Republicans are Only Part of the Problem - But Not for the Reasons the Mainstream Press Suggests

In his column today, Paul Krugman doesn't just excoriate American political elites, he chastises the press for mis-representing the source of the ongoing political disaster in Washington. He concludes by exclaiming: "The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse."

In a certain sense I agree. One major source of political and political-economic dysfunction in the U.S. is the reactionary politics of a series of Republican Congressional delegations (and paralleling that, the reactionary politics of the Bush-Bush-Reagan administrations). It surely is hard to argue with Krugman about that. Pretty much everything we know about the rightward shift of American politics in the past several decades locates a preponderate amount of responsibility with the Republicans.

But Krugman is only half right here. He spends a good portion of the column documenting the anemic centrist politics of the current Democrats. They are not now - and have not in recent memory - mounting any credible opposition to the Republican train wreck. Essentially the Democrats are Republican-lite and that is a big part of the problem too. The difficulty they pose is not one of being equally extreme (as the press narrative would have it) but of being craven. No one seems to want to say that out loud either.

Beach Clean Up at The Economist

An interesting case of airbrushing at The Economist. You can read about it here. I subscribe to the magazine and actually find the rationale they offer pretty plausible.

Shoot the Messanger: Illinois Officials Harassing Students

The Illinois State's Attorney in Cook County (Chicago), Anita Alvarez, is in the process of legally harassing students at Northwestern University who conducted class-based inquiries into allegedly wrongful convictions. You can read the story here in The New York Times. As is typically the case, government functionaries are more interested in persecuting those who call them to account than they are in getting things right. Given the regularity with which law enforcement agencies and the courts more or less willfully convict citizens of crimes they did not commit, what is wrong with some oversight?

Assessing How The National Business Press "Covered" the Financial Crisis

The short answer is "pretty poorly." You can find a systematic assessment here at the Columbia Journalism Review.

"It struck us that it is impossible to avoid trying to assess the business press’s performance in the run-up to the meltdown. The business press is the sole means by which normal citizens would know of goings-on in the lending industry and on Wall Street. It is the vital connection between the public on one side and regulators and financial institutions on the other. It is the only instrument capable of catalyzing the virtuous cycle of reform that emerges when dangers and abuses come under the public gaze. If readers screwed up, so be it. But if it is the business press, readers are going to have to insist on identifying weak points, cultural problems, skewed priorities, and areas in which the business press’s institutional interests might be out of alignment with those of the broader public. If members of the public must go elsewhere for warnings, they need to know that, too.

It is true that few sectors of journalism, with the possible exception of the Washington press corps, are as infected with the extreme form of know-it-all-ism as the business press, which wields the complexities of its subject area like a cudgel against non-cognoscenti. But readers should not shrink from asking relevant questions merely because they don’t know the precise mechanics of a credit default swap and don’t read Fortune as closely as they might, say, the Torah.

The fact is, you don’t need to be a media critic or a quant to assess whether proper warnings were provided. What’s more, I suspect most rank-and-file reporters would welcome scrutiny, as long as it’s fair. And so we undertook a project with a simple goal: to assess whether the business press, as it claims, provided the public with fair warning of looming dangers during the years when it could have made a difference.

I’m going to provide a sneak preview of our findings: the answer is no. The record shows that the press published its hardest-hitting investigations of lenders and Wall Street between 2000–2003, for reasons I will attempt to explain below, then lapsed into useful-but-not-sufficient consumer- and investor-oriented stories during the critical years of 2004–2006. Missing are investigative stories that confront directly powerful institutions about basic business practices while those institutions were still powerful. This is not a detail. This is the watchdog that didn’t bark.

To the contrary, the record is clogged with feature stories about banks (“Countrywide Writes Mortgages for the Masses,” WSJ, 12/21/04) and Wall Street firms (“Distinct Culture at Bear Stearns Helps It Surmount a Grim Market,” The New York Times, 3/28/03) that covered the central players in this drama but wrote about anything but abusive lending and how it was funded. Far from warnings, the message here was: “All clear.”

Finally, the press scrambled in late 2006 and especially early 2007 as the consequences of the institutionalized corruption of the financial system became apparent to one and all.

So the idea that the press did all it could, and the public just missed it, is not just untenable. It is also untrue."

There are (at least) a couple of points that I think are worth noting. First, as the CJR piece makes clear the press is trying pretty vigorously to shift blame for their own failure to note the impending collapse onto readers who allegedly neglected to pay sufficient attention. This is sort of like blaming poor people (via the Community Reinvestment Act and ACORN) for the sub prime mortgage boondoggle that bankers and mortgage companies created. In short, it is preposterous. Te point is not that the folks at Bloomburg or the Wall Street Journal or wherever were themselves out peddling securitized debt obligations. No, it is just that they failed abysmally to say much about those who were engaged in such practices. The converse point is that while they'd now like to blame their readers, they are unwilling to challenge the powerful financial institutions on which they rely and report. Hence the name of the article - "Power Problem." Having failed to do that, the press failed in its central task. Ooops!

Here we seem to have an analogy to the Washington Press Corps, which, because it relies on government sources for information, can only be so critical. I recommend Tim Cook's terrific book Governing With the News: The News Media as a Political Institution, 2nd Edition (Chicago, 2005). The business press relies on connections in the finance industry and surely no reporter or outlet would ant to be cut off from access to information by - gasp! - criticizing corrupt or venal or duplicitous practices.

Media Coverage of War Dead

Not long ago, various entities in the media got all worked up because the White House wouldn't allow photographers into the Oval Office for publicity shots of the new President. I thought at the time that their complaints were more or less totally ridiculous and said so here. In part my irritation over that flap was colored by my sense that the press has been supine when significantly more important matters were at stake. For example, over the past two decades (since the first Gulf War) the military has prevented photographs of the caskets of returning war casualties. The press has basically capitulated completely.

Military personnel escorting coffins at Dover Air Force Base in
one of hundreds of photographs the Pentagon released in 2004.
Photograph: Agence France Press.

Today, the government rescinded that policy, sort of. According to this story in The New York Times Defense Secretary Gates announced that "the news media will now be allowed to photograph the coffins of America’s war dead as their bodies are returned to the United States, but only if the families of the dead agree."* With all due respect, I think the families of military dead ought to have no say in this. Men and women who head off in the military are public figures - they represent the country. Their deaths in service are the cost - in the case of Iraq, the senseless cost - of policies our government is implementing. The rest of us get off Scot free and are happy enough with that. We do not, however, respect or honor the sacrifice of the dead or their families by allowing their remains to be secreted back into the country. The claim to 'privacy' simply masks the cost of war. I have made this and similar points here and here and here and here and here and here and here.

Do not misunderstand me. I know from personal experience exactly how obnoxious and intrusive the press can be when a young person dies. But the press is hardly going to be showing us dismembered and maimed bodies. (After all, the military still keeps the press corralled "on the ground" in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is another matter though.) What they might show us is the mounting number of flag-draped caskets that are coming back as the result of military adventures. To the man quoted in The Times story who claims that allowing coverage of returning war dead will simply "politicize our fallen" I would say, that the decision to go to war is a political one. While I am saddened by the fact that this man's son died in Iraq, unfortunately, the politics of the matter started well before his casket was shipped home. (And, of course, as The Times reporter makes clear, Bush the elder's initial policy decision to prevent photographs of the returning dead was itself politically motivated.) We here at home can only assess whether the sacrifice being made is 'worth it' if we have some basis for knowing what sacrifice is actually being made. The "new"policy persists in making that task especially difficult.
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* You can find other earlier stories from The Times on this issue here and here and here and here.

Preparing for the Onslaught

It has has started. The ombudsman at The Washington Post published this lament today about how the paper "tilted" toward Obama in its campaign coverage. I am sure we will see more of this gnashing of teeth. And I am sure too that the right-wing nutters will run with the laments as far as their whining will allow. Regular readers will know that I hardly am an Obama-niac. That said, this column is inane on several counts.

First, the ombudsman - Deborah Howell - is so focused on reporting the numbers that she hardly bothers to ask why they might turn out the way they do. She complains, for instance:

"The op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on Sen. John McCain, 13. There were far more negative pieces about McCain, 58, than there were about Obama, 32, and Obama got the editorial board's endorsement. The Post has several conservative columnists, but not all were gung-ho about McCain."

The first thing to note is that fully half of the opinion pieces on Obama that The Post were negative. More of those they ran on McCain were negative. But McCain was a crappy candidate who had to pull a stunt (i.e., name Palin as his running mate) in order to excite the base of his own party. Do we need to insist that a paper make up nice things to say about someone when his own partisans are lukewarm? OK, maybe saying negative things about McCain was like kicking a sick dog. But he was running for office after all. And he did pull boner after boner along the way. Beyond that, just maybe the editorial endorsement was deserved. There is a reason, after all, why we call it an endorsement - it's a judgment on the part of the editors. The fact that conservative commentators - and not just those whom The Post pays - thought McCain was a loser can hardly be held against the paper. Maybe the conservative columnists ought to have lied about their views?

Second, Ms. Howell seems to misunderstand the distinction between the preferences of the media and reality.

"Stories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those devoted to McCain. Reporters, photographers and editors found the candidacy of Obama, the first African American major-party nominee, more newsworthy and historic."

Maybe it's just me, but the issue here is not that reporters etc. simply thought the Obama campaign was historic. It was historic. Maybe the reporters and photographers and editors noticed something - we never before had had a plausible African American candidate for President. By contrast, John McCain was simply another in a long line of old white men running for President. And he was not a terribly compelling old white man at that. Ms. Howell! Wake up!

Finally, Ms. Howell, makes assertions that are, at best, ambiguous, and very likely wholly misleading. For instance, after praising the background profiles the paper ran on the candidates, she opines:

"But Obama deserved tougher scrutiny than he got, especially of his undergraduate years, his start in Chicago and his relationship with Antoin "Tony" Rezko, who was convicted this year of influence-peddling in Chicago. The Post did nothing on Obama's acknowledged drug use as a teenager."

Well, why? First, is it the case that The Post paid no attention to these alleged stories? Or, is it that they made initial queries and decided that there is nothing to them? The fact that The Post ran nothing on this litany of non-stories doesn't mean they "did nothing" with them. It may mean that they actively dismissed them as wacky or irrelevant. Ms. Howell provides no information about that. In any case, what precisely does Ms. Howell suspect about Mr. Obama's nefarious dealings during his years at Columbia? What do we need to know about his drug use that we don't already know? He admitted it. And even if, like virtually every American teenager, Obama engaged in illicit activities, what is the relevance of that to his current abilities and judgment? (After all, our current President was a drunk well past his college years and was a crappy student to boot. Who cares? His real problems - such as being an ideologue - are unrelated to such minor symptoms.) Do we know every mis-step taken by John McCain as a youth? Do we care? No. And no.

Ms. Howell is here simply pandering to the paranoid nutters who spend too much time watching Fox News or reading Matt Drudge or listening to Rush Limbaugh. If we want rumor and innuendo without substantiation we know precisely where to get it Ms. Howell. Do you think the FOX News folks (and their ilk) didn't poke under every possible rock? We all recall the notorious case of the Clintons murdering those like Vince Foster who'd become politically inconvenient? The issues Howell raises here are in that category. Note to Post ombudsman: the mere fact that some reader complains about something doesn't make it a problem.

Let's move on to more general matters. Here are the salient passages from a recent (late October) study of campaign coverage by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. Ms. Howell refers to it in her column. The study examined campaign coverage during was the six weeks between the end of the conventions and the final debate:

"The media coverage of the race for president has not so much cast Barack Obama in a favorable light as it has portrayed John McCain in a substantially negative one, according to a new study of the media since the two national political conventions ended.

[. . .]

For Obama during this period, just over a third of the stories were clearly positive in tone (36%), while a similar number (35%) were neutral or mixed. A smaller number (29%) were negative.

For McCain, by comparison, nearly six in ten of the stories studied were decidedly negative in nature (57%), while fewer than two in ten (14%) were positive."

OK, so only a third of the press coverage devoted to Obama was positive. That means the rest - the other two-thirds - was mixed at best! The negative coverage on McCain was nearly two thirds negative. So what? Let's repeat what I've already noted. McCain ran a crappy campaign. He embarrassed himself by picking Palin as VP. And he looked like a fool for putting his campaign on hold to charge off to DC so he could meddle in the bailout negotiations. Even right wing columnists were mocking him. The numbers do not reflect a liberal bias. They reflect reality.

Indeed, the Pew folks discovered that: "Since the end of August, the two rivals have been in a virtual dead heat in the amount of attention paid, and when vice presidential candidates are added to the mix the Republican ticket has the edge." And that in a campaign where the other candidate was making an historically unprecedented bid! So the Republicans got a lot of attention and failed to turn that to their advantage. I don't call that bias, I call it incompetence.
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Update: (13 November) ~ For an alternative assessment of the press performance - especially The Post's you might have a look at this column by Eric Alterman at The Nation.

Russia, Georgia, South Ossetia, the U.S. and Our Press (amongst others) ...

I am getting ready to head out to class - a lecture on "freedom" and "pluralism." The students are meant to have read Isaiah Berlin's essay "Two Concepts of Liberty." We'll see!

In any case, last summer, before we all became distracted by our economy and its travails, there was much hand-wringing about the military conflict between Russia and Georgia over South Ossetia. At the time, I wrote that there seemed to be plenty of bad behavior all around. The standard narrative in the west was that the evil Russians were solely to blame. While they were not, neither were they innocent. Same with the Georgians. Same with the U.S. and other western powers. Most of that complexity was lost in press accounts of the conflict. Over at The Nation you can find this account of just how skewed the press accounts may really have been.

How To Pay for A Free Press

A few days ago I posted on the vicissitudes of independent media, pointing out the irony of the fledgling Toronto-based blackfly magazine simultaneously receiving critical accolades and experiencing a more or less dire financial crisis. In this essay reprinted in Eurozine, André Schiffrin who for many years ran Pantheon and is now a prime mover at The New Press (a "not-for-profit publishing house with titles on educational, cultural, ethnic, and community subjects") addresses the problem of "How to Pay for a Free Press." The central problem seems to be how to insure diversity in media "markets" where the threat of concentration and homogenization is high. As Schriffin makes clear the danger is not just that we risk an anemic cultural ecology but that players in a concentrated are perhaps less likely to resist political pressures when government seeks to restrict information. And, to be clear, government has always provided a scaffolding for the "free press" in the U.S. by, for instance, providing unified, efficient postal service.* This, of course, is simply a specific instance of why enforceable rights presuppose government instead of pre-existing it.** So the issue here is one of institutional design ~ how to create institutions that can sustain a free press organized primarily through a market while at the same time not affording those institutions undue direct influence over how the market operates.
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* Paul Starr. 2004. The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications. Basic Books.
** Stephen Holmes & Cass Sunstein. 1999. The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes. W.W. Norton.

Independent Press & Its Vicissitudes

The other day I read an article in In These Times by Erin Polgreen enitled "R.I.P LiP"; it is a eulogy for a now defunct independent magazine. Of course, In These Times has had its share of financial troubles over the past few years. Hopefully it will survive in its re-organized format.

Polgreen astutely notes that even when they disappear such endeavors often serve as incubators for young independent minded journalists and wiwrters and artists. As an example she points to Matt Bernstein Sycamore (a.k.a. Matilda) who has moved on from LiP to Make/Shift ~ Feminisms in Motion. The latter "creates and documents contemporary feminist culture and action by publishing journalism, critical analysis, and visual and text art." And it seems to be off to a good start. Indeed, Make/Shift has been nominated for a 2007 Utne Independent Press Award in the category of "Best New Publication." On their web page the Make/Shift folks not only noted their own nomination but (generously) also linked to all the other nominees too.

I figured that I would follow the links and check out some of the other incipient undertakings. One of these, Blackfly, is published in Toronto and presents itself as "taking a bite out of Ontario politics." It too looks like a terrific outfit run by committed young folks on a shoestring.

Unfortunately, even though it has garnered critical notice, Blackfly seems to be really struggling financially. So if you are committed to the value of a robust, independent press, and especially if you live north of the border, think about subscribing or even donating some of the dollars you'd otherwise devote to holiday shopping.

The Price of My Subscription (Again)

Yet again [1] [2] [3] [4], Katha Pollitt single-handedly makes subscribing to the The Nation worthwhile. Her column this week "With Facts on Our Side," complete with an allusion to Dylan, calls attention to a recent essay in The Lancet (Vol.370, #9595, 13 Oct. 07) on the worldwide incidence of abortion. Turns out that (1) making it illegal does not decease the incidence of abortion, it only makes the process more dangerous to women and (2) the best predictor of low rates of abortion is widespread and easy availability of contraception. You would think that 'pro-life' types who want to miniize the practice of abortion would stop their efforts to impose legal restrictions on abortion and start working instead to make sure contraception is widely and easily available. Fat chance.

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P.S.: (Added 26 October) From openDemocracy comes this report on an international Conference in London this past week focusing on the task of making abortion safe and available. Also at oD is this report on abortion politics in Brazil.

The Price of My Subscription

I have subscribed to The Nation for a long time now. It is generally a provocative read, especially when skewering liberals, actual and putative, from the left. This week the columnists Katha Pollitt (about whom see * * & *) and Alexander Cockburn once again remind me why I subscribe. Cockburn lambasts the spineless Democrats in the Congress for squandering political resources in hopes of capitalizing in partisan terms. Pollitt not only contributes her two-cents-worth to the Ignatieff-bashing that has taken place much of the week, but asks more pointedly why the mainstream media simply cannot bring themselves to acknowledge that opponents of our Iraq boondoggle have been right all along and right, too, for good reasons.

Why Can't We Ignore Right Wing Authors When They Invite Us To Do So?

Once again Katha Pollitt has single-handedly redeemed the price of my Nation subscription. Her column in this week's issue - "Ayatollah D'Souza" - dismantles Dinish D'Souza's newly published right-wing rant in which he tries to pin the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the "cultural left" in the U.S. and then recommends that American conservatives make common cause with potenital allies among "traditional Muslims." This is lunacy.

Pollitt has a right to focus on such nuttiness, I suppose, since apprently she is among the targets of D'Souza's ire. However, I also noticed that The New York Times felt obliged to waste column inches on the book in its review section last Sunday. The reviewer, Alan Wolfe (hardly a radical by any estimation), offers a caustic assessment of the new book, saying first that it "is clearly designed to restore his reputation as the man who will say anything to call attention to his views" and then calling it "a national disgrace, a sorry example of a publishing culture more concerned with the sensational than the sensible." At what point will the "liberal" media feel that it can safely ignore such authors?

Is it Redundant to Say that the Right Wing in America is Obtuse?

Over the past weeks and months, I've become increasingly amazed (and irritated) at the inability or unwillingness of right wing types in the U.S. to entertain the possibility that the war they've planned and supported has been an abject failure. Well, it would be a failure if their purported criteria for success hadn't shifted on quite so regular a basis. So, assume some reasonably stationary and clearly stated criterion of "victory" or "success" - the words BushCo typically chant - and the war could then be considered an abject failture.

This seems to have occurred to others as well, and in this regard I would recommend two recent columns, one by Susan Douglas in In These Times and one by Eric Alterman in The Nation each of which skewer the talking heads of the right. As Alterman rightly inquires: "If William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Lawrence Kaplan and David Brooks et. al. are so smart, why were they so wrong about something so crucial? And why, given their sorry records, do they and their editors still think anybody ought to keep listening to them? At the very least, those they misled are entitled to an explanation." The answer, of course, is that this crowd (and the editors who pay them) have no interest in journalistic or intellectual integrity; they are interested in pushing a right-wing political agenda to which they are committed regardless of the costs to the everyday folks who bear the cost. The slightly more complicated problem is why allegedly "liberal" media outlets such The New York Times or npr regularly feature such ideolgues. And there it apparently comes down to the notion that "objectivity" somehow requires giving voice to both sides of an issue even when one side is so clearly hair-brained. (Of course, that notion itself is something the right has insisted on to the detriment of political debate in the country.) On the war in Iraq there is no reason whatsoever to continue giving the right a platform for the very simple reason that they are wrong. I would say "dead wrong" but for the insult that would be to the Iraqi civilians and U.S. service men and women who have died in the name of the right's inexcusable error.

Foleypalooza

There is a certain delicious quality to the predicament that the Republicans find themselves in these days. That said, a number of things strike me as salient about the Foley matter.

(1) The Congressman engaged in completely inappropriate behavior. Being a drunk or having been molested as a child, even if they are not simply claims fabricated to divert attention and responsibility, are not excuses. His interactions with a sixteen year old are not that same as Clinton's (also unacceptable) relationship with a 22 year old intern (Monica) as many apologists on the right insist. But a 16 year old is not exactly a child either as many opportunistic leftists seem to think. Sendng inappropriate cyber messages is not the same thing as haivng physical contact with a young child. (I write as the father of two teenage sons.) How to sort all that out is a problem, but it is getting run together in much of the discussion. It is crucial to find out, and be clear about, precisely what was going on.

(2) The Republican leadership in Congress, if it is established that they knew about all this and did nothing, are much the same as Catholic Bishops who moved pedophilic priests around from parish to parish without taking steps to protect young parishoners. In other words, the leadership should be investigated and held accountable too. And should any Democrats get swept up in this (was the minority leadership wholly unaware of Foley's behavior?) they should be held accountable as well. So, following on point one, how about an independent counsel? Then we could get to actual poltical matters in the weeks leading up to the election.

(3) The right-wing pundits and politicians who are focusing on the way this story emerged instead of on what Foley and his fellow partisans have been up to are sniveling hypocrites. This latest affair simply highlights that well-known quality.

(4) As is typical, Katha Pollitt has cut through the cant and hyperbole and hypocrisy surrounding the Foley affair. She has a column in The Nation entitled "Foley's IMbroglio" in which she comments on the way the press and the Democrats have gleefully embraced this latest sideshow instead of actually addressing problems of war and the economy and political corruption. The premise for the press and politicos seems to be that the voting public simply doessn't care abaout such matters. Pollitt concludes:

"Financial corruption like the Abramoff affair is complicated and boring, but everyone understands sexual shenanigans. Perhaps, but are the voters really so brain-dead? Is there no point trying to whip them up into a frenzy about some outrage that actually matters? Like, oh, Bush's refusal to declassify the full National Intelligence Estimate documenting how the Iraq War has created more terrorists. Or Afghanistan, where the Taliban is resurgent--so much so that Senator Frist said he wants to put them in the government. Have we given up on habeas corpus, just voted away with the help of twelve Democratic Senators and twelve House Dems, including Sherrod Brown, often praised in this magazine? It would be interesting if someone mentioned the record Foley compiled on the rare occasions when he zipped up his pants and went to work--like his support for that stupid 700-mile fence along the Mexican border, and for denying public education to illegal immigrant children. Now that's what I call child molestation.

It shows you how hapless and shallow the Democrats are that they find so little electoral joy in a principled coherent challenge to Republican rule. Instead, we get tactical theatrics over whatever comes down the pike: last month gas prices, this week Foley. I see why the Democrats feel they have to do it: They're too compromised, the contests are too close and the discourse has been dumbed down for so long, it takes something simple and splashy to get people's attention. But it doesn't say much for the party--or for the rest of us, either. "

I agree.

"Islamo-Fascists": How to (Try to) Do Things With Words

In 1946, Orwell wrote: "The word Fascism has now no meaning except insofar as it signifies 'something not desirable'." Unsurprisingly, BushCo have picked up on and sought to exploit this meaninglessness by adopting the label "Islamo-fascism." On the true idiocy and actual purpose of using this phrase I recommend two columns by Katha Pollitt in recent issues of The Nation [1] [2]. Pollitt is a wonderfully smart, very funny, politically astute writer; her column is, by itself, worth the price of my subscription to The Nation. As she writes in the first of her columns on the matter:

"'Islamo-fascism' looks like an analytic term, but really it's an emotional one, intended to get us to think less and fear more. It presents the bewildering politics of the Muslim world as a simple matter of Us versus Them, with war the only answer, as with Hitler. If you doubt that every other British Muslim under 30 is ready to blow himself up for Allah, or that shredding the Constitution is the way to protect ourselves from suicide bombers, if you think Hamas might be less popular if Palestinians were less miserable, you get cast as Neville Chamberlin, while Bush plays FDR. 'Islamo-fascism' rescues the neo-cons from the harsh verdict on the invasion of Iraq ... by reframing that ongoing debacle as a minor chapter in a much larger story of evil madmen who want to fly the green flag of Islam over the capitals of the West."

Just so. I posted a while back on the irony of BushCo accusing their critics of "appeasement" and will not reiterate the point here. Instead I will plug Pollitt's most recent book of essays: