Op-Ed
There has been another defenestration of a television-based political commentator for touching the only real electrified third rail remaining in reporting what passes for the news. Marc Lamont Hill, a Temple University professor of Media Studies and Urban Education, who is a regular political commentator on CNN, was fired for what he said in a speech at the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, which took place last Wednesday at the United Nations. Hill called for a “free Palestine from river to the sea,” which CNN considered grounds for terminating his contract.
“What is seen with one eye has no depth.”
I’m thinking, as I ponder the wisdom of Ursula LeGuin, that American culture is at the end of what it can accomplish with its single-eyed vision. For all our material progress, for all our ability to dominate just about anything or anyone we encounter — this is our history, our manifest destiny — things are falling apart in every sector of society.
What’s left of the media can’t stop selling us our own desperation and anxiety. We keep piling on more of the same — more troops in Afghanistan, more surveillance cameras in our neighborhoods — but it isn’t working. Could it be that we’re not seeing the world the way we need to see it?
The promise the United States once represented to the world has spent itself, and what we have to offer in terms of opportunity, or at least hope, is dwarfed by the spreading shadow of our hubris. And it’s all coming home to roost.
This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.
he integrity of the US judicial system is actively, albeit quietly, in play. A sitting federal judge, or more likely a panel of sitting federal judges, will be required in the near future to render an assessment of the honesty, integrity, and fitness of a Supreme Court justice to retain his lifetime appointment. The process and the result of the federal judges’ decision will, together, render a judgment as to the integrity of not just one Supreme Court justice but the federal courts as a national institution.
Remarks at Fellowship Hall at Berkeley, Calif., October 13, 2018.
Slogans and headlines and haikus and other short combinations of words are tricky things. I wrote a book looking at many of the themes in how people commonly talk about war, and I found them all without exception — and the marketing campaigns before, during, and after every past war without exception — to be dishonest. So I called the book War Is A Lie. And then people who misunderstood my meaning started insisting to me that I was wrong, that war really does exist.
– Senator Jeff Flake, Arizona Republican, September 28, 2018
This is so much bigger than Brett Kavanaugh, or the outcome of his nomination.
Women are suddenly opening their secret wounds. Their trauma — often many decades old — is becoming, for the first time, public. So are their tears.
Enduring a sexual assault is only the beginning of the journey through hell.
This is the awareness that has accompanied the Kavanaugh nomination and the politically motivated dismissal of Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation against him, beginning with Donald Trump’s all-knowing tweet: “I have no doubt that, if the attack on Dr. Ford was as bad as she says, charges would have been immediately filed with local Law Enforcement Authorities by either her or her loving parents. I ask that she bring those filings forward so that we can learn date, time, and place!”
It’s not easy being vulnerable!
But Trump’s callous ignorance has opened up the gates of grief and fury.
“I was watching CNN and I just broke down. I just lost it. I finally started experiencing the emotion.”
Any talk of a hearing on Monday, frankly, is premature, because she just came forward with these allegations 48 hours ago. And since that time, she has been dealing with hate mail, harassment, death threats. So she has been spending her time trying to figure out how to put her life back together, how to protect herself and her family. And there hasn’t been an investigation. And these are serious allegations.
– Attorney Lisa Banks, representing Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, September 18
You know your story is going badly when you’ve taken care to do it right in coming forward with a dark accusation against a powerful man and even your lawyer, a woman, misrepresents your reality in a way that favors the powerful man. What does it take to confront reality with care, accuracy, and integrity?
Let’s concede that at this point, nothing is proved. On balance, however, it’s fair to say that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s bona fides are significantly more credible than Brett Kavanaugh’s honesty, integrity, or fundamental decency.
Sexual assault is such a nuisance, not only, but especially, for Republicans.
Here’s the Wall Street Journal editorial board, attempting, with gentlemanly politeness, to dispense with Christine Blasey Ford’s accusation against SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh as quickly as possible:
“Yet there is no way to confirm her story after 36 years, and to let it stop Mr. Kavanaugh’s confirmation would ratify what has all the earmarks of a calculated political ambush.
“This is not to say Christine Blasey Ford isn’t sincere in what she remembers.” But . . .
Two time Medal of Honor recipient Marine Major General Smedley Butler once said “war is a racket.” He might have added that while enriching the few it victimizes and degrades everyone else who is caught up in the meat grinder, soldiers as well as civilians.
At least that’s the hope of those who elected Andrés Manuel López Obrador, aka AMLO, aka Peje, on a platform of sweeping out the corruption — a platform promoted in Obrador’s book, A New Hope for Mexico. That Barack Obama did not permanently decommission the word “hope” for credible electoral campaigns on this continent may be the least of the book’s surprises.