Greg Mitchell's Blog, page 115
March 16, 2014
More Strange Love from Russia
A top Russian news anchor reminds us (it's true, many here have forgotten) that his country can still "turn the U.S. into radioactive dust." Fortunately some in Russia mocking him online, with photo tributes such as (left) with him supposedly being dragged away to the psych hospital.
Louisiana Suing MoveOn Over Jindal Billboard
Just got this email:
Breaking news: The state of Louisiana is suing MoveOn.org in federal court. They're trying to force us to take down a billboard that calls out Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal—an aspiring presidential candidate—for denying health care to 242,000 people. After carefully discussing the matter with our lawyers, we've made a decision:
We're leaving our billboard up—even if we have to take this fight all the way to the Supreme Court. This lawsuit is unprecedented in MoveOn's sixteen-year history. And it will take all of us to respond. Normally, we ask for folks to donate when they can—and we know that not everyone can give every time.
But today, we're urgently asking all MoveOn members to step up to the plate and help with a monthly contribution starting now. Can you donate as little as $5 a month—or as much as you can afford—to make sure MoveOn has the resources we need to defend ourselves in court and keep our work going?
Take One iPod And Call Me in the Morning
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is committed to figuring out how to make health care work better, and sometimes the fixes involve only empathy and imagination. In this RWJ podcast "Pioneering Ideas," Dr. Rushika Fernandopulle explains how a $45 iPod helped calm the anxieties of a seriously ill patient whose avoidance of dialysis landed him numerous times in the hospital, at a cost of $280,000. The staff took the time to find out that listening to his favorite music helped calm his distress when he was at home, so they bought him an iPod and downloaded his beloved merengue music so he could listen when he was receiving treatment at the clinic. Problem solved, but the system offers little incentive for such innovative thinking. "A $45 iPod saved $280,000," notes Dr. Fernandopulle. "Why didn't the system do it? Because there's no CPT billing code for ‘buy iPod from eBay.’" -- Barbara Bedway
Chesepeake Screws Land Owners
"If you or I did that we’d be in jail” --third-generation Pennsylvania dairy farmer Jim Drake
A Pro Publica investigation shows how oil and gas company Chesapeake--once run by Aubrey McClendon, dubbed "America's most reckless billionaire" by Forbes--found a surefire strategy to raise the cash it needed to come back from near-failure: slash the royalties it paid property owners to drill on their land.
A Pro Publica investigation shows how oil and gas company Chesapeake--once run by Aubrey McClendon, dubbed "America's most reckless billionaire" by Forbes--found a surefire strategy to raise the cash it needed to come back from near-failure: slash the royalties it paid property owners to drill on their land.
Confident he was in good hands, Drake endured the trucks, dirt and noise that accompanied gas drilling and signed agreements that allowed Chesapeake to run pipelines across his fields. To transport the gas from Drake’s well, Chesapeake built a pipeline that stretched south from within spitting distance of the New York border, cutting a wide swath through the forest. Then it went down beyond the white-spired church in Litchfield, and ran some 35 miles further to its handoff at the Tennessee interstate pipeline near the Susquehanna River.--Barbara Bedway
What Drake didn’t know at the time was that the pipeline was more than a way to move his gas to market. It would become part of a strategy to make more money off of Drake himself.
Malaysian Airliner Now in...Shangri-La?
It might make as much sense as anything else....so it's worth recalling the plot of the 1930s novel and Frank Capra film Lost Horizon, where an airliner is seized, taken off course, to land in "Shangri-La" in Tibet where you just might enjoy bliss and live forever. Here's the opening of the Wikipedia entry on the film.
Before returning to England to become the new Foreign Secretary, writer, soldier and diplomat Robert Conway (Ronald Colman) has one last task in 1935 China: to rescue 90 Westerners in the city of Baskul. He flies out with the last few evacuees, just ahead of armed revolutionaries.
Unbeknownst to the passengers, the pilot has been replaced and their aircraft hijacked. It eventually runs out of fuel and crashes deep in the Himalayan Mountains, killing their abductor. The group is rescued by Chang (H.B. Warner) and his men and taken to Shangri-La, an idyllic valley sheltered from the bitter cold. The contented inhabitants are led by the mysterious High Lama (Sam Jaffe)
Initially anxious to return to civilization, most of the newcomers grow to love Shangri-La, including paleontologist Alexander Lovett (Edward Everett Horton), swindler Henry Barnard (Thomas Mitchell) and bitter, terminally ill Gloria Stone (Isabel Jewell), who miraculously seems to be recovering. Conway is particularly enchanted, especially when he meets Sondra (Jane Wyatt), who has grown up in Shangri-La. However, Conway's younger brother George (John Howard), and Maria (Margo), another beautiful young woman they find there, are determined to leave.
Conway eventually has an audience with the High Lama and learns that his arrival was no accident. The founder of Shangri-La is said to be hundreds of years old, preserved, like the other residents, by the magical properties of the paradise he has created, but is finally dying and needs someone wise and knowledgeable in the ways of the modern world to keep it safe. Having read Conway's writings, Sondra believed he was the one; the Lama had agreed with her and arranged for Conway's abduction. The old man names Conway as his successor and then peacefully passes away....
Tat's All, Folks
If you've missed Ted Cruz's twitter respond to this poster, which appeared around L.A. for his speech last night. It got the venue wrong but his corrective was: "Saw this, but noticed an error. So I wanted to make one thing clear: I don't smoke cigarettes http://bit.ly/1nqK08i ."
16 Media Outrages Re: Iraq
As we approach the 11th anniversary of the U.S. attack on Iraq we may face more media coverage of that tragic conflict than usual. How much of it will focus on the media misconduct that helped make the war possible (and then continue for so long)? We will see, and I’ll be charting it all here.
For now, let’s re-live some of the good, the bad and the ugly in war coverage from the run-up to the invasion through the five years of controversy that followed. In updating the new edition (and first e-book version) of my book, So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits—and the President—Failed on Iraq, which features a preface by Bruce Springsteen, I was continually surprised to come across once-prominent names, quotes and incidents that had faded, even for me. Here is a list of sixteen of those nearly forgotten episodes, in roughly chronological order.
1) In late March 2003, the day before the U.S. invasion, Bill O’Reilly said, “If the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it’s clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation; I will not trust the Bush administration again, all right?”
2) After the fall of Baghdad in April, Joe Scarborough, on MSNBC, said, “I’m waiting to hear the words ‘I was wrong’ from some of the world’s most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types.”
3) The same day, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews declared, “We’re all neocons now.”
4) Thomas Friedman, who had called this a “legitimate war of choice,” now wrote at The New York Times, “As far as I am 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.”
5) Phil Donahue suddenly lost his show at MSNBC, he later claimed, because he did not wave the flag enough. A leaked NBC memo confirmed Donahue’s suspicion, noting that the host “presents a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war…. At the same time our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”
6) President Bush’s “comedy” routine during the Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner on March 24, 2004—nearly one year into the war—included a bit about the still-missing WMD. While a slide show of the president searching the White House was projected on the wall behind him, he joked, “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere…. Nope, no weapons over there… Maybe under here?” Most of the crowd roared, and there was little criticism in the media in following days. David Corn, then Washington editor of The Nation, was one of the few attendees to criticize the routine. Corn wondered if they would have laughed if Ronald Reagan had, following the truck bombing of our Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241, said at a similar dinner, “Guess we forgot to put in a stoplight.”
7) When The New York Times carried its belated editors’ note on May 26, 2004, admitting some errors in its WMD coverage, it appeared on page A10 and Judith Miller’s name was nowhere to be found. The note is often described today as an “apology,” but it was no such thing. On the day it ran, Executive Editor Bill Keller (who once called himself a “liberal hawk” on Iraq) termed criticism of the Times’s coverage “overwrought” and said that the main reason it even published the note was because the controversy had become a “distraction.”
8) The first mainstream editor/columnist to call for a US pullout was the unlikely Allen H. Neuharth, founder of USA Today, who is certainly not known for expressing antiwar or liberal views. His May 2004 column drew wide reader protest but “the old fighting infantryman” (as the former soldier billed himself) stuck to his guns and penned a few more columns in that vein in the years that followed.
9) It’s often said that The Washington Post issued an apology for its coverage of the ramp-up to the war. But the criticism of its prewar coverage came not in an editors’ statement but in an article by the paper’s media critic, Howard Kurtz. Post editors offered several defenses for the coverage, and top editor Len Downie argued that it didn’t make much difference anyway, because tougher coverage would not have stopped the war.
10) Stephen Colbert’s riotous routine at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in April 2006 is remembered for the in-his-face mockery of President Bush—but he also spanked the press, perhaps one reason his mainstream reviews were mixed at best. Addressing the correspondents directly, Colbert said, “Let’s review the rules. The president makes decisions; he’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell-check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know—fiction.”
11) Fox News’s John Gibson ripped Neil Young after the rocker released his excellent protest album Living With War. Gibson demanded that Young go see the new United 93 movie and even offered to buy his ticket. Young, it was soon pointed out, had actually written one of the first 9/11 songs,”Let’s Roll,” about, you guessed it, Flight 93.
12) Surprise: David Brooks, Thomas Friedman and Oliver North all came out against the “surge” in 2007 after it was announced by President Bush. George Will wrote a column titled, “Surge, or Power Failure?” And, after the botched hanging of Saddam, Charles Krauthammer declared, “We should not be surging American troops in defense of such a government.”
13) On March 27, 2007, John McCain, referring to the supposed calm settling on Baghdad, said, “General Petraeus goes out there almost every day in an unarmed Humvee.” This turned out to be pure bunk, but McCain quickly visited Iraq to try to prove his overall point. There, the Arizona senator went from the ridiculous to the maligned, touring a Baghdad market and claiming all was safe—while troops surrounded him and helicopters twirled overhead. Representative Mike Pence (R-Ind.) likened the scene to “a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime.”
14) When Valerie Plame Wilson finally testified before Congress in March 2007, much of the media coverage focused on her appearance. Mary Ann Akers wrote a piece for the Washington Post titled “Hearing Room Chic,” noting that Plame wore “a fetching jacket and pants” and should be played by Katie Holmes in the movie version of her story because they both favor Armani.
15) The New York Times, which had editorialized against the invasion, did not call for a change in course or the beginning of a withdrawal from Iraq until July 8, 2007.
16) On Meet the Press in July 2007, David Brooks declared that 10,000 Iraqis a month would perish if the United States pulled out. Bob Woodward, also on the show, challenged him on this, asking for his source. Brooks admitted, “I just picked that 10,000 out of the air.”
Greg Mitchell’s new edition of So Wrong for So Long includes a preface by Bruce Springsteen, a new introduction and a lengthy afterword with updates right up to Bradley Manning’s hearing last month.
For now, let’s re-live some of the good, the bad and the ugly in war coverage from the run-up to the invasion through the five years of controversy that followed. In updating the new edition (and first e-book version) of my book, So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits—and the President—Failed on Iraq, which features a preface by Bruce Springsteen, I was continually surprised to come across once-prominent names, quotes and incidents that had faded, even for me. Here is a list of sixteen of those nearly forgotten episodes, in roughly chronological order.
1) In late March 2003, the day before the U.S. invasion, Bill O’Reilly said, “If the Americans go in and overthrow Saddam Hussein and it’s clean, he has nothing, I will apologize to the nation; I will not trust the Bush administration again, all right?”
2) After the fall of Baghdad in April, Joe Scarborough, on MSNBC, said, “I’m waiting to hear the words ‘I was wrong’ from some of the world’s most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types.”
3) The same day, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews declared, “We’re all neocons now.”
4) Thomas Friedman, who had called this a “legitimate war of choice,” now wrote at The New York Times, “As far as I am 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.”5) Phil Donahue suddenly lost his show at MSNBC, he later claimed, because he did not wave the flag enough. A leaked NBC memo confirmed Donahue’s suspicion, noting that the host “presents a difficult public face for NBC in a time of war…. At the same time our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”
6) President Bush’s “comedy” routine during the Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner on March 24, 2004—nearly one year into the war—included a bit about the still-missing WMD. While a slide show of the president searching the White House was projected on the wall behind him, he joked, “Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere…. Nope, no weapons over there… Maybe under here?” Most of the crowd roared, and there was little criticism in the media in following days. David Corn, then Washington editor of The Nation, was one of the few attendees to criticize the routine. Corn wondered if they would have laughed if Ronald Reagan had, following the truck bombing of our Marine barracks in Beirut, which killed 241, said at a similar dinner, “Guess we forgot to put in a stoplight.”
7) When The New York Times carried its belated editors’ note on May 26, 2004, admitting some errors in its WMD coverage, it appeared on page A10 and Judith Miller’s name was nowhere to be found. The note is often described today as an “apology,” but it was no such thing. On the day it ran, Executive Editor Bill Keller (who once called himself a “liberal hawk” on Iraq) termed criticism of the Times’s coverage “overwrought” and said that the main reason it even published the note was because the controversy had become a “distraction.”
8) The first mainstream editor/columnist to call for a US pullout was the unlikely Allen H. Neuharth, founder of USA Today, who is certainly not known for expressing antiwar or liberal views. His May 2004 column drew wide reader protest but “the old fighting infantryman” (as the former soldier billed himself) stuck to his guns and penned a few more columns in that vein in the years that followed.
9) It’s often said that The Washington Post issued an apology for its coverage of the ramp-up to the war. But the criticism of its prewar coverage came not in an editors’ statement but in an article by the paper’s media critic, Howard Kurtz. Post editors offered several defenses for the coverage, and top editor Len Downie argued that it didn’t make much difference anyway, because tougher coverage would not have stopped the war.
10) Stephen Colbert’s riotous routine at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in April 2006 is remembered for the in-his-face mockery of President Bush—but he also spanked the press, perhaps one reason his mainstream reviews were mixed at best. Addressing the correspondents directly, Colbert said, “Let’s review the rules. The president makes decisions; he’s the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Put them through a spell-check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know—fiction.”
11) Fox News’s John Gibson ripped Neil Young after the rocker released his excellent protest album Living With War. Gibson demanded that Young go see the new United 93 movie and even offered to buy his ticket. Young, it was soon pointed out, had actually written one of the first 9/11 songs,”Let’s Roll,” about, you guessed it, Flight 93.
12) Surprise: David Brooks, Thomas Friedman and Oliver North all came out against the “surge” in 2007 after it was announced by President Bush. George Will wrote a column titled, “Surge, or Power Failure?” And, after the botched hanging of Saddam, Charles Krauthammer declared, “We should not be surging American troops in defense of such a government.”
13) On March 27, 2007, John McCain, referring to the supposed calm settling on Baghdad, said, “General Petraeus goes out there almost every day in an unarmed Humvee.” This turned out to be pure bunk, but McCain quickly visited Iraq to try to prove his overall point. There, the Arizona senator went from the ridiculous to the maligned, touring a Baghdad market and claiming all was safe—while troops surrounded him and helicopters twirled overhead. Representative Mike Pence (R-Ind.) likened the scene to “a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime.”
14) When Valerie Plame Wilson finally testified before Congress in March 2007, much of the media coverage focused on her appearance. Mary Ann Akers wrote a piece for the Washington Post titled “Hearing Room Chic,” noting that Plame wore “a fetching jacket and pants” and should be played by Katie Holmes in the movie version of her story because they both favor Armani.
15) The New York Times, which had editorialized against the invasion, did not call for a change in course or the beginning of a withdrawal from Iraq until July 8, 2007.
16) On Meet the Press in July 2007, David Brooks declared that 10,000 Iraqis a month would perish if the United States pulled out. Bob Woodward, also on the show, challenged him on this, asking for his source. Brooks admitted, “I just picked that 10,000 out of the air.”
Greg Mitchell’s new edition of So Wrong for So Long includes a preface by Bruce Springsteen, a new introduction and a lengthy afterword with updates right up to Bradley Manning’s hearing last month.
Sunday Morning in the Church of Beethoven
My weekly feature. This week: very rare performance of Beethoven's amazing string quartet movement known as the "Cavatina"--for full orchestra, conducted by the controversial German legend. Go here for latest on our film and book about amazing influence of Beethoven's Ninth.
March 15, 2014
Saturday Night Music Pick
Isolated guitar tracks for Jimi Hendrix, "All Along the Watchtower."
Eleven Years Ago: David Brooks, Iraq War Hawk
You'd never know from his claims over the past few years, but New York Times pundit David Brooks was a full-throated hawk for the tragic U.S. invasion of Iraq and swallowed all of the Bush administration claims about WMD whole. He attempted to muddy the waters, long ago, after WMD were not found and the "liberation" proved to be a disaster by blaming the post-invasion disaster all on Rumsfeld, perhaps figuring that if he became known as a war critic folks would forget that he'd promoted the conflict from the beginning. Not a chance, in my case. Brooks, meet elephant in room. (And see my new e-book, So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits and the President Failed on Iraq, with preface by Bruce Springsteen.)Here's an excerpt from a column he wrote at his then-home, The Weekly Standard, March 10, 2003:
The American commentariat is gravely concerned. Over the past week, George W. Bush has shown a disturbing tendency not to waffle when it comes to Iraq. There has been an appalling clarity and coherence to his position. There has been a reckless tendency not to be murky, hesitant, or evasive. Naturally, questions are being raised about President Bush's leadership skills.
Meanwhile, among the smart set, Hamlet-like indecision has become the intellectual fashion. The liberal columnist E. J. Dionne wrote in the Washington Post that he is uncomfortable with the pro and antiwar camps. He praised the doubters and raised his colors on behalf of ‘heroic ambivalence.’ The New York Times, venturing deep into the territory of self-parody, ran a full-page editorial calling for ‘still more discussion’ on whether or not to go to war.
In certain circles, it is not only important what opinion you hold, but how you hold it. It is important to be seen dancing with complexity, sliding among shades of gray. Any poor rube can come to a simple conclusion--that President Saddam Hussein is a menace who must be disarmed--but the refined ratiocinators want to be seen luxuriating amid the difficulties, donning the jewels of nuance, even to the point of self-paralysis. …
But those who actually have to lead and protect, and actually have to build one step on another, have to bring some questions to a close. Bush gave Saddam time to disarm. Saddam did not. Hence, the issue of whether to disarm him forcibly is settled. The French and the Germans and the domestic critics may keep debating, which is their luxury, but the people who actually make the decisions have moved on to more practical concerns….From his Weekly Standard column on March 24, two weeks later:
The president has remained resolute. Momentum to liberate Iraq continues to build. The situation has clarified, and history will allow clear judgments about which leaders and which institutions were up to the challenge posed by Saddam and which were not.
Over the past 12 years the United States has sought to disarm or depose Saddam--more forcefully since September 11 than before. Throughout that time, France and Russia have sought to undermine sanctions and fend off the ousting of Saddam. They opposed Clinton's efforts to bomb Saddam, just as they oppose Bush's push for regime change. Through the fog and verbiage, that is the essential confrontation. Events will show who was right, George W. Bush or Jacques Chirac.
What matters, and what ultimately sprang the U.N. trap, is American resolve. The administration simply wouldn't let up. It didn't matter how Hans Blix muddied the waters with his reports on this or that weapons system. Under the U.N. resolutions, it was up to Saddam to disarm, administration officials repeated ad nauseam, and he wasn't doing it. It was and is sheer relentlessness that has driven us to where we are today.
Which is ironic. We are in this situation because the first Bush administration was not relentless in its pursuit of Saddam Hussein. That is a mistake this Bush administration will not repeat.Also see my new piece recalling 16 or the worst media outrages re: Iraq.
Greg Mitchell's influential book "So Wrong For So Long," on the media and the Iraq war, has been published in an updated edition and for the first time as an e-book.
