Sunday Screening

I thought I was done forever with the Sunday Screening. I rather lost my momentum this fall; Sundays seemed better spent relaxing, watching real-life television, perhaps even doing "schoolwork." But after Tuesday's election, and the consequent earthquake in American politics, I've been thinking; no Sunday Screening? That's not change we can believe in! So without further ado:

What better time than now to look at 1980, birth year of the late, lamented Reagan Revolution? I love this clip both because it has a priceless few seconds of channel-flipping at the beginning (nothing gives you the sense of an era better than channel-flipping), and because the WPIX newscast is a great demonstration of the contradictions of the time. The theme, for instance, is the famous Move Closer to Your World tune used for decades by Philadelphia's WPVI; this song dates from 1970, and I can call it a song not only because it's danceable but because believe it or not it has lyrics:

Move closer to your world, my friend / Take a little bit of time
Move closer to your world, my friend / And you'll see...

Just a little bit of time / That's all it takes to bring your world together
Take a little bit of time / Don't turn away, my friend, tomorrows are forever

Get close to people / Your world needs you to care, to share it
Take the time / Join hands, my friend, with all the people in your world

Hard to reconcile this peace-and-love sentiment with the news of the day (in this instance, that America was being INVADED BY SCARY CUBANS). But the dominant cultural paradigm, and the Carter administration, still had that sensibility to it. (Now, TV news varied widely in the U.S., from the austere Midwesterners to the Boston lunatics, but you get my point.) By 1980 people were, understandably, feeling alienated both from their junk culture and their lame, ineffectual politics. And remember, it was an emotionally simpler time, a time when children could have long phone conversations with strangers--

--without consequence. So people were open to new frames in their politics, and vulnerable to an emerging politics of fear:

That's a hell of a thing. I hadn't seen that until today; amazing how closely it mirrors the scare-politics that Karl Rove elevated to an art form. (I keep thinking about Saxby Chambliss' famous 2002 ad against Cleland that used Osama bin Laden's face -- and not coincidentally, Chambliss' latest ad for his impending runoff against Jim Martin plays the decidedly retrograde 9/11 card. The more things change...) You are looking here at the start of conservative politics as we know it. My Indy article touched on this -- that 1980 began an aberrant, freakish period in our history, one which is just closing now.

But I don't mean to be too harsh on 1980. Sure, it was a pretty awful year in terms of music (not only did Zeppelin break up, but worse, ABBA didn't) and television (The Rockford Files was cancelled, and yet the year's best new show was Bosom Buddies with Tom Hanks and Peter Scolari); sure, John Lennon was killed and Robert Mugabe came to power in Zimbabwe. I just can't dismiss the year wholesale, though, for one simple reason:

Yes. Talking Heads released Remain in Light, which spawned the immortal "Once in a Lifetime." Not only is this a great song in its own right, it also gave us one of the most perfect and brilliant music videos ever. Let that one sink in, and enjoy the rest of your weekend. This is an open thread.

...What, you thought I was going to do a riff on Obama's victory being a once-in-a-lifetime moment or whatever? Jesus. Give me a little credit here.

Larison on Fears

For a couple days now I've been thinking about something Daniel Larison wrote re the 2008 nominations. (In fact, I was thinking about this during my exam this afternoon, which means I may have failed History 1422. Oh well.) Look:

Some people say that Democrats are afraid of McCain as the GOP nominee, and some people say that Republicans are afraid of Obama as the Dem nominee. [...] It seems to me that there are at least two things that explain this fear: admiration for the opposing party’s candidate and contempt for that candidate’s rivals. Contempt blinds both sides to the political strengths of the other candidates, while their admiration exaggerates the abilities and appeal of the one candidate, whose exaggerated abilities and appeal then make them fear for their party’s success in the fall. Another factor seems to be that the candidate whom each side fears the most seems to represent something, whether in style or substance, that exposes what each party sees as a glaring weakness in itself. Republicans have built up an entire mythology about the importance of optimism as central to the appeal of Reagan, and if there is one thing Obama has in spades it is optimism, while the modern GOP traffics in the most blatant fearmongering and doomsaying, so perhaps Republicans fear that Obama’s comparison of himself to Reagan isn’t merely self-important bluster. Meanwhile, Democrats fear McCain because he represents unvarnished militarism and appears to Democrats, conditioned for decades to be constantly on the defensive on military and national security matters, to have an insurmountable advantage on foreign affairs and national security. (Read it all.)

Part of me listens to this argument and goes "yeah, that makes sense." Partisans naturally view all candidates through their own prisms; Republican and Democratic ideas of general-election strength are very different. (We can also see these differences intraparty. For instance, I am an old-fashioned soak-the-rich country populist, and I think Mike Huckabee would be the strongest Republican candidate. Whereas my effete urban liberal friends tend to say just the opposite.) It's a good insight.

But another part of me wants to say "no, fuck that, this argument is too cute by half." First of all, what Republican fear of Obama? Unless you count Byron York, who is sort of the awkward cousin at the NR Family Reunion, I'm not hearing a lot of worried whispering. Aren't conservatives raising money off the formidable specter of Hillary Clinton, or did that stop a couple months ago while I wasn't looking? And on the flip side, Democrats are more worried about McCain mainly because he polls better, substantially better, than the other Republicans in general-election matchups. These numbers are not predictive of course, but they certainly do tell you the state of play, and they reinforce the media narrative that McCain is a popular "maverick" dude. (In what is maybe the most depressing analogy ever, one GOPer told the New York Times today that "John McCain and his friends used to beat up Mitt Romney at recess." This is an actual rationale for electing a president, apparently.) And then the whole argument's basis is gone, and it starts to look like one of those pithy insights you have while you're high and then later realize it's totally nonsensical.

So I don't know. What do other people think about Larison's idea? Are the parties doing themselves disservices by projecting their own weaknesses onto their analysis? I got nothing here. (Yeah, this post is pretty much just an excuse to push the Sunday Screening down the page. Speaking of which: where is everybody else? Intersession is no excuse to slack off. I will just keep posting, and you will all live to regret it...)

--

From the CREDIT WHERE CREDIT IS DUE Dep't.: Watch or read Barack Obama's MLK Day speech if you haven't already. I'm still a long way from supporting the guy, but damn -- that is a voice that needs to be heard.

Every time Robert Novak is frightened, an angel gets its wings

Huckabee is campaigning as a conservative, but serious Republicans know that he is a high-tax, protectionist advocate of big government and a strong hand in the Oval Office directing the lives of Americans. Until now, they did not bother to expose the former governor of Arkansas as a false conservative because he seemed an underfunded, unknown nuisance candidate. Now that he has pulled even with Mitt Romney for the Iowa caucuses and might make more progress, the beleaguered Republican Party has a frightening problem.

A Republican who supports universal health care, energy independence, and fair trade -- that is to say, a guaranteed-winner election platform? Run away, Novak! Run away!

(From Novak's column today. Via Drudge, not that he needs the traffic.)

How we ended up with the Republicans' FISA bill

Everybody pretty much guessed that the White House put out a bunch of really scary, frightening 'intelligence' to try and manipulate the Democrats who are still (ridiculously) afraid that if they don't give the White House unlimited power, they'll be blamed for a future terrorist attack.

Today's NY Times article confirms that that's what happened:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 — At a closed-door briefing in mid-July, senior intelligence officials startled lawmakers with some troubling news. American eavesdroppers were collecting just 25 percent of the foreign-based communications they had been receiving a few months earlier.

Congress needed to act quickly, intelligence officials said, to repair a dangerous situation.

Some lawmakers were alarmed. Others, jaded by past intelligence warnings, were skeptical.

The report helped set off a furious legislative rush last week that, improbably, broadened the administration’s authority to wiretap terrorism suspects without court oversight.

...

“There was an intentional manipulation of the facts to get this legislation through,” said Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, a Democrat on the Intelligence Committee who voted against the plan.

The White House, Mr. Feingold said Friday in an interview, “has identified the one major remaining weakness in the Democratic Party, and that’s its unwillingness to stand up to the administration when it’s making a power grab regarding terrorism and national security.”

...

Democratic leaders did not demand that the security agency seek individual court warrants for eavesdropping. But they did want the court to review and approve the agency procedures soon after surveillance began.

The administration, however, wanted the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to approve the surveillance, with the court weighing in just to certify that no abuses occurred, and only long after the surveillance had been conducted.

The talks intensified in the days before the recess last weekend, highlighted by proposals and counterproposals in calls between Mr. McConnell and the Democratic leadership.

By Aug. 2, the two sides seemed relatively close to a deal. Mr. McConnell had agreed to some increased role for the secret court, a step that the administration considered a major concession, the White House and Congressional leaders said.

But that night, the talks broke down. With time running out, the Senate approved a Republican bill that omitted the stronger court oversight. The next day, the House passed the bill.

If the White House was really so concerned about this gap in the FISA law, they should've been sharing this intelligence consistently instead of doling it out in driblets, and only the bits likely to get the Democrats to do what they want. Any Democrat in Congress who honestly thinks that this was an emergency that just happened to come up right before the August recess doesn't deserve to be in the Congress.

It isn't the Democrats that were endangering national security, it was Republicans who were willing to risk the non-passage of changes to the FISA bill that both sides agreed were necessary, for the sake of grabbing more power for the President.

And tell me, how in the hell did these Democrats decide that it was a good idea to give oversight privileges to Alberto Gonzales, instead of a court?

The Democrats that voted to continue Bush's reign of fear were played for fools. And Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid showed a distinct lack of leadership. If they'd wanted to, they could've stopped this; but obviously the continuing erosion of our Constitutional rights wasn't a big enough deal to inconvenience anyone with.

Gyah.

The Indefatigable Entrepreneurial Spirit

I always thought that the worst casualty of the 9/11 attacks was that they'd "ended the Age of Irony" -- or at least, so the shell-shocked media predicted. It was a shame, I liked irony. So it's been very heartening for me to watch the writers and the comedians come back around, finally gathering the courage to be politically sharp again.

Still, Jon Stewart and the "Get Your War On" guy hardly count as Middle America. It's plausible that the creative intimidation we felt is still present in more culturally isolated areas. Where can we turn to find real proof that real Americans are regaining their trademark joyful puerility? I know where -- and I know it involves low, low prices! Details after the jump.

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