As usual Somerby buries the lede:
"What really counts from Congo: Dowd’s column teaches a lesson today in the meaning of “tabloid” journalism. Before pretending to discuss something important, Dowd burns up half her piece with Clinton’s briefly awkward moment. Cable “news” has had a ball with it too. It’s what these imbeciles live for.
Yesterday, Jeffrey Gettleman had a different idea. In this fascinating news report in the Times, he discussed Clinton’s actual diplomatic efforts in Congo. (Headline: “Clinton Presses Congo on Illicit Minerals.”) Many human lives were at stake, which explains why Dowd didn’t care. In our hard-copy New York Times, there wasn’t a single word about Clinton’s brief, embarrassing moment. On-line, we see that the Times has added one paragraph, right at the end, presumably from a later edition.
Today, Gettleman continues his serious reporting. (Headline: “Clinton Presents Plan to Fight Sexual Violence in Congo.”) One passage—one of many:
GETTLEMAN (8/12/09): After the camp, [Clinton] spoke with two rape survivors, including the woman who lost her fetus and nearly bled to death in the bush. Mrs. Clinton then talked with a group of doctors and advocates who specialize in treating victims of sexual violence. Many said they felt abandoned.
“Children are killed, women are raped and the world closes its eyes,” said one woman.
Children are killed and women are raped? Trust us. Dowd doesn’t care.
Not for the first time: Margaret Carlson behaved very similarly in her 2003 memoir, Anyone Can Grow Up. At one point, she recalled a trip Hillary Clinton took to South Asia in 1995. In real time, Joe Klein had played the Gettleman role, reporting the serious issues involved in Clinton’s trip. Eight years later, Carlson posed as Dowd. See THE DAILY HOWLER, 6/12/03. Until we find a way to change it, this is the heart of our political culture.
"
And, if I may, let me show you why Somerby's archives are incomparable. From the 6/12/03 archive:
"Here is the clowning account she presents in her book. Again, it’s designed to help her readers see Mrs. Clinton’s lack of character:
CARLSON (page 150): Hillary, too, could talk anyone into the ground. One night very late in New Delhi, Joe Klein, then at Newsweek, and I got a joint interview with the First Lady. She used up our time with chatter about the Taj Mahal and the ambassador’s gardens—all about as newsworthy as someone showing you slides from their summer vacation. About midnight, an aide showed us the door, literally. Our time was up. Valiantly, Klein reeled her back in with a question about health-care reform. As we descended into the swamps of single-payer insurance and Klein’s very own plan for universal health care, I leaned against the open door—and fell asleep. I woke up when my notebook clattered to the floor, embarrassed that jet lag had struck so hard, but unworried that any news had been committed.
The sheer stupidity of this anecdote simply leaps off the page. Just follow Carlson’s idea flow. First, she complains when Hillary doesn’t talk policy. Then, when Hillary does discuss policy, Carlson instantly falls asleep. When she awakes, she snidely says that she’s certain she didn’t miss anything. In this episode, Mrs. Clinton stays up well past midnight to speak with Carlson, but Carlson can only find fault with her conduct. As with other bizarre Clinton-haters who have made such a joke of our national discourse, Mrs. Clinton is damned in this book if she does—and Mrs. Clinton is damned in this book if she doesn’t. Amazingly, Carlson fails to see how stupid she looks in the process. Clinton “used up our time,” she sniffs, displaying her astounding hauteur."
Joe Klein had a plan for universal health care. Who woulda thunk it?
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There are two issues
Rape (which is most assuredly on her front burner), and mineral rights. As SoS, she's got to deal with both, as well as with all the idiots.
I think she's doing an excellent job.
If it had been me answering the (mistranslated?) question, I would have punched out the questioner. (Why I shouldn't be SoS!) And that's after more than 20 years of being treated as if my expertise is worth nothing because I'm a woman (who, not incidentally, looks younger than I am). It is not my fucking problem if you hate having women smarter than you are around you. Deal with it.
We can't afford not to have single-payer!
The sad thing is
Is I can totally believe that the questioner actually meant to ask her Obama's opinion on the matter, not fmr. Pres. Clinton's, and just got so flustered at being called on, that they switched the names. I've done that to people I would have an easier time asking questions of, than Sec. Clinton.
Especially since the questioner apologized afterwards. It irritates me though that they keep calling it a mistranslation, when it was obviously just a misspeaking by the questioner.
He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave.
- Sir William Drummond
No. There is one issue. Militarization of US policy in Africa.
The focus on Hillary and sexism toward her by some questioner, mistranslated or not is a disgusting sideshow. The real issue should be our murderous and hypocritical policies toward the African continent.
The real issue should be the deaths of five or six million Congolese people since the mid 1990s invasions by the armies of seven (or is it nine? still have not had that first cup of coffee — lemme see… Burundi, Uganda, Kenya, Zimbabwe, Angola, Tanzania, Rwanda and somebody else). What the invading armies all had in common was US military training, arms transfers, and weapons. We give aid to 52 out of 54 African armies for precisely this sort of thing.
Our military training and aid also keeps healthy an ever-changing cast of semi-official and unofficial African proxy arimes, like one on the Congo-Uganda border run by the son of the late unlamented Idi Amin.
It is our policy that has made Africa the cheapest place on earth to buy an assault rifle, although none (except in South Africa) are manufactured there. It is our policy that has created vast law-free zones in which depopulation, mass rape and the erasure of civil society enables the profitable extraction of timber, diamonds, titanium, gold, diamonds, coltan and other precious minerals. George H.W. Bush and Andrew Young sit on the board of Barrick Gold, one of the beneficiaries of Congolese genocide. Vernon Jordan used to do legal work for them.
Congo is where the coltan in your cell phones and computers comes from, and the titanium in the F-16s and F-22s that buzz over my house (I live not far from the Lockheed plant and an adjoining USAF base). Uganda has no gold, but since the invasion and occupation of Congolese border regions has become a major exporter of the stuff. And all the brutally extracted resources of the Congo, along with the profits therefrom, flow westward. To Western Europe and the U.S.
We are pulling the strings there, and AFRICOM is the intensification of those policies. So the real issue is the militarization of our Africa policy that keeps the continent barefoot, sick, hungry and afraid, and deeply profitable.
Focusing on rape without addressing or even mentioning the US engineered causes of the disintegration of African civil society is deeply hypocritical, and allows us to feel good for sending mere band-aids rather than stopping our militarization of the place. It invites us to react as “moral beings” who need to be reassured that they are “good” rather than as citizens responsible for atrocities engineered with our money and in our name. We are guilty of those rapes, and much, much more.
"If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other people, then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding" Zora Neale Hurston, from Moses, Man of the Mountain
Bruce Dixon www.blackagendareport.com
Two Issues, Albeit Inter-related
Women would have problems in Africa regardless of U.S. policy. Which doesn't mean I agree with U.S. policy, I don't. It certainly exacerbates women's plight in Africa to a large degree and has other horrifying effects on African people of both sexes, as you rightly point out.
But there are multiple wars going on in Africa, as there are everywhere else, there's the war over resources and power and money, but there's also the more intimate war for equality that women fight in virtually every society (which is also about power). To a certain extent, the first war is only an excuse used to explain away the more violent aspects of the second war. It is not why the second war exists. Because that second war exists damned near everywhere.
"Do what you feel in your heart to be right -- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. " - Eleanor Roosevelt
“Children are killed, women
“Children are killed, women are raped and the world closes its eyes,” said one woman.
there are days when i feel the world can't be rid of men fast enough, although i'd be willing to make an exception for bob somerby [and probably some others].
iirc, biden was offered [expecting to be offered?] either secretary of state or vp. i'm so glad hillary is secretary of state, just because of issues like this. makes me almost glad obama is president, instead of hillary.
Women's Issues
are the one policy area where I think it's really great Hillary Clinton is SoS. She's not going to change the empire, but women's right is something she's had a long dedication to and can actually make a difference. Even a slight different would be huge for a lot of women. And since we were never going to get an SoS who was going to change the empire, this is at least something good.
BTW, via BTD, here's an example of her good work from the NYT website.
And other parts of the NYT, have done a much better job of putting her incident with the question into context - see here (also via BTD) and here(Hillary Fights a Tide of Trivialization, via Shakesville).
"Do what you feel in your heart to be right -- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. " - Eleanor Roosevelt
The Times coverage has been good overall
Which makes me wonder all the more why they keep MoDo on. Maybe there's some kind of "conservation of intelligence in writing" law they are compelled to follow? I've wondered that about Safire as well, and others...
Á propos of nothing, check out Google's logo today: Happy birthday to my "landsman", Hans Christian Ørsted!
We can't afford not to have single-payer!
The focus on rape makes Americans feel good
but it omits altogether the US policies which have caused civil society to disappear --- the IMF and World Bank structural adjustment policies which ban the expansion of public funding of free education for women and girls, or medical infrastructure, It omits from consideration as well the thoroughgoing militarization of US Africa policy since the 1950s.
If you leave out US militarization of Africa and our policies of corporate plunder --- along with our maintainence of a global financial system that facilitates the laundering of trillions of dollars in extracted profits, bribes and outright theft, the exclusive focus on the mass rapes which are one of the bitter fruits of those same policies become a justification for further intervention.
Like science fiction terraformers we have created the African conditions that justify our further military intervention, and the mass rapes are part of those conditions.
"If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other people, then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding" Zora Neale Hurston, from Moses, Man of the Mountain
Bruce Dixon www.blackagendareport.com
But The Media Can't Even Be Bothered To Focus on Rape
If they could be, perhaps people would take a bigger interest in the Congo and Africa, including U.S. policy. Instead, we get this truly trivial bullshit.
I think you can applaud the attention being brought to the plight of women in the Congo and also want to see more attention paid to the Congo generally as well as U.S. Africa policy. I don't think it has to be an either/or proposition. It's all interconnected and something most Americans, including me, don't know enough about and need better and more information (and I would like to thank BAR because what little I do know of U.S. African policy, I learned primarily there).
But getting any media to pay any attention to anything beyond the most trivial crap is damned near impossible these days. The media is, IMO, our biggest obstacle to changing U.S. policy on any issue, including Africa.
"Do what you feel in your heart to be right -- for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be damned if you do, and damned if you don't. " - Eleanor Roosevelt
no. it really IS an either - or proposition
What makes it so is the disposition of media, when they are inclined to focus on rape in the Congo at all, to omit any and all causes, as if Africans just decided they could not maintain civil society and protect each other for some inexplicable and never-explained reason, and the current US policy which is trying to manufacture popular consent in the US for an even more direct US military role on the continent.
Thus westerners are invited to sympathize with some of the victims by supporting relief work on the one hand and US intervention to "protect" the victims on the other. This concept of the US "Responsibility to Protect" people in what Pentagon planners have for some time called the "ungoverned zones" of Africa is now the bipartisan cornerstone of US policy on the continent. It even has a web site, for chrissakes, at http://www.responsibilitytoprotect.org.
If you only focus on the rapes, the logical answer is US intervention to cure a situation that the US has orchestrated and engineered into existence over the last several decades.
The entire career of Susan Rice, the Obama administration's UN Ambassador is staked on the US right and duty to intervene in Africa for the supposed "protection" of persecuted civilians. That was one of the justifications for the Afghan war too, wasn't it, protecting women? How's that working out? Another principal Obama foreign policy advisor is Samantha Powers, author of "Genocide, A Problem From Hell", a most naked interventionist tract distinguished largely for dealing in large part with Africa in the 80s and 90s but never mentioning the millions dead in the Congo. If you're interested, here's my take on why.
The incontrovertible fact is that our government's policies, IMF and World Bank structural adjustment, our dependence on cheap African resources, and our maintenance of an international financial system of black holes and transnational money laundries all make those rapes happen, not something in the African water or air or social makeup. Again, focusing on retail relief for the victims and chasing some of the front line perps gives us all warm glows and makes us feel superior and justified. It's easy and sweet like candy. Facing up to how we, and our government, on a bipartisan basis have orchestrated those conditions is bitter, takes some deliberate effort and goes down hard.
You are using a computer right now with coltan in its motherboard from the Congo. Every modern military aircraft in the world contains titanium, most of which comes from the Congo (almost all the rest of the world's titanium is in Russia!). US corporations have long profited from the rapes and the dissolution of African civil society. Omitting our deep implication in this, and failing to help bring these policies into sharp focus is not a mere matter of choosing to emphasize the human rather than the dry economic and military stuff.
It's --- I don't know how else to say it --- lazy and dishonest. It empowers and shields the Hillary Clintons, the Susan Rices, and the AFRICOMs, and the multinational business and financial interests, and their African allies.
For a thorough background of how US military and corporate policies decisively contribute to the state of affairs in Africa I recommend you give a listen to the Ravaging of Africa, a four-part radio documentary series written and produced by Asad Ismi and Kristen Schwarts, absolutely the best, most lucid and understandable explanation of the destructive impact of U.S. imperialism on Africa, featuring voices of African activists interviewed at the 2007 World Social Forum held in Nairobi, Kenya.
Give it a listen. You'll never think of this stuff the same way again. Then burn a CD of it or two and hand them out. I made a few dozen, and linked to it on my site.
The only way you can make this NOT an either-or proposition is if you believe that Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice and the bipartisan US foreign policy establishment are sincerely concerned about Africans, and African rape victims in particular. You and I both know better than that, don't we? Governments lie, and count on us not to notice or care or admit they're lying.
In the end, Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton and the Us corporate media are perhaps even less concerned about African rape victims and their children than Obama's biggest campaign contributors are about health care for all. Face up to it, and then let's face up to our responsibility to change our plundering and militarized Africa policies.
"If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other people, then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding" Zora Neale Hurston, from Moses, Man of the Mountain
Bruce Dixon www.blackagendareport.com
Have to partly disagree with you here
In the end, Susan Rice and Hillary Clinton and the Us corporate media are perhaps even less concerned about African rape victims and their children than Obama's biggest campaign contributors are about health care for all.
While agreeing with you about the US media on the whole (though I hate to make such a damning blanket generalization when I'm sure there are a couple of people out there who qualify as "US corporate media" who probably do care, either about suffering in general or about rape victims or AFricans in particular, w/some overlap), I think Hillary has a long established track record of caring about women and being willing to speak up and fight for women's issues, and for the disadvantaged in general, going back to her law school days if not earlier. Having been party to some dumb decisions doesn't equate to being the sort of person who can be aware of misery and be unmoved by it. And even though I know very little about Susan Rice, I'm going to assume women in general will care about other women being raped unless I know something about them that leads me to believe otherwise (men, not so much, which is sad, but I still wouldn't call someone out by name to say something that awful about them w/out having a really good reason).
I don't think focusing on this particular issue needs to take away from focus on the other problems in Africa, and in fact I think it's more likely to *get* focus on the other problems, in part thanks to comments like yours here that are being read by people like me who knew some of this stuff but not a lot of it. I'm probably more politically and historically aware than most people, and I'd never heard a lot of what you posted--it's a sad truth that most Americans get very, very little history of their own country post 60's, and I've seen other people comment that they personally got their 60's history(and all their post WWII history) from the movies and not from any classes. Based on things I know a little more about, what you're saying certainly fits a pattern of how we helped fuck up places like Haiti and Iran and various other countries, so I wanna be clear that I'm not arguing with you about that part of your posts, but all but the most sociopathic people, even people who generally otherwise are scumbuckets, probably have an impulse to want to fix things when they see genocide and mass rape. Where we start running into problems is figuring out how and how to allocate resources (and I wouldn't hold our breath waiting for the media or most politiciansor most Americans to say this mess is partly our fault, either; I'll happily settle for just getting them to help make things better).
Your view of "womens issues" is limited
if it does not include the issue of how African countries are prohibited by the dictates of the World Bank and IMF and bilateral agreements with the US and western creditor nations from investing in the education of girls and women, and from investing in building health infrastructures that could address HIV-AIDS and other stuff.
As Secretary of State, Hillary today and Condi before her and Madeline Albright (skipping one or two) --- all women Secretaries of State have all insisted that the repayment of principal and loan shark interest by African countries must take precedence over investment in the education and health of women and girls. For plenty of well researched, deeply sourced and easily digestible info on how this works give a listen to one or more segments of the radio documentary The Ravaging of Africa.
It's divided into four half hour parts which are best listened to in order for the sake of context, but the particular points germaine to the enforcement of Western budgetary priorities on African economies, health and education infrastructures and the like are in part 2.
Now if you want to ignore that well-documented record of US-enforced economic priorities on those countries and concentrate only on some of the pious statements of concern which issue from the offices and the lips of Secretaries of State, I can see how you might credit them with some kind of concern for the rights of women and children. But that takes a lot of what I can only call willful blindness.
I do not mean to be disrespectful, but is the word hypocrisy in your vocabulary? or do you just imagine crocodiles --- some of them female --- are crying real tears of concern? Remember SoS Madeline Albright when she said that half a million dead Iraqi children killed by the US blockades of Iraq on her watch were a reasonable price to pay for whatever we were trying to do back then?
If any of these Secretaries of State were mainly concerned about womens issues and womens rights in Africa how could they countenance most of our "aid" expenditures being military? African militaries do not educate anybody.
"If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other people, then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding" Zora Neale Hurston, from Moses, Man of the Mountain
Bruce Dixon www.blackagendareport.com
OMG, Biden as SoS?
Even on days I don't mind him so much, this idea would make me cringe.
Yes, Obama has made some good appointments. (His nominee for OSHA also comes to mind.)
We can't afford not to have single-payer!
This is effective chain pulling, btw-Not belittling the problem,
just how it's being used.
When Bernhard was still running Moon of AL, he would post every so often about how the numbers of people killed in Darfur didn't make sense. But there are many who think we should use military force there to protect against this near holocaust.
But...there are oil dicoveries there, so...best to build up a reason for use of force when it becomes "necessary." In the Dick Cheney sense of necessary.
Adding that there can be a serious problem which is getting some necessary attention, but that it may not be completely altruistic. There may be energy concerns as well as concern about brutality toward women and children.
who's pulling? and what's on the end of that chain?
"getting attention" is NOT a worthy goal in or of itself Why>
Because when this "attention" is divorced from anything like historical responsibility it combines with America's famous ignorance and arrogance to justify current imperial policies. "Attention" of this kind is purely and invariably the servant of the established order and its established state of consciousness. In the American media-generated consciousness, Africa is an inexplicably violence-prone place. No causes are offered, save a presumed uniquely African inability to manage their own affairs.
There is no blank slate this "attention" is written on. If flows within a context. Ignoring that context makes us the servants of those who do NOT ignore it, who create it.
"If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other people, then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding" Zora Neale Hurston, from Moses, Man of the Mountain
Bruce Dixon www.blackagendareport.com
I think we agree on this--I'm saying governments use atrocities
to stir up their populations; once stirred up, the government can use the emotions to achieve goals; the goals may be good or not so good. Sometimes they create atrocities to serve their greater purposes (infamously, the Iraqis killing babies in their incubators in Kuwait is a recent well-known example).
In looking at Darfur, anyone not digging deeply into the situation would agree with the MCM* presentations that there are very bad villains attacking innocent people; the next step. should be government want to take it, could be be military force to protect the innocent.
I don't know enough to gauge the levels of villainy or innocence. Actually, until Bernhard wrote about certain reports on his blog, I was pretty much in the why don't we DO something to protect those poor people. Then, learning more, I realized I might be manipulated. BushCo certainly used manipulation of people's feeling to great effect with the "save the poor women" tact; except I didn't trust Bush, so I basically felt he didn't mean it. I recall listening to the news of the start of announced hostilities, asking whatever powers that be that the invasion of Afghanistan would not result in many deaths and that at least Bush's people would liberate the women. That didn't work out too well.
A secretary of state may work on issues of importance to her, but she can't pursue endeavors which are not supported by her president. She may or may not realize there are other agendas (if there are, should be aware of them) when she is given the go ahead on working issues important to her.
Your point that we here do not know much about vast swathes of the rest of the world is spot on--and what news we get is often tailored to meet the needs of our government. Bah. Now, BushCo set up the Africa Command, and Obama is continuing with the plan. What else? Gates was kept on for a reason....
Now, gotta run. Good piece--will this be a post at BAR?
*MCM--Mainstream Corporate Media
it's pretty much an ongoing series of them....
…an ongoing theme. But it’s not about just using atrocities. We literally created those atrocities with our policies and now we are using them as excuses for the next round of interventions, like, as I said in a previous post, sci-fi terraformers who create their own needed atmosphere.
See our “need to know” page on Darfur-Sudan, especially Ten Reasons Why “Save Darfur” is a PR Scam to Justify the Next US Oil and Resource Wars in Africa. It is the most read article on our site, actually. Follow the links.
We also print a lot of the work of journalist Keith Harmon Snow, and you can find lots more of his stuff at All Things Pass.
Mahmood Mamdani in his latest book Saviors and Survivors writes a lot, specific to the case of Darfur, about how the simplistic portrayal of real or imagined genocides —- and Darfur is very much an imagined genocide —- Mamdani says that the general in charge of the African Union peacekeeping force pegged the death toll on ALL sides of the Darfur conflict last year as under 1500 —- serves the interventionist West and appeals to moralizing Westerners, giving them a chance to feel whole and nice, uplifted and superior to Africans. There are links to his book and a two-hour speech he made this March at Howard University in the margin.
"If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other people, then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding" Zora Neale Hurston, from Moses, Man of the Mountain
Bruce Dixon www.blackagendareport.com
Thnx so much for all these great links...I've been having Moon
of AL withdrawal, miss its world view. Looks like your site has some really in depth coverage.
how is praising Hillary in Africa different...?
from the Obama-worship of some black folks I know every day. Obama is black, but he is on the other side. Hillary is a woman, and she too is on the other side. Why is this so hard to digest?
The murderous Susan Rice, like Condoleeza Rice, is black AND a woman, AND on the other side.
"If you want that good feeling that comes from doing things for other people, then you have to pay for it in abuse and misunderstanding" Zora Neale Hurston, from Moses, Man of the Mountain
Bruce Dixon www.blackagendareport.com
Well this thread was successfully hijacked.....
Apparently it would be better for our State Dept. to just ignore Africa, since we (along with the Russians, along with Europe, along with China) have blood on our hands.
And anyone who is saying anything about the evils that are happening in Darfur and the Congo are mere apologists or "useful fools" (as they used to call us) for U.S. imperialism and militaristic aggression.
Up is the new down.
Sorry, I don't fall in love with politicians. I'm not that desperate.....
Sorry to disagree re: hijacked thread
That's really an insult to Bruce and others who are interested in looking deeper into issues. And, Bruce gave some great resources to check out.
Yes, you put up the original post, but I don't understand why you think that if the conversation on the thread doesn't go the way you expect or want, that counts as "hijacking"
If a post of mine had provoked such a discussion, I'd be happy!
Here is my response
Here is my response.
Is Clinton furthering American militarism in Africa? I don't know, maybe, although none of the many, many links that Bruce provides give much evidence on that either way. Since claiming she doesn't give a rat's ass about the violence in Africa and is only spilling crocodile tears is a pretty damn serious charge, I would like to see some pretty serious and damn specific evidence that it is the case. I wouldn't even say that about Obama (Clinton's boss, and I'm not a big Obama fan) without some very serious evidence to back it up. It is interesting that even this is all about the personalities....
I respect a hell of a lot about what Bruce writes, I'm sure he can put up a post either here or at his own site that gives specific documentation to his claims and accusations*.
But regardless of whether he is right or wrong in his accusations, it is pretty damn pathetic that our establishment media could care less either way. As long as there is some "Hillary Clinton is a ball-breaking shrew" or "Oh my God, The Clintons!" line to follow, they are content to keep all of us ignorant of what is happening in Africa and anywhere else in the world. And who is served by ignorant and stupid?
Which was my point. Maybe saying my thread was "hijacked" was the wrong thing to say, but what Bruce brings up is a whole separate topic which deserves it's own post, where it can be more critically disected or debated.
* Beyond "it's been US policy for dozens of years to maintain instability in Africa and they aren't specifically renouncing it, and now Clinton is railing against sexual violence in the Congo and that's how it starts", none of which is real strong evidence to me. And yes Bruce, I read ALL of your links, although I haven't had the hours to listen to the radio broadcasts, and I've read many other things as well, apparently even the recently indicted president of Sudan doesn't share the "1500 dead" figure you cite.
Sorry, I don't fall in love with politicians. I'm not that desperate.....
Okanogen, hey, you've got a real live thread going! Congrats!
And I'm glad you brought this topic up. When I saw the MCM* coverage I was pretty PO
'd, then it went to joke time on late night and I got furious. Read about MoDo's carp (refuse to read her any more). Came across a NYTimes blog which pointed out the questioner did indeed seem to think Bill Clinton was using Hillary as a sock puppet.
I was going to say something, but the health care thing is pretty time consuming...
So, good post, good thread.
*MCM--Mainstream Corporate Media...which cannot resist an opportunity to put Hillary in a bad light. Interestingly, on Washington Week in Review, a reporter on the trip said the only place where this Q&A got much attention was the US (kindergarten) MCM. Zing.
I liked the original post or I wouldn't have read the thread
and I don't agree with everything Bruce is saying (in particular, I don't get why he thinks Hillary is part of the problem on this particular issue, and I disagree with him about how unified the various media and government forces that have interests in Africa are; I'm not sure to what extent he's deliberately oversimplifying to make a point but if so I think tis wrongheaded), but I think it's a really interesting discussion with a ton of of useful information.
Back to the original topic -- yes, Dowd's columns are symptomatic of the modern journalism that allows atrocities to go barely noticed while everyone picks nits over who has what sort of temperament or is wearing the right clothes. And Somerby is great at noting these sorts of trends.
What disturbs me is how easily people are led by our idiot media. Part of it is, as someone I no longer read (Amanda Marcotte) once said, people think watching a few hours of news every week and maybe glancing at the front page of a newspaper once in a while will give them adequate information. And they have every right to expect this--that's what the media is for, it's their job, and if they were doing it well, then a few hours of a week would be enough for people to have a fair idea of what is going on. And you can't reasonably be mad at the people who don't dig deeper unless they have some reason to know better--people have to work and they want to have some fun in their lives, too, and they shouldn't have to ferret out where the best books or magazines or internet sites are for real, reasonably accurate information devoted to reasonably important topics.
There are far too many really important topics for everyone to be well informed about, but one thing for sure is that no one needs to be wasting time on who has what sort of temperament unless there's a danger that person is gonna pull out a gun or start a war--oh, wait, no one bothered covering *that* temperament, just everyone else's--and no space in real news sections should have been given to what Hillary or Michelle Obama are wearing. It's all bullshit distraction.
I can't imagine too many people in the newsroom going "Huh, do we cover the science geeky solar energy story that might help save the world in 100 years, or the slaughter of these animals that might be the last of their kind, or these women being raped, or do we argue about whether kids should get expelled for bringing Tylenol to school and present both sides of the argument in depth to get the parent audience? Yeah, the first story is boring and the other two are really negative. Let's go with the tylenol, that's more of a real concern to most people. Nah, let's talk about Hillary's temper! We gotta make sure people know she's a scumbucket who gets mad sometimes!"
Wait. Sadly, I can imagine this conversation taking place in a newsroom. Except probably with less attention paid to the first three stories.