The Club

The mentality is this; ergo, glowing reports on this.

It's a "news" media (unlike Charles Pierce) too couth to observe that—

Over in Iraq, they seem to be celebrating with considerable enthusiasm the opening of the new presidential library dedicated to the man almost personally responsible for their liberation, and for the transformation of their country into a shining beacon of liberal democracy in that strife-torn region of the world.

Sarcasm dropped, for a count of yesterday's sectarian attacks, death tolls; just the bloody usual.

While at the Texas shindig—

Back here, of course, there was nothing but love and good feeling, and a conspicuous lack of helicopter gunships raining death from above.

The annual White House Correspondents' spectacle is "Versailles without guillotines", and—

There is no clearer example of the uselessness and essential decadence of our courtier press than the annual White House Correspondents Association dinner, which will be fouling the reputation of the craft of journalism this very weekend.

In reporting the extravagance and inappropriateness of the event, Pierce refuses to forget that—

These would be the same "media organizations" that are laying people off by the carload, slashing the benefits of those they don't lay off, and making people do more work in less time for smaller salaries.

Eternal Sunshine of the Blameless Mind

NYT: "Hitting Rewind, Bush Museum Says – You Decide"—

A six-minute introductory video by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledges disputes over Iraq and interrogation techniques while defending them as efforts to protect the country. "If you were in a position of authority on Sept. 11," she says, "every day after was Sept. 12"

Sure: before September 11, all went swimmingly.

With the, What memo would that have been? And the, "All right. You've covered your ass, now."

Not to worry: from "Sept. 12," this crowd was in complete control of the story line.

You have to credit the right for its brilliance in undermining education while creating an enormous propaganda mechanism. When a vast segment of the population has a bit of a problem with logical thought, this (from the NYT story) is a piece of cake—

... visitors to an interactive theater will be presented with the stark choices that confronted the nation's 43rd president: invade Iraq or leave Saddam Hussein in power? Deploy federal troops after Hurricane Katrina or rely on local forces? Bail out Wall Street or let the banks fail?

False choices embedded in the fog of propaganda... Weirdly resonant in the abstract "choice" between starving and dying in unsafe working conditions, so beloved by the makers of conventional wisdom.

This Bush place's presentation of 9/11 is "celebratory," says Steve M. But then it's always been; this simply enshrines Bush's crowing about The Trifecta. It has always been about the profit to which they know they are entitled and over which they never will be held to account.

The right triumphed after 9/11; now they have a ready-made, institutionalized Terror narrative, always waiting to serve their political gain. As Steve M. writes—

... right-wingers, at least during Bush heyday, always acted as if 9/11 was the greatest day of their lives. It made them and their president the moral arbiters of America. It made it impossible to challenge their political dominance. That's all they cared about. Bush clearly looks back on that moment of unchallenged power with nostalgia. He misses it.

The right is responding to the Boston bombings pretty much the same way. In a way, it's even worse -- if you went to right-wing sites after 9/11, you were at least likely to find memorial shrines to the dead with solemn patriotic music and illustrations of eagles shedding tears. With Boston, they're going straight the liberal-bashing, Muslim-baiting, and Democrat-hunting. Never mind the absurdity of the notion that 9/11 was somehow a triumph for their guy but Boston was a horrible failure for the current administration. What's also clear is the self-righteous joy with which they're waving real and invented evidence of intelligence lapses, cover-ups, and Muslim group guilt. They're doing an end zone dance without even a pro forma pause to remember the dead and wounded.

Pierce, on the media's role—

The coverage of the opening of this vast temple to prevarication and ruin is not about bricks and mortar. It's about an attempt by the courtier press to absolve itself of a dereliction of duty that rivaled even that of the president in question while New Orleans drowned, and while the economy was bubbling toward disaster. (That dereliction of duty, it should be noted, now and forever, began with the coverage of the 2000 presidential campaign, and the disgraceful performance of the elite political press corps towards Al Gore.) It's about their efforts to help the country absolve itself from the immense damage it brought upon itself by electing, and then re-electing, a half-bright dry drunk who wrecked nearly everything he touched, and who now is trying to rehabilitate himself by explaining that he hasn't ruined anything else since he left office, and doesn't that make him a swell fella. The elite press is dedicating an entire day of coverage to the perpetuation of a monstrous public lie. Electing George W. Bush twice was a monumental act of democratic self-destruction from which the country has yet to recover. Celebrating him celebrating himself is simply to pour battery acid into the still-open wounds.

The Living Presidents Club always shows up for business as usual. Of the yuks here, Clever Sister said, "Bush would paint horns on Clinton."

Not unreasonably, Steve M. thinks ""Jeb Bush is the happiest man in America."

And if all else fails to rehabilitate sufficiently, demented (apparently Republican) lady can torture a rodent, and present us with a thrilling Flight Suit Sugar Bush Squirrel.

Discursus Interruptus

Reporters' tone was notable in its disappointment: how could the quickly arrested guy turn out to be the wrong one, which forces us to change a story we thought we'd wrapped up? NPR's examples here, here, and here.

The absurdity of the quick arrest that was a leading national story, then turned out to have been wrongly made on the basis of silly Facebook postings, to be followed by undisguised media disappointment is one part of this.

The released arrestee's later interview by said media is something else that has to be heard. The switch of tone from disbelief at the charges, to anticipation of being "famous world-wide," for his lame Elvis impersonation and catch phrase.

What can be said, but, Ricky Bobby: "Shake and Bake!"

"Everything Looks Like A Nail"

Somewhere, in all that's been said the last few days, a Pierce commenter remarked of Boston's lock-down, "'shelter in place' should apply to the media."

Pierce, on the manhunt's "everything... nail"—

It may be Columbine with a thin overlay of politics. It may be Columbine with Jihadist YouTube videos instead of rambling diaries. It may be Columbine extended over a greater geographical area. But, for the moment, it looks like a couple of young people who went completely off the twig and decided to kill a lot of people. I'm wary of speculating that they simply came under the spell of some YouTube mullah. I also am wary of believing the staggering amount of information dandelion fluff floating through the air from within various intelligence communities. (CNN just reported the speculations of a "senior official" in Kyrgyzstan about the passports of the two brothers.) Right now, all I'm willing to say is that a couple of deadly misfits went on a crime spree for reasons, likely, known only to them. Right now, it's not an act of war. Right now, it's a multiple murder.

But it's all too useful: for mass media that wants screaming sound-bites, and for the perpetual motion machine that is right-wing opportunism.

Steve M has focused, during the manhunt and since the capture, on the right's new opportunity to gin up hatred of Muslims.

Via Digby, this bit of historical perspective from Rick Pearlstein. Comparing the 1975 response to the gruesome Christmas bombing at LaGuardia with reaction to incidents now, Digby writes that—

... 9/11 was a spectacular terrorist attack and it's natural that it would inspire terrible fear. It may not have "changed everything" but it did scare people in a very primitive way. But in reality, it was no more an existential threat than that airport bombing was in 75 or this Boston Bombing was this week. These attacks are designed to make us lose our heads. We didn't used to do that. Now we do.

War on Terror: too useful to ever declare victory and go home.

Boston's taking over the news diverted a bit from Congress' brave fight against "emotional bullying" by the likes of Gabby Giffords, to defeat a watered-down gun control measure.

Easing the effect of the sequester on airports has a constituency; too bad the unemployed, school kids, and the elderly in need of meals don't.
Lee Feng's reporting confirms that the West, Texas fertilizer plant explosion was a likely and predictable result of deregulation.

In The Nation, Richard Kim contrasts coverage of the West victims with those in Boston, to raise some of the never on the table issues—

... Let's imagine that instead of sending a handful of investigators from the ATF and the Chemical Safety Board to West, Texas, we marshaled every local, state and federal resource available to discover the exact sequence of events that led to the explosion. Let's imagine that the question—Why?—became so urgent that the nation simply could not rest until it had overdetermined the answers. We'd discover that OSHA hadn't inspected the plant in twenty-eight years—did this play a role in the disaster? If it's found that the company that owns the plant, Adair Grain, violated safety regulations, as it had last year at another facility, we might call it criminal negligence and attribute culpability. But would we ascribe ideology? And which ideology would we indict? Deregulation? Austerity? Capitalism? Would we write headlines that say Officials Seek Motive in Texas Fertilizer Explosion? And could we name "profit" as that motive in the same way that we might name, say, "Islam" as the motive for terrorism? Would we arrest the plant's owners, deny them their Miranda rights and seek to try them in an extra-legal tribunal outside the Constitution, as Senator Lindsey Graham has suggested we treat US citizen Dzhokhar Tsarnaev?...

.No, we won't. We won't do any of these things, because even if the West fertilizer plant disaster is ultimately understood as something more than "just an accident," it will still be taken as the presumed cost of living in a modern, industrialized economy.

When it comes to terrorism, we have the opposite response. We launch wars against other countries, denude the Constitution and create massive state bureaucracies for espionage, covert operations and assassinations. Since 9/11, it's become a political imperative that our nation must express zero tolerance for terrorism, even though, like workplace fatalities, terrorism has been with us long before globalization lent it a more exotic and threating provenance.

To the problem of violence, there ought to be a path between callous indifference and total social warfare. And that's why the miserable and absolute failure of gun control legislation in the Senate—just two days after the Boston bombing and on the same day of the West explosion—was especially galling. Like acts of terrorism, the murderous rampage at Sandy Hook Elementary School precipitated a national crisis. In the wake of that tragedy, our collective grief took a particular shape, the shape of democracy. The deaths of those school children were linked to the fate of more than 30,000 victims of gun violence each year, and the impulse to act was channeled through our democratic system, where an overwhelming majority of Americans and a majority of the US Senate expressed support for new gun laws, which were nonetheless defeated.

Long Arc of Justice

82 years later: posthumous exoneration of the Scottsboro Boys.

"The Spreadsheet That Killed The Economy"

One more example of the daily indispensability of Sam Seder: this interview with Mike Koncal, who's broken the story of how the report used to promote government austerity has now been exposed for its sloppy methodology.

Konczal's reporting here is on the details of Reinhart and Rogoff's questionable use of data. Seder's interview goes to the access the two were given: a meeting with forty senators in need of either frightening about where the economy was heading, or justification for policies they were set to pursue. As Konczal notes, the Reinhart-Rogoff work was never peer-reviewed—but it certainly was propelled into channels more important to establishing conventional wisdom.

Seder also makes the point that the selling of these policies works the same as the selling of Iraq did: by a process of political access being determined by a "credentialism" that can also serve as the rationale for choosing atrocious policies. Konczal's reply: "elite self-policing broke down."

Commonwealth

Yesterday Charles Pierce noted a 50th anniversary date: first publication of Martin Luther King Jr's "Letter From Birmingham Jail."

Much has changed—as Pierce suggests, with his link to a Birmingham News column commemorating the anniversary. Yet at the highest levels, we have this.

Disenfranchisement is one of the very best tools for destroying government in any sort of public interest. Absence of government oversight is very likely responsible for tanother bloody event this week.

In the aftermath of the devastation in Boston, Pierce writes of Massachusetts as—defiantly—a "Commonwealth"—

...there are limits to grief and there are limits to mourning. We will go back to being what we were before. We will return to our good public schools and our decent public parks. We will walk again for free in the woods and along the sea. We will place ourselves in the care of our decent health-care system. (Thanks again, Mitt!) We will pay again for our public servants and our first-responders, and some of them will game our systems, and we'll raise a great howl, and mock the suckers who got caught, but we will not be conned by the grifters who are trying to make a Mississippi of us all.

Boston: The Day After

In a sad irony that's to the benefit of the quality of real world reporting, Bostonian Charles Pierce was on the scene here, and following day.

Via Digby, is the powerful eyewitness account of Pierce's appearance on Chris Hayes' MSNBC show.

It's no surprise that while this is going on, Pierce has continued writing on other topics: putting in perspective events in other parts of the world, as well as bringing up our continued culpability.

Tasteless?

"Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead": No. 2 on the British pop charts.

Too personal, perhaps. But it is a reaction to someone who so personified an ideology it was named for her.

David Ehrenstein makes the interesting connection: lyricist Yip Harburg, who wrote "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime" years before doing "The Wizard of Oz," would go on to write a number of Broadway shows with something to say.

And would be blacklisted for his Yankee-Doodly-dum.

Reviews Are In

Nice that Nelson Mandela has outlived her.

Tengrain, on the breaking news—

Pinochet, Reagan, and Thatcher walk into a bar... Hell got a little bit brighter as Satan's favorite daughter came home.

Though Tengrain also offered condolences to

... the fascist son Mark (who, to avoid international crimes prosecution relating to his coup attempt in Equitorial Guinea was forced from his home in South Africa, to his home in Texas, to his mother's home in the UK, and now to an undisclosed location in the euro zone), and his racist twin sister, the failed reality star Carole.

Via Adrastos is Germaine Greer's 2004 look at Thatcher's career. Adrastos writes that, aside from making no pretense of "geniality," Thatcher was pretty much "Ronald Reagan in a frock."

And, yes: the two had so much in common besides ideology. Greer's piece details "the long process by which the millionaire's decorative wife with the fake, cut-glass accent was made over into the no-nonsense grocer's daughter"; her support of corrupt cronies; her deal-making to benefit party donors, as well as her son.

From BagNews: 1970s images of Thatcher's success in "co-opting the female role."

As a commenter somewhere said, she was "the muse of punk music"; songs she inspired have been much noted, as in this compendium, and by Digby here.

Via Water Tiger, is this little image.

Like Reagan, Thatcher left the political scene long before departing the planet. But they went on winning—and continue to, from the graves. No wonder the management need wait only for everyone with any memory to check out, for the history re-write to have no naysayers. 

Before that happens, David Ehrenstein, on a bricklayer's daughter: "before she signs off — this triumph," as she remembers the point when social vices were turned into "virtues."

A + B =

From various recent posts by Digby:

If "A" equals the influence exerted over politicians by Pete Peterson, et al.

And "B" equals a compliant academic/political/media establishment at the ready to push same.

What follows "=" is akin to "regulatory capture"; in this case, capture of a once conventionally liberal establishment.

And so, we get stuff like erstwhile slasher of Social Security receiving award named for a key figure in Social Security history, and architect of Medicare. The latter program having been established with the expectation that it would evolve into universal health care.

Well, it's not really algebra: the formula yields lots of results, but all are predictable and advance the plan.

No one can know what makes Obama tick, but I agree with those who think what motivates him here is the "legacy" angle, of being determined to get the kind of establishment approbation Clinton gets for "welfare reform."

Via Digby again: these charts, with telling captions in between graphics—

In each of the charts below look for the year 1981, when Reagan took office.

Conservative policies transformed the United States from the largest creditor nation to the largest debtor nation in just a few years, and it has only gotten worse since then...

Working people's share of the benefits from increased productivity took a sudden turn down...

This resulted in intense concentration of wealth at the top...

Which forced working people to go into debt...

Again, we can thank Saint Ron. Among so many other deeds, he slayed the health care threat.

4/2 update: just back from a break today is Sam Seder, discussing all of the above with Digby. Depressing as it is, it's some of the only public discussion of whether Democrats will ever wake up to how Republicans are salivating over the "Democrats slashed Social Security and Medicare" theme they anticipate using for their campaigns. Or whether Democrats simply are willing to do the dirty work because, in Sam's words, "the media will never punish Democrats for making government less responsive to the people, in fact, they will reward a Democrat for making government less responsive to the people."