Our So-Called Foreign Policy: Globalists Remain as Clueless as Ever on the CCP Virus

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America First, Catch 22, CCP Virus, Clinton administration, coronavirus, COVID 19, globalism, health security, healthcare products, Joseph Heller, Madeleine Albright, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, pandemics, TIME, Wuhan virus

The current CCP (for Chinese Communist Party) Virus outbreak has intensified a broad debate about America’s grand strategy in world affairs.

Specifically, supporters of an America First-type strategy (including, to some extent, President Trump) believe that the key to current and future anti-pandemic success, and overall national success, is building up national capabilities – like restoring lost production capacity in healthcare goods like pharmaceuticals and medical devices (think “ventilators”).

Pushing back is a school of thought now called “globalism” – a handy shorthand for backers of pre-Trump U.S. foreign policies who have long insisted that the nation’s best bet for adequate levels of security and freedom and prosperity is strengthening mechanisms of international cooperation. Not that the globalists completely neglected the need for national self-sufficiency, especially in terms of purely military products, or national sovereignty. But they clearly sought to “bend the curve” of American national security and foreign economic policy toward buttressing global capacities instead of national capacities. My evidence? The very healthcare goods shortages America is facing today.

As RealityChek regulars know, I’m squarely in the America First camp. And my confidence in this strategy has just been immeasurably bolstered by having read Madeleine Albright’s new essay in TIME defending the focus on cooperation.

I’m this confident not simply because Albright has long been one of the dimmest bulbs in the globalists’ ranks – despite having served as Secretary of State (during the Clinton administration). As I’ve previously noted, she never seemed to have learned the definition of “deterrence.” Instead, I’m mainly confident because her own new post (unwittingly) explains why it’s globalism that – in her words – reflects “childish” beliefs.

To oversimplify a little, the America First strategy doesn’t softpedal cooperative efforts because it’s selfish or mean or any of those human character traits that so commonly (yet so misleadingly) are used to characterize approaches to world affairs and the motives underlying them. Instead, its emphases stem from the assumption that American leaders can’t count anytime soon on the rest of the world adopting the kind of cooperative ethos needed to transition to globalism safely, and that as a result self-reliance is the only realistic choice available.

It’s also important to note that support for the America First strategy doesn’t require believing that all of most or even any other countries can rely on their own devices as well. Rather, it requires understanding how distinctively capable of self-reliance the United States has always been – and how much more self-reliant it can become.

Albright regurgitates the standard globalist points about how the main foreign dangers to the United States, including pandemics

“do not respect boundaries. They include rogue governments, terrorists, cyber warriors, the uncontrolled spread of advanced weapons, multinational criminal networks and environmental catastrophe. These perils cannot be defeated by any country acting alone, and any country would be foolish to try.”

Yet here’s what she also observes about the current state of world affairs:

>”[T]he largest and most powerful national governments are not prioritizing the improvement of our capacity for international cooperation.”

>”Hyper-nationalist leaders across the globe seem determined to ignore the awareness of interdependence that was—in the last century—drummed into our minds at a nearly unbearable cost.”

>”In the past two decades, jingoism has returned and spread in the manner of a contagious disease. Instead of highlighting the need for global teamwork, the doctrine of “every nation for itself” has taken hold on matters involving oil prices, trade, refugees, climate change, the regulation of communications technology and more.”

>“Look around: where are the leaders who will remind us of our mutual obligations and shared fate? In Moscow? Beijing? London? Rome? Paris? New Delhi? Ankara?”

>”[A] huge gap has opened between what the international community needs and the patchy, underfunded, under-energized reality now in place. The size of this gap represents a failure on the part of leaders on every continent….”

It’s true that Albright seeks to pin the blame on “a vacuum at the top that only the United States can fill.” But is claim is not only loony, but clueless. For this kind of leadership obviously requires the kind of superior material power and wealth that, in a world lacking common rules because common values are missing, have always been essential to influence behavior abroad. And relative American power in all fields except actual weapons and military equipment (though not in the materials, parts, and components needed to build them) has always been dismissed by the globalists as a pipe dream.

In one of the dark comedy classic novel Catch 22‘s numerous stunningly insightful exchanges, Yossarian, the main character who’s trying to have himself declared crazy and therefore unfit for combat or any kind of military service, tells one of his superior officers, “From now on I’m thinking only of me.” As author Joseph Heller continues:

“Major Danby replied indulgently with a superior smile: ‘But, Yossarian, suppose everyone felt that way.’ 

“‘Then,” said Yossarian, ‘I’d certainly be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?’”

That’s obviously disastrous advice for Americans today – and inexcusably so, since the nation unmistakably has built up a network of shared values that marks it as a genuine community, and consequently a political unit that makes cooperation both necessary and possible to begin with. When it comes to the (undeniably anarchic) “international community” – not nearly so much.

Which is why until Madeleine Albright and other globalists acknowledge this situation, and the policy imperatives flowing logically therefrom, you’d need to be a damned fool to take them seriously as well.

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Im-Politic: The Latest Trump CCP Virus Fake News

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Beth Cameron, CCP Virus, CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, China, coronavirus, COVID 19, ebola, Im-Politic, National Security Council, NSC, Obama administration, pandemic, Politico, Tim Morrison, TIME, Trump, Washington Post, WHO, World Health Organization, Wuhan virus

I’m getting sick and tired of debunking Mainstream Media myths spread about the Trump administration’s failures in dealing with the CCP Virus (as I have now taken to calling it, in honor of the Chinese Communist Party regime’s role in covering it up and thereby preventing timely responses all over the world). And maybe you’re getting sick and tired of reading them.

All the same, the attacks keep coming, and three in particular that have appeared in the last week – which happen to be closely related to each other – are screaming out for pushback.

Off the bat, though, some essential context: As I’ve tweeted repeatedly, I agree that the President’s anti-Wuhan Virus (another monicker I’ve been using) policy has been flawed. Chiefly, Mr. Trump does deserve criticism for claiming until recently that everything’s under control – although I can’t help but continuing to note that the World Health Organization (WHO) didn’t declare the situation to be a global pandemic until March 11. That’s a grand total of nine days ago.

In addition, testing of course took off way too slowly. I strongly suspect that this stemmed from outmoded guidelines and manufacturing processes at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that predated the Trump inauguration. But the buck in the U.S. government ultimately and rightly stops on the President’s desk, and a Chief Executive who’s described himself as a Can-do-type disrupter should have stopped the agency’s business-as-usual approach faster.

As for the broadsides with much less, if any, merit? The first concerns the claim that the administration foolishly abolished the National Security Council (NSC) office that it inherited from the Obama administration that focused on protecting the country from pandemics. This allegation, first made by that office’s first director, has been (to put it charitably) exposed as misleading by one of her NSC successors, Tim Morrison.

He’s explained that the office’s responsibilities were merged into a new office that looked at pandemics more holistically, because they’re closely related to challenges like those posed by weapons of mass destruction generally. And Morrison has contended – credibly – that thanks to various preparations made by this reorganized NSC, an Ebola outbreak was quashed quickly.

To be sure, as I’ve pointed out, the emergence of diseases in regions like Central Africa, which have scant connections with the global economy, and in places like China, which have extensive connections, pose dramatically different challenges. And I continue to think, as argued, that bureaucratic reforms involving such tiny government agencies are game-changers in real-world terms. But you’d think that the initial accuser, Beth Cameron, might consider apologizing. And that the Washington Post would acknowledge a huge fact-checking failure (though it did run the rejoinder).

What’s even less well known – and has gone even more scantily reported than the Morrison observations – is that Mr. Trump’s predecessors approved decisions that actually do look like genuine pandemic defense downgrades. According to this TIME magazine post:

“The Trump Administration has become the third White House in a row to downgrade or eliminate the senior White House personnel tasked with tracking disease and bioterrorism threats, according to Kenneth Bernard, a retired Rear Admiral and physician, who served as a special assistant to the president for security and health during the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations.”

TIME continues:

Bernard “served in the top role in the Clinton National Security Council, only to be ignored by the incoming George W. Bush Administration, which eliminated his special advisor position.

“But after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington spurred fears Al-Qaeda would follow up with a bioweapons attack, and the anthrax attacks of 2001, the Bush Administration re-established the office, bringing Bernard back to serve as the first former Special Assistant to the President for Biodefense, as a subset of the White House’s Homeland Security Council (HSC), which later helped combat outbreaks of SARS and the Avian Influenza.”

And as for the Obama record:

“Under Obama’s NSC, Bernard says the office was downgraded again, until the 2014 Ebola crisis emerged, and President Barack Obama appointed ‘Ebola Czar’ Ron Klain. National Security Advisor Susan Rice later institutionalized the office in 2015, calling it the Directorate for Global Health and Security and Biodefense.”

Not exactly a model of foresight.

The next two myths were propagated (and weirdly invalidated at the same time) by this supposed Politico scoop about a transition-period Obama administration warning to the incoming Trump administration to ramp up for an inevitable big-time pandemic. The thrust of the article, written by Nahal Toosi, Daniel Lippman, and Dan Diamond, is that outgoing Obama officials held a briefing with soon-to-be Trump counterparts on the potential dangers of the kind of bio-threat being faced by the nation right now, and that the Trump-ers were decidedly uninterested.

The allegedly clear implication, as the article quoted former national security advisor Susan E. Rice as recently writing: “Rather than heed the warnings, embrace the planning and preserve the structures and budgets that had been bequeathed to him, the president ignored the risk of a pandemic.”

As noted above, the structures and budgets point is bogus. But so is the warnings point. And we know this in part because, as Politico stated (in paragraph 18), “None of the sources argued that one meeting three years ago could have dramatically altered events today.”

Also important to note: The authors presented documents presented at the meeting, and they make clear the phoniness of both the charge that Trump officials were (uniquely) caught flat-footed by CCP Virus testing requirements, and that the leadership vacuum they’ve created has given the states no choice but to fill a gap that’s not their responsibility.

Except the documents say absolutely nothing about boosting testing capabilities or modifying CDC guidelines. And they specify that “State and local governments lead public health response,” especially when it comes to “hospital preparedness and response.”

Recent news reports have created some optimism that effective anti-CCP Virus medicines may be developed sooner than initially expected.  Too bad there’s no reason to think that another serious malady – Trump Derangement Syndrome – will soon come under control.

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 point, 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

Tags

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

Tags

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.