Showing posts with label Washington Post. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Washington Post. Show all posts

Monday, March 20, 2017

A Promise Kept, A Message Delivered: President Trump delivers a much-needed reality check on Germany and Chancellor Angela Merkel re their longstanding failure to honor their NATO pledge. Trump bluntly says what Americans have wanted to hear: It's time for Germany to pay what they owe and live up to their promise. No more excuses!; Anne Applebaum continues to disappoint me

Screenshot of The Drudge Report of March 18, 2017: U Owe Us





Last Friday during her visit to the White House, German Chancellor Angela Merkel received a strong dose of unfiltered President Donald J. Trump, who delivered the reality check he promised to deliver to NATO allies during the 2016 election campaign regarding their longstanding failure to live up to their own past pledges to spend at least 2% of their GDP on their own defense spending. 

 Instead of doing what the U.S. foreign policy elites in Washington wanted him to do, which was to allow this unproductive behavior of Germany -and so many other NATO members- to continue, or, if brought up at all, to talk about it away from the prying eyes of cameras of the U.S. news media and the American people, President Trump delivered on yet another important campaign promise, and did so in an honest away that neither Presidents Obama, Bush or Clinton ever did, that left no room for any misunderstanding.
We are talking about you, Germany.











Spiegel
FEBRUARY 21, 2017
Germany’s Self-Imposed Obstacles to Increasing Defense Spending
Washington is threatening consequences if NATO member states don't increase their defense spending. Germany is the primary focus of the demand. But the Defense Ministry in Berlin is already having trouble spending the money it currently has at its disposal.


By Konstantin von Hammerstein and Peter Müller
http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/germany-s-self-imposed-obstacles-to-increasing-defense-spending
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/pressure-on-germany-to-increase-defense-spending-for-nato-a-1135192.html























Message to Brussels: People on the Left in the U.S. and Europe who think that Germany is right on this issue, and that a government foolishly spending money on #ClimateChange but NOT honoring its pledge to its own allies regarding the amount of money it will spend on its own self-defense, are dreaming if they think Americans will support defending any nation that consciously chooses NOT to defend itself.
They won't. Period!




Both before and after I lived and worked in the Washington, D.C. area and was very much involved with then-current passing developments and perspectives from people involved with foreign policy and defense policy in DC, whether at the myriad Think Tanks and non-profits, Left and Right, or at the House Foreign Affairs Committee or the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I was an admirer of Anne Applebaum, @anneapplebaum, and a longtime reader of her outstanding foreign policy/defense columns in the Washington Post.

 More times than I can count, Applebaum's column was the best thing in the entire newspaper that day, combining genuine insight, forthright candor and an original POV, relative to the stuffy/fussy and self-reverential nature of much of what passes for insight in 99% of the American Foreign Policy establishment, whose journals I subscribed to for years, with walls of past issues that lined my Arlington County garage in banker boxes.

For many years I was, in the abstract, Anne Applebaum's ideal reader: someone who not only devoured her Washington Post columns and shared them with friends around who were very involved in a direct way with foreign policy, but also someone who actually purchased multiple copies of her books with my own money as gifts for friends and colleagues, as opposed to people who bought them on a corporate account.
I even bought copies of the decidedly non-holiday-friendly books, Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe and Gulag: a History.

 (As many of you longtime readers of this blog know, I have a longtime interest in Eastern European history and politics, especially Poland. My maternal ancestors fled Prussian-controlled Silesia and arrived in Texas right before Christmas of 1854, after a three-month boat trip from Bremen, eventually setting in the beautiful Hill Country of Texas and becoming Bandera County Pioneers.)

So, it's with all of that history in mind that I tell you now that it's been VERY disappointing to me the past few years that despite lots of opportunities for her to use her very important and very visible perch at the Washington Post to push for more honest and resolute critical thinking and reporting about the issue of NATO members finally delivering on their promises to pay 2% of their respective GDP for their own defense, she's punted.
Specifically, she's been far too quiet and NOT been publicly critical about Germany's failure.
Not that Gemany is alone, because only 5 of the 18 NATO members hit their marks.



Even worse in my mind, if possible, Applebaum has held her tongue about Germany's incredibly feeble response to the rise of ISIS (ISIL, IS) which I have talked to many of the people reading this blog post about over the years, as well as tweeted about when German-friendly individuals and groups seemed to be trying to give them a pass nd make excuses for them.

Instead of Applebaum being a leader for actively confronting manageable issues that a clear majority of Americans are quite justified in wanting to see FINALLY resolved, she has continued to champion the POV of the Foreign Policy elites in the U.S. and Europe, who are owners of so many broken Conventional Wisdom crystal balls that have not worked properly in many years. 
As Brexit proved to a fare thee well, as I predicted months before last year's June vote in the UK.

 She's exactly the sort of person who ought to be championing Trump on this issue because he happens to be right on the facts and right on the public's perceptions of it being an issue where supposed allies have failed to deliver.

 Plus, Applebaum's too smart to think that Trump and his supporters will simply allow the issue to evaporate. Trust me, Trump supporters like me will tell him that if Germany does not change course in tangible ways in the near-future that Americans can see with their own eyes, he will need to do something publicly to show his displeasure in a way that will leave no room for misunderstanding.

 Is that really what the folks at the German Embassy up on Reservoir Road NW, a place where I spent so much time in the late 1980's and the '90's, and the place that now continues to do such a consistently piss-poor job of public outreach to the U.S. public at large and Congress in particular, wants?
Because the truth is, that day where Trump is pushed into doing something is much closer than they think.
Every day Germany continues status quo brings it closer...

 I continue to be surprised at the large number of usually well-informed people who do NOT know that Germany's response to ISIS has been to dispatch, after more than a year's worth of debate in the Bundestag, 100 UNARMED men in non-combat positions located far from the fighting. 
That's the response of Europe's largest and most economically powerful country?
To place one-hundred unarmed men far from where the fighting against ISIS is? 
Really?

For many well-informed Americans who care about U.S. foreign policy and defense issues, regardless of their party preference, Germany's efforts of late, esp. vs. ISIS, seem incredibly underwhelming and not cause for thinking that cooler heads in Berlin are prevailing.
Just the opposite. :-(

In its own way, this Le Nouvel Observateur article makes the point.





 To which I replied with cool hard facts:

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Monday, October 17, 2016

Why is Washington Post so reluctant to ask hard questions about Hillary Clinton that could well have been raised about her H.S. govt. aspirations -by even her friends- that are still dogging her now? Elizabeth Wurtzel's 1998 analysis of Hillary remains my go-to bible!

Why is Washington Post so reluctant to ask hard questions about Hillary Clinton that could well have been raised about her H.S. govt. aspirations -by even her friends- that are still dogging her now? Elizabeth Wurtzel's 1998 analysis of Hillary remains my go-to bible!


The Washington Post
Always running, always prepared: Hillary Clinton as a high school politician 
By Dan Zak 
October 17 at 11:54 AM 

PARK RIDGE, Ill. — Hillary Rodham was 16 when she first ran for president.

It was February 1964, her junior year of high school in this town of steeples and lawns on the rail line to Chicago. She was vice president of her class, and one of five students running to lead the student council for the next academic year. Student rock bands played in support of candidates in the hallways and cafeteria of Maine East High School.

“Stop mudslinging before it starts,” the school newspaper opined. “Keep this election clean!”

No girl had ever held the job before. “The boys would run for president, and the most popular girl would run for secretary,” says classmate Tim Sheldon, who was one of Hillary’s rivals and is now a retired judge in Elgin, Ill. Years later, in her memoir, Hillary recalled a boy telling her she was “really stupid” if she thought a girl could win.

But it was 1964, and she wasn’t even the only girl in the race.

Read the rest of the article at:













https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/hillary-clinton-high-school-years-always-running-always-prepared/2016/10/17/35dd9e4a-8c08-11e6-bf8a-3d26847eeed4_story.html

The logical counter-point to this kind of gauzy and whimsical reporting-by-yearbook or scrapbook that the washington post has specialized in its Style section the last few decades is how real and modern -and menacing!- the Tracey Flick character portrayed by Reese Witherspoon was in the film adaption of "Election." 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tracy_Flick
That character didn't just plot and scheme, she practically leaped out of the screen, oozing sanctimonious personal ambition and a sense of entitlement!

Even after all this time and all the self-evident examples both good and bad of who Hillary Clinton really is and what she believes in, the Washington Post, rather curiously in these types of breezy profile pieces that regular Post readers like me have come to expect at predictable times in an election news cycle, still seems reluctant to ask a hard-but-fair question about her and the premise of her current candidacy: 
Why are the logical questions that could have well been fairly raised about Hillary's candidacy in High School, by even her friends and supporters -her lack of charisma, authenticity and a consistent inability to make even people who plan to vote for her feel comfortable with her, and around her- still dogging her now?

Especially since it's been clear for so long that she intended to run?

Why, given her unique and unchallenged access to the sorts of resources and people that nobody else in the country can match, has she NOT done enough to actually change that dynamic, even a little bit, except for occasionally changing her political consultants? 
It's a mystery.

In the opinion of not only myself but many other people I know and respect who have a much-closer observation point, she actually seems to have regressed, and is doing retail politics even more poorly now than when she ran for re-election to the U.S. Senate in 2006, in what was her second personal campaign.

That answer is surely not contained in any of her own books, nor in this article.
It might be time for me to again re-read the amazing 1998 book by Elizabeth Wurtzel,
Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, a book, below, which I believe has the single best analysis and dissection of Hillary Clinton and her persona that I've ever read.


 Certainly light years ahead of the conveyor-belt of sycophantic utterings about Hillary from media pals and protectors that have circulated in the news stream for the past twenty years, leaving younger voters grasping for something that's real and meaningful.

I actually attended Elizabeth Wurtzel's book reading/discussion of Bitch on June 27, 1998 at the then-extant Olsson's Books at Metro Center, in Washington, D.C.

I arrived at the event early because I was very motivated and knew in advance: 
a.) It would be fascinating because Wurtzel was so damn interesting herself, and articulate and intelligent that very few Beltway media types ever actually area once you get to know them. (I speak from experience on that.) Wurtzel always seemed to be speaking in full and convincing phrases in interviews in ways that seemed intoxicating to me, almost like she was reading well-rehearsed lines filled with bite, but which comes natural to some people who are very sure of themselves and the facts.
b.) Even by DC's usual literary standards, I knew it was sure to be packed because of the large amount of buzz and controversy about her and the book that had preceded her, and no doubt as well by her publisher for choosing to use a fetching photo of her -the cover?- to promote the event in the DC CityPaper.

Trust me, I was not alone in thinking even before she ever walked into the room that Elizabeth Wurtzel had ample intelligence, good looks and breezy, knowing attitude to spare and to slay any dragons that dared appear at the bookstore. I was not wrong.

 I can assure you, once she was introduced and began filling the air with clever and inventive analysis and some occasional zingers, she positively sizzled in every way.
There were many more men in that bookstore personally energized and turned-on by her and what she was saying than you can possibly imagine now in reading my words here.

For myself, I kept thinking that Wurtzel, someone who clearly was using to people projecting onto them all sorts of their own imagery (or baggage) was more like a contemporary version of a combination of Lauren Bacall in her first film, 1944's To Have and Have Not, below, plus Katharine Hepburn in the 1942 film, Woman of the Year. 
Pretty good company!


Karen Lehrman's April 19, 1998 review of Bitch in the New York Times:
I Am Woman, Hear Me Whine 
Elizabeth Wurtzel celebrates women who are a pain in the neck.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/04/19/reviews/980419.19lehrmat.html


I'll re-read Elizabeth Wurtzel's chapter on Hillary Clinton and report back here soon!

 But to give you a taste, watch Elizabeth Wurtzel discuss her book on C-SPAN on June 27, 1998 https://www.c-span.org/video/?105509-1/bitch-praise-difficult-women

A gentle reminder for you newcomers to the blog or any by-now-angry Hillary acolytes: I was a vocal supporter of Bill Clinton for President in 1991, long BEFORE he ever announced for the presidency. As my friends and family can tell you, I even planned on running as Clinton delegate to the 1992 DNC before the Virginia Democratic Party HQ down in Richmond even knew what it was doing, so could only tell me to "hold tight" until I heard back from them when I asked what the procedures were.

I was also a member of the DLC when I was living and working in Washington, even to the point of often hauling soda and various snacks around Capitol Hill for our occasional meetings from Oklahoma Congressman Dave McCurdy's office when he was in charge.

And did I mention that my best friend is from Hope, Arkansas, birthplace as well of... well, you know who.
Just saying...

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Friday, October 9, 2015

Perspectives on American TV, 2015: A public shout-out for some nicely-observed insight from Stacia L. Brown @washingtonpost - How @RosewoodFOX is expanding representations of black men in network TV. She correctly notes how the new Fox-TV show starring @Morris_Chestnut has already shown "how rare it is to see two black men onscreen discussing something other than violence, racism, or their own mortality." Amen.

Perspectives on American TV, 2015: A public shout-out for some nicely-observed insight from Stacia L. Brown @washingtonpost - How @RosewoodFOX is expanding representations of black men in network TV. She correctly notes how the new Fox-TV show starring @Morris_Chestnut has already shown "how rare it is to see two black men onscreen discussing something other than violence, racism, or their own mortality." Amen.

I've written the following post in reverse-chron order, with oldest on top, in an attempt to be more logical than usual.














For me, the highlight from Brown's column was this line: 
"The subtlest moments — like Rosie, Dante, and those flowers — punctuate how rare it is to see two black men onscreen discussing something other than violence, racism, or their own mortality."

 Exactly!

I've watched all three Rosewood episodes so far, and partly because it's set here in South Florida -#SoFL- and partly because I also think it has a good premise for a series and a nice core of actors around star Morris Chestnut, it's definitely starting to grow on me.
Especially as it finally stops trying to explain who every character is and can actually breathe a little and let the plots develop however they will.

Not that it's ever going to be M.A.S.H., of course, or even aspires to be, but most people now forget how really crummy some of their early M.A.S.H. episodes were when the writers and editors kept hammering home who the various characters were long past the point where we got it, esp. Klinger, 
Radar and Frank Burns.

 In retrospect, some of those early M.A.S.H. episodes often seem like the show's writers were intentionally bullying Larry Linville's Burns character just to see what sort of reaction it might provoke in either him or the show's audience. 
People loved seeing pranks performed on poor Frank Burns, but serial cruelty is another thing altogether. 

 It's always especially noticeable in those episodes composed largely of clips.
You almost wonder what the writers were thinking.

Most TV viewers nowadays forget that, for a while at least, like the Mary Tyler Moore Show,
M.A.S.H. was forced by CBS network execs to use a laugh track, which was cringe-worthy, even though it was performed without a studio audience.
As we know, as the two shows' dramatic success grew expondentially on Saturday nights, that foolish crutch was eventually dispensed with, even if it remained on so many other middling network TV shows well into the 1980's.

The really odd thing is that I was thinking the same exact things last night watching the newest episode of Rosewood as what Washington Post reporter Stacia L. Brown writes about. 
Weird. :-)

 Like Brown,  I also hope that they give the show a chance to properly develop and find its way.
It's always a good thing to have fully-realized characters on network TV, especially if they can be set against an area of the country that is -quite correctly I'm sorry to say- often regarded as the height of superficiality, where physical looks always-but-always trumps brain power every time.
(As I know so well from growing-up in sunny sand, surf and bikini-clad South Florida!)
How ironic would that be?

And if it can be a character that looks, acts and thinks like series star Morris Chestnut's,  one that's doesn't adhere to most Hollywood's showrunners' pre-conceived paint-by-numbers notions of what the show has to do, as opposed to what it can do, so much the better for everyone concerned, not least, the poor TV audience who desperately prefers to see more accurate depictions of complex people's lives on the tube. And lives different from their own, with their own separate struggles.
But then a sophisticated TV audience that wants more also has to let the networks know they want that, not more of the same old thing, or variations on a TV theme from 25 years before.
And so it is here with Fox-TV.
People have to use their voices.
So far, so good!













Since I sent out an email with much of the above Thursday afternoon to my corps of well-informed friends and Followers(!)  across the country, have been greatly heartened by the number who say that they not only like and watch the show, but also agree with points that Stacia L. Brown and I raise.
:-)

Dave
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Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Selected 2014 stories/tweets re News Media worth taking a 2nd and 3rd look at: Hyperdemocratization of news, sleepwalking journalists, elite media, news media bias, swooning White House press corps vs. stonewalling Obama, collapse of The New Republic, et al






Sharyl Attkisson - Stonewalled - My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama's Washington. 
Seasoned former CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson reveals how she has been electronically surveilled while digging deep into the Obama Administration and its scandals, and offers an incisive critique of her industry and the shrinking role of investigative journalism in today’s media.
https://twitter.com/SharylAttkisson






 






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CBS News YouTube Channel: Former CBS correspondent Richard C. Hottelet dies at 97
Uploaded December 18, 2014. http://youtu.be/TgUNmijqNFM
Richard C. Hottelet on D-Day

 The first time I ever walked into the CBS News Washington office on M Street, around '91, the very first person I saw was Eric Sevareid. 
I stopped in my tracks and immediately thought of all the amazing things he'd witnessed first-hand, for both good and bad. 
And we even got a chance to talk for 5-10 minutes while he waited for his driver.
Hearing THAT voice from a few inches away was both thrilling and other-worldly. 
But even he was never held in solitary for a LONG TIME by the Gestapo like Mr. Hottelot.

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Blondinbella does it again!






























Per saturation coverage of Ray Rice story at ABC News but no follow-up to an earlier story that shocked people:










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