GHOSTS OF ELECTIONS PAST

WEAPONS WERE THERE WHEN SADDAM WASN’T

PUBLISH OR PERISH

Trick or treat?

Two days to go until Halloween, four to the election. These two occasions seem more and more alike with all sides masking their real identities and appearances. Trick or Treat America? Forward or Backward? Up or down?

There are ghouls to the right of us and the country itself seems haunted by so many political message points that it is hard to keep up with the out of control “discourse,” harder still to disentangle the evasive rhetoric from real issues. Surrealism long ago displaced realism as facts and information increasingly matter far less than dramatized posturing and phony imaging.

When you look back at it, the whole campaign of 2004 feels like one long photo-op and soundbite slam. One is brought back as I was in a letter sent to a colleague overseas who involes a quote from an earlier Republican President, the man from Illinois in a stove pipe hat, one A. Lincoln who said wisely during an earlier Civil War:

“A HOUSE DIVIDED AGAINST ITSELF CANNOT STAND.”

The haunted house we live in today is barely standing. You can see the ghosts of Vietnam stirring in the attic and hear the wails of the tortured of Iraq in the basement. We are being given sweets on all side as the house creaks and tilts from side to side. This correspondent addsfor ironic effect: “Abraham Lincoln came second to Bart Simpson in the BBC’s question of who is the greatest American,”

Meanwhile in Rome, 25 countries in Europe meet to begin the process of forging an EU constitution. They are coming together while America seems to be falling apart.

MISSING WEAPONS

The missing weapons story has taken a new turn.. Professor Nathan Brown of George Washington University writes:

“In the dispute between the Kerry campaign and the Bush administration over the disappearance of explosives at al-Qaqaa, the core of the Bush defense is that we don’t know when the explosives disappeared; it could have happened before American troops arrived. President Bush stated today: “Our military is now investigating a number of possible scenarios, including that the explosives may have been moved before our troops even arrived at the site. This investigation is important and it’s ongoing, and a political candidate who jumps to conclusions without knowing the facts is not a person you want as your commander in chief.”

Sounds good, right?

SMOKING GUN VIDEO

And then along comes Channel 5 in Minneapolis which goes through some old footage from one of its embed crews and voila, there’s the footage of weapons at the base in question AFTER Saddam was overthrown but before they disappeared from areas supposedly under the control of the US military. A smoking gun video ? Maybe. Why let facts get in the way of strongly held beliefs. Meanwhile the mighty mainstream media is scooped by a local crew from Minnesota. Perfect!

Washington Dispatch reports:

“The footage and reports by the Channel 5 News crew supports the Iraqi government’s claim as they state that Iraqi’s were “coming and going” and the site and bunkers were left unsecured.

“The Washington Times went so far as to claim that the explosives were taken by Russian forces. They based their report on the words of a controversial pentagon official.

“The video is clear and the explosives shown on the film are being verified by experts in Washington, D.C. to see if they are the specific HMX and RDX explosives that the IAEA claims are now missing. Note that the HazCat code (Hazardous Category) on many of barrels and boxes within the video are 1.1D which is the proper category for both HMX and RDX.”

http://www.washingtondispatch.com/cgi-bin/artman/exec/search.cgi

ITS ALWAYS ALL ABOUT US

While this Iraq story involving Americans gets all attention, this horiffic development was baredly mentioned: “Study: 100,000 Civilian Iraqi Deaths Since War”

“The rise in the death rate was mainly due to violence and much of it was caused by U.S. air strikes on towns and cities.”

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&u=/nm/20041028/ts_nm/iraq_deaths_dc&printer=1

And what about this story? Mmmmm

“Ex-CIA Chief Tenet: Iraq War Was Wrong”

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/102304A.shtml

DENIAL AS A POLITICAL ART FORM

What is the deeper mentality here? How is it that Mr. Bush and Co. can just ignore facts that are not his own. Let’s ask the man who actually beat him in the vote tallies the last time out way back in 2000. That corrupted election seems destined to be seen after we are through here as a less contested mess than 2004. Here’s a snatch of Al Gore’s latest insight into the man who he beat only to get ass whipped by the Supremes:

“There are many people in both parties who have the uneasy feeling that there is something deeply troubling about President Bush’s relationship to reason, his disdain for facts, an incuriosity about new information that might produce a deeper understanding of the problems and policies that he wrestles with on behalf of the country. One group maligns the President as not being intelligent, or at least, not being smart enough to have a normal curiosity about separating fact from myth. A second group is convinced that his religious conversion experience was so profound that he relies on religious faith in place of logical analysis. But I disagree with both of those groups.

“I think he is plenty smart. And while I have no doubt that his religious belief is genuine, and that it is an important motivation for many things that he does in life, as it is for me and for many of you, most of the President’s frequent departures from fact-based analysis have much more to do with right-wing political and economic ideology than with the Bible.”

NEW STUDY: THREE IN FOUR SAY IF IRAQ DID NOT HAVE WMD OR SUPPORT AL QAEDA, U.S. SHOULD NOT HAVE GONE TO WAR

“College Park, MD: A new PIPA/Knowledge Networks poll finds a consensus among the American public that if Iraq did not have WMD and was not providing substantial support to al Qaeda, the US should not have gone to war with Iraq. Seventy-four percent overall have this view, including 58% of Bush supporters, 92% of Kerry supporters and 77% of the uncommitted-those who have not made a definite commitment to vote for one or the other candidate.

“Overall, support for the decision to go to war has eroded slightly, so that a bare majority of 51% now says that it was the wrong decision, and 46% say it was the right decision (as compared to August when 49% said it was the wrong decision and 46% the right decision). “

NASA PHOTO ANALYST: BUSH WAS WIRED

Kevin Berger reports in Salon.com:

“Oct. 29, 2004 | George W. Bush tried to laugh off the bulge. “I don’t know what that is,” he said on “Good Morning America” on Wednesday, referring to the infamous protrusion beneath his jacket during the presidential debates. “I’m embarrassed to say it’s a poorly tailored shirt.”

“Dr. Robert M. Nelson, however, was not laughing. He knew the president was not telling the truth. And Nelson is neither conspiracy theorist nor midnight blogger. He’s a senior research scientist for NASA and for Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and an international authority on image analysis. Currently he’s engrossed in analyzing digital photos of Saturn’s moon Titan, determining its shape, whether it contains craters or canyons.

“For the past week, while at home, using his own computers, and off the clock at Caltech and NASA, Nelson has been analyzing images of the president’s back during the debates. A professional physicist and photo analyst for more than 30 years, he speaks earnestly and thoughtfully about his subject. “I am willing to stake my scientific reputation to the statement that Bush was wearing something under his jacket during the debate,” he says. “This is not about a bad suit. And there’s no way the bulge can be described as a wrinkled shirt.”"

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/10/29/bulge/

ANOTHER MYSTERY

Philly news.com reports:

“Two men who worked extensively in the wreckage of the World Trade Center claim they helped federal agents find three of the four “black boxes” from the jetliners that struck the towers on 9/11 - contradicting the official account. Both the independent 9/11 Commission and federal authorities insist that none of the four devices - a cockpit voice recorder (CVR) and flight data recorder (FDR) from the two planes - was ever found.”

http://www.philly.com/mld/dailynews/news/local/10033802.htm

YASSER ILL, TO LEAVE COMPOUND

BBC reports:

“Ailing Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat is suffering from a low blood platelet count and will be flown to Paris today for medical treatment. The Palestinian Authority, the prime minister and legislative council will take over leadership in his absence, Mr Arafat’s senior aide told the BBC.”

Will the Israelis allow him to return? Who will or can replace him? What will this mean for the political struggle within Palestine? These are questions without answer for now.

NOT IN THE NEWS OR IN THE CAMPAIGN

“Although the world has more than enough food to sustain all people, a dozen children under the age of five are dying every minute from hunger-related diseases and the number of malnourished is on the rise, a United Nations experts says in a new report.

“Jean Ziegler, the Special UN Rapporteur on the right to food, says 842 million people were permanently or gravely undernourished last year, an increase of 2 million on the previous figures. Hunger levels have now risen every year since the World Food Summit in 1996 called for global action to stem the trend.”

WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

Jim Rutenberg noted yesterday in the NY Times:

“Practicing cheap and dirty politics, playing fast and loose with the facts and even lying: Accusations like these, and worse, have been slung nonstop this year.

“The accused in this case are not the candidates, but the mainstream news media. And the accusers are an ever-growing army of Internet writers, many of them partisans, who reach hundreds of thousands of people a day.

“Journalists covering the campaign believe the intent is often to bully them into caving to a particular point of view. They insist the efforts have not swayed them in any significant way, though others worry the criticism could eventually have a chilling effect.

“Many of the Internet writers say they have been empowered by the Web to begin serving as a long-needed real-time check on mainstream outlets and reporters who they say wield too much power, sometimes irresponsibly and often with hidden partisan motives.”

It worse than that Jim. Just read the Mediachannel daily. Its filled with news your bosses consider not fit to print. Does anyone wonder why anymore? Read on.

HOW TO “CHARACTERIZE” BOOKS?

This just in from Jennifer Nix of Chelsea Green Publisher of Vermont on “The Making of a New York Times Bestseller.”

“All publishers aspire to have their books hit bestseller lists, and probably no list more so than the New York Times, the coup de grace of bestseller selections. So how does one achieve a spot on this compendium of all the books fit to list? It turns out the criteria are not as straightforward as you might expect.

“Following reports that George Lakoff’s political work Don’t Think of an Elephant! had made the Booksense and San Francisco Chronicle paperback bestseller lists, Chelsea Green received word that the book had made #30 on the NY Times paperback list. We were ecstatic, but troubled to see that the book was listed with the wrong author (Howard Dean) and wrong publisher (Ballantine). When president and publisher Margo Baldwin called the Times to correct the information, she was told that the book was no longer on the list at all, as it had been reclassified as a How-To/Self-Help book. What follows is a mystifying conversation between Chelsea Green staff members and the book taxonomists at our nation’s Paper of Record.

“Here’s what Publisher’s Lunch had to say about the exchange: The NYT raised a few eyebrows last week after unusual dispatch of two different versions of its weekly e-mail providing advance release of the bestseller lists dated October 31. The first version incorrectly listed DON’T THINK OF AN ELEPHANT, credited to Howard Dean and Don Hazen with Ballantine listed as the publisher, at No. 30 on the extended paperback nonfiction list. (Dean wrote the foreword and Hazen contributed an introduction; the author is linguist George Lakoff, and the publisher is Chelsea Green.)

“At least a few eyebrows remained raised when a second, corrected version of the list dropped the title entirely, with the paperback of Thomas Cahill’s SAILING THE WINE-DARK SEA moving onto the list at No. 35. When Chelsea Green publisher Margo Baldwin contacted the NYT, they told her the book had been recategorized for tracking on their “advice/how-to/miscellaneous” list.

“After challenging the recategorization multiple times (a political book, it provides “advice” in the sense of what Amazon calls “recommendations for how the progressive movement can regain semantic equity by repositioning their arguments.” Baldwin’s appeals apparently ended with NYT staffer Rich Meislen, who told Baldwin via e-mail, “Having looked through the book, I think it’s correctly categorized…. I appreciate your concern, but people of good will can disagree, and we disagree on this one. (10/26/04)”

HUH? DUH? I thought Jayson Blair left the paper.

IMPERIAL “ELECTION”

For an analysis of the Afghan election which the US government and the media togther hailed as fair and free, see Lloyd Hart’s ” Why the Afghan Election Has No Credibility. ”

http://dadapop.com

YOUR LETTERS: DOWN WITH BASEBALL?

Paul Palmer pounds a ball my way:

“Do you really have to descend to reporting so exultantly on juvenile baseball drivel? You should be ashamed of yourselves…. Good going on the rest though.”

From Texas, this observation:

“Thank you for writing about the Red Sox victory. Sorry that it came at the expense of your beloved Yankees but that was karma!

From Israel:

” From the Mid-Eastern ranch - never a dull moment. First the disengagement vote, with Netanyahu making a fool of himself, and now the drama around the health and fate of Arafat, and much more. It was a welcome relief to see a rebroadcasting of the Red Sox 4th game victory on ESPN this evening.:”

Finally from Sox City, my brother Bill:

THE CURSE REVERSED? (OR WORSE?)
More than the moon was eclipsed last night:
this cosmic event lit up Red Sox delight,
plunging Yankee fans into dark despair,
in a universe damaged beyond repair.
But lifting the curse on Beantown’s team
may inadvertently have cracked the central beam,
for ancient folk knew when the moon disappeared
it presaged the coming of things to be feared.
But away with mystical lunar vibrations,
instead here’s a Yankee‚’s congratulations.
Red Sox Nation, hoist your flag, hoist some beers!
(Won’t it just be another 86 years?)

Kevin Gibson writes from San Lorenzo, CA:

“In the midst of the beauty and wonder that was the Red Sox win last night, I was struck by how Fox will stop at nothing to bolster the Bush campaign. Several times in the later innings Fox cut to shots of troops watching the game in Iraq. Now there is nothing wrong with that, I actually thought it was pretty cool, the problem was with the caption. The caption under the live shot of the troops was, “Multinational Force Iraq”. I seriously doubt there were any “multinational” forces in these shots, but that they were all US troops. Another shot in the war of terminology. Did anyone else notice this? Keep up the good work!”

Think that was distorted? The Daily Kos blog notes: “that the new GOP Ad appropriately titled “Whatever It Takes”, uses Bush’s convention acceptance speech, stirring music, and images of dedicated troops and families in the heartland.”

As astutely noted by mikellanes in this thread: “It also uses Photoshopped images to turn a small crowd into a large one to cover over Bush at a podium!”

Karen Douglass from Georgetown University comes to my defense against the fury of the Foxphobes:

“Anyone who calls Danny Schechter a ‘johnny come lately’ to watchdog, muckracking, investigative journalism is an uninformed ignoramus. Mr. Schechter reported the Watergate breakin story heavily the summer of 1972 before the election, before the mainstream media. Danny Schecter was there on the radio reporting every new disgusting detail. He gathered the information and he reported it to America, just like now. Thank you Danny Schechter, keep up the good work you’ve been doing for over 30 years!!!!”

This was unsolicited. Thank you.

ELECTION PROTECTION NEEDED

NYU’s Mark Crispin Miller shares a letter he received from the Sunshine State:

Joyce Chumbley writes from Orlando, Florida “And the harassment is going on at all levels. I put a Kerry/Edwards sign in my yard a few days ago and discovered this morning that it had been covered up with a Bush/Cheney sign. Folks at the Dem Hdqtrs say that “scores” of people have complained about signs being stolen. When I called the sheriff’s office, they refused to take my complaint and said to call the Republicans for removal. When I called the Repub Hdqtrs, some smartass asked me if I had taken my medicine this morning and hung up. It seems that we can’t even be safe on our own property from personal violations and hateful, hostile, directly violent acts.”

Anna Taylor shares a s new word for you political scrabble fans:

“r e v e l e c t i o n (I tried revo-lection, but prefer the “revelation” association — as in the Democrats and whatever Republicans are left look at what REALLY goes on in this country, for the nonrich, nonwhite, nonmale, nonstrong, working, poor, déclassé.”

Anonymous:

“Is there anyway to approach the FCC (i know, don;’t laugh) and find out if Broadcasters can be fined for lying? CBS gets a ridiculous fine for accidentally showing a woman’s nipple but Fox (and god knows how many other news stations) can sit there and lie through their fake teeth. Is there anything that can be done? I get terrets watching the news over here. Could i sue them for my condition because its been caused from listening to their lies? Not very PC of me to say for the people with the condition i know, but there must be something that can be done to stop them from blatantly misleading the public.”

Wendi Meremark:

“Whatever begins Nov. 2, it is a long time to Jan. 20. In that interval in 1992, lame duck Bush 41 sent the Marines to Somalia with no exit — Dan Rather on the beach to welcome them ashore, though — kind of like leaving the Oval Office booby trapped.”

WEEKEND OF WORK

Across the country campaign workers will bot be getting much rest as the final push goes into overdrive. Check out: http://www.RegimeChangeGuide.com

I am off to the Northampton Film festival this weekend, WMD screens at 2 PM and I am on a panel at 7PM. I am then off to Boston to catch some Sox fever. On Sunday, I screen WMD in Gloucester and then back to NYC for a UN screening Monday. There’s no rest for the weary

Await your emails for Election Day. What was the most egregous failing of the media in this campaign? What can be done about it. Share your thoughts and hopes, Write: Dissector@mediachannel.org

Posted by Danny on Fri, Oct 29, 2004 at 06:57 AM EST