For those of you who watched American Idol tonight and saw somebody in the audience cheering and holding a sign with a pickle on it, that wasn’t a photo of contestant Kellie Pickler, it was Associated Press hack Nedra Pickler :
Look familiar American Idol fans? Since it’s the most popular show in the world or something, lemme point out that the graphic was originally made to highlight the fact that the press routinely gives Republicans a free pass while holding Democrats to a higher standard. Atrios in particular was all over this a couple years ago and described Pickler’s style as such :
Nit Picklering being the writing of news stories admonishing Democratic candidates for daring to not explain their own inconsistencies, as demonstrated by Nedra Pickler by the inclusion of some utterly irrelevant detail.
Matt Yglesias later expanded the Nit Picklering phenomenon into an article for the American Prospect :
Pickler, a 28-year-old Washington-based reporter who covered the auto industry before moving to the campaign beat last January, took Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) to task for telling the story of a New Hampshire couple whose water supply was rendered unsafe for drinking or showering due to the presence of a gasoline additive, MTBE, without noting that they now, in fact, had potable water from an alternate source. Was Kerry remiss? Certainly no more so than Pickler, who failed to mention that the senator’s remarks came up as he was discussing the Bush administration’s efforts to shield manufacturers of the toxic substance from lawsuits. (MTBE has a propensity for poisoning groundwater). A revised version of Pickler’s story was released on the wires the next morning, now leading with the Kerry-bashing in the first paragraph, insinuating that the senator had inflicted emotional distress on the victims of his “dishonesty.” Actual harms caused by the chemical didn’t make the cut, however.
. . .
Pickler’s tic is a source of amusement, but it also has quite serious ramifications. While most discussion of media bias focuses on elite outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post, stories put out by The Associated Press form the backbone of national political coverage in the small- and medium-sized newspapers whose combined circulations far exceed the majors. These early campaign reports, moreover, set the larger story line that constrains later coverage of events. Once Al Gore got the “liar” label on the 2000 campaign trail, he was unable to shake it no matter how unfair the charges were or how much worse Bush’s behavior was. This is a movie we’ve all seen before, and it doesn’t have a happy ending.
And now her photoshoped mug has become a prop on the most popular show on TV. It’s fitting that the audience, producers, network, hosts, and contestants seem to be unaware that the sign that drew so much attention was a case of mistaken identity, since American Idol’s Pickler is dumber than a bag of hammers, but the original pickle sign was a humorous way to protest the media’s continual double-standard towards liberals. It would be nice for this to be used to shine a light on the talking points-recycling Pickler and her Republican-boosting colleagues. but since Idol is on Fox, don’t hold your breath waiting for Ryan Seacrest to point out the mix-up.
UPDATE : In case you thought I was mistaken, here’s a screengrab from the American Idol segment that features the Pickler :
I argee with Atrios. This isn’t as weird as Evil Bert, but WTF?!
Anybody have a good connection there? I’d like to attend, but I need some Official Sponsoring Type Group to host a signing or a talk … and apparently the large, BuyBlue-approved bookselling chain with which my new publisher works (at the Festival, I mean) isn’t interested … lord, this stuff makes me tired…
… the good thing about my situation is that the book is only a by-product of the work — whether it does well or completely tanks, I still have the weekly cartoon, the work itself … I can’t imagine what it would be like to work on a novel for several years and then go through this crap, trying desperately to attract a little notice in the short window of opportunity that you’ve got immediately after publication, before everyone loses interest entirely …
My longtime email buddy Vance Lehmkuhl won Arianna’s Contagious Festival contest. And got to hang out with John Cusack.
I almost met the latter, at a bar in Boston during the last Democratic convention, which I went to with a group that included my pal Ward Sutton and one of the Farelly Brothers (and maybe Chris and Marianne Cooper, I can’t remember if they’d bailed by that point or not). A number of people gave me very strange looks as I walked in, because, as it turned out, John Cusack was right on my heels. I’d had a few too many scotches that night and didn’t actually notice my brush with greatness. Cusack quickly disappeared into the VIP nook (does every bar have one?) which, even though I was there with my very good close personal friend One of the Farelly Brothers, was off limits to me.
… Robert Smigel got kicked out of the bar shortly thereafter because the bartender had no patience for the film crew and the whole dog puppet thing. It was a strange night…
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Patrick K. Tillman stood outside his law office here, staring intently at a yellow house across the street, just over 70 yards away. That, he recalled, is how far away his eldest son, Pat, who gave up a successful N.F.L. career to become an Army Ranger, was standing from his fellow Rangers when they shot him dead in Afghanistan almost two years ago.
“I could hit that house with a rock,” Mr. Tillman said. “You can see every last detail on that place, everything, and you’re telling me they couldn’t see Pat?”
Mr. Tillman, 51, is a grieving father who has refused to give up on his son. While fiercely shunning the public spotlight that has followed Cpl. Pat Tillman’s death, Mr. Tillman has spent untold hours considering the Army’s measurements, like the 70 yards.
He has drafted long, sometimes raw, letters to military leaders, demanding answers about the shooting. And he has studied — and challenged — Army PowerPoint presentations meant to explain how his son, who had called out his own name and waved his arms, wound up dead anyway, shot three times in the head by his own unit, which said it had mistaken him for the enemy.
“All I asked for is what happened to my son, and it has been lie after lie after lie,” said Mr. Tillman, explaining that he believed the matter should remain “between me and the military” but that he had grown too troubled to keep silent.
As the second anniversary of the death of Corporal Tillman, once a popular safety for the Arizona Cardinals, approaches, Mr. Tillman, his former wife, Mary, and other family members remain frustrated by the Army’s handling of the killing but for the first time may be close to getting some of the answers they so desperately seek.
I mean, I understand that I am pretty obscure, but honestly, they have authors on all the time who are way more obscure than me.
Oh well. I guess it makes sense. What possible interest would the audience of the Daily Show have in a long-running, nationally-syndicated, prestigious-award-winning political satirist?
There’s a rumor that Jeopardy champion and occasional guest blogger Bob Harris might make a surprise appearance at my signings in either New York or Los Angeles–or possibly both, oddly enough. Can’t be confirmed, though.
Incidentally, I’ve been reading the manuscript to Bob’s new book. I don’t think I’m supposed to say much about it, but I will say this: I think Bob is about to really hit the big time.
The book should hit stores on Thursday, and the week after that I’ll be on tour, so blogging will probably be light. In the meantime, thank you to everyone who pre-ordered so far. I’ve mentioned this several times before, but I don’t assume that everyone who visits this site memorizes every word I write, so forgive me for repeating myself: this one is important to me. This is sink-or-swim time.
After more than a decade with St. Martin’s, it was painfully clear that while they would publish the books, they were simply not ever going to put much effort into promoting them. I’m not the only person who’s ever had this experience with SMP; I saw one relatively well-known author refer to them bitterly once as “St. Tombstones”. My own editor there was perfectly willing to sign me on again, but even he agreed it would be a lot better for my career if I could find a new home somewhere else.
So I asked my agents to shop around a proposal to other houses. I guess they gave it some amount of effort, but they came back empty handed, which left me feeling pretty discouraged. However, at around the same time, I had agreed to let John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton use a panel out of context from a cartoon on the cover of their book, Weapons of Mass Distraction, as long as they published the full cartoon inside — but when I got my copy of the book, the full cartoon wasn’t there. I called up their editor with every intention of reading him the riot act, but somehow by the end of the conversation, I had a new publisher instead.
So now I’ve got people actually making a push, though I’m still a little on edge — the publicist I was working with for the past several months left the job rather abruptly, and I’m afraid something important may fall through the cracks. (When an author loses an editor, this is called being “orphaned” — I assume the same term applies here.) At any rate, the material in this book is strong. It’s good work, and I’m proud of it, and I want this book to do well — which means putting myself out there a lot more than I usually like to do. (Believe it or not, I’m generally pretty interview-shy, at least when I don’t have anything specific I’m trying to promote). As some of you will remember, the Colbert Report was initially interested in having me on, but unfortunately that fell through, for reasons unknown. (Speaking of which, I’m officially abandoning my little “fake feud” riff — I got too much email from people who thought I seriously had Colbert confused with O’Reilly.) (I shudder to imagine the email Colbert himself must receive.) The Daily Show, meanwhile, hasn’t given us a final “no” yet — you can send them a note of encouragement here, if you’re so inclined (use the drop-down menu). Who knows, maybe it’ll help. And if by any small chance I have any readers out there in a position to help me get the word out about this book to audiences that might not otherwise hear about it — i.e. reporters at daily newspapers or mainstream magazines, producers at radio or tv programs, organizers of book festivals, whatever — please, shoot me an email.
There are a several very strange items floating in today’s front page New York Times piece on Camp Nama, the torture chamber run by Special Operations forces at Baghdad airport.
Consider: American soldiers treated prisoners so viciously that even the CIA blanched, and prohibited its officers from taking part in interrogations at the prison.
A knee-jerk response awaits: How bad does abuse have to be before the CIA would object?
The suggestion that the torture at Camp Nama was too harsh for the CIA doesn’t make sense on its face, and even less so when you read the details in the NYT story. Camp Nama showed an Abu Ghraib-like mixture of classic physical and psychological torture of prisoners, combined with sadistic delight in power. Soldiers beat prisoners with rifle butts, constricted their breathing and senses with hoods, subjected them to horrible smells, noise, and cold, kicked them, burned them, poured water on them to make them believe they were drowning. And then they got creative, using prisoners as targets in a paintball game.
Once you let people torture, someone always discovers its fun side.
Horrendous abuse, to be sure, but nothing that would shock the conscience of anyone’s whose job it is to do this.
On August 3, 2003, the CIA objected to something going on at Camp Nama, but it wasn’t the harshness of prisoner treatment. That simply makes no sense.
But this isn’t the first time the CIA has pulled out. In his 2004 piece on "Copper Green," the special access programs the Pentagon set up to use physical coercion and sexual humiliation to pry intelligence from Iraqi prisoners, Seymour Hersh reported that the agency had a similar reaction at Abu Ghraib:
By fall, according to the former intelligence official, the senior leadership of the C.I.A. had had enough. “They said, ‘No way. We signed up for the core program in Afghanistan — pre-approved for operations against high-value terrorist targets — and now you want to use it for
cabdrivers, brothers-in-law, and people pulled off the streets’ ” — the sort of prisoners who populate the Iraqi jails. “The C.I.A.’s legal people objected,” and the agency ended its involvement in Abu Ghraib, the former official said.
The C.I.A.’s complaints were echoed throughout the intelligence community. There was fear that the situation at Abu Ghraib would lead to the exposure of the secret , and thereby bring an end to what had been, before Iraq, a valuable cover operation.
CIA fear of exposure makes a bit more sense than CIA squeamishness or moral objections.
The NYT discusses a second objection which is equally odd. Defense Intelligence Agency officers, according to the Times, also complained about the way prisoners were treated at Camp Nama, and the agency’s director wrote to Stephen Cambone about the reports of abuse.
You are about the enter the Twilight Zone:
Admiral Jacoby’s memo also provoked an angry reaction from Mr. Cambone.
"Get to the bottom of this immediately. This is not acceptable," Mr. Cambone said in a handwritten note on June 26, 2004, to his top deputy, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin. "In particular, I want to know if this is part of a pattern of behavior by TF 6-26."
Cambone?
Let’s return to Hersh: Cambone ran this program, and insisted on controlling it. He probably didn’t have much to do with the paintball game, but the rest of it — the special forces having permission to abuse prisoners, shrouded in secrecy — was all, Seymour Hersh informed us all two years ago, in Rumsfeld’s and Cambone’s program.
The New York Times article adds important details to Hersh’s old story — most ominously, that the unit’s operations "are now shrouded in even tighter secrecy" — but it also seems determined to let those who designed this program off the hook. They report Cambone’s objections — and his memo is vague enough that it isn’t entirely clear what he’s objecting to — but also note that the extent of abuses committed at Camp Nama may never be fully revealed because of "the secrecy surrounding the unit," without ever explaining the source of that secrecy.
They used to have a very good reporter who wouldn’t have let that pass. They can now read him in The New Yorker.
The cause du jour over at puduland these days is Stephen Heller, a regular guy now getting financially wiped out and looking at multiple criminal charges for blowing the whistle on Diebold and hinky voting machines in California.
Imagine yourself in this guy’s shoes — because it’s a situation anyone could have bumped into: office temp, regular guy trying to make ends meet, middle-class fellow with a wife and a dog, etc., stumbles across legal documents indicating that Diebold looks way fishy re California elections. Like their-own-attorneys-thought-it-was-criminal fishy. (Incidentally, since Democrats can’t be elected nationally without California, this has fairly obvious national implications.)
So the guy blows the whistle, getting the papers into the hands of the California secretary of state, and pretty soon newspapers get involved, etc. Bottom line: Stephen Heller, little guy who didn’t ask to run across this stuff, decides to try and protect the most fundamental aspect of our democracy. Good on him, right?
You’d think. But now he’s facing three felony charges.
Bottom line: I’m no expert, but it seems pretty clear. Dude deserves a medal, not jail and financial chaos.
The Stephen Heller Legal Defense Fund has more info and updates. As things progress, I’ll be yapping about it over at puduland as things progress; for the moment, I’ve posted my own email to the DA, politely explaining my own thoughts about why the charges should be dropped, along with the address if you want to send your own.
