There are things that need to be said

If these political pushers can throw a man like John Murtha under the bus, they can do it to anyone.

This is what it's come to, a decorated Marine pilloried for political points by a nitwit freshman congresswoman, a draft-dodger VP and a TANG playboy. Not to mention the bread-and-circuses resolution the GOP floated to discredit Murtha's proposal. Will the last to leave this madhouse please turn out the lights? The inmates are willfully living in the dark already.

Everyone who voted Republican, I hope you're happy. Everyone who let the long lines, lack of voting machines, poll watchers/inimidators, crappy weather, work schedule, whatever keep you from voting, I hope you're happy too. Everyone who couldn't be bothered to vote, or couldn't be bothered to learn enough about the current situation to feel comfortable pulling a lever, touching a screen or anything else, I hope you're happy. Everyone who voted in one of the enabling assholes--of whom Murtha was until recently a member--I hope you're happy.

I sure the fuck hope you're happy, because if you aren't, you helped fuck this up and it'll likely end up that not even the Bush administration and its useful idiots in Congress are going to end up with much to show for it. Hopefully they'll be brought lower than the Nixon gang, low beyond the hope of recall in the shadowy netherworld of talk radio and the "balanced" op-ed pages of dying newspapers. But even if all they face are three years of emasculation and impotence (which, while hard to bear for tough-talking bullies like these, isn't nearly punishment enough; anyone up for a trip to The Hauge?), even if the military and its friends like Murtha convince them to leave Iraq before many more lives are lost, the damage this had done, this five years of incompetance and, frankly, an unwillingness to aim for competence, will be horrendous.

We'll have a symbol--perhaps in the sad husk that was America's most interesting city, New Orleans. We'll have to overcome a mind-boggling deficit held entirely too much by a strategic rival. We'll have to live with generations of poorly educated people unable to adapt to new economies. We'll have the domestic economic, racial and other divides to overcome that have been exacerbated by this pack of morons. We'll get the chance to really understand Britain's post-WWII malaise and the fall of the Roman Empire. Like as not, we won't recover in our lifetimes, nor our childrens', not as a recognizable United States, and hopefully not as what we've become. It's a sorry state to reach where you'd rather see your country cease being than continue in its current path.

I don't want to be too pessimistic, but I really think it's hard to understate the danger the ideal of America is in, really hard to overstate the dire consequences of a descent into autocracy, torture, dictatorship, madness.

Oh, and for those who think "It can't happen here," you're helping it happen. Stop now.

The Death (by Inches) of Journalism

I have rarely read anything I've hated to have to agree with more, but Marty Kaplan accurately describes the current situation in big-time journalism.
Since most of us who are in journalism aren't there, the question becomes (at least in part), what do I aspire for now? How do I make a living doing what I love without selling my soul to the point that I no longer love it? Can I continue to do this in light of the tarnish these idiots have put on my profession, avocation, whatever?
Why isn't Woodruff isn't joining Miller on the unemployment line? Even more so and even quicker, since he's an icon. She was, in many ways, a product of favoritism much like Jayson Blair (and for a similar reason, too; except in her case, it was "see, we do have conservatives" instead of "see, we do have minorities') and her statements as to her perception of her job clearly illustrate her bankruptcy as a journalist. He is, along with Carl Bernstein, the reason many of us got into this business, someone who spoke truth to power and blew the bastard's damned kneecap off. (Bonus points for those recognizing the second reference.) But when the leaders transgress, is it not worse than when the flock does? Aren't they supposed to be somehow elevated, held to a higher standard? (Please don't give me any of the oversimplified democracy crap about how we're all equal unless you're willing to support election to public office by random means; I'm ambivalent and unsure if it would be that much worse.)
If you care at all about journalism and democracy, do something. (I'm writing this, for starters.) Push your paper, station, whatever to cover this, not just repeat the RNC talking points released into the magical media echo chamber. Write something yourself, and send it in. Call, write, fax, moon your representatives and senators, anything to get the message across. (Note: message mooning tends to require the assistance of another person for legibility. Caveat exposor.) Shake the hell out of the next person who says "they're all corrupt"--if we run the corrupt ones out of town on a rail, tarred and feathered, other corrupt ones will be less likely to try and take up residence in the capital. Same thing for the next person who pillories the entire media--there are still some who can read, think and report,, like Keith Olbermann and the K-R DC Bureau. Even Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are worth more to a functioning democracy than a thousand Millers and Woodruffs.

Marty Kaplan
11.17.2005
Journalism: R.I.P.

Mainstream journalism has cancer. The diagnosis – stage three, terminal – was made this week, by anyone with eyes to see.

Before now, the symptoms were alarming, but there was still hope. Fox’s “liberal media” lie; the reduction of all debates to polarized left/right shouting matches; the triumph of infotainment and missing-white-women-as-news over information we actually need to know; the substitution of he-said/she-said for shoe-leather and fact-finding; the social coziness of reporters and sources; the bottom-line obsession; the consolidation of power in fewer and fewer owners' hands' the politicization of public broadcasting – these, and more, were tumors, but their fatal metastasizing was not inevitable.

But the coverage of the battle between the White House and the Democrats over the use of prewar intelligence, and the reporting on l’affaire Woodward, is the end of the road for the mandarin gatekeepers.

Read the rest at the Huffington Post

Thoughts while reading Don’t Think of an Elephant, by George Lakoff:

We should not commit lesser evils while attempting to overcome a great evil. It is far too easy to surpass the great evil with the sum of our lesser evils, and then we have not only exceeded the original, but these lesser evils are often ineffective at fighting the great evil and we have turned the tide in its favor.
There is excess in the defense of liberty (and several other worthy abstract nouns): excess that sullies the liberty protected until it is an unrecognizable thing that lay in fetters at the feet of a once-great civilization. We must not spill the blood of innocents to avenge our lost innocence and innocents, or we will sure not just become the dragon we fight, but one far worse than that, a failed saint.