A hilarious piece of satire from The Onion today that comes a little too close for comfort: Exiled American King Triumphantly Returns To Washington. The best passage, funny in a shivery way, reports that "Citizens were overjoyed by the monarchic restoration. 'Huzzah!' said Diane Sowell of State College, PA. 'At long last, we are rid of that corrupt, antiquated system of government known as democracy, a system that has done nothing but maintain the status quo of political inequality, economic stagnation, and social injustice. Our good king will change all that.'"

Really it is hardly a joke when the White House issues statements seriously contending that if the president's own lawyers say he does have to consult Congress about going to war, then he doesn't. Perhaps it was felt that Gen. Musharraf was on to something when he amended Pakistan's constitution by decree a few days ago.

Mickey Kaus: Inside the Beltway and Lost in the Blogosphere
Noted blogger and onetime quasi-liberal journalist Mickey Kaus, of Slate now seemingly an appendage of the Republican party, is clearly living in some alternate universe where raising taxes hasn't been politically impossible for better than two decades (unless the taxes are disproportionately hard on the poor.) It certainly shows how far Kaus's experience and vision doe NOT extend beyond Washington, D.C. "It's easier to raise taxes than it is to cut spending," he writes, desperately looking for some way to defend the return to Reagan era policies of defense increases and tax cuts that will surely create a huge new deficit. Out here in Missouri, the roads are falling apart, many of the schools are substandard, the state universities have high tuitions but can barely afford books and journals for the libraries, among many other things, because of underfunding. My university's budget was cut by something like 10% and they are still having to consider things like layoffs and campus closings! Yet we (including the legislature and the voters in a recent referendum) still can't raise taxes here to save our lives. And the federal tax cuts are making it all far worse. Thanks for the brilliant insights, Mickey. I dub thee Michael the Shrubber.

The New York Times "Week in Review" piece on the political fallout from the stock market decline gives us just a little taste of just how conservative a force even the bastions of the so-called liberal press has become. We learn about "a rift between those Democrats . . . who want to pursue a populist us-versus-them strategy for retaking the House and the White House, and pro-business centrists . . . who want to avoid a lurch leftward." See, those Democrats who actually want to rethink the party's pro-business tilt in recent years, which has made them complicit in the radical deregulation, privatization, and market fundamentalism that have gotten us to fix we are now in, are guilty of mindless "lurching." What could be more mindless and distasteful than actually responding to changed circumstances or the actual problems faced by their constituents? What, show some partisan backbone and offer actual alternatives to Republican policies? Talk openly about who benefits from current economic trends and policies and who doesn't? Recognize that the interests of "investors" and the interests of working Americans don't always coincide? Mention the fact that we are now dealing with the most anti-democratic administration since John Adams, and possibly the most nakedly self-interested and cynical one ever? Why that would be an icky "us-versus-them strategy"? And we know, especially now, that Wall Street always has everyone's best interests at heart. It's just mean to suggest otherwise. And don't even get me started on the pallid caricature of "populism" that the media rolls out every time a Democrat raises his or her voice, rare as such occasions are.

THE DISAPPEARING SUBJECT
There is a common technique in modern commercial journalism that I like to call "the disappearing subject." This is where the media's obvious role in some development is elided by shifting to passive voice, personifying an ongoing story (as when "questions dog" a political candidate) or otherwise removing the actor from a sentence. A complex example appears in a New York Times story today on the accounting scandals, Tweaking Numbers to Meet Goals Comes Back to Haunt Executives

"On Wall Street, it is called backing in.

"Each quarter, analysts at securities firms forecast the profit per share of the companies they cover. Companies whose profit falls short of the consensus estimate can be severely punished, their stocks falling 10 percent or more in a day.

"So some companies do whatever they have to to make sure they do not miss that estimate. Instead of first figuring out their sales and subtracting expenses to calculate the profit, they work backward. They start with the profit that investors are expecting and manipulate their sales and expenses to make sure the numbers come out right.

"During the last decade's boom, as executive pay was increasingly based on how the company's stock performed, backing in became both more widespread and more aggressive. Just how much so is only now becoming clear."

Obviously the villains here are the analysts and the companies. But what institution turned the ubiquitous collective "analysts" into an awe-inspiring force and created the situation where meeting analysts targests became an overriding goal. The burgeoning business media, perhaps, which made securities analysts into TV stars and imposed their trusty old political horse-race coverage template onto business news? I would say so. Though terribly circular and simplistic, the "expectations game" is a tremendous source of easy-to-write, easy-to-understand stories. Every quarter, every big company gets a little story about whether they will or won't meet their targets. The business pages and news web sites are full of these; they must be all lots of casual investors ever hear about lots of companies. It's almost axiomatic in daily journalism that automatic stories tend to dominate. Looking more deeply into how companies operate would be a much tougher way to fill the allotted space. Now, how did meeting the targets became an overriding goal again?

Jerry Falwell once again proves his firm grasp of history: the New York Times piece on reactions to the Pledge of Allegiance ruling: "The Rev. Jerry Falwell said the ruling was 'appalling.'
'This is probably the worst ruling of any federal appellate court in history,' Mr. Falwell said, adding that he had started a petition drive to gather a million signatures by Friday to urge the Supreme Court to reverse the panel's ruling immediately."

Oh, I forgot, Jerry probably supports the Dred Scott decision.

A year and a half later, the national media finally gets down to proving one of the my pet theories about the 2000 election, which is that Gore's decision to soft pedal one of his few core beliefs, environmentalism, cost him an unchadded victory in Florida:
To the White House, by Way of the Everglades (washingtonpost.com) "Al Gore's people blame the environmentalists, although some admit they didn't think much of Gore's fence-sitting strategy. The environmentalists blame Gore, although some admit to twinges of regret about kneecapping one of the most earth-friendly presidential candidates in history. But both sides agree that in the closest state in the closest election ever, the bizarre swamp politics of the Everglades sent George W. Bush to the Oval Office."
I never knew the specifics, but it seems that Gore failed to denounce the building of an airport near the Everglades in Homestead, Fla., in order to curry favor with the Dade County Democratic machine and Miami's Cuban-American mayor, Alex Penelas. As if Al Gore was going to win any of the Miami Cuban vote after Elian! Gore's most natural supporters in the area, the Everglades-defending South Florida environmentalist communiy, were given the captive constituency treatment, but they refused to go along, giving Gore only half-hearted support or switching their support over to Ralph Nader and the Greens, who got 10,000s of Florida votes that Al could have used.

Very significant story, but this pretentious "Post" series on the politics of the Everglades misses the point. Florida politics is indeed a "swamp" to use the "Post"'s rather squushy metaphor, but only a died-in-the-wool inside-the-beltway type could see only "political infighting as usual" in this. The thing revealed here is the fatal flaw in the "New Democrat" strategy of automatically selling out base constituencies and core beliefs in favor of pro-corporate, contribution-driven pragmatism that often turns out to be not so pragmatic after all in a close fight. If Al Gore had acted and sounded like more of an Old Democrat, he would have won the 2000 election.

EVERY MAN A PEDANT
I suppose one should celebrate that old online democracy that upends all knowledge hierarchies and such, but one sure does find some jaw-droppers in these customer review pages. An apparent college kid, for instance, sniffs that he found Richard Hofstadter's "The American Political Tradition" solid if not spectacular . It does seem as though one of the Web's "achievements" is the democratization of many qualities we academics are always getting our ears boxed for. You know, pedantry, arrogance, condescension, etc.

MORE REASONS FOR THE SHRUBS TO MAKE MANY ANNOUNCEMENTS THIS WEEK
White House Faces Disclosure Suit (washingtonpost.com) "We believe that the White House knew or had reason to know that an anthrax attack was imminent or underway," Klayman said. "We want to know what the government knew and when they knew it."
"We did not know about the anthrax attacks. Period!" said Gordon Johndroe, a White House spokesman.
Johndroe said he did not know why staffers were given Cipro but guessed it was "a precautionary measure in the early hours of Sept. 11 before the situation could be fully assessed."

Good line from The Guardian on Bush's "nonsensical proclamation" that "'Our wars have won for us every hour we live in freedom' (which means, presumably, that Martin Luther King should have got the Nobel Belligerency prize)." Not to mention the fact that just about everything that Jefferson and both John Adamses (after 1776-83) did would also be excluded. They never fought anybody. But conquering Texas and Puerto Rico and blowing up most of SE Asia -- we won many hours of freedom there.

A Host of Legal Questions on U.S. Action in Bomb Case: "'Citizens who associate themselves with the military arm of the enemy government, and with its aid, guidance and direction enter this country bent on hostile acts, are enemy belligerents,' the justices wrote in [in the 1942 Nazi saboteur case.]. . .

"The case suggests that the government is free to try Mr. Padilla before a military tribunal, said Ruth Wedgwood, a law professor at Yale.
'If you go to war against your country, you do not have rights to a jury trial,' Professor Wedgwood said. 'And the answer to the practical question is that we are at war.' "

Why are even Yale law professors and the NYTimes so cowed that they have to skip over the obviously missing link in the 1942 precedent? The parts about the "military arm of a foreign government" and "enemy belligerents," legal terms referring to a legal state of war that we are not in. Are we so accustomed to having politicians gas about the war on drugs/inflation/energy dependence/etc. that we are unable to tell what an actual war is? (As opposed to, what, the "campaign" or "efforts" or some such to fight terrorism, which I support.) The only reasons for the state of pseudo-war involve the neato powers and immunities (such as, from criticism) that the Bush administration thinks it gets to claim thereby. And even the country's great "liberal" institutions are just letting them do it.

NEWS THEY CAN'T USE
We now know why the administration really wants to keep the names of their "war" prisoners secret: you can hold a press conference about one of them when they don't want people to pay attention to the news. Following last week's announcement of a new Cabinet department on the day that whistle-blowing FBI agent Colleen Rowley was testifying before Congress, we now get a suddenly revelation that would-be terrorist Jose Padilla was arrested in early May. This on the same day that other stories let us know that the U.S. is renouncing its Cold War policy of not striking first with nukuler weapons and that just about nothing is going to be done about Enron, while the 9/11 intelligence hearings go on. There is even a movie tie-in; the number one film right now is "The Sum of All Fears," a Tom Clancy number that appears to involve "a radiological dispersion device" or "dirty bomb" wasting Baltimore. Whaddya know, that exactly the kind of bomb that John Ashcroft has discovered this "known terrorist . . . exploring a plan to build and explode."
It's not clear whether the administration claims that there was any substantive reason to relax their wall-to-wall secrecy on this occasion. It certainly doesn't seem like such great policework to make a big announcement like this is they hoped to use Padilla to find out more about such plans. On the other hand, it probably did a good job of making all moviegoers who just found out what a "dirty bomb" was over the weekend feel extra scared and dependent on the Bush administration.
I thought one really interesting moment in the "New York Times" story on this was where Paul Wolfowitz said Padilla was being held without charge "under the laws of war" -- you know, the ones that apply when we actually declare a war, as we have not done since 1941. The fight against terrorism may be a situation where some naked use of power is necessary, but one wishes that the Shrubbers wouldn't bother dressing these little power episodes up with lies like this, lies that are rapidly corroding what little public understanding seems to exist of the way that republics are supposed to conduct themselves.

MY OLD PAL THE IMMIGRATION "EXPERT"
The following from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Law professor from UMKC is shaping immigration policy

Kris Kobach was a relative unknown when he took a temporary job at the Justice Department just days before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. But immigration advocates have since become very familiar with the Missouri law professor's name -- as a detail man behind the department's controversial new immigration policies.

"He's quite well-known," said Angela Kelley, deputy director of the pro-immigrant advocacy group, the National Immigration Forum. "Many of the post-Sept. 11 actions by the Justice Department that take aim at immigrants have been attributed to him. He's the brains behind them."

Kelley and other advocates are not enamored of Kobach's work.

"He's showing a profound disrespect and disregard for the realities of immigrants and refugees in this country. He's come out of nowhere."

But the 36-year-old Kobach is getting major kudos from Justice Department leaders for his work. His academic credentials are impressive: a bachelor's degree from Harvard, a doctorate in political science from Oxford and a law degree from Yale. That resume helped catapult the professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City into an elite category of 12 White House fellows, chosen from hundreds of applicants nationwide. Their one-year fellowship began Sept. 1; each was assigned to a Cabinet member or the White House.

"We did not pick him. I actually didn't know him prior to him getting here, even though I'm from Kansas City," said David Israelite, Attorney General John Ashcroft's deputy chief of staff. "We learned about what his talents were, and then he got significantly involved in those areas. Kris Kobach comes to us with a very impressive legal background, and he's been working on a number of immigration matters. (He's) a very sharp guy."

Kobach did not respond to requests for an interview.

He's no stranger to controversy. Kobach, the son of a Topeka, Kan., car dealer, won his first political race in April 1999 - to the Overland Park City Council. The same month, he wrote an opinion piece for the Kansas City Star critical of both the Missouri and the Kansas legislatures suggesting that "sloppy lawmaking" was the result of the low number of lawyers in both statehouses.

The Missouri Legislature's response: a vote to cut $2.9 million from UMKC, where Kobach taught constitutional law. They thought better of it later and restored the funding.

Now, even the lawmaker who sponsored the cuts is a fan. Rep. Dennis Bonner, D-Independence, said he met Kobach that summer at the law school, where Bonner happened to be a part-time student.

"I was signed up for a fall class with him, and I went in and I said, 'I'll just drop it,' but he said no," Bonner said. "I have nothing but good things to say about him. Whatever impact he's had on these new policies, I'm sure has been one of professionalism. As Americans, I think we're all lucky to have him there. I'm sure the university will be glad to get him back, but I'll be a little surprised if he does."

Indeed, Kobach's brief tenure in public service is an ambitious one. Eleven months after his election to the city council, he filed to run for a Kansas state Senate seat but lost in the Republican primary. His resume says he was the "youngest faculty member to achieve the rank of tenured full professor" at UMKC.
__________________________________________________________________

This Kobach is a childhood acquaintance of mine. Outing us both as recovering geeks, I will admit that we used to play in the same Dungeons & Dragons group. I have not seen him in 20 years and wish him well personally, but the mind reels at anyone with our mutual background making immigration policy. We are both from the 'burbs of Topeka, Kansas, specifically a whiter-than-whitebread spot called Lake Sherwood. On the shores of this man-made mudhole, the streets are demoninated according to some Kansas developers' notion of Ye Olde English place names. "Fountaindale" and "Dancaster," for instance. In this world, ethnic cuisine meant tacos and pizza. There were a couple of Chinese restaurants in town, but I do remember being taken to one. I don't think you could get falafel or hummos if you held the governor for ransom. Hell, bratwurst and asparagus were exotic.

There was a sizable Mexican-American community miles away from us in the city of Topeka, but most of us Lake Sherwoodites knew as much about immigrants as we did about the bus service in downtown Bucharest. The very word conjured sepia pictures of people in kerchiefs and big mustaches from the social studies textbook. While we would have had to admit that immigrant-y places like New York and Los Angeles were part of the United States, we were quite sure that the word American applied chiefly to we heartland WASP types.

Let's just say that diversity was not a big part of the culture. Had anyone answering to the description Muslim been so misfortunate as to show up in our high school, they would be considered de facto terrorists even without the FBI's help. Presuming, perhaps unjustly, that old Kris has retained this rich heritage, he is probably just the man to set the current administration's course as to foreign-type people.

I have "gotten over" the 2000 election, but just on the level of pure accuracy, I wish that the press would stop gleaning electoral truths based on Bush's alleged success with the voters, which as we know was hardly very smashing even if one does believe he won Florida on the merits. For instance in today's NYT, we see the following bit of false context, mixed with cliched metaphors:
Social Security Issue Rattling Races for Congress It is a debate largely touched off by the Bush administration's proposal to allow people to divert part of their Social Security taxes into private investment accounts. When he unveiled his idea in the 2000 campaign, Mr. Bush was considered to have boldly — or brashly — grasped the legendary third rail of politics and lived to tell of it. Congressional Republicans are far more wary.

Houses of the Holier-Than-Thou
Here is one of those quotations that explains why the rest of the word finds us so annoying.

St. Louis Post-Dispatch (from an AP report) Bush insists that Pakistan squash attacks in Kashmir Bush said after a Cabinet meeting: "We are making it very clear to both Pakistan and India that war will not serve their interests."

Obviously, we do not want another India-Pakistan war, but where does Bush (who doubtless knew Kashimir only as a Led Zeppelin tune before 9/11) get off telling these two longtime rival nations what their interests are? How we react to such a statement coming from the Russians or the French or the Indonesians? Or, hell, from omnipotent space aliens? "Nuts," I believe that hero general said at the Battle of the Bulge.

Just when I thought I could not be shocked by the Bush administration anymore, the German press (not ours) reports the following:

Bushs Allgemeinbildung: Gibt es Schwarze in Brasilien? - Panorama - SPIEGEL ONLINE Washington - It was Condoleezza Rice, national security advisor, who helped her boss out of the embarassing situation. During a conversation between the two presidents, George W. Bush, 55, (USA) and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, 71, (Brazil), Bush bewildered his colleague with the question "Do you have blacks, too?"
Rice, 47, noticing how astonished the Brazilian was, saved the day by telling Bush "Mr. President, Brazil probably has more blacks than the USA. Some say it's the Country with the most blacks outside Africa." Later, the Brazilian president Cardoso said: regarding Latin America, Bush was still in his "learning phase".

And remember, kids, Latin America was supposed to Shrub's lone area of foreign policy interest. But I guess that was based on liking tacos or something.

TRANSPARENCY IN ACTION
President Bush recently included a lack of transparency as one evil feature of the Iraqi government. True enough, though it seemed a bit hypocritical at the time given the Bush administration's tendency to keep secrets and angrily dismiss all questions and criticisms. But perhaps Bush was touting a different kind of transparency, the political kind where your administration's every action is determined solely by the imperative to help your friends and hurt your enemies. Has there ever been a policy decision no nakedly political as this most anti-environmentalist of presidents, whose administration has trashed regulations and pushed for more logging and drilling everywhere imaginable, whose Grand Vizier regards energy conservation as no more than a symbolic gesture, suddenly deciding to protect the environment in the one state where his up-for-reelection brother is governor? (Bush's foreign policy is done this way, too: He would be fast-tracking trade deals with Fidel today if the Miami Cuban emigre community was not such a huge constituency for Jeb's Florida Republican party.)

Sadly, the Bushes and the media seem to regard this as perfectly normal and natural, and even rather shrewd: Bush Wades Into Everglades (washingtonpost.com) "The Bush administration has been pushing to expand oil and gas exploration nationwide, but today's agreements should burnish the president's environmental credentials in the swing state that decided the 2000 election." The contempt in which both this writer and the president hold we the voters and readers is truly astonishing. One of the saddest things about modern political journalism is the way it always takes, and encourages the reader to take, the cynical political calculator's view of every question. This is called objective journalism because it avoids taking any ideological viewpoint. Karl Rove must be very pleased.

MY FRIEND SHRAK
One hopes that the president wasn't thinking about that movie where the ogre was in love with Cameron Diaz: The Independent: "On the environment. . the French President said all countries should learn to reduce pollution and the consumption of "resources that cannot be renewed".
Repeated at a joint press conference, this assertion brought a blank stare from the US president, who spent almost his entire career before politics in the oil industry."

"Mr Bush went out of his way, however, to respond to the frequent European complaint that the US – and his own administration in particular – makes constant demands on its allies without consulting them."

"'I appreciate this good man's advice,' he said, nodding towards Mr Chirac. 'I listen carefully. And I am proud to call him a friend.'
Mr Bush seemed, however, to be in a rather skittish and unfocused mood after a demanding five day tour to Germany and Russia. He referred twice to Mr Chirac as 'President Jacques' and pronounced the French President's second name throughout as 'Shrak'."

I'm back. Blogging during the last part of the semester is tough for those of us who actually teach!

Having once gotten sucked into a witless e-learning initiative at a certain Deep South university where I was once employed, I was gratified to read in the "New York Times" that online universities are mostly flopping badly. I always said that colleges where you could not drink beer, meet girls (or boys!), and bullshit sophomorically into the wee hours with your friends would be of little interest.

And yet, how the media that flogged all things Webbed for so long continues not to get it. The lone success, we read, is the University of Phoenix, which excels at "branding" we are told in Lessons Learned at Dot-Com U. "The trick now is finding a way for universities like Columbia, steeped in academic tradition, to make it work.
'In a way, that is the crux of the matter,' said Ms. Kirschner of Fathom [Columbia University's e-venture]. 'Are universities going to grow smaller and marginalized in a world teeming with sources of information, or are they more important than ever, as people seek to separate fact from fiction, knowledge from data?' Ms. Kirschner said she hoped the answer would be the latter."

There's little evidence for this growing smaller and marginalized jazz at all; state legislatures may be eviscerating budgets this year but there is no time to be in school like a recession. The "Times" is just allowing a diehard to recycle the same deluded rhetoric that buffaloed nearly every school in the country to throw money at distance learning in the 1990s. The real way for universities to find themselves marginalized would be to continue the behavior that led to these debacles in the first place: acting like corporations whose main mission is to compete in the marketplace and create profit centers. As many real corporations have found, losing focus on your "core business" -- in this case, expanding knowledge and educating students -- usually leads to disaster.

Joseph Ellis is creeping back from his "Why Wasn't I in Vietnam" scandal using his obviously excellent connections in the high-middlebrow press. It is rather sick to see him doing his oracle of the Founders number again in this week's "New York Times Book Review." Reviewing a book that he himself might have written on the rivalry between Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall, Ellis might be writing about his own work when he praises James F. Simon's ''What Kind of Nation'' as "a major contribution not because it breaks new scholarly ground, but rather because it moves across familiar ground with such clarity and grace." Ellis also shows some craftiness and grace himself by directing a bon mot at the press while invoking one of their favorite concepts regarding the academic world of which Ellis was once, and I believe still is, a card-carrying member. According to Ellis, the author "has the storytelling skills of a former journalist accustomed to writing for an audience that lives outside the groves of academe." The obvious joke about Ellis's own "storytelling skills" will now be omitted.

THE OH-SO-LIBERAL PRESS STRIKES AGAIN
In a story about a commission report critical of Amtrak (Advisory Panel Tells Congress That Amtrak Should Be Split) , the New York Times extensively quotes commission members who want to break up the railroad. Several versions of the thought that Amtrak should be "run like a business" were included, as well as arguments that passenger rail service should be privatized. Nowhere is it mentioned that Amtrak exists because privately-owned railroads abandoned passenger rail service in the 1970s, nor does the author of the story mention that Great Britain's railroad privatisation scheme, Railtrack, has been fraught with controversy and marred by declining safety and quality of service. Then the pro-privatization quotations are balanced only by the following half sentence: "Norman Y. Mineta, the Secretary of Transportation, who is a member of the commission, abstained, and a labor representative, Charles Moneypenny, issued a sharp dissent."

POP HISTORIANS IN CRISIS: Chapter XVIII
While it has not been as widely reported as his World War II borrowings, Stephen Ambrose was caught three years ago (by a Washington University student named Lara Marks) employing similar tactics in his blockbuster Lewis and Clark book, Undaunted Courage. The story appears in yesterday's St. Louis Post-Dispatch. No news report on the pop-history plagiarism scandal would be complete without a dig at us evil academics: "Unlike some professional historians, Marks doesn't fault Ambrose for being a popularizer. 'It's really important to bring history to the people,' she said." Usually, we are just accused of being boring; now we're snobs as well. All I have read professional historians saying is that yes, this sure looks like plagiarism and that students would be severely penalized for doing anything similar. (It has been said that any historian who popularizes as often as Ambrose might be tempted to take shortcuts.) On what television show did reporter Susan Thomson see some John Houseman-esque history perfesser haughtily condemning Ambrose or McCullough for daring to reach out to the popular audience? I get the distinct impression that many people in the media have some sort of complex about their college teachers. Was someone spending too much time working on the school newspaper when they should have been studying for their history midterm?

The J. Clifford Baxter suicide story will make an interesting contrast with the Vince Foster suicide story. While I imagine that both men really did kill themselves, Vince Foster was subject of years of right-wing conspiracy theorizing, much of it from relatively respectable sources despite the fact that the whole scenario was drawn from a Hollywood thriller and the lack of damaging information that Foster could have been hiding. Now we have the largest bankruptcy in American history, involving a company with heavy political connections and a record of destroying evidence. Moreover, unlike the Foster case, we have family and friends who actually do suspect foul play.
(from Amityville Buries a Native Son (washingtonpost.com)) "The people who know him closely doubt [that] it [was a suicide]," said Kretz [a family friend]. "The family doesn't buy it." It will be the ultimate proof of Hillary Clinton's "vast conspiracy" argument if, as I suspect, we hear nothing more about the Baxter suicide from the ostensible truth-seekers of the right or from a media establishment that increasingly seems to take its cues from that quarter.

The Enron Story That Waited To Be Told (washingtonpost.com) "It's fair to say the press did not do a great job in covering Enron," says Steve Shepard, editor-in-chief of Business Week magazine, which ran only briefs on the company's financial problems until a cover story in November. "Enron was really a systemic failure of all the checks and balances we have on corporate governance: integrity of management, board of directors, audit committee of the board, outside accounting firm, Wall Street analysts and ultimately the press. And all of us failed."

UNDERSTANDING THE ENRON OUTRAGE
The first thing we need to do is remember Michael Kinsley's Reagan era mantra, the scandal is not what illegal actions were taken, the scandal is the obvious wrongdoing that was perfectly legal. (I paraphrase.) The media and congressional investigators (with the Shrubbers' encouragement) will focus on what did the administration or the accountants know and when did they know it, when the real scandal is the degree of power this one company was able to amass -- getting whole new markets created through favorable government action -- and how little there was to stop or even impede them from raiding the company and raping their employees, investors, and the general public in the process. The scandal is how few people in politics or business, now or while it was happening, are even willing to criticize these injustices or do anything to prevent them.

An astute but overly jovial Miami Herald column (Miami Herald: Enron falls -- with a whimper) asks: "Where have all the conspiracy theorists gone?" The columnist seems to get (just barely) the basically reactionary nature of modern conspiracism, something that gets obscured in the Hollywood image of the left-leaning post-hippie conspiracy buster, a la Oliver Stone and "The Lone Gunmen" of X-Files fame. In the real world (as opposed to the Hollywood imagination), most of the paranoid flack we got to know so well in the 90s was thrown out by the right wing, much of it quite cynically. Did Rush, Jerry et al ever really believe that Vince Foster was murdered and such, or did that just fit the silly thriller plot they were trying to spin out for their gullible audience of angry white guys and Christian fundamentalists? You be the judge. We should also not be surprised that something really massive like Enron does not get them going, any more than the election by Supreme Court did in 2000. These particular conspiracy theorists were never interested in exposing the hidden power centers in our society -- heck, they have lunch there every other day; they are interested in using the conspiracy trope to demonize anyone who might stand in the way of their reactionary political agenda. They are about promoting corporate power, not fighting it.

Why can't reporters ever seem to make distinctions? A piece in today's "Times" retails the idea that the Enron mess should be understood as the "reawakening" of the Washington scandal machinery, and then tries to proceed on the assumption that the current situation is somehow analogous to the various Clinton accusations:
A Familiar Capital Script . "The capital may once again face months, if not years, of yet another investigation of the White House featuring the volatile mix of money, influence, access and politics."
"Elements of a classic political scandal are here: A Texas corporation, led by Mr. Bush's most generous campaign contributor, files the largest bankruptcy petition in American history. A handful of executives are able to sell $1 billion worth of the company's stock before its collapse, but thousands of employees are barred from selling, losing their life's savings and retirement accounts."
Does anyone at the paper check over these stories for logic? How is there any equivalency between destroying the lives of thousands and anything Clinton was ever to supposed to have done? How can inviting contributors to White House parties and sleepovers be compared to contributors be allowed full access to and granted tremendous influence over policy-making? Frankly, it all looks makes a night in the Lincoln Bedroom look like a fairly innocuous perk for contributors, the illusion of access and influence, rather than the very real thing that Enron had for years wherever Bush was in control.

ENRON: When partisanship becomes a dutyWhite House Moves to Contain Political Damage From Enron Turmoil "'It's appropriate to take a look at what led to the bankruptcy of Enron,' " Mr. Fleischer said. He expressed the hope that any Congressional inquiry would be even-handled, not a 'partisan, politically charged investigation' of the kind that he said had so soured many Americans on Washington." It is going to be a stern test of the country's democratic instincts to see whether or not the Republicans are going to be allowed to get away with arguments like this. Certainly it is true that that scandal-driven politics turns the public off -- that's Bill Clinton got re-elected and stayed popular despite the most sustained campaign of scandal politics ever mounted against any administration. But those scandals were so different, involving personal morality and personal finances, on a very petty level. How will we respond to something as massive, and as steeped in systemic corruption, as Enron? In which the executives of one corporation used its close political ties to the state and national Bush administrations to get major government policies redone for its benefit, and then walked off with millions of their stockholders' money while in effect taking billions more from their stockholders, employees, and taxpayers who will inevitably have to pay to repair some of the damage? It is not mere partisanship but the democratic duty of the administration's political opponents to see that such a crime is full investigated and that justice is done -- partisanhip in the best sense of applying the kind of outside pressure and criticism that only can keep the powerful relatively truthful and honest.

P.S. I am guessing that the Republicans are now thanking their lucky stars that the Indepedent Counsel law has lapsed. If Ken Starr could keep busy on the slim pickings he had all those years, Enron could keep a firmament of Starrs busy for decades.

Books for Political Conservatives Top Best-Seller Lists "Can best-seller lists indicate the country's political leaning?" A New York Times writer thumbsucks a bit over the fact that the Times best-seller list is currently dominated by overtly right-wing books. One can only marvel at the way that the media, and especially the Times these days, fail to grasp the implications of basic demographic facts. Who has the money to throw at brand-new hardcover books, especially during a recession? The wealthier segments of the population, perhaps, especially those who have not been hurt much by the recent economic travails, or maybe even benefitted from upper-income skewed tax cuts and such? What segments of the population have always voted Republican (and usually conservative)? The same, and we may add here two other conservative-leaning groups that have the best access to the mega-bookstores and airport shops where NYTimes best-sellers are sold: suburbanites and businesspeople. I am going to look up how often (or how long ago) liberal or radical books have made the best-seller charts, if they have at all. I am guessing that nonfiction best-sellers have always skewed conservative, only more typically in the form of get-right-with-capitalism business and self-help books. And best-sellers say nothing about public opinion if that term is to be given even a moderately democratic definition. The article linked above says that the number one best-seller this week, Bernard Goldberg's "Bias," has 225,000 copies in print, but a tiny drop in a nation of 285 million people.

SENIORITIS
Also published at "Publick Occurrences Extra" because of the recent outage.
Two Senior Al Qaeda Fighters Captured : This is a headline from today's "New York Times." Like much of the formulaic language that journalists use, the phrase "senior fighter" is more interesting than illuminating. "Fighter" has emerged as the term of choice for the individual combatants that the U.S. has faced in most of the "rogue nation" interventions of the past decade or so. It bespeaks the conceptual difficulties that U.S. journalists and policymakers find themselves in when faced with the vast gulfs that exist between our nation and many others in the world, in terms of both wealth and what used to be called "political development." Basically many of the institutional methods of operation that have been developed in the European world either do not exist or have been artifically and weakly imposed over non-institutional political and social networks that determine how people in these societies actually live and think. War as we know it, something conducted by professional armies and kept separate from normal political and social alignments, is an institutional solution. So are constitutional governments.

We know these things exist weakly or not at all in places like Afghanistan and Somalia, but we still it almost impossible to think or write about them without our usual institutional concepts and categories. The term "soldier" is reserved for uniformed members of professional armies, people who fight as part of an institution in the service of some state and political ideology that we can recognize as legitimate and reasonable. "Warrior" would be a closer to the mark, but that carries all sorts of good connotations (such as honor and courage) that cannot be associated with people already labeled as cowardly terrorists or who are known to employ such tactics as robbery or the in-person killing of non-combatants. So the weirdly generic "fighter" has come to fit the bill.

Yet if "fighter" seems to recognize the social, non-institutional character of war in these places, "senior fighter" reveals how deep the conceptual and semantic confusion still is. Here we are fighting this now completely stateless and always only loosely instutionalized enemy ("declaring war on a noun," I believe Molly Ivins has called it); both the government and media have had the put the enemy through a punishing course of rhetorical solidification, talking about Al Qaeda as though it were a multinational corporation and its influential men like congressional aides. "Senior" fighters must be higher on the organizational chart, like divisional vice presidents or associate deans!

I'm back! In a random Washington Post story on Internet security, I came across this incredibly wrong-headed but rather typical contextualizing observation: "For much of its life, the Internet has been seen as a great democratizing force, a place where nobody needs know who or where you are." I do not deny that this is one of the ways the Internet "has been seen" (not the disppearing subject --- what the writer means is, this is what the media has said), but one never ceases to be amazed at the things that mistaken for democracy. Shouldn't it be "great atomizing force"? Since when did anonymity and bodilessness become the keys to democracy? Or has democracy stopped being about bringing individuals together and making their collective voice into something that will be not only heard but heeded? Does democracy have nothing to do with politics anymore?