Marbury

barack travolta

There are basically two reactions to the many portraits of Obama that populate the web. One is to indulge in an easy sneer at the unschooled art this popular president has inspired. The other is to celebrate the creativity of thousands of ordinary people, unfettered by the artificial boundaries of taste, empowered by the internet.

Myself, I go for the easy sneer every time.

gibbs unloads on the british press: how dare he?

Having been fairly busy this week I somehow managed to miss Robert Gibbs's reaction to the Telegraphs's alleged scoop about Abu Ghraib photographs:

Ooh that Gibbs, he is wicked.

I'm afraid, rather disloyally, I sympathise with him rather than with our own press. British newspapers don't take facts seriously. They set out to entertain and shock, and that plodder Truth can catch up afterwards, if at all. This has long been true of what used to be called the tabloids; it's now true of the "qualities", too. Actually, it's not just the need to entertain or shock that drives the sloppiness - it's sloth. Can't be bothered to check that story you turned up on Google? Print it anyway - everyone else has. Some guy you meet in a Washington bar remarks (contra all evidence) that Obama isn't interested in foreign policy? Throw it in. A Labour-sympathising civil servant/spin doctor says that Obama called Cameron a lightweight? Run with it.

These are just examples I happen to have picked up on recently. Peruse any British newspaper on any day and as you scan the pages you'll find dozens of loosely sourced or no-sourced rumours and canards presented as facts. This is particularly true of British coverage of American politics, which on the whole simply doesn't give a very accurate picture of what's going on. As well as errors of fact, situations are routinely misread or distorted, as if the reporter has phoned it in from Bedfordshire and lacks an internet connection. Gibbs will have become aware of all this during the long campaign and has evidently been dying to say something about it. Maybe the Telegraph's story is true, but it can hardly complain if it's become too easy to dismiss.

Not that it hasn't complained. It's published three outraged counterattacks from different writers, including Nile Gardiner (who he?). It all comes across as rather petulant: the clatter of toys hitting the floor. If they're confident in their story, that ought to be the only defence they need.

(Ps I like the wonderfully named  - and faced - "Chip Reid". Funny how often life resorts to cliché.)

UPDATE: It looks like the Telegraph willfully distorted the words of its key source. Surprise!

bill clinton's restless engagement in the world

If you're a Bill Clinton fan, as I am, then this (long) NYT magazine piece by Peter Baker, entitled "The Mellowing of WJC", is essential reading.

Like many cliches, the expression "larger than life" has only become moribund through repetition - in itself it's a rather brilliant expression of the way some people seem to be more vivid, to embody more of the world, to bend more of the space around them, than the rest of us. For all his flaws - well, in part of because of his flaws - Clinton is one of those individuals.

It's hard to say why he remains such an attractive character, even when you know about his dark side (much on evidence last year). Towards the end of the piece one of Clinton's colleagues has a good go at capturing it:

“It’s a restless engagement in the world,” said Eric Nonacs, who was the foreign-policy adviser to Clinton’s foundation and now does work for the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative. “He’s the same guy who has a huge circle of friends and keeps in touch with all of them. He’s the same guy who wants to finish the crossword puzzle and will do it with everyone around him if he needs to.”

break time

I'm going to be away from a computer over the next 24 hours so please talk amongst yourselves...

against the hate show ii

One or two of the commenters below seem to think I'm taking a position on the question of MPs' expenses. I'm not, particularly. My objection - my revulsion - is at the national mood: its unwarranted intensity, its unbearable sanctimony, its abandonment of reason and proportion. I find it unpleasant and even ominous when any group of people is singled out for an indiscriminate barrage of abuse.  Daniel Finkelstein writes on this theme today. Like Joan Smith's, his piece ought to be read in full, but here's a taster:

I would find it all fantastically silly if I didn't find it so worrying. It is, you see, a flashing alert signal for me when “I was following the rules laid down by Parliament” ceases to be regarded as any sort of defence. I get worried when I see people declared guilty until proven innocent in Harriet Harman's famous “court of public opinion” because there has been an article written about them in a newspaper. It makes me shiver when a whole category of people - politicians - are regarded as guilty, because “they're all the same” and when it becomes routine to dehumanise them by comparing them to farm animals.

As he goes on to point out, this phenomenon encompasses more than MPs.

sotomayor for scotus

A great pick, and a public introduction that in its very drama (Sotomayor visibly moved; the story of her rise from the Bronx; the mother who raised her alone after her father died blubbing in the front row) indicates how popular it's likely to be with the voters at large.

For the Republicans it presents a terrible dilemma. They don't want Obama to have a smooth ride to his first Supreme Court nomination. But if they opt for a full-bore attack on the first Hispanic nominee to the court, it's unlikely to go down well - to say the least - with a community whose support they desperately need more of, if they're to return to power any time soon.

At least you'd think it would present a dilemma. So far, leading Republicans show every sign of being as blithely oblivious to the wider politics of this as you'd expect from a party still stuck in its own defensive cocoon. Romney called the pick "troubling". Huckabee straight out condemned it and got the nominee's name wrong in the process. He called her "Maria" Sotomayor. Way to go Mike.

(As ever, Ambinder has the inside scoop on Obama's decision-making process.)

tested

I imagine that when Obama made it down to the Situation Room in the early hours of Monday morning (having thrown on a dressing gown or whatever you're supposed to do in these circumstances) he was met with the sight of a grinning Joe Biden, who was just about to say "See...?" when he was silenced by his boss's now familiar NOT-funny-Joe! stare...

against the hate show

Joan Smith writes in defence of MPs - a brave thing to do right now. It's not just a defence, it's an attack on the hysterical sanctimony - and indiscriminate spite - of her fellow citizens (including a sort of inverted echo of Michelle Obama):

The British public – not all of them, but the smug guardians of morality who are enjoying this crisis so much – say they are disgusted by the behaviour of our elected representatives. Let me say that it works both ways: for the first time in my life, I am sick of my country. I am sick of the daily undermining of democracy, and sick of the sadistic pleasure people take in humiliating decent public servants.

I agree with her. It's all a bit Oceanic.

obama's first 3am call

Well, not quite. But close. Obama's statement on North Korea's nuclear test was issued at 2am this morning.

spin strategy

EJ Dionne offers an insight into how the White House courts the commentariat:

Last Thursday afternoon, for example, the White House invited in journalists, mostly opinion writers, to sell them on the substance of the president's big speech on Guantanamo and the treatment of detainees.

Unbeknownst to the writers until afterward, they had been divided into two groups, one more centrist with a sprinkling of moderate conservatives, the other more liberal. (I was in the liberal group.) The president made an unscheduled appearance at each briefing. As is his way, he charmed both groups.    

The idea, as far as I can determine, was to sell the liberal group on those aspects of Obama's plan that are a break from George W. Bush's policies, and to sell the centrist group on the toughness of the president's approach and the fact that it squares with Bush's more moderate moves later in his second term.

This is clever. Although it obviously runs the risk of being too clever. Journalists don't like to feel they're getting played (even though they are always getting played).

dept. of faith in humanity

If you've spent more time than you'd wish watching Dick Cheney this week then I offer this as an antidote:

From the boys and girls of Public School 22.

cheney's golden years

David Brooks takes up the theme I've been harping on here and here (I'm sure that Brooks is an assiduous Marbury reader):

The Bush-Cheney period lasted maybe three years. For Dick Cheney those might be the golden years. For Democrats, it is surely the period they want to forever hang around the necks of the Republican Party. But that period ended long ago...

..When Cheney lambastes the change in security policy, he’s not really attacking the Obama administration. He’s attacking the Bush administration. In his speech on Thursday, he repeated in public a lot of the same arguments he had been making within the Bush White House as the policy decisions went more and more the other way.

Brooks argues Obama is largely building on the approach to national security that emerged in the latter years of the Bush administration; that 'Change', in this regard, has been cosmetic and presentational. But he means this as a compliment:

What Obama gets, and what President Bush never got, is that other people’s opinions matter. Goldsmith puts it well: “The main difference between the Obama and Bush administrations concerns not the substance of terrorism policy, but rather its packaging. The Bush administration shot itself in the foot time and time again, to the detriment of the legitimacy and efficacy of its policies, by indifference to process and presentation. The Obama administration, by contrast, is intensely focused on these issues.”

Obama has taken many of the same policies Bush ended up with, and he has made them credible to the country and the world.

UPDATE: Slate's Fred Kaplan does a good job of nailing the many dishonesties and distortions in Cheney's speech. I used to think Cheney was deep and dark. I'm coming to think he's shallow and dark. There's a good speech to made attacking Obama's anti-terrorism policies from the right. But that just wasn't it.

the jog-a-dog

From a selection of pet products which proves that when it comes to inventing new stuff to sell people, the American economy hasn't lost any of its, uh, creativity:

JOG-A-DOG The easiest way to deal with destructive behavior is with exercise, but occasionally it’s not realistic to toss the ball with your pup (long work hours, snowstorms, laziness). Doesn’t mean you can’t wear your dog out. Joga- Dog, $1,195 and up (JogADog.com) is a treadmill designed with canines in mind. Side guardrails ensure your dog doesn’t escape his workout, and an 11- degree incline is said to provide the resistance needed to build strength and muscle.

This might give Obama some ideas about how to keep Joe The Biden occupied.

(Via Marginal Revolution)

cheney vs bush

On the same theme, Marc Ambinder argues that Dick Cheney is really arguing with the last president, not the current one:

Cheney seems to be arguing with himself; or, rather, with the decisions that his President, George W. Bush, made after the thumping of the 2006 elections.  He is arguing with Republican Party elites, most of whom are willing to criticize individual decisions Obama has made but who can't find fault with his general approach to terrorism.

dick cheney and the 17-month bush presidency

Dick Cheney is going head-to-head with Obama today. Both are making big speeches on national security (Obama's obviously being somewhat more consequential).

The former VP, through sheer persistence, has had some success in pushing his storyline across (success, that is, as measured in chatter - there's no evidence, yet, that he's shifted the public's views). The story is that he and Bush kept America safe - even if they did resort to "harsh" interrogation techniques, Gitmo, etc - and that Obama is endangering the nation because he wants to play nicey-nice with an enemy that doesn't care.

Cheney's version of history pretends that the Bush presidency lasted not eight years, but less than two and a half, starting on 10 September 2001 and ended on 28 April 2004.

He can't be counting the months pre-9/11 because to do so would be to admit culpability for the attacks: there's plenty of evidence that they took their eye of the Al Qaeda ball during this time, and the trouble is, you can't pretend that terrorist attacks are unpredictable disasters with one breath and then set the next guy up for a fall with the next (this is sort of like Gordon Brown and the economy in reverse - if the credit crunch was just bad luck then surely the ten years of growth was largely good luck).

Neither can he be counting the months and and years post-Abu Ghraib, because as Laurence Wilkerson points out and Obama himself reiterates, the Cheney-Rumsfeld approach to fighting terrorism pretty much came to an end after those photographs were published: the CIA shut down its "harsh interrogation techniques" for fear of prosecution and the administration began to shift to a decidedly more conciliatory, multilateral approach to diplomacy.

A short presidency, then. We can agree, however, that Cheney got a lot done during those two and a half years.