Copyright © 2005 Frank Lynch.
Copyright © 2005 Frank Lynch.
Me: Frank Lynch Home These are my mundane daily ramblings. Email: |
Good causes. Amidst my recent heavy
work pressures, tonight I found time to do telephone
solicitations for my kid's school. What a waste, when you think
about all
the other causes.
A major round of layoffs? No, not
here. The posts below this one (under the heading of Tuesday
November 8) were actually written and uploaded on Monday November
7. This kind of human error cannot be tolerated, and the staff
responsible for it have been issued warnings. It was
uncomfortable for all involved — you may have been in
similar situations — but suffice to say the cafeteria was
muted today. But we're carrying on.
Time to reach out. I don't always pay
enough attention to what goes on in the comments, and the past
few weeks have been even more taxing. But one of our regular
commenters, Tom Feranda, is going through one of those ordeals
that puts everything else in perspective. He's got a journal going on it,
and deserves all of our best wishes. We wish him the best, and
hope he gets well soon!
Up periscope! Apologies for the recent sporadic posting — I even skipped a photo for a day, which usually only happens when I'm on the road. But work has been a crush, due mostly to my being in a new arena for marketing research: the company and the people I work with are all fine, it's friction (in the physics sense) of my adapting. Pressure's still on though, so how about a little hand feint?
Aside from that, move along, folks, nothing happening here (what it isn't ain't exactly clear). But make sure you vote tomorrow. There's probably something on
your slate that counts.
What's NOT a charade with this White House? Today Frank Rich uses his column to describe how the military's handling of Pat Tillman's death — idealized to promote the glory of serving your country in Iraq — was done at a time when the White House seemed especially vulnerable to criticisms about its policies, and how it goes hand in hand with outing Valerie Wilson. But when I think about how many ways in which the White
House has played with reality (whether it be as trivial as
labeling boxes from China as if they were made in the U.S.A. or
as important as saying that Saddam Hussein's aluminum tubes were
for a nuclear program or talking up an "average tax cut"), I have
to start to wonder: is anyone maintaining a list of what the
White House has said which is unvarnished truth?
Missing Aaron Brown. You probably know by now that Aaron Brown, who held CNN's 10 PM slot for years, has now been displaced and is no longer with CNN. Basically, he lost his job to Anderson Cooper; Cooper's 7-8 PM slot expanded into two hours, 10 PM to midnight. It didn't look good when Cooper started "co anchoring" with Brown in the 10 PM slot, and now the axe has fallen. I'm not happy about this. Cooper got a lot of word-of-mouth over his coverage in the wake of hurricane Katrina, when he was a passionate, frenetic anchor enmeshed in the aftermath of her destruction. And the ratings for Cooper's show went up; yet I wonder how much of it was due to the novelty of the news itself. I think we all have to be honest with ourselves and remember how much cable news thrives on events like Katrina (or a Chinese student standing in the way of a tank). Will Anderson Cooper's impassioned Katrina style work equally well with all stories? For what it's worth, my preference is more for Brown's style. Watching him conduct an interview, you could feel him sifting through a story's aspects. To some this may have meant he approached an interview without a firm point of view, and thus may not have challenged his guests enough; if you were a viewer who was already well informed and had drawn your conclusions, the slow approach may have been infuriating. But for me it meant that an interview became a discussion, developing organically. He was polite to his guests and let them make their points rather than interrupting them. He afforded them the same space and courtesies that you and I would have wanted. What I've seen of Anderson Cooper is altogether different. He paces an interview more rapidly, and I'm not sure I want that at 10 PM. I think it's also worth noting — I think I read this — that when Brown and Cooper were co-hosting the 10 PM slot as an experiment, ratings were up. Yet they weren't sustained; I think it was Katrina boredom, which reinforces my doubts about the sustainability of interest in Cooper himself in the 10 PM slot. One more plaudit for Aaron Brown. A year and a half ago, when
we were left reeling from the disappointment of what was going on
with the Abu Ghraib abuses, it was on Aaron Brown's show that we
learned that it could all be explained by Zimbardo's social
psychology experiments which simulated prisoner-warden
situations. Not an easy concept to convey, but Brown did it. Brown hasn't died, but I think we've all died
a little bit with his dismissal.
Brooks loses his compass. Generally David Brooks likes to do this above-the-fray routine where he suggests that he's the only level-headed person around. Not so sure he can lay claim to that mantle today; in today's column he portrays Harry Reid as a conspiracy theorist "sit[ting] alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m., writing important notes in crayon on the outside of envelopes. It's been four weeks since he launched his personal investigation into the Republican plot to manipulate intelligence to trick the American people into believing Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction." It goes into ridiculous twists and turns, but of course what Brooks fails to remember from the outset was that Reid did not launch the investigation. It's only because Reid called a closed-door Senate session which embarrassed the Republicans in the Senate into accepting oversight of their slowness in investigating that Brooks has made this odd association. Reid hasn't launched an investigation, he's made an effort to keep it on track. If you read the column, you'll hear all sorts of bologna which if Brooks were to read coming from coming from liberal columnists (on the other foot) would set him in high dudgeon:
Brooks is trying to be funny, following each of these with an instance where Brooks can try to say, "Bush wasn't the only one who was wrong." But Brooks doesn't uncover any instances where Clinton was cherry-picking info, or not allowing the proper intelligence authorities to vet the intel which was coming in. Brooks doesn't get it: he doesn't see that the Bush administration created its own intel offices in the Pentagon, run by amateurs who didn't know how to sift through sources and would stovepipe anything they wanted to believe up the chain. That's why we need an investigation, and that's why
Reid cranked it up. But Brooks would rather demonize Reid as some
irresponsible wacko. It's so much easier that way then to
accept any moral responsibility for his own past praise of the
Iraqi venture and what Bush was doing.
Thou shalt not be a Muslim in America.
And if you insist, by all means don't hang out in public with any
of your Muslim friends. And certainly
don't get caught praying together at Giants Stadium. After
all, Christians never say private spontaneous prayers before a
football game...
Pride in America. We are a great
country, of course, but stories like today's
— about the CIA's secret prisons for terror suspects
— really make you question how far we've fallen. You lie to
your people about weapons of mass destruction to manufacture a
war, and well, that's not a good precedent. Of course, it's
because they hate our freedom and way of life that terrorists are
after us anyway, right?
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