BAGHDAD (AP) - Seven U.S. soldiers and an Iraqi army interpreter came under attack Saturday morning during a patrol in a Sunni insurgent stronghold south of Baghdad, leaving five dead and three missing, the military said.
Troops were searching for the three missing, using drone planes, jets and checkpoints throughout the area, according to the statement. Soldiers were also asking local leaders for information.
Just following up the post from last night, it's not entirely clear whether being pro-war, anti-war, or just being split over the war was what "destroyed" the Democratic party after Vietnam, but the real point is that whatever the cause it didn't really destroy it. Nixon got elected twice. That's it.
I'm sure someone has written about this, and maybe it reaches back farther than I remember, but this whole "Vietnam destroyed the Democrats" myth seems to be one which has recently taken hold. I don't remember it from my teens, though I do remember that Jane Fonda sold a very popular line of exercise videos.
Such is the Democratic party’s confidence that some Democrats are talking of bringing about the same kind of splits in the Republican party that so damaged their own party’s electoral fortunes following the Vietnam war a generation ago. “There are a lot of people on the Republican side who are not happy with the situation,” said Trent Lott, a normally hardline Republican Senate leader.
For the record, in the 1974 election, before the full end of the war but certainly after the Democrats had become tainted by antiwarness the democrats picked up 49 seats in the House, increasing their majority to 291-144. In the Senate they picked up 3, for a total of 61.
This did follow the 1972 election where, yes, they lost 13 whole seats in the House, leaving them with only 242 seats. That year they gained 2 seats in the Senate, giving them a total of 56.
And then came the 1976 election, post-war, where Democrats picked up the presidency, 1 House seat, and stayed even in the Senate.
True, in 1978 they lost 15 seats in the House, leaving them with a meager 277, and 3 in the Senate, leaving them with only 58.
And then along came Reagan, though his election had little to do with Vietnam, and those Vietnam-scarred Democrats managed to maintain control of the House until 1995, with Senate control flipping back and forth.
Democrats did ok in '68 and '70 too. So, maybe Vietnam gave us Nixon. That's it.
New charges have been filed alleging that the CIA's former No. 3 official used his influence in that role to support a proposed $100 million government contract for his best friend, a defense contractor, in return for lavish vacations, private jet flights and a lucrative job offer.
The indictment, returned Thursday by a federal grand jury in San Diego, supersedes charges brought in February against career CIA man Kyle "Dusty" Foggo and Poway-based contractor Brent Wilkes. The charges grew from the bribery scandal that landed former U.S. Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham in prison.
Foggo resigned from the spy agency a year ago, after his house and office were raided by federal agents. He is the highest-ranking CIA officer to be charged with crimes allegedly committed while working for the agency.
BAGHDAD - Two suicide car bombers struck checkpoints at Baghdad bridges within minutes of each other Friday, killing at least 23 people and damaging the spans despite increased American efforts to target the insurgent networks planning deadly vehicle attacks.
In the post below I had meant to prominently include the 2000 election recount/selection as a cause of a major online lefty boom. While that was the time when I began to turn to the web for news/perspectives I couldn't find elsewhere, it wasn't actually until the inauguration that I finally concluded that something was seriously messed up, and that the problem was the media. I never had any illusions that Supreme Court Justices were noble people above reproach or that politicians could be trusted. I did at some point, however, have the sense that the mainstream media - CNN, New York Times, Washington Post, network news - while imperfect wasn't completely broken. It was the coverage of the inauguration that did it for me.
You may remember that this was a cold and rainy day, truly miserable. Nonetheless thousands of protesters had gathered. However, most Americans would have no idea this was happening. Switching back and forth between coverage by the television networks, and the somewhat more raw footage carried by C-SPAN, it was apparent just how much effort the networks were expending to hide this fact from their viewing public. They would frequently cut away from the parade, provide odd camera angles, and do anything to maintain the illusion that the coronation was proceeding blissfully. The following day, for its inauguration coverage, the New York Times published a photo of George W. Bush walking the parade route. As discussed in Dennis Loy Jonson's The Big Chill, this was an entirely staged photo. Bush had been unable to follow in the tradition established by Carter and carried on Ronald Reagan, Bush's father, and Bill Clinton. The presence of the protesters prevented this, and it wasn't until after Bush had left the public parade route, and was behind a barrier, that he could briefly hop out of the limousine and wave for the cameras. The Times had established a practice which impacted much of the media's reporting on the activities of the Bush administration. They signaled a willingness to report things not as they necessarily were but as the administration wished to present them.
I suppose someone should point out that as pressure within the administration and the military for things to improve in Iraq, as emphasis shifts from training Iraqis to "pacifying" them and "quelling" violence that there could be a lot of bad ahead.
To the Editor: A woman I had dinner with the other night said to me that the atmosphere in this country since the Persian Gulf war is like that at a party in a beautiful home, with everybody being polite and bubbly. And there is this stink coming from somewhere, getting worse all the time, and nobody wants to be the first to mention it.
KURT VONNEGUT (to the New York Times, March 27, 1991)
Some of the discussion has been about when and why blogs and the netroots emerged. I'd say, roughly, online liberal activism began with Move On, the online liberal web generally grew in response to the Clinton impeachment and the 2000 recount/selection*, and the liberal blogosphere as a semi-definable distinct movement emerged in 2002 in response to the glorious summer of war.
Political blogging generally was a post-9/11 phenomenon, headed by the ole perfesser under the name "warbloggers." It was a subculture which consisted mostly of people who were conservative and self-described liberals who knew that the 2nd most serious the country faced was the all powerful The Left, which was generally represented by some anonymous poster on Indymedia, Some Guy With A Sign Somewhere, or occasionally Cythia McKinney. Subsequently a few actual liberals such as myself joined in, and for awhile it was a kind of semi-civil amateur debate club with the ole perfesser, the only person with significant traffic, acting as a one-hand-on-the-scales moderator of the conversation. That brief moment of relative comity faded quickly as the Iraq war debate began and people like me were regularly accused of treason, of supporting dictators, of "being on the other side," by our very civil non-swearing friends on the right side of the blogosphere.
The uniting feature of all of the catalyzing events - whitewater and impeachment, selection, the Iraq war - was that they were moments when it became clear that there was something tremendously flawed with our various elite institutions and of "the liberals" which supposedly represented people like me in them, especially in the mainstream media. They represented tremendous failures of our elite classes.
There were almost no anti-war voices in the media, and the few who were present were basically ridiculed. There were some "war skeptics," but they didn't really question the basic premises of the war - the existence of WMD, the concept of preventive war, the flowers which would follow - but instead nitpicked around the edges. You know, we need more allies, we need the UN's blessing, maybe we need more troops. There were no mainstream media voices who actively opposed the war. Joe Klein did in his heart, he claims, but in public he supported it.
Opposing the war seemed to many of us to be a perfectly non-crazy thing, yet that viewpoint was either completely ignored or actively ridiculed. Even many of our so-called liberals didn't simply support the war or fail to oppose it, but actively "opposed the opposers" by joining in with conservatives to attack and marginalize any one who dared suggest that their Great and Glorious Crusade might be a bad idea. There were only us dirty fucking hippie bloggers.
*added after the fact, though in my mind it was there all along. I blame steve simels.
This will be my long rambling response to various things which have been floating around with respect to Chait's TNR article and other related things.
A fascinating thing about the rise of blogs with respect to the media is that for some reason blogs have caused them to confront and deal with all kinds of questions about media roles which they spent a lot of time ignoring. When pressed about their craft, journalists, and especially print journalists, generally retreat into some sort of Platonic Journalist Ideal. They dismiss all of the lesser forms of journalism, those which deviate from this imagined ideal, as being something distinct from what they do. For some individual journalists there's some validity to this, as they mostly stick to their primary role and resist the temptation to go on the teevee and start talking about the news instead of reporting it, but for the media system as a whole these distinctions have long been rather meaningless.
The media system has long included players other than The Journalist. Political hacks get their time on CNN and are (often anonymous) sources for print journalists. Rush Limbaugh does election night analysis for NBC and goes on Katie Couric's show to do commentary. Journalists regularly mix it up with hacks and ideologues (usually conservatives) on the various roundtable programs. Think tank "experts" with overt agendas fill the hours on NPR. Mark Halperin gets down on his knees to beg for Hugh Hewitt's approval. Pat Buchanan is on MSNBC constantly. And, of course, Matt Drudge Rules Their World. All of these players in tandem provide legitimacy to each other, and reinforce the notion to casual consumers that they are in effect all the same beast.
All of this was true before blogs, as was the exisence 35 year conservative attack on mainstream media institutions. Still, there's something about blogs which really bothers them. There are various somewhat unrelated reasons for this I think. One is general anxiety about their profession and a tendency to blame the internets and blogs for those anxieties. Two is that it's perhaps easier to not listen to Rush Limbaugh than it is to ignore easily digested bits of text. Three is that their existence degrades the value of punditry and the elite station of tenured pundits, which has long been the gold watch awarded at the end of a long career doing harder journalism. Four is that they were used to hearing and internalizing the conservative critique of what they do, and they don't know how to react to a sustained critique from the left. Five is that since text is the medium it's more obviously similar to what they do so they feel the need to distinguish themselves somehow.
This last bit (combined with three) is what largely motivates Chait I think. He feels the the need to define what he does as somehow different or more pure than the undifferentiated mass of bloggers. That's fine if it makes him happy, but the distinctions he tries to draw are largely meaningless. Sure what Jon Chait does is different than what I do, but what I do is different than what Markos does, which is different than what Jane does, which is different from what Bob Herbert does, which is different from what Pat Buchanan does, which is different than what Chris Matthews does. There's never been one definable pundit hat and job description. Some are a bit more partisan, some practice a bit more advocacy, some are completely dishonest hacks, some are uninformed if well-intentioned, some do a noble job of making complex issues accessible to readers, some think their navels speak for America, etc... Chait wants to set himself, or perhaps TNR and punditry generally, as distinct from the dirty bloggers. Again, if it makes him happy to carve out some special category of punditry and place himself in it that's fine with me, but what would be more interesting is for media people to take all of these issues and questions they have with blogs and apply them to the media landscape more generally.
The point I'm trying to make is that for some reasons blogs have caused many members in the media to raise lots of questions about just what the proper roles of journalists and pundits are, but instead of directing these questions at themselves and the general system in which they operate they've directed them at bloggers. It's weird, really.
...adding, as was suggested in comments, the elite pundit status really went away when conservative affirmative action kicked in and newspapers started running syndicated columns by people like Malkin and Goldberg.
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