Following Up: No, Trump’s Guards vs Guns Idea Isn’t Crazy

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anti-semitism, armed guards, Associated Press, Following Up, guns, Kansas City Star, Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, political violence, TIME, Trump, Twitter, Washington Post

President Trump’s claim after the Pittsburgh synagogue shootings that the presence of armed guards would have reduced the fatalities had all the earmarkings of one of those face-palming (for various reasons) comments he too often makes. I mean, everyone knows this belief is bonkers, right? Twitter has apparently “melted down” over them. Late-night TV comics were in full snark mode. More seriously, public officials in Pittsburgh threw cold water on the suggestion.

Apparently, all these critics missed these highly conspicuous exceptions: many prominent Jews themselves. Their views of course aren’t dispositive. But given all the dismissive and/or indignant harrumphing generated by the idea that any houses of worship need such security, or should need such security, the points they’ve made certainly deserve more attention than they’ve gotten so far – and they’re worth presenting in some detail.

In particular, according to this Associated Press report:

“[B]efore those incidents, many synagogues and Jewish organizations in the U.S. had been ramping up security measures.

“Fifteen years ago, the Anti-Defamation League issued a 132-page guidebook titled, ‘Protecting Your Jewish Institution: Security Strategies for Today’s Dangerous World.’

“It includes detailed advice on controlling access to the premises, and also urged leaders of institutions to think carefully about whether or not they wanted to hire armed guards.”

In addition:

“A rabbi-emeritus at the Tree of Life Synagogue that was the site of the Pittsburgh attack, Alvin Berkun, “said guards — while used during the major Jewish holy days — were not on duty Saturday.”

And it’s not just Pittsburgh:

“In Kansas City’s synagogues, armed security has been a presence for years — particularly on major holidays such as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Some synagogues hire guards every Friday night and Saturday morning for Shabbat (sabbath) services. At others, armed security protects children as they come and go for preschool.”

One big reason? As RealityChek regulars know, Kansas City’s Jewish community was attacked by a neo-Nazi gunman in 2014.

In fact:

“Many U.S. synagogues do employ armed guards; others have taken alternative measures to tighten security.

“‘I doubt there’s a synagogue in the US that doesn’t think seriously about security,’ said [Heidi] Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center [from the AP story linked above].”

Further, in the wake of the latest shootings, the Washington Post has reported that:

“[P]olitical and Jewish leaders across the country are grappling with whether [Mr. Trump’s] suggestion makes sense.”

And in Pittsburgh itself, at least one Jewish congregation has settled on an answer: “Pittsburgh Synagogue Hires Armed Guards to Open for Sunday School After Shooting.”

At this pthatoint, I’m far from sold on armed guards as the idea way to prevent shootings at synagogues and other religious institutions – or any other public places. And I hate the fatalism implied. But we don’t live in an ideal world. And we certainly don’t live in a world that permits us to safely dump all over a recommendation just because we don’t happen to care for the source. At least that’s the message being sent by those who need to take on this challenge in the here and now, as opposed to posturing from afar.

 

Im-Politic: The Mainstream Media Covers Up Clinton’s Birther Link

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2008 election, 2012 election, birtherism, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Im-Politic, Jim Asher, Mark Penn, McClatchy, Newsweek, Obama, Politico, Sidney Blumenthal, The New York Times, The Washington Post, TIME

We now have a foolproof test of whether the Mainstream Media deserves even a smidgeon of trust from readers and viewers for coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign: See how a news organization has reported – and whether it starts to report – that one of Hillary Clinton’s closest confidants is now credibly accused of spreading in 2008 the rumor that President Obama was born overseas (and therefore was never eligible according to the U.S. Constitution to serve in the Oval Office).

Before fans of the Democratic presidential nominee and/or haters of her Republican rival Donald Trump become apoplectic at reading this, please keep in mind that posing the above challenge does not mean that I endorse Trump for president, that I think he’s a good person, or that I don’t recognize his own prominent role in pushing the so-called “birther” story. Nor does this position of mine mean that I view as fact the claim about Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal. (For the record, he has called it “false. Period.”)

What it does mean is that I’m arguing that the country’s leading sources of information about the world’s most important political event – a U.S. presidential election – have now been presented with a claim from an entirely respectable source (one of their own!) that one of the earliest proponents of the birther story (which of course has been denied by the president himself and indignantly by former Secretary Clinton) was a long-time associate of the Democratic nominee. And so far, the verdict is clear: Much of the Mainstream Media has flunked badly.

Let’s leave out opinion columns and unsigned editorials, since they’re not supposed to be objective accounts of events. Let’s even leave out so-called “news analyses” – which although they tend to appear in the news sections of publications and websites, are at least labeled as something other than supposedly straight reporting. And let’s quickly review what we know for sure.

Yesterday on Twitter, a former head of the McClatchy newspaper chain’s Washington, D.C. Bureau stated that Blumenthal had told him “in person” during the 2008 Democratic primaries that Mr. Obama was born in Kenya. Then-Senator Clinton was the future president’s opponent for that year’s Democratic nomination in the White House race. McClatchy is a national newspaper chain that publishes major dailies in cities including Miami, Florida; Charlotte, North Carolina; Dallas, Texas; and Kansas City, Missouri.

As for Blumenthal, this lengthy account, among others, should make clear that his intimate association with both Clintons stretches back several decades. Indeed, Hillary Clinton intended to name him as one of her senior aides at the State Department. And even though the new Obama administration quickly scotched the idea, the new Secretary and Blumenthal stayed in continual touch during her tenure – as so many hundred of her released emails show. His access, in fact, was so good that 24 of them contained information that was classified at the time as confidential or secret – and still is. (See the previous linked item.)

So the contention by former McClatchy newsman Jim Asher was undeniably important. In a subsequent email to his former colleagues, he elaborated:

“Mr. Blumenthal and I met together in my office and he strongly urged me to investigate the exact place of President Obama’s birth, which he suggested was in Kenya. We assigned a reporter to go to Kenya, and that reporter determined that the allegation was false.

“At the time of Mr. Blumenthal’s conversation with me, there had been a few news articles published in various outlets reporting on rumors about Obama’s birthplace. While Mr. Blumenthal offered no concrete proof of Obama’s Kenyan birth, I felt that, as journalists, we had a responsibility to determine whether or not those rumors were true. They were not.”

So how did The New York Times, which has long fancied itself the world’s “newspaper of record,” deal with this development? It didn’t. The paper’s main article about the latest birther-related developments contained no mention of the Blumenthal. And the only reference to the 2008 Clinton campaign was this brief paragraph:

“During the 2008 Democratic contest, a senior strategist for Mrs. Clinton at one point pondered, in an internal memo that was later leaked, the ways in which Mr. Obama’s personal background differed from those of many Americans.”

(Just FYI, the senior strategist in question – pollster Mark Penn – was really senior, and also a leading Clinton adviser for many years.)

The Washington Post‘s main news story also ignored Blumenthal’s reported actions, though it did mention the Penn memo – which it said was written in 2007 (i.e., incredibly early in the 2008 campaign). In addition, the Post quoted by name a then-top Clinton campaign official’s for-attribution claim that a volunteer in Iowa was let go for a similar suggestion.

The newspaper Politico doesn’t have the national reach of The Times or the Post, but it is considered must-reading by the intertwined political-media-and policy establishments in Washington. Sometimes it’s hard to tell with this publication where hard news ends and that murky news analysis category begins. But three of its posts on the alleged Clinton campaign role in fostering birtherism omitted any mention of the Blumenthal-related charges, too. They’re found here, here, and here.

And in case you’re wondering – because the newsmagazines have clearly lost influence in recent decades – both TIME and Newsweek whiffed on this story, too.

Moreover, here’s what could be more disturbing: the apparent failure of any Mainstream Media types to investigate Asher’s charger further, rather than simply include Blumenthal’s denial in the accounts that do mention him, and leave the impression that we’re left with an intriguing but ultimately unresolvable “He said, he said” situation.

For Blumenthal is well known throughout the national political press corps, and it’s very difficult to believe that McClatchy was the only news organization to which he attempted to sell his own birther insinuation. Indeed, it’s almost as difficult as believing that Blumenthal acted in 2008 without Clinton’s knowledge.

As a result, the major news organizations still have a chance to redeem themselves. First, their reporters could directly ask Clinton about Blumenthal’s actions. Second, they could ask each other whether or not they were contacted by Blumenthal. I’ll certainly be watching to see if the press is interested in improving its so-far failing grade. If you’re really interested in the health of our democracy, whatever your political leanings, you should be, too.

Im-Politic: The Elite Media Bash the White Working Class Again

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Appalachia, black working class, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jobs, Joe Klein, Mainstream Media, offshoring, Primary Colors, TIME, Trade, urban poverty, white working class, William Julius Wilson

Recent Gallup findings show that the news media’s approval ratings with the American people lag those of every other national institution except for Congress and big business. That is, the public says it has more confidence in the nation’s schools and banks, among others, than in “newspapers” and “television news.” Moreover, Americans’ opinions of the press keep getting worse all the time.

After reading Joe Klein’s new Time magazine column on the mounting woes of America’s white working class, I can only wonder why the media’s numbers are even this good.

Klein shot to media superstar status by exploiting his chummy ties with the Clinton political team to write an adoringly leering anonymous novel about the 1992 presidential campaign. Primary Colors was packed with so much inside information that the national chattering class echo chamber was abuzz for years trying to decide whether it was written by a Clinton staffer. (President Clinton’s own musings on the matter didn’t exactly hurt.) Klein lied repeatedly to fellow journalists about his authorship, but on the verge of being outed, finally confessed in mid-1996 – several months after the best-seller was published.

Since journalism says it values honesty and independence from power, you’d think that Klein would have been disgraced and ostracized. Instead, not only did Primary Colors fly off the shelves and win a movie deal for the author. But his career thrived outside Hollywood, too as he “became a columnist at the New Yorker magazine, then edited by [celebrity-worshiping] Tina Brown, the wife of Harold Evans, the head of Random House, which published Primary Colors” before landing his current gig at Time.

So after literally decades of cruising in the chattering class’ most glamorous circles, you’d think that Klein might be a little hesitant about commenting on the state of working class whites in Flyover America – and that whatever he wrote might express at least a little sympathy. But you’d be wrong.

According to Klein, the recently spotlighted spread of “sexual profligacy, drug dependency, violence, indigence and a free-range sense of helplessness that leads to irresponsibility” in regions like (but not restricted to) Appalachia have little to do with economic trends like “the departure of manufacturing jobs.” Instead, as with the presence of these pathologies in the African-American community – which he claims is also mistakenly attributed to (and excused by) job and wage loss in the liberal canon – the real problem is “a bottom-up crisis of individual responsibility.” Even more conveniently from lofty perches like Klein’s, this malady is “largely beyond the reach of public policy.”

Apparently it’s beyond Klein’s ken nowadays that “habits of indolence–the inability to show up to work on time, the refusal to follow orders on the job, the preference to hang out at a home often subsidized by the federal government” might have something to do with the reality that after entire careers of meeting all these standards of responsibility, tens of millions of working class Americans of all races have been rewarded by entire industries being offshored with Washington’s active assistance, or destroyed by predatory foreign competition as American leaders looked the other way. P.S.: The vast majority of Mainstream Media journalists were loudly applauding the entire time.

It’s also clear that Klein is completely unfamiliar with the findings of sociologist William Julius Wilson, who has painstakingly shown how the loss of good industrial jobs in urban America has fueled much of the social breakdown experienced by black families and communities. I presented Wilson’s key conclusion in a May, 2015 post and it’s worth considering again today:

“The consequences of high neighborhood joblessness are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty. A neighborhood in which people are poor but employed is different from a neighborhood in which people are poor and jobless. Many of today’s problems in the inner-city ghetto neighborhoods – crime, family dissolution, welfare, low levels of social organization, and so on – are fundamentally a consequence of the disappearance of work.”

Wilson’s analysis – which of course is as relevant to the white working class as to the black – undoubtedly sounds obvious to anyone who has depended on employment day in and out at a factory or similar facility that generated family-wage jobs. For jet-set journalists like Klein, who at most drop in occasionally on this world – usually for a little local election-year color – and who not so coincidentally benefit handsomely from cheap imported goods, not to mention cheap legal and illegal immigrant labor, it’s much easier to blame the victim.

Im-Politic: A Slobbering Media Love Affair…with Jeb

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2016 election, Donald Trump, elites, Establishment Media, Gawker.com, Im-Politic, Immigration, J.K. Trotter, Jeb Bush, media bias, NBC News, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, TIME, Trade, Washington Post

A major theme of RealityChek since its launch has been that, if America’s Big Media ever took seriously their one-time mandate to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” those days are long gone. Instead, establishment journalists collectively have clearly decided that their priority instead is coddling the nation’s political and business elites and protecting their privileged perches from the great unwashed. That’s when they aren’t crossing back and forth among those worlds.

So you can just imagine how (ruefully) pleased I’ve been these last few days to read through various media post-mortems of former Jeb Bush’s historically disastrous presidential campaign. In an ordinary campaign year, media types surely would have roasted the former odds-on Republican favorite as a monument to nepotism whose respectable turn as Florida governor was massively offset by his family connection with his widely reviled brother, the former president, by his reliance on George W. Bush’s neoconservative foreign policy advisors, and by the oceans of special interest money that were funding his White House run.

But of course, this isn’t an ordinary political year, and although Jeb Bush was not exactly adored by the mainstream press, he was often flatteringly contrasted with Donald Trump. This media anti-Christ’s capitol offense has been daring to blast away at the two of American elites’ most sacred cows – the job- and wage-killing mass immigration and offshoring-friendly trade policies that simultaneously enabled the establishment to claim cosmopolitan, noblesse oblige ideals even as it’s pocketed nearly all of the lavish benefits.

Now that Bush is toast politically (and both Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton and establishment darling Marco Rubio, Republican Senator from Florida, are still running reasonably strong), the media has been freed to let its pro-Bush – and thinly disguised anti-Trump – biases hang out.

We should all be indebted to Gawker.com’s J.K. Trotter for compiling some of the most cringe-inducing. All are worth reading, but in case you’re pressed for time, here are a few lowlights, as well as examples I’ve found:

>From The New York Times‘ Ashley Parker: “[A]t the core, what made Jeb compelling to cover was that he was deeply, impossibly human.

“In a cycle where so many other candidates were able to toggle effortlessly between soaring speeches and masterful debate performances, between well-rehearsed outrage and manufactured indignation, Jeb almost seemed to think aloud in real time, and we got to watch him muddle and bumble through, just like any real person….

“Jeb was a flawed candidate, who ran a wildly imperfect campaign. But he struggled mightily and did it on his own terms, trying to talk about big, serious things. And for that, perhaps, he deserves a round of applause.”

>From the Washington Post‘s Chris Cillizza: At January’s South Carolina Republican debate, Bush “made serious and nuanced points about immigration and foreign policy, and he demonstrated deep knowledge on almost every issue. …as he has throughout the campaign, Bush painted a picture of a complex world — from the Middle East to here at home. His answers to questions were larded with detail and complexity. On Trump’s call to ban Muslims from entering the country, for example, he was measured and thoughtful; ‘every time we send signals like this, we send a signal of weakness, not strength,’ Bush said.

“Jeb knows the world is complex. He knows that problems aren’t solved simply because you say so. He knows the work of governance is hard. ”

>From The Wall Street Journal‘s Beth Reinhard and Rebecca Ballhaus: “Mr. Bush’s departure also reflects the fading of a brand of Republican politics as a harder-edged conservatism comes into focus. His father advocated a ‘kinder, gentler nation,’ his brother described himself as a ‘compassionate conservative’ while Mr. Bush called for ‘the right to rise.’

“It was conservatism laced with the Bush family’s sense of noblesse oblige and old-fashioned patriotism, manifested in a focus on education policy, a desire to bring illegal immigrants out of the shadows and a strong military presence on the world stage.

“But Mr. Bush faced a GOP electorate angry at all things Washington, making ties to the establishment a vulnerability rather than a strength.”

>From TIME’s Philip Elliott and Zeke J. Miller: “At a time when experience was a vulnerability rather than a resume line, Bush insisted on running a policy-centric campaign. It was a year that saw bluster overtake substance, and Bush refused to shift. ‘In this campaign, I have stood my ground, refusing to bend to the political winds,’ he said before leaving the stage, tears visible in his eyes. His insistence on running his campaign his way proved his undoing. While rivals mastered clipped sound bites, he held forth on policy. When reporters tried to goad him into questions about politics, he defaulted to wonkdom. If a voter took the time to attend his town halls, he owed it to them to give a thoughtful answer.”

>From NBC News: “Bush ran for all the right reasons, according to NBC News. He told voters he had a ‘servant’s heart’ and, in private and public, his campaign always appeared motivated by duty rather than personal ambition right up to his final speech.”

It’s important to note that all these strongly opinionated views have come not from pundits – who are supposed to be opinionated in their work. They come from beat reporters and political analysts – who are not. The media’s increasingly open biases can only be signaling ever mounting levels of contempt for Main Street, and warning everyday Americans that trusting all the news they watch and read can be hazardous for their political and economic health.

Im-Politic: Insidious New Frontiers in Media Bias

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2016 elections, Bryan Caplan, chattering class, China, currency manipulation, Donald Trump, echo chamber, Financial Crisis, Global Imbalances, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jeffrey Sachs, Joseph E. Stiglitz, Mainstream Media, Open Borders, Project Syndicate, The Atlantic, TIME, Trade, Vanity Fair, Vietnam War, Walter Cronkite

I’ve always found the role played by the Mainstream Media in setting the national policy agenda fascinating, important – and sorely neglected. As suggested in recent posts about establishment figures and organs expressing formerly taboo perspectives about U.S. involvement in the Middle East, the nation’s leading publications and news shows in particular not only actively campaign for favored policies through legitimate (e.g., their own editorials) or not-so-legitimate (biased reporting) means.

In addition, especially with opinion articles they publish and post, they exert influence more subtly – by deciding which subjects and positions are acceptable for their often highly educated and politically active readers, and of course for politicians, to raise. And as others in the media or the nation’s political classes and other elites start getting and repeating the message, powerful momentum for chosen views can be generated through what many observers have called the “echo chamber effect.”

In my lifetime, one of the clearest examples was the late CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite’s famous 1968 broadcast portraying victory in the Vietnam War had become a futile ambition for the United States. Until then, respectable opinion was split, but along the relatively narrowly drawn lines of calls for escalating America’s military involvement, and calls for (some kind of) negotiated solution to the conflict. But Cronkite’s pessimism was so complete and unexpected, and his judgment and integrity so highly regarded, that even though he endorsed more energetic diplomacy, the idea of cutting losses and simply pulling up stakes inevitably moved from the wings toward center stage.

So that’s why it’s important to spotlight examples of this agenda-setting and momentum-creation on top of those already discussed in these digital pages – especially since the two latest exemplify some troubling contemporary twists. Authors have  been permitted to air path-breaking versions of preferred points of view without being required to contend with screamingly obvious objections. And these missives are appearing practically – and suspiciously – back to back. Even worse, there appears to be a blatantly political, Campaign 2016-focused objective being sought as well.

The first example concerns immigration, and my conviction that it can’t be completely coincidental that both TIME magazine and The Atlantic presented readers with articles making the case for completely open borders within three days of each other!

I’m not saying that this is not a perfectly valid opinion to hold. But in addition to the timing, what’s revealing – and in fact outrageous – is that evidently none of the editors at either publication asked the authors to deal seriously with the potential problems that relatively wealthy countries would run into if they started sending “Come one, come all” messages around the world. After all, it’s not like the chaos that’s resulted in part from the European Union’s welcoming stance regarding refugees has not been screamingly obvious for months. And imagine the possible magnet effect on Mexico if the United States explicitly dropped its immigration limits and border enforcement. (Not to mention the national security threats that could arise.)

To his credit, the author of the TIME column, George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan, did acknowledge such challenges. But although his answer – restrict welfare benefits for immigrants – is defensible logically, it’s absurd politically. What makes him believe that most of the pro-amnesty forces would accept this kind of compromise?

The second example of such sophisticated propagandizing concerns international trade. In this case, two other economists (and indeed, much bigger names than the above open borders champions) have argued for coddling China’s brazen violations of market-oriented commercial norms, including its currency manipulation. Again, although I strongly disagree, there’s a defensible argument for the United States to accommodate China’s rise. Ditto for believing that with enough supposed smarts in Washington, the opportunities for mutual gain should and will outweigh the temptation in both Washington and Beijing to view bilateral relations as an exclusively zero-sum proposition.

But both authors – Nobel economics laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz and superstar Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs – have ignored what happened when the United States pursued just this strategy on the economic front just a short decade ago. The resulting trade and investment imbalances arguably helped trigger the global financial crisis. It’s infuriating that neither author – both of whom are surely familiar with this contention and the impressive evidence for it – referred to this danger. And it’s appalling that none of the editors of even Vanity Fair magazine and the Project Syndicate website that showcased their work brought up the question.

Either these staffs weren’t aware of this objection, or they shunted it to the side in order to portray these theses in the best possible light. Neither explanation would reflect well on media platforms that claim to value educating the public. And let’s not forget that Stiglitz’ Vanity Fair article was posted barely a week after Sachs’ Project Syndicate column.

So it seems entirely reasonable to conclude that these four articles were published and posted specifically to start convincing the public not only to support today’s watered down versions of open borders-type immigration and trade policies. They also sought to demonstrate that the logical extremes of these policies are eminently feasible as well as desirable. And son of a gun – which front-running presidential hopeful this year has made more restrictive immigration and trade proposals his core issues?

The First Amendment properly protects the media’s right to engage in such subliminal political advertising. If only the Constitution could protect the public’s right to know when it’s being manipulated.