The best of the lot, Vidal’s life and work set the outer boundaries of liberalism’s contribution to culture and politics. In this essay, Sandy English carves a slightly dissonant but captivating portrait of the man, which considerably sharpens our understanding of his place in America’s intellectual history.

“No man can be all that bad if he’s owned by a cat.”

By Sandy English, WSWS.ORG, a socialist organization
Thank you WSWS.ORG

Gore Vidal, novelist, playwright, essayist and one-time television personality, died July 31 at his home in Hollywood Hills, Los Angeles. One of the more penetrating bourgeois critics of American politics and culture, he always remained firmly of and within the establishment.

Vidal was one of the few public figures who spoke openly about the dismantling of democratic rights in the US, and as early as the 1970s began to draw attention to growing social inequality and the subservience of political institutions to the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans. He was an outspoken critic of the brutality of American foreign policy—and earned the hatred of the ultra-right as a result.

He was an accomplished writer whose fiction, at its best, for example, in Narratives of Empire, attempts to capture the development of the American ruling elite and its concerns. Vidal was able to write knowledgably about other historical periods as well, the late Roman Empire, for example, in Julian. His drama with less success took up political and social themes.

Vidal’s literary judgments were unconventional and sometimes hit the mark, particularly when he drew attention to underappreciated authors or cast doubt on accepted opinion. His memoirs also have literary value, as they give a vivid sense of what social and cultural life was like in the United States, particularly in the first 20 years or so after World War II.

In the final analysis, however, Vidal stood out for a half century as a political commentator largely because he was one of the few honest voices still emanating from the establishment. At a time when so many liberals turned dramatically to the right and discovered the wonders of the market and the glory of the American military, Vidal held himself aloof from that process.

But there is no need to go overboard in praising him. The perfidy and worthlessness of so many others does not make Vidal more than he was. He had a genuine commitment to democracy, but never overstepped certain boundaries. He criticized the two-party system as the rule of a single party of wealth, but offered no alternative, certainly not in the form of socialism. In the end, Vidal always gave reluctant support to one or another (generally) Democratic Party politician. That helps explain why he was allowed to continue to have a place at the official table.

Given his background and the times he grew up in, the Cold War period with its relentless anticommunism, it proved impossible for Vidal to break with official political culture or even to challenge it artistically in a head-on fashion.

His father, Eugene Vidal, was one of the first military aviators and later the director of Air Commerce in the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt and was also the founder of companies that eventually became Eastern Airlines and Trans World Airlines (TWA).

Vidal’s mother, Nina Gore, was the daughter of Thomas Pryor Gore, a Democratic Party politician with populist leanings and one of the first two US Senators from Oklahoma (which became a state in 1907). Vidal spent most of his childhood in Washington, living with his grandfather after his parents’ divorce in 1935.

Embarking on a literary career after the war (he served in the Navy in the Aleutian Islands), he gained notoriety for his third novel, The City and the Pillar (1948), which dealt frankly with homosexuality.

The anticommunist witch-hunts were beginning, and the purging of left-wing elements in Hollywood had largely been accomplished by the time he began writing for film and television. Cold War assumptions, of which he may not have been fully conscious, entered into his work as they did in the efforts of other left-liberal writers.

Vidal stopped writing serious fiction by the 1950s—he attributed it to the blacklisting by the New York Times—and wrote genre material for a time under a pseudonym. He then wrote a number of film adaptations of plays and more original material, including portions of the screenplay for Ben Hur (1959).

His drama, The Best Man (1960), about two would-be presidential candidates (one of them based on Richard Nixon) and “dirty tricks” in American politics, was a major success on Broadway. It marked a return to more substantive political topics. It was later made into a film (1964) directed by Franklin J. Schaffner and featuring Henry Fonda.

Vidal ran for the US Congress in 1960 in New York state with the support of Eleanor Roosevelt, and other liberal figures. It marked the beginnings of his career as a public liberal intellectual.

Around the same time, he seems to have become disenchanted with mainstream politics. It is not clear if this occurred during the John F. Kennedy administration (he was acquainted with the president through family connections), because of the president’s assassination in November 1963, or was the result of a combination of troubling events.

Whatever the case, in the wake of the assassination and the soul-searching it generated, Vidal produced what many consider his most artistically significant work, Julian (1964), a novel about the life of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, based on original documents. Julian unsuccessfully tried to return the Roman Empire in 362 AD to its earlier traditional culture and religion and away from Christianity, which had become the state religion.

Vidal poses Julian’s actions as a principled defense of freedom of religion and a rejection of the status quo. Tellingly, the novelist holds out the possibility that the ruling classes can produce from within their ranks a virtuous reformer, even in the midst of an empire’s decline and decadence—a process he portrays quite vividly.

After witnessing incognito an orgy by palace eunuchs, Julian remarks, “It is the basis of a lawful society that no man (much less half-man) has the power to subject another citizen to his will …What was done that night—and many other nights—was lawless and cruel.”

This was clearly a commentary of some sort on the world, and, more specifically, the American state, in the early 1960s. Was it possible for the American ruling class to observe the rule of law as it created, in Vidal’s view, a global empire?

As the postwar boom began to unravel and the war in Vietnam became more untenable for the American elite, establishment figures critical of American foreign policy, such as Vidal, became more visible in the mass media.

A dramatic upswing in the struggles of the working class, including in the United States, culminated in the May-June 1968 general strike in France. There is almost nothing in Vidal’s large body of work that refers to these events, much less an attempt to come to terms with them. This was largely a sealed book to him.

Vidal defended the right of the Vietnamese people to determine their own fate and famously called archconservative William F. Buckley a “Crypto-Nazi” on ABC News in front of millions of viewers while both were covering the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

However, he had much in common with a Buckley, in spite of their differences. Both came from the upper echelons, and concerned themselves with influencing ruling class policy, albeit from different points of view.

Vidal produced a number of critical literary essays, some of which deserve to be read today, such as his 1983 piece, “William Dean Howells,” which attempted to re-introduce this classic American novelist to a broader public.

After Julian, his most significant works of fiction were the seven novels in the Narratives of Empire series, which begin with Burr (1973), a fictional memoir about the American “founding fathers” by Aaron Burr, who famously killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel in 1804. The series ends with The Golden Age (2000), an account of Washington, D.C. political circles from 1939 to 1954. Many passages ring true.

In one scene in the latter book, an adviser to Franklin Roosevelt speaks with an agent of British imperialism. The conversation centers on the global strategy of the American ruling elite. Roosevelt’s adviser tells the British representative, “We’ll never let Hitler invade you. But we will never accept you—with or without an empire—as an equal anywhere in the world. If we win, we win.”

Following the events of September 11, 2001, Vidal resisted the patriotic hysteria and offered an analysis that rejected the official line. He linked the subsequent preparations for war against Iraq with the needs of American imperialism represented by what he termed the “Bush-Cheney Junta.”

Toward the end of The Golden Age, during festivities on New Year’s Eve 1999, an elderly character whose views seem to resemble Vidal’s, thinks of the recently translated Mayan hieroglyphs and our ability to better understand the fate of that civilization.

He tells a journalist who asks what he feels about the new millennium, “I feel nothing except interest in the fact that there have been other empires before us in this part of the world and that Pacal’s people [Pacal was a Mayan emperor], in time, became too many and when they did, they devoured each other.”

For the last 20 years of his life, Vidal was increasingly concerned with the advanced decay of American democracy and the eruption of American militarist violence. But his criticism remained in the Populist and isolationist traditions, currents within the ruling class itself that are nationalist and hostile to the class struggle. Vidal, in fact, never came close to grasping the class struggle as the engine of world history.

While sympathetic to ordinary people, he saw them essentially as a passive mass who could be manipulated by television commercials or political sleight-of-hand.

Almost anything that smacked of a popular movement simply did not concern him as material for serious commentary. This attitude may also be the root of some of the limitations in his fiction: a more rounded, more popular, more deep-going view of American life seldom came into view, and this prevented him from producing the most aesthetically satisfying and emotionally powerful work, even in relation to some of his contemporaries.

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Assange: Persecuted by world-class hypocrites on a classical case of trumped up charges.

Eight BIG PROBLEMS with the “case” against Assange (MUST-READ by Naomi Wolf)
Something Rotten in the State of Sweden: 8 Big Problems with the ‘Case’ Against Assange
Exclusive to News from Underground

Now that Andrew Kreig, of the Justice Integrity Project, has confirmed Karl Rove’s role as an advisor to the Swedish government in its prosecution of Julian Assange on sexual misconduct charges, it is important that we note the many glaring aberrations in the handling of Assange’s case by the authorities in Sweden.

Dr. Brian Palmer, a social anthropologist at Uppsala University, explained on Kreig’s radio show last month that Karl Rove has been working directly as an advisor to the governing Moderate Party. Kreig also reported, in Connecticut Watchdog, that the Assange accusers’ lawyer is a partner in the law firm Borgström and Bodström, whose other name partner, Thomas Bodström, is a former Swedish Minister of Justice. In that office, Bodström helped approve a 2001 CIA rendition request to Sweden, to allow the CIA to fly two asylum-seekers from Sweden to Egypt, where they were tortured. This background compels us to review the case against Assange with extreme care.

Based on my 23 years of reporting on global rape law, and my five years of supporting women at rape crisis centers and battered women’s shelters, I can say with certainty that this case is not being treated as a normal rape or sexual assault case. New details from the Swedish police make this quite clear. Their transcript of the complaints against Assange is strikingly unlike the dozens of such transcripts that I have read throughout the years as an advocate for victims of sex crimes.

Specifically, there are eight ways in which this transcript is unusual:

1) Police never pursue complaints in which there is no indication of lack of consent.

Ask Sweden to produce ANY other police report in which any action was taken in a situation in which there is no stated lack of consent or threat of force. Police simply won’t act on a complaint if there is no indication of a lack of consent, or of consent in the face of violence. The Assange transcripts, in contrast to any typical sex crime report, are a set of transcripts in which neither of the women has indicated a lack of consent. (There is one point at which Miss W asserts she was asleep – in which case it would indeed have been illegal to have sex with her – but her deleted tweets show that she was not asleep, and subsequent discussion indicates consent.)

The Assange transcript is therefore anomalous, as it does not suggest in any way that either woman was unconsenting, or felt threatened. On this basis alone, therefore, the Assange transcript is completely aberrant.

2) Police do not let two women report an accusation about one man together.

The transcripts seem to indicate that the police processed the two accusers’ complaints together.

This is completely unheard-of in sex crime procedures; and the burden should be on Clare Mongomery, QC, or Marianne Ny, to produce a single other example of this being permitted.

Never will two victims be allowed by police to come in and tell their stories together–even, or especially, if the stories are about one man.

Indeed, this is a great frustration to those who advocate for rape victims. You can have seven alleged victims all accusing the same guy — and none will be permitted to tell their stories together.

It doesn’t matter if they coordinated in advance as the Assange accusers did, or if they are close friends and came in together: the police simply will not take their complaints together or even in the same room. No matter how much they may wish to file a report together, their wishes won’t matter: the women will be separated, given separate interview times and even locations, and their cases will be processed completely separately.

The prosecutor, rather than being able to draw on both women’s testimony, will actually have to struggle to get the judge to allow a second or additional accusation or evidence from another case.

Usually other such evidence will NOT be allowed. Miss A would have her case processed and then Miss W — with absolutely no ability for the prosecutor to draw form one set of testimony to the next.

The reason for this is sound: it is to keep testimony from contaminating separate trials–a source of great frustration to prosecutors and rape victim advocates.

Thus the dual testimonies taken in this case are utterly atypical and against all Western and especially Swedish rape law practice and policy.

3) Police never take testimony from former boyfriends.

There’s another remarkable aberration in this transcript: the report of a former boyfriend of “Miss A,” testifying that she’d always used a condom in their relationship.

Now, as one who has supported many rape victims through the reporting process, I have to say that the inclusion of this utterly atypical–and, in fact, illegal–note will make anyone who has counselled rape victims through the legal process’ feel as though her head might explode.

There’s a rape shield law in Sweden (as there is throughout Europe) that prevents anyone not involved in the case to say anything to the police, whether it be positive or negative, about the prior sexual habits of the complainant. No matter how much a former or current boyfriend may want to testify about his girlfriends’ sex practices — even if that woman wants him to — the courts will, rightly, refused to hear it, or record it, or otherwise allow it in the record.

4) Prosecutors never let two alleged victims have the same lawyer.

Both women are being advised by the same high-powered, politically connected lawyer. That would never happen under normal circumstances because the prosecutor would not permit the risk of losing the case because of contamination of evidence and the risk of the judge objecting to possible coaching or shared testimony in the context of a shared attorney.

So why would the Swedish prosecutor, Marianne Ny, allow such a thing in this case? Perhaps — bearing in mind the threat that Assange will be extradited to the US once he is in Sweden — because she does not expect to have a trial, let alone have to try to win one.

5) A lawyer never typically takes on two alleged rape victims as clients.

No attorney–and certainly no high-powered attorney– would want to represent two women claiming to have been victimized by the same man, for the reasons above: the second woman’s testimony could be weaker than the other one’s, thus lessening the lawyer’s chances of success.

There also is a danger that the judge may well object to the potential cross-contamination of the women’s stories.

Again, the only reason why a lawyer would thus weaken his own clients’ cases us that s/he does not expect the case to come to trial.

6) A rape victim never uses a corporate attorney.

Typically, if a woman needs a lawyer in addition to the prosecutor who is pursuing her case (as in the Swedish system) she will be advised by rape victim advocates, the prosecutor and the police to use a criminal attorney — someone who handles rape cases or other kinds of assault, who is familiar with the judges and the courts in these cases. She will never hire a high-powered corporate attorney who does not specialize in these cases or work with the local court that would be hearing her sex crime case if it ever got to trial. Given that a law firm such as this one charges about four hundred euros an hour, and a typical rape case takes eight months to a year to get through the courts – given that legal advice will cost tens of thousands of euros, which young women victims usually do not have access to – it is reasonable to ask: who is paying the legal bills?

7) A rape victim is never encouraged to make any kind of contact with her assailant and she may never use police to compel her alleged assailant to take medical tests.

The two women went to police to ask if they could get Assange to take an HIV test.

Sources close to the investigation confirm that indeed Assange was asked by police to take an HIV test, which came back negative. This is utterly unheard of and against standard sex crime policy. The Police do not act as medical mediators for STD testing, since rapists are dangerous and vindictive. A victim is NEVER advised to manage, even with police guidance, any further communication with her assailant that is not through formal judicial channels. Under ordinary procedures, the women’s wishes for the alleged assailant to take medical tests would be discouraged by rape victim advocates and deterred and disregarded by police.

First, the State normally has no power to compel a man who has not been convicted, let alone formally charged, to take any medical tests whatsoever. Secondly, rape victims usually fear STD’s or AIDS infection, naturally enough, and the normal police and prosecutorial guidance is for them to take their own battery of tests – you don’t need the man’s test results to know if you have contracted a disease. Normal rape kit processing–in Sweden as elsewhere–includes such tests for the alleged victim as a matter of course, partly to help prevent any contact between the victim and the assailant outside legal channels.

8) Police and prosecutors never leak police transcripts during an active investigation because they face punishment for doing so.

The full transcripts of the women’s complaints have been leaked to the US media. The only people who have access to those documents are police, prosecutors and the attorneys. Often, frustratingly, rape victims themselves cannot get their own full set of records related to their cases. In normal circumstances, the leaking of those transcripts would be grounds for an immediate investigation of the police and prosecutors who had access to them. Any official who leaks such confidential papers faces serious penalties; lawyers who do so can be disbarred. And yet no one in this case is being investigated or facing any consequences. It seems quite likely that the Assange documents were leaked by the police or prosecutors because they got a signal from higher-ups that they could do so with impunity.

Indeed, these are all major aberrations–suggesting that somebody at the top has interfered.

And who is at the very top in Sweden? Players working with Karl Rove, who was a party to the Swedish government’s collusion in the Bush regime’s rendition/torture program. As Britain holds its hearings into Julian Assange’s fate, we must take careful note of that connection.

Naomi Wolf is a prominent feminists and social justice activist.

Related Posts:
Sweden doesn’t prosecute REAL rape, but locks up Julian Assange (for “rape”)
Assange not wanted for rape, but something called “sex by surprise”
Swedish case is a “holding charge” to get Assange extradited to US

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British Foreign Secretary’s ‘Unprecedented’ Threat to Raid a Foreign Embassy

Chilean dictator Pinochet: Shielded by crony justice. It pays to do the dirty jobs for the global establishment.

by DEEPAK TRIPATHI
A decade ago, the British government of Labour prime minister Tony Blair decided to back President George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq even though foreign office lawyers in London had warned that such an attack had no “legal basis in international law.”

In the midst of sharp divisions in government and British society, the invasion went ahead in March 2003. The consequences were far-reaching and they undermined the Blair government’s authority at home. Limping thereafter, he resigned in June 2007, humbled and apologetic. War and the economy together played no mean part in Tony Blair’s fall in British politics and the Labour Party’s defeat three years later.

A few days ago, Britain’s foreign secretary William Hague personally approved a letter that was sent to Ecuador. Its details were taken as a threat to raid the Ecuadorean Embassy in London and drag out WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange for extradition to Sweden, where state prosecutors say they want to question him about complaints of sexual assault. Hague’s letter was delivered to Ecuador despite the “grave reservations of lawyers in his department.”

Speaking anonymously to the Independent newspaper, a senior British official said that “staff feared the move could provoke retaliatory attacks against British embassies overseas.” A large majority in the Organization of American States is up in arms. Outside the Americas too, Britain is struggling to find much sympathy for its stance. In soccer parlance, Prime Minister David Cameron’s center forward has scored a spectacular own goal.

While Julian Assange made a statement from the balcony of the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, attacking America’s “witch hunt” against WikiLeaks and journalistic freedom, several former mandarins of the British Diplomatic Service expressed serious misgivings over William Hague’s handling of the affair. Oliver Miles, a 40-year veteran, described the letter to Ecuador as a “big mistake,” because “it puts the British government in the position of asking for something illegitimate.” Former ambassador to Moscow, Tony Brenton, commented that the Foreign Office had “slightly overreached themselves, for both legal and practical reasons.” And a former envoy to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, said, “You cannot legislate domestically to opt out of international law.”

Otherwise, the mainstream broadcast and print media continued to provide a running commentary of the whole affair. The coverage has been generally confused, selective, repetitive and often hostile to Assange and a small Latin American country’s decision to grant him asylum. The Economist, though, positioning itself on the other side, criticized Britain’s “ham-handed invocation of a never-used, 1987 law to insinuate that it could, eventually, have the right to enter the embassy.”

It is perhaps necessary at this point to take note of the London-based Bertha Foundation’s lawyer Jennifer Robinson, who has described the British Foreign Office’s letter and the implicit threat as unprecedented––one which, if implemented, would force a profound change in the conduct of international diplomacy. Also important is to take a look at the concerns raised by prominent American feminist writer Naomi Wolf in an article titled “Something Rotten in the State of Sweden: 8 Big Problems with the ‘Case’ Against Assange.” Under her microscope is the entire Swedish legal system.

Why does Assange and others fear that Sweden would repatriate him to the United States, where he could face the rest of his life in jail, even execution for publishing leaked official documents? Because in November 2006 the United Nations found Sweden guilty of violating the global torture ban. Swedish officials handed over Mohammed El Zari and Ahmeed Agiza, two Egyptian asylum seekers, to CIA operatives in December 2001, to be rendered from Stockholm to Cairo. Both were tortured in Egypt. And, as Seamus Milne wrote in the Guardian, because of reports of a secret indictment against Assange by a U.S. federal grand jury in Alexandria, Virginia.

The law says that someone who has suffered persecution, or fears that he or she will suffer persecution because of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular group or political opinion may seek asylum. In the last few days, the United States has claimed that it does not recognize the concept of “diplomatic asylum.” Exactly what distinction is Washington trying to make between asylum, political asylum and diplomatic asylum is baffling. Assange was after all in the territory of a foreign country that granted him refuge. Let us look at some precedents.

Stalin’s daughter Svetlana sought asylum when she walked into the U.S. Embassy in Delhi in 1967. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn got asylum and lived in the United States for years before returning to Russia. Martina Navratilova, the Czech tennis player, took asylum in the U.S. in 1975. There are numerous instances when dissidents have been granted refuge in the United States and elsewhere. The concept is universal and depends on the sovereign decision of the country dealing with an asylum request.

Also worth examining is the British foreign secretary’s assertion that the United Kingdom has a “binding obligation” to extradite Assange to Sweden. Let us, for a moment, go back to October 1998. Chile’s former military dictator Augusto Pinochet was visiting London for medical treatment. A Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzon, now on Assange’s legal team, issued an arrest warrant for Pinochet on charges arising out of crimes against humanity in Chile. Pinochet was arrested a few days later in Britain, where he would spend more than a year in judicial custody, fighting extradition to Spain. The House of Lords, then Britain’s highest court, ruled that Pinochet could indeed be handed over to the Spanish judicial authorities, because crimes such as torture could not be protected by immunity.

The British government nonetheless allowed Pinochet to return to Chile in March 2000 on health grounds. The law was clear, but for Britain’s Labour government at the time there was no “binding obligation” to extradite Pinochet to Spain. Chile under Pinochet had backed the United Kingdom during the brief Falklands war with Argentina. Moreover, he and Britain’s former Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher were admirers of each other. There was, after all, a way out for Pinochet to return home instead of being extradited to Spain.

Writing about the essence of rule of law and government’s legitimacy, Thomas Hobbes in his seventeenth-century work Leviathan observed: “The law is the public conscience.”

What conscience?

DEEPAK TRIPATHI is the author of Breeding Ground: Afghanistan and the Origins of Islamist Terrorism (Potomac Books, Incorporated, Washington, D.C., 2011) and Overcoming the Bush Legacy in Iraq and Afghanistan (also Potomac, 2010). His works can be found at: http://deepaktripathi.wordpress.com and he can be reached at:dandatripathi@gmail.com. 

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It’s hard to imagine a greater irony than our political press, obsessed as it is with process stories, dubiously sourced rumors and trivial fluff, lamenting the fact that we can’t have a “serious national debate.”

Consider what may be the funniest lede in this cycle so far: “The elevated presidential campaign of ideas, fleetingly achieved after months of mudslinging, died Tuesday,” wrote Reid Epstein. “It was three days old.” Epstein went on to catalog all of the mean things the two campaigns were saying about each other, as if this is an election year or something.

But what makes that so hilarious is that Eptein’s piece appeared [3] in Politico exactly two days after the rag ran a piece [4] titled, “Forget the budget: Paul Ryan is hot!,” and just two days before a penetrating analysis headlined [5], “Fit for office: Candidates in best shape ever.” (Politico is also slapping together a quickie e-book about how the Obama campaign is “roiled in turmoil,” which is just a campaign classic that never gets stale.)

We can’t have serious debates in this country because we don’t have a news media that offers us serious debates. Rather than dig into candidates’ claims, we get he-said/she-said drivel and doses of whatever conventional wisdom is flying around the Beltway – we get dueling campaign “narratives” rather than a serious look at issues of substance, which seem to bore most campaign reporters.

That has long been the case, but we appear to have entered a new environment, one that Dave Roberts of Grist described [6] as an era of “post-truth politics” – “a political culture in which politics (public opinion and media narratives) have become almost entirely disconnected from policy (the substance of legislation).” The Romney-Ryan campaign appears to have embraced this reality, running a campaign that is unprecedented in its mendacity. While reporters and fact-checkers can — and do — highlight the inaccuracies of specific claims, it’s beyond the reach of mainstream journalism to point out the pattern for fear of appearing “biased.”

Consider a few examples of how our feckless fourth estate has performed during this cycle. We have Paul Ryan constantly being referred to as both a “serious” person, and a “fiscal conservative.” In a fawning profile, the New York Times, which conservatives liken to Pravda, told its readers [7] that Ryan “has become a particular favorite of — and powerful influence on — the intellectuals, economists, writers and policy makers who are at the heart of Washington’s conservative establishment.” The piece characterized him as “an earnestly interested, tactically minded policy thinker, with a deep knowledge of budget numbers.”

That image is based entirely on the conventional wisdom, but it’s also divorced from objective reality. The New York Times is the same paper that employs Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who pointed out [8] that over the course of a decade, Ryan’s Roadmap would cut $1.7 trillion in public spending, whils slashing taxes, mostly on high earners, to the tune of $4.3 trillion, and would this increase the deficit by a tune of $2.6 trillion. “And this is what passes inside the Beltway for serious thinking and a serious commitment to deficit reduction,” Krugman quipped.

As for his reputation as a deep thinker, Nate Silver noted [9] — also for the New York Times — that a statistical analysis of Ryan’s voting record placed him at about the same spot on the ideological spectrum as Minnesota’s tea party nutjob Michele Bachmann, whom the chattering classes rightly consider to be anything but serious.

Or look at Newsweek’s cover story, by Niall Ferguson, about why Obama should be voted out — it’s so riddled with the most blatant falsehoods [10] that Ferguson, perhaps unaware that there’s this thing called Google, appears to have lied [11] about which candidate he supported in 2008.

How easy it’s become to manipulate the media. You withhold any substantive information, not taking questions other than softballs thrown by friendly journos, until the travelling press is so desperate for a story that they’ll go with whatever you run up the flagpole. This week, the Boston Globe – another supposedly über-liberal paper – ran an editorial [12] calling for Joe Biden to apologize for saying that Romney, who had promised to “unchain” – deregulate – Wall Street would “put y’all back in chains.” Are we to suddenly pretend, en masse, that references to slavery haven’t become a staple of campaign speeches? Hardly a week goes by without a Republican urging African American voters to flee [13] the “Democratic Plantation,” or saying [14] that government regulations are “shackling the economy.” That stuff doesn’t leave the Globe editorial board reaching for their smelling salts. Yes, Biden made a poor choice of words, but with the number of Americans living near the poverty line reaching an all-time high [15], one might think that we could talk about topics other than the ‘gaffes’ that political reporters so enjoy.

Meanwhile, the Romney camp has referred to Obama as a “food-stamp president,” and is running a series of dog-whistle ads claiming – also entirely falsely [16] – that Obama is rolling back the Clinton era work reforms. The ads are reminiscent of the infamous “White Hands” ads [17] Jesse Helms ran in 1990. Political scientist Michael Tesler studied [18] voters’ reactions to seeing Romney’s first welfare ad, and found that, “among those who saw it, racial resentment affected whether people thought Romney will help the poor, the middle class, and African-Americans.”

The political press seems almost allergic to diving into the policy weeds to offer readers a sense of what politicians would actually do if elected. After Paul Ryan appeared – with his mother – at a Florida retirement community, the Washington Post quoted [19] one of the attendees saying, “I personally like his plan, because at 73, it really wouldn’t affect me… It’s something for the future. Under Obama, I just have too many problems — with the money he took away, the $716 billion.”

Both statements are totally untrue [20], but only one – that Obama “raided” Medicare – has been widly debunked by the fact-checkers. Every day reporters repeat the false claim that Ryan’s roadmap doesn’t impact people aged 55 and over because they wouldn;t be switched over to vouchers. But the reality is that Ryan’s budget repeals “Obamacare,” which is closing the prescription drug “donut hole” and covering free wellness visits and cancer screening for retirees right now, and he’d cut Medicaid by about a third over the next ten years (about a quarter of all Medicaid dollars go to seniors – it helps pay for 6 million retirees’ home health visits and covers Medicare’s out-of-pocket expenses for millions more). This isn’t some obscure policy arcania – it’s simple stuff to understand.)

So, no, tender Politico writers, we won’t have a lofty debate about the issues. But don’t blame the candidates – to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, they’re going to war with the press they have, not the one they necessarily want. Look in the mirror, because nobody is forcing you to uncritically repeat the campaigns’ claims or offer us breathless stories about who raised more dough or ran more ads in the battleground states. It’s you who will go bonkers over something vaguely titilatting like a bunch of drunk Republicans skinny dipping in Israel – nobody’s making you downplay reports [21] that the FBI was investigating allegations that one of those swimmers had violated campaign finance laws (it was none other than Politico that offered an “exclusive report [22]” claiming that the FBI “probed a late-night swim,” as if that’s even remotely plausible).

And that’s why we’ll continue living in a democracy in which 30 percent of adults can’t tell you which major party is more conservative [23] or correctly name their sitting vice president [24]. But they’re not clueless about everything. They know when they’re being poorly informed, which is why Pew tells us [25] that, “for the second time in a decade, the believability ratings for major news organizations have suffered broad-based declines.”

JOSHUA HOLLAND is an editor affiliated with Alternet.
Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/election-2012/media-hacks-why-our-national-press-corps-failing-public-abysmally

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