OMG, Where's That Tide Table?

Glenn Greenwald, posting these days at Salon, makes mention in the title of his blog today of "Sea Change." I like that sound, and so much want to believe it is happening, as I suspect you do too.

But it is good to remember that there is a terrific amount of corporate and other cult-like support, devotion, and flat-out corrupt loyalty to george. This is of course courtesy of his criminal devotion to padding those corporate bottom lines and eroding the most important roles of our government, e.g., regulation of the nasty instincts of robber-baron industry. Given that and the tendency of under-george to never actually perform or be accountable but instead sacrifice thousands of lives and billions of dollars in one of the most exquisitely painful cases of psychopathic denial in history, we dare not be over-confident.

With that huge caveat, however, I want to bring on the happy sounds of the Glenn Greenwald orchestra. Given that (as I believe he would agree), he is more generally the sort to sound alarms, this is quite something. I have posted more than is my usual preference, trying to maintain the flow:

There were two seemingly unrelated incidents this week which, taken together, reflect some extremely important political developments.

First was the amazing letter to The Washington Post jointly sent by all 50 Democratic Senators other than Harry Reid -- written in response to, and in emphatic rejection of, David Broder's self-caricaturizing attack on Reid this week, where Broder condemned Reid's criticisms of the Leader and the War and equated him with Alberto Gonzales. The letter was signed by all 50 Democratic Senators -- each and every last one of them -- who stood behind Reid and, in effect, told David Broder that he and his previously revered High Broderism are completely out of touch and irrelevant.

When is the last time Democrats were so unified in their defiance of Wise Beltway Wisdom, which endlessly warns them not to adhere to their beliefs too steadfastly or to defy Republican decrees, especially on foreign policy?

The national media -- the World Ruled by Drudge, led around by and working in conjunction with the rest of the right-wing noise machine -- have tried mightily for months to depict Nancy Pelosi as weak and her leadership in chaos, and they try to do roughly the same with Harry Reid. Yet that has all been brushed aside, as the Democratic caucus in both the Senate and the House have been shockingly unified, not just once but continuously, in their defiance of both the Leader's will and the worthless Hiatt/Broder/Fox News "warnings" about "going too far" in opposing the war and the Leader.

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And then there are the not-yet-fully-appreciated revelations in George Tenet's new (and unconscionably and unforgivably belated) book, one highly illustrative example of which was recounted today by Scott Shane in The New York Times:

In January 2002, George J. Tenet, the man who oversaw all American spy agencies, was asked by a visiting Italian intelligence official what he knew about United States officials making contact with exiled Iranian opposition figures.

"I shot a look at other members of my staff in the meeting," Mr. Tenet writes in his newly published memoir. "It was clear that none of us knew what he was talking about. The Italian quickly changed the subject."

The embarrassed Mr. Tenet, then director of central intelligence, had stumbled upon a quixotic effort by a few Pentagon officials working closely with a conservative Middle East specialist, Michael A. Ledeen, to meet with Iranian dissidents living abroad. It was neither the first nor the last time he would be surprised by intelligence efforts inside the Bush administration but outside official channels. . . .

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Taken together, these two seemingly unconnected incidents reveal: (a) just how radical, extremist and dishonest are the people who have been running this country for the last six years, the whole Bush-led neoconservative Republican edifice loyally supported by most of the "conservative" movement, and (b) outside of the hard-core Bush followers and the stuck-in-2002 Beltway media establishment, there is a rapidly growing recognition of (a) in this country, which is beginning to engender a very potent sea change in political opinion and political power.

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I wasn't planning on posting today, and fortunately, I don't really need to beyond these few paragraphs, because this comment last night from DCLaw1, in response to yesterday's post, perfectly describes what I think is the critical point:

Stewart on Moyers' Journal

I'm watching Moyers' Journal, and Jon Stewart is the guest, with Josh Marshall from TPM to follow. It's caused me to reflect on the fairly recent past, and I am getting an almost cellular sense that something very profound is beginning to bud.

I have to say that a remarkably intimate, yet expansive, community of thought seems to be forming across television, film, and the Internet. There's a rather quiet, yet intense, movement of thought and expression building. It focuses not so much on any particular ideology ("right" or "left"), but on a common, critical-mass thirst to dispel the deception, irrationality, and utter hubris that has been corroding our proud country for what seems like an eternity.

An undeniable intellectual and social confluence is rapidly gaining momentum and solidarity. This solidarity is amazingly organic, not hierarchical -- its only guide is the sixth sense of skepticism, outrage, and, yes, reason. It transcends party. It is oceanic, atmospheric. An intellectual, moral, societal, and psychological gestalt as ancient as humanity itself, kept underfoot by a long winter, but indelibly germinating once again with the thaw.

It is literally everywhere now. The voices of blindness and rage cannot shake me anymore. I haven't felt such hope in a very long time.

There are many issues and potential debates raised by this comment, but the crux of it, in my view, is absolutely right. And there is all kinds of evidence demonstrating it. I recommend reading the discussion prompted by this comment which ensued in the comment section yesterday.

This is the sea change America needs so profoundly, and there are many signs that it is emerging and growing in strength. The 2006 election -- a truly crushing defeat for the President's political movement -- was but a glimpse of it, and the amount of wrongdoing and sleaze that has been revealed in just three months of real Congressional oversight is but a small sampling of what is to come.

Most of what has occurred in this country under the Bush presidency has been effectively concealed -- mostly due to a broken, corrupt media and a malfeasant Congress -- but all of it is beginning to emerge, and the consequences will likely be as extreme as the corruption and deceit itself have been.

War-study Night Class

The seventieth anniversary of one of the more infamous war crimes of the modern era - the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War - passed comparatively unremarked this week. Picasso's passionate commemoration of the event has of course become an international icon for those opposed to war with all its inevitable human suffering. Nothing with a comparable mix of artistry and viscera-grabbing seems to have yet been spawned by george's folly, but it's interesting to speculate what the future emblems of this horrendous nightmare could be. Pictures from Abu Ghraib come to mind, but for me they are more evocative of childhood sickbay nightmares when I was tossing and turning with a fever.

But as far as the broader issue of the ongoing destruction of all that goes with the word "civil" - including "ity" and "ization" - this week has also of course marked the welcome return to prime time of Bill Moyers. His special Wednesday continues to roil the waters, with numerous conscience-laden would-be-journalists called out by Moyers for their war-ennabling scrambling indecorously for cover.

Inspired by that special, there was no way I was going to miss the premier last night of Moyers' new regular Journal show on PBS. And that was before I learned that the first show was to feature Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo and Jon Stewart of The Daily Show. Josh fessed up in a post yesterday, no doubt adding at least a few tens of thousands of additional viewers last night. That post features links to a blurb for the show as well as the website that might allow any delinquents to pick up on a replay. Believe me, that was a seminal event in recent television journalism.

And speaking of Josh and TPM, a recent post there is must-reading. Josh does a terrific job of unpacking the ridiculously misdirected framing of the war debate in terms of "lose-versus-win":

With Harry Reid's controversial 'war is lost' quote and with various other pols weighing in on whether we can 'win' or whether it's 'lost', it's a good time to consider what the hell we're actually talking about. Frankly, the whole question is stupid. Or at least it's a very stilted way of understanding what's happening, geared to guarantee President Bush's goal of staying in Iraq forever. A more realistic description is President Bush's long twilight struggle to see just how far he can go into one brown paper bag.

We had a war. It was relatively brief and it took place in the spring of 2003. The critical event is what happened in the three to six months after the conventional war ended. The supporters of the war had two basic premises about what it would accomplish: a) the US would eliminate Iraq's threatening weapons of mass destruction, b) the Iraqi people would choose a pro-US government and the Iraqi people and government would ally themselves wtih the US.

Rationale 'A' quickly fell apart when we learned there were no weapons of mass destruction to eliminate.

That left us with premise or rationale 'B'. But though many or most Iraqis were glad we'd overthrown Saddam, evidence rapidly mounted that most Iraqis weren't interested in the kind of US-aligned government the war's supporters had in mind. Not crazy about a secular government, certainly not wild about one aligned with Israel and just generally not ready to be America's new proxy in the region. Most importantly, those early months showed clear signs that anti-Americanism (not surprisingly) rose with the duration of the occupation.

This is the key point: right near the beginning of this nightmare it was clear the sole remaining premise for the war was false: that is, the idea that the Iraqis would freely choose a government that would align itself with the US and its goals in the region. As the occupation continued, anti-American sentiment -- both toward the occupation and America's role in the world -- has only grown.

I would submit that virtually everything we've done in Iraq since mid-late 2003 has been an effort to obscure this fact. And our policy has been one of continuing the occupation to create the illusion that this reality was not in fact reality. In short, it was a policy of denial.

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Of course, the damage that's been done over the last four years of denial is immense -- damage to ourselves, to the Iraqis, damage to Middle Eastern security and our standing in the world. So walking out of the bag isn't easy and it won't fix things. But the stakes alleged by the White House are largely illusory. Most of the White House's argument amounts to the threat that if we walk out of the bag that we'll have to give up the denial that the White House has had a diminishing percentage of the country in for the last four years. The reality though is that the disaster has already happened. Admitting that isn't a mistake or something to be feared. It's the first step to repairing the damage. What the president has had the country in for four years is a very bloody and costly holding action. And the president has forced it on the country to avoid admitting the magnitude of his errors.

The Bush War Sale

I hope you had the good fortune to watch Bill Moyers, one of the few journalistic icons we have left, tonight on his PBS special. It was a great program, pulling together what probably most anyone reading (or deleting) this is well aware of by now of the perfidity and criminality that led to the destruction and occupation of Iraq. It is exciting to hear he is back to a regular program (Friday night?).

I was late to come upon Mr. Bill. I guess that was of a piece with my skepticism with major media news and the idiot box in general. But I regret I did not see more of him in his prime - he has a winning way of being direct and un-gulled yet avoiding the whole panoply of fake emoting, shrill histrionics, and National Enquirer-style journalism that seems to have become de regeuer for the major networks. Presumably this is largely in reaction to the former success of Faux.

His show tonight, "Buying the War," struck me as exceptional. He gathered up so many of the loose ends related to administration malfeasance, active propagandizing, and war crimes as well as the absolute dereliction of duty by the vast majority of the media, too timid, unthinking, braindead, or simply corrupt and dishonest like Kristol et al to actually stop waddling and do some reporting. Or, in Kristol's case, a quiet suicide might be acceptable, the circumstances obviously fully explaining and justifying to the point where no note is needed.

My limited reading on the White House Correspondent's dinner the other night suggests nothing has changed there. We cannot expect to get real insights and independent reporting from the quislings who are sharing chuckles over Rich Little's stale old-in-the-60's bon-mottes with Laura. (Was the tune of that name - Hitchcock soundtrack? - insipid prior to 2000? I can't recall. It's ruined for me now.)

Apologies for this longer-than-usual squib from the always-entertaining Digby, but I felt it essential to make this as easy as possible:

I noticed this odd omission this morning too. Why didn't the NY Times review the Bill Moyers documentary that's slated to air tonight called "Buying The War"? They barely even mention it.

The LA Times did:

"Deep Throats were talking, but few in the press were listening," Bill Moyers says in 'Buying the War", a cold-eyed look at how lock-step with the Bush administration the mainstream news media became in the months leading up to the Iraq war.

Airing tonight on PBS, the documentary marks Moyers' return as a regular PBS presence. he left his previous eries, "Now With Bill moyers," at the end of 2004, frustrated by what he saw at the politicization of public broadcasting under then Corporation for Public Broadcasting Chairman Kenneth Tomlinson.

Tomlinson is gone and Moyers is back (albeit with a suspicious lack of fanfare.) "Bill Moyers Journal" (which last aired in 1994) will settle into Friday Night on KCET after tonight's premiere. In "Buying the War," Moyers the citizen journalist (in the good sense of that term) goes back over the hawkish national climate in 2002 and '03, and the echo chamber the Bush administration created out of the mainstream media, including hallowed institutions such as "Meet The Press" and the New York Times, in selling the idea of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapon programs and ties to Al-Qaeda.

The heavy-hitters that Moyers says he tried but failed to get to comment for Buying the War" include former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, Times columnists Thomas L. Friedman and William Safire, and Fox News Channel architect Roger Ailes.

The lighter hitters you will see a lot of are Warren R. Strobel and Jonathan S. Landay, reporters in the Washington bureau of Knight Ridder Inc, along with their bureau chief John Walcott.

This is Moyers' larger point: that these men were exceptions to the rule, writing stories that questioned the veracity of official intelligence, and because Knight Ridder (now owned by McClatchy Co.) didn't have a paper in New York or Washington, their dissenting voices couldn't compete with the theme of the moment.

The front pages were blaring, and cable news, of course, was banging the drum --- and the pots, and the pans. The clips alone that "Buying The War" amasses are chilling, what amounts to a hall of mirrors, administration officials leaking and spinning and then going on talk shows to point at their media-fed leaks or spin.

Phil Donohue, fired as host of an MSNBC show in early 2003 says he was told he could have a war advocate on his program as a solo guest, but dissenters had to be balanced out from the right."

Our producers were instructed to feature two conservatives for every liberal," he says.

There is no one representing the conservative argument here, not the deeper ideological reasons for believing in the Iraq invasion. But that's partly Moyers' position: In the run-up to war, point-counterpoint emerged as a devastating sham.

I guess it's not so surprising that the NY Times didn't bother to review this. It's cowardly, however.

Those of us who have been following this story in depth from the beginning know most of this, of course. But I'm glad that Moyers has amassed the footage and put it all in one place so that people can see it again in its glory. It's a big story and I'll be interested to see how many of the most dizzying moments during that long national acid trip Moyers was able to capture.

My personal favorite was Bush's press conference a few days before the invasion began. Matt Taibbi put it best:

The Bush press conference to me was like a mini-Alamo for American journalism, a final announcement that the press no longer performs anything akin to a real function. Particularly revolting was the spectacle of the cream of the national press corps submitting politely to the indignity of obviously pre-approved questions, with Bush not even bothering to conceal that the affair was scripted.

Abandoning the time-honored pretense of spontaneity, Bush chose the order of questioners not by scanning the room and picking out raised hands, but by looking down and reading from a predetermined list. Reporters, nonetheless, raised their hands in between questions–as though hoping to suddenly catch the president’s attention.

In other words, not only were reporters going out of their way to make sure their softballs were pre-approved, but they even went so far as to act on Bush’s behalf, raising their hands and jockeying in their seats in order to better give the appearance of a spontaneous news conference.

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