September 11 retrospective: Shields and Brooks find something meaningful to say about 9/11

I'll forgo my usual introductory carping about the conventionality of Sleepy Mark Shields and David "Bobo" Brooks. It's still there in their 09/09/2011 PBS Newshour appearance, Shields, Brooks on Obama's Jobs Speech, Perry's Debate Debut. Okay, I'll carp a bit. Sleep Mark doesn't seem to have noticed that President Obama has proposed cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits earlier this year, proposed cutting Medicare again in his Thursday jobs speech and is floating benefit cuts for Social Security again. But I was struck by their comments on the 9/11 anniversary.



Bobo surprised me again this week by saying something I wonder if he really intended to say:

I would just emphasize some of the positive things that have happened since 9/11 because of U.S. actions. Saddam is out. Gadhafi is out, not all because of U.S. actions. Taliban is out. Mubarak is out. There has been a change in the world. Al-Qaida has been destroyed. We haven't been attacked again. And so I would say it's at least a mixed blessing and that, after 9/11, the Middle East is in a period of turmoil, could turn out bad, could turn out good. [my emphasis]

Say what? "Al-Qaida has been destroyed." Say what?!? The massive terrible Terrorist Menace that we have to spend half the military budgets of the world to fight doesn't exist anymore? He's right, of course. There's little if anything left of Bin Laden original Al Qa'ida group, at least from what we can tell from the confused and often deeply self-interested news we get on the subject.

Shields has always been decent on the Iraq War, even as most of his political analysis has slid into mind-numbing conventional wisdom, albeit with a consistent Democratic Establishment twist. He challenged Bobo's otherwise bland Profound Reflection on 9/11 this way:

I think that to use 9/11 as a justification for going to war against Saddam Hussein is indefensible. It was indefensible then is indefensible against -- war on Iraq and a war of occupation. The United States now has two wars of occupation 10 years later.

I think Afghanistan, you could certainly make the case, after the attack of 9/11, that that was necessary and required. There was a sense of national unity and solidarity and compassion that existed in this country after 9/11, which is gone. It's no longer, no longer with us.

The United States' standing in the world, that sense of solidarity with the United States and support for the United States after the terrible events of 9/11 has been allowed to go away. I agree with David about the Arab spring. And I think it is encouraging, and I -- but I don't think that going to Iraq is an instrument of it.

Tags: 9/11,, david brooks, iraq war, mark shields

A few moments of actual news analysis from Mark Shields and David Brooks

The PBS Newshour for 08/26/2011 had the A Team - such as it is - on hand for the weekly Political Wrap segment, Sleepy Mark Shields and David "Bobo" Brooks: Shields and Brooks on GOP's Zeitgeist, Whether Obama Gets Credit for Libya. The non-dynamic duo actually had some notable things to say about the Libya War in the first couple of minutes.



Seemingly cutting-edge reporting is not something we usually associate with Bobo. And I don't want to give him too much credit. But my eyebrows did pop up when I heard Bobo say this:

JIM LEHRER: David, does President Obama deserve any praise or credit for what happened in Libya?

DAVID BROOKS: I think he does, and a lot more than he's getting, actually.

You have to remember, when the -- Gadhafi was marching on the rebels and threatening to massacre them, a lot of people in this country wanted to do nothing. A lot of people in Europe who were more upset about it just wanted to have sort of a no-fly zone.

And Obama has pushed them more aggressively than they wanted to go, so it wasn't just a no-fly zone. Were -- we actually ended up helping the rebels. We ended up helping the goal of regime change. And people have criticized whether it is was slow enough or fast enough, whether it was more aggressive or not.

But I think, more than anybody outside the country, I think Obama does deserve a lot of credit for showing that you can do an intervention reasonably well, achieve at least the first step of your objective, and do some large good for that country and potentially the region. [my emphasis]

What Bobo says here is that not only did NATO go beyond the no-fly zone which was the only military action in Libya authorized by the UN Security Council, but it was President Obama who pushed the NATO allies to do that.

Bobo doesn't mention that little business about Congress not authorizing the President to go to war. But I know that's so, like, 1940s to even mention. Still, it bothers some of us who like parts of Article 1 of the Constitution.

And Sleepy Mark, who I also don't want to give too much credit, is actually often decent on military issues. And he managed to mention something about the scope of the NATO intervention:

JIM LEHRER: Yes. Why? Why is he not getting any credit?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, I think because, when the economy is bad, the economy is the only issue. I really do. I think American opinion or interest in Libya has been episodic at best.

There was a lot at the beginning. But the people who most strenuously supported intervention now refuse to -- mostly Republicans -- refuse to give the president, the prime intervener, any credit. And most of the people who opposed the intervention were Democrats.

So they're reluctant to -- seem to be reluctant to crow, although they do acknowledge the president's role. And it is a case of NATO working. The stalemate that was -- loomed is over. A despot has been removed -- 17,000 sorties were flown. You know, it's a...

JIM LEHRER: Seventeen thousand sorties, that's a lot of hardware.

MARK SHIELDS: Seventeen thousand. That's a lot. It sure is. It sure is. [my emphasis]

A sortie in this context is an aircraft combat flight. Sleepy Mark didn't get into the reports suggesting that US Special Forces and/or CIA were operating on the ground in Libya. Also without Congressional authorization. But then, that's not so unusual these days, as Nick Turse explains in A Secret War in 120 Countries: The Pentagon's New Power Elite TomDispatch 08/03/2011. Personally, if I heard about a foreign military running its own hostile operations in the United States, it would irritate me. I would probably think of it as an act of war. Something that might make a lot of Americans resent the foreign country running hostile military operations on our soil. I guess that's another way I'm just sort of old-fashioned. But I digress.

The rest of the segment is pretty much standard, mostly pointless political chatter about the Presidential race. With Bobo, as he often does, rehashing the content of his latest New York Times column. In this case, President Rick Perry? 08/25/2011, in which Bobo warns that Perry is another warmongering Texan backed by demon-fighting Pentecostalist fanatics explains that Perry is a Good Ole Boy with a charmingly distinctive style.

Still, you have to give the Political Wrap Twins credit for jarring their viewers' brains for a few seconds.

This video extra, though, shows that such moments of lucidity are likely as not entirely accidental. Sleepy Mark and Bobo give a brief repeat of their Political Wrap segment, then chatter about sports for a few minutes.



They have to still fake being serious analysts for the PBS audience, an especially hard pull for Bobo. But they see their business as infotainment.

Tags: david brooks, libya war, mark shields

Glenn Greenwald "fisks" the Shields and Brooks Clown Show on the national surveillance state

I often post the video of the PBS Newshour Political Wrap segment from Fridays because it provides a good glimpse of the conservative and liberal version of Beltway Village conventional wisdom of the moment. Every now and then, Mark Shields will suddenly aware from the semi-somnolent condition of torpor in which he usually functions in this segment and say something actually insightful.

I didn't catch any of that happening on the 05/27/2011 edition:



Glenn Greenwald in Establishment thought and the War on Terror Salon 05/27/2011 looks at the happy acceptance of the renewal of the PATRIOT Act substantially unchanged by both conservative David "Bobo" Brooks and Sleepy Mark. His comment on Bobo's endorsement of the surveillance state:

Our Leaders know secret things that we don't that make them know better [according to Bobo], and justify their complete abandonment of what they promise when campaigning (and as I've said many times, if that's really what happened -- if Obama got into office and learned Secret Things that showed him that his criticisms of Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies were misguided -- then don't he and his defenders owe the GOP a serious apology for the inaccurate harsh criticisms they spewed all those years?).

His comment on Sleepy Mark's endorsement of the surveillance state:

Now that we killed bin Laden [according to Sleepy Mark], we need civil-liberties-eroding measures like the Patriot Act more than ever. The notion that the death of bin Laden would trigger a winding down in the War on Terror -- as though bin Laden was the cause of those policies rather than pretext for them -- will prove to be one of the more absurd notions advanced on such matters. [emphasis in original]

Tags: david brooks, glenn greenwald, mark shields, patriot act

Immigration reform prospects

It may be accurate enough as political commentary. But I found the opening dialogue between Sleepy Mark Shields and Bush II hack Michael Gerson on the 05/13/2011 PBS Newshour to be tiresomely cynical on the prospects for immigration reform:



From the transcript:

JIM LEHRER: And to the analysis of Shields and Gerson. That's syndicated columnist Mark Shields, Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson. David Brooks is off tonight.

Picking up on what Secretary Napolitano told Judy, Mark, where do you see the prospects for immigration reform in the short run?

MARK SHIELDS: I see it more politically than I do statutorily, Jim.

I mean, the reality is that there -- first of all, there's not going to be a major immigration bill pass the Congress between now and Election Day.

JIM LEHRER: Why not?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, for a whole host of reasons. I mean, one is, it's not on anybody's agenda. And, secondly, there's no consensus.

The party -- the Republican Party has moved from the position of President Bush, who was -- worked with people like Sen. Kennedy, and who, by the way, got 43 percent of the Latino vote in 2004. In 2008, that fell down to 31 percent for John McCain, 67 percent for Barack Obama.

It's -- at 16 percent in the census, they are now the largest minority in the country, Latinos are. And one -- almost one out of four people in this country under the age of 17 is Latino. So, it's politically important, especially in states like Nevada and New Mexico and Gov. Napolitano's Arizona, in New Mexico, Colorado. Those are important -- that's an important vote. So, it's going to get attention, but it's not going to get any...

JIM LEHRER: OK.

Do agree with that, Michael?

MICHAEL GERSON: I do.

I think the president's speech in Texas was a political speech. But being political doesn't mean that it's cynical. The president would prefer to see a comprehensive reform. He's welcome to talk about that. Symbolism is very important in ethnic politics.

Republicans, the last few years, have been providing symbols of exclusion, talking about changing the 14th Amendment, and the Arizona law, the crackdown there. Obama wants to provide some symbols of inclusion, for political reasons. There's nothing wrong with that. It's not, eventually, enough. If the economy doesn't improve, Hispanics will feel that as well and react in that way.

But the president is well within his rights to make that case.

JIM LEHRER: Well, as Mark pointed out, President Bush, for whom you have worked, he was in favor of immigration reform that had both parts, right, that it took care of -- or it dealt with the issue of illegal immigrants who are already in the country and also about sealing the border better, right?

MICHAEL GERSON: And he made some of those arguments that Secretary Napolitano was making on this program...

JIM LEHRER: Yes.

MICHAEL GERSON: ... which is, if you want to get control of the border, you have to have some regular way to have guest workers come into the United States, and be registered, instead of, you know, crossing the border illegally. That's an important complement to controlling the problem at the border itself.

These are -- you know, it is a bipartisan issue. It has been in the past. But it has almost no chance in the current Congress.

JIM LEHRER: What -- in shorthand, what happened? Why -- where did the -- why did the consensus go away?

MICHAEL GERSON: Well, it's -- I think it's a tough question.

Some of it is, the Republican Party is not the Republican Party of George W. Bush. It doesn't have a leader that makes this case. It also -- you know, Bush failed within his own party. There was a revolt against it.

JIM LEHRER: He couldn't get it done. Yes.

MICHAEL GERSON: He couldn't get it done. And it was a talk radio issue all across the country within the conservative community. And they turned against the legislation strongly.

So, I think that that has burned a lot of Republicans. They know it is a tough thing among their own constituents. And, so...

MARK SHIELDS: Practically speaking, Jim, in an increasingly less white country, as -- which the United States is, the Republican Party has become an increasingly more white party. And that's a real political problem, just the arithmetic that works against them. [my emphasis]

When Shields says that comprehensive immigration reform is "not on anybody's agenda," he means that it's not on the agenda of anyone who counts - in the eyes of Beltway pundits.

Tags: comprehensive immigration reform, mark shields

The legendary May 1, 2003 Mission Accomplished speech

Out of curiosity, I went back to check the PBS Newshour commentary from Sleepy Mark Shields and David "Bobo" Brooks on May 2, 2003, where they gave their considered evaluation of Bush's Mission Accomplished speech the day before. I expected to hear Bobo praising the speech and Shields, who seemed to be more often fully conscious in those days than now, to be more critical. After listening to their commentary, I'm struck by what a measure of the depth of both their judgments it represented.

Today, of course, the Mission Accomplished speech is a subject of ridicule, generally regarded as one of the silliest and most ill-advised Presidential stunts ever. Fortunately, viewers of the Quality TV offered by the PBS Newshour were treated to the sober judgments of Bobo and Sleepy Mark, who could obviously see beyond the superficial judgments of the moment:

The president's victory speech

JIM LEHRER: All right. What did you think of the president's victory speech last night?

DAVID BROOKS: It was actually an interesting aesthetic debate over whether him flying into the boat was gimmicky and demeaning, which is what mature people thought or gimmicky and cool, which is what I thought. And so there is sort of an aesthetic judgment there. To me, the important things were the fact that he recognized these sailors who have been away from their families for ten months, some of them missing ... 150 missing the birth of their children. To me when this whole war proceeds into history, this cultural moment will be defined by those sailors and soldiers and the young people who are looking at this war will have their world view shaped by what they see of those people. And it will be totally different the way the Vietnam era saw the world. That will be an interesting thing.

The other substantive thing Bush said, he called this action in Iraq a battle. He said it was part of a longer war and you really got a sense of his mentality. Afghanistan was part of it. The al-Qaida fight was part of it. But we now got a lot more parts to go. And he said significantly the tide is turning. The tide... but you get the sense that he doesn't feel that something is over. He is in the middle of something Iran, Iraq, Syria. It is all not militarily but it's part of a life-long process for him.

JIM LEHRER: How do you feel about it?

MARK SHIELDS: Jim, I thought it was just in view of presidential presentation, it was spectacular. I mean, it was visually arresting. The president did the right thing. He struck the right note by not taking a victory lap himself, but offering a victory salute to the sailors, who, as David pointed, to the point of exhaustion. I mean these are people that have been out there ten months; 150 children have been born while they were at sea off this crew alone.

JIM LEHRER: No carrier has been out as long as this one.

MARK SHIELDS: No carrier has been out this long. And it was a symbolism that was heavy. The Abraham Lincoln; that did not go unnoticed. The fact that it was the only carrier that had been in both Afghanistan and Iraq -- but, you know, will it be a success? I thought of other great presidential moments. I thought of Jack Kennedy at Berlin in 1963. Ronald Reagan at Berlin in 1987 and Normandy....

JIM LEHRER: Mr. Gorbachev, bring down this wall.

MARK SHIELDS: One thing missing. I talked to professor Robert Schmuhl today, who's the author of "Stagecraft" and "Statecraft," and sort of an expert on this, and he pointed out two things to me. One, 9:00 Thursday night is the most viewed television hour of the entire week, so it was very shrewd scheduling on the part of the White House; they had their maximum audience then. But the other thing was there was not a memorable line that came from the speech. There wasn't "Ich bin ein Berliner". There was not a "tear down that wall." And I think we'll see this footage over and over again, probably with a voiceover of this is the president who is comfortable with his troops.

JIM LEHRER: Rather than hearing his words --

Assessing the criticisms of the speech

DAVID BROOKS: One of the nice things he did was talk about the action as the activation of America's true nation, not a Republican thing, not a Democratic thing. He talked about FDR's four freedoms, he talked about the Truman Doctrine; the Reagan Cold War policies. This -- he cast this as part of a long-term American project advancing the tide of democracy and on the Lincoln made researches to the Gettysburg Address as part of the founding of that.

JIM LEHRER: Some of the punditry suggested that the president and his handlers used these sailors and that aircraft carrier and all of the circumstances, props for his presidential reelection campaign -- cheap shot?

DAVID BROOKS: Not entirely. I went home last night in a terrible mood because I thought a lot of the pundits had ignored the sailors, had treated them as they were bunting in a big campaign event. Whereas the president paid tribute to the sailors. I wrote this up on a spasm of anger on the magazine's Web site and I got a lot of thoughtful commentaries -- well a minority of thoughtful commentaries -- some of which said the president started the politicization of this with the gimmick of flying in and treating it as a campaign prop. That's not an illegitimate shot.

It was -- some people who support the war believe he cheapened it in by flying in, by not delivering it from the Oval Office, by landing in military uniform, but I do think he at least paid tribute to those people unlike the pundits.

MARK SHIELDS: The most recurring criticism I heard of the president was the uniform, that you recall during the 2000 campaign, questions he was missing from the meetings in Alabama when he went to work on a political campaign there, didn't show up for reserve meetings. There was a question just exactly what his commitment was to the Texas Air National Guard, especially in the very important Battle of Amarillo. And so that was raised by some critic. I have flown in on to the Abraham Lincoln, I've spent a night on the Abraham Lincoln.

JIM LEHRER: I didn't remember watching you doing it live.

MARK SHIELDS: I didn't have the cameras. One shrewd thing the president did do when he got off in his flight suit was he had the helmet off, you know, the helmet. Because when you leave the helmet on, Condi Rice left the helmet on for the picture and nobody.... I don't care who it is --

JIM LEHRER: Looks good in a helmet?

MARK SHIELDS: Chuck Yeager doesn't look good. John Glenn didn't look good. I mean, it just dwarfs the person, so he was smart enough to do that. But sure, it is a legitimate question, but I don't think there is any question overall that last night was a smashing success politically for the president.

Looking ahead to the 2004 election

JIM LEHRER: And the polls, there is a new poll today, Washington Post/ABC Poll that shows the president enormously popular with the public, enormous confidence the public has in his ability to handle foreign affairs but not so much with domestic affairs. Why don't the two carry over?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, there are a number of things. The president said he wanted to be uniter not a divider when he ran. That hasn't worked out. It's his fault whether he has been a divisive figure as Democrats were charged or whether in fact the Democrats have been polarized. The president never got the boost out of this war that his father got for his leadership, in large part because his father did not have that same level of antipathy and opposition from the Democrats. And the reality is, Jim, if you're Karl Rove going into 2004, you want it to be about George W. Bush commander in chief on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln. You don't want to be about 6 percent unemployment today.

JIM LEHRER: Sure. But the Democrats, who are now the nine who want to take President Bush's job, are going to have a debate this weekend in South Carolina, are going to be talking about domestic things, are they not?

DAVID BROOKS: Right. And they'll have an advantage. They start way behind; 69 percent of the registered Democrats can't name one of the people running for the nomination. So they're just beginning.

JIM LEHRER: Now that is really being behind --

DAVID BROOKS: 9 percent is the John Kerry, they can name John Kerry tied with Al Gore, the number of people who still think Al Gore is running. So they're just starting. The advantage they have is that there have been two George Bushs. There has been the foreign policy Bush who has been a progressive, bold, very moralistic person -- somewhat taking Democratic rhetoric of human rights and liberation of peoples, using it for his own purposes and to me, reducing the Democrats to seeming somewhat churlish and conservative; but on the domestic side, the moral progressive, bold vision just hasn't carried over. The Republican domestic policy, the White House domestic policy is the same basic Republican orthodox policy that you had five years ago or ten years ago. There hasn't been sort of a new post-9/11 George Bush on domestic policy. To me, that's why he is still vulnerable [my emphasis]

Tags: david brooks, iraq war, george w bush, mark shields

Beltway blather about public debt

David "Bobo" Brooks and Sleepy Mark Shields hold forth here about the alleged horrors of public debt, with the unstated implications that people other than billionaires and star TV pundits will have to suffer in order to right this scary, scary debt problem. The liberal Sleepy Mark reflects of the great foresight of, uh, Ross Perot on debt:



Bobo thinks we should go to war in Libya. He doesn't mention any concerns about boosting the debt in connection with yet another neocon war wetdream. Sleepy Mark manages to state fairly coherently why that would be a seriously-to-disastrously bad idea. Bobo and his neocon friends never tire of advocating wars for other people for other people to kill and die in. Bobo is here spinning a boys-with-toys fantasy and making a quick-and-easy strike in Libya, which in neocon fantasy-world would then magically create democracy.

But this bipartisan consensus among the punditocracy and even, sad to say, in Congress and the White House that it's a dandy idea to slash domestic public outlays in the early stages of a fragile and slow-moving recovery is just remarkable for its disconnect with the practical needs of the moment.

Tags: david brooks, mark shields

Which side is David "Bobo" Brooks on?

On the side of the bosses and the reactionaries, as he always is.

The Wisconsin union fight has become a real "Which side are you on?" moment. Sleepy Mark Shields can be awfully weak as a political analyst. But he's at least on the democratic side of this issue. Bobo is doing his usual schtick, in this case promoting the most reactionary, anti-union position with a calm voice to make it "reasonable" by the degraded, completely unreasonable standards of the Beltway Village. Bobo sometimes has reasonable things to say. This isn't one of them. This is the PBS Newshour Political Wrap of 02/25/2011:



This PBS Newshour clip from the same day has a mediocre this-side-says-the-other-side-says chat about reactionary union-busting. But the first part of this clip shows Democratic members of the Wisconsin lower house dressed in union solidarity shirts chanting "Shame, shame" at the Republicans who had just voted to deny the basic right of union organizing to Wisconsin public employees. To hell with the Beltway Village version of "civility", whether it's the Bobo version or the Jon Stewart version. This is how representatives who get elected with the votes of working people should be acting:



Tags: david brooks, labor movement, mark shields

The crippled debate over phasing out Social Security among our political and media elite

Sleepy Mark Shields managed to recover a bit on the PBS Newshour Political Wrap of 02/11/2011 from what he did on the previous week's segment. Or rather, from what he didn't do. He and moderator Jim Lehrer let David "Bobo" Brooks get away with a typical anti-Social Security whopper about how cutting Social Security is vital to be Serious about cutting the federal deficit. This is the more recent segment. Social Security comes up in this one just after the 6:30 mark.



Here was Bobo's take on Social Security from the 02/04/2011 segment:

DAVID BROOKS: Eric Cantor has told me, he's told a million people, we are not shutting down the government.

And they are going to walk into the debt-ceiling fight knowing they are going to compromise. They will compromise. My problem is, which Mark just referenced, what are we going to cut? Because neither party has the guts to cut Medicare and Social Security and defense -- well, maybe defense, but not the big entitlements.

We're going to cut all the little things that, one, don't make any difference to the deficit, and do actually -- programs that actually work. So, early childhood education will probably get a whack. Funding for the sainted Corporation for Public Broadcasting will probably get a whack.

And all these things, National Science Foundation...

MARK SHIELDS: National Institute of Health.

DAVID BROOKS: National Institutes for Health. These are great programs that probably have bipartisan support, most of them. They are going to get a whack, because we don't have the guts to tackle the things that actually would make a difference to the deficit. [my emphasis]

Here's how Lehrer and Sleep Mark responded (or not) to Bobo's Social Security hooey:

JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with that?
MARK SHIELDS: I do. I do. I think Democrats are willing to take on defense. But there is no question that they are circling, and it's Alphonse and Gaston: You go first on the entitlements.
And that's really it.

But I do feel a sense that there is kind of a revitalization of the Simpson-Bowles, I mean, that all of a sudden, people are saying, well, maybe that wasn't the answer, but damn it, they did at least confront and engage it.

DAVID BROOKS: And there's a movement on Capitol Hill led by Mark Warner of -- and Saxby Chambliss, Democrat and Republican, to get some senators and say, let's get serious about this. We are going to have some tax increases. We're going to have some entitlement cuts.

And, of course, both are getting some pressure from their own party. But there is some building momentum. And I hope all the people who want to save great programs, like early childhood education and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, don't just plead, oh, don't cut me, don't cut me, actually say, cut that. We're going to get together, and we're going to say, you cut entitlements and save that, because, if you don't tackle the entitlements issue, all these good programs are going to get the shaft.

JIM LEHRER: OK.

Mark's sleepy reference to "Simpson-Bowles" is, of course, the Catfood Commission, where everyone could agree on cutting Social Security but not enough on everything else to put out an official report.

I actually think that the Feb. 4 version was more reflective of their actual attitudes. Probably the single biggest disconnect right now between the general public, on the one hand, and our political and media elites is over Social Security. There is a stunningly broad consensus among the official Serious People that Grandma should be eating catfood and that obsolete New Deal Social Security program has to go. On Feb. 4, Mark was groggy enough to totally agree with Bobo's Catfood Commission position.

They evidently were embarrassed enough by the criticism they got, including in the comments to the website on the Feb. 4 segment, to go through the motions of doing some actual reporting on the subject on Feb. 11. This was actually kind of a do-over of that part of the previous week's discussion:

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. I mean, the leadership and people like Paul Ryan are plenty conservative, and they want to scale back government, but they say cutting in the middle of a year just is problematic.

And a lot of the freshman said, we are going to cut $85 billion, or we're going to cut $100 billion, or whatever it is going to be. We're going to do some more serious cuts.

My big concern is that they are really unwilling to take on the stuff that seriously is contributing to the debt, which is Medicare, Social Security -- especially Medicare. And they are cutting all the stuff actually that people kind of like and that they -- and they're -- so they are going to end up cutting kind of effective programs that will have no long-term fiscal benefit.

And this is really the challenge the Republicans face. Are they going to cut all the stuff that is popular, and not solve the debt, which they talk about? And, right now, they are heading down that direction.

JIM LEHRER: Do you see a serious division here?

MARK SHIELDS: I do. Just -- I'm glad David made the point. I mean, Social Security is self-financing. I mean, it is not -- I mean, it -- there is a -- there is a funding problem with the baby boomers, no question about it.

But that -- when we talk about entitlements, I mean, the reality is that it is solvent. And, in fact, it's bankrolled the federal government, if you look at the borrowing from Social Security. [my emphasis]

Tags: david brooks, mark shields, social security

Man bites dog! Mark Shields rouses self from slumber, criticizes Obama's tax deal

Sleepy Mark Shields awoke from his customary state of slumber during the Political Wrap portion of the PBS Newshour of 12/10/2010 and explained reasons why many Democrats see President Obama's tax deal with the Republicans as a bad idea. This unusual event begins to occur at about 0:58 in the video.



From the transcript:

MARK SHIELDS: I think there is a choice. I think there -- the -- I think David's right that Speaker Pelosi doesn't want it to go down. But she does want it changed. And there really -- this is real in the House. This is not a pro forma...

JIM LEHRER: You mean the protests the Democrats...

MARK SHIELDS: The protest is -- is authentic. It is based on both the means by which it was done, but, more importantly, the substance of it. I just was reading, ["]between 1971 and 2001, median income of the average worker showed historically no gain. During that same 30 years, the income of the top 100th of 1 percent went up by almost 500 percent. That is why the Bush tax cuts are immoral.["] Those are words written in this autobiography by Barack Obama.

That is what he made the centerpiece of his campaign, domestically, in 2008. And so there is a sense of that, of betrayal on what is a defining issue to his presidency. And he just kind of walked away with it and with the stain and contempt toward Democrats who didn't embrace it and who had been his most steadfast supporters for the last two years, and many of whom paid for their loyalty to the president with tough, difficult votes that put their careers at risk. [my emphasis]

After his partner David "Bobo" Brooks makes a weak case for Obama's deal, then Shields actually jumps on Bobo's claim, as a bit of adrenalin seems to flow through him:

I would point out, Jim, two words that were spoken reverentially on this set in the last couple of weeks: Simpson-Bowles. We were talking about the debt.

JIM LEHRER: The deficit, the deficit.

MARK SHIELDS: The debt in the country and how important it was. And we were in a new era and we're going to deal with this.

Nine hundred billion dollars of red ink just out there, and $120 billion of it goes to the top 2 percent, at a time of the greatest income inequality in this country since 1928. David says the president cut the deal. The president cut a deal after no fight.

He did have -- not have a weak hand. He had 60 percent of the American people believed, according to a Bloomberg poll, asked specifically this week, during the fight itself as it was emerging, do you favor repeal of these taxes for the richest? Was there a fight made? That's when you come to a compromise, is after a fight.

I will tell you what the problem that Barack Obama has right now in the political world. Republicans are secretly gleeful. I haven't heard any Republicans who are condemning this, with the...

DAVID BROOKS: ... talk radio.

MARK SHIELDS: Well, talk radio. I'm talking about those who are going to cast votes on it.

But the problem is, they don't know where Barack Obama will fight. They don't know what his backbone -- and whether he does have a backbone. It's a question that is always asked about liberals: How tough is he?

And he -- at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the United States and the Soviet Union stood at the bridge of the war, Dean Rusk put it -- he said, we were eyeball to eyeball with the other guy, and the other fellow blinked.

And with Barack Obama, you got the sense that he blinked the minute he walked in the room, and gave the Republicans what they wanted. ...

MARK SHIELDS: So, keeping tax rates for the very wealthiest...

JIM LEHRER: I take it you don't agree?

MARK SHIELDS: ... where they have been since 2001 -- all right? The First eight years of these tax cuts -- that is why they were there -- the country lost 600,000 jobs in the private sector. This is before the collapse.

This is before -- this is before the financial crisis. I mean, it's a myth. This is supply-side, trickle-down economics. If you really want to stimulate the economy, you don't start by giving 120 billion to the wealthiest people, who sit on it.

And, secondly, you don't pass an estate tax that gives the lowest rate, Jim, since 1931. After 11 years of Republicans in the White House and in the Congress, they finally got it down to the point where it's going to be now, under a Democratic president, where, as a consequence of this, who is going to benefit? We're going to have 39,000 families get a total windfall of $27 billion next year.

Now, is that -- that is stimulus? ... [my emphasis]

Shields and Bobo actually managed to deliver news on the interesting fact that even the START nuclear arms control treaty was part of the tax deal:

MARK SHIELDS: So, we will find out on that. I mean, if the estate tax giveaway is in there, windfall, and START doesn't come, then, boy, that is a hell of a bargain, what he's driven with him.

JIM LEHRER: Are you suggesting that is how it works?

MARK SHIELDS: I'm suggesting that this came out of nowhere. This wasn't even on the wish list, the estate tax.

JIM LEHRER: The estate tax, right.

MARK SHIELDS: No.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. And START was clearly held up as part of the tax negotiation. And, already, there are signs of crackage, if you want to use that word, that we will probably get a START treaty. [my emphasis]

Tags: barack obama,, mark shields, obama administration

Health care down?

This is bad news that the vote on the health care plan was successfully postponed, thanks to Blue Dog Dems and "Give 'Em Whine Harry" Reid's lack of leadership in the Senate. The opponents had been banking on postponement as their main strategy, giving the insurance lobbies more time to pick the thing to death and load it up with more favors to the industry. Bill Moyers and Michael Winship give a sobering assessment of the state of the fight for a normal health financing system in Obama's Health Care Struggle -- Waterloo or Water Down? CommonDreams.org 07/25/09.

Republican Sen. Jim DeMint put his foot in his mouth when he said publicly, "If we're able to stop Obama on this, it will be his Waterloo. It will break him." And Obama was right to jam him on it. The Dems have been far too reluctant to hold the Republicans accountable for what their own leading members say. While the Republicans hold the Dems accountable for things they didn't say or for things they had no control over (e.g., the "Betray-us" flap).

We also see in this heath care fight how the particular dysfunctionality of our Establishment media are more likely to facilitate Republicans goals than Democratic ones. Our "quality" PBS network gave us an example in Friday's Newshour Political Wrap segment with the generally Republican Party-liner David "Bobo" Brooks and the increasingly hapless Mark Shields, the McCain fanboy who is supposed to look like the "liberal" in their little weekly discussion. Or I least I suppose that. Maybe the Newshour doesn't even care any more that the segment has become a weekly spectacle of two stodgy-minded white guys repeating slight variations on the Beltway Village conventional wisdom on the issues of the day.

Speaking of which, I'm beginning to wonder whether the San Francisco Chronicle's Carolyn Lochhead is just the pseudonym of some service that complies the Village CW into articles every few days. If not, she's doing a remarkably good job of it on her own. Here she offers us the Village line on health care, i.e., deficits! deficits! Oh, it's all so expensive!:Obama: Health reform must not worsen deficits 07/25/09. She reports:

"We're not going to set up something that's not fully paid for," Obama said. "... That's been my criteria from the start."

Wonky and cerebral in a White House interview with The Chronicle and a small group of reporters from other metropolitan newspapers, the president showed a determination to see through what he called his chief domestic aim since announcing his candidacy for president more than two years ago on a cold February day in Springfield, Ill. [my emphasis]

The Village press is fixated on the deficit, for which the Republicans not coincidentally acquired an urgent new concern as soon as a Democratic President was elected. That's normally the only time most of them make any pretense of caring about it. Sadly, the Democrats apparently actually do care about the deficit. And they've spent decades now talking up their "fiscal responsibility" credentials. It's long past time for them to knock it off.

Our sad excuse for a press corps is clearly getting really bored with having a President who gets all "wonky and cerebral" and stuff. Not like getting insulting nick-names from Shrub Bush. Or swinging on the tire at McCain's vacation home.

Shields and Brooks put the Village attitude proudly on display Friday. Brooks was happy over the delay in the health care vote, because that's the Republican Party line and current legislative strategy: delay is good. Bobo:

The public part, not so great. I mean, if you had to rate how they're doing, inside Washington, they're actually doing pretty well. They've got all these committees working on the bill, and the big story is they're not going to pass it this summer. We're going to have to wait until the fall until -- and so that seems like a big setback.

But when you actually look at what the committees are doing and the substance of the bills, there's actually much more overlap that I would have thought. And so I think, you know, they're going to get the Blue Dogs, the centrists.

I would suspect within Washington right now there's a very good chance they will get health care reform because of the way the bills are cohering.

Outside of Washington, the public part, that's where the danger is. If you look at where the American people are, a slim majority now say -- disapprove of Obama's approach to health care. Among independents, 66 percent think it's too big government.

So public support is eroding. But among Democrats in Washington, there's a procession going on. [my emphasis]

There has been some slippage in the polls on the particular plan. Not surprising, with a press corps like this. Of course, they prefer to frame everything in terms of the horse race. But it bothers me that Brooks seems so confident that the Blue Dogs will get their way, i.e., gut the bill. And he none too subtly suggests that the reg'lur folks out there, the ones for whom our celebrity pundits likes to pretend they speak, aren't so hot on this whole fixing health care nonsense, that it's just something the out-of-touch Dems in Washington are focused on.

Shields was in full Village whiner mode, which is more and more often his schtick. Acting as Obama's theater critic, he explained that Obama bored him and his fellow Villagers with all that wonky and cerebral talk about health care:

MARK SHIELDS, syndicated columnist: ... I think, first of all, Jim, that the president on his own presentation this week did not have a good week.

JIM LEHRER: He did a bunch of television interviews, including one with us.

MARK SHIELDS: With us.

JIM LEHRER: And then he had his news conference. He's been everywhere.

MARK SHIELDS: But the news conference was the wall to wall. That was the national -- I mean, people who were wise enough and shrewd enough to watch the NewsHour saw something else.

But in that presentation, I really thought that -- all I could think of was, Adlai Stevenson once said when he was introducing John Kennedy -- remember in classical times, whenever Cicero spoke, the people reacted and said, "He spoke so well." But when Demosthenes spoke, the people said, "Let us march." And after the Wednesday presentation, there was nobody saying, "Let us march."

JIM LEHRER: No marching?

MARK SHIELDS: It was a listless, overly academic -- and at a time when you really need to distil [sic] and to explain to people and to inspire and motivate them and educate them, I think the president, who was a great professor, according to everybody who sat in his classroom, failed the test on Wednesday night. [my emphasis]

Maybe Shields should just start taking a nap before he listens to these press conferences. Maybe he wouldn't be so inclined to nod off then.

If it's not about sex or race or a famous pop star, it's hard for our celebrity infotainers to get excited about it. I mean, it's not like they're really news analysts or anything. They just play them on TV. But maybe Shields should take a nap before taping his Newshour segments, too, because he's starting to become overly frank about how little he and his celebrity colleagues in the Village press actually care about the health care issue:

MARK SHIELDS: It is working in Washington. Washington right now is going through convulsions. It always happens just before Congress goes into recess, that, "Oh, my goodness"...

JIM LEHRER: They suddenly say, "Oh, my goodness. We've got to"...

MARK SHIELDS: "This is a crisis. It's all -- if it doesn't pass." That has nothing to do with anything.

The reality is, the worst thing that could happen is for either House Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid to bring a bill to the floor and have it fail in the votes. The fact that they didn't bring it to the floor is not going to be cause for, you know, great concern in the nation.

Five out of six people in the country have health coverage. Three out of four of them, according to most polls and pollsters I talk to, are satisfied. They're not thrilled with it, but they're satisfied with it. And that's where the president and the case has to be made in the country, that, look, this is in the national interest.

It's something that's bigger than me personally. But at the same time, I'm not going to be punished and I'm not going to come out of this worse. But, you know, I think that's where the job remains to be done.

You have to listen to this segment to appreciate the "I don't give a s**t" tone with which the "liberal" Shields delivers this. This context of this remarkable comment was in describing the message that Shields was saying Obama needs to get across, but it's not much of a stretch to assume that he was really expressing his own attitude: "It's something that's bigger than me personally. But at the same time, I'm not going to be punished and I'm not going to come out of this worse."

One of the characteristics of the American celebrity TV commentators is that they assume the conceit that their own thinking - eccentric as it is, shaped by a remarkably weird form of groupthink - is typical of "the American people". So much so that when one of them says, "The American people think ...", the correct translation into regular English is usually, "I and my fellow celebrity pundits think ..." So even leaving his statement in the context he apparently wanted, it gives a remarkable insight into how Shields and his fellow Villagers see the health care issue. My own summary of the Village consensus:

I've got good health care. Everyone I know and consider significant has good health care. So it doesn't matter to me what they come up with on this health care thing, as long as I don't have to keep listening to a lot of boring talk about insurance and the annoying tales of all these losers who don't have good health care. Borr-rring!

Shields is really out of touch, intellectually and emotionally, from the realities of the health care problem. Not only to polls consistently show overwhelming concern about the state of health insurance in the US. But it's an all-too-typical concern for people, even those who have half-decent coverage today who Shields thinks should care as little as he does. For people who lose their jobs - and despite the oblivion in which people like Bobo and Shields apparently live, it's happening to a lot of people right now - health insurance often is a more urgent concern than the loss of their old paycheck.

And Village press rules strongly forbid Bobo or Shields to use any of their commentary time to talk about the sad performance of our broken-down press in covering the health-care issue. But that Brooks/Shields segment puts that problem on display. Or, as Shields smugly put it: "I'm not going to be punished and I'm not going to come out of this worse."

Tags: harry reid, health care reform, mark shields

The Clown Show must go on

Infotainment can be in good taste or not. But I'm coming to really agree with economist Jamie Galbraith that it's foolish to judge our TV "news" reports by the standards of what most of the world calls "journalism". The PBS Newshour's Political Wrap infotainment segment of 05/15/09 is a prime example of why that is so.

"Liberal" Mark Shields, who managed to get through this whole segment without expressing his unbounded admiration for the Bold Maverick McCain, and neoconservative David Brooks were in full-blown clown-show mode. Moderator Jim Lehrer was, too. Clown Brooks and Clown Shields both agreed that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was thoroughly horrible for giving a news conference to defend herself against Republican accusations that she is to blame for the Cheney-Bush torture program.

Clown Brooks expounded a current Beltway Village script - remember, facts don't need to impede on their scripts - about how Pelosi has been changing her story on the CIA briefings about their criminal torture program. Neither Clown Shields nor Clown Lehrer bothered to point out that the Village tale is bogus.

Try going to the text at the link above and press Ctrl-F and search for words like "law", "legal", "crime", "criminal". I did get one hit. The word "law" appears as part of the word "flawed". Yes, our PBS "quality" news program devoted a whole Political Wrap segment of 12 minutes or so focusing on the torture issue and Dick Cheney's torture tour without bothering to bring up the fact that it's seriously, big-time illegal. Because the Villagers think it's fine and perfectly normal for (Republican) Presidents to break the law. Torture itself is major-league illegal. But we know from government admissions that nearly 100 people died in custody in the Bush Gulag, over two dozen of them officially considered homicides.

Be sure to watch the video to get the full effect of the good ole boys setting around snickering about how dumbass it is for anyone to get upset about a little torture. Toss in a few dozen murders, that doesn't diminish the merriment. Not that the homicides came up on the Clown Show.

Honestly, this is far more sickening to me than the photos Obama refused to release on their scheduled May 28 date. (More snaps from Abu Ghraib Sydney Morning Herald Update 05/30/09: 14 of the 15 photos in the Sydney Morning Herald set had been previously published by Salon on 03/26/2006, including the one shown below) Those photos depict crimes that can be prosecuted. The Political Wrap segment shows in vivid detail the extent of the corruption our public discourse in general and the collapse of the infotainment reports formerly known as news.

Tags: david brooks, mark shields, pbs newshour, torture

The American press is broken, seriously broken

Don't you just hate it when your head starts to spin?

Watching Mark Shields and David Brooks on their Friday "Political Wrap" segment on the PBS Newshour is becoming almost as painful as watching Maureen Dowd's prolonged personality disintegration in her twice-weekly New York Times columns. Maybe more so, because it's clear that MoDo has become a raving loon. (Her Sunday column trashes Sarah Palin - a task not unlike the proverbial catching of fish in a barrel - and she even does that badly. And explains that Obama is worse.)

The 09/12/08 segment of the Political Wrap made me feel like Linda Blair's character in The Exorcist when she was flopping around in the bed shouting, "Make it stop! Make it stop!" That moment was cemented in my memory when I saw an interview with her once in which she said while filming that scene, the metal bar that was holding her on the bed got loose and was pounding her. So she was reall meaning it when she was yelling, "Make it stop! Make it stop!" But no one realized it because that was what she was supposed to be saying in the script.

The PBS newshour, to say once again sadly, is "quality TV" by American standards. If PBS Big Pundits are this atrocious, it's a real barometer for how terrible the networks and cable are. It makes me wonder if we can ever have a healthy democracy in the United States again. With a press like this, how can we?

Shields needs to retire. He just needs to hang it up. He started out this segment by giving a stumbling, bumbling criticism of McCain's sleazy, lying campaign ads. Since it's now acceptable within the Establishment narrative to criticize the bold Maverick for dishonesty, Shields at least managed to do that.

It was downhill from there.

Remember that in our badly broken-down press, Mark Shields passes for a "liberal". Last week in the 09/05/08 segment, he reflected back on the 2000 election for a bit. In the Republican primaries, John McCain was running as the darling of the "national greatness" neoconservatives. He was a flaming militarist, and he employed a rabid white supremacist to lead his key South Carolina primary campaign. (See below.) Here's what "liberal" Mark Shields said last week:

The guy in 2000, I've got to tell you, I was ready to put his bumper sticker on, you know, I mean, and risk domestic harmony. But, I mean, I just -- if something happens, whether it's Icarus and, you know, getting so close to that flame, whatever it is, you know -- and I think you can see it with Obama.

I mean, they just -- they just start to pull back. And someone's whispering in their ear, and I think that's what's happened to McCain. [my emphasis]

Shields is having a harder and harder time getting complete sentences out. But, yes, the "liberal" Mark Shields supported McCain for President in 2000.

That little recitation about how the great St. McCain was lead down the wrong path by little tempters whispering in his ear has become a press corps favorite the last couple of weeks. Shields was laying it on even thicker this week. And this was the best part of Shields' pitiful performance Friday:

Just, finally, I would say this, Jim. John McCain said -- and he meant it -- that he would rather lose an election if it meant winning the war when he supported the surge. And, right now, I think that that the bargain he has made -- and I hate to say this, because this -- these are dishonorable acts. This makes -- these are dishonest...

JIM LEHRER: Dishonorable.

MARK SHIELDS: Dishonest and dishonorable. And that's not the kind of campaign that one expected from John McCain. It is certainly not John McCain's lifetime. And one hopes that he is not going to trade his self-respect for political victory, because I will tell you, it will be ashes if he does win that way. It will be ashes. There will be no chance of bipartisanship.

You will think Bill Clinton had a rocky road in '93. It will be awful in 2009.

Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby said in his 09/11/08 post what needed to be said:

... please spare us the scripted palaver about always thinking McCain was so decent and honest. When people report this about themselves, they are, in effect, admitting that they’re too goddamn dumb to do politics. Let’s get real: In his initial run for the White House, McCain gained his reputation for probity by riding reporters around on his bus, telling them jokes about stripper ex-girl friends—and insisting to scribes that he thought they were smart. Plainly, the man was a liar! He constantly dissembled about his opponents; he rarely knew whereof he spoke when he was forced to talk about something other than Marie the Flame. Always knew he was decent and honest? Who was running his South Carolina campaign, at a salary of $20,000 per month?

The rest of the Friday Political Wrap segment was just nails-on-the-blackboard bad. It was gruesome.

To me, the most worrisome thing I've heard about the White Princess' interview with Charlie Gibson this week was not her somewhat artless answer to his sloppy questioning about the Georgian-Russian conflict. It was that she didn't know what the Bush Doctrine was about. It may not have occurred to her briefers that she would need to be instructed in the most rudimentary facts about the country's official national security policy, which is known as the Bush doctrine.

What did the two greatest pundits on "quality" TV news have to say about it? Both "liberal" Shields and conservative Brooks agreed together with Jim Lehrer that not only was their nothing wrong with Palin's answer. But Charlie "Softball" Gibson was wrong to even ask it! To borrow one of the Howler's tradmark phrases, try to believe they said it!

JIM LEHRER: What did you think?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I thought she made no gaffes. You know, I thought she did fine.

I guess my view was changed a little, not for the better, to be honest. I don't think it was a disastrous performance. But the sticking to the talking points just shows a lack of comfort level with a lot of the issues. I thought -- I thought the Bush doctrine question was illegitimate and unfair.

MARK SHIELDS: Yes ...

JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with that?

MARK SHIELDS: I agree with that.

JIM LEHRER: I mean, who knows the Bush doctrine?

DAVID BROOKS: I know it well. There are four different Bush doctrines. Well, anyway. But then ... [my emphasis]

Why are we in Iraq for a hundred years? Why does almost no one know what a mess Afghanistan is? Why is the CIA (most likely) fomenting a civil war in Bolivia and hardly anyone in the US is hearing anything about it?

That passage is one of the biggest reasons. The cream of our press corps, the leading commentators of quality public television sneer at the idea that anyone should know what the national security doctrine of the United States is. "I mean, who knows the Bush doctrine?" Lehrer asked - as a rhetorical question.

Is our press really this brain-dead? Sadly, that's a rhetorical question, too.

For those who actually care about what happens to the country, and who are concerned about having a foreign policy based on a literally criminal doctrine of preventive war - and apparently our leading journalists and pundits are by choice and perhaps mental capacity excluded from that category - the Bush Doctrine is actually available in official government documents online and in a string of public speeches.

I did a string of posts about it myself, inspired as I recall by a German book that recited some of the key elements, Power and Mission: Was Amerika antreibt by Detlef Junker (2003). Yes, in 2003, literate people around the world were analyzing the Bush Doctrine. But in 2008, the top guns of our press corps are still shrugging and asking helplessly, "I mean, who knows the Bush doctrine?"

Since I'm a dirty foulmouthed hippie blogger and not a celebrity journalist, I'll mention a few sources available online on the Bush Doctrine.

The key documents include:

Remarks by the President, 2002 graduation exercise of the United States Military Academy, West Point, NY 06/01/02

George W. Bush, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America Sept 2002

State of the Union address 01/28/03

The National Security Strategy of the United States of America Mar 2006

I did a search at the Army's Strategic Studies Institute on "Bush Doctrine". It came up with 258 results, plus another 232 hits in a separate category called "Key Strategic Issues". Here are a couple:

U.S. Army War College Guide to National Security Policy and Strategy, J. Boone Bartholomees, Jr., ed., 07/01/04

U.S. Army War College Guide to National Security Policy and Strategy, 2nd Edition J. Boone Bartholomees, Jr., ed., 06/16/06

Here are some others from other sources:

Bush's vision: The PNAC manifesto Old Hickory's Weblog 10/11/04

Iraq, Nuremberg, law and legitimacy Old Hickory's Weblog 11/08/04

The Bush Doctrine and War with Iraq by Jeffrey Record Parameters (US Army War College) Spring 2003

Preemption and Just War: Considering the Case of Iraq by Franklin Eric Wester Parameters (US Army War College) Winter 2004-5

The Sources of American Legitimacy Foreign Affairs by Robert W. Tucker and David C. Hendrickson Nov/Dec 2004

Andrew Bacevich on the fate of the Bush Doctrine Old Hickory's Weblog 02/06/06

Al Gore and "amygdala politics" Old Hickory's Weblog 06/09/07

Tags: bush doctrine, david brooks, mark shields, maureen dowd, sarah palin

Press whackodoodlery

I like to watch the PBS Newshour because it's supposed to be the leader in "quality" TV News. Lately, every week is a downer reminder that "quality" doesn't mean that the program always discards press scripts and does solid journalism.

And every week increases my embarrassment that I once in my early days of blogging did a post praising Mark Shields. Well, he was against the Iraq War. So that alone did make him stand head-and-shoulders about the other Big Pundits. Not that such a comparison is much of a complement in itself. But I give him credit for having more sense than most pundits about the invasion of Iraq.

On Friday, the David Brooks/Mark Shields commentary was introduced by Jim Lehrer. The three "quality TV" journalists opened by a discussion of what our press corps considers probably the most burning need in American politics, which is the Holy Grail of High Broderism, "bipartisanship". If I had heard Shields say one more time how badly we needed legislators who would "reach across the aisle", my head would have exploded.

Meanwhile, Maureen Dowd is keeping her laser-like focus on the most pressing public issues of the day in Keeping It Riell New York Times 08/10/08. MoDo is so obsessed about politicians having sex but is so weirded out about sex and about gender roles that it's become emotionally disturbing to read her. Usually I don't worry that creepiness in a text will wear off on me somehow. But with MoDO, I do. And, yes, MoDo is still taken to be High Punditry!

And we wonder why a blithering old warmonger like McCain is polling as close as he is to Obama in a year when Republicans are about as popular as malaria.

I like to think I'm reasonably alert to the general dysfunctionality of the press. But I still manage to be surprised at some things. Like the press obsession with Edwards' admitted love affair, which is scarcely confined to MoDo, although I haven't seen anything else that approaches the level of weirdness in her Sunday column.

The Los Angeles Times ran a piece by a writer who was loosely acquainted with the Other Woman, Edwards' affair? My fault by Sarah Miller 08/10/08. She frames it as cynical-New-Yorker-meets-California-ditz story. When she encountered Rielle at a cocktail party, Miller became "extremely tense" because Rielle ... touched her on the wrist with two fingers. You know, lady, there are medicines you can take that will help with such anxieties.

Conservative columnist Debra Saunders weighs in along the same lines as MoDo in The not-so-pretty boy San Francisco Chronicle 08/12/08. Though Saunders lacks the bizarre creativity that comes with whatever afflicts MoDo when it comes to Democratic politicians and anything remotely to do with sex. Saunders does manage to mention the disparity in the press treatment of Edwards' liaison with Rielly and John McCain's conduct during his first marriage that didn't entirely conform to the official Southern Baptist standard. Saunders says it shows press bias ... against McCain!

The liberal Web bastion of the Huffington Post has been running over with columns from people rushing to condemn Edwards with various degrees of pseudo-sophistication. Even Elizabeth Edwards comes in for blame.

I mean, just for the sake of ritual, let me wonder aloud here if these great pundits bother with the most minimal fact-checking when they write their garbled ruminations like those of MoDo and Saunders. Saunders, for instance, tells us in her second paragraph that Edwards was "boffing an overpaid campaign aide".

But what facts do we actually know about this event of such overriding importance to our "press corps"? We know that the National Inquirer got a photo of Edwards going to visit Rielle at a hotel this year. We know that Edwards has admitted to an affair of some sort with Rielle in 2006. We know that Rielle is unmarried and has a child under a year old, which both she and Edwards say is not his.

I'm not sure that a contract film-maker counts as a "campaign aide". Nor do I have any clue if she was "overpaid". Did Saunders bother to check on either?

More to the point, so far as I'm aware, what's in the public record doesn't tell us squat about the interaction between the two that Edwards confessed to being an affair. Saunders has no problem assuming it involved "boffing". But does anyone other than the two of them actually know that? Maybe they held hands and talked about energy fields. Maybe they smooched a lot now and then. Maybe she touched him on the wrist with two fingers.

And with all the pop psychology going on about the effect of this on Elizabeth, what do we really know about that other than her very general and conventional standing-by-her-man statement on it?

Here's an alternative scenario. Edwards and Rielle had an affair that consisted mostly of conspiratorial visits and minimal physical contact. Elizabeth knew about the fling at the time and didn't care. Maybe even encouraged it.

Not the most likely scenario, perhaps. And certainly not as entertaining as the one everybody is fantasizing about in their writing. But is there anything in the public record that wouldn't also fit that scenario? And there are other variations that come to mind.

But when it comes to sex and Democratic politicians, worrying about what actually happened when you report on it is like, so 1980s. Remember Gennifer Flowers, who made all sorts of wild claims about an extended affair with Bill Clinton and even claims about him being involved in murdering people? Under sworn testimony in the Ken Starr witch-hunt, Clinton admitting to having had sexual contact with Flowers on one occasion under the broad definition of such contact used by Starr's inquisitors, though Clinton specified that the contact was not intercourse. (That weird definition of Starr's also excluded oral sex. And maybe Debra Saunders definition of "boffing" is more expansive that what I assume.)

But after that, Establishment journalists considered Flowers' claims about her affair with Clinton to be credible, even though Clinton's very limited admission of one encounter that did not involve "boffing", was the only remotely credible collaboration for any her claims about the affair. And, as the Daily Howler has repeatedly noted with disgust, the "liberal" Chris Matthews afterwards invited her onto his show where she made even wilder accusations about the alleged murders Bill Clinton had committed.

But the business trend that has made news organizations, including newspapers, parts of entertainment conglomerates that are expected to not just make a profit but make a level of profit that shareholders of entertainment companies expect, have made politicians into celebrities. And so they are encouraged to speculate freely about their sex lives with less regard to facts than tabloids!

(To see how a news organization being part of a diverse corporate "family" can work to the detriment of good reporting, check out Sam Zell's Deal from Hell by Emily Thornton, Michael Arndt and Ronald Grover Business Week 07/30/08.

While I'm on a rant about this, how did the conventional wisdom arise that John Edwards' political career is finished? How does this disqualify him for a Cabinet post, for instance? In less enlightened times, there was a saying: "Nothing is fatal in politics except being found in bed with a live man or a dead woman." I don't know if anyone has come up with a contemporary wording. It might be kind of difficult. We'd have to include a Rick Santorum clause these days, I suppose.

But this is a big reason why we have the absurdity over the last week of a public discussion where Serious Foreign Policy experts talk about the need to defend our long-standing, passionate American commitment to keep Abkhazia and South Ossetia as parts of Georgia without being laughed off the set. A week ago, most Americans (including me) couldn't have said where either of those places were, if we'd heard of them at all, without a quick consultation with Google. But our news organizations are far more focused on the latest sex gossip about famous politicians than they are about covering events that could well involve us in more wars and even more likely add to the justifications for insane levels of military spending.

No wonder Paris Hilton is a player in Presidential politics. And no wonder a blustering, mean old warmonger like John McCain has a serious chance to become President and invade Iran. The press obsession with their own sex fantasies about Democratic politicians has real-world consequences.

Tags: david brooks, debra saunders, establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press, mark shields, maureen dowd

Summer press war against Obama

I was willing to think that Tom Brokaw might be a big improvement over Timmy Russert at the helm of Meet the Press, based on Brokaw's first couple of shows. But he's settled in to a conventional press "gotcha" approach, concentrating on the horse-race like good Establishment journalists are expected to do.

On the 08/03/08 program, Brokaw had Joe Lieberman and John Kerry on as the respective surrogates for the McCain and Obama campaigns. The choice of surrogates is notable in itself. Lieberman as the allegedly "bipartisan" spokesperson for the Great American, War Hero and Maverick McCain, and the previous Democratic Presidential candidate and still nominal head of the Party as the Obama spokesman.

Kerry, I'm sorry to say, was defensive and generally uninspiring. Lieberman, on the other hand, was so animated and assertive it's hard to believe it's the same man who let Dick Cheney steamroller him in the Vice Presidential debate in 2000. Kerry made the complaint that the Republicans hope to get in response to an ad like the Britney-Paris-Obama (Obama and the two famously sexy white women):

No. What he was saying is they're trying to scare you. They're trying to scare the American people. And, believe me, I'm an expert on how they do that. They are engaged in character assassination, even John McCain's partner in a number of initiatives in the Senate, Russ Feingold, said yesterday, "They've decided they can't win on the issues, so now they're going to try to destroy his character." And that is exactly what this ad is calculated to do.

Couldn't he have managed to get in a reference to the racial subtext of that ad? Apparently not.

Following Brokaw's lead, Kerry complained that McCain wasn't living up to those high Maverick standards that the press corps idolizes him for. And, Lord forbid that he would defend Wes Clark. When Brokaw put up the famous statement that Bob Schieffer got out of him, Kerry couldn't manage to refer to the press misconduct in their sensationalist, crassly pro-McCain reporting on that non-event. Instead, he said:

Yeah, I, I don't agree. I don't agree with Wes Clark's comment. I think it was entirely inappropriate. I have nothing but enormous respect for John McCain's service. I had the privilege of standing with John McCain in the, in the cell in Hanoi when we visited there together, when we worked on the issue of Vietnam together. It was an emotional moment. I, I have awe for John McCain's experience as a prisoner of war, and he, and he does understand duty and service. But ...

So, McCain's is putting his POW story front-and-center of his campaign. But, Lordy, Lordy, we nice Democrats can't possibly be expected to take that on directly. No, we must reject, rebuke, repudiate, disown and generally scold any prominent Democrats who try to demystify that pitch, and instead praise the boundless heroism of St. McCain to high heaven. Digby spoofed this silly practice the other day in a footnote to her post Keeping It Unreal 08/02/08.

Note: No one should construe this as a criticism of McCain's heroic service in Vietnam or infer that he isn't entirely color blind and above any kind of racial bias. Neither should this be seen as any kind of attack on him for his age or an accusation that he isn't always a straight talker of unwavering principles. He has a heroic and unimpeachable character and I would never imply otherwise.

Obama will lose this election if the Dems can't put forward and more aggressive, unapologetic posture than this. Kerry was even happy to let McCain's faithful cheerleader Lieberman pose as "bipartisan":

MR. BROKAW: People who are, people who are, people who are looking in on this who don't pay a lot of attention to politics may find it hard to believe that you sit on the same side of the aisle...

SEN. KERRY: Yeah, also we're, also we're friends.

MR. BROKAW: ...and that you're in the caucus. Is he, is he going to, is he going to be welcome at the Democratic caucus?

SEN. KERRY: Absolutely. This...

MR. BROKAW: Next year...

SEN. KERRY: Sure.

MR. BROKAW: If there's a Senator--if there's a President Obama?

SEN. KERRY: I think he's going to want to be part of the stronger Democratic majority. I'm confident of that.

MR. BROKAW: Incidentally, can we show you a Joe Lieberman Web site that he may not be welcoming?

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Yeah.

MR. BROKAW: There's a Web site out there in which they say, "Get rid of Joe. Lieberman must go." More than 50,000 signatures have been signed so far. Do you think you're going to be comfortable next year in the Democratic caucus as a self-described Independent/Democrat?

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Well, look, I, I've crossed party lines to support John McCain because this is not an ordinary time in our history, it's not an ordinary election, and I just felt, more than following the party line, I had to go with the guy that I thought would best serve this country, and that's John McCain.

I'm sorry to say it. But John Kerry sounds like he doesn't much care whether Obama wins, or whether the Democrats can get critical policies like withdrawing from Iraq and establishing universal health care coverage enacted.

Also, on the topic of McCain's Obama-and-the-white-girls ad, I wanted to point out that Sara Robinson caught one of the "dog-whistle" messages in that ad that didn't occur to me: for hardcore Christianists, it presents Scary Black Obama as the Antichrist. (The Second Coming of Barack Obama Our Future blog 08/01/08)

Meanwhile, over at the quality TV of the PBS Newshour (Shields and Brooks Mull Campaign Rhetoric, Senate Indictment), Big Pundits David Brooks (the conservative) and Mark Shields (the liberal) discussed the horse race, as well. Conservative Brooks washed his hands of the naughtiness of McCain's Obama-and-the-white-girls ad:

Well, it's not the campaign a lot of us were hoping for, especially a lot of us who, you know, admired John McCain a great deal.

I wouldn't say the last week has been the McCain campaign we were hoping for. And that includes John Weaver, a longtime friend and former adviser to McCain. And so it hasn't been an elevated Teddy Roosevelt-style campaign.

The question on my mind is, is it an effective campaign? The fact of the matter is this is Obama's election to lose. The country wants a change. Obama is a change. If people feel comfortable with Barack Obama, then he will win the election. (my emphasis)

This is a favorite press theme, "this is Obama's election to lose." It happens to fit very well into the Republican theme that Obama is "presumptuous" in supposedly thinking he's a shoo-in for the President (oh, and a megalomaniac cult leader, too). It's conventional political wisdom that each campaign should try to make the other side "the issue" in a campaign. Our press corps is willing to help their adored Maverick frame things that way.

One of the weird variations on this is to say that Obama should be further ahead in the polls. As Brooks put it, "Why is Barack Obama not 15 points ahead the way the Democratic Party is 15 points ahead?"

In other words, the fact that Obama is ahead in the polls is Good For The Republicans, as so much seems to be in the accepted scripts of our broken press corps. That's also a variation on the press theme after the Scalia Five overruled the voters and appointed George Bush President in 2001, which said that Gore should have been farther ahead (even though he won both the popular vote and the Electoral College vote - if the Scalia Five hadn't stepped in as they did). And, you see, that would have made the election theft more difficult. So it was Gore's fault that the Republican Supreme Court overruled the voters.

Of course, Shields was there to present the "liberal" case. Actually, he did a half-decent job on the race issue:

MARK SHIELDS: I was out for three days this week. I challenge any of my colleagues, any citizen to talk to people about this race.

The misinformation about this race is so terrifying. And, I mean, I'm talking about not mean people, not bad people, not uninformed people. I mean, the Internet has done a job of savaging Obama.

JIM LEHRER: That's where they're getting the information?

MARK SHIELDS: That's where they're getting the information. And add to that, at the Texas State Republican Convention, a sanctioned vendor there, sanctioned by the party, was selling pins that said, "If Obama is president, will we still call it 'the White House'?"

Now, did he raise the race issue? The race issue is with him every day of his life. When you see his picture, the race issue is there.

The gender issue was there with Hillary Clinton. And when Hillary Clinton stood up, I mean, it didn't take a nuclear physicist to say, "That's a woman. She's running for president."

This is an African-American man. He's running for president. That is there; that is a reality of this campaign. Barack Obama didn't raise it.

Like I said, half decent. But then he proceeded to promote the press/McCain line that the Republicans' race-related attacks are meant to facilitate. It's partly an appeal to say, "don't vote for a black guy". But in addition, it's to get white voters to approach it as, "he's black, and that makes him different, and is he really one of the good black people?" And "liberal" Shields is on board with that latter part, as he furrows his brows with deep concern:

MARK SHIELDS: I think there are doubts about him [Obama]. I mean, I think the questions are going to be about Obama. And the race [issues] is the wild card. I don't know; I honestly don't know.

I mean, the charge yesterday that Obama had introduced and played the race card was so over-the-top by the McCain campaign. I mean, it was truly - it boggled the mind. And it went beyond any concept of rationality.

But I do think that there are doubts about Obama, about essentially his background and his values. It is not the American story. It's a great American story, but it's not the traditional American story from which presidential campaigns, candidates have come.

It's not Bill Clinton in Hope, Arkansas. It's not Dwight Eisenhower in Abilene, Kansas. It's not even John Kennedy in Hyannis Port.

I mean, this - it's Indonesia. It's a Kenyan father. And there's a question, Jim, that voters really have. And it's, are his - given his background, are his values my values? Can I feel comfortable with him and confident with him?

And I think that's what his campaign is about. And that's what the McCain campaign is about is sabotaging that. (my emphasis)

In other words, Shields the "liberal" agrees with the McCain campaign that Obama is the issue in this campaign. And that Obama's a very scary guy because he's not a regular Amurcan like that white guy from Arkansas, or that nice Old Man Bush - whose father's bank was shut down for doing business with so many German Nazis - though, funny thing, that paternal heritage was never a press concern about Old Man Bush. For that matter, Joe Kennedy's pre-Second World War isolationism wasn't really an issue during Kennedy's Presidential campaign, either. But Obama had a Kenyan father. Obama hardly knew him, but so what? Who knows what kind of strange influences may come from that Kenyan blood? And, yes, this is what passes for "liberalism" on the PBS Newshour's "quality" TV.

The McCain campaign's whine about Obama "playing the race card" is really a version of the stock conservative up-is-down thinking on race. In that view, racism has nothing to do with institutions, but is rather a matter of personal attitude and character. And minorities complaining about racism is an insult against the personal character of the whites being criticized. Thus, is the mean old white guy McCain who is the victim of racism in this thing, you see? Or, to put it another way, racism is really a problem of minorities complaining about white people.

Yes, it makes your head hurt to try to work through the weird thinking. So it's not surprising that our press corps isn't keen to sort it out. In this article, Mark Barabak does what Establishment journalists considered their duty, i.e., approaching the issue as a this-side-said, the-other-side-says matter: Obama, McCain find race issue isn't easily discarded Los Angeles Times. He writes:

Both candidates stand to gain - and lose - from the testy back-and-forth, underscoring just how incendiary, and complex, racial politics remain more than 200 years after vexing the first set of American politicians.

"It is not to Barack Obama's advantage to make this a big issue," said Dan T. Carter, a history professor at the University of South Carolina, who has written extensively about race and politics. At the same time, McCain cannot afford to be seen as exploiting racial tensions for political gain, Carter said: "It is simply not acceptable to the majority of people, including many of those who may be sympathetic."

That may explain why the candidates acted the way they did: Obama ignoring McCain and leaving his initial response to aides - who quickly shifted the subject to the economy and foreign policy - and McCain portraying himself as the victim of a rhetorical mugging.

And, of course, he assures us, "Whoever picked the fight, neither side has clean hands." This side says, the other side says: reporter's duty done. At least according to today's press standards. And the gist of his article is, yes, this race thing is very complicated, and both sides are to blame, and anyway, what the heck, Obama's black so race is really the only issues that matters. Yes, he concludes his article this way:

As this week's back-and-forth suggests, the politics of race have become so combustible, so freighted after more than two centuries of history and hard feelings, that the obvious can be easily overlooked. Take the gist of Obama's remarks. "Everybody knows it's true," said Carter, who grew up in the segregated South. "One of Obama's big problems is that he's black and he does have a funny name."

Ever since Obama declared his candidacy, the question overhanging this election is whether America is ready to elect its first black president. It's a simple and straightforward question.

But when race enters the political arena, nothing is simple or straightforward. (my emphasis)

The last two paragraphs together are so goofy you have to wonder how an editor let it by. It's a simple and straightforward matter, except that by the next paragraph it's not simple and straightforward.

Or maybe the editor added the last sentence to murk up the obvious meaning of the previous one: "Ever since Obama declared his candidacy, the question overhanging this election is whether America is ready to elect its first black president. It's a simple and straightforward question."

No, it's not about the disastrous Iraq War, the credit crisis, global climate change, oil prices, or any of that dull stuff. No, Barabak (and the McCain campaign?) see that the election is "simple and straightforward" to report: Are you really gonna vote for that black guy?

In other words, our so-called press corps is still obsessed with the race issue, as they have been ever since Obama became a clearly competitive candidate in the Democratic primaries.

Tags: david brooks, establishment press, mainstream media, mainstream press, mark shields