Category: The Dish

Oops. Sorry guys. Somehow managed to screw up the earlier link to Reihan. Try this. (Scroll down until you hit the "full-spectrum" item) Deepest apologies. —Michelle

While I’m the first to agree with new White House C.O.S. Josh Bolten’s bold assertion yesterday that it’s time to “refresh and re-energize” the president’s top staff, I can’t help but suspect the Bushies will try to fudge their noisy reinvention pledge by making a handful of basically meaningless staff changes, like replacing Scooter Libby with David Addington. Almost certainly, the end is nigh for poor Treasury Secretary John Snow, perhaps the most pointless and serially humiliated senior member of this administration. But unless Rummy, Dick, or Karl is sent packing, I fear none of us should take all this talk about change too seriously. As much as I’d like to see Rove returned to the private sector, I vote for Rumsfeld.

—Michelle

I’m sure the point has been made before, but in her “My Time” column, (also in the Post’s “Health” section), Abigail Trafford makes a couple of interesting observations about immigration and America’s aging population.

—Michelle

Of all the weekly newspaper sections I slog through for work, my favorite may be the Tuesday “Health” pages in The Washington Post. One interesting tidbit today is a brief write-up of yet another faith-based medical study. This one purports to find a connection between weekly worship-service attendance and increased life expectancy. The author of the study, a University of Pittsburgh Medical Center physician who also happens to be an Episcopal priest, suggests that weekly worship may increase one’s life by 2 to 3 years. (As a point of comparison, cholesterol lowering drugs add 2.5. to 3.5. years).

This report comes on the heels of the recent high-profile prayer study, which found that having strangers pray for you doesn’t help, and may actually harm, your recovery from serious surgery. While on one level the studies’ findings seem contradictory, to me they appear to point in the same direction, at least secularly speaking. If you are devout enough in your faith to regularly haul your carcass to worship service every week, you most likely have a solid network of fellow worshippers to provide emotional support during life’s stressful times. (Isolated people tend to be less healthy than those with friends and family.) Moreover, you probably also enjoy some of the more nebulous psychological benefits of faith, such as the belief that even bad things happen for a purpose, that a higher power is looking after you, that life isn’t some cruel, random series of events totally beyond your control. Such emotional comfort helps to reduce stress levels, which in turn produce happier, healthier worshippers. By contrast, if in the wake of serious surgery you are told that a bunch of strangers have been assigned to pray for your speedy recovery, this seems like it could very well raise your stress level by increasing your expectations or making you feel somehow pressured to perform.

Non-spiritual message of both studies: God or no God, stress is a killer.

—Michelle

Democrats and Republicans alike should check out the always engaging Reihan Salam’s morning musings about the GOP’s need for a “full-spectrum dominance” approach to wooing voters. Even if you don’t agree (which I suspect Karl Embrace-the-Base Rove would not), it’s worth a read. But I wouldn’t try tackling it before that second cup of coffee.

—Michelle

It’s been funny to hear the leader of Iran talking about his nation’s natural right to exploit the secrets of nuclear physics and join the global technological vanguard. His basic argument is “You can’t stop progress” even though stopping progress, I recall, is the great goal of his theocracy. Fundamentalist Islamic futurism? Can such a strange cultural particle exist, even for a half an instant in a cyclotron? Perhaps the man should speak more carefully, lest he unwittingly split the nucleus of the system he’s trying to hold together.

The Chinese regime, in its drive to ultra-modernize while simultaneously pushing back the Internet, is falling into paradox as well (with the paid collusion of Google and Yahoo, a few of whose brightest engineering minds have been challenged, one supposes, with the task of un-enriching the Web’s uranium into a stabler, safer element: gold). China, an upside-down version of Iran, is proclaiming the dangers of one type of progress while staking its fortunes on progress in general. Its rulers, like most rulers, have confused defending themselves with helping everyone else. I’d wager that many of them truly think that intellectual stagnation is the key to material forward motion.

These are the sort of internal contradictions that both Marxist dialecticians and Jeffersonian idealists are taught to regard as unsustainable. Nuclear medievalism. Know-nothing modernism. Managing such schizophrenic systems would seem to require an exhausting clamp-down that’s bound to produce, eventually, a revitalizing reformation. We assume that such projects’ illogic spells their doom. And we further assume that in the rational West (or whatever we’re calling our special realm these days that doesn’t sound too culturally arrogant but still conveys our sense of moral excellence) we need only to wait, well armed, until they fail.

But will we, as I fear in my darker moments, fail with them? Maybe our own grinding inner contradictions are as ruinous as theirs. Aside from the strident Biblical literalists who seek to purify a Constitution that they would never have been inclined to write, we believe in progress and we pursue it, too – and yet our liberalism feels at times like a high-interest loan from the idealogues. Blessed by fate with the oil we can’t stop drinking and endowed by history with the serf-classes whose products we can’t stop playing with, they take our bank notes and invest them in our bonds so that we can print more notes to hand them. To earn a few notes back and tip our trade imbalance less steeply their way, we sell them devices to suppress the liberty that commerce theoretically unleashes. Tanks and riot gear they can make themselves or obtain from fellow anti-democrats, but state-of-the-art self-hobbling search engines they have to buy from freedom-loving us.

Economists may see a synergy here. Others may detect a vortex. When the broad-minded grow used to living large by buying things on credit from the narrow-minded — and then try to work off their mounting debts by servicing those narrow-minds — the whole gang risks succumbing to dysfunction. McWorld? That sounds to cheerful. McPurgatory?

Which still may beat the other course: stepping back from the transactions, standing on first principles, and risking blowing one another up.

There’s a third way, I trust, and perhaps a fourth and fifth way. And I’m hoping that someone will explain them.

Soon.

–Walter

The war on fat has always struck me as well-intentioned but misguided–not to mention ultimately futile. A while back I did a longish piece about the crusade to make fat the new tobacco, but Slate’s Will Saletan has boiled the issue down to its essence in today’s Human Nature column (consistently one of the most entertaining non-Tom-and-Katie-related reads on the web).

—Michelle

I may be spoiling for a fight, but I can’t resist plugging my colleague Mike Crowley’s wry ode to boredom in this week’s tnr. BlackBerry addicts and IM obsessives are likely either to take serious offense or to break down weeping in total agreement.

—Michelle

Details aside, the underlying message of Howie’s aforementioned piece is that even hyper-respectable White House reporters should think twice about judging Page 6’s Jared Paul Stern, lest they be accused of hypocrisy.

Ever noticed how nothing drives media types crazier than the thought of hypocrisy? Whether the charges are being leveled at one of our own or, more often, a politician, religious figure, or activist type, nothing send reporters into search-and-destroy mode faster than the h-word. Bill Bennet‚Äôs affinity for slot-machines, Clinton-impeachment-leader Henry Hyde‚Äôs extramarital affair, George W. Bush‚Äôs ‚Äúyoung and foolish‚Äù years–the mere suspicion that a public figure hasn‚Äôt practiced what he‚Äôs preaching is enough to get him a media whoopin‚Äô of the sort generally reserved for child molesters. (Let me go ahead and plead guilty to this myself, before anyone charges me with, well, you know.)

Since more often than not the targets in question are conservatives, some will be quick to blame the liberal bias of the media–meaning that left-leaning journalists are always on the lookout for ways to bring down values-hawking conservatives. I‚Äôve always suspected the reason was less political and more psychologically tortured. For straight-news journalists in particular, there‚Äôs often a hesitance to look as though you‚Äôre passing judgment on behaviors that may be morally distasteful but aren‚Äôt technically illegal. (Liberal journalists, meanwhile, might be loath to violate the moral relativism often associated with lefty politics.) But if you can bust someone for acting in a way that contradicts their own stated (or implied) beliefs, then you can savage them for being a hypocrite without having to comment one way of the other on the original misbehavior. Since conservatives are the ones who tend to launch moral crusades in the first place, they’re obviously the easier targets when it comes to hypocrisy.

A couple of years back, I did a column for tnr posing a related theory for why Democrat/liberal types seem to freak out over hypocrisy more than their conservative counterparts. One key difference: Social conservatives are too busy obsessing over far graver sins to spend too much energy worrying about hypocrisy. Then again, lately I‚Äôve been inundated by emails from the RNC, GOPUSA, etc. shrieking about Democratic hypocrisy regarding the GOP’s current ethics troubles. So it may be time to fine tune my theory.

—Michelle

The hardest working man in journalism, Washington Post media reporter Howie Kurtz, has a piece today comparing the current New York Post Page Six blackmail scandal to the way political journalists operate: Be nice to sources who cooperate; make life difficult for those who don’t.

To illustrate his point, Howie cites a number of journalistic episodes/practices that have drawn criticism of late: Judy Miller’s serving as a mouthpiece for bad WMD info; White House reporters agreeing to secret, off-the-record chats with Bush; Bob Woodward acting as a stenographer for White House power players (Howie is, of course, more diplomatic in his characterization), and White House reporters occasionally writing positive stories to ingratiate themselves with key sources. (This last practice, of course, is hardly confined to White House scribblers; though Howie doesn’t mention it, the production of “beat sweeteners” is standard operating procedure for journalists assigned to a particular industry or area of government.)

In the broadest sense, I can see the parallel. (And before anyone asks, I don‚Äôt have much of a dog in this hunt. Coaxing sensitive tidbits out of reticent sources isn‚Äôt exactly in my wheelhouse.) Source reporting requires certain techniques and compromises that can carry a whiff of the dishonest and lend themselves to abuse‚Äîespecially if the reporter in question is, say, an out-of-control megalomaniac like Miller. Even so, there seems to be a significant difference between the examples Howie cites–all of which involve reporters cutting either implicit or explicit deals with sources in exchange for info that (ostensibly) enables to the reporter to better do his or her job‚Äîand a reporter informing some billionaire that, unless he wants to have his personal life splashed all over the papers, he had better start fattening said reporter‚Äôs personal bank account.

Couple of caveats: Yes, in the cases Howie mentions, the reporters in question are also expecting to benefit  personally in the form of career advancement. But being personally ambitious is not an ethical no-no per se. Blackmail, by contrast, is. Also, there‚Äôs no question that some reporters get too close to sources and wind up getting snowed or use their cozy relationship with sources as a way to be lazy in their reporting. But those are examples of the way such reporting techniques can be corrupted, rather than indictments of the techniques themselves. Blackmail for personal financial gain, by contrast, is by definition a corrupt enterprise.

None of which is to suggest that the political media doesn‚Äôt have a lot to answer for of late–most notably letting itself get suckered into backing a lousy war. But unless, say, Timesman David Sanger is ginning up Iran hysteria because Dick Cheney has refused to buy him a new Maybach, the Page 6-political press parallels seem like a reach.

—Michelle