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We have a short history lesson today about Walter Duranty, a NY Times reporter who refused to report the early 30′s famine in Ukraine. He was the dean of the West’s reporters in the Soviet Union and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his work, which was in many respects, outright lies. To this day, the Times includes his award in their brag. Last year the first Walter Duranty Prize for Mendacity in Journalism was awarded to Vogue Magazine for their adoring puff piece on the wife of Bashar Assad. Power Line’s John Hinderaker posts on that award’s prescience. Pickerhead has two Duranty biographies in his library. One is titled Stalin’s Apologist. The other, his autobiography is titled I Write As I Please. True enough.
Last fall, PJ Media and the New Criterion teamed up to award the first-ever Walter Duranty Prize for mendacity in journalism. My wife and I attended the event, and I wrote about it here. You can read the principal speeches, in which the grand prize and two runner-up awards were given out, here. So, who won the Duranty Prize last October?
Vogue Magazine, and reporter Joan Juliet Buck and editor Anna Wintour, for their stunningly stupid cover story on the glamorous wife of Syria’s dictator: “Asma al-Assad: A Rose in the Desert.” Seriously. Claudia Rosett’s speech awarding the grand prize was hilarious; here are a few excerpts:
‘Styled as a profile of the first lady of Syria, Asma al-Assad, this article was a paragon of propaganda — a makeover of the Assad dictatorship, presenting Asma as the human face of President Bashar al-Assad’s rule: “glamorous, young and very chic.” ‘ …
…How could these people be so dumb? PJ Media ridiculed Anna Wintour for falling for the murderous Assad dictatorship, but after all: Wintour may be a political figure by virtue of her massive fundraising for Democratic Party candidates, but she isn’t the Secretary of State. Or the President. What we see here is a characteristic failing of liberals. They are easily seduced by glamour, and–always in the background of glamour–money. Why else do they keep voting for Kennedys with IQs in the 80s? Or wear Che Guevara t-shirts, because they think he’s cute? These people are suckers.
So congratulations to PJ Media and the New Criterion. Their first-ever Duranty Award was prophetic. With hindsight, it honored not just mendacity in journalism, but stupidity in foreign policy.
When Assad opposed W Bush the DC Dems were in Bashar/Love. Rowan Scarborough makes sure their statements don’t get flushed down the media memory hole.
The Obama national security team that wants to go to war with Syria and demonizes President Bashar Assad is the same group that, as senators, urged reaching out to the dictator.
As a bloc on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, President Obama, Secretary of State John F. Kerry, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and Vice President Joseph R. Biden all opposed the George W. Bush administration’s playing tough with Mr. Assad.
None grew closer to Mr. Assad and promoted him in Washington more than Mr. Kerry.
“President Assad has been very generous with me in terms of the discussions we have had,” Mr. Kerry, as a senator from Massachusetts, told an audience at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in March 2011. He predicted that Mr. Assad would change for the better.
But that same month, pro-democracy demonstrations erupted in Syria that would lead to a civil war, unmasking Mr. Assad’s brutal tactics, including the Aug. 21 unleashing of nerve gas that killed more than 1,400 civilians.
Today, Mr. Kerry is a leading advocate for attacking Mr. Assad’s regime. On Friday, he called the man he once befriended a “thug and murderer.” …
John Fund on “president present.”
Washington is abuzz with talk about how much President Obama has damaged America’s credibility with his indecisiveness on Syria. It’s become accepted fact that Obama’s decision-making style resembles that of an academic convening an unruly seminar whose participants he largely disdains. What he is not is a decisive leader with the ability to bring disparate players together behind a common purpose.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. We had inklings of it a long time ago. Back when Barack Obama was running for president in 2008, Hillary Clinton accused him of “taking a pass” on tough issues when he was in the Illinois state senate, a theme later picked up by Republicans. Its basis is the 129 times he voted “present.” On 36 of those occasions, he was the only one to vote present of the 60 senators. One of those occasions was in 1999, when he twice chose not to vote on a bill protecting sexual-assault victims from having the explicit details of their cases made public without “good cause.” Bonnie Grabenhofer, the president of the Illinois National Organization of Women at the time, said she endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2007 in part because “when we needed someone to take a stand, Senator Obama took a pass.”
Today President Obama’s chaotic indecisiveness is a big part of his challenge in getting both houses of Congress to approve military action in Syria. Republicans are strongly leaning against intervention at this point, but Obama’s real problem may be with Democrats. ABC News reports that several congressional Democrats pushed back against military action against Syria in a conference call with administration officials Monday. ..
And Ed Morrissey says the world has figured it out too.
One of the major arguments for intervention in Syria is that it will be a rescue mission for the credibility of the American presidency, if not for any other reason. John McCain has been making that point repeatedly over the last two weeks, insisting that a show of weakness now would be fatal to American interests in the region and to our alliances with the Arab world. Jake Tapper interviewed the newsman who got Barack Obama’s first televised interview in 2009 for Al-Arabiya, Hisham Melhem, who says that Obama’s credibility in the region has been on the wane for four years:
‘Arab allies now view Obama as “wobbly, indecisive, not strong enough,” said Washington bureau chief of al Arabiya television Hisham Melhem, who also conducted that interview with Obama back in 2009.
Obama’s style of leadership does not engage Arab leaders, and does not address regional issues, like Egypt, said Melhem.
But “everybody’s crying out for American leadership, the Turks, the Arabs, and the Europeans. And given the weaknesses of the Europeans, given the vote in the British Parliament, given the fact that NATO ally Turkey is unable to lead – everyone is looking for the United States to lead, and there is no leadership,” said Melhem.
“The United States is AWOL.” ‘
Of all the arguments for intervention in Syria, this is actually the only one with any merit at all. …
Here’s something different. Business Insider publishes the American impressions of a student from Mumbai, India who has studied computer science the last two years at Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh.
Aniruddh Chaturvedi came from Mumbai to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Penn., where he is majoring in computer science. This past summer he interned at a tech company in Silicon Valley. During two years in the U.S., Chaturvedi has been surprised by various aspects of society, as he explained last year in a post on Quora. Chaturvedi offered his latest thoughts on America in an email to Business Insider.
The most surprising things about America:
Nobody talks about grades here.
Everyone is highly private about their accomplishments and failures. Someone’s performance in any field is their performance alone. This is different compared to India where people flaunt their riches and share their accomplishments with everybody else.
The retail experience is nowhere near as fun/nice as it is in India. Because labor is cheap in India, there is always someone who will act as a “personal shopper” to assist you with holding your clothes, giving suggestions, etc. In America, on the other hand, even if you go to a Nordstrom or Bloomingdales, there is almost nobody to help you out while you’re shopping. Shopping in America is more of a commodity / chore than it is a pleasurable activity
This may be biased/wrong because I was an intern, but at least in the tech world, nobody wants to put you under the bus for something that you didn’t do correctly or didn’t understand how to do. People will sit with you patiently till you get it. If you aren’t able to finish something within the stipulated deadline, a person on your team would graciously offer to take it off your plate.
The same applies to school. Before I came to the United States, I heard stories about how students at Johns Hopkins were so competitive with each other that they used to tear important pages from books in the library just so other students didn’t have access to it. In reality, I experienced the complete opposite. …
… Chaturvedi ended his post with a link to a video of “America F— Yeah” from the movie “Team America.”
Weekly Standard review tears away some of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s “noble savage” BS.
Fantasies of the “noble savage” are nothing new, of course. There were Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s state-of-nature imaginings in the 18th century, and something similar appears even in the ancient epic Gilgamesh. In 1580, Montaigne compared holy-warring Europeans (unfavorably) with Brazilian cannibals, and the phrase itself first turns up in English in John Dryden’s 1672 play The Conquest of Granada.
Typically, the idea is that the natural man is the virtuous man, living in small, happy, family groups, treading lightly upon Mother Earth, taking only what he needs, and returning himself gratefully to her enfolding bosom after, one supposes, a decently short interval. It’s become one of the left’s foundation myths, as well as a congenial foil to the modern free-market industrial culture it blames for many of the world’s woes.
Marlene Zuk now lends weight to some much-needed pushback. Although she doesn’t tackle the doubtful politics behind this striving for a primitive past, she does provide a welcome corrective to the “newspaper articles, morning TV, dozens of books, and self-help advocates promoting slow-food or no-cook diets, barefoot running, sleeping with our infants, and other measures large and small claim[ing] that it would be more natural, and healthier, to live more like our ancestors.” …