For Your Xmas Stocking (pretend it's still xmas)

So Richard Falk is awesome and I thought I would just dedicate one small post to his 2004 book, which everyone should read, and which perfectly sums up the central conceit of this blog.

Buy it now!

Slanting the News on Israel and Palestine

From Counterpunch

Gaza is Buckling
Richard Falk, Israel and the New York Times
By ELLEN CANTAROW

As Israel nails shut the coffin that is Gaza under a siege that has lasted nearly three years, steadily intensifying so that malnutrition rates rival those of sub-Saharan Africa, sewage runs raw in the streets and pollutes the ocean, homes are still being bulldozed to super-add collective punishment upon collective punishment; men, women and children are still being sniped at and killed; children are deafened by continuing sonic booms, the vast majority of them suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome, and many of that majority have no ambition other than becoming “martyrs,” Israel in mid-December denied entry to Richard Falk, UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur on the occupied territories.

It is Dr. Falk's responsibility to report to the UN on conditions in the occupied territories. Israel is blocking him from carrying out this job. In an article that reads as if it rolled off the computers in Israel’s Government Press Office (no quotes by anyone friendly to Falk’s point of view, for instance), The New York Times, tells us Dr. Falk “has long been criticized in Israel for what many Israelis say [emphasis mine] are unfair and unpalatable views.” The blind attribution is typical.

Unlike European Union ministers who recently condemned Israel’s acts in Gaza and the West Bank only to turn around and approve upgrading the EU’s relations with Israel, Falk will not compromise. He not only describes Israel’s atrocities in Gaza, but calls for immediate protective action “to offset the persisting and wide-ranging violations of the fundamental human right to life.” He also calls for an International Criminal Court investigation to “determine whether the Israeli civilian leaders and military commanders responsible for the Gaza siege should be indicted and prosecuted for violations of international criminal law.”

Perhaps it’s his clarity of focus and refusal to back down that constitute his sins in Israel’s eyes? (The usual hasbarah about anti-Semitism, etc., is to be discounted, though being Jewish Falk may fall into the category, “self-hating Jew.”) Many others, Jewish and not Jewish (including Israeli Jews never quoted by The New York Times) have charged Israel with violations of international law and war crimes in Gaza. As Falk himself noted in his statement about Gaza to the UN (see “Gaza: Silence is not an Option” at The Heathlander and other Internet sites), the Secretary General of the UN, the President of the General Assembly, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights have all condemned Israel for its monstrous siege. “Karen AbyZayd,” stated Falk, “who heads the UN relief effort in Gaza, offered first-hand confirmation of the desperate urgency and unacceptable conditions facing the civilian population of Gaza. Although many leaders have commented on the cruelty and unlawfulness of the Gaza blockade imposed by Israel, such a flurry of denunciations by normally cautious UN officials has not occurred on a global level since the heyday of South African apartheid.” Other denunciations have been made by B’tselem, an Israeli human rights organization that in June, 2006 called Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s electrical power plant “a war crime” (“Aiming attacks at civilian objects is forbidden under International Humanitarian Law and is considered a war crime. The power plant bombed by Israel is a purely civilian object and bombing it did nothing to impede the ability of Palestinian organizations to fire rockets into Israeli territory.”) Last month, Switzerland accused Israel of violating international law by destroying Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and Ramallah. This denunciation, writes a reporter for The First Post, is “arguably the strongest condemnation of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians to come from any western European country since Charles de Gaulle famously attacked the ‘oppression, repression and expulsions’ of Palestinians by Israel over 40 years ago.”. (November 17, 2008.)

Christopher Hedges writes that Falk told him Israel’s siege has unleashed “an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe that each day poses the entire 1.5 million [population] Gazans to an unspeakable ordeal, to a struggle to survive . . . This is an increasingly precarious condition. A recent study reports that 46 per cent of all Gazan children suffer from acute anemia. There are reports that the sonic booms associated with Israeli overflights have caused widespread deafness, especially among children. Gazan children need thousands of hearing aids. Malnutrition is extremely high in a number of different dimensions and affects 75 per cent of Gazans. There are widespread mental disorders… Over 50 per cent of Gazan children under the age of 12 have been found to have no will to live."

Gaza committed the ultimate sin. Its residents refused to be good little natives; it launched the first Intifada. It became legendary, together with Jenin in the West Bank, for its refusal to submit to Israel’s occupation. Gaza was also a region that, unlike the West Bank, was negligible in terms of fertile land and water resources. So Gaza must first be quarantined (Darryl Li has compared Gaza after Israel’s “pull-out” to an animal pen where – before the siege, at any rate – food and supplies were thrown in, Israel having divested itself of any responsibility for the population.) Israel’s aim was that Egypt take responsibility for Gaza, which has not happened. Gaza’s resistance has continued firing rockets into Israel. But Gaza’s final and unpardonable sin was, in a completely fair election, to elect a party that displeased Israel and the US. Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra infamy helped the reprisal along by engineering civil war between Hamas and Fatah (see Vanity Fair, April, 2008.)

Now, finally, Gaza is buckling. While the world watches, a people is being destroyed. The definitive essay is Sara Roy’s in this month’s London Review of Books. She details an excruciating decline in all means of life – food, fuel, medicine, water-purifiers, etc. Roy doesn’t say it, and neither does Falk, but Israel’s siege fulfills at least three points in Article 2 of the Convention on Genocide (killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.) Roy’s depressing conclusion is that if Gaza falls, the West Bank will follow.

Line Your Cage With the NY Times

From FAIR
As Usual, NYT Ignores Iraqi Opinion Anecdotes trump polls on withdrawal
By Dahr Jamail

The New York Times failed spectacularly in its coverage of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, helping lead the country into war and only much later (5/26/04) publishing a half-hearted mea culpa. As the near-apology acknowledged, the paper’s failure resulted in large part from its lack of skepticism regarding its sources, most notably exiled Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi.

Despite the mea culpa, though, the Times continues to mislead on Iraq, particularly on the issue of whether or not Iraqis want the U.S. military to exit their country. Once again, that journalistic failure seems to be rooted in the same fundamental problem of overconfidence in the paper’s sources and ignoring the obvious contradictory evidence.

An article by Times reporter Stephen Farrell headlined, “Should U.S. Forces Withdraw From Iraq? The Iraqis Have a Few Opinions” (9/9/08) serves as a recent example. The piece, which also kicked off a special series on “the debate among ordinary Iraqis over the presence of American troops” that ran in the Times’ online blog section, purported to bring readers insight into Iraqi opinion on withdrawal. “As Iraqi and American diplomats negotiate a deal for American troops to stay in Iraq, or not, Iraqis are also debating the issue,” Farrell wrote—as though there is a great deal of debate among Iraqis about whether they prefer that their country continue to be occupied.

The Times reporter split Iraqis into “three categories” of opinion, with only one actually supporting the withdrawal of occupation forces. Besides a group that “simply [wants] the Americans to leave, period,” Farrell described one pro-occupation group of Iraqis that “worries that the brief period of improving security which Iraq has witnessed this year will be vulnerable if the Americans abruptly withdrew.” Those in this group, according to Farrell, “say the United States has a moral obligation to remain, and that continued presence of the occupiers is preferable to a return to rule by gangs and militias.”

Farrell described the other pro-occupation group as sharing “a common worry, that without a referee, Iraq’s dominant powers—Kurds in the far north and Shias in the center and south—will brutally dominate other groups.”

Farrell gave no indication of the relative sizes of each group, but the Iraqi quotes featured below the piece seemed to suggest that the pro-withdrawal group was quite small: Only two of the ten people who expressed a personal opinion about the troops spoke in favor of immediate withdrawal.

Survey says
Notably, Farrell opted not to include polling data in his article. Perhaps that’s because had he done so, it would have undermined the thesis of his piece.

A poll from March 2008 conducted by Opinion Research Business (ORB) for the British Channel 4 (2/24–3/5/08) found 70 percent of Iraqis wanting occupation forces to leave. Within this group, 65 percent wanted them to leave “immediately or as soon as possible”—meaning fully 46 percent of Iraqis would fall under Farrell’s “leave immediately” group. Another 19 percent wanted them out within a year or less, while 12 percent wanted to wait until “whenever the security situation allows it.” (Interestingly, in Baghdad—where Times journalists are based—the number of those who wanted troops out immediately was only 42 percent, while 20 percent wanted to wait until the security situation improves; still, a majority wanted troops out within a year.)

Another March 2008 poll conducted by D3/KA for ABC News and other media outlets (2/12–20/08) similarly found that 73 percent of Iraqis either “somewhat” or “strongly” opposed the ongoing foreign troop presence in their country, with 38 percent in favor of immediate withdrawal. Only 7 percent of Iraqis—primarily Kurds—“strongly” supported the presence of occupation forces.

The D3/KA survey, which did not offer a timetable for withdrawal as a choice, found 35 percent of Iraqis wanting troops to stay until security is restored and another 24 percent wanting them to stay until the government is either “stronger” or can “operate independently.” But with respect to the “improving security” that Farrell pointed to as a reason many Iraqis want troops to stay—a result, according to media conventional wisdom, of the successful troop “surge” (Extra!, 9–10/08)—61 percent of Iraqis said the U.S. troop presence was making security worse, compared to only 27 percent who said better. The same survey found that 70 percent of Iraqis believe the U.S. and other “coalition” forces had done “quite a bad job” or “a very bad job” in carrying out their responsibilities in Iraq.

To illustrate the U.S.’s “dilemma,” Farrell made references to two previous occupations of Iraq: the failed British occupation during the 1920s and the Empire of the Caliphate under the Ummayad provincial governor al-Hajjaj in 694 AD. The examples presented Iraqis as irrepressibly “fractious” and “troublesome” going back to ancient times; as Farrell concluded loftily, “Names and governments change, but there is nothing new under the Mesopotamian sun.”

According to such logic, chaos, violence and majority Iraqi opposition to the occupation would seem to have less to do with the occupation itself—which has left an estimated one million dead and nearly 5 million displaced (9/18/07; UNHCR, 8/08)—and more to do with an inherent incapacity to accept the “civilization” or “democracy” that a brutal occupation brings.

Unchanging trends
Bylines and dates change, but there is nothing new under the Manhattan sun. A look back at New York Times coverage of Iraqi opinion over the years shows a long trend of ignoring polling data despite their ready availability and their remarkable consistency.

A Gallup poll from April 2004 (USA Today, 4/28/04) revealed that “a solid majority [of Iraqis] support an immediate military pullout.” Fifty-seven percent said the coalition should “leave immediately.” The same poll found that 75 percent of the residents of Baghdad favored an immediate withdrawal. At the same time, a poll from the Iraq Center for Research and Strategic Studies (4/28/04), which was partly funded by the State Department and had coordinated its work with the Coalition Provisional Authority, found that more than half of all Iraqis wanted an immediate withdrawal of all U.S. forces, an increase of 17 percent over the previous October.

In writing about Iraqi opinion, though, the Times’ Ian Fisher (5/23/04) ignored this data, asserting, “There are still far more people . . . who are skeptical of, and maybe even hate, the Americans but see them as the only way to save themselves.” As evidence, Fisher cited not scientific surveys—as those would have contradicted his claim—but rather a tally conducted by Sadim Samir, a 23-year-old political science student at the University of Baghdad, who “canvassed five neighborhoods” of Baghdad for a “class paper.”

Two years later, Times journalist Michael Gordon, who co-wrote some of the Times’ most misleading WMD reports with Judith Miller and still periodically files stories from Iraq, criticized Democrats calling for a withdrawal from Iraq because, Gordon argued (CNN, 11/15/06),

there are a significant number of players in Baghdad today who don’t mind if the Americans withdraw. These are the militia leaders. They would be happy if the United States withdrew, because, then, they can go and carry out their ethnic cleansing campaign against the Sunnis.


But a poll by the Program on International Policy Attitudes (9/1–3/06) found that then, as today, 7 in 10 Iraqis favored troop withdrawal within a year—not just a small band of “militia leaders” bent on ethnic cleansing.

More recently, 18 Iraqis were interviewed for the Times article “In Iraq, Mixed Feelings About Obama and His Troop Proposal,” by Sabrina Tavernise and Richard Oppel (7/17/08). Again, the Times preferred to rely on the opinions of less than two dozen Iraqis rather than refer to available polling data that would have undercut the theme of the story: that Iraqis faced “a deep internal quandary” about Obama’s support for withdrawal.

The first Iraqi quoted was a general who, when asked about Barack Obama’s plans to draw down troops in Iraq, shook his head and said: “Very difficult. . . . Any army would love to work without any help, but let me be honest: For now, we don’t have that ability.” When the piece mentioned one Iraqi who favored immediate withdrawal, his quote (“I want them [U.S. soldiers] to go to hell”) was framed in rhetoric couching the situation as “complex.” The piece concluded by quoting an Iraqi government official who, having traveled to Germany and seen the U.S. bases there, said: “I have no problem to have a camp here. . . . I find it in Germany and that’s a strong country. Why not in Iraq?”

Writing history by anecdote
One of the New York Times’ chief perpetrators of skewing Iraqi opinion is John Burns. The paper sent Burns to Baghdad during the lead-up to the invasion of 2003, and he served as bureau chief there until the summer of 2007; his perspective on the occupation no doubt heavily influenced the Times’ reporting from Iraq.

Burns, the son of a NATO general, has publicly voiced his remarkably uncritical view of U.S. foreign policy, telling Rolling Stone magazine (7/04):

The United States has been overwhelmingly a force of good in the world. This is very unfashionable talk, but I think this ought to be remembered here. I grew up in a world where the survival of democracy depended on the military and economic power of the United States. If that power became less credible here, I think the world would be a lot less safe. The stakes are extraordinarily high. I think this is a tipping point in the fate of the American empire.


Many journalists with the Times used to regularly report from the streets of Iraq in the early days of the war, before the security deteriorated to the point where most decided against venturing out; Burns, however, was not generally one of them. Those of us reporting from Iraq rarely saw Burns, the winner of two Pulitzer Prizes, leave the heavily guarded New York Times compound unless he was going on an embed or taking an armored convoy over to the Green Zone to report on the military press conferences that we referred to as the “five o’clock follies.”

When journalists report this way in Baghdad, they put themselves in a position of total reliance upon the Iraqis they hire to send out into the streets with questions; they then have to sift through the answers those Iraqi reporters bring back to find anecdotes to fit their stories. In this way, history is written by anecdote, and this is exactly what the Times does by quoting individual Iraqis or referring to “Iraqi opinion” without citing available polls.

Despite his limited perspective on Iraqi opinion, Burns has repeatedly presented that perspective to the public without caveats, both in the Times and in other outlets—most frequently the Charlie Rose show on PBS—and it’s a perspective that runs counter to the survey data.

“In my experience, the great majority of Iraqis are . . . very loathe to see those American troops leave now,” Burns told Rose on June 14, 2006, shortly before the State Department’s own polls showed nearly half of Iraqis wanting immediate withdrawal and seven in ten wanting troops out within a year (Washington Post, 9/27/06). Burns told Rose a year later (PBS, 7/17/07):

I think, quite simply that the United States armed forces here—and I find this to be very widely agreed amongst Iraqis that I know, of all ethnic and sectarian backgrounds—the United States armed forces are a very important inhibitor against violence. I know it’s argued by some people that they provoke the violence. I simply don’t believe that to be in the main true.


Meanwhile, Iraqis were telling pollsters the opposite: 69 percent believed U.S. troop presence was making the security situation worse (D3, 2/25–3/5/07), and they believed security would get better rather than worse in the immediate weeks following a coalition troop withdrawal by two to one (ORB, 2/10–22/07).

As Baghdad bureau chief, Burns’ influence reached beyond Times reporting. When the National Journal (12/9/05), for example, wanted to give readers the “assessment” of the Iraqi people, they cited Burns: “I think you would get overwhelming assent from Iraqis that should American troops be precipitously withdrawn from the war, civil war and escalation of the sectarian conflict already under way would become virtually inevitable.”

Mismeasures and misjudgments
Burns’ piece on the fifth anniversary of the war (3/16/08) gave some insight into the paper’s attitude toward both polls and the situation in Iraq. The lead photo of the piece showed U.S. bombs exploding over Baghdad during the initial invasion, with the title “The Air Show.” The caption read: “The war began with a mesmerizing display of American might. But the United States made a basic misjudgment about the Iraqis’ readiness to share power.”

Burns downplayed the number of Iraqi civilians killed by the war—“tens of thousands”—in another instance of the Times’ refusal to accept surveys when they have to do with Iraq. Burns’ number, the number preferred by the Times, comes from Iraq Body Count, which only counts violent civilian deaths actually recorded in cross-checked media outlets, and supplemented when possible by morgue, hospital, NGO and government data. Estimates based on scientific polling methods, which are widely accepted by the Times and other outlets when reporting on, say, Darfur, placed Iraqi deaths due to violence at over 600,000 in 2006 (Lancet, 10/11/06) and at over a million by mid-2007 (ORB, 9/07). Those numbers do not distinguish between civilians and combatants, but even if one only counted women, children and the elderly as “civilians,” more than 100,000 had died violently in Iraq as of two years before Burns’ article was written (Lancet, 10/11/06).

Burns also blamed journalists for failing “to uncover other facets of Iraq’s culture and history that would have a determining impact on the American project to build a Western-style democracy, or at least the basics of a civil society”—facets such as “how deep was the poison of fear and distrust” and the “harsh reality that Iraqis . . . had little zest for democracy.” Again, Burns chose to fault “traumatized Iraqis” for the chaos and bloodshed in Iraq, rather than the illegal, brutal invasion and occupation of their country.

And despite his moment of self-critique, Burns continued to do precisely what he faulted journalists for doing in the past—failing to uncover Iraqis’ perspectives. He laid out very explicitly his view of polls:

Opinion polls, including those commissioned by the American command, have long suggested that a majority of Iraqis would like American troops withdrawn, but another lesson to be drawn from Saddam Hussein’s years is that any attempt to measure opinion in Iraq is fatally skewed by intimidation. More often than not, people tell pollsters and reporters what they think is safe, not necessarily what they believe. My own experience, invariably, was that Iraqis I met who felt secure enough to speak with candor had an overwhelming desire to see American troops remain long enough to restore stability.


In other words, because they don’t reflect his “own experience,” Burns simply dismissed the validity of all polls (and most reporting!) on Iraqi opinion, and declared his own conversations with a minuscule slice of the Iraqi public a more reliable measure of the opinions of the entire country.

A problematic practice
“It’s a tradition for journalists to see themselves as the researcher to go out and get the story, so that’s their default position,” said Dr. Steven Kull, director of World Public Opinion (WPO), when asked why he thought some media outlets tend to ignore polling data.

Some journalists are not well-trained to interpret polls, so they might be uncomfortable with them. And they might see them as a source of competition to the traditional approach of interviewing people and getting their anecdotes. But a few anecdotes here and there don’t really give you the picture.


Kull also directs the Program on International Policy Attitudes that plays a central role in the BBC World Service poll of global opinion and the polls of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs; he gives briefings on world opinion on various issues to Congress, the State Department, NATO, the United Nations and the European Commission.

“The problem is that when these [anecdotes] are at odds with polling data, these are incorrect stories,” Kull added. “The universe of people who may be willing to talk to a reporter may not be indicative of the attitudes of the general population.”

Certainly the Iraqis John Burns “know[s] best” are not representative of the population as a whole; those Iraqis, he told Charlie Rose in 2006 (PBS, 10/20/06), were “almost all on their way to the passport office” to get out of the country—an option he acknowledged was “only available to the middle class, primarily to those who are being paid in dollars.”

Kull explained that when reporters interview some Sunnis in Baghdad who express fears of a U.S. withdrawal,

then a reporter can reason, ‘They are a minority, and the Shia are ascendant, and this makes sense that the Sunni feel as they do.’ But the polling data suggest the Sunnis are eager for a U.S. withdrawal. I think it’s problematic when there is an anecdote reported and there is polling data available to the contrary.


Kull admits that polling in places like Iraq has its challenges, and is imperfect, but hastened to add that when it comes to capturing overall national opinion on topics, there is no substitute for scientific polling: “It is far superior than the method of a reporter going out on the street and talking to people. There’s no question.”

To view the article in FAIR, click here.

Teenage Wasteland

THE AMERICAN BOY'S PENIS IS SHRINKING AND THE AMERICAN GIRL LIKES IT UP THE ASS

The phrase Are you fucking kidding me? is uttered every day, all over the world. And yet I fear I threaten to use up all its meaning whenever I read the New York Times...

Never ever doubt that the Times panders to middle and upper class anxieties. This weekend, they ran this story about teenagers and young people who -- oh no! -- can't drive anymore because of gas prices! There are even priceless quotes from sample teens like douchebag Kevin Ballschmiede (16) who can't ride his "pride and joy” anymore (translation: my penis is too small to be my pride and joy); cry-baby wanker Tim Chou (19) whose parents had to -- oh the horror! -- give his car away to charity and now some homeless person might get a meal at his backseat action expense (translation: my folks bought me a lame car, so I wasn't getting any backseat action anyway); and another 19 year old asshat, Elliot Lee complained about not being able to hang with his friends anymore (translation: they were only friends with me so I could drive them around). Oh these poor kids! Oh how they've suffered!

Again: Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me?

Yet another example of the American Leisure Class flaunting its privileged position on the world stage and doing it oh so crassly. But it's one thing that teenagers think this is a big deal -- they are arguably too young to have the benefit of perspective (although only in America do we excuse nineteen year olds for juvenile behavior and global apathy) -- but it's quite another thing for the nation's leading newspaper to give this kind of classist concern any major attention. Rising gas prices and our dependency on foreign oil is indeed a major concern, but how about delving into the global politics and environmental matters at hand instead of devoting an entire article to Timmy and Tiffany and the fact that they might have to walk to the Mall in their Nike's or -- GASP! -- take the bus! (To be fair, the newspaper did feature ten Op-Ed contributers writing their thoughts on rising gas prices and its more relevant efficacy in terms of economics, the environment, and the country as a whole. But these were snippets, and the question remains: why have one of your reporters devote an entire article to teenage driving woes?) And let's face it, parents of these kids only give a crap because they might have to drive the little monsters around and/or spend more time with them. One can only hope that these negligent parents will buy that problem-solving miracle desk that Obama told poor black families to buy so they could spend more time with their children. At least we know these families can afford to buy it!

Seriously, the article focused on this "problem" of Receding Rugrat Roving without any irony. There was no sub-textual analysis on the over consumption of cars and how this plays into our capitalist culture and environmental problems, no criticism on how spoiled-rotten kids are in the U.S., no insightful peering into the Cult of the Child that we live in. Nope. The emphasis really was primarily on the fact that -- and I must quote this directly -- "teen cruising is way down" and that this pesky gas price problem was "cramping [kids'] style."

Is the Times that desperate to be cool? Must they be such whores to privileged Americans? Wouldn't you feel like the world's lousiest reporter if you were Karen Ann Cullotta and found yourself driving around (because Times reporters can afford gas) to ask teenagers about their cars and gas prices?? Is this really why you became a journalist? Can we really be that self-absorbed, myopic and ridiculous as a culture? Are you fucking kidding me?

Ah, but kidding is exactly what they're doing. Not kidding as in "joking around" but kidding as in "obsessed with children." Or -- more pointedly -- privileged children. Parents kowtow to these brats, the mainstream media exploits that concern for revenue and cultural capital, and then before you know it, the country as a whole is brainwashed into the Cult of the Child. It's the same obsession with teen stars and with youth and beauty. It's the reason adults become violent at soccer and baseball games involving their kids. It's the reason we have the ridiculous drug wars and the subsequent incarceration of many poor and lower income Black and Latino men. It's the reason Miley fucking Cyrus has a career. It's the reason for censorship, and sexual repression, and the restriction of adult pleasures, and every other heinous thing we do to adults in the name of children. Except of course the things we should be doing for them (universal education, universal heathcare etc.) And this is the difference between protecting children, and caring about them in a meaningful way versus just kidding around.

Meanwhile, other REAL journalists were doing more important work while the Times was scooping this story.

Like Leonard Pitts Jr. at The Miami Herald who wrote a more urgent article regarding young people in America -- this story on rising teen pregnancies and STD's after the Bush cartel implemented their abstinence only program. Because any idiot knows that telling kids "Don't fuck" only results in them fucking unsafely. (Don't even get me started on all those teenage Christian suburban princesses who wanted to save intercourse for their wedding night, so they decided blowjobs and anal sex was the way to go till then. There just isn't a loud enough laugh track for that one.) Ah, the Bush Abstinence plan! (A delicious oxymoron if your appetite whets -- like mine does -- at euphemisms for vag.) Next move: stop kids from meeting other kids to fuck by raising gas prices so they can't drive around!

Or Noelle Robbins at The Alameda Sun writing about the global food crisis and how we can help. Imagine being a child starving in another country while American teens grouse about gas and cars. The rest of the world must really wanna kick our asses. (Memo to America from the rest of the world: we're not interested in your first-world problems, and we're even less interested in your spawn. Except Roman Polanski. He might like spending time with a few of them.)

Or Kai Wright in this wonderful article for The Nation about the insidious subprime crisis and how it's robbing poor African American families. Hopefully Obama will read this article before he promises more of his soul to corporate America, or before he makes another speech about black people. He really should get to know black people better since he kinda looks like them.

Thank god then for journalists like these who continue to do important work about issues that really matter, instead of just kidding around.

The Real Obscenity

While the journalistic gold standard bearer would have you believe that an obscenity trial in Florida and/or the Math and Reading scores of horrid little monsters in New York are worthy news-stories, the fact is they're not. The only real obscenity is pretending that these things matter a great deal, and yes I'm extra pissy today, but it's because I just finished reading this devastating article from Salon about the illegal detainment, abuses of justice, and torture of MINORS, occurring at Guantanamo. It's outrageous, horrific and deeply, deeply sad. These children -- and they most certainly are children , or they were when they were apprehended -- have been detained for YEARS. The U.S. has violated international law and every code of decency in its treatment of these boys and if reading this article doesn't break your heart, then nothing will. Please, I beg you, if you don't already do it, add alternative reading to your news source if you're only looking at the NY Times. Add The Nation or Salon or BBC News, or go to Commondreams.org and find news stories that are actually important. I feel like a terrible person reading about fucking test scores while these boys have been restricted from access to education (one is even described as illiterate). I know this blog was all about criticizing the NY Times -- and it is -- but this story really rattled me.

Oh, and this douchebag too...

Because I also said I would point out when Times articles/columns were inaccurate or just plain stupid, here's a good article from Counterpunch skewering the loathsome Paul Krugman for his ridiculous assertion that race was no longer a problem in America, and for implying that Clinton did a good thing by "ending welfare as we know it." Here's the original article too if you wanna take your own potshots at it. It would be as easy as, well, you know...the thing with the nail gun.

The Golden Touch

You would think after comprising of the mainstream media that sat back lazily and didn't do its job in 2002-2003 -- allowing George Bush and his gang of thugs to rush to war -- that the NY Times would be more critical of said war, right? Like all the other lemmings though, they've taken the safe route. "Support our troops" is the mindless mantra, promulgated by people who fail to realize that really caring about the troops would be to encourage a critical look at the war, and to bring the soldiers home. (Not me of course, I don't care about the troops at all. Yeah I said it. Whaddya gonna do about it? I don't think killing anyone is ever something to be proud of and I refuse to respect the U.S. military in any way. I don't want the troops home because I care about them, I want them home because that would mean we had stopped killing innocent Iraqi civilians.)

And so the Times printed this odious article by William Kristol where he blasts Move On, does the usual military cheer-leading, grins like a Disney villain in his picture, and laughably refers to the U.S. army as "voluntary", without at all mentioning the social and economic factors that act as a form of coercion (not to mention some of the outrageous recruiting tactics -- all of which the military actively and insidiously exploits). Perhaps he was inspired by Barack Obama who gave a speech about black fathers and responsibility without mentioning the similar factors that come into play. Keep spreading that message of hope Obama! You're doing a great job reaching the elite and other people who have nothing to lose. I guess that "whisper in Iowa" was the kind King Midas whispered to the reeds.

Which brings us to the only NY Times columnist with a golden touch -- Bob Herbert. As a writer, he's mediocre, lacking any kind of rhetorical flourish or interesting turns of phrases. But he makes up for it with his important work and a strong sense of citizenship. Blowhards like Kristol should take note: it is not unpatriotic to criticize your leader, your military, or your country. It is far worse to stay silent, or ape an empty mantra, at the precise moment when you should be speaking out. Principles only mean something if you stick by them when they're inconvenient. I was pleased that Herbert took the time to point out that wagging one's finger at black fathers (even if the finger is black itself) isn't productive if we're not going to talk about the socio-economic issues at hand. He didn't go after Obama in quite the way I would have liked, but it's a start, and for that I commend him.

And my universal maxim applies to liberals too. If conservatives need to start looking at Dubya critically, then liberals need to do the same with Obama. And we can't be timorous about it. He's a big boy, he can handle it. We're not sabotaging his election and we shouldn't be afraid to be unfairly called racist or uncool simply because we want to hold him to a higher standard. It's not undoing our cause to call him out on his bullshit (and really, there's so much of it, he's composting at this point) -- if only because maybe then we can coerce our elected officials into doing the things they should be doing. And that includes a (clearly) power hungry, elitist disappointment like Obama. Remember in Angels in America (which I quote way too often) when hot Mormon guy tells the Jew-who-left-his-boyfriend-when-bf-was-sick-and-most-needed-help (wow, Prior honey, I can so relate) that the reason he complains about the world's imperfections is because he fundamentally believes the world is perfectible? This is definition of optimism, of real hope. This is Bob Herbert versus almost all the other yahoos at the NY Times (don't even get me started on Maureen Dowd who once again spent an entire useless column comparing First Ladies of Europe to First ladies of America -- which she already did last year!) When all the evils of Pandora's Box had been unleashed, this was the small glimmering thing at the bottom of the box.

And this is exactly why it's okay to complain, to criticize, to dissect, to analyze, to speak truth to power. If Kristol really wants to "support the troops", and if Obama's supporters really believe in hope, they would both come to this realization.

(EDIT: Last paragraph has been edited to include "Obama's supporters" and not "Obama" since the latter implies that Obama thinks he shouldn't be criticized, which was not the focus of my blog post. Thank you Frank for catching that)