The New York Daily News still occupies a key place in New York political and media circles, even if its old core base of outer borough white ethnic types has died out: for one, it's got whatever center there is, between Murdoch's vanity publication on the wacky right, and the staid, liberal New York Times. For another, it's the voicebox of Mort Zuckerman, a hawkish media mogul B-lister.
The News suffers from an acute identity problem, a true personality crisis.
The Archie Bunker base in New York has either died or moved away and the real working-class New Yorker is likely to be black or Hispanic or Asian and quite often, born someplace else. The News is out of touch with this growing, churning middle class economic powerhouse - a look at its opinion pages is a window into just how clueless the paper is. The News doesn't get this new middle class, and its lead opinion voice - Pulitzer winner Michael Goodwin - is cartoonishly out of kilter, pitching his faux dese, dems, and dose common man pablum to mere ghosts in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx.
Back in November, was to throw out a hackneyed Mommy Party column in the spirit of the noted anti-feminist Maureen Dowd.
Republicans, with their macho men and muscular policy prescriptions, are in decline because they are out of answers. Dems are getting better at seizing their opportunities, and doing it with women playing a Put another way, Mommy is taking over because Daddy screwed up.
This is blatant sexism; can Goodwin actually walk around this town in public after writing something like that? To put it another way, what's he smoking? New York's working class is filled with ambitious women; its professional class shows more and more numerical equality between the sexes each year.
And Goodwin acts like an old, doddering man from another century with his mommy class tripe.
Then today, Goodwin loads his with a scat-like riff loaded with anti-woman downbeats.
He's everything she's not.
He's warm, she's cold. He's a great speaker, even off-the-cuff. She's usually wooden and sticks to the calculated message.
He's the fresh-faced outsider. She's the ultimate insider. He talks about uniting America across racial and political lines.
She's a born-to-divide partisan. Her sense of inevitability makes you tired, Obama's charisma makes you pay attention.
Cold.
Wooden. Calculating (and we know what that usually modifies, don't we?).
Born-to-divide partisan. She makes us tired - you know who we are: blue-collar, outer-borough he-men, two-fisted drinkers down at the corner bar, at Archie's Place. That kind of us.
She wears us out, because she's a woman and we don't want to hear a woman talk. Who does, you know?
No, I don't know.
Goodwin is writing for some tiny slice of old male-dominated New York; he's incredibly out of touch and it rankles. Senator Clinton, to Goodwin, has no authenticity - whereas all her male counterparts don't get the same challenge at the gate, despite being career politicians. He even :
She famously wore a Christian cross around her neck, which was the equivalent of a flashing neon light that shouted “CENTRIST.When's the last time Michael Goodwin doubted the religious beliefs of a prominent male politician. Here's a gentle hint: never.”
Then there's Iraq.
It's obscene, frankly, that Mike Goodwin is battering Senator Clinton for her war vote when he wrote - just last summer - :
So now that the wackadoo wing of the party has a bloody scalp, what are they going to do with it? Wave it at Islamic terrorists in Iraq and Israel and New York and declare peace? That will work for sure.
They better also wear armor and duck.
If last night's results are a window on the party's tilt, then a huge America. God help us if the Republicans also get the wobblies.
Let's hope the Connecticut Condition isn't contagious. And let's hope last Yeah, the wackadoo wing, Goodwin. Nice perspective.
(He means us, by the way - you and me). And oh yeah, :
World War III has begun.The war on terror, or the war of terror, has tentacles that reach much of the globe. It is a world war.
It's not perfectly clear when it started.Perhaps it was after the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended. Perhaps it was the first bombing of the World Trade Center, in 1993.
What is clear is that this war has a long fuse and, while we are not in the full-scale combat phase that marked World Wars I and II, we seem to be heading there.The expanding hostilities mean it's time to give this conflict a name, one that focuses the mind and clarifies the big picture.
Within the course of half a year, Goodwin lambasts the Democrats for being weak on the war - Democratic Party leaders want to pretend we can declare peace and everything will be fine - and smacks Senator Clinton for being too hawkish!
Then again, Goodwin has always had it in for the Clintons. He demands absolute leaders, who don't employ nuance in their policies (we corner bar New Yawkas really love guys like George Bush - real men).
This is what , defending the Bush Administration and attempting to relegate Bill Clinton to history's scrapheap in this, our new post-9/11 world:
American politics, like everything else, changed on 9/11. As the last election proved, the game is no longer about traditional standards of interest groups and issue positions. Biography, charisma and the polish of education matter far less than they did just four years ago. The new gold standard is at once more elusive and more precise. For every would-be leader, the test is this: Are you rock-solid? Those who cannot say yes, and convince voters, need not apply.Yeah, charisma and charm don't matter anymore to Michael Goodwin - until they're exhibited by someone running against Hillary Clinton. Then they're worth a column. Because we can't have that woman in the lead, she talks too much, she's calculating (because women, you know, just are), and we don't want a mommy party.Weakness, And for God's sake, no more parsing and blurring. It's a gut-check world now, and half-truths are no longer half true. They're damnable Bubba had his run.
His time, and times, have passed. He isn't ready to accept that, but we must. The future demands it.
Not down at the corner bar. Not at the Daily News. Not in a New York that went away 30 years ago - the New York that Michael Goodwin and the Daily News still believe exists.
Check those circulation numbers, and get back to me on that.
UPDATE: Good arguments in comments, where I admit I've been lying in the weeds on this for awhile - and :
Now that Zev Chafets has vacated the paper and A. M.2005 during the Transit Strike.Rosenthal has departed the planet, Goodwin, never the victim of an original thought, incorrect. Column after column, he churns out consensus opinion at its most pernicious, cobwebbed, creaky, and self-satisfied. Sexism aside about the Mommy Party and its mommy dearest, Hillary Clinton), it is mush vis a vis American involvement in Iraq.
For years Goodwin, like the Daily News's editorial page, stood stalwart behind George Bush and mocked liberals and Democrats for being defeatist, myopic about the threat of Terrorism, politically emasculated; he ladled out his own failure in Iraq became so unignorable that Goodwin himself slowly, grudingly gravitated to the point of view some of us had all along, he couldn't lay his Liebermanism aside, no, he saw fit to demand that should take to extricate itself from the mire. Just so he could find it insufficient.
While White New York, now the minority, was engraged, the rest of New York was supportive of the union. Which shocked people. The borderline racist comments in the News started to backfire when someone realized, as anyone looking around the streets would, that the people who paid their bills were black and Latino.
When they depicted TWU leader Roger Toussaint as a caged animal, they crossed a line.
The in the face.
The News was once the right wing paper and the Post the left.
Until 1977, when Rupert Murdoch bought it. Suddenly, the News started tacking left slowly. But the paper, like a lot of institutions, are no longer the white middle class of the boroughs.
Posted by Tom Watson on February 11, 2007 at 10:21 AM | Breaking News: Hugh Hefner has a statement. Repeat, Hugh Hefner has a statement. The tributes are starting to come in now.
The tragic news. Anna Nicole Smith ..
. dead at 39.
This was the scene at 6:30 on MSNBC tonight - Rita Cosby, live experts on celebrity deaths, endless b-roll, veteran celebrity journalists, hushed stand-ups outside the hospital.
All Anna, all the time.
As terrible as the death of a young woman with a history of drug abuse clearly is, I submit that the depth to which our so-called news media sunk today is a far more important and tragic story for the republic. That Anna Nicole Smith, whose career consisted of celebrity news-making of the lowest order, is anything but a sad footnote in the national flow of news is sickening.
Another Marine's death is a ho-hum half-sentence; save the special packages for Anna.
It's not Parkland Memorial Hospital.
This was a souped-up Marilyn impersonator, without the legacy of screwball comedy and iconic glamor.
And on the same day, the AP reported that A U.S. airstrike Thursday killed 13 insurgents in a volatile area west of Baghdad, the military said.
Local officials said 45 civilians, including women and children, died in the attack.
On the same day, the prosecution rested in the trial of Scooter Libby in the CIA covert leak case, a case that is on the action of the powerful Vice President of the United States.
Heck, on the same day some towns in upstate New York are paralyzed by six feet of snow!
Those are all what we used to call news stories back in the day - the kind of stories that should lead the major newscasts. Instead, we get pathetic, lame, culturally inept coverage of the sad death of a scarred minor celebrity in a casino hotel room.
card-swiping herd, and at the same time are utterly saturated with news Great Society, we are in trouble.
UPDATE II: This is beyond insane. Rita Cosby just promo'd an upcoming segement on MSNBC - a tour of the autopsy room where Anna Nicole was examined! I kid you not: this is the actual room where they performed the autopsyon Anna Nicole Smith, and we got an exclusive tour.
Paging Jeff Zucker, paging Jeff Zucker. Please report to firestation Cosby. Your company is on fire.
UPDATE III: Jon Swift at this difficult, historic moment and wonders why President Bush seems so out of touch.
Posted by Tom Watson on February 8, 2007 at 07:09 PM | Like a scene from the director's cut of some lost George Romero zombie flick, the anti-feminists stumble forward in this dawn of the dead pre-political season, lurching incompetently and semi-blindly for victims, and reminding Americans that an endemic hatred of powerful women lies just below the surface when the full moon blooms. Only a head shot will kill them.
The bitter harvest of the incompetent Duke lacrosse sexual assault prosecution - tied so closely as it was to national fault lines of race, gender and wealth - is sucked into the thresher of public opinion, tossing out the seeds of enduring misogynist lore. Women lie about rape. They use it was a weapon against men.
I've always believed that one of the worst legacies of the disastrous Tawana Brawley episode in New York was the cover it provided for gender discrimination. Race got the headlines, as it did in ; but the collapse of a prominent rape case, its notorious revelation as a hoax, throws up a screen to the endemic violence against women, regardless of race of social status.
Thus, when noted blogger feminist Amanda Marcotte was for her admittedly knee-jerk reaction to reports about the Duke case, the online gotcha moment in the last day or so (she was hired by the Edwards campaign to lead its blogging efforts, and so became an instant target) immediately led within nanoseconds to hate speech on the right-wing :
R.Yes gentlemen, cover your genitals. And beware the feminine. Rush's feminazis. It's tempting to read too much into the sniveling, mindless effluvium on the right-wing blogs, until you tune into Chris Matthews or read Maureen Dowd - and see the panic-sweat glistening from their pores at the thought of a Commander-in-Chief without the standard set of wedding tackle.E. Finch: I guess calling her 'Blogmistress' is out?
Kyle8: How about man-destroying, dyky, leftoid, blogbitch-Empress?
Matthews was in full anti-Hillary mode this week on Hardball, every question suggesting that her disastrous support for the Iraq War resolution was somehow purely calculated with a political formula, and removed entirely from any true belief - as if Hillary alone from the other 99 Senators employs a political algorithm in creating her voting record. Matthews (fresh from a stint as a Miss America judge) seemed genuinely angry at the candidate, as : the very thought driven Chris Matthews into some serious brain-fever.
And Dowd, well, there she goes again - the only op-ed writer for The New York Times has a big-time grudge against the even-odds first woman President of These United States. Note the loaded language of gender from her :
stars, Hillary fidgeted and elbowed, trying to be co-captain rather than just wingman, or worse, winglady.The Iraq War and Senator Clinton are a fair combination for political comment and criticism on the op-ed page of the nation's leading newspaper; Senator Clinton and her gender are not.
She didn’t have to feign interest in East Wing piffle — table settings and pastry chefs and designer gowns.
She showed off a long parade of unflattering outfits and unnervingly changing hairdos.
In Iowa, her national anthem may have been off-key, but her look wasn’t. It was an attractive mirror of her political message: man-tailored with a dash of pink femininity.
Now she feels she can’t simply say she made a bad decision. And that makes her seem conniving — not a good mix with nurturing.
Dowd's obsession with Clinton's femininity - now she has it, now she doesn't - and her use of loaded terms like conniving (quick, what noun does that so often modify) are pathetic, and entirely unworthy of a publication that considers itself the paper of record.
Fear of feminism, of radical women who demand equality in the workplace, has long been one of the strongest pillars of mainstream American conservatism.
A post-election - the go-to site for activist conservatives - is a neat illustration of the right's views of women.
Under the headline the site takes issue with a November article in the usually-reliable Washington Times, which reported that “A 2005 U.N. Population Fund report found that 70% of married women in India were victims of beatings or rape.
” Said the writer:
Maybe it’s time to assess whether the feminist ideology has been allowed to invidiously dilute the conservative message.
In other words, the conservative newspaper was being disloyal to the conservative movement by reporting on the rate of sexual crimes against women in India. The post further noted:
Let’s be perfectly plain about it: Feminism is the antithesis of everything conservatism stands for.
Thankfully, Schlessinger, Catherine Seipp, Kathryn Jean Lopez, and Myrna Blyth.
Yes, thankfully. It was Coulter, after all, who of the accuser in the Duke case: Not a trace of DNA from any of the lacrosse players was found on the accuser, though this girl had more DNA in her than a refrigerator at a The right will always attack feminists, and nothing is more threatening to their leadership than an actual woman in charge.
So feminism is now Stalinist, unyielding, and worst of all, manly. As Pat Robertson famously said during the 1992 presidential campaign, Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.
Beyond pure conservatism, there's a threat to female power, especially among the crowd that sucks its power from being part of the Beltway social scene, its machinery of cogs and cocktail party.
The likes of Maureen Dowd feel the threat.
But let's leave this with a little levity, courtesy of the late, great Molly Ivins who always, as someone said, put a little jalapeno in every column:
I used to go on college campuses 25 years ago and announce I was a feminist, and people thought it meant I believed in free love and was available for a quick hop in the sack. .UPDATE: I've been called a . Okay!.. Now I go on college campuses and say I'm a feminist, and half of them think it means I'm a lesbian.
How'd we get from there to here without passing 'Go'?
A typical quote from this board: ...
these mad women seem to believe that every sexual encounter, where the man is not actively tied to the bed, is rape! Nice. Funnily enough, over at right-wing blogger Riehl World View, it took less than a day for regulars there to call that my ole buddy once called me - right here.
I wonder if it's now been reclaimed by the right, too? And the calls Marcotte a delusional bitch. See the language pattern here, folks?
UPDATE II: into MoDo and Matthews, first on the Times: ...
the deplorable thing is that the MoDo style has permeated the Times, voiceover. And his transcript quote (priceless) on Matthews and his positive Stepford spin is preceeded by this:
rest, but the sad truth is that we're not going back to the prefeminist driveway--what Matthews half-jestingly considers the good old days.Posted by Tom Watson on February 3, 2007 at 02:45 PM | During the long and fascinating investigation into the shameful, politically-motivated leak of a CIA officer's name to the press, one blog made its reputation - .
Because FDL did two things incredibly well - collating all the important links and posts, and doing its own analysis of documents - it became Plame Central online and its reputation and readership grew rapidly.
As the case finally hits the courtroom, FDL is throwing all its resources at the story, assigning its team to cover everything from jury selection to pre-trial motions. I'll admit that I'm not as obsessed with the case since the confession of former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage - it doesn't seem Watergate-big anymore - but I am still very much interested in how the Plame affair puts the actions of this government into perspective.
And I do believe the trial will shine a light into the inner workings of the Bush Administration, especially into the Vice President's office.
Sadly, the lead voice of FDL won't be there to cover the start of the trial she helped make into a national cause - in the third go-around of her battle against breast cancer. I've tangled with Jane a bit, and with some of the FDL regulars, as readers here know.
She's tough, hard-headed, and knows how to deliver a beating in the hardscrabble back alley of blogging. But I wish her the very best, and I'm looking forward to FDL's ground-breaking flood-the-zone coverage. C'mon, and shine that light.
Posted by Tom Watson on January 17, 2007 at 09:33 AM | You may have noticed a slight slackening here the last few days, the appearance of distraction, of a mind engaged elsewhere. All true.
Friends, meet the .
Newcritics.com is a fledgling effort that promises web-based criticism in literature, music, television, film, technology, theater and art from a diverse group of bloggers.
That promise is my promise; I cobbled the site together over the past few weeks and invited a few bloggers to post.
Last week, the first posts hit the clickstream.
Newcritics is an experiment for me - it came about after a gathering of political bloggers a couple of months back. What I expected to be a hard-core politicalfest actually became and meandering and fascinating discussion of culture, both high and low.
I loved it, and thought about extending the conversation; newcritics is my answer to that problem.
I hope you read the posts there, subscribe to the feeds, link to them, and comment often. So far, there have been some terrific articles - here's a few:
by Tony Alva, on role-playing games and soldiers
Steve Bowbrick's , a review of Carl Hiaasen's latest
by Brendan Tween, a reaction to Apple's media domination
Blue Girl's on Calvin Trillin's memoir of love
, by Lance Mannion, which discusses film characters who are controlled by their appetites and emotions
Then there's what I hope will be the first of many list postings - argument-provoking Top 10 affairs that spur reaction.
Jason Chervokas and I take a shot at the ten best American domestic sit-coms of all-time, those classic situations revolving around a home and a family. Sure, we've all got The Honeymooners, I Love Lucy, and All in the Family..
.but what's on your list? That's the point!
Read and let us know.
Consider what's up the first week, and my reaction is this: that's a magazine I'd read. Lots of voices, shared interests, conversation.
We got one comment this week from Roxtar that really hit home, and made it feel (thus far) worthwhile:
discussion of popular culture, on the other hand, can spin off in an infinite number of directions. It can take you from poetry to music to television, to literature, to film, to sociology and psychology, to marketing and persuasion, to technology and its role in the future…. I suspect your dinner last November touched on most, if not all, of those culture is not a trifle, or an idle diversion.
It is like water to a fish; it surrounds us and, to a large degree, it defines us. But unlike our finny friends, we can actively participate in evaluating and determining the quality of our environment. Which I suppose is what you Exactly.
I'm not giving up blogging here by any means. This will still be my personal space, and I'll probably cross-post most media/culture pieces. I'll only blog politics here.
No politics on newcritics - it's a place for discussing what unites us, not what divides us. . Posted by Tom Watson on January 15, 2007 at 09:24 PM | series on BBC 4.
Each weekly installment is devoted a historical theme hosted by Bragg, with frighteningly articulate guest experts, and listen) Samuel Johnson his circle.
I can't recommend it enough (my last listen was the Alexander Pope segment). The range of topics is brilliant, the style straightforward and occasionally humorous, the total, enlightening.
Posted by Tom Watson on January 10, 2007 at 09:15 PM | I never suffer from writer's block. This may be because it doesn't exist. Writer's block is simply the refusal to write poorly, the inability to give in and just spew the trash.
A crutch, no more. So it never gets in my way. A far more insidious condition has, however, paralyzed this humble journal over the past week or so - the malady (rare in these parts) known as nothin' t'say.
By rights, I should be cranking out more top music lists, jotting a few more post-hanging thoughts, ripping into the failed Administration anew. At the very least, I should be cheering the historic rise of Nancy Pelosi to the Speaker's chair and the iconic transfer of power from the wheels that slip to the wheels that grip.
But I can't.
Somewhere between the mistletoe and the ball-drop, the movement mojo fled these pages. It was great to win the election, incredible to be a tiny part of the netroots, and wonderful to see the electorate finally repudiate an illegitimate movement. But the grins on the faces of the newly-sworn, and the high-fives in grand chambers of the republic left me cold, I must admit.
(Though I did get a kick out of the classic in-your-face that Rep. Keith Ellison delivered with ol' Tom Jefferson's prized Koran. Sweet.
)
Blame the New York Times for the mirthless mildew herein; the editors on 43rd Street had to go and run one of their big faces of the dead packages to mark the New Year. The 3,000th death coinciding with Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve and all the lost souls in Times Square, keyed by the pages of young, hopeful faces just shook the blogging life right out of me.
Then I went to the NYT's Website and really got lost, body and soul.
Some interactive genius has created the to this war's cost that I've yet beheld: an ever-changing photo map of tiny squares, each one linking to the life of a dead soldier and the whole forming the bitmapped face of life sacrificed too early and in vain. Behind that are personal stories, some recording into audio files by comrades still living. I've been clicking and reading and and listening and getting sadder by the day.
And there's nothing, really, to say.
What's the point of writing yet again about the uselessness of this adventure, its cost in lives and limbs and burned skin and terrorized, battered psyches? Of picking out another failed Bush Administration policy, another anti-American invasion of civil liberties, another poor decision?
For what? This keyboard can't bring them back. Their families must go on living without them forever, knowing that their lives were cast away in adventurous frivolity by a bunch of think-tankers and oilmen.
Who can say our young men and women are defending democracy now, as the shouts of Moktada! Moktada! still echo in the American-built death chamber?
We can oppose this phony surge on our blogs all we want, but we're still throwing away our own young for a lost and immoral cause - day in and day out, more die needlessly. They die now to protect the ego of the President; they die now because a few old men with names like Cheney and Lieberman and McCain believe that America can't sustain another defeat like Vietnam. Not on their brave, Churchillian watch.
No-sir.
Well, we can sustain a defeat. We cannot sustain the bleeding.
We will not. This is clear.
Right now, I can't find the will to write about it, however.
I need a break from the blogging ramparts. Maybe we all do. Hurling bytes back and forth while soldiers are dying on their third or fourth or fifth tour of duty in Iraq seems amoral, vacant, pointless.
Possibly just for today, I'll admit. Or a week. Or a month.
Or maybe it's time to foresake the blogs. In favor of the streets. Posted by Tom Watson on January 5, 2007 at 10:17 AM | America can regain the sense of pride that existed before Vietnam.
But it cannot be achieved by refighting a war that is finished as far as America is concerned. As I see it, the time has come to look forward to an agenda for the future, to unify, to bind up the Nation's wounds, and to restore its health and its optimistic self-confidence.
-- Gerald R.
Ford, April 23, 1975
And so the old man's body will be brought along the wide boulevards and monuments, and the shadows of the caisson will flicker off the cold marble. A lone horse will be led riderless, boots turned backwards in the stirrups and the guns will fire their salute. This is how we mourn our dead commanders in chief.
The last time we did this, the war was young and the casualty count was low. And we were burying a President who according to common legend, lifted the nation's collective spirit in the post-Vietnam era, the venerated creator of a national political movement that governed absolutely on that Washington DC day two years ago.
Just two years later, that movement is in ruins and disgrace; the Reagan revolution has been forever discredited; its formula of trading winked-at intolerance for tax-cutting power and wealth led to corruption and to the current White House disgrace.
Two years ago, we buried the movement conservative, the great man who lifted the nation out of the malaise of a failed war. Two months ago, voters buried his movement. Now, we bury the moderate deal-maker who brought the troops home the last time America failed on a grand scale overseas.
Yet, the war drones on. The number rises always. The injured and maim return.
And our disgraced President faces two more long years in office with no plan, no support, no movement, and no strength in his political parties. George W. Bush refuses the reality that Gerald Ford embraced, even after his neo-con wizards in Vanity Fair and hung the sign of cowardice around their own, wrinkled necks.
As a nation, we refuse to join together to mourn the nearly 3,000 American men and women who have died for the neo-cons' grand adventure, for George Bush's divinely-inspired dream.
The plastic flags no longer flutter from car windshields and the magnetic Support the Troops bumper ribbons are all mangled and soiled by exhaust fumes and road grime. There is no national sacrifice; in spirit, we are all the free-spending Bush twins, tossing back Cosmos and enjoying our freedom heedless of what a roadside bomb can do to a body.
Mission Accomplished has morphed into Stay the Course, which has become the New Way Forward. The Maoist Republican phrase-makers demand lockstep mind-marching by the legions even now, even as silly as it now seems, even with their party in splintered ruins, the movement now synonymous with humiliation.
So they'll wheel the old man through Washington one more time and our current President will stand at attention in a smart gray suit, purse his lips and scowl.
The nation will mourn, he will decree.
Let us step forward instead to honor the sacrifice instead of the ritual. As we bury the man who ended the Vietnam War, let's make his funeral the National Day of Mourning our soldiers have not received.
Nearly, 3,000 dead and no national prayer service, no national day of remembrance, no national honors. Yet all the flags will be ordered to half mast and the bands will play their mournful tunes for a moderate, mediocre national leader. Where is our sense of scale, our sense of justice, our sense of duty?
George Bush is taking his time, being a deliberate Decider; he's closeted at Camp David sketching out the alternative course. Then he will return to bury a Republican forebear who slashed his policies in a .
Why not watch that long march, the line of Senators, the President with the hand over his heart and say a silent thanks for the young men and women who have died in this adventure?
Better yet, write about it. Blog about it. Use Ford's funeral dirge to play a nationwide recessional for the cost of this war.
Don't mourn a 93-year-old who became President and enjoyed a quarter century of long drives and birdie putt. Mourn the young soldiers dying in Baghdad, in Anbar, in Diyala. Remember the .
UPDATE: on this: A flag-draped coffin is acceptable viewing only if a dead president is inside. Indeed.
Posted by Tom Watson on December 28, 2006 at 04:47 PM | The political deal that brought Gerald Ford to the Oval Office was a good one, and cynically sure-handed: a pardon in exchange for the Presidency.
That Ford only served two years before a Watergate-weary nation elected a born again reformer and sent the unelected chief executive into a golf-laden retirement was beside the point: the man from Michigan was a political deal-maker, hardly the bumbler Chevy Chase made him into on Saturday Night Live to great comedic advantage.
Indeed, the deal to get Nixon to San Clemente was the capstone on a legislative career built on something that many pundits believe is impossible these days - bipartisan compromise, which is, you must understand, the exact opposite of nonpartisan surrender.
Ford represented Grand Rapids in the House from 1949 till he became Vice President after Spiro Agnew's disgrace.
Little remembered is that he gave up significant political power to serve Richard Nixon in his last year of power: Ford was the minority leader for a decade, and he opposed LBJ's Great Society programs in public, while cutting deals to approve them in private. He described himself as a moderate in domestic affairs, an internationalist in foreign affairs, and a conservative in fiscal policy - the kind of description that would fit any number of ambitious Democrats these days.
Ford's Presidency began with one of the seminal political speeches of the last 50 years, clearly the moment he will best be remembered for; I remember listening to it by my Dad's old portable radio in our rental on Cape Cod that August.
But in the end, his White House tenure was one of necessary and painful defeat - the pull-out in Vietnam, the comic Whip Inflation Now campaign, the Swine Flu epidemic, Ford to City: Drop Dead, the Mayaguez incident, and the two weird assassination attempts.
He was at the center of what was popularly viewed as a failed institution in the 1970s just as we view it here in the 2000s. Gerald Ford made the deal, took the hits, and lit out for the links.
Somebody had to. May as well have been a deal-maker from Michigan.
Posted by Tom Watson on December 27, 2006 at 01:50 PM | loopholes with an extension of pro-business tax breaks?
If you’re outgoing Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, you’d call it your pet project. If you are the rest of America, you’d call it an all-out insult. In one of the biggest acts of political cynicism to show its face in 2006, Frist pledged support for a much needed increase in the minimum wage.
.. as long as it came with a substantial tax break for the a pay cut for some workers.
Lucky for current and aspiring middle-class Americans, who need both a minimum wage increase and the paved highways and cops and teachers paid for with revenue from the Estate Tax, the Trifecta Bill was taken off the table in August. This one merits the Even better is the review of hte work of the Family Research Council, the $10 million think tank of the hate-based, er, values voter initiative. Three red-hot books funded by these guys:
• Getting It Straight: What the Research Shows About Homosexuality by Timothy J.And the review also as a nice section on netroots' storming of the political gates in '06, including an episode overlooked in this wild mid-term year:Dailey and Peter Sprigg / This book argues, among other things, that coming out will lead to an early death. Its purpose is to dispel the myth that “homosexuality is harmless.”
• Women Who Make the World Worse by Kate O’Beirne / O’Beirne’s first book accuses leading feminists of fracturing families, driven by the notion that men are the enemy.
• “How U.S. Official Promotes Marriage To Help Poor Kids” by Laura Meckler / Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Meckler endorses the government’s decision to spend more than $5 million in taxpayer funds to promote healthy marriage initiatives.
On March 25, 2006, 500,000 people protested for immigrant rights in Los Angeles. One in four of all middle and high school students in the city participated, an extraordinary turnout, and it wasn’t by coincidence. MySpace.Posted by Tom Watson on December 14, 2006 at 04:58 PM | Maureen Dowd has described herself as a fascinated observer of our gender perplexities. Too bad that in-depth study of American sexual roles doesn't mix with her political commentary.com, an online social network where people — mostly teens — post profiles and link to friends, was a critical hub. Protest organizers were able to communicate to students who had otherwise never participated in social activism. Teenagers learned how their friends—immigrants and the children of immigrants—were impacted firsthand by this debate.
Thanks to MySpace, politics became personal, and the result was thousands of people in the street forcing a shift in the thinking of the hundreds on Capitol Hill deciding their fate.
Dowd betrays no perplexity there. She doesn't ask whether men are necessary in politics - her columns stipulate that men are central. In Dowd's world, women can't advance on their own.
Dowd's latest anti-feminist screed appears on today's op-ed page, disguised as the early handicapping of the purported race between Senators Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama for the Democratic nomination in 2008. Whether that particular fight card will ever materialize is irrelevant - MoDo has to ask aloud about Obama's particular flavor of blackness and Clinton's shade of femininity. For Dowd, we're all just stereotypes - little wooden pegs to be placed into their pre-drilled holes by American voters who never rise above the thinking level of toddler.
Leaving aside the clueless racism in today's column - her apparent understanding of black American perplexity is less nuanced than a comic book - Dowd's continued attacks on Hillary Clinton deserve further commentary. A while back, I wrote about the daft and harmful sexism that creeps into so much liberal speech [parts , , and ] and there was quite a dust-up over some sexist language used by to tar female public figures they didn't particularly like. [The best wrap-ups of this slamfest are and - they make for good reading and lots of great links].
Amidst the name-calling that resulted, I found the idea that in a post-feminist world, a lot people apparently believe women were fair game for sexual attacks in politics.
What's laughable is the crazed idea that we're living in a post-feminist world in the United States - that women have achieved gender equality, that politics is blind when it comes to sex. This point of view (which seems to come with liberal usage of the word snark and feature pop culture references to the 30-year-old music genre known as punk) has Ms.
Dowd as its national leader. For this crowd, the battles are won, the obstacles overcome, the mountain climbed. Rubbish.
We're in the foothills. We've never nominated a women for President from a major party; we've nominated one Vice-Presidential candidate. We've had two women Supreme Court Justices.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi is the highest-ranking female U.S.
politician ever.
Which brings us back to Hillary Clinton and Maureen Dowd, two accomplished, progressive, successful women who should be natural allies but are not. Senator Clinton will, by all accounts, soon be the front-running Democratic candidate for President.
But to the Times columnist (the only female, for you clueless but oh-so-hip post-feminist goobers) she's still just a wife, a spouse, an accoutrement. Or half-so, and thereby disqualified from the that conveys respect upon the worthy; dig this sniffy, condescending (and yeah, clever) prose from today's paper of record:
“Desperate Housewives,” one foot in the world of hotshot alphas ruling husbands’ dallying with office cupcakes.Dowd conveniently ignores that fact that once declared, Hillary Clinton wore those pumps out working every back-road and strip mall in New York State - that she didn't do the fainting couch routine against the younger, handsome Republican Rick Lazio, but outworked his Long Island machine ass in every facet of that campaign. Watching her roll up John Spencer this year like a piece of used chewing gum, while spending lavish sums and her own time to help fellow Democrats, I never sensed that she was struggling with her sexual planets.
She won her Senate seat only after becoming sympathetic as a victim.And she still struggles with the balance between her Mars and Venus sides, sometimes showing her political steel and other times fetching coffee for male colleagues.
I sensed she was a clear-eyed professional with a vision - one of toughest American politicians operating on the national scene today.
You can criticize Hillary Clinton on the war, or on any area of policy; she's been an engaged and energetic Senator with a national footprint. You can grouse about the Clinton legacy and knock the idea of political dynasties.
And that criticism is quite fairly on the table. But so much of what you hear about Senator Clinton is linked to style rather than substance - electability as a costume for sexism. Maureen Dowd chose her quote carefully in today's column and she contrasts the hunky Obama with the older Clinton:
Senator Obama is Senator Clinton’s worst nightmare, as comfortable in his skin as she is uncomfortable in hers.
push comes to shove, I think gender is going to be a harder sell than race,” said Deb Chase, a teacher from Gilmanton, N.H., who followed Senator Obama from Portsmouth to Manchester, to see him twice.
“It’s president. But look at the schools here — there are lots of women Yeah, so the argument that women face a glass ceiling in the New Hampshire public school system is an argument against a President Clinton? This is post-feminism?
Tell it to my daughter. She's 14, whip-smart, tech-savvy and hungry to participate in the democratic process. And she's got a Hillary poster in her room.
You know why? Because a woman has never been President of the United States.
Posted by Tom Watson on December 13, 2006 at 11:40 AM | Nancy Pelosi's rough beginning as Speaker-Elect of the House caught a fair level of criticism and analysis; I suspect the tough battle over her No.
2 will fade by the time the new class is sworn in during the January storms, when the focus will shift to Bush v. Democrats in earnest. But there's a sour taste that remains, the flavor of something that is unfortunately infecting the so-called enlightened, liberal left - creeping and creepy anti-feminism.
You see, progressives all too often frame their self-criticism in sly sexist terms while overtly lambasting far-right women as nothing better than Republican whores.
And I'll say it here at the top, this has to stop for a couple of reasons: one, it's obviously wrong and well beneath the lofty goals of progressive politics. And then there's the undeniable fact that within the next year or so, there's a better-than-even chance that we'll all be working to elect the first female President of the United States.
Of course, there's always Maureen Dowd's overt lack of respect for any politician not carrying the Y chromosome. Her self-hating misogynist dismissal of Pelosi this week?
Madam Speaker-Elect throws like a girl. That Dowd remains the top Washington columnist for the best newspaper in the world despite her frantic anti-feminist views is as strange as some of Arthur Sulzberger's other talent choices. But I'm sick of waking up to see Dowd take her last-generation, life was better in the cocktail-swigging 50s, women must know their place attitude splattered across the Op-Ed page.
(Luckily, that page is becoming ever less relevant thanks to the NYT's incredibly stupid decision to place opinion behind a paid firewall; hence no link here).
Non-opinion coverage also holds women to a different standard, injecting sexist attitudes into every-day copy. Last week, the Pelosi in a photo caption from Capitol Hill as .
..dressed in an Armani acqua blue-grey pantsuit as she heads towards her first news conference since Election Day.
John Aravosis on AmericaBlog, and lefty bloggers are understandably sensitive on sexism directed at the 66-year-old woman who will be third in line to the Presidency.
Last week, Rolling Stone editor Benjamin Wallace-Wells on the Washington Post editorial page whether American politics was more racist than sexist, and whether by extension if Hillary Clinton or Barak Obama had the higher mountain to climb. But he clearly lost his feminist readers with this line:
Repression of blacks was the stuff of massive state-leveraged cruelty -- the police dogs and fire hoses -- while repression of women in this country was made of quieter stuff: bras, aprons and constitutional amendments.are both generalized to the umpth degree...
bras and aprons?! Bras and aprons?
! Seriously?
to control their own bodies, created a national discourse on domestic violence and rape, and challenged sexual harassment and workplace words--pieces of clothing, at that!
--bras and aprons. Lovely.
And yet.
Yet. Yet. Yet.
Sexism in what some call the post-feminist age is generally accepted, even in the most active leftist salons - especially when it's directed toward conservative women.
Take a recent post by the prolific TRex at the A-list progressive blog FireDogLake. Entitled , the post looks at the legal problems of right-wing talking heads Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter, whose opinions I personally find hateful and rather stupid.
Nonetheless, here's a taste of TRex's language:
perhaps a Clydesdale or two in their respective family trees...Yeah, the erudite are challenged to avoid sexist slurs - as Bush would say, it's hard work.
And certain very, very special little girls named Ann who always get what they want...
fingers twitch in her sleep...
Enjoy it, Laura, this may be the only time in your life that a sitting US Senator ever addresses you by name except to say, Your money's on Whatever you think of the radical, strange Coulter and the angry, ill-informed Ingraham, what does their sex have to do with their arguments? Yes, their looks have something to do with their television popularity, no question. Hey, that's life among the ratings-conscious.But do we really win converts by attacking their gender? Especially when we know what's coming against Speaker Pelosi and Candidate Clinton - and all the women who run for City Council, Assembly, or State Senate?
On the very same blog, at those who would attack Pelosi based on her sex, and quotes Eleanor Roosevelt brilliantly: Every woman in public life needs to develop skin as tough as rhinoceros hide.
Yet a couple of clicks down from that quote, you'll find Republican women derided as cows and hookers. Very strange.
Maybe I’m just no fun, but I think calling monkey.You’d be called out for being a racist, and deservedly so. We jumped all over George Allen for his ‘macaca’ comment.
some women are cows, harpies, whatever, and invite such descriptors.erudite to find meaningful definition. cow and harpie? they are what they are, and deserve what they get.
Well, you see Maureen, about that tone.
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