Greg Mitchell's Blog, page 102
April 9, 2014
11 Years Ago: Hawks Celebrate 'Winning' Iraq War
Earlier today, I explored the media malpractice 11 years ago todaywhen U.S. troops "took" Baghdad and helped a few Iraqis topple that statue of Saddam. With that sort of media celebration, war hawks felt emboldened to declare victory--and vindication. Some predicted that the missing WMD would show up soon. The NYT the next day published the following and more:
Mr. [Kenneth]Adelman said he hoped that ''fearmongers'' would derive some lessons about leadership from the seizure of Baghdad. President Bush had not been dissuaded by the criticism, and Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain boldly stared down public opinion in his country, he said. ''I hope it emboldens leaders to drastic, not measured, approaches,'' Mr. Adelman said. ''That's the only way to make a difference in the world.''
William Kristol, the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and a strong supporter of the war, said he had been deeply affected by the images of the statue of Mr. Hussein tumbling in downtown Baghdad, which he compared to the fall of the Berlin Wall. ''I was moved and relieved,'' he said. A former aide to Vice President Dan Quayle, Mr. Kristol said the American victory in Iraq could go far to dispel some of the self-doubt and isolationist impulses brought on by the Vietnam War....This is a little bit of a Vietnam in reverse, I would argue.''
William J. Bennett, another early advocate of the war, said the United States was on the verge of an extraordinary rout of a totalitarian system, and close to capturing a nation the size of California with minimal troops. ''This will go down as one of the great military efforts of all time,'' said Mr. Bennett, who was education secretary and drug czar under President Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush.
11 Years Ago: Baghdad Fell, War 'Ended'
On this day in 2003, April 9, U.S. forces took central Baghdad and millions watched on TV as locals toppled a giant statue of Saddam Hussein (it was only later revealed that U.S. marines played a large role). I remember it well. I was in New Orleans for a newspaper convention as editor of E&P and sat in a ballroom awaiting the arrival of Dick Cheney. Cheney told us that day that critics of our conduct of the war were merely ''retired military officers embedded in T.V. studios." Media commentators suffered from premature ejaculations. Chris Matthews on MSNBC gushed, “We’re all neo-cons now.” Joe Scarborough, also on MSNBC, declared: “I’m waiting to hear the words ‘I was wrong’ from some of the world’s most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types.”
Fred Barnes at Fox News said: "The war was the hard part. The hard part was putting together a coalition, getting 300,000 troops over there and all their equipment and winning. And it gets easier. I mean, setting up a democracy is hard, but it is not as hard as winning a war." Dick Morris at Fox News: "Over the next couple of weeks when we find the chemical weapons this guy was amassing, the fact that this war was attacked by the left and so the right was so vindicated, I think, really means that the left is going to have to hang its head for three or four more years."
Extensive looting soon began in Baghdad and many other large cities, with prizes ranging from household items to deadly weapons and bomb-making equipment. Donald Rumsfeld explained, “Stuff happens….Freedom’s untidy.” Mobs were greeting Americans as something less than liberators. With combat over about two-thirds of the embeds quickly exited. But Judith Miller had arrived to claim that WMDs were in Iraq on the eve of war – but then buried, somewhere.
On April 18, tens of thousands of Iraqis demonstrated against a U.S. occupation in Baghdad. Jay Garner arrived to serve as postwar administrator. USAID Administrator Andrew Nastios told Ted Koppel that rebuilding Iraq could be accomplished with just $1.7 billion. In late April, in separate incidents in Baghdad and Fallujah, U.S. troops fired on demonstrators, killing more than dozen and inspiring grenade attacks on Americans. Thomas Friedman wrote in The New York Times, “As far as I’m concerned, we do not need to find any weapons of mass destruction to justify this war….Mr. Bush doesn’t owe the world any explanation for missing chemical weapons.” David Ignatius of The Washington Post wrote a column along the same lines. Richard Perle on May 1 advised in a triumphal USA Today op-ed, “Relax, Celebrate Victory.”
The same day, President Bush, dressed in flight suit, landed on the deck of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln and declared an end to major military operations in Iraq – with the now notorious “Mission Accomplished” arrayed behind him in the war’s greatest photo op. Chris Matthews called Bush a “hero” and PBS’s Gwen Ifill said he was “part Tom Cruise, part Ronald Reagan.” Much more in my book on Iraq and the media, So Wrong for So Long.
April 8, 2014
Holy, Toledo!
In a kind of climax to several months of "Ode to Joy" flash mob mania--which I hope our film
Following the Ninth
had at least a little to do with--the Toledo Symphony two days ago played Beethoven's Ninth in the local arena, home to rock and country concerts most weekends, and a huge risk. No sweat. Big crowd--and a choir of 1200 from various schools and groups. Now: do it in every city. (h/t Sally Vallongo)
A Little Dotty
Dorothy Parker, of course, is regarded as one of the wittiest writers ever, at and far from the Algonquin Round Table. Like so many famous writers from the East, she journeyed to Hollywood to write (and often fail to write) screenplays for the studios--along with Fitzgerald and Faulkner and on and on. My new ebook
When Hollywood Turned Left
tells how Upton Sinclair's race for governor of California provoked such outrageous actions and tricks by the moguls that it led to the liberal takeover that remains to this day.
One of the writers who backed Sinclair, despite threats from her bosses, was Dorothy Parker. Here's an excerpt from the book, which takes place in September 1934, two months from election day.
*
Dorothy Parker was happy to be back in California. Signing a new
contract this morning with Paramount, at a salary of five thousand
dollars a week, she also felt a bit sheepish, for she was the latest in a
long line of literary figures to arrive in Hollywood with much fanfare,
having once vowed never to return.
For several dozen celebrity writers, Hollywood was truly the land of
milk and honey. Since the dawn of the talkies, the studios had lured star
newspapermen, playwrights, and novelists with sunshine and fat pay-
checks, which most of the writers were wholly unaccustomed to. Some,
on arrival, bought automobiles for the first time. The emigres from the
East looked down their noses at the crude moguls and posturing actors,
then knocked off early and headed for the pool, the racetrack, or the
beach.
"Millions are to be grabbed out here," Herman Mankiewicz had
wired his friend Ben Hecht, "and your only competition is idiots." It
was an invitation few could resist—not John Dos Passos, not Scott
Fitzgerald, not even Thomas Wolfe. MGM grabbed the lion's share:
Robert Benchley, Anita Loos, Joseph and Herman Mankiewicz, George
S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, Frances Marion, P. G. Wodehouse,
S. J. Perelman, Charles MacArthur, Carey Wilson.
Some came and left quickly, in disgust. "It's slave labor and what do
you get for it?" one writer complained. "A bloody fortune!" After
working on eight scripts for MGM in 1932, only two of which were
produced, William Faulkner happily returned to writing stories in Mis-
sissippi, announcing that he had "not forgot how to write during my
sojourn downriver." The only reason anyone would ever go to Holly-
wood, Faulkner announced, was "to get what money he could get out
of it." Following this dictum, he returned in July 1934 to work on
“Sutter's Gold” for Universal.
Departing Hollywood in 1931, Dorothy Parker boasted that she hadn't
actually written a single word. Hollywood was the Klondike, Sodom-in-
the-Sun, Poughkeepsie with palms. Streets were paved with Goldwyn,
she sighed. The pay was good, but in Hollywood money was like con-
gealed snow in your hand. She likened Beverly Hills, where she lived,
to a woman in a Cadillac dangling a mink-clad arm out the window and
holding a bagel.
Although her initial stay in Hollywood lasted only three months,
stories about her season in the sun were legion. "Where does my con-
tract allow time to fornicate?" she supposedly asked one MGM execu-
tive. ... Upon occupying her office at MGM, she stripped the nameplate
from the door and replaced it with MEN. . . . After completing a script
and then waiting for days to see Irving Thalberg, she abandoned her
office to meet a gentleman in Santa Barbara. When Thalberg, suddenly
unable to reach her, wrote to complain, she replied that the only excuse
for her absence was that she was "too fucking busy and vice versa."
Now, three years later, the sparkling critic, poet, and short-story
writer, often called, to her horror, "American's only female humorist,"
was back, with her two Bedlington puppies and new husband Alan
Campbell, to supply witty dialogue for Paramount. Dottie and her
handsome bridegroom, who at age twenty-nine was twelve years her
junior, would write in tandem. Their first assignment: a piece of fluff
entitled “One Hour Late.” Dottie considered scriptwriting a bore, a stren-
uous bore—you sat there and sat there and sat there—but she thought
they might be able to toss it off in about a week. Then they would relax
and enjoy themselves. Everything about California that wasn't writing
was fun.
While looking for a mansion to call their own, the couple, like so
many transplanted literati before them, pitched their tent at the Garden
of Allah on Sunset Boulevard. This garish stucco bungalow hotel was
home, at the moment, to Dottie's old friends Bob Benchley, Aleck
Woollcott, John O'Hara, and Donald Ogden Stewart.
Hollywood was happy to have Dorothy Parker back, and though
Parker might deny it, she fit right in. She was a celebrity herself, and
on her arm she wore a tattoo in the shape of a star. Her life-style was
suitably flamboyant. She had engendered numerous affairs (with Charlie
MacArthur, Ring Lardner, and Scott Fitzgerald, among others), at least
two suicide attempts, and a marriage to a much younger man that had
Hollywood tongues clucking already. Like her fictional character Hazel
Morse, she was socially promiscuous and always good for a few laughs.
At parties, some guests demanded, others dreaded, one of Parker's
famous put-downs, always delivered in a soft, pleasant voice. This was
one person whose bite was frighteningly worse than her bark.
Alexander Woollcott called her "so odd a combination of Little Nell
and Lady Macbeth." When George Bernard Shaw attended a party of
international celebrities on the Riviera, the one person he asked to meet
was Dottie Parker. Surprised by her girlishness, he admitted that he had
"always thought of her as an old maid." Only five feet tall, and no Garbo
or Dietrich, she was nevertheless interesting to look at, with her cute
bangs, wide brown eyes, and huge hats. "A tired Renoir" was how her
friend Sheilah Graham described her. Dottie never wore her eyeglasses
when men were around, proving that her most famous couplet (concern-
ing men, passes, girls, and glasses) was heartfelt.
What Hollywood didn't know about Dorothy Parker was that she
had a hidden political agenda. Back in New York she was, with Lillian
Hellman, a chief organizer of the Screen Writers Guild. Even worse, she
had privately declared herself a Communist. All she meant by this,
friends believed, was that she felt sympathy for the poor and wanted to
help them, and was mad at the rich (who wouldn't). Several years ago,
Parker had been arrested, with Robert Benchley and John Dos Passos,
for protesting the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Now she had taken
up a new cause, the Scottsboro Boys—nine young blacks arrested in
Alabama on charges of raping two white women—and planned to throw
a fund-raising bash for them when she got settled in Hollywood.
Dottie had come a long way from her prosperous but lonely child-
hood as Dorothy Rothschild. As a young woman, she began to identify
with the underprivileged. Her slashing wit, said to be the product of
mere cynicism-—Mencken in verse—actually reflected a kind of crushed
idealism. As self-contemptuous as she was critical of others, Parker
found that the left-wing politics of the 1930s gave her life new purpose.
Naturally she supported Upton Sinclair's EPIC crusade. Like so
many of Upton's admirers, she was no fan of his fiction. His muckrak-
ing, she once remarked, was marred by his inability to "keep himself out
of his writings, try though he may; or, by this time, try though he
doesn't." Also, he had become a confirmed bellyacher. Many socialists
get to be that way, she observed, "and I say it though my heart and soul
are with the cause of socialism."
Still, she loved Sinclair as a symbol, as a cause. "To me," she had
written back in 1927, "Upton Sinclair is one of the American great. I
have no words worthy of being laid before his courage, his passion, his
integrity." As she signed on at Paramount for another tour of duty,
Parker was determined to put some of her own passion into politics,
Hollywood-style.
One of the writers who backed Sinclair, despite threats from her bosses, was Dorothy Parker. Here's an excerpt from the book, which takes place in September 1934, two months from election day.
*
Dorothy Parker was happy to be back in California. Signing a newcontract this morning with Paramount, at a salary of five thousand
dollars a week, she also felt a bit sheepish, for she was the latest in a
long line of literary figures to arrive in Hollywood with much fanfare,
having once vowed never to return.
For several dozen celebrity writers, Hollywood was truly the land of
milk and honey. Since the dawn of the talkies, the studios had lured star
newspapermen, playwrights, and novelists with sunshine and fat pay-
checks, which most of the writers were wholly unaccustomed to. Some,
on arrival, bought automobiles for the first time. The emigres from the
East looked down their noses at the crude moguls and posturing actors,
then knocked off early and headed for the pool, the racetrack, or the
beach.
"Millions are to be grabbed out here," Herman Mankiewicz had
wired his friend Ben Hecht, "and your only competition is idiots." It
was an invitation few could resist—not John Dos Passos, not Scott
Fitzgerald, not even Thomas Wolfe. MGM grabbed the lion's share:
Robert Benchley, Anita Loos, Joseph and Herman Mankiewicz, George
S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind, Frances Marion, P. G. Wodehouse,
S. J. Perelman, Charles MacArthur, Carey Wilson.
Some came and left quickly, in disgust. "It's slave labor and what do
you get for it?" one writer complained. "A bloody fortune!" After
working on eight scripts for MGM in 1932, only two of which were
produced, William Faulkner happily returned to writing stories in Mis-
sissippi, announcing that he had "not forgot how to write during my
sojourn downriver." The only reason anyone would ever go to Holly-
wood, Faulkner announced, was "to get what money he could get out
of it." Following this dictum, he returned in July 1934 to work on
“Sutter's Gold” for Universal.
Departing Hollywood in 1931, Dorothy Parker boasted that she hadn't
actually written a single word. Hollywood was the Klondike, Sodom-in-
the-Sun, Poughkeepsie with palms. Streets were paved with Goldwyn,
she sighed. The pay was good, but in Hollywood money was like con-
gealed snow in your hand. She likened Beverly Hills, where she lived,
to a woman in a Cadillac dangling a mink-clad arm out the window and
holding a bagel.
Although her initial stay in Hollywood lasted only three months,
stories about her season in the sun were legion. "Where does my con-
tract allow time to fornicate?" she supposedly asked one MGM execu-
tive. ... Upon occupying her office at MGM, she stripped the nameplate
from the door and replaced it with MEN. . . . After completing a script
and then waiting for days to see Irving Thalberg, she abandoned her
office to meet a gentleman in Santa Barbara. When Thalberg, suddenly
unable to reach her, wrote to complain, she replied that the only excuse
for her absence was that she was "too fucking busy and vice versa."
Now, three years later, the sparkling critic, poet, and short-story
writer, often called, to her horror, "American's only female humorist,"
was back, with her two Bedlington puppies and new husband Alan
Campbell, to supply witty dialogue for Paramount. Dottie and her
handsome bridegroom, who at age twenty-nine was twelve years her
junior, would write in tandem. Their first assignment: a piece of fluff
entitled “One Hour Late.” Dottie considered scriptwriting a bore, a stren-
uous bore—you sat there and sat there and sat there—but she thought
they might be able to toss it off in about a week. Then they would relax
and enjoy themselves. Everything about California that wasn't writing
was fun.
While looking for a mansion to call their own, the couple, like so
many transplanted literati before them, pitched their tent at the Garden
of Allah on Sunset Boulevard. This garish stucco bungalow hotel was
home, at the moment, to Dottie's old friends Bob Benchley, Aleck
Woollcott, John O'Hara, and Donald Ogden Stewart.
Hollywood was happy to have Dorothy Parker back, and though
Parker might deny it, she fit right in. She was a celebrity herself, and
on her arm she wore a tattoo in the shape of a star. Her life-style was
suitably flamboyant. She had engendered numerous affairs (with Charlie
MacArthur, Ring Lardner, and Scott Fitzgerald, among others), at least
two suicide attempts, and a marriage to a much younger man that had
Hollywood tongues clucking already. Like her fictional character Hazel
Morse, she was socially promiscuous and always good for a few laughs.
At parties, some guests demanded, others dreaded, one of Parker's
famous put-downs, always delivered in a soft, pleasant voice. This was
one person whose bite was frighteningly worse than her bark.
Alexander Woollcott called her "so odd a combination of Little Nell
and Lady Macbeth." When George Bernard Shaw attended a party of
international celebrities on the Riviera, the one person he asked to meet
was Dottie Parker. Surprised by her girlishness, he admitted that he had
"always thought of her as an old maid." Only five feet tall, and no Garbo
or Dietrich, she was nevertheless interesting to look at, with her cute
bangs, wide brown eyes, and huge hats. "A tired Renoir" was how her
friend Sheilah Graham described her. Dottie never wore her eyeglasses
when men were around, proving that her most famous couplet (concern-
ing men, passes, girls, and glasses) was heartfelt.
What Hollywood didn't know about Dorothy Parker was that she
had a hidden political agenda. Back in New York she was, with Lillian
Hellman, a chief organizer of the Screen Writers Guild. Even worse, she
had privately declared herself a Communist. All she meant by this,
friends believed, was that she felt sympathy for the poor and wanted to
help them, and was mad at the rich (who wouldn't). Several years ago,
Parker had been arrested, with Robert Benchley and John Dos Passos,
for protesting the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. Now she had taken
up a new cause, the Scottsboro Boys—nine young blacks arrested in
Alabama on charges of raping two white women—and planned to throw
a fund-raising bash for them when she got settled in Hollywood.
Dottie had come a long way from her prosperous but lonely child-
hood as Dorothy Rothschild. As a young woman, she began to identify
with the underprivileged. Her slashing wit, said to be the product of
mere cynicism-—Mencken in verse—actually reflected a kind of crushed
idealism. As self-contemptuous as she was critical of others, Parker
found that the left-wing politics of the 1930s gave her life new purpose.
Naturally she supported Upton Sinclair's EPIC crusade. Like so
many of Upton's admirers, she was no fan of his fiction. His muckrak-
ing, she once remarked, was marred by his inability to "keep himself out
of his writings, try though he may; or, by this time, try though he
doesn't." Also, he had become a confirmed bellyacher. Many socialists
get to be that way, she observed, "and I say it though my heart and soul
are with the cause of socialism."
Still, she loved Sinclair as a symbol, as a cause. "To me," she had
written back in 1927, "Upton Sinclair is one of the American great. I
have no words worthy of being laid before his courage, his passion, his
integrity." As she signed on at Paramount for another tour of duty,
Parker was determined to put some of her own passion into politics,
Hollywood-style.
The True All-Time Dinger List
As we mark the anniversary of the day Hank Aaron passed Babe Ruth's career HR record with #715, I will make the claim that the ranking of the all-time leaders has really not changed all that much since, even allowing for the tentative addition of steroid-era players not publicly linked to PEDs (though one has to wonder about, for example, Griffey's sudden power exploits at the apex of the scandal). So here's the true top 19, and you can see the gaps where cheaters were deleted.
Hank Aaron7551Babe Ruth7142Willie Mays6603
Ken Griffey, Jr.6304Jim Thome6125
Frank Robinson5866
Harmon Killebrew5737
Reggie Jackson5638
Mike Schmidt5489Mickey Mantle53610Jimmie Foxx53411Willie McCovey52112Frank Thomas521 13Ted Williams521 14Ernie Banks51215Eddie Mathews512 16Mel Ott51117
Eddie Murray50418Lou Gehrig49319
Hank Aaron7551Babe Ruth7142Willie Mays6603
Ken Griffey, Jr.6304Jim Thome6125
Frank Robinson5866
Harmon Killebrew5737
Reggie Jackson5638
Mike Schmidt5489Mickey Mantle53610Jimmie Foxx53411Willie McCovey52112Frank Thomas521 13Ted Williams521 14Ernie Banks51215Eddie Mathews512 16Mel Ott51117
Eddie Murray50418Lou Gehrig49319
Greenwald, After Manning, Pre-Snowden
Tape of panel I shared at the Media Reform conference in Boston three years ago day with Glenn Greenwald, Micah Sifry, Emily Bell and Amy Goodman.
Kubrick Narrates "Strangelove" Promo Reel
As I've (often) noted, it's my favorite film, and now here are a nine-minute and seven-minute reel that Kubrick put together, and narrated (his voice rarely heard in our lifetime), possibly for the studio or nervous investors, made up of bits of the film in progress and some footage never used. Background here.
DC5
One of my British Invasion faves--and Tom Hanks said they were #1 with him when he inducted them into the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame (catch Joan Jett and others at end of that)--get a surprising two-hour "Great Performances" tribute tonight on Channel 13 in NYC and possibly other PBS stations. One of my favorites:
Kickstart THIS?
Trailer for upcoming short film on the always controversial "Amanda F---ing Palmer."
11 Years After U.S. Took Baghdad: Surge in Violence There
As George W. Bush treated as great artist over the weekend and greeted warmly at NCAA finals last night, even as we mark 11 years since U.S. took Baghdad (based on his lies), there's this today from Agence France-Presse:
Thomas Friedman, later rightly mocked for his prediction, over and over, for years, that things would be turning around there within six months, was pretty clear-eyed in a column titled 'Hold Your Applause," that closed with:
Attacks in Iraq left 15 people dead Tuesday while security forces said they killed 25 militants near Baghdad amid worries insurgents are encroaching on the capital weeks ahead of elections.Looking through article in the NYT eleven years ago today one is struck by how many were already noting that we were not being greeted as liberators and tough times were ahead, though none recognized the true scope of the problem (and the crime of the invasion to start with). "Chaos" and "looting" were also beginning, amid false U.S. reports that "barrels" of chemical agents had been found, a possible "smoking gun," as one official put it.
The latest violence is part of a protracted surge in nationwide bloodshed that has left more than 2,400 people dead since the start of the year and sparked fears Iraq is slipping back into the all-out sectarian fighting that plagued it in 2006 and 2007.
Thomas Friedman, later rightly mocked for his prediction, over and over, for years, that things would be turning around there within six months, was pretty clear-eyed in a column titled 'Hold Your Applause," that closed with:
America broke Iraq; now America owns Iraq, and it owns the primary responsibility for normalizing it. If the water doesn't flow, if the food doesn't arrive, if the rains don't come and if the sun doesn't shine, it's now America's fault. We'd better get used to it, we'd better make things right, we'd better do it soon, and we'd better get all the help we can get.Greg Mitchell's new book on Iraq and media malpractice is "So Wrong for So Long."
