The sky again is pearly gray and a foot of snow is expected in the mountains. Last night a friend e-mailed photos of snow covering her yard in Seattle and the orange plastic tarp protecting her plants. As I was out walking last night I noticed the dogwoods are beginning to bloom. I had been talking on the phone with my brother who lives in Illinois about a family matter—our mother’s deteriorating health—and then politics. He told me that after he watched the so-called debate on ABC on Wednesday night he was so pissed off he’d had a hard time sleeping that night.
Then I returned home in time to watch Bill Moyers Journal on PBS. He began the show with remarks about the lack of journalistic ethics by Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos in the 21st meeting of Clinton and Obama Wednesday night in Philadelphia.
Moyers began, “You knew it was going to be a dismal night this Wednesday when just a few minutes into the debate, ABC interrupted the candidates for a long commercial break -- the first of many. By the time it was over, the audience had had enough.
Makes you think that if Lincoln and Douglas were around, they'd be sandwiched between a Viagra ad and Victoria's secret. In a real debate the candidates would face each other on the stage with no one but a timekeeper to enforce the clock. As it is, these 'debates' are commercially-staged press conferences about as connected to reality as an Elvis Presley sighting.
THE WASHINGTON POST's Tom Shales called the affair "shoddy" and "despicable." Greg Mitchell of EDITOR AND PUBLISHER said it was "perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years." And the historian and writer Eric Alterman said: "I don't like to speculate on people's motives. Just why ABC thinks that a presidential 'debate' should entirely ignore health care, environmental issues, science policy, our over-stretched and under-resourced military, an epidemic of people losing their homes, the bailing out of mega-banks, and our disappearing civil liberties… is a mystery to me.”
Sadly, as the fantasy-inducing commercials and journalistic narcissism built through the evening, the most damning indictment of all came from facts on the ground, otherwise known as reality. …” The full transcript of the show is at http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04182008/transcript3.html.
Then Moyers spoke with Leila Fadel, the Baghdad bureau chief for McClatchy Newspapers. She has covered the war in Iraq for Knight Ridder and now McClatchy on and off since June 2005, as well as the 34-day war in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel in the summer of 2006. The interview began with news photos from Iraq where 110 Iraqis have died this week and some of Fadel’s footage from Sadr City. She has just received the Polk Award.
It was one of the most remarkable interviews I’ve ever heard. Fadel, is only 26 but has the most articulate and clear-eyed understanding of the situation I’ve heard so far. She can explain with eloquence the role of all the players such as Iran (“Iran has chips on every table. They’re betting on everyone.”) the role of Maliki and the Mahdi Army that we’ve been paying off, the history of Sunni and Shiite differences, the foreign leaders of Al Qaeda, and how the American troops are faring. The interview was interspersed Bush’s saber-rattling speech and Lieberman’s questioning of Petraeus. When asked if she thought we could invade Iran she said “The American army is tired.” And went on to discuss how the soldiers stationed there were on there third or fourth rotation and that from a practical matter there were simply no troops to send into another country. She had returned recently from being embedded with American soldiers who had taken over a civilian’s home in Sadr City. This is a slum of Baghdad where sewage runs in the streets. At this point Baghdad has been divided up into fiefdoms, many of the guarded by Blackwater troops.
There are a number of blog posts at the site and I believe Fadel is going to respond to them. You might also want to check out her blog, Baghdad Observer http://washingtonbureau.typepad.com/baghdad/ and the blog of her Iraqi colleagues, Inside Iraq at http://washingtonbureau.typepad.com/iraq/
The second guest on the show was Martha Nussbaum who discussed her new book Liberty of Conscience and how religion needs to be separate from politics in this country.
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