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August 29, 2003

'I'm here to move love to the top of your to-do list'
: It's a mistake to judge a series by its preseason promos but if we were to do that, Alicia Silverstone's Miss Match would be sure be be a bomb, based on lines like that.

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Send the man some Prozac spam
: Matt Welch points to evidence that Bill O'Reilly is starting to crack under the strain.

: More evidence here.

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A simple request
: A simple request to the wonderful group blogs I read (you know who you are, Corante and Hit & Run and Command Post and Harry): Put the name of the post's author at the top of the post so I can hear the right voice as I start to read. Also, put your authors' names in the RSS feed. Thank you.

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The bloggers on the bus
: Dave Winer tells candidates how to blog and echoes my call to let bloggers on the campaign bus.
Bloggers should also be credentialed to cover the conventions (see wi-fi and conventions, below). I plan to do just that myself.

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Told ya
: I told you it would happen: Somebody would dig up fresh dirt on Arnold's past lifestyle -- and it wouldn't make a difference in the campaign, freeing up future politicians to become human again and not priests supposed saints.
LA Observed has the backstory on the digging up of Arnold's Oui interview by Mickey Kaus and its subsequent publication at The Smoking Gun.

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The left shall rise again
: John Podhoretz in the NY Post does the left the favor of listening to them, recognizing their growing movement, and advising them how to succeed:

THE rise of an ardent, passionate, angry and engaged left is the most important political story of 2003.
The hottest book of the new publishing season is Al Franken's "Lies (and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them)." Joe Conason of the New York Observer has a fast-selling tome called "Big Lies." At the end of September comes "The Lies of George Bush" by David Corn of the Nation magazine, which will likely hit the bestseller list as well.
The triumphant success of Howard Dean's once-quixotic presidential campaign in marshaling genuine grass-roots support and money over the Internet demonstrates that there is a large and hungry audience in the land for a leftist political-cultural message.

Yow. It sounds as if he's ready to convert. Not. He still sees the devil in the left:

The Dean campaign is a more mainstream outgrowth of the popular demonstrations against the Iraq war organized last winter by the Stalinist anti-Semites of International ANSWER.

Yow, again. But then he hits his stride making two important points about the political reaction to FoxNews and about the left's agenda. First, Fox:

Part of what fuels this alliance is a feeling of powerlessness — of not being heard, of not being paid attention to. Note the rise of what I like to call "Foxanoia," the lunatic theory popular these days in leftist circles that the Fox News Channel has become the dominant voice in all of America and is controlling every piece of information that gets out to the American people.

I'll second that motion and amend it: The anti-Fox craze also reveals (pardon my standard screed here) an essential snobbiness to the left these days. The left used to be the people's cause, the Democratic party the people's party. But with the age of disapproving, PC snips, the left became a culture of snobs. Labor ties aside, they look down upon the mall masses. And that's why they don't understand the popularity of Fox and its balls-out opinions. That's why theirs has become a smaller movement.
Podhoretz is right, though, to sense a spark of growth in energy if not numbers in the left thanks to George Bush:

These folks believe a grotesque, nearly cosmic unfairness is going on — a wrong that must be righted. Everything — everything — has gone wrong since 2001. "The Bush administration has done virtually nothing good for the country," says Michael Tomasky, who as editor-elect of the American Prospect magazine will be making the more cerebral versions of the arguments offered in Franken's unabashed screed.
That is a powerful glue, the perfect opinion for the rise of a mass movement.
The problem for the Foxanoia axis is this: What, aside from hating Bush and the Fox News Channel, do they believe in?

Right again, I'm sorry to say. The left has become the negative side. That used to be the right's job: to resist change, to complain. (Now don't give me hell in my comments and email, you conservative gabsters out there. I know I'm oversimplifying. Let me make my point. And note that I'm agreeing with a conservative columnist here, ferchrissake. Step away from that keyboard!). Now the left is complaining about everything that's wrong and about its enemies, Fox and Bush. That won't get them very far, in elections or in governance.
So Podhoretz suggests that they need to come up with a more positive agenda and he's right; it's the best advice the left can get from a sworn enemy.

Yes, the left is rising. But for the left to truly challenge the right for dominance of the intellectual debate, its leaders and thinkers will need to be able to offer a picture of a better, safe and wealthier United States.

Listen to the guy.

: More on the left and its causes: Matthew Yglesias says reforming Alabama's taxes is a more important issue than stopping the crackpot "judge" from etching granite. Gene at Harry's blog agrees and points to David Bromwich's piece that says: "It is sometimes said that the left won the culture war of the late 1960s and the right won the political war."

: Ted Barlow asks a good question in the comments:

Left-wingers criticize Fox for being biased, unfair and deceptive. At the same time, right wingers have been criticizing the New York Times and the BBC for being biased, unfair and deceptive.
We could talk forever about the validity of these sets of claims, but they're beside the point. Jeff, you say that the left-wing anti-FOX craze reveals an essential snobbery. Hmm. What does the right-wing anti-NY Times and anti-BBC craze reveal?

Yes, I think that the right's paranoia about the NY Times is quite revealing -- of its paranoia, mainly.
But I'll counter that that's besides the point here. The point is not who's biased and who's not or who's right and who's not but instead what the left is missing in not having its own FoxNews, its own balls-out opinions, its own sense of populism.
Politics is marketing and the right and FoxNews know that better than the left.

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Too many last words
: Yesterday, I heard a shrink on TV say that people would react differently to the release of the Port Authority 9/11 transcripts that filled the papers today: Some people need to know more; some would stay away. I wasn't sure which I would be.
Well, I read them all. It was painful, again, bringing memories back to the surface, reopening wounds. But I read them.
There are tragic mistakes: telling people to stay put. Who could have known?
There are stories of heroism, pieced together now. Jim Dwyer in the Times tells how two PA employees saved at least 50 people trapped on the 88th and 89th floors of the north tower. I look at the picture of one of them, Frank De Martini, with his beautiful children and I start counting the broken hearts again.
There are stories of helplessness; all the papers quote the assistant manager of Windows on the World dutifully calling, asking when help will arrive, telling the police that air is running out fast, even asking permission to break a window.
There are stories of wisdom, such as PATH dispatchers getting all their passengers and employees safely out of harm's way. I was one of them.
Yes, I had to read it all. I'm not sure why. I think it is a matter of keeping witness, of making sure we remember the horror and the heroism of the day.
As the second anniversary fast approaches, I had feared that we were trying to forget too quickly; TV is paying scant attention to the day and that is wrong, for we must remember.

: See the stories and transcripts here. Star-Ledger: 1, 2, 3. New York Times: 1, 2. Newsday: 1, 2, 3.

: The Port Authority, which was sued to release the transcripts, said:

Because of the sheer volume of these materials, it is impossible to summarize their details. In general, they show people performing their duties very heroically and very professionally on a day of unimaginable horror.
Representatives of media organizations have assured us that they are interested in this material solely to evaluate emergency response on September 11, and to recount heroism. We take them at their word, and fully expect them to refrain from publishing gruesome, gratuitous or personal details that do nothing to further this discussion. We also hope and expect that the media will show appropriate respect for the families of the heroes of September 11, particularly as the second anniversary of that painful day approaches.

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Our man in Kabul
: Ben Hammersley goes shopping:

One store we visited tried to sell me a bullwhip. Ah, cool, I thought. Indiana Jones. No, says the shopkeeper, from the Taliban time. For women, he says, and looks away.

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