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Jihad 2.0, Ctd

Patrick Kingsley looks into the success of ISIS’s online propaganda:

Thousands of their Twitter followers installed an app – called the Dawn of Glad Tidings – that allows Isis to use their accounts to send out centrally written updates. Released simultaneously, the messages swamp social media, giving Isis a far larger online reach than their own accounts would otherwise allow. The Dawn app pumps out news of Isis advances, gory images, or frightening videos like Swords IV – creating the impression of a rampant and unstoppable force.

And it works, Iraqis say.

When Isis stormed Mosul, Iraqi soldiers fled their posts, apparently aware that they would face a gruesome fate if they were captured while on duty. “The video was a message to Isis’s enemies,” says Abu Bakr al-Janabi, an Isis supporter in Iraq who claims to have knowledge of the group’s media operations. “It’s Isis saying to them: look what will happen to you if you cross our path. And it actually worked: a lot of soldiers deserted once they saw the black banners of Isis.”

Canadian-born ISIS fighter “Abu Usamah” describes how the group puts skilled recruits from the West to work, including in its media department:

[W]hen prospective members do arrive on the Syrian front, he says ISIS places them into skill-specific trades supporting their overall war machine. In other words, there are fighters, there are thinkers, and there are even propagandists for the outfit now carving out a new state in northern Iraq and Syria.

For example, I asked him about the super-stylized ISIS videos of battle highlights, which are both horrifying in content and impressive in production value. It’s a far cry from the grainy videos Osama Bin Laden issued during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. “We have a large media department and Doula [ISIS] doesn’t allow people with skills to enter the front lines,” Abu Usamah said. “If you’re an engineer, doctor, or in the case of a graphic designer, etc you are placed in a position suited to your skill set. Many underestimate the strength and organization of this state, many just think of us as bloodthirsty barbarians which is FAR from the truth.”

Meanwhile, enterprising retailers in Indonesia and Turkey are rolling out ISIS swag:

#ISIS outlet clothing store in Istanbul… interesting… pic.twitter.com/OhetnmZIaB

— Gürkan Özturan (@obefintlig) June 24, 2014

cash-strapped? #ISIS sells T-Shirts online to raise funds http://t.co/nGn1jRKKbR pic.twitter.com/vfkINIz6sZ

— Al Arabiya English (@AlArabiya_Eng) June 25, 2014

ISIS uses merchandising to market itself as “cool,” but Facebook says not on its pages. http://t.co/jqwULntEOc pic.twitter.com/W0wlwAjTI2

— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) June 25, 2014

(Top image: ISIS propaganda)

Putin’s Kangaroo Council

The latest machination:

[Yesterday] the Russian president made a request to the Federation Council, the upper house of parliament, that they revoke his right to stage a military intervention in Ukraine. [Today] they will undoubtedly approve his request, just as they approved his request for that questionable authority several months ago. Although Ukraine’s president welcomes Putin’s move as a “first practical step,” skepticism remains with good reason. After all, Russia last week began to regroup thousands of troops near the Ukrainian border, less than a month after promising to remove troops. And, the separatists, some of whom claim to be Chechen mercenaries on official orders, have an uncanny ability to get their hands on tanks, rocket launchers, and other military equipment, and earlier [yesterday] they broke a ceasefire they agreed to several days ago.

Anna Nemtsova tries to get in Putin’s head:

Why would Putin want his hands tied (however loosely)? One likely reason: He made the request a few days before European leaders are to discuss new sanctions against Russia, this time covering the banking sector. Another possibility: He can get the reversal reversed any time he wants, and may be trying, once again, to wrong-foot the West by talking conciliation while stepping up covert action to support the rebels in eastern Ukraine.

Bershidsky also makes clear why Putin’s gesture is bullshit:

Given his rubber-stamp parliament, Putin can gain permission to send troops back to Ukraine at any time. Besides, if Putin’s goal is to keep Poroshenko off balance, an invasion isn’t necessary. Russia has already succeeded in drawing out the conflict, arming rebels and making it possible for Russian citizens to fight on the separatists’ side. So much for “deceit.”

As for “bargaining,” it has now started in Donetsk, with Ukrainians from both camps searching for compromise. [Viktor] Medvedchuk’s ties to both Putin and Poroshenko — along with the possible backing of one of Ukraine’s richest men, Rinat Akhmetov — suggests a resolution with the armed rebels is in sight. The rebels have been useful to Putin, but they are unreliable over the long term. The Kremlin prefers to work with familiar pro-Russian politicians and businessmen in Ukraine’s east to make sure Ukraine doesn’t end up in the Western bloc.

In effect, Putin is now ready to enter the quiet phase of his Ukraine operation. The West will acquiesce to his game — but only after claiming that sanctions have been a success.

Keating’s take:

With more international sanctions potentially on the way, Putin lately seems to be playing the unlikely role of good cop in this conflict, voicing support for reconciliation and peace while the pro-Russian rebels keep fighting with what certainly seems like tacit support from Moscow, and his foreign minister and the national gas monopoly keep up the pressure on Kiev. Some of the rebel groups may also have gone rogue – some members of the recently formed militia group Russian Orthodox Army recently expressing irritation with Putin’s on-again-off-again support.

In any event, the good news is that the worst-case scenario – full Russian invasion – now looks extremely unlikely. But the volatile mess in Eastern Ukraine still looks a long way from resolution.

(Photo from Getty)

Reality Check, Ctd

Yesterday I posited that Obama’s sudden downward turbulence in the polls was almost certainly about Iraq. Sure was:

President Obama receives his worst marks yet for handling the situation in Iraq, with 52 percent disapproving and strong negative sentiment now outpacing strong approval by 2 to 1 (34 to 17 percent) in a new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Asked whether the U.S. should launch air strikes against Sunni insurgents, 45 percent support and 46 percent oppose that idea. Fifty-eight percent of Republicans support air strikes, compared with 44 percent among Democrats and 41 percent of independents. The gap between men and women is just as large and extends across party lines. Men support air strikes by a 54 to 40 percent margin, while women oppose them by 52 to 38 percent.

Nearly two-thirds of the public, however, opposes sending U.S. ground forces to combat insurgents, including at least six in 10 Democrats, Republicans and independents. No demographic or political group in the poll expresses majority support for deploying ground troops, while opposition surges to above 70 percent among those over age 50 and post-graduates.

Flagging yet another new poll, Aaron Blake remarks on the partisan gap:

A new CBS News/New York Times poll on Iraq suggests that the American people are quite uncertain about what should be done amid the rise of the al-Qaeda-inspired group ISIS. Perhaps most notably, though, there is little urgency among Democrats or independents to get involved, suggesting that any push for further involvement will be spurred in large part — yet again — by the political right.

The poll shows majorities of Democrats (51 percent) and independents (55 percent) believe that the United States does not have the responsibility to do something in Iraq, while 52 percent of Republicans say it does. Similarly, majorities of both Democrats (60 percent) and independents (56 percent) say the violence in Iraq doesn’t raise the threat of terrorism against the United States. Six in 10 Republicans say it does increase the threat.

Waldman ponders why Obama’s approval numbers keep sinking when he and the public agree on pretty much everything:

While you can quibble about the wording of a question here or there, the overall picture is one of a public that would like to help, so long as it doesn’t involve much direct risk to our personnel, but still doesn’t think what we do is going to make much of a difference. That certainly sounds like a description of where the President himself is at the moment.

So why doesn’t he get more credit for being on their side? We can stipulate that there is literally nothing Obama could do that would satisfy most Republicans; when he says he intends to do exactly what they want, they simply change what they want, since agreeing with him on anything is psychologically intolerable for so many of them. But what upsets most Americans, I suspect, is that we’re being forced to think about Iraq at all. To the American public, the place is a black hole, sucking all our good intentions and sacrifice and money and attention into its miasma of chaos. They hear that there’s an army of Sunni extremists rampaging through the country, then see that Muqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite followers are mobilizing in response (remember when they were the bad guys?), and they can’t figure out how anything we could do would possibly stop this nightmare.

Which is where I am – except I’ve come to a more non-interventionist position overall since 2003. Drum’s take:

In other words, Iraq is like the economy: it doesn’t really matter what the president is doing. If the economy is good, the public approves of his performance. It it’s bad, they disapprove.

But Larison isn’t letting Obama off the hook:

As I’ve said before, Obama sets himself up to fail by trying to take the “lead” in crises and conflicts that the U.S. doesn’t know the first thing about resolving. The mismatch between rhetoric and action has been a persistent problem for this administration. For instance, Obama has made unnecessary declarations about the legitimacy of other leaders and governments (e.g., “Assad must go”) that would seem to require much more aggressive policies than he or the public would be prepared to support. As a result, his policy is judged against the much higher standard that he unwisely set for the administration. Pursuing more ambitious hawkish goals with limited means puts Obama in a bad position at home as well, since it invites attacks from hawks that always want the U.S. to “do more” without giving anyone else something that they can fully support.

I agree. But in his actions, Obama has been more eloquent. Maybe it’s impossible for a US president to resist giving the impression that he is somehow able to do anything about vast, complicated upheavals thousands of miles away, but at some point we need one who will say so more definitively.

Past Your Bedtime As A Pastime

Researchers are finding that bedtime procrastination – “failing to go to bed at the intended time, while no external circumstances prevent a person from doing so” – runs rampant:

In [one] study—whose results will soon be published in Journal of Health Psychology— [researcher Floor] Kroese looked at a representative sample of twenty-four hundred and thirty-one Dutch adults, who responded to an online survey and kept a sleep diary every day for a week. The participants reported what time they wanted to go to bed, what time they actually went to bed, and, if there was a discrepancy between the two, whether that reason was outside of their control (crying baby, sick husband, waiting up for a tardy daughter) or within it (good TV). … [H]er team found that a large number of people got insufficient sleep and that, as the report states, “people who have low self-regulation skills are more likely to keep watching the late night movie, or play yet another computer game despite knowing they might regret it the next morning when waking up tired.”

“When you’re in these situations, it’s sort of a foggy state, a foggy inertial state,” [researcher Joel] Anderson said. “You need to get going, you need something to get you out of that. You need a greased skid to help you.” This might be a timer that switches off your television, or an alarm on your phone—anything to switch off the illicit zombie impulse that makes you keep scrolling through Twitter under the bedcovers. “It’s not magic, but the effect is robust,” he went on. “If there’s a clear cue, and a clear plan of action lined up, then there are ways of managing yourself.”

Raging Against Obama – And History

[Re-posted from earlier today]

If you’re looking for a majestically sweeping indictment of everything president Obama has achieved in foreign policy over the last six years, go read Walter Russell Mead’s screed. The rise of an ISIS-led Sunni insurgency in Iraq is, apparently, “a movement that dances on the graveyard of his hopes.” No one wants to take on the emperor with no clothes or “the full and ugly course of the six years of continual failure.” He’s not done yet: “Rarely has any American administration experienced so much ignominious failure, or had its ignorance and miscalculation so brutally exposed.” And on it goes. The Obamaites “have piled up such a disastrous record in the Middle East” that they couldn’t be trusted to “negotiate their way into a used car lot.” And the final denouement:

The President isn’t making America safer at home, he doesn’t have the jihadis on the run, he has no idea how to bring prosperity, democracy, or religious moderation to the Middle East, he can’t pivot away from the region, and he doesn’t know what to do next.

Inevitably, when one reads a piece like this, you expect the author to tell us what he would do next. If the results of specific Obama policies have been so disastrous, then surely he must be able to point to several mistakes, offer an alternative in hindsight, or, heaven forfend, provide a constructive proposal today. But you will, alas, find no such thing in the screed. The most you’ll get it this:

How could the U.S. government have been caught napping by the rise of a new and hostile power in a region of vital concern? What warning signs were missed, what opportunities were lost—and why? What role did the administration’s trademark dithering and hairsplitting over aid to ISIS’s rivals in the Syrian opposition play in the rise of the radicals?

Indeed, I’m sure those questions will be debated by pundits and historians. But Mead has no answers. He supported arming the “moderate” Syrian rebels, sure, but even he acknowledged this could end up in tears. And when you grasp his admiration for ISIS’ strategic chops, it seems quite likely that American arms could have ended up in the Jihadists’ hands. After all, one result of the US’ arming, training and equipping the moderate Iraqi army are the humvees and arms being paraded around Iraq by the Sunni-ISIS insurgency today. Arming any single side in a complex, metastasizing conflict is fraught with unintended consequences and the constant risk of blowback. But even if we’d been able to arm genuinely “moderate” Syrian rebels, does anyone believe they would prevail in an internecine war with the true fanatics? From the record of the last year or so, almost certainly not.

Mead also manages to blame Obama for the failure of the democratic revolution in Egypt. Quite how the US president could have changed the course of Egyptian politics in a period of massive unrest and revolution is not entirely clear. And that’s really the deepest flaw in the case against the president. There is an assumption – even now! – that the world is controlled by the US and that everything in it is a result of American hegemony. So there are no places on earth where the US is not a factor, and any bad things that happen are ipso facto a consequence of poor foreign policy. The planet is “Obama’s brave new world,” and the actual actors in it, from Moscow to Fallujah, from Qom and Cairo, are denied the real agency they have and keep exercising. And of course, whatever Obama has done has failed. When we don’t intervene, as in Syria, the result is a disaster. When we do intervene, as in Libya, the result is “an unmitigated disaster from which not only Libya but much of north and west Africa still suffers today.” So what does Mead suggest? This is as good as it gets:

The U.S. might do better to try to strengthen the non-ISIS components of the Sunni movements in Syria and Iraq than to look to Tehran and the Kremlin for help.

As they still say in Britain’s Private Eye, er…. that’s it. We should actually be arming the very Sunni forces that are trying to take Baghdad, and somehow hoping they’ll turn around and beat the fanatics if we ask nicely. Well, thank you very much, Mr Mead. How could the administration have ignored your genius for so long?

I think what’s missing from Mead’s harrumph is any sense that the world is, in the end, not about us; that the Arab and Muslim worlds are in a historic convulsion that has been fed by countless tributaries from the past and will forge many unexpected paths in the future; that the generational shifts, the impact of new technology and media, the decay of traditional Islam, the rise of an Internet Islamism, the legacies of the sectarian war in Iraq and the Assad despotism in Syria, and the rise of a new Shiite awareness … all these represent forces we have no way of arresting, let alone controlling, let alone micro-managing, as Mead suggests. Our role, if we are not to become insane, is not to manage the unmanageable; it is to understand that some historical processes have to take place and that some of them will not necessarily be in our interests.

Interventionists, in other words, can become like addicts.

Yes we need the courage to change the things we can change (like our surveillance, security and intelligence apparatus), but also, critically, the serenity to accept the things we cannot change (like the future of the younger Arab and Muslim generations or that of the ancient Sunni-Shia struggle), and the wisdom to know the difference. Interposing ourselves even now as the indispensable overseer and arbiter of the fate of Iraq and Syria and the Middle East is to further engage in the fantasies that still linger from the elysian period of 1989 – 2001. If we haven’t learned from the last decade and a half that our assumption of that control is a self-defeating chimera, then we’re incapable of learning anything.

Even with unlimited resources, a decade of effort and death and suffering on a vast scale, we were unable to change the reality of Iraq: a divided traumatized, sectarian mess, where the Sunnis believe they have a right to rule, the Shia have somehow regained power, and the Kurds could give a shit about either. Maybe it should have occurred to us that there has not been majority Shiite rule in Iraq for so long for a reason. Maybe Maliki’s dictatorial impulses were not some wanton decision to destroy Iraq, but a rational move if you are actually trying to govern Iraq as it is, just as Saddam’s despotism was. What amazes me about critics such as Mead is that they have learned no deeper lessons from this; they still, rather pathetically, cite the surge as a success, when it clearly did nothing but bribe a phony peace into temporary existence in order for us to leave … and the old order of things return. And they still cling to a worldview in which everything is run from Washington.

But it isn’t. Our long-term goal is the emergence of a peaceful, democratic Middle East that does not export terror and medieval fanaticism across the globe. And we’ve seen the first spasms of that process: the ousting of tyrants, the failures of revolutions (with one notable success in Tunisia, one place where we haven’t intervened), and the ructions of a youth movement in Iran. But we have barely seen the next phase – and it will surprise us, I’m sure. The great religious wars in Europe burned (literally for some) for a couple of centuries. And it was only the bitter, collective experience of those endless, brutal, bloody wars that persuaded the majority that they weren’t worth fighting any more. At some point we have to ask: why are we spending lives and treasure and attention to prevent that outcome from coming sooner rather than later?

(Photo: Barack Obama yesterday by Chip Somodevilla/Getty.)

Inherit The Windfall, Ctd

Jared Bernstein “didn’t think [Mankiw] made much of a case” in his defense of inherited wealth:

In fact, in an article based on nervousness over a wealth or inheritance tax—they’re not the same thing but their differences are not germane to what follows—there was a conspicuous lack of any discussion of such taxes in practice. As with any tax, the question is: given its magnitude and scope, what is its distortionary impact on behaviors relative to the benefits its revenues provide?

In the US case, the current estate tax—a tax on the value of estates at death—is tiny. As we point out here, because individuals and couples can exempt $5.25 million and $10.5 million, respectively, “fewer than 2 of every 1,000 estates will owe any estate tax in 2013.” In other words, “everybody dies, but only the richest 0.14% of estates pay the estate tax.” Though the top statutory rate on estates is 40%, because of the exemption and other provisions that to reduce the liability of heirs to the estate, the effective rate—the average share of the estate paid in taxes—is about 16%.

Danny Vinik also knocks Mankiw:

[A]ll of this misses a fundamental argument against substantial sums of inherited wealth: fairness. Kids from wealthy families already have numerous advantages over low-income children, including receiving a better education and having access to more social capital. Huge inheritances only exacerbate those advantages.

A particularly strong point from Vinik:

Not only are these huge disparities unfair, but they also reveal a double standard among conservative policymaking.

Republicans often argue that giving people money – or health insurance – will disincentivize them from working and reduce economic growth. … If [Paul] Ryan is so concerned about Obamacare discouraging low-income Americans from working, he should have the same qualms about huge inheritances discouraging kids from wealthy families from working. But you never hear that argument from Republicans. Apparently, free money – whether from the government or your parents – only acts as a disincentive to work when poor people receive it.

Krugman joins in:

[T]he larger criticism of Mankiw’s piece is that it ignores the main reason we’re concerned about the concentration of wealth in family dynasties – the belief that it warps our political economy, that it undermines democracy. You don’t have to be a radical to share this concern; not only did people like Teddy Roosevelt openly talk about this problem, so (as Thomas Piketty points out) did Irving Fisher in his 1919 presidential address to the American Economic Association.

A few readers get their say:

Mankiw’s argument that inherited wealth is not something to worry about is dubious at best. The argument assumes that investing in productivity, and the storing of wealth necessary to make those investments (“financing capital”) are desirable pursuits. And I think many of us would agree that this is the lynchpin of civilization. But what is not at all clear from Mr. Mankiw’s argument is that a system of inheritance is an efficient way to both save and invest this wealth in capital. Are those who inherit money more likely than any other entity to invest it in capital, and to do so wisely?

The part about rising wages is even worse. Mankiw’s writes, “[H]eirs induce an unintended redistribution of income from other owners of capital toward workers.” Now, I’m not a professional investor, but I believe the point of investing in capital is to yield a better return on your money then you would get from labor. I mean, sure, some people’s wages will increase. But that will be more than offset by the number of man-hours saved. So in the end there is a smaller share of money going to workers as wages and a larger share going to owners of capital. That is the whole point of owning capital.

Historically, labor has done OK because new capital has created a larger demand for skilled labor. But as automation becomes increasingly sophisticated and better able to replace skilled labor, it is not at all clear that this will continue to be the case. And if the rate of labor replacement outstrips the rate of job creation, what do we do with all of these unemployed people? Wealth that is locked into blood lines by inheritance sure isn’t going to help them.

Another objects to Mankiw’s characterization of Capital in the Twenty-First Century:

He dismisses Piketty’s book as “provocative speculation.” It might be speculative in the sense that it makes some broad assumptions about the future (with equally broad caveats), but its predictions are supported by data. Manikaw’s article is mostly a series of unsupported assertions. For example, he says that “because increased capital raises labor productivity, workers enjoy higher wages,” which is obviously not true if you observe the last 20 years or so – the gains from increased worker productivity don’t necessarily go to workers, especially in an environment of ever-increasing pay for executives.

Mankiw also talks about how the “regression toward the mean” is some sort of natural enemy of inequality. However, part of Piketty’s point is that we’re returning to the historical “mean” rates of growth and return on capital: something like 1-2 percent growth and 5-7 percent on capital annually (with larger fortunes getting higher gains). He goes on to show how this basic mathematical inequality resulted in economic inequality throughout recorded history. For now, we’re still waiting for a rebuttal of Piketty’s book that’s based on data and actual research.

An Abrahamic Turducken

A design has been chosen for the House of One, a project that aims to bring a church, a mosque, and a synagogue under one roof in the heart of Berlin:

Each of the three areas in the House will be the same size, but of a different shape, architect Wilfried Kuehn points out. “Each of the singular spaces is designed according to the religious needs, the particularities of each faith,” he says. “There are for instance two levels in the mosque and the synagogue but there’s only one level in the church. There will be an organ in the church. There are places to wash feet in the mosque.” He and his team of architects researched designs for the three types of worshipping place and found more similarities than expected.

“What’s interesting is that when you go back a long time, they share a lot of architectural typologies. They are not so different,” Kuehn says. “It’s not necessary for instance for a mosque to have a minaret – it’s only a possibility and not a necessity. And a church doesn’t need a tower. This is about going back to the origins when these three faiths were close and shared a lot architecturally”.

Update from a reader:

While never a bad idea, it’s not as new as people seem to think. For example, in Ann Arbor, a Jewish synagogue and an Episcopal church have been sharing space for going on 30 years. Maybe a little easier for two faiths to share the same sanctuary when they have different days of worship, of course, but it’s not a new idea.

Another:

Check out the tri-faith campus in Omaha. It has run into a little bit of controversy that resulted from the anti Muslim people but I know that in the end common sense and good will will win out.

Thin Skin Deep

As summer-camp season approaches, Alyson Krueger reports from Eden Village, a Jewish organic farming program that has a “no-body-talk” rule for kids:

“The specific rule is while at camp, we take a break from mentioning physical appearance, including clothing,” said Vivian Stadlin, who founded the camp six years ago with her husband, Yoni Stadlin. “And it’s about myself or others, be it negative, neutral or even positive.”

On Friday afternoon, when the campers, girls and boys from 8 to 17, are dressed in white and especially polished for the Sabbath, they refrain from complimenting one another’s appearances. Rather, they say, “Your soul shines” or “I feel so happy to be around you” or “Your smile lights up the world,” Ms. Stadlin said. Signs posted on the mirrors in the bathroom read, “Don’t check your appearance, check your soul.”

Marcotte is wary:

It sounds wonderful on paper to live in “this wonderful, utopian kind of place where you’re not judged on anything except your spirit,” as one parent described Eden Village. But in the real world, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to include the body as part of your overall judgment of a person, such as when you are picking people to be on your tug-of-war team or auditioning potential sex partners. Doing things like covering up mirrors, which one camp does, treads a little too far in the direction of treating the body like it’s a source of shame instead of helping campers embrace their bodies for what they are and what they can do for them.

She offered similar criticism of a New York City ad campaign last year featuring the slogan “I’m a girl; I’m beautiful the way I am”:

No doubt it satisfies adults to pat little girls on the head and tell them they’re perfect and beautiful just the way they are, but kids often have better BS detectors than adults give them credit for. A handful of slogans on local ads will not change the fact that, in the real world, girls and women do suffer relentless judgment about their looks and are, whether they like it or not, frequently treated as if how they look matters more than anything else about them. For kids already picking up on this grim reality, having adults tell them that they’re perfect just the way they are has a strong chance of being read like yet another bit of adult wishful thinking.

Katy Waldman also criticized the campaign:

[W]hat’s with the slogan? As Kat Stoeffel at the Cut notes, “There’s something slightly contradictory about the NYC Girls Project message—‘Don’t worry about how you look. You look beautiful!’ ” Isn’t the point of the program to encourage girls to disassociate their sense of worth from their physical appearance? Why couldn’t the slogan simply be, “I’m Awesome the Way I Am?”

Beating Back the Distortions Of Gay History

While the p.r. juggernaut behind the deceptions and distortions of Ted Olson, David Boies, Jo Becker and Chad Griffin grinds relentlessly forward to mainstream applause, there’s been an extraordinarily gratifying pushback from countless people who actually know something about the subject. We had Mark Joseph Stern weighing in at Slate. Alyssa Rosenberg filets the Becker and Olson books in the Washington Post here. Jamie Kirchick takes a good whack in the Wall Street Journal here. Hank Stuever got the true measure of the documentary here.

Alyssa’s review is particularly strong and I recommend it if you haven’t read enough about this controversy. She rightly sees this egregious p.r. campaign as turning the actual story of this remarkable civil rights struggle into something “less true and less interesting.” And she has a good eye for the motives of Boies and Olson:

Much is made of the fact that Olson and Boies opposed each other in Bush v. Gore, but little of the alternative legacy each man might want to build for himself, Boies as a winner rather than a loser, Olson as a man above politics rather than a partisan operative.

It goes to show that there is, in the end, a riposte to public relations. It’s called journalism. And the rumors of its death – at the hands of Jo Becker – are mercifully exaggerated.

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