Smythe's World

Today was the long-awaited debut of the "liberal" talk radio network, Air America. For the most part, aside from some annoying opening-day glitches, it isn't bad, but I don't see Limbaugh, Hannity, et al., shaking in their boots. One of the problems is the lack of experienced talk radio hosts on the network; much of the output so far has seemed like Pacifica Lite, with an especially irritating tendency of complaining about stories that aren't being covered by the Establishment Media for reasons of bias or expediency. It may be true, but I'm a pessimist by nature; the last thing I want to listen to on the way to court is how the whole world is conspiring to silence me. The new network does promise to be blog-friendly, though, with Atrios earning major props for his stint as a guest on the evening show. You can listen to the live feed on the Air America website, or the west coast feed (from Portland) three hours later.

After a long hiatus, Neal Pollack has returned, chastened but unbowed:

Thank goodness that I have this forum in which I can address those of you who are sitting in front of your computers, or who have programmed updates to this website directly into your cell phones. Your government failed you. Those entrusted with providing you the best in fact-based Web opinion failed you. And I failed you. I tried hard, but that doesn’t matter, because I failed. For that failure I would ask, once I’ve explained to you why I stopped blogging, for your understanding and your forgiveness.

Allah akbar.

Richard Clarke: the public speaks !!

March Madness nearly being complete, and the Final Four/Frozen Four set, I am now ready to return to blogging forthwith. Not that I wouldn't have sacrificed a few minutes during the Tournaments if events had warranted, but the major story (Richard Clarke) was being addressed by voices more eloquent than mine, and the Presidential campaign is currently in stasis: the Democrats, having jumped out to a quick early lead, is resting its big guy, while the Republicans, with a big war chest and with the commercial airwaves to itself, is struggling to put some space between the candidates before the summer. The 9-11 Commission has served to thwart the efforts by the President to build a commanding lead, and the closer this race remains going into the Democratic Convention, the more likely it is Kerry will pull away at the end, when the candidates will be on relatively equal footing, in terms of both money and stature.

For the second time in as many months, the White House has seemed inept in dealing with a frontal assault on its competence. Last month, it was the National Guard story that they managed to turn from a minor hiccup into a major embarrasment; now, it's their reaction to Richard Clarke's book and testimony before the 9-11 Commission. As any number of commentators have pointed out, Clarke's revelations are nothing new. Clarke made for a compelling witness last week, telling the family members of the 9/11 dead that he had failed them (btw, when was the last time anyone can recall a politician using the active tense when discussing his mistake?), but Kerry's campaign manager must have woke up the next morning with some serious wood after seeing the GOP's inept response. Some free advice to Karl Rove, Bill Frist, et al: never even hint that your adversaries aren't telling the truth, since a) it only reminds people how mendacious you guys are, and b) you never seem to be able to deliver the goods. Also, fire Condi Rice. It's never a good thing when the whole world is laughing at you.

Law of Unintended Consequences: An Israeli writer believes that the big winner in the Israeli take-out of Sheik Yassin last week will be Hamas, the group Sharon intended to destroy. If there is any world leader who is less competent than George Bush in dealing with terrorism, it's Arik the Whale. [link via Tom Paine]

Any doubt that George Bush is unfit to hold the office of President was resolved this week, in the aftermath of the Richard Clarke revelations. His patent inability to admit error would be the envy of any fifteenth century papist. At some point, one would hope that a more rational head in the Administration would say to His Highness that having his flacks (or as one cartoonist says, his "flying attack monkeys") use every charge in the books to assasinate the character of his critics is not only immoral, but politically counterproductive as well. I suppose that's what you get for having a President who sees himself as God's Righteous General. As William Saleton writes in Slate this morning:

It's funny, in retrospect, that Bush ran for president as a uniter. To unite a country, you have to acknowledge and reconcile differences. Bush doesn't work toward unity; he assumes it. He doesn't reconcile differences; he denies them. It's his tax cut or nothing. It's his homeland security bill or nothing. It's his terrorism policy or nothing. If you're playing politics, this is smart strategy. But if you're trying to help the country, it's foolish. The odds are that 50 percent of the other party's ideas are right. By ruling them out, you start your presidency 50 percent wrong.

Some of the resulting mistakes may be inconsequential. Some may cost 3,000 lives. Some may cost 2 million jobs. "If the Democratic policies had been pursued over the last two or three years … we would not have had the kind of job growth we've had," Cheney bragged three weeks ago. That's the way this administration thinks: We do things differently. But being different doesn't guarantee you a better result—just a different one.

Taken together with Mr. Clarke's testimony this afternoon before the 9/11 Commission, in which he did something that Bush, Rumsfeld, Rice, et al., have refused to do, which is take responsibility, it is a damning portrait.

Every now and then I wonder how it is that the GOP has proven utterly incapable of receiving significant support from outside its white male base, and then I read a blogpost like this, and the answer becomes obvious. A white reporter joking that a team in the NCAA Tournament will lose a game because it has "too many white players" is not the same thing as a white pundit with a history of racial bigotry saying that a black quarterback who has taken his team to three consecutive conference championships is overrated because he is black.

Moreover, the comparison made between basketball and NASCAR is utterly bogus. Black racers were shut out of auto racing by the bylaws of the sport, which limited participation to members of the Caucasian race; today, that earlier exclusion means that there is less interest in NASCAR, both as a career objective for potential black participants and as a pastime to follow on the weekends. Either formally (as in golf) or informally, the same was true in almost every other sport. The fact that black athletes were able to take part in some college football and basketball programs north of the Mason-Dixon Line before the Jackie Robinson Era gave those sports added cache with African Americans. White players have never been shut out of basketball because of skin color or racial prejudice, no more than they've been shut out of football, baseball or hockey.

In case you were wondering, Joanna Kerns (TV's "Maggie Seaver" from Growing Pains) has sold her home in Brentwood. According to the LA Times, which broke the story Sunday, she intends to build a new house in the area, no doubt with the $3.5 million she got from the sale of her three bedroom, three and a half bathroom mansion. No word on the lucky sap who can now boast to friend and stranger alike that he owns the old "Joanna Kerns Estate".

The last word on Spain:

"Spanish voters weren't intimidated by the terrorist bombings — they turned on a ruling party they didn't trust. When the government rushed to blame the wrong people for the attack, tried to suppress growing evidence to the contrary and used its control over state television and radio both to push its false accusation and to play down antigovernment protests, it reminded people of the broader lies about the war.

By voting for a new government, in other words, the Spaniards were enforcing the accountability that is the essence of democracy. But in the world according to Mr. Bush's supporters, anyone who demands accountability is on the side of the evildoers. According to Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House, the Spanish people "had a huge terrorist attack within their country and they chose to change their government and to, in a sense, appease terrorists."

So there you have it. A country's ruling party leads the nation into a war fought on false pretenses, fails to protect the nation from terrorists and engages in a cover-up when a terrorist attack does occur. But its electoral defeat isn't democracy at work; it's a victory for the terrorists."

--Paul Krugman

Occam's Mach3: One can make all the arguments you can trying to explain the latest polls that Kerry has lost his mojo, that Bush's ad-attacks are working, that Kerry as a campaigner has fundamental weaknesses, and you can boil them all down and you still wouldn't have enough crack left to get a buzz. The amount Kerry has lost in the polls to Bush is almost exactly the same as the amount Ralph Nader gets now that he is included in the horse race. Kerry is in trouble only if you believe that Nader is going to double his 2000 vote, which the latest polls all indicate.

There will be even less output than usual for the next few days, due to a bad case of Tournament Flu that I've come down with (btw, any who would like to take part in my brackets pool, just drop me a line), as well as a truckload of legal work that has to get done.

Kevin "Sherlock Holmes" Drum, whose investigative skills were praised in this month's Vanity Fair by James Wolcott, has a good analytic post on the Spanish election. He focuses on the feeling of betrayal by the electorate in the days immediately after last week's atrocities, towards a government that seemed more interested in using the bombings to score domestic political points, rather than showing that the Spaniards are Tapas-Eating Surrender Monkeys and the like. Those who have characterized yesterday's vote as being objectively pro-terrorist, or as evidence of moral cowardice by the electorate, have lost almost all credibility at this point.

The use of the "war" analogy really obscures the fact that most people don't simply fear terrorist attacks as something that might happen to their country, but as something that might happen to themselves. The Bush Administration often ridicules its critics as people who believe that terrorism should be treated as a "law and order" issue, fought with subpoenas rather than bullets, with laws rather than smart bombs. In over-simplifying the matter, they risk losing the American people by over-emphasizing the military aspect of this fight, while ignoring the crime prevention aspect. Some terrorists are state-sponsored, and in those cases we should treat the nations that support them as hostile, but most aren't, or are sponsored only tenuously. In those cases, the only way to fight back, and win, is to use all the weapons at our disposal. And yes, those weapons include the subpoena, the levy, and the arrest warrant, where the nefarious dealings of the underworld are exposed to the light of day. After all, we didn't crush the Mafia by nuking Sicily.

In that respect, the neo-conservatives are starting to resemble the liberal establishment of the '60's, which believed that problems such as crime were social disorders which would go away once the "War on Poverty" succeeded, while not taking seriously the public's desire to feel safe walking the streets. What has happened in Spain the last two days should be a wake-up call: the people will show no loyalty to a government that seems ineffectual when it comes to protecting the people it serves. We don't want crusades; we're not going to wait until you reshape the Middle East. We want the problem stopped. Now.

The people of Spain get serious about taking the fight to the terrorists, bouncing the government that supported Bush's diversionary vendetta. Any opponent of the President has to be chilled by the result; what happened last week is a taste of what we might get just before the next election, and the impact that might have is far more important than the results of any partisan dispute.

Eric Alterman, co-author of the excellent The Book on Bush, will be in L.A. this weekend, signing books at the Midnight Special in Santa Monica this Sunday, and no doubt giving advice on filling out brackets for next week. His website, which is less a blog so much as a daily column, does an excellent job spotlighting less-famous writing talent (in the guise of a "Correspondents Section"), which is often more entertaining than the column itself. To wit, check out yesterday's tribute to the "A.J. Soprano of politics".

An unsubtle example of "working the ref": John Ellis, the man who mau-mau'ed the networks into prematurely calling Florida for Bush in 2000 (and a cousin of the President, to boot), attacks the lib'rul media for going "easy" on John Kerry. Considering the hatchet jobs the press gave to President Clinton for eight years, and the atrocious job they did on Al Gore four years ago, Bush's supporters have little to complain about this time. Ellis complains:

Republicans are amazed by the disparity in the news coverage of Senator Kerry and President Bush. As well they might be. Kerry's triple back-flips on virtually every issue are "explained" in The New York Times and The Washington Post as the products of a "nuanced" mind at work. President Bush's straightforward assertions are portrayed as the lies of an ill-advised moron. What's going on here?

What's going on is that some members of the media take their responsibility to be impartial seriously. When the Bush campaign attempted to use the flip-flop issue to attack Kerry, a few reporters actually looked at the record and found that the attacks were weak and deceptive. And like the rest of the country, members of the news media no longer take a word the President says at face value; the fact that he can lie with a straight face doesn't carry him as far as it used to. Ellis later complains that the media largely shares a personal animus of Kerry, but they haven't allowed that bias to color their coverage of the candidate. If true (and let's remember, it would be hard for anyone to be a bigger a-hole than the incumbent), that would be an historic mark of maturity in the Fourth Estate.

One of the consequences of deciding to fight peripheral targets, rather than the people who actually attacked us on September 11, occurred today in Madrid. Bush has pretty much chosen not to be serious about Al Qaeda and its sources of support in the Middle East, and I doubt our European allies are going to be too enthused about following our lead in the future until we get serious. They may have to wait til next January for that to happen.

Why can't the U.S. of A. have a Labor Secretary as good as the one the Iraqis have? [link via WWDT]

In describing the significance of Monday night's acquisition of forward Anson Carter, the local paper of record notes:

"[H]e becomes the fourth African American player to suit up for the Kings in their 37-season history, joining Grant Fuhr, Nathan Lafayette and Mike Marson."

Isn't that a good example of why labeling people isn't necessarily appropriate? Carter, in fact, is a native of Canada (as were Fuhr, Lafayette and Marson), and is therefore as much of an "African-American" as Lennox Lewis or Kip Keino; in fact, Charlize Theron is more of an "African-American" than he is. In any event, for most hockey fans, the notion of a "black" hockey player is not much of a novelty: Fuhr was recently elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame, and besides Carter, Jerome Iginla has been one of the top players in the league for the past three seasons. But as with most hockey players, they are Canadians, not Americans, and are not hyphenated-Americans in any event.

I had never listened to her program while it was still on KCRW, and I am coming rather late to this controversy, but the firing last week of humorist Sandra Tsing-Loh from her gig on public radio has pissed me off no end. One can talk about censorship, free speech, the creativity of an artist, or whatever, but what it really signals is that the SoCal area has a public radio station run by a timid programmer. And for me, that's everything.

Public radio is something that I wished I listened to more often. Usually, it's just for the news and political coverage, and "Which Way L.A." with Warren Olney, and even then infrequently, but I'm glad that there is someplace on (as Al Smith would put it) the raddio where the programming isn't entirely dominated by market considerations and safe, centrist political views. It's good to know that it's there, and that it's relatively uncensored.

To put it another way, it's radio for adults. And adults, every once in awhile, swear. There is a time and place for four-letter words: in casual conversations with friends, or in heated arguments, they're part of the vernacular; in church, at an elementary school, or with one's grandmother, some discretion should be used. I try to steer clear of such language on this blog, partly because it limits the audience that can access this site (web-blockers already make some blogsites difficult to access at government offices and high schools), but also because this site is a creative outlet for me, and I would prefer to articulate the same sentiments with less vulgar language, if possible. But it's not always possible.

Not having heard the program in question, I'm not going to venture whether Ms. Loh's use of the f-word was appropriate in the context of her piece, or whether the piece itself was funny, because frankly, I don't care. The issue is not whether her rights have been violated; it is, instead, my desire as a consumer to hear and experience the work of creative people in an unedited manner, when I choose. It is from that desire that the right of free speech is based. The decision about whether she could use the word in question was resolved when she was hired to do the program (or at least, when the station agreed to air the pre-taped piece twice the same morning). Public radio's mandate is different from the mandate of, let's say, NBC or Nickelodeon; it's not like SpongeBob SquarePants was using the word at 8:00 p.m. I don't want to believe that the battles posthumously won forty years ago by Lenny Bruce are going to have to be refought everytime a woman's breast is exposed, or a rock star extemporaneously exults at winning an award.

As with Howard Stern, there is a fair amount of hypocrisy involved here on behalf of the programmers. Clear Channel knew that Stern's radio show was vulgar and sick; that was the whole point, and those that listened, and those that refused to listen, knew what they were getting. They didn't act until the government began another one of its three-times-a-decade rampages on morality in popular culture. With Loh, I haven't seen any evidence that she made a habit of skirting the boundaries of good taste, but that doesn't matter. If she had been little more than a female version of Andrew Dice Clay, then KCRW is hypocritical for pulling the plug now after all this time. On the other hand, if this was just a one-time occurrence, then nothing will create a climate of fear with the rest of the talent more than firing a long-time employee for an innocent mistake.

There is currently a boycott right now of KCRW, but I can't honor it, for the same reason I couldn't honor a boycott of Rush Limbaugh's show, or the 700 Club. You can't "boycott" something you have no intention of patronizing in the first place. A public radio station that places draconian content restrictions on its programming isn't much better than the 24-7 news on KNX, so why would I listen? Just to listen to the pledge drives? It would be like if I decided to "boycott" peas, and that's just fucking crazy.

More evidence that the flip-flop attack on Kerry is a campaign loser: Dick Morris thinks its brilliant !!!

I suppose one way we can test the credibility of former "weakman" ruler Jean-Bertrand Aristide is to demand that he return to Haiti post-haste. After all, if he was kidnapped by foreign armies (that is to say, the U.S. and its beloved ally, France), and if he is currently free to move around in exile, as he claims, then there should be no problem for him to return and resume power in Port-au-Prince. The fact is, democratically elected or not, Aristide was a thug, and his unpopularity with his constituents sealed his fate. Although we shouldn't be in the business of rubber-stamping military coups, such as the one we backed several years ago in Venezuela, the United States cannot provide protection to every third world despot, elected or not, simply because the alternative may be worse.

Too often, we look at the veneer of democracy, and ignore the fact that the government we are propping up is as autocratic as the typical military junta (and to a lesser extent, the same could be said for Hugo Chavez, Ariel Sharon, and whichever puppet of the mullahs happens to be in control of Iran). South Africa, for crying out loud, had the outer appearance of a democracy for a century, yet liberals hardly demanded that we send in the Marines to defend P.W. Botha. Being able to participate in contested elections is no substitute for possessing the full human rights of a citizen.

For those of you who wondered whatever happened to Jose Offerman, this story gives the skinny. Like many small-market teams, the Twins are pursuing a variation of the Billy Beane philosophy, and larding up on players who get on base, take pitches, and basically act like a schnorrer to the opposing pitching staff, and that's what Offerman does. He had his best years with the Royals, where they downplayed his defensive shortcomings and tried to find a niche for the talents he actually possesses, which is to take pitches like a mother/father and hit triples. He did those things with LA and Boston (at least he did his first two years with the Sox) too, but the teams, and by extension the local media, were more obsessed with what he couldn't do, such as catching anything that was hit at him or stealing bases, and the result was unfortunate for all concerned.

My college football blog, Condredge's Acolytes, is going to start covering the NCAA Tournaments in basketball and hockey. Since it's a collaborative site, I welcome the contributions of any who have two cents they'd like to put in.

Best news of the day for Democrats: Dick Morris is predicting a Bush landslide.

What to do, if the goals of fighting terrorism and fighting Saddam conflict? Well, if you're this President, to hell with 9/11, you give this guy a pass, and he ends up killing several hundred people in Iraq.

Slate takes John Kerry to task for "flip-flopping", a meme hatched by Karl Rove, et al. Most of the examples are bogus, or can be easily explained, but the question I have is, who f---ing cares? "Flip-flopping" is an attack that only resonates in primary contests, when you are trying to convince base voters that the other guy is insincere. In general elections, it's a loser issue, the type of thing that people who don't like you and won't vote for you anyway will use to rationalize their votes.

One example of that attack failing miserably was Jerry Brown's reelection bid in 1978. Brown turned the entire dynamics of that election on its head by changing his position on Proposition 13, which he had fought against when it was on the June 1978 ballot. After the initiative passed, Brown suddenly became its biggest supporter, defending its constitutionality in the courts, and earning kudos from Howard Jarvis in the process. His opponent, Evelle Younger, who had led in the polls, made Brown's "flip-flops" on that and other issues the centerpiece of his campaign. The voters, instead, returned Brown to office by an overwhelming margin. Clinton's strategy of triangulation after the 1994 elections is another example of how a politician who changes his position on issues not only survives, but thrives before the electorate.

One of the dirtiest secrets in politics is that voters in a democracy not only tolerate a politician who changes his mind, they demand it. If swing voters are unsettled by Iraq or the economy, they are not going to give a rat's ass whether Kerry changed his mind about welfare reform in the mid-90's. And since many of those same voters performed the same "flip-flops" over the Patriot Act and the war, it doesn't do the Republicans any good to rub their noses in it.

WACK JOB WATCH: James Lileks jumps the shark here, with a pitiful claim that supporters of Kerry are objectively pro-terrorist. And a Republican Congressman goes one-up on Move On, comparing Kerry to Adolf Hitler. Oh, yeah, he's "French" looking, too. Also, Donald Luskin links to a clearly bogus "corrections" site for the New York Times, fooling (among others) Mickey Kaus. Lastly, Ilsa, She-Wolf of the S.S. has her unique take on the latest Mel Gibson movie; no surprise here, she loves it [link via Pandagon].

UPDATE: A reader (Kaus, actually) writes in to explain to your ignorant correspondent what "doppel" means. Turns out he wasn't fooled, but I was. That, and the fact that I actually missed a question on the Harrick Jr. Final Exam, means that my entire week has been one of humiliation and despair. I SUCK !!

First of all, the fact that a criminal defendant has claimed that he provided several baseball superstars with the juice should be taken with a grain of salt. The bigger the story he can tell in court, and the bigger the names he can bring down, the more leniency the court will grant him when it comes time for sentencing. In that sense, Barry Bonds should be given the same benefit of the doubt that Lance Armstrong was given.

Second, any lawyer who puts out a statement that his client "never knowingly" did something should be disbarred for rank incompetence, or even worse, made to practice in the field of workers comp. If an attorney is going to be that stupid, why not just put out a statement saying that there is "no controlling legal authority" to implicate your client and be done with it. Far better for Sheffield's attorney to have just kept his mouth shut, or at least said that his client will have no comment on what was or wasn't said to the Grand Jury.

Third, steroid use in baseball will be The Big Story for the next year, and will probably color how fans eventually look back at the last decade in the sport. Obviously, Bonds' single-season home run record will come into question (as will McGuire and Sosa, btw), but he has had such an impressive career that he will still be viewed as one of the all-time greats. Less fortunate will be players like Sheffield or Giambi (or Nomar, or Piazza, or any other player who gets caught up in this net), who may not have a pre-steroid portion of their career they can point to if they get implicated. Any well-sculpted ballplayer from the last fifteen years is going to be tainted by rumors of steroid use, regardless of guilt, in much the same way that the late Flo-Jo was after the 1988 Olympics. Sheffield, for example, with three consecutive MVP-candidate seasons, was just starting to put together a legitimate case for Hall of Fame consideration, which the steroid rumors may have irreparably damaged. This is a scandal the sport can ill-afford.

Prof. Johnson presents: "The Passion of Elvis".

Contrary to my post last week, the Seeds didn't open for the reclusive Ken Layne & the Corvids last Thursday. No matter; it was still worth the $7 cover to see the opening night of the "Minotour". The group keeps getting tighter, and the night was marred neither by Matt Welch's solo cover of "Only Women Bleed" nor by the obscenity-laced spat over welfare-reform between Mickey Kaus and Sky Saxon that interrupted the concert for ten full minutes until the police finally arrived. Saturday, in Huntington Beach, they were even better, debuting three new songs, including one kick-ass blast that sounded like an unholy mixture of Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, and "Him or Me" by Paul Revere and the Raiders. Hopefully, a "Maxotour" is in store for the rest of the country real soon. And by all means, if you go see them, print out one of their flyers....

Any doubts I may have had about John Kerry being a better president than George Bush were resolved by his answer to yesterday's debate's final question: Is God on our side? A good leader often tells people what they don't want to hear, and Kerry's answer actually seemed to have been generated out of some thought on his part. There was none of the phony religiosity that one gets out of W, who clearly sees matters of faith as a prop he can use to pick up Red State votes, rather than something that actually has meaning to him. I'm still voting for the ambulance chaser tomorrow, but my respect for the frontrunner has gone up enormously.