Good Night and Good Luck

About midway through the evening last night I realized that it was a Fuck You Friday. This morning I thought differently about it. It was still a Fuck You Friday, but one differently intoned.

Midway into his show on Friday, Keith Olbermann was informed that that edition of Countdown would be his last. The agreement to end the show had been more or less finalized late in the week, but for when his last show would be. Clearly, MSNBC didn't want to give him time to prepare a last show.  He even had to carve out Fridays with Thurber in order to say goodbye.

I know not everyone who reads this is a fan, but I'm still smarting a little bit.  Keith's been on the air for eight years, which is as long as I've had this blog. I've been watching him for 5, and he helped me cope with some dark times, both in our history and for me personally. He also introduced me to Rachel Maddow, who has been a similar influence to me.

Jonathan Turley, a Georgetown professor of Constitutional Law, and himself a big thinker, had this to say:

I have known and worked with Keith since the 1990s and his first news show, The Big Show with Keith Olbermann. He has held a number of positions on different networks — all with equal success. The public has always connected with Keith’s wit and sometimes wacky style. He is one of the smartest individuals I have ever known. He also genuinely cared about the issues addressed on his show.

...

Those characteristics that are so central to his success with viewers often led to conflicts with his respective networks. He is the ultimate lone wolf in an industry known for its pack mentality.

There are certain classics in American culture. They include the 67 Mustang, Wrigley Field, and every John Wayne film. For many news junkies, they also include Keith Olbermann. Intense, irreverent and insightful, Keith is unique. For that reason, his fans and friends will not allow him to be gone from the airways for long.

I see Keith as sort of a Bob Dylan of anchormen. Between his reading of Thurber and his opening music is style is firmly rooted in the forties and the golden age of television. It has the familiar feeling of Edward R. Murrow and Peter Jennings, but less dry. What he does with it is unique; the first of its kind.. The Bush era created a need, and he filled it. When he threw off the veneer of objectivity with his first special comment about Rumsfield and the Bush administration's response to critics of the Iraq War it was like Dylan going to Newport with Al Kooper, the Butterfield Blues Band and a Stratocaster. Many thought it was a betrayal, but it was more honest. More appropriate for the time.

Like Dylan, he's brilliant, but occasionally goes off in a direction that doesn't quite make sense. Despite that, he kept a good number of people sane during a dark time.

In this metaphor, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O Donnell, Chris Hayes, Melissa Harris-Perry, and Ezra Klein are sort of like The Band. Each of them was already talented, and in ways that go beyond Keith's strengths, and he gave them all a stage that raised their profile and made them shine.

MSNBC says that his departure has nothing to do with the merger with Comcast, and I think that they're being honest, but they're wrong. The corporate culture that led the people in charge to even think for a moment that it was acceptable to sell a news network to Comcast is the same one that causes friction with Keith.

There has been a lot of wild speculation on Twitter about where he should go next. What follows is an open letter to Keith Olbermann.

Keith, you've got millions, and you likely have been barred from TV for two years. Want to deliver a final Fuck You to the sell-outs at 30 Rock? It's time to break another old rule and put your money in the show.

Get some investors together (maybe team up with Howard Dean) and buy The Nation, and with Chris Hayes still acting as political director, expand it into web video.  It would be stupidly inexpensive to put Countdown on the net.  Three Cannon 7Ds, some lights, some servers, Cisco Telepresence, and a desk would just about do it.. That shit I described? Under forty grand plus $25 per month per Telepresence unit. In cable, you need the access to infrastructure to support 61.6 million viewers in order to service a million viewers. On the Internet, you only need the servers to be able to support a million (but you'd have enough to support 2 million).

I've been thinking about those logistics for some time and I'm utterly surprised that it hasn't happened yet.  With Google TV just around the corner, the time for the Internet to take over the visiual media has come.  Now is the time to push your chips to the center.

Offer contracts to Sam Seder, David Shuster, Dave Weigel, Ezra Klein, Chris Cilliza, David Wolffe and Ana Marie Cox (me too plz) and establish a fund for investigative journalism with Seymour Hirsch at the head.  Maybe try and poach Rachel and Lawrence, but they'd probably stay where they are (as would, doubtlessly, a number of the people I just mentioned).  Be a mogul.

If there's one thing you and Rachel have shown me, it's that it's time to get into the game. Whether or not the Comcast takeover had anything to do with you splitting with MSNBC, it serves as a reminder that the future of journalism is walking on a razor's edge. Many said that you were partly responsible, but they were wrong and it's time for you to prove it. You have the opportunity to make it a tightrope walk.

And just as an added bonus, MSNBC would have to pay your company in order to get your people on its shows.  And if you made the move, the cable networks would put your face on the air, embargo or no embargo, end there'd be nothing MSNBC could do about it.

Not for nothing though, if Obama offers you the press secretary job, just forget everything I said and take it.

Assange, Liberals and the Reality-Based Community

I had this post in the can when Tuscon happened, and decided not to put it up at the time.  If I'd written all of it today, the focus would be less on Julian Assange, but here we are.

Julian Assange is not a terrorist.

Let's just get that out of the way.  While we're at it, he's also not somebody who we should be trying to lock up in prison as a spy, because he would love nothing better.  He's not a journalist either.

Most importantly, he's not a hero.

Incidentally, nobody should be surprised by this.  There may be real heroes in the world, but they are vanishingly few.  And we progressives are used to being led by false ones.

There is no math that will tell you that a 2000 Presidential election without Ralph Nader would have produced a President Bush.  Not only did he campaign aggressively in pivotal states, he spread the obscene lie that there was no significant difference between Bush and Gore.  Four years later he has the chutzpah to claim that the significant amount of donor cash he was collecting from Republicans had nothing to do with this.  Lately he's been a guttersnipe, who has unrepentantly referred to Obama as an Uncle Tom. which puts into perspective his 1996 refusal to come out against the referendum in California on ending affirmative action

This is the same man who founded PIRG, which in addition to its invaluable advocacy work employed yours truly for... part... of a summer in '04.  If it weren't for Ralph Nader, I would never have been invited into the home of a mostly-dressed middle aged beatnik couple from Wilmington, MA-- who had clearly been fucking when the doorbell rang-- to discuss energy efficiency standards.  It was one of the few days I exceeded my donation quota.

I'm sorry, I got lost there for a moment.

The impact of Ralph Nader's life's work is unquestionable.  Imagine, for a moment, how different your life would be today if cars weren't required to have seatbelts.  It's hard to even contemplate.  But as was said by Harvey Dent in that crowning political work of our time, Batman, the Dark Knight:  You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

Some of our country's worst moments are--and mind you not without accomplices-- causally linked to the fact that so many progressives mistook 2000 Ralph Nader for a hero.  We ought to know better by now.

Of course, you probably don't actually support Julian Assange's politics, because he's an anarchist.  He believes that government secrecy in and of itself bespeaks an authoritarian conspiracy.  Apparently this includes not wanting Russian diplomats to know that our diplomats see Vladimir Putin and Dimitri Medvedev as a kleptocratic Batman and Robin.

Assange isn't doing what he's doing so that you know what your government is up to and are informed as a voter.  He's doing what he's doing so that people who work in governments no longer trust each other, and become ineffectual to the point of international diplomacy crumbling and governments falling under their own weight.  He sees the world as a series of nails, and himself as the wielder of a hammer that would make John Boehner blush, if bronzefolk are capable of blushing.

Julian Assange is also, apparently, a Rorschach test.  Conservatives have been waiting for some time for an intellectual they could pound their fists about and call a terrorist.  Speaking of which, I'd like to take this time to thank Joe Liebermann for his invaluable support in getting DADT repeal over the goal line, and declare "good riddance" re: the entire rest of his career.  He and others have pounded their fists on the table and called for, among other things, Assange's assassination.  Because what we really need are more people gathering under Assange's banner.

In any case, the response from conservatives is easily predictable.  The last two years in conservative commentary and politics have consisted of lies, damned lies, and a total lack of statistics.  But what of the so-called "reality-based community" that we Progressives participate in?  Why are so many on the left demanding that Julian Assange be thought of as something that he's not?  They say he's for transparency, and if that were true, there wouldn't be an entire Wikileaks splinter group that split off precisely because he isn't. They say that the accusations of sexual assault in Sweden are trumped up, but if that were true, wouldn't he have something more to say about it than "this is all just about a broken condom," which couldn't be true, as that would imply that he was only being accused by one woman.

The extent to which Assange's defenders in the United States have dismissively parroted the phrase "sex by surprise" and the distortion about the condom without once considering that maybe-- just maybe-- his accusers are telling the truth is appalling.  Instead of taking a step back when the police report was leaked, many criticized the Guardian for running it.

This break with reality doesn't stop there.  Many prominent progressives lost their shit when Obama administration officials touted the bill that extended the Bush tax cuts as a second stimulus.  They said that Obama had swallowed the trickle-down economics Kool-Aid, despite the fact that the compromises exacted from Republicans in the Senate have proven stimulative effects. The mantra that tax cuts don't create jobs was more important than the truth.  Similarly, Keith Olbermann and Arianna Huffington recently decried the Obama administration's announcement of a year-long study of government regulations with an eye towards simplifying some and cutting others. They said he'd swallowed the Tea Party Kool-Aid that regulation kills jobs, and in so doing, at least Arianna seemed to imply that regulation could never kill jobs.

I was put off by it at the time, despite being a huge fan of Keith's. (Arianna Huffington has never impressed me, and I think it's telling that her first foray into politics was to call for Bill Clinton to resign over the Lewinsky scandal), but the next day, the CBS Evening News ran with this:

(Available also in HTML flavor)




Redundancy is great for computer systems, networks, and point defense, but it's rubbish for rulewriting.

Does this suggest that there's something to it every time a Republican goes to the House or Senate floor and decries the newest Democratic bill as being 'just more burdensome, job-killing regulation'?  Of course not.  For some time now, Republican politicians have come to town claiming to want to overhaul regulation, and then wind up only focusing on the good ones.  Are we really going to get outraged because Obama might suggest that frozen cheese pizzas and frozen pepperoni pizzas be regulated by the same fucking agency?  Did he not thoroughly demonstrate, in the fights for both Healthcare and Wall Street reform, that he believes that regulation done right is a good thing?  Are we so pissed off that he didn't tilt at windmills over the Public Option that we take every chance to say that he's just the same as the other guys?

We have said that it's time for our political discourse to change. This is undeniable.  But we'd be fools to only focus on the intensity of partisan rhetoric.  I call on anyone of any political inclination about to write a column or a blog post, or appear on cable news to do their research first.  If you can support your argument, declaim it with passion but with restraint.  If you can't, say something else.  It's time for us all to stop being salesmen and start being teachers.

The Aftermath

Editor's note:  This post has been altered to reflect the fact that maybe not everyone can watch the clip (hi, Google Buzz!)

I wasn't going to say a word about the "Rally to Restore Sanity/Fear" here because anything I'd say about it was likely to have been said by somebody else already.  For instance, somebody has already said this

I have two things to say about Jon Stewart's speech. One: bravo. And two: bravo.

I know this wasn't a political event, but I am a liberal -- a capital-L liberal and a small-L liberal -- and that 'you go, I go, you go, I go' principle, I believe it, and I'm really happy that in my country, over 200,000 people turned out to cheer that.

And there have also been some who have criticized the rally's "pox on both of their houses" message as constituting an oversimplification at best, and false equivalence at worst, clips of which are seen here on yesterday's Daily Show:


For the record, I wouldn't even bother saying any of this if I weren't a huge fan of Jon Stewart.

The boxing gag is brilliant.  But as for the rest?

My intention was not to make no moral judgment between competing arguments... It was to suggest that we be perhaps more judicious with our blanket slander

I'm sure anyone who's watched as much Boston Legal as I have knows this:

IF IT'S TRUE, IT ISN'T SLANDER.

I know that he doesn't literally mean slander, the crime, but given the context of the argument being made against him-- that he's equating actual slanderers to people who say mean, true, things-- the words were poorly chosen to say the least.

Right before that quote, Stewart passive-aggressively exclaimed, "Well, I guess the rally was a massive failure."  Which is funny, because the only person  in those clips who thought that the rally was a massive failure was Bill Maher.

If you were going to say that there was a left-wing equivalent of Bill O' Reilly, you'd be wrong, but if you squinted a little and turned your head, you could be forgiven for mistaking Bill Maher for that fictional entity.

So Bill Maher said that your rally wasn't about anything.  He also said that there's no reason to get a flu shot.

The person who I quoted up above there?  It was Rachel Maddow, who didn't even say a word about the rally on the air outside of that quote, and yet a segment in which she voiced her support of her colleague Keith Olbermann appeared on The Daily Show, for reasons passing understanding.  She was talking about how Keith's suspension on the grounds of private donations he made to three Democratic candidates reflects on the narrative prevalent in the media--some of which is driven by Jon Stewart, but most of which isn't-- that there's no real difference between Fox News and MSNBC.  The full transcript can be found here.  That song, as Stewart once told Jim Cramer under similar circumstances, wasn't about him.
 
As for Keith?  Jon took clips from a segment the Monday after the rally in which Keith made the case that Stewart, in putting clips of Countdown alongside those of Glenn Beck in his blame-the-media mashup, was equating sticking up for the powerless with sticking up for the powerful.  That one of those clips was him using the phrase "un-American Bastard" to refer to a man who'd said "Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims," and who'd utterly refused to admit that he was wrong in doing so (though all that was shown was "un-American Bastard) is I think instructive.  In any case, here's what Keith had to say in the segment preceding that one on Countdown that night:

The overall message that the tone needs to change, that the volume needs to change, was not lost on any of us. The anger in this news hour was not an original part of it, nor was it an artifice that we added to it. It was a response to a threat to this democracy posed by Mr. Bush, and now by his lineal descendants. The anger happened, it will still happen. It is not for ratings and it is not "get angry first and find a reason later."

But there is an institutionalization of it that may no longer be valid. That is "The Worst Persons in the World" segment, which started as a way -- of all things -- of defending Tucker Carlson. It's satire and whimsy have gradually gotten lost in some anger, so in the spirit of the thing, as of right now, I am unilaterally suspending that segment with an eye towards discontinuing it. We don't know how that works long-term. We might bring it back. We might bring back something similar to it. We might kill it outright. And next week, we'll solicit your input.

But I suppose showing that-- or Rachel's statement in support of Stewart-- would ruin the bit.  Which one could say is fair, for a comedian  But in his inveighing against the problems concerning cable news, he seems to be vigorously co-opting at least one of them:  The tendency to pull quotes out of their original context and arrange them in whatever way most fits your own narrative.  Which he doesn't need to do to make his point, and he doesn't need to do to be funny.

Ok, so I saw that clip from The Daily Show this morning, and wrote most of this post on notebook paper while I was riding the subway into Boston to try and get enrolled in Massachusetts' public option.  The last sentence was going to be:  "Instead of what I embedded here, Stewart should have had one of the three people in the video on his show to discuss what bothered them.  Surely, that would have been more in keeping with the spirit of the rally."

And then, I got home, logged in to twitter, and saw this:

Well, there we go.  Everything else I've said still stands though.  And I'd very much doubt that Rachel's appearance in that segment didn't come up in the back-and-forth before the interview was confirmed.

Share this with your friends.

ED--  I'm still working on the piece I alluded to in my last post.  As it turns out, explaining what I love so goddamned much about The Venture Brothers to an audience that (I assume) isn't familiar at all with the show, which has been around for years, is an interesting challenge.  While I figure it out, here is some must-see analysis of the two most important political fights going on right now.

Keith on the debate over repealing the Bush tax cuts for the rich and its alleged impact on "small businesses"

I'd known since 2004 that the claims about "small businesses" that Bush was using to defend his tax cuts were shameless manipulations of the facts, but this is fucking ludicrous.  Share this with anybody who is even considering voting Republican this year.  It casts a pale light upon not only their deception but the extent to which it fills their campaign coffers.

Rachel on the Senate's failure to repeal Don't Ask, Don't tell

Who would have guessed that the United States Senate would manage to come down on the wrong side of an issue that 78% of Americans agree on. I have no words.

Ok, that's not true, but I don't have any that are better than Rachel's.

The silver lining here is that progressives have two issues that they can run on. But as the great philosopher Jerry Garcia wrote, "Every silver lining has a touch of grey."  And here it's obvious.  It's the Democratic Party.  So, you know.  Good luck everyone.