Just Above Sunset

Frank Luntz is that corporate and political consultant and pollster you used to see on CNN and MSNBC a lot, until they figured out he wasn’t exactly neutral – he had worked and still works for the Republican Party.  All that “let’s turn to our expert” stuff became a bit of a joke.  After all, his specialty is “testing language and finding words that will help his clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue or a candidate.”  He’s good at it, and he formed The Luntz Research Companies in 1992 – in Alexandria, Virginia, close to the Republican action.

Samantha Bee nailed him in an interview on the Daily Show – that interview opens with her commenting in voiceover that “Luntz has made a brilliant career spraying perfume on dog turds” – then she offers him a chance to tweak various words and phrases.  “Drilling for Oil” becomes “Responsible Exploration for Energy.”  “Logging” becomes “Healthy Forests.”  “Manipulation” becomes “Explanation and Education.”  Bill Maher later kidded him that he’d call “Concentration Camps” something like “Faith-Based Detention Centers.”  Luntz just smiles.  He actually was the one who came up with the term “Healthy Forests Initiative” for policies of the current administration that favor massively expanded logging on public lands and complete deregulation of the logging industry.  It’s all in how you frame it.  He was also responsible for the administration’s stance on climate change – “the jury is still out” and all that.  He’s since distanced himself from that.

In 1997, he was reprimanded by the American Association for Public Opinion Research and in 2000 he was censured by the National Council on Public Polls.  In a video piece, Penn and Teller ripped into him for his comment that the key to survey polling is “to ask a question in the way that you get the right answer.”  All this is on record.  But he’s still around.

So is Time magazine’s Joe Klein, the fellow who wrote Primary Colors, that roman à clef about Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign.  Lately Klein got into a bit of a mess himself - columnist Glenn Greenwald pointed out some whoppers, factual errors in a column Klein had written about the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).  Time eventually published a “correction” of sorts – “In the original version of this story, Joe Klein wrote that the House Democratic version of the legislation would allow a court review of individual foreign surveillance targets. Republicans believe the bill can be interpreted that way, but Democrats don’t.”

Greenwald pointed out that the actual text of the Democratic legislation quite specifically does not require court review of individual targets – it’s right there in the text – and Time’s response, that their job is just reporting “what each side says” and not the facts at all, is an odd view of journalism.  Greenwald thinks the facts matter. 

Klein’s own response was as follows - “I have neither the time nor legal background to figure out who’s right.”

So what the facts are doesn’t interest him much.  The whole thing sums up most everything you need to know about journalism these days – so and so said Barack Obama was a Muslim terrorist and also secretly ran a combination donut shop and opium den in Helsinki in the early sixties and Obama says this isn’t so, but we’re just telling you what people say and won’t look into it.  That’s journalism now.  The details of this FISA thing are here, if you’re interested – but it’s just sad.

Klein says he greatly admires George Bush, but doesn’t like one or two of his policies.  He’s quite a pip – and Time’s sole in-house “liberal.”

Okay, so let’s put them together.

Frank Luntz invited Joe Klein to a “dial-in group” watching the latest Republican debate and this is what Klein saw –

I attended Frank Luntz’s dial group of 30 undecided - or sort of undecided - Republicans in St. Petersburg, Florida, last night… and it was a fairly astonishing evening.

Now, for the uninitiated: dials are little hand-held machines that enable a focus group member to register instantaneous approval or disapproval as the watch a candidate on TV. There are limitations to the technology: all a candidate has to do is mention, say, Abraham Lincoln and the dials go off into the stratosphere. Film of soaring eagles will have the same effect. But the technology does have its uses.

Last night, for example, it was apparent from the get-go that Rudy Giuliani was having a very bad night. Mitt Romney clearly got the better of him in the opening debate about illegal immigration. Romney’s dial numbers hovered in the 60s (on a scale of 100) while Giuliani (40s) seemed defensive, members of the focus group later said… and they thought Romney seemed strong, even when defending his Sanctuary Mansion. (I mean, if you care about illegal immigrants - which I don’t understand in the first place, because I don’t - shouldn’t you check the people working your lawn and, if you have doubts, hire another company?)

In the next segment - the debate between Romney and Mike Huckabee over Huckabee’s college scholarships for the deserving children of illegal immigrants - I noticed something really distressing: When Huckabee said, “After all, these are children of God,” the dials plummeted. And that happened time and again through the evening: Any time any candidate proposed doing anything nice for anyone poor, the dials plummeted (30s). These Republicans were hard.

But there was worse to come: When John McCain started talking about torture - specifically, about waterboarding - the dials plummeted again. Lower even than for the illegal Children of God. Down to the low 20s, which, given the natural averaging of a focus group, is about as low as you can go. Afterwards, Luntz asked the group why they seemed to be in favor of torture. “I don’t have any problem pouring water on the face of a man who killed 3000 Americans on 9/11,” said John Shevlin, a retired federal law enforcement officer. The group applauded, appallingly.

Oh my.  This is the base.  There was the applause, and there were those dial readings.

McCain on immigration policy at the debate –

But then you’ve still got two other aspects of this issue that have to be resolved as well. And we need to sit down as Americans and recognize these are God’s children as well. (APPLAUSE)  And they need some protection under the law. And they need some of our love and compassion.

The hopeful Digby –

It seems to me that if you can get applause (and no boos) for a comment like that on immigration at a GOP debate then Democratic consultants should relax just a tiny bit about the breathless responses they are getting in their focus groups and tell their candidates to sound reasonable too. They aren’t going to be able to out-hate the Tancredo wing of the party so there’s no margin in helping the Republicans set the political agenda by pushing bad legislation and even worse rhetoric.

It certainly looks like the cranky old Republican creeps are once again on the rise in the GOP. But Huckabee and McCain are judged to have done well in the debates last night and those answers don’t seem to have hurt them.

Pat Buchanan ran for president partly on immigrant bashing in 1992 and he had quite a following. His speech at the Republican convention that year is infamous. The angry divisive tone of that speech was also considered to be the kiss of death for Poppy’s candidacy. Republicans should probably consider whether making Tom Tancredo happy is really in their best interest. The Democratic leadership certainly should.

But then there are those dial readings.

The McCain answer on torture also got applause from the audience –

MCCAIN: Well, Governor, I’m astonished that you haven’t found out what waterboarding is.

ROMNEY: I know what waterboarding is, Senator.

MCCAIN: Then I am astonished that you would think such a - such a torture would be inflicted on anyone in our - who we are held captive and anyone could believe that that’s not torture. It’s in violation of the Geneva Convention. It’s in violation of existing law… (APPLAUSE)  And, Governor, let me tell you, if we’re going to get the high ground in this world and we’re going to be the America that we have cherished and loved for more than 200 years. We’re not going to torture people.  We’re not going to do what Pol Pot did. We’re not going to do what’s being done to Burmese monks as we speak. I suggest that you talk to retired military officers and active duty military officers like Colin Powell and others, and how in the world anybody could think that that kind of thing could be inflicted by Americans on people who are held in our custody is absolutely beyond me. (APPLAUSE)

ROMNEY: Senator McCain, I appreciate your strong response, and you have the credentials upon which to make that response. I did not say and I do not say that I’m in favor of torture. I am not. I’m not going to specify the specific means of what is and what is not torture so that the people that we capture will know what things we’re able to do and what things we’re not able to do. And I get that advice from Cofer Black, who is a person who was responsible for counterterrorism in the CIA for some 35 years.  I get that advice by talking to former generals in our military… and I don’t believe it’s appropriate for me, as a presidential candidate, to lay out all the issues one by one… get questioned one by one: Is this torture, is that torture? And so, that’s something which I’m going to take your and other people’s counsel on.

MCCAIN: Well, then you would have to advocate that we withdraw from the Geneva Conventions, which were for the treatment of people who were held prisoners, whether they be illegal combatants or regular prisoners of war. Because it’s clear the definition of torture. It’s in violation of laws we have passed.  And again, I would hope that we would understand, my friends, that life is not “24″ and Jack Bauer.  Life is interrogation techniques which are humane and yet effective. And I just came back from visiting a prison in Iraq. The Army general there said that techniques under the Army Field Manual are working and working effectively, and he didn’t think they need to do anything else.  My friends, this is what America is all about. This is a defining issue and, clearly, we should be able, if we want to be commander in chief of the U.S. Armed Forces, to take a definite and positive position on, and that is, we will never allow torture to take place in the United States of America. (APPLAUSE)

Digby, even after reading about those dials, thinks the applause was genuine –

Now, I would be open to the idea that there might have been a large number of Democratic ringers in the audience applauding for that sort of statement except for the fact that, other than the predictable Ron Paulite responses, there was no other counterintuitive evidence but for these two questions. It’s extremely unlikely that these Democratic ringers would have remained silent except on these answers pertaining to treating “all God’s children” with kindness and compassion and abiding by the Geneva Conventions. And anyway, the applause was much too loud for it to have been done by a spattering of Democrats in the audience. I think it was a reflexive response by the decent Republicans in the audience to these candidates saying the obviously correct thing.

But she knows something else is up here, that odd, perhaps small minority –

Frank Luntz, for reasons we can only speculate about, invited Joe Klein to observe one of these (unreliable, as Klein notes) focus groups that didn’t feature any of those decent Republicans. It could easily be just the luck of the draw - there are a whole lot of them who obviously think torture is terrific and that Mexicans aren’t God’s children. It’s not unlikely that you could easily wind up with a roomful of them.

But I don’t believe that they are representative of how all Republicans really felt about Huckabee and McCain’s answers. That immediate applause is exactly how you would expect normal Americans, raised with American values, to respond to such statements. That they did it publicly at a Republican function where many of their fellows apparently think that torture and punishing children for their parents’ behavior is an American value, is a testament to their decency.

Those in that private little group of true believers are, as Klein writes, appalling.

Digby is an optimist.  Luntz may be a tool, but he does his homework.  The applause doesn’t matter.  People go into the voting booth alone.  Who knows what they’ll dial up?

In 1999 Ron Rosenbaum gave us Explaining Hitler –

Seeking explanations for Hitler’s monumental evil and the Holocaust, Rosenbaum traveled from Vienna and Munich to London, Paris and Jerusalem, interviewing leading historians, biographers, philosophers, psychologists and theologians. While this convoluted, selective survey of Hitler scholarship will frustrate readers looking for hard answers, it offers groundbreaking insights into the enigma of Hitler’s psyche.

And it was thorough –

Rosenbaum effectively re-creates the hitherto largely untold story of the heroic anti-Hitler Munich journalists who courageously took on the Nazis from 1920 to 1933. And he provides compelling testimony refuting the oft-repeated claim that Hitler had one undescended testicle.

And last year Rosenbaum gave us The Shakespeare Wars –

Acclaimed journalist Rosenbaum, New York Observer columnist and cultural omnivore (Explaining Hitler), conveys the impassioned arguments of leading directors and scholars concerning how Shakespeare should be printed and performed. “Hearing Sir Peter Hall pound his fists in fury over the vital importance of a pause at the close of a pentameter line, for instance - wonderful!” Rosenbaum enthuses. Elsewhere he recalls how seeing Peter Brook’s definitive 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream inspired Rosenbaum’s “outsider’s odyssey into the innermost citadels of scholarship” to investigate the painstaking work of Shakespearean textual experts as they convert the Bard’s earliest published works into authoritative editions. Evoking the clashing methodologies and discourses of scholars, the dizzying depths of lexicographic databases and a rare instance of Shakespeare’s voice transcribed in a court proceeding, Rosenbaum captures with clarity and wry humor the obsessive fervor, theoretical about-turns and occasional scholarly fiasco that characterize this arcane world.

But now he’s moved beyond the arcane and perhaps trivial (depending on your point of view).  He’s writing about World War III – but not in a book, just at slate.com, part of the Washington Post organization.

The item is Talkin’ World War III – and that next great war must be considered, as the president keeps bringing it up, most famously on October 17, when we were warned that “if you’re interested in avoiding World War III,” you ought be with him on doing anything and everything to make sure Iran is not developing nuclear weapons and never does.  What the president meant by that World War II comment was unclear – it was more a generalized “be very afraid’ political ploy than any explanation of a likely scenario.

But Rosenbaum sees the comment as a watershed –

This past month may be remembered as the one when World War III broke out. Not the thing itself, obviously, but the concept, the memory, the nightmare, which had been buried in the basement of our cultural consciousness since the end of the Cold War. The beast suddenly broke out of the basement and it’s in our face again. The return of the repressed.

Indeed, many found the phrase “jolting, coming out of the blue.”  It had not been in widespread use, “certainly not from a White House podium,” and too “World War III” generally “connotes a global nuclear war, while Bush was speaking about regional scenarios involving Iran and Israel.”  So the question we’re dealing with here is why the sudden rhetorical escalation?

If it was just political jockeying – trying to make those who think he’s a little too fond of bluster followed by bombing look like head-in-the-sand fools – we are reminded that this is the man who has the “nuclear football,” the black briefcase with the Emergency War Orders, always by his side, and he can, if he wishes, pretty much wipe out the entire human race.  And he is a proud man, with a temper, who doesn’t like details and is somewhat impulsive.  Perhaps we should be more careful in choosing a president, no?  It has been decades since anyone brought up the “nuclear button” power that comes with the office.  It may be becoming an issue again.

But Rosenbaum isn’t going there.  He’s just stringing together incidents that raise red flags, like what he calls an even more ominous quote – originally published two weeks earlier in London’s “usually reliable” Spectator, in a story about the September 6 Israeli raid on that Syrian nuclear facility, if that is what it was.  There’s no telling now.  It’s gone.  But the quote in question was from a “very senior British ministerial source” – “If people had known how close we came to world war three that day there’d have been mass panic.”

Rosenbaum – “Here, it wasn’t Bush theorizing about the future; it was a responsible official saying we’d already come close to Armageddon.”

Do you like red flags?  Try this –

And then there was the “mistake” that came to light about the same time as the Israeli raid, the mistake in nuclear weapons handling, which allowed - for the first time in 40 years - six nuclear warheads to be flown over U.S. airspace, suspended from the wing of a long-range B-52 bomber en route from Minot, N.D., to Barksdale, La., a staging point for Mideast missions. And though the incident appears to have been an accident, it set off seething blogospheric speculation about its connection to the Israeli raid, and a prospective U.S. raid on Iran. Could it have been a signal of sorts? Even if it was a simple error, the unauthorized flight of the exposed nukes betrayed profound flaws in our control of our nuclear arsenal. Suddenly, the bombs that we knew, on some level, were there somewhere, were out in the open, waving: Hey, we’re still here!

Ah, the nuclear end of everything seems to be bubbling up in the background, doesn’t it?

There’s more –

And now we have the crisis in Pakistan, one that portends a nightmare scenario in which Pakistan’s so-called “Islamic bomb” falls into the hands of al-Qaida sympathizers. Such an outcome would put us on a fast-track route to World War III, because logic would dictate an immediate attack on those Pakistani nukes before they could be dispersed or launched, and logic on the other side would dictate that their new possessors launch or disperse them as soon as possible under a “use it or lose it” threat.

Add to that the recent “almost unprecedented” declassification of an element of our nuclear war plan formerly known as the Strategic Integrated Operating Plan, OPLAN 8044 –

The heavily redacted document, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Hans M. Kristensen, a nuke specialist at the Federation of American Scientists, is almost completely blanked out, save for a few headings suggesting that we have off-the-shelf plans for nuking “regional” states, a phrase Kristensen believes applies to states that have weapons of mass destruction programs, such as North Korea and Iran. Soon, if not already, one can be sure, there will be “robust contingency plans” for Pakistan, as Martin Walker put it recently in the New York Times.

And there is “a kind of synchronicity in the collective unconscious.”  Books —Richard Rhodes’ history of the Cold War nuclear arms race, Arsenals of Folly, “which takes us up to 1986 and the failure of the superpowers to ban the bomb,” and Jonathan Schell’s “utopian revival of the cause of nuclear abolitionism” in The Seventh Decade.   The talk is in the air.  And Rosenbaum notes there was this month’s new film, Southland Tales - World War III begins with a nuclear attack on Abilene, Texas.  And we’ll soon get Tom Clancy’s EndWar, a World War III video game (”for advanced systems only”).

Something is up –

World War III hasn’t broken out, but an apprehensive foreboding about it certainly has. Of course, World War III has never gone away, in the sense that there are some 500 Minuteman missiles alone, lurking out there in underground silos below the northern great plains; all of them, according to Kristensen, “on high alert” - meaning ready to fire on command in 15 minutes or less - and many more on submarines and ready to load on bombers. They’re no longer targeted on the former Soviet Union but are easily re-targetable.

As the saying goes, nuclear war has until recently been “forgotten but not gone,” the ghost at the feast. First, there was the decade-long “holiday from history,” from the fall of the Wall to the fall of the Twin Towers. And then a different kind of nightmare supplanted nuclear war, the one that went by the name “the next 9/11.”

But Rosenbaum says that was small beans –

Not to diminish the horror of a “next 9/11,” but 3,000 died that day. At the height of the Cold War, the estimate for the number of killed in a U.S.-USSR nuclear war ranged from a low of 200 million to a high of everyone, the death of the human species from an Earth made uninhabitable by nuclear winter. Or, as one nuclear strategist once memorably put it, “the death of consciousness.”

Should we worry about the war that ends everything?  Put things in context –

It didn’t happen back then, in part, we now know, because of blind luck (misleading radar warnings on both sides that could have been, but weren’t, taken as signals for launch). And because back then, despite the madness of Mutually Assured Destruction deterrence doctrine, there were only two main players, both semi-rational monoliths with an interest in their own survival.

Now, there are at least eight nuclear nations and who knows how many “non-state actors,” as the euphemism for terrorist groups goes. And some of these non-state actors have adopted an ideology of suicidal martyrdom, even when it comes to nukes, and thus can’t be deterred by the reciprocal threat of death.

And he says that is what is “so sad about Jonathan Schell’s admirable, idealistic book.”  There’s no going back.  You can do treaties and do containment – but you cannot “un-invent” the bomb.  As he puts it – “Once information on how to make them gets out there, no matter what efforts good people employ to make them go away, bad people will keep building them.”

And there is what Rosenbaum sees as a bit of an issue right now –

I don’t want to be alarmist (actually I do, or rather I’d like you to share my sense of alarm), but I’m surprised there isn’t a greater sense of concern about those Pakistani nukes. Forget Iran and Israel (Bush’s hypothetical route to World War III). Pakistani nukes now represent the quickest shortcut to a regional nuclear war that could escalate to a global nuclear war.

The instability of the Musharraf regime and uncertainty about its control of its “Islamic bomb” - actually an arsenal of nukes, including, reportedly, the long-range missiles they can be mounted on - has been a particular concern since 9/11. The key “unknown unknown” in the decision to invade Afghanistan was whether the considerable bloc of radical Islamist Taliban (if not al-Qaida) sympathizers within the Pakistani military and its notorious intelligence service, the ISI (which in fact helped create al-Qaida), would destabilize the Musharraf government.

We dodged a bullet then. But now the once-shaky Musharraf regime is on the brink of collapse. Musharraf has survived assassination attempts before, and there is little likelihood that the forces behind those attempts have a diminished appetite for his demise, literal or political.

And add this –

In recent years entire regions of Pakistan have become safe havens for al-Qaida and (quite likely) Osama. Is it not possible that instead of pursuing elaborate schemes to buy nukes on the black market or smuggle an improvised radioactive “dirty bomb” into the United States, al-Qaida has been biding its time, burrowing its way into Pakistan, waiting for the Islamic bomb to drop into Bin Laden’s lap? (I know: not a great choice of metaphor.) Because he thinks long term, he doesn’t have to try to scrounge up some “loose nuke” from the former Soviet “stans”; he can just wait. He’s one coup - or one bullet - away from being handed the keys to an entire arsenal of nuclear weapons.

Add the New York Times front page story on November 18 on the nature of our “control” over Pakistani nukes.  The Times had held this story for more than three years at the request of the Bush administration –

This time, when discussion of the issue in Pakistan became more public in the midst of the crisis and the Times told the administration it wanted to publish, the White House withdrew its request for a hold. If people in the administration withdrew their request because they thought the story would be in any way reassuring, they are, to put it mildly, out of their minds.

The rumors circulating that the United States was somehow in Pakistani launch control rooms, presumably exercising some control, turn out to be - the Times story revealed - wishful thinking. In fact, the American efforts appear to have been aimed at preventing an “unauthorized” launch, a scenario in which al-Qaida or some terrorist group steals a weapon and tries to use it.

Of course the real danger is not “unauthorized” launches but unwelcome “authorized” ones.  When Musharraf falls, what happens if the authority to authorize a launch falls into the hands of either al-Qaida-sympathizer elements in the military and intelligence service or, worst case, al-Qaida itself?   What happens?  Very bad things.

Rosenbaum believes that this scenario is being war-gamed “incessantly in the defense and intelligence ministries of every nuclear nation, most particularly the United States, Russia, and Israel.”  And the reason is obvious –

War is just a shot away, a well-aimed shot at Musharraf. But World War III? Not inevitably. Still, in any conflict involving nukes, the steps from regional to global can take place in a flash. The new “authorized” users of the Islamic bomb fire one or more at Israel, which could very well retaliate against Islamic capitals and perhaps bring retaliation upon itself from Russia, which may have undeclared agreements with Iran, for instance, that calls for such action if the Iranians are attacked.

If Pakistan is the most immediate threat, U.S., Israeli, and Iranian hostilities over Iranian bomb-making may be the most likely to go global. That may have been what the “very senior” British official was talking about when he said the Israeli raid on Syria brought us “close … to a third world war.” Iranian radar could easily have interpreted the Israeli planes as having its nuclear facilities as their target. On Nov. 21, Aviation Week reported online that the United States participated in some way in the Israeli raid by providing Israel information about Syrian air defenses. And Yossi Melman, the intelligence correspondent with Haaretz, reported a few days later that - according to an Israeli defense specialist - the raid wasn’t about a nuclear reactor but something more “nasty and vicious,” a plutonium assembly plant where plutonium, presumably from North Korea, was being processed into Syrian bombs.

It’s all a bit murky, but the signs are not good.

Rosenbaum may be wrong about all this, but he is someone who notices things.  It seems the Zeitgeist has shifted again.

Just thought you should know.  It’s not just Rosenbaum – many of us felt it.  Rosenbaum just keeps an eye on things to let us know we’re not crazy.  Doomed, but not crazy.