Rearranging Hindenburg Deck Chairs

Not a gumbo night; instead we tested new recipes for roast chicken a la Naked Chef, with lemon peel, prosciutto, garlic, thyme, p&s, and butter tucked under the little one's skin. Roasted baby artichokes with olive oil and Provence herbs. Yum, as long as you have a tolerance for some (choke leaf) bitter!

All because we'd had to decline our invite to the White House Correspondent's Dinner since there were no airline tickets in the envelope.

Wish we could have been there, as is the case every year. I'm gradually coming around to the idea that this blog is unlikely to make it happen.

But in case any of you were also left out, I'm here to let you know that Stephen Colbert was one of those invited to the podium. I'm guessing that might not happen next year. I'm proceeding here on basis that if you are not a fully-doddering idiot, a sworn idiot-box agnostic (you go!), or one in a rural setting where you have an ISP (well duhh!) but no cable (actually sounds pretty attractive, Dave!), you either do watch the Colbert Report or have been shamed for not doing so to the point where extended intro is unnecessary. The eagle-man does a good send-up, I must say.

And he reportedly did so in full measure tonight, even to the point of transcending his normal on-screen shrub-phantic schtick. (In the spirit of full disclosure, if you've read this far you are likely already a subject of NSA eavesdropping - be careful what you think):

WASHINGTON A blistering comedy “tribute” to President Bush by Comedy Central’s faux talk show host Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondent Dinner Saturday night left George and Laura Bush unsmiling at its close.

Earlier, the president had delivered his talk to the 2700 attendees, including many celebrities and top officials, with the help of a Bush impersonator.

Colbert, who spoke in the guise of his talk show character, who ostensibly supports the president strongly, urged the Bush to ignore his low approval ratings, saying they were based on reality, “and reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

Noting those low ratings, Colbert advised, "The glass isn't half empty - it's 68% empty. There's still some fluid in there, but I wouldn't drink it."

He attacked those in the press who claim that the shake-up at the White House was merely re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. “This administration is soaring, not sinking,” he said. “They are re-arranging the deck chairs--on the Hindenburg.”

Colbert told Bush he could end the problem of protests by retired generals by refusing to let them retire. He compared Bush to Rocky Balboa in the “Rocky” movies, always getting punched in the face—“and Apollo Creed is everything else in the world.”

Turning to the war, he declared, "I believe that the government that governs best is a government that governs least, and by these standards we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq."

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Also lampooning the press, Colbert complained that he was “surrounded by the liberal media who are destroying this country, except for Fox News. Fox believes in presenting both sides—the president’s side and the vice president’s side." He also reflected on the good old days, when the media was still swallowing the WMD story.

Addressing the reporters, he said, "You should spend more time with your families, write that novel you've always wanted to write. You know, the one about the fearless reporter who stands up to the administration. You know-- fiction."

He claimed that the Secret Service name for Bush's new press secretary is "Snow Job." Colbert closed his routine with a video fantasy where he gets to be White House Press Secretary, complete with a special “Gannon” button on his podium. By the end, he runs fleeing from Helen Thomas and her questions about why the U.S. really invaded Iraq and killed all those people.

As he walked from the podium, the president and First Lady gave Colbert quick nods, unsmiling, and left immediately. E&P's Joe Strupp, in the crowd, observed that quite a few sitting hear him felt the material was, perhaps, uncomfortably biting.

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The Crony Fairy

I don't get to read near as much Krugman as I'd like these days, what with that firewall the new yorkers have thrown up, presumably a bit petulant at being oh-so-accurately accredited as warmongers and administration shills.

So the occasional leaks are much appreciated:

The U.S. government is being stalked by an invisible bandit, the Crony Fairy, who visits key agencies by dead of night, snatches away qualified people and replaces them with unqualified political appointees. There's no way to catch or stop the Crony Fairy, so our only hope is to change the agencies' names. That way she might get confused, and leave our government able to function.

That, at least, is how I interpret the report on responses to Hurricane Katrina that was just released by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

The report points out that the Federal Emergency Management Agency "had been operating at a more than 15 percent staff-vacancy rate for over a year before Katrina struck" - that means many of the people who knew what they were doing had left. And it adds that "FEMA's senior political appointees ... had little or no prior relevant emergency-management experience."

But the report says nothing about what caused the qualified people to leave and who appointed unqualified people to take their place. There's no hint that, say, President Bush might have had any role. So those political appointees must have been installed by the Crony Fairy.

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O.K., enough sarcasm. Let's talk about the history of FEMA.

In the early 1990's, FEMA's reputation was as bad as it is today. It was a dumping ground for political cronies, headed by a man whose only apparent qualification for the job was that he was a close friend of the first President Bush's chief of staff. FEMA's response to Hurricane Andrew in 1992 perfectly foreshadowed Katrina: the agency took three days to arrive on the scene, and when it did, it proved utterly incompetent.

Many people thought that FEMA was a lost cause. But Bill Clinton proved them wrong. He appointed qualified people to lead the agency and gave them leeway to hire other qualified people, and within a year FEMA's morale and performance had soared. For the rest of the Clinton years, FEMA was among the most highly regarded agencies in the federal government.

What happened to that reputation? The answer, of course, is that the second President Bush returned to his father's practices. Once again, FEMA became a dumping ground for cronies, and many of the good people who had come in during the Clinton years left. It took only a few years to transform one of the best agencies in the U.S. government into what Senator Susan Collins calls "a shambles and beyond repair."

In other words, the Crony Fairy is named George W. Bush.

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So let's skip the name change for FEMA, O.K.? The United States will regain effective government if and when it gets a president who cares more about serving the nation than about rewarding his friends and scoring political points. That's at least a thousand days away. Meanwhile, don't count on FEMA, or on any other government agency, to do its job.

Talking Patriotism

I'm unabashedly once again tonight stumping for Glenn Greenwald, who has the terrific blog Unclaimed Territory (UT). The dude is wonderfully lucid, yet rarely pulls a punch.

The occasion/excuse is the impending publication of Greenwald's book How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values from a President Run Amok. He has announced the publication on his blog and IMO done a terrifically un-egotistical job of dealing with the complexity of forwarding his message and book-product without being a Tom Cruise or other People magazine sort. He had my admiration already; his handling of this just clinches it (in case you couldn't tell). A bit more on the book later. My initial focus here is on related business, namely Greenwald's insights on dem party shortcomings and the media old and new and how this book came to be.

One recent UT post helpfully delineates some of the background to the semi-ragged Feingold move for presidential censure. In his blog commentary on a Bradblog interview of the Senator Greenwald offers this:

As Crashing the Gate chronicles, and as Feingold implied, the Democratic Party has all but turned itself over to highly risk-adverse, overly calculating political consultants who have drained the party of ideals, passion, energy and life. Almost all of them inspire nobody, because they so transparently lack any governing principles or passion about anything. They embrace only those ideas which are guaranteed in advance to be popular, and they run from ideas they believe in and that are right whenever they are told -- by the bookish, soul-less consultants who dominate them -- that those ideas are risky or unpopular. And everyone sees this and knows this.

Say what you will about the Bush movement, but it is difficult to accuse it of lacking passion and conviction. Indeed, the deep emotional fulfillment it provides to its adherents is one of its greatest strengths. Democrats never throw caution to the wind or take a real stand -- one that might be unpopular or risky -- for anything, including their core convictions, to the extent such a thing exists any more. The Swift Boat attacks in the 2004 election were so effective mostly because they provoked no reaction from Kerry -- no fury, no aggression, no unrestrained human conviction. When a response finally did come, it was pre-scripted, contrived and transparently empty, and that became the hallmark of the campaign.Feingold's Censure Resolution had such resonance because it was something which came -- finally -- from conviction, from principle, from a political soul.

Greenwald's post "The Power of the Blogosphere" is also required reading. I excerpt here in lengthy fashion (apologies), but there is more - please check it out in its entirety:

In just one day, before it has been released, and with literally nothing more in the way of marketing and publicity than a handful of bloggers discussing it and a very committed and passionate blog readership here, How Would a Patriot Act? went to #1 on the Amazon Top Sellers List last night, and it sits there currently. Both thank you and congratulations are in order for everyone who helped make that happen, especially the regular readers of this blog and the other bloggers who have supported both this blog and the book, and I want to make a few observations about why I think this is so potentially significant:

(1) This book is a pure blogosphere book. The book's ideas and arguments were developed almost exclusively as a result of writing this blog. The research was done primarily by blog readers who worked with me on the book, and I discovered many of the arguments and much of the evidence that comprise the book as a result of reading comments here as well as the posts of other bloggers.

The publisher, Working Assets, approached me about writing the book as a result of their reading this blog. They were willing to commit to the book, first and foremost, because they were committed to publicizing the ideas and arguments in it. But the fact that the liberal blogosphere along with more independent and centrist bloggers would likely discuss and support the book enabled them to feel comfortable that the book -- just from blogs alone -- had a viable marketing base. They were obviously right about that.

There have been a few other recent blog-based books, including Markos and Jerome's highly successful Crashing the Gate, Get This Party Started by Chris Bowers, and Tom Tomorrow's recently released Hell in a Handbasket. Publishing books by bloggers, the ideas for which largely emerge from the blogosphere, is clearly a model that works and will only grow.

(2) That matters not simply because bloggers are new faces, but because so many of the ideas, so much of the analysis, and the underlying approach to political change which characterize the blogosphere is just different in nature than most everything else that comprises the standard national media discussions of the political issues facing our country. That isn't to say that the blogosphere is perfect (it definitely is not) or that it doesn't have disadvantages as compared to the national media (it does). But very generally speaking, the blogosphere is a fundamentally different way of talking about, thinking about, and being engaged in political matters, and all of that means that the content it produces, the ideas it generates, are substantively different than what gets produced elsewhere.

Whole books could be (and, I believe, have been) written on how and why the blogosphere is different. The collaborative nature of it is definitely one of the principal factors -- unlike some paid media pundit who talks only to a handful of like-minded and similarly situated pundits and others in the isolated elite political class, the blogosphere is nothing more than the aggregate by-product of mass, undiluted conversations taking place among thousands of highly motivated, engaged and well-informed citizens every day.

But beyond being just collaborative, the blogosphere is characterized by an independence and autonomy which is glaringly absent in the conventional national media venues. As Jane Hamsher eloquently observed the other day, there has to be some significant motivation for someone to go to their computer every day and do the work to maintain a blog, just as something has to motivate people to spend time at their computers every day reading and participating in intense, detailed political discussions.

Bloggers, their readers and commenters are mostly just citizens who are highly dissatisfied with the conventional media outlets and dominant political institutions, all of which have failed in so many ways. What is most significant about the blogosphere, in my view, is that it enables direct and immediate communication -- and coordination -- among huge numbers of dissatisfied citizens who want to force new ideas and arguments into what was previously a closed and highly controlled media and political dialogue. And, gradually and incrementally, it's working. I think we are at the very beginning of that process and the impact on our country's political processes will only grow, vastly.

Reading other blogs is what made me become much more attentive to the political crises we face, and is what then motivated me to start this blog. That happens over and over again, to thousands and thousand of people. That is just inevitably going to have a significant impact.

Given how broken and rotted our media and government institutions are (with some noble exceptions), fundamentally new ideas and different voices, no matter their imperfections, can only be an improvement. Our media and government are, on the whole, staid, depleted, corrupted, broken down china shops that could use some good, irreverent, aggressive bulls running through them.

(3) Specifically with regard to How Would a Patriot Act?, I can't think of anything that would be more gratifying and, in my view, more beneficial for our country than for the issues it raises to enter the public discourse, and I know that most everyone who reads this blog shares that view.

Whatever else one might want to say about this administration, it is simply indisputable that the theories of executive power it has adopted are radical, extremist and extraordinary; the policies adopted pursuant to those theories -- including the efforts to intimidate the media, stifle dissent, and prevent disclosure of its conduct -- are wholly alien to our most basic political values and traditions; and the entire approach to governing the country is unlike anything we have seen for a very long time, if ever.

Regardless of whether one thinks those theories and policies are justifiable, there is simply no question that allowing them to fester and become legitimized and institutionalized -- and we are well on our way to that destination -- will change our country in fundamental and likely irreversible ways. The changes will be not just to our laws and system of government but to our national character.

And, finally, on Greenwald's book How Would a Patriot Act?, how about this:

John Dean -- who made a point of refusing to say anything about the book until he had read the manuscript in its entirety -- provided this blurb:

"Glenn Greenwald has assembled a devastating bill of particulars against the
Bush and Cheney administration's insistence on operating outside the rule of
law. He has gathered solid information and marshaled a litany of abuses of
power that make Richard Nixon's imperial presidency look timid. All
thinking Americans must answer How Would A Patriot Act? this coming
election, and those who ignore what Greenwald has to say act at our
collective peril."