BY DAN
KENNEDY
Notes and observations on
the press, politics, culture, technology, and more. To sign up for
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For bio, published work, and links to other blogs, visit
www.dankennedy.net.
For information on Dan Kennedy's book, Little People: Learning to
See the World Through My Daughter's Eyes (Rodale, October 2003),
click
here.
Friday, March 07, 2003
Bush and the Big Guy,
cont'd. Suddenly, the Bush-and-God punditry is coming fast and
furious. Two more contributions:
1. Michelle
Cottle, writing on the
New Republic's website (this piece seems to be available to
everyone, not just subscribers), notes: "Even for those who accept
the basic premise of a proactive Almighty Father, it's probably
unsettling to think that W. is charging into battle with the blind
confidence that God will of course help him emerge victorious -- just
like he helped Bush kick the hooch and become a better
father."
2. I'm a little behind the curve on
this one, but University of Virginia political scientist
James
Ceasar, writing in last
week's Weekly Standard, observes approvingly that Bush is
something of a throwback to Lincoln, who invoked the "providence of
God" in his second inaugural address.
posted at 9:11 PM |
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Flat and flat-footed. So how
did George W. Bush do at his televised news conference last night? To
this consumer (after all, the president was selling, hoping we'll
buy; we're all consumers now, citizenship being so
20th-century), he was okay, sort of, neither soaring to the heights
nor making a blithering idiot of himself.
On WBUR Radio (90.9 FM), I heard
the Atlantic Monthly's Jack Beatty tell the On Point
audience that Bush had "fallen below the moment" -- I think that was
his phrase, though I was in my car and not taking notes -- persuading
absolutely no one who has not yet been persuaded, especially among
the European allies. Beatty was right.
A few random
observations.
-- About 20 minutes into it, I was
bored and distracted, and felt guilty for not focusing more closely
on what was, after all, a momentous discussion of war and peace. So I
was relieved to read Tom
Shales in this morning's
Washington Post, who asked -- under the headline "Bush's
Wake-Up Call Was a Snooze Alarm" -- "Have ever a people been led more
listlessly into war?" In the New York Times, Elisabeth
Bumiller pussyfooted around
the same topic, calling Bush's demeanor "extraordinarily tranquil."
So it wasn't just me.
-- Even conservative commentator
David
Brooks, a cofounder (with
Weekly Standard editor William Kristol) of the John
McCain-inspired "national greatness" school of conservatism, is
worried about how "bold" Bush's go-it-alone approach is. In a piece
for the Standard's website, Brooks writes:
Maybe Bush thinks that by
essentially threatening the diplomatic equivalent of the doomsday
scenario, he can induce Russia, China, and France to abstain,
rather than veto the resolution. But it is an incredible gamble.
It certainly does nothing to help Tony Blair, who has been trying
to somehow finesse things at the United Nations.
-- In Slate,
William
Saletan observes that in
trading Bill Clinton for Bush, we traded ambiguity for certainty --
something that sounds good in the abstract, but that doesn't always
play well in the real world. Saletan observes:
[S]ometimes,
things aren't black and white. Sometimes they're gray. When the
governments of France, China, or Mexico don't see things your way,
you have to start the process of persuasion by understanding where
they're coming from. That's where Clinton was at his best and Bush
is at his worst. Four times at his press conference, Bush was
asked why other countries weren't seeing things our way. Four
times, he had no idea.
-- In the Boston Globe,
John
Aloysius Farrell took note
of Bush's frequent references to 9/11. Indeed, Bush intoned
"September eleventh, two thousand and one" so many times last night
that it began to take on the aspect of a chant. But it came across as
either disingenuous (polls show that an enormous percentage of
Americans believe -- wrongly -- that there is evidence showing Iraq
was involved in 9/11) or desperate, with the president hoping that
the memory of that horror will impel Americans to give him a free
pass to do whatever he wants to dislodge Saddam Hussein.
This was only Bush's second
prime-time news conference since assuming office more than two years
ago. If last night was any indication, we haven't been missing
much.
posted at 8:07 AM |
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Your Shribman fix. Former
Boston Globe Washington-bureau chief David Shribman, now the
top editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is writing a
political column called "My Point." This week, he made it to his old
stomping grounds in New Hampshire in order to size up the Democratic
field. He writes:
The size of the field may
present the Democrats with difficulty, but it also stands as a
symbol of their opportunity: Many Democrats believe that the
president is vulnerable and that, as [John] Kerry put it
in a conversation the other day, "suddenly this is a nomination
worth having."
Click
here if you thought
Shribman's Tuesday column was one of the best things in the
Globe.
posted at 8:06 AM |
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Thursday, March 06, 2003
More on Bush and religion.
It won't be online for a few weeks, if ever. But National
Review's Richard Brookhiser offers a worthwhile discussion of
George W. Bush's religious views in the April issue of the
Atlantic Monthly. Bush's relationship with "Providence," as
Brookhiser puts it -- even as he notes that Bush himself would
probably regard that as "too indefinite a word, smacking of the
gentlemanly theological evasions of the Anglo-American Enlightenment"
-- is laid out in a short section of Brookhiser's long and
exceedingly kind analysis of the president's leadership
skills.
Similar to Howard Fineman and
Martin Marty in the current Newsweek, Brookhiser finds Bush's
religiosity to be both a source of strength and a potential danger,
although Brookhiser himself does not use that word. He
writes:
Practically, Bush's faith
means that he does not tolerate, or even recognize, ambiguity:
there is an all-knowing God who decrees certain behaviors, and
leaders must obey.
If I say I find that frightening,
does that make me a bigot?
By the way, Brookhiser offers the
additional insight that Bush's beliefs help explain his close
relationship with Tony Blair, a "devout Anglican." Maybe I should
have known that, but I didn't.
posted at 7:50 AM |
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Media Channel, over and out?
The Media
Channel, "News Dissector"
Danny Schechter's three year old international media-watch website,
has gone on a "temporary hiatus" after running into a funding crisis.
I write about the project's money problems, as well as Schechter's
hopes of resolving the current difficulties, in this
week's Phoenix.
posted at 7:50 AM |
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Up in smoke. UMass Boston
has suspended Michael Rhys, editor-in-chief of the Mass Media,
the student newspaper, on a pot-smoking
allegation. Needless to
say, this is idiotic, but typical of the puritanical atmosphere that
prevails in college campuses today.
The Mass Media's report on
the suspension makes a compelling case that the administration
doesn't even have any authority over the paper. But that didn't stop
the just-say-no crowd from making an example out of Rhys.
Needless to say, Rhys's one-month
suspension is a far heavier punishment than anything UMass president
Bill Bulger received when he refused to testify before a
congressional committee last year. On that occasion, the university
board all but nominated him for a Nobel Prize.
posted at 7:49 AM |
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Erin not go Kerry. Not sure
what to make about this front-page Boston Globe story, by
Frank Phillips and Brian Mooney, suggesting that John Kerry has gone
out of his way to obfuscate
his non-Irish roots. But my
guess is that, though this is surely an interesting wrinkle, it will
be treated far more seriously than it deserves to be. Also in today's
Globe, Alex Beam catches up with Kerry's
ex-wife, Julia Thorne. Gee,
isn't Kerry talking about, you know, issues and stuff?
posted at 7:49 AM |
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Wednesday, March 05, 2003
No more Mr. Nice Guy. This
Dallas Observer interview with Texas Rangers outfielder
Carl
Everett is unbelievable.
Except that Red Sox fans will believe it. Wow.
posted at 3:41 PM |
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Good lord. Newsweek's
Howard Fineman has a detailed, insightful, and respectful piece this
week on George
W. Bush's deep religious beliefs,
which inform everything from his domestic agenda to his views on the
war against terrorism. The article's value is that it explains the
roots of Bush's spiritual fervor, but it also delves into a deeper
concern: that Bush's particular brand of religiosity does not lend
itself particularly well to debate or even to agonized reflection.
Fineman writes:
The president is known to
welcome questions about faith that staffers sometimes have the
nerve to share with him. But he's not the kind to initiate
granular debates about theology. Would Iraq be a "just war" in
Christian terms, as laid out by Augustine in the fourth century
and amplified by Aquinas, Luther and others? Bush has satisfied
himself that it would be -- indeed, it seems he did so many months
ago. But he didn't do it by combing through texts or presiding
over a disputation. He decided that Saddam was evil, and
everything flowed from that.
An accompanying piece by the
liberal theologian Martin Marty is bluntly titled "The
Sin of Pride." Marty
worries that a president who believes that God's on his side may lack
the judgment and humility to take into account the concerns of others
-- especially in the crisis over Iraq.
Despite Bush's frequent references
to Islam as a "religion of peace," Marty notes that Bush's one-time
reference to the war against terrorism as a "crusade" has not been
forgotten in the Muslim world. The support Bush receives from
evangelical Christians who denounce Islam -- such as the preacher
Franklin Graham, for instance -- hasn't been overlooked,
either.
Marty writes:
After September 11 and the
president's decision to attack Iraq, the talk that other nations
found mildly amusing or merely arrogant has taken on international
and historical significance. It rouses many Americans to an
uncertain cause and raises antagonism among millions elsewhere.
Few doubt that Bush is sincere in his faith, a worthy virtue when
he alone must decide whether to lead 270 million people into war,
possibly killing thousands of others. The problem isn't with
Bush's sincerity, but with his evident conviction that he's doing
God's will.
For millions of Americans, of
course, Bush's brand of Christianity is the best thing about him.
Expressing any doubts about his religion is dangerous, since it's
sure to raise cries of religious bigotry. Newsweek deserves
credit for asking some tough questions about how religion and
government may be intersecting in ways that we will later come to
regret.
posted at 8:01 AM |
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A crisis of credibility. As
he usually does, New York Times columnist Thomas
Friedman gets it exactly
right today. Despite being generally supportive of a strike against
Iraq, Friedman observes that George W. Bush has placed the country in
a painful dilemma: to back down now without forcing out Saddam
Hussein would be a huge blow to US credibility. Yet, of course, it is
Bush himself who placed us in that position in the first place.
Writes Friedman:
For Mr. Bush and for the
U.S., the costs of leaving Saddam in place -- having made
Washington blink and abandon its allies in the region -- would be
enormous. I suspect that when the small group of war hawks
persuaded Mr. Bush to begin a huge troop buildup in the gulf back
in July -- without consulting Congress or the country -- they knew
that it would create a situation where the U.S. could never back
down without huge costs.
Of course, the counterargument is
that forcing Bush to back down would not damage US credibility --
rather, it would damage his credibility.
A military strike against Iraq may
yet prove necessary, provided Bush can line up a respectable
cross-section of international support. But it's hard not resent his
strategy of treating the American public with the same level of
contempt and disrespect that he normally reserves for, say, the
Turkish parliament.
posted at 8:01 AM |
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A blow to Bulger. UMass
president Bill Bulger's ace-in-the-hole has been that he's resented
not for anything he's done personally but, rather, for the fact that
his brother is a vicious killer. Nearly everyone has given Bulger
high marks for the way he's run UMass, if not for the $309,000 salary
that he pays himself.
Thus Governor Mitt Romney's bid to
do away with Bulger's job got a big boost this morning when Boston
Herald columnist Cosmo
Macero reported on a
conflict of interest involving an energy company on whose board
Bulger sits that is "competing" for a big-bucks contract at UMass
Lowell. Good stuff.
posted at 8:01 AM |
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Shading the truth, and then
some. It is a mystery why Governor Mitt Romney's sterling
character is continually cited as one of his principal attributes. No
doubt he's nice to his family, but even by political standards his
rhetoric is disingenuous. From his state of residency to the state of
his Medicaid proposal, from the harshness of his budget cuts to the
breadth of his tax -- whoops, fee -- hikes, Romney's instinct is
always to fudge, obfuscate, and sometimes tell what might be
charitably called alternative versions of the truth.
Today, the Boston Globe's
Scot
Lehigh and the Boston
Herald's Tom
Keane both nail him for it.
Romney should be careful: neither Lehigh nor Keane could be described
as being among the usual anti-Romney suspects.
posted at 8:00 AM |
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Tuesday, March 04, 2003
An ugly battle over gay
rights. It's barely registered on the media radar screen in
Boston -- I learned about it via a squib in this morning's
Globe -- but New Hampshire is in the midst of a huge political
battle over gay rights. The state's new Republican governor, Craig
Benson, has nominated to the Human Rights Commission a reactionary
former state legislator who has made hostility to lesbians and gay
men a cornerstone of his public persona.
This is a double tragedy, not just
because of the specific ugliness of the situation, but because as
recently as the late 1990s it seemed that New Hampshire was, at long
last, leaving behind its dubious past -- a legacy that includes being
the last state in the country to approve a holiday celebrating the
Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday (see timeline
that accompanies this article).
The current controversy involves a
former Republican state representative named Gary Daniels, who in
1997 was a vocal opponent of a law banning discrimination against
gays and lesbians -- the very law Benson now wants him to help
enforce. Here's what Daniels reportedly said at the time, according
to an
editorial opposing his nomination
in last Wednesday's Concord Monitor: "In the case of race,
color or creed, you don't have any control over that, and those are
constitutional." To complete the so-called thought, here's what he
said last week: "Sexual discrimination is not a constitutional right,
and that is really the big difference."
As the Monitor observes,
"Former state representative Gary Daniels leaves no one in doubt
about where he stands on the issue of civil rights for gays and
lesbians. The Milford Republican doesn't believe they
exist."
A perusal of the statewide
Manchester Union Leader's website this morning did not turn up
any editorials on the Daniels nomination. However, the paper ran a
story yesterday reporting that Daniels
believes his views have been
misrepresented. "I don't
think anybody should be discriminated against, and I don't feel that
I discriminated against anybody. This debate was about policy, not
people," Daniels was quoted as saying. "I don't believe in
discrimination. I opposed the bill because I thought the
discrimination statutes were sufficient."
Yet the Union Leader dug up
a transcript of Daniels's remarks from 1997 that leaves little doubt
as to what his views are. Here's what Daniels said about the
civil-rights bill, HB421, which became law despite his "no"
vote:
This bill seeks to raise
the protection of homosexual and bisexual behavior to the same
constitutional level as race, color, creed, age and sex,
characteristics over which we have no control. Simply put, it
seeks to disrupt the natural order of things.
If we are truly to fix the
problems that we profess that we are here to resolve, we need to
start looking at the actions we take and their impact upon the
problems yet to be resolved. The new set of ideas proposed by
HB421 creates a new set of problems, disruptions that I don't
believe are acceptable or wanted in today's society.
Misrepresented? I don't think
so.
What was Governor Benson thinking?
Who knows? But this much is sure. One of the unfortunate facts of
life of the modern Republican Party is that its leaders must
occasionally placate its most retrograde elements. In Trent Lott's
case, it was Mississippi's irredentist racists. In Benson's case, it
is reactionary moralists.
In this morning's New York
Times, columnist Nicholas
Kristof has an insightful
column on the utter contempt that the mainstream media show toward
evangelical and born-again Christians -- a group that comprises
nearly half the country.
Trouble is, the tolerance that
Kristof urges, while laudable, will never be returned. For liberals,
tolerance and acceptance are paramount values that should be extended
to religious conservatives just as they are to other groups. For
religious conservatives, though, tolerance is the enemy.
Ultimately there is no
reconciliation possible. What Kristof argues for is respect rather
than the "sneering tone" that many secular people show toward
evangelicals. That's fine. In New Hampshire, the executive council
should reject the Daniels nomination forthwith, as reports suggest it
already has the votes to do.
Respectfully, of course.
posted at 8:00 AM |
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Taking it back. Boston
Globe columnist Joan Vennochi this morning admits
the obvious: that she
should not have compared Governor Mitt Romney's higher-education
proposal to the
fatal nightclub fire in
West Warwick, Rhode Island.
posted at 8:00 AM |
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The blue wall. Good column
today by the Boston Herald's Margery Egan on the
intimidation tactics used
by police unions to prevent any reform of the treasury-sapping Quinn
bill.
posted at 7:59 AM |
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Monday, March 03, 2003
I have returned. Having
finished my book on dwarfism, I am back at the Phoenix as of
this morning. I should have my screwed-up voice-mail message
straightened out by the end of the day, if not earlier. And no, I'm
not going to finish this item without giving myself a free plug.
Little People: Learning to See the World Through My Daughter's
Eyes will be published by Rodale this fall.
posted at 10:20 AM |
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This is why they're called
"yuppie scum." Meet Jay Kuhlow. According to a piece by
Donovan
Slack in this morning's
Boston Globe, Kuhlow, 27, grew up in the suburbs of Florida
and works at a technology company in Woburn. And, oh yes, he's found
a delightful little place to live in the North End. Slack is hazy on
the details, but I'd be willing to bet that it's a high-priced condo
carved out of the remains of what used to be an affordable apartment
building.
Somehow Kuhlow got named to the
North End's neighborhood council. And would you like to know what
cause he has embraced? Denying his neighbors the right to buy their
groceries at a supermarket! Kuhlow's battle cry: No chains.
"We don't need it," he told Slack. "We need our pastas, our sauces, a
couple of items here and there. We need the historic character of our
neighborhood."
Kuhlow's crusade is being opposed
by a lot of elderly neighbors, many of them no doubt lifelong
residents of the North End, who want the convenience and savings of
being able to shop at a supermarket. But, damn it, Kuhlow wants to
preserve the character of his neighborhood. "It feels like
I've found my own environment," Kuhlow said. Isn't that
special.
Of course, there are several large
supermarkets within a 10-minute drive of Woburn, any one of which
Kuhlow could easily stop at on his way home. Maybe he doesn't, but
he's got the choice. His elderly neighbors, many of them living on
the sort of fixed incomes that would make Kuhlow's head spin, deserve
the same choice, don't you think?
posted at 8:29 AM |
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Getting real about Romney's
reforms. The Massachusetts Taxpayers Foundation -- perhaps the
most objective source of information about the state budget -- has
posted its analysis of Governor Mitt Romney's proposed 2004 budget on
its website. The
verdict: a mixed bag.
Though the MFT lauds many of
Romney's reform initiatives, it continues:
It is unfortunate that
this bold restructuring plan has been undercut by overstated
claims about its short-term fiscal benefits. While the budget has
been billed as eliminating $2 billion in "waste, inefficiency, and
mismanagement," more than $1 billion of that total reflects new
taxes, fees and other revenue, and another $400 million derives
from one-time fiscal gimmicks.
In addition, the MFT finds that the
savings Romney proposes to generate through budget cuts come mainly
at the expense of real programs that fill real needs, such as local
aid and health care, and not from cracking down on patronage
abuses.
posted at 8:29 AM |
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Listening in and twisting arms.
Reader AQ passes along a link to this report in yesterday's
London Observer charging the US with conducting a
surveillance
campaign aimed at digging
up information that could be used to pressure members of the UN
Security Council into voting with the White House on Iraq.
The article doesn't quite deliver
on the promise of the hyperventilating lead, which refers to "a
secret 'dirty tricks' campaign." Nevertheless, the allegations of
telephone and e-mail intercepts are serious indeed, and are backed up
by a memorandum that reportedly was written by a National Security
Agency official.
National-security adviser
Condoleezza Rice gets dragged into this as well.
Follow-up, anyone?
posted at 8:28 AM |
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Bidding farewell to the
blogosphere at One Herald Square. Boston Herald columnist
and fellow blogger Cosmo
Macero writes this morning
that Herald publisher Pat Purcell is moving to a
pay-as-you-go
model if you want to read
some of the paper's marquee columnists online -- including
Macero.
I'm sympathetic. Free content is a
backbreaking burden for daily newspapers -- especially a second read
such as the Herald, many of whose readers may be looking for
just two or three features. But this isn't going to work.
There may come a time when paying
for online content will seem as natural as buying newspaper and
magazine subscriptions. But until that day comes, anyone who tries to
break from the pack and test the market is only going to get
burned.
And from a selfish point of view,
it's going to become nearly impossible for bloggers who take the
Herald seriously, such as Jay
Fitzgerald and me, to link
to the paper's content.
posted at 8:27 AM |
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With a clove of garlic and a
wooden stake. New York Times columnist William
Safire today interviews the
dead. Well, at least the guy will never claim he'd been
misquoted.
posted at 8:26 AM |
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Sunday, March 02, 2003
Iraq and disarmament, round
two. Two follow-ups to Friday's
item on that
Newsweek report over whether Iraq had rid itself of chemical
and biological weapons as of 1995:
- The Boston
Globe reported
yesterday that even if Saddam Hussein's very late son-in-law
Hussein Kamel was telling the truth, UN and CIA officials believe
Saddam Hussein has had more than enough time since then to build
more weapons. Former UN weapons inspector Jonathan Tucker told the
Globe's John Donnelly, "If true, and that's a big if, it
would simply mean that Iraq destroyed its pre-'91 stocks, and had
retained the ability to reconstitute them at any time. We don't
know what they did after 1995, and it's very possible when the
inspectors were out of the country, they reconstituted some of
their stocks.''
- Reader CC upbraids me for
writing that UN weapons inspectors were "kicked out" of Iraq in
1998. He writes: "The UN withdrew them. You may consider this
splitting hairs, but the phrase 'kicked out' has implications that
are overblown." CC is correct. As this CNN.com
story from 1998 makes
clear, the weapons inspectors left Iraq voluntarily to protect
themselves from US military strikes after Saddam had refused to
allow them to do their work.
posted at 10:11 AM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
