Month: February 2010

A reader writes:

I'm glad to see you touching the Ethan Bronner situation, but I'm pretty surprised you do not see a "shred of bias" in his reporting. As Lysandra Ohstrom points out in her HuffPo column, a search of Bronner's recent articles points to his Israeli-centric approach to the conflict. Virtually every article quotes Israelis, but few if any Palestinians. Most glaringly, he's written about Israel's Rebuttal to Goldstone, but nothing about the Goldstone report itself. This is simply astonishing. Did Bronner even read the report?

Bronner was biased before his son joined the IDF, so this dust-up just makes the case against him much more vivid and clear.

Let's be realistic; would Mr. Keller be willing to look the other way if a correspondent's direct family member joined Hamas or Hezbollah? Of course not; issues of bias and conflicts of interest would immediately come in to play. What makes Bronner more special?

Finally, as a journalist, I think you should be pushing for the NYT to assign an Arab-American reporter to cover Gaza and the West Bank. It is incredibly perplexing that they have expected Bronner to cover both occupied Arab side and the Jewish side of this conflict while living in the comfort of Israel. Taghreed El-Khodary, the NYT's correspondent in Gaza, would make an excellent choice.

Goldblog addresses a similar question from a reader. His bottom line:

This sort of reductionist thinking isn't useful. It ghettoizes writers and thinkers based on the circumstances of their births.

Julian Sanchez considers the evolution of the remix – with Julian’s inimitable spin. It has some beauts in there – well worth your time, even at eight minutes:

It’s been fourteen years since I left TNR and Leon Wieseltier is still obsessed with his long-standing and at this point tedious personal vendetta against me. I will try and defend myself from these dark insinuations of anti-Semitism one by one in due course (allow me a little time to respond to a 4,300 word ad hominem). But just for the record, let me grapple with Leon’s first claim that my citation of W H Auden’s letter to Ursula Niebuhr represented some dark and ugly attempt to convey anti-Semitic tropes and code. Now it’s impossible to refute mere insinuations about my true motives for posting a random quote. But really: does Leon really believe I was making a swipe at the Jewish faith? To give just one of countless examples of my own passionate defense of the Jewish people from Catholic bigotry, see my review here. But as luck would have it, I have the email trail that gives the full context of this one-line post, so you can make your mind up yourself. Here’s the first email from a close friend, alerting me to the quote.

He’s a Niebuhr scholar who had been reading Niebuhr’s correspondence, and with whom I frequently talk about faith, theology, life, Oakeshott, Niebuhr, et al.:

From Auden to Reinie’s wife, Ursula, via letter (circa 1944) while W.H. was teaching at Swarthmore:

“It was such a pleasure to see Reinhold again, looking more of a benevolent eagle than ever. His Destiny is grand, I think, and is already on the required reading list for my seminar in romanticism which starts tomorrow. Poor things, they have no idea what they have let themselves in for — Kierkegaard’s Unscientific Postscript, for instance. Seminars last from one-thirty to six, so I have to provide refreshments. Quakers or no Quakers, I shall serve bread and cheese and beer at four o’clock…”

For some reason this cracked me up … just something a bit lighter for you! (I’m reading the letters between Reinhold and Ursula, and there’s an appendix of her correspondence with W.H. Auden.)

And also, a special quote just for you, Andrew (from a letter dated June 2, 1944, from WHA to Ursula): “Trying to explain the doctrine of the Trinity to readers of the New Republic is not easy.”

Ha.

So you can see the context is clearly about how hard it is for truly highbrow theological and philosophical subjects to be taught to Swarthmore students – with an extra dig at TNR’s very secular lefty readers of the day, who, as Leon rightly notes, were living in a spiritually shallow time. Now it’s perfectly true that the New Republic reference also made me chuckle because, as Leon Wieseltier once said, TNR is a kind of “Jewish version of Commentary.” So I was also implying a little joke about the contemporary irony of such a remark.

This, by the way, was the kind of joke ubiquitous at TNR when I worked there, as we teased each other for years about my being one of the few goyim at the place, that I was a function of affirmative action, etc. Leon was particularly and often mordantly hilarious on this kind of theme.

I recall once asking if an extremely long essay in TNR’s literary section might be cut a little. “Six million Jews died and you want to cut the piece?” was his reply and we all cracked up. And, so I found the Auden quote funny enough to forward the whole email to the current editor of The New Republic, my old friend, Frank Foer, with a note from me to him, as part of a small fellowship of TNR editors:

love the auden quote

xx

a

I emailed him the quote before I posted the piece. Frank responded in the same jokey vein:

That’s just perfect—and before we entered our High Shul phase even!

If you think all this is yet more proof that I am an ugly Jew-baiter, well, there’s not much else I can do to persuade you. 

My attempt to respond to the rest of the screed in due course.

Yesterday, Nate Silver compared Bush and Palin:

Bush was at least smart enough to surround himself with a team of exceptionally competent strategists, advisers and consultants. He was smart enough to recognize that it takes a village to get oneself elected President, and ideally one a bit less isolated and insular than Wasilla. Palin hasn't figured that out yet; her ability to become the Republican nominee and have a fighting chance in the general election will depend on her ability to do so.

She had some total pros in the last campaign – Schmidt, Wallace, et al – and she just couldn't handle any direction. Continetti is still auditioning for one of those roles:

Palin's speech was a window into the Tea Party movement and the future of the Republican party. The reaction to her discussion of national security and social issues revealed that the Tea Partiers share much in common with rank-and-file GOP voters. Palin's emphasis on limited government — her frequent mention of the Tenth Amendment, for instance — and less government spending was an attempt to re-capture the conservative voters repelled by George W. Bush's big-government conservatism. The Tea Party movement is a return to an older, more traditional conservatism. Katrina vanden Heuvel is not wrong when she says Palin shares many similarities to Barry Goldwater; she's just wrong to describe those similarities with such venom and condescension.

When Palin or the tea-partiers proposes real spending cuts commensurate with deeper tax cuts and higher defense spending, I'll take her seriously. The trouble is, you only get to break the bank once with this blarney. And the bank is already broken.

Please, reporters, keep, keep, keep asking the central question: what would you cut? (As well, of course, as asking Democrats, what taxes they want to raise).

The maker of the movie emails to say that the Dish's link gave a false impression of the film. Since I haven't seen it myself, I'll try and see a screening when one comes up in DC and report back. But the Daily Beast's John Avlon liked it:

There have been highlights to balance out the lowlights at the Tea Party Convention. For all the Obama Derangement Syndrome evidenced, the spark of the movement was a demand to return to fiscal responsibility. These roots were well represented by a special screening of a new documentary about the roots of the fiscal crisis and the reckoning still to come, called Generation Zero. Written and directed by Stephen K. Bannon (Titus) and produced by the now infamous Citizens United, it is not primarily a partisan polemic—instead it is a smart and comprehensible look at the results of fiscal irresponsibility, featuring commentary from Amity Shlaes, Shelby Steele, Victor Davis Hanson, and Newt Gingrich, among others. It can be difficult to capture the outrage of overspending or to humanize the long-term costs—but Generation Zero succeeds in doing it.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Here are three more emails from March 21 – 23, 2008, which I reproduce because of the Dish's long commitment to providing as much information about the strange stories Sarah Palin has told about her fifth pregnancy and because governor Palin has welcomed such scrutiny, declaring that her life is an open book. They come from this 3,000 email archive from the State of Alaska, requested by MSNBC.

A little over a month after Trig was born, the state sent Governor Palin an email asking for his birth certificate. It's a routine letter, reminding Palin that if the state did not get the certificate within a month, any state benefits for the child would be suspended. Since Trig had special needs, I imagine this would be important in providing support for his rearing. Here's the first email:

 
You can click to enlarge. For some reason, Governor Palin and her staff did not respond to the email about her one-month old baby. Instead, the next day, one of the governor's staffers, Janice Mason, forwarded the email to Todd Palin, marking it "URGENT":

The First Dude replied that he had "called, thanks." Maybe readers can search further into the email record to see if there is any update that confirms that the state of Alaska received the certificate and granted Trig the relevant government benefits. I sure hope so. A child with Down Syndrome may need such benefits.

And for good measure, here's my own long-form birth certificate, which I was required to produce as part of my green card application:

A reader writes:

I am the mother of a 16 year-old girl with severe intellectual disabilities.  I am disturbed by Mrs Palin's insincere comments when she speaks out for individuals with developmental delays. I watched The Colbert Report last night, and I have never been more proud to call myself a fan of Stephen Colbert. 

But also, as a mother I wonder what is in Trig's future.

If his Down Syndrome does not severely effect his ability and he is able to read, he will read his mother's autobiography and learn that she questioned if she could love him.  He will read interviews that his mother considered even for a split second to terminate her pregnancy, he will become aware that many consider his mother a hero for not terminating her pregnancy – thus knowing that among her fans he is considered beautiful but somehow a burden.

She needs to start treating him quietly as a child who will grow into a man. She needs to learn to advocate for him and not allow him to be a victim of satire when it suits her and a victim of discrimination when it can get her attention.

And she needs to stop using him as a political prop. A child with such needs should surely not be hauled around half-naked in front of flash photographers to promote a book tour, or be routinely referred to in speeches for applause lines. It's unseemly. But then so much about this person is.

Reza Aslan sums up the pro-Green reaction to Ahmadi's "alarming" nuclear rhetoric from Sunday:

These announcements are a joke; they cannot be taken seriously. Not only has Iran thus far barely managed to enrich uranium to 5 percent, it can hardly keep its one enrichment plant in Natanz—which took many years to build—up and running full time. The idea that Iran could build 10 more plants in a year while also figuring out how to enrich uranium to 20 percent is laughable. Ahmadinejad’s announcement is nothing more than a feeble attempt at nuclear brinksmanship, as the French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner acknowledged when he called it “blackmail.” Iran’s hope is to return to the negotiations begun in Vienna last October over its nuclear stockpile on more favorable terms.

More than anything else, these announcements were intended for domestic consumption.

With what promises to be a tumultuous and violent national celebration on the horizon, Ahmadinejad is desperate to rally the country behind him using the one issue on which all Iranians, regardless of their politics or piety, agree. Ahmedinejad hopes to elicit a belligerent response from the West, allowing him to arouse the people’s national pride. Which, by the way, may explain Iran’s surprising move last week, when it launched a mouse, two turtles, and some worms into orbit as a prelude to a promised manned space mission.

Juan Cole undercuts the rhetoric even further.

Reihan checks in with the latest McCain campaign:

McCain has scrambled to crush the [J.D. Hayworth] insurgency, raising money and rallying the troops with a robocall from newly minted Republican folk hero Scott Brown. He's even scheduled campaign appearances in March with his former running mate Sarah Palin, the woman some believe made his slim chance at winning the White House even slimmer. Hayworth's flacks are crying foul, telling anyone who'll listen that McCain is being too tough on a man who until recently made his living as a minor-league radio shock jock. Polls aside, it's very clear that McCain is taking Hayworth's candidacy seriously.

The man has been in politics for decades; he's 73; he has run two presidential campaigns; why is he running again – and turning once more to the hardest right – to stay in power? Is politics his entire life? I prefer my politicians to have some kind of perspective, some kind of sense of when it's time to leave the stage with grace. But McCain? No grace. Just bile and hunger for power.

Ambers has a devastating and brilliant post on why Palin – "a blend of Nixon and Buchanan", with boobs and a Christianism now fused into Republicanism – is a lethal force in the land. I keep remembering the election of 2004, when people were shocked that the polls were wrong as millions of previously unknown voters flocked to the voting booths to put Bush back into power. But Palin is so, so much more than Bush – so much more charismatic, so much more shameless, so much more prepared to use proto-fascist memes to demonize elites and run rings around a tepid media unable to confront her with her lies. In normal times, she would be a joke. In depression times, as debt mounts, and wars against "the other" at home and abroad fester, as one party openly advocates using the military to snatch "enemy combatants" off the streets and dispatch them to detention and torture sites, such as Gitmo … well, she is a force to be reckoned with, as I've said from the very start. Money quote:

In Searching for Whitopia, Rich Benjamin defines of a geo-racial balkanization that gives Palin-like candidates a natural base: towns like Coeur d'Alene Idaho, with a "diversified economic base," a pro-business regulatory environment, a commitment to "quality of life" issues, and — a 95% ethnic homogeneity.  Coeur D'Aleners were migrants from the California of the 1990s; they live now in Colorado and the suburbs of Phoenix and are slowly pushing their way around the Sunbelt.

Benjamin notes the "cultural, ancestral and implicitly racial" bond to their communities. The new residents come looking for land and living space; the long-time residents just want as little disruption as possible. Right now, there is enormous disruption. It is the same disruption that Democrats believe redounds to their benefit; depressed wages, exotic financial deals, government spending cuts (which feeds the disruption), what one Palin watcher calls the "downstream effects" of a country that has lived beyond its means for 60 years.

George W. Bush never spoke this language. He was an evangelical convert, more influenced by his advisers' Catholicism than by, say, Palin's Assembly of God charismatics. She is pure in ways the rich son of Connecticut could never dream of.

A racially and religiously pure mother figure, able to communicate sub-rationally and rationally in Twitter-length sound-bites, able to construct a series of soundbites without real scrutiny, a person who has so framed the debate that any media criticism strengthens rather than exposes her among the folk she connects with.

Know fear.