Vietnam

On 30 April 1975, Saigon fell to the invading army of North Vietnam. Americans watched the last helicopters fly out of the city and then immediately got on with the task of forgetting their longest war.

Three books to combat the great forgetting.

Just sayin'

Right now, if you google "izzy" "Stone", this post is #5. Number one and two are Wikipedia and the official Stone site. They are out of reach. But three and four are written by Izzy fans.

Now if a couple of bloggers were to link to my post, maybe they can be demoted.

How to win a statehouse by ruining a company

Eliot Spitzer and AIG:

The Tragedy of AIG

The Porn-Conspiracy connection

To their credit, the MSM was a bulwark of sanity on the JFK assassination and Warren Commission. They were never taken in by the ravings of the conspiracy theorists and, they have debunked and unmasked many of the charlatans who inhabit the fever swamps of the Grassy Knoll.

This is not true for one not so mainstream media. From the beginning, the skin magazines have been eager promoters of the conspiracy theorists.

Both Mark Lane and Jim Garrison were “honored” with Playboy interviews in 1967. The Garrison interview ran after CBS, NBC, and the Saturday Evening Post ran stories on the New Orleans DA that demonstrated that his investigation was a dangerous farce. Oui ran an admiring profile of one of the looniest of the CTers--Mae Brussells. Larry Flynt of Hustler actually subsidized Brussells and published her in his short-lived magazine The Rebel.

For a couple of decades the conspiracy promoters were sure to get a hearing in Playboy, Penthouse, and their sticky kin.

[In the 1970s] assassination literature found its way increasingly into soft-core pornographic magazines….it is worth noting the appearance of numerous articles, both multipart series and forums, in magazines such as Penthouse, Playboy, Swank, Gallery, and Playgirl.

Art Simon Dangerous Knowledge: The JFK Assassination in Art and Film, 1996

I’m sure there are many interesting facets to this nexus of the obsessively clueless and the one-hand mags. It certainly does suggest Bill Whittle was right with his description of the CTers:

I’ll tell you something. These conspiracy theorists that ignore that miserable, pathetic, self-aggrandizing egomaniac named Lee Harvey Oswald, or glorify him as a patsy and a hero, do so because deep down inside they realize something unpleasant about Lee Harvey Oswald and themselves.

They are Oswald.

"All great rock music was recorded by the time John Bonham died"

So pronounces Robert Stacy McCain. Off the top of my head i can't think of a song that proves him wrong.

So there you have it. 25 September 1980. The real day the music died.

High praise indeed

The authors of the piece on I. F. Stone have a book due to hit the shelves. I could tell you why it is an important book. But i'm just a guy pecking away at a keyboard on the internet. Try this endorsement instead:

So outstandingly authoritative and convincing is this material that it will take an honored place alongside the basic sources on Soviet espionage in the United States. Here, the heart of the KGB is laid out as never before.—Tennent Bagley, author of Spy Wars

That would the Tennent Bagley who wrote the best recent book on CIA and counterintelligence.

Good reads

Happily Divorced from Bill Maher’s ‘Reality’

Maher is the sort of stunted narcissist who cannot conceive that other people have needs, desires and feelings as legitimate as his own. In his puerile mind, there is no room for consideration of anything except What Bill Wants Right Now. To know such creatures — and most of us have, unfortunately, encountered at least one spoiled brat like Maher — is to loathe them. They tend to be unconscionably rude toward “little people” like waiters and store clerks, taking vicious pleasure in bossing around and humiliating people.

The Wail of the 1%

As the privileged class loses its privileges, a collective moan rises from the canyons of Wall Street

Meghan McCain Is Not, Strictly Speaking, Very Smart

She didn't become a Republican out of principle. She did it as a gift to her dad, which is honestly very sweet but hardly qualifies you to position yourself as the voice of young Republicans. Honestly the 'my daddy is the nominee' is a small cohort the party can do without winning over.

Izzy Stone: Lying commie slime

A few weeks ago i posted on journalistic icon I. F. Stone. It now appears that i was too kind to the old fraud.

I.F. Stone, Soviet Agent—Case Closed

I wonder if the Neiman Foundation or Harvard University have any second thoughts about issuing a medal in Stone's honor?

UPDATE: Ronald Radosh weighs in here.

UPDATE 2 (Friday) From the American Spectator:

Harvard University's Nieman Foundation for Journalism awards an "I.F Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence." Ithaca College hosts an "Izzy Awards" for "independent media." The University of California-Berkeley's graduate school of journalism offers "I.F. Stone Fellowships." In 1999, New York University's journalism department, and a panel of prestigious scribes that included Jeff Greenfield, Mary McGrory, and Morley Safer, named I.F. Stone's Weekly as number 16 on its list of the 100 best works of U.S. journalism in the 20th century.

Don't expect the academic honors, or the media hosannas, to evaporate anytime soon. Stone took money from the KGB and not the CIA, after all. Izzy Stone was wrong about nearly everything he wrote about during the Cold War. It is only fitting that his admirers got him so wrong too.

Back to his old tricks

Disgraced punter Eliot Spitzer is trying to get on the anti-AIG bandwagon as part of his rehabilitation effort.

The always interesting Edward Jay Epstein demonstrates that Spitzer still is only vaguely familiar with the truth.

He also has some interesting questions for Car Czar Steven Rattner.

UPDATE: See here for more on Rattner.

Talk about wasted airtime

Even before one NFL season ends, the sports shows start talking about the upcoming draft. ESPN easily spends hundreds of hours discussng who will choose whom. Mel Kipper is ubiquitous with his patented formula: frequently wrong, but always certain.

Cold Hard Football Facts shows just how wrong Kipper and his ilk usually are.

The dismal mock-draft scorecard

Missed it

Yesterday was David Brooks Fisking Day.

Choice bits

Management professor Henry Mintzberg gives no quarter as he assesses blame for the economic crisis we face. Harvard gets a couple of well deserved kicks in its backside:

Harvard prides itself on how many of its graduates make it to the executive suites. Learning how to present arguments in a classroom certainly helps. But how do these people perform once they get to those suites? Harvard does not ask. So we took a look.

Joseph Lampel and I found a list of Harvard Business School superstars, published in a 1990 book by a long-term insider. We tracked the performance of the 19 corporate chief executives on that list, many of them famous, across more than a decade. Ten were outright failures (the company went bankrupt, the CEO was fired, a major merger backfired etc.); another four had questionable records at best. Five out of the 19 seemed to do fine. These figures, limited as they were, sounded pretty damning. (When we published our results, there was nary a peep. No one really cared.)

How much discussion has there been at Harvard about the role it might have played in forming the management styles of graduates who, over the past eight years, have been running America and what used to be its largest company?

See also here and here.

Paul Krugman shows why Larry Summers is the gift that keeps on giving:

Only a few people warned that this supercharged financial system might come to a bad end. Perhaps the most notable Cassandra was Raghuram Rajan of the University of Chicago, a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, who argued at a 2005 conference that the rapid growth of finance had increased the risk of a “catastrophic meltdown.” But other participants in the conference, including Lawrence Summers, now the head of the National Economic Council, ridiculed Mr. Rajan’s concerns.

And the meltdown came.

James Surowiecki notes that companies always face two kinds of risk.

Then again, the record is also full of forgotten companies that gambled and failed. The academics Peter Dickson and Joseph Giglierano have argued that companies have to worry about two kinds of failure: “sinking the boat” (wrecking the company by making a bad bet) or “missing the boat” (letting a great opportunity pass).

In a perfect world, competition will balance those risks. Those who gamble and succeed will grow. At other times, the prudent will inherit the market when their high flying brethern crash and burn.

In our less than perfect world, we have created a bias in favor of gambling.

First, it is increasingly hard for conservative firms to sit out a speculative binge. The stock market drives down their share price compared to their aggressive competitors. The CEO gets fired or the company is acquired by a gambling firm. The end result is that there are no grown-up companies around to sort through the debris after the gamblers wreck their companies.

The second bias is discussed here:

The Looting of America’s Coffers

Sixteen years ago, two economists published a research paper with a delightfully simple title: “Looting.”

The economists were George Akerlof, who would later win a Nobel Prize, and Paul Romer, the renowned expert on economic growth. In the paper, they argued that several financial crises in the 1980s, like the Texas real estate bust, had been the result of private investors taking advantage of the government. The investors had borrowed huge amounts of money, made big profits when times were good and then left the government holding the bag for their eventual (and predictable) losses.

In a word, the investors looted. Someone trying to make an honest profit, Professors Akerlof and Romer said, would have operated in a completely different manner. The investors displayed a “total disregard for even the most basic principles of lending,” failing to verify standard information about their borrowers or, in some cases, even to ask for that information.

The investors “acted as if future losses were somebody else’s problem,” the economists wrote. “They were right.”

On Tuesday morning in Washington, Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, gave a speech that read like a sad coda to the “Looting” paper. Because the government is unwilling to let big, interconnected financial firms fail — and because people at those firms knew it — they engaged in what Mr. Bernanke called “excessive risk-taking.”

That time again

The Other McCain has the linkfest beyond compare.

Freedom Meets Jeering Response Again

And, yes, this will be on the final.

Nice job

I keeping with my media luck, I really liked NBC's "Life". When it failed to grab an audience, i figured that we had another "Joe Doe" or "Tru Calling" situation: the show would end with a whimper and never explain the central mystery that defined the show.

The series two finale of "Life" was better than i expected. A little rushed, some loose ends. But at least they made an attempt to wrap it up with a decent conclusion.

Much more than we got from ABC and "Pushing Daisies"

Seventh grade politics

I wondered how the resercons would handle the sloppy, shoddy, and bigoted report on right-wing extremism thrown together by Homeland Security.

Well, the David Frum has weighed in and I am pleased to say that he did not let me down.

Frum does not exactly defend the report. He mutters a few disclaimers about how it is too bad that Homeland Security is politicizing intelligence. For eDF, however, that is a sideshow. To Frum, the real villain is not the laughably bad report.

No, David Frum aims his cannon at Glen Beck. The rodeo clown on Fox makes the report seem true and conservatives who do not denounce Beck are more to blame for the problem than are the “analysts” at HSA.

All in all, it is a remarkable performance. Clearly Frum will go to any lengths to win MSM plaudits as a courageous conservative leader.

Just a few quick points on Beck and Fox News. I do not listen to the guy on radio or watch his show on cable. In fact, I’ve detested the little punk for years. (Beck not Frum). I also rarely watch Fox News since it is loud, sleazy, and hopelessly tabloid.

That said, I am baffled that Frum even mentions Beck. What does he have to do with the Homeland Security document? Does Frum believe that conservatives must not criticize Obama until they have silenced every clownish media mouthpiece who is on their side of the political divide?

Did DF ever apply this standard to liberals and Bush? Was (is) all criticism of the prior administration off-limits because Olbermann, Maddow, and Matthews are biased clowns? We all know that the David Frum never dared make that argument.

Frum, no surprise, is acting once again as a free-lance hit man for the leftwing. The White House decided to make Rush Limbaugh the face of their opposition; eDF was happy to oblige by attacking Rush in Newsweek. Now the administration wants to paint all opposition as loony conspiracy theorists. Big surprise that Frum jumps on the anti-Beck bandwagon.

I question the timing of the attacks on Beck. He is not newcomer to cable news. Odd, isn’t it, that he drew positive press when his show was on CNN and his populist attacks were aimed at a Republican administration. Now he is on Fox, Democrats are in power, and Glenn Beck is a secular antichrist.

It is the same old MSM double-standard. The only thing new is that Frum has enlisted as a Judas goat against conservatives.

eDf proclaims that he is interested n building a conservatism that can win. Yet he spends most of his time tearing down other conservatives in order to enhance the standing of one David Frum. He wants conservatives to be serious, yet he is the one who flacks for the White House while ignoring the real issues voters care about.

All too often Frum and his ilk behave like a bunch of cliquish junior high school girls. They define themselves by who they exclude. They always need victims to scorn, otherwise the really cool kids might start to scorn them.

The recent Tea Parties really put the lie to Frum’s posturing. By all rights, he should love this essentially libertarian grass roots movement. His great bugaboo--the Religious Right--is not driving the movement. The Tea Parties focus on economics not the social issues that Frum detests.

But Frum is luke warm. Fox News jumped on the board the bandwagon, you see. The people at MSNBC and CNN are making fun of the demonstrators. People might think that David Frum a dork like Sean Hannity if he supports the Tea Parties.

That really is the bottom line with Frum. He cares a lot about what the right people think.

Not Right as in conservative. Not Right as in correct. No, right as in popular in the cool circles and cool in the popular circles.


At the top of my blog I quote Sam Adams. The old boy speaks for millions of conservatives when it comes to Frum and the latest phase of his career management.

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands, which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

Good question

Why isn’t Joe Biden more generous with his OWN money than he is mine?

Um, just wondering

Did Immelt and Zuckerman ever hold a meeting because MSNBC had become a Bush-bashing network?

'The Whole Meeting Was Really Kind of Creepy'

THE top suits and some of the on-air talent at CNBC were recently ordered to a top-secret meeting with General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt and NBC Universal President Jeff Zucker to discuss whether they've turned into the President Obama-bashing network, Page Six has learned.

I doubt it.

Where are the paladins of press freedom and unbiased journalism? Why is this item a Page Six story and not cause for thunder denunciations across the journalistic establishment?

A book i hope to read before i die

It does not exist. No one has written it yet.

I want to read a good history of the McCarthy era.

My bookshelves are littered with books that cover the topic. All of them are unsatisfactory.

Most take the conventional view that Joe McCarthy was evil personified, an unscrupulous politician who persecuted innocent people. They take it as a given that there were no Reds to fear so any Red Scare was inherently irrational. After Venona and the opening of the Soviet archives, that just won't cut it anymore.

Some conservatives have used the new revelations to defend McCarthy but they don't quite hit the mark either. I'll grant that there were communists aplenty in Washington. Unfortunately, Joe did not go after them. He let Roy Cohn run off chasing books in USIA libraries and dentists in the Army Reserves.

How did even an unscrupulous Red Hunter fail in such a target rich environment?

He has a point

Interesting comment on an article about Columbine (actually a review of a book about Columbine):

Weinberg tells us, in effect, that he and the rest of the world were duped by the media coverage of Columbine (it's not so much that the media got it wrong intentionally, but in the end, they got it wrong). So Weinberg picks up a single book, and it tells him everything we know about Columbine is wrong. Suddenly, Weinberg assumes everything in this new book is right. To boot, Cullen was one of the reporters covering Columbine in the first place. So now we can trust him to get it right?

Still still busy

Plenty of good stuff out there:

DHS, 'Rightwing Extremism' and Information Warfare

The Dash To Dumb - Special DHS Edition

Tea Party Derangement Syndrome - it’s here!

The Obama Administration Is Criminalizing Dissent? Intimidating Its Ideological Opponents? You Must Be Joking