Bush's IRS Cracks Down on Pasadena Church

A liberal Pasadena church facing an IRS investigation over alleged politicking sounded a defiant note Sunday, with its leaders and many congregants saying the probe amounted to an assault on their constitutional rights and that they were inclined to defy the agency's request for documents.

At the pulpit Sunday, Bacon got straight to the point, eliciting loud laughter from the congregation:

I want to begin my sermon by once again expressing my gratitude to the Internal Revenue Service. Those brothers and sisters really know how to shine a spotlight on a struggling church and swell the number of worshipers.

Bacon told the congregation that, although he recognized that the church could not endorse or oppose a political candidate,

neither could it remain silent in the face of dehumanization, injustice and violence. . . History is shamefully littered with the moral bankruptcy of people who were Christian in name but not behavior

Neutrality and silence in the face of oppression always aids the oppressor.

When he was done, Bacon received a minutelong standing ovation.

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How 'Truthy' Replaced Truth Following 9/11

Tim Rutten reviewing The Greatest Story Ever Sold The Decline and Fall of Truth From 9/11 to Katrina by Frank Rich.

My excerpts:

Rich writes what is surely American journalism's smartest and most original newspaper column

He also has a genuine relish for popular culture and has almost single-handedly made the word "truthiness," first coined by Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert, an indispensable political term of art. As Rich defines it, "truthiness" describes a situation in which it doesn't matter whether something is true: "What matters most is whether a story can be sold as true, preferably on television."

That describes precisely the stories George W. Bush and his surrogates told the American people to induce them to support war in Iraq, and Rich lays out these evasions, exaggerations and outright lies in "The Greatest Story Ever Sold."

According to Rutten, Rich recently told an interviewer:

There's certainly tremendous overlap, but the fact is, when you're writing a column, you don't see the larger picture. I really wanted to write a narrative more than an argument. In the run-up to the war in Iraq, a lot of stuff was hiding in plain sight. Some of it I saw at the time, some of it I didn't.

Rutten continues by saying that the book includes,

All of the stuff that counts . . . marshaled in a narrative that unfolds with the cadence of a well-paced newspaper column. There's also a shrewdly observed and reasoned explanation of the motives behind all this horrifically destructive deceit — and Rich is clear in his belief that one of the casualties of the ill-considered war in Iraq has been the real war on real terrorism, which is as serious and avoidable as a fight can be.

Dick Cheney, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Paul D. Wolfowitz and the rest of the neoconservatives who came to Washington as intellectual props for a stunningly ill-prepared and "incurious" president brought with them an ideological belief that the Middle East, starting with Iraq, needed to be remade. Karl Rove, Bush's political prop, brought with him a single-minded loyalty and an unparalleled mastery of campaign — which is to say, media — technology. Those qualities converged in the run-up to the first midterm elections following Sept. 11 and the failed attempt to apprehend Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.

As Rich puts it:

For Rove and Bush to get what they wanted most, slam dunk midterm election victories, and for Libby and Cheney to get what they wanted most, a war in Iraq for ideological reasons that predated 9/11, their real whys for going to war had to be replaced by more saleable ones. We'd go to war instead because there was a direct connection between Saddam and al Qaeda and because Saddam was on the verge of attacking America with nuclear weapons."

The story was better than true; it was "truthy."

. . . . If our public conversation still were capable of making any distinctions but partisan ones, the sheer moral force of Rich's argument and the logical weight of his evidence would lay to rest the casual conservative canard that he is, somehow, an avatar of rarified Manhattan liberalism, writing in a language that is foreign west of the Hudson. As this book so clearly demonstrates, the very heart of his project as a writer and public intellectual is nothing fancier than a rugged old American belief that facts matter and a fierce old American resentment at being conned.

It's hard to imagine values more traditional. It was, after all, a Republican president from the heartland who once mused,

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.

Five Years Later: Pop Culture of Denial

Patrick Goldstein published a column five days after 9-11-01 in which he said

The terrorist attacks may have brought to a close a decade of enormous frivolity and escapism.

Maybe Hollywood will recognize that Americans suddenly view the world as a more serious place. There's a new moral gravity out there.

Today he admits that he was then

blissfully unaware that it would take more than a horrific catastrophe to quench our thirst for the madcap antics of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Star Jones Reynolds, Jessica Simpson and all the other bobble heads bouncing around our celebrity universe. When it comes to frivolity, escapism and a lack of moral gravity, we haven't lost a step, have we?

. . . . But the truth is that the trauma of Sept. 11 did not change us, not so much because we live in a culture of superficiality as because we are imprisoned in a culture of hyperactivity. We're so inundated by juicy bites of information — both serious and tawdry — that we don't have the psychic attention span to emotionally involve ourselves in much of anything. What we're really good at is denial.

In this atmosphere it's hardly surprising that Sept. 11 has the sound of distant thunder, treated with great solemnity but rarely given a thought in our daily lives . . . .

The events of Sept. 11 have been anointed in heroic balm, its victims sanctified either for their ordinariness (as in "United 93") or for their stouthearted stoicism, as in "World Trade Center." The subject is still too sensitive for artists to have any dramatic free rein — we've had authenticity, but precious little poetry. The rest of our culture is awash in irony, sarcasm and the self-flagellation of reality TV, but the respect for the Sept. 11 dead prevents artists from exploring the blindness, delusion and foolish human behavior that make for great drama . . . .

Trying to see shades of Sept. 11 in our fragmented pop culture is something of a fool's errand . . . .

You could also argue that historic events today don't pack the wallop they once did, since they are so quickly chewed over and transformed into cheesy cliché by our voracious media machine.

The world of new technology, which in many ways is the most strikingly different part of our post-Sept. 11 universe, has made us so over-connected that we have trouble processing real, traumatic tragedy. It quickly becomes so over-analyzed that it loses its potency by losing its singularity . . . .

This fragmentation is just a fact of life in our world, which has so many hundreds of niche channels and radio formats that we rarely get to share a common reaction to a cultural event.

Goldstein concludes by citing writer-director Paul Weitz, whose "American Dreamz" was a cheeky satire about the convergence of politics, terrorism and show business:

There are so many different venues for entertainment that you don't have to be exposed to any serious thoughts if you don't want to — there's no one guy like Walter Cronkite to watch.

The sheer proliferation of media makes it hard to make judgments or really be engaged in the world. You wonder — if Watergate happened today, would people really all be irate or would they just be watching some other channel?

Five Years Later: Pop Culture of Denial

A.B.C. Stands for Always Bash Clinton

ABC Follows A Path To Shame

I'm racheting up my hero, Tim Rutten's, article. He's been away too long on vacation, and he's coming off a little as Timid Timmy. Given time, he'll get back up to speed. In the meantime, here's how I would say, what he has to say. (We catch this in mid-program.)

.... For most of the week, ABC rather haughtily attempted to characterize itself as the victim of philistines, or self-righteously as a champion of free speech or, more pathetically, as just plain misunderstood by people who just don't understand how television is done.

It is none of those things.

It's an opportunistic and self-interested organization that somehow thought it could approach the most wrenching American tragedy since Pearl Harbor with the values that prevail among network television executives — the sort of ad hoc ethics that would make a streetwalker blush — and that nobody would mind.

That part of this whole shabby sequence of events is the hardest to fathom. It's well understood, of course, that docudramas are seldom documentary and only sporadically dramatic. As a rule, they're basically devices to free unimaginative writers from the burden of having to make up characters' names. You simply appropriate the names of real people, then make them do whatever attention-getting thing fills the allotted time.

But did the people who run ABC Entertainment — the network division directly responsible for this mess — really believe that Bill Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger would watch themselves on television doing and saying thing they never did or said and not object? When these fictional incidents were portrayed as contributing to the deaths of nearly 3,000 innocent people, did they think that the former Clinton administration officials and others so caricatured simply would shrug and say, "Well, that's dramatic license for you?" Did they really expect anyone to accept the preposterous notion that — as some at the network argued this week — the film's facts were wrong, but its "essence" was true? These people really need to get out more.

What's easier to understand is what ABC thought it was up to with its marketing of "The Path to 9/11" and why it thought a successful marketing campaign might lead our politically polarized nation to feverishly overlook the network's irresponsibility toward history. After all, why should the many thousands of Americans still grieving for loved ones lost five years ago care about an accurate account of the governmental decisions that may have contributed to those deaths when they could get a good dose of "essence"?

Over the past weeks, the network flooded the country with advance copies of its film. Some sources put the number of DVDs in circulation at 900. An ABC spokeswoman, who demanded to be "off the record" said Friday that she couldn't confirm 900 copies, but that the number "certainly was more than 500." She promised to e-mail back an accurate count; she never did. Many of those copies were directed at right-wing talk show hosts and, some, to Republican bloggers, who long have argued that — however complacent the Bush administration may initially been concerning radical Islamic terrorism — Clinton and his people overlooked far more signs of Al Qaeda's lethality for a far longer period of time. These commentators were delighted to see that ABC's docu-dramatic version of events supported their view. So, for weeks they've been talking the film up on their radio programs and analyzing its merits on their blogs. . . . .

. . . . However, with that many copies in circulation, interested Democrats and former Clinton administration officials soon saw the movie and began picking its ludicrous inaccuracies apart in protests to ABC and — more important — directly to Robert Iger, the chief executive of Disney, the network's parent company. By Friday, even the film's star, Harvey Keitel, was telling an interviewer:

You cannot cross the line from a conflation of events to a distortion of the event. Where we have distorted something, we made a mistake and it should be corrected.

So ABC began re-editing a film that already had been scrutinized by hundreds of people with long memories and access to publication. Democrats remained skeptical that any version of the film could be made credible; GOP partisans were angry and some said they felt used. Most were disgusted with what they deemed Disney/ABC's cowardice in the face of Democratic criticism. As conservative columnist Mark Steyn put it on one talk show: ABC

...supposedly spent years working on it to get it absolutely right, to get the absolute truth, and then they're frantically staying up late the night before it broadcasts snipping out 10 minutes here and there, because Bill Clinton and Sandy Berger and various other Clinton apparatchiks object to this or that line here and there. I mean, that makes them look pathetic, it makes ABC, I think, look ridiculous, in fact, because there's hundreds of these tapes out there. People are going to know exactly what lines were cut and what weren't cut....

One of the most unfortunate consequences of all this was that most of the news media completely overlook a stunning affront to 1st Amendment freedoms that occurred when the Democratic leadership of the U.S. Senate sent Iger a letter Thursday appearing to threaten the network's licenses unless "The Path to 9/11" was altered or killed:

The Communications Act of 1934 provides your network with a free broadcast license predicated on the fundamental understanding of your principle obligation to act as a trustee of the public airwaves in serving the public interest ... ," the lawmakers wrote. "We urge you, after full consideration of the facts, to uphold your responsibilities as a respected member of American society and as a beneficiary of the free use of the public airwaves to cancel this factually inaccurate and deeply misguided program."

We've all become accustomed to a Congress that behaves as if it's divided between Bloods and Crips rather than Republicans and Democrats — but this was a thuggish new low. If we were inclined to dramatic license, the guys with thick necks in "On the Waterfront" would come to mind, though it's doubtful even Harvey Keitel could plausibly play Harry Reid as threatening.

WTF!!??

Here's where I part from Timid Timmy. What is wrong with him? This is not thuggishness. If this is thuggery, I say you haven't seen nuthin' yet, city-boy.

Come November.

In Verbal Chess, Who's Appeaser?

Again - Sorry Los Angeles Times - I feel compelled to print most/all of Tim Rutten in his original (almost) form - my formatting and emphasis has been added:

Political rhetoric is a never-ending chess match that gathers intensity as an election approaches.

The successful players know that the best way to win is to dominate your opponent by forcing him or her to contest the game on your terms and that the way to do that is to think as many moves ahead as you can.

Whatever else it can or cannot do, the Bush administration plays major league electoral chess. So, it's the proximity of November's midterms that made this week's speeches by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld — and the coverage they received — matters of more than passing interest. Essentially, all three attempted to draw a parallel between the debates over how best to resolve the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq and the pre-World War II controversies over whether or how to confront rising fascism.

In this instance, the terrorist adherents of Islamic fundamentalists become Islamofascists and those who oppose a continuation of the Bush administration's military policies in Iraq become … well, more on that shortly.

In his address to the American Legion, the president was careful to say that "many" of those who oppose his conduct of the Iraqi war are "sincere" and "patriotic" but "could not be more wrong." It was a shrewd bit of calculation, since not even Karl Rove could convince anyone that George W. Bush can tell the difference between a fascist and a frankfurter.

When he spoke to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Cheney was slightly less restrained, calling "a vigorous debate on the issues … part of the greatness of America" but going on to argue that "there is a difference between healthy debate and self-defeating pessimism."

That set the board for Rumsfeld, the administration's designated tough guy, who told the American Legion that the years leading up to World War II were "a time when a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion set in among Western democracies. When those who warned about a coming crisis, and rise of fascism and Nazism, they were ridiculed and ignored. Indeed, in the decades before World War II, a great many argued that the fascist threat was exaggerated or that it was someone else's problem…. I recount the history because once again we face similar challenges in efforts to confront the rising threat of a new type of fascism."

The Defense secretary went on to synopsize what he alleged were media distortions concerning the war in Iraq and its abuse of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay and urged the American Legionnaires to adopt a watchdog role. That, he said,

is particularly important today in a war that is to a great extent fought in the media on a global scale, a role to not allow the distortions and myths be repeated without challenge, so that at the least the second or third draft of history will be more accurate than the first quick allegation we see…. That is important in any long struggle or long war, where any kind of moral or intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong can weaken the ability of free societies to persevere.

In an op-ed piece published by The Times on Friday, Rumsfeld was given the opportunity to make many of the same points in almost precisely the same language employed in his speech.

Today, some think that World War II and the Cold War were black-and-white affairs: good versus evil. But there were always those who thought that we should retreat within our borders.

In an effort to avoid repeating the carnage of World War I, much of the Western world tried to appease the growing threats in Europe and Asia in the years before World War II.

There's the word this whole rather clumsy bit of rhetorical choreography really is all about: "appeasement."

This sequence of speeches with their carefully chosen audiences has nothing to do with fascism — Islamo or otherwise — and everything to do with introducing the word "appeasement" into our domestic debate over the war in Iraq.

So far, of course, no elected lawmaker or official has proposed negotiating with Osama bin Laden or any other Islamofascist terrorists, as the historical appeasers did with Adolf Hitler. Rather, the entire debate so far has been about whether the war in Iraq has advanced the struggle against Islamic radicals. That's the ground the administration is hoping to change with this sequence of moves in the electoral chess game.

If opponents of Bush's military policies in Iraq can be made "appeasers," it gives the administration's partisans a way to attack them without questioning their patriotism — something against which polls show Americans instinctively recoil. The real "appeasers," after all, weren't unpatriotic — think Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax — they were dreadfully, almost fatally mistaken.

Think folly so complete that it carries the whiff of treason.

What's doubly interesting about all this is that we have a recent — indeed, ongoing — example of what happens when the administration is allowed to dictate the rhetorical terms of debate. In the forthcoming issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, former Slate columnist Eric Umansky compellingly documents the American news media's generally lackluster performance in reporting the Bush administration's adoption of torture as state policy. It is failure rooted in the acceptance of the government's euphemisms for its conduct — "coercive interrogation," "extraordinary rendition" and the like.

As Umansky writes:

Reporters and news organizations deserve enormous credit for exposing the abuse and torture of detainees during the U.S. war on terror, more than other institutions or individuals. Without a handful of reporters, we might well never have learned of the abuse and torture that have occurred in Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib and elsewhere. . . . when the record on torture coverage is examined in detail, an ambiguous picture emerges: in the post-9/11 days, some reporters offered detailed accusations and reports of abuse and torture, only to be met with skepticism by their own editors. Stories were buried, played down or ignored — a reluctance that is much diminished but still bubbles up with regard to the culpability of policymakers.

Umansky notes that the media's tentative and frequently timid approach to covering the Bush administration's adoption of torture as state policy began with senior editors' reluctance to accept the evidence of their own reporting and was abetted by "long-standing journalistic shortcomings; for example, the tendency to treat both sides of an issue equally, without regard to where the facts lie."

It is a disregard that continued this week in the generally matter-of-fact, news-story-as-usual treatment most of the media gave the portion of Rumsfeld's address in which he attacked alleged distortions by the press and Amnesty International of the events at Abu Ghraib and of conditions at Guantanamo. (According to Rumsfeld in The Times on Friday, the biggest problem confronted by prisoners in America's Cuban gaol is whether to interrupt their reading of "Harry Potter" for soccer, basketball or another serving of halal meat.)

None of the accounts of the Defense secretary's speech bothered to point out something from the public record that Umansky includes in his piece: The general

who had overseen the report on FBI allegations of abuse at Guantanamo later testified that Rumsfeld had been 'personally involved' and was given 'weekly updates' on the interrogation of one detainee, who was kept near freezing and led around naked on a leash. Interrogation logs later showed that the detainee's heart rate became so slow during his 'cold' treatment that he nearly dies. Another prisoner in CIA custody in Afghanistan died of hypothermia.

The confusion between callous indifference and evenhandedness is a form of moral blindness that begins in the fog of euphemism. You cannot recognize things for what they are when you've forfeited the ability to call them by their real names. As Umansky's report clearly documents, much of the American press was so cowed by the Bush administration and so crippled by its unexamined inhibitions that it badly failed in its obligation to report this government's embrace of torture.

That failure began when the news media uncritically adopted the government's vague new labels for what it was doing to its prisoners. If the administration now is allowed to recast the critical debate over the war in Iraq into a spitting match between farsighted anti-fascists and cringing appeasers, it will be worse than tragic.