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Featured Articles — September 24, 2009

September 24, 2009 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Featured Articles 

Interesting Takes From Home And Abroad:

The President Risks Getting Stale By Karl Rove, The Wall Street Journal
Continuous TV appearances can’t rescue a bad argument.

ACORN fights back By Jake Sherman, Politico
A week after undercover videotapes made it the butt of a national joke, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now is launching a three-pronged effort to rebuild its reputation and try to hold on to the millions of dollars in funding it gets each year from the federal government.

Why we can’t go small in Afghanistan By Bruce Riedel and Michael O’Hanlon, USA Today
A narrow counterterrorism mission sounds like a win-win. One problem: It won’t work.

Two Cheers for Andrew Breitbart By Jack Shafer, Slate
Sometimes it takes an outsider to show the press corps the way.

We can’t decide Iran’s struggle. But we can avoid backing the wrong side By Timothy Garton Ash, The Guardian
Iranians will choose their own fate, but the west must not abandon the reformers for the sake of an elusive nuclear deal.

Lots of People Love Obama, But Does Anyone in the World Really Fear Him? By Greg Sheridan, The Australian
It may seem rather unkind to express some serious doubts about US President Barack Obama just now. He is wowing the UN with talk of nuclear disarmament. He is mesmerising the Group of 20 with talk of global recovery. He is leading a policy review that talks of winning in Afghanistan and he will not send more troops in response to the request of the US military commander in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, without deeper talks.

Obama the un-Bush woos the UN By Michael Tomasky, The Guardian
An admirable and bold speech to the UN general assembly – but Obama had the political capital to go much further.

UN report a victory for terror By Michael Oren, Boston Globe
CONSIDER THIS scenario. In response to the atrocities of 9/11, the United States invades Afghanistan and battles non-uniformed Taliban terrorists who fight within densely populated areas.

The Partisan Industrial Complex By David Paul Kuhn, RealClearPolitics
President Obama’s five Sunday television interviews included a telling thread. “The media encourages some of the outliers in behavior, because, let’s face it, the easiest way to get on television right now is to be really rude,” Obama said on ABC’s “This Week,” repeating himself on other networks.



Comments

2 Responses to “Featured Articles — September 24, 2009”

  1. MK on September 24th, 2009 4:37 pm

    Thank you very much for posting to the David Paul Kuhn piece on the the “The Partisan Industrial Complex.” Much food for thought there. I would not have seen this piece, had you not linked to it. Tribalization and dismissing one’s countrymen as foreign certainly can lead to terrible results, as illustrated here (some of the people still live now):
    http://hnn.us/readcomment.php?id=137141&bheaders=1#137141

  2. MK on September 25th, 2009 4:29 am

    Mr. Kuhn points to the lack of central news sources these days, something I have pointed out in previous potings here. I read the Washington Post, the Washington Times, and the New York Times. For tv news, I turn to ABC among the broadcast networks and CNN on cable.

    The Internet can be problematic. Former Bush White House official Michael Gerson addresses Internet discourse in a column in today’s Washington Post. He writes in “Banish the Cyber-Bigots” that

    “User-driven content on the Internet often consists of bullying, conspiracy theories and racial prejudice. The absolute freedom of the medium paradoxically encourages authoritarian impulses to intimidate and silence others. The least responsible contributors see their darkest tendencies legitimated and reinforced, while serious voices are driven away by the general ugliness.

    Ethicist Clive Hamilton calls this a ‘belligerent brutopia.’ ‘The Internet should represent a great flourishing of democratic participation, he argues. ‘But it doesn’t. . . . The brutality of public debate on the Internet is due to one fact above all — the option of anonymity. . . . Free speech without accountability breeds dogmatism and confrontation.’

    This destructive disinhibition is disturbing in itself. It also allows hatred to invade respected institutional spaces on the Internet, gaining for these ideas a legitimacy denied to fringe Web sites.”

    Most posters on message boards probably do not think tactically about how they represent the party or ideology they support. (I’m not convinced many of the writers at TNN think tactically, either.) But historians will have to take into account whether what they say takes a toll. And it behooves an administration to keep up with how its supporters engage its critics. A President can use his speeches to set the tone at the top, even to have Sister Souljah moments.

    Some of the writers at The Corner at National Review have argued that they never called George W. Bush’s critics unpatriotic while he was President. Yet many anonymous commentators on message boards did just that. It was a move that backfired as it insulted needlessly a lot of Independent voters as well as the increasing number of people who came to doubt the wisdom of having gone to war in Iraq. In the end, anonymous posters’ bluster on message boards about patriotism may have hurt rather than helped President Bush. An administration may formulate a communications strategy and try to apply message discipline to what its official surrogates say. But in the age of the Internet, it’s all too easy for people to see how some citizens (whether they are outliers or represent ordinary people) feel viscerally about the issues. Something for the present administration to consider, even if the past one did not seem to do so.

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