Gene Lyons

Alas, the duo’s leaden humor only underscores their own devotion to gossip, trivia and Beltway conventional wisdom. For example, what’s funny about the “public option” in health insurance? If he doesn’t get his way, Dr. Howard Dean might scream again. Ha, ha, hah. In short, Dean, silly man, may actually give a damn.

Meanwhile, what makes Milbank scream? A breach in decorum: a commoner treated as a member of the Beltway peerage. During President Obama’s recent press conference, he invited a question from one Nico Pitney, a blogger with Huffington Post, a liberal-leaning Web site. Somebody at the White House had noticed that Pitney was in regular contact with Iranian protesters.

“I know that there may actually be questions from people in Iran who are communicating through the Internet,” Obama said. “Do you have a question?”

Indeed Pitney did, as he’d been invited to the press conference for exactly that purpose. It turned out to be a tough one: “Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad? And if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn’t that a betrayal of what the demonstrators there are working towards?”

Almost needless to say, Obama ducked it, declining to pronounce upon the legitimacy of Iran’s government. The White House believes that doing so would lend credence to the regime’s false claim that the protesters are American stooges.

Even so, Pitney’s question did succeed in dramatizing the administration’s unwillingness to take sides, conveying to Iranians who’d urged him to ask Obama exactly how things stood. They’re on their own.

Milbank was nevertheless infuriated. A mere blogger had been recognized at court. In a column that neglected to quote Pitney’s question or Obama’s answer, he railed at the impropriety: “Reporters looked at one another in amazement at the stagecraft they were witnessing … The use of planted questioners is a no-no at presidential news conferences, because it sends a message to the world — Iran included — that the American press isn’t as free as advertised. But yesterday wasn’t so much a news conference as it was a taping of a new daytime drama, ‘The Obama Show.’”

Merciful heavens, stagecraft at the White House? Surely not. In a face-off on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” Milbank continued to allege, based on zero evidence, that Pitney’s question was scripted by the White House. He’d have been more convincing in his “Mouthpiece Theater” outfit.

The young man gave as good as he got, mocking Milbank for wasting his own face time with the president chatting about Obama’s svelte appearance in a bathing suit. Altogether, it was not one of journalism’s finest moments.

Next, Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth got caught acting like an impoverished British aristocrat selling tours of the ancestral manse. Specifically, a promotional flier sent out by the newspaper offered lobbyists an “underwriting opportunity” to purchase exclusive dinner parties at her home attended by Post editors and reporters, members of Congress, White House officials and other “stakeholders” in public issues.

“Be at this nexus of business and policy with your underwriting of Washington Post Salons,” the brochure urged. Conversation, it promised, would be strictly off-the-record. “Spirited? Yes. Confrontational? No.” The first gathering, expected to raise as much as $250,000 for the newspaper’s bottom line, was scheduled for July 21. The topic du jour would be healthcare. In short, the newspaper promised “an exclusive opportunity to participate in the healthcare reform debate among the select few who will actually get it done.”

Ah, the select few. It wasn’t immediately clear if Lord Milbank would attend. No sooner did the upstart Politico.com learn of this exclusive soiree than the newsroom erupted, editor Marcus Brauchli thundered that, “You cannot buy access to a Washington Post journalist.” Publisher Weymouth, who inherited the job from her late grandmother Katharine Graham, blamed the whole thing on an overly enthusiastic marketing executive, doubtless a fellow of low and peasant birth.

© 2009 by Gene Lyons. Distributed by Newspaper Enterprise Assn.

Exponentially dumb because it could set the entire Middle East aflame.

You’d think the Israelis, of all people, would recognize that threatening a people with death and destruction hardens their resolve. Yet the New York Times reports that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “told visitors that he believes the Tehran government to be deeply unpopular, indeed despised, and that a careful attack on its nuclear facilities might even be welcomed by Iranian citizens.”

Yes, and Dick Cheney predicted that U.S. forces invading Iraq would be greeted with candy and flowers. “Most analysts [in Jerusalem] and abroad,” the Times noted cautiously, “take a different view.” Indeed, historical examples of civilian populations cheering on aerial bombardments are rare, if not nonexistent. Despite his and Cheney’s obvious affinities, one would expect Netanyahu to be made of saner stuff.

Assuming that the Israeli prime minister’s motives for threatening a unilateral Israeli strike against Iranian nuclear facilities are as reported. I suspect they are not. To put it bluntly, it’s not so much the regime in Tehran that Netanyahu is keen to destabilize as the one in Washington. The question now is how far he’s willing to take it.

Despite media chatter about “red lines” being crossed, it’s hard to point to anything the Iranians have done to provoke the current crisis. They’ve been trash-talking since 1979. Otherwise, no Iranian armies are massing. With its navy badly outgunned in the Persian Gulf, and a vestigial air force scarcely capable of defending against Israeli bombers, Iran sits surrounded by U.S. bases in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan — well, everywhere.

Iran’s last military action of any consequence was its catastrophic 1980s war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, during which it suffered more than a million dead. The Persians haven’t actually invaded anybody for more than 300 years. The Shiite regime’s expanded regional influence came about as an unintended consequence of the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

For what it’s worth, the Ayatollahs deny any intention of attacking the “Zionist Entity”— despite frequently wishing that it would vanish from the earth. Even Iranian clients Hezbollah and Hamas have been mostly quiet. With Iran’s economy faltering under economic sanctions engineered by the Obama administration, and much of its population seething with resentment amid an acrimonious feud between President Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Khameni, the Tehran regime’s got all it can do to survive, much less to start a suicidal conflict with Israel — not to mention the United States.

But when articles invoking the Holocaust and urging “creative destruction” in Iran appear on the same day (Feb. 7) in the Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and Bloomberg News, a skeptical observer might be forgiven for suspecting a well-coordinated propaganda campaign.

Writing in Beirut-based Al-Akhbar, American journalist Max Blumenthal dates its inception to a Jan. 3 article in Israel Hayom revealing that Israel’s National Security Council — basically Netanyahu’s closest political allies — had concluded that “U.S. President Barack Obama is ‘naive’” and fails to understand Israel’s precarious position. Deemed a Likud Party organ, the newspaper is owned by multibillionaire Las Vegas casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson, who bankrolls Netanyahu and serves as Newt Gingrich’s Sugar Daddy too.

Netanyahu appears to see an Obama second term as an impediment to further Israeli expansion into the West Bank — or “Judea” and “Samaria,” as Likudniks style it — and has cast his lot with the Republican right. He’s made public appearances with notables like Glenn Beck and “End Times” evangelist John Hagee. Adelson himself has pledged his vast resources to Obama’s defeat.

In his State of the Union speech, President Obama reiterated his determination to prevent Iran’s getting nuclear weapons. He said he was “taking no options off the table.” But he also expressed hope that international sanctions could lead to a peaceful resolution.

On cue, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen called this “startlingly naïve.” Only a fool or a Frenchman, the same pundit once opined, could doubt the existence of Saddam Hussein’s WMD. Bombs away!

President Obama also reportedly dispatched Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey to Israel to warn Netanyahu that if he tries to force the United States’ hand, he’s on his own.

But can he make it stick?

For his sake and everybody else’s, he’d better.

I’ve never thought any Chicago politician could possibly be so naive. Rather, Obama appeared to be an opportunistic shape-shifter like most successful candidates, enacting the pose of healer to set him apart first from Hillary Clinton, then Sen. John McCain — two figures hopelessly identified with the Washington trench warfare most Americans had grown heartily sick of. A fresh face, a proverbial outsider. “Mr. Hopey-Changey,” as an embittered Clinton supporter of my acquaintance called him.

So here we are, three years down the road. President Obama’s no longer a fresh face, Washington infighting has never been fiercer, nor Republican intransigence and recriminations any more bitter. “Predictions that Obama would usher in a new era of post-partisan consensus politics,” writes the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, “now seem not just naïve but delusional.”

Yet even as he’s disappointed liberals by yielding to GOP budgetary demands — extending the Bush tax cuts, and capitulating during last summer’s farcical debt limit hostage crisis — Republicans have responded by attacking him in ever more hysterical terms. Washington Post pecksniff George Will, who hosted a January 2009 dinner party introducing Obama to conservative pundits, now accuses the president of “Lenin-Socialism.”

The Post’s Charles Krauthammer reacted to Obama’s 2009 State of the Union speech by decrying “a shrunken presidency, thoroughly flummoxed by high unemployment, economic stagnation [and] crushing debt,” yet compared him a few sentences later to Mao Tse-Tung. This for the sin of calling for “equality and fairness.” You know, like the Sermon on the Mount.

Sometimes, you wonder what these boys are smoking. Whatever else you’d call Chairman Mao, you wouldn’t call him ineffectual.

If anything, Obama’s GOP political rivals have gone even further off the deep end. Mitt Romney has this passage in his stump speech where he all but accuses the president of being a communist.

“President Obama,” Romney insists, “believes that government should create equal outcomes. In an entitlement society, everyone receives the same or similar rewards, regardless of education, effort and willingness to take risk. That which is earned by some is redistributed to the others. And the only people who truly enjoy any real rewards are those who do the redistributing — the government.”

This when the multimillionaire Wall Street investment banker isn’t accusing hecklers of envying his wealth — rarely a successful political tactic, in my experience.

“This is nuts, Glenn Beck-level insane,” writes New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait. “Restoring Clinton-era taxes is not a plan to equalize outcomes, or even close. It’s not even a plan to stop rising inequality. Obama’s America will continue to be the most unequal society in the advanced world — only slightly less so.”

So is it possible that driving Republicans crazy is Obama’s deepest political strategy of all? His key to reelection in 2012? In Newsweek, Andrew Sullivan argues that’s precisely the case: that having inherited an economy in near-catastrophic free fall — losing jobs at a rate of 750,000 a month in early 2009 — problems he knew couldn’t be fixed overnight, President Obama has been playing a “long game” all along.

That is, thinking in terms of eight years rather than four, and employing a Zen-like strategy that makes him appear to the untrained eye incapable of defending himself. Time and again, Sullivan tells us “the president begins by extending a hand to his opponents; when they respond by raising a fist, he demonstrates that they are the source of the problem; then, finally, he moves to his preferred position of moderate liberalism and fights for it without being effectively tarred as an ideologue or a divider.”

Fair enough. But this isn’t the genius-level strategy of a political savant; it’s how a good poker player thinks. Play the cards you’re dealt, not the ones you wish you had. One hand at a time. To anybody not hypnotized by the Hopey-Changey business, President Obama’s never been anything else: a pragmatic mainstream Democrat, more Bill Clinton than, say, Dennis Kucinich.

As for Republicans, the Bush administration’s epic failures confronted them with two options: fold or double-down on ideology.

Most simply pushed all their chips onto the table.

Ah, but there were deeper passions at play in South Carolina. So let’s switch metaphors. Judging by the whooping and hollering of the CNN debate audience, the GOP’s neo-Confederate wing wishes for nothing less than an electoral replay of Pickett’s charge — the doomed infantry attack at Gettysburg most historians believe marked the beginning of the end of the Civil War. A sizable proportion of South Carolinians have yearned for a rematch ever since.

And they don’t think they’re going to get it with Mitt Romney, a Yankee’s Yankee who goes around babbling passionless truisms like this gem unearthed from his standard stump speech by the National Review’s Mark Steyn:

“I believe in an America where millions of Americans believe in an America that’s the America millions of Americans believe in. That’s the America I love.”

Do what? (That’s Southern for what the hell?)

Romney’s not only a dead ringer for Sesame Street’s puppet anchorman Guy Smiley, but could probably have switched places with CNN’s John King without missing a beat. To Gingrich supporters, Steyn observes, he comes across as “a synthetic, stage-managed hollow man of no fixed beliefs.”

There’s little sign of anger in his personality. But then why would there be? The son of a failed candidate, Romney gives every indication of wanting to be president simply because, well, he deserves to be president.

To a GOP base bombarded with Manichaean propaganda depicting President Obama as a veritable antichrist, that may not be good enough. They don’t simply want to prevent Obama’s reelection. They want to see him obliterated, humiliated and shamed. Watching Gingrich verbally pummel Fox’s Juan Williams and CNN’s King — antagonists who, by definition, can’t fight back — sharpened their appetite to see him take on Obama.

Republican debate audiences that have boisterously cheered Texas’ use of the death penalty, booed a gay soldier serving in Iraq, hooted at Fox News’ Williams for asking about racially stereotyping food stamp recipients, and even applauded torture, appear to find Gingrich’s surliness and ill-concealed personal resentments a perfect match for their own. Newt’s ability to channel their anger resembles Richard M. Nixon’s, albeit without Nixon’s self-discipline.

Fox News’ Steve Doocy spoke for them all, predicting that, if nominated, “Newt is going to take off the head of the president” (lovely metaphor) in debates. Many actually believe that Newt’s a brilliant extemporaneous thinker like Rush Limbaugh, while Obama’s an affirmative action hire who’s helpless without his teleprompter.

Meanwhile, back in reality, the saner kinds of Republicans are running scared. The Washington Post’s George Will empathizes with GOP candidates who could find themselves “running next autumn with Gingrich — whose current approval rating nationally in a Jan. 12-14 Fox News and Opinion Dynamics poll was 27 percent favorable, 56 percent unfavorable — atop the ticket.”

The very decorous Ms. Coulter laments that “South Carolinians would rather have the emotional satisfaction of a snotty remark toward the president than to beat Obama in the fall.” The scholarly author of “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America” explains that the GOP nominee can’t win over independent voters simply by calling the president bad names. Now she tells us.

Conservative talk show host Michael Medved cautions that “for swing voters and independents, Gingrich’s reference to ‘Obama’s secular-socialist machine’… may sound extreme and irresponsible; few of them would agree with his conclusion that the current president represents a greater threat to the nation than Nazism or Soviet communism.” He adds that “the current craving for an intense and impassioned candidate” would likely backfire in the general election.

You know things are crazy when Ann Coulter starts making sense. I think even the perception that Newt could get under Obama’s skin is badly mistaken. In a presidential debate, the guy sweating and glowering is the guy losing. The sorehead right, however, won’t believe it until they’ve lost the visceral confrontation they so crave.

In that sense, a Gingrich nomination could end up being very good for the country.

Mencken could recall no such excitement. “The unanimous opinion of all the journalists that I know, excluding a few Liberals who are obviously somewhat balmy,” he added “… is that since the days of the national Thors and Wotans, no politician who was not out for himself, and himself alone, has ever drawn the breath of life in the United States.”

Alas, such attitudes went out of fashion with snap-brim fedoras, smoke-filled rooms and bottles of rye in desk drawers. Today’s national political reporters have attended fancy colleges, regard their professional affiliations as valuable status symbols, hence give every sign of identifying more with Washington courtiers and political professionals than the great unwashed.

To the extent they may share Mencken’s exuberant disdain for hoodwinker and hoodwinked alike, ambitious reporters are well-advised to keep it to themselves. As a career strategy, thoughtful circumspection is advised. The uphill path to a sinecure on “Meet the Press” must be trodden carefully.

Many readers, for example, can probably identify a name-brand journalist such as Judith Miller, who fell into disrepute for parroting Bush administration propaganda about Saddam Hussein’s WMD. But can you name anybody whose skeptical reporting made them famous? No, you cannot.

Columnists have more leeway, but even there it’s safer (and easier) to stick to anodyne topics such as dorky clothes, bad hair, which candidate resembles what character in “Pride and Prejudice,” and who mistreats his dog. To me, it’s significant that an honorable exception like Paul Krugman — my nominee for progressive MVP — is not a product of newsroom culture.

So now comes New York Times “public editor” Arthur Brisbane with maybe the most disingenuous question of the year: Should Times reporters be “truth vigilantes”? When politicians lie, should reporters call them out?

And if so, how?

Brisbane’s two columns on the subject drew widespread astonishment and hilarity from readers and journalists alike — partly because journalists love talking about ourselves as much as the average Hollywood starlet. They also drew a sharp rebuke from Times editor Jill Abramson, who insisted that the “kind of rigorous fact-checking and truth-testing you describe is a fundamental part of our job as journalists.”

Abramson gave instances of the newspaper supplying proper context for politicians’ statements such as Mitt Romney’s preposterous charge that President Obama wants “to replace our merit-based society with an entitlement society.” (Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge. Know what he means?) She said that the Times reported that “the largest entitlement programs — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid — were all enacted before Mr. Obama entered grade school.”

Of course, that’s not what Romney’s really saying. Look, as somebody who spent more than a decade waging a quixotic war of words against the New York Times over its role in the Whitewater hoax, the subsequent “War on Gore,” and its shameful (and acknowledged) role in “catapulting the propaganda” that led the U.S. to invade Iraq, I have two observations.

First, the Times has rebounded since those dark days of 2003. Far less unmediated government propaganda and make-believe scandal characterizes its news columns. Abramson’s 2011 appointment as executive editor gives further reason for optimism.

Second, the answer to Brisbane’s real question — exactly how reporters are supposed to go about calling Mitt Romney a liar — has no good answer. Because the more forcefully it’s done, the more the GOP candidate’s apt to like it.

Take Romney’s oft-repeated charge that Obama goes around apologizing for America. The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler did this one to a fare-thee-well, showing conclusively that the allegation is completely false — an absurd mix of misrepresented circumstances, doctored quotes, etc. And it took him 1,800 words.

And who read them? Certainly nobody who’d already swallowed the lie on Fox News, Rush Limbaugh or any of a hundred right-wing websites. So the Washington Post says it’s a lie. Well, they would, wouldn’t they? The Times agrees? Even better.

Romney’s not talking to reporters, but over and through them, seeking not nuanced news stories, but five-second video clips and TV ads. Reporters who ask confrontational questions can be ignored, or worse, made characters in the story. Well-paid operatives can make their editors’ lives miserable.

The uncomfortable truth is that no newspaper today has the power and moral authority the New York Times so thoughtlessly squandered, and it ain’t coming back. Obama will have to defend himself.

Of course, so can any president. But hold that thought.

Meanwhile, anybody who questions the character and judgment of a politician who until fairly recently peddled “The Original Famous Ron Paul Survival Kit” in his eponymous newsletter isn’t playing fair.

How it worked was you sent them a check or money order in (doomed) U.S. currency, and they sent you a WWII Army ammo box filled with silver coins for “hand-to-hand” commerce after U.N. troops have seized control of the United States. Back when I was a lad, you could only get bargains like that from tiny ads in the back pages of DC Comics.

But I digress. Hasn’t the Great Man renounced the race baiting and conspiracy mongering in the newsletter he supposedly never read?

“Just kidding!” Paul said. You know, like a junior high school girl.

I’m like, whatever.

But at least one aspect of the pro-Paul argument is worth unpacking further if only to show why embracing his candidacy is such a terrible idea. I take Glenn Greenwald’s point that nobody ever gets exactly what they want in a political candidate. To anybody not completely blinded by partisanship, there are always tradeoffs to be made, tactical silences to be observed, and fools to be suffered, if not gladly, at least without rancor.

To me, at least, the futile and destructive Drug War is one such. It’s like Roaring Twenties all over again, only worse. Alas, no Democrat, and certainly no black or Latino Democrat, can afford to touch it. So Obama gets a pass.

Anybody who tries can probably come up with a dozen examples of his own. Sometimes, you’ve just got to hold your nose and vote.

But let’s talk war and peace, as Paul boosters insist.

Recently, I wrote about Paul’s apostasy regarding Iran. In a GOP debate, Paul aptly compared election-year bombast about the alleged Iranian nuclear threat to the 2003 propaganda campaign that drove the U.S. to invade Iraq.

“Even when he’s right, as on bombing Iran,” I wrote, “he’s wrong. (Hint: it’s about the Jews.)”

Numerous Paul loyalists angrily seconded the motion. “Have you ever questioned,” one wrote, “why Jews pop up in every major national swindle and tragedy:  9/11, TARP, Wall Street swindles, AIPAC, illegal wars, Goldman Sachs, The FED, ADAA, financial crises, etc?  It is not a real conspiracy because they are doing it in plain sight … I think you are either a traitor or just another dumb American.”

Nice, huh? While he’s often cagey about how he expresses it, Ron Paul’s whole history as a conspiracy theorist is right out of the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” — the 19th century forgery that’s kept anti-Semites buzzing for generations.

Here’s a second thinker in the Paul tradition: “Zionists dominate many of the world’s centers of power, wealth, and media … plundering the wealth and assets of nations … depriving peoples of their freedoms and destroying their cultures and human values by spreading their nexus of corruption.”

Actually, that’s Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also a sometime Holocaust denier, in a speech at Tehran’s Sharif University in 2009.

Reader Mel Birge of Portland, Ore., argues that’s precisely why Paul makes such a terrible spokesman. Complaining of “sitting in synagogue for the last dozen years listening to pseudo Middle East experts give the same frantic talk about the danger of Iran nukes and how the U.S. must stop it,” he believes such a war “is no way in the United States’ interest.”

But he also thinks Paul’s “anti-Semitic paranoia allows AIPAC, the neocons and their fellow travelers to paint the entire Iran war opposition with the Ron Paul brush. That’s the danger of Ron Paul that you should speak of:  He snuffs out substantive discussions on Iran.  The media feasts on him and the neocons love it because he’s his own straw man.”

I think that’s exactly right.

However, Birge also wonders, “Where’s Obama saying, ‘I was elected on getting us out of Middle East wars. I’m not starting another’?”

Well, we’ll see, won’t we?