The Wayback Machine: From Ten Years Ago: July 27-August 2, 2006
- 2006-08-02: Hoisted from Comments: Dan Tompkins Defends Thomas E. Ricks: Dan looks at the gap between what the White House wanted printed and what Ricks wrote in 2004, and concludes that Ricks "was doing a pretty good job." I look at the gap between what Ricks writes in Fiasco and what Ricks wrote in 2004, and conclude that White House pressure did a pretty good job of neutering Ricks: that he (and his Washington Post bosses) knuckled under.... The gap between the very good and very shrill Fiasco and the daily news stories [at the time] is, I think, the most remarkable thing here. The harder question and the better defense--but not one that any defender of Ricks has advanced publicly--is "If he'd written what he knew was going on, they'd have pulled his press pass. Ricks can't function without his press pass."
2006-08-02 Thomas E. Ricks (2006), "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq": Tom Ricks could have done any of a huge number of things to tell the Washington Post's readers that Wolfowitz was--as Ricks knew he was--either lying through his teeth or the most deluded man north of the Picketwire.... Many episodes from Wolfowitz's history--"Team B" in the late 1970s, the strange "Wolfowitz Memorandum" of 1992, Wolfowitz's advocacy in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that the U.S. strike Iraq first, Wolfowitz's role in pushing the idea that Saddam Hussein was linked to 9/11, Wolfowitz's role in pushing the idea that Saddam Hussein was a near-imminent threat to the United States, Wolfowitz's role in pushing the number of troops in the invasion of Iraq far below what the military planners desired, Wolfowitz's role in pushing the idea that allies who could provide lots of Arabic-speaking military police were not needed--would have made a much better, a much fairer, a much more accurate story. Why, Tom, why? Why in the name of the Holy One couldn't you have told us what you knew was going on back in 2003 or 2004?
2006-08-02: Bruce Bartlett vs. the Bush Smear Machine: The smear machine takes aim at Bruce Bartlett. Not a single substantive word contradicting Bartlett's lament at the hideous waste of opportunity that is the apparent collapse of Doha.... What is the charge?... "Remember that Bartlett has books to sell and speeches to give and NYT columns to write--all with the purpose of bashing Bush..." So we see: Not a single criticism of Bartlett's arguments, only an accusation that Bartlett is mercenary. At least they aren't calling him shrill...
2006-08-01: Chickenhawks (and Others) Down (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?): David Sirota outshrills everybody, as he observes that the weapon of choice of the chickenhawk is the Xacto knife.... You know, if I had been sitting in Peter Beinart's chair in June of 2004 and somebody had brought this proposed letter edit to me, I would have said: "We can't do this. This is not moral. This substantially changes the points that the author of the letter was trying to make. We either preserve the author's main points, or we don't print the letter at all." I would have gone to say: "Moreover, this would be stupid. Technology is changing very fast. If I were the author of the letter and if we posted this truncated version, I would be seriously pissed. It's likely that the author's being pissed will end up on the internet someday, in which case crazed persons in bathrobes accessing search engines will then be able to use it to give this magazine a real black eye." But it appears that Peter Beinart did not say this--that nobody at the New Republic said anything like this. The idea that one can misrepresent what is going on without triggering a "But that's not what I said..." or "But that's not what happened..." is to my mind a strange and wondrous one. We see Peter Beinart doing it to John Renehan here. But as I think about it lots of other examples come to mind...
2006-08-01: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (New Republic Edition): Ah. Marty Peretz of the New Republic speaks.... "I want the U.N. to go to Lagos, where no one would go. Fini! The end of the bullshit, and no more Kofi Annan. The United Nations survives only because of big city New York, where hosts and hostesses still imagine it's a catch to have an ambassador from a foreign country to dinner. Provincial New Yorkers. The oil-rich emirates and kingdoms are terribly upset about what's going on in Lebanon. They've put up... less than the Scandinavians... Can they really be that upset? I bet that there were more demonstrations and better-attended demonstrations against the Danish cartoons than for Hezbollah now. And, yes, any demo against Israel is a demo for Hezbollah..." Memo to Jonathan Chait, Franklin Foer, Peter Beinart, Noam Scheiber, Spencer Ackerman, and anybody else working for the New Republic who wants to have a reputation: It's time to bail out.
2006-08-01 Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Washington Post Edition): Daniel Gross is shrill after reading the Washington Post's Peter Baker, for whom the news is that Bush is "focusing on a domestic agenda," but who has absolutely no interest in telling his readers what that domestic agenda might be. I give the Post ten years. The Post brand has negative credibility, and the organization has no value once classified ads go elsewhere...
2016-07-30: FIRST DRAFT: SYLLABUS: Economics 101b Fall 2006
2006-07-30: FIRST DRAFT: Economics 210a Fall-Winter 2006-2007
2006-07-30: Paul Krugman on Joe Lieberman: What was most interesting was Lieberman's response: he counterattacked, claiming to know more about economics than Paul Krugman.... Certainly Lieberman does not believe he needs support from the reality-based community...
2016-07-30: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Michael Abramowitz of the Washington Post Edition): A little more than a week ago, we were sent rolling on the floor in howls of laughter after reading this sentence by Washington Post White House reporter Michael Abramowitz: "It has not helped the neoconservative case, perhaps, that the occupation of Iraq has not gone as smoothly as some had predicted..." with its unmistakeable echoes of the Emperor Hirohito's surrender broadcast at the end of World War II.... A number of Washington Post staffers told me that they thought Abramowitz intended his sentence to be read straight. But I couldn't quite believe it. So I wrote to Abramowitz and asked him whether the echoes of Hirohito were intentional, and he was being snarky. He doesn't dare to reply...
2006-07-28: The Colbert Report: Stephen Colbert is a national treasure.... Colbert says: "I asked Congressman Lyn Westmoreland who proposed requiring the display of the ten commandments in the House and Senate chambers if he could name the ten commandments. What I should have asked him according to "Today" and "Good Morning America" was this: "(1) Is tanning addictive? (2) How long did it take you to grow that beard? (3) Do you really need to wait a half hour after you eat to go swimming?"
2006-07-27: Favorite Weblogs: My current top 20 weblogs by attention, according to NetNewsWire: Political Animal... Talking Points Memo... Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal... Economist's View... Crooked Timber... Marginal Revolution... MaxSpeak, You Listen!... TPMCafe... Greg Mankiw's Blog:... Boing Boing Blog... The Washington Note... Infectious Greed... Discourse.net... NYT > Business... Daniel Gross... TPMCafe... Brad Setser's Web Log... Daniel W. Drezner... Washington Wire... Making Light...
2006-07-27: Obsidian Wings: Asymmetric Warfare and Jus in Bello: Sebastian Holsclaw successfully takes on Chris Bertram, and clarifies thought in an excellent post on jus in bello.... I, too, found Chris Bertram's argument to be bizarrely off-center, particularly the argument that jus in bello "looks crazy".... Recall that "melting into the civilian population" and "adopting unconventional tactics" help "armed resistance to... the well-equipped and powerful" only if the well-equipped and powerful are themselves followers of jus in bello. If you eliminate jus in bello, then the well-equipped and powerful use the well-tried strategy of solitudinem faciunt et pacem appellant. To eliminate jus in bello is bad for the guerrillas, and is very bad for the people caught in the crossfire they purport to be fighting "for." Can we say that U.S. aid and support to those violating jus in bello in their fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s wound up doing the people of Afghanistan a lick of good? Wouldn't it have been better to cool down the situation, let the Afghan Communist Party build roads and schools and powerplants, and to have waited for Gorbachev?
2006-07-27: Hoisted from Comments: On Mike Allen, Tom Ricks, Journamalism, Rumsfeld, TipFids, and Other Topics: An anonymous lurker who works in a remarkably senior position , in email: "Brad-- Did you see Tom Ricks's response, in his Washington Post chat, to the gnawing criticism of the weblogs? It was quite a defense of 'he said, she said' journalism.... Ricks is quite alarmed, or he would be more coherent. Back when he was writing softball profiles of Paul Wolfowitz for the front page of the Washington Post December 23, 2003 Style section, it never crossed his mind that in two and a half years there would be angry people in bathrobes with computers accessing his clippings file and calling for him to explain himself. It would never have crossed his mind in a million years that anybody would ever see a highly complimentary profile of a Deputy Defense Secretary on the front of a soft-news section as a violation of journalistic ethics, or of duty to readers. Read through the first chapters of Fiasco again. You will find Ricks complaining that the media fell down in the run-up to the war, that the media was incapable of finding speakers putting forth an alternative point of view to the Bush administration, that it was Congress's fault for not having prominent Doves willing to make strong quotable statements. "The Silence of the Lambs" is the way he puts it. Yet the opposition to Bush's war plans contained Scowcroft, Baker, Zinni, Schwarzkopf, the leaders and high officials of all our major allies.... (As soon as the war started, publications like the National Journal had no trouble finding sources to say that Rumsfeld's interference with force planning and logistics had the potential to cause great trouble. Inside-baseball sentences like 'A lot of people around here can get very emotional talking about the lack of a TipFid for this operation' carry a very powerful message for those who think about logistics. And it was because of Rumsfeld's misunderstanding of modern war that the campaign required V Corps to resort to such stopgaps as pulling the 101 Air Assault Division back from the spearhead to use as LOC troops.)... The media fell down because elite reporters like Ricks decided to go along with Cheney, Rumsfeld, and company, even though they believed they were highly ideological and disconnected from reality--good inside the Pentagon and in the AEI conference rooms, but noplace else. They didn't want to elevate the critics, because they thought that would have meant 'taking sides', and taking sides against the USA."
2006-07-27: The History of the Shrill: I guess it started, I think, with that extremely strange and not-very-analytical Svengali of the Bush Social Security reform plan, Peter Ferrara, who wrote back in 2001 about "the fierce, shrill, and unreasoned denunciations of allowing workers the freedom to choose a personal-account option for Social Security may impress the gullible... and denounced ..the highly irascible Paul Krugman..." That was, I think, the start of a very peculiar meme: a piling-on of critics of Bush--especially of Paul Krugman--whose sole criticism was that he was "shrill." The critique was neither that he was a bad economist, nor that his accusations that the Bush administration was lying about a whole bunch of stuff were incorrect (indeed, one of Paul's most vicious critics, Andrew Sullivan, gloried in the fact that Bush was lying about his tax cut. See http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/05/yes_andrew_sull.html). So if you wanted to attack Krugman, but could not attack him because his analytics were right, and could not attack him because his accusations of Bush administration dishonesty were correct, what can you do? Well, a bunch of right-wingers led, IIRC, by Mickey Kaus and Andrew Sullivan found a way...
2006-07-27: Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?: Daniel Gross points out how sad it is that the Washington Post's Peter Baker has lost his mind--or perhaps never had a mind at all: how true that is!... The most illuminating thing that one of Peter Baker's peers has said to me to explain stories like this is: "We really have to write these sort of things to maintain access. But we don't believe them. And everybody serious reading our newspaper knows we don't believe them." Seems to me that somebody needs to have a talk with Peter Baker about the importance of not printing stuff that is false, for the only asset the Washington Post might ever have would be credibility as a news source...
http://www.typepad.com/site/blogs/6a00e551f08003883400e551f080068834/posts/page/1470/
