Re: event invite

Krauthammer

Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer engaged in a bit of media criticism back in August of 2002, having noticed that certain media outlets were actually going so far as to print material which could be construed as contradicting the case that Krauthammer and others were then making in favor of war. As he began:

Not since William Randolph Hearst famously cabled his correspondent in Cuba, "You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war," has a newspaper so blatantly devoted its front pages to editorializing about a coming American war as has Howell Raines's New York Times. Hearst was for the Spanish-American War. Raines (for those who have been incommunicado for the last year) opposes war with Iraq.

Of course, Krauthammer has no way of knowing if this is true, having obviously not familiarized himself with the front pages of every American newspaper as they appeared in 1914-1917, 1938-1941, 1949-1950, 1963-1968, 1990-1991, 1998-1999, and 2001; it is not very likely for that matter that he had taken any real tally of what was going into the front pages of newspapers in 2002-2003, and even less so that he would be honest or even perceptive enough to note any front-page editorializing in favor of the Iraq War on the part of, say, The Wall Street Journal or The New York Sun. What we have here, then, is a transparently false assertion to the effect that whatever war-related slant may have been detectable on the part of Raine's New York Times is some huge aberration from how newspapers generally go about such things.

Krauthammer continues by listing the various front-page stories that had recently appeared in The Times which would seem to support the columnist's thesis. One such item noted that an Iraqi opposition leader had failed to show up to a meeting; Krauthammer retorts, not unreasonably, that there are a dozen more where that came from. Less reasonably, he goes on to note the following:

A previous above-the-fold front-page story revealed - stop the presses! - that the war might be financially costly.

Though I'm unable to locate the particular story to which Krauthammer is here referring, I'm going to go ahead and assume that the article in question did not so much hinge on any revelation "that the war might be financially costly" as it did on the strong possibility that the war could end up being far more costly than was being admitted by its backers, many of whom famously quoted figures well below the $100 billion mark and some of whom even proposed that the whole thing would pay for itself in the oil revenue that grateful Iraqis would be happy to pay us in the aftermath, assuming they had any money left over after buying flowers to toss at our troops. Perhaps we ought not to ascribe to mendacity what could be more readily ascribed to competent reporting. Or perhaps we ought:

Then there are the constant references to growing opposition to war with Iraq - in fact, the polls are unchanged since January - culminating on Aug. 16 with the lead front-page headline: "Top Republicans Break with Bush on Iraq Strategy.'' The amusing part was including among these Republican foreign policy luminaries Dick Armey, a man not often cited by the Times for his sagacity, a man who just a few weeks ago made a spectacle of himself by publicly advocating the removal of the Palestinians from the West Bank. Yesterday, he was a buffoon. Today, he is a statesman.

Krauthammer does not bother to cite any instances in which the Times had contradicted any polling data regarding the public take on war, and so we may assume that he is being disingenuous, particularly seeing as how his subsequent take on the August 16th piece is exceedingly disingenuous and it of course difficult to go from non-disingenuous to exceedingly disingenuous in the space of two sentences, just as acceleration takes time in even the finest of sports cars. Because Krauthammer in this instance has actually given us a means to check his work, I have been able to find and read the article to which he refers, in which it is noted that Dick Armey has expressed some opposition to the strategy being proposed by Bush - hence the title, "Top Republicans Break With Bush on Iraq Strategy." Through the use of loaded terms and false restatements of Times sentiment, though, Krauthammer here seeks to give the impression that there is something contradictory in citing some notable thing that Armey has said and with which liberals might happen to agree after having previously cited some notable thing that Armey has said and with which liberals might happen to disagree. The Times, of course, never referred to Armey as a "buffoon" nor as a "statesman;" had it done so, then we would indeed have here some contradiction, and Krauthammer would be right in pointing this out. But those characterizations are Krauthammer's - and he makes those characterizations and then attributes them to The Times because he has nothing substantial with which to make his non-case that the Times is being hypocritical in this matter.

Krauthammer comes closer to hitting upon a legitimate objection in pointing out the overreach on the part of The Times in including Henry Kissinger among those who had made some "Break with Bush on Iraq Strategy;" though the former foreign policy kingpin did indeed write an op-ed noting his concerns regarding whether or not the U.S. was willing to follow through after any invasion, Kissinger had at the same time agreed with the administration that such an invasion was wholly necessary to the future safety of the West. The Times later ran a correction in which it was explained that Kissinger's expressed views on the subject had been more nuanced than one might have gathered from the piece. Krauthammer, meanwhile, has never gotten around to correcting his own, far more dishonest misrepresentation of Wesley Clarke's expressed views regarding whether or not Clinton's air campaign in Kosovo would be sufficient to accomplish NATO's goals in the region, as described earlier in the chapter. He does, however, sum up Harold Raines' misdeeds thusly:

It is one thing to give your front page to a crusade against war with Iraq. That's partisan journalism, and that's what Raines' Times does for a living. It's another thing to include Henry Kissinger in your crusade. That's just stupid. After all, it's checkable.

What's really stupid is characterizing a newspaper as doing something "for a living." Does The New York Times bring his paycheck home to his little wife every other Friday and give her a great big kiss? Are the two of them rather poor but nonetheless very much in love? In the days leading up to Christmas, did The New York Times sell his father's pocket watch in order to buy her some tortoiseshell combs with which to arrange her luxurious head of hair, and did she meanwhile sell that same hair in order to buy a nifty chain for his now-sold pocket watch? Is it too much to ask that a Pulitzer winner learn how to parse a fucking sentence? These are all important questions, sort of.

Of course, the general thrust of Krauthammer's column is that, because some articles appeared on the front page of The New York Times that might be construed as contradicting the case for war, someone at the Times must therefore have been waging some covert campaign by which to defuse pro-war sentiment. And perhaps this is really what was going on. After all, here are these articles that might be construed as contradicting the case for war. If the editors of a newspaper are running front-page articles that might be construed as either supporting or contradicting the case for a war, after all, we may perhaps suspect that these editors are operating under some sort of political agenda, and not simply doing their jobs.

Less than a month after Krauthammer wrote his column, The New York Times featured a front-page piece by longtime Middle East correspondent Judy Miller and reporter-turned-author Michael Gordon in which it was alleged that Saddam Hussein had ordered an array of aluminum tubes which were likely intended for use in a nuclear weapons program; her sources turned out to be several administration officials, and the story was in turn trumpeted by several other administration officials on the various Sunday public affairs programs. All of which is to say that, a month after Krauthammer accused the powers-that-be at The New York Times of being blatantly opposed to the war, Dick Cheney was citing The New York Times in the course of making the case for same.

Clearly, The New York Times is schizophrenic! And he's gone and sold his father's pocket watch! Life is full of twist endings.

Krauthammer wasn't done with the Times and its pro/anti-war sentiment quite yet; a few days after the paper ran Miller's later-discredited article to the effect that Iraq was probably building nuclear weapons that very instant, Krauthammer recapped his own position that, an earlier Times piece to the contrary, there was no real opposition to the administration's war strategy among top-ranking Republicans. After dismissing the ambiguous statements of Brent Scowcroft and others who had reportedly been concerned about how this all might play out, Krauthammer proceeds to analyze the supposed opinions of the then-secretary of state:

That leaves Colin Powell, supposedly the epicenter of internal opposition to the hard line on Iraq. Well, this is Powell last Sunday on national television: "It's been the policy of this government to insist that Iraq be disarmed. ... And we believe the best way to do that is with a regime change.'' Moreover, he added, we are prepared "to act unilaterally to defend ourselves." When Powell, the most committed multilateralist in the administration, deliberately invokes the incendiary U-word to describe the American position, we have ourselves a consensus.

Unless, of course, Powell was objecting to the strategy in private while toeing the administration line in public - which, as we now know, is exactly what he was doing.

Here's the pertinent excerpt from the Times piece in question:

At the same time, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who summoned Mr. Kissinger for a meeting on Tuesday, and his advisers have decided that they should focus international discussion on how Iraq would be governed after Mr. Hussein - not only in an effort to assure a democracy but as a way to outflank administration hawks and slow the rush to war, which many in the department oppose.

Again, we now know that this is indeed what was happening at the time, which is to say that the reporting in this case was both solid and relevant - which is to say in turn that, contrary to Krauthammer, we did not actually "have ourselves a consensus" at all.

The tale gets funnier, as such tales often do. Just a few months after haranguing The New York Times for claiming that Powell was somehow objecting to the war strategy, Krauthammer discovers a credible report that Powell was not only objecting to the war strategy, but even to the war itself, beginning a January 2003 column with the following:

The single most remarkable passage in Bob Woodward's "Bush at War" has, to my knowledge, gone unremarked. In early August 2002, Colin Powell decides that the Iraq hawks have gotten to the president, and that he has not weighed in enough to restrain them. He feels remorse: "During the Gulf War, when he had been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Powell had played the role of reluctant warrior, arguing to the first President Bush, perhaps too mildly (emphasis added), that containing Iraq might work, that war might not be necessary. But as the principal military adviser, he hadn't pressed his arguments that forcefully because they were less military than political." Now, it is well known that Powell had been against the Gulf War and for "containment." What was not known was that, if Woodward is to be believed, Powell to this day still believes that sanctions were the right course and that he should have pushed harder for them. This is astonishing.

Very astonishing indeed, particularly if one spent 2002 blindly flailing ones arms in the direction of any reporter with the gall to report that perhaps the unilateralist dove with a penchant for stopping at sanctions was acting like a unilateralist dove with a penchant for stopping at sanctions. Quick, let's jump into my magical time machine and look at Krauthammer's original claim:

When Powell, the most committed multilateralist in the administration, deliberately invokes the incendiary U-word to describe the American position, we have ourselves a consensus.

Remember that Krauthammer was basing all of this on what Powell was willing to say on television at such time as he was serving at the pleasure of the president in the run-up to a war. That's some astute political commentary there, Charlie. I wish my magical time machine was a real thing and not just some silly product of me being kind of drunk. We could send Krauthammer back to the Byzantine Empire circa 1034 and have him serve as palace affairs correspondent for the Constantinople Times-Courier. "Emperor Romanos III drowned in his bathtub today in a freak accident. Theodora said so on Meet the Scribes." Get it, Meet the Scribes? Like Meet the Press? Because they had scribes back then. Look, fuck you.

These things being relative, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer is today considered - rightfully - to be among the Republican Party's greatest intellectual assets. In a profile piece that appeared in mid-2009, Politicos Ben Smith proclaimed the Canadian-born commentator to be a coherent, sophisticated and implacable critic of the new president and a central conservative voice in the Age of Obama. Around the same time, New York Times mainstay David Brooks characterized him as the most important conservative columnist right now. When Krauthammer was presented with an award that summer by Rupert Murdoch in recognition of his having done a lot of whatever it is that makes Rupert Murdoch happy, Dick Cheney himself was on hand to congratulate him. In liberal terms of achievement, this is somewhat akin to winning an award from Noam Chomsky while being fêted by the ghost of Louis Brandeis.

Krauthammer's prestige is such that, when foreign publications find themselves in need of someone to explain the conservative outlook, they are as likely to turn to our chapter subject as to anyone else. In October of 2009, Der Spiegel published a particularly comprehensive interview in which Krauthammer held forth largely on foreign policy. Among other things, he derides Obama as a wide-eyed amateur who lacks the columnist's own grounding in reality:

I would say his vision of the world appears to me to be so naïve that I am not even sure he's able to develop a doctrine. He has a view of the world as regulated by self-enforcing international norms, where the peace is kept by some kind of vague international consensus, something called the international community, which to me is a fiction, acting through obviously inadequate and worthless international agencies. I wouldn't elevate that kind of thinking to a doctrine because I have too much respect for the word doctrine.

    In pronouncing judgment upon a president's competence in the arena of foreign policy, Krauthammer thereby implies that he himself knows better. It is a fine thing, then, that we may go through the fellow's columns from the last ten years and see for ourself whether this is actually the case.

    In 1999, NATO sought to derail yet another potential humanitarian disaster in the Balkans by way of an air bombing campaign against Serbia. Krauthammer promptly denounced Bill Clinton in a column that begun thusly:

On Monday, as "genocide" was going on in Kosovo (so said the State Department), Bill Clinton played golf. The stresses of war, no doubt. But perhaps we should give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps he needed to retreat to shaded fairways to contemplate the consequences of his little Kosovo war.

    Our columnist seems to have since changed his mind on the propriety of playing golf in the midst of conflict, but then if we are to concern ourselves with every little thing for which he has denounced his opponents while giving a pass to his allies, we will be forever distracted, so knock it off. Better for us to note that Krauthammer uses the term "genocide" in quotes and implies such a characterization to be the work of the foolish Clintonian State Department; the intent here is to cast suspicion on Clinton's judgment by implying that no such thing as genocide is actually taking place. And in the very next paragraph, when Krauthammer asserts that NATO intervention thus far has failed to prevent "savage ethnic cleansing, executions of Kosovar Albanian leaders, the forced expulsion of more than 100,000 Kosovars" - with no such terminology being put in quotes this time - the intent is to cast even greater suspicion on Clinton's judgment by implying that some sort of genocide is taking place.

    Krauthammer goes on to argue that air strikes would be insufficient to force Serbian forces from Kosovo. Bizarrely enough, he even tries to convince his readers that General Wesley Clark agreed with him over Clinton, quoting the then-NATO commander as telling Jim Lehrer, we never thought that through air power we could stop these killings on the ground. No doubt due to space constraints, Krauthammer leaves out the rest of Clark's answer, in which it is explained that the person who has to stop this is President Milosevic and that the purpose of the air campaign was to force him to do just that - which, of course, it did.

    Even after Clinton's "little Kosovo war" proved successful, Krauthammer remained ideologically committed to chaos in the Balkans, having also predicted in 1999 that NATO involvement would sever Kosovo from Serbian control and lead inevitably to an irredentist Kosovar state, unstable and unviable and forced to either join or take over pieces of neighboring countries. When an ethnic Albanian insurgency arose in Macedonia along its border with UN-administered Kosovo in 2001, he felt himself vindicated, announcing that "the Balkans are on the verge of another explosion, making several references to Vietnam, and characterizing our continued presence in the region as a quagmire. The violence ended within the year, having claimed less than 80 lives. Kosovo has since joined both the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank and is now recognized by three of five permanent members of the Security Council; as of late 2009, Macedonia is preparing for membership in NATO as well as the European Union.

    Like most others who had cried apocalypse in Kosovo, Krauthammer bumbled into the Afghanistan war in a haze of amnesia and inexplicable self-regard. When New York Times contributor R.W. "Johnny" Apple wrote a piece in late October proposing that the conflict could develop into a "quagmire," our columnist ridiculed him for using a term that he himself had wrongly applied in his own Balkans-as-Vietnam column from earlier in the year. The Apple article in question proved to be among the more prescient compositions of that period; unlike Thomas Friedman, who was in those days proclaiming that Afghans don't really mind having bombs dropped on them and was otherwise engaged in the inexplicable application of scare quotes around the word "civilians," Apple predicted that civilian casualties would become a major source of discontent among the population and that this might very well be problematic for U.S. efforts to win such people over. He ended the piece by pointing out that there exists "a huge question about who would rule if the United States vanquished its foe. Washington never solved that issue satisfactorily after the assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963, and solving it in Afghanistan, a country long prone to chaotic competition among many tribes and factions, will probably not be much easier." And, of course, he was right.

   Long after others had abandoned the illusion of quick and longterm success in Central Asia, Krauthammer was still mocking anyone foolish enough to express concern over whether the illusion might be illusory. "Before our astonishing success in Afghanistan goes completely down the memory hole, let's recall some very recent history," Krauthammer politely suggested in a December 2004 column. "Within 100 days, al Qaeda is routed and the Taliban overthrown. Then the first election in Afghanistan's history. Now the inauguration of a deeply respected democrat who, upon being sworn in as legitimate president of his country, thanks America for its liberation.... What do liberals have to say about this singular achievement by the Bush administration? That Afghanistan is growing poppies." This was indeed noted by liberals of the time - along with a whole range of other concerns that Krauthammer does not bother to address, with one exception:

The other complaint is that Karzai really does not rule the whole country. Again the sun rises in the east. Afghanistan has never had a government that controlled the whole country. It has always had a central government weak by Western standards.

But Afghanistan's decentralized system works. Karzai controls Kabul, most of the major cities, and much in between. And he is successfully leveraging his power to gradually extend his authority as he creates entirely new federal institutions and an entirely new military.

As it turns out, this "deeply respected democrat" won the 2009 election by deeply undemocratic means, further de-legitimizing himself in the eyes of Afghans already angry over the corruption that marks not only Karzai's cabinet but also certain members of his immediate family. The former monarch's authority, meanwhile, has not so much been "gradually extended" as it has since retracted. American analysts of both the private and public sort are now virtually united in their contempt for the fellow.

Krauthammer also explains to us the following:

What has happened in Afghanistan is nothing short of a miracle. Afghanistan had suffered under years of appalling theocratic rule, which helped to legitimize the kind of secularist democracy that Karzai represents.

The "secularist democracy" of Afghanistan proclaims Islam to be its official religion, holds that none of its civil laws may violate the teachings of Islam, and punishes conversion from Islam by death - all of which was already the case at the time of Krauthammer's writing.

Elsewhere in the column we are confronted by the following declarative interrogatory: "The interesting question is: If we succeeded in Afghanistan, why haven't we in Iraq?"

The Interesting Question: If we succeeded in Afghanistan, why haven't we in Iraq?

Answer: Because our nation's foreign policy was informed in large part by people who thought we had succeeded in Afghanistan.

On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 11:23 AM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

Ha. Yeah, I've got a couple on him. Didn't even have room to use all my notes in the chapter. He's more machine than man now...

Will send along soon.

On Fri, Jun 18, 2010 at 11:21 AM, Sam Apple <samapple@gmail.com> wrote:

hey barrett,

yeah. we're interested. if you have a section specifically on krauthammer, that would be great. that guy drives me nuts...

thanks,
sam

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 6:17 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Howdy again. Let me know if you'd have any interest in running an excerpt from my upcoming book on how Thomas Friedman, Charles Krauthammer, et al are all incompetent; it's coming out in August, so am about to start sending out a couple of excerpts I've compiled in the next few weeks.

On Thu, May 27, 2010 at 5:46 AM, Sam Apple <samapple@gmail.com> wrote:
hey barrett,

your new venture sounds pretty amazing. and i thought i was ambitious..

breaking news. i got a last minute invite to a journalism conference and won't be at the event. you should definitely still go though. should be a great night. just tell them i said you were on the list..

sam

On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 11:08 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

Howdy-

I'll definitely try to make it. Haven't gotten around to subscribing yet but will do so presently; will I be able to get in?

True/Slant was just bought by Forbes, which had been funding it. Be interesting to see how they run it. Not a bad organization, to my knowledge.

On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 3:05 PM, Sam Apple <samapple@gmail.com> wrote:

in case you're interested...

-sam

TFTS Literary/Journalism Networking Night - Come Have Drinks with New Yorks Top Writers, Editors, Agents

Who Will Be There (Among many others..)

Gary Belsky, Editor, ESPN The Magazine

AJ Jacobs, Author of The Know it All, Esquire,Editor-at-Large

Joshua Henkin, Author of Matrimony, Director ofthe MFA program in Fiction Writing at Brooklyn College.

Amy Sohn, Author of Prospect Park West, Magazine Columnist

Jill Schwartzman, Senior Editor, Random House
Emily Bobrow, Editor, More Intelligent Life (The Arts Magazine of the Economist)

Samantha Shapiro, New York Times Magazine, contributing writer

Aaron Gell, Editor and Publisher, MediaElites.com, Formerexecutive editor of Radar Magazine

How to Get an Invite
Easy. Just Become a Member of the The Faster Times for as little as $12 well put you on the guest list. In addition to getting an invite to this event, youll be supporting an amazing journalism project. Youll also be able to choose from a wide array of gifts, from New York subscriptions, to critiques of your writing from experienced journalists, to personalized erotic fiction.

Your $12 Membership also comes with a DigiDude Tripod Keychain Which Regularly Sells for $25

When and Where:
Thursday, May 27th, 8-10 PM
The Libertine Library (pictured above)
15 Gold Street (at Platt)VIEW MAP

--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

--
Regards,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

TFTS Literary/Journalism Networking Night - Come Have Drinks with New Yorks Top Writers, Editors, Agents

TFTS Literary/Journalism Networking Night - Come Have Drinks with New Yorks Top Writers, Editors, Agents