The Mock President

What with numerous prominent Democrats attacking Trump from the right on Iran, I shouldn't have been surprised by NPR's commentary this morning.  The perky A Martinez had a nice chat with White House correspondent Franco Ordoñez, and then NPR's Token Hoosier Steve Inskeep spoke to a seeming AI chatbot who supposedly was an assistant secretary of state during the Biden administration.

GAVITO: I think on one hand, it indicates that progress is actually being made, and I tend to think that that is true here. The only way to end this conflict is through a diplomatic resolution, and those take time. I think it's important to remember that the JCPOA - the agreement over Iran's nuclear deal - took over two years to negotiate. I think at the same time, though, this may continue to suggest that there is within the Trump administration a fundamental misunderstanding of the Iranian regime and its adherence - continued adherence - to its ideological red lines because it doesn't believe it's lost this war and it doesn't think it has to compromise...

I think he's inching towards progress. I think it's important to note that. But those last 5% of the negotiations are always the hardest. And I think that that's the moment that we're in right now...

Long term, there is certainly something in it. The Abraham Accords were a very positive development. That being said, I think that this is somewhat of an own goal. Saudi Arabia has been crystal clear that absent a pathway to statehood for the Palestinians, it will not normalize. And so President Trump has essentially laid something on the table that has eroded his chance of success.

What really startled me, howver, was this incoherent question from Inskeep:

What does it do to the United States when Iranians are able to mock our president and accuse him of manipulating the stock market, which does, in fact, move up and down with everything he says?

Why shouldn't Iranians mock our president?  For those who care about ranking, Trump is probably the most mockable US president to date, and we've had some doozies. He freely mocks other heads of state, so why shouldn't he be fair game as well?  It's perhaps somewhat painful that Iranians were able to mock him so cleverly and effectively.  That surprised a lot of people, including me, and nobody can fairly say Trump doesn't have it coming.

I suppose it's some kind of progress that NPR can speak openly about Trump's "whiplash diplomacy," but in both of these segments it would easy to forget that Trump (and therefore the US) is, along with Israel, the aggressor in this war. They're very concerned that Iran should submit to Trump and Netanyahu, should maintain a ceasefire, and should compromise (read: surrender) with its attackers. The question for NPR, as for the rest of the corporate media, is whether Iran can be trusted to keep its commitments, while pretending that the US and Israel can be trusted to keep theirs. This isn't a new stance, of course, but it seems that they're sticking to it as it becomes increasingly obvious that it's untenable.

Swing Battuh Battuh Battuh, Swing

 

This sort of slop isn't the product of partisan thinking. It's a product of not being able to think at all.  When news outlets assign sports reporters who see everything through the lens of elite corporate sports to cover serious news, this is what you get.

I'd already heard NPR's Scott Simon and Franco Ordoñez do a more restrained version of the same thing on Weekend Edition today:

ORDOÑEZ: ... And again, as you noted, it comes as American and Iranian teams are meeting in Pakistan for peace talks led by the vice president, Vance. You know, they kicked off this morning between the U.S., Iran and Pakistan, which of course is serving as host and intermediary for the talks.

SIMON: To state the obvious, I suppose, this seems like a huge test for Vice President Vance.

ORDOÑEZ: Yeah, very much so. I mean, perhaps the most significant of his political career. I mean, it'll be a defining factor as he looks ahead to a, you know, possible run for the White House himself. 

But there is no joy in Mudville, mighty JD has struck out.  Does this mean he'll be sent back to the minors, or will he just be benched for awhile?

 

Down the Memory Hole

Ah, NPR's Scott Simon.  What a guy.

On Saturday morning, Simon interviewed Cardinal Blase Cupich to find out why three American cardinals, Cupich among them, had criticized Donald Trump's foreign policy in Venezuela, Greenland, and elsewhere.  

The interview was of little interest, but at one point Cupich sneezed, and Simon said "Gesundheit!" He then chortled at the crazy idea of him, a layman and a non-Catholic, saying "God bless you" to a Prince of the Catholic Church. Cupich accepted it graciously.

The trouble is, Gesundheit is German for "health," not "God bless you." I know, I know, it's the thought that counts, but NPR is supposed to be high-quality, fact-based journalism.  Not that Simon's smarmy combination of coziness and obsequiousness is either one.  But it jolted me awake, and I figured I had an easy blog post in hand, so I waited for the transcript to be posted.

A few hours later, I read the transcript, and the exchange wasn't there.  I listened to the sound file; it too had been edited.  I don't know why.  If Simon was embarrassed by his tiny error -- no, he seems incapable of embarrassment. This isn't a big thing, but it's emblematic of NPR.

Elsewhere in the interview, Simon asked:

What about the argument, for example, that 8 million Venezuelans have voted with their feet and left their own country. It's a quarter of the population. Hasn't removing Nicolás Maduro to stand trial for drug trafficking in the U.S. opened the door to change?

It's true that extensive emigration from Venezuela has taken place, but it predates Maduro's regime.  First, when Hugo Chavez became president, wealthy Venezuelans moved to Miami, which has long been a haven for right-wing Latin Americans. Then as the US moved to strangle the Venezuelan economy with sanctions and other forms of economic warfare, plus support for multiple military coups,.poorer Venezuelans joined the exodus.  Most stayed in the region; certainly the US didn't intend for them to come here. How much of this flight was due to political opposition to either Chavez or Maduro and how much was driven by economic need probably can't be distinguished.  But I don't think, in years of waking up to NPR's morning news programs, I've ever heard more than token acknowledgment of destructive US policy, and never of its role in driving emigration. Nor did Cupich say anything about it, for what that's worth.

In other faith-based news, CNN reported on Saturday that our new American Pope had issued a warning that

“As we scroll through our information feeds, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand whether we are interacting with other human beings, bots, or virtual influencers,” Pope Leo wrote on Saturday.

“Because chatbots that are made overly ‘affectionate,’ in addition to always present and available, can become hidden architects of our emotional states, and in this way invade and occupy people’s intimate spheres,” he added.

So true! That's the clergy's role.

(I'm also worried about many people's turning to AI constructs for emotional support, but there are good as well as bad reasons why they do it. Clergy in all sects have not distinguished themselves by their respect for boundaries with vulnerable believers, and their superiors (and even parents) have protected the abusive ones. I'm still concerned by people who turn to AI for interaction that is designed never to cross them, just as I'm concerned by people who turn to pets for it. The trouble isn't just that it's difficult to understand whether one is interacting with other human beings or with computer software, it's that many people prefer the software to actual human beings.  That chatbots can become abusive is worrisome too.  But this is too serious for what I meant to be a lighthearted post.)

Raised by Americans

Ah, Scott Simon, he's such a model of how NPR helps me wake up each day.

This morning he interviewed the author of an epic new biography of the early Hollywood moguls Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg.  Little details jumped out at me. First I thought he referred to the hero of Ben-Hur, a recurring Hollywood blockbuster, as "Ben."  But when I checked the transcript I found he'd said "Ben-Hur" after all, though his voice dropped almost to inaudibility on the "Hur."  

Then he referred to Tarzan of the Apes as a "British novel," though its author, Edgar Rice Burroughs, was an all-American writer.  A little later he said that Irving Thalberg died young, "... At the age of 67."  Well, he was only thirty years off.

Overall, Simon was at his smug, smarmy worst this morning, chuckling over private jokes that I doubt would be funny even to his inner circle and which he carefully explained for those unfortunate enough to be outside it: "Tarzan the ape man, played by Johnny Weissmuller, who will forever be the best-known graduate of Senn High School in Chicago ... I say that as a Senn grad myself."  He's mastered the art of sounding insincere even when he may really be sincere, as in his references to young Judy Garland being molested by Louis B. Mayer.

But like the rest of the NPR personalities, he drives me out of bed in the morning, if only to turn off the radio.

If Corporations Are People, What About Black Holes?

NPR strikes again.

I've noticed before how their news programs use astronomy as an excuse for flights of erotic fancy.  Last Thursday, though, they took a further step into feel-good, Culture-of-Therapy inanity, giving three minutes of their valuable airtime to an astrophysicist named Regina G. Barber.  Google News kindly sent it my way, showing that the Internet is malicious (if that wasn't already obvious).  "Black holes can teach us how to live our best lives," read the headline, and it was entirely accurate. 

One of my favorite celestial objects in the universe is the black hole.

Granted, I'm an astrophysicist. But I know I'm not alone. People love black holes. They seem to hold a near-mythic status in movies and pop culture.

People, movies, and popular culture love serial killers and zombies too.

What lessons do black holes have to teach us, according to Barber?  Here's the first one.

Lesson One: Push the limits, even if others doubt you

From there she tells how black holes were theorized and their existence eventually confirmed.  Apparently they were sitting out there, light-years away, patiently waiting to be found, pushing the limits against old meanie Albert Einstein's doubt about them.  But his obstructionism "didn't work," and they emerged to take their place in the sun.

And so on.  If you want to know the other two lessons, click through.  Barber concludes:

So, next time you're feeling unsure about your place in the world, remember: "Just because you are not seen, it doesn't mean that you are not there or that you are not, you know, playing a very, very important role," says [fellow astrophysicist Priyamvada] Natarajan.

Black holes have feelings too, just like you.  They too are Somebody.

This is of course all bullshit.  Planets don't dance with each other or kiss each other, and black holes were not waiting for astronomers on Earth to prove their existence.  I'm working on a blog post about meaning and purpose in scientific accounts of the universe, and despite what some philosophers and scientists will tell you, there was never any danger that personification of Nature was going to go away.  I don't know what Barber thought she was doing here; I suspect it's another attempt to make Science and Scientists look like nice guys instead of mean old grinches who want to take away all your illusions.  Luckily for us, black holes are too far away for people to try to pet them.  Barber and Natarajan would be first in line.

The Democratic Establishment Also Believes, and Trembles

 

This is pretty good, but I think it's misleading to take all the "Red Wave" predictions from Fox. I don't watch Fox. I do listen to NPR every morning, and they were just as sure as Fox News that the GOP would win big last November; also as disappointed when it didn't pan out. And I can't help wondering what Chris Hayes was saying before the fact. Don't misunderstand me, I think the lefty-Democratic resurgence is great news and I hope it continues. But corporate news coverage is mostly terrible, and Hayes himself as a booster of "meritocracy" is opposed to democracy.

This morning, for example, NPR's Morning Edition aired a brief interview on the UAW strike with Bernie Sanders, which they sought to balance with comments from a guy from the Brookings Institution. Does NPR "balance" its interviews with right-wing politicians and pundits by talking to people from the left? They do not.  If they can, they'll talk to commentators who are further to the right.

A Celestial Orgy?

I'll give NPR this much: last week for the twentieth anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq, they actually talked to some Iraqis.  The results, no doubt carefully managed, were mild-mannered to the point of absurdity, but at least some of our victims were allowed to talk about their trauma on a major news program.  I noticed that Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep slipped in a segment on Ukraine and called it "this war in Iraq."  Someone's conscience tripping him up?

But that was then, and this is now.  Morning Edition is back to its usual antics this week.  And in keeping with tradition, they're covering another astronomical non-event, a five-planet alignment involving "Jupiter, Mercury, Venus, Uranus, and Mars [that] will dazzle us earthlings this week."  Really?  Uranus is barely visible to the naked human eye at best, as the story admits toward the end.

Still, they've toned it down a little compared to the recent Venus-Jupiter conjunction, the "little nighttime kiss," the "celestial dance" that had astronomers and science journalists drooling.  This time it's a "planetary parade."  Not a planetary daisy chain?  Not an orgy?  These guys aren't trying hard enough.  The story quotes an astrophysicist, one Jackie Faherty, who gushes:

I want people to want to go outside and look up. I want people to be excited about looking up at the stars and planets. Right now what's happening is something that you might not realize does happen quite a bit, which is the planets are up a lot. This is not a particularly rare event, but it is an event that you should celebrate and you should want to go outside and look at.

Not much to excite the rabble there.  You've gotta sex it up some more, y'know?  An astronomical menage a cinq, maybe.  Surely the professionals of NPR can do better.  It's Pledge Week, so earn your money!

Celestial Soft Porn

NPR evidently ran this story last night on "All Things Considered," which I almost never listen to; but it tracked me down anyway on my tablet.  A planetary conjunction involving Venus and Jupiter is happening, and in the great tradition of cheesy, cringey science journalism, NPR packaged it thusly:

"They've been coming in closer and closer for a little nighttime kiss," says Jackie Faherty, who's an astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History.

Of course in space the planets aren't really going to smooch. "They are actually 400 million miles apart," Faherty says. That's more than four times the distance than we are from the sun.

And since the Earth's orbit is actually between those of Jupiter and Venus, we are in the position of Lucky Pierre, is that cool or what?  The writer, Michaeleen Doucleff, didn't have to come up with the "kiss" metaphor on her own: an actual astronomer provided it.  Doucleff got creative herself, noting that tonight, Thursday, "The two planets will still seem quite close, continuing their celestial dance. But soon, they'll go back to arms length."  Awww, can't this marriage be saved?  It seems tragic that they're going to break up.  Relationships just don't get the same commitment nowadays that they used to.  Think of the children!  Isn't it bad enough that the moon is going to leave the Earth in six hundred million years?

This sort of hyperbole is evidently irresistible, not only to science journalists ("celestial date") but to scientists themselves.  Another recent conjunction was described by an astronomer as "like teenagers at a high school dance: They’re getting closer and closer together.  It’s been a year of watching this, of them getting closer, and now they’re going to have a close slow dance."  I suppose it's better than the religious language that physicists keep falling into (the "God Particle," for instance), but for me it's a turnoff, and I always wonder if the disappointment other laymen feel when the stars fail to perform as promised prevents any interest -- let alone enthusiasm -- for science and nature that they might otherwise have acquired.

P.S. This story from USA Today washed up on the Internet after I thought I'd finished this post, and it's much better than the stories I linked before.  It manages to cover the Jupiter-Venus conjunction by providing factual information without tarting it up.  Ironic, isn't it, given USA Today's reputation as a lowbrow rag, while the more prestigious NPR and its astronomer sources evidently felt that the rubes wouldn't be interested if the event weren't cast as a romance?  It's even more ironic, since NPR's audience probably see themselves as devout believers in Science, Evidence, and Reason. 

Sauce for the Goose

NPR, contrary to its custom, put a smile on my face this morning with this story.  The Southern Baptist Convention has expelled five Baptist churches for having female pastors, and Morning Edition's Leila Fadel spoke to Linda Barnes Popham, one of the deposed pastors.  Barnes Popham was indignant:

Why us? We've been - we consider ourselves very Southern Baptist. We would be more Southern Baptist than many of the other churches - like I said, conservative, evangelistic, mission-minded. Now, of course, there are many other emotions that the congregants share with each other. Yeah, we are not happy about their decision.

I would love to ask Barnes Popham just how "conservative," how "very Southern Baptist" she and her congregation really are.  The Southern Baptist Convention was founded in 1845 in a break with other US Baptists in support of slavery, a little detail this story not-so-strangely neglects to mention, and continued to uphold white supremacy until the 1990s.  Does she still support slavery, the Lost Cause, and Jim Crow?  If not, how can she call herself a conservative Southern Baptist?  Or is she really just another stealth woke [sarcasm alert] liberal working against the SBC from within?

Fadel was very sympathetic, though.

BARNES POPHAM: That Southern Baptists no longer adhere to the priesthood of the believers and no longer believe in the autonomy of the local church and that those in power in SBC life do not value churches who are truly doing the work of the gospel.

FADEL: Wow. Pastor Linda Barnes Popham of the Fern Creek Baptist Church, thank you so much for your time.

I have no sympathy whatsoever for these pastors, and it's a pleasure to see them hoist on their own petard.  I'm reminded of the late antigay crusader Anita Bryant (Cthulhu, I'm old) who wanted to become vice-president of the SBC in 1978. She was rejected, of course, on Biblical grounds, and she promptly griped about "Bible-beating literalists" who wouldn't let her do what she wanted to do.  This contemporary New York Times article doesn't mention the gender issue, but says that Bryant's lack of experience in church administration was also a factor.  But details, details: Who needs experience? The Holy Spirit would surely have guided her at the helm of the world's largest Baptist denomination. Conservatism for thee but not for me!

We Will End No War Before Its Time (And It's Never Time)

The rapid collapse of the US client government in Afghanistan is getting heavy coverage in the corporate media, and the party line is predictable: Oh my god, they're taking over, how can this be happening, it must be Afghan corruption, what about our helpers, what about the girls and women, it's going to be terrible, whose fault is it, and so on.  

These aren't bad questions in themselves.  I am worried about the safety of the Afghans who worked for the US, and I am worried about what girls and women will face under Taliban rule. As we've seen, the Biden administration dawdled about getting our helpers out, ignoring well-known precedents, and it's probably too late now.  But the Beltway perspective, based in US propaganda about the war with its historical amnesia and the inviolable assumption that the US can do no wrong, dominates most of the reporting and commentary on the Taliban's victory.  The best I can say is that it makes me turn off Morning Edition sooner than I would otherwise.

Except for one segment that aired this morning.  Host A. Martinez interviewed Sarah Chayes, a former NPR reporter who spent years in Kandahar and speaks Pashto.  She filled in the historical background of the original Taliban takeover and went off in a direction that I don't think NPR expected.

And so my question is, what democracy did we bring to Afghanistan, you know? Meanwhile, we're building a banking system during the very same years that we were incubating, you know, the crash of 2008. By 2010, the Afghan banking system crashed because it was a Ponzi scheme. And so I think the painful thing I have to ask myself is American democracy - is that what we brought or is cronyism, you know, systemic corruption, you know, basically a governmental system where billionaires get to write the rules - is that, in fact, American democracy as we are now experiencing it?

"Wow," says Martinez, and that's the end of the segment.  There may have been more, these bits are usually not broadcast live, they're edited, but I'm surprised NPR aired this interview at all.  At that, I wish they'd let Chayes talk a lot longer, but you know: concision.

And by the way: as with so many hot issues, it appears that a solid majority of Americans, including Republicans, support US withdrawal from Afghanistan.  Which, of course, is why the corporate media are trying to scare them.

The End Times May Be Upon Us

Ah, NPR, you even make Pete Buttigieg look good.  Today Morning Edition had him talking about the end of Biden's negotiations on an infrastructure bill with Republican Senator Shelley Moore Capito.  The only real information that emerged is that other Republicans are stepping up to negotiate in her stead; from the headlines I see, you'd think it was totally over.  But host Rachel Martin and Buttigieg kept referring to the Republicans as "bipartisan," as if there were more than one party in the GOP.  You could make a case, I suppose, that the party is divided between moderate Republicans and the Trump fanatics, but that would be mere propaganda at best; and anyway, it is still one party.  So far.

Buttigieg impressed me mildly today, though.  Not enough that I'd ever vote for him, but as a party apparatchik he's improved.  He stayed on message with none of his usual tone-deaf platitudes, and -- something I can't remember having heard anyone do before -- every time Martin tried to interrupt, he bulldozed smoothly over her before she could get a full word out.  The transcript isn't up yet, but I doubt it will show her inchoate starts and stops, so I commend the audio for your pleasure.

Martin finally managed to get out the question she seemed to think most important: Will Congressional Democrats resort to reconciliation to get the bill through the Senate?  Buttigieg seemed to think it was important too, because he refused to simply say Yes, though that was the upshot of his reply: It's got to be done.  He might have borne down harder on the fact that Biden's programs are popular, and supported by a majority of voters in both parties.  I've seen a number of notices like this one, reminding us that numerous important bills passed without bipartisan support; it's sad, perhaps, but partisan obstruction is never an excuse.

Lesser-Evilism in Peru

NPR continues to wake me up in the mornings with predictably skewed "news" coverage.  Today Morning Edition's summaries twice claimed that in Peru's upcoming presidential election, voters must choose between "two unpopular candidates."  That was all: they didn't even name the offenders.  I suppose they are saving real coverage for the coup that will surely ensue if the left-wing guy wins.  It's odd, though, because NPR, like US mainstream news in general, prefers to report on what hasn't happened yet; why aren't Steve Inskeep and Noel King asking some corporate think-tanker "what we can expect" in Peru if the Commie is elected?

Left-wing guy?  C'mon, it was obvious: left-wing candidates and (worse) winners have been troubling the sleep of US and Latin American elites for some time now.  And when I looked it up, sure enough, the current front-runners in Peru are Keiko Fujimori, the far-right-wing daughter of a famously corrupt former President -- think of her as the Ivanka Trump of Peru -- and Pedro Castillo, a former schoolteacher who "attained prominence as a leading figure in the 2017 teacher strike in Peru" according to Wikipedia.

Fujimori and Castillo emerged as the front-runners in a field of seven, which included a member of Opus Dei who scourges "himself daily to repress sexual desire" and "a former goalkeeper for the Alianza Lima football club".  Castillo came in first on April 11, but without a majority, hence the runoff.

NPR's characterization of Fujimori and Castillo as "unpopular" is dubious at best.  It may accurately describe Fujimori, with her baggage as the scion of a vicious right-winger, but Castillo came more or less out of nowhere, from only about 2% in the polls in March to the front-runner, ahead of candidates with a lot more name recognition.  (That Fujimori only made it to the second round with 13% of the vote confirms that she, at least, really is unpopular.)  According to Jacobin's article, he didn't even have a Twitter account, and "So unlikely was Castillo’s first round triumph that CNN failed to locate a photo of the candidate in time to announce his victory."

Unfortunately, like many on the Latin American left, Castillo embraces a "pronounced social conservatism".

Castillo opposes the legalization of abortion, same-sex marriage, and policies promoting gender equality — a stance unremarkable on its face given those same positions, in one form or another, are common to many of the region’s progressive leaders.

But Peru is also, along with Brazil, one of the Latin American countries where religious fundamentalism has made the biggest inroads into national politics. Rafael López Aliaga of the Popular Renewal party almost made it into the second round by branding himself the “Peruvian Bolsonaro,” and Peru is home base for the “Con mi hijo no te metas” campaign, a continent-wide propaganda movement that incites hatred against women and the LGBT community.

This is not good.  (Remember, though, that US liberals and progressives rallied deliriously around an antigay Democrat in 2008.)  Read the whole Jacobin article for details and nuance; it's much better than the usual suspects.  Even if you're not sympathetic to the left, left-wing media tend to do a better job of covering the news than the respectable corporate media.

"Two unpopular candidates" is what I'd expect from NPR.  Aside from the probably unconscious echo of the 2016 presidential race in the US, what it means is that Castillo is unpopular among those who really matter: wealthy Peruvians and US political and media elites.  I'm not sure why they wouldn't like Fujimori, though.

Just the Fact Check, Man

Joe Biden just signed the American Rescue Plan, his $1.9 trillion COVID bill, into law today.  I meant to write about this yesterday, but my computer was recalcitrant; but I figure we're in for more of the same pattern that inspired this post, so here I go.

Morning Edition ran a segment about the ARP yesterday, featuring a Republican Representative who denounced the bill in familiar terms.  Host Scott Detrow began by asking Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri:

Appreciate you being here. Let's start with this - the president's overall COVID response is pretty popular so far. This bill is popular according to polls. Why do you think that is?

SMITH: It's because the bill has changed so many times throughout the process that once the American people see everything that's in it, the popularity will not be there. It - as what I've said all along, it's the wrong plan at the wrong time. If this bill was about direct payments to people and putting shots in the arms and vaccines, you would have strong bipartisan support across this Congress, across this country. But less than 9% of the entire spending in this bill actually goes to crushing the virus and helping distribute vaccines and putting shots in arms.

DETROW: And I want to get to some of the details that you would rather see in the bill in a moment...

It doesn't seem that they did get into such details.  Smith had a lot of complaints, which were familiar from other right-wing Congressional Republicans, but they were rather insubstantial.  He kept digressing to matters like California's $10 billion deficit, bipartisanship and the danger of a Green New Deal.  Detrow was a crummy interviewer, like most of NPR's team, and I noticed that he let Smith's statements go unchallenged.  It took NPR, like most corporate media, years to get to the point where they dared to point out Trump's lies and the false conspiracy theories about a stolen election, but having done that, they seem to have exhausted themselves.  I had the impression that Smith was spraying out a smoke screen of GOP talking points.  I kept waiting for Detrow to fact-check him, but no dice.  And fact-checking is part of a reporter's job.  Every sentence Smith uttered should have been scrutinized; but of course, it wasn't

I poked around on social media and the web, but couldn't find anything helpful.  My usual liberal and progressive and leftish sources were focused on the progress the bill was making through Congress: it passed the House on Wednesday and the White House announced that Biden would sign on it Friday.  As it turned out, he did it today, ahead of schedule, which is fine.  But I couldn't find any fact-checks of Republican objections to the bill.  Maybe I missed something, I don't know.  I presume, of course, that Republicans lie about such things, but then I also presume that Democrats lie.

This morning I saw on Twitter that Ro Khanna had scoffed at Republican claims about the ARP, but again, without details, and I wanted details.  The comments on his remarks were almost all cheerleading, of course.  Then someone posted a pie graph of the distribution of money under the bill.   The graphic was sourced to the Congressional Budget Office, but without a link. So, to the search engines.  I found a couple of articles that included the graph, but without a link to the CB for more information.  Here's an example from Common Dreams:

So why can't I find a version of this graph on the mainstream news sites?  Why aren't they analyzing the bill and addressing the Republicans' claims about it?  Scott Detrow, for instance, could hardly have been unprepared for Smith's remarks.  All I've heard on NPR the past few weeks has been horse-race stuff: the filibuster, reconciliation, will Biden reach out to the GOP?  Will John and Mary find true love? Can this marriage be saved? As usual, they waste a lot of time asking what might happen, what we can expect, what the future might bring. This is what the responsible, respectable mainstream news media have to offer.

The Cold Hard Facts of Life

It's pledge season on NPR, and the area station I wake up to each morning is having a rough time.  Usually their "challenges," where local businesses and other institutions offer to make a large donation if the station gets a certain amount in pledges or a given number of calls in an hour, are more or less successful.  But so far they're not making it.  I made a donation myself for one of these when I hoped my pledge would get them over the top, with only four more calls needed; but they didn't make that one, and for the past few mornings I haven't heard them getting even that close.  That's worrisome, because regardless of my reservations about NPR this station does a good job with local news and weather reports.  The announcers have voices outside the NPR standard, somewhat quirky, and I like that.  I hope they pull through.

I cringed, though, when they played a few audio messages from people who'd called in their pledge.  A recurring theme was praise for NPR's "fact-based" news coverage.  As I indicated, I'd apply that label to the affiliate's local coverage, but not to Morning Edition or All Things Considered, let alone The 1A.  Like its television sibling PBS, NPR subordinates fact to its self-consciously middle-of-the-road but all-American corporate agenda. Morning Edition, as I've often complained, is obnoxious in that regard: its hosts are not reporters but pundits, often obnoxiously perky or outright smarmy.  They can sometimes stand up to right-wing Republicans, but give them someone a wee bit left-of-center, or just rude to their corporate masters, and they get mean. Before I moved from Bloomington I hadn't listened to these programs for decades, and now I'm starting to hate them.  I loathe the quickies, where the pundit tells an upbeat little item over a perky, rhythmic little tune that ends with a twinkle. And, like most commercial news media, they devote far too much airtime to reading tea leaves, asking "what we can expect": from the President's upcoming speech, from Congress, from the stock market, from the economy, from the pandemic.  I estimate that at least a third of their nominal news airtime is devoted to this kind of speculation.  But hey, it wakes me up each day.

So where do these listener-members get their claim that NPR is "fact-based"?  I suspect they don't really know what it means, and just are just echoing NPR's self-estimation.  Just as the same sort of people gushed over the "competence" of Joe Biden's appointees without knowing anything at all about most of them, NPR's classiness and superiority to Those Other Networks is an article of faith.  It doesn't need to be defended, it just is.

Similarly, one of the pledge crew exalted one of today's Weekend Edition stories, about a young Kentucky punk rocker who'd turned to playing banjo during the pandemic, and tracked down the 90-something craftsman who'd made his instrument.  The story was pleasant, mildly interesting, if shallow, but the announcer held it up as the sort of thing you'd never hear from mainstream news.  On the contrary, similar stories from CBS or NBC are regularly recommended to me by Youtube. It's called Human Interest, and it's utterly standard.

Really Gives You Something to Think About

NPR's Weekend Edition did an item today on Fox News's cancellation of Lou Dobbs, which may or may not have something do with the $2.7 billion lawsuit SmartMatic filed against Fox. By way of illustration, the segment included a recording of Dobbs and Rudy Giuliani declaring that SmartMatic was founded by some Venezuelans seeking to undermine American democracy by tampering with our elections.

NPR's reporter declared that SmartMatic was not founded by Venezuelans, and that the company has nothing to do with Maduro or the late Venezuelan "dictator" Hugo Chavez.  I thought that the reporter hesitated very slightly before he bore down on the word "dictator," as though he might have been about to say "President" but remembered just in time that this is America.

Or maybe not, it might have been my imagination.  But Hugo Chavez was legally and democratically elected, and managed to stay in office until his premature death of cancer despite a US-supported military coup in 2002 and ongoing US monetary and other support for the Venezuelan opposition. The criteria for calling him a dictator are unclear, given the US' enthusiastic support for dictators elsewhere in the world, so I'll just assume that the reporter was conforming to American propaganda guidelines, as NPR and other corporate media normally do.

It's doubly ironic, because Chavez did not institute a reign of terror after the 2002 coup, which compares favorably with many US liberals' drive to pass new, draconian laws in the wake of our own January 6 insurrection. Democrats are now trying to claim that Russia and China were behind the insurrection.  Even now, the unelected US-designated leader of Venezuela, Juan Guaido, is still at large despite his calls for a US invasion to install him (Trump thought it would be "cool", Lindsey Graham said it was "too early"), for an uprising against the democratically elected President Maduro, and his utter lack of popular support.  That's what NPR considers "democracy" to be.

Be Specific, Sir, If You Please...?

I'm not going to go into today's attempted coup in Washington (but it wasn't only there) because events have been succeeding each other too rapidly and I prefer to wait until things are sorted out.  It may be worth noticing, however, that at least one Democratic Congressman is ready to forgive and forget and move on:

I just asked Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) about this:

“The idea of taking the time to try to impeach him, the idea of trying to expel members of the House of Senate for their efforts to protect the President and continue this fiction ... I just think we need to turn the page."

So, it emerges, is Nancy Pelosi; the list is bound to grow longer.  But for now, I'm going to finish the post I began this morning.  It was already fairly certain by then that Raphael Warnock had won the Georgia senatorial runoff against Kelly Loeffler, though the race between Jon Ossoff and David Perdue was still too close to call.  So NPR's Noel King got Warnock on the line and asked him some typical NPR questions, trying to get him to confess that he is a member of the Communist International and wants to nationalize white women.

KING: President Trump asked Georgia's secretary of state to change the results of the presidential election. Many Republicans, including your opponent, didn't criticize him for doing that. Do you think that part of the Republican Party has abandoned democracy?

WARNOCK: Listen. The four most powerful words in a democracy are the people have spoken. The people of Georgia spoke very clearly on November 3 when they elected Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, gave them our 16 electoral votes. We counted those votes three times. It is clear when you look at the swing states all across our country, Joe Biden is president-elect. And unfortunately, there are enablers of this nonsense in the United States Senate. And it's why the people who I'm running into all across Georgia are frustrated with politics. And quite frankly, it's why I got in - because we can't outsource our democracy to politicians. The people have to rise up, reclaim their own voice in their own democracy. And that's what happened last night right here in the state of Georgia.

I've never heard Warnock speaking before, and I recommend listening to the clip.  This interview was early in the morning after Election Night, and I imagine he was worn out from the intense campaign, which I hope explains his dull delivery and robotic soundbyte content.  (Since I wrote this I've seen a clip of Warnock delivering a sermon full of fire and prophetic fury, so I was probably right about his condition while talking to King.)  But maybe I expected too much after all the kvelling I saw about his Black Church eloquence.  King was obnoxious as she usually is with any interviewee who is or might be left of center: 

KING: What do you think Congress needs to do now to help Americans through the coronavirus pandemic and specific, sir, if you could, please?

WARNOCK: We ought to pass the $2,000 stimulus.

KING: OK.

WARNOCK: I mean, folks waited for months without getting any relief at all. And when we saw relief in the spring, too often, it centered large corporate businesses while small businesses were at the back of the line. It left workers out. And so people need immediate relief. And we've got to get this virus under control. We've got to get the vaccine safely and efficiently distributed so that we can safely reopen our economy, get our businesses roaring again, get our children back into school, but in a way that's safe and sustainable. These are big issues.

Warnock's responses weren't bad, exactly; again, I think he was exhausted.  What he said here, except for coming down firmly for a $2K stimulus payment, sounds like centrist boilerplate to me.

KING: Let me ask you lastly about the work. Where do you stand on the progressive or moderate scale? Let me put a direct question to you. Do you think the Senate should push for progressive climate legislation like the Green New Deal?

WARNOCK: I think that we need common-sense reform on a whole range of issues. There's no question that climate change is real. There's work we need to do on that front. And I'll be focused on getting that work done. I think too often, even in the places where there is agreement, at least among ordinary people, that we need movement, we get no movement. And that's quite frankly because someone other than the people own our democracy. And so one of the things that I'll be very focused on is the outsized influence of well-connected corporate interests in our politics. I think if the people can get their democracy back, we can get the reform that we need around issues of environmental justice, around health care and the whole range of concerns.

The "progressive or moderate scale" is hooey, of course - the question, as King phrased it, makes little sense.  In a way, Warnock tried to reframe it, but invoking "common-sense reform" isn't a good way to put it.  I'd have taken the stance that the Green New Deal, or government-run healthcare (which Warnock, like Ossoff, opposes), or a higher minimum wage, or higher taxes on the rich, let alone more and bigger stimulus payments, are favored by a solid majority of Americans.  That makes them moderate by definition, I would say, and I believe Warnock meant that by "common-sense."  Any politician (or radio personality) who opposes them is a marginal right-wing extremist -- definitely not a centrist.

NPR's anchors are almost always uncomfortable with, even hostile to, anyone outside that extreme-right Beltway consensus.  If you listen to the audio you can hear King trying to keep Warnock at a safe distance.  I know I'm not the only person who gets impatient with their clumsy questions, typical of the Washington press corps.  Maybe they're too busy, and don't have time to inform themselves properly?  I don't believe so, but even if that's the case, they need to demand more time, asserting the need to maintain professional standards.  The real trouble is that they see themselves as gatekeepers, the responsible objective moderates between the extremes of left and right. They aren't -- as I said, they're really far right -- but even if they were, fetishizing the middle is a guarantee of getting things wrong.

And Warnock?  I'll wait and see, but I'm not happy with having another religious nut in national office.  Remember how Barack Obama's deeply-held religious beliefs made him oppose same-sex marriage - though not letting torturers and war criminals escape legal penalties, or murdering teenagers with drones?  Even if Warnock turns out to agree with me on many or most issues, I don't care what he thinks his god wants, and it's irrelevant to the job he now has to do.  The best I can say is that a successful minister also has to be something of a politician, balancing different interests in his or her congregation.  I saw a lot of giggly excitement from liberals and leftists about how Warnock is a real Christian who follows Christ's teaching.  Nobody follows Christ's teaching, and Christ's teaching is not the law of this land.  Funny how liberals flipflop on whether America is a Christian nation as the winds change. 

Saving Facebook

NPR's Morning Edition had a segment this morning on the antitrust lawsuits against Facebook.  Host Noel King went after Connecticut Attorney General William Tong aggressively.  Her opening line was  "Facebook crushes the competition. That's one of those cliches we use to talk about big, successful companies."  In other words, it's not true, just a cliche, probably thrown around by envious losers who can't cut the mustard.

When Tong tried to explain how Facebook crushes competition and takes away users' freedom of choice, King interrupted.  (The transcript doesn't convey her snotty tone, so it's worth listening to the audio.)

Let me jump on you there. Facebook argues that there is competition. And I will tell you, the young people in my life - the teens, the tweens - they don't care about Facebook at all. They're all on TikTok. Is it possible that in five, 10 years, Facebook will be kind of irrelevant or at least not the behemoth it is now, and that this is just sort of panicking over something that - companies become dominant for a few years, and then they tend to fade? 

And so on.  Tong was stoical and answered King patiently.  But I noticed something unusual.  Ordinarily whenever NPR does a story about Facebook, the host begins by acknowledging that "Facebook is one of NPR's financial supporters."  This story, posted on Wednesday, includes the disclaimer as an editor's note.  But Noel King never mentioned it, nor was any note to that effect added to the transcript.

One of the other trials of my morning patience is Marketplace Morning Report, which also had a segment this morning on the Facebook antitrust actions.  Marketplace is an American Public Media product, so maybe Facebook isn't one of its underwriters and a disclaimer wasn't needed.  At any rate the program was clearly pro-Facebook, though not as stridently as Morning Edition was. Missing from the linked audio is an interview with an academic who predicted derisively that nothing was likely to come from these lawsuits and investigations, any more than the Microsoft antitrust case twenty years ago.  He neglected to note that what stopped that process, which began during the Clinton administration, was George W. Bush's accession to the presidency: he (or his lackeys, which amounts to the same thing) announced that the action would be dropped.

To belabor a dead horse, Morning Edition also had a brief segment on the December 21 Great Conjunction today.  They talked to a planetary geologist who gushed,

You cannot help but notice these incredibly bright stars. And every night, you can go outside, and you can see them getting closer and closer. And just a couple days before Christmas, they'll kiss. And then they'll wander apart again.

Noel King explained that the planetary geologist was "describing a phenomenon that's known as the Christmas star."  No, it's not, since this conjunction only happens every several hundred years.  Cohost David Greene continued:

The Christmas star, even though we're not talking about a star or two stars, it's actually two planets, Jupiter and Saturn, closely aligning in the sky. Astronomers call this a conjunction. And this year, its peak will come on December 21st. Jupiter and Saturn will appear to be right on top of each other.

 "Kiss"?  "Right on top of each other"?  Sounds hot, but it won't be, any more than it'll be a Christmas star.  Next up was an astronomer, who explained that "They are nowhere near each other. The separation between the two is something on the order of 400 million miles."  Just another Christmas Grinch, throwing the ice water of fact on people's lubricious fantasies.

Noel King concluded with another reference to "the Christmas star."  That can't be meant to suggest anything but the (probably mythical) star over Bethlehem at the time of Jesus' birth, which is not what viewers will see as Jupiter and Saturn align in the southwestern sky this month.  That's NPR for you: sober, just-the-facts, professional journalism.

What's in a Name?

I feel for writers and journalists who cover politics, because they have to attend to the corporate news media: Fox, CNN, the corporate broadcast networks, public broadcasting, and a range of print media.  Just listening to NPR for an hour or two each morning makes me climb the walls: how much worse would it be if it were my job to follow it and all the others?

Last Sunday, for example, NPR's Weekend Edition gave airtime to an instructor in government at Dartmouth College, to opine on Donald Trump's refusal to concede the election to Joe Biden.  Host Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked Brendan Nyhan "Why is he doing this? Is this a soft coup? And what I'm hearing you say is that this misses the larger picture of what's happening to democracy itself."

NYHAN: That's right. I think coup is the wrong way to think about this. We're not seeing an attempted military takeover. What we're seeing instead is a violation of the norms of democracy that we depend on to make the peaceful transfer of power possible. And as those norms get called into question, we start to see more of what political scientists call democratic erosion, where a system of government remains a democracy, but the norms and values that make democracy work start to be called into question.

Most of this is unexceptionable, a string of the buzzwords you'll hear on any network.  I do take serious exception to Nyhan's claim that "coup is he wrong way to think about this."  While most Americans probably do think that "coup" (short for "coup d'état") refers to a military takeover, it actually means any sudden and extralegal seizure of power in an institution.  Violence is optional, the icing on the cake.  An academic should know better, and clarify the issue rather than obscuring it.  Instead the one substantive assertion Nyhan made was false.  But this is NPR we're dealing with.

Later in the week, on Friday, Morning Edition brought in a heavy-hitter, an intelligence officer in the Trump regime until 2019.  Host Steve Inskeep asked Sue Gordon, "I'm thinking about the fact that you have briefed presidents. If this event were happening in a different country and you were briefing the president about it, what would you call it?"

Gordon worded her response with some care:

SUE GORDON: We would talk about it as basically - if it were a purported democracy, I think we would say the democracy's teetering on the edge. If I were briefing the president on this at this moment in time, and this White House were doing what this is doing and I happen to be in the Oval, I would say stop it.

"If it were a purported democracy"?  This is hard to take seriously.  Whether a country is a "purported democracy" has little to do with its political institutions and practices and a lot to do with how the US views it.  During the Trump years the US has backed and even participated in at least two coups against elected governments, in Venezuela and Bolivia.  Harking back to Brendan Nyhan, in Venezuela the military didn't back the coup, much to the indignation of US commentators, so by his standards it may not count.  In Bolivia the military carried out the coup with considerable violence, so Nyhan would presumably be satisfied.  Mainstream US and UK commentators and political authorities were reluctant to label either action a coup, partly for reasons I'll into presently, but for now the fact that two democratically elected governments were overthrown, with various degrees of violence, didn't concern the media or the US government: they denied the legitimacy of the elections instead.  (Does that sound familiar?)  Contrary to Sue Gordon, in such cases US intelligence would not say to "stop it."  Nor would NPR or other mainstream news media.

We all know that Trump is a very bad man, though.  President Obama was good, right?  Actually, no: he supported numerous oppressive dictatorships and backed the far right-wing Venezuelan opposition with millions of taxpayer dollars.  He hedged a bit when the Honduran military overthrew an elected President, fiddling with aid payments for a little while, but eventually gave in.  

Obama's initial response to the 2013 military overthrow of the elected president of Egypt was somewhat firmer.  Obama wasn't pleased, but many in his regime were.  President Morsi was unpopular in US government circles because he was a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, and his incompetent governance seems to have turned the populace against him.  There were street demonstrations demanding that Morsi step down, much like those that had led to the removal of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak in 2011.  Back then Obama had been

naturally inclined to side with young, Internet-savvy protesters against an 82-year-old dictator who ran a cruel police state. But Mubarak was also a longtime U.S. ally who opposed Islamic radicals, honored a peace treaty with Israel and gave the Pentagon vital access to the Suez Canal. Younger aides like Rhodes, Power and Antony Blinken, then Vice President Joe Biden’s national security adviser, urged Obama to get “on the right side of history” and give Mubarak a decisive push. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would later describe them, in her memoir, as being “swept up in the drama and idealism of the moment.” 

I wonder, though: if Morsi hadn't inspired such intense personal dislike in US rulers and their clients, couldn't they have cut him some slack, as they would for any struggling new leader?  Morsi "spent much of his energy struggling against resistance from an entrenched establishment — the soldiers, spies, police, judges and bureaucrats left in place from six decades of autocracy."  If he failed "to fulfill the promises of the Tahrir Square uprising" that removed Mubarak, shouldn't wiser heads have urged that Morsi be given more time?  Two years in office against six decades of dictatorship isn't that long.  I can't help thinking that our champions of democracy were relieved to have a "strongman" in charge again - the kind of person US elites and their cronies are accustomed to doing business with.

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, whose rulers feared elections and dreaded them even more if they were presented as Islamic, lobbied hard to convince Washington that Mr. Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood were a threat to American interests. And American officials later concluded that the United Arab Emirates were also providing covert financial support for protests against Mr. Morsi.

Wait a minute - Saudi Arabia is afraid of Islamism?  That does not compute: the Kingdom is a notorious Islamist regime.  And the UAE were undermining Morsi?  Who's at fault here, really?

When a murderous autocrat is a longtime ally to the US and a friend to Israel, his country becomes an honorary "purported democracy."  Democracy is all very well until the wrong people win an election, and then "drama and idealism" must be set aside.  Obama wasn't exactly pleased, we're told, when General Sisi massacred at least a thousand pro-Morsi demonstrators, but what can you do?

Supporting a military coup would hardly send a positive message about democracy. But declaring Sisi’s power grab a coup would, by law, cut off all U.S. military aid to Cairo. So be it, argued Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, who wrote in the Washington Post: “we may pay a short-term price by standing up for our democratic values, but it is in our long-term national interest to do so.” Obama wasn’t prepared to go that far. The administration publicly danced around the word “coup” for weeks until, at an August 6, 2013, briefing, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki memorably announced: “We have determined that we do not have to make a determination.” (“What is a coup?” Wael Haddara, a senior adviser to Morsi, asked the New York Times. “We’re going to get into some really Orwellian stuff here.”)

At first Obama dug in his heels, freezing military aid, cancelling joint military exercises, demanding "credible progress" toward a "democratically elected civilian government."  John Kerry replaced Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, and Kerry

declared a few weeks after the coup that Egypt’s generals were “restoring democracy” to the country and quickly worked to reverse the aid freeze. Kerry had an ally in Hagel, who had developed a relationship with Egypt’s top general. Both men believed they could moderate Sisi’s behavior. “Kerry thinks he can get guys to do things because they trust him, even if it’s not necessarily in their interest,” says one former State Department official. Hagel sent Sisi Ron Chernow’s 904-page biography of George Washington, urging him to read a chapter about Washington peacefully relinquishing the presidency.

(I love that last bit - it reminds me of Ronald Reagan sending a copy of the Christian Bible to Iranian leaders in 1986.)

As it turned out, Kerry was wrong: he couldn't get Sisi to "do things."  He announced after a 2014 meeting that Sisi  'gave me a very strong sense of his commitment' to human rights issues."  The very next day, Sisi cracked down violently on dissent, but it all turned out okay: he "was officially 'elected' Egypt’s president with a reported 96.1 percent of the vote."  So Egypt was officially a "purported democracy" again.  In 2015 Obama restored military aid to Sisi's regime, personally calling the General to pledge his fealty.  As Glenn Greenwald wrote at the time,

Obama’s move is as unsurprising as it is noxious, as American political elites — from Bill and Hillary Clinton to Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright — along with the Israeli Right have been heaping praise on Sisi the way they did for decades on Mubarak. (“I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family,” said Hillary Clinton in 2009. “So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States.”)

Two things to notice here.  One is that the wise adults running US foreign policy, who sneer at youthful idealism, have a vastly overrated estimation of their competence.  That's familiar from more than a century of American imperialism and support for repressive dictators, aka "the Free World."  There's something about swarthy men in uniform forcibly holding down the primitive brown-skinned masses, who just don't know what's good for them, that makes our leaders go all moist.

The other is that the word "coup" isn't just a word: using it has legal consequences.  If a coup overthrows a government you dislike, for whatever reasons, then you simply don't call it a coup, because then you'd have to take action against it.  And that wouldn't do.  Maybe the remedy is to stop pretending that the US cares about human rights; our historical practice down to the present proves otherwise.  The law clearly doesn't place any constraint on our government, let alone others.

It's pointless to fret about how the US media, intelligence agencies, and government officials would react to Trump's current efforts to overturn the 2020 election, because we know how they feel about coups.  If it were happening in a different country, there might be some division in their ranks -- some unrealistic idealists -- but the sensible, responsible, realistic ones would hail Trump for "restoring democracy," and Trump as the savior of freedom.  Hillary Clinton would remind us that she considers Mr. and Mrs. Trump to be friends of her family, as indeed they are.  John Kerry would send Trump a copy of Barack Obama's new thousand-page memoir.  Obama himself would order idealistic young people to stop complaining and learn to work within the system.  We wouldn't want to alienate our good allies by stirring up trouble.

By Any Memes Necessary

Yesterday NPR's Morning Edition did a segment on antifa.  Noel King interviewed Mark Bray, a historian at Rutgers and the author of a new book, Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook.  Bray seemed to have his head on straight, and was even able to resist King's repeated efforts to ignore what he said and turn the discussion in a direction she preferred. 

Bray pointed out right away that antifa is not a "singular organization.   It's a kind of politics or activity of radical opposition to the far-right that doesn't have any qualms about physically disrupting far-right demonstrations." King wasn't having it, though: she kept referring to antifa as a "group."  Bray corrected her, but she wasn't listening.

To Bray's report that "the antifa argument is that we need to treat all far-right and fascist groups as if they could be the seeds of a new genocidal regime", King countered: "The rebuttal would be nonviolent protest has a history of working - right? - and no one gets killed."  If I'd been in Bray's place I have pointed out that it's false that "no one gets killed" as a result of nonviolent protest: there's a long list of nonviolent martyrs in the Civil Rights Movement.  She can hardly be unaware of them, so what she presumably meant was that the movement's opponents don't get killed.  This is an attitude typical of US news media, which report that things are "calm" in Israel-Palestine as long as no Israelis are killed, no matter how many Palestinians are killed.  There's a long history of white-supremacist, arguably fascist violence in this country, and right now police officers all over the country are defiantly killing unarmed people, despite the growing backlash against them.  Police are meeting nonviolent protest with batons, chemical weapons, and other violence -- rioting, in a word -- and apologists like Noel King never seem to fret that they're just hurting their own cause.

Does nonviolent protest work?  There is a good case to be made that it doesn't.  Violent white racists succeeded in terrorizing African-Americans and their white allies with impunity.  Only after decades were some of them tried and convicted.  Segregation receded in the South, but it's hard to find a direct connection between the protests of the 50s and 60s and the changes that finally took place.  A combination of factors, including legislation, court orders, and economic pressure played as much of a role as direct mass action, and as we're seeing now, white supremacy just went underground.  The success of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the iconic action usually cited as proof of the efficacy of nonviolence, has been overstated.  Terrorist violence by whites continued, and hasn't ended to this day.  Rosa Parks -- you've heard of her, I'm sure -- had to leave Montgomery, moving north, to escape threats and retribution.

I recently read a classic work, Negroes with Guns, by Robert F. Williams, a North Carolinian who returned home in 1945 after serving in the Marine Corps, determined not to accept racism anymore.  He joined the local NAACP chapter and moved it in a more militant direction.  He also formed an NRA-chartered gun club to prepare for black self-defense. This led to some exchanges of gunfire with white racist vigilantes, and ultimately to trumped-up kidnapping charges that drove Williams and his wife into exile, first in Cuba, then in the People's Republic of China.  They returned to the US and the charges were dropped in 1975.  Along the way the Williamses became friends and allies with Rosa Parks.  His account of his activities is interesting and inspiring, but I ended up doubting just how successful his embrace of self-defense really was.  Does nonviolent protest work?  Sometimes, maybe; but often not. Does armed self-defense work?  I'm not sure it does, and it certainly doesn't if you don't have local police, state troopers, and the FBI on your side, as white racists did.  As we've seen this summer, they still have the police on their side.

There have been a few more recent, scholarly books on black anti-racist self-defense in the South during the Civil Rights era, and I'll be reading them soon.  As I've said before, I don't rule out violence as a form of protest or resistance, but I don't get the impression that most of those who talk about it have a clear idea how to do it and make it work.  It doesn't help that mainstream voices, like NPR, are so malignantly ignorant and dishonest.  But I'm increasingly convinced that babbling "by any means necessary," a popular slogan of the 60s and 70s, is just posturing.

Don't Bite the Hand that Feeds You Propaganda

A few days after his skirmish with the Iranian ambassador to the UN, NPR's Steve Inskeep interviewed Trump's National Security Adviser, Robert O'Brien.  It's instructive to compare the two.  Inskeep put his foot in it immediately, asking O'Brien about the briefing about the assassination of Qasem Soleimani he gave to lawmakers the day before.  O'Brien noted that it wasn't he but Mike Pompeo, Mark Esper, Joseph McGuire, and Gina Haspel who gave the briefing.  Inskeep's full response: "Right."  O'Brien went on:

I've heard from a lot of people that it was a fantastic briefing. So there's always mixed reviews on those, depending on what people's viewpoint is on the subject matter. Mike Lee's a friend of mine, and someone who I greatly respect and the president really respects. And so I was disappointed to hear that he wasn't happy with the briefing. But I've also heard from other senators, including Chairman [James] Risch of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — he thought it was one of the best briefings he'd ever had. So I think there's there's always mixed reviews on these things.

I think these claims should be taken with a grain of salt.  It wasn't only Mike Lee who was displeased with the briefing, quite a few other Senators were unhappy.  If James Risch thought well of it, he should say so publicly.

O'Brien, it should be remembered, is the fellow who tried to help Trump cover for Anne Sacoolis, a US diplomat who ran over a young Englishman, by tricking his parents into meeting with her.

The Dunn family blames National Security Adviser O’Brien for the misstep. “It struck us that this meeting was hastily arranged by nincompoops on the run and in particular Mr. O’Brien, who appeared to be extremely uptight and aggressive and did not come across at all well in this meeting which required careful handling and sensitivity,” [Dunn family spokesperson Radd] Seiger wrote. “The family remain open to the possibility of meeting Mrs. Sacoolas one day in the future but in a neutral and appropriately controlled environment.”

In other words, not in a reality-TV setting. 

More recently, O'Brien got attention for his apparent belief that the family name of the leader of North Korea is "Un" rather than "Kim."  To be scrupulously fair, numerous better-informed individuals, such as the lefty journalist Amy Goodman, have made the same blunder.  But O'Brien's gaffe fits so well with the general level of professionalism in Trump's White House that it deserved the whoops and cackles he got for it.  (And really, "the most notorious dictator in the world"?  More notorious than Mohamed bin Salman, Sisi, and other US buddies?)

O'Brien basically bullshitted his way through the interview with Inskeep, who was not totally subservient (just mostly) but still collegial as his subject repeated Trump / US propaganda.  It's different when a bold journalist is shooting the breeze with one of our guys.