| |
 |
Thursday, May 4, 2006 |
OKAY, I'M REALLY GOING TO TRY TO MAKE THIS MY LAST COLBERT POST.
Scott Thill: Truthiness and Consequences.  Certain elements of the crew had decided to pretend that it was not a crash but a crash landing that was seconds away. After all, the difference between the two is only one word. Didn't this suggest that the two forms of flight terminaton were more or less interchangeable? How much could one word matter? An encouraging question under the circumstances, if you didn't think about it too long, and there was no time to think right now. The basic difference between a crash and a crash landing seemed to be that you could sensibly prepare for a crash landing, which is exactly what they were trying to do. The news spread through the plane, the term was repeated in row after row. 'Crash landing, crash landing.' They saw how easy it was, by adding one word, to maintain a grip on the future, to extend it in consciousness if not in actual fact...Suddenly, the engines restarted. Just like that. Power, stability, control. -- Don DeLillo, White Noise
There are times when you have to leap into the clusterfuck, and then there are times when you just have to sit back and enjoy the delicious ironies of life. Which is another way of saying that I wasn't late to the blogger party on Stephen Colbert's in-person smackdown of the president of the most powerful country on Earth (for now, anyway, but probably not for long). Rather, I was soaking up the unrestrained love and the hate, and searching for the type of hyperreal hilarity that once belonged to the finest show on television -- Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, if you must know -- but now almost wholly belongs to one of that show's flawless talents and his new show, an equally hyperreal laugher on Comedy Central.
Like his soon-to-be-retired Birdman doppleganger Phil Ken Sebben (Falcon Seven, for the cartoon nerds in the audience), Stephen Colbert's blowhard doppleganger has an unquenchable penchant, like the president he skewered, for ignorance and zealotry in equal measure. And he's decided that the most productive way to transmit that ignorance is through language. Phil Ken Sebben is prone to making ludicrous statements, punctuated by a hearty "Ha Ha!" -- which is then followed by a repeat of said statement's core content. (My favorite? "Dangly parts.")
Meanwhile, Colbert's show self-consciously abuses the limits of language to prove that, in the end, reality can take a backseat to fantasy when the right words are weaponized for action. This practice is most capably illustrated in Colbert's "The Word" segment, where terms and phrases are ripped out of their context, destroyed, refashioned as slogans or propaganda, dissected and ridiculed (by Colbert's own right-screen commentator, yet another metafictional element of his vertiginous show), before being then resituated once again in their reality-based meanings, courtesy of the right-screen textual commentator.
Colbert's linguistic satire, of course, reached its apotheosis at the White House Correspondents Dinner, a back-slapping orgy of consensual hallucination that, to mangle Pink Floyd's hyperpolitical missile "Pigs," is "really a laugh/But [it's] really a cry." For so long, the line between fake news of Colbert and Jon Stewart's invention and the "real" news of CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Washington Times, The Weekly Standard, The Drudge Report -- Christ, this fucking list goes on forever! -- has been inverted to the extreme. That is, while the "real" news media have fed the American people a steady diet of bullshit built equally by the Bush administration, think-tanks (always a handy repository for those who lost their virginity in their 20s), and a Republican party bursting at the seam with haters of every stripe, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report -- "That's French, bitch!" -- have been answering the late John Lennon's clarion call, "Gimme Some Truth." Though Lennon died too early to see those very "short-haired, yellow-bellied, son[s] of Tricky Dicky" stick around to goose the same, stupor-stoned populace into unnecessary war and wiretapping, Stewart and Colbert have been searching (and outing) the truth -- the reality beneath the Bush administration's "real" -- with a vengeance.
So just what in Hades did Bush and his sycophants (you know who you are) think was going to happen when Colbert took the podium and wrecked shop -- right in Bush's face, I might add? That he would be cowed, awed, intimidated into cojone-less humor? Didn't they watch Stewart on Crossfire? Don't they remember how he handed Begala and Carlson's asses to them, then got their show canceled as one last kick in the nuts before he was done with them? Does anyone even look at Tucker Carlson now without laughing? One suspects that neocon William Kristol, who helped diagram our war of choice in Iraq, wishes he never said that he deserved thanks for helping Colbert get the gig in the first place.
Those, of course, are all rhetorical questions. The answer is, plainly, yes: The Washington establishment thought they could cow Colbert the way they cowed the rest of the media, government and listless American people, who have given Bush free reign to do just whatever the hell he thinks God is telling him to do. To the Iraqis, to the homosexuals, to the Democrats, to the economy, to the nation, to whoever and whatever. That, suck it up, is reality. That is what happened. To all of us.
And the idea that a man who makes his living -- and will be making a better one, if Bush or Pat Robertson's followers don't kill him first -- trafficking in the machinations and complexities of language wasn't going to do the very same to the very man who has made him a full-fledged phenomenon is as telling as the fact that Bush spent time at the same event talking to a a simulation of, what else, himself. But it only took one person to make it stick for Colbert's smackdown, albeit one with dual identities speaking in dual modes (truth and "truthiness," which are not the same as Colbert will tell you himself). Meanwhile, the president literalized his dual identities (fearless leader and fear-mongering liar) by employing an impostor to play one of them, not a bad idea. Except that it was followed by a man so adept at language that he got himself invited to a cushy affair where he could both praise and insult the president without restraint, right to his face. To the shock and awe, pun intended, of the so-called journalists and bloggers (you know who you are too) out there who feel, for some inexplicable reason, that Colbert either stunk up the joint or didn't show Bush the proper respect.
As if the worst employee this country has ever had wasn't doing a fine enough job disrespecting the presidency all by himself.
Indeed, the outcry itself had all the earmarks of metafictional madness. Here are a couple of my favorites. See if you can spot the hypocrisies:
-- "Colbert crossed the line." US News and World Report
-- "How do you criticize the president without disrespecting the presidency? Then there's the human dimension. Here's a comedian dissing a man non-stop in front of the subject's wife." Chicago Tribune's blog, The Swamp
-- "Stephen Bridges played 'George W. Bush' in the same way that Stephen Colbert plays a pompous talk-show host named 'Stephen Colbert' who interviews 'real' people in politics. Bridges was successful, because he brought along a 'real' person ready and willing to take part in the joke." Robert George, Huffington Post
-- "Consensus: Colbert did indeed bomb." David Frum, National Review
-- "Self-mockery can be funny. Mockery that is insulting is not." Some loser from the Washington Post
-- "Insulting the Prophet is one thing, but insulting Stephen Colbert, the patron saint of the piously correct left! That's really blasphemy." Nathan Gardels, Huffington Post
OK, that's enough. Every stomach -- and well-defined sense of irony -- has its limits. To start with the unnamed critic (wimp!) in the U.S. News and World Report, which line Colbert actually crossed is not expressed. Would it be constructing an appearance on false pretenses? Insulting intelligence, not of the national security variety but of the audience? This president has crossed so many lines during his nearly six years in office that it's insulting to make me find all the necessary hyperlinks to illustrate my case.
How about The Swamp's lament for the "human dimension?" Not too convincing, especially when you're talking about a guy who calls butchered civilians "collateral damage," right before he refuses to count them. Or one whose administration terms raining incendiaries from the skies "shock and awe." A guy who flew over Katrina's aftermath, to get a better look at the "real" situation.
Fine then. How about the misguided concretizations of Robert George? Amatuer night. "Stephen Bridges played 'George W. Bush' in the same way that Stephen Colbert plays a pompous talk-show host named 'Stephen Colbert' who interviews 'real' people in politics?" Did he now? Really? Aside from being a nice example of a logical fallacy known as "X is the common thread," George's conflation of Colbert and Bridges misfires because it fails to recognize the obvious, which is that Colbert interviews real politicians, while Bridges' "real" interview was, in fact, a constructed charade. The parallel would have been apt had Bush, for example, decided to conduct the schizo monologue by himself. The fact that he brought a real person (not a "real" person, George, come on!) goes to show that he cannot comprehend the complexities of metafiction, which is exactly what Bush's stunt with Bridges attempted to pull off. Right before it sucked ass.
On to Frum's judgment that "Colbert bombed." Did he indeed? Which country? Last time I checked, the only guy on the stage who had bombed anyone was Bush himself. And he's bombed the shit out of pretty much everyone he can get away with, and wants to bomb more. Frum was using a metaphor, you say? Employing a general colloquialism to manipulate the collective recall of the event? Ah, got it. My point exactly. Language is power. Except when you don't know how it works. Especially against you. Which explains the "Consensus" stab in Frum's banal jab. To quote Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride: "You keep saying that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
As for the Washington Post hack's theorizations of the nuances of "mockery," I'm speechless. Unlike Colbert, who more fully understands what the term mockery means than anyone I've watched in recent memory. The fact that he attacks it from both ends (the real and the hyperreal) means that he's got it on lockdown. The Post hack, otherwise known as Richard Cohen, has a little bit of it, as evidenced by the first sentence of his clumsily arranged criticism: "First, let me state my credentials: I am a funny guy." You sure are, dude. I laughed my ass off reading your column, as well as the "fact" that you're so funny is , as you state, "well known in certain circles." Which circles, one asks? Who knows? Maybe they're located somewhere near that line Colbert wasn't supposed to cross.
Then there is Gardels' particularly huffy (no disrepect, Arianna, you're the ma'am!) comeback, which was about as long as a third-grader's book report. (OK, that's not fair to the third-grader.) Adopting religious metaphor when criticizing those who criticize Bush makes about as much sense as calling a free pass for polluters The Clean Skies Act. Remember, Gardels, this is a guy who says God told him to invade Iraq, which so far has led to thousands of inhabited body bags and the loss of billions of dollars. And the best you can do is tar Colbert as a leftist saint? Really? Like I said earlier, amateur hour. Or in the case of Gardels, amateur 127 words.
The truth, or truthiness, is this: Colbert's attack on Bush was the bravest thing any entertainer has accomplished this year. He's fashioned a simulation so startlingly coherent and productive that Republican tools like Kristol, Michael Brown (!), Lou Dobbs and countless more are lining up around the block to appear on his show. Better yet, they think that doing so will give them a sorely needed image makeover. That is, rather than do something real to save their skins, they'd rather subject themselves to the hyperreal ravings of a Bill O'Reilly-like madman. They'd rather sit through someone who lampoons the nation's most grievous ills by pretending to approve of them than actually set about fixing any of them. And that is why they invited Colbert to Washington, and that is why he roasted all of them like the pigs they are.
I don't believe in God and openly ridicule those who do -- man, is it ever fun! -- but if I was, I'd thank Him, Her or It for sending Colbert's "balls-ilicious" comedy earthward. Just in time for Armageddon.
 [The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed]
6:19:10 PM 
|
|
What the Media Finds Funny. Stephen Colbert[base ']s recent skewering of the president and the press at the White House Correspondent[base ']s Dinner prompted a number of journalists to declare that Colbert "just wasn[base ']t that funny." (Lloyd Grove suggested that the lampoon had "bombed badly.") But while mainstream outlets have all but ignored or belittled the event, web writers have rushed to Colbert's defense. Yesterday Salon wrote a cover story on the media's efforts to sweep Colbert under the rug[~]and got more traffic for this than for any story since breaking the Abu Ghraib torture photos[~]while the liberal blogosphere has been talking about him nonstop.
The disdain for Colbert's remarks, most of which touched on issues that were all perfectly valid and matters of public record (NSA spying, the energy crisis, global warming, FEMA and Joseph Wilson), raises the question: what does the media find funny? Apparently, it[base ']s when President Bush makes fun of those missing WMDs. According to Alternet:
It occurred on March 24, 2004. The setting: The 60th annual black-tie dinner of the Radio and Television Correspondents Association (with many print journalists there as guests) at the Washington Hilton. On the menu: surf and turf. Attendance: 1,500. The main speaker: President George W. Bush, one year into the Iraq war, with 500 Americans already dead. That night, in the middle of his stand-up routine before the (perhaps tipsy) journos, Bush showed on a screen behind him some candid on-the-job photos of himself. One featured him gazing out a window, as Bush narrated, smiling: "Those weapons of mass destruction have got to be somewhere." Since Bush[base ']s parody[~]which received none of the media backlash that Colbert's did[~]1,900 more Americans have died in Iraq. Yet two years later Colbert points out indisputable failures of the administration and it[base ']s widely considered "unfunny." [MoJo Blog]
1:00:04 PM
|
|
Thursday, May 4, 2006
Independent / UK
The Innocence Project: Guilty until Proven Innocent
Capital punishment in the US is under the microscope and lawyers using the latest forensic science techniques have found justice wanting.
by Andrew Gumbel
Cameron Todd Willingham is the first and only man executed in the United States for suspected arson after his three children, all under the age of three, burned to death at their home in Corsicana, about an hour's drive south-east of Dallas, Texas, in December 1991.
Willingham testified at his trial that he narrowly escaped the fire himself, that he tried and failed to rescue his children, that he then made repeated attempts to call for help and re-enter the building, at one point smashing a window with a pool cue in the hope of reaching the children's bedrooms.
Not everyone, though, believed him. One of his neighbours, who knew he was a drifter, knew he had trouble holding down a job and knew about his fondness for going out to drink beer and play darts, thought he hadn't done nearly enough to save his family.
When the fire marshals examined the aftermath of the fire, they too found some anomalies and began to wonder if Willingham hadn't set it deliberately. Particularly damning at his trial was the testimony of the deputy state fire marshal, Manuel Vasquez, who examined the burn patterns on the wood floor and the melted aluminium threshold piece, as well as the way certain pieces of glass has cracked into crazy patterns in the heat, and told the jury there was no way this was the result of an accident. Someone, presumably Willingham, had sprinkled fuel and set light to the building.
"The fire tells a story," Mr Vasquez said on the stand at Willingham's trial. "I am just the interpreter. I am looking at the fire, and I am interpreting the fire. That is what I know. That is what I do best. And the fire does not lie. It tells the truth."
Willingham was duly convicted of murder and, after 12 years on death row, was executed by lethal injection in February 2004.
Now, though, compelling evidence has emerged that Mr Vasquez did not in fact know what he was talking about. None of his testimony has passed muster with a panel of acknowledged arson experts, which has gone over it in detail. And without his testimony, the case against Willingham is left essentially baseless. Unlike most capital convictions, where a defendant's protestations of innocence raise the question of who else might have committed the crime, this case may well have constituted no criminal behaviour whatsoever, just one more ghastly element in an unspeakable family tragedy. That is certainly what Willingham asserted as he went to his death. "The only statement I want to make is that I am an innocent man, convicted of a crime I did not committed," he said. "I have been persecuted for 12 years for something I did not do."
Thanks to the work of the New York-based Innocence Project - a team of defence lawyers who put dubious capital convictions under the microscope of modern technology - his protest is looking increasingly believable.
The group commissioned a real expert's report using advances in the understanding of arson evidence which will make uncomfortable reading for the prosecution in the Willingham case. Their findings will this week be handed to the Texas Forensic Science Commission, which is constitutionally bound to launch its own investigation and report back to Governor Rick Perry, the man who gave the green light to Willingham's execution.
The Innocence Project's report will be hard to argue with. It was compiled by four of the country's leading arson experts who have testified on behalf of defence and prosecution in previous cases. Their conclusion: Willingham's conviction was based on bad science, and none of the evidence should have ever led investigators to believe the fire was set deliberately. "While we have no doubt that ... witnesses believed what they were saying, each and every one of the indicators relied upon have since been scientifically proven to be invalid," the report says.
And so the stage is set for the next big showdown over the death penalty in the US. Already, the pace of executions in most states has slowed because of doubts in recent years about the safety of capital convictions. The release of death row inmates shown by DNA evidence and other methods to have been innocent of the crimes of which they were accused is steadily increasing.
And a host of other doubts are being introduced. California's execution machine is at a standstill because of evidence that the lethal drugs administered during executions merely mask the pain felt by the dying prisoner instead of eliminating it. Reports emerged from Ohio on Tuesday of convicted murderer Joseph Lewis Clark taking 90 minutes to die after the team trying to deliver a lethal injection had problems finding a suitable vein.
The Project's lawyers have been instrumental in forcing courts to take new DNA-testing technology into account when reviewing convictions. Since 1992, when the Innocence Project first began, 175 prisoners have been exonerated, including 14 who spent time on death row.
It was the Project's lawyers who first questioned the arson evidence. They assembled the panel of experts and commissioned the report. More strikingly, they were also responsible for lobbying the Texas authorities and bringing about the existence of the Forensic Science Commission in the first place.
As the Innocence Project itself put it in a statement, the release of its report "marks the first time in the nation that scientific evidence showing an innocent person was executed has been submitted to a government entity that is legally obligated to investigate cases, reach conclusions and direct system-wide reviews to determine the extent of the problem". In other words, it could conceivably be the beginning of the end of the death penalty in Texas.
It also spells political trouble for Governor Perry as he faces an election race this November. Many of the arson panel's conclusions had been reached even before Willingham's execution, by a Cambridge-educated arson expert called Gerald Hurst, who passed on his findings to the Governor's office. As he told an investigative team from the Chicago Tribune at the time: "There's nothing to suggest to any reasonable arson investigator that this was an arson fire. It was just a fire." It does not appear, however, that Dr Hurst's findings were taken seriously by either the Governor's office or the state Board of Pardons and Paroles.
Barry Scheck, one of the two principles of the Innocence Project, who remains perhaps most famous for his role in defending O J Simpson, said he had established through open records requests that the Hurst report had indeed been properly filed before the execution.
"Neither office has any record of anyone acknowledging it, taking note of its significance, responding to it or calling any attention to it within the government," he said. "The only reasonable conclusion is that the Governor's office and the Board of Pardons and Paroles ignored scientific evidence and went through with the execution."
The prosecution, meanwhile, presented last-minute, second-hand evidence that Willingham had confessed to his estranged wife, something she later said was untrue.
Perhaps most poignant for Willingham's surviving relatives is that, at the time of execution, a similar case was going through the Texas legal system, that of Ernest Willis, who had been sentenced to death for his alleged role in setting a fatal fire in west Texas in 1987. Dr Hurst examined his case, too, found the forensic evidence similarly flawed and said he saw no evidence of arson. Willis was able to have his case reopened and dismissed. He walked out of death row a free man seven months after Willingham's execution.
All this adds up to a potentially explosive cocktail of political and social issues. Texans may be more attached than most Americans to the death penalty, but even they tend to draw the line at putting innocent people to death. One candidate in the governor's race, the humourist and former singer Kinky Friedman, does not appear to have been harmed by his record of campaigning on behalf of death row prisoners. One of Friedman's campaign lines is: "Texas: 50th in education, first in executions... how's that working for you?"
If the political tide is turning slowly, the sense of discomfort in the professional world of forensics and legal analysis is starting to be overwhelming. Copycat Innocence Projects have been set up. The original one, meanwhile, has been at the forefront of denouncing errors and unprofessional behaviour at forensic crime labs around the country, most notably in Virginia, Texas and Ohio.
The group has also made disturbing findings about the functioning of the criminal justice system more generally. The Innocence Project has found that the single biggest cause of wrongful convictions is mistaken eyewitness identification testimony. In more than a third of cases, forensic science has also been misapplied in some way, with experts presenting "fraudulent, exaggerated, or otherwise tainted evidence to the judge or jury".
Six years ago, the state of Illinois issued a blanket commutation of all its death sentences after it was established that 13 people on death row were in fact innocent of the crimes of which they were committed. (In that case, it was journalism students at Northwestern University who did the legwork.) Much more recently, New York state chose not to reinstate its death penalty law.
The backlash against capital punishment may be coming too late for Willingham, but his case remains a potent weapon in the hands of the Innocence Project and other campaigners. If Texas, of all states, is forced to acknowledge it killed an innocent man, then the death penalty may be on its way to extinction.
© 2006 Independent News and Media Limited
12:49:27 PM
|
|
Cenk Uygur: Are We Ever Going to Bring Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to Justice?. Yesterday Zacarias Moussaoui was sentenced to life in prison. We got him!
Woop-de-doo! He was apparently just as much a clown inside Al Qaeda as he was inside our court rooms. He was a failed terrorist - does it get any lower on the human totem pole? He didn't help the FBI to stop the 9/11 conspirators when he could have, so I am satisfied with his sentence. But no one should delude themselves into thinking this was a big case. This guy is the very definition of small potatoes.
But the US government does have someone in their custody that was a real player in Al Qaeda. In fact, he was the mastermind of 9/11. The capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the biggest victory we have had in the war on terror. His capture was more important than the whole Iraq War (but since that's been counterproductive and caused more terrorism than it has averted, that's not saying much).
We should be proud of this accomplishment. So, where is he? Why aren't we bringing him to justice?
Why did we just make a big show of sending a two-bit player away for life when we aren't even prosecuting the big guy? Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the real number three guy in Al Qaeda (since his capture we have pretended to capture a lot of #3 guys in Al Qaeda). Sometimes it seems capturing him was the only right thing we have done so far in the so-called war on terror.
Aren't we all a little surprised that the Bush administration hasn't thumped their chest a lot more over this guy? This is the type of thing that they could rightfully brag about. Along with the capture of some other real bad guys like Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Abu Zubaydah. We got them!
So, what gives? Here's my guess: We tortured them, so now we can't bring them into open court. So, we're never going to be able to bring them to justice.
How does that sit with the 9/11 families? As an American citizen, it doesn't sit well with me. I want justice. Are we never going to move these guys out of our secret prisons? Are we going to give up all pretenses to being a country of laws?
The problem is this administration has never believed in the American justice system. They think it's too weak. They think they're tough guys who know better. That the better route is ghost detainees, secret prisons, torture chambers and no trials. That's abhorrent and does more damage to our system than any terrorist could.
Terrorists may be able to kill us, but they can't kill our way of life. We're the only people who can do that. Is that what we really want? Are we going to let Al Qaeda win by changing America?
I know what the Bush administration is going to do. They are going to try to run out the clock on their term and hand the problem off to the next president. They tortured these guys and they're not going to admit it by bringing them into open court. If they had it their way, they would deny us justice for as long as they possibly could - to cover their own ass.
If you believed in what you did to them in the first place, just admit it and come out and defend it. If you thought what you did was wrong in the first place, why did you do it?
I might be a throwback to times where we believed in America and what we stood for as a country. So I might be a relic, but I believe in bringing people to justice. I think that means something.
I can't wait for the day that we put Khalid Shaikh Mohammed away for good. That doesn't mean the day we squirrel him away to a secret prison without a trial. We're not a third rate banana republic, or at least we shouldn't be. That means the day we bring him through the American justice system and find him guilty as charged. Guilty of the murder of nearly 3,000 American citizens. Don't we deserve justice for that?
The Young Turks
 [The Huffington Post | Full Blog Feed]
12:47:42 PM
|
|
© Copyright 2006 Patricia Thurston.
|
|
|
|
|
