BY TOM TOMORROW
“If you’re so smart, how come I’m president and you’re not?”
— George Bush Senior the First.
“I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the President. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel like I owe anybody an explanation.”
— George Bush Junior the Second.
President Bush signed legislation creating a new independent commission to investigate the Sept. 11 attacks Wednesday and named former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to lead the panel.
“Dr. Kissinger will bring broad experience, clear thinking and careful judgment to this important task,” Bush said at a signing ceremony in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. “Mr. Secretary, thank you for returning to the service of your nation.”
I really have to remember to check in on Neal Pollack more often:
As you may have read on Friday, and should read immediately below this post, there is a new name for the new category of political thought shared by my 256,540 readers. We are Beagles! Loyal, true, and prone to howling at the slightest noise or provocation. And I have written a song that you must teach to your children. Post the lyrics on your mantle for the day when I come to visit you in your home. I will visit each and every one of you, I promise. Now sing with me:
We are the Beagles!
Long and strong and proud!
We are the Beagles!
Our voices are quite loud!
We will destroy our enemies
Like Krugman, Raines and Dowd
‘Cause we are the Beagles!
Long and strong and proud!
We will multiply our minions
With the strength of our opinions!
For we are the Beagles!
Long and strong and proud!
David Corn on Jerry Falwell:
Falwell is free to be foolish, and CNN is free to exploit his foolishness to achieve that much-sought-after image of fair-and-balanced. But Falwell went further. He claimed, “global warming is a myth.” Sider tried to rebut him, saying, “Our best scientists tell us that, in fact, global warming…” But Falwell interrupted to counter, “No, our best scientists don’t tell us.” He explained: “It was global cooling 30 years ago … and it’s global warming now. And neither of us will be here 100 years from now to know what it is. But I can tell you, our grandchildren will laugh at those who predicted global warming. We’ll be cooler by then, if the Lord hasn’t returned…. The fact is that there is no global warming.”
Falwell was lying. The consensus of the climate-science community is indeed that human-induced global warming is real and that it poses serious dangers. Last year, after much foot-dragging, President Bush acknowledged this. His acceptance came begrudgingly when the National Academy of Sciences released a report that Bush had commissioned. The study decisively noted, “Greenhouse gasses are accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise…. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities…. Human-induced warming and associated sea level rises are expected to continue through the 21st century.”
Does Falwell not consider the NAS to be “our best scientists”? Does he know better ones? Does he know better himself?
Falwell then shifted from deceit to delusion: “The whole [global warming] thing is created to destroy America’s free enterprise system and our economic stability.” That must be why so many radical anti-American individuals and outfits such as the NAS, George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, British Petroleum, William Clay Ford Jr., Kenneth Lay and Enron (yes, indeed!), Colin Powell, and Christine Todd Whitman have acknowledged the threat of global warming. Falwell is a paranoid loon to believe some devilish force cooked up global warming to annihilate America. And he ignores all the other costs of an oil-obsessed economy: air pollution, oil spills (see Spain), a dependence on imports.
* * *
Falwell’s appearance on this segment illustrates a fundamental problem with shouting-head journalism. Cable news networks, adopting the bedrock principal of the adversarial judicial system, often act as if the best way to present information is to serve the viewer two opposing advocates battling it out. But in many instances, this ends up confusing rather than illuminating. Not every fact is debatable, not every opinion equal — or worth equal time. What was the journalistic responsibility of Judy Woodruff, who moderated the Sider-Falwell exchange? Shouldn’t she have informed the audience that there was absolutely no factual basis to what Falwell was saying? Is it her job to provide a platform to someone who can be proven to be a liar?
My friend Steve Perry has some somber thoughts on the Democratic Party:
You could say that times changed and the party changed with them, and you would be right so far as it goes. But it had nothing to do with the sentiments of the people. The party’s right turn was a move conceived from within and designed to make the Democrats a more appealing vehicle for major private and corporate donors. This past election notwithstanding, the strategy has been an enormous success. Cash receipts have grown mightily. The business wing of the party has generated a president who became the first Democrat since FDR to win re-election to the White House, and missed electing his successor by a handful of votes (one vote, really, in the Supreme Court). The business Democrats’ hold on the national party apparatus is complete.
The Reagan/Bush/Clinton years worked many changes in the political culture, and none was more profound than the market revolution. Over the past generation the American public has been relentlessly conditioned to believe that whatever is dictated by the market — in more guileless days, it was simply called the money power — is sensible, reasonable, necessary. Our values and aspirations as a society are now routinely subjected to the flummery of cost/benefit analyses in which it’s understood that the only thing that really matters is cost. Democrats, under cover of “realism,” are every bit as complicit in this shift as Republicans.
And where does it leave us? More than ever, the business of America is business (and its stepchild, war) and the business of Democrats is betrayal.