Politics, culture war and "reality TV"

Gary Kamiya recently wrote in The culture war: It's back! Salon 09/15/08:

Resentment explains some of this. So does a widespread lack of respect for government itself, and ignorance about what it is and what it requires. Most insidious, perhaps, is the fact that more and more Americans seem to see politics as just another reality TV show. You vote for [Sarah] Palin the same way you vote for a designer on "Project Runway." As Katharine Mieszkowski reported for Salon, Palin's rapturous supporters embrace her because "she represents me." It's the politics of sheer narcissism. [my emphasis]

I don't know if this is based on any actual polling data. But it "rings true" as they say, at least in the sense that I can find it credible that some people look at politics this way.

Kamiya's mention of "reality" TV reminded me of my experience on a jury in a civil case in 2007. I wasn't thrilled about the outcome. It was a 10-2 vote in favor of the plaintiff; a unanimous verdict wasn't required. But I understood why it came out like that. Both the plaintiff and the defendant talked too much on the stand for their own good. And at one point, the defendant got flustered and admitted that he had lied on a key document. And it was a document the defense was using for a key point. So it's understandable that it went that way.

But after the trial was done, as we were leaving, a juror who had been convinced right away that the plaintiff was right and seemed to be in a hurry to get things over with walked up to the plaintiff's attorney as we were leaving and shook his hand and said, "Good job!"

It's normal in a case like that for the attorneys to request the jurors to talk about the decision with them, which I also did. But it just struck me as inappropriate for a juror to go congratulate one of the attorneys as though it were simply a competitive event rather than a legal decision.

And I though to myself when he did that, that this was probably a "reality TV" effect. This guy didn't really care what was the right thing to do. He was just grading the contestants over which was more entertaining.

I can't help but believe that one of the effects of the dysfunction we now see from our celebrity press corps is that many voters are processing political campaigns as "reality TV". Politics has always been part entertainment. But in recent years, we've gone into a qualitative new level of celebrity politics.

Tags: culture war, gary kamiya, sarah palin

Salon's headline writers come up with a memorable one

Psycho Christians and the media is the title over the article Gary Kamiya Salon 05/20/08. Maybe "psycho-Christian" will enter the language as a synonym for Christianist.

Kamiya's article features Maverick McCain's good bud John Hagee, who's eager to back Israel in any and every war they could fight and some they don't so it will bring nearer that happy day (happy in his warped theology) when most of the Jews of the world will be killed by hostile armies and the rest convert to Christianity. And also McCain backer Rod Parsely, of whom Sarah Posner wrote in a memorable portrait of him (With God on His Side American Prospect 10/23/05) that he sees himself as "the arbiter of what's right and wrong because, as he is unafraid to say, God told him so."

Kamiya focuses on the painfully obvious double standard of the Establishment press in covering radical Christianist clerics as opposed to, say, scary black preachers like a lot of people apparently find Jeremiah Wright to be. "The dirty little secret of mainstream American journalism is that it operates within invisible constraints that conform to some imagined Middle American consensus," writes Kamiya.

Oddly, though, he also says, "Obama's personal relationship with Wright raised more legitimate questions than were raised by McCain's actively seeking Hagee's endorsement." I'm not sure how he gets to that. The bold Maverick sought out Hagee's endorsement knowing very well that Hagee's main political issue is inciting the US to war with Iran to further his crackpot End Times theology. In other words, McCain sought Hagee's endorsement precisely because of his most violent, bigoted, crackpot views on the Middle East.

Tags: christian fundamentalism, christian right, christianism, gary kamiya, mccain

Yes, widening the war to Iran would be really loony

Gary Kamiya may be using "us" a bit broadly. But his comment on Establishment thinking - what liberal bloggers have taken lately to calling "the Village" - is uncomfortably accurate (Iraq taught us nothing Salon 11/06/07):

The U.S. could attack Iran in the next few months. ...

The fact that this sentence can be written with a straight face proves that the Iraq debacle has taught us absolutely nothing. Talk of attacking Iran should be confined to the lunatic fringe. Yet America's political and media elite have responded to the idea of attacking Iran in almost exactly the same way they did to the idea of attacking Iraq. Four and a half years after Bush embarked on one of the most catastrophic foreign-policy adventures in our history, the same wrongheaded, ignorant and self-destructive approach to the Arab-Muslim world and to fighting terrorism still rules establishment thinking.

The disturbing thing is that we have no excuse this time. (my emphasis)

I wouldn't go so far as he does in criticizing Clinton's position on the Iran issue. A couple of recent Huffington Post articles with differing points of view help put the Democrats' position in context, A Reality Check on Iran Policy and U.S. Campaign Politics 11/04/07 by Joe Wilson and Coercive Diplomacy and War: The Vietnam Precedent by Gareth Porter 11/01/07.

Tags: gareth porter, gary kamiya, iran war, joseph wilson

Historical analogies and the people who analogize them

Jeffrey Record of the Air War College has given a lot of attention to the use of historical analogies in US foreign policy making in his books Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (2002) and The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler (2007). Much of the latter book can be found online in Record's paper, Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s (US Army Strategic Studies Institute) August 2005, which I've discussed separately.

Gary Kamiya takes a look at the Cheney-Bush administration's fondness for flaky Second World War analogies in Last refuge of the scoundrel Salon 05/01/07:

Throughout the Bush presidency, there has been one infallible rule: If someone starts talking about World War II, watch your wallet. Ever since Bush invaded Iraq, his supporters have been desperately trying to convince the American people that Iraq is the WWII of our time. They constantly invoke the Blitz, the invasion of Poland, the Hitler-Stalin pact, the fall of France, Pearl Harbor and other momentous events from the Last Good War.

Unfortunately for the GOP, Bush's own words have rendered the Churchill comparison absurd. Churchill called for blood, toil, tears and sweat. Bush called for tax breaks for the rich and continued shopping. He didn't raise taxes, or impose a gas tax, or institute a draft, or in any way put the country on a war footing. Asked by "The NewsHour's" Jim Lehrer why he hadn't asked Americans to sacrifice anything for the war, Bush replied, "Well, you know, I think a lot of people are in this fight. I mean, they sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night ... And one thing we want during this war on terror is for people to feel like their life's moving on." Yes, that certainly has the Churchillian ring to it.

But then Kamiya himself can't resist his own Second World War analogy:

Besides, if there are any legitimate analogies between Iraq and WWII, they aren't ones that Bush wants Americans to think about. Iraq more closely resembles Stalingrad, where a delusional Hitler refused to cut his losses, or the Maginot Line - that heavily armed defensive wall that the Germans simply went around. The Battle of Britain, Iraq ain't.

Well, let's see: Stalingrad was urban warfare, and a lot of the Iraq War has been fought in cities. And the Maginot line, where the Germans "went around" it by attacking in a whole different direction is, well, not at all like anything I can see about the Iraq War.

His Stalingrad point about self-deception on the Leader's part I can see how it might fit, but the war fans will just brush it off by saying, "Oh, look, he's saying Bush is like Hitler!"

As far as the Battle of Britain, I would say the Iraq War could be like that. The US is bombing Iraq relentlessly and they're still fighting and hate us that much more. See, I can't resist making the Second World War analogies myself!

I think there's a difference between "lessons of history" and "analogies of history". The analogies usually wind up being rhetorical flourishes, or attempts to brand one war with the positive glow of another, or something along those lines. Kamiya is on better ground when he contrasts Churchill's famous "blood, sweat, and tears", we're-all-in-this-together style with Bush's we're-all-annoyed-by-watching-this-on-TV style. I though Bush's statement, by the way, was worded to fit with the complaint that the only thing that's wrong in Iraq is that the fabled Liberal Media don't bring us enough of the good news.

And Kamiya is right that Bush's Second World War posturing over the Iraq War is absurd. Cheney and Bush have taken it to extremes, like they have with a lot of things, but this Second World War imagery has been pervasive. To judge from the comparisons that have been made all along, we've fought Hitler over and over against since 1945: Kim Il Sung Hitler (with Joe Stalin Hitler in the background), Ho Chi Minh Hitler, Slobodan Milosevic Hitler, Saddam Hussein Hitler. The Iran hawks tell us now that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Hitler is a deadly menace to our whole way of life.

Jeffrey Record points out at some length that Hitler Germany presented a combination of great industrial capability and military power and a leader who was both undeterrable and unappeasable. The Western powers couldn't have avoided war in that circumstance. But different policies in the 1930s might have made war far less costly and much shorter. In "Appeasement Reconsidered", he writes:

No post-1945 foreign dictatorship bears genuine comparison to the Nazi dictatorship. The scope of Hitler’s nihilism, ambitions, and military power posed a mortal threat to Western civilization. No other authoritarian or totalitarian regime has managed to employ such a powerful military instrument in such an aggressive manner to fulfill such a horrendous agenda. Stalin had great military power but was cautious and patient; he was a realist and neither lusted for war nor discounted the strength and will of the Soviet Union’s enemies. Mao Zedong was reckless but militarily weak. Ho Chi Minh’s ambitions and fighting power were local. And Saddam Hussein was never in a position to reverse U.S. military domination of the Persian Gulf. (my emphasis)

And the most serious problem is not that the imagery is phony, it can lead to bad policy decisions. As Record writes:

The problem with seeing Hitler in Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Saddam Hussein is that it reinforces the presidential tendency since 1945 to overstate threats for the purpose of rallying public and congressional opinion, and overstated threats in turn encourage resort to force in circumstances where deterrence, containment, even negotiation (from strength) might better serve long-term U.S. security interests. Threats that are, in fact, limited tend to be portrayed in Manichaean terms, thus skewing the policy choice toward military action, a policy choice hardly constrained by possession of global conventional military primacy and an inadequate understanding of the limits of that primacy. (my emphasis)

Tags: jeffrey record, second world war, gary kamiya

Which side are you on? Do you even know?

I don't know who it was that first came up with the comment that is attributed to Robert Frost that liberals are so open-minded the refuse to take their own side in a debate. It may be like one of those fake Abraham Lincoln quotes, I don't know. Naturally, the rabid conservatives like to pretend that liberals take their own side so much they want to suppress all others. But that quote, bogus or not, sometimes comes to mind when I read things like this: Is there life after Bush? by Gary Kamiya Salon 02/20/07.

Kamiya does some good political analysis. But it's not evident in this piece. You can almost pick a paragraph at random and see how vapid it is. Writing about those vulgar bloggers, he says:

But having said that, it should also be said that the hate-Bush mind-set can spin out of control, leading to propagandistic thinking and a cynical ends-justify-the-means ethos. Faced with a triumphant administration and an army of right-wing media hacks, it's understandable that the left fought back with everything it had. But the obsession with victory can come at a dangerous price. Right now, the left - or at least some elements in the liberal blogosphere - have at times shown a disturbing tendency to close ranks and deny inconvenient truths. It should not still be necessary to point out that in battling a foe, you don't want to turn into him.

He rags on the "liberal" and/or "left" blogosphere - I envy the European publics who at least have some better common idea about who's liberal, conservative or left ("liberal" is not the same as "left" in most democracies in the rest of the world. But he doesn't give a single example of who these foaming-at-the-mouth lefties bloggers are. He gives a link of the phrase "deny inconvenient truths" to an article by Salon editor Joan Walsh, Fighting words 02/16/07. But Walsh's piece is more specifically about the tension that can arise between partisanship and factual reporting, a perfectly legitimate issue, and she is generally respectful to the bloggers she mentions even in criticizing them.

But Kamiya's piece is ditsy. He talks about Bush-haters that certainly exist in the fantasies of David Brooks, who's been beating the drum about this alleged malady for years. Now, when you're using generalities like talking about the dangers of "propagandistic thinking and a cynical ends-justify-the-means ethos", who can really argue with the abstract point? But who is he actually talking about? He doesn't say.

But what he does do is echo the same nonsense that, the sad characters who dominate our national "press corps" promote. See, for instance, Think Progress' report, Tony Snow and White House Reporters Slam The ‘Hateful,’ ‘Polarized’ Blogosphere 02/20/07.

Kamiya's piece seems to assume that after Bush and Cheney leave office, that things will revert to the 1970s or something, where you actually still had Republican "moderates" - real live ones, not the Maverick McCain and Chuck Hagel versions - and the bipartisanship so beloved by David Broder and all proper Big Pundits was actually feasible on major issues.

But the Republican Party isn't going to revert to some non-authoritarian form overnight. The Republicans, according to one count I've seen, have a higher percentage of their total Congressional seats coming from the Deep South than the Democrats ever had during the days of the "Solid South". And that Southern Republican base is essentially made up of conservative white people, heavily influenced by Christian Right appeals and policies.

They aren't going to suddenly decide to make nice in January of 2009. We saw how long their phony appeals for "bipartisanship" lasted after last November's elections. So Kamiya's apparent longing for a Broderian era of moderation and reduced partisanship starting in two years is unlikely to be fulfilled.

Tags: bipartisanship, gary kamiya, joan walsh