Category: Uncategorized

What Patrick meant

Gov. Deval Patrick did a decent job yesterday of deflecting criticism over his 9/11 remarks. “Let me be clear: I don’t think America bears any fault for the attack on us in 9/11, and I don’t think that any of the family members with whom I spoke that day heard it or saw it that way,” he said on the “Eagan & Braude” show on WTKK Radio (96.9 FM). The Boston Globe covers the story here; the Associated Press here.

Lest you forget, here is the section of Patrick’s speech that brought him to grief:

Because among many other things, 9/11 was a failure of human understanding. It was mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States. But it was also about the failure of human beings to understand each other, and to learn to love each other.

At the time, those words struck me as odd, and he obviously opened himself up to accusations that he was being insensitive to the victims of 9/11. But it’s an exercise in intellectual dishonesty to suggest that he really, actually meant to say that Al Qaeda wouldn’t have attacked us if only we had demonstrated love and understanding toward the terrorists. Naturally, the Massachusetts Republican Party and the usual suspects on talk radio nearly injured themselves from the speed with which they leapt to that conclusion.

The Phoenix’s David Bernstein digs deeply, and shows not just the context in which Patrick made his remarks on Tuesday, but on other occasions as well. Here, most tellingly, is a long excerpt from the commencement address Patrick gave this past May at Mount Wachusett Community College:

The events of September 11, 2001 were horrific, you know that. They disrupted individual families and our collective sense of security and well-being. It was a “wake-up” call to our own vulnerability. And it represents a catastrophic failure of human understanding. In its wake, I believe we have been governed by fear.

Fear is what drove us to round up people of Arab descent, many of them American citizens, and to hold hundreds without cause or charge.

Fear led us to lose focus on a known enemy in Afghanistan and invade Iraq instead.

Fear justified what I believe to be the greatest assault on personal freedoms (in the Patriot Act) and the greatest aggregation of Presidential power in much of our history.

Fear created the Guantánamo detention center, where the very rule of law that has made our democracy an envy of the world has been set aside.

Just a few months ago in a radio interview, a senior Pentagon official, Charles “Cully” Stimson, named some of the law firms providing free representation to the Guantánamo detainees and suggested that corporate America make those law firms — and I quote — “choose between representing terrorists and representing reputable firms.” He attempted to mark these lawyers as enemies of society. There was no subtlety in his message.

Speaking about this post-9/11 phenomenon, former Vice President Gore observed that, “Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction.” He quoted former Justice Brandeis, who said that, “Men feared witches and burnt women.”

The Vice President, I think, captured the spirit of the active citizen in the heat of danger when he said, “The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hanged as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk. Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the Bill of Rights.”

Like me, he wonders: “Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol?”

Fear is treacherous.

Now, I’m sure there are some conservatives who would disagree with those remarks, but they pretty much reflect what most liberals believe has happened during the post-9/11 era. Certainly no one would consider them to be particularly controversial. (Indeed, they’re now four months old and no one has said a thing.) Too bad Patrick didn’t express himself as clearly on Tuesday as he did in May.

Finally, have a look at Jay Fitzgerald’s post in which he links criticism of Patrick’s remarks to the idiotic brouhaha over MoveOn.org’s “General Betray Us” ad in the New York Times. Jay — a conservative, or at least someone who passes for one in Massachusetts — correctly notes that President Bush’s defenders are going berserk over these two issues because they can’t offer substantive arguments over everything that’s gone wrong in Iraq.

Personally, I thought Patrick’s remarks — or at least that one excerpt — were tone-deaf, and that MoveOn’s ad was silly and misdirected. But offensive? What’s offensive is the right’s knee-jerk response in attempting to turn everything into a attack on the other side’s patriotism.

If Patrick is guilty of anything, it’s failing to understand how the game is played. Too bad it’s a game, isn’t it?

Photo of Patrick (cc) by DoubleSpeakShow. Some rights reserved.

Kenney does it his way

After a slight lull, action is heating up once again on the casino front. Today’s highlights:

— In the Boston Phoenix, Adam Reilly profiles Peter Kenney (photo at left), the Cape Cod Today blogger/ reporter/ activist who was a key player in bringing down Mashpee Wampanoag president Glenn Marshall, and who continues to break important stories. I think Adam gets a little too hung up on whether Kenney is a “journalist,” but he’s got a lot of insight and some great quotes from the colorful Kenney. Here’s one: “Did I do it the way a traditional journalist would? According to journalistic ethics, if there are such things that are taught in school? No. Was I correct in what I said? Yes.”

— What will Gov. Deval Patrick say about casino gambling? We’re still waiting. Kenney himself writes that a source tells him Patrick has decided to punt and let the Legislature handle it. That would be good news, as House Speaker Sal DiMasi is a casino opponent. In the Cape Cod Times, Stephanie Vosk reports that whatever happens, casino gambling is likely to be the subject of a referendum on the state ballot.

— In the Brockton Enterprise, Michael DeCicco reports that the selectmen in Berkley have voted unanimously to fight against the building of a proposed casino in neighboring Middleborough. “We’re talking about transforming this area into something that will be unbelievable,” said chairman Robert Anctil. “It’s bad growth, not good growth.”

— In the Boston Globe, Sean Murphy looks at the plans for the proposed Middleborough casino and finds that it’s intended to “draw a national tourist clientele because of its proximity to Cape Cod and would be crammed with 4,000 slot machines, 180 table games, and amenities like a 10,000-seat auditorium for sporting events and shows.” Not that it would harm the rural character of the town or anything.

My standard disclosure.

The “Surge Twins”

There’s a lot about Maureen Dowd’s column (sub. req.) in today’s New York Times that I don’t like, but never mind. I love her description of Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, whom she has dubbed the “Surge Twins”:

The Surge Twins seemed competent and more realistic than some of their misbegotten predecessors, but just too late to do any good. They’re like two veteran pilots trying to crash land the plane.

Exactly.

Peace, love and (mis)understanding

It looks like Gov. Deval Patrick is going to have a rough couple of days over an unfortunate (but not unfair) implication some critics are drawing from his 9/11 speech yesterday. I’ll get to that in a moment. But first I want to establish the context, so here’s the full text of his brief remarks (link now fixed; plus I’ve added paragraphing to make it easier to read):

We meet today to honor the lives and memories of the 206 sons and daughters of our Commonwealth who were lost six years ago in the tragedy of September 11th, 2001 and with them the thousands of others from across our nation and across the globe, who were lost in that tragedy as well.

Our tribute is for each of them and our condolences are with each of you and the families and survivors so touched by that day. Each of us felt the impact of the incidents of September 11th. But the mothers and fathers and sons and daughters, sisters and brothers and friends of those endured perhaps the most profound loss of all. This is your community and your community is with you today and everyday.

We have lived the last six years in the shadow of that tragedy. We carry the vivid reminders of the pain and the anger we felt. But we must also carry the vivid reminders of the compassion and generosity that was shown that day and the days and weeks that followed. The coming together that happened not only in communities that lost a loved one remember them, and not only in New York, Virginia or Pennsylvania and Washington DC or not only in the United States but all across the world.

That is the spirit in which we re-convene today, and that is what must last. Because among many other things, 9/11 was a failure of human understanding. It was mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States. But it was also about the failure of human beings to understand each other, and to learn to love each other. And it seems to me that that lesson and that warning is something that we must carry with us everyday.

Fortunately, for human beings, the human heart is not designed to carry grief forever. Somehow we manage to move on and that might be in some ways our greatest strength. We live in a rare place, where our ideas, our shared goals, and our common humanity will and must be more powerful and must ultimately win out over intransigence and anger and violence and division.

Tempered by these losses, we will emerge a strong and better place. That is how we best serve the memories of those we love. We do that not in anger at the horror of their loss, but in honor of the beauty of their lives. We miss them not because they are gone, but because they were here.

The part that’s causing Patrick problems, obviously, is this: “Because among many other things, 9/11 was a failure of human understanding. It was mean and nasty and bitter attack on the United States. But it was also about the failure of human beings to understand each other, and to learn to love each other.”

A Boston Herald editorial today — headlined “Hearts, flowers just aren’t enough” — begins with this sarcastic observation: “If only Osama bin Laden had been hugged more as a child.” The editorial continues:

Unfortunately, the governor’s fuzzy recollection of that terrifying day seems to be in keeping with a certain “blame us” mentality that so many of his supporters embrace, along with a failure to acknowledge the continuing threat of evil that Americans face.

A little while ago, the Massachusetts Republican Party sent out a press release that quotes party chairman Peter Torkildsen as saying, “The only failure of understanding is Governor Patrick’s failure to understand the 9/11 attacks were a cowardly, unprovoked act of war aimed at destroying our democracy and our economy. Terrorists murdered 3,000 innocent people on 9/11, and they were attempting to murder many thousands more that day.” It continues in that vein for several more paragraphs. (So far, the release doesn’t appear to be available at the party’s Web site.)

Bloggers are beginning to react as well, as you can see from this Technorati search.

As you can see from Patrick’s speech, nearly all of it is exactly what you would expect an elected official to say on such occasion. I don’t think his remarks about the human failure to understand and love one another were taken out of context; but I do think they need to be seen within their full context, which was a speech clearly aimed at honoring the victims of 9/11.

As for the part that the Herald and the Republicans are upset with, I’d call it a sloppy bit of rhetoric. I’m all for peace, love and understanding, but Patrick’s words lend themselves too easily to being interpreted as meaning that the attacks came about, at least in part, because we failed to love our enemies.

Look for the inevitable clarification later this week — if not later today.

How false becomes true

Dan Gillmor blasts the media for a recent New York Times/CBS News poll finding that one-third of Americans still believe Saddam Hussein was involved in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. He writes:

The continuing scandal is that media organizations are doing so little to correct the record. Because it is not enough to run an occasional story debunking the lie.

I don’t disagree, but it’s also more complicated than that. Last Friday, NPR’s “On the Media” ran a fascinating interview with the Washington Post’s Shankar Vedantam, whose reporting suggests that the harder you try to debunk a falsehood, the more people are likely to believe it. Here’s Vedantam, talking about what happened after the subjects of a University of Michigan study read a flier produced by the Centers for Disease Control debunking myths about vaccines:

[A]bout 30 minutes later, older people started to remember some of the false statements as true, and three days later, very large numbers of older people and significant numbers of younger people also started remembering increasing numbers of myths as true.

The true statements did not suffer the same kind of deterioration with time. In other words, over time we tend to remember false things as true but not true things as false.

This doesn’t mean the media shouldn’t at least try to educate the public in an ongoing way. But it does mean that it’s likely a significant minority of Americans will continue to believe whatever they like, whether it’s about 9/11 or the (non)-existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

After all, as Vedantam points out, majorities in Arab and Muslim countries continue to believe the United States and/or Israel were responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center. You can only do so much to set the record straight.

Vedantam’s original Post story is online here.

More alleged news

Would the New York Times Co. please, please, please sell its 17 percent stake in the Red Sox? Then, when the Boston Globe publishes a press release like this on the front of the business section, we can attribute it to simple bad news judgment rather than more nefarious motives. Good grief.

Oh, yeah, and this one too — although I suppose it actually qualifies as news.

Update: Boston Daily beat me to it.

McCarthyism and MoveOn.org

Conservative supporters of the war in Iraq are spreading a bizarre meme — that MoveOn.org’s New York Times ad attacking Gen. David Petraeus as “General Betray Us” is the moral equivalent of McCarthyism. A few examples:

  • “We may be about to witness a McCarthy-Army-Welch moment in the debate over Iraq. This time, the role of McCarthy is played by MoveOn.org, a liberal political group that launched its own attack on a respected US Army figure.” — Peter Feaver, former National Security Council staff member, writing in the Boston Globe.
  • “MoveOn.org has thrown down an unprecedented attack on an American general’s character and honesty. It is a disgusting overreach, one that brings to mind Joe McCarthy’s attacks on the Army half a century ago.” — Hugh Hewitt, radio talk-show host and blogger, in the Los Angeles Times.
  • Blogger Dean Barnett posts of a photo on Townhall.com of Sen. Joseph McCarthy being confronted by lawyer Joseph Welch at the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings, at which Welch memorably spoke up on behalf of an officer who’d been targeted by McCarthy: “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?”
  • Sen. John McCain called the MoveOn ad “a McCarthyite attack,” according to this report in the Boston Globe by Lisa Wangsness.

OK, enough. You do see what the problem is, don’t you? McCarthy was smearing government officials by accusing them of being communists. MoveOn is smearing Petraeus by accusing him of being a known associate of (gasp!) George W. Bush.

And though it may have been wrongheaded for MoveOn to suggest that Petraeus would shade the truth on Bush’s behalf, it would be a stretch to call that offensive, let alone “McCarthyite.” Shading the truth about the war — its causes and its prosecution — is, after all, the modus operandi of the Bush White House. Pete Hegseth, writing in the Weekly Standard, accuses MoveOn of calling Petraeus a “traitor.” Hegseth needs to think through the implications of what he’s saying.

I have no love for MoveOn, and I fail to see how blowing its members’ money on a full-page ad in the Times advances its cause. There are not too many Times readers, I suspect, who continue to support (or who ever supported) the war.

I also think that Petraeus stands as one of the few honorable leaders in this terrible folly. His analysis — that U.S. and Iraqi troops are making progress on the ground — seems eminently reasonable. Too bad Iraq’s leadership continues to rip the country apart. (And yes, I understand that Petraeus wrote an overly optimistic op-ed piece for the Washington Post just before the last presidential election, an act that could be seen as political.)

This past Sunday’s “Meet the Press” was valuable, both for the downbeat assessment offered by retired Marine Gen. James Jones and former Washington police commissioner Charles Ramsey, members of the Independent Commission on the Security Forces of Iraq, and for Sen. Joseph Biden’s take on the MoveOn ad: “I don’t buy into that. This is an honorable guy. He’s telling the truth.”

Petraeus‘ truth, unfortunately, is just a small part of the picture. But unless President Bush is suddenly the new Nikita Krushchev, then MoveOn’s ad can’t possibly be compared the tactics of the late, unlamented Joseph McCarthy.

Dennis and Callahan return

Not much to say about the return of John Dennis and Gerry Callahan to WEEI Radio (AM 850) except that Entercom executives proved to be not quite as suicidal as they sometimes appear.

Personally, I wouldn’t have minded seeing the offensive duo take a permanent vacation. But they’re ratings monsters, and it was obvious that Entercom had to do everything it could within reason to bring them back.

Even though I suspect WEEI’s morning ratings would be fine without Dennis and Callahan, Jason Wolfe and company would be foolish to take a chance.

Paul Sullivan

Paul Sullivan has died. I heard it on the way to work this morning on WBZ Radio (AM 1030), where he had hosted a talk show until his illness forced him to step down in June. Sullivan was also political editor of the Lowell Sun. Here’s a rundown of the coverage:

— “The Sullivan Family and the WBZ family lost a real treasure,” says the station’s news director, Peter Casey. “Paul Sullivan brightened up every room he ever entered and every life he ever touched. Right now, our thoughts are with Paul’s wife and their five children and Paul’s extended family.” (WBZ Radio)

— “Paul Sullivan, the irrepressible veteran Sun columnist, popular radio talk show host and educator who turned his battle with cancer into an example of the bravery and grace with which such epics can be fought, has died.” (Lowell Sun)

— “His handling of his illness was a classic insight into the man,” says WBZ-TV (Channel 4) and radio political analyst Jon Keller. “He refused to make a spectacle of it and downplayed it with self-effacing humor.” (Boston Globe)

— “God gave us in eight years what most don’t have in 80,” says Sullivan’s wife, Mary Jo Griffin. “Paul came into my life and taught my girls by example how they should be loved by a man. I’m most grateful for that. I think he is at peace.” (Boston Herald)

I did not know Sully well, but his demeanor was such that you would think you’d known him your entire life. Every so often he’d call me out of the blue and ask whether I could come on his show to talk about a media topic. It was always a welcome invitation. Sully’s style — like that of the late David Brudnoy, whom he replaced in 2004 — was to let you have your say, but at the same time to challenge you if he thought you were laying it on a little thick.

Ironically, and tragically, Sully attained his greatest professional success just as he was beginning what would prove to be a long battle with melanoma. Sullivan learned he had cancer in late 2004, just before Brudnoy himself died of cancer. Sullivan, who’d been a late-night host and frequent Brudnoy fill-in, got the coveted 8 p.m.-to-midnight slot — as Brudnoy had wished — and filled it with distinction during the short time he had left.

Media Nation’s thoughts go out to the Sullivan family and to his professional families, WBZ and the Sun.