Time to Let This One Go

I find myself very tempted to write--and write, and write--about the ongoing Cindy Sheehan story, particularly as I believe it speaks volumes about the media and their lust for any sign of a hippie peace-and-love movement. The media's credulity and its caressing of their subject, despite (as only one example) her well-publicized imputation that some neo-con agenda was behind the 9/11 attacks, is almost beyond belief. So I will say this one last time.

A search today of Google News for the terms "Sheehan" and "meet with her" turned up 1,690 print news stories (a good many, admittedly, local papers picking up AP or Reuters feeds) containing statements along the lines of "Sheehan will continue her protest until Bush agrees to meet with her."

Bush has already met with her.

He invited her and her family to speak with him. Maybe she regrets not confronting him then, I don't know. And heck, if she wants to sit out there and lead a protest, fine. But I see no reason for Bush to meet with her again. Let's say you're going door-to-door collecting for some charity or another. You stop at a house, make your pitch, and maybe get a small donation. As you walk on toward the next house, you stop and reflect, "I should have pressed him harder. I should have gotten more out of him." So you turn around, ring the bell again, and say, "More." Is it a newsworthy event if the person fails to bow to your demand? This is, frankly, a child's behavior: maybe if I ask over and over again, maybe if I ask louder, even scream, I'll get what I want. Enough.

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On an unrelated note, I read a letter to the editor in the local paper this morning that quoted a John Donne poem, one of his most familiar works. However, the author chose to recast the piece (it is not a poem, but a piece of prose from his Meditations XVII) into a more modern English, thereby robbing it of much of its character. For the record, the original words are:

No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

Tugging at Loose Threads

I didn't expect a week away from the keyboard (gratefully riding waterslides with my kids) to change very much, and I sure wasn't disappointed. There are real news stories out there, such as the impending consistutional deadline in Iraq and Israel's unilateral pullout from Gaza, but the media seems to be fixated on the kind of stories that make so many of us cry "enough already."

First, of course, is the difficult case of Cindy Sheehan, a woman who lost a son in the Iraq war and who has decided to voice her displeasure with the administration by pitching a tent outside Bush's ranch in Crawford, TX. I'm not surprised the media is on this so hard--after all, isn't it great when a story comes directly to you, a story you don't have to pound the pavement to pin down?

I don't have a problem with Sheehan sitting there and grieving in this way. Let her protest and scream until she turns blue--she's earned it. What I do mind is the way the media seems to be treating her as if she represented some kind of "tipping point" (and man, am I sick to death of this term) that will turn Americans en masse against the President. And they have done this in an uncritical way: I believe Americans would have tired of this story by now, tired of all the questions about whether or not Bush will come and speak with her, if they were at all informed that the President has already met with her and her family; and while at this meeting she certainly was not converted to a pro-war point of view, she decided not to use it as a platform to vent her anger.

Since this article was first unearthed by the Drudge Report, all sorts of left-wing outfits have attacked the disclosure as if there were some sort of distortion. RawStory accuses Drudge of "gross distortion" even though he linked back to the original article in its entirety. Arianna Huffington (whose tedious Huffington Post ravings seem now to be available via Yahoo! News, for all love) goes on and on with the same sort of spleen she accuses people like Rush Limbaugh of using...all while implying that it's a "sleazeball" thing to do to learn the truth.

And if you have any doubt whose side the media prefers, here's a Washington Post headline for you: Mom's Protest Riles Gun-Toting Neighbor. "Gun-toting" indeed. The man discharges his shotgun on his own property and not in the direction of anyone, and he gets labeled with a term generally reserved for crackpots. Frankly, this man makes more sense to me than anyone else, because I find his reaction very understandable. Perhaps that will shock my gentle readers, but his desire for all these people to get their asses away from his land feels very authentic. I wouldn't have fired a shotgun to get their attention, but then I don't live in Texas.

While about 60 in Sheehan's group held a religious service Sunday morning, a nearby landowner, Larry Mattlage, fired his shotgun twice into the air. Sheriff's deputies and Secret Service agents rushed to his house but did not arrest him.

"I ain't threatening nobody, and I ain't pointing a gun at nobody," Mattlage said. "This is Texas."

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I've also had quite enough of the garment-rending that's accompanied--last week's!-- death of Peter Jennings. I understand that it should be an item of some interest, and I certainly am not happy at the news of anyone's death, but the obsession (and that's what it is) in the media for this story is really getting to me.

It's a phenomenon we've all seen before: if a news story involves the media, suddenly they drop everything and focus all their energies on it. My God, he wasn't the Pope or a President or anything, he was a news reader. I have to believe if Gerald Ford, for instance, had died the same day, they'd receive the same level of coverage (and perhaps Ford's memory would even be slighted). Understandable media behavior, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

Have you heard about the lonesome loser?

How far have you fallen from a position as a party of national consequence when you resort to celebrating defeats?

So the Democrats failed to get plastered in an election for a House of Representatives seat in the electoral "flashpoint" of Ohio. (Just as an aside here, it is me or are the Dems always fighting the last war?) Forget that it was a special election with no incumbent; forget that voter turnout was about a third of what it was in the November 2004 regular election, forget that local issues may have played a major role in the result. It's the end of the Bush era! Let's celebrate!

I guess there's always the possibility that the Dems are trying to lull the GOP into a false sense of security. Yeah, that's probably it.

Excellence Watch: Prose

While it's not my typical type of post, I feel I must occasionally salute excellence where I stumble upon it, whether it's fine writing, art, argument, etc. Today, I bring you a pretty little bit of copy from a tongue-in-cheek article about how to destroy the Earth:

You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing hideous quantities of pollution into the atmosphere threatens to end the world.

Fools.

The Earth was built to last. It is a 4,550,000,000-year-old, 5,973,600,000,000,000,000,000-tonne ball of iron. It has taken more devastating asteroid hits in its lifetime than you've had hot dinners, and lo, it still orbits merrily.

I admit it, it's the "and lo" that gets me.

Is it an abuse of power to fight the Senatorial "hold"?

So who is this man, and why should we care? His name is Peter Cyril Wyche Flory, and yesterday President Bush recess appointed him (which appears to be the correct term, awkward though it is) to the position of Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy.

Is this yet another example of a manipulative Bush thwarting the will of the Senate, of an abuse of power so heinous as to call into question the legitimacy of our democracy? Of course not: instead, it helps illustrate the partisan gridlock in the Congress, a situation which has grown so dire that Bush must make extraordinary efforts to keep things running.

The Senate did not filibuster, or explicitly threaten to filibuster, Flory's nomination to the position. Nor in fact does it appear that significant objections were raised about his fitness for the position. Instead, it seems that he was caught in the crossfire between Senator Carl Levin and Undersecretary Douglas Feith, Flory's superior at the DoD:

Flory was first nominated to the post on June 1, 2004, but the nomination was blocked by Michigan Sen. Carl Levin, the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, in a dispute over release of intelligence-related documents that Levin sought from Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy.

You may well ask how a single Senator can hold up a nomination for more than a year without resorting to a tactic such as the filibuster. n the fancy terminology of the Senate, it's called a hold, an unofficial procedure whereby one Senator--one Senator--can simply say that they don't want a measure to go ahead. It's usually a signal that someone is willing to put up a strenuous fight over a bill or nomination; but in this case it appears that its use was a ploy for Levin to try to gain some leverage against Feith...never mind that a third party (indeed, the first party in this case) got run over, and that an important national security position remained vacant for more than a year.

When you talk about recess appointments, John Bolton, and Bush's supposed abuse of power, remember poor Peter Flory, and maybe consider sending him a fruit basket in congratulations.

Ambassador John Bolton, fait accompli

I wonder whether Tom Skerritt is available to play me in the made-for-TV "John Bolton Story"?

Things tend not to qualify as news if they come as no surprise. There is no "news alert," for example, when the sun rises in the morning. But I expect there to be a great deal of journalistic hand-wringing about the recess appointment of John Bolton as ambassador to the UN.

The article I linked above helpfully explains that

Bush gave Bolton a "recess appointment," taking advantage of a loophole that allows him to make such appointments when Congress is in recess.

Quite right. That is, if you take the word "loophole" to mean "something explicitly permitted by the United States Constitution." Really. Article II, Section 2 reads, in part,

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

Never mind that the Senate is actually in recess, or that there is actually a vacancy, or that Presidents since George Washington have used recess appointments (and for far more significant offices: Ike made three recess appointments for Supreme Court justices, for God's sake!). Never mind that that hero of the Left, and indeed champion of all that is Good and Light Bill Clinton, made 140 of them. Ted Kennedy, whose own brother made a recess appointment of Thurgood Marshall (against the will of the Senate!), had this predictable thing to say:

It's a devious maneuver that evades the constitutional requirement of Senate consent [emphasis mine]

This is the sort of thing we'll doubtless be treated to over the next few days. But all you Democrats, take heart: you'll get another swing at Bolton later on down the road; and if you're right and Bolton burns down the UN headquarters at the first opportunity, you'll have a lot to crow about.

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2 August: With 24 hours of Bolton coverage behind us, I'm a little surprised at one of the media's foci: the notion that the recess appointment somehow hurts Bolton's credibility at the UN. Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd, a fellow Nutmegger, is quoted in this report:

One of Bolton's harshest critics, Sen. Christopher Dodd, predicted Bolton's credibility at the world body would be damaged by the recess appointment, since Bush failed to get the nomination through the Senate.

"I think you're going to have an awfully difficult time with Mr. Bolton building the kind of support the United States needs today at the United Nations," said Dodd, D-Connecticut, a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

A justified criticism? Think about it: I bet many countries' UN ambassadors serve only at the pleasure of the lcoal strongman. Do they have a tough time because they weren't chosen by bipartisan dealmaking? And keep in mind that Bolton would have been confirmed to his post, and not by a one-vote margin, if he'd simply been presented to the full Senate for a vote.