Archive for July, 2006
Don’t look now, but Cynthia McKinney — who having been bounced from Congress in 2002 is facing the very real prospect of becoming an ex-member once again — has herself a campaign blog. More than a few public officials have tried their hand at blogging over the past few years, and with a few exceptions, most probably would be better off if they hadn’t. It’s not that they shouldn’t blog, it’s that they should only do it if they’re willing to do it right. I’ve seen many an inept campaign blog in my day, but Rep. McKinney sets a whole new standard.
For example: Although this particular page on her official campaign site does bill itself as a “blog,” and indeed has permalinks, it fails one particular test of blogginess that frankly, I can’t recall ever having seen failed before: The posts are in chronological, not reverse-chronological order.
In other words, the first thing you see when the page loads is an entry from April 20. At the bottom of the page is the latest post, on July 20. You could be forgiven for thinking the site had been abandoned, but no, if you scroll down from the top, the next post is June 17. And that one’s a doozy, responding to the hullabaloo over McKinney’s confrontation with the Capitol police earlier this year:
The good ol’ boy cracker-crats of the Republican party are having themselves a regular hootenanny over allegations that congresswoman Cynthia McKinney landed a punch on a security guard at the Capitol.
To be fair, that post appears to have been authored by a caucasian, although if black-on-black racism is a problem, then white-on-white racism cannot be discounted entirely. The self-described “white boy” is Greg Palast, a journalist whose investigations could be called controversial at best. Perhaps Palast is behind the campaign’s primary day efforts to play on her constituents’ fears about voting machine manufacturer Diebold’s rumored pro-Republican programming tendencies.
But it’s worth asking: If Diebold was certain that ousting McKinney is a good idea — and some prominent Atlanta conservatives want her to stay — then why not install DeKalb Co. Commish Hank Johnson without the trouble of a runoff?
And if you head to the most recent entry of McKinney’s pseudo-blog, she prepares her supporters for the primary fight ahead:
I will be pitted against a mostly unknown and unproven opponent, who will nonetheless have the unanimous backing of big national media and national money. The media and money behind my opponent will do their utmost to polarize the election along racial and party lines.
Indeed, Rep. McKinney would never tolerate, let alone disseminate or seek to gain from, racial or partisan polarization. Right?
At the WaPo’s politics blog, Chris Cillizza profiles Matt Bennett of center-left think tank Third Way. (The interview also clears up the mystery of what happened to the jumpsuit Michael Dukakis was wearing in that tank in 1988. Access to this kind of souvenir is an underrated perk of a campaign aide’s job.)
Bennett’s assertions aside, Third Way may find itself at the heart of that debate [over a Dem presidential nominee] in 2008. Many within the party are painting the 2008 nomination as struggle between those who want the party to tack further to the ideological left (best represented by the liberal blogosphere) and those, like Third Way and the DLC, who believe only by appealing to the center can Democrats regain the White House.
MyDD’s Matt Stoller reacts to this, understandably enough, by going on the offensive. After disagreeing at length with the tactics of Americans for Gun Safety, a group Bennett helped found, he says this:
Bennett doesn’t care that he’s screwed up everything he’s ever touched. Read the interview; Bennett sees himself as being in the center of the 2008 Presidential debate on the Democratic side even though he’s pursuing the same strategies he’s always pursued, and has done nothing but lose.
Stoller’s post also points out, via Cillizza, that Bennett was part of Bill Clinton’s advance team in 1992. Such failures we should all have. It’s true that Bennett worked for Wesley Clark’s 2004 campaign, and Clark didn’t win. On the other hand, neither did Howard Dean. In fact, it’s really not in the interest of the left-netroots to introduce support for winning candidates as a measure of competence. In the meantime, the question of whether the Democrats’ recent electoral fortunes are due to triangulating corporate sell-outs or unhinged lefty extremists looks set to remain unresolved for a while.
In Sunday’s Washington Post, writer Michael Grunwald has a (mostly) tongue-in-cheek column suggesting that the numerous Democratic 2008 hopefuls consider Al Gore a potential running mate. In doing so, he invokes one of the most famous put-downs* of the vice presidency:
John Nance Garner famously said that the vice presidency wasn’t worth a bucket of warm spit, and for Garner (who served under FDR) it probably wasn’t.
The problem is, this isn’t what Garner said. I can’t prove this as the moment, as Bartleby.com is still using the 1919 edition of Bartlett’s Quotations. But angry letter-writers to both the LA Weekly and Salon.com agree with me, and Google confirms (Exhibit A, Exhibit B) that the prevailing version is “a bucket of warm piss.” I mean, think about it for a second: Who would have the time to fill a whole bucket with spit?
This was hardly the first time I’ve seen Garner misquoted, and I decided to ask Grunwald himself if this was an editor’s call or his own decision. He got back to me in short order:
I’m embarrassed to admit that I didn’t even know the original quote was “warm piss.” I certainly would have gone for the accurate version if I had, although as you undoubtedly know, “warm spit” is how the quotation has come down through the ages, probably because (according to my quick google search) the reporters who wrote about it at the time all used the euphemism.
He’s certainly right about that, and to this day some newspapers try to keep cursing at least out of their print editions, even when the word is an integral part of the story. The New York Times struggled with President Bush’s recent reference to an even less savory human excretion — not the first time a mic has caught his mild expletives, either — while the Post let the president speak for himself. As in Garner’s day, the mass media still worries about offending the masses’ sensibilities.
Grunwald also isn’t the only knowledgable person to get this quote wrong. TCU history professor Michael L. Collins has passed the saying along as “a quart of warm piss.” Earlier this year Jonathan Alter of Newsweek (the Post’s sister publication) pointed out the “piss” vs. “spit” discrepancy — apparently Garner wasn’t pleased with the bowdlerized version — but somehow got “bucket” mixed up with “pitcher.”
How serious is this, really? Well, the quote is funnier in its original incarnation, and depicts Garner’s orneriness more accurately. To be sure, the euphemism doesn’t withhold any significant facts, but for those who do know the actual quote, it probably does hurt a newspaper’s reputation, or that of the reporter, to see “spit” in print.
Absent the explanation — which is why I asked Grunwald first — it sounds like the Post is keeping an inconvenient truth (ba dum) from its readers. It may be wrong to suggest that a paper which will hide the ugly truth on small things will also hide the truth about larger things; I don’t think it necessarily follows, certainly not as a matter of logic — but that doesn’t mean people won’t think it. It’s a small thing, but accuracy is still the best policy.
The Post should run a correction, but they’ll probably judge this below the threshhold of what matters. After all, the “spit” quote has a history of its own. What the Post really should have done is make comments available on political stories already.
*The other, and my personal favorite, is from Sen. Daniel Webster, who rejected Zachary Taylor’s offer to run with him (the two had both sought the Whig nomination) in 1848, saying:
I do not propose to be buried until I am dead.
Taylor went on to win the election, but died soon after, which would have made Webster president anyway. Instead we got Millard Fillmore.
John Kerry is taking a beating this morning from the conservative blogs, which isn’t exactly a surprising development, but it’s illustrative of the lopsided attention certain stories get. In this instance, while campaigning for Mich. Gov. Jennifer Granholm this weekend, Kerry weighed in on the situation/crisis/war in southern Lebanon. The Detroit News does the quoting:
“If I was president, this wouldn’t have happened,” said Kerry during a noon stop at Honest John’s bar and grill in Detroit’s Cass Corridor.
And at the end of the article:
“This is about American security and Bush has failed. He has made it so much worse because of his lack of reality in going into Iraq.…We have to destroy Hezbollah,” he said.
Now see the link roundup at Memeorandum: As of 11:30 this morning, I count 22 right-leaning blogs to just 3 left-leaning ones. This is a pattern you’ll see time and time again if you watch the blog swarms: They’re almost always lopsided in favor of which side has an easier time getting indignant, based on what’s included in the report.
Nothing I’ve written has ever generated as much critical email from friends and acquaintances as my tortured, anti-anti-Lieberman column from a couple weeks ago.
So says The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait, who goes on to say that he’s coming around to the anti-Lieberman position. Now, it’s easy to get the impression from the blogosphere that, at this point, Lieberman’s entire base of support consists of immediate family members and Marshall Wittman, but I still think it’s safe to say that if even TNR writers are wavering, that means trouble.
The real shock here, though, is that a single Lieberman column generated more critical email for Chait than his excellent Diary of a Dean-o-phobe blog. It is to be hoped that Chait will develop a similar burning antipathy towards one of the 2008 candidates – which one really doesn’t matter.
Comment-mining blogs on the right (or left) to find people saying crazy things and then holding them up as paradigmatic of their side is a fun thing to do, and while taking issue with him I’d be remiss not to note that Glenn Greenwald’s blog is a valuable resource for things like this extraordinary Ben Shapiro column.
Last I paid attention to Shapiro, he was still in his comfort zone: he didn’t get along with his professors at UCLA, and his fellow young adults weren’t living up to his exacting moral standards:
I am a member of a lost generation. We have lost our values. We have lost our faith. And we have lost ourselves… The ‘live and let live’ societal model is a recipe for societal disaster.
Shapiro is given to making this kind of statement, and he’s provided a great deal of sport for bloggers as a result. (Not just lefty bloggers, either – see also this review by Radley Balko, from which I pulled that overwrought quote.) However, he seems undaunted, and has now turned his attention to the history of armed conflict and hoisted the “sedition!” flag:
Under the Espionage Act of 1917, opponents of World War I were routinely prosecuted, and the Supreme Court routinely upheld their convictions. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes rightly wrote, “When a nation is at war, many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and that no Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right.” The Allies won World War I.
During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the internment of hundreds of thousands of Japanese-Americans, as well as allowing the prosecution and/or deportation of those who opposed the war. The Allies won World War II.
During the Vietnam War, the Supreme Court repeatedly upheld the free speech rights of war opponents, whether those opponents distributed leaflets depicting the rape of the Statue of Liberty or wore jackets emblazoned with the slogan “F— the Draft.” America lost the Vietnam War.
Yes, the jackets were the last straw. What’s really impressive about this, though, is the Malkinesque dotted line connecting the internment of Japanese-Americans and Allied victory in WWII. By Shapiro’s logic, one supposes that the Nazis’ own acts, being so much more heinous than the Korematsu decision, should have given them a substantial tactical advantage of some kind. (Also, read in this light, he seems to be inadvertently calling for the suspension of habeas corpus.)
Of course, it’s in Shapiro’s interest to say ridiculous things to get a reaction, and it’s in the interest of the left-hand side of his audience to provide him with the outrage he’s looking for. This is a symbiotic relationship with which everyone seems to be happy – however, its significance is unlikely to be as great as any of the participants would wish it to be.
Eric Alterman is very properly disturbed by virulently anti-Semitic remarks made by the Speaker of the Iraqi parliament, snarking:
Here are your tax dollars at work.
This is a good catch, and a definite step forward from last week:
A lot of Jewish organizations get their funding – and a lot of Jews their personal identities – from hyping anti-Semitism in Europe in general and France in particular… As far as I can tell, any increase in anti-Semitism in Western Europe is attributable to the influx of young Arabs and they have reasons – whether you or I like or not – to hate Jews that have nothing whatever to do with traditional European anti-Semitism.
Yikes. Presumably Alterman would not react favorably to someone countering his more recent post with the assertion that there are “reasons – whether you or I like or not” for the guy he’s quoting to hate Jews.
But Can They Agree To Agree?
Jeff Goldstein is absolutely right about this appalling post at BooMan Tribune.
But it also merits pointing out that a majority of the comments to that appalling post are absolutely right, as well.
P.S. Not all of them, of course.