, and others. In other words, it is a political rally – and pretty hamfisted one at that – with entertainment thrown in to draw a crowd.

Verizon Wireless saw this as a “community event” and a sales opportunity, according to its spokespeople. Well, maybe. But you can’t have it both ways. Does Verizon sponsor antiabortion rallies or antiwar protests? This is corporate PR 101: don’t align yourself with divisive, partisan causes, especially when officially your sympathies lie with the other – in this case, the more credible and responsible – side.

Moreover, when the political director of Credo Mobile, a company that donates part of its proceeds to progressive causes, was corresponding with one of those Verizon spokespeople, Jim Gerace, she got a snide or flippant response referencing recent tree-sitting protests against MTR: “This is how our response is going over with the activists. Becky once lived in a tree for a while. At least now I know where the emails are coming from.” Has Gerace lost his mind? Only last week, he was explaining that Verizon Wireless had decided to withdraw its sponsorship of Glenn Beck’s Fox News show because of its “controversial track record.” Verizon has a huge customer base, most of which does not work for the coal industry, and a significant portion of whom aren’t too fond of Sean Hannity or Massey CEO Don Blankenship. Does Verizon really want to sell out whatever green credibility it has in exchange for selling some service contracts?