Right Wing Nut House

I took a little test this morning to measure my “outrage quotient.” I’m sure you’re familiar with this test. Although it doesn’t require medical supervision, I recommend that at the very least, you have a friend or family member present just in case something goes wrong. After all, trying to gauge how angry you can get at the mainstream press or the left can be a dangerous proposition. There’s always the chance that you’ll come across something so spiteful, so biased, so…so…outrageous that a myocardial infarction becomes a distinct possibility.

Sue was dead set against me taking the test. “What happens if you read something from Daily Kos and your head explodes?” she asked plaintively.”Or watch Anderson Cooper emote like a cheesy actor in a bad production of Hamlet and throw up? I just did the floor, ya know.”

You can see it took a little convincing.

After promising to accompany her to Pier 1 Imports to pick up a wicker chair to replace the one that our loving cats eagerly shredded by peeling, ripping, biting, and chewing the offending furnishing to smithereens, she agreed to closely monitor my vital signs in the interest of safety.

We started with something easy; the indictment for homicide of the husband and wife owners of a nursing home where 34 elderly patients drowned during the hurricane. Evidently, the owners failed to accept an offer to evacuate the residents prior to the hurricane’s arrival.

My reaction surprised me. Didn’t the Mayor of New Orleans do exactly the same thing when Amtrak offered to evacuate several hundred people the day before the hurricane by train? According to the Washington Post, Amtrak ran a “dead head” train to move equipment out of the city. The company says they offered to move several hundred people but city officials turned them down.

I waited anxiously for the bile to rise in my throat in disgust and my blood pressure to careen out of control, but nothing happened. I glanced at Sue who looked relieved. I could have explained to her that the Mayor of New Orleans has become an untouchable. Any responsibility for the catastrophe rolls off his back like the water that inundated the hundreds of buses left in a municipal parking lot to become submerged instead of being used to evacuate citizens.

Since that didn’t elicit much of response, Sue tried to get a rise out of me by showing me a story involving the other half of the disaster duo, the Governor of Louisiana. It seems that Governor Blanco continues to exhibit a bit of peevishness at the federal government, this time because the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is taking too long to recover the dead bodies left in the wake of the hurricane. She says that the dead “deserve more respect than they have received.”

For a moment, I thought I detected a slight rumbling in my gut, a sure indication that my outrage was about to burst forth into a white hot series of invective and angry retorts. I wanted to say something like “maybe you should worry about giving more respect to the living, you cretinous lickpsittle! Start thinking about all the citizens of your state you let down so ignominiously in the hurricane’s aftermath! ” Alas, the rumbling was only indicative of a little indigestion from the Dominoes Pizza we had eaten the night before, not of any real outrage at Governor Blanco’s extraordinary mismanagement of the crisis.

I was beginning to get worried. The test was not going at all like I planned. Even Sue had begun to look at me as if something might be wrong. Then she remembered the story about the Louisiana Congressman who used to National Guard to retrieve his personal belongings while they were still carrying out search and rescue operations.

It seems that Representative William Jefferson (D-LA) commandeered some National Guard troops on Friday, September 2 to take him back to his house in New Orleans so he could pick up a few odds and ends - three suitcases, a laptop, and a box “the size of a small refrigerator.” This is the same Rep. Jefferson who last month had his home searched by the FBI in connection with a corruption probe.

Kind of makes you wonder what was in the box, no?

Sue looked downright crestfallen. No response worth mentioning. My heart never skipped a beat nor was my respiration affected at all. Again, I could have clued her in that having lived and worked in Washington D.C., you develop an outrage proof attitude when it comes to members of Congress. The venality and amorality is so widespread and endemic to the institution that it becomes depressingly the norm to read about such things.

So far, nothing had been able to raise my hackles. It really looked like, with a nod to Jo Dee Messina, “My Give a Damn” was really busted. Then I saw the fearful look on Sue’s face.

“I don’t think you should see this,” she said carefully. “It’s from a diarist at Daily Kos and it’s in response to the President’s statement that he takes responsibility for the federal foul-ups during disaster relief.”

I laughed and Sue nearly swooned. “You don’t get it,” she said angrily. Do you have any idea what this moonbat said?”

“Let me guess,” I chuckled. “Now that Bush has taken responsibility for mistakes made by the Federal government, he should be impeached. Am I right?”

“How did you guess?”

“Honey,” I said patiently, “Nothing those idiots at Kos say either surprises me or causes me much anger any more.”

Sue looked desperate. She thrust a printed copy of the offending passage in front of my nose:

Now that Bush has taken responsibility, he must resign. He has pleaded guilty. He has admitted that he was complicit in the deaths of thousands of people.

Haul his ass in front of the House of Representatives for an impeachment trial, and then ask him to confirm that he admits responsibility. If he denies this, he will look like a flip-flopping liar; if he confirms that it was his fault, Congress will be forced to impeach him.

I actually giggled after reading that. Somehow, the avalanche of lies, distortions, bias, and prejudice had numbed me. I felt like a wet noodle. I got the feeling that nothing the left did from here on out could possibly affect me one way or another. In short, I was suffering from “Outrage Fatigue.”

Then again, maybe it was that Dominoes Pizza we ate last night and by tomorrow I’ll be back to my old apoplectic self.

According to a CNN-Gallup poll released yesterday, the American people are in no mood as yet to blame President Bush for the relief fiascoes that occurred in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Nearly twice as many people - 25% to 13% - blame the disaster debacle tag team champions Blanc-o-Nagin for the unbelievable number of screw-ups, let downs, and incompetent decision making as blame the Bush-led undynamic duo of FEMA Director Brown and DHS Secretary Chertoff. And showing a perspicacity not evident when listening to people in Washington or Baton Rouge, 38% of the American people blame Mother Nature or, specifically, no one at all.

Never underestimate the intelligence of the American people.

Only 35% think the President did a “great” or “good” job. Another 21% believe he performed neither “good” or “bad.” On the other hand, 42% believe he did either a “bad” or “terrible” job which would seem to indicate the majority of independents believe the latter.

Not very cheery numbers for the White House…but also shows the stupidity of the Democrats who have been trying to portray the relief effort as a disaster almost before the last hurricane force gusts of wind from Katrina died down in the Gulf. There has been no discernible backlash yet against the Democrat’s blatant attempt to politicize the relief efforts while people were still stranded on rooftops and the law of the jungle reigned in the Convention Center. That tally may come when many more details are revealed regarding the inability of local DHS officials to work with FEMA employees.

What is slowly emerging from the rubble in New Orleans may in fact shock the American people out of the poisonous partisan warfare that has gripped the nation for more than a decade. The question will inevitably be asked: Was part of the reason for friction between state Homeland Security Department officials and national FEMA employees the result of partisan party politics?

The state government is Democratic. The national government is full of Republicans. Could there have been a level of distrust regarding the motives of each side which played a deleterious role in the disaster? A possible hint of this was revealed by Mayor Nagin in an interview with CNN American Morning on Friday, September 2. Nagin was talking about a meeting the President had with Governor Blanco in which he offered to have the federal government take over the relief effort:

NAGIN: They both shook — I don’t know the exact date. They both shook their head and said yes. I said, ‘Great.’ I said, ‘Everybody in this room is getting ready to leave.’ There was senators and his cabinet people, you name it, they were there. Generals. I said, ‘Everybody right now, we’re leaving. These two people need to sit in a room together and make a doggone decision right now.’

S. O’BRIEN: And was that done?

NAGIN: The president looked at me. I think he was a little surprised. He said, “No, you guys stay here. We’re going to another section of the plane, and we’re going to make a decision.”

He called me in that office after that. And he said, “Mr. Mayor, I offered two options to the governor.” I said — and I don’t remember exactly what. There were two options. I was ready to move today. The governor said she needed 24 hours to make a decision.

S. O’BRIEN: You’re telling me the president told you the governor said she needed 24 hours to make a decision?

NAGIN: Yes.

S. O’BRIEN: Regarding what? Bringing troops in?

NAGIN: Whatever they had discussed. As far as what the — I was abdicating a clear chain of command, so that we could get resources flowing in the right places.

S. O’BRIEN: And the governor said no.

NAGIN: She said that she needed 24 hours to make a decision. It would have been great if we could of left Air Force One, walked outside, and told the world that we had this all worked out. It didn’t happen, and more people died.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the Governor didn’t trust the President not to use the federalizing of the relief effort to highlight the national response to the tragedy at the expense of state efforts. Nor could the President take much more of the idiotic finger pointing on the part of Mayor Nagin who seemed to be spending more time giving interviews to the press saying nothing was being done than he did trying to recall the 500 or so New Orleans city policemen who had vanished into thin air once the storm struck.

Once the complete picture emerges regarding the scope of this tragedy, those numbers may jump substantially one way or another. For now, the American people, as usual, are showing themselves to be much more grown up than the idiots who are trying to make one side more culpable than the other.

In what has to be one of the most egregious examples of ignorance (or deliberate bias) ever demonstrated by a major media source, the Associated Press has released an article that takes FEMA Director Brown to task for failing to bring the agency’s victim relief and community outreach paper shufflers to New Orleans in the immediate aftermath of the storm.

The government’s disaster chief waited until hours after Hurricane Katrina had already struck the Gulf Coast before asking his boss to dispatch 1,000 Homeland Security workers to support rescuers in the region - and gave them two days to arrive, according to internal documents.

Michael Brown, director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sought the approval from Homeland Security Secretary Mike Chertoff roughly five hours after Katrina made landfall on Aug. 29. Brown said that among duties of these employees was to “convey a positive image” about the government’s response for victims.

“Among other duties”…HMMM. But what would be their main duties? Unfortunately, we don’t find this out until several paragraphs later:

Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said Brown had positioned front-line rescue teams and Coast Guard helicopters before the storm. Brown’s memo on Aug. 29 aimed to assemble the necessary federal work force to support the rescues, establish communications and coordinate with victims and community groups, Knocke said.

Instead of rescuing people or recovering bodies, these employees would focus on helping victims find the help they needed, he said.

THESE EMPLOYEES HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH RESCUING VICTIMS TRAPPED ON ROOFTOPS OR BRINGING FOOD TO THE HUNGRY OR WATER TO THE THIRSTY!

Instead, these 1,000 FEMA paper shufflers were responsible for helping the shocked and reeling citizens in filling out the massive number of federal forms necessary to get disaster relief.

It’s like this: Once upon a time, there was a little, tiny bureaucracy in the United States Government called the Federal Emergency Management Agency that would move into a disaster area after the clean-up was underway and open temporary offices where people could come and get help in trying to get their lives back together. In their benign munificence, the federal government would supply you with food, water, shelter, and loans to rebuild your smashed homes through a series of disaster relief programs. The kindly paper shufflers at FEMA were on hand to guide you through the labyrinth of federal forms you needed to fill out in order to receive this aid.

Later, the tiny agency grew, and grew, and then grew some more until it was all grown up and became the gargantuan disaster nanny that it is today. But a legacy of their early days still exists; they still set up temporary offices to help residents rebuild there lives.

This is what those 1,000 FEMA employees were being dispatched to do. They had nothing to do with hanging out of helicopters to pluck people from rooftops stranded by the flood. They had nothing to do with driving trucks into the city full of food and water to feed the people who desperately needed it. They had nothing to do with even coordinating any of these activities. All these people were already there, on the ground, in New Orleans working tirelessly to save lives.

For the Associated Press to release an article like this is flabbergasting. It reveals a breathtaking bias in reporting that should be pointed out and condemned by not only bloggers but anyone in the MSM who is concerned about the credibility of their industry. What should have been a one paragraph “filler” in any newspaper has been transformed into definitive “proof” that FEMA and, by extension the Bush Administration, failed to act in a timely manner in relieving the distress of the people of New Orleans.

Watching New York Times columnist Paul Krugman plumb the depths of depraved Bush bashing is getting close to becoming something of a guilty pleasure; sort of like viewing pornography but without the edifying inclusion of the undraped model’s vital statistics to offset the charge of prurient behavior. After all if, as Justice Potter Stewart famously said of it, pornography is something I recognize when I see it, then certainly the former Enron consultant Krugman’s scribblings will be immediately identifiable as the product of a smutty and lascivious mind, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Marquis de Sade was writing his paeans to the grotesque and unnatural.

Krugman is the best fulminator in the business. No other columnist seethes with as much irrational spite. No other liberal commentator can work himself into such hysterical paroxysms of revulsion over his ideological opponents. He has accused conservatives of wanting to kill liberals. He has just recently been taken to task for blatantly lying about the results of the 2000 Presidential recount by a consortium of media outlets, saying falsely that the study - in which his own paper participated - showed Al Gore winning the election.

And now, Krugman has written a column so chock full of omissions, falsehoods, and outright lies that I’m going to break my promise made just three days ago not to play “the blame game” and give some well deserved rhetorical slaps to The Fulminater’s gigantic ego and minuscule wit.

The title alone should warn the reader off. “Killed by Contempt” is an interesting concept but one that belongs in the realm of exaggeration rather than serious thought. This is par for the course for surely, Mr. Krugman wasn’t being serious when he wrote this:

Each day since Katrina brings more evidence of the lethal ineptitude of federal officials. I’m not letting state and local officials off the hook, but federal officials had access to resources that could have made all the difference, but were never mobilized.

Never mobilized? A partial listing of federal resources not only mobilized but in place less than 24 hours after the hurricane hit make Krugman out to be either a sloppy, ignorant journalist with no business writing for a major newspaper (even if it is th New York Times) or a prevaricator of monstrous proportions.

Federal assistance in place by Tuesday afternoon:

FEMA deployed 23 Disaster Medical Assistance Teams, seven search and rescue task forces, and several hundred tons of supplies for stricken residents.

Department of Transportation had 390 trucks full of millions of MRE’s, millions of gallons of water, millions of pounds of ice, as well as millions of pounds of other disaster supplies.

The Coast Guard had 30 ships and 40 aircraft carrying out operations the minute that Katrina’s fury had passed.

There were 4,000 National Guardsmen assembled and deployed in Louisiana alone.

This doesn’t include assistance mobilized from other agencies such as the Department of Agriculture, Department of Labor, Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Defense and government coordination with the American Red Cross. And most of those listed assets were in place before Katrina even hit.

Then, just to prove he likes to kill his readers with contempt for their intelligence, Krugman contradicts himself:

Here’s one of many examples: The Chicago Tribune reports that the U.S.S. Bataan, equipped with six operating rooms, hundreds of hospital beds and the ability to produce 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, has been sitting off the Gulf Coast since last Monday - without patients.

Experts say that the first 72 hours after a natural disaster are the crucial window during which prompt action can save many lives. Yet action after Katrina was anything but prompt. Newsweek reports that a “strange paralysis” set in among Bush administration officials, who debated lines of authority while thousands died.

I can’t be the only one who sees the total disconnect between his charge of the feds not mobilizing resources and his depiction of a fully staffed hospital ship off the coast on the day of the storm. The fact that it stood empty was the result of necessity. A trip to the ship by helicopter would take nearly 1/2 an hour from the Superdome. A trip to the airport (where medical cases were brought) took 10 minutes. Perhaps we should ask Mr. Krugman if it was his life at stake where minutes counted, would he like to take a nice, relaxing half hour trip to a hospital ship or have the helo make a mad dash for the airport where medical assistance available. And relying on Newsweek for a characterization of an attitude regarding how the Bush Administration reacted (”strange” paralysis? Is there any other kind?) is just plain batty.

Here’s where Krugman deserves to be cast into the outer darkness:

What caused that paralysis? President Bush certainly failed his test. After 9/11, all the country really needed from him was a speech. This time it needed action - and he didn’t deliver.

It would be interesting indeed to know what Dr. Krugman’s prescription for America would have been following 9/11. Alas, given the shallowness of his critique of what the President did in the days and weeks following the attack, we’ll never know. Krugman’s diagnoses since that awful day have usually been so far off the mark that if he was a doctor he would have been jailed for negligence and run out of the medical profession for incompetence.

But the federal government’s lethal ineptitude wasn’t just a consequence of Mr. Bush’s personal inadequacy; it was a consequence of ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good. For 25 years the right has been denigrating the public sector, telling us that government is always the problem, not the solution. Why should we be surprised that when we needed a government solution, it wasn’t forthcoming?

Actually, the government response to the disaster somewhat proves conservative’s point about bureaucratic incapacity. But Krugman’s laughable summation of conservative attitude toward government reveals an unseriousness of thought when it comes to the conservative ideal of federalism. It’s not government conservatives hate. It’s government held hostage by do gooding lickspittles like Krugman who wish to use it’s power as a club to affect behavior and foist a stultifying sameness on the rest of us. It’s bad government conservatives hate. It’s incompetent government conservatives criticize. And for Krugman to say that conservatives hate all government is worse than simplistic; it’s moronic.

Mr. Krugman then turns his less than insightful gaze on one of the most useless Federal agencies around; the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Several recent news analyses on FEMA’s sorry state have attributed the agency’s decline to its inclusion in the Department of Homeland Security, whose prime concern is terrorism, not natural disasters. But that supposed change in focus misses a crucial part of the story.

For one thing, the undermining of FEMA began as soon as President Bush took office. Instead of choosing a professional with expertise in responses to disaster to head the agency, Mr. Bush appointed Joseph Allbaugh, a close political confidant. Mr. Allbaugh quickly began trying to scale back some of FEMA’s preparedness programs.

You might have expected the administration to reconsider its hostility to emergency preparedness after 9/11 - after all, emergency management is as important in the aftermath of a terrorist attack as it is following a natural disaster. As many people have noticed, the failed response to Katrina shows that we are less ready to cope with a terrorist attack today than we were four years ago.

But the downgrading of FEMA continued, with the appointment of Michael Brown as Mr. Allbaugh’s successor.

There is not one shred of evidence that the establishment of FEMA in 1979 has led to the saving of a single additional human life. Prior to the creation of this monster in 1979, each state was responsible for disaster response, a job they were well suited for given their proximity to the tragedy. If the state emergency managers needed help, they called on the Federal government to supply it. The thing is, they didn’t always call on the feds for help in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. And for really big cataclysms like devastating earthquakes or hurricanes, the governors and local officials on the scene knew best what they needed and either placed a call to Washington where the resources were then dispatched, or for longer term help, got their Washington representatives to pump the federal spigot for funds.

FEMA was originally seen as a paper shuffling agency. FEMA reps would show up after a disaster with federal forms for the stunned and reeling survivors to fill out in triplicate and a check would then be forthcoming; a redundant but relatively harmless activity for which they were perfectly suited.

What happened in the intervening years has been a textbook case of bureaucratic turf building. From a budget of $250 million in 1979 to its current bloat of nearly $6 billion, FEMA has taken upon itself the role of disaster nanny, horning in on local and state control of disaster resources until disaster management itself has now been pretty much placed in their hands. By duplicating many of the resources that states utilize in the management of natural calamities, FEMA sows confusion and the kind of turf wars mentioned by Governor Blanco.

FEMA has since been moved into the Department of Homeland Security where the President hoped to scale back its disaster management efforts in favor of local DHS officials who would be better positioned to get what they need from Washington. Since one of the first rules of bureaucracy is all good deeds - such as trying to reduce a layer of unnecessary government control - are punished severely, it appears to me anyway that some of the problems associated with this disaster can be attributed to a system in transition.

All that said, even if Mr. Krugman’s criticism of management were valid, he inadvertently makes the point that local and state officials usually know what they need and should be trusted with asking for it without having to fight the Michael Browns of this world who today probably wishes he was back running horse shows.

Finally, Krugman reveals a childlike faith in government that is so misplaced as to put his entire critique in the realm of fantasy:

That contempt, as I’ve said, reflects a general hostility to the role of government as a force for good. And Americans living along the Gulf Coast have now reaped the consequences of that hostility.

The administration has always tried to treat 9/11 purely as a lesson about good versus evil. But disasters must be coped with, even if they aren’t caused by evildoers. Now we have another deadly lesson in why we need an effective government, and why dedicated public servants deserve our respect. Will we listen?

Of course! Government as a force for “good.” Jeez…I thought that went out with the 1960’s. Government, of course, is neither good nor evil. It just is. It’s as close as you can get to being a man made force of nature.

And the “lesson” we might learn from this tragedy isn’t that we need effective government but rather effective local government. While Krugman dreams the dream of all good government liberals, the truly insidious nature of government is revealed. Just because good people want good things doesn’t mean that government will deliver them. The law of unintended consequences - as we’ve seen over the 25 year history of FEMA - knows no morality other than it’s own, relentless logic when it comes to bureaucracy.

Reporters are for the most part a hard bitten lot. Inured as they seem at times to human suffering, journalists have been criticized more than once for intruding on a family’s grief or reporting from disasters as if it were a ballgame of sorts.

An exception was on display last night. Veteran CNN reporter Jeanne Meserve was reporting first hand from neighborhoods that were underwater in New Orleans last night and showed genuine feeling and emotion as she reported to Aaron Brown via satellite phone. Her voice, shaking with emotion Meserve gave the most mesmerizing first person account of a disaster I’ve ever heard:

It’s been horrible. As I left tonight, darkness, of course, had fallen. And you can hear people yelling for help. You can hear the dogs yelping, all of them stranded, all of them hoping someone will come.

But for tonight, they’ve had to suspend the rescue efforts. It’s just too hazardous for them to be out on the boats. There are electrical lines that are still alive. There are gas lines that are still spewing gas. There are cars that are submerged. There are other large objects. The boats can’t operate. So they had to suspend operations and leave those people in the homes.

As we were driving back, we passed scores of boats, Fish and Wildlife boats that they brought in. They’re flat bottomed. They’ve obviously going to put them in the water just as soon as they possibly can and go out and reach the people who are out there who desperately need help.

We watched them, some of them, come in. They were in horrible shape, some of them. We watched one woman whose leg had been severed. Mark Biello, one of our cameramen, went out in one of the boats to help shoot. He ended up being out for hours and told horrific tales. He saw bodies. He saw where — he saw other, just unfathomable things. Dogs wrapped in electrical — electrical lines who were still alive that were being electrocuted.

Brown asks her if rescue workers can communicate at all with those who are trapped:

They aren’t tonight. When the boats were in the water, as the boats went around through the neighborhood, they yelled. And people yelled back. But Mark, when he came back, told me that — that some of the people, they just couldn’t get to. They just couldn’t get to them. They couldn’t maneuver the boats in there.

Because this had happened before in Hurricane Betsy, there were many people who kept axes in their homes and had them in the attic in preparation for this. Some people were able to use those axes and make holes in their roof and stick their head out or their body out or climb up completely. But many others clearly didn’t have that. Most of the rescuers appeared to be carrying axes, and they were trying to hack them out as best they could to provide access and haul them out.

BROWN: I’m sorry. What…

MESERVE: There were also Coast Guard helicopters involved in it, Aaron, with the seat up (ph), flying overhead. It appears that when they saw someone on a rooftop, they were dropping flares, to try to signal the boats to get there.

BROWN: Is there any sense of — that there’s triage, that they’re looking to see who needs help the worst? Or they’re just — they were just getting to whomever they could get to and get them out of there?

MESERVE: I had the distinct impression they were just getting to whoever they could get to. I talked to one fire captain who’d been out in his personal boat. He said he worked an area probably 10 square blocks. He’d rescued 75 people. He said in one instance there were something like 18 people in one house, some of them young. One, he said, appeared to be a newborn.

Brown asks how high the water is:

MESERVE: Well, I can tell you that in the vicinity where I was, the water came up to the eaves of the house. And I was told by several rescue workers that we were not seeing the worst of it, that we were at one end of the Ward 9 part of the city and that there’s another part, inaccessible by road at this point, where the road — where the houses were covered to their rooftops. And they were having a great deal of problem gaining access down there. The rescue workers also told me that they saw bodies in that part.

BROWN: Any — you mentioned earlier that the water seemed to get progressively deeper. The walkway from this, if you don’t know, is just a question of tide moving in and tide moving out?

MESERVE: Well, I can tell you that the people who were rescued with whom I had a chance to speak told me that the water came up very suddenly on them. They said most of the storm had passed and what apparently was the storm surge came.

Some of them talked about seeing a little water on their floor, going to the front door, seeing a lot of water, going to the back door, seeing more bodies of water, and then barely having time to get up the stairs. One man I talked to was barefoot. He hadn’t had time to put on shoes. Another woman was in her housedress and flip-flops.

As for the water tonight and how fast it may be going up and down, and you know, I may not have the most current information about the tides, but I can tell you that downtown here the water seemed to be, I’d say, six inches or so deeper than it was when I left earlier this afternoon. It may be a totally situation — different situation…

Brown asks if Meserve has any idea how many people may be stranded. Here Meserve actually starts to cry:

MESERVE: Yes. Nobody has a sense of that. And may I say that the crew was extraordinary. We’ve had very difficult situations. Our cameraman is working with a broken foot since 9 a.m. this morning to try and get this story to you. Big words of praise for them and for Mark Biello, who went out and ended up in that water, trying to get the rescue boats over partially submerged railroad tracks. It was a heroic piece of work by CNN employees.

BROWN: Our thanks to you for your efforts. It — you don’t need to hear this from me, but you know, people sometimes think that we’re a bunch of kind of wacky thrill seekers doing this work, sometimes, and no one who has listened to the words you’ve spoken or the tone of your voice could possibly think that now. We appreciate your work.

MESERVE: Aaron, thank you. We are sometimes wacky thrill seekers. But when you stand in the dark, and you hear people yelling for help and no one can get to them, it’s a totally different experience.

BROWN: Jeanne, thank you. We’ll talk later tonight. Thank you.

Jeanne Meserve, been on the team for almost 15 years, I think. She is a very tough, capable, strong reporter, and she met her match on a story tonight.

Superior reporting told with a reporters eye and a human soul.

UPDATE

To keep abreast of events, for links to bloggers covering the disaster on scene, for links to agencies that need help, and for links to anything and everything to do with this disaster, visit Michelle Malkin at least once an hour for updates.

Talk about a journalist giving us the first draft of history, Michelle is doing it for the blogosphere.

The latest IPSOS-AP poll is out and it’s official: an overwhelming majority of Americans support the Constitution.

The American Constitution, that is.

This earth shattering news is based on the fact that 1001 people responded to one of the silliest questions ever asked by a major polling organization:

An overwhelming number of people say critics of the Iraq war should be free to voice their objections - a rare example of widespread agreement about a conflict that has divided the nation along partisan lines.

Well, duh.

Nearly three weeks after a grieving California mother named Cindy Sheehan started her anti-war protest near President Bush’s Texas ranch, nine of 10 people surveyed in an AP-Ipsos poll say it’s OK for war opponents to publicly share their concerns about the conflict.

I think if some pasty-faced pollster had asked me that question I would have looked at him as if he was from the planet Mongol and spit in his eye for insulting my intelligence. Why would such a question be of earth shattering importance? Better they ask if 1001 Americans like ice cream or enjoy sex.

Of course, the purpose of the question was to tie that 90% figure into the Cindy Sheehan-George Bush “Stand-Off” in Crawford. By implication, the AP is making it seem as if people are endorsing Sheehan’s quixotic, Quixote-like quest to bitch slap the President over the Iraq war - a moment she devoutly hoped would have been a catalyst for the anti-war movement.

Instead, the President won’t see her. Now that’s a question I would love to know the answer to: “Should President Bush meet with Cindy Sheehan despite the fact that he met with her once already and where she expressed her thanks to the President for “really caring?”

Somehow, I don’t think we’ll be seeing a question like that asked by any national polling outfit anytime soon.

Other poll results showed the President’s approval in handling the Iraq War right where it should be: around 37%. I know I would have given my disapproval for the way the civilians have handled the war recently. While our military is doing its usual spectacular job, the President and the brass in the Pentagon seem wedded to policies that are confusing, contradictory, and unrealistic.

One result of the poll that surprised me was that only 53% of the people think the war was a mistake. After the most relentless and aggressively anti-war media campaign in American history 47% of the American people still think invading Iraq was the right move. The poll also showed a solid 60% favor staying in Iraq till the job is done. The Gallup number is much higher - 67% - which could reflect an oddity in the way the polling was conducted.

There was the inevitable (and tiresome) comparison to Viet Nam:

More than half of those polled, 53 percent, say the United States made a mistake in going to war in Iraq. That level of opposition is about the same as the number who said that about Vietnam in August 1968, six months after the Tet offensive - the massive North Vietnamese attack on South Vietnamese cities that helped turn U.S. opinion against that war. Various polls have shown that erosion of war support has been faster in Iraq than during the Vietnam War in the 1960s.

Please note the totally unrelated mention of August 1968. What in God’s name does that have to do with a poll taken in August 2005? The 1968 poll was taken “six months after the Tet Offensive.” The 2005 poll was taken six months after…February. Now I hate the month of February as much as the next man but to compare Tet with February is just a little kooky.

And then there’s the helpful information (wishful?) that the erosion of war support (in what way?) has been faster in Iraq than Viet Nam.

Perhaps it would have been more helpful to know what analysis those numbers were based on. Seems to be a pretty broad statement to make with no proof to back it up. Perhaps some enterprising blogger would like to look into that statement because I seem to recall polls taken last November that while showing greater approval of the President’s handling of Iraq also show about the same percentage of people believing the war was a mistake and that we should leave immediately.

I have no doubt that Americans are getting tired of the war. They’re tired of the constant bombardment of bad news from the press and the carping and caterwauling of the left over the war. I am too. But if the Iraqis can ever get their act together and come up with a constitution agreeable to most of the country, I’m pretty confident that some of those numbers will inch upward.

And if the President could get out front on the war and show a little leadership, his numbers will probably take a turn for the better too.

“Every tomorrow has two handles. We can take hold of it with the handle of anxiety or the handle of faith.” (Henry Ward Beecher)

For just a few hours today, I want to forget about Cindy Sheehan, George Bush, Democrats, Republicans, the right, the left, the MSM, Islam, Chrstianity, Osama, Zarqawi, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, any and all things I’ve been writing about since I started posting on this site almost exactly 11 months ago.

Instead, I want to think about the future. Not of the country or the world, but a much more personal future - a place that you and I will find ourselves before we know it. I think that a large part of that future will involve what’s going on here, on this site, on your site, and millions like them around the world.

In a large sense, we’ve moved far beyond Marshall McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message.” McLuhan was talking about human interaction and the “extensions” we use to communicate. Everything from gossiping over the backyard fence to satellite communications fell within McLuhan’s broad definition of “medium.” McLuan also famously coined the phrase “the global village” to describe how these extensions would unite the planet while at the same time, shrinking it to the point that it could be squeezed through a cathode ray tube and shown on a TV screen.

But the old definitions, like the tired gatekeepers who are fighting a losing battle against the barbarians storming the pallisades of old media, are simply not working. We’ve had some fun on this site making sport of their demise. And like dinosaurs who didn’t have a clue they were on the way out, we can sit back and watch in bemused fashion as we take a perverse sort of pleasure in their death throes. In a ghoulish sort of way, this is what passes for entertainment on many blogs, including this one. I suspect that this will continue to be the case because the nature of this medium enslaves us, binds us, and with tortuous regularity ultimately dooms us to follow a certain path.

The nature of this medium is content. When I first started writing a blog almost exactly 11 months ago, I knew I wanted to write about politics, media, history, and the way that those forces intersect and ultimately interact. I found the best way to do that was to write essays. Occasionally, to feed the content monster, I’ve been forced to alter the formula and simply link to other good blog posts with scant commentary on what someone else has written. Whenever I do that, I feel a twinge of regret and feel like slapping myself for my laziness or lack of inspiration.

This demon of a blog is an all consuming beast. It eats ideas for breakfast. It gobbles up perspectives for lunch. It devours concepts for dinner and snacks on personal conceits and beliefs between meals. But what it really gorges itself on is time.

I figure to write a 500-750 word essay takes about 3 hours. Some take longer, some shorter. Where time comes into play is doing research for an essay. And this is where it’s easy to be seduced by the internet.

The amount of information out there is beyond belief. I’ve gotten pretty good at googling up whatever information I need in order to get different perspectives on just about any issue you can imagine. What’s even more amazing is that you can find a treasure trove of information on just about any event in world history. And there just isn’t time to read it all. I’d love to sit back and read a long essay on the reign of Franz Joseph and how the death throes of the Hapsburg dynasty resulted in the explosion of nationalism which was a proximate cause of World War I. But I don’t have the time.

Perhaps I should explain. One would think that in my position - unemployed by choice, financially comfortable - I would have all the time in the world. Indeed, I spend a good 10-12 hours a day in front of this screen trying to keep up with the world as it rushes past. But my purpose in starting a blog was two-fold; to reaqcuaint myself with the writing skills I used a couple of decades ago when politics was my life and to build a blog that could act as a stepping stone to making a living as a writer.

The problem is that in the content driven culture of blogs, you don’t really have time to work much on number 1 and thus become a slave to number 2. There are not too many people who want to say upfront that most of what they do on a blog is geared toward increasing readership, links, and ultimately their standing in the ecosphere. Some see such grasping materialsim as sullying the “purity” of this new medium. Spare me. This new medium is exactly what you make of it. If you want to remain pure as the driven snow and not take any advertisements and say that you’re only writing for yourself, that’s fine. You’re welcome to that point of view and I congratulate you for it. You’re a better man than I.

Ultimately, readers will praise or condemn me not for the reason I write but for what I write - content. And here’s where the future comes into play in a big way.

How are we going to be receiving content 5 years from now? Ten years? I say “receiving” content because at the moment, we are slaves to others for access to that vital commodity. Will there come a day when content will not be “received” as much as it just simply is? In other words, if we’re not slaves to gatekeepers for the distribution of information, will there come a time when the “message is the medium?”

Jeff Jarvis:

I’m writing this post — grappling with perhaps the most fundamental truth of my brief blogging career — because I still hear big-media colleagues insisting — or perhaps they’re praying — that content is king, that owning content is where the value is, that equity will still grow from exclusivity.

But no: Content is transient, its value perishable, its chance of success slight. You think your article or book or movie or song or show is worth a fortune and in a blockbuster economy, if you were insanely lucky, you could be right. But now anyone can create content. And thanks to the power of the link — and the trust it carries — anyone can get the world to see it. Is some of this new load of content crap? Sure. Lots of content in the old media world was crap, too. But don’t calculate the proportions. Look instead at the gross volume of quality: There’s simply more good stuff out there than there could be before. And it can be created at incredibly low or no cost.

There is no scarcity of good stuff. And when there is no scarcity, the value of owning a once-scarce commodity diminishes and then disappears. In fact, it’s worse than that: Owning the content factory only means that you have higher costs than the next guy: You own the high-priced talent or infrastructure while your new competitor owns just her own talent and a PC.

What Jarvis is saying - and I agree with him wholeheartedly - is that I and most other bloggers are barking up the wrong tree. Content is transient. It’s not the end. It’s not even a means to an end. It simply exists. Content is not even a commodity - unless it’s so superior that it transcends conventions and enters the realm of culture itself. As Jarvis points out, that is a rare occurence. Content and how you recieve it (distribution) are secondary. But to what?

This is so hard for those of us trained in the old economy to get our heads around. That is why, like an ape on 2001, I keep poking at this obelisk to figure out what it is.

But in this new age, you don’t want to own the content or the pipe that delivers it. You want to participate in what people want to do on their own. You don’t want to extract value. You want to add value. You don’t want to build walls or fences or gardens to keep people from doing what they want to do without you. You want to enable them to do it. You want to join in.

And once you get your head around that, you will see that you can grow so much bigger so much faster with so much less cost and risk.

So don’t own the content. Help people make and find and remake and recommend and save the content they want. Don’t own the distribution. Gain the trust of the people to help them use whatever distribution and medium they like to find what they want.

In these new economics, you want to stand back and interfere and restrict as little as possible. You want to reduce costs to the minimum. You want to join in wherever you are welcome.

Okay…so there will be content and there will be distribution of that content but the value of both will take a backseat to the value of the community (or readership) itself, what Jay Rosen refers to as “a horizontal network” of like minded people all of whom will not only read content but contribute and help others contribute. In turn, the content is disseminated (linked?) where ideally, the value is contained in the act of sharing.

Here’s Jay Rosen on the sea change that’s taking place right under our noses:

Everywhere the cost of putting like-minded people in touch with each other is falling. (Idea number 8 on my Top Ten list.) So is the cost of pooling their knowledge. The Net is ideal for horizontal communication— peer to peer, stranger to stranger, voter to voter, reader to reader. When you talk about the Web era in journalism think: audience atomization overcome. Then you will be on the right track.

Think: media tools in public hands. We are in the middle of a producer’s revolution in media, also called Citizens Media by its great promoter and sage, Jeff Jarvis, following in the steps of others, who recognized what a big shift this potentially was.

Open Source journalism is all journalism that derives from the Janes Intelligence Review case, which was, in fact, “a giant leap forward for collaborative online journalism.” (There were other leaps too, the most important of which is Oh My News.) Not satisfied with that definition? Simpler one: Dan Gillmor says his readers know more than he does. Open Source journalism builds on that insight, which is foundational.

On a macro level, we saw this concept of open source journalism in action during the Rathergate affair where literally thousands of blog readers whose expertise in arcane subjects like typewriter fonts of IBM Selectrics from the 1970’s contributed to the overall story. And now that concept has been extended to on-line publications and even the editing of on-line books!

But let me whine for a moment; I’m not a journalist. I don’t pretend to be one nor do have any desire to imitate one. Will there be room for a 51 year old opinionated fat man who sees himself in a silly, heroic sort of way as a polemicist, a rabble rouser, someone who 200 years ago would have been posting broadsides on buildings facing the town square? Where does that leave me? How do I participate in this brave new world if I don’t want to climb on board this new media bandwagon?

More questions; what innovations will there be in hardware and software that will affect this new medium? How about changes in the internet itself? Access to it? The portability of it?

These questions go to the root of my problem; how should I approach the future? As Mr. Beecher (whose daughter Harriet was to write the play Uncle Tom’s Cabin) points out, one can either be anxious about the future or have faith in it. At the moment, I’m extraordinarily anxious. I suppose that’s natural for anyone my age whose basic supposition about the way things are is undergoing a radical transformation. I’d like to have faith in the future but wishing won’t make it so. I think the best any of us can do is keep an ear to the ground, watch for trends, and even try to anticipate change wherever possible. Easier said than done. I suppose in the end, having faith in the future means having faith in oneself.

And that, dear readers, is a process that gives meaning to any life. Self-discovery in the internet age. Who woulda thunk it.

UPDATE

Demosophist at Jawa Report links the Jarvis post and ties into what appears to be an idea for an open source intelligence network during wartime. The idea comes from this post by Donald Sensing which lists some interesting advantages that such a network would have.

The writer ties this in with MSM coverage of Iraq:

As always the value is in reliability and validity, and what has changed involves the method by which the public at large arrives at its assessment of those conditions. Every time MSM provides an assessment that turns out later to have been imprecise and even wildly erroneous the public downgrades their determination of the reliability and validity of their information and explanations. But the cycle by which this process unfolds, while nearly instantaneous in some instances, can take up to a year depending on the kind of information involved. And some things, like the brushstrokes of the counterinsurgency in Iraq, are making it through in dibs and dabs. But this is the very nature of brushstrokes. When the entire masterpiece becomes fully visible things may change very quickly, because it will be universally recognized that the critical detail was largely, if not completely, invisible to MSM.

I agree with Ann Althouse on this one: Is this for real?

IN THE presidential campaign, a new threshold in church-state relations was crossed when Catholic bishops threatened to exclude Senator John Kerry from the Eucharist because of his support for Roe v. Wade. The Senate Judiciary Committee is now fully justified in asking these bishops whether the same threats would apply to Supreme Court nominee Judge Roberts, if he were to vote to uphold Roe v. Wade.

The bishops have made this question legitimate because Americans no longer know whether a Catholic judge can hear abortion cases without an automatic conflict of interest.

Asking the bishops to testify would be healthy. If they rescinded the threats made against Kerry, then Roberts would feel free to make his decision without the appearance of a conflict of interest, and Catholic politicians who support Roe v. Wade would gain renewed confidence in their advocacy. If the bishops repeated or confirmed their threats, the Senate Judiciary Committee should draft legislation calling for the automatic recusal of Catholic judges from cases citing Roe v. Wade as a precedent.

That’s right. The author of the article Christopher Morris is advocating a law be passed to automatically mandate the recusal of a judge based solely on his religious beliefs.

Actually, this opens up some marvelous opportunities for legislative mischief aimed at miscreant judges. Imagine being able to bar minority judges from ruling on civil rights cases. Or white judges from ruling on reverse discrimination cases. Or women judges from ruling on gender equality cases. Or Quaker judges from ruling on death penalty cases.

While we’re at it, why don’t we make Catholic judges sew a great big red “C” on their cloak and make them clean the Supreme Court bathrooms?

A little too much hyperbole for you this early in the morning? Try not to choke on your danish when reading this:

One would think Catholic judges would want such a measure in place as a means of honoring their own convictions. That this proposal will no doubt be controversial should not be a reason for failing to pursue it: Political advocacy by religious organizations is on the rise and will only become stronger. If the subject is ducked this time by the Senate Judiciary Committee, it will only come up later in a more aggravated form.

It’s time to have this dialog. Without it, the decisions of our highest court, already tainted by the Bush-Gore election, will increasingly be perceived as self-serving, political, and illegitimate.

I like Dale Frank’s take on this:

Why, you know I hadn’t thought about that before. But, while we’re on the subject, maybe Jews could be forced to wear yellow stars, so they can more easily identify their fellow co-religionists in public. I mean, you know, they’d feel so much more secure if they could look around in a crowd and see a fellow landsmann, wouldn’t they?

Please note that all decisions of the Court have been “tainted” for their defiance of the Democratic party in upholding state election law in Florida which was passed by state legislators who were voted in by the people of the State of Florida. It’s amazing that to this day, liberal partisans like Mr. Morris are still grumpy over the fact that the Supreme Court refused to nullify state law and dictate to the state of Florida how the people’s representatives should conduct the business of elections.

But, hey! Why let a little thing like, you know, the law stand in the way when there are Christians to be publicly gored:

In theory, the same Holy Spirit that made evangelicals born again could also move them to change a social or political view at any time. (In drafting mandatory recusal legislation, senators should probe the foundations of these beliefs and persuade themselves that evangelicals retained a meaningful, not just a technical, choice.) Inquiry into Judaism, Islam, and other religions should also focus on whether any of them make threats against members who hold particular views about abortion.

In other words, in order to see if our Christian judge “retained a meaningful, not just technical choice” in their ability to change their minds about Roe V Wade, we should delve deeply into their religious convictions by asking them all sorts of personal questions not related to their ability to carry out their duties as impartial jurists.

Mr. Morris is not a serious man. He is instead, in need of attention. I recommend his mommy come to his home in Vermont and deliver a few well aimed whaps to his backside and give him the love and consideration he so obviously missed out on as a child.

If it’s attention he seeks, Mr. Morris has got it. And perhaps a little history lesson is in order for Mr. Morris and anyone else who seeks to revive religious litmus tests for any issue and for any public servant whose personal beliefs may conflict with the law.

The anti-Catholic bigotry that roiled this country’s politics for more than 300 years reached a zenith of sorts in the election of 1928 which saw Democrat Al Smith, a Catholic, face off against Herbert Hoover. The nauseating display of ant-Catholic bigotry which directly led to Smith’s defeat convinced both parties that nominating a Catholic for high office was the kiss of death.

This all changed in the election of 1960. Historians have long pondered the reason for the dissipation of anti-Catholic sentiment in the electorate that finally allowed for a Catholic to be elected President. At first, as historian Thomas Carty points out, there was even a high level of anti-Catholic bigotry among liberals:

Author James A. Michener recalled feeling quite startled when guests at publisher Bennett Cerf’s early 1960 dinner party challenged John F. Kennedy’s presidential candidacy on religious grounds. In an educated, professional crowd, Michener encountered “American liberals [who] … had the most serious and deep-seated fears of a Catholic in the Presidency.” One individual called the Vatican “dictatorial, savage[,] … reactionary … [and] brutal in its lust for power.” Others feared that clerical pressures would determine Kennedy’s political decisions. One colleague declared that “Irish priests” would manipulate a Catholic president “as if he were their toy.” A Catholic at Michener’s table characterized her church as antidemocratic and incompatible with church-state separation and religious liberty. According to Michener, these individuals claimed to know many other ideological liberals who mistrusted Catholic presidential candidates.

Kennedy had to prove to Kingmakers - even Catholic ones like Mayor Richard Daley in Chicago - that his Catholicism would not be a liability in a general election. The first test of his viability was in the West Virginia primary where his main rival, Hubert Humphrey, tried to play the old “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” card with elliptical references to Kennedy’s faith.

Kennedy fought back with both political savvy and a few dirty tricks of his own, trying to tar Humphrey as a draft dodger during WW II (he served variously as state director of war production training and reemployment and State chief of Minnesota war service program in 1942 and assistant director of the War Manpower Commission in 1943) while addressing the issue of his Catholicism head on.

In what author Theodor H. White pointed to as a public appearance almost as important as JFK’s speech at the Ministerial Association of Greater Houston, Kennedy was asked point blank at a press conference about his religion. Rather than remain silent on the issue as he had in Wisconsin two weeks before, Kennedy framed the issue as one of fairness. He said “I do not believe that forty million Americans should lose the right to run for president on the day they were baptized.” In short, Kennedy challenged voters to prove they were not bigots by voting for him. It was a brilliant political stroke and Kennedy’s subsequent win effectively ended Humphrey’s challenge.

Later that fall in Houston, Kennedy buried the issue before one of the most conservative Protestant organizations in the country, the aforementioned Ministers group. In one of the more memorable lines, Kennedy once again, gives people a reason not to use anti-Catholicism as a reason to vote against him:

I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish — where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches, or any other ecclesiastical source — where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials — and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

On election day, the American people made a conscious choice to elect a Catholic President not because of his religion, but in spite of it. Now Mr. Morris would have us choose judges for exactly the opposite reason. In Mr. Morris’ world, either Catholic judges need not apply or they should be hamstrung with litmus tests and background checks and God knows what else. Once you let loose the dogs of legislation on judicial qualifications, we’ll have litmus tests for all sorts of issues; gay marriage, school prayer, eminent domain, and on and on.

For a country founded both because of religious freedom and in spite of religious differences, we’ve done remarkably well in tolerating one another’s religious viewpoints. But politics is another matter. There are still barriers to high office for people of certain faiths that need to come down.

Mr. Morris isn’t helping matters any.

Like most of you, I found the news about audio tapes from Marilyn Monroe’s psychiatrist revealing some pretty sordid stuff about Robert Kennedy and Joan Crawford to be titillating, if not earth shattering news. After all, Monroe, by all accounts, was a Hollywood hedonist of the first order so any alleged sexual affairs with other celebrities would not be shocking in and of itself. Perhaps it says more about our celebrity driven culture that 40 years after her death, her life should still captivate a world that views Marilyn’s overt sexuality as tame and even innocent compared to the vixens and harlots who strut and prance across the media landscape today, flaunting their sexual escapades in tell-all books and TV interviews.

If you’re like me and thought that this “new” information was based on tape recordings made by Marilyn in the days before her suicide, you’ll probably be as surprised as I was to find out that there are, in fact, no tapes at all. And reading further into this story, I’ll bet you’d be further surprised that a book containing “excerpts” from these non-existent tapes is scheduled to hit the book stores soon.

All in a days work for the celebrity obsessed media.

The story would be compelling - if it could be verified.

John W. Miner, who investigated Monroe’s death as a Los Angeles County prosecutor, claims Monroe’s psychologist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, played him secret audio tapes made by the star during one of her therapy sessions shortly before her death. A key revelation of the alleged tapes, according to Miner, is that Monroe was not depressed and was actively planning for to become a serious, Shakespearean actress.

Miner says he took careful, hand-written notes of the tapes and later produced a near-exact transcript.There is no proof Miner’s claims are true, since Dr. Greenson is now dead and no one else claims to have heard the tape.

“You are the only person who will ever know the most private, the most secret thoughts of Marilyn Monroe,” she allegedly told her doctor.

What in the wide, wide, world of sports is this story doing on the websites of respectable news organizations or on the pages of supposedly mainstream media outlets?

There are no tapes to verify these “quotes” from Monroe. No one has even hinted at their existence before. All we have is the word of someone who was paid a fee by an author of a forthcoming book to use “quotes” from non-verbatim transcripts gleaned from tapes that no one else has heard and that no one has even independently verified being in existence.

Matthew Smith paid an undisclosed fee to Miner to use the Monroe transcript in his book, “Marilyn’s Last Words: Her Secret Tapes and Mysterious Death.”

“The important thing about it was that she wasn’t suicidal,” Smith said.

Smith found Marilyn’s talk of the future very compelling, calling her “level-headed.”

“She wasn’t up and down,” he said. “She was on a plane that marked her out as a smart lady. She knew where she was going. It was definite.”

And where was Marilyn going with her career? Why, she was going to play Shakespeare’s Juliet!

“I’ve read all of Shakespeare and practiced a lot of lines. … I am going to do Juliet first,” Marilyn Monroe allegedly said on the tape. “Don’t laugh. What, with what makeup, costume and camera can do, my acting will create a Juliet who is 14, an innocent virgin.”

Monroe’s comic genius (when she was sober) was a joy. Anyone who’s ever seen Some Like it Hot knows that Monroe was could carry off light comedy better than almost any other actress at the time in Hollywood. But she was 36 years old, on the downside of a career in shambles because of her drinking and pill popping. It was pure fantasy to believe that she could play Juliet, or Ophelia, or any other Shakespearean tragedienne.

The realization that her acting options were going to be limited due to her age could have been a catalyst for suicide so any speculation to the contrary is specious. That didn’t stop Mr. Miner from throwing his two cents in regarding the bogus “Who killed Marilyn” fantasies:

Some people believe the Kennedys had to with it; I don’t at all,” he said. “I believe it was the disenchanted survivors of the Bay of Pigs, the CIA agents.”

Smith believes the CIA was angry at President John Kennedy about the botched Bay of Pigs operation a year before. The CIA, according to Smith, was hoping Robert Kennedy would be blamed for Monroe’s murder, and that the investigation would reveal her affair with both the president and his brother. This would force them to resign.

“This was a ploy,” Smith said. “By killing Marilyn, they expected Robert Kennedy, who was in the house twice the day before she died, would be interrogated.”

Now that’s what I call convoluted reasoning. Using Marilyn Monroe to bring down the Kennedy’s? If our CIA had been half as imaginative in fighting the commies, the Russkies would have been brought down decades before the final collapse in 1990.

How this claptrap made it into mainstream publications is a case study in how the confluence of media, celebrities, culture, and politics has changed the way we get our information and what kind news is fed to us. Are the MSM simply making themselves more irrelevant by carrying “news” stories like this one?

Judging by how many Google hits there are of this story, probably not irrelevant enough.

The death last night of long time ABC anchor Peter Jennings brings to a close an era of journalism that witnessed the power of the press at its zenith in American history. From historic highs in 1969 that saw 85% of televisions in use at the time tune into one of the three major network newscasts every night, that number has now dropped to below 20%. And Peter Jennings was there for both the rise and fall of the network news phenomena as a well traveled foreign correspondent and then as news anchor for “The World Tonight.”

Actually, when Mr. Jennings took over the anchor chair in 1983 following the death of Frank Reynolds, it was his second stint as newsreader for the ABC news broadcast. Joining ABC in 1963, he was elevated to the anchor chair in 1964 at the age of 26. This was at a time when ABC was not considered a serious news contender, finishing a distant third to broadcasts headed up by CBS’s Walter Cronkite and NBC’s Huntely-Brinkley tandem. Despite the fact that both CBS and NBC had gone from a 15 minute format to a 30 minute show for the news in 1963, ABC couldn’t get clearance from local stations for the extra 15 minutes of network news until 1967 by which time Jennings had been eased out of the anchor chair and assigned the foreign beat for the network.

It was his overseas assignment where I first became aware of Mr. Jennings. In an age when it was hugely expensive to transmit via satellite, many of Jennings early reports were on film that was shot on location and then rushed to ABC studios in New York for developing and editing. By the late 1960’s, this had changed and the golden age of news broadcasting had begun. Maintaining enormously expensive foreign bureaus in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, Central America, and Australia as well as desks in several American cities, the network news shows became the primary source of news for the first time, surpassing newspaper readership for good in 1980.

Jennings reports always seemed calm, measured and balanced when overseas. Whether he was reporting on the Viet Nam war or Oktoberfest in West Germany, he was usually interesting to watch. When ABC went to a 3 anchor format in 1978, Jennings joined the team from London reporting foreign news. His elevation to the anchor chair in 1983 was seen by most as a move by ABC to finally attempt to compete head to head with news giants NBC and CBS.

For whatever reason, it worked. ABC first caught and surpassed CBS and finally NBC. Much of the credit was given to Mr. Jennings calm and deliberate presence as well as ABC’s faster paced and more interesting format. But it’s ironic that just when Mr. Jennings success was reaching its apogee, audience for all network news started to decline. From 1980 to 2003, network news audience declined a staggering 44%. Much of that decline was attributed to the rise of CNN but other factors played a role as well. Expanded local news broadcasts that included national and foreign news - usually with some local angle - pulled viewers away from the nets. And the rise of cable broadcasting in general meant that there was that much more competition for the attention of the American people during the 6:00 - 7:00 PM time slot.

It’s very hard for anyone under 30 to realize the enormous power wielded by the press, especially the major networks, in the period from 1970 to 1980. Their relentless coverage of the Viet Nam war helped end that conflict. Their investigative reports on the Watergate scandal assisted in bringing down President Nixon. And their wall to wall coverage of the Iranian hostage crisis with nightly pictures of American humiliation helped make Jimmy Carter an irrelevancy.

Then came Ronald Reagan and his media savvy advisor’s who changed the entire dynamic of the relationship between the Presidency and the press. Seeing what had happened to the last three Presidents, the Reagan’s advisor’s decided to go over the heads of the media and speak directly to the American people. Partly through prime time addresses from the oval office but mostly through the manipulation of images on the nightly news, Reagan’s counterspin was able to get through the media’s hostility and enable the President to achieve success in both domestic and foreign policy.

Further erosion of the power of the press occurred during the Bush 41 and Clinton years as both White House spin and declining audience due to the explosion of cable news fractured the ability of the media to set the agenda for the nation. Through it all, however, Jennings and ABC news maintained, in my opinion, the least biased reporting - with notable exceptions - of any of the three “major” networks.

Then came 9/11. Jennings coverage of the attack was extraordinary. Showing off both the technical wizardry that makes the immediacy of network news so compelling as well as a personal stamina that saw the anchor on the air for more than 12 hours straight, Jennings and his counterparts - Brokaw and Rather - played a vital role during those dark hours in calming the nation and helping it begin the grieving process.

With the passing of Mr. Jennings, the end of what could be termed the post World War II media is at hand. It was peopled with individuals whose worldview was shaped by the events during the war years. The current crop of media denizens has had their worldview shaped by Viet Nam and Watergate.

Somehow, I think we’re a lot poorer today.