Let's Take A Lesson From General Musharaf

Pakistan's General Pervez Musharaf has this week assaulted Pakistan's judiciary, lawyers, and media, imprisoning many and shutting down or limiting access and content of TV broadcasts. He's fighting those who are fighting him. And his methods aren't that nice.

We could take a lesson from the General -- not by sending people to jail; but by firing them and bringing in a new group of players.

Throughout this campaign I've been waiting for any of the candidates to speak about corruption, temptation, campaign financing, the complacency of the Congress, the fact that Congress cares more about political gain and reelection than it does about the rule of law, the protection of our Constitution, and common-sense accountability. And the media who have complacently gone along with converting an altruistic news organization paid for by all the other venues, to the news groups becoming profit centers owned and operated by entertainment conglomerates.

Well . . . in the footsteps of a recent and very powerful speech by Salt Lake City's Mayor Ross Anderson, let's fire the bums.

You have failed us miserably and we won’t take it any more.

While we had every reason to expect far more of you, you have been pompous, greedy, cruel, and incompetent as you have led this great nation to a moral, military, and national security abyss.

You have breached trust with the American people in the most egregious ways. You have utterly failed in the performance of your jobs. You have undermined our Constitution, permitted the violation of the most fundamental treaty obligations, and betrayed the rule of law.

You have engaged in, or permitted, heinous human rights abuses of the sort never before countenanced in our nation’s history as a matter of official policy. You have sent American men and women to kill and be killed on the basis of lies, on the basis of shifting justifications, without competent leadership, and without even a coherent plan for this monumental blunder.

We are here to tell you: We won’t take it any more!

I spent three hours researching the news to see how Mayor Anderson's speech was reviewed. In America, not a single major media outlet covered it but a few online services reported it with the full text of the speech. It appeared on a few independent blogs and news feeds. Overseas however, it got more play. New Zealand and Australia particularly.

Again, from Mayor Anderson's speech:

We must avoid the trap of focusing the blame solely upon President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. This is not just about a few people who have wronged our country – and the world. They were enabled by members of both parties in Congress, they were enabled by the pathetic mainstream news media, and, ultimately, they have been enabled by the American people – 40% of whom are so ill-informed they still think Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks – a people who know and care more about baseball statistics and which drunken starlets are wearing underwear than they know and care about the atrocities being committed every single day in our name by a government for which we need to take responsibility.

One of the first few acts of the new team at the AG's office would be to enforce the FCC standards that are being flagrantly violated so that the media will do what we chartered them to do: fairly report the news in return for the use of the public's airwaves, and to end torture and rendition. I can't see either happening with our newly appointed AG.

One of the first acts of a new team of legislators will be to free themselves from funding outrageously expensive campaigns that require huge amounts of time fundraising to the detriment of hours that could be better spent doing the job they were elected to do. Whether it be federally financed campaigns or some other alternative, we cannot afford for our legislators to abrogate their duties to spend time fundraising and also spend face time with big contributors with an axe to grind. Since this topic hasn't appeared too often in the debates - and when it has there's been lip service instead of serious proclamations - I don't foresee a major change in this area either.

And one of the first steps from a new President will be to perform a serious house-cleaning (de-Baath-ification-like) within the top echelon of our government's bureaucracy to rid us of those who have been tempted and those who close their eyes to it.

There are a thousand other activities that need to happen to bring us back down to earth and get the various arms of our government functioning full-time again.

What say you?

Certainly the public senses all these things. Otherwise why would Congress' approval rating be so low? People know but they don't know what to do. The answer is simple: draw a line and say "I'm not going to take it anymore" and then vote to throw the bums out. More importantly, research who's running and select only those that meet your standards. YOUR standards.

What say you?

A New Book by Al Gore

Time Magazine calls Al Gore "the perfect stealth candidate for 2008" in their article which excerpts from his new book The Assault on Reason. I've read the excerpts but the book won't be available until next week. Gore says some wonderful things toward developing an understanding of how the media has failed us and what we can do to change the process.

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong.

One-way media, TV, enables manipulation of public debate which leads to cynicism, doubt and lack of participation.

Unfortunately [there is] a new cynicism about reason itself — because reason was so easily used by propagandists to disguise their impulse to power by cloaking it in clever and seductive intellectual formulations. When people don't have an opportunity to interact on equal terms and test the validity of what they're being "taught" in the light of their own experience and robust, shared dialogue, they naturally begin to resist the assumption that the experts know best.

So the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way—a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.

I've blogged many times about Gore's point of view (which I share) on this subject. In the area of political dialogue, it might be called the “pollster-consultant industrial complex” [coined by Joe Klein] that has had the same effect in political dialogue as manipulative commercial advertising has on the buying public: lack of spontaneity, test-tube bromides, insipid photo ops, and idiotic advertising combined to pass for political discourse. In the current Time excerpt Gore is less dramatic and confrontational than he was last year when he said:

The conversation of democracy has been desiccated [pulverized; lacking in energy or vitality]. To bring it back to life, break the monopoly of broadcast and cable television.

Is there hope in what he writes? Does he propose a plan to take back the airwaves and enable real awareness and discourse? Here's what he writes:

...broadband interconnection is supporting decentralized processes that reinvigorate democracy. We can see it happening before our eyes: As a society, we are getting smarter. Networked democracy is taking hold. You can feel it. We the people—as Lincoln put it, "even we here"—are collectively still the key to the survival of America's democracy.

Engaging rather than interrupting; reasoning rather than rabble-rousing

It seems like the pendulum of political discourse is swinging back to reality instead of sarcastic, provocative entertainment.

• When Ann Coulter said what she did about John Edwards, the backlash was swift and across the board non-partisan. Republicans, Democrats, gays, straights, they all reacted similarly suggesting that Coulter wasn't just out of line, but instead making a desperate attempt for self promotion at the expense of Edwards.


• When the Attorney General fired the eight Federal attornies and it became apparent that they were all political firings - that there was nothing negative on any of their records (in fact, quite the opposite) - the press, the attorneys themselves, and the public all reacted quickly with dismay that Gonzalez could be so petty and robotically following the whims of President Bush and that the lies coming out daily from Rove's office, Gonzales', and the White House were so blatant that it's become painfully clear that there's total disorganization at the top of our government.


• Valerie Plame-Wilson made the clearest statement of how she and her husband were misused for purely vindictive political purposes while public sentiment suggests that Libby (who was found guilty for the leak that harmed Plame-Wilson) was the Vice President's fall guy and should get pardoned.


• NBC News recently reported that 73% of Americans say they are following the Presidential election process closely - "an astounding figure in a country in which it's a big deal if more than half the electorate votes. Everywhere there's talk that this may be the most momentous race in our lifetime, that it's clear that the country is teetering on the cusp of something good, bad or cataclysmic" says Anna Quindlen in a Newsweek editorial.

Finally the blinders are off and we're all seeing what has been happening and the harm that's been done: that the bias has been so unfriendly and unwavering, that there's a backlash wanting silence (or at least the toning down of the rhetoric), that issues have gone wanting, and that partisan politics - particularly President Bush's brand of politics - has abandoned the will and wishes of the bill-paying electorate.

Quoting again from Anna Quindlen: "If, as many suspect, this is either a moment for the United States to prevail or to implode, a radio program, a column, or a TV talk show really matters. It's a valuable piece of public real estate that should be earned every day, by engaging rather than interrupting, by reasoning rather than rabble rousing. Maybe even by doing the really unthinkable in the civic auditorium and trying to move the conversation in fruitful directions."

I fervently hope that this is the case!