After the recent political rants, it’s time to cleanse the mental palate with a bit of photographic sherbet:
A pleasant memory of our February snows—in particular, the huge flakes on the 25th that fell straight down through the absolutely still air. The way the snow built up on the twigs of the dogwood almost defied belief. But seeing is believing, of course.
To see more (and more deeply), visit the Wilson Bentley collection. [Hat tip to Laureeg]
The New York Times ran an analysis of the Libby case today that argues the verdict will change the way the press covers the government. Would that it does.
“Every tenet and every pact that existed between the government and the press has been broken,” said Theodore J. Boutrous Jr., a media lawyer who represented Time magazine and one of its reporters in their unsuccessful efforts to fight subpoenas from Mr. Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the Libby case.
There have been “tenets” and “pacts” between the government and the press? That would explain a lot.
Actually, there was a “truce,” but it was between the press and government prosecutors:
In the 35 years since the United States Supreme Court ruled, in Branzburg v. Hayes, that reporters have no right under the First Amendment to refuse to answer questions from a grand jury, press protections against Justice Department subpoenas have existed largely as a matter of prosecutorial grace. That is over.
“We had this truce for a generation since Branzburg,” said Mark Feldstein, a journalism professor at George Washington University. “Nobody really pushed it. The virginity is lost now.”
It’s interesting the Feldstein brings up the notion of virginity, what with an entire generation of Washington reporters behaving more like cheap tarts than innocent naifs.
But the clincher is this passage about “access journalism.” It dovetails with something I said earlier about what it used to mean to “protect a source,” and what it has come to mean in 21st century Washington:
Earl Caldwell, a reporter for The Times who was involved in the Branzburg case, would not cooperate even after the Supreme Court’s decision, and the government never pressed the point. In 1978, another Times reporter, Myron Farber, spent 40 days in jail rather than identify his source.
“I wonder,” Professor [Jane] Kirtley [of the University of Minnesota] said, “if part of it is that Caldwell and Farber were proudly outsiders.” By contrast, the journalists who testified at the Libby trial were Washington insiders, and they gave the public a master class in access journalism. It was not always a pretty sight.
“They’re not fearless advocates,” Professor Feldstein said of the reporters involved, “but supplicants, willing and even eager to be manipulated.”
Meanwhile, in faraway California, an editorial board “gets it.”
Thomas Nephew has done such a fine job demolishing the insipid op-ed by Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post on H.R. 106 (the Armenian Genocide Resolution) that it seems almost sufficient to merely point to his blog entries (here and here).
Every year around this time, as the April 24 anniversary approaches and Congress bestirs itself on the issue, the Post sends someone out to swat at Armenian Americans. This year Diehl was the designated hitter. In the process of simultaneously arguing that the nonbinding resolution is pointless, since it’s nonbinding, and extremely harmful, because it hurts Turkey’s feelings and Turkey is an important ally (that’s what they say, anyway), Diehl mentions that “American Jewish organizations” have locked arms with the Turkish government in applying pressure to get it defeated. Yes, American Jews are trying hard to quash a bill that recognizes a genocide that predated the Holocaust and may have helped pave the way for it.
“Turkey’s Chutzpah”—that’s what the The Jewish Press called it. Although there seems to be plenty of chutzpah to go around, the editorial board at The Jewish Press seems to hold their fellow citizens blameless. Be that as it may, the editorial is worth quoting at length:
We are certainly not insensitive to the significance of Turkey’s support of Israel. But the Turkish government’s attempt to capitalize on that support by pressing the American Jewish community to oppose a Congressional resolution that condemns as “genocide” Turkey’s murder of a million and a half Armenians during World War I strikes us as being the height of chutzpah.
As The New York Sun reported, on February 5 the Turkish foreign minister met with representatives of several major Jewish groups and “made a hard sell” against House Resolution 106, which now has 176 co-sponsors. The Turkish official reportedly appealed to the participants by noting—outrageously, we think—the uniqueness of the German genocide against the Jews.
The Turks do not deny that between 1915 and 1917 they conducted a devastating military campaign against the Armenians and that thousands of Armenians were killed on forced marches. They claim, however, that the hapless Armenians were a fifth column, often armed and working on behalf of the Russian army in World War I.
But the American ambassador to the Ottoman Empire at the time, Henry Morgenthau, wrote in his memoir, “I am confident that the whole history of the human race contains no such horrible episode as this.” The orders for the deportations of the Armenian families in 1915 “were merely giving a death warrant to a whole race,” he wrote.
Anyone who seriously and objectively considers those events cannot but conclude that there was a calculated and purposeful effort to exterminate the Armenians. After all, approximately 1.5 million perished.
That said, we understand that opposition to House Resolution 106 does not necessarily signify lack of sympathy with the victims, or, indeed, sentiment against the concept itself. Not buying into an initiative on someone else’s schedule is not always an indicator of nefarious motives at play.
We also have no doubt that some would argue the Jewish community should oppose the resolution if only to preserve the aura of uniqueness surrounding the destruction of European Jewry in the Holocaust. And this, perhaps, was the point the Turkish foreign minister was trying to make in his presentation to Jewish leaders.
But acknowledging as genocide the systematic murder of a million and a half human beings of a particular ethnic heritage in no way detracts from recognition of the Holocaust as a uniquely monumental evil in the blood-soaked annals of human history.
Okay, it was so impressive, I quoted the piece in its entirety.
For those unfamiliar with The Jewish Press, this New York newspaper champions, in its own words, “Torah values and ideals from a centrist or Modern Orthodox perspective.” It is also a “tireless advocate on behalf of the State of Israel.” Not exactly a raving left-wing rag.
Also, the first sentence in the editorial alludes to something that may not be widely understood or appreciated. Among other things, Israel and Turkey are deeply engaged together on energy projects and, perhaps more significantly, on water pipelines. (See also “Triple Alliance: The US, Turkey, Israel, and the War on Lebanon” for more on the strategic partnership of Israel and Turkey.)
In short, this is the context of Jackson Diehl’s op-ed. Big power machinations. Control over natural resources. If you want to play this game, you can just leave your snivelling little moral issues at home. History isn’t about people. 1,500,000 is just a number. Memories don’t weigh anything. “Get real,” Diehl and the Washington Post say. “Get real.” Realpolitik.
It’s been a banner week over at the Washington Post. On Monday they run a rotten op-ed piece pooh-poohing the Armenian genocide (more on that later this week). And today’s Post brings a truly execrable editorial on the Libby verdict. The editorialist (presumed to be Fred Hiatt, head of the Post‘s editorial board) says the Libby affair was “a Washington scandal remarkable for its lack of substance.” He says Joseph Wilson “will be remembered as a blowhard.” And what did government officials do wrong? Well, nothing, really. “Mr. Cheney and Mr. Libby were overbearing in their zeal to rebut Mr. Wilson and careless in their handling of classified information.” Zealous (perfectly acceptable). Careless (certainly excusable). What’s the fuss?
The Washington Post still doesn’t get it.
I dropped in at the Post to comment (among hundreds of others). I’ll reproduce the comment here because, with all the technical talent available to washingtonpost.com, they don’t seem to have anyone on staff who knows how to apply measures to block malicious code in form submissions. Previously it had seemed they strip only single quotation marks, so I used the odd “reverse single quote” that lives at the extreme upper left edge of my keyboard. Well, it turns out they strip just about all punctuation, including double quotes and—get this—parentheses. Ridiculous. So, here is what I said, replete with quotation marks and parentheses:
“Mr. Wilson’s case has besmirched nearly everyone it touched.” What on earth is Fred Hiatt (or whoever wrote this bizarre, fact-challenged editorial) talking about? Still attacking Joe Wilson, are we? “Wilson claimed,” “Wilson suggested” … The fact is, Joe Wilson was basically right about Iraq. The Washington Post, as an institution, was basically wrong. And yet it weeps big tears for its friend and Leaker Extraordinaire “Scooter” Libby, and for his boss and Unnamed Source Supreme Dick Cheney, and for his putative boss and erstwhile War President George Bush. “Most people (not us at the Post, of course, or Newsweek, or MSNBC) think they were not just spectacularly wrong, they lied themselves silly in the process. But boy, they’re nice guys. Couldn’t ask for nicer lunch companions, so pleasant to run into at Nags Head or the Vineyard. What a shame so many people are mad at them.” Every once in a while, the Washington Post still manages to report an unvarnished fact. The rest of the time it’s just insider gossip and the government line.
Enjoy your special access, boys and girls. When you get that close to power (so close as to actually be in it—we won’t mention the likely mode of ingress), you can’t see clearly or think straight anymore. It’s actually kind of dark in there, isn’t it? But it’s a good living, eh? A comfortable life at the imperial court, where Cheney is merely “overbearing” rather than cynically manipulative; where Libby is a martyr alongside his fourth-estate pals who were willing to take a hit (which he was counting on when he lied to the grand jury) for the sake of “protecting” a source who is in no need of protection—a government employee, as it turns out, who wanted to be able to plant disinformation in the press so that the government could quote it back as if the press had found it and verified it all on its very own. In the good old days, a reporter protected a source because that person was in a weak position and could suffer retaliation as a result of talking to the press. In “protecting” a powerful government source like Libby, the press is actually protecting itself—protecting its easy working conditions and its more-than-comfortable lifestyle. That’s what this story is all about, Fred: collusion unmasked. [link added]
I remember when Fred Hiatt was the Post‘s Moscow bureau chief. I think he actually did some reporting back then. I wonder if, after reading all the comments, he wishes he were back in the USSR.
Captain Kirk to Chekov and Sulu: “Phasers on ‘stun’ …”
It’s not a handheld device … yet. Raytheon’s Silent Guardian™:
From Raytheon promotional video
Your tax dollars at work. William Saletan at Slate reports:
Three weeks ago, the U.S. armed forces tested it on volunteers at an Air Force base in Georgia. You can watch the video on a military Web site. Three colonels get zapped, along with an Associated Press reporter. The beam is invisible, but its effects are vivid. Two dozen airmen scatter. The AP guy shrieks and bolts out of the target zone. He says it felt like heat all over his body, as though his jacket were on fire.
The feeling is an illusion. No one is harmed. The beam’s energy waves penetrate just one-sixty-fourth of an inch into your body, heating your skin like microwaves. They inflame your nerve endings without actually burning you. This could be the future of warfare: less bloodshed, more pain.
Don’t worry, this “less-than-lethal directed-energy application” will only be used against bad guys. It will never be used to intimidate the innocent or help maintain despotic rule.
At the Silent Guardian console, targeting one such (pretend) bad guy:
From Raytheon promotional video
Read more about it at Slate and ponder the ethical issues involved.
Rollout of TheBook, v.1:
(Happy Valentine’s Day to bibliophiles everywhere!)
Martin Strel likes to swim. In rivers. Long rivers. From end to end.
The Danube. The Mississippi. The Yangtze. And now, the Amazon. Never mind the piranha and the candirú.
It’s the Slovenian red wine that keeps him going—he laughs when he says it, but he drinks it as he floats on his back down whatever river he happens to be in.
He set out on February 1, and you can follow his progress online. Like all modern nutcases, he has a personal website.
His motto: “Plavam za mir, prijateljstvo in čiste vode” — “I swim for peace, friendship, and clean water.” Nothing crazy about that.
Photos by Vanderlin
“Looks like a bomb t’me. Whaddya think, Mick?”
“Yuh, could be. Better blow id up just in case.”
It’s progress of sorts. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post described how “tens of thousands” marched in Washington on Saturday in protest against the Iraq war. In September 2005, an even bigger march was characterized by the Times as “thousands” of protesters. Technically true, but oh-so-misleading. The coverage—scant and dismissive—provoked a massive protest of its own, and within days the Times published a better, truer version of the event. This time both newspapers devoted a reasonable amount of space to the rally and march, and the tone was properly neutral. It’s amazing what three years of disaster in Iraq, a sea-change election, and a populace that has found other channels of information can do to mainstream reporting. The press duly noted that the march was large enough to loop back on itself—when those at the front reached the end of the march route (which started on the Mall and wound past the Capitol on the east side), they came upon marchers just beginning the trek.
As usual, creativity of all sorts was on display, from clever signs to costumed performers. I offer just a few scenes that struck my fancy. You can find more photos in the Washington Post story.
George W. Bush’s buddy, the attorney general, says “[t]here is no express grant of habeas in the Constitution.” No, just an express injunction that it is not to be suspended except in the case of rebellion or invasion. Probably everyone at Saturday’s protest knows that the right wasn’t explicitly stated because it was assumed as part of our legacy of British common law—it is a given. I wonder why the nation’s top lawyer acts as if he doesn’t understand that?
This lady was about 4′10″ and had the bad luck to be right behind a big banner (and probably in front of one as well). I had the feeling she was too nice a person to use spicier language, which wasn’t hard to find—for instance … Continue reading
It should come as no surprise that composers of music for motion pictures continually mine the classical repertoire, just as contemporary novelists grab whatever they can from the stocks of literature, ancient and modern. (Have you heard the story, for instance, of “a cultivated man of middle age [who] looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone.” The story was published in 1916; its author is Heinz von Lichberg. Not the story you were thinking of, is it? It was, however, called “Lolita.” All this courtesy of an article by Jonathan Lethem in the February 2007 Harper’s, “The Ecstasy of Influence.”)
Today’s musical tidbits revolve around the Hitchcock classic Psycho. Anyone who’s seen it cannot help but be struck by the soundtrack, composed by the acclaimed Bernard Hermann. As Wikipedia notes, “The screeching violin music heard during the famous shower scene (which Hitchcock originally suggested have no music at all) is one of the most famous moments from all film scores.” Here’s what it sounds like, in case you’ve forgotten:
Now here’s a snippet from a piece composed some forty years earlier:
I think it’s unlikely Hermann would have been unaware of Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1, which has enjoyed enormous popularity over the years. (The clip above features Berl Senofsky with the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell; my best guess is that this radio broadcast dates from the late fifties or early sixties.) Hermann’s music is quite different, both in its relentless repetition and the palette of accompanying notes. And yet one can’t help but feel he must have been inspired, consciously or not, by the Prokofiev. (If unconsciously, it would be a case of cryptomnesia—another tip of the hat to Jonathan Lethem.)
For the technically curious, I offer this Q&A about the actual notes used in the Psycho excerpt:
Q: What are the notes or note being played during “The Murder” in the famous shower scene (the violin shrieks)? (from Mr. Bunderfull in Chicago Ill. U.S.A.)
A: The highest note in the violins is an E flat, but the second violins are playing an E natural, and lower voices are playing F and G flat. So basically, the highest note is E flat, but everything from E flat to G flat is being heard. (thanks to Gizm, Texas)
If you like this sort of thing, here’s something similar.
