Archive for: May, 2008

At Least I’m No Longer Alone In Defending McClellan

May 30 2008 Published by under Democrats, Government, Political Parties, Politics, Republicans

Peggy Noonan has a great read up on the Wall Street Journal. In it she expresses in slightly more artful terms, exactly what I was trying to express yesterday.

William Safire, himself a memoirist of the Nixon years, said to me, a future memoirist of the Reagan years: “The one thing history needs more of is first-person testimony.” History needs data, detail, portraits, information; it needs eyewitness. “I was there, this is what I saw.” History will sift through, consider and try in its own way to produce something approximating truth. …

[T]he purpose of the book is a serious one. Mr. McClellan attempts to reveal and expose what he believes, what he came to see as, an inherent dishonesty and hypocrisy within a hardened administration. It is a real denunciation. …

He scores President Bush’s “certitude” and “self-deceit” and asserts the decision to invade Iraq was tied to the president’s lust for legacy, need for boldness, and grandiose notions as to what is possible in the Mideast. He argues that Mr. Bush did not try to change the culture of the capital, that he “chose to play the Washington game the way he found it” and turned “away from candor and honesty.”

Mr. McClellan dwells on a point that all in government know, that day-to-day governance now is focused on media manipulation, with a particular eye to “political blogs, popular web sites, paid advertising, talk radio” and news media in general. In the age of the permanent campaign, government has become merely an offshoot of campaigning. All is perception and spin. This mentality can “cripple” an administration as, he says, it crippled the Clinton administration, with which he draws constant parallels. [emphasis mine]

This is exactly what I tried to say yesterday in my post here.

My point to Sam, and the point to my Twitter comment last night, was that Scott has written a book about the nastiness of politics in general and the notion of the permanent campaign specifically, that is right on the money. The excerpts I have read of the book make a very salient and very meaningful point – this town and the culture of constant political battle, do great harm to the process of actually governing.

It also echoes the point Jon Stewart made in his now classic appearance on the soon-after cancelled Crossfire.

It’s not so much that it’s bad… as it’s hurting America. So I wanted to come here to say… Here’s what I want to tell you guys… Stop. Stop hurting America and come work for us. It doesn’t pay well, but you can sleep at night.

A point made in humor, but one that speaks volumes about society. Our political system is fundamentally broken. When our idea of a serious debate over policy issues is two people on opposite sides of Chris Matthews’ table trying to shout over each other, is it any wonder that the people have lost faith in our institutions? When our elected officials – rather than actually leading – appear on O’Reilly or Matthews or Olbermann to dance like some trained monkey to the organ grinder’s tune, we must question the way we are led.

I fundamentally believe that McClellan’s book simply tries to make the point that this Washington mindset is damaging our nation. You can question his assertions about Rove or Libby, and you can argue he was not in the room during a particular meeting, but I don’t think anyone can question his larger message.

It’s a point we need to take seriously.

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New Look and Feel

May 30 2008 Published by under Miscellany

A while back I played around with a new look and feel and decided I didn’t like it. I had asked Katie Harbath to help me out and she gave me some really good designs to choose from, but I still didn’t feel they were quite right. (Thanks, though, Katie. I really appreciate it.)

I wanted something that captured the essence of why I write here. While I don’t write often, this site gives me the occasional place to vent my pent up frustrations and express the specific brand of cynical, pessimistic, skeptical idealism that I practice.

I ended up finding my vibe while reading an article about the punk movement of the 1970s and early 1980s. The frsutration, the skepticism, the anger, and the cynicism were all there. Surprisingly, so was the idealism in its own weird way.

I noticed the culture really emphasized black, white, gray, and red in clothing, album covers, etc. It really gave me a palette to work with, and when applied with little modification (other than the fist replacing the little Kung Fu dude in the logo) I was really happy with the result.

I’m not sure if anyone else will like it, and I’m almost positive a lot of people will find it hard to read. It’ll probably end up being even more irritating than I usually am. However, I kind of think that’s what punk was all about, and that suits me.

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Twitter’s Capacity Problems and Net Neutrality

May 30 2008 Published by under Craziness, Net Neutrality, The Internet, Twitter

For users of Twitter, this will come as no surprise, but the service has massive capacity issues. The text message based social network (for lack of a better description) crashes more frequently than a drunk teenager with an eye patch. It has become almost comical that a significant volume of the chatter about Twitter relates to its failings.

Word out of Twitter yesterday was their more “popular” users were fuqing it up for everybody else. Anytime someone with 25,000 plus followers and 21,000 followees sends a message, it craps out their database. This has led to more than a few helpful suggestions for them to redesign their backend to better manage the load.

Ironically, this is the perfect illustration for the problem with Net Neutrality. Here you have a service with no management at all, and a very few large scale users are screwing it up for everybody else. They’re sucking up all the available capacity and the guy with a small handful of followers is unable to reach them.

An unmanaged service becomes a free for all where a small minority can consume the available capacity. A managed service creates a situation where the consumption of some users is restricted for the benefit of the wider audience. In this case, the Twitter community is clamoring for management of the backend to produce a better front-end experience.

It very clearly demonstrates the net neutrality problem – how do you balance a system to provide the best possible experience for the broadest possible audience? With Twitter users the demand is for better load management. With net neutrality proponents the demand is for no management (or worse, a government defined management plan).

I think it’s funny that many of the Twitter users are likely the same people calling for net neut, yet they don’t see the irony in their conflicting positions.

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The Deadly Sin of Disloyalty

May 30 2008 Published by under Craziness

One thing struck me as I read the numerous and rabid posts attacking Scott McClellan yesterday. I’ll offer a random sample of what that was.

He’s a very unattractive fellow both in physical appearance and for his lack of class in his disloyalty. Рa Townhall commenter

Scott McClellan joins Dick Morris as a disloyal, self-serving former staffer. Who ever likes a “snitch” as Drudge says? He better enjoy his moment in the sun. – John Hawkins, Right Wing News

Others couldn’t decide whether to give McClellan a verbal spanking for his disloyalty or applaud him for expressing complaints that they too had harbored. – LA Times

But McClellan’s explosive new book… prompted a counterattack yesterday from some of his oldest political colleagues, who accused him of disloyalty and questioned his credibility. – Washington Post

Scott McClellan has revealed himself to be a cynical, disloyal, petty and bitter man. – John Matthews, blogger

Conservatives view the former member of the President’s tight Texas inner circle as a disgruntled, disloyal opportunist who is savaging his ex-boss to make a buck. – Texas on the Potomac

A Google search for “Scott McClellan” and “disloyal” turns up 4,700 references. But what I find fascinating is that in almost none of the those does the word “wrong” appear. In almost none of the posts, articles, or comments have I seen the word “dishonest”. The closest the talking points have so far come is to suggest that he wasn’t “in the loop”. He wasn’t in some specific set of meetings so he was not privy to the whole story. Yet nobody can point to what part of the story he got wrong as a result of missing a meeting?

Instead, the attacks are personal, and vicious. Scott was disloyal. Period. End of Story.

When, exactly, did being disloyal to an employer become a greater sin than being dishonest? When did loyalty become a greater virtue than integrity? At what point did we begin to celebrate fealty to employers as if we were serfs pledging our unending service to a master for the pittance he chooses to throw to us? Why is loyalty now demanded rather than earned?

I view loyalty in exactly the same way I view respect. It is something I give you as a reward, not something you demand as a payment. That view, however, seems to be lost in our culture. Loyalty now is expected. It is the invoice you receive when you get a job.

I’m not aware of the exchange rate for various salaries and what you are expected to hide at that price, but that kind of thinking leads to nothing good. As a commenter on one post had said, “It’s no surprise that whistle blowers are rare” and we learn of things like Enron and Vioxx only after they explode into our living room having cost people billions of dollars or their lives.

We have allowed people’s misdeeds to hide behind the NDA and the threat of employment difficulty. We label people disloyal for showing a greater loyalty to the truth and the public good than to their salary.

I may be nothing more than an idealist, but I believe in more than a payday. I hope I’m not alone in that.

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To Be Clear About McClellan…

May 29 2008 Published by under Government, Operatives, Political Parties, Politics, Republicans, The President

First, I have to give HuffPo credit. I exchanged e-mail with Sam Stein shortly before walking out the door to lunch, and before I had finished my brisket at Capitol Q (just six blocks from my office) my e-mail started buzzing with questions/comments about this post. They work fast.

As for the content, let me expand on what I told Sam.

I have no idea what Scott did or did not experience in the White House and have no way of knowing whether his specific accusations are true or false.

My point to Sam, and the point to my Twitter comment last night, was that Scott has written a book about the nastiness of politics in general and the notion of the permanent campaign specifically, that is right on the money. The excerpts I have read of the book make a very salient and very meaningful point – this town and the culture of constant political battle, do great harm to the process of actually governing.

When you are unwilling to admit a mistake for fear of creating an opening your opposition can exploit for partisan gain, you create a cycle where bad choices become compounded upon one another. I think that is a syndrome that we saw emerge from the Clinton years and grow worse during the Bush years. There is simply no room for honest discussion anymore. There is merely partisan scorekeeping and score settling.

I also believe, as Matthew Dowd noted in the New York Times, that Bush has squandered the second term that 62 million people gave him.

He criticized the president as failing to call the nation to a shared sense of sacrifice at a time of war, failing to reach across the political divide to build consensus and ignoring the will of the people on Iraq. He said he believed the president had not moved aggressively enough to hold anyone accountable for the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and that Mr. Bush still approached governing with a “my way or the highway” mentality reinforced by a shrinking circle of trusted aides.

Believe it or not, there are more than a handful of people who work in politics and become involved because they fundamentally believe that we can change the world we live in. Matt referred to the idea in his NYT interview.

“I’m a big believer that in part what we’re called to do — to me, by God; other people call it karma — is to restore balance when things didn’t turn out the way they should have,” Mr. Dowd said. “Just being quiet is not an option when I was so publicly advocating an election.”

I think McClellan’s interview on Today this morning echoed much of that same sentiment. These are people who worked tirelessly to elect a President in which they saw so much more than what was to come. McClellan says they got caught up playing the Washington game. I believe that is true, and I believe almost everyone recognizes that is true.

As I told Sam, I think McClellan’s book should be viewed through that prism. The media and the Administration may portray this as a gotcha perpetrated by Scott, but I think that discounts the larger message. It is that message that I agree with. For that reason, I fear the typical Washington response to discredit the messenger will force us to lose sight of the message.

I am a believer. I think people can change their world by getting involved. Unfortunately, this town tests my faith in that idea every day. Watching Scott being savaged for fighting for that ideal is testing it again today.

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