Tag Archives: Charles Krauthammer

The low-class Washington, D.C., chattering classes

Posted on by
Reply

The chattering classes are lower-class than the masses.

We have seen this before. In 2002 and 2003, millions of ‘ordinary’ Americans figured something was wrong about wantonly invading Iraq. That perception was not shared, however, by established media authorities including George F. Will, Charles Krauthammer, the entire Republican noise machine, the three original major television networks and Fox, The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the major cable outlets. The upshot was a bloody and unconstitutional invasion of a sovereign nation that basically amounted to the betrayal of the less educated by the (nominally) educated.

Now we are seeing it again. The newest representation is our more elevated media mouths’ reaction to Donald Trump.

Typically inadequate commentary about Trump’s rise or support can be found here and here, among many other places.

The ground rule of pundits like these: always blame the many rather than the few. So much for participatory democracy. So much for each-one-teach-one. For Democrats, so much for winning in November 2016.
In commentary pieces like these, however well-meant they may be, a good guideline is to look at what is missing. Thus, in these particular pieces linked and in many others, there is no account of the staggering dearth of valid information in what passes for ‘political reporting’ in our big media outlets. Nothing about the paucity of genuine information in our politics coverage. (Far too typical. Did we learn about segregation and desegregation from the big media outlets? — not until the latter was dramatized by protests that lighted racial justice up on the big board. More recently, did we hear about insurance companies’ stiffing their own customers? — not until John Grisham and Michael Moore and, on a lesser scale, I, voiced the issue. For that matter, when was the last time Wolf Blitzer used the word ‘redlining’?) Nothing about the infotainment dished out by what Chris Matthews actually called (with a straight face) “Washington insiders.” Nothing about the brutal assaults on public education that leave many students unknowing about checks and balances. Nothing about the internal corruption in the Democratic Party that shut out an excellent candidate, Vice President Joseph Biden, away from voters who would have liked more choices. The behind-the-scenes money-and-connections apparatus, you will recall, did its collective best to lock up the party nomination for the deeply flawed Clintons. One result was that 17(?) 27(?) 127(?) GOPers were salivating at the chance to run against Hillary Clinton. And one result of that was Donald Trump–the cue ball banging into the rack, with the arithmetic of the field always in his favor.
Some of these guys in media commentary have even found ways to be unfair to Donald Trump–not a feat any ordinary person could pull off. Trump has at moments engaged in more accurate political commentary than the analysts covering him–one example being when he called out Ted Cruz for megaphoning that Ben Carson was liable to drop out of the race, just before the Iowa caucuses. The result was that Cruz came out on top in Iowa, beating Trump by a few points, with Carson well down toward the bottom. (Incidentally, the loss may have helped Trump in the long run. If he had ‘won’ Iowa and gone on to win the next couple of races, the rest of the field and the party establishment would have homed in on him that much sooner.)
More importantly–to do Donald Trump justice, it is Trump who has repeatedly criticized George W. Bush’s wanton and unconstitutional invasion of Iraq. Only Trump has had the temerity to point out that for George W. Bush to take credit for our ‘safety’ when 9/11 occurred on his watch is a dubious claim. (Imagine what would have happened to the principal of Columbine High School, had he gone around boasting, à la Bush/Pataki/Giuliani, about his actions in the immediate wake of the tragic events there). One predictable outcome is that all the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) signatories are now up in arms against Trump. PNAC was co-founded by Dick Cheney and Jeb Bush, and all the apologists for the Iraq War, all the movers and shakers who think the problem is that we just didn’t spill enough blood, are now joined with the remains of the GOP establishment to take an imaginary moral high ground against Trump.

PNAC

WOULD THAT HILLARY CLINTON AND THE SO-CALLED MAINSTREAM DEMOCRATS HAD MADE THE SAME CLEAR STATEMENTS, in recent years. Hillary Clinton never does, for obvious reasons; she voted for the Bush war. But too many Dems who see themselves as either connected or cerebral have spent the last seven years on the sidelines. Worse yet, too many of them dug in with passive-aggressive tactics against President Obama– undoubtedly partly out of the pettiest and most parochial envy/jealousy/competitiveness, partly out of spite because they underestimated him, and partly out of residual bigotry that afflicts some leftish writers as well as some rightwingers. So you have GOPers blaming President Obama, rather than GWBush, for every disaster in the Middle East. And the Blue Dog ‘centrist’ types and the sideline sitters seldom or never step up to the plate to defend one of the best presidents we have had. (Hillary Clinton now claims to be his defender, having adopted the line from people with my view that Obama should get more credit. Meanwhile, her emails show her as SecState chiefly intent on gauging Obama’s and Biden’s popularity. Read some of them.)

Priorities

I might add that the same left-ish media sources are not exactly eager to pay their own writers and lower-level staff; look at Arianna Huffington, Daily Kos’ Markos Moulitsas, and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow for examples. Too many producers take advantage of the passion of populist writers by paying, if at all, on the Walmart model–calling them Kossacks, or bloggers, etc., rather than employees, even contract employees. The treatment of PT/contingent workers has affected our republic of letters. This again is something you do not hear discussed by Hillary Clinton-type candidates–not for decades. Not until her people pick it up via social media from someone like me, or until some event makes it safe and popular.
The Democrats underestimate Trump at their peril in 2016. And downplaying Trump’s supporters as dumb will not help. Quite the contrary.
If some of the guys/gentlemen who have profited most from their media positions could be a little more concerned about fellow human beings and a little less concerned about vague notions of status, they might pull off some actual analysis once in a while. In the meantime, their accuracy will inevitably be hobbled by their vulgarity. It is quintessentially vulgar to proceed on an assumption that some individuals are worth more than others, purely on the basis of position or status or anything else extraneous to merit. The assumption also leads to a very simple but very obtuse logical slide–the view that if So-and-so is not important, then misrepresenting him is also not important.

Grover Norquist Lost

Posted on by
1

Obama won, Grover Norquist lost

2012 election results are in, and Obama won. President Obama should also win Florida. That means an electoral college tally of 332-206.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which spent at least $28 million against Democrats, lost.

 

Represented by Chamber of Commerce

American Crossroads and Crossroads GPS, which spent $1 billion against the president and against Democrats, lost.

Karl Rove lost. Grover Norquist lost. Donald Trump lost. Rudy Giuliani lost. Rush Limbaugh lost. Charles Krauthammer lost. George Will lost. Bill O’Reilly lost.

(Here from YouTube is Rove, on air, trying to dispute the outcome in Ohio: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQLV7nqD3CA)

The grotesques lost.

‘Winners’ and ‘losers’ are worse than useless as words. The winners-and-losers language cannot be trusted, anyway, as to validity. The commentators most eager to identify winners and losers self-identify as less eager to nail accuracy; a vulgar mindset characterizes notable non-wizards. I do not want to sound as though I were auditioning to become one of the sillies.

But clearly on election day 2012 some won, some lost.

 

The president

Won:

President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden won re-election, and rightly so. They won the popular vote as well as the electoral college. For the first time since 1936, they won re-election with over 50 percent of the popular vote.

FDR

Several deserving Democratic senators won hard-fought re-election in an avalanche of negative advertising, including Sherrod Brown in Ohio, Joe Manchin in West Virginia, Bill Nelson in Florida, and Jon Tester in Montana.

 

Massachusetts Senator-elect Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren won in Massachusetts, Claire McCaskill won in Missouri, Tammy Baldwin won in Wisconsin, Heidi Heitkamp won in North Dakota, Mazie Hirono won in Hawaii. There are now twenty women in the United States Senate–a record. The senate is better off with such women Democrats.

Alan Grayson won as U.S. Rep in Florida, rightly so.

Tammy Duckworth won for the House in Illinois, in the process defeating the disgraceful Joe Walsh. The swing from awful to good is even bigger than the outcome.

 

Lost:

Lackluster corporate ally Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, the author of the Ryan so-called budget, lost. (Rep. Ryan won re-election to the House.)

Rep. Allen West lost decisively in Florida. Way past due, but better late than never.

GOP Senate candidate George Allen lost in Virginia.

Rep. Joe Walsh lost in Illinois.

 

Big money lost.

The Koch brothers, who spent tens of millions on the election, lost.

Sheldon Adelson, who donated tens of millions first to Newt Gingrich and then to Mitt Romney, lost.

The Chamber of Commerce losses and the losses of Rove’s groups, the losses incurred by all the super-PACs massed on the pro-corporate, pro-tax haven, anti-union side of the aisle, are the biggest money losses. But it is worth mention again that wealthy self-funding candidates also lost. Linda McMahon lost in Connecticut; Steven Welch lost to incumbent Sen. Bob Casey in Pennsylvania; most others lost in primaries. The national political press could have seen an augury for fall 2012 in the losses of so many self-funders.

Along with the billionaires and millionaires, corporate executives who stepped off the sidelines to bully the political process through their workplaces lost.

Speaking of losses, the long string of candidates who lost the race for the GOP nomination lost again. They did not help Republicans look better in the general election. Remember the parade–the string of fallen candidates from the GOP campaign trail—Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, Rick Santorum, Tim  Pawlenty, Michele Bachmann. None can claim—although that won’t keep them from trying—that the election outcome enhances his individual credibility, or that they enhanced the party’s credibility.

Republicans lost. They lost the presidential race; they lost seats in the senate; they lost seats in the house; and they lost seats in the state legislatures. Only in governorships did the GOP eke out an advantage, and even there, with more to defend, Democrats kept or took five governorships including the hard-fought governorship of West Virginia.

Sen. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) lost.

House Republicans lost. They lost their two ugliest members, they lost some of their ‘base’, and once and for all the scorn of establishment Republicans for the anti-abortionists was clarified for all to see.

 

Won:

Democrats won. Not all state tallies are complete, but enough returns are in to clarify a nationwide pattern.

Democrats gained two seats in the senate, giving them the edge 53-45. Of two independents–Vermont’s Bernie Sanders and Maine’s Angus King–at least one will caucus with the Democrats. Given the quality of the new Democrats elected, that means the Democrats are stronger now than with the nominal ‘filibuster-proof’ sixty they had in 2009, relying on Joe Lieberman.

Democrats gained at least six seats in the house. In a notable upset, physician Raul Ruiz defeated GOP Rep. Mary Bono Mack in California. (Bono Mack’s husband, Connie Mack, also lost his senate race in Florida.) Dem Pete Gallego beat Quico Consego in south Texas. Lois Frankel beat Adam Hasner in South Florida. If Scott Peters has beaten Rep. Brian Bilbray in California, the gain is at least seven for Dems.

In the states, Dems gained the New Hampshire Executive Council. Democrats flipped at least eight state chambers from Repub to Dem in 2012, including chambers in Colorado, Maine, New Hampshire, New York and Oregon, losing only two. Early estimates are that Democrats picked up 200 seats in state legislatures, partly making up for the large losses of 2010. Local races parallel the federal and state patterns.

Lost:

Media grotesques lost.

Charles Krauthammer and Rush Limbaugh lost, as mentioned. George Will and Bill O’Reilly lost. Sarah Palin lost. Sean Hannity lost. Dick Morris lost.

The rightwing noise machine lost.

Fox News lost.

Rupert Murdoch lost.

The Wall Street Journal lost. The Chicago Tribune lost.

A host of auxiliary right-wing pundits installed by the newspaper I subscribe to, the Washington Post, lost. David Gergen lost. For that matter, most pundits lost. Dan Balz lost. The WashPost‘s layout editors–whoever composed the unfavorable headlines and picked the disfiguring photos of Obama–lost. George Stephanopoulos’ Round Table on ABC’s This Week lost. Face the Nation lost. Meet the Press lost. Chris Matthews lost.

Many or most of the pollsters–except for Nate Silver–lost.

 

The middle class won. Some degree of tolerance won. Health care won. Social Security won. American labor won. Reproductive rights won. The U.S. automobile industry won. Collective bargaining won. College students won. Mortgage holders won. Banking customers won.

Unfortunately, Paul Ryan won re-election to the House. So did Michele Bachmann. We can’t have everything. Bachmann’s race was tight, though. In theory that should end any discussion of Bachmann as some kind of powerhouse. Still, politically progressives won. Racism lost. Anti-immigrant campaigning lost decisively.

I am not gloating. This is a celebration of improvement, of steps toward a cleaner and healthier body politic. People like Joe Walsh and Allen West never did have any place in public office and should never have gotten a federal office in the first place. Anyone who held the opinion that the election was Mitt Romney’s to win was never qualified to be a political reporter in the first place. Any writer who thought ‘the economy’ an issue that would work in Romney’s favor is unqualified to appear in print. Corporate managers who spent more time throwing their weight around than they did improving their companies never should have been managers in the first place. Corporate management should never have been so pinned to stock price in an imaginary paper market as to neglect product, service and labor in the first place.

Political reporting, like every other kind of reporting, is supposed to shoot for accuracy. So read it here, all you buckaroos and buckaresses who spent a year and a half predicting a ‘close election’ and a ‘late election night’:

  • The presidential race was not close.
  • The battleground states were not razor-thin.
  • Democrats won. It was not fifty-fifty. It was not split-the-difference.
  • Republicans lost. The party has also lost name affiliation among registered voters.
  • Progressives won. Where Democrats lost, it was either a Blue Dog, a Republican-leaning district, or a hard race, sometimes close, where a challenger took on an entrenched incumbent. As mentioned, Alan Grayson won.
  • The right wing lost. As mentioned, Joe Walsh and Allen West lost. So did Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock, although their brand of conservatism differs from the ugliness of Walsh and West.

 

more later

Financial sector finds money for rightwing speakers

Posted on by
Reply

Speaking of money, speaking for money, money for speech

Who said speech was free?

It is good to see the hard-hit and lovely city of New Orleans supported. The 2012 New Orleans Investment Conference, however, is a whole different ball game.

Speaker

The NOLA Conference bills itself as

Your Path To
Profits And Safety
During Global Chaos

It further bills self as a gathering of “The world’s greatest geopolitical, economic and investing experts,” who will “lead you to profits and safety during the dangerous days ahead.”

Who dat?

Who are these experts? Prominent mention goes to the geopolitical experts.

Tina Fey as Palin

Featured speakers:

  • Gov. Sarah Palin
  • Charles Krauthammer, rightwing commentator
  • Rick Santelli, billed as the founder of the Tea Party

There is also a lineup of finance experts in some veins. Promises include the following:

“At New Orleans 2012, Dr. [Marc] Faber will reveal the truth about global inflation and the commodities boom. Including which commodities will benefit — and which won’t!”

“And at New Orleans 2012, Mr. [Peter] Schiff will reveal why today’s environment is like the 1970s on steroids — and how you can invest for both fun and profit during the coming runaway global inflation!”

“Plus, you can stroll through a veritable bazaar filled with dozens of high-potential companies in our exhibit hall. Every year, some of the biggest winners in the precious metals and resource sector are found here before they take off.”

One notes in these fulsome blurbs the characteristics also found in gold-sellers on TV and on the back pages of magazines–an emphasis on volatile commodities, ditto on precious metals, apocalyptic rhetoric about the future economy, and lack of data.

It all happens this month–Oct. 24-27.

“In New Orleans, Gov. Palin will participate in our Summit on America’s Future panel with Charles Krauthammer and Rick Santelli, and give a rousing closing address. In the process, she will reveal the dire stakes in this year’s national election, and what you can do to prepare regardless of the outcome.”

The most influential commentator in America, for gold sellers

Hard to wait.

 

Dewey Beats Truman, again –Wrong predictions on health care

Posted on by
Reply

DEWEY BEATS TRUMAN, AGAIN!

2012 wrong predictions on health care

“Surely, as there are mountebanks for the natural body, so are there mountebanks for the politic body; men that undertake great cures, and perhaps have been lucky, in two or three experiments, but want the grounds of science, and therefore cannot hold out. . . So these men, when they have promised great matters, and failed most shamefully, yet (if they have the perfection of boldness) they will but slight it over, and make a turn, and no more ado.”

Francis Bacon, “Of Boldness”

 

George Will

The list of wrong predictions about the U.S. Supreme Court ruling on ‘Obamacare’ would be a long, long one. This post will hardly scratch the surface. Still, it is worth pointing out that some of the preeminent newspapers in the United States got it wrong; some cable television channels got the prediction wrong and even went so far as to get the ruling wrong after it came down; and virtually every member of the rightwing noise machine got it wrong.

Erroneous headlines went up first

A few main points:

1)      They said what they were paid to say, of course. Rush-Limbaugh-Land would not have reacted kindly had George F. Will or Charles Krauthammer, for example, suggested that the high court might well uphold much or most of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The Koch brothers retreats, the speaker circuits, the book-buying in bulk, even the television appearances designed to reinforce a safe predictability–what David Brock referred to as six-figure speaking fees and seven-figure book contracts—all might threaten to dry up or at least to diminish, if any significant right-wing voices had taken a balanced line with regard to health insurance reform.

2)      This is health care they were talking about. Not predicting the horse race of presidential elections, not the outcome of a senate race. Health care, which in one way or another touches every American.

3)      Not one of them is financially in need of help with regard to health care.

4)      There is no suggestion whatsoever that any editor or producer or othre member of so-called management, at their respective media outlets, will provide guidance or correction, for even the most egregiously ridiculous predictions and bogus arguments about ‘Obamacare’. Far from it.

 

Admittedly not everyone went so far as Forbes, with a blanket prediction that the Supreme Court will strike down all of Obamacare.

But some notable prognosticators spent months overtly campaigning against, and predicting the downfall of, health care reform and/or health insurance reform. (The same experts likewise campaigned, for weeks and months on end, in favor of invading Iraq, and for much the same reasons.) That includes—of course–George F. Will, who used to be referred to as a constitutional scholar, and Charles Krauthammer, who at least once on air advanced his training as a psychiatrist to argue in favor of torture. Krauthammer is a Fox contributor, but Will is employed by ABC. They are both syndicated through the Washington Post Co., through which Colman McCarthy—the noted peace author—used to be syndicated, until both the Washington Post and the Washington Post Writers Group fired him on the same day.

In the wake of the high court’s ruling on health care, both Will and Krauthammer brought out columns this morning spinning the high court’s ruling on health care. Taking Bacon’s impudent fellow as their model, neither columnist volunteers the fact that he himself was wrong, let alone repeatedly wrong, on the question of whether the law would be upheld.

Let’s keep this short. Krauthammer and Will have both predicted the downfall of the law too many times to catalog. For Krauthammer, a few reminders here and here and here and here and above all the 180-degree-wrong prediction here.

For Will, offerings here and here and here, among many others. Will predicted on air that the law would be struck down, and “should be.”

 

The problem is that, as go the big-money columnists, so too often go the journalists—at least in political reporting. Chris Cilizza and Dan Balz of the WashPost may use a different idiom from Will and Krauthammer, but their line of thought is all too similar. Like God, they are always on the side of the big battalions, or what they perceive as the big battalions.

 

One result is that some of the biggest papers in the country have gone for decades as though insurance abuses are among the topics nice people don’t mention, at least in print. A corporate insurance practice of denying claims, whether denial was colorable or not, got outed in fiction by John Grisham, not in reporting by the Times.

Btw I heard about this as ‘company policy’ at one insurance company, anecdotally, myself. It is improbable that no Washington journalist, NYC journalist or Chicago journalist ever heard of it.

UPDATE:

Damn

I thought, ‘Dewey beats Truman’, swear I did. THEN I saw this blog, minutes after posting. It includes the related video: Stranger, go read it.

So They ‘Surveilled’ Financial Institutions? – You Don’t Say

Posted on by
Reply

So they ‘surveilled’ financial institutions? – You don’t say

On July 29, the Democrats wound up their national convention and awaited the anticipated ‘bounce’ in the week’s opinion polls.  On August 2, the administration announced, with maximum fanfare, that U.S. financial institutions and locales in New York and Washington were under surveillance by terrorists.

 

Bush, Porter Goss

Some thoughts here:

(1) My own call on this one is that it demonstrates beyond a reasonable doubt that the Bush White House uses terror alerts as bludgeons in domestic politics, especially since–as it turns out–some of the purported information on terrorism was three years old.  It seems to have worked, too, at least for the capital’s pundits:  the following Sunday, Chris Matthews’ weekly opinion-experts’ panel voted that Bush had ‘won’ the week, and administration media shills including Charles Krauthammer gleefully proclaimed that Kerry had gotten no bounce.

(2) Unfortunately, along with the older information, the flamboyant items also involved some sensitive information.  The news released by the administration compromised a (rare) actual investigation by disclosing the name of an undercover intelligence asset, and was followed by an equally abrupt round-up of several suspects, with more risk and less stealth than law enforcement personnel would have preferred.  To call the media release cavalier would be charitable.

(3) The release was also timed fortuitously in another way:  old though some of the information was, it came just that little bit too late for the suspects and other witnesses to be interviewed by the 9/11 Commission or by congressional investigators.  Two of the suspects were relatives of alleged 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohamed.  Why weren’t they pulled in shortly after KSM’s capture, if not before?

(4) Anyone privileged to read about the CIA’s role in supporting the Taliban, through Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), has to be aware of Pakistan’s support for terrorism.  Much terrorist funding came (and still comes) from Saudi Arabia, more than ever now after the invasion of Iraq.  But mujahideen training, schooling, transportation and logistics have come extensively from Pakistan, as the administration knows:  the Osama bin Laden-ISI-Taliban triangle is an old story.  Presumably, the CIA and ISI could have pulled in the usual suspects earlier than summer 2003.

(5) One last, sad story.  Among the genuine 9/11 investigations short-changed and/or outright impeded by the administration are scientific investigations of the sites.  The National Science Foundation gave several special awards immediately after September 11, 2001, for expert investigation including a study of the World Trade Center debris by a much-credentialed engineering professor at Berkeley.  The result? –Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki had the debris hauled away immediately and destroyed; the authorities involved never gave the engineering researchers the videos, blueprints and other primary material requested; and wild conspiracy theories of ‘controlled demolition’ are floating around three years later, even though hundreds of people saw the planes hitting the towers.

Professor Astaneh’s own suggestion about the skyjackers is that they did not know the buildings would implode but intended the towers to topple onto the Stock Exchange, causing thousands more deaths and crippling the much-hated US financial sector.  It’s only a guess–as he points out, “there are not enough data for a hypothesis”–but it sounds like a good guess.

The item that purported assailants had financial institutions under surveillance sounds valid.  Three years ago, however, we were all barraged through corporate media outlets about an “attack on America.”  An attack on Wall Street and the Pentagon is still an attack on America, but it’s too bad the networks’ thrust had to be so aggressive on this point; I think the American people could have been trusted to draw the right conclusions on their own.  Surely, given all the deaths and injuries, the grief and heroism, we could safely have been allowed to hear that the hijackers thought they were dealing a crippling blow to US military and financial centers.  Couldn’t we?

 

Iraq WMD

But only now, safely after wars have been launched against pitiful Afghanistan and starved-and-strangled Iraq, are we allowed to hear widely that the assailants had financial institutions in their sights.

Afghanistan