Category: Rants

Former U.S. Attorney and National Review mainstay Andrew McCarthy wrote an absolutely must-read piece on Saturday entitled "Why All the Secrecy?" Don't worry, it's not useful or informative. But you have to read it because there may never be a better example of everything wrong with journalism in the Trump era.

Being a lawyer who not only graduated law school but passed a bar exam and – AND! – rose to one of the more prestigious categories of jobs in the legal profession as a U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Andrew McCarthy absolutely goddamn knows "why all the secrecy." He understands exactly how criminal investigations, grand juries, and the other basics of the criminal justice system work. He knows as well as he knows how to put on a pair of pants that no prosecutor, judge, or investigator on the planet is going to conduct an investigation via the mass media. He knows which part of our nation's legal process is the "Turn over your cards and show the public" stage, and he knows that this certainly is not it.

Yet here he is, writing this entire goddamn piece without once mentioning things that even an observant Law & Order binge-watcher probably knows. He makes some half-hearted attempt to justify why no such rules should apply in this situation, but the fact that he could write this entire thing (and have an editor give it the green light) without using the phrase "Rule 6e" even dismissively is…well, it takes 'brazen' to a new level.

Of course the problem is he's not interested in making any kind of argument that stands up to logic or scrutiny. He is, in the media outlet conservatives often cite as their Serious Intellectual Place, throwing red meat to conspiracy-hungry idiots. The false naivete implicit in the titular question is preposterous, as though this retired Federal prosecutor really can't understand why some level of secrecy is being maintained here. But he doesn't care. In his post-prosecutor career as a journalist he also knows how to attract clicks and to whip his following of increasingly deranged Trump cultists into a frenzy.

This is modern "opinion" writing, especially on the right: pretending you don't know really obvious and simple things to appeal to people so dumb or myopic that they legitimately don't understand.

Where do I sign? I hear it pays well.

Many years ago, one of my most successful former students – she had been in a few of my undergrad classes at a previous institution – called me in a panic. I had heard from her fairly regularly on the internet, and our conversations were a mix of me giving her pep talks for the difficult first few years post-graduation and her regaling me with awesome Washington DC insider stories ("I saw ____ vomiting in the bushes last night.") But here I could tell something else was wrong.

Long story short, it turned out to be rather amusing (from my end). She had met a young man she liked, and had "panicked" and invited him over for dinner. Now in the cold light of day she was realizing that she didn't actually know how to cook anything. So, with considerable help from Rachel Ray I talked her through a basic action plan and the problem was solved.

Later, after I thought about the implications, I asked her: out of curiosity, you've been living independently for something like five years. Without even the most basic cooking skills (she really was at Ground Zero; I sent her a copy of the invaluable How to Boil Water cookbook) what the hell had she been eating all this time? Obviously a Young Professional is getting a lot of carry-out and delivery food, a lot of restaurant meals, and so on. But you have to make something to eat sometime. At least occasionally.

The answer: "Healthy Choice frozen meals. And nachos."

It was at that moment that I became convinced that American schools need to devote a semester or two during K-12 to teaching kids how to cook. Home Economics classes get a bad rap because of their historical role as something "For Girls" intended to shepherd young women into a lifetime of uncompensated domestic labor. But think about some of the problems that could be solved if every student left high school with the basic skills and knowledge to make 10 to 15 simple meals with ingredients costing between $5 and $10.

I know there are a lot of other problems, like the cost and geographic availability of food. But the knowledge simply isn't there in a lot of cases, and the blithe assumption that young people are learning to cook from their families or from osmosis or from the internet isn't helping. Imagine how much the dependence on low-priced fast food or high-calorie garbage food (Doritos can be a meal if you have a 2-liter with them!) if young adults were flung into independence with at least some knowledge of what to do with the kitchen part of the apartment other than fill it with chips and granola bars.

How hard would it be for each school district, combining contributions from parents, students, and teachers, to come up with a dozen things suitable to local preferences and spend less than schools routinely spend on less useful pursuits buying the ingredients? Hell, you could probably get half of it for free when the grocery stores are getting ready to throw it out. Or hell, just have the state pony up the money after admitting that this is going to save millions in the long run.

It seems uncontroversial enough, but I'm sure there's something I'm missing that would turn this into a pitched battle in the culture wars.

Sometimes, strictly as a mental exercise, I try to figure out how many words I've barfed onto the internet in my life.
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I've been doing this regularly since, oh, 2002 and had irregular and very 90s things prior to that (remember having a "personal website"?). Add in social media and it has to be in seven figures. The output isn't overwhelming but it's consistent over a long period of time. As a rule I don't go back and re-read things from years ago.
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If I did, and on the rare occasions that something from the Deep Archive is brought to my attention, usually my thoughts haven't changed too much. But sometimes I read things and cringe a little on the inside. There are things I would express differently, and a few things I would express not at all, compared to Ed from 2004.

Luckily I never went through a white supremacist or "I hate the gays" phase, so there's nothing agonizingly awful that I would feel compelled to apologize for. If there were, though, and when I see things from the past that I would say differently now, there is only one effective way to deal with it: apologize. Apologize and mean it. Everyone is going to find things they said (in writing or otherwise) from 10, 15, or 20 years ago and realize that some combination of personal growth and changing mores combine to make it seem dated and inappropriate now. If you think that's not true in your case, there is an outstanding chance that you're lying to yourself and even greater a chance that you're dangerously narcissistic and see yourself as essentially flawless and incapable of error.

The Joy Reid fiasco is interesting to me not because I give a shit about Joy Reid – Luke Savage once accurately described her as "Fox News for liberals" – but because I will forever be fascinated by people who find themselves in this embarrassing situation and are constitutionally incapable of…
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not making it worse. Like, the worst possible reaction is to stand by what you said and insist that it is right when it clearly is wrong. The second-worst possible reaction is to pretend that you didn't say it and make up some sort of half-assed, totally implausible story about how someone must have hacked the internet archive because you are a flawless and perfect person who could never say anything that was not awesomely Woke.

A person who can't apologize is a narcissist at best and a sociopath at worst. How hard would it be, for example, for someone like Reid to say:

I look back on these statements from 2007 with intense shame. I apologize sincerely and unconditionally for the damaging, tone-deaf, and malicious things I said on (insert date) in (insert post). These words were irresponsible and whatever I thought they were when I wrote them – clever, funny, 'edgy', provocative – I look back and feel nothing but embarrassment at how wrong and inconsiderate I was. In the future it will be my responsibility to demonstrate by words and actions that this is not the person I am anymore. I am sorry.

Look, people fuck up. This is a thing. I'm going to go out on a limb and assert that for anyone predisposed to like a person like Joy Reid – essentially anyone to the left of Glenn Beck on the political spectrum – that apology would suffice. We generally want to give people second chances. We want to see that they can own their mistakes, express sincere emotions and thoughts about them, and try to move forward. Yes, there are some people in the world who love a good dragging and are going to use any mistake Joy Reid makes to trash her for all eternity. But I don't need to tell you that there are countless examples of people in the public eye who have done shitty things – things much worse and shittier than Joy Reid, even – without being obliterated from the face of the Earth. Sincere humility and remorse can go a long way. My point is not "Say you're sorry and that makes everything ok and that's the end of it." My point is that if you at least try to express your remorse, on balance people who like you or are inclined to like you as a media personality are very likely to give you another chance.

Or, you know, you can claim that you were framed by the now ubiquitous "Russian hackers." You can concoct some obviously horseshit story and see which of your fans are drunk enough on the Kool Aid to swallow it. Fox News personalities do it all the time. You're in good company, Joy.

Real wages have been stagnant for 40 years, even as economic productivity has continued to grow. One way to make people feel like their incomes are not stagnant or shrinking is to cut taxes constantly, a trick that has been exhausted and overused since St. Ronnie arrived in 1980. A second, which we saw at its worst in the late 00s, is to extend really easy credit. For nearly half a century, this is how lawmakers have tamped down the potential danger of a system in which working people run faster just to stay in place while wealth and income skyrockets for the very richest. Say "tax cuts" constantly (even people not actually benefiting from a given tax cut will think they are) and give anyone with a pulse a mortgage, an auto loan or three, and a handful of credit cards. Open a payday lender in every run-down neighborhood or town, et voila.

I like cars and I find the economics of the industry are a decent proxy for overall trends (the crash of auto lending circa 2002-04 presaged the much more damaging collapse of the housing market in 2008-09). A couple trends in recent years are ominous. One is that prices have skewed so high that only old people can afford new cars. Many brands, under intense pressure from the auto press, keep trying to "get younger" and build sportier cars that appeal to less stodgy buyers. The problem (evidenced by the collapse of "Brands aimed at the kids" like Scion, Saturn, and Volkswagen's now-extinct low price marketing) is that no one under 40 can afford new cars beyond entry level compacts. The idea from the 1950s and 1960s that a high school kid would buy a cheap new car with his after-school job is…gone. Good luck finding all but the most spartan new cars under $25,000. Hell, I bought a used Porsche Cayman, since sold, for less than the cost of a mid-level new Camry now. Cars are expensive. "Affordable" cars in magazines hover around $40,000 or more. You know those fun Minis that seem ideally aimed at The Youths? The average price of a Mini Cooper sold new is $35,000.

A second trend is that loans are getting really long in an attempt to compensate for higher prices. Trucks, which have gotten staggeringly expensive yet are targeted at "white working class" types least able to afford expensive vehicles, are soon to be offered at 84 month loans. Seven years. Seven years of interest for something that has three years of warranty and will have depreciated 50% in its first 12 months after purchase. Think about that.

What companies do with trucks will soon be done for any vehicle. It is nearly impossible to find any new truck, no matter how stripped down, under $30,000 and with options most full-sized trucks are in what used to be Mercedes or Jaguar prices – Ford F-150s can easily be optioned to close to $60,000 and maxing out the options can push it close to $80,000. Trucks are big sellers and they are expensive as hell.

Most people earning good money can't even afford a $50,000+ vehicle, and yet truck sales are often highly dependent on people who have little long term economic stability. The only way Bob the Non-Union Builder is going to afford a new $50,000 Ram is if you can lower the monthly payments and hope he sucks at math.

As recently as a decade ago, 60 month auto loans were spoken of in hushed tones. It had long been assumed that the repayment should not extend much beyond the warranty period, nor past the sharpest depreciation points. Now we've tacked two years onto what was already a tenuously long lending period. Good luck paying seven years' interest on a truck that will be worth about 25% of what was borrowed by the time it is paid off.

PS: I'm sorry about the title, but also not even a little sorry.

In my course on Media & Politics one of the themes I harp on is the centrality of newspapers to American journalism. This is a point that needs to be made to people under the age of 25 because reading a newspaper or finding one in the driveway every morning are experiences they do not necessarily have. To them, getting news from a newspaper is what using the telegraph would be to people of previous generations. These kids, like many adults, now get their news from "the internet" writ large, and they do not have any clear or meaningful mental differentiation between the the website of a newspaper (e.g., New York Times Dot Com) and any other site providing news. The same holds true for TV news networks – CNN isn't a TV station to an 18 year old; it's just one of many places on the internet that offers news.

It is not difficult for them to grasp that the business model of newspapers in the current media economic landscape is…perilous. Physical newspapers have a shrinking and aging audience. Newspapers' websites are competing with internet-only entities with vastly lower overhead costs. And their costs are lower, of course, because most of what they are doing is re-reporting things from newspapers. Same for TV news networks and their online entities.

The problem, as I emphasize, is that the vast majority of actual reporting is done by newspapers. Browse the various online news aggregators and pay attention within the stories. They inevitably link to or reference a story "originally" or "first reported in" a major newspaper. It's not as if Slate is hiring and sending out reporters. Some of the largest online entities have a skeleton staff of correspondents (maybe a DC / White House person) but they certainly don't have reporters working, you know, the city hall beat.

It's an inverted pyramid; as newspapers cut more and more staff (either due to legitimate economic necessity or takeover by venture capitalist types who just want to "run a lean operation") there is less and less reporting. And that's bad, especially when the number of "media outlets" re-reporting the work done by actual on-the-ground journalists grows. It's like quadrupling the number of car dealerships, making them all sell the same car model, and then not producing many of them.

Check out this story of the photojournalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for his mid-action photo of a car hitting protesters in Charlottesville – a photo he took on his last day working for the Charlottesville Daily Progress. The next week he started a job…running the social media account of a brewery. Why? It pays more and has more stability. While I don't begrudge the individual for choosing, as I would, the best paying and most stable career option, it's an incredibly sad commentary that our system better rewards tweeting for a beer company than producing iconic, sometimes world-changing journalism.

Mr. Kelly is hardly alone. Anecdotally, I know a ton of journalists (not including freelancers) and every one of them sweats out having a paycheck from month to month. Staff cuts and ominous meetings with the new managing editor and ombudsman are commonplace to the point of numbness. When the opportunity arises, they frequently switch careers. They stop doing real journalism and almost inevitably transition into more lucrative but (I say this without judgment) more frivolous work. Lots of kids used to grow up wanting to be a reporter like April O'Neill or Clark Kent; nobody grew up wanting to be a Brand Ambassador for a skincare pyramid scheme. Yet we all choose the latter eventually because we all need to eat. I get it. It's incredibly hard to make a lower middle-class income in journalism, a few high profile media outlets aside. I'd take the beer tweets job too, man.

In short, this is a totally unsustainable model. Almost all mass media depend on newspaper reporting as primary source material to endlessly repackage as "different" pieces as the ability of newspapers to survive financially (and employ actual reporters) shrinks every day. This edifice will collapse, and soon.

There are bad arguments, and then there are arguments that are offensive and insulting in addition to being bad.
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James Traub offers up the latter in this widely-circulated piece from The Atlantic this weekend. For those interested in a more complete takedown rapidly written up by Jamelle Bouie, the title of which says everything you need to know about how bad the initial argument is: "Democrats Shouldn't Give In to White Racism." Kinda embarrassing that that needs to be said.

This is nothing new. We have been hearing variants of this argument from within the Democratic Party since the 1960s – "In order to appeal to the majority of whites, we need to be willing to throw minorities under the bus." Ergo, the more the Party does to stand up for the rights of and issues of particular relevance to African-Americans and Hispanics, the more it will push away white voters of the kind who (in Traub's words) inherently see the appeal of a "message of collective responsibility and common purpose." But they also, you know, don't like black people very much.

The last time we saw this strategy in practice – trying to build a white majority by pandering to racist tendencies and throwing minorities in the meat grinder – was during the presidency of Bill Clinton. Despite the near-worship with which many Democrats see him today, there is unequivocal evidence that "Welfare Reform" and "Sentencing Reform," two positions the 1990s Democrats adopted explicitly to steal the GOP's thunder in the never-ending battle to appeal to white reactionaries, have inflicted more pain and suffering on black and Hispanic communities than can adequately be conveyed in this space. Sentencing reform will, from the perch afforded us by history in a few more decades, be recognized as one of the most shameful moments in Democratic politics.
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And they embraced it willingly in a calculated effort to appeal to the kind of white voter who thinks the problem with this country is that not enough people (wink) are being locked up in prison.

The fundamental flaw in this logic has always been apparent and is never explained. It presupposes some additional value gained from building a *white* majority, as if one white voter is worth more than one vote. It makes even less sense here in 2018 than it did in the mid-90s given our changing demographics to throw the moral high ground in the crapper in a (likely failed) attempt to woo the kind of white voter who wants a social welfare system but is also kinda racist when as an alternative the Party could make a better effort to appeal to the 30% and growing of the electorate that is not white. Rather than, as Traub suggests, dialing back on the ol' equality for all thing in order to appeal to some stereotype of a midwestern blue collar white voter why not, say, try to push up black turnout by a couple percent by going hard on problems with racial disparities in policing and the justice system as a whole? Or maybe try holding out on DACA for more than two days so the nation's millions of Hispanic voters don't feel like the old, white Democratic leadership is always going to sell them out at the first opportunity?

Traub may not be a person who holds racist beliefs. I don't know him. But what he's proposing here is racist on a very fundamental level. It is racist because it implies at every stage of his logic that getting more white people to vote for Democrats is what really matters here. I thought winning elections and having a coherent ideology that differs from the increasingly batshit Republican Party was most important. Everything about recent elections – the huge numbers of eligible non-voters, the changing demographics of the electorate, the disparity in issue preferences between younger and older voters – suggests that there are more votes to be won by taking positions that appeal to the 50-60% of eligible Americans who are not voting than to craft shameful appeals to white "moderates" that require backing down on commitment to full equality for LGBTQ people, African-Americans, immigrants, Latinos, and other marginalized groups that should see the Democratic Party as their natural political home for some reason more compelling than "The GOP is even worse."

It is difficult to say which part of this argument is worse: that someone is proposing that the Democrats throw African-Americans under the bus for the umpteenth time to try to appeal to whites who want stuff from the government but don't like black people, or that even the most cursory look at reality suggests very strongly that it wouldn't work anyway.

Listening to Trump talk about the southern border and Mexico makes it more apparent than any other issue (China and tariffs being a close second) how much the guy literally just says whatever he thinks of to get through the moment with zero forethought, ideology, or long term strategy.

If he's mad at Mexico and immigrants, Mexico has a weak border policy and Mexico sucks.

If he's mad at the American political system and immigrants, Mexico has a strong border policy and Congress won't equal it.

As was blatantly obvious before the election, there is no policy, no *anything* lending coherence to these outbursts.
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He says whatever will square with, at most, his previous four or five sentences, and then moves on. It's like writing non-canon fan fiction; as soon as that rant is over, it's like nothing that was said ever happened. It's self-contained and has no effect on anything before or after it.

On the plus side, some of the "Never Trump" right-wingers who voted for him anyway are probably starting to recognize how useless all their theories about how he would grow into the office were.

Oh, who are we kidding. They don't reflect on their decisions.

Americans seem all to grasp the plot of 1984 and other dystopian depictions of the omniscient surveillance state while, unsurprisingly, learning entirely the wrong lesson from them. That has contributed more than anything else to the modern dilemma of how to get the benefits of using the available technologies without surrendering our privacy to unregulated non-governmental entities.
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A moron, or someone who knows what it is about but has never actually read it, uses 1984 to illustrate the point that we must be absolutely vigilant against any attempt by The Government to limit our precious freedoms. Yet these same people willingly, even eagerly, endorse the growth of an unregulated data scraping colossus dressed in the platitudes of the libertarian wet dream of a free market.

I have written many times that I don't express any outrage over things like Facebook, Google, our smartphones, etc collecting data about us because from the beginning I had no expectation that those entities would respect my privacy and information. Only a dolt would use Facebook without assuming that every single thing on the site is collected, sifted, and sold. That's how they're making money. I don't lie awake at night paranoid that my iPhone is spying on me, but I also expect that every task I perform with it is similarly creating bits of User Data somewhere. I don't enjoy or approve of it, but I recognize it as a tradeoff I am making. I reap the benefits of this technology and in return the companies behind it profit from using my habits to target ads at me or to sell to third-party marketers. Simply put, I'm not upset because I have always known it was happening.

The thing that people in general, and right-wingers in particular, have always misunderstood about the value of the sci-fi dystopia genre is that it was never going to be The Government here in real life. We'd never have a government forcing us to install listening devices in our house (as, famously, in the TVs in 1984). It was always going to be Big Business. And they were never going to force anything on us. They were going to make us want to do it, and to pay them for the privilege. So while Uncle Freedom and the middle aged patriots were putting on stupid tri-cornered hats and waving guns around to protest Big Government, the free market quietly began to do every single thing the evil government was purported to be planning.

Surveillance? No government could ever devise a system that tracks and monitors us as effectively as the one we've happily chosen for ourselves. Invasion of privacy? For the right price, every word you've ever typed in an email or anywhere on the internet has left a trace that can be unearthed. Control of the news? Look at what the President does with a simple, free Twitter account to lead the media around by the nose, or how state-sponsored propaganda networks like RT and Fox News have come to dominate the landscape.

Imagine the blood-curdling outrage that would result from the government forcing every news network to recite some kind of creed during every broadcast; yet when a company called Sinclair does it, well that's fine. Because it's not the government. And as long as it's not the government, the deluded logic goes, our Freedom really isn't at risk.

It is enough to make me skeptical that the right was ever really worried about Freedom and Privacy and Liberty at all, but merely the idea that the state or anyone else would engage in policies they didn't like. Because when the iron fist of 24 hour surveillance and propaganda comes from the libertarian or nationalist far right and free market – as it most certainly has – they don't seem to mind nearly as much. The First Lady suggests kids eat more vegetables and everybody loses their shit; one unaccountable corporation takes control of a huge share of local media in the U.
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S. and puts them on a propaganda script and those same vigilant patriots are either silent or downright enthusiastic.

If being oppressed by the state is so frightening, why is being oppressed by private enterprise no real cause for alarm among the fierce freedom advocates on the right? Maybe – just maybe – they're down with totalitarianism as long as there's no risk that it will express even a passing interest in advancing the public good.
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Perhaps the scariest part of 1984 in their reading was not the surveillance state but that the government fed everyone.