Centrist Pundits

I like to think I am a fairly bright guy, and I can usually see both sides of an issue. But there’s something I can’t quite understand.

Yesterday, someone was arrested overseas for a 32-year old outstanding warrant after he’d confessed and plead guilty to raping a thirteen year old girl.

However, there are many people who think he shouldn’t have to serve time for his crime — maybe because he’s a celebrity. Can someone explain it to me?

Greg Crime and Punishment, Foreign Relations crime, diplomacy, Media

One of the more amusing aspects of the 24 hour news networks and the fact that we essentially always have the news at our fingertips is that there is that polling gets a lot more play, while at the same time the reporting on it has become somewhat meaningless.

What I mean by that is simply this:  Obama’s poll numbers are dropping.  They are now in the mid to upper 50s, if I recall correctly.  And yet, this is reported in almost the exact same tone as Bush’s numbers being in the low 30s during parts of his Presidency.

I’m not saying polling numbers, and the movement of polling numbers, aren’t news.  In fact, in the poor signal-to-noise ratio of the 24 hour news cycle, polling numbers are actually signal.  But this is one of the places commentary needs to be more active.  The difference between a President dropping to the 50s – which is still amazingly high – and a President stagnating in the 30s – which is fairly low – are significant.

Often times, the complaint about the news is bias.  Fox is conservative, MSNBC is liberal, etc.  And that is a problem, when commentary runs amok and disguises itself as news.  But commentary in and of itself isn’t bad.  News can need context sometimes, especially on subjects where the average person isn’t an expert.  A company is selling off a division: is that good or bad?  You can’t know without context.  In its proper place, commentary is very useful.

All or nothing solutions are rarely the right solution.  The world is complex.  We need more commentary in some regards, and less in others.  Maybe someday a news network will get it right.  All evidence is to the contrary at the moment, however.

JC Media Media, obama, polling

To be honest, I didn’t think I’d be bringing up Senator Ensign again.

CNN has their political ticker, a website off their main page that does brief political news stories.  I find it a very useful website for scanning what the major political stories of the day are.

Tonight, one of the stories is:  http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2009/07/08/report-senator-tried-to-stop-colleagues-affair/  which is about the efforts of Senator Coburn to get Ensign to break off his affair.  It is a news article about a more complete story located in the Las Vegas Sun, at http://www.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/jul/08/spouse-ensign-affair-says-senator-should-resign/

Now, in the article, it says that the husband of the woman having an affair with Ensign reached out to a conservative Christian senator, Coburn, for assistance in ending the affair.  That’s all well and good, a story about a good man trying to help another man behave well.  Right?

I want to call attention to one line in the middle of the Sun article:

“The group, including Coburn, a well-known conservative, confronted Ensign and suggested that the Hamptons needed to be given financial assistance — in the millions of dollars — to pay off their $1 million-plus mortgage and move them to a new life away from Ensign.”

I guess I could be misreading this, it doesn’t explicitly say it, but is that saying what I think it is saying?  That a group of people including Senator Coburn, in their attempt to get Ensign to break off the affair, suggested that he pay off his mistress to just go away?  Isn’t that just called “hush money” most of the time?

I think CNN really buried the lead on this one.

JC Media, Personalities John Ensign, Media, senators

There a small but disturbing trend on the admittedly extreme right of American Political Thought that goes as follows:  “Obama’s policies are making America less safe.  Obama’s policies are popular.  The only way to convince people that Obama’s policies are making America less safe is with a demonstrable loss of human life.  Therefore, the best thing for America might be to suffer an attack, so that Americans will shake off their complacency and demand Obama do better on security, or replace Obama with someone who will.”

This type of fetishization of the need for an attack is rarely quite so succinctly put, of course.  Dick Cheney has been using longer, more guarded variations of it in his preservation-of-legacy tour.  But it was boiled down to its essentials on Glenn Beck the other night, when the guest, Michael Scheuer, said “the only chance we have as a country right now is for Osama Bin Laden to deploy and detonate a major weapon in the United States.”

Now, let’s be as fair as possible here, and offer up as much context as we can.  Scheuer is the former head of the Osama Bin Laden unit of the CIA, so he probably knows as much as is possible about what kind of security it would take to stop Bin Laden if he were determined to make a strike against us.  He’s also not quite expressing a desire to be attacked here, as some are theorizing he is, as much as saying that it will take a big event to wake people up.  Still, the phrasing he uses… “the only chance we have”… does, linguistically, give on pause; if it is our only hope, then what hope does America have?

It isn’t treason, as some have said it is.  But it is hateful.  It might also be wrong, but I’m willing to give Scheuer the benefit of the doubt and say that he may know more than I do and this might be a fair conclusion given the facts and his frame of reference.  But it is still hateful, and still morally wrong.  To make this perfectly clear, you can’t say America’s only hope is a major attack, and also stake a legitimate claim to love this country.

Its okay to hate America.  Lots of people around the world do and are no worse the wear for it.  We live in a country founded on the principles of freedom of speech, and there are people in America who hate our country, or hate what our country does, which is different.  That’s cool, because freedom of speech includes speech you don’t like.  But you can’t wrap yourself in the flag at the same time you are saying it needs to be torn asunder.  Like it or not, whether he “wishes” for an attack or not, stating that our only hope is for an attack is tantamount to saying we need to be attacked.  It is, after all, our ONLY HOPE.  And attacking America is the ultimate sign of not loving America.

And don’t think it is only Scheuer who is at fault here.  Glenn Beck is many unpleasant things, but the fact that he didn’t immediately dismiss this guy as a crackpot once that statement was made, or at least try to bring the conversation back to some semblance of sanity, but instead nodded and agreed, saying “Which is why Bin Laden won’t do it” lowers him further in my estimation, much lower, which is shocking to me, personally, because my opinion of Beck was already pretty low.

I am a big believer that most of the time, the world is all shades of gray.  The cases in which there is a right and a wrong that are so obvious that even the most oblivious person can see it are miniscule in amount.  But stating that an attack on America is the best thing for America is “right” to only two kinds of people:  kooks who think that 9/11 was perpetrated by Americans to cause us to go to war, and people who hate America.  Scheuer and Beck probably aren’t in the 9/11 kook category, so what conclusion am I left to draw here?

JC Media, Terrorism Media, security, Terrorism

Governments are large, powerful organizations that, if left unfettered, can cause serious problems for those that are governed.  This is why our founding fathers did their best to create a system of government that had plenty of checks and balances, to prevent power from corrupting, and to prevent any one faction from pushing forward their own agenda without considering the needs of others.

Our government is well designed in this regard, even if it slows things down.  3 branches, and one of those branches is actually split in two parts.  2 of those branches are elected, so the people can decide if those in it are corrupt and can replace them, while the last branch is appointed for life, but has little power to effect itself, so those lifetime appointments are more about reducing the possibility of being swayed by those outside then about preventing corruption from within.

At this point, you’re probably all wondering if this is going to be about the Democrats controlling the White House and both Houses of Congress.  But it isn’t.  The checks and balances inherent in the government are great, I wouldn’t want to live without them.  But they aren’t the only way to try and keep Government honest.  There is also the Press.

In theory, the Press is supposed to ask the Government hard questions about why they do things, investigate and report on things the Government is trying to keep secret, basically, be nosy on our behalf, and alert us when we need to get off our duffs and do something.

The Press has been weakened over the years by all sorts of factors.  The rise of the internet has made many news organizations transform themselves, not always for the better, as they lose their advertisers and they lose their audience’s attention.  Entertainment and news have become intertwined.  Reporters have become friendly with those reported upon, in hopes of gaining “better access” they can also be more easily manipulated.  Sometimes, politicians just implant completely fake reporters in to the equation to ask softball questions or even frame questions in lies.  Bloggers can and do sometimes just make things up wholesale, pundits and politicians use talking points rather than actual conversation.  All in all, bunches of different things chipping away at a strong press asking strong, difficult questions of the Government.

It was so bad, in fact, that it seemed like the responsibility for questioning our Government had moved out of the news media all together.  Bloggers would bring things up, but it can be hard to tell the legitimate news blogs from people blathering on, and the signal to noise made it impossible to know what to act on.  Comedy shows would call things in to question, but it is hard to take things seriously when your show is advertised as humor, not news.

I think the news media wants its job back.  By and large, many of them are still not being as responsible as I think they should be, but we’re seeing signs.  Last night’s Obama press conference had a series of mostly serious questions about serious topics, and surprisingly little “how’s Bo the dog doing?”  On the flip side, sometimes they seem to have forgotten that they can do these things with respect.  I applaud Rick Sanchez for calling out nonsense statements on behalf of Jim Demint, but he probably could have done it more respectfully than “What the hell does that mean?”.  Even “With all due respect, what does that mean, sir?” would convey the same meaning  (and trust me, you can load “with all due respect” with sarcasm) while at the same time being a bit more respectful.  I don’t agree with anything Demint says, and his statement was inane, but he’s still a Senator, and even if you don’t respect that, he’s still a fellow human being.

That said, good for Sanchez for not letting him prattle on about nonsense.

JC Media, National Politics, Society checks and balances, language, Media