A credible Iran portal, for the latest developments not only political but cultural, can be found here.

Billionaire cleric Rafsanjani stumps for Mousavi at Tehran University. My coverage of what has been happening in Iran has been negligent, of course due to other events. But it is still worth discussing, as things appear to be dynamic again after a frightening lull following the massive display of force and brutality against the demonstrators. Above, in the embed: the latest victim, an (as of now) nameless woman. It is remarkable that in such a stridently patriarchal society women have been at the forefront of many of the protests.

News roundup: Iraqi authorities have decided to put a tighter lid on the movements of US forces, in an apparent effort to enforce their sovereignty, probably as a political show for the people who apparently do not want to be kept safe by a foreign power. It would be sensible if the same applies for Iran, whose fighters the US has often cast as foreign to the region, implying it is naturally our backyard.



Walter Cronkite, the legendary television newsman who recognized the folly of the war in Vietnam (Robert McNamara, its troubled architect, passed last week), is dead at 92. This appears to be a fitting coda to the transition the craft of journalism itself is making, step by step, toward a new medium and style. He was a giant of broadcasting and one of my heroes.

The other day, the Democratic-led Senate slapped organized labor in the face by stripping a key provision of the Employee Free Choice Act, namely the section that guarantees a free choice vis-à-vis arbitration (if a simple majority of workers wish to unionize, they simply check a card). For mainstream liberals the enemy is usually the G.O.P., but they ignore their enemies among their own ranks at their peril. Labor unions have captured bankrupt auto manufacturers, endangered health benefits, and a denied life-line. This is a triumph for the Chamber of Commerce.

Speaking of money matters, on that same day it was reported that JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs have emerged as the last titans standing on Wall St., which “underscores how the government’s effort to halt a collapse has ... set the stage for a narrowing concentration of financial capital” (Graham Bowley, New York Times) The largest banks have reported exorbitant profits, as well, but lending remains a trickle, posing a thorny “political problem” (Binyamin Appelbaum, Washington Post).

Bernard Madoff’s new inmates in Butner, North Carolina include:

Omar Abdel-Rahman, the terrorist known as the “Blind Sheik” who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and former Adelphia Commmunications [sic] Chief Executive Officer John Rigas… former U.S. Naval Intelligence Analyst and convicted spy for Israel Jonathan Pollard; former Colombo crime family boss Carmine Persico; and Russell Weston, the perpetrator of a 1998 U.S. Capitol shooting that left two U.S. Capitol Police officers dead.

Honestly, though, why is the former chief of Nasdaq being roasted on a spit while other traders and financiers who were probably complicit in similar schemes, less audacious perhaps and more legalistic, have wholly escaped punishment or any sort of accountability? One could argue that the deregulation of derivatives, pushed by Larry Summers and Paul Volcker, among others, caused more damage than Madoff and his Ponzi scheme. But for now, though it is speculative, one could make that argument.

Free Press has been cooking up new business models for journalism, and are even considering “micropayments” to bolster Internet news content. The Wall Street Journal originally tried out that scheme, only to recently make it free for the public. Google is an ambiguous villain in this picture, and it’s certainly a force that cannot be ignored. This is going to take some time.

Good move, Aussies. Perhaps my country should follow suit. Bottled water, in my opinion, has always been a terrible idea, in terms of waste and unsustainability, in addition to the fundamental unfairness of paying good money for something that should be free to the entire human race. Compounded to that is the picture of (at least) a billion or so people in the world who lack something as basic as clean drinking water while Westerners like us have the luxury of bottling it up and selling it at a profit.

The Declaration of Independence, as translated by H.L. Mencken in 1921. Happy Fourth.

After six years of military occupation, US forces have finally handed over sovereign control to the Iraqis of their major cities, including Baghdad. Prime Minister Maliki is said to declare tomorrow National Sovereignty Day. Two huge issues remain: the status of Kirkuk, the oil-rich Kurdish-dominated city in the north, and the Embassy in the Green Zone. I do not have any prescriptions, as I am not one to issue or advocate policy, nor am I in any position to do it. All that my capacities can lead me to do is try to report what appears to be happening, with respect to Iraqi affairs and whatever else. The troops have been over there for a long time, and it is good that we have really begun to let the Iraqis take back their own country, which is something that should have taken place immediately after the overthrow of Saddam.

The Beeb reports today that “Israel has approved the construction of 50 new housing units in a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank,” a decision that “came hours before Defence Minister Ehud Barak was due to fly to the US.” This follows the snub by Netanyahu to George Mitchell and his non-offer to the Palestinians of quasi-statehood. This is all either deliberately provocative or simply unreasonable. In either case the US government ought to rethink its special relationship, and soon. Words are nice but actions speak louder.

Western journalists have been more or less banished from Tehran for the time being. Michael Slackman reports from Cairo:

Iran’s government said Sunday that it had arrested Iranian employees of the British Embassy, while the police in Tehran beat and fired tear gas at several thousand protesters who joined a demonstration at a mosque in support of defeated presidential candidate Mir Hussein Moussavi.

This is said to be an escalation between the Iranian authorities and Britain (which incidentally played a major role in the 1953 MI-6/CIA coup against Mossadegh). The United Kingdom has been accused, on the basis of no evidence, of instigating the demonstrations of the past two weeks.

A ribald look at our news media complex from across the Pond.

Religious fanaticism and worship of force equals this.

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Dreyfuss anticipates “the next explosion,” following the current lull as Baseej have stamped out much of the recent unrest with swift incredible brutality. Hope is still there.

What we know about Iran can be cleverly packaged into convenient dichotomies. Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian Studies at Columbia University, breaks it down:

Highly educated, pro-Western and progressive Iranians are … placed on Mir Hossein Moussavi’s side, while backward villagers and urban poor are on Ahmadinejad’s. The fact that in North America and Western Europe, usually unveiled and fluently English-speaking women are brought to speak on behalf of the women demonstrators further intensifies the impression that if women are veiled or do not speak English fluently then they must be Ahmadinejad supporters.

This is a deeply false dichotomy that projects a flawed picture to the outside world. It is predicated on the spin that a very limited pool of expatriate academics are putting on a movement that is quite extraordinary in Iranian political culture, one whose full dimensions have yet to be unpacked.

…Moussavi is universally known as a hard-core socialist in his economic platform and a social reformist in his politics. Mehdi Karrubi is far to Moussavi’s right in his economic neo-liberalism and social conservatism. Mohsen Rezaie, meanwhile, is even more to the right of Karrubi in his social conservatism but to his left in his economic platform.

What above all challenges the reading of this event as a middle-class revolt against ‘uncouth radicalism’ is a crucial statistic that professor Djavad Salehi-Isfahani, one of the most reliable Iranian economists in the U.S., provides in the same set of responses that The New York Times solicited from experts. ‘Young people ages 15-29,’ Salehi-Isfahani reports, ‘make up 35 percent of the population but account for 70 percent of the unemployed.’

The overwhelming majority of the people pouring into streets of Tehran and other major cities in support of Moussavi are precisely these 15- to 29-year-olds. How could this then be a middle-class uprising if the overwhelming majority of those who are supporting it and putting their lives on the line are in fact jobless 15- to 29-year-olds who still live with their parents — who cannot even afford to rent an apartment, let alone marry and raise a family and join the middle class in a principally oil-based economy that is not labor-intensive to begin with?

Another crucial statistic that Salehi-Isfahani does not cite is the fact that more than 63 percent of university entrants in Iran are women, but only 12 percent are part of the labor force. That means that the remaining 51 percent are out of a job, and yet the most visible aspect of these anti-Ahmadinejad demonstrations is that women visibly outnumber men. How could jobless men and women be participating in a massive middle-class uprising against their ‘uncouth’ leaders?

If we were to look closely at Moussavi’s campaign commercials, his social and economic platforms since he entered the race, and the presidential debates with all the other candidates, we see that a sizable component of his supporters are indeed university students, young faculty and the urban intellectual elite — such as filmmakers, artists and the literati.

But the fact is that a major constituency of Moussavi is also the urban poor and particularly the war veterans who have no respect for Ahmadinejad, believing he had an inglorious war record, but are full of unsurpassed admiration for Moussavi because of his role as a fiercely dedicated prime minister during the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988).

Conversely, there is a significant segment of the traditional middle class, the bazaaris, that is in fact the beneficiaries of Ahmadinejad’s economic policies of governmentally subsidized commodities and services, and thus supports him.”

The heart-rending news of the martyrdom of yet another group of protesters to the recent fraud in the elections put our nation in shock and sorrow. Shooting at the people, militarizing the city, scaring the people, provoking them, and displaying power are all the result of the unlawfulness we’re witnessing today. How surprising it is that the people who instigate all this, accuse others of these very events.” — Mir Hossein Mousavi, referring to Iranian state media that has branded the opposition movement as terrorist

Juan Cole has more information on the events yesterday.

It is interesting to see the nexus between the Old Guard in Iran and its neoconservative sympathizers in my country.

Supreme Leader Khamenei spoke, declaring Ahmadinejad the rightful winner and the protests illegitimate. Things appear to be getting to a head, as Tehran continues to explode, according to the news accounts, and there are also dispatches about acid being sprayed from security helicopters overhead the demonstrators. The other meme that is developing is that Mousavi is not interested in fundamental change. But it is too soon to see all of this clearly.

An even more basic question for Joe Klein: Why does anyone still take Wolfowitz and Krauthammer seriously?

Still in Teheran, Roger Cohen points out the rather obvious:

I don’t doubt that his [Ahmadinejad’s] piety, patronage and populism secured him many millions of votes. He personifies a defiant nationalism, symbolized by Iran’s nuclear program. But a genuine victory with almost two-thirds of the vote would not require the imposition of near-martial law to secure it.

Wired reports that Twitter may not be the medium de rigeur, much noise to the contrary notwithstanding.

The groundswell waves of democratization and popular activism in the West during the late 60s-early 70s have spread to the industrializing Mideast. It is a different time, but oddly resonant. So that leads me to this.

Andrew Sullivan keeps the coverage going.

Time says it is not so simple:

We're told that a young and restless Facebook generation has arisen in Iran, text-messaging and Twittering away at the fabric of a conservative clerical rule that it is no longer willing to accept. Ranged against it are the dogged defenders of a decrepit regime that has outlived its purpose, surviving only through brute force and its ability to convince the unsophisticated, mostly rural poor folk in their ragged suits and black chadors that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is their champion against corrupt politicians and the treacherous intellectuals and amoral rich kids who support them.

Obviously these are stereotypes — and highly misleading ones at that.

Robert Dreyfuss reports that, according to former Iranian Foreign Minister Ibrahim Yazdi, it really was rigged:

A coup d'etat? They've already made one! They've created a dictatorship, in fact. Do you know that last night the security forces occupied the offices of many newspapers, to make sure that their reporting on the election was favorable? They changed many headlines. They fixed the election.

The Guards are taking over everything, including many economic institutions. The ministry of the interior is increasing its control in all the provinces.

We have information that Ahmadinejad is thinking about changing the Constitution to allow the president to serve more than two terms, to make his presidency more or less permanent.

The revolution is being twittered.

The Green Revolution?

From Roger Cohen, our man in Tehran:

As dusk comes, people gather on the roofs of their apartment buildings and the haunting sound of “Allah-u-Akbar” — God is great — and “Death to the dictator” echoes across the megalopolis.

The Iranian yearning in these cries is immense, a measure of all that was not delivered by the 1979 revolution, when the same cries went up and liberation was promised.

Juan Cole: 100,000 people in the streets. Photo montage here.

It is difficult to keep up; such is the nature of this medium. I wonder how other revolutions would have looked like had blogging existed then...

From Independentista, 25 June 2005:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, mayor of Tehran and reported hard-liner, defeated alleged reformist Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in yesterday’s run-off election. Marred by accusations of fraud, Ahmadinejad’s victory (a big surprise) is observed to "complicate" U.S.-Iranian relations — in the words of the Washington Post and the New York Times. The Iranian Interior Ministry’s figures give Ahmadinejad nearly 62% of the vote and Rafsanjani 36%, with the official turnout of 60%.

Incredible.

Moussavi is not under house arrest. According to CNN:

Reformist Mir Hossein Moussavi, whose claims of fraud in Friday's vote have fueled three days of unrest and prompted authorities to launch a probe, was cheered through Tehran's streets as he apparently drove to meet thousands of supporters.

The crowd is estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands.

As a reporter, I know that my observations are supposed to be impartial, but in the case of the Green Revolution that is currently underway in Iran, I cannot refuse to take sides: my sympathies and hopes lie with the students who are trying to change the regime, as they are being savaged in the streets and attacked in dormitories. Moussavi appears to remain under house arrest, and Khamenei indicates that he wants some kind of recount or investigation into alleged (and highly likely) fraud and intimidation. In his latest speech, Bibi Netanyahu said not one word about the students and their good fight, but instead the same tired hash about the threat from Iran. If by Iran he means the old theocratic thugs, he would be correct. But a new Iran is emerging, slowly and fitfully for sure, but it is happening, live. More as it develops.

According to virtuoso pollster Nate Silver, the election may not have been rigged after all.

Hopes have been quickly dashed to bits in Iran. Tehran rigged the polling; riots in the streets have been brutally put down. Ahmadinejad will have a second term.

Andrew Sullivan has done an excellent job covering the events as they unfold: here, here, here, and here.

James Spencer reports that the toll may have neared 100 arrested.

In the wake of economic turmoil for which many Iranians attribute to the disastrous rule of Ahmadi-Nejad, and the historic opening that the US has offered, the 30-year-long reign of the Islamic Republic appears to be drawing toward a fateful shift, away from the rigidity of the recent past and toward a Khatami-like reformation in its politics toward the West, its own grappling with social values, and its place in the region.

The challenger, Mir Hussein Moussavi, is a former premier. And the incumbent is a clownish demagogue who has borne so many parallels with our own preceding leader that many commentators have seen echoes of the Obama campaign in that of Moussavi, who has tapped into the energy and organizational acumen of the youth (who comprise the strong majority of the population).

Iran has a long way to go, and so does my own country, although we have more formally democratic institutions and do not vet our candidates by a board of theologians (one could argue about the Republican primaries in certain states). Four years ago, the forces of reaction were victorious in both Iran and the United States. Now, after so much, maybe the tides are finally shifting, if just by a bit, one small step toward a better place for these two nations to repair relations after the mutual bitterness and suspicion of the recent past.

An update on the madness of Von Brunn, who remains in custody (and alive).

From the Washington Post LiveChat, now:

Arlington, Va.: Is this indicative of a larger problem? It seems like far right wing violence is occurring fairly often lately, or is that just the media making it bigger than it is?

Heidi Beirich: This is not a media phenomenon. We have had two incidents involving cop killings by anti-government extremists, two white supremacist plots against the president and a guy in Maine was actually found, after his wife shot him, to have had the components of a dirty bomb in his home, according to the FBI. There was also a racist rampage by Keith Luke in Massachusetts that involved rape and murder of African immigrants. So these are real things that are sadly occurring.

The shooter has been identified as James von Brunn, alternately aged 88 or 89 according to different press accounts, with reported links to neo-Nazi groups. This ghost of the ghastly past, in a flash, scandalized the area. Ironically, my thoughts centered this morning on the opinion piece that Michael Gerson wrote about denial of the Nazi Holocaust. This violence is denial made incarnate.

The security guard has been confirmed dead.

This is what we should anticipate, nor should it engender surprise; still shocking, but what the CIA would call blowback. Above: another gem from Mr. Fish, terrible and true beyond ink-stained words.

The March 14 coalition has prevailed in Lebanon, dealing a blow to the Hezbollah-led bloc. Good news for US and Israeli interests and those of moderate Lebanese. Perhaps his widely-lauded appeal in Cairo is doing the trick. Or it is simply an internal matter to Lebanon. Either way, as elections in Iran come up later this week, we will all see which way the winds are blowing throughout the Mideast. In Europe, however, the polls are swinging decisively to the rightist parties, according to news reports.

ALSO: Good development in Pakistan.

The latest act of sedition.

The other day the NY Times reported that a highly confidential nuclear report had been leaked, detailing in its 267 pages the locations of every single atomic facility in the United States, which was only hitherto seen by the IAEA. Experts quoted agreed that no serious breach of security had been dealt, but in this reporter’s opinion it is a very impressive (in the negative sense) disclosure. The news report did not provide the link, surely their prerogative as a responsible conveyor of news and not state secrets.

But I was curious at this point, so I went ahead and emailed Steven Aftergood, who releases a bulletin called Secrecy News with the Federation of American Scientists. It was a simple request: is the report available online, and where can one find it. To my surprise, he gave me a hyperlink and I downloaded the whole thing, completely unredacted. It’s a stunning document, and quite disturbing. Maybe Iran should disclose its own inventory and then we’re on the up-and-up.

It is indicative of the information environment we have today that such an important document can be so easily accessed. I didn’t even have to file a FOIA request, which surely would have been rejected had the document not already been declassified, for reasons that remain obscure. With such universality that the Internet provides, it is extremely difficult to make sure that “the wrong hands” don’t get a hold of this kind of information. The document shows the actual addresses of our nuclear fuel stations and processing/enrichment plants, even with maps.

The aim of journalism is to get the public’s right to know in line with the state’s right to protect the public from those who would use knowledge that may be in the public interest into the very private interest of malevolent individuals and organizations. It’s a fine line, for sure, and the best strategy may be to approach it case-by-case. In this case, I think it was correct for the Times and other news organizations to not include the link that is still readily available to any fifth-grader with a dial-up anywhere in the world. For that reason, my decision here to omit Aftergood’s email address, much less the link he gave me, are strictly on a need-to-know basis. And to be honest, I’m not sure I need to know.

Some good moves from the State Department about Tiananmen. Hopefully we will not lose our most-favored-nation status and their holding of Treasury bonds for a simple call to recognize that a massacre took place.

An excellent question in the wake of the Tiller case: would it be okay for the advocates of untrammeled executive power to fight terrorism at the price of due process if anti-abortion extremists were detained and tortured? Doubt it.

The big news stories are that General Motors, for now, is a bankrupt and nationalized corporation; an extremist pro-lifer murdered a late-term abortion doctor; and an Air France flight may or may not have plunged to a terrible fate over the Atlantic from an electrical storm. I want that audacity of hope thing again, and that promise of change. Folks on the Randian right, like Glenn Beck among others, are very good at rallying people for a common cause. Why must the left-liberal-progressive groups remain so fractured, reliant too much on the latest dictates from the administration? Why is citizen action on the right so predominant, and left-of-center energy so passive?

Choe Sang-Hun, in the New York Times, reports today that N. Korea is warning that it will deliver a “powerful military strike” on its neighbor to the south if any of its ships are intercepted by US naval forces, adding that Pyongyang “no longer feel[s] bound by the armistice” that ended the hellish Korean War over a half-century ago. It is clear that Kim Jong-il is a man of his word, and the situation appears quite dire, though not yet immediate; in range are American forces in the Pacific and on the peninsula and, of course, Seoul and other population centers in S. Korea itself. The “homeland” will not likely be in the cross-hairs, for the near future. Still very grim. More as it develops.

Iran has restored access to Facebook. Phew. Now it just needs to restore parliamentary democracy.

Former SWAT officer Kirk Black is an American hero. Featured in today’s New York Times (Richard A. Oppel, Jr., “U.S. Captain Hears Pleas for Afghan Detainee,” A1), this man—in defiance of draconian command procedure that nearly cost him his livelihood—made sure that an Afghan captive could contest his detention after Black had realized that there was no evidence to justify the imprisonment of that civilian, Gul Khan, at the fearsome Bagram AFB.

People like this in our military make our country great, in my opinion, because, according to the report (which is backed up by extensive corroboration), Capt. Black recognized something that should be obvious to much more people who pepper our media commentary with their nonsense: indefinite detention, on questionable grounds and in murky circumstances, can create more headaches. Black was quoted as saying, “Lock a guy down for 22 hours a day”—and it must be understood that this our standard operating practice—“and you are creating a criminal.”

Iran has blocked off access to Facebook, a not so subtle attempt to rig the wheels ever more favorably for Ahmadinejad and his chances at the upcoming polls. North Korea, the remaining evil cadet in the axis, has detonated an atomic weapon (again). Pakistani refugees continue to flood from Swat and the Lower Din as their army battles an entrenched Taliban. General Colin Powell, to the certain dismay of some, is remaining loyal to the Republican banner; the party has left him, not the other way round.

More random news roll-ups as they happen. Time for a little shut-eye.

A good tip for liberals still clinging to hope: Instead of waiting from On High for social change, go ahead and make him do it. He is a servant of the people, not its savior.

If this sounds negative and not audacious enough, perhaps it would be wise to face up to the very real institutional boundaries any center-left figure must confront; or the difficulties, and absurdities, that stare down reasonable demands like, say, shuttering a torture camp or ending the occupation of a foreign country.

The worst of it is when supposed allies make their own excuses and seem to have shit for brains, only concerned about their precious seat and their next poll. This spans both parties. Putting Obama into office was just the first step, not the last. He cannot do it alone, nor should he; such opens the door to overreach and abuse. What we need is a broad-based coalition of citizen action groups that are principled, not reactionary and progressive, not regressive. It will take time, which is always in short supply.

Normally what I like to do here is put up clippings from the news reporting belt or do media analysis of my own, but I think it made more sense at this time to set out what seems to be shaping up and how we can still control things, and not merely let the System take care of it, in our names.

Above: typical blue-blood New Englanders enjoying the Long Island Sound. Further comment would be superfluous.

Are you kidding me, Eric Holder? It is going to take a generation to undo all of this damage.

Condi: Are you smarter than a fourth grader?

A grain of salt due Internet polling notwithstanding, this seems like a good sign that the American people are still awake.

The law-breakers in the predecessor’s administration ought to be prosecuted. It is incredible to me why a call for enforcing the law of the land is considered solely the stand of the political left. It is also maddening that pseudo-progressive Obama is not willing to do this, or even “investigate.” But there is no need for a commission. All of the evidence proving that crimes were committed is on the public record. It’s in open sight, and the fact that “law and order” pseudo-conservatives are wailing and screaming about vengeful leftists seeking to contribute to our nation’s security by paring down the torture-surveillance-unitary executive policies is very sad. These authoritarians have no principle but power and the privileges of dominating the discourse that that power had bestowed to them. God forbid we get attacked again; that would be the end of whatever self-respecting Republic we have left. For now, I’m holding onto a residual of hopeful feeling that someday justice will be done to the people who injured my country, and that the man I elected as an ostensible agent of change will not only see our high ideals and our security as a false choice — but will also recognize that the choice between leaving the unforgivable and indefensible recent past behind us and prosecuting the bastards is a total no-brainer.

Here we have it: sycophantic, reprehensible, and completely dishonest. Kudos to the students who tried to hold her feet to the fire.

Bob Herbert is right: “This is an insanely violent society, and the worst of that violence is made insanely easy by the widespread availability of guns.”

For the first time I am genuinely impressed by something Maureen Dowd wrote.

It is official: Condoleezza Rice was a war criminal, too. They are talking about the torture of Abu Zubaydah, to whom she readily assented in 2002. And if there is any more doubt that our government legally codified torture as an anti-terrorist and intelligence-gathering method, we also have this.

It’s time we owned up to the sober facts facing the news industry: first among these is that the very medium that has sustained it and given life to accountability, transparency and community ties among Americans is not only on its way out but is dying quickly.

Some dispatches that were gleaned from today’s issue of the Newspaper of Record:

AbitibiBowater, “the world’s largest newsprint maker,” has filed for bankruptcy; a few pages later we read that Gannett “reported a 60 percent decline in first-quarter profit … and said its advertising was continuing to fall.” The New York Times itself “plans to eliminate several weekly sections” to save rapidly hemorrhaging costs and a similar ad shortfall.

A.O. Scott, their lead film critic, couldn’t help but notice the antiquity of newspapers in the new Crowe-Affleck film “State of Play”:

A breaking, earthshaking story makes its way from computer screen to newsprint. The plates are set, the presses whir, sheaves of freshly printed broadsheet are collated, stacked on pallets and sent out to meet the eyes of the hungry public. Truth has been told, corruption revealed and new oxygen pumped into the civic bloodstream.”

Scott is being sentimental but his point is valid. We’re losing more than pulp here. The question is will the transition, all but inevitable now, to the digital press engender a similar spirit of investigation, truth-seeking and muckraking that the best moments of our print media have seen. The answer has not yet been written.

In the interim, Sen. Cardin (D-Md.) has introduced a bill that would make newspapers tax-exempt entities (link here).

“Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mold the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations” (Joseph Pulitzer, 1904).

Remember when protesting was anti-American, or worthy of ridicule? Only when the left does it; when the right does the same thing, it is the epitome of nation-loving. The so-called TEA (taxed enough already) parties are not spontaneous; they were closely coordinated and sponsored by a group called FreedomWorks, given free publicity by extremists in Fox Views, and so full of irony and disingenuous appeals one cannot even begin, not knowing whether to laugh or cry.


You wonder: where were these people when a Republican president saddled them with unsupportable debt and reckless spending? When people took to the streets to oppose government policies they opposed — say, illegitimate foreign military misadventures and warrantless wiretapping, or even torture — these very people would have ruthlessly denigrated them for their lack of patriotism. Marc Ambinder provides a fair description of what seems to be going on.

I conclude with this thought, captured in the aphorism below: “When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross” (Upton Sinclair).

What remains of the right wing (for lack of a better way of putting it) is spinning out of control, lost in a hysterical, inflammatory morass of hyperventilating rhetoric — which contributes to its own loss of credibility and embarrassment toward itself. Rick Moran, a disillusioned right-of-center observer, comments:

[Glenn] Beck worries me. Conservatives worry me. I worry about myself. I feel trapped in a huge ball of cotton, trying gamely to make my way out but don’t know which direction to start pushing. I am losing contact with those conservatives who find Beck anything more than a clown — and an irrational one at that. Same goes for those who worship at the altar of Rush, Hannity, Coulter, and the whole cotton candy conservative crowd. I can’t take those people seriously. The fact that they are popular mystifies me.

It should mystify anyone concerned with the future of democratic discourse. The fact is, and it is one of those blunt statements, the figures that Moran is talking about are almost openly anti-Enlightenment — that is, anti-rational — opposed to reason, and the attendant value of fairness. This is not hyperbole. There is always room for well-reasoned and thoughtful dissent; it is a necessity. Pure and simple reaction, however, is not meaningful or useful, and militates against the norms of discussion and debate. It is also flies in the face, very contemptuously, of standards of evidence and argument. These are dismissed as irrelevant; conviction is what matters.

In the mainstream sphere, Fox News is the most visible culprit, as both a hyper-partisan ideological cocoon and a massive exercise in fraud. Its leading blowhards engage in a postmodern game in which they consistently promote themselves as the head of the pack of media wolves; at the same moment, they maintain they are outside the entire media entity. Another sleight-of-hand trick is introduced with the use of projection, in which the just-folks multimillionaire opinionator-reporters blithely accuse their enemies for their incitement, their inflammatory and irresponsible pretensions to analysis, and their absurdity. A plausible analogue would be a child who steals a cookie and calls his mother a thief for catching him.

But how do we know that the CIA has stopped running its secret prisons (just announced)? On the say-so of the new CIA director, Leon Panetta? Is there any way to verify this?

“Israel cannot find peace by behaving in the Middle East as if it were the American Wild West of a century ago. Reprisal is abhorrent, it punishes the innocent with the guilty. The predictable effect has been to inflame enmity in a fresh spiral of hatred.”

—I. F. Stone’s Weekly, 5 December 1966 (vol. 14, no. 39)

“Zionist immigration is out to establish itself in Palestine on lines of its own choosing. On the other hand, those lines are foreign, unintelligible, and antipathetic to the mentalities of the Arab communities that represent the large majority in the country. If no bridge is built, how can these two existing, and mutually repellent, social states grow side by side without endless friction?”

—Owen Tweedy, Atlantic Monthly, October 1930

Enough is enough. But why?

After reading the chapter on demagogy (specifically pp. 389-90) in Gordon Allport’s book The Nature of Prejudice (1958), I immediately thought of Glenn Beck (and others) — minus the antisemitism, which is not apparent. It also brings to light the hatreds toward Obama’s “radical agenda” (see Hannity, Sean). If you take out the antisemitism and racialism, it’s a living mirror to what we see right now coming from the Right:

“In their volume Prophets of Deceit, Lowenthal and Guterman have analyzed a large number of similar speeches and tracts. There is a sameness of protest and hatred in all of them. What the demagogue is saying seems to boil down to the following points: You’ve been cheated. Your social position is insecure because of the machinations of … New Dealers, communists, and other agents of change. Sincere and plain folk like us are always dupes. We must do something.

“There is a widespread conspiracy against us. It is being engineered by devils — by Wall Street, … internationalists, the State Department. We must do something. The conspirators are sexually corrupt too. [e.g., O’Reilly et al constantly deplore the “gay agenda” and decry gay marriage and other affronts to Christendom] They ‘roll in wealth, bathe in liquor, surround themselves with the seduced daughters of America.’ ‘Oriental exotics debauch youth for the purpose of wrecking gentile morale.’ Aliens enjoy all the forbidden fruit. Our present government is corrupt. The two-party system is a sham. Democracy is a ‘trick word.’ ‘Liberalism is anarchy’ [or mob rule, or a mental disorder]. Civil liberties are ‘silly liberties.’ We cannot be universalistic in our ethics. We must look out for ourselves. We can’t trust the foreigners. Internationalism is a threat. [see the debate on immigration — Beck, among others, warns that a “North American Union” is coming and the borders will be opened and the demographic nature of America will change]

“But we can’t trust our own government either. Alien termites bore within. Washington is a ‘Bolshevik rat’s nest.’ Our enemies are low animals: reptiles, insects, germs, subhuman. [there was an editorial cartoon in the Columbus Dispatch in 2007 depicting Iranians as roaches] Extermination is called for; we must do something. There is no middle ground. The world is divided. Those who are not for us are against us. It is a war between haves and have-nots; between true Americans and ‘foreigners.’ … [Hannity, a few nights ago, seriously asked, “Why do we care so much about what the rest of the world thinks of us?”] … But with disaster around the corner what can you do? [“I’m sorry (weeping); it’s just I love my country, and I fear for it”—Beck] Poor, simple, sincere people need a leader.

“Behold I am he. It isn’t the American nation that is wrong; it is the corrupt men in office. Change the personnel. I am available. I’ll change the whole smelly mess. You’ll have a happier and safe life. The situation is too urgent to permit the luxury of thought. Just give me your money, and I’ll tell you later what to do. Everybody is against me. I am your martyr. The press … [and] the stinking bureaucrats are trying to shut me up [see the “conservative” talk radio hostility to the Fairness Doctrine]. Enemies plot against my life, but God will protect me. I’ll lead you. And I’ll ignite the public mind everywhere. ... Maybe we’ll march on Washington. ...” [and throw “tea parties”]

The Arab League makes a despicable decision, uniting behind this bloody murderer.

The graveyard of empires? 21,000 troops — including 4,000 advisers — are on their way to find out.

Is it just me, or is Roger Cohen completely on point?

What quantum mechanics tells us, I believe, is surprising to say the least. It tells us that the basic components of objects — the particles, electrons, quarks etc. — cannot be thought of as ‘self-existent’. The reality that they, and hence all objects, are components of is merely ‘empirical reality’.

“This reality is something that, while not a purely mind-made construct as radical idealism would have it, can be but the picture our mind forces us to form of ... Of what ? The only answer I am able to provide is that underlying this empirical reality is a mysterious, non-conceptualisable ‘ultimate reality’, not embedded in space and (presumably) not in time either.”

— Quantum physicist Bernard d’Espagnat, in the London Guardian

Wait, what?

The commentariat, though not the bulk of the population, remains mired in an outmoded, neo-Reaganite paradigm that government must be small enough to be drowned in a bathtub, to borrow Grover Norquist’s famous phrase. It is almost a given that, with changed times, we need changed thinking. Two years ago, a friend who described his politics as “moderate,” spoke of the need for massive public works projects to get things moving again and foster better communal ties. Again, this was before the market crash. Yet, now, there is a reaction among certain circles that is deriding the plans on the table as socialistic. What is the alternative? Radical individualism and unremitting hostility to social democracy, which will atomize us further. It’s the wrong path, and we’ve been there before.

In William Leuchtenburg’s history of the pragmatic reforms of the 1930s, which thanks to revisionist historiography are now being reshaped into instruments of tyranny, we read that Franklin Roosevelt “refused to be awed by the warnings of economists and financial experts that government interference with the ‘laws’ of the economy was blasphemous. ‘We must lay hold of the fact that economic laws are not made by nature,’ the President stated. ‘They are made by human beings.’” This is no less true now than it was then. Henry Steele Commager and Richard Brandon Morris, in the introduction, write, “The character of the Republican ascendency of the twenties had been pervasively negative; the character of the New Deal was overwhelmingly positive. … Apathy, resignation, defeat, despair—these were the foes that Roosevelt routed from the scene; action, advance, confidence, hope—these were the sentiments that he inspired in his followers, the vast majority of the American people.”*

It is as if we as a society accept certain circumstances as immutable forces of nature that are beyond our control, and therefore cast attempts to remedy or reform them as wicked, for they oppose the divine will. The strategy is as foolish as it is corrupting. We need to be clear-headed and sober-sided about all of this. We need to recognize that the era of selfish acquisition and uncaring disposition toward our fellow citizens is dead and gone.

*Respectively, the quotations are from Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), p. 344 and p. ix.

A just punishment of a very sick man.

Do you think these people will also demonstrate against the socialism-for-the-rich schemes, too? Remember when it was unpatriotic to protest? What the hell is going on?

“The problem with American foreign policy goes beyond George Bush. It includes a Washington establishment that has gotten comfortable with the exercise of American hegemony and treats compromise as treason and negotiations as appeasement. Other countries can have no legitimate interests of their own. The only way to deal with them is by issuing a series of maximalist demands. This is not foreign policy; it’s imperial policy.”

— Fareed Zakaria

Another newspaper folds. This time it is the first paper with a major readership (about 100,000) to fail. It is only a matter of time until the bigger fish start frying from hemorrhaging budgets. East Coast dailies still dominate, however, which may delay the inevitable. Where will all the reporters and editors go?

After 150 years, the Rocky Mountain News published its last issue. The verdict, by this point, is beyond dispute: print media is going to die very soon. The New York Times could be next, sometime down the road given its recent financial difficulties, but as we said about the big investment houses it may be too big to fail. It is more likely that the Washington Post, once it is entirely digital, may be shuttered within the next decade; I want to clarify that I see no evidence for that assertion and that it is simply a dread feeling.

Does he mean it, or is this simply bluster and bombast to keep progressives placated? They are, admittedly, strong words: threat to the status quo, their descriptive of populist crusader, etc. Not sure how credible it is but it is a good start at least rhetorically. But it will not be enough until sufficient, organized popular pressure builds to match his words with deeds that will have an impact.

The federal government budget for next year is projected to be equivalent to over a quarter of U.S. gross domestic product (about $3,600 billion). It is worth keeping in mind that, according to Joseph Stiglitz, the ultimate cost of the Iraq war is projected to be around $3,000 billion.

Speaking of racism, recently (while in Columbus, Ohio) I’ve found some confirmation that a part of Hunter S. Thompson’s childhood involved little race wars. That’s right. Now, Thompson is a beloved gadfly to me which makes this all the more distressing and puzzling. I first chanced upon this unsavory aspect of his early life in the recent book Gonzo (compiled by Jann Wenner and Corey Seymour), a couple of years ago; my denial had persisted ever since.

“Hunter would go over to another friend’s house, and behind the street where this friend lived was Bear Grass Creek and a culvert. A lot of African Americans lived on the other side of the creek. Hunter and his group would shoot these guys with BB guns and hurl racial insults, and the black guys would finally have enough and swarm down into the culvert and up the wall, and Hunter and the others would retreat into their friend’s house and hide. They’d start these little mini-race wars.” (Neville Blakemore, quoted on p. 5)

In Columbus (to be specific, the Easton Town Center), I picked up a cheap copy of E. Jean Carroll’s book Hunter: The Strange and Savage Life of Hunter S. Thompson. It appears biographical but it is quite apparent that Thompson himself may have been the author, although it quotes his friends and acquaintances — which were legion.

Blakemore is quoted here, too, and the friend in question is named Walter Kaegi. Blakemore is quoted as saying: “the thing I remember about going over to Walter Kaegi’s when we were about ten or eleven is that Hunter used to say, ‘Let’s go over to Kaegi’s and fight the niggers’” (p. 18). He added: “for some reason there were black guys on the other side of the culvert. I don’t know if they lived there or not. But there would be taunts and bricks and stuff thrown. And then somebody would charge” (p. 19).

Gerald Tyrrell gives this account more corroboration (quoted in the same page): “Beargrass Creek was a concrete culvert going through Louisville. And black dudes would be walking down there and we would ambush them. We’d have BB guns with us. When they’d come down the creek, we’d shoot at them. And well, of course, the result was absolutely predictable. They’d come boiling up out of the creek, and they’re much bigger than us. They’re black guys, and, of course, we’d run like mad, screaming and hollering, into Walter Kaegi’s house and lock the door. And we’d hide in there.

“And that became part of the Hunter mythology. ‘Let’s go shoot ’em in the creek!’”

Here’s one fan of Thompson that hopes it’s just a myth.

Tourists are just not safe in anyplace where the fundamentalist and fanatical Islamists prey on Muslim societies that have a high Western presence. Very sad.

This has gone way too far. I do not see the racism in the cartoon — poorly done, anyways — nor, much less, incitement to violence. Maybe I simply have a very narrow definition of what constitutes racist, per se, or maybe a (dumb) cartoon is just a dumb cartoon. And nothing more than that. How can the NAACP not have bigger targets? Seriously.

(Above: a cartoon that appeared in 2007 that was actually racist, against which there was hardly any protest at all.)

Change we can believe in: more war, less development. In all seriousness, Beitullah Mehsud is a worthy target, but it is time to retire the illusion that Obama is a peacenik. He is simply fulfilling a major campaign promise.

Meanwhile, Bagram AFB remains a black hole.

In lieu of seeing the film (have not yet done so and may not be able until it comes out on DVD), I just received the graphic novel version of Waltz with Bashir today. The first thing to notice is that as a work of art people of any political persuasion should be impressed. More later.

Big Brother for Kids:

“I applaud Playmobil for attempting to provide us with the tools we need to teach our children to unquestioningly obey the commands of the State Security Apparatus,” wrote one Amazon reviewer pseudonymously. “But unfortunately, this product falls short of doing that. There’s no brown figure for little Josh to profile, taser, and detain?”

The commenter, who goes by the name Gen. JC Christian, adds (what is not quoted): “Where are all the frightened plastic Heartlanders pointing at the brown figure as they whisper "terrorist?" Where are the hippy couple figures being denied boarding passes? And shouldn't someone be forcing a mother figure to drink her own breast milk?”

In an anti-democratic move today, 54 percent of Venezuelans freely voted to give Chavez the power to run for office indefinitely, striking down term limits. If my ironic voice is too subtle, my apologies. It is transparently absurd to describe this as anything but democratic; the will of the people, that is a clear majority in this case, made a decision on executive power in a popular referendum. I welcome the opposition, another cornerstone of a healthy democracy. But it is ridiculous to continue the charade that the caudillo of Venezuela, though autocratic, is a dictator. One need not be a Chavista to make this point.

So who won, exactly?

Image courtesy Ha’aretz.

Bibi and Livni are in a dead heat. Exit polls have come in:

“The Channel 1 poll gave Kadima 30 seats, Likud 28 seats, and Labor 13 seats. Yisrael Beiteinu is predicted to win 14 seats...”

Does an Israeli left remain?

History repeats.

So the British hate the Jewish state, eh? Balloting began about two hours ago. Bibi is expected to win, with proto-fascist Lieberman at third place. I choose my words carefully; he is by any definition such a political figure. He has made explicit, avowed rhetoric to make a swap between Arab-dominated areas of Israel for (illegal) Jewish settlements in the West Bank. In other words, kick out the Arabs — or at the very least make them sign a Stalinist loyalty oath — and annex more Palestinian land, further pushing any prospect for peace to the farthest reaches of oblivion. Not that with Netanyahu it will be much better, viewing this whole thing as a non-Israeli I hasten to add, but perhaps more sane.

In completely unrelated news, Walter Isaacson of Time wants to have newspapers charge readers a small fee to read articles online. On one hand, my inclination is to oppose such a move because I feel that information should be free and open to the public; yet, on the other hand, whatever it takes to ensure the survival of the industry may take precedence. At least for the short term — and if I am to have a chance in print media, it may be what is needed.

US soldiers stationed in Iraq and Afghanistan are committing suicide in record numbers and the military doesn’t know why?

Could it be due to the possibility that they have no discernible mission and are posted in dangerous war-zones indefinitely? Just asking.

“Is peace out of reach?” Yes, according to this courageous report.

The wealthy no longer get to set socially acceptable norms of moral behavior for the rest of us? Sweet.

Today the New York Times reports that President Obama “intends” to put forth

a new American approach to Afghanistan that will put more emphasis on waging war than on development, senior administration officials said Tuesday.

I wonder how long it will take until the “progressives” experience an acute feeling of buyers’ remorse. For me, stepping up the fight against Taliban is a great idea. But war versus development is a false choice, and a dangerous one. That is how we create new enemies and contribute to our own vulnerability.

“As it turned out, most of the refugees did not leave Gaza in return for plane tickets. Mass deportations were more or less impossible, because diplomats and the world press were always watching. But there was a third way. A senior official in the Foreign Ministry, Michael Comay, wrote to Ambassador [Avraham] Harman that the military governor of the Gaza Strip, Mordechai Gur, was pushing people to leave Gaza by eroding their standard of living; he said Gur himself had admitted to this. Not everyone in the military government favored this approach: [Moshe] Dayan believed that although a deterioration of life in the Gaza Strip might bring about the departure of refugees, it might also make things difficult for the military government and damage Israel’s reputation.”

— Tom Segev, “The June 1967 War and the Palestinian Refugee Problem,” Journal of Palestine Studies 36(3), 2007, pp. 16-17

News objectivity at work.

“We go around behaving as though we had invented perpetual peace when all the time we are candidates for the military psychopathic ward. We were all steamed up in 1918 to have a real crusade, a holy war of extermination against the ungodly. … We become maudlin and sentimental whenever Peace is mentioned and we long all the time for a chance to gouge the eyes out of some other nation. In brief, as a nation, we are suffering from a badly suppressed case of homicidal mania disguised as universal benevolence.

“Psychologically, we are ready for battle and as soon as we can select a sufficiently remote and interesting antagonist, we are going to let him have it. … Better still, we have the arrogant self-righteousness of the utterly pure and we will cut throats devoutly and starve peoples in the name of the highest ideals. We will even shed a tear of commiseration for the poor creatures whom we destroy and will honestly believe that it hurts us more than it does them.

“The America of the peace societies, of the college professors, of the churchmen and the discussion clubs is very thin. Under it lies the America of Al Capone, the America of the lynchings, the America that kills its thousands and maims its tens of thousands, the America whose police draw their clubs whenever they see two or three gathered together, the America whose criminals use machine-guns, armored-cars and poison-gas, the America whose people shrug their shoulders at one of the highest maternity death-rates in the world and shudder at the thought of a starving Armenian on Mount Ararat. This second America needs a war as a dipsomaniac needs a drink, as a drug-fiend needs his dope, and as a red-hot momma needs her man, and when its chance comes, the first America will be swept aside in an instant.”

—Jay Franklin (1931)

It is about time.