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Much unreliable rhetoric, and some rare fact-finding

Thursday, March 25, 2010

IT’S IN THE MEDIA’S NATURE to lose interest when news is no longer new.

From the high excitement of the House passing the Senate’s Health Reform package at the weekend, we’ve now slumped into an informational torpor on the issue.

 

From here on, it’s just a dreary slog. For whatever the incantatory chants of “historic!” as President Barack Obama signed it into becoming what many media insisted was “the law of the land”, that same bill or act or law is back on Capitol Hill being “reconciliated” as I keep hear it being called. That inelegant, and probably plain wrong, usage means of course merely turning the legislation finally - with all the necessary fixes - into the shape that House Democrats really wanted when they voted for it.

 

And that’s a journalistic assignment about as interesting for most political reporters (despite any amount of intricate maneuvering by Republicans to bounce the legislation from Senate back to House again, which began happening early this morning) as covering a community schoolboard subcommittee's monthly meeting.

For more pulse-racing value, can the issue be presented as a life-or-death fight for this November’s Congressional elections? Fox News and those other partisan media activists in talk-radio and the blogosphere clearly believe so. And they are claiming, in Fox’s words in particular, that: “Washington, it's payback time!”

Fox showcased Debbie Dooley, a national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots, and their plans to get reform-supporting Representatives voted out of office: "They chose not to listen to what the people want,” Dooley told Fox, “We the people will have our say in November."

But it was telling that the Democratic leadership, as it knuckled down almost too late but then finally succeeded in rallying 219 votes, was politically clear-eyed last weekend - as well as sounding aptly idealistic at times. Media caricatures of both Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi (the cool, uninvolved professor, and the San Francisco socialite – above left) were shattered by the no-nonsense political arm-wrenching each demonstrated - in his case personally cajoling 64 Representatives, and she 68, according to their staffs.

They stressed that the risk ahead in November of being thrown out of office for supporting the bill could well be trumped by the risk of being thrown out for cravenly opposing it. Their granular efforts extended to pressuring Representatives in their home districts by mobilizing well-chosen local media, not to mention local healthcare providers and workers’ leaders.

I suppose November's outcome all hinges on whether you believe there’s anything of real substance behind the threatening rants of the anti-Obama media, and especially whether there’s anything of real political substance to their even less restrained (if that were possible) cohorts in the Tea Party movement.

 

Invective of the kind the Tea Partiers have been using so far – and even more their mob chants and yelled slurs (homophobic, racist – and whatever category best embraces the inane insult “baby-killer”) – could prove counterproductive.

 

Not merely in the sense that many voters who are unpersuaded by the Tea Party anyway will be repelled further, and prompted into greater turnout in support of its targets. The discomfiting drift toward violence (like the bricks thrown against windows at Rochester and Niagara Falls party offices in New York state, and similar attacks in Wichita, Kansas and Tuscon, Arizona) could also end up splitting the opponents of reform – as is already evident from local media polls conducted in Senate leader Harry Reid’s state of Nevada.

There, right-leaning voters are being pulled in different directions by a divide between more traditional Republicans and the Tea-baggers who appall them. The new harsher, hate-spewing newcomers to the field may ironically end up rescuing Reid.

 

We’ll know more, maybe, after this Saturday’s Tea Party rally convened in Reid’s own tiny home-town of Searchlight, to be addressed by Sarah Palin, various broadcasting hosts like Jerry Doyle (the one who doubles as an actor on in a cable-TV Sci-Fi series) and even – wait for it - "Joe the Plumber” of 2008’s campaign fame.

   

 

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INVECTIVE AND BASELESS INSULTS - inevitably - enjoy widespread currency in politics, internationally as well as domestically. I’m wearied, though, by a certain kind of poorly-sourced repertoire of denigratory lies, which paranoid Israelis of a certain stripe have specialized in over the years.

 

They have a new focus now – the Obama Administration, which in their view has turned an evil eye upon their nation, especially now that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (pictured above center) has been feted in Washington this week, and only marginally less gushingly than just about every visiting Israeli PM since 1948.

 

Allowing no press photographers to capture the inescapable White House handshakes is the full extent of any Administration disapproval being oh-so-subtly expressed. (That would be over the Israeli government's blunt insistence on building more Jewish settler housing across the Green Line in East Jerusalem.)

 

Netanyahu’s own stockpile of material critical of Obama is thin and outlandish, though it has a tediously familiar sound. The press corps in the Prime Minister's Bureau has reported him (only to have it denied by his spokesman later) as applying the description “self-hating Jews” to both Obama political adviser David Axelrod and Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel. For heaven’s sake ... Rahm Emmanuel!  A man who wouldn’t entertain a moment’s modest self-questioning, let alone self-hatred.

 

Netanyahu’s brother-in-law Hagai Ben Artzi has proved to be the most egregious hit-man in this boorish onslaught of character assassination. With all the authority of a bible scholar at a religious college, Ben Artzi flat-out called Barack Obama himself an “anti-semite” during an interview on Israeli Army Radio.

 

These Israeli myth-merchants seem to be drawing on the same taproot of irrational notions and hate-based misinformation that keeps the backwoods supporters of many conservative Congress members supplied.

 

THANK YAHWEH FOR ANOTHER breed of contributor to Israel’s political discourse – the journalists of Haaretz, one of the best newspapers in that entire troubled region. Its favored currency, readers know, is the well-attested factual report.

 

An intriguing Haaretz article this week had it giving credit (it always sources its stories clearly, including those originating with other media outfits) to a Scottish newspaper that I’m also fond of - The Sunday Herald in Glasgow.

 

It’s a roundabout kind of fact-finding journey, but the Scottish-Israeli report provides information about the US government and Iran – matters of intense concern to Haaretz’s home audience, naturally.

 

The Herald reported a keen-eyed sighting by Dan Plesch, Director of the Centre for International Studies and Dipomacy at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies (a school I have relied upon for decades for its thorough research work). He is known as co-author of a recent study of US policy toward Iran’s nuclear ambitions, along with Martin Butcher (from the European Parliament’s foreign affairs staff) - and in follow-up work last week Plesch found some new and striking information on a military contractors’ website. A deal has been done of a deal to transport nearly 400 “bunker-buster” bombs from California to the US military base on the British-owned Pacific island of Diego Garcia.

 

No major US media outlets have featured this news, but it carries enormous significance. It means that these 1,000-pound BLU-110s and the twice-as-big BLU-117s (pictured above right) will soon be ready for launching against Iran’s nuclear facilities, little more than a couple of hours flying time away. (Diego Garcia was used by the US for airstrikes attacks on Iraq in 1991 and 2003). The story comes as extra confirmation of a report by the Herald two years ago that facilities at Diego Garcia were being strengthened in order to take these enormous new munitions.

 

The Obama Administration’s canny year or so devoted to trying velvet-glove diplomacy against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (oh, and threatening sanctions too) has now evidently run out, and with minimal press observation, America’s iron fist is being put in place - and clenched to deliver a pounding.

 

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