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Reversals, stunning and otherwise

Thursday, January 10, 2008

AMAZING – OR PERHAPS IT'S NOT – what a difference another small state can make. If ever there was a case of “group-think” at work, it was the mainstream media’s reaction first to Iowa’s Democrats rejecting Hillary Clinton, and then to New Hampshire’s narrowly approving her five days later.

The media managed to persuade themselves that the Mid-West’s quarter-million caucus-goers created such a massive, universal sea-change by tilting toward Barack Obama (for instance, the normally careful and fairly considered Frank Rich confessed in the New York Times to feeling “a palpable sense that our history was turning a page”) that they simply had to interpret the rather different North-Eastern decision - again by about a quarter-million Democrats - as a veritable cataclysm, or at the least a transformational event akin to the Resurrection. (See - pictured above - the New York Post’s Lazarus-style treatment of Clinton, on front-pages separated by only a day … Tuesday and then Wednesday, by when she was “Back from the Dead”).

 

Doesn’t it occur to political writers -- or are they so bemused by some enforced need to overdramatize their stories -- that such ripples in the nation’s political fabric are just the inevitable ebb and flow (or to stick with my mixed metaphor, the warp and the weft) that are occasioned by the arrival - at last! - of an actual voting year in this country’s 4-yearly round of president-selection?

 

The tabloid press, hyperactive bloggers and cable TV are all going to run out of superlatives - and melodramatic vocabulary in general - long before we even get to February 5th, when some two dozen state primaries are scheduled … obviously a more significant set of indicators, when combined, than any of the single states voting before then.

 

I’m already pretty disheartened to see that day being labeled “Super-Dooper Tuesday” or “Tsunami Tuesday” in tones that are all too familiar. Those two particular monikers are so revealingly reminiscent of Madison Avenue’s infantilizing sales slogans - and of headline-writers’ inveterate trivializing of fatal catastrophes.
 

 
**AN AUDIO VERSION OF THIS COLUMN IS AIRED BY ROBIN HOOD RADIO**

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST - CLICK HERE

 

 

 

 

SPEAKING OF REVERSALS, A REPORT THE SIZE OF A BIG CITY telephone directory comes out every year about this time. It’s the World Bank’s report on the state of the global economy.

 

Through all the years of my seemingly interminable beat reporting on “international development”  -  mostly a euphemism, quite frankly, for “under-development”  -  I had to consult this annual tome, with the snappy title “Global Economic Prospects” (cover pictured above right). It functioned as not quite a bible, perhaps, but at least as a kind of Frommers Guide to the relationship between the rich and poor segments of the earth.

 

Other “Third World” observers and myself would each year wearily summarize the Bank’s repeated exhortations that privileged, comfortable countries should do more to help the suffering unfortunates of the planet’s hotter climes. But this year things have completely turned around

 

The unavoidable background is that western industrialized nations and Japan now teeter on the brink of what could be a substantial recession (-- I mean, even George W Bush - remember him? - admitted in Chicago this week that “recent economic indications have become increasingly mixed” and that the US “can't take economic growth for granted").

 

Well, in the face of all this, the Bank, now under Robert Zoellick - Bush’s much better choice as the institution’s boss than the doubly-disastrous Paul Wolfowitz - is suggesting that developing countries, with their very considerable growth these days, will be the ones to help “cushion” our economic distress, to use the Bank’s own headline word.

 

An intriguing prospect, don’t you think?

 

While the existing “heights” of the world economy are expected to achieve only 2.2% growth this year compared with 2.7% last year (and the United States, especially, is expected to slow down sharply, to only 1% in the first half of the year) the once-desperate “Third World” countries could achieve a remarkable average of 7.1% growth.

 

The average is buoyed up of course by the spectacular growth-rate of China at 10%, and that of India which is not far behind; these are economies that the Bank’s report now chooses to call “resilient”, and they could serve to help the whole world.

 

This role-reversal, cutting so deeply against the long-established grain, prompts me to use words from the narrow political arena again. Not from US primaries, but from Britain - in fact from John Major, speaking in 1990 as a brand-new Prime Minister the very morning after he’d unexpectedly dethroned his once all-powerful predecessor Margaret Thatcher. He addressed his now all-male Cabinet with: “Well, Gentlemen - Who’d have thunk it?”
 

 
 

THAT INFAMOUS DESTRUCTION OF THE EVIDENCE - HUNDREDS OF HOURS of video that recorded the CIA’s interrogation of Al Qaeda detainees - is no longer to be so fully investigated.

 

US District Judge Henry Kennedy yesterday threw out an application by a group of Guantanamo prisoners’ lawyers for a judicial investigation into the tape-shredding because it took place after the judge himself issued an order that any such evidence should be produced, since it might have a bearing on their clients’ cases.

 

Yesterday’s ruling determined that no contempt of court was committed, since the order didn’t cover these particular interrogations, conducted long before the detainees were sent to Guantanamo. And Judge Kennedy also said there was no reason to doubt the US Justice Department would conduct a rigorous inquiry of its own, despite the lawyers’ insistence that it would be “a classic case of the fox guarding the henhouse".

 

So we’re reliant now on the Justice Department’s choice to lead its probe, the federal prosecutor John Durham of Connecticut. Durham famously went after the FBI for its criminal activity in cahoots with the mob in Boston, and has been admired for that - but now some are questioning how full that 1999 inquiry finally was, with just three individuals being convicted of crimes.

 

We’ll have to bear in mind, too, that Durham is a “Special” investigator, reporting to the Department - not an Independent Prosecutor like Patrick Fitzgerald in the Valerie Plame - Lewis “Scooter” Libby case.

 

We’ll have to bear in mind, too, that Durham is a “” investigator, reporting to the Department - not an Independent Prosecutor like in the - case.