Olbermann out indefinitely

Any number of news outlets have reported the news that Keith Olbermann has been suspended indefinitely from his job as anchor of MSNBC's Countdown for donating to political campaigns in violation of NBC News rules. No need to rehash the details here, except to note that at least one report (not the Times', to which I linked) said first-choice substitute Chris Hayes didn't host because the network found he, too, had contributed to candidates against network rules; Hayes explicitly rebutted that assumption.

Olbermann's defenders say the network has been looking for any excuse to muzzle him; his critics claim he arrogantly presumed he was above network rules and journalistic best practices. They're probably both right.

Thus far, Olbermann hasn't commented. I expect he's wondering how to spin this, because it seems incontrovertible that he knowingly violated network rules. He also blatantly ignored what should be common sense for anybody in journalism: you can't pretend to be an objective interviewer -- that is, a proxy for the audience -- if you're on record supporting (or opposing) your subject. At the very least, you have to disclose your support so your audience can judge for itself whether you have an irreconcilable conflict of interest.

If Comcast is looking to ditch him as part of its takeover of NBC, I doubt it will find a better excuse.

For my part, and a little to my own surprise, I don't think I'll be too unhappy if he doesn't come back.

I was a fan of Countdown and Olbermann during the George W. Bush administration. In fact, it wouldn't be saying too much to admit that Countdown was a lifeline in that dark era, regularly reminding me that sane people existed. His segments had a distinctly anti-Bush tone, but it was a natural reaction to the extraordinary deference shown by virtually all of the rest of the mainstream media. Yes, Olbermann said, it was crazy to invade Iraq, because the damned attackers of 11 September 2001 came from freaking Saudi Arabia, financed by al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and had nothing whatsoever to do with Iraq. No, you weren't deluded for thinking that tax cuts during a major military operation (couldn't legally call it a war) were themselves bonkers and totally contrary to common sense. Yes, staffing the government with lackeys who didn't believe that government should work did doom its efforts to failure: see the Iraq occupation, see FEMA in Katrina's wake, see the Interior Department's abdication of oversight responsibilities that led to the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010; etc., etc., etc.

Olbermann also took his shots, mostly deserved, at Republican lawmakers in Congress, both for their enabling of Bush's misguided policies and their hypocrisy: they prated about fiscal responsibility but oversaw, indeed facilitated, an unprecedented increase in the national debt; they bloviated incessantly about limiting government oversight of corporations but enacted the most intrusive monitoring of private communications in the nation's history; they claimed Christian family values but routinely engaged in activities that horribly offended their socially conservative supporters, like gay sex or extramarital affairs.

After Obama's election, Olbermann would have occasion to take the new administration to task as well, mostly for not fulfilling its promises swiftly enough or for lacking the courage to take principled stands against unreasonable Republican intransigence. However, he also continued his attacks against Republicans generally -- and it was in these attacks that he started to lose me.

Not that Republican intransigence wasn't and isn't infuriating: it was and is. But Olbermann's rhetoric became less well-grounded over time; he more frequently descended to ad hominem attacks than he had during the Bush administration. Even then, such attacks were unworthy of him, but they didn't outweigh the factual information he presented. During 2009, though, his attacks on Republican lawmakers started to lose their moral force because he started to take cheap shots. Instead of being a vigorous gadfly against stupidity, dishonesty and corruption in government -- as his newscast during Bush's administration suggested he might be -- he was often as shrilly and sometimes embarrassingly partisan as his critics said he always had been.

I have loyally continued to download the Countdown podcast, but I haven't watched it since February 2010. To an extent this reflects my diminished interest in the news generally, but a bigger reason is that I just don't find his ranting quite so informative these days.

That I say "ranting" rather than "orating" or simply "reporting" points to what I think went wrong. He started to love the sound of his own voice too much, especially the notes it reached during his "Special Comments."

The Special Comments at first were truly special. Infrequent, prompted by exceptionally egregious governmental misconduct, they let Olbermann unleash his formidable gift for invective on such deserving targets as Donald Rumsfeld. Olbermann would pile on fact after damning fact, rhetorically asking the miscreant, "When is enough, enough?" Jeremiads, yes, but richly deserved because the targets were otherwise unchallenged by the media.

As the Special Comments gained Olbermann greater notoriety, they started to appear more often. That, I aver, was a mistake. Whether he decided there was more to rail against, or just wanted to lash out more often because it felt good, the comments became less special. More troublingly, they also started to be less justified. It was hard not to think he was yelling for the sake of yelling rather than bringing a righteous fury to bear on a well-chosen victim.

As for the non-commentary segments, I can only say it became obvious Olbermann was not illuminating the topics nearly as well as he had when he was, for lack of a better term, an opposition figure. He was no longer countering official (and highly misleading) propaganda by bringing to light contradicting facts. Instead, he spent his time asking his correspondents straw-man questions intended to embarrass Republicans. That Republicans have been obstructionist and deceptive during the Obama administration is clear; however, it isn't the whole story. The Obama administration has its own inadequacies to explain, and even its most fervent supporters would benefit from hearing well-reasoned critiques of its goals and the means by which it has sought them. Countdown, though it excoriated the administration for retreating from more progressive stances during the health-care debate last year, otherwise has not routinely traded in enlightening criticism of the administration's actions.

I wanted Olbermann to be as effective, if not as angry, an observer and critic of Obama as he was of Bush. I wanted Olbermann to channel his formidable intellect into constructive and illuminating avenues. Perhaps that was never in the cards. Maybe, having let his inner attack dog run loose for several years, he doesn't know how to rein it in again. Whatever is going on in his head, he stopped being a trustworthy voice months ago. It's too bad.

UPDATE: Per the AP via HitFix, Olbermann will be back on the air Tuesday.

Cooks Source, crooks source

From The Guardian, via Daring Fireball, comes an article about theft of intellectual property, aka plagiarism, that takes my breath away.

Student Monica Gaudio found one of her online articles published without permission in the print publication Cooks Source. Gaudio demanded an apology on Facebook and in the magazine, plus a small donation ($130) to the Columbia Journalism Review. Considering she caught the magazine dead to rights in an act of thievery, you'd think it would count itself lucky to get off so lightly.

Not Cooks Source. According to the article, here's the emailed reply from its editor:

But honestly Monica, the web is considered "public domain" and you should be happy we just didn't "lift" your whole article and put someone else's name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me... ALWAYS for free!

The magazine's Facebook page is filled with angry comments, none of which, from my cursory examination, supports the editor's position. What a shocker.

Anybody with a normal IQ and a normal ego understands why this is wrong. I don't know if the editor, who appears to be someone by the name of Judith Griggs, is mentally disadvantaged or narcissistic. Her attitude in that email and in the one comment I saw from her on the Facebook page, though, makes me wonder if she ought not to visit a mental health professional.

Or I suppose she could just be scum.

Faith in the judiciary

A healthy dose of faith is required to make a democracy work -- not religious faith, but a belief in that society's institutions. We may laugh cynically about "the consent of the governed," but don't kid yourself: the only reason the U.S. functions as a nation is that most of us are still psychologically invested enough in its laws and customs to follow them without significant physical compulsion.

One of this country's core institutions, the judiciary, requires exceptional faith from us. The majority of judges are unelected, so they aren't directly accountable to the citizenry: we can only elect executives (mayors, governors, Presidents) who in turn appoint those judges. And whether or not a given judge is elected directly, most of us don't have the expertise to know whether s/he is any good at the job. We hope and assume that's so, unless we hear otherwise in the press.

So I am disturbed by the electoral removal of three Iowa Supreme Court justices. According to the New York Times, the recall election was motivated by popular anger against the court's unanimous decision "to strike down a law defining marriage as between a man and a woman, making the state the first in the Midwest to permit same-sex marriage." This popular anger was fueled by a lot of out-of-state money from conservative groups like the National Organization for Marriage and the American Family Association.

Popular anger is almost never a good indicator of what is legally right. Here's how the recall election was justified:

“I think it will send a message across the country that the power resides with the people,” said Bob Vander Plaats, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for governor who led the campaign. “It’s we the people, not we the courts.”

This is an ignorant misreading of why the judiciary exists.

Judges are not supposed to be susceptible to popular sentiment. Their job is to interpret the law, not to respond to lynch mobs. That's why the majority of them are unelected. They have to feel their job security (if not their physical security) doesn't depend on how well their decisions go down with the public.

If you think I'm misconstruing the judiciary's role in our government, ask yourself why it exists. Its purpose is to decide whether the legislature and executive are acting within the bounds of the law and the (state or federal) constitution. If that could be done purely by popular referenda, i.e., elections, why would we need a judiciary at all, considering that we elect our legislatures and executives? No, the whole point is that we need people who are dedicated to upholding the laws of the land no matter what popular opinion is.

The recall of the Iowa justices, motivated by what everyone admits was simple dislike (well, hatred) of one of their decisions, points at a total loss of faith in the judiciary by a number of people.

That's not a victory for the people. That's a sign that our system is breaking down.

Ironically, it's the so-called "conservatives," those who claim to be so passionate about preserving our bedrock ideals, who are so eagerly undermining the institutions intended to preserve those ideals.

The agony of Cubs fans

It would be hypocritical for me to congratulate the San Francisco Giants on their World Series win: I have never been a sports fan, much less a baseball fan, much less than that a Giants fan. I paid just enough attention to them in my youth to conclude they were a cursed team that would not win a Series in my lifetime. (For the long-suffering true fans out there, I'm delighted to have been proven wrong.)

Still, much in life is relative. That was brought home to me when I scraped acquaintance with a native Chicagoan some years ago. This fellow seemed aged beyond his tender years. One spring day I learned why, when he admitted he was a die-hard Cubs fan. (All Cubs fans are die-hard, by the way.) I didn't know of the Cubs' history (see "never been a sports fan," above), so I cavalierly advanced my hypothesis of the cursed Giants. The Chicagoan, regarding me with polite but unmistakable scorn, was silent for a moment. Then he launched into a description of what a real curse is.

Time has washed my friend's exact words from my memory, but I found their echo in the comments on a New Yorker column by Roger Angell (thanks to John Gruber's Daring Fireball for the pointer). A fellow with the handle "patrickmarren" elegantly set out the history that weighs on the Cubs fan's head:

I am truly happy for the Giants and their fans. But I inhabit an unimaginably more torturous circle of baseball hell: I am a Cub fan. The scar tissue has scar tissue. We have not been IN a World Series in 65 years, 9 years longer than the Giants' World Series VICTORY drought. We have not WON a World Series since man first trod the North or South Poles. We have not won since the human voice first was carried by radio. We have not won since 90% of the world's population was ruled by one of seven emperors. We have not won since both Mark Twain and Leo Tolstoy were alive and writing books. We have not won since the first Model T was two weeks old. We have not won since the year the Sultan was deposed. Remember how, allegedly, in old folks' homes around New England, codgers clung to life so they could witness another Red Sox championship in 2004, causing a drop in mortality before the clincher and a spike right afterwards? That could not happen in Chicago. Because all those who witnessed the last Cubs championship first-hand, on October 14, 1908, are already dead.

Now that's a curse.

The Stewart-Colbert rally

I didn't attend Jon Stewart's and Stephen Colbert's rally on 30 October in Washington, DC, but I was rooting for it. Stewart's call for a return to sanity, a retreat from the insane polarization on right and left (and across the cable news wasteland), was welcome as far as I was concerned.

I missed most of the Comedy Central telecast, but caught most of the last hour. I was unimpressed, having the feeling that "there was no 'there' there." What I saw was a few labored comedy bits, one or two totally unmemorable musical performances, and an earnest address from Stewart which left no impression on me. Everything I saw begged the question, "Why are you all doing this?"

What did I expect? I don't know. A rallying cry to storm the barricades somewhere? Well, that was probably never in the cards, and I probably would have been quick to denounce anything along those lines anyway. Stewart's role as a gadfly would have been seriously, perhaps irretrievably, compromised if he had attempted to harness his audience for any such activist purpose.

Should it have been pure entertainment? That would have been superfluous. We tune into their shows: that's entertainment enough.

So the rally came and went without leaving any impression on me. Then I read Andrew Sullivan's take on the rally in The Atlantic. I don't know if he's right about What It Meant, but I hope he is.

One obvious observation: it was the first actual ironic rally I've attended. Most of those in this movement were clearly ambivalent about being in any movement, but at the same time seemed to be acting out of some shared civic duty.

I remember feeling exactly that way in 2003 or so when I participated in my first, and so far only, march. It was against the Iraq invasion, and while I was deeply ambivalent about attending (as usual in such marches, every underdog political movement had latched onto it, and I didn't have a position on Palestinian statehood, to take but one example), I felt I had to do something to show the world that I wasn't on board with the Administration's actions.

If Sullivan's right, I have a lot in common with the bulk of the attendees (except youthfulness):

It was very good humored, and one sensed that the entire crowd loathed Fox, felt queasy about MSNBC, couldn't bring themselves to watch CNN and caught NPR in the commute. The young were out in force, but, again, they seemed like the Obama generation - not the facile dreamers who saw a Messiah in 2008, but the resilient rump who knew full well what he was up against.

Is this actually a politics?

Not if one compares it with, say the Perotistas of the early 1990s, or the Beckians of August (almost all of whom will surely be voting Republican on Tuesday because to do otherwise is the end of all American liberty for ever). But it is an identity politics: proud of being educated, sick of being stereotyped, interested in facts and reality, fed up with being condescended to ... and deeeply worried about the direction in this country.

If the ghost of Richard Nixon will allow me, Stewart and Colbert have sensed a silent plurality, alienated by both parties, still hoping for Obama's success, and yet unwilling to worship any politician or even take themselves too seriously for fear of falling into the same foul-smelling bullshit that already covers far too much of our political culture.

I still have a malaise, but maybe there are enough other sane people that one day, we can stop this country's mad thrashing about, and start to fix it. Maybe. One day.

Greg Graffin on evolution

Scientific American has an interview with Bad Religion's lead singer, Greg Graffin. (An abridged version of the interview appears in the November 2010 dead-tree edition.) Why? Well, Graffin also happens to be an evolutionary biologist at UCLA. Graffin's scientific bent probably plays a big part in Bad Religion being one of my favorite punk bands. Its music has remained relentlessly intelligent and critical of the status quo, qualities that, in my humble opinion, are at the heart of what it means to be a real punk.

He has a problem, unsurprisingly, with how evolution is characterized to the general public:

The trick is: how do you talk about natural selection without implying the rigidity of law? We use it as almost an active participant, almost like a god. In fact, you could substitute the word "god" for "natural selection" in a lot of evolutionary writings and you'd think you were listening to a theologian. It's a routine we know doesn't exist but we teach it anyway: Genetic mutation and some active force chooses the most favorable one. That simply isn't a complete explanation of what's going on. We need to stop thinking about lawlike behaviors and embrace the surprises.

Anthropomorphizing the process simply plays into the hands of those who argue that evolution is an illusion.

On Darwin:

Q: Was Darwin a punk?

A: He was very straight-laced because of English Victorian culture, but he sure did like to hobnob with the radicals. There are punk fans who kind of stand in the back and never in their lives go slam dancing but love the music and what it represents. Darwin may have been that kind of contemplative and pensive anti-authoritarian.

Being one of those non-slam-dancing fans, I appreciate that he knows we're there.

When I hear right-wing politicians and pundits inveigh against the supposed groupthink of the scientific consensus (on any topic, be it evolution, climate change, etc.), I wish more scientists would pipe up along these lines:

Q: How are evolution and punk rock related?

A: It's a similar feeling from being in a community of punk rockers as a teenager and the feeling I still get today when I'm in a community of skeptical scientists. The idea with both is that you challenge authority, you challenge the dogma. You challenge the doctrine in order to make progress.

The thrill of science is the process. It's a social process. It's a process of collective discovery. It's debate, it's experimentation and it's verification of claims that might be false. It's the greatest foundation for a society.

Like any good scientist, Graffin does recognize the perils of groupthink and what might be called "proof by assertion" (that is, relying on one's reputation to declare something to be true):

Q: Einstein said, "To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself." Isn't science just another form of authority?

A: That encapsulates the struggle so nicely: How do you subscribe to an authority without becoming authoritarian? There is nothing wrong with being the right kind of authority. Someone who is willing to throw it all away at the drop of a hat—even if it means discarding his or her life's work—because a new discovery was made. That is the best kind of authority. The worst kind of authority is an ill-informed autocrat like Josef Stalin.

There are numerous scientists who fit that bill but hardly any political leaders.

We'd do well to elect more scientists and fewer lawyers. Unfortunately, most scientists would rather do science, which they perceive to be far more useful and far less stressful than catering to the misconceptions and whims of the average citizen. (Yes, I'm an elitist who thinks smarter people often have better ideas. My most fervent wish would be for the average citizen to become smarter so we don't have to keep repeating the same mistakes and making new ones we could have foreseen.)

Graffin's new book, Anarchy Evolution: Faith, Science, and Bad Religion in a World without God, is on sale now at all the usual places. He is also on a book tour; you've already missed the East Coast leg, but he's swinging through Austin, Tempe, Denver, Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco in early/mid-November.

My malaise

I have lost faith that corporate America can be entrusted to show us the way to a brighter future, because it has demonstrated its susceptibility to manipulation by a handful of savvy players who have no compunction about lying and cheating to make their bucks. Most who subscribe to the Tea Party rubric undoubtedly would say the same about government. I can't say they're wrong on that score, either.

Yet the Tea Partiers want to reduce spending, but damned if they want to cut defense, homeland security (I hate that fucking Orwellian phrase), Social Security, or Medicare, the biggest components of the budget. If you believe that's a viable approach to fixing the deficit, you are deluded. Too many of my fellow citizens are deluded, or simply can't be bothered to be angry that deluded people are setting the country's agenda. So I have lost faith in my fellow citizens, too.

In whom can I believe? No one, it seems. And I bet I'm not the only one who feels this way.

All I can do, and this is how I plan to survive the near future, is to take hold of my own life as best I can.

Turning inward is unfortunate, because our survival as a species depends on our collectively taking our activities in hand. This is something a purely free-market approach is simply incapable of doing, or even conceiving of doing. But since voicing such an idea is all but heresy in the eyes of the ascendant free-marketeers, well, fuck it.

That the nation that first put a man on the moon is now wallowing in its own ignorance is tragic. But since a plurality of my fellow citizens doesn't give a shit, why should I?