Well, This is Encouraging

Rocky Mountain News to close shop.

The Rocky Mountain News, Colorado's oldest newspaper and a Denver fixture since 1859, will publish its last edition Friday.

Owner E.W. Scripps Co. said Thursday the newspaper lost $16 million last year and the company was unable to find a buyer.

"Today the Rocky Mountain News, long the leading voice in Denver, becomes a victim of changing times in our industry and huge economic challenges," Scripps CEO Rich Boehne said.

The Politics of "Terror."

Interesting column today from The New York Times' public editor, Clark Hoyt. Hoyt writes about an issue that's been a sore spot for me for a long time, so I gobbled this up eagerly.

When should journalists describe purveyors of violence as "terrorists" and when should they use the less polarizing "militants?" What attacks on civilians are "terrorism?" What are "terrorist groups" and what are "militant groups" or "extremist groups?"

Those questions have bedeviled reporters for years, specifically as it regards the Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. Hoyt spends the first half of his column on the Mumbai attacks, but it becomes clear pretty quickly that most reporters had no problems affixing the terrorism label there. The real controversy in the piece is in Hoyt's description of The Times' attitude toward the Middle East.

"Terrorism" is a tricky word for journalists because there's a moral judgment inherent in its use, and reporters aren't comfortable making moral judgments in complex situations. It puts the writer on a ledge, clearly labeling one side as wrong and the other as right. That cuts against the grain of years of training.

Some organizations have solved that dilemma by deciding that they will not use any form of the word "terror" to describe Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians. The BBC is the biggest offender here, but Reuters acts similarly. This isn't objectivity; it's gutless, spineless, soulless "journalism" of the worst kind, sapping the humanity out of reporters and draining the outrage from stories that frankly demand a little righteous indignation.

Yes, "terrorist" has strong implications, but blowing yourself up on a school bus or shooting rockets into a major city is a strong act. It seems inconceivable to use the polite word choice in describing those who would commit such crimes.

The Times' approach is more nuanced than the BBC's; they (accurately) described Samir Kuntar as a terrorist. The usage is not universal: Hoyt quotes a memo on the subject written by James Bennet, the editor of The Atlantic and formerly The Times' Jerusalem bureau chief. Bennet wrote that he initially refused to use the word "terrorism," instead relying on a vivid description of the act in question to get the point across. Bennet eventually changed his mind, saying that "felt so morally neutral as to be a little sickening."

So far so good. But Bennet's memo goes off the rails when he settles on the following rough rule:

He would use the words, when they fit, to describe attacks within Israel’s 1948 borders but not in the occupied West Bank or Gaza, which Israel and the Palestinians have been contending over since Israel took them in 1967. When a gunman infiltrated a settlement and killed a 5-year-old girl in her bed, Bennet did not call it terrorism. “All I could do was default to my first approach and describe the attack and the victims as vividly as I could.”

Hoyt disagrees, and I'm with him. However, I'll go even further than Hoyt: Bennet's attitude here is, frankly, disgusting and more than a little horrific.

Every reporter, every writer, knows that his words have deep implications. I talked about that already; many journalists refuse to use the word "terrorism" because the implication is that the so-described act is morally unjustifiable and that those hurt by the attack are innocents undeserving of the violence.

Describing an attacker as a "militant" or...well, as an "attacker" and refusing to use the word "terrorism" sends a different kind of message. No one would be so harsh as to claim that Bennet thinks the five-year-old girl deserved her fate.

But in some small, perhaps even miniscule, way, Bennet, by refusing to describe brutal acts of terrorism in the West Bank as terrorism, is saying that little girl was less a victim than an individual in Tel Aviv or a Manhattan office worker on September 11. In that small, perhaps miniscule way, he's saying that acts of violence directed at civilians in the West Bank are more justifiable than the attacks in Mumbai.

It might be small or even miniscule, but linguistic wars are usually fought over inches, not miles. Language is the only weapon a reporter has, and those small distinctions between words make all the difference in the moral tone of a piece.

I'm not ignorant of the complexities in this conflict. I don't think every Israeli wears a white hat and every Palestinian a black hat. But for all the gray in the region, there has to be at least a little good and a little evil. And it seems that everyone in a civilized world should look with disgust at the murder of a five-year-old girl in her bed, no matter if she lives in a West Bank settlement. If we can't condemn that, if we can't unequivocally call that unjustifiable slaughter "terrorism," then we've fallen so far into soulless moral relativism as to eviscerate any moral fabric that still remains in this world.

I don't agree with everything Hoyt says in the column. The Times refuses to call Hamas a terrorist organization, and Hoyt agrees with that decision. It's worth noting that Israel and the US aren't the only countries to call Hamas a terrorist organization. The European Union, frequently hostile to Israel, uses that label, as does Canada. So Hamas as a terrorist group is not a fringe view held by a paranoid Likud government and a US State Department in the thrall of the Elders of Zion.

To the consternation of many, the Times does not call Hamas a terrorist organization, though it does sponsor acts of terror against Israel. Hamas was elected to govern Gaza. It provides social services and operates charities, hospitals and clinics. Corbett said: "You get to the question: Somebody works in a Hamas clinic - is that person a terrorist? We don't want to go there." I think that is right.

("Corbett" is Phil Corbett, the deputy to news editor Paul Winfield.)

This argument is staggeringly unpersuasive. Hamas is an organization that repeatedly and unapologetically launched suicide attacks aimed at innocent Israeli civilians. (James Bennet will be satisfied to hear that many of those civilians live in Israel proper, so they truly are innocent civilians, instead of slightly-less-innocent five-year-old girls in the West Bank.) It's an organization that has killed women and children and bragged about it. By Hoyt's admission, it sponsors terrorism. It is a terrorist organization.

Yes, it runs the Gaza government and administers various hospitals and charities. That does not change the fact that Hamas is a terrorist organization, any more than Al Capone's mob protecting downtrodden Italian families in Chicago and handing out Christmas geese made it less of a mob engaged in organized crime.

Corbett's logic doesn't follow. Is the doctor working at a Hamas-run clinic a terrorist? No, because he doesn't engage in terroristic acts. He doesn't try to kill Israeli civilians and terrorize the government into enacting policies he wants. You can construct an argument where everyone who helps Hamas gain the approval of the Gaza citizenry is a terrorist, but no one makes that claim, and to use that extreme distortion of logic to justify a morally neutral label for Hamas is, again, spineless.

An Unclean Slate

I read something yesterday that got me pretty mad. Not Attend-A-Sarah-Palin-Rally-And-Call- For-The-Death-of-a-Presidential-Candidate mad, but mad enough that I wanted to write an angry email to the person responsible. Unfortunately, Slate, which published the piece, didn't provide the email address for Rachael Larimore, who wrote the piece. I searched high and low for that address, and while gross incompetence is always a possibility when we're discussing me, I eventually came to the conclusion that it wasn't available on the site.

I fumed for awhile. Damnit, I had all this righteous rage to vent and no way to do it. I resigned myself to the reality that in this situation, I'd simply have to let it go.

And then I remembered: I have a blog and a captive audience of several people. I never have to let anything go! Plus, I didn't have anything else to write about today, who knows what would turn up Friday and the Gators have an off-day Saturday. I didn't want to run silent here for three or four straight days. So this is a perfect opportunity to rage like noble Achilles. If noble Achilles had a laptop. And a blog. And no life.

What angered me about the linked post on Slate's XX Blog was not Larimore's claim that Obama's words to Joe Wurzelbacher (aka "The Plumber") "sent chills down her spine," though I would argue that if Obama's statement really had that effect on her she needs to join Cindy McCain in some spinal insulation shopping. No, what riled me up was this paean to the nobility of Joe Wurzelbacher:

Can we look at a larger point about Joe the Plumber? Joe Wurzelbacher is, after all, a plumber. He didn't have his well-off parents send him off for his MBA or a law-school degree so he could get a cushy 9-to-5 job with an office and an assistant and good benefits. He's not a 25-year-old starting an Internet company with someone else's venture capital. He's gotten where he is today by unclogging our smelly toilets and fixing the pipes we probably should have had looked at before they burst.

It should be noted that the post you're reading has been building for awhile. I've been growing increasingly agitated with Larimore's constant deification of the Average American (TM) at the expense of Elitist Intellectuals (TM). It's usually in the context of defending the folksy, down-home, heartland appeal of Sarah "Community Organizing Is A Pathetic Endeavor Worthy Only of Scorn And Derision" Palin. (The heartland I live in honors those who work for the betterment of their community, but whatever)

Here, it's in the context of glorifying Wurzelbacher and his fear of Obama's tax plan. I don't want to talk about Joe The Non-Licensed Plumber or the details of Obama's proposals. Instead, I'd like to register my disgust at Larimore's greater point.

Let me be very clear: there is nothing inherently noble about working with your hands. Cleaning a toilet is not prima facie evidence of moral character. It's not a fast track to beatification. Nor, of course, is it evidence of a life gone askew or intellectual inferiority.

But we have this kind of Cult of the Working Man established in our political dialogue. We have this idea that everyone with a blue collar is more American than everyone with a white collar, that those who work on the side of the road or in strange bathrooms are simply better than those who work in offices or libraries.

We have serious issues in this country with wealth disparity. Politicians should address that. But we do not glorify the plumber by denigrating the graduate student. We can not turn a blue collar into a halo by besmirching a white collar. There is no courage in mocking those with MBAs, no nobility in perpetuating the idea that education is a straight road to moral turpitude.

And Larimore's rhetoric isn't just unhelpful, it's actively hurtful. There's an education crisis in this country, and while that has many causes, one of those is student apathy. And while that has many causes, I am convinced part of it derives from the national pastime of assaulting book learning.

In the middle of this national education crisis, we have a pundit class that uses the adjective "professorial" as a slur directed at Barack Obama. We have politicians who continually tar their opponents with the dreaded "Ivy League" appellation. We have an education crisis and we're telling our children that they shouldn't strive to attend our best colleges, shouldn't strive to achieve advanced degrees, shouldn't strive for a wide-ranging intellectual curiosity.

A character in Caddyshack famously said, "The world needs ditch diggers too." It's true; society doesn't function without plumbers, garbage men and cable guys. But the world needs guys in suits too, it needs guys who went to school for eight years to get that master's degree in business administration or accounting or Eastern European Zoological History. Rhetoric like that coming from Larimore (who, by the way, has a degree in journalism from Ohio University and has contributed to The New York Times) only serves to hurt the country.

Another Programming Note

I will not be liveblogging tomorrow's VP debate, for the simple reason that I don't think there will be anything terribly consequential said or done.

The McCain campaign is trying to drive expectations for Sarah Palin down to the 10th ring of Hell. Those stories coming out in The Wall Street Journal and other venues quoting anonymous aides as being terrified of what she might say seem way too convenient. Frankly, they're reminiscent of an episode of The West Wing from its last season when Leo leaked footage of his deliberately awful debate prep performances. Campaign journalists are smart enough to recognize what's going on, but even subconsciously all that spin is going to sink in. If Palin gets through the night without mispronouncing a foreign leader's name the performance will be hailed as a tour de force.

Joe Biden's staffers, for their part, are probably going to slip some Valium into their candidate's pre-debate bottle of water. He'll be so afraid of coming off as condescending and sexist that he'd probably hesitate to speak up if Palin talks about how the conflict in Georgia endangers the several million people who live in Atlanta. He'll take the standard shots at John McCain, try to link him to President Bush, but he'll probably just leave Palin alone and hope she repeats her performance from the Couric interviews. As I said above, I don't think that will happen.

And then there's the moderator, PBS' Gwen Ifill, a journalist I like an awful lot. The right is already wailing and gnashing its teeth over the book Ifill plans to release in a couple months. One of McCain's surrogates has ominously threatened unnamed punishment should Ifill dare to ask Palin "gotcha" questions. I don't know how all of that will affect Ifill's performance. I hope not at all. But you can never tell.

So no liveblogging. I will, however, have post-debate reaction here. So look for that if your life is sad and pathetic.

David Brooks is a Sad Panda

David Brooks likes John McCain. There's nothing surprising about that, of course, but more importantly, there's nothing wrong with that. I've castigated Brooks on a couple occasions for pointless cynicism, so it would be inconsistent and wrong of me to mock him for being genuinely fond of a politician. And considering how genuinely fond I am of Barack Obama, I would only be adding to the world's endless trough of hypocrisy.

Brooks' point, and it's not a ridiculous one, is that McCain is a good man, a serious man, and that we've lost track of that in the crucible of our presidential election. Brooks criticizes McCain for running a campaign with "no central argument," but the rest of the column is largely a paean to Arizona's senior senator. He desperately urges us to remember McCain's basic decency.

On that point I agree with Brooks. McCain's a decent man. It's unfortunate that we've forgotten that. But if McCain wants to blame someone for that lapse in our collective memory, he needs to look in the mirror.

McCain has run a brutal, dishonest, sarcastic, insulting campaign, and he's done so in an election that is guaranteed to be remembered in the annals of our history. Brooks acknowledges this reality. He just doesn't care about it.

And besides, both sides are guilty, so no one's to blame.

Nor is it, primarily, the dishonest ads he is running. My friends in the Obama cheering section get huffy about them, while filtering from their consciousness all the dishonest ads Obama has run — the demagogic DHL ad, the insulting computer ad, the cynical Rush Limbaugh ad, the misleading Social Security ad and so on. If one candidate has sunk lower than the other at this point, I’ve lost track.

Let's get this part of the discussion out of the way early, because Brooks loves to caricature everyone who supports Obama as an unthinking cultist. Yes, Obama has run several deceptive ads. Yes, he has pursued lines of attack on the stump that are misleading. No, those are not acceptable.

Still, we must make no mistake: it was McCain and Steve Schmidt, the Karl Rove acolyte who runs his operation, who poisoned the atmosphere of this election. As Slate's John Dickerson always takes pains to point out, Obama did start the attacks. He was linking McCain to President Bush before the Republican primary results were official and before his own primary battle with Clinton was even close to finished. And yes, Obama did make the unfortunate decision to spurn McCain's offer of several joint town hall meetings.

But I think deep down, David Brooks knows who has fallen deeper into the muck. The astonishing aspect of McCain's campaign is not that it has thrown mud at the opposing camp. Every campaign does that to some extent. What sets the McCain campaign apart is the joy it takes in trying to drive a shiv into the back of Obama's neck.

But Brutus is an honorable man.

When Karl Rove painted Al Gore, a good and decent man, as a serial liar back in 2000, or alleged that decorated war hero John Kerry was a spineless coward unwilling to defend America in 2004, he didn't do it out of any personal animus. He did it because Gore and Kerry were in the way, and those attacks were the best way to remove the obstacles. McCain's group, by contrast, has reveled in nothing so much as mocking and denigrating every aspect of Barack Obama's life.

But Brutus is an honorable man.

It was not Obama who released an ad rife with potentially explosive racial symbolism that accused the opposing candidate of being nothing more than a vacuous, empty-headed celebrity. It was not Obama who kicked dirt in the faces of the millions of young people who were engaged in, and enthusiastic about, the political process for the first time in their lives. It was not Obama who nominated a dangerously incapable and unsuitable woman for the vice presidency and then roared with false outrage when anyone dared question her qualifications.

But Brutus is an honorable man.

And above all else, remember, it was McCain who uttered the most odious assault of the election when he said Obama would "rather lose a war than lose an election." That was McCain's choice. Those were his words. It was John McCain, David Brooks' good and serious man, David Brooks' good and serious man who at the 2004 Republican Convention had urged his party to not treat its opponents as its enemies, it was that man who alleged that his opponent was deliberately advocating a strategy he knew would result in a defeat. That allegation, practically a charge of treason, introduced a toxic element into the campaign. That element would not have existed if McCain had not conjured it.

But Brutus is an honorable man.

I could argue that journalists, men and women like David Brooks, should be on guard for attacks like McCain's, as they would be most vulnerable in a society that treats criticism of the government as treason. But I suspect that's not something David Brooks would have to worry about.

Is John McCain a good man? Probably. A serious man? Probably. But that doesn't redeem his story. That only makes it a tragedy.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the comedy stylings of David Brooks!

What's the only thing worse than a fatuous ass endlessly and tendentiously expounding on important issues with grave pomposity? A fatuous ass trying to be funny.

The Cult of the Average

A few minutes ago the Democrats officially nominated Barack Obama as their candidate for president. You might have heard about it. It made all the papers.

If you believe the pundits, the Democratic Party has made a massive mistake: they have nominated a man who is not average.

Oh, the horror. The horror.

A couple pieces inspired this entry. The first comes from New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor (who evidently made it a point to write out "Barack Hussein Obama"); the second from Slate's John Dickerson, who has quite conspicuously valued balance this election cycle.

Dickerson tears into Obama for the crime of erecting some Greek columns on the Invesco Field stage where he'll be speaking tomorrow. (To be sure, Salon's War Room had a similar take) Never mind, as Dickerson at least notes, that George Bush had a similar set-up in 2004 and received no criticism for it. Never mind, as some of Salon's readers pointed out, that much of America's governmental architecture is designed in a Greco-Roman manner. If Greek columns indicate delusions of divinity, then the whole of Washington D.C., not to mention the Baker County courthouse in Macclenny, Florida, should be targets of John Dickerson's next column.

Kantor's story, by contrast, is not an opinion piece, but purports to investigate why Obama has had so many issues connecting with people. My two "favorite" passages:

But with Barack Hussein Obama officially becoming the Democratic presidential nominee on Wednesday night, some of the same qualities that have brought him just one election away from the White House — his virtuosity, his seriousness, his ability to inspire, his seeming immunity from the strains that afflict others — may be among his biggest obstacles to getting there....

Last month, while visiting Jerusalem, Mr. Obama crammed a note in the Western Wall that was promptly fished out and posted on the Internet. The message was elegantly phrased, as if he had anticipated that his private words to the Almighty would soon be on public display.

The overriding message here? Barack Obama is too good for his own good. There's no evidence that he intended that Western Wall prayer to be read by the public, but damnit, it was remarkably well-written. What shallow artifice! He can inspire people! He has "seriousness!" God, please save us from this above-average writer, inspirational figure and serious individual.

I mock Kantor and Dickerson, but I suspect no one will be as upset with their pieces as I am. After all, it has long been established wisdom that our candidates must fundamentally reflect us. They must be like us. They cannot be too far above us, because that frightens us.

Well, guess what? Barack Obama is above you. Hillary Clinton is above you. John McCain is above you. We need to recognize that. We need to embrace that.

John McCain has argued, and the media has embraced the claim, that Obama's unique ability to inspire crowds, to remind them of their hopes and aspirations, is a piece of sorcery to be shunned and scorned. The media has argued that Obama's wide-ranging intellect, his professorial ability to find the depths of a question and explore them, are hindrances to an effective campaign.

We must denigrate enthusiasm. We must mock idealism. We must spit on oratory and inspiration and passion. For countless generations we have told the youth of the nation that they must assemble and participate. They must take part in the political process, because if they don't, democracy crumbles. We have told them to be passionate and enthusiastic. And when they finally discover a candidate about whom they can be passionate and enthusiastic, people like Dickerson and David Brooks and countless others insult them. Brooks and Dickerson and countless others insult that candidate for his willingness to speak to them and his ability to inspire them. The youth of America, it seems, was meant to be seen and not heard in the political process.

And John McCain? McCain's message to those who are my age is simple: participate in the process, attend a rally, cheer your candidate, express enthusiasm, and I'll put you in an attack ad that labels you a member of a messianic cult.

Why do we want our presidents to aspire to average? Do we understand the kind of decisions a president has to make? We're talking about a man who decides to send troops into harm's way. We're talking about a man whose decisions affect the wellbeing of millions of Americans. We want an average man making those decisions? Why? When did we come to that conclusion?

I think that moment came before I was born, and frankly, I'm rather pissed that decision was made without my input.

We've seen what happens over the past eight years when our president is a man of average intelligence and below-average intellectual curiosity. So why then do people like Dickerson and Kantor, two writers who presumably did not earn their positions at Slate.com and The New York Times by being idiots and sub-par writers, continue to help perpetuate this idea of the middle brow, unexceptional president?

As much as I want to blame the media, this is on us. We ask silly, insipid questions like, "Which president would you rather have a beer with?" Yeah, I ended that sentence with a preposition. That's what Real Americans(TM) do. Screw you Barack Obama and your firm grasp of the English language!

If this entry makes me sound enraged, it's only because I'm enraged. This denigration of excellence has poisoned our political system to the extent that any deviation from average is considered evidence of electoral weakness. We have, after more than 230 years of independence, finally succeeded in creating a political atmosphere that punishes a candidate for demonstrating skill and talent.

Did McCain Play The New York Times?

This story appeared in The Times August 9; I'm getting to it now because...well, because I'm lazy and I have lot of nothing to do around the house.

Anyway, the story is a fairly conventional "inside the campaign" peek, the message of which is that John McCain's operation is wide open and at times practically chaotic. Newly imported campaign manager Steve Schmidt is trying to bring order and stability to the campaign, but there remain unresolved tensions simmering barely below the surface.

The story was written by Adam Nagourney and Jim Rutenberg; Nagourney is The Times' chief political correspondent. You'll see his byline on a lot of the paper's campaign trail accounts. The story they write is not, on the surface, entirely flattering. Aside from the description I gave above, at times McCain comes off slightly confused and prone to "adopt the last opinion he has heard."

Yet, the overall image painted by the story is one of John McCain as The Anti-Bush. He's so anxious to hear differing viewpoints from advisers that Schmidt has staffers limit McCain's access to his cell phone. He is "the overseer of a kingdom of dissenting camps."

And McCain's pretty cool with all that. His big quote in the story:

“I think a certain amount of tension is very healthy, and a certain amount of different views,” he said. “Because of the bubble that a president is in, and the bubble that a candidate is in, sometimes you find out afterwards something that — ‘Oh boy, I wish I had heard thus and such and so and so.’ So I appreciate and want some of the tension; I don’t want too much of it, obviously, because we have to have certain efficiencies. But I think there is a balance there.”

What's interesting there is McCain's invocation of the "bubble," which is the exact word that has been frequently used to describe George W. Bush in the Oval Office. In fact, Nagourney and Rutenberg explicitly lay out the anti-Bush argument in one paragraph:

While President Bush has been criticized for being too insular and too slow to adapt to changing circumstances, Mr. McCain’s leadership of his campaign suggests a less hierarchical, more free-form style, much closer to that of President Bill Clinton.

You have your standard accounts of campaign in-fighting; two pollsters with conflicting philosophies are referenced, and the reporters chronicle a fight over McCain's recent negative veer. It might be instructive to note that the latter scuffle was initiated by a couple former McCain ads and outside image man Alex Castellanos, who you might remember from CNN's election night coverage.

I read this story and I can't help but wonder if McCain and Schmidt were thrilled to read it in the paper. McCain is, in this story, an omnivorous information consumer and a fan of dissent. That may all be true. But it seems conveniently timed, coming at a moment when the campaign is desperate to distance their candidate from an unpopular incumbent whose extraordinary lack of intellectual curiosity has long been chronicled.

So in the back of my mind there's a niggling little voice that keeps raising questions, foremost among them being this: did the McCain camp plant this story? You have a couple aides conspicuously grumble around a reporter, maybe stick them at a bar and let the press corps see them slam home a couple beers in frustration. Feed Nagourney and Rutenberg a few choice, anonymous quotes, and the reporter instinct takes over. Now they've got their teeth in a story that paints your guy in a positive light while ostensibly raising questions about the strength of his operation.

And I can't ignore the fact that Nagourney's one of the authors here. As I said, he's a go-to guy for The Times. He was also involved in a fairly significant kerfuffle with the Obama campaign a while back after he analyzed a poll by pointing out that Obama hadn't closed all of America's racial divides. Conflicts between reporters and campaigns are fairly routine, but this one got splashed around the internet and became a (very) minor sensation.

Now, let me say something that will pretty much invalidate the rest of this post: if I had to bet on the motivations involved here, I would guess that Nagourney and Rutenberg wrote the story in the usual way, using the usual sources, with no particularly unique involvement from the McCain camp.

But I do find myself slightly suspicious. And I wanted to share that, because I have lots of free time.

David Brooks Needs to Remove the Stick Up His Ass

Barack Obama made a big speech in Berlin yesterday. You might have heard about it; it made all the websites. The transcript shows an address that was inspiring and high-minded, if admittedly light on substantive policy discussion. The 200,000 people who showed up certainly seemed happy with it.

New York Times columnist David Brooks was not.

Brooks, who was not initially hostile toward Obama, soured on the Illinois Senator roughly the second it became obvious Obama would win the Democratic nomination. Ever since he's devoted many columns to mocking Obama's supporters and tedious screeds pointing out that he's human. (Shock!)

Brooks' point here is that Obama really should have been grumpier yesterday. The key paragraph:

But now it is more than half a year on, and the post-partisanship of Iowa has given way to the post-nationalism of Berlin, and it turns out that the vague overture is the entire symphony. The golden rhetoric impresses less, the evasion of hard choices strikes one more.

The columnist gives Obama some begrudging credit for calling for an increase in the European troop presence in Afghanistan, an unpopular position in Germany. But generally, Brooks wanted Obama to dig into the nitty gritty of foreign policy and give a wonkish policy speech to the 200,000 gathered in front of the city's "Victory Column."

What Brooks ignores is that there's a time for hard-nosed pragmatism and there's a time for hope and inspiring oratory. When 200,000 Germans gather in front of the Victory Column in the middle of the July, that is not the time to talk about chlorine baths for chickens. (Seriously. It's an issue.)

And I'm brought back to the point I made yesterday; namely, that oratory isn't worthless. It's not something you do to pass the time while the grown-ups talk in a back room. Inspiring people is important, and we do a disservice when we claim otherwise.

Considering the context of Obama's visit, it would have been inappropriate for him to stand up in front of the world and lay out the detailed foreign policy he hoped to implement in his first term as president. It would have been seen as an American senator subverting the authority and credibility of a sitting president in an international forum. In fact, the Times' political blog cited Obama's call for more troops as an unusual, perhaps unprecedented move.

There's nothing wrong with speaking vaguely and inspirationally in that environment. There will be a problem if it comes out that Obama met with Angela Merkel in private and seriously argued that the problems with Iran could be solved by joining hands and praying. There will be a problem if Obama takes office and tells his Secretary of Defense that the troops in Iraq can deflect RPGs by chanting "Yes, we can." Since there's precious little evidence that Obama's an idiot, I don't anticipate either of those revelations.

My favorite part of Brooks' column?

Obama used the word “walls” 16 times in the Berlin speech, and in 11 of those cases, he was talking about walls coming down.

Brooks would evidently like Obama to spend more time talking about the impenetrable walls that continue to divide us.

"And then there's the Great Wall of China, a tragic reminder of a time when Mongol hordes roved the Asian continent, killing and pillaging. Can't see that one coming down any time soon. Oh, and the Ebola virus. That must suck. It definitely builds a wall between people and their desire to have healthy organs. No cure for that in the offing. Also, this isn't really relevant to what I was just talking about, but I think it's important for those of you are single to know that you're probably not going to find love. You'll likely die embittered and alone. And those of you who have someone shouldn't get too comfortable; more likely than not you'll end up loathing the person you now love. Thank you, Berlin! Yes, we can!"

Brooks ended with this:

But substantively, optimism without reality isn’t eloquence. It’s just Disney.

And cynicism without intelligence isn't wisdom. It's just unpleasant.

You Stay Classy, Fox

Media Matters: Fox News airs altered photos of NY Times reporters
On the July 2 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, co-hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade labeled New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg and editor Steven Reddicliffe "attack dogs," claiming that Steinberg's June 28 article on the "ominous trend" in Fox News' ratings was a "hit piece." During the segment, however, Fox News featured photos of Steinberg and Reddicliffe that appeared to have been digitally altered -- the journalists' teeth had been yellowed, their facial features exaggerated, and portions of Reddicliffe's hair moved further back on his head. Fox News gave no indication that the photos had been altered.