Leadership... Fuhrershaft is another word for it...

    

This is a mild story of love and perhaps a form of leadership.  I notice the pedalo is much bigger than the black swan, Petra, who has fallen in love with her skewed mirror image…

A couple of years ago I read that in his native Austria they find it difficult sometimes to report on the speeches of Arnold, out here in Reagan’s Morning in America, City on the Hill… California…

He uses “leadership” so often in his speeches and the translation is Fuhrershaft, a verboten word.

I read that one editor in Austria just inserts a standard replacement passage on ‘not raising taxes’ when Arnold talks of ”leadership”.

Well the love of Petra for her large white pedalo is benign… but few forms of leadership are.  Whether fully revealed in the public political arena, on the spurious gag-worthy Blahgs (jerk those pink rhinestone poodle collars!) or hidden behind the various curtains.

I wonder what is to become of us…

She always keeps close to the pedal boat and sometimes even nestles in the hollow area underneath it,” Münster zoo director Jörg Adler told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “She regards it as her firm partner. We’re going to introduce her to some male swans in March to see if she fancies mating with a real swan but I don’t think she does.

    

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UPDATE, 5:18 pm

Yes yes yes… let’s kill him too.  After all, it would not be random street violence nor sectarian revenge killing, nor spoils of war killing, nor fodder of war, all sides, killing.  Nor would it be blasting the children to death, as they gather for American sweets in the midst of a dying world…

Yes, let’s kill him too.  A full bore, state sanctioned, Rule of Law killing.  Why not… after all, he is the one who knows all the dirty deals, across the years, with America and her leaders.

Every offer, every bargain, every knock down price.  Absolutely, let’s kill him.  A crime passionel.  Why not.

[E]ven on the relatively ”safe” side of the river, a dizzying assortment of armed men roamed freely. In the space of an hour, we encountered the Badr Organization militia, the Mahdi Army militia, the Kurdish peshmerga militia, the Iraqi police, Interior Ministry commandos, the Iraqi military, American troops, the Oil Protection Force, the motorcade of a Communist Party official and Central Bank guards escorting an armored van.

We drove through one of my favorite districts in hopes of visiting shopkeepers I knew. But they had fled, leaving behind padlocked doors and faded signs for shops whose names now seem ironic rather than catchy: ”Nuts,” ”Ghost Music,” “Once Upon a Time.”

I asked my colleagues to arrange meetings with old Iraqi sources — politicians, professors, activists and clerics — only to be told they had been assassinated, abducted or exiled.

Even Mr. Milk is dead. The grocer we called by the name of his landmark shop in the upscale Mansour district was kidnapped and killed, along with his son, my colleagues said. The owner of a DVD shop where I once purchased a copy of Napoleon Dynamite also had been executed.

SLOW DAY FOR DEATH

So many blindfolded, tortured corpses turn up that an Iraqi co-worker recently told me it was ”a slow day” when 17 bodies were found. Typically, the figure is 40 or more. When the overflowing morgue at Yarmouk Hospital was bombed last month, one of our drivers wearily muttered, “How many times can they kill us?”  [snip]

[thanks to Madman]

Gibson comes on with the ABC evening news.  He says someone, “they”, are worried about retaliations after the execution.

Why worry?  About what?

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UPDATE, 6:56 pm

 Riverbend:

[A]gain, I can’t help but ask myself why this was all done? What was the point of breaking Iraq so that it was beyond repair? Iran seems to be the only gainer. Their presence in Iraq is so well-established, publicly criticizing a cleric or ayatollah verges on suicide. Has the situation gone so beyond America that it is now irretrievable? Or was this a part of the plan all along? My head aches just posing the questions.

What has me most puzzled right now is: why add fuel to the fire? Sunnis and moderate Shia are being chased out of the larger cities in the south and the capital. Baghdad is being torn apart with Shia leaving Sunni areas and Sunnis leaving Shia areas- some under threat and some in fear of attacks. People are being openly shot at check points or in drive by killings… Many colleges have stopped classes. Thousands of Iraqis no longer send their children to school- it’s just not safe.

Why make things worse by insisting on Saddam’s execution now? Who gains if they hang Saddam? Iran, naturally, but who else? There is a real fear that this execution will be the final blow that will shatter Iraq. Some Sunni and Shia tribes have threatened to arm their members against the Americans if Saddam is executed. Iraqis in general are watching closely to see what happens next, and quietly preparing for the worst. [snip]

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UPDATE, 9:47 pm

Gonna be a loooong two years… with this much capitulate and bitch from the Paid Campaign / DNC / Unions / NDN / Democracy Alliance / DMI / DLC / Whatever / Whoever / Else Blahgger class:

You don’t have to be an Edwards fan or be convinced he’s the one for ’08 to get that the latest reviews on Edwards’ presidential announcement are not only way off base, but missing the point entirely. Or maybe it’s just that the spending gluttony of splashy campaign starts has jaded us all into believing that if you don’t flaunt it you don’t got it, if you’ll pardon the slang. If that’s the case, then public funding for campaigns, which will make presidential runs less glamorous as well as less expensive, are a non starter.

hmmm I think it is the PAID CLASSES that want to keep the “spending gluttony of splashy campaign starts” going (chocolate fountains anyone?  Warner on a triscuit?  Anyone??)… Fundraising, big and small, is the BlogSnottery’s way in… one of them anyway.  So look to your own self.  And others like you.

And by the way, LOL it is not a movement.  It is a business that is online.  NOT A MOVEMENT (more than one site has moved to full on gag level using “movement”, even recommending other sites as “movement sites” or offering ”movement perspective“).

Between Harry Shearer’s Edwards Uses New Orleans as a Backdrop, and Michelle Pilecki’s The Media Disconnect of Edwards’ New Orleans Photo Op, you’ve got to wonder if these two people understand what was going on yesterday. Sorry to pick on them, because they’re not the only ones. Fox ran an old Bill O’Reilly interview with Edwards featuring questions that would be insulting for the local dog catcher.

It’s called an announcement for president not John Edwards solves the problems of NOLA that George W. Bush and his Administration continue to ignore.

 

No… it is called using New Orleans and her people.  For what is, again and again, fake white missionary work as a veneer for politics.

And it likely was instructive to observe Jimmy Carter at a cross street in Bed Stuy and 4 years later, Reagan at the same cross street.  It was searing then, searing now.

What people are saying is, we don’t see [hear] much that will benefit the American people.  And we feel taken.  It took a reporter’s question for Edwards to even mention the governmental lapses.  Standing in NO, in the Lower Ninth Ward.  Other than that the speeches this week as he moves from NO to Iowa to NH and now to NV are a soft drooly call for people to sacrifice and be patriotic.

WTF?

How about really calling out the bullshit?

And how about not kissing Edwards shoes and bitching over Shearer’s and Pilecki’s columns… neither of which gave in.  Taylor does not just disagree with the two reviews of Edwards very lame start at Huffpo, she does not want that sort of thing SAID.

Why give in? Especially early on? 

Unless of course shoring up the god damned fucking Democrats is a paid position

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hmmm Having a movement, shopping it hard.  A very long two years indeed:

Compare Edwards’ rhetoric — “We can create that change that America needs” — to that of Gandhi: “Be the change you want to see in the world.” In his 2-minute and 28 second pre-announcement video, he touched on the continuing hot-spot that is Sudan and the rather bizarre and gruesome situation in northern Uganda. It’s almost as if he’s Bill Clinton of the Clinton Foundation-era, having skipped all those years in the White House.

I had convinced myself of before joining up with Mark Warner that it’s okay — healthy even — for us to end up with a Democratic presidential nominee who was not also at the head of a larger (progressive) movement. I think I largely still think that’s true. But Edwards is confusing me because it seems like the latter might be the job that he’s auditioning for.

Lordy.

I thnk Bill just lives on in their minds as the big white pedalo, the object of their love.  And mixing Gandhi and Edwards… ooo so ill-advised I don’t know where to begin.

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hmmm Really looooooooong two years.

OK… I stumbled early this week on a mention at the Chronicle (SFGate.com) Technical blog that some “top blogger” had been invited along on the Edwards plane this week.  So I read along from his flight out of Oakland  via Houston into NO…and then along with Edwards this week..

It was massively unedifying.  Link to his last post.

And here is <laugh now> a comment of his to his last post on the “hard questions” he asked Edwards that were (satisfyingly to him) answered.

John: I haven’t said anything about his policies on purpose. My blog isn’t about politics. It’s very easy to get a good look at his stances. He was online the other evening for 1.5 hours.

 

But, here’s my list:

 

Gay rights. Yes.
War. Pull out, starting now.
Medical care. Wants national medical care.
Stem cell research. For it.
Global Warming. Thinks it’s a place where we need to do a LOT more (gave a bunch of specifics).

I’ll put together a more comprehensive list, if you want. But there are other places to do that. A wiki is much better for that kind of thing.

And, video certainly is better. WHy? Why should I be another gatekeeper on his ideas? Why shouldn’t you just listen to what he said and draw your own conclusions?

Comment by Robert Scoble — December 29, 2006 @ 11:09 pm

God help us.  Oh yes, the blogger did post a link to some photos of HIMSELF that another “going along for the ride” took.

I am sorry, the candidates are buying soft coverage, I have long thought that the sharpest elbows in the game (Scoble just appears to be a rather dull as dishwater geek and likely has some shilling for products in his background) sell the FuckedNutRoots as utterly malleable. 

I also rather think there is open talk of how dissent is shoved to the side.  “Concern trolls” being banished or at the least ridiculed:   Sign me up, I am a Concern Troll. 

Hell why not.

The other thing the candidates are buying is lack of criticism.  Soft slop, blogswarming, building buzz.  Stuff they/staff can check online and feel good about.

No wonder all the “message” and the “massage” is even sloppier than just a few years ago.  Hype the hits.  Hit the links.  Roll those numbers.  Stack up the tulips for Tulipmania!

At one point early on, Scoble said this:

But, I’m not going to write a lot about John Edwards. If you care about what happened here today he’s been doing a different interview every 15 minutes, just follow the reports on Google News, and just stood on the lawn next to a destroyed Ninth Ward home in New Orleans and talked with dozens of press here (I counted 20 video cameras). Translation: you can read a ton about what he said, with a lot more coming soon.

And fuck the American people.  A lot of what goes on in campaigns and online is just a transient flash mob of one sort or another.  But BlogSnots are selling and the poor advertising men (oh yeah, plus HillaryBillary) being run as ”leaders” (also known as fixers) are buying.

The one consistent theme that resonates with me is that Edwards is asking people to get involved to fix America.  The taxi driver yesterday who drove me from the airport said he thought Edwards sounded a lot like John Kennedy. I hear that on the front lawn today.

Sorry.  Soft slop.  Same slop Carville was selling about Edwards in 2003.  At least Scoble got some push back in his threads.

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UPDATE, 11:25 am

In fairness to Scoble, he has up two more postings, sort of early assessment at the end of the “compression tour” (my words, not quoting) of a few days on the campaign plane with Edwards…

He comments, in both posts, on some of the limitations of blogging in the firestorm of a political run.  I agree with him. 

As for how bloggers can play in this process? I think we just are going to come up short in coverage of campaigns when compared to the mainstream press. In order to ask really tough, probing questions, you need to build relationships with not just the candidate, but also with the staff. The staff really can decide whether you get him at a good time, or one where he’ll lower his guard a bit — and to really ask a tough question you need to listen to him answer questions thousands of times — that’s when you’ll see his weak points and where to probe more. There’s no way a blogger who comes in fresh without following him around is going to know his weak points, or the questions that he always gets riled up about. I got him a little riled, for instance, when I told him that people thought pulling out of Iraq would destablize the Middle East. I knew that’d get him riled, cause I had seen how he, and his staff, were thinking about that. You’ll see that on video next week too.

There is a tremendous expansion of information with the advent of the internet.  Fabulous.  But the noise and the sell outs (that would be the Blahgers – and the Box Cars tied to Armando and whoever – and others,  the ones tied utterly to elections) went up exponentially. 

Less fab.

Over all of the years, what I get the most from is verbatim transcription.  Full text.  Interview, Q & A, full text speeches.  And then, second, astute observation of the candidate, the campaign and the people from a tiny, tiny number of political writers.

I get a lot from TV.  I would never sign off from observing politics thru the dirty lens… of corporate owned, bottom line driven television.  And I love the way C-Span just sets up and films.  Lets it roll… Wonderful.

If Nancy had a brain cell operative (she is making herself a gatekeeper, WRONG!), she would agree to what Brian Lamb wants, for C-Span to have their own cameras, under their control, in the House.  But she said “No”.

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