“Credulous Times”: Grasping At Straws In The Wind, What Has Happened To Journalism At The New York Times?
If you are a regular reader of the New York Times, and tend to think of it not just as a Newspaper of Record, but as an institution with unimpeachable standards of journalistic objectivity and excellence, you might want to give a gander to a scathing piece by New America’s Peter Bergen at CNN about the New York Times Magazine cover story suggesting the official story of Osama bin Laden’s assassination was a pack of trumped-up lies. Seems its author, Jonathan Mahler, is largely buying a conspiracy theory hatched by the famed muckraking journalist Seymour Hersh back in the spring, which was pretty thoroughly challenged at the time–by among others Bergen, who wrote a well-regarded book on the pursuit and killing of bin Laden.
[A]s I wrote in May when Hersh’s story first appeared, his account of the bin Laden raid is a farrago of nonsense that is contravened by a multitude of eyewitness accounts, inconvenient facts and simple common sense.
As Berger notes, both Hersh and Mahler paint a picture of US-Pakistani complicity in a handover of bin Laden followed by a deliberately fabricated “firefight” that contradicts other Times reporters who cover Pakistan and the U.S. intelligence community.
Among those sharing in the Big Lie of bin Laden’s capture and assassination if these lurid tales are true, of course, is not only the President of the United States but his most likely Democratic successor, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
One of those supposed liars would also be the woman who may well be the next president of the United States, Hillary Clinton. By the way, give her an Oscar for acting for her performance when the iconic photograph was taken at the White House as the bin Laden raid went down, the one in which Clinton has her hand over her mouth in disbelief and anxiety so uncertain was the outcome of the raid.
Hmmm. Seems like there’s another recent line of reporting at the Times that is focused on showing that Hillary Clinton’s an untrustworthy liar, eh?
I don’t know that there’s a connection, but without question, certain elements at the Times are showing some surprising credulity at any straws in the wind that can be used to build the facade of a case against Obama and Clinton.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, October 19, 2015
“Republicans Punish Their Own For Speaking The Truth”: Sometimes, The Biggest Sin You Can Commit In D.C. Is To Tell The Truth
“A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth — some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.” — journalist Michael Kinsley
So another Republican congressman has come forward to admit that his party’s Benghazi obsession is little more than an undisguised effort to damage the presidential campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner.
In a radio interview on Wednesday, U.S. Rep. Richard Hanna (R-NY) defended his colleague, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who had acknowledged that obvious truth as well.
“Sometimes the biggest sin you can commit in D.C. is to tell the truth. This may not be politically correct, but I think that there was a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after people and an individual: Hillary Clinton,” said Hanna.
Well, of course. Anyone who has been paying the slightest attention already knows that the unending series of Benghazi “investigations” began as a way to embarrass the administration of President Barack Obama, including his then-secretary of state. When Clinton announced her presidential campaign, the investigations began to center on her (and are now more focused on her use of a private email server).
If you only dimly recall the origin of the GOP battle cry “Remember Benghazi!” it started with a tragedy. On Sept. 11, 2012, Christopher Stevens, then U.S. ambassador to Libya, and three other Americans were killed in separate assaults by Islamic jihadists on U.S. installations in Benghazi, Libya. Stevens was the first U.S. ambassador killed in the line of duty since 1979.
The incident deserved a thorough probe to see whether there was anything that could have been done to prevent the deaths of diplomatic personnel in the future: Was security too lax? Intelligence ignored? The area too dangerous for diplomats?
But in the days after the deaths, it became clear that leading Republicans were much more interested in scoring their own attacks on Democratic targets than investigating the “Battle of Benghazi,” as it has been called. For one thing, they focused on such superficial and unimportant details as whether Susan Rice, then the president’s national security adviser, had clearly described the assault as “terrorism” or merely extremism. It’s not at all clear what difference that makes, but that line of attack derailed any shot she had at succeeding Clinton as secretary of state.
With that, Republicans were emboldened. And they haven’t given up their efforts to sink some notable Democrat with even a tenuous link to Libya and its national security implications.
They’ve not had any luck so far. After seven congressional and two executive-branch investigations, there has been no evidence of criminal wrongdoing, malfeasance or cover-up. The last was an exhaustive probe conducted by the GOP-led House Intelligence Committee; it found no evidence that either the U.S. military or the CIA had acted improperly. There was no delay in sending a military rescue team, as many conservatives have insisted.
So there was no genuine surprise at what McCarthy told Fox News in a September interview:
“Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping,” McCarthy told Sean Hannity.
Still, he paid dearly for the slip. Criticized by Republican leaders for dropping the gauzy veil over their nakedly partisan smear campaign, he was forced to abandon his plan to succeed John Boehner as speaker of the house.
McCarthy was supposed to keep up the pretense that the House Select Committee on Benghazi is conducting a high-minded probe free of partisan tilt. And that pretense continues. Clinton will appear before the committee later this month.
If there is any better example of the excessive and stultifying partisanship that has laid waste to Washington, it’s hard to know what that may be. After all, it can hardly be considered shocking that an American diplomat was killed in a dangerous country full of Islamic militants. Tragic, gut-wrenching, awful, yes. Shocking, no.
Still, the GOP’s listing and rudderless Benghazi ship — white whale on the horizon — sails on.
By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize Winner for Commentary in 2007; The National Memo, October 17, 2015
“Gun Industry Must Not Be Shielded From Liability”: Bloodshed Is Moving The Needle On The Question Of Liability For The Gun Industry
Hillary Clinton pounded Sen. Bernie Sanders for his gun rights record during the first Democratic presidential debate, all but calling him a BFF of the NRA.
Clinton’s argument was that Sanders’ support for the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which prohibited lawsuits against gun sellers and manufacturers for the unlawful misuse of a firearm, means that he isn’t serious about stemming gun violence in America.
With his vote, Clinton charged, Sanders supplied immunity from liability to the only industry in America that has it. “Everybody else has to be accountable but not the gun manufacturers,” she said. As a senator, Clinton had voted against the bill.
She might not have been aware that within hours of her comments, that law — long considered nearly insurmountable — had taken a major hit. A Milwaukee jury awarded two police officers more than $5 million in damages, holding the owners of a gun store negligent for selling a semi-automatic pistol purchased through a straw buyer.
One of the officers, Graham Kunisch, now retired, was said to not show any emotion when the civil verdict was reached, according to the New York Times. He couldn’t, his lawyer said, because of the brain injury he suffered after being shot in the head by the gun.
Staff at Badger Guns, the defendant, should have been more suspicious that the pistol was being bought for an 18-year-old who stood alongside the straw buyer, attorneys argued. The younger man, now serving 80 years for shooting the policemen, strode into the store with the buyer, helped pick out the gun, left the store to get more cash together for the purchase, and watched as the straw buyer fumbled filling out the paperwork. On the form, the buyer admitted that he wasn’t the intended owner but then changed his answer.
Red flags had been everywhere, the plaintiffs’ attorneys argued. The jury agreed. That almost never happens in America. One of the reasons it doesn’t is a 2005 law that Clinton says she intends to repeal (and that Sanders agrees needs to be revisited).
The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act passed after major lobbying by the National Rifle Association. George W. Bush signed it. To the gun lobby, the bill was seen as necessary to protect the gun dealers and manufacturers from being bankrupted by a slew of cases being filed nationwide at the time.
Gun safety advocates had a strategy to move manufacturers toward devoting more attention to safety features on firearms and for sellers to improve ways to ensure that they were selling to legal buyers.
The idea was to treat gun safety as a matter of public health. Car manufacturers, after all, hadn’t eagerly added seatbelts and other safety devices to vehicles. They did so under public pressure and after being held accountable by the courts.
Passage of the immunity law circumvented that approach to the manufacture and sale of firearms.
But times have changed in the decade since the law was passed. The public is all too aware of the toll of firearm violence: dead children slaughtered in mass shootings, women murdered because men with records of domestic violence aren’t stopped from buying guns, a yearly toll of 19,000 gun suicides. Bloodshed is moving the needle on the question of liability for the gun industry. But only a smidgen.
The NRA has filled people’s heads with the nonsense that it is unfair to expect a seller to know whether a gun he sells will be used later in a crime. Really? Even if the gun is sold to a known criminal, someone under age or a person with a record of domestic violence?
What’s missing are the other pieces of smart gun safety. Gun shows should no longer be places where guns are bought and sold without any scrutiny. The tracking of guns that wind up at crime scenes must improve. Records of who should be barred from ownership need to be readily accessible and comprehensive. And the public needs to come to grips with the fact that there are no magic formulas to predict who might act out violently with a gun due to a mental health condition. Most people with mental illness are not violent.
A great sense of responsibility ought to come with being licensed to sell a product designed to take human life. It’s far past time that gun manufacturers and sellers come to grips with that moral and civic duty.
By: Mary Sanchez, Opinion-Page Columnist for The Kansas City Star; The National Memo, October 16, 2015
“Our Current Distemper”: “Asymmetric Polarization” Emanating From The Radicalization Of The Republican Party
As we head towards what will probably be another fiscal crisis in December, perhaps managed by a caretaker Speaker of the House, coinciding with the frenzy of a presidential nominating contest in which nearly all Republicans are running against their own party’s leadership, it’s a good time to step back and remind ourselves how we got to this juncture.
In pursuit of perspective, Bloomberg View‘s Francis Wilkinson interviews Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution. As you may recall, Ornstein and Mann published a book in 2012 entitled It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, which broke from the usual “balanced” assessment of blame for the nation’s problems that prevails in the MSM and much of academia and pointed at the phenomenon of “asymmetric polarization” emanating from the radicalization of the Republican Party.
Now that the political dysfunction they analyzed has if anything intensified, have Ornstein and Mann changed their minds about any of this? No, as you can quickly see from the interview. But I’d point to a succinct quote from Mann that addresses the preconditions for recovery:
There is no clear path out of our current distemper. The solution, like the diagnosis, must focus on the obvious but seldom acknowledged asymmetry between the parties. The Republican Party must become a conservative governing party once again and accept the assumptions and norms of our Madisonian system. That will likely require more election defeats, more honest reporting by the mainstream press and more recognition by the public that the problem is not “Washington” or “Congress” or “insiders” or politicians in general.
The burden is on the GOP because they are currently the major source of our political dysfunction. No happy talk about bipartisanship can obscure that reality. Unless other voices and movements arise within the Republican Party to change its character and course, our dysfunctional politics will continue.
Remember how annoyed much of the punditocracy was on Tuesday night when Hillary Clinton listed “Republicans” as among the “enemies” she was proud of earning? That reflexive annoyance, not Clinton’s “partisanship,” is a big part of the problem.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, October 15, 2015
“Republican Obstructionalism”: Why The Democratic Candidates Can’t Confront The Real Elephant In The Room
In last night’s Democratic debate, there was only one question, to Bernie Sanders, on what may be the most difficult challenge that will confront the next president if he or she is a Democrat: What are you going to do about Congress?
We’ll get to the answer Sanders gave in a moment, but first, some context. When Barack Obama was elected, congressional Republicans made what was in some ways a strategically shrewd decision, that they were going to oppose him on basically everything. Because he started with huge majorities in both houses of Congress, he had an extraordinary record of legislative achievement in his first two years, that opposition notwithstanding. But in 2010 Republicans won the House, and four years after that they took the Senate. For all intents and purposes, legislating was over.
In those two wave elections of 2010 and 2014, a generation of extremely conservative Republicans who viewed all compromise as betrayal were elected, moving the party to the right ideologically and making it far more obstructionist. Now let’s say a Democrat wins in 2016. What happens then?
It’s almost a certainty that Republicans will retain control of the House. Democrats have a chance to win back the Senate (Republicans have to defend many more seats, because everyone who won in 2010 is up for reelection), but even if they do, it certainly won’t be with a filibuster-proof majority. Not only that, if Democrats make gains, it will be in those few competitive states and House districts, which would mean that the remaining Republicans would as a group be even more conservative than they are now. Are they going to be in the mood to work with a Democratic president?
So here’s what Bernie Sanders said when he was asked about this problem:
“Now, in my view, the only way we can take on the right wing Republicans who are, by the way, I hope will not continue to control the Senate and the House when one of us is elected President. But the only way we can get things done is by having millions of people coming together. If we want free tuition at public colleges and universities, millions of young people are going to have to demand it, and give the Republicans an offer they can’t refuse.
“If we want to raise the minimum wage to $15 bucks an hour, workers are going to have to come together and look the Republicans in the eye, and say, “We know what’s going on. You vote against us, you are out of your job.”
In 2007, Mark Schmitt called the argument among Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards the “theory of change primary.” As Clinton would describe it in speeches, Edwards thought you demand change, Obama thought you hope for change, and she thought you work for change. Sanders’ theory, as he lays it out here, is essentially that you force change, by making it too politically dangerous for Republicans to resist.
Which is realistic in one way and unrealistic in another. On one hand, Sanders is not bothering to indulge the dream that you can reach across the aisle and bring Democrats and Republicans together. In fact, no candidate from either party is saying that — and after the last seven years, who could do so with a straight face? But that’s a dramatic change from the last couple of decades.
Though they all ended up inspiring partisan passions, our last three presidents all ran as conciliators who could unite Washington and the country. Bill Clinton was going to create a liberal/conservative synthesis, a “Third Way” that could attract support from both parties. George W. Bush touted his record working with Democrats in Texas. “I want to change the tone of Washington to one of civility and respect,” he said in his 2000 convention speech. Barack Obama, who became a national figure in a 2004 convention speech where he said, “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America,” thought that he could sit down with everyone, earnestly listen to their concerns, and bring them around at least some of the time. All three presidents failed at this goal.
But if Sanders is being realistic about the present, his portrait of his future presidency has a big problem, particularly in the House. Let’s say he succeeds in creating a mass movement behind parts of his agenda. Is he really going to be able to raise the political risk of opposing something like free public college tuition high enough to overcome House Republicans’ personal inclinations and their constituents’ wishes?
Imagine you’re a Republican representative who hails from a conservative district in Alabama or Idaho or Tennessee; we’ll call him Jim. Jim is right now stopping comprehensive immigration reform, which the GOP as a whole knows it needs to pass in order to have any chance of appealing to the growing Hispanic population. But Jim won’t sign on, because though that might be good for the party, it’s bad for him. His conservative constituents don’t want it, he personally doesn’t want it, and the only political risk he fears is a primary challenge from the right.
Is Jim really going to be scared and/or persuaded when a bunch of young people in America’s cities — even if there are millions of them — create a movement behind President Sanders’ plan for free college tuition? Don’t bet on it.
It should be noted that their obstructionism, and the demands it creates among their own constituents, may keep the GOP from winning the White House as long as it continues. But that’s not really a problem for Jim. Indeed, if they lose again, Jim and others like him will tell themselves that it was only because their nominee wasn’t conservative enough.
I’m talking about Sanders here because he’s the one who got that question last night, but I haven’t heard Clinton address this problem in a real way, either. And maybe there’s no good solution. I’m not sure how I’d tell them to answer it if I were advising them, at least not if they want to maintain the lofty, hopeful tone presidential candidates tend to use, where they present themselves as potent agents of change and renewal who can overcome any obstacle. No candidate is going to tell voters, “Here are the things I’d like to do, although, let’s be honest, I probably won’t be able to.” Even if it’s the truth.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Plum Line Blog, October 14, 2014
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