Still, television was our surrogate: a stunned witness, a black box and also a storybook we needed. This is what it looked like, the Big Pixel, and the mangled steel and broken stone; the brilliant blue, unbearable sorrow, heroes in uniform, stalwart mayor — and an unmooring and a creepiness, as if a CAT scan had suddenly disclosed anomalies as unreadable as Rorschachs. So not even a girdle of oceans was enough to preserve our innocence. Nor could we flee in our Air Jordan running shoes. And what good were laser-beam defense shields against the guided missiles of our own passenger planes?

We gathered as we usually do in a parenthetical frame of mind, somewhere between the trauma and the stress syndrome. We have been there when we were merely curious: an Oscar or a Super Bowl. And when we have felt compelled: the Watergate hearings or the Berlin Wall. On exalted moments, like a moon shot. On dreadful occasions, like an assassination. It’s a fix, and I’m not here to pick and choose among the performance arts of a Rather and a Brokaw and a Jennings. Bad news grays their skin beneath the powder, glooms their eyes staring at the Prompter, slows and thickens their aspect whether they’re wearing a jacket or not — although it often seems that we also see through them, to the pentimento of every other terrible thing that ever happened while they had to sit there like an Easter Island emperor penguin.

I will say that Aaron Brown on CNN was the man I wanted standing on my roof, from whom I’d even buy insurance, while Bill O’Reilly factoring on Fox was a guy I wouldn’t let in to check the Con Ed meter. But then CNN also still has foreign bureaus in those inconvenient places where the strangest people behave as though they have a purchase on history, too — like Kabul, from which only Nic Robertson was seen to be reporting, as only Peter Arnett had reported before him from Baghdad during the Gulf War. On the other hand, there was Larry King, who has never met a ninny who couldn’t wow him. Fruit bats fly into one of his ears and out the other as though there’s nothing there but ether.

But we needed the rapture of the feed. We needed the shadow on the scan. And then the reversion. Before you could say Holy War, the screen filled with the usual pols, and their hierophants and sycophants. Bad enough that we had to listen on every channel to the same spin doctors explaining the same behaviors of a Flying Dutchman president. But we also had to listen to the pols we had booted out of office in previous elections, like the disgraced former dictators in García Márquez’s “Autumn of the Patriarch” waving at the sea as it sails by their retirement home: one last photo op for James Baker, Madeleine Albright, Richard Holbrooke and Dr. Kissinger himself. What we didn’t see — or at least I didn’t, and I have more eyes than most flies — was any meaningful dissent from the tom-toms. End of dialogue.

We are apparently supposed to shut up and eat our spinach. Asking questions, proposing alternatives, making distinctions, arguing analogies, remembering history or criticizing our stand-tall president is for the moment unpatriotic and maybe even unmanly. Wave that flag, stuff that qualm. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that even such “peacenik” leftovers from the Vietnam era as Lee Weiner, one of the Chicago 7, and Stew Alpert, an original Yippie, were all of a sudden in favor of retaliatory violence and “surgical” military strikes. Grace Paley, on the other wonderful hand, suggests in the same article that we bomb Afghanistan with three tons of wheat, rye and rice, since they are starving: “If we do it with a vicious attitude, maybe that will be enough for some people.”

I want to say something about Afghanistan, but in a minute. First this incantation: There can be no grievance that excuses the killing of innocents, either by terrorism or state violence, its Siamese twin. Any cause that does so is corrupt. The murder of children in Belfast, Sarajevo, Rwanda, Beirut or anywhere else is beyond extenuation. Some of the West’s best writers, from Dostoevsky and Conrad and Malraux to Mary McCarthy, Heinrich Boll, Doris Lessing, Alberto Moravia, Nadine Gordimer and Gabriel García Márquez, have tried to read the minds of what Don DeLillo in “Mao II” called “men in small rooms.” All they’ve done is make those minds seem almost as interesting as their own, which of course they aren’t. The kamikazes of Kingdom Come — the skyjackers, land-miners, thumbscrewers, militia-men, death squads and ethnic cleansers; the bombers of department stores, greengrocers and abortion clinics; the Pol Pots, Shining Paths and Talibans — have stupefied themselves.

That said, our intellectual responsibility is to read our own minds. We are, we are told, at war. In wartime in America, civil liberties go out the window. Abe Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. During World War I, Woodrow Wilson’s attorney general pushed an Espionage Act through Congress that kicked socialists out of state legislatures and sent Eugene V. Debs to prison. During World War II, Franklin D. Roosevelt wasn’t at all troubled by the internment of thousands of Americans guilty of nothing else but Japanese descent. Even the Cold War was hard on radical schoolteachers and those government workers who could be blackmailed because they were homosexuals. And the war on drugs has long since undermined constitutional protections against searches and seizures and a dozen other niceties of due process.

Let’s hope a war on Osama bin Laden and his cancer cells is more successful than the war on coke and smack, although the difficulties seem at least as onerous and the prosecution is likely to last even longer. (“Infinite Justice,” indeed. Well, to “rid the world of evil” takes a while. And perhaps one should be grateful we stopped calling it a Crusade.) But already 115 individuals are being held by federal authorities under the notoriously permissive gunslinger bylaws of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, without charges, bail or even lawyers. (When in recent history have we seen so few lawyers, fetishizing an antiquated Bill of Rights?)

Already Congress is falling all over itself to give Attorney General John Ashcroft most of what he wants in roving wiretap legislation (cellphones having complicated the warrant-getting process), e-mail and other Internet peeping rights, detention and deportation of aliens based on secret evidence, and a gutting of statutes of limitation, not to mention the unleashing of the CIA to hire its own gang of thugs and to resume assassinating foreign leaders we don’t like.

And already the cry goes up for a technological deliverance from our grief and insecurity by the “biometrics” of fingerprinting, voice recognition, retinal scans and racial profiling, not only at airports, but at train stations, sports stadiums, parks, schools and reservoirs. Plus of course a national electronic ID “smart” card, capable of tracking our criminal history, our bodily motions, our financial transactions, and our driving speed. Previous “wartime” abridgements of freedom have been temporary, but will Infinite Justice mean Permanent Surveillance? Somebody besides Congresswoman Barbara Lee must ask these questions. And why haven’t I see her on network or cable television?

Now about Afghanistan: Readers of Salon, in particular, and surfers of the Web, in general, know a lot more about the subject than watchers of television, unless the TV watchers happened to catch a sympathetic segment on “CBS News Sunday Morning.” But on Friday, Sept. 14, Tamim Ansary, an Afghan writer of delightful children’s books who happens to live in Berkeley, Calif., posted a cri de coeur that has since been published in Salon and forwarded to tens of thousands of e-mail sites. He hates bin Laden and the Taliban equally. But he argues that a bombing attack will only kill women and children, including 500,000 orphans from all the previous wars. How then to snuff the mastermind? Ground troops, obviously. But these would have to advance from Pakistan, where bin Laden’s sort of fundamentalists are perhaps stronger than the government. Which in turn could mean a fight to the death between Islam and the West, exactly what bin Laden lusts for.

Imagine Tamim Ansary talking to Larry King.

There are indications that Secretary of State Colin Powell, if not any of the talking heads on television, may share these apprehensions. But even as I type, two dozen heavy bombers are circling what we think of as the crime scene and the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, with 70 attack planes, has left Virginia for an undisclosed location. I wish each pilot could read not only Ansary’s anguished essay but also a Sept. 15 Internet communiqué from RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, the underground feminist organization that has braved the wrath of the Taliban by teaching its own children and by smuggling out videotapes of executions to Western news outlets. RAWA asks us, please, to differentiate between the people of Afghanistan (70 percent women and children) and “a handful of fundamentalist terrorists.”

But that’s impossible, from an aircraft carrier or a bomber or the little blue fox full of Bill O’Reilly. It’s especially impossible if nobody talks straight to us in the mainstream media. It’s almost as though we don’t need any legislation to curtail our dangerous civil liberties. Stunned by grief, we’ve shut ourselves up. If the ultimate contemptuous purpose of terrorism is to dominate and humiliate — to turn citizens into lab rats and cities into mazes — then bin Laden may have already won this round, because we seem to have acquiesced into playing his favorite game: bloodbath.

And what, precisely, were Cameron’s bold remarks? When prodded on the subject of same-sex marriage on Morgan’s CNN show, the Christianity-themed movie star and father of six said that “I believe that marriage was defined by God a long time ago…. Do I support the idea of gay marriage? No, I don’t.” And when Morgan asked if he thought homosexuality was a sin, Cameron hedged a bit, refusing to use the word “sin” but declaring, “It’s unnatural, it’s detrimental and ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization.” Maybe “sin” would have been a nicer way of putting it.

Cameron’s remarks — along with his assertion that if one his children came out to him, “I would say … just because you feel one way doesn’t mean you need to act everything you feel” — were not greeted with universal applause. Over the weekend, GLAAD started a petition to “Tell Kirk Cameron it’s time to finally grow up,” calling him “out of step with a growing majority of Americans, particularly people of faith who believe that their gay and lesbian brothers and sisters should be loved and accepted based on their character and not condemned because of their sexual orientation.” Perez Hilton, speaking for much of the Twitterverse, referred to the interview as a “spew” of “homophobia and bigotry.” But as Hilton notes – and anyone familiar with Cameron’s hyper-evangelical ways would likely agree – “Did anyone really expect less from him?”

That’s where Morgan comes in. He knew exactly what a guy who’s currently on a “marriage tour” — and shilling a new documentary that says that “something is sick in the soul of our country” – would say. It was not going to sound like the lyrics to a Lady Gaga song. Accepting a person’s right to say things, even stupid things, isn’t the same as condoning them. Speaking to TMZ, Morgan described Cameron’s statements as what many would argue is “an antiquated view” and asserted, “I think that you can take the biblical thing too far.” On CNN, Morgan told Cameron directly that if one of his own children admitted that he was gay, “I would say, ‘That’s great, son, as long as you’re happy.’”

Unlike the even-more-loathsome Rush Limbaugh, Cameron wasn’t going out of his way to personally attack an individual, or to denigrate anybody in the name of a repulsive stab at humor. He was just answering a question. Morgan is correct in his assessment that Cameron’s response was an authentic one, and that there is a kind of bravery in that. It doesn’t make that kind of thinking good or right or decent, any more than it makes Morgan less of a hack for noting it. We may be demoralized by Cameron’s answer, and rightly decide that such rhetoric needs to be challenged. We can refuse to support his films. But in the fight against intolerance and hypocrisy, what we can’t do is ask a man a question point blank — and then be outraged when he answers it truthfully. All we can do is fervently hope that with the right amount of tolerant persuasiveness, one day he might be able to give a different one.

BLITZER’S BLOG: It’s going to get nasty!

By Wolf Blitzer, CNN
(CNN) – If you think it’s been a rough ride for the Republican candidates during this current campaign season, just wait. This will be seen as child’s play once the general election campaign begins.

I’ve said this before but I’ll say it again: the war of words between President Obama and his campaign supporters versus the eventual Republican nominee and his supporters will be fierce.

Even though there has already been a lot of talking and stuff happening during this political campaign, you won’t believe how much additional talking and arguing there will be as it continues. I have said in the past that Barack Obama and the person running against him will say things at and about each other, and I am saying it again. Things will be said.

If you think Wolf Blitzer’s blog post about the intensity of this campaign is finished, just wait. He quotes three lines from last night’s debate, then writes four more one-sentence paragraphs:

And that’s just for starters. Just wait for what’s coming.

By the way, the president and his supporters will not be shy in fighting back.

And like the Republicans, they will have hundreds of millions of dollars to finance attack ads.

Get ready for a brutal political season.

I am, Wolf! I am!

THIS JUST IN TO THE SITUATION ROOM: Every other political blogger has retired from political blogging to curate Pinterests about sandwiches instead, because Wolf Blitzer just made our jobs redundant.

The only remaining question is whether Wolf Blitzer is a better blogger than his Fox counterpoint in incisive online commentary, Greta Van Susteren. As long as CNN insists on “copy editing” Blitzer, we may never know for sure.

Grace, the woman who has made an entire cottage industry out of her indignation over Casey Anthony, who paints herself nightly as the avenging angel of poor dead Caylee, has never been one to trade in subtlety — or, for that matter, facts. CNN had to settle a wrongful death suit after the mother of a missing child killed herself after being browbeaten on her show. (The parties agreed that Grace “engaged in no intentional wrongdoing.”) She fearlessly championed the prosecution’s side in the Duke lacrosse team rape case, blithely referring to “the victim,” and went ballistic over the very notion that the accused might be innocent. (She then conveniently remained quiet on the subject after the case was dismissed.) This, folks, is a woman who has guilt-tripped abduction victim Elizabeth Smart for not playing along with her interview tactics. And even after a jury found Casey Anthony not guilty last summer, she has held on to the story like a dog with a bone, insisting that “I told the truth,” luxuriating in descriptions of “the backdrop of 2-year-old Caylee’s decomposing body just a few houses down from where Tot Mom put her pillow every night,” and excoriating Anthony for – rich irony alert –“generating interest in herself.”

Yet apparently there just aren’t enough kidnapped babies and alleged gang rapes out there to keep Grace satisfied. She’s turning her attention now instead to the mysterious death of a diva. Grace, who famously said last summer that she knew more than the “kooky jury” on the Anthony case, now seems to know more than the L.A. coroner’s office. Despite word that foul play is “not suspected at this time” in Saturday’s death of Whitney Houston, Grace isn’t so sure. On Monday she appeared on CNN to ponder, “Who, if anyone, gave [Houston] drugs following alcohol and drugs.” That itself isn’t a crazy question, though it is a bit of a reach – a suggestion that the story of a superstar dying alone and surrounded by prescription bottles just isn’t sexy enough. Not when surely there’s a villain on the loose for Nancy Grace to bring to justice. Cue dramatic theme music!

Medical accountability is to be considered whenever someone dies who may have had drugs administered to him or her. Just ask physician Conrad Murray, who was convicted of involuntary manslaughter in the death of Michael Jackson. But where Grace, in her totally Nancy Grace-like way, went totally bananas was when she asked, “Who let her slip or pushed her underneath that water? … Who let Whitney Houston go under that water?” Uhhhhhmm… Whitney Houston?

The sad desperation of news networks, and their flailing competitiveness in a glut of information overload, is rarely pretty to watch. But Grace isn’t just some blowhard, saying provocative things to get a rise out of the viewership. She’s a full-on loose cannon, a disseminator of disinformation and an ego gone rogue. That CNN and its sister network HLN continue to permit her to spew her wild speculations, to proudly flaunt her flat-out contempt for the facts as they are known, and to engage in character assassination long after a not guilty verdict has been rendered in a court of law, is blatant and arrogant recklessness. Unchecked, how long before Grace decides she knows who “pushed” Houston under the water? How long before she’s on another crusade, deciding who is a victim and who is a perpetrator? How long before a real criminal investigation or trial is tainted because of her nightly yammering?

After her jaw-dropping segment Monday, CNN anchor Don Lemon had to leap into fire-dousing mode, issuing a hasty reminder that “This is not CNN’s reporting. We don’t know that to be true.” Here’s a crazy idea – you shouldn’t be talking about things you don’t know to be true on a network with the word “news” right there in the middle of it. And CNN shouldn’t continue to provide a platform to a woman whose self-interest makes a mockery of journalistic credibility.

Politicians, you see, should be admired, because even though they are by and large rich, they still work very hard, every couple years. So says Wolf Blitzer in his essay on politicians, “I admire politicians, by Wolf Blitzer.”

Most of them already have lots of money. They could easily coast at this point in their lives and sit back and relax.

Instead, they are working hard on the campaign trail.

Sometimes people have to do stuff they don’t want to do, unless they have a lot of money. Usually people with a lot of money like to play golf, because playing golf is more fun than going to work. If a person with a lot of money goes to work, he must like work a lot. Even though sometimes work is hard:

I’ve seen them in action, and it’s tough. They get up early in the morning and go to sleep late at night. They have to deliver the same stump speech over and over and over again, and then answer an endless amount of often annoying questions at town hall meetings, at diners and from reporters such as me.

Next time you think about criticizing a politician, step back and think about how early he woke up this morning, and how many times he had to give a boring speech. He might have even had to deal with Wolf Blitzer! Now don’t you feel guilty?

Blitzer hits his main theme — it’s admirable that politicians actually get out of bed and do things even though they are rich — once more and names the politicians he is specifically saluting:

Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich, Jon Huntsman, Ron Paul and Rick Perry could have taken the easy path and relaxed and enjoyed life. Instead of playing golf and hanging out with their children and grandchildren, they are working hard trying to get the Republican presidential nomination. In the process, they are bitterly attacked – often for good reason.

In their pursuit of more power these already powerful men have allowed themselves to be scrutinized and even occasionally criticized, which is quite a sacrifice.

This salute to politicians even ends in the most perfectly CNN-y way possible, by presenting two vague and conflicting viewpoints and refusing to adjudicate between them:

Why do they do it?

I know what they say. They say they are interested in public service and want to help the American people. They say they believe in what they are trying to achieve.

The cynics say they have huge egos and are simply seeking power and glory.

That is certainly true of some politicians.

But having covered many of them over the years, I also know some are trying to do the right thing, and I salute them.

“Some say politicians are power-hungry narcissists, others say they are noble public servants. Both sides could be part right, some of the time, most likely.”

The sole disappointing aspect of Blitzer’s salute is that it includes no musical tribute.

[Via Glenn Greenwald]

In a new video — ostensibly recorded in October but which did not emerge until Thursday — a now blond, bobbed and bespectacled Anthony narrates a four-minute “diary” entry about her new life. She says she’s “extremely excited” about her future and new computer – being able to Skype, take pictures, and “finally have something that I can finally call mine.” What she doesn’t mention? The child she used to call her own.

Though Anthony, still on probation in Florida, makes no mention of her exact location, her parents said Thursday they were “concerned” the video might endanger her. It has definitely stirred up the usual outrage from the most predictable mouthpieces. In other words, CNN is stoked. For Nancy Grace, the video has been like a late Christmas present, an opportunity to froth like she hasn’t frothed about “two-year old Caylee’s decomposing body” since last summer. Trotting out her favorite nickname for Anthony, Grace opined that “I think this is very simply Tot Mom Casey Anthony and her lawyers, possibly, injecting themselves back in the national media because nobody’s touching her offer for a paid-for interview with a 10-foot pole.” She added that: “It’s all about Tot Mom… generating interest in herself.” Dr. Drew Pinsky, meanwhile, eagerly pointed out her “narcissism and … issues of judgment.”

Out in the wider world, meanwhile, the public reaction has been mostly an excuse for another outpouring of revulsion against the lady one MSNBC commenter called “the most hated person in the U.S.A.” Also unsurprising — and straight-up gross — is that Anthony has her fair share of rabid admirers. On the shudderingly self-proclaimed “#1 Casey Anthony Fan site,” reaction toward the “smokin’ hottie” and her video has been considerably warmer. Or, as one commenter put it, “I would love to rock your world sometime.”

But why did the video emerge now, and who is Anthony really communicating with? Is this a public statement or truly a private “diary”? Anthony’s lawyers told a Florida Fox affiliate that “Casey has maintained some notes on her thoughts for personal use, especially for counseling. She did not release this video to YouTube and does not know how they got it. It could not have been legally obtained and was not authorized.” And John Riley, the man who runs a “Boycott Casey Anthony” Facebook group and first posted the clip, told Nancy Grace Thursday that he found the clip on a few pay-per-view sites and “kept looking and looking and looking” until he found it for free. He says he posted it “so there would be no money made off it.” Try to get your head around the idea of someone clawing doggedly around the Internet for four minutes of what Anthony  promises “will be as tedious as my audio recordings have been” and you begin to appreciate the apparently endless fascination this woman still holds.

Anthony’s “tedious” four minutes don’t reveal much about the inner workings of someone found not guilty of killing her daughter. They do seem in line with thoughts of someone recently released from jail – the simple relief of having one’s own possessions, the pleasure of having a dog. And she might well be circumspect about talking about her child and her trial, even on a supposedly private “video log,” if her lawyers have coached her to be. So is her video a case study in narcissism, a private moment from a “smokin’ hottie,” or just personal thoughts before a counseling session? The answer is simple. It’s whatever you already thought. Though Casey Anthony says, “Things can only get better,” minds aren’t changed as easily as hair color. “It’s surreal how things have changed since July,” she declares at one point in the clip. Then she adds, as if speaking for both herself and everyone watching, “and how many things haven’t.”