Dear Fellow Sea King…

I’m trying to figure out what’s going through Senator George Allen, Jr.’s mind — the Republican senator battling for re-election. 

What’s he trying to pull, denying he used racial epithets?  He knows he did it.  He’d be better off admitting it. He’ll have to eventually — but by then all his supporters who are working overtime claiming Allen is being “smeared” will realize he’s been hanging them out to dry.   

Do his campaign people really think they can convince voters this woman is lying?

Just six weeks before the congressional elections, Virginia’s incumbent senator, George Allen, is now facing more charges that he used racial slurs.

Pat Waring, 75, of Chesterton, Md., first brought her story to MSNBC when she contacted us in a direct phone call.  We then conducted a series of interviews.   Waring says that at a sports match in the late 1970′s, Allen repeatedly use the ‘n’ word to describe blacks.

“I just didn’t think in the late 70′s people would be so ugly and so overt about it and so public,” Waring said.

Waring says that in 1978, she and her then-husband, Robert Michael Schwartz, had just moved to Charlottesville, Va.  Friends from the time confirm that Schwartz was a Ph.d. candidate at the University of Virginia, an avid rugby player and the volunteer coach of the school’s rugby club team.

MSNBC has also confirmed Pat Waring worked in a doctor’s office and came to some of the rugby games.  Waring says there is one game, from either the fall of 1978 or the spring of 1979 that she will never forget.

“I heard to my left, the ‘n’ word, and I heard it again, and I looked around and heard it again,” she said.  “And there was this fellow sitting on the ground.  He was putting on red rugby shoes, it is seared in my brain, believe me. And he was kind of showing off I guess, but he was telling a story about something or other and in the story was a lot of ‘n’ words.  So, I got out of the bleacher and I went over and I said young man, I am the coach’s wife and if you don’t mind, would you please not use that word.  And he in essence told me to buzz off.”

Waring said when she learned the man using the slurs was George Allen, son of the Washington Redskins coach, she was “crestfallen.”

Republican cheerleaders are reacting to stories like this by calling them smears and throwing fits.  They raise questions about the timing of these accusations.  They claim his use of a Tunisian racial slur against a dark-skinned opposing campaign worker was purely coincidental, even though his mother was raised … in Tunisia!

Allen is doing them no favors by letting them defend him like this.  It happens to be true that, at least when he was young, George Allen, Jr. was a racist.  Or, to be extremely charitable, beyond what’s really reasonable, he was perfectly happy to stir up hatred for blacks by whites, and damn the consequences.

My story has been reported before, I think.  In 1969, I was 13 years old and a freshman at Palos Verdes High School.   One Friday morning in autumn, I arrived at school where the buses drop you off, and walked to my locker, a path that took me past the Multi-Purpose Room and then Senior Park, which has a bandstand at its western end. 

The walls of these structures and the rows of classrooms were white stucco.  Every wall was covered with black spray painted graffiti, well-known racial epithets blacks supposedly used to inflame whites back then, along with phrases like “Black Power,” and threats that “Whitey Will Die,” or words to that effect. 

As it happened, the PV Sea Kings varsity football team was in a conference with several teams from predominantly African-American schools, including Centenniel and Morningside.  I forget which one we were playing.  And as it happened, George Allen, Jr., the son of the popular, eccentric and hugely successful coach of the Los Angeles Rams, was our team’s quarterback.

The buzz around the school was that kids from the opposing school must’ve come onto campus overnight and sprayed this foul graffiti.  There was so much of it, it was overwhelming.  But I have to say, there was something bogus about the graffiti.  This was just a few months after the Manson family attacks, where the killers also left behind graffiti, in blood, that was supposed to suggest that blacks were responsible — which Manson hoped would trigger a race war.  But Manson’s graffiti seemed weirdly inauthentic — a white guy’s idea of what a black revolutionary would write.  So did this stuff.

So I was not terribly surprised when my first period class was interrupted by the principal with a special announcement that the other high school had nothing to do with the vandalism — our own students did it in a twisted attempt to inspire “school spirit.” The next voice we heard was George Allen Jr.’s, confessing that he was the guilty party. I think Allen was suspended for one game, and his family had to pay to clean up the spray paint. 

Now:  This happened.  Anyone who attended PV High in 1969, which is at least a thousand kids, witnessed it.  Allen, Jr. was the varsity quarterback.  His father was a celebrity.  This is not something you forget.  It seemed bizarre, especially because his father coached a team whose most famous players, Deacon Jones and Rosie Grier, were outspoken, politically involved African Americans.  And his son was a racist?

The stories that you’ve been reading lately about Allen, including the MSNBC story, take place only a few years after the incident at PV High.  Given what I witnessed, I think they are entirely credible.  Since Allen emerged as a political figure, I’ve been wondering whether there were other episodes like it, and apparently there were. As a public figure,  how would he deal with it, I wondered.   

And yet, here’s his campaign, in full denial mode:

Senator Allen’s campaign manager says this is all just another false accusation, and that it’s not true.

When asked how he knows it’s not true, the campaign manager simply said, “It’s not true.”

Hello? Hello?  

Clinton as a Tragic Figure

Like most political junkies nowadays, I knew about ex-President Clinton’s appearance on Fox News Sunday from what bloggers were saying about it before I ever got to see it for myself.

I don’t have all the links at hand anymore, but suffice to say it broke down very predictably along party/ideological lines. To leftists, it was all about Clinton “smacking down” Fox . One site thought Clinton’s assault on Fox was so devastating, Fox might edit those parts out — a remarkably inept bit of paranoid speculation, given that Fox’s real objective is to make money. On TV, conflict equals ratings. “If it bleeds, it leads.”

To conservatives, Clinton’s blowup, combined with his supporters’ misguided attempt to pressure Disney/ABC to pull “The Path to 9/11″ miniseries off the air, meant it’s now open season to say what they’ve always wanted to say: The blood of 9/11 is on Clinton’s hands. Many right-wing bloggers patted themselves on the back for having held their tongues all these years (ha!), but said that the blame game is now fair game, since Clinton decided to make an issue of his culpability.

My view is a little different. When I finally saw the interview, my reaction was, “How remarkable that he’s held this inside him for so long.”

Both right and left agreed that his rant was an example of Clinton’s famous temper, his “purple-faced rage,” that aides saw frequently but the public saw rarely.

I didn’t see that much anger. I saw grief.

The key exchange, copied here from Fox’s transcript, was this:

——-

CLINTON: No, no. I authorized the CIA to get groups together to try to kill him.

The CIA, which was run by George Tenet, that President Bush gave the Medal of Freedom to, he said, “He did a good job setting up all these counterterrorism things.”

The country never had a comprehensive anti-terror operation until I came there.

Now, if you want to criticize me for one thing, you can criticize me for this: After the Cole, I had battle plans drawn to go into Afghanistan, overthrow the Taliban, and launch a full-scale attack search for bin Laden.

But we needed basing rights in Uzbekistan, which we got after 9/11.

The CIA and the FBI refused to certify that bin Laden was responsible while I was there. They refused to certify. So that meant I would’ve had to send a few hundred Special Forces in helicopters and refuel at night.

Even the 9/11 Commission didn’t do that. Now, the 9/11 Commission was a political document, too. All I’m asking is, anybody who wants to say I didn’t do enough, you read Richard Clarke’s book.

WALLACE: Do you think you did enough, sir?

CLINTON: No, because I didn’t get him.

WALLACE: Right.

CLINTON: But at least I tried. That’s the difference in me and some, including all the right-wingers who are attacking me now. They ridiculed me for trying. They had eight months to try. They did not try. I tried.

So I tried and failed. When I failed, I left a comprehensive anti-terror strategy and the best guy in the country, Dick Clarke, who got demoted.

——

Some of this is incoherent. Some of this has been challenged factually. But what remains is this almost plaintive, and undeniably honest, confession: “I tried and failed.”

Now, any chief executive realizes quickly after assuming office that for most of what you try to do, failure is the most likely outcome. You can only follow so many initiatives with the degree of attention required to ensure success. You are at the mercy of events that will throw you off track. Your subordinates are not uniformly competent, and even the best ones can have egos that poison their minds and lead to time-wasting, soul-sucking turf wars.

If you’re both very good and very lucky, you will get some of the big things right. Your most important accomplishments might be invisible, even to you: The decisions that averted crises that no one could foresee. Maybe in time, someone will notice and give you credit. But by that time, you might be dead and forgotten.

Clinton was, to me, a president whose grade point average was a C, but he accomplished that by scoring a lot of A’s and a lot of F’s. (Kind of like my son.) History shows he was prescient about Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda. I believe him when he says he tried to kill Bin Laden. But what is apparently haunting him, and came out in this interview, was whether he tried hard enough.

Every office in America, there is some put-upon exec with a sign on his desk saying “How can I soar like an eagle when I’m surrounded by turkeys?” And: “Don’t let the bastards get you down.” Clinton let the bastards get him down. He envisioned the kind of threat Bin Laden posed, but he let the legalistic mind of his Justice Department, the pinhead intellectuals of the CIA and the feckless leaders of the military back him down. He didn’t quite have the courage of his convictions; and he was surrounded by unimpressive advisers like Sandy Berger and Madeleine Albright who sapped his confidence.

When Clinton left office, the unfinished business with Al Queda was just one item on the list that he didn’t complete. All executives know dozens of these disappointments upon leaving office. But the polls on his presidency were high, the economy was still pretty strong, the deficit was down, Hilary was in the Senate, the impeachment battle had been won — I’m sure Clinton felt pretty good, overall. Then 9/11 happened.

From that day to this one, I’m sure he has replayed in his mind all the meetings where he got talked out of taking the next aggressive step. But, the debate was mostly inside his head. In the political world, I don’t think 9/11 damaged Clinton significantly — otherwise, why would his wife have been considered the shoo-in for the presidential nomination in 2008 until very recently? For every right-winger who said “Clinton didn’t do enough,” you had many more voices like Richard Clarke saying he did a lot more than anyone thought, and that Bush’s neglect of terrorism in the first eight months of his reign was just as decisive.

But surviving politically and surviving your own doubts are two different things.

Because Clinton is so smart, his critics see every move he makes as calculating. It’s a myth. What I saw on Sunday’s show was not Clinton the politician trying to score points. I saw Clinton the human being trying to convince himself that he really did all he could, that his attempts to stop Bin Laden were noble and his failure forgivable.

The political implications seem petty compared to the drama of a once-powerful leader stirring the ashes of his conscience. The burden he must carry now! It was an episode worthy of Shakespeare.

Mintz Meat

My popular Elliot Mintz post has also generated some of the most entertaining comments from people who lived in LA when Mintz was on the radio or TV and remember him fondly, or laughingly, or…  Even though I wrote the post back in February, I still get comments.  One of the best arrived yesterday, from Jon Monday:

I worked in record promotion from 1970 to 1982 – at first with a small label – Takoma Records – that had artists like Leo Kottke, John Fahey, and Robbie Basho. Then after Chrysalis bought Takoma in 1979, I became head of marketing for Chrysalis working with Billy Idol, Huey Lewis, and Blondie. KPPC and later KROQ were very influential stations that supported alternative music of the time.

In 1972 I got Fahey a spot on Elliot’s TV show, which was a very big deal for us. Fahey was supposed to finger-sync to a recording – and although the show was taped, they ran it as if it was a live show, so they wouldn’t have to edit it.

After a spot with Joan Baez, Elliot introduced Fahey by saying, “Here’s John Fahey to sing his new song…” Fahey went nuts, stopped the taping and bellowed, “This guy doesn’t even know who I am. I DON’T SING!”

They had to reset everything and re-introduce Fahey, but then Fahey wouldn’t even fake the guitar playing. He swung his arms around like Pete Townsend, etc.

Fahey, if you’re not familiar with the name, was an incredibly gifted guitarist who played in a folk style, but pushed the boundaries of the form.  Before he died, he wrote a great memoir, How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life.

Monday is an archivist of spoken word, music and film.  His company is about to release, for example, the final poetry reading by Charles Bukowksi (whose work is the basis for the current film “Factotum”), and he sells a 1955 lecture by Aldous Huxley.  He finished his comment with a request, that I thought it might be nice to highlight in case anyone can help him.

On another note, in April 1968 there was a benefit concert at the Kaleidoscope Theater for KPPC. I was there and it was incredible – Canned Heat, Bo Diddley, Traffic, and the Doors. For years I’ve been looking for a poster of the event for my collection. Anyone got any ideas?  

If you can help, you can post here, or email him directly at info@mondaymedia.org. 

Thanks to everyone who has commented on the Mintz post.  If you haven’t gone to that post in awhile, check it out again to read the comments. It helps bring back the sense of that fascinating period in LA; fascinating to me, obviously because I was a teenager, but also rather amazing culturally.

Mars Attacks!, the sequel

There are two kinds of people in the world: Those who think the zany Tim Burton movie Mars Attacks! is incredibly stupid, and those who laugh their heads off through the whole thing.  I’m in category #2. 

The best thing about Mars Attacks! is the clueless president played by Jack Nicholson, his pretentious foreign policy advisor, played by Pierce Brosnan, and his gung-ho military advisor, played by Rod Steiger, debating what to do about the Martian invaders. 

Puffing on a long pipe, Brosnan’s character advises the president that the world will laud him if he greets the Martians as friends.  The First Lady isn’t convinced:

First Lady: I’m not allowing that thing in my house.
President Dale: Sweetie, we may have to. The people expect me to meet with them.
First Lady: Well they’re not going to eat off the Van Buren china.   

The leader of the Martians arrives and delivers a speech that is translated as “We come in peace!  We come in peace!” At almost the same moment, the Martians start firing powerful ray guns that kill everyone.  But the Brosnan character is undeterred, continuing to press the president to offer peace, saying the Martians need to be understood. Repeatedly, the Martians say things like “Don’t run from us! We are your friends,” which always turns out to be a trick.

This op-ed from today’s Wall Street Journal reminded me of Mars Attacks! Even though it’s serious, it makes the diplomatic maneuverings around Iran’s nuclear plans seem just as laughably futile as Jack Nicholson’s attempts to mollify the Martians.   The essay’s author, Michael Rubin, says that as the West tries to negotiate a deal to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons, keep in mind that Iran has a tendency to lie rather brazenly.  His article documents a number of Iranian switcheroos since the seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979:

In 1986, former U.S. national security advisor Robert McFarlane’s traveled to Tehran. While the Iran-Contra Affair is remembered today for the Reagan administration’s attempts to circumvent Congressional prohibition of funding of the Nicaraguan resistance, it also illustrates the inadvisability of trusting Tehran. President Reagan sought to win the release of American hostages in Lebanon but, as soon as Washington compensated Tehran for its bad behavior, its militias accelerated hostage seizure. Diplomatic enticement–bribery by another name–backfired. But diplomacy is not just about incentives; it is also about trust. What could have been just a failed initiative turned to scandal when, on the seventh anniversary of the embassy seizure, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, today the chairman of the Expediency Council, broke a pledge of secrecy and revealed the meetings to the international press.

Iranian authorities showed diplomatic duplicity once again after Khomeini issued a declaration calling for author Salman Rushdie’s death. Four months before Khomeini’s death, then-president Khamenei demanded that Mr. Rushdie apologize in exchange for cancellation of a religious edict ordering his murder. Mr. Rushdie apologized, but the Iranian government nevertheless kept the bounty in place. President Khamenei was insincere, his diplomacy was a tactic. By winning an apology, he confirmed Mr. Rushdie’s guilt.

Would such a religious group be okay with lying?  Indeed they would, according to Rubin:

During his long exile in Najaf, Khomeini endorsed taqiya, religiously sanctioned dissembling. From his perspective and that of his followers, the ends justify the means. Hence, Khomeini saw nothing wrong when he told the Guardian newspaper, just months before his return to Iran, “I don’t want to have the power of government in my hand; I am not interested in personal power.” Tehran may still conduct diplomacy to fish for incentive and reward but, at its core, Iranian diplomacy is insincere. The Iranian leadership will say anything and do anything to buy the time necessary to acquire nuclear capability.

Throughout the Western diplomatic community, there is a strong yearning to change Iran’s course diplomatically. No one wants more war in the Middle East.  The fear we should have, however, is that we might be lulled into a false sense of security by such an agreement.  If we sign one, we shouldn’t kid ourselves.  Whatever we gain from a deal with Iran will be very temporary, and must be monitored just as closely as if the agreement didn’t exist. 

Part of the joke of Mars Attacks! is the hopelessness of Earth’s situation.  Nothing can really stop the Martians’ gleeful killing spree.  The general who rages at “Intellectuals! Liberals! Peacemongers! Idiots!” and wants to bomb the invaders’ spaceships is, in the end, no more effective against the Martians than is the naive Brosnan. The Martians are just too powerful.  Their only vulnerability?   It is discovered by accident that Slim Whitman music makes their heads explode. 

Oh well, there’s only so much foreign policy guidance you can expect from a Tim Burton movie.

Going to Extremes (*updated)

I hope Brendan Nyhan is wrong when he says this:

Today, online politics has come to be dominated by two warring camps, just like offline politics. And while many critics complain about the polarization of the blogosphere and its effect on elections, how blogs will affect the economics of opinion journalism is less well understood. In particular, partisan blogs have become so popular that they are threatening the business model — and the independence — of center-left opinion magazines, which may be forced to toe the party line to ensure their survival.

He illustrates this point with his own experience. A founder of the now-defunct Spinsanity, Nyhan was invited to blog on The American Prospect’s TAPPED site. The American Prospect is a liberal publication, but like The New Republic, it was not monolithic and could be contrarian from time to time, in keeping with the open-mindedness long associated with liberals. But after Nyhan posted a couple of items criticizing other liberal bloggers, TAP’s editor asked him to limit his attacks to conservatives. This diktat caused Nyhan to quit.

Is TAPPED afraid of dissenting viewpoints? Not editorially. But according to Nyhan, it is afraid of popular left-wing bloggers’ Moses-like effect on the flow of liberal click-throughs:

One important factor shaping TAP’s decision may have been the popularity of Democratic bloggers like Atrios, who pump out a stream of pre-filtered news and commentary. Before the rise of online competition, opinion magazines had some freedom to be idiosyncratic and less partisan than their readers. The initial incarnation of the Prospect, for example, had a thoughtful, academic tone. But the availability of more points of view online (while laudable in many ways) has paradoxically increased the pressure on ideological publications to pander to readers, who have the option of seeking out exclusively partisan blogs instead.

In addition, the huge audiences of the partisan bloggers make them a key source of online traffic for opinion magazines if they supply ideologically favorable content. (At Spinsanity, we quickly learned that it was virtually impossible to get links from liberals when we criticized a liberal, and vice versa for conservatives.) Similarly, the risk of not getting links means that few commentators are willing to criticize the gatekeepers.

In some cases, the threat may be existential. Opinion magazines lose money — a lot of money — and are vulnerable to further financial losses. Atrios, Kos, and other liberal bloggers have attacked The New Republic for years, helping to undermine the center-left magazine’s lagging popularity among liberals. If TNR’s subscriber base were to shrink as a result of these attacks, the viability of the magazine could be threatened.

Nyhan points out that conservative journals of opinion were always less prone to ideological divergence, but the same syndrome exists on the right as the left. Although it does seem to me there are a number of bloggers that get called conservative but are really more libertarian, like Instapundit, Ann Althouse and The Volokh Conspiracy, who provide lots of links, but rarely to right-wing mags.

I like a battle of ideas, not a march of talking points. My advice to TAPPED and The New Republic is to take more risks, not fewer. I can’t help but think that when Bush is truly a lame duck and there is fresh soil being plowed in both political parties, the lock-steppers on both the right and the left will seem a bit marginal–dull and shrill.

For over a century, the opinion magazines have played a role as idea labs for the candidates. If all they’re doing is saluting Kos and Hugh Hewitt all day with predictable rants, that will just drive the stuff of politics, the intra-party policy debates, out of the public eye and into realms accessible only to insiders. That’s not what the Internet promised.

*UPDATE:  Here is Nyhan’s blog post about the reaction to his column.  Extremely interesting comments. although it seems as if no one got his point.  The question isn’t whether the right and left blogs enforce conformity.   Some do, some don’t.  The question is whether the right and left blogs are causing the traditional opinion journals to mute contrarian points of view or self-criticism for economic reasons — to keep the referral clicks coming from the more popular blogs.

This is really an economic issue.  A political blog starts out as a labor of love, done for free.  If it catches on, it can sell ads, but the ad revenue need only “pay for” the time the bloggers spend working on it, and the small amount of overhead needed for web hosting.

However, the New Republic and The American Prospect (and National Review, and Weekly Standard) have the enormous additional cost of maintaining a paid staff of writers, editors, graphic artists, circulation managers, ad managers, etc., plus paper, ink, postage and rent. They are hoping their web site advertising will offset some of those costs.

And, if Nyhan is correct, the editors of those sites have noticed that traffic goes up or down based on whether these sites give reliable reinforcement to their ideological fellow-travelers.  This tendency exerts pressure on editors of these magazine-based websites to enforce comformity, he believes.

So the real question on the floor is: Do we lose anything if these magazines are forced by the marketplace into becoming more orthodox?

NomaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhH!!!!!! (updated*)

If you’re into baseball, it was a great night for Los Angeles.  Comebacks do happen!!! LA Dodgers 11, San Diego 10, 10 innings   LA Dodgers 11, San Diego 10, 10 innings   Preview – Box Score – Recap By JOHN NADEL, AP Sports Writer September 19, 2006 LOS ANGELES (AP) — The Los Angeles Dodgers hit four consecutive homers in the bottom of the ninth to tie the game and Nomar Garciaparra‘s two-run homer in the 10th lifted Los Angeles to an 11-10 victory over the San Diego Padres on Monday night. The Dodgers moved back into first place in the NL West, a half-game ahead of the Padres. After Los Angeles tied it in the ninth with four straight homers — just the fourth time that’s happened in major league history — the Padres took a 10-9 lead in the top of the 10th on Josh Bard‘s RBI single off Aaron Sele (8-6). But Rudy Seanez (1-2) walked Kenny Lofton to begin the bottom half, and Garciaparra followed by hitting his 18th homer deep into the left field pavilion. The capacity crowd of 55,831 at Dodger Stadium stood and cheered for several minutes afterward.

*Update:  Josh Rawitch’s in-house Dodger blog, Inside the Dodgers — which is surprisingly independent given that Rawitch works for the McCourts — added this perspective on the game…and perhaps an alibi for those who left the Stadium early, or who, like me, gave up on the game in the 8th inning, and was lucky to flip back to it at a crucial moment in the ninth. 

The fact is, your 2006 Los Angeles Dodgers do a lot of things well, but not comebacks:

This is a team that hadn’t erased a four-run deficit to win a single time this year. Not once. Only once had they erased a three-run deficit to win. And yet, they erased two four-run deficits in the game, one in the ninth inning.

This is a team that is last in the league in homers and they hit seven on the night. Four in an inning. Four in a row. Three on consecutive. Off the game’s best closer ever.

This was a team in a must-win game. Not a “it’d be nice if we took this game from the Padres.” Players before the game were calling it must-win. And falling behind 4-0 isn’t a great way to come out the gate. But in a must-win situation, this team won in arguably the best game anyone here has ever seen. Greg Maddux just told me he’s never seen anything like it. Same with Grady Little, Dave Jauss, Derek Lowe and just about anyone you could talk to downstairs.

You can also relive the key moments by reading the Dodgers Thoughts’ game thread, here.  Start at post #553, time-stamped at 10:32 p.m. in which “Steve in Rochester” reaches the depths of despair as the Dodgers fall behind 9-5 in the ninth:

2006-09-18 22:32:30

553.   Steve in Rochester

this is as discouraged as I have been about anything in a long time

Within eight minutes, the four consecutive solo homeruns have occured, including the last one by recent acquisition Marlon Anderson: 

2006-09-18 22:40:30

598.   Vaudeville Villain

OMG  

Marlon Anderson!!!!

Fourteen minutes later, as Dodger reliever Aaron Sele gives up a run in the top of the 10th inning, despair again: 

2006-09-18 22:54:06

675.   joekings

I think I’m going to be sick.

2006-09-18 22:54:37

676.   underdog

{{cursing quietly to self at home}}

But just eight more minutes later, something obviously has happened.  Poster “confucius” is felled by the vapors:  

2006-09-18 23:04:15

700.   confucius

Oxygen!

And finally, 28 seconds later, some clarification:

2006-09-18 23:04:43

701.   Greg Brock

The greatest game ever played.

2006-09-18 23:04:47

702.   KG16

Just in time…

2006-09-18 23:04:51

703.   StolenMonkey86

NOMAHH

2006-09-18 23:04:54

704.   Telemachos

OMG.OMG

OMG!!!!!

2006-09-18 23:04:57

705.   Linkmeister

OMG!

Read the whole thing, and the next post, too, which has a bunch of aftermath posts. Almost like having these guys in your living room. 

Liberals Who Fear Liberals

Sam Harris, a liberal writer who wrote a provocative book he described as “highly critical of religion,” is now highly critical of liberals, while still trying to be one.  I am familiar with this struggle!

In the wake of my prior post describing the last years of feminist journalist Orianna Fallaci, you must read this op-ed Harris wrote for today’s LA Times.  The response he got from thousands of readers of his last book, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason, inspired him to panic.  Here are a few chunks of what Harris has to say:

On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.

This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that “liberals are soft on terrorism.” It is, and they are.

(snip)

Numerous studies have found that the most radicalized Muslims tend to have better-than-average educations and economic opportunities.

Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society, it is actually possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual resources to build a nuclear bomb — and to believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism.

(snip)

The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a terrifying number of the world’s Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem facing civilization and yet it is regularly misconstrued, ignored or obfuscated by liberals.

(snip)

We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

(snip)

While liberals should be the ones pointing the way beyond this Iron Age madness, they are rendering themselves increasingly irrelevant. Being generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity, liberals should be especially sensitive to the dangers of religious literalism. But they aren’t.

The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.

To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

There is still time for liberals to find a voice in defense of civilization, but the window is shutting.  It will shut for good in 2008, when they can no longer use “Bush rage” as an excuse for their mindless opposition to waging a war that is being waged against us whether they want to acknowledge it or not.

I’m quite unhappy about a future in which liberalism, the belief system with which I’ve been affliliated for my entire adult life becomes marginalized and irrelevant, and where its adherents are considered unqualified to govern. 

I don’t like the idea of having to choose between candidates with whom I agree on 90 percent of the issues, but who fail to have a supportable position on the single most important issue, and Republicans, who are mostly wrong, but right about the one thing that matters most.

And I’m furiously angry that half-witted partisans who run the left-wing, self-described “netroots” blogs are now seen as arbiters of true liberalism.  They might be speaking for this generation’s liberals, I fear. But they don’t know what liberalism means, historically or intellectually.  They’re so in love with their aggressive tone, they haven’t bothered to notice their positions are incoherent. 

The Democratic Party should look at the liberal netroots like pre-adolescent children. You have to listen to them, because you can’t disown them, and because they’re loud and hard to ignore.  But they shouldn’t be allowed to drive until they grow up.

Burying Fallaci

The obituaries and tributes to Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, who died of cancer last week, illustrate the gulf between principle and politics.

When I was in college, Fallaci was twice a hero — as a reporter whose portraits and interviews cut to the heart of the arrogance and brutality of power in Interview With History — and as a political activist who took enormous risks to fight fascism, dictatorships, sexism, and the Vietnam War. 

In Margaret Talbot’s recent profile in The New Yorker, she quoted from Fallaci’s preface, words I still remember from 30 years ago:

“Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon. . . . I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born.”  

As a journalism student, I was blown away by her interviews.  Like everyone who fancied themselves a non-fiction writer in the 70s, I was attracted by the highly stylized “new journalism” of Joan Didion, Tom Wolfe, Michael Herr and Hunter S. Thompson.  But Fallaci made them all look silly, soft-headed and obsessed with trivia.   Her writing, at least in the English translations I read, had a Hemingwayish clarity and economy, left nothing to interpretation and engaged the most serious, life-and-death issues of her times.  And the things she got her subjects to say!  Henry Kissinger describing himself as Richard Nixon’s “mental wet nurse,” and agreeing with Fallaci that the Vietnam war was “useless.”  

There’s a mind-numbing cliche now, “speak truth to power,” which is mostly used by self-indulgent politicians to flatter themselves. But Fallaci was the rare example of someone who walked right up into the faces of powerful people, and using a mix of charm and intense honesty, got them to admit what were, essentially, crimes and misdemeanors against humanity.

But in her final years, Fallaci became much more controversial, primarily on the left.  No neo-conservative, Fallaci was a feminist and a Socialist until the day she died.  But she was infuriated to the point of hysteria on the way Europe’s political establishment was turning a blind eye to impact of a growing Muslim population on Europe, in particular Italy.  Again from The New Yorker:

According to Fallaci, Europeans, particularly those on the political left, subject people who criticize Muslim customs to a double standard. “If you speak your mind on the Vatican, on the Catholic Church, on the Pope, on the Virgin Mary or Jesus or the saints, nobody touches your ‘right of thought and expression.’ But if you do the same with Islam, the Koran, the Prophet Muhammad, some son of Allah, you are called a xenophobic blasphemer who has committed an act of racial discrimination. If you kick the ass of a Chinese or an Eskimo or a Norwegian who has hissed at you an obscenity, nothing happens. On the contrary, you get a ‘Well done, good for you.’ But if under the same circumstances you kick the ass of an Algerian or a Moroccan or a Nigerian or a Sudanese, you get lynched.” The rhetoric of Fallaci’s trilogy is intentionally intemperate and frequently offensive: in the first volume, she writes that Muslims “breed like rats”; in the second, she writes that this statement was “a little brutal” but “indisputably accurate.” She ascribes behavior to bloodlines—Spain, she writes, has been overly acquiescent to Muslim immigrants because “too many Spaniards still have the Koran in the blood”—and her political views are often expressed in the language of disgust. Images of soiling recur in the books: at one point in “The Rage and the Pride” she complains about Somali Muslims leaving “yellow streaks of urine that profaned the millenary marbles of the Baptistery” in Florence. “Good Heavens!” she writes. “They really take long shots, these sons of Allah! How could they succeed in hitting so well that target protected by a balcony and more than two yards distant from their urinary apparatus?” Six pages later, she describes urine streaks in the Piazza San Marco, in Venice, and wonders if Muslim men will one day “shit in the Sistine Chapel.”

For saying things like this, Fallaci was excommunicated from the left, with anti-racism organizations working to get her most recent books — all about the threat to Europe she perceived from Islam – banned.  A Milan art gallery, Talbot reported, showed a large portrait of Falacci — beheaded.  Nice. When she died, she was facing trial in Italy for blasphemy.

To her critics, it didn’t seem to register that this lifelong feminist might have a problem with what another recently ostracized feminist, Phyllis Chesler, called “Islamic gender apartheid” — the brutal, total subjugation of women in the more fundamentalist Muslim societies. 

Fallaci’s 1979 interview with the Ayatollah Khomeini must have been a pivotal experience in her intellectual journey.  On reflection, she realized he was “the Robespierre or the Lenin of something which would go very far and would poison the world.” From The New Yorker:

She had followed instructions from the new Islamist regime, and arrived at the Ayatollah’s home barefoot and wrapped in a chador. Almost immediately, she unleashed a barrage of questions about the closing of opposition newspapers, the treatment of Iran’s Kurdish minority, and the summary executions performed by the new regime. When Khomeini defended these practices, noting that some of the people killed had been brutal servants of the Shah, Fallaci demanded, “Is it right to shoot the poor prostitute or a woman who is unfaithful to her husband, or a man who loves another man?” The Ayatollah answered with a pair of remorseless metaphors. “If your finger suffers from gangrene, what do you do? Do you let the whole hand, and then the body, become filled with gangrene, or do you cut the finger off? What brings corruption to an entire country and its people must be pulled up like the weeds that infest a field of wheat.”

Fallaci continued posing indignant questions about the treatment of women in the new Islamic state. Why, she asked, did Khomeini compel women to “hide themselves, all bundled up,” when they had proved their equal stature by helping to bring about the Islamic revolution? Khomeini replied that the women who “contributed to the revolution were, and are, women with the Islamic dress”; they weren’t women like Fallaci, who “go around all uncovered, dragging behind them a tail of men.” A few minutes later, Fallaci asked a more insolent question: “How do you swim in a chador?” Khomeini snapped, “Our customs are none of your business. If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it. Because Islamic dress is for good and proper young women.” Fallaci saw an opening, and charged in. “That’s very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so, I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now.” She yanked off her chador.

But Fallaci’s intemperate language about the Muslim religion and culture gave license even to supposedly objective journalists to marginalize her as a bigot.  To take just one example, consider Los Angeles Times’ Tracy Wilkinson’s obituary:

It was the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon that jerked her out of semi-retirement and launched her on her final crusade, against Islam. She saw radical Islam — and argued there was no such thing as moderate Islam — as the new brand of Nazi Fascism, “SS and Black Shirts who wave the Koran.” In the book that emerged, “The Rage and the Pride,” she ranted against Islamic terrorists and fundamentalism.

But Fallaci did not stop at terrorists; all Muslims, she wrote, posed a problem for Western civilization. She assailed European officials and the intelligentsia for bending over backward to accommodate Muslim immigrants who she said were hostile and insulting, who refused to adapt to Western values and customs, and who were ruining her city of Florence and much of Italy.

Using derogatory, ugly, distasteful language, she portrayed the “Muslim intruders” who “infest our streets and squares” as drug dealers, thieves, leches and prostitutes spreading AIDS. “They breed too much,” she said.

“The children of Allah spend their time with their bottoms in the air, praying five times a day,” she noted.

She also attacked the Vatican under the late Pope John Paul II, saying that the church appeased Islam and did not do enough to solidify Christian values in Europe.

“Tell me, Holy Father: Is it true that some time ago you asked the sons of Allah to forgive the Crusades that your predecessors fought to take back the Holy Sepulcher?” she wrote. “But … did they ever apologize?”

Does Fallaci’s language make me uncomfortable?  Of course.  Perhaps her zeal caused her to be too sweeping in her judgments and too vivid in her antipathies.  If Wilkinson is right that Fallaci saw “no such thing as moderate Islam,” then of course that’s a falsehood.  She lived in New York during her final years, but apparently didn’t notice the predominance of “moderate Islam” among the US’ millions of Islamic faithful.

But I’m still going to defend Fallaci.  Perhaps her strategy is wrong, but her objective was noble — to remind Europeans and Westerners in general that the culture in which they were born and raised is at war with an enemy.  We will lose this war, Fallaci saw, if we don’t think our way of life is worth defending. 

It strikes me as a fitting irony that an atheist like Fallaci would seek to strengthen the morale of the Catholic Church, inasmuch as she saw in the traditions of that church the seeds of tolerance — paradoxically, in an institution guilty of horrific intolerance during its history.  Neverthelesss, the Judeo-Christian ethic respects diversity of opinion and the integrity of the individual.  It is a culture open to change such that, eventually, after painful struggle, feminists, gays, atheists and other apostates from the fundamental creed, could find places of honor in our society.  At least that was Fallaci’s experience.  She saw all that, and then compared it with the social vision of Khomeini and his followers, and experienced a sense of dread.  She looked around and saw complacency, and it made her want to scream.  

The LA Times: Not Just a Numbers Game

Good luck to Dean Baquet in his fight to protect his LA Times newsroom staff from further cuts. If he’s fighting for quality, he’s fighting an important fight. 

But does everyone think the status quo = quality at the Times?  In a subtle way, the 14 civic leaders who demanded that the Tribune Company stop the layoffs, suggested that the Times isn’t quite delivering to its audience:

If I were the Tribune Company, instead of killing the Times at 100 layoffs the whack, I would take a cue from this letter, and challenge Baquet to revamp the Times and refresh its staff.  There are far too many reporters at this paper who have forgotten how to engage an audience, who don’t want to know what their readers think, and who think the “public trust” rhetoric applies to them personally — as if they themselves were monuments.

I agree that one could argue that a newspaper in the Times’ dominant market position is a “public trust.” Kind of like a baseball team.  “Public trusts” of this nature serve two masters — owners who require profits, and their community, which requires that you live up to your responsibilities. 

But just as the Dodgers improved by replacing their inexpensive, banjo-hitting shortstop with a costlier but more productive one, the Times needs to assess whether all its position players are helping the paper earn the “public trust” designation.  The dramatic fall in circulation over the past several years suggests it is not.

The civic leaders’ letter captured one part of the problem:  Implicitly, they said today’s Times is not “thorough,” and hasn’t kept up with “the civic, political and cultural life of the region.” While it is more diverse than it used to be, there is still a DNA code shared by most Times writers that reflects an insular, arrogant, one-sided view of the world. Subject-matter expertise is spotty. Laziness, both physical and intellectual, is indulged.  So is mediocre writing. 

Some might say the foregoing is true in all mainstream newspapers.  I disagree.  For all its biases, the New York Times remains a bracing read.  (Compare the NY Times’ business section with LA’s — it should be embarassing how much better NY’s is.) The Wall Street Journal doesn’t allow reporters to cover issues they don’t understand, and its stories are edited with an awareness of its readers’ intelligence and impatience. USA Today is edited rigorously to deliver what it promises, a quick but authoritative look at the news.

Compared with these institutions, the LA Times has long seemed the impecunious cousin with a dwindling trust fund.  Tellingly, the other three papers long ago embarked on national editions, in which their “public trust” status is subjected to competitive pressures in dozens of markets. The idea of a national edition of the LA Times seems far-fetched. Who would buy it if not for its coverage of its hometown market?

The Times has been the only show in Los Angeles for decades, and it shows.  Unaccustomed to competition, the Times’ staff interprets the pressure from the Tribune Company as unfair, like cutting teachers from an overcrowded school.  “If we don’t do this job, what will happen to the children?” 

The Times needs to get over itself.  Even as far back as the early 80s, when I first started hanging around the journalistic/civic world, the Times was known as a “velvet coffin” — its reporters overpaid and underchallenged.  In the journalistic world that’s emerging, that sense of entitlement won’t survive.  Readers need to be earned, every day.  Even if you forget for the moment that young people don’t read newspapers, and even middle-aged people are dropping the habit; the serious news consumer now has many more places to go — the best news sites offered by newspapers all over the world. 

They’re going to hate this comparison (I’m not even sure I like it) but perhaps reporters need to start looking at everything they write as akin to a pop song.  A hit is a hit, and now, by adding up the page views, editors and publishers now can see clearly what’s a hit and what’s a miss. 

To make a hit, you have to be inspired, and you have to know what your readers want. I know it’s real, real important to be the “watchdog” at City Hall, for example, but if you can’t engage your readers, you’re a watchdog with no bark and no bite.

The Times should be watching what the Washington Post, another nationally-respected establishment newspaper — another “public trust” — is doing. Like the Times, the Post never managed to get much of a readership for a national print edition.  But the Post has become the pacesetter in the US for online content, and the commitment to Web journalism has started to influence the writing and editing of stories. 

News coverage at the Post is now starting to be seen as part of a continuum of engagement with readers.  Text is no longer elevated artificially above images and sounds.  Reporters regularly engage with readers in chats, and will soon be subjected to reader comments on every story — as its sports reporters are now. Even symbolically, with its Technorati and de.licio.us icons, the Post is telling the Web audience it’s for them.

Mr. Baquet, you might need a different staff of people to make the necessary transformation.  I’m with you; it’s unwise to just make cuts.  Seniority-based layoffs, buyouts and such are no way to retool the Times — they’re a meat-axe.  But you can’t just stare the Tribune people down.  You need to establish a vision for the LA Times of the next 10 years, and begin making choices based on implementing that vision. 

Right now, Mr. Baquet, you are highly popular in the newsroom because you’re playing the strong daddy, protecting the kids.  Don’t get too high off of that.  You will still need to make tough choices — creative choices, but still tough ones.

A Lesson for Bloggers: Don’t Go All Ga-Ga

It surely seemed like a great idea at the time:  Former President Bill Clinton inviting a group of progressive bloggers to lunch in Manhattan to talk politics and get their pictures taken with him.  The attendees who blogged about it frankly gushed.  Talk Left said it was “awesome,” and added this:

Criminal defense lawyers take note: He’s far better on our issues than we thought while he was President, from mandatory minimums, to drug courts to restoring the right to vote to former offenders. I’m totally impressed.

Americablog, meanwhile, was ecstatic:

And while the policy discussion was fascinating, for me these kind of get togethers are far more interesting on a personal than substantive level. Meaning, it’s fascinating to see someone like Clinton in person. How his brain works, what he’s like personally, and just as importantly, to meet and get to know his staff so we can all help each other in the future (we are, after all, Democratic bloggers).

My impressions? He looks a little older than I expected, though befitting someone who was president for eight years (and he was first elected 14 years ago). He’s got beautiful blue eyes (this isn’t something I normally notice, but in his case I did, and he does, and I suspect he uses it to good effect). The man is smart as hell. He knows a lot about everything, and he gets it, he gets politics, he gets people, he understands what’s going on and knows how to get things done. His political advice is no-nonsense and straight forward – he’d rather take an issue on than run from it (oh for the days of that in a Democratic politician).

Bu-u-ut… the blog commenters weren’t all as kind, as you can read below.  This is a big lesson for everyone who wants to blog with a purpose, whether it’s political or business.  It’s really not about you at all; it’s about the community you create.  And they don’t like it if it seems like you can be bought off with a cheap lunch. Even the dreaded MSM tries to maintain objectivity.

Although Americablog’s commenters were mostly happy for ”John in DC,” and complimentary of Clinton, most of Talk Left’s commenters weren’t happy.  Here are some excerpts of the negative comments.  

So why the f–k wasn’t he a more progressive, less reactionary, less corpoRatty prez?

his triangulation killed the liberal wing of his Party…

just askin…

And:

saying it don’t make it so… and he’s talked a good line for a long time.

i’m going to stick to judging him by his actions.

And:

I doubt I’ll ever stop thinking that Bill Clinton was the greatest,most talented president I will ever see in my lifetime, but the commenter above is right… it is awefully strange to compliment him on the opinions he *actually* holds but did not put on paper.

And:

Bill Clinton fought for Nafta and got it passed. He signed legislation that allowed media to consolidate into a handful of companies. He failed to restore the Fairness Doctrine. He left it up to the Bush Administration decide whether to pursue Osama Bin Laden, rather than launch the attacks once the evidence was in on the Cole Bombing. He has refrained from criticizing Bush even though the Bush Administration has broken all precedent by criticizing him relentlessly. He continues to support dynasticism in American politics by supporting his wife’s presidential ambitions.

Most unforgivably, he labors under the naive impression that his political opponents just differ about what’s best for the country when it has been quite clear from the beginning that they wanted to liquidate it, take possession of its assets and trample on its founding document. And I don’t believe he’s taken much of a stand on the war, but I might be wrong about that.

These are all pretty important issues to me, so I’d be just fascinated to know on what issues he’s supposed to be “better than we thought while he was president,” when, as an ealier commenter pointed out, it would have made more of a difference.

And, cruelly:

Politicians find it notoriously easy to impress intellectuals and writers in face-to-face meetings. It’s the oldest trick in the book. I hope the others in this meeting were more on their guard than the host of this blog.

Personally, if I had been invited to that lunch (ha!), I’m not sure I would have been any less thrilled.  To me, Clinton has grown in stature since 2000, and I would have been fascinated to hear his perspective on just about anything political and foreign policy especially.  But the caution remains.  There are blogs that exist primarily to generate conversation among like-minded people.  You fly in the face of their expectations at your peril. 

Urban Politics After the Bubble Pops

I just caught up with Joel Kotkin’s column of 8/27, which has bad news for cities that have spent, rather than hoarded, the spike in real estate tax receipts.  The softening of the real estate market is disproportionately hitting what he calls “high-priced, overhyped urban areas.”

Many of these markets are heavily influenced by speculators, who own as much as one-third of the condos for sale in downtown San Diego and more than four-fifths in Miami. These “flippers” are most likely to unload properties once they see the prospect of declining prices.

Many other big city condo buyers are nonresidents for whom their city apartment constitutes, if not pure speculation, a second or third residence. One New York real estate developer places the percentage of second homes in his buildings as high as 80 percent. Since the 1990s, the number of Manhattan residences serving as second homes has grown as much as threefold. Unlike year-round residents, many with families, this group seems unlikely to stick around to see a sharp reversal of fortunes.

There is simply less substance to the current urban “boom” than meets the eye. Over the past five years, job growth in many cities with the greatest home price inflation — New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston and San Francisco — has remained well below the national average. True, there has been a substantial growth in income among the highest end professionals and those who benefit from rising asset prices, but earnings for everyone else have been flat at best. Instead of the real estate tide lifting most boats, it is helping elevate only a few yachts.

The weakening of condominium prices — prices could fall 9 percent this year, Kotkin says – will also leave a lot of developers who committed to “smart growth” downtown projects out of luck.  Were those projects a trend, as it seemed for awhile, or just a fad?  The developers I knew about were more than happy to talk about transit-oriented development, bringing employees closer to their work and reviving urban street life–so long as they could expect $1 million bids for the luxury condos they were building.

Ironically, Kotkin says,

a significant correction in real estate prices — albeit painful for some, including speculators, developers and promoters — could contribute to a reorientation of urban priorities. Lower rents — partly supplied by developers who give up on selling — would provide incentives for middle- and working-class families to remain in the city. It could also allow artists, young professionals and others now being priced out of San Francisco a chance to re-enter the market.   

But is it really true that cities with underfunded pension obligations didn’t shore them up when the getting was good? Who do they think is going to bail them out?  

So what happens to cities once the property boom ends? One immediate effect will be to undermine the fiscal health of these cities, which are so dependent on real estate taxes.

Many cities may rue the day that they failed to address pressing city wage and pension issues when they had the chance. Unfortunately, mayors like San Francisco’s Gavin Newsom and New York’s Bloomberg — temporarily flush with unexpected property taxes — saw fit to grant hefty raises to city workers and refused to address the looming crisis posed by their enormous pension fund liabilities. In New York City, these amount to more than $50 billion.

Think about the California political impact if Kotkin’s prophecies bear out — long-term.  Newsom and LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa are presumed to be the two top contenders for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2010 (since no one thinks there will be an incumbent named Angelides readying for re-election that year).  Both are mayors of cities that have benefited fiscally from the housing bubble.  By 2010, which mayor will have the bigger fiscal mess on his hands, and who is most likely to come out of it looking good?   It’ll be interesting to see who is more willing to accept some short-term grumbling by labor unions and clients for city services in order to better position themselves, and their cities, for the longer-term.

The whole column’s worth reading, particularly for Kotkin’s scathing descriptions of the kinds of cities real estate wealth creates.  

“Forget it Dick, It’s Chinatown”

That might have been a good final line to the ABC mini-series “The Path to 9/11.” Because John O’Neill didn’t survive, it would have had to be spoken to Richard Clarke.

Supposedly this two-part show was a right-wing smear attack on the Clinton Administration. Well, look. If you’re going to tell the story of how the government screwed up in protecting America from this attack, you’re going to feature characters who are part of the permanent government, such as the story’s hero, FBI Special Agent John P. O’Neill. As a rule, such people have contempt for politics, politicians and, above all, political appointees. (This is true at every level of government.  I saw it all the time at City Hall.  Elected officials and their appointees eventually figure out that there are two types of bureaucrats:  The smart, dedicated ones who think the political people are stupid, and the dumb, lazy ones who think the political people are stupid.)

It is part of the story to show there was tension between people like Clarke and O’Neill on one side, and presidential appointees like Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger and, later, Condi Rice on the other. Especially in the case of O’Neill, a fierce, brilliant Irish bulldog who headed the FBI’s National Security Division.

Barbara Newman, a documentary producer for A&E, interviewed O’Neill in 1997. That interview was included in a 2002 PBS Frontline episode on O’Neill called “The Man Who Knew.” On the PBS website, Newman writes:

I had covered terrorism stemming from the Middle East since 1980, when I was a producer for ABC’s 20/20. John and I shared an interest in this area and a belief that the U.S. could suffer a tremendous blow from those who espoused a hatred of us and our society. Some found his zeal shrill and annoying. I found it reassuring.

John could be utterly charming or totally devastating. He could wither with a look, suffering fools badly. He was openly contemptuous of people he didn’t think pushed the envelope or themselves. He thought so quickly he often finished my sentences. I knew when he disagreed with me by catching an amused flicker in his eyes.

John had old-fashioned values. He was patriotic. He was religious, never missing a Sunday mass. He told me that he was so poor growing up, he had done every job, including cleaning bathrooms. He went to the FBI at age 18 and became a tour guide. The Bureau was his life; they sent him to college at American University.

Behind the bluster, John was a gentle soul. He might not admit it, but I think he would rather light a candle than curse the darkness.

John and I were friends. We were able to communicate directly, without artifice. We trusted each other and knew each other’s limits. For years John had told me that Osama bin Laden was an enormous threat to the U.S. and that I should do a documentary about him. And for years I told him that Americans weren’t interested. We were both right.

Also in 2002, the New Yorker‘s Lawrence Wright wrote a posthumous profile of O’Neill, in which Clarke played a prominent role. The whole piece is worth reading — Wright has a new book out about 9/11 that I am anxious to get. This excerpt is telling:

Clarke immediately spotted in O’Neill an obsessiveness about the dangers of terrorism which mirrored his own. “John had the same problems with the bureaucracy that I had,” Clarke told me. “Prior to September 11th, a lot of people who were working full time on terrorism thought it was no more than a nuisance. They didn’t understand that Al Qaeda was enormously powerful and insidious and that it was not going to stop until it really hurt us. John and some other senior officials knew that. The impatience really grew in us as we dealt with the dolts who didn’t understand.”

That’s right: Dolts. It’s obvious both Clarke and O’Neill didn’t like much of anybody in Washington, regardless of party. Maybe they were being unfair, or maybe they were right. But it wasn’t partisan.

“The Path to 9/11″ was primarily the story of these two men and their frustration in trying to protect the nation from a threat they saw clearly and — so they thought — no one else did. “No one” is inclusive of Clinton and his appointees. It would have been untrue to the characters to have them make nice comments about the Administration, or to whitewash the contempt that numerous witnesses say they felt toward them.

The activists and Democratic Party leaders who have interpreted the dramatization of these two characters as a partisan attack don’t get it. Curiously, their furious response underscores O’Neill’s view of the political types as more interested in protecting their rear ends than protecting the country.

My 9/11/01

I woke up five years ago this morning in a room at the Chase Park Plaza Hotel in St. Louis. A colleague was on the other line. I looked at the clock: It was about 9 a.m. I had only gone to bed an hour earlier. My plane arrived in St. Louis about 6:45. I was frustrated because I’d always been able to grab just enough sleep on a red-eye to do my next day’s job, but on this trip I couldn’t sleep at all.

“Hey, I need to sleep a little more.”

“You need to turn on the TV right now.”

What ran through my mind was — our client was buying a local business and today was supposed to be the announcement, and the seller had been squirrelly about how the announcement was going to be handled. He was a prominent local business owner. He wanted to be able to tell his employees before telling anyone else, but that was inconsistent with the announcement strategy that I had been sent to St. Louis to enforce. So I thought, oh crap, the seller is talking about the transaction on some local morning news show.

“Which channel?”

“Any channel. Just watch and call me later.”

She hung up. I’m thinking: Wow, this guy is powerful. He’s got every TV station in St. Louis carrying his announcement. I didn’t think it was that big a deal.

So I click on the TV, just in time to watch one of the Twin Towers fall, crumbling into a giant cloud of dust. Or, it might have been a tape of something that had just happened. I wasn’t sure what was live and what was tape — I was still disoriented from lack of sleep. Buildings were falling and falling — tapes of both towers being played over and over.

I didn’t know until a few minutes later what had caused this. I hoped they had been able to evacuate the towers. I started trying to figure out how many people might have died — it was staggering. Maybe 40,000 people, I figured. By the end of the day, they were saying 10,000. It seems like a miracle that it was “only” about 3,000.

Before I really understood what was happening, I called my wife back in Southern California. We had only been married a few months, and she was home with my 10-year-old son. It wasn’t normally their habit to watch TV in the mornings, so I figured my son would go off to school and find out there. In those days, he was given to horrible nightmares, so that wasn’t how I wanted him to get the information. My wife and I decided she would tell him, they wouldn’t watch it on TV, and he would stay home from school.

I left the TV on, but tried to get a little more sleep, so the information and speculation seemed to swirl around me, not making sense or hanging together, like a blob of mercury in a whirlpool. Eventually I moved into the living room, noticing for the first time that I had been put up in an extremely large and luxurious space — a suite with a big living room and a kitchen. That was also surreal. I was only supposed to be in St. Louis for eight hours. Who thought I needed all this?

I switched to the TV in there, and my colleague eventually joined me to watch the story unfold. By now, I’d said goodbye to Katie and Matt, and hello to CNN. I had a selfish interest in watching. They had grounded all the planes, and here I was, stuck in St. Louis. When would I be able to fly out again? So while the reporters reported and the pontificators pontificated, I was watching the little space at the bottom where words fly by, trying not to miss information from the FAA. Or Amtrak, which was also halted. There was a rumor of terrorists plotting to take over a train, right here in Missouri! My colleague had already checked on rental cars — there were none.

My wife and I were selling our home, and today was the day it was supposed to go on the market. At some point my wife and I spoke and agreed we would probably not be getting any lookie-loos that day. But then the phone rang. We had an offer. Sight unseen! At our price, which our Realtor had defined as “aggressive.” They wanted us to accept today. Today? While our country is in this turmoil? It was a Korean family. Our neighbors in this complex were mostly Korean, and we figured it was a family thing.

“Gosh, maybe we should have named a higher price,” I said.

I wasn’t very experienced in real estate, but it didn’t seem quite ethical that if you set a price and someone met it, you didn’t accept it. We agreed to accept. The day got yet more surreal, as my Realtor tried to fax the 50 pages of the sale agreement, each one of which I had to initial and fax back.

Eventually, I was in touch with my office in LA. After going through all the “how horribles” and “can you believe its” they wanted to talk business. One of our clients was Microsoft’s PC games, including Flight Simulator. Apparently, one of the many speculative comments that had been repeated on, I believe, NBC, was that the hijackers had trained on Flight Simulator. Questions were being raised about whether Flight Simulator — the most popular PC game by far — should still be sold since, after all, anyone who played Flight Simulator could now hijack a plane and fly it into a building! How should this be countered? Especially since a new version had been produced and was about to be shipped!

What you had was about 20 PR people — in-house, at my firm and at another firm, plus some lawyers — with nothing else to do and a sense of unease from which we all wanted to escape. So we all glommed onto this project, and started having conference calls and sending e-mail. I borrowed my colleague’s computer, since I didn’t think I would be away from home long enough to justify dragging mine along. The e-mail chains went on for 50 screens as this PR problem was considered from every conceivable angle, and as every decision-maker weighed in. The fact was, nobody could fly a real plane based on logging even an infinite number of hours on Flight Simulator. But the press didn’t want to hear that. Suddenly, a fun game that lots of geeks liked to play at their desks instead of doing real work was being redefined as a national security threat!

“Couldn’t you reprogram the game so it would be impossible to fly into buildings?” someone asked. Apparently, if you had a creepy sense of humor, you could deliberately crash your plane on Flight Simulator. Maybe that functionality should be, you know, uh, turned off. A fine idea, but it was too late for all the new Flight Simulator boxes being stacked up and ready to ship. Even though it was only September, the product had to be in stores soon for Christmas sales.

Somebody said: “I don’t think America will be celebrating Christmas this year.”

Somebody else said: “Are you kidding? By Christmas, no one will even remember this!”

Meanwhile, CNN was still playing in the living room. I turned the sound off and the closed-caption on, but closed caption reduced everything to nonsense, especially Muslim names like Osama Bin Laden. At one point, I swear, I think the closed-caption typist gave up and just started pounding out letters at random. They didn’t make any less sense than what was being typed deliberately.

There was a brief break in all the Flight Simulator action, so I decided to focus on the news. Normally, I don’t like watching the news in the immediate aftermath of a huge event like this, because in those first 24 hours, facts are few, speculation runs rampant and mostly it’s just the talking heads talking to each other. This, I now realized, was different. There was a rescue underway. The survivors, if any, needed to be found quickly. Some of the missing people were police officers and firefighters who had rushed into the towers with little consideration for their own safety, and apparently no awareness that the fires from the planes might cause the buildings to pancake on top of them.

Plus, people were sharing amateur on-the-scene video. The jumpers — my God. And the Manhattan canyons filling with debris as the towers fell, with onlookers rushing to get out of the way of the cement and steel avalanche. It was starting to sink in.

There was Benjamin Netanyahu on the screen, calmly being interviewed. He said something that has stuck with me ever since: “If they’d had nuclear weapons, they would have used them.”

His statement made a horrible kind of sense to me. So much hatred had to go into these attacks. Boundless, bloodthirsty hatred. Suicidal in the sense that, to this enemy, people didn’t matter, not even their own people; only history and God. It was, I began to realize, a war of revenge against western society, for a thousand years of crimes that could never be atoned for. There was no negotiation possible. The grievances went back a millennium, but were palpable today in the fury they stoked. We were seen as the same people who waged the wars of the Crusades and then went on to blaspheme the Muslim religion by allowing naked women to dance on cable TV. It was all one crime. I had to agree with the fabled Israeli reactionary. If Al Queda could have smuggled a nuclear weapon onto one of those jets, we would be seeing Manhattan or Washington DC in radioactive ruins now.

It was one of those long summer dusks we don’t have in Los Angeles, where the light lingers in the sky long after sunset, when I finally wandered out of the hotel, alone, in search of something to eat. The hotel was in a beautiful old neighborhood. I’d never been to St. Louis before, but it seemed like a real hidden treasure. (Later I was advised that the hotel was in the only good neighborhood in St. Louis. Oh well.) I found an independent record store in what seemed like a collegiate community. The music industry’s new releases were out front. Two interested me: Bob Dylan’s “Love and Theft,” and Nick Lowe’s “The Convincer.” Eventually they became two of my favorite CDs, but I thought the Dylan might be more suitable. Dylan had been prophetic in the past. He couldn’t have known the attack was coming, but it would be interesting to find out what he was tuned into in the months leading up to it. I then found a Chinese restaurant, ordered some to go, and brought my Dylan album back to the hotel.

Well, if you know the album “Love and Theft,” you know it was Dylan’s return to comedy for the first time since the mid-60s. The music was at times hard rocking and blues-y, at other times more like vaudeville of the 1920s and parlour music of the 1890s. The lyrics were as brilliant and madly surreal as “Blonde on Blonde” or “Highway 61 Revisited,” but now from the vantage point of a 60-year-old man who’d seen a lot and was more dispassionate, empathetic and greatly amused; who accepted loneliness and heartbreak as part of humanity’s grand buffoonery, and his own. “Love and Theft” was not a prophetic album; instead it looked back. It was, as Robert Hilburn might say, “quintessentially American.” It didn’t reflect how I felt right at that moment, but in some way it reflected how I felt most of the time. Songs like “Summer Days” wouldn’t have outraged Bin Laden the same way, say, Madonna’s frank sexuality would. But its laughing spirit would have made him uncomfortable:

Wedding bells ringin’, the choir is beginning to sing
Yes, the wedding bells are ringing and the choir is beginning to sing
What looks good in the day, at night is another thing

She’s looking into my eyes, she’s holding my hand
She’s looking into my eyes, she’s holding my hand
She says, “You can’t repeat the past.” I say, “You can’t? What do you mean, you can’t? Of course you can.”

Where do you come from? Where do you go?
Sorry that’s nothin’ you would need to know
Well, my back has been to the wall for so long, it seems like it’s stuck
Why don’t you break my heart one more time just for good luck

I called my wife again and spoke to my son. Their nerves clearly were frazzled and even though they knew it wasn’t my fault, they were both irritated that I couldn’t be home, and couldn’t even tell them when I would be home. “Why can’t your company help you?” I explained that the CEO of my company was also stuck somewhere — Nebraska I think. He’d somehow gotten a car and was driving back to New York.

On TV, the World Trade Center site was glowing in the night sky. The fire had not gone out, plus I think by this time some kleig lights had been erected to help with the rescue. News was starting to filter in about cellphone calls by airline passengers and by people trapped inside the upper floors of the towers — giving reports and saying goodbye. I tried to imagine 10,000 souls all dying in these horrible conflagrations. It was sickening and sad, and paralyzed my heart.

Of course, at that moment, I hated the people who had committed this murderous act. But what was worse was realizing they hated me, and my people, so much more than I could ever hate them. That’s the true nature of asymmetrical warfare. We in America don’t sustain hatreds for very long. We lost hundreds of thousands of soldiers in World War Two, the worst cataclysm in U.S. history, and within a very few years had made our peace, basically, with the Germans and Japanese. Within 20 years, we were joking about the whole thing on shows like “McHale’s Navy” and “Hogan’s Heroes.” We would soon forget the rage about this attack that was not yet called “9/11,” and instead try to figure out what we had done wrong. Or so I predicted, somewhat fatalistically.

I know many people would say my prediction was totally wrong. We went to war almost immediately in Afghanistan, and soon in Iraq, and we have shown our most violent side in atrocities like Abu Graibh. We’ve declared war on what people from Christopher Hitchens to George W. Bush are now calling “Islamofascism.” But I think it’s too early to tell. Bush has a horrible time trying to define this war, and if anything the Democrats are worse. Our political system has failed to rise to the challenge, to say the least. This week’s absurd pissing match over the ABC docudrama served as a perfect illustration of how sadly inadequate our political class is to the task before us.

The Iraq war’s endless denouement has seemingly wearied our nation. It was absolutely a good thing to overthrow Hussein, but now what? All we’ve managed to do is unleash more of what we’re really supposedly fighting against. And many Americans think we should pull out, which means essentially letting the most ruthless of the Islamofascists to take over Iraq. The global Islamofascism war overflows with ironies like that. It is exhausting us already, and it has barely begun.

On the other hand, 9/11 hasn’t happened again on our turf. As tattered as our Homeland Security seems to be, it’s apparently working. Or we’ve been lucky. Or, more likely, we don’t understand the historical framework of our enemy. If it takes another 10 years to stage an apocalyptic attack like 9/11, to them, that’s a blink in the eye of history, barely any time at all from the vantage point of Allah.

Eventually, of course, my colleague and I made it home from St. Louis. It took until Saturday. We had to line up at 4 a.m. at the airport. Everyone was very quiet in that line. It reminded me of the last scene of “The Birds,” where the traumatized people leave as silently as they can, so as not to disturb the flocks of angry birds lining their route. Only we couldn’t see the angry birds. We weren’t even sure whether the angry birds were our ostensible enemy or our own people in hypersecurity mode. I was careful not to make any jokes that morning.

In the days between, I’d eaten a lot of room service until finally discovering a health food store where I could buy some organic soups. On what I thought would probably be my last day, I took trip to see the great St. Louis Arch, and to eat catfish in a restored gaslight district restaurant. I also jogged one evening around Chase Park, and swatted a lot of mosquitos. A friendly hotel employee took my colleague and I clothes-shopping, since neither of us had brought enough to wear for such a long stay. And I had several more conference calls about Flight Simulator. Microsoft ended up releasing the new version, but delayed it about 10 days. Why that was the best solution, I can no longer remember.

I was traveling with a Swiss Army knife that I knew I couldn’t get onto the plane. I asked the hotel desk staff if they could mail it to me, and I gave them all the information. The knife never made it home, but I did. My wife had already started packing to move us into our new place. It was a long time before I agreed to fly anywhere again.

Democrats as Censors?

I get a lot of e-mails from the Democratic party. Howard Dean, Rahm Emmanuel and a guy named Tom McMahon are frequent visitors to my in-box.  This one was from McMahon and it was called “RE: A Despicable, Irresponsible Fraud.” Here’s how it started:

Dear John,

This is it: crunch time for getting the slanderous ABC television docudrama “The Path to 9/11″ yanked off the air. The network schedule has this slanderous attack on Democrats slated to start on Sunday night, September 10, at 8 o’clock — and as long as it stays on the schedule, we have work to do. Take a minute right now and tell Disney president Robert Iger to keep this right-wing propaganda off our airwaves:

http://www.democrats.org/pathto911

Here’s the good news: the suits at ABC and the Walt Disney Company have started panicking under pressure, thanks to your ferocious response to the outrageous decision to put this irresponsible miniseries on the air. But until Disney quits defending its plan to broadcast conservative propaganda — fraudulently presented to Americans as “based on the 9/11 Commission Report” — the company should plan to keep taking every bit of heat we dish out.

I really don’t get the party’s strategy — at all. Here are the problems with it that I see:

1) They’re calling attention to something that they don’t want people to see. Which means curious people are more likely to want to see it. Human nature.

2) They’re associating the Democratic Party with censorship, e.g. boycotts and pressure to push for prior restraint of a program. Why aren’t they mindful of the precedent they’re setting? “If we don’t like it, take it off the air,” is now an official party position. I have a feeling that’s going to come back to haunt them when the right wing objects to a pending TV program that offends them. Dems are supposed to be for free speech.

3) A related point: Will the entertainment leaders so critical to the party’s fund-raising agree that such pressure tactics are appropriate? Has anyone asked Rob Reiner, or David Geffen, or Larry David how they feel about this?

4) The position they’re defending isn’t credible. Clinton turned over the White House keys to Bush in January 2001. The attack was in September 2001. It’s pretty apparent the plannng for the attack started before 2001, and was preceded by a number of Al Queda-sponsored attacks on American assets that all took place during Clinton’s tenure. So why is it out of bounds to criticize the Clinton Administration’s record on this issue? How could you review the “path to 9/11″ and avoid doing so? I don’t hear Bush people complaining about what is supposed to be some very harsh criticism aimed their way in this show. Which leads to…

5) The program is going to air. People will watch it, more than would have because of curiousity. Many will be expecting it to live up to the description: “Right-wing propaganda.” But I bet it won’t strike most viewers that way. “What are they fussing about?” will be the response, I bet. Or worse: “What were they trying to hide?”  The net effect will be to give the show more credibility than perhaps it deserves. If “The Path to 9/11″ isn’t a drooling right-wing fantasy, it will be regarded as fair, and its critics will be taken as over-sensitive.

Could be that the party is once again trying to catch up with the left-wing blogosphere, which has been hysterical on this topic, and probably has been pressuring the party to “stand tough.”  It’s fine for grassroots, independent people to be upset. But the party itself should be above this sort of thing. It should have adopted a more sober “wait and see” approach, keeping powder dry until after the show aired rather than demanding that the show be censored. Really, the Democratic Party, as an institution, should have done nothing whatsoever to call attention to it.

Am I wrong?  If you understand the point of the party’s strategy, please, enlighten me in the comment section below.

I’m Guessing He Doesn’t Like Term Limits

There appears to be so much cool political intrigue in the City Hall term limits story, but a disdain for term limits seems to have caused Times reporter Steve Hymon to avert his eyes from it all.  Here’s some of the story that ran this morning about the proposed term limits/ethics “reform” measure being pulled off the ballot* for violating the “single-subject” rule:

Because council members could be viewed as acting in their own self-interest, the civic organizations that wrote the ballot measure attempted to sweeten the term limits proposal with broader ethics reforms, only to run into a buzz saw of opposition.

(snip)

The ballot measure was written by the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce and the League of Women Voters Los Angeles. At their request, the council voted 14 to 0 to put it on the ballot, sidestepping advice from Delgadillo to break it into two measures.

In these early paragraphs, Hymon makes it sound like this was a good-government reform requested by organizations outside City Hall.  But at the end of the story, he writes:

The court ruling could have political ramifications for council President Eric Garcetti, who has been pressured by his colleagues to get term limits eased or face possible loss of the presidency.

So which is it? A high-road attempt at government reform, or a complex political deal engineered by Garcetti to save his presidency?  Hymon leaves us hanging, just when the story starts to get interesting.  I want to know:  Which councilmembers threatened Garcetti?  How was this threat conveyed?  Is there any connection between the threat-makers and the civic organizations?

Hymon seems more interested in making term limits look pernicious.  His on-the-one-hand/on-the-other struck me as unbalanced:

Proponents of term limits credit them with ensuring fresh faces in government. Critics, however, say they deny voters the chance to vote for qualified incumbents and discourage lawmakers from tackling politically difficult issues.

Actually, the argument for term limits goes beyond the need for “fresh faces.”  Given the way the district lines for state and local officials are drawn, and given the way campaigns are financed, incumbents become nearly impossible to dislodge absent a severe scandal or a major political sea-change. Which means incumbents could govern pretty much however they wanted, for as long as they wanted, with little to fear from the electorate.  That’s why term limits became popular; and other than term limits, nothing else has changed that would ease voters’ concern about abandoning or relaxing them. 

Term limits are imperfect, a blunt instrument, and I can think of lots of areas where it has altered the council’s approach toward the city’s long-term assets. But the political class hasn’t given voters anything else with which to curb the power of incumbency, so the voters will tend to hang onto term limits.   

Hymon also demonstrates a bit of the Stockholm Syndrome on the question of whether it is term limits that “discourage lawmakers from tackling politically difficult issues.”  That’s what the political leaders say, but is it really true? Isn’t it just as credible to assume that a politician who will no longer face the voters after their last term could be encouraged to deal with difficult issues, while a politician who is always looking toward the next re-election would be discouraged? 

The “politically difficult issues” issue strikes me as more of an alibi; or maybe a ransom demand:  Let me keep my office or else I’ll vote like a coward. 

A poll commissioned earlier this year by the chamber and the voters league found that a proposal to ease term limits stood a better chance of passing if it were combined with other reforms. That poll was widely circulated in City Hall.

I would have liked more information on that poll.  Which “other reforms?”  Anything that smelled kinda like reform?  It might be interesting to find out how specific the poll was about the “other reforms,” to compare them against the “other reform” the council actually put on the ballot.  If Hymon was curious enough to ask.

The motives of the measure’s opponents are scrutinized for political self-interest much more skeptically than its proponents’:

Controller Laura Chick and Delgadillo were unhappy that the proposal to ease term limits didn’t include their offices, while ethics commissioners were upset they didn’t get to vet the lobbying reforms.

The Chick/Delgadillo complaints are always mentioned in these stories. But Hymon makes no mention of his own coverage a few days earlier of the Council’s attempt to trick voters by describing the measure in its ballot title as a “change” in term limits, avoiding language that would suggest the change was to lengthen them. Garcetti’s explanation for why he preferred the vague word “change” was funny, I thought:.

In a legal opinion last month, City Atty. Rocky Delgadillo warned the council that the ballot title could provoke a legal challenge and recommended that it use “lengthen” in the title while also saying that “change” was legally sufficient.

At the time, council President Eric Garcetti said that using words such as “lengthen” or “extend” were politically loaded terms and that “change” was more neutral.

Sure is!  I can see it now. Don’t call it a tax increase, call it a tax “change.”  A power plant wants to emit more pollutants? Don’t say it that way!  Call it an environmental “change.”  “Officer, I wasn’t going too fast.  I prefer the more neutral ‘changing speeds!’”

*By the way: This afternoon, the 2nd District Court of Appeals directed the county registrar to put the measure back on the City ballot.  This doesn’t mean the matter’s settled, but it does mean that if the measure survives after a hearing, October 3rd, the voters will be able to vote on it Nov. 7th, rather than waiting until next year. The decision is more a recognition of the need to start printing ballots and allow for the possibility of the measure’s survival than it is a determination of whether the city violated the “single subject” rule.

If Elliot Mintz is the Cadillac, Here’s the Yugo

From E! Online:

It turns out Jessica Simpson and John Mayer‘s hot romance was only taking place in Wonderland.

And Rob Shuter will no longer be playing the role of Fairy Godmother.

Simpson’s manager dad, Joe Simpson, gave his daughter’s publicist the ax this week, reportedly because he’s quite perturbed about the way Shuter put the spin on his little girl’s burgeoning relationship with Mayer, with a People magazine cover story Aug. 31 touting Simpson’s declaration that she was in love eventually turning into an Us Weekly cover pronouncing the singer “Dumped!”

Which must have come as a surprise to Simpson, considering she went on The View this week and announced, “I am actually not dating John Mayer.” (Isn’t it hard enough getting dumped by the people you actually are going out with?)

A source close to the hullabaloo told Radar magazine that the overblown story was “100 percent Shuter. He broke all the rules of the game. He’s a pathological liar. I wonder how much Jessica even knew what he was up to.”

A call to Shuter was not immediately returned. Radar and TMZ.com were the first to report the split.

Meanwhile, the latest issue of Star points the finger at Joe Simpson and an Epic Records executive who allegedly cultivated the romance in the media to add to the buzz surrounding the release of Simpson’s latest album, A Public Affair, which ended up moving about 95,000 copies its first week out.

An Epic spokeswoman called the accusation “ludicrous.” Joe Simpson also denied having a hand in the hype.

I have exactly zero Jessica Simpson fans who read this site.  But I do think a few PR people do, and that’s who this item is posted for.  Do you worry about the reputation of your profession?  No?  Maybe this story will get you to re-think.

What I see is this:  Jessica Simpson has a new CD.  They want people who favor this kind of music to know about it, to embrace it passionately, and to rush right out and buy it, so the album has a chance to hit #1.  They’ve obviously decided that Simpson’s romantic ups and downs are what captivate her potential fan base — young girls who still think life can be a fairy tale.   As the reviews make clear, this album is supposed to represent Simpson putting “her marriage far, far behind her…(and) out to have nothing but a good time.” 

So her publicist, perhaps with her father’s cooperation, concocts a story about a budding romance with a heartthrob pop star — one who has a bit more artistic credibility than her ex-husband, just to rub it in.  They hope girls will rush out and buy the album not because they love the music, but for clues to Simpson’s emotional state.  The false story is planted the same week the CD is released.

The scam worked — well, nearly.  The CD debuted at #5 on the Billboard charts (with the #1 slot going to Bob Dylan, which is another story).  But the ploy has blown up — in part because the two alleged lovebirds finally got around to denying statements being put in their mouths in 40-point type on hundreds of thousands of newsstands around the world.   People are pointing fingers and being accused of lying to the press. A prominent publicist gets fired. And the children are listening.

So, PR executives, answer me this:  What upcoming experience with the PR industry is going to make these teenage girls less cynical about it?  If they start out at age 13 associating PR with lies, what will come along later to disabuse them of this notion?  

This is not the first time publicist Rob Shuter is accused of lying, by the way. Readers of Gawker and other gossip sites know his name well from his work for Paris Hilton, placing an allegedly false story on Page Six of the N.Y. Post. (Whose idea it was is a matter of dispute between Shuter and Hilton.)  Hilton is no longer Shuter’s client; he was apparently replaced by Elliot Mintz.  

Mulling over this kind of PR practice, it does become clear why Elliot Mintz is so successful.  He’s credible. He’s succinct.  He’s prompt.  He’s focused on his task.  Mintz is not trying to market Paris Hilton.  His job is to protect her reputation, and limit the damage that her antics might cause her.  Mintz, I suspect, would have no part in a scheme to plant a false story.  It is ironic that someone with his hipster background is working with Paris Hilton, and that’s why I like writing about him.  But it should be said that today’s Mintz does his job honorably and professionally; a point driven home by observing the Simpson stunt’s embarassing crash and burn.

Welcome, Paris Hilton Fans!

Every time Paris Hilton or one of her friends does something to schlock the conscience of a nation, there is one little-noticed side-effect: “From the Desert to the Sea” gets a lot more hits.

I usually find out about Paris’ latest missteps by observing the spike in my visitors; whereupon my first thought is: My heavens, what’s Paris done now? (Today, it’s a DUI.)

Most of my new readers (welcome everyone!) go to this post from last February, in which I express surprise that Elliot Mintz, a LA radio personality from the “underground” days and then prominent publicist, confidante and acolyte to John Lennon and Yoko Ono would ply his trade on behalf of Ms. Hilton, her sister, and several other blonds-in-distress like Christie Brinkley and Janet Jones Gretzky.

I did a little bit of digging and was able to find some facts to verify my recollections, plus a pricelessly funny, oh-so-earnest display ad from the time Mintz was a late-night host on KABC-AM. I had fun writing it; it brought me back to the days when all I wanted was to live as cool a life as the zonked-out DJs with left-wing dreams and mystical fantasies who introduced me to the Grateful Dead, Carlos Santana, David Bowie and Steely Dan.

My post got picked up by LA Observed’s Kevin Roderick, who gave it a very kind boost, which led a lot of other people to it, which floated the post up the Google search list, which then meant I got more hits the next time Paris did something that Mintz had to go out and explain to her worried public.

Eventually, my homework was transformed by someone into a Wikipedia entry on Mintz, which includes two links back to my blog. If you Google “Elliot Mintz,” you’ll find my handiwork at #2, just behind the Internet Movie Data Base entry. (At IMDB, you’ll find that Mintz was featured in Something’s Happening, a 1968 documentary about the youth movement. His co-stars were Muhammed Ali and General Herschey Bar.)

It’s quite a compliment to the public relations industry that so many people are interested not just in the celebrity, but in the publicist behind the celebrity. But, like me and quite a few others who have served clients as a PR professional, the job is not something we started out planning to do; self-doubt comes with the territory.

Even Mintz. His quaalude-calm demeanor and icy self-control seemed to wobble a bit when he had to explain why Paris was laughing at her boyfriend’s obscene taunting of Lindsay Lohan. I mean, this is the same guy who was hanging out with John Lennon when he was talking revolution! Now he’s babysitting a childish socialite who flouts the rules of decent bourgeois society not because she wants to overthrow the system, but simply because she’s got enough money to buy her way out of any trouble she gets into.

Paris Hilton is the black hole of scandal journalism; what would destroy almost every other celebrity’s reputation only enhances hers. I think I see, just behind Mintz’ reptile eyes, an unspoken wish that his Paris Hilton gig wasn’t so easy…that everyone in the press and Hilton fandom who enables her arrogant sense of entitlement would, for once…just ignore her.

Or maybe he wishes he were young and foolish again, and that he didn’t have to be a designated driver to someone who knows so little about what used to matter to people like Elliot Mintz.

Video Out-Takes Rides Into the Sunset

 

 

If you are a Quentin Tarantino fanatic, you might recognize the name Video Out-Takes as having a “who begat what” relationship with Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs.

In 1979, Tarantino’s now-estranged writing partner Roger Avary took a job at what was then a new and innovative business, a video-rental store called Video Out-Takes in Redondo Beach. Video Out-Takes was co-owned by Lance Lawson, who then broke off and founded Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, taking Avary with him. Tarantino became a loyal patron and employee of Video Archives, and a friend of Avary’s.

When VHS and Beta movies first appeared, the studios assumed people would buy them like books and LPs. By offering what were supposed to be end-consumer products for rent, the first video stores had a kind of “is this legal?” feel about them. Stores like Video Out-Takes and Video Archives provided the first opportunity for fans to see classic movies, cult movies, foreign movies, on demand in their living rooms–or in the case of Avary and Tarantino, on the TV monitor at the store when business was slow.

I never went to Video Archives, so I missed my chance to meet Tarantino in his pre-fame geekdom. However I was a Video Out-Takes customer for 25 years. My mother is a movie-lover, so she was willing to shell out what it took to buy a VHS player when the technology was still new and too expensive for me; and Video Out-Takes was her source. I lived an hour away in Los Angeles, but would sometimes come home on weekends just to rent movies and watch them in my parents’ den.

When I moved back to the South Bay in 1992, one of my first stops was to buy a discount card at Video Out-Takes. In addition to the movies I was interested in, Video Out-Takes had a great collection of Disney cartoons and obscure movies for kids — videos that had long gone out of print and could only be found there. My son and step-son loved to browse through dusty shelves full of faded clam-shell boxes to claim movies like Old Yeller, The Three Caballeros and The Best of Beany & Cecil.

Video Out-Takes was an oasis for people who loved movies of every genre — from art-house to slasher. You could tell that before you even walked in the door, from looking at the bizarre murals on the side wall: Elvis riding a pink Cadillac with Chucky…John Wayne taking E.T. for a ride. These murals as well as a faded collection of steamy lobby cards for obscure films noirs can still be seen if you visit the storefront on PCH, but probably not for much longer.

Video Out-Takes survived competition from giant chains like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video because of the depth of its offerings (which apparently also included a large porn collection secreted behind a false wall). It made the transition to DVDs fairly seamlessly.

Perhaps Netflix delivered the coup de grace, because like Video Out-Takes, the online service provides access to a huge collection suiting many tastes. However, when I visited the store last night, I saw an announcement for a public hearing on converting the site to a “commercial condominium.” It might just be that the landlord sold the store out from under them, and the owner didn’t have the energy to relocate.

What Video Out-Takes had that Netflix does not was its collection of old VHS tapes dating back to the beginning of the technology. Hundreds of titles got issued on VHS — once. These are titles that aren’t on DVD and might never be. The images and sound were starting to fade on these tapes, but at least you could see them. I was on my way to look for an out-of-print VHS title like that when I discovered the store was closed.

That was a great cinematic library: Where is it now?

(One buried treasure I need to mention: Lou Bunin’s Alice in Wonderland, a stop-motion animation “puppetoon” combined with live action that came out in 1950, the same year as Walt Disney’s more famous version. The Disney lawyers managed to suppress Bunin’s charming rendition of Lewis Carroll’s tale, allegedly threatening film labs and theater chains so that it barely reached U.S. screens. However, at some point in the late 70s, it was issued on VHS, and Video Out-Takes had it. I stumbled across it and thought my son might like it — and boy did he! That movie became the central focus of his life for several years, inspiring hundreds of drawings. We must have rented it 25 times, until finally we made a copy of it, fearing the rental tape might get stolen…or that something like this would happen.)

Hanging Out on the Central Coast

San Simeon State Park:

Hearst Castle:

Moonstone Bay:

More from San Simeon State Park:

Looking at driftwood in the grass near San Simeon Beach:

The Misguided “Electoral Compact”

Did this really happen while I was on vacation?

The California State Legislature voted to hand over our state’s electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote for president — even if that candidate was rejected by Californians!? Apparently so.

Under the legislation, California would grant its electoral votes to the nominee who gets the most votes nationwide — not the most votes in California. Get enough other states to do the same, backers of the bill say, and soon presidential candidates will have to campaign across the nation, not just in a few key “battleground” states such as Ohio and Michigan that can sway the Electoral College vote.

How does it benefit the Democrats in California — struggling to win a governor’s race — to say “We stand for disenfranchising California voters.” That’s who voted for this thing — Democratic legislators.

The disputed Bush victory in 2000 has deranged the entire political system: the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, the good-government reformers…all of them! The political system is no longer a place for ideas; it’s all about tactical warfare at the elite level. The reformers who proposed this half-baked idea have fallen out of touch with any notion of what voters think is fair. The politicians who have attached their names to it have fallen out of touch with basic common sense.

“But,” a supporter of this legislation might say, “no one’s disenfranchising California voters. Their votes are included in the popular vote that determines where our electoral votes will be directed.” And that’s true in a literal sense.

Nonetheless, this measure — and its underlying goal, the abolition of the Electoral College — reduces the state’s influence on the presidential election. The theory that only the “battleground” states get the focus of presidential politics depends on where the “battleground” states happen to be in any given year. In my lifetime, California has been a “battleground” state many times: 1960, 1968, 1976, 1980, 1988, 1992. Moreover, one or both parties have to consider California’s political composition when selecting their nominees. The size of our state exerts a gravitational influence on all the decisions that lead up to the selection of a nominee, including which candidates fundraisers will back.

Why would Californians listen to any reformer who wanted us to surrender the power our size gives us? We need a bigger voice in the process because as the nation’s largest state we have bigger issues, bigger problems, and make a bigger contribution to the nation’s welfare.

But what’s really stupid about so-called “electoral compact” measure is this: The reformers assume everything else remains static — that the 2000 election will be re-run endlessly, pitting a smart Democrat against a dumb Republican in a contest the smart Democrat will win, just barely, because there are just enough smart people to overcome all the dumb ones. (This is how professional Democrats see the blue vs. red divide.)

It is true that only the flukish nature of the Electoral College kept Gore out the White House. But it is not true that if the 2000 election were re-run without the Electoral College, Gore would have won. Because a USA without an Electoral College would not be a nation of two, large, national parties that aggregate various interests — parties of the size and scope necessary to wage campaigns that will win state-by-state elections. If all you have to do to win an election is gather votes where you can find them, we would see a splintered array of no-compromise parties representing regions, ideologies and countless special interests that can go it alone to muster up blocs of voters.

The “electoral compact” contains no provision for a scenario in which there are, say, five presidential candidates who each get around 20 percent of the popular vote. The candidate who gets a plurality — say 26 percent — might only get 5 percent in California. But under the new state law, California’s electoral votes would all go to that candidate.

(And I think five candidates is conservative. If you could run and conceivably win without the backing of a party, a ballot with 25 names on it is easily imaginable.)

I would consider supporting presidential election reforms that included abolishing the Electoral College; but such reform would have to include a run-off between the two top vote-getters. That can’t happen if the “electoral compact” succeeds, because all the compact proposes to do is end-around the Constitution, not amend it. Absent a Constitutional amendment, there is no way to add a run-off provision. And without a run-off provision, any attempt to nullify the Electoral College would be an extremely dangerous gamble. (Unless you are comfortable with the idea of a candidate who wins 20 percent of the vote becoming president.)

I don’t even see the short-term gain for Democrats in this. What made them think it was a political plus to embrace it? I guess the party pros who instruct our legislators on details like how to vote see 2008 as 2000 all over again. If so — wow. What a lack of confidence in a candidate that hasn’t even been chosen yet.