John McQuaid

At first, I couldn’t quite understand why David Weigel, the Washington Post politics blogger who just resigned, would merit his own feeding frenzy. He’s not Helen Thomas: he hasn’t been around for 60-plus years, nor does he have a front-row seat in the White House briefing room, nor has he uttered on-camera statements that many people consider offensive or outside the bounds of political discourse.

Instead, one of his offenses was … dancing, maybe a little strangely, at a wedding. This was truly a feeding frenzy worthy of a Seinfeld episode.

Seriously, Weigel is a talented journalist who added a fresh perspective to the Washington Post. He should not have been booted out for what he did. Why was he? The Weigel Incident does illustrate some of the biggest fault lines and flaws of Washington journalism. Here are a few: (more…)

Wendell Pierce as Antoine Batiste

If any TV show deserves not just ratings but love, it’s Treme. The HBO show (which concluded its first season Sunday night; a second has been greenlit) has interesting characters, an epic overarching storyline, a fascinating setting and great music. And the themes it treats – the frayed yet unbroken civic bonds of New Orleans society, and America, in the face of disaster – are very important. Not just because south Louisiana now confronts another catastrophe, but because of our crumbling infrastructure, dirty energy economy, institutional rot, and climate change, there are going to be a lot more of them.

And yet, to me anyway, Treme has not lived up to expectations. (I will pause here to ask my New Orleans friends for forgiveness.) It’s had some great moments, but just as often it’s been erratic and self-indulgent. Compared to the awesome mastery of The Wire, Treme still feels like a minor work in the David Simon oeuvre, yet to find its focus. (more…)

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

One feature of modern conservatism has been its ability to embrace, in the service of pragmatism and politics, things many of its followers find inimical. And I want to thank Joe Barton for confirming that that thin thread linking conservatives to basic political reality still exists.

“Wha-?” you say. Bear with me.

The conservatism of the past 40 years or so has basically been a critique of the modern liberal welfare state. Sometimes a pertinent critique, but usually just a critique – never an actual alternative. For the most part conservatives say they’re just fine with the achievements wrought by liberals, over their movement’s opposition: big things like Social Security, Medicare, the Voting Rights Act, and smaller things like regulations requiring seatbelts and airbags. That’s because the public overwhelmingly likes and approves of this stuff.

Lately, though, with the emergence of the tea party movement, conservatives are having a hard time covering up the fact that a lot of them aren’t really okay with the stuff they’re supposed to be okay with. And because they don’t really have a viable alternative to the basic outlines of the liberal welfare state, the atmosphere has been getting crazier and the potential policy results dangerous. (more…)

Image via CrunchBase

Every so often, the establishment press unintentionally reveals how it works. It’s as if you suddenly put Big Media through an fMRI that showed not only its internal structures and their connections to the government, business et al, but how this system actually works, dynamically – and also pinpoint where something has gone wrong.

I’m referring to James Risen’s New York Times story on Afghanistan’s apparently vast mineral resources. I wanted to wait a little while before writing on it, because such a story has a kind of lifecycle, and I wanted to see how this one played out.

At first it appeared to be a geopolitical game-changer, perhaps heralding the arrival of a the next big 21st conflict, like the “Great Game” in 19th century Central Asia between the Russian and British Empires. And maybe it is.

Then, instantly, the story came under fire for overhyping known facts and what looked like too-convenient timing. The U.S. military mission in Afghanistan – set to end next year – is faltering, Hamid Karzai is acting odder than usual, Congress is growing restive. Suddenly, the NYT runs a story quoting David Petraeus saying: Afghanistan has enormous strategic importance. (more…)

Entry in the Greenpeace BP parody logo contest

This is a constant drumbeat, but think about it: Isn’t it remarkable how transcendently awful BP’s approach to the Gulf disaster has been? At each and every turn, with the stakes impossibly high, BP has always chosen to do the wrong thing. There’s the substance – having no emergency worst-case contingency plans for a blowout, disingenuously refusing to estimate the amount of oil flowing. There’s the politics and image stuff, including CEO Tony Hayward’s lies and self-pity and the platoons of lawyers and PR people trying to keep cleanup workers silent and choke off media attention. It’s been an awesome display of every kind of 21st century corporate dick-itude.

If you’re cynical, then this is merely garden-variety corporate misbehavior, if on a grand scale. But we’re at an interesting pass here. Consider: for years BP has buffed its image with the green sunflower logo and the “Beyond Petroleum” campaign, portraying itself as a forward-looking, responsible corporate citizen. This nominally covered its left flank, but more importantly gave it a forward-looking, friendly image. Perfect mainstream mass-market positioning.

Meanwhile, the cult of the free market, which too often means letting big business do what it wants, retained a powerful hold on U.S. politics. (more…)

Image via Wikipedia

Last week, Israeli commandos boarded a relief ship attempting to break the blockade of the Gaza Strip and, during a clash with pro-Palestinian activists, shot nine people to death. It was an old-fashioned, bona fide “international incident,” a fiasco that raised alarming questions about the current trajectory of Israel’s security, the wisdom of its government, as well as the fate of Obama’s Middle East policies and U.S. security in general.

But this week, somehow, the Washington media’s “Israel narrative” has abandoned those questions and focused instead on the ugly words and sudden retirement of cranky 89-year-old White House correspondent Helen Thomas.

I’m not going to defend Thomas – what she said was deeply offensive. But in the overall scheme of things, it was a trivial incident, and DC’s sudden obsession with it – to the exclusion of a lot of other, more important things – is especially ironic given the parlous state of the Israeli situation.

The Washington media universe may not have set a new speed record here for spinning itself, Tasmanian devil-style, from grave and difficult to trivial and ironic. (more…)

Image via CrunchBase

Recently, a woman started following my Twitter feed and began retweeting nearly everything I posted, mostly about the oil spill, and sending me frequent @replies. This was kind of annoying, but most of the replies were innocuous observations or expressions of empathy, with a few non-sequiturs. At first I chalked this up to a newbie’s enthusiasm and perhaps a misunderstanding of the Twitter social space. She was following only about 20 people, and also engaging others with equal gusto. Big events such as the BP disaster tend to pull new people into Twitter, so this behavior didn’t seem extraordinary. However, it soon became clear that she was not merely embracing Twitter, but mentally ill. (more…)

There is a perverse new meme brewing on the right, a riff on the apparent impotence of the Obama administration to stop the oil spewing into the Gulf of Mexico. It goes like this: some things are just too big and complex for the government to deal with. In fact, 21st century life itself has grown too complex and interconnected for government to deal with. So let’s scale back our expectations and our reliance on government to fix stuff. Just go with the flow, as it were.

At NRO, Yuval Levin dismissed the anger over the response to Hurricane Katrina as unjustified because “accidents happen.” David Brooks argued that technological systems had grown too complex to manage in a column last week. In a later NPR discussion with E.J. Dionne, he rejected the idea that more effective regulation might have made a difference in heading off the Deepwater Horizon disaster:

As for the regulation, if you go down the list of decisions that were made that led to this disaster, the interpreting of the tests, whether to recycle the cement, how to recycle the mud, how to set the cement, none of these things is clear to me would be solved by different regulations. There are certain decisions that have to be made on the spot on a case by case basis and they were made, in this case, by people under extreme duress and in extreme ignorance. I’m not sure a regulator 3,000 miles away could really have done a better job.

It’s interesting how Brooks can take a good point (the problems of growing techno-complexity) and, in a sentence, turn it into a dumb, knee-jerk point. (more…)