Month: May 2003

From, yes, the Onion.

“Yes, yes, yes! Enough already with the infantile bullshit that passes for leadership in modern management. I was at Sprint for three years. There it was a goose! Ironically, I stole the damned thing for a souvenir when I left and it may be worth some money. My wife says it’s a genuine “Beenie Baby.” Who’d a thunk it? One time we spent two whole days discussing the childhood classic, “Who Moved My Cheese,” the story of two rats. We managers referred to the book as “Who Cut The Cheese.” It’s a rip-off that could easily be condensed into less than one page, single-spaced, but then nobody would pay $20 for it. The gist of it is never be comfortable, your cheese is moving (i.e., the world is changing) and you have to keep moving or starve (i.e., become obsolete, laid off, etc.). To cap the seriousness of the sessions, they gave out “cheeseheads” (a la Green Bay Packer’s fame) to the participants.
After it was over most of us felt the main thing we learned was never to be comfortable (at Sprint), the world is changing (i.e., telecom was starting to slide into the toilet) and you have to keep moving or starve (i.e., maybe we should be looking for a job in another industry). With such brilliant leadership – surprise! – Sprint’s in trouble.”

The latest piece of anti-Bush spin from the BBC contains the following topic sentence: “President George Bush must now regret declaring on 1 May, that the tide had turned in the war on terror.” Yeah, right. The piece goes on to concede that “al-Qaeda seems to have adapted to the fact that, for the moment at least, it is no longer able to hit high-profile Western targets.” And that is not progress? The piece concludes: “If [al Qaeda] is no longer waging a jihad, or holy war, against the symbols of American power, and is simply engaged in indiscriminate slaughter, it risks alienating many of those who have so far provided its wider base of support.” So the tide might have turned after all?

From today’s Le Monde, thanks to my intrepid French correspondent:

“The difficulty for French policy makers is to deliver, in the presence of George Bush, an intelligible message without seeming to go back on everything.- France is now ready to vote at the UN in favor of the American Iraq resolution.- ‘It’s not the role that we would have hoped for the UN, but there has been real progress in the American text, and maybe there can be even more progress,’ said the Elysee Palace.- This vote, which could happen Thursday morning, would liberate the Evian summit from a weighty subject full of conflict. . . . And then, you have to look at the facts:- ‘There is no alternative,’ they say in Paris.- A majority of the Security Council is in favor of the American text.- Germany and Russia hope to avoid relaunching another battle at the UN and France, said one diplomat, ‘does not have an interest, for the future, of disassociating itself from them because it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the Americans could again look to implement their policies by force of arms.- The advantages and inconveniences of an abstention [at the UN] should be weighed against all that.”

Reculer pour mieux sauter. (Translation: we still need to watch our backs.)

The administration’s decision to start knocking heads and confiscating weapons in Iraq is an overdue sign that the White House now gets what has to be done. Without credible order, nothing political can be achieved. Without the recognition of unquestioned allied authority, no new authority can emerge. Bringing in the Brits to help train the Iraqi police is also a smart move. They have, er, experience with this kind of thing.

THE END OF SHAME: Jayson Blair is right about one thing. Even Stephen Glass can’t match his chutzpah. The seven figure Hollywood treatment; the laughter; the casual invocation of racism at the New York Times; the book deal. The contempt for the profession he pretended to care about:

The discovery of New York Times reporter Jayson Blair’s deception in his coverage of the Lynch family in West Virginia, especially his description of a house from which he wrote that tobacco fields and cattle were visible (they are not), provoked laughter from the disgraced journalist during his first extensive sit-down interview with the New York Observer’s media columnist Sridhar Pappu.
“That’s my favorite, just because the description was so far off from the reality. And the way they described it in The Times story – someone read a portion of it to me – I couldn’t stop laughing.”

The guy is beyond gross. And the culture that will pay him handsomely for this callow tripe is even grosser.

INSIDIOUS SID: If you have any lingering belief that Sidney Blumenthal can be trusted to portray even a smidgen of the full truth about the Clinton years, then read Mike Isikoff. Right now.

HEDGES AGAIN: Yes, the NYT hack who gave the offensive commencement speech was the same Chris Hedges who wrote the now-infamous piece of factually-challenged anti-Israel propaganda, published by the old leftist bore, Lewis Lapham. Here’s a righteous fisking of the piece. Hedges is a political extremist masquerading as a reporter. That’s why he has found such a comfortable niche at Howell Raines’ New York Times.

MY BLIND SPOT: “I alternate between applauding your tireless efforts at educating the public about homosexuality and thundering against the likes of Rick Santorum to feeling complete exasperation at your equally tireless efforts to see a gay-friendly and “inclusive” G.W. Bush. Incredulously, you ask this President to endorse ENDA. I hate to be the one to tell you, Andrew, but that will never happen. When the votes were counted (or not counted) in 2000, George W. was not exactly a slam dunk. Similarly, the 2002 Congressional elections were much closer than the subsequent media spin would have us believe. Now we have the bible bangers threatening to walk in 2004 because the GOP defense of Santorum was deemed too tepid. Do you think Rove will dare to risk alienating a major part of the GOP base by allowing this President to do anything perceived to be favorable to homosexuals?” – more feedback, including a defense of Danny Glover, on the Letters Page.

A classic:

Grown-ups do not behave this way. Unless they are running a day care. It’s a cute anecdote for a retreat, but applied to the real world, to the newsroom, is a sign of how infantile management theory has become. The introduction of the moose splits the staff into two groups: the brown-nosers who put the moose on top of their computer monitor and give it seasonal decorations, and the cynics who stuff the damn thing in their bottom drawer next to the employee manual, the healthcare benefits package, and the rest of the crap the company expects you to read. They look at that moose, and think: if I get fired tomorrow, they’ll ask for the moose back. It’s their moose. It ain’t mine. I put this moose up on eBay, I’m going to be covering Trenton zoning meetings for the next ten years. Screw the moose.
There’s probably a secret Times subculture of Moose Abuse. No doubt the Moose has been photographed in a stripper’s cleavage, face down on a bar in a puddle of New Amsterdam lager, sitting in Thompkins Square with an anarchist’s A photoshopped on his chest, standing outside the building with a cigarette in his mouth.

Yes, that cigarette. The scarlet letter of our time.

NYT reporter Chris Hedges uses a commencement address to give an anti-war harangue. Students walk out.

Conservative insurrectionary, David Horowitz, goes after Gary Bauer et al for their hostility to gay dignity. Money quote:

In what the Washington Times described as a “stormy session” last week, the Rev. Lou Sheldon, Paul Weyrich, Gary Bauer and eight other “social conservatives” read the riot act to RNC chairman Marc Racicot for meeting with the “Human Rights Campaign,” a group promoting legal protections for homosexuals. This indiscretion, they said, “could put Bush’s entire re-election campaign in jeopardy.” According to the Times’ report by Ralph Hallow, the RNC chairman defended himself by saying, “You people don’t want me to meet with other folks, but I meet with anybody and everybody.” To this Gary Bauer retorted, “That can’t be true because you surely would not meet with the leaders of the Ku Klux Klan.” Nice analogy Gary. Way to love thy neighbor.

Couldn’t put it better myself. But for Bauer, gay people are the equivalent of the KKK. A central tenet of his political message is not Christianity as represented in the Gospels, but the use of Christianity for purely political ends.

John Kampfner’s Jessica Lynch “scoop” falls to pieces.

This is the tired line now being peddled by those too embarrassed to admit that they were wrong about the war on terror, wrong about the war in Afghanistan, wrong about the war against Saddam. They are now complaining that criticizing the far left’s embrace of anti-Americanism is equivalent to McCarthyism. Hooey, of course. Tough criticism in a free society is not McCarthyism; it’s free speech. But what to make of this? MSNBC’s O’Reilly clone, Joe Scarborough, launched a TV campaign against Danny Glover’s lucrative spokesman contract with MCI on the grounds that Glover is a left-wing extremist, backing Castro, fulminating against the president, and so on. After a wave of viewer calls and emails, MCI has apparently now canceled Glover’s contract. Is this kosher? As a matter of principle, I loathe boycotts and the screeching and self-righteous rhetoric that often accompanies them. I even defended Dr Laura’s show against the mau-mauing gay left. So Scarborough’s campaign leaves me with not a little distaste in my mouth. Still, it’s not McCarthyism. The government is not involved; the argument is a valid one; no-one has a right to be a spokesman for corporate America, without public controversy or opposition. Glover hasn’t been silenced; and he’s free to continue to be an actor, where his views are likely to help, not hinder him. No one would complain if a similarly extreme right-winger were passed over by a major corporation. I don’t like Scarborough’s tactics. But Danny Glover can choose between his views and his corporate contracts. Perhaps, for his ideological consistency, it’s about time he did.