The Big Benghazi Fizzle

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In his classic work “Democracy in America,” French historian Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that “the job of the journalist in America is to attack coarsely, without preparation and without art, to set aside principles in order to grab men.”

That was in 1835. Looks like things haven’t changed much, judging by the recent “60 Minutes” debacle, in which the venerable CBS program recently ended up with egg on its face over its sloppy reporting about last year’s deadly attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Correspondent Lara Logan introduced us to “Morgan Jones,” who, we were told, was using an alias to protect his safety. “Jones” told a tale of derring-do and high-level betrayal that night that was suitable for a thriller novel or a blockbuster movie.

He’d rushed to the compound upon learning it was under attack and gone over the wall. He’d knocked out a terrorist with his rifle butt. He’d sneaked into an al-Qaida-controlled hospital where he’d seen the dead and burned body of Ambassador Chris Stevens (cue big dramatic music). “Jones” recounted how the ambassador himself had told him he was worried about security, but that his pleas for help had fallen on deaf ears.

The right wing went insane (I mean, even more than usual) with joy. Finally, they had something they could really use to turn the tragedy into political gain again. After all, it had worked so well for Mitt Romney.

They even had a sad-eyed hero who’d only been doing his job when he was betrayed by those in power. Twitter exploded with the right-wing war cry of “BENGHAZIIIIIII!” Lindsey Graham stomped his dainty little feet and said he was going to hold up every Obama nomination until he got some answers.

Well, he got some, but probably not the ones he wanted, as the story began to unravel. It turns out that “Morgan Jones” was actually Dylan Davies, a security contractor (i.e., a mercenary). He’d given written reports to both his employer, the British company Blue Mountain, and to the FBI. Those reports contradicted what he’d told “60 Minutes.”

For instance, he’d told both his employer and the FBI that roadblocks had prevented him from even getting to the consulate compound. Like the general in the old soldier’s song (the one who got the Croix de Guerre), “the son of a gun was never there.”

“60 Minutes” first said that it stood by its story. Then, when the FBI report was revealed by The New York Times, Logan finally went on-air with an apology.

How could this happen? What would motivate a TV news institution like “60 Minutes” to be so sloppy that it wouldn’t fact-check or do any vetting on this guy and what he’d said to other people before dropping his bombshells on the air? Well, it’s exactly the motivation described by de Tocqueville: “to grab men” (and, since this is the modern world, women).

This was a big story. It was dramatic. It would inspire editorials, tweets, and the usual yelling on the usual on-air yell-fests. Both “Benghazi” and “60 Minutes” would be on everyone’s lips for weeks. They’d probably even be cited in congressional investigations. And “60 Minutes” wouldn’t just be reporting big news, it would BE big news.

It’s the same motivation that once led the same program, in its now-defunct Wednesday edition, to run a story on the premature departure of George W. Bush from the Texas Air National Guard that featured alleged “official memos” that later turned out to be fakes. A lot of liberals fell for that one, because they wanted to.

Just as there are inconvenient truths, there are convenient falsehoods, and the “Jones” story was a very convenient one for CBS and its ratings, as well as for the right-wing rubes for whom no snake oil is too dubious to swallow if they think it might be the magic potion that makes the man they love to hate go away.

However, it’s the job of entertainment to show us what we want to see, and thus make money for the producers. Journalism should show us what we need to see, whether or not it’s popular or profitable. Like so many other news outlets these days, “60 Minutes” set aside principles “in order to grab men” and went for entertainment and ratings over actual reporting of the truth.

In the process, CBS, and the wingnuts who suddenly loved it (if only for one night), got snookered by a glib con man. Both managed to damage their brand even further than it already was.

Shut It Down. Shut It All Down.

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I’m telling you, this website thing is a total debacle.

One applicant, whose heartbreaking story was told by The Washington Post, spent hours trying to log in, only to be told via one of those infuriating error messages that the username and password that he’d picked didn’t exist.

Another filled out all the questions, only to have the website tell her that her application was incomplete. A third applicant cleverly set her alarm for 3:30 so she could successfully log on when no one else was on the site, but many more continue to experience frustration and anger due to the buggy, crash-prone online application process.

Oh, you think I mean the Obamacare website, healthcare.gov? Well, yeah, that’s a nightmare, too. But the online application giving thousands of young people heartburn is the one that 515 colleges and universities (including my own alma mater, UNC) require prospective students to fill out to seek admission.

It’s called the Common Application, and this year, more than 723,576 students used it to send in more than 3 million applications. Gone are the days of laboriously typing or hand-writing pages and pages of information, over and over, before stuffing them into manila envelopes and dropping them in the mail addressed to the college of your choice.

Now, bright young scholars-to-be can fill the info in once, send it off, and go back to their SnapTweets or their Tumblegrams or whatever the kids are up to these days. Or so they hope. It seems that a recent “upgrade,” as upgrades so often do, bollixed the system up, but good.

So it’s clear, fellow Americans, that there’s only one thing to do. We need to completely dismantle and defund the college and university system.

I mean it. The recent problems with the application process are undeniable proof that the entire system of higher education is a hideous combination of slavery and the Holocaust. Just ask any college student during exam week. Something has to be done to help all the young people who are being hurt by the train wreck that is higher education.

In fact, we need to get Ted Cruz (who seems a bit aimless and out of sorts these days) to go back to the Senate floor bravely clutching his copy of “Green Eggs and Ham” and ramble and rail against college until he drops from exhaustion.

While we’re on the subject, where are the investigations? Where are the hearings? Why aren’t more officials being dragged away from fixing problems so they can sit under hot lights and be berated by pompous attention grubbers? I’m a tax-paying citizen, by golly, and I deserve my congressional grandstanding. And I want both dogs AND ponies in this show, do you hear?

On second thought, wait. Let’s not do all that. Because that would be stupid. Like the Common App site, the central healthcare.gov site has problems. It should not have those problems. With that point agreed upon, what now?

Well, some pols continue to demand that the whole law be dismantled. This is the wingnut pipedream it always was, the province of right-wing grifters like Ted Cruz and the delusional rubes who love them. Some are angrily seeking scalps and sound bites.

While it’s important to figure out what went wrong so we can try to keep it from happening again, trying to accomplish that through the modern congressional hearing is like trying to fix your busted computer by throwing it into the monkey cage at the zoo and hoping the simians stop screaming, beating their chests, and throwing poo long enough to at least give you an estimate.

It should be noted, by the way, that states who accepted the health care law rather than dragging their feet, i.e., states that set up their own exchanges, seem to be doing a lot better than the ones relying on the federal site.

For example, California, Connecticut, Kentucky, New York, Rhode Island and Washington state “have exceeded federal-enrollment targets,” according to an article in The Seattle Times. Here in North Carolina, however, and in other states where our New Republican Overlords have decided to do prove that Obamacare won’t work by doing everything in their power to make it not work, we’re stuck with the federal site.

So since the ACA is the law, and will remain so for the foreseeable future, maybe we should be hoping for it to be fixed rather than cheerleading for failure. Or better yet, maybe the GOP-controlled state government could make itself look good by setting up our own successful exchange. They could even sigh in exasperation like an irritated tech support guy and say, ‘Here, get out of the way and let me do it.”

But that would mean trying to fix problems with the law rather than create them.

Review: HOUR OF THE RAT, Lisa Brackmann

Hour of the Rat by Lisa Brackmann
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The protagonist is engaging, the local color and descriptions of life in modern China are fascinating, and the writing is top-notch. Problem is, the story doesn't finish. The book just ends, and not even on a cliffhanger. Nothing is resolved, the situation is still as perilous as it ever was, and the reader, one supposes, just has to buy the next volume to find out what happens next. This always annoys me. I don't mind series, and I don't even mind story arcs that go from book to book, but I just feel like each book should have at least one self-contained story. Even the rambling Song of Ice and Fire series ends each book on a high note or turning point. This just feels like the author wrote till she hit the deadline and quit. YMMV, of course, and it that sort of thing doesn't bother you, then this is a fine read.


View all my reviews

The Folkenflik Revelation

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In his recent book “Murdoch’s World: The Last of the Old Media Empires,” National Public Radio media correspondent David Folkenflik describes, in no-holds-barred detail, how Australian media magnate Rupert Murdoch built his company News Corp “from a small paper in Adelaide, Australia, into a multimedia empire.”

Among the details of scandals and corporate infighting is a revelation that’s gotten some people’s backs up: that the Fox News PR department actually hired people to go on the Internet — on blogs, message boards and other public outlets — and “post pro-Fox rants” on websites.

“One former staffer,” Folkenflik writes, “recalled using 20 different aliases to post pro-Fox rants. Another had 100.” They were provided various technological work-arounds to disguise the fact that their pro-Fox commentary was coming from within online accounts associated with Fox itself.

When I read this, I immediately thought two things: (1) Is “David Folkenflik” not the coolest name ever? And (2) wait, you mean I can’t trust the rantings of anonymous strangers on Internet comment boards to be the real thing?

I’m shocked; shocked, I tell you.

It is a striking phenomenon that you notice in online discussions: Make some mention of Fox News’ decided rightward slant and obvious bias, and someone will immediately and vigorously leap to their defense, usually by attacking MSNBC (on the often erroneous assumption that anyone who regards Fox as nakedly partisan must be a huge MSNBC fan).

You never see that sort of passionate defense of CNN, CBS, et al., and you rarely see it of MSNBC. It had not occurred to me it could be the result of paid shills. The technique is called “sock puppetry”: pretending to be someone you’re not to bolster a particular point of view or promote a product. It’s a well-known tactic in PR and marketing.

During the dot-com boom of the 1990s, for example, speculators developed a technique called “pump and dump”: anonymously going on influential stock trading message boards to tout a “great, underrated” stock (which the pumper, of course, owned a lot of), driving up the price, then selling it by the bushel basket when it peaked.

More recently, a “sock puppetry” scandal broke out in the publishing world last year when it was revealed that British thriller author RJ Ellory was creating aliases with which to go online and post not just glowing reviews of his own books, but nasty “one-star” reviews on Amazon and other book sites trashing authors with whom he felt he was in competition.

Ellory later apologized, but another Brit author, Stephen Leather, defiantly announced that he’d go online under his own name and under various other names and various other characters. “You build this whole network of characters who talk about your books and sometimes have conversations with yourself,” adding that everyone else does it too. (For the record, I haven’t, and hope I never will.)

Sound crazy? To paraphrase “Chinatown”: Forget about it, Jake. It’s the Internet. What probably surprises some people about the Folkenflik revelations is that a news network (as opposed to a writer trying to flog his own work to a jaded public) is using fake identities and deception to try to promote or defend its brand.

But it really shouldn’t. Not just because it’s Fox News, but because televised news in general is becoming less and less about excellence in reporting, and more and more about marketing and branding, stars and image. Fox is just better at it.

Take, for example, the set — or, as they call it, the “news deck”— that Fox reporter Shepard Smith recently revealed to the public for his show. There are 55-inch touchscreens that can be “put on the air at a moment’s notice”! A 38-foot-long “video wall” upon which Smith can move and shuffle images with what looks like a Wii controller on steroids!

The whole thing looks like Starfleet Central Control. It makes CNN’s absurd election-night coverage, which featured correspondents “beaming in” with a blue haze around them like the Princess Leia hologram in the first “Star Wars” movie, look downright puny.

Which is entirely the point. News isn’t news anymore, and hasn’t been for a long time. It’s what someone long ago dubbed “infotainment.” That’s why so many “analysis” shows are nothing but people yelling crazy, inflammatory crap at each other, and why most reportage of “breaking stories” is a steady stream of rumor, supposition and plain just making stuff up.

News is a commodity, a product, and it’s being marketed like one, with the various sources targeting their various demographics and all the stops — including online sock puppetry — pulled out to sell the product.

Whether the product is all sizzle and no steak is not their concern.

We're Up and Lurching Again

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Well, I know we’re all glad that’s over. The House and the Senate have finally reached both a continuing resolution to keep the government running at current funding levels and a raising of the debt ceiling so we can continue to pay the bills we’ve already run up.

This came about after a small but noisy group of Teahadists decided to take the government and the economy hostage to try to undo the legislative loss they’d suffered when they were unable to defeat the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Once again, they assumed that everyone hated and feared President Obama and his “Care” as much as they did, and once again, they were wrong. Even the people who disliked or distrusted the ACA weren’t, in the final analysis, willing to destroy the country’s credit rating and its already shaky ability to function to magically make it go away.

When it became apparent that the president and the Democrats were, for once, united, and that the legislative process does not include threatening to dynamite the government if a bill you don’t like got passed, the desperate and doomed Teahadists and their hapless enablers in the Republican Party began strutting and raging like Al Pacino’s bumbling bank-robber-turned-hostage-taker playing to the crowd by yelling at the cops outside the bank in the movie “Dog Day Afternoon.”

Some of my favorite (and by “favorite” I mean “I had to laugh to keep from banging my head against the wall”) moments:

— Congressman Marlin Stutzman (R-Kindergarten) fuming, “We’re not going to be disrespected. We have to get something out of this. And I don’t know what that even is.” If you ever needed a quote to perfectly sum up the incoherent, unfocused rage and childish hissyfits that characterize the current American right, there you have it.

— Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert deriding John McCain’s criticism of the Teahadists by saying John McCain (who was a POW) was “a guy that’s been to Syria and supported al-Qaida and the rebels” — followed by McCain’s shrugging off the insult by saying, “If someone has no intelligence, I don’t view it as being a malicious statement.” Zing!

(By the way, there are some people who like to email me to express their outrage that I’m disrespecting Sen. McCain’s military service every time I say something less than complimentary about him. I’m sure you’ll want to express your displeasure to Loony Louie at his website: http:// gohmert.house.gov/contact/. Don’t bother thanking me, I’m here to help.)

— Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham admitting that while the Republicans “overplayed their hand,” he was “frustrated” at the refusal of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the president to negotiate with a gun to their heads.

“This is a very frustrated Lindsey Graham,” he added, “which is a very dangerous thing.” It would have sounded a lot more impressive if Graham didn’t sound like Aunt Pittypat from “Gone With the Wind” when he said it.

— GOP strategist Alex Castellanos likening Ted Cruz’ Quixotic crusade to “having bunny sex” — something that feels good while you’re doing it, but which is ultimately destructive because the population boom leads to an inevitable bust.

To which host Anderson Cooper incredulously asked, “Are you high?” and Castellanos replied: “I wish I was.” (By that time, he wasn’t the only one.) The next night, Cooper showed up with an actual bunny for Castellanos, who thankfully did not try to make a date with it.

— A group protesting the closure of war memorials by marching on the White House and waving Confederate battle flags. 

Because nothing says you love your country more than brandishing the flag of the people who made war on it because they lost an election.

In the end, for all their posturing, the Tealiban got nothing.

 They chose Obamacare as their hill to die on, and die on it they did, but not before costing the U.S. economy an estimated $24 billion (according to Standard and Poor’s).

People who contracted with their government suffered from the delays in contracts and payments. People trying to buy homes with FHA or VA loans found their closings delayed because the personnel needed to verify their incomes were “furloughed.” In short, for one brief moment, the government functioned exactly as it would if the Teabaggers had their way, which is to say barely at all. And people didn’t like it one bit.

So now the government is up and running again. Well, not so much running as lurching and staggering ahead toward the next crisis like an addled drunk who briefly rallies from slumbering in the gutter to make a few hundred more yards of progress toward home before collapsing again under an inviting oak tree, all the while swearing to himself, “I’m never doing this again.” I hope they don’t, but I’m not betting on it.

Make Up Your Minds: Is The ACA Slavery or the Holocaust?

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I’ve noted before how our crowded media environment has led politicians to resort to wilder and wilder rhetoric and crazy hyperbole to try to draw attention to their side.

But I have to say, the current fight over the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) has created some truly grade-A hysteria among its opponents, both on the right and the left.

For instance, Virginia gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli has been fond of using his stump speech to claim that the resistance of some states to implementing the Affordable Care Act is analogous to the states that refused to honor fugitive slave laws in the pre-Civil War period.

Venerable conservative George Will, whom I used to actually respect, parroted what has apparently been distributed via fax, text and email as the latest anti-Obamacare talking point.

“I hear Democrats say, ‘The Affordable Care Act is the law,’” he groused, “as though we’re supposed to genuflect at that sunburst of insight and move on. Well, the Fugitive Slave Act was the law, separate but equal was the law, lots of things are the law, and then we change them.”

New Hampshire State Rep. Bill O’Brien apparently got the memo, too. He called Obamacare “a law as destructive to personal and individual liberty as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, that allowed slave-owners to come to New Hampshire and seize African-Americans.”

To be fair, some on the left are as prone to overheated rhetoric over the ACA as those on the right. Michael Moore, for example, lambasted Obamacare because it didn’t ban the health insurance industry altogether and create a single payer system. “If you’re going to ban slavery,” he said, “ban slavery.”

Yes, because a law that keeps insurance companies from denying you coverage based on pre-existing conditions is exactly like a law requiring that human beings who achieved freedom be returned to owners who would most likely beat them half to death with a bullwhip before castrating them for running away.

And having to have health insurance is exactly like being forced to pick cotton from sunup to sundown, having your wives and daughters subject to rape, and living under constant fear of having your family broken up and sold to someone hundreds of miles away. It’s eerie how similar those two things are.

For some Republicans, however, comparing the ACA with slavery doesn’t create the horror they’re looking for. Nothing will do for them but to equate it with the Holocaust, because after all, nothing makes you look more reasonable and level-headed than the knee-jerk Hitler reference.

“You must buy health insurance or pay the new Gestapo — the IRS,” said Maine Gov. Paul Lepage. Sheryl Nuxoll, a Republican state senator from Idaho, characterized the health care exchanges set up under the ACA as “much like the Jews boarding the trains to concentration camps.”

Ted Cruz, in his famous “Green Eggs and Ham” faux filibuster, compared Republicans who doubted the efficacy of his “defund Obamacare or we shut down the government” strategy to the European powers who rolled over for Hitler in the 1930s.

Yes, because creating an online health care marketplace where people can compare and contract different plans is exactly like forcing people into an unheated cattle car with no room to sit or lie down and no sanitary facilities and taking them hundreds of miles to a hellhole where they’ll be tattooed with numbers on their arms and either worked to death or herded into extermination chambers and asphyxiated en masse with Prussic acid. Those are entirely the same thing.

Here’s the thing about the health care system: You really can’t opt out of it. At some point, you’re going to get sick, and you will receive medical care. We don’t just let sick people die for lack of money, because despite the efforts of the Teahadists, we’re still a civilized country. And if you don’t have the means to pay for it, then the rest of us foot the bill.

While the ACA isn’t perfect, it is one means of making sure that more people have the ability to pay for the medical care they get. It was arrived at by grueling negotiation and multiple compromises, and it was found constitutional by the Supreme Court.

Equating it with slavery or the Holocaust makes you look like the kind of teenage drama queen for whom cleaning her room before she goes out is The End of Life As She Knows It.

Lose the tantrums and grow up.