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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Saturday, October 22, 2005

Turning the Volumn Down On the Miller Noise 

...I don't even want to talk about Judith Miller anymore. There's plenty about which to have a beef with Miller over, but even in terms of her water-carrying for the Bush Monkeys in their effort to get their Iraq War on, the fault lies as much with failed leadership at the New York Times as it does to her abandonment of fundamental journalistic principles and ethics in pursuit of whatever dreams she was personally chasing. In the case of Plamegate, she's in many respects a minor player, one more brick in the wall Patrick Fitzgerald is building. Executive Editor Bill Keller was right in the mea culpa email he sent to the NYT staff - which he had to know would be spilling out on teletypes (do they even still exist?) and computer screens all over America before he could fetch that next cup of coffee after hitting the 'enter' button - but its like scraping spilled milk back into the glass trying to save the newpaper's reputation from the damage her reputation caused: exceptionally messy and generally unproductive...

...the story isn't about Judith Miller, except at the NYT, and her absurd and self-serving rebuttal to Keller's email is something for the paper to deal with (in most business settings, the usual resort is termination). She insists that she never thought that she was the target of some disinformation campaign, wasn't writing a story about the matter, but still decided to go to the pokey for 85 days to 'protect a source'. This is where it gets confusing. Even though she claimed innocence about the dirt campaign against Joseph Wilson, one would have thought she would have figured it out when she became a subject of interest to the special prosecutor. One would have also thought that she would have been more forthcoming to her bosses about her conversations, but maybe the real world requires a higher sense of responsibility that the world of journalism. In any case, the whole Plamegate thing that has everybody all stirred up isn't about her; it's about who in the Administration tried to put the muscle on Wilson by outing his wife. Even if the NYT isn't through with Miller, the rest of us should be. While she stands as an icon to the dangers of unquestioned, unmonitored behavior of an out-of-control reporter, the real story is about the boys of the White House Iraq Group and their naughty behaviors. Miller is a sideshow, even though she managed to bull her way to the top of the page in this story by going to jail and, by doing so, creating in the larger journalist community the misimpression that this was some sort of brave stand somehow in the mold of the Pentagon Papers instead of a small, shoddy bit of obstruction of justice in an effort to protect a presidential administration that was attempting to use all of its awesome power and connections to harass, discredit, and intimidate a private American Citizen...

...in an otherwise perfect world, the leadership of the NYT would decide that Miller's services are no longer needed in its pursuit of its journalistic goals and she would be free to seek employment writing about city council and county commissioner meetings for the Idaho County Free Press. There might be some visceral personal satisfication in seeing her spend a bit more time behind bars, but that is all about payback for her efforts to get us into this Iraqi quagmire with all of its bloody costs; it has nothing to do with the subject at hand. It's time to turn down the volumn on this show and let it disolve into its own dark silence; there's a bigger show with bigger issues affecting the American people to pay attention to. The best thing that can be said about the Miller effect has been, and Maureen Down said it yesterday:
“Sorely in need of a tight editorial leash, (Miller) was kept on no leash at all, and that has hurt this paper and its trust with readers,” Dowd wrote.

If Miller returns to covering national security issues, Dowd wrote, “the institution most in danger would be the newspaper in your hands."


...probably tells you all you need to know about plans for her going-away party...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:46 PM 0 comments

Friday, October 21, 2005

Goose and Gander? 

...ok, someone needs to 'splain me this: why the hell is it OK to nominate some partisan hack unknown with a proven track record of opposition to both abortion and Roe v. Wade to a seat on the US Supreme Court where she will presumably be passing official judgement on those very subjects, but it's not OK for a trial judge, who at some point in the past donated money to Moveon.org in support of John Kerry's presidential bid, to hear a case about Tom Delay's alleged campaign law violations just because Moveon.org now has a t-shirt that says "Indict Delay"?

What am I missing here? As if I didn't know...

UPDATE: Courtesy of Atrios, we discover from Think Progress that Delay's lawyer's charge isn't even frickin' TRUE!!

It's not a good day when these thugs can actually stoop to some low that actually surprises me. I mean, the lying and deception are customary, but you would think they'd throttle it back a notch in a courtroom...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:03 AM 0 comments

Thursday, October 20, 2005

Calvinball Comes to ANWR 

...the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge is one of those odd sorts of federal land designations. Unlike the majority of federally-designated wilderness throughout most of the rest of the United States, it doesn't really exist as a place for the hearty to go forth and explore. Sitting up in the Northeast corner of Alaska, crammed up against the Canadian border, it is a difficult place to even get to, and certainly doesn't feature trails and trailheads and maps showing cool places to go. It exists because there was a time when Americans wanted to have wild places that existed of their own right, regardless of whether very many people would ever visit to soak up the solitude and special nature of the place. ANWR was established because that was simply the proper thing to do. It was good enough that we knew that it was there, even if we would never come within a thousand miles of the place. The name itself defined what this piece of ground was all about; it was a wildlife refuge, a space set aside for the purpose of supporting the various species that make the coastal plain of Northeastern Alaska their home. Our rapacious need for oil and the uncertainties of a contentious world, coupled with a large reservoir of oil resting underneath the hooves and paws of the most common residents, made the whole idea of "refuge" a tenuous concept and, yesterday, the Senate Energy Committee laid what appears to be the final building block of the idea that American energy needs trump all other considerations...

...the Republican Senate leadership, having grown tired of a handful of traitorous tree-hugger Bambi-loving Republican cross-over votes conspiring with the Democrats to stymie efforts to introduce oil exploration to ANWR, decided to play Calvinball with the issue by shoving it into a budget bill, which by Senate rules cannot be filibustered. The fact that this amendment was more of a policy decision and less of a budget item was a point that was glossed over by the insistence that there would someday be money flowing to the Federal Tresury from the drilling rights, which in turn could be used in the Federal budget, so it's inclusion was something of a budgetary move. Of course, it is a budgetary item in the same sense that madly racing around town to scarf up as many McBurger collectable Beanie Babies as possible because they might be worth some money some day is an investment strategy. Most interesting of all, the Republican majority also managed to defeat an amendment by my Senator, Oregon's Ron Wyden, to prohibit exportation of any oil produced by this exploration. Why this restriction would even be contentious, much less unacceptable, to a group of legislators who have been insisting for the better part of a decade that America's energy needs could only be met by drilling in ANWR is the sort of thing that can make a cynical person sit up and take notice...

There's a pretty strong likelihood that this whole thing is going to be a done deal, barring some sort of House-Senate blowup over the actual facts of the reconciliation bill itself. I considered calling my federal legislators, but both of my Senators (even Republican Gordon Smith...imagine that) voted against the ANWR provision, and my Congressman, Greg Walden, would choose to drink his own bathwater over denying Big Oil the opportunity to explore any opportunity whatsoever to increase their mind-numbing profit margins. Poking more holes in the ground to find more oil regardless of the impact on the surrounding landscape and the critters abiding therein - even on a chunk of Federally-managed land that was specifically allocated for the preservation of those species - does not an energy policy make. It also doesn't hold faith with the children that we have created and to whom we owe the implicit promise of leaving a world worth inhabiting. As long as we have a Republican majority, however, sacrificing other values to the benefit of an already-rich few is the rule of the day...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:45 PM 0 comments

Tuesday, October 18, 2005

The Wrong Kind of Fame 

...some of the most entertaining writing that the late Dr. Hunter S. Thompson produced was his coverage of the departure from stable flight of the Nixon Adminstration and its lurid, wild spinning dive to that infamous smoking crater that mars the landscape of history and 1970's politics. One memorable bit was his recreation of the day that John Mitchell, former Attorney General and CREEP chairman, discovered that his wife, Martha was all over the newspapers screeching about dirty Watergate dealings in the White House. Sadly for him,self, Representative Robert Ney (R-Ohio) is now hip-deep in the same sort of ugly moment that Hunter drummed up for Mitchell; even more sadly for him, instead of a "Martha Effect" to try to fall back on, he's stuck with Jack Abramoff. Abramhoff isn't going to be featured on some front page with eyes like basketballs screeching at reporters about all of Ney's committed sins, but he doesn't even have to...

...Abramoff is the sort of millstone around the necks of members of Congress (and of both parties, sadly) that you almost couldn't make up unless you had the most virulent hatred of all things political. He is a barrel of diesel-soaked nitrogen fertilizer with a powerful implanted detonator planting smack dab in the middle of any half-hearted argument by your elected officials as to the actual rightness and need of all those sky-box parties and golfing trips to St. Andrews. Jack Abramoff is a walking, talking, human manifestation of the cronyism, corruption, deceit, and insiderism that has driven the poll ratings for both parties and the entire institution of the U. S. Congress down to levels normally reserved for mass murderers and convicted child molesters. Rep. Ney rolled out of bed yesterday to discover that some joker had taken a bottle of Elmer's Glue and pasted pictures of Jack Abramoff all over his best suit, and there almost isn't a big enough bat in the world to beat all the obvious connections into unrecognizable lumps before his constituents get a whiff of the story. This just has to be one of those testicle-sucking moments for a fellow who has been able to twiddle with the switches of power from behind the Wizard's curtain without the folks back home finding out the truth about just exactly all the things their vote has been paying for. There must to be a particular chilling clutching at the heart as a result of opening up the morning paper in Washington DC to discover that multiple column inches have been devoted to demonstrating to anybody who cares to read about it that you are circumstantially entwined so at such a deep arterial level with a certified fixer facing serious jail time that even the most skilled surgeon would be hard pressed to separate you from that menace with any particular hope of survival...

...the Washington Post article is almost a roadmap for the campaign against Ney, and it's a compelling one. This particular episode doesn't have the same gripping dark humor of the Thompson work, and there isn't a "Martha effect" to fall back on, but in an otherwise just world there will be someone to take notice next year and maybe, just maybe, just rewards will come to the truly deserving...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:25 PM 0 comments

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