harmonicminer

It is simply shocking that the president of the United States has some secrets he wants to keep.

What’s funny is that as Obama the president takes over, to any small degree, from Obama the campaigner, his supporters are loving the opportunity to pretend objectivity by lambasting him on relatively minor issues, all the while still supporting him, and not acknowledging their own complicity in failing to ask him any tough questions DURING the campaign.  This is all pretty small beans.  Every president tries to preserve and extend presidential power after entering office.  And maybe, just maybe, Obama has learned some things from intelligence briefings since taking office, things Bush knew and couldn’t discuss, that have altered our new president’s perspectives on a few matters.

But journalistic credibility is hard to come by these days, so those still in the tank for the annointed one have to make lots of noise on minor matters to hide their fecklessness in serious reporting on his economic policies, foreign tour debacles, and the like.

Keith Olbermann’s scathing criticism of Obama’s secrecy/immunity claims – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com

Several weeks ago, I noted that unlike the Right — which turned itself into a virtual cult of uncritical reverence for George W. Bush especially during the first several years of his administration — large numbers of Bush critics have been admirably willing to criticize Obama when he embraces the very policies that prompted so much anger and controversy during the Bush years. Last night, Keith Olbermann — who has undoubtedly been one of the most swooning and often-uncritical admirers of Barack Obama of anyone in the country (behavior for which I rather harshly criticized him in the past) — devoted the first two segments of his show to emphatically lambasting Obama and Eric Holder’s DOJ for the story I wrote about on Monday: namely, the Obama administration’s use of the radical Bush/Cheney state secrets doctrine and — worse still — a brand new claim of “sovereign immunity” to insist that courts lack the authority to decide whether the Bush administration broke the law in illegally spying on Americans.

The fact that Keith Olbermann, an intense Obama supporter, spent the first ten minutes of his show attacking Obama for replicating (and, in this instance, actually surpassing) some of the worst Bush/Cheney abuses of executive power and secrecy claims reflects just how extreme is the conduct of the Obama DOJ here. Just as revealingly, the top recommended Kos diary today (voted by the compulsively pro-Obama Kos readership) is one devoted to attacking Obama for his embrace of Bush/Cheney secrecy and immunity doctrines. Also, a front page Daily Kos post yesterday by McJoan vehemently criticizing Obama (and quoting my criticisms at length) sparked near universal condemnation of Obama in the hundreds of comments that followed. Additionally, my post on Monday spawned vehement objections to what Obama is doing in this area from the largest tech/privacy sites, such as Boing Boing and Slashdot.

In the meantime, too much of this post by Greenwald seems to be about what a cool guy he is, and how influential he is.

I wonder when the Left media will get around to serious consideration of the disastrous spending Obama is trying to ram through Congress?  Does anyone think they’re ever going to criticize him three or four times as much as they did Bush, for having deficits three or four times the highest Bush ever had, and doing it year after year (in even the rosiest scenario for the “out years”)?

But to the Left, the growth of government is virtually an intrinsic good.  The bigger the better.  So to divert us, let’s consider again the amazingly disgusting scene of a president keeping secrets.

Sigh.

Tags: media

Uproar over ‘news story’ ad on front page of LA Times

An advertisement dressed up as a news story on the front page of the Los Angeles Times has reporters at the newspaper fuming and the publisher defending the move.

The advertisement, for the NBC television series “Southland,” appeared on page one of the Times on Thursday. Although it was labelled “advertisement,” the ad resembled a news story complete with a bold-type headline.

According to the blog MediaMemo, more than 100 staffers at the newspaper signed a petition protesting the appearance of the fake news story ad on the front page.

“We the journalists of the newsroom strenuously object to the decision to sell an ad, in the form of a phony news story, on the front page of the Los Angeles Times,” mediamemo.allthingsd.com quoted the petition as saying.

“The NBC ad may have provided some quick cash, but it has caused incalculable damage to this institution,” it said. “Placing a fake news article on A-1 makes a mockery of our integrity and our journalistic standards.

“Our willingness to sell our most precious real estate to an advertiser is embarrassing and demoralizing,” the petition said.

I guess the LATimes’ “journalists” have a problem not so much with selling out as making a profit for it, judging from their behavior in the last election cycle, in which the front page was repeatedly used for unpaid campaign ads for Obama.

Apparently they didn’t find that “embarrassing and demoralizing.”

A “mockery of our integrity and our journalistic standards,” indeed.

Tags: media

Chris Matthews features prominently in the new movie Media Malpractice as essentially a shill for Obama. (Full disclosure: I provided the music for the film.)

Now, Matthews displays again his uncanny knack for completely distorting facts and misrepresenting contexts. Watch, and judge for yourself:

Tags: media

The New Che, Same as the Old

Most of what you’ve heard about Steven Soderbergh’s Che is true. At four and a half hours, the film, now playing in selected domestic markets and available on video on demand, is extremely long. And even at this length, the film skips over the least convenient, indeed morally repulsive, period of Ernesto Guevara’s life. It’s a testament to Soderbergh’s skill that the film still has some merit—above all, the director’s typically meticulous composition and audacious experiments with form—but it falls abjectly short of accuracy.

…….Soderbergh presents Che as an unabashedly ideological revolutionary who rejects any path for change aside from violent struggle. For the most part, the film focuses on his two periods of most intense guerrilla activity, in Cuba and then in Bolivia—revolutions to the death in each case. A fellow moviegoer observed afterward that she no longer thought of Guevara as “cuddly.” That’s a start.

Yet for Soderbergh, this violent Guevara remains a sympathetic figure. Such admiration may have motivated the director’s omission of the years that Guevara spent after the revolution in Castro’s Cuba, supervising executions, establishing the state police, and helping build an authoritarian state—unpleasant activities that the Che T-shirt crowd would rather not examine. It’s a politically convenient choice, to be sure, but given the film’s emphasis on Guevara’s guerrilla career, perhaps it makes some artistic sense. A few flashbacks intervene, but for the most part the film concerns itself with combat and survival in the Cuban and Bolivian countryside. This close attention to the practicalities of guerrilla warfare binds together what might have been two tonally incoherent episodes—in two different countries and separated by nine years. Showing Guevara’s comparatively humdrum years in Castro Cuba—where he killed from behind a desk instead of from behind a rifle—might have enervated the film’s narrative energy.

Hollywood continues the whitewash, with just enough truth to claim objectivity, but not enough to provide real understanding of the murderer.

No surprise there, of course, since few of us want to understand murderers, and since telling the truth tends to make for difficult to watch story lines.

I’m still waiting for Hollywood to make a nice movie to “humanize” Lenin, or Stalin, or maybe Hitler.  I’m sure it’s only a matter of time.  Probably win some Oscars.

Tags: media