Columbia Journalism Review had arranged with Farnaz Fassahi to keep a journal of her experiences during the time she was reporting from Baghdad late this summer for the Wall Street Journal. It was only toward the end of her assignment that her email to family and friends became a cause celebre on the internet. CJR has now published her journal.

[UPDATE 10-28-04] by nadezhda

Apparently Mr Stewart hit several nerves in a portion of the body politic. Via Jeff Jarvis (who's got gobs of goodies this week -- see also his Michael Powell/Howard Stern coverage):

10-25-04 Exploding TV

: By the latest count, the Jon Stewart CNN segment has had more than 1.4 million views on iFilm -- not to mention all the BitTorrent distribution. Welcome to the future of media: A distributed network is more powerful than a centralized network. And the people you once called viewers are your best marketers (if you have anything worth marketing).

: Just noticed that iFilm calls this all viral video. Good title. [BTW, the viral video link also includes iFilm's segments of the Bush one-fingered salute and Eminem's Mosh, among other "crazy stunts, funny ads, dumb blondes, and gross clips"; ed.]
[...]
: Here's where you can get the latest counts on iFilm's clip: It's over 1.5 million now. [10-28 update, over 2 million, and again, not counting BitTorrent; ed]

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And here's a more analytical take on the Stewart/CNN confrontation that captures my viewpoint of what the fuss was all about, from Andrew Cline of Rhetorica, who's become a daily read. This goes a long way towards explaining why I thought it wouldn't have made sense for Stewart to ask Kerry "hard" questions in that format. Stewart would just be "playing" at tough journalist, goofing on the media. If Stewart tried to have a meaningful exchange about an issue with Kerry, they'd have to abandon the Daily Show format. That's because the structure of the interview and news shows, which Stewart is lampooning, prevents anything "tough" other than "gotcha."

The Daily Show is not about politics. It's about media. It is 30 minutes of satire about what it is the news media do day after day and how it sometimes hurts us. There is much humor to be found in that because humor is often a defense mechanism--a way to live with circumstances we'd rather were different.

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The absurdity of campaign rhetoric's disconnect from either reality or intentions is further highlighted by AP's extensive interview with President Bush on Airforce One. Please tell me how the following differs in any material respect from Kerry's stated policy objectives, especially when taken together with recent remarks by Rumsfeld on troop draw-down after January elections.

President Bush says he doesn't envision a longtime presence of U.S. troops in Iraq similar to post-World War II deployments in Europe and South Korea that continue today.

"I think the Iraqi people want us to leave once we've helped them get on the path of stability and democracy and once we have trained their troops to do their own hard work," Bush said Monday in a wide-ranging interview with The Associated Press.

Still, Bush said, "It's very difficult for me to predict what forces will exist although I will tell you that Iraq's leadership has made it quite clear that they can manage their own affairs at the appropriate time."

If free and open Iraqi elections lead to the seating of a fundamentalist Islamic government, "I will be disappointed. But democracy is democracy," Bush said. "If that's what the people choose, that's what the people choose."

Why can't our leadership -- from both parties -- speak to Americans in something other than sound bites for second graders? Why can't Bush take advantage of the debates to articulate a sensible view of the "vision" that informs his expectations about future steps the US is likely to take in Iraq? Has the White House campaign strategy relied so totally on being able to demonize Kerry's approach as nothing but "cut and run" in disguise that they have abandoned the public conduct of US foreign policy from the White House?   more »

There are several closely related themes floating around the political ether:

1. the increasingly evident disconnect between fact-based reality and the policy decision-making and execution by the Bush Administration over the past three years, especially in relation to Iraq
2. the credibility gap, which is becoming a chasm, between fact-based reality and the claims of the Bush Administration regarding its policy and the results of its policy
3. the apparent continued credulousness regarding the Bush policies within a substantial portion of the pool of potential voters in November's presidential election, and
4. the failure of the US mainstream media to identify and communicate effectively these various disconnects.

Sunday's NY Times Magazine piece by Ron Suskind is the talk of the day, and both bondra and praktike have offered their personal takes on the tale of why a president, and the apparatus structured to serve him, have become so disconnected from a world view and an intellectual process that are the sine qua non of governance for the country's professional elites. Relying on the explanation of "faith" (not necessarily religious, but at least moral certainty) for the president's attitudes and behavior, Suskind extends this explanation to the portion of the public who not only continue to support Bush's re-election, but share his assessment of both the primary foreign policy goals of the US and how the US is and should be going about achieving those goals.

I also have a personal take, which is consistent with bondra's and praktike's views but comes at the conundrum of Bush and his supporters from a bit different angle than Suskind's. I began to sketch it out in an earlier response to bondra using a Viet Nam analogy as a sort of typology of politicians and opinion groups. I'll try to get to fleshing that out a bit further in the next few days after I finish some more of Charles Kupchan's The Vulnerability of Empire, which deals explicitly with the dynamic between elite decision-making and public opinion in foreign policy. But in the meantime, I want to go back to the issue of the "credibility gap" itself.
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bondra -- Responding to your "Bloody hell, can those Americans get any dumber?" I'm amazed that you managed to get through that tendentious gobbledygook from the Guardian. Jonathan Raban has concocted an exotic brew of American exceptionalism, anti-intellectualism, authoritarianism, nativism, and charismatic evangelicalism. Did he leave out millenialism? I got lost. And he lays this unholy mess at the feet of our Pilgrim heritage, the victor over our enlightened Virginia tradition in the eternal manichean conflict between "religion and reason." Whew!

I understand the impulse of Europeans (in this case I include Brits) to try to apprehend the value systems and belief structures that could produce a re-election victory for someone they view as demonstrably and odiously unqualified not only to be President of the United States but leader of the world. They don't get a vote, yet their futures are certainly affected by the resident of the White House. The objective of analysis, however, is to "demystify," not produce some incoherent kabbalistic theory to prove the inherent incomprehensibility of the "other". (One could make the same comment about most writing on followers of Islam.)

I must pick a quarrel with you a bit on the "merits" (not of Raban's piece but of why Bush retains a considerable base of support on foreign policy, even from people who have concluded that Iraq is going to hell in a handbasket). First, from polling data on specific beliefs**, it's clear that there indeed remains for at least a third of the population a considerable disconnect between perceptions of the entire Iraq saga, as narrated by the Bush Admin and the BC04 campaign (with constantly shifting details, to put it most charitably), and the accumulating evidence from official reports and credible information from the ground.

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James Wolcott gives voice to my frustrations:

The panel this week included Cokie Roberts, George Will, and Fareed Zakaria, and might as well have been performed by marionettes. I can't decide who's worse, Cokie Roberts or NBC's Andrea Mitchell. Maybe it's like the controversy that once raged over who was the worse actress, Candace Bergen or Ali MacGraw, and Pauline Kael's answer was: Whichever one you're watching at that moment.

Cokie revealed that after the townhall debate, the audience members clustered around Bush, leaving Kerry a rather lonely figure, thus feeding the meme that Bush is more likeable than Kerry (a Beltway truism belied by recent poll data). She then said that if Bush could mingle with 200 million or so voters, he'd have the election sewn up.

Of course what a Cokie is never going to tell the audience is that Bush can't and won't mingle that freely because his crowds are throughly vetted to keep unfriendlies or even neutrals away from the exhibit. His "likeability" is a complete guarded construct, his rallies a gated community on wheels.

I detect a growing sense of futility from Fareed Zakaria, an existential sigh emanating from his being, and no wonder. He's the only one on the regular panel who is intellectually a citizen of the world, who sees beyond the Beltway and has a grasp of the unfolding calamity in Iraq and elsewhere, the hate for America that now engulfs milliions. And nothing he says seems to signify as Will alludes to the Founding Fathers as if he were having them over to the house afterwards for brunch and Cokie airs out the obvious and Stephanopoulos nurses his pen in his mouth and nods his head for that extra-thoughtful look.

It'd be nice if just once he had an actual original thought to go with that look.

It strikes me that there is a deep yearning in elite America for the kind of political or foreign affairs show that goes beyond the banal trivialities of the Beltway programs. The blogosphere echoes with Wolcottian contempt for the predictable, soul-crushing nature of the format and the mediocrities who inhabit it, and rightly so.

Speaking for myself, I'd love to watch a one or even two-hour show that combines the debate or townhall format of the Sunday bobblehead shows but allows for deeper exploration of issues and moves beyond partisan follies and staid talking points. Instead of shopworn access journalists like Cokie Roberts who wrap themselves in conventional wisdom, give some room to people like Steve Clemons, Reuel Marc Gerecht, or Jonathan Rauch, who actually have their own ideas to share. There has to be a way to do this without sucking all life out of the universe in the manner of PBS and C-Span. And I think the rise of the political blogosphere shows that there's a ready market for it.

Ok, I will first backtrack a bit and bring up a point that was made at the talk Wednesday night I attended on the election in historical context. There is a certain inevitable rhythm to these sorts of events that makes it hard to pick out especially novel lines of argument -- it was, for the most part, a pretty standard generalist take on the election and it's importance, complete with the appeals to voter registration and the fact that, hey, a lot of people disagree this year on who's best to vote for. Since these were political scientists and historians up there, rather than attempting to settle controversy, they were apparently more content in the space of this forum to simply point out that it existed. Fine stuff if you're just now tuning in, but yeah, kind of familiar, and the horse race mechanics ultimately don't interest me much beyond the broad outlines.

I thought Prof. Bacevich did make two crucial points, though. In his opening remarks he made a comparison between this election and that of 1952, when Truman, having articulated the basic outlines of US containment strategy against the Soviets at the start of the Cold War (through the promulgation of the Truman Doctrine, the Korean intervention, NSC-68, and so forth), was challenged by Republicans both for his percieved failures in prosecuting the Cold War (as in the loss of China and the stalemate in Korea) and, in some segments, for the whole strategy of Cold War containment itself. The basic upshot was, Eisenhower won and, while altering some policy details, basically reaffirmed Truman's course.

In doing so, and this I think is an important lesson for today, he depoliticized the Cold War and effectively gained bipartisan consensus on its basic outlines for the next several decades. So advocates of pursuing this "global war on terror" -- whose principles and goals really need to be further explained and debated by both candidates, some of which we saw last night -- might want to consider the real significance that a Kerry donning of its mantle might mean for its future. This stuff is really too important to be left to George W. Bush's handling alone.

Bacevich was critical of Kerry for failing to articulate thus far a really strong comprehensive criticism of President Bush's "Global War on Terror" strategy and for the degree of triviality which has served to obscure a lot of the important foreign policy questions implict in such a strategy, as waged by the Bush administration. Later on, he made a rather affecting appeal for an informed citizenship that takes the time to debate the issues and consider what policies will best serve our country, to which several of the gathered political scientists basically responded, well yeah that'd be really great, but unfortunately it doesn't work that way in our current system. Which, unfortunately, I think, is probably right -- one of the other profs (I don't remember which one now) basically made the point that you to a great extent can't know what sorts of issues your future leader can face, and when it comes down to it the best you can do is take a measure of a candidate's character as you see it, try and get a sense of whether he will vote generally in a way that represents your interests.

And that is, I think, a pretty good summary of my feelings on Kerry; in the debates last night I saw a seriousness and a command of the situation that Bush was clearly lacking. I realize I may be projecting my hopes upon Kerry without the guarantee that he'll match them in office -- but like praktike below, really the best I can do is accept that political constraints will force Kerry to make certain generalizations about the importances of alliances et. al and trust that when the time comes to take charge of the situation, he can do better, by virtue of his intelligence, skills of evaluation, and leadership and George W. Bush's manifest failures by comparison.