Just-in-time-production?
See CNN’s Breaking News Alert: “Security forces have captured a high-level al Qaeda operative in a raid in central Pakistan, Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat said.”
Then, after you see that, remember that we noted in May and then The New Republic reported out extensively early this month, that this White House has been telling the Pakistanis for months that they wanted to see a big-time al Qaida leader — hopefully bin Laden — produced during the Democratic convention.
Reuters is reporting that the guy they’ve served up may be a Tanzanian involved in the 1998 African embassy bombings. So apparently they couldn’t come up with bin Laden himself.
But here’s the thing. I’m not going to be able to watch the television coverage of this throughout the day. But many of you will. So I’d be very, very curious to hear whether when, oh say, CNN goes on about how this al Qaida guy has been hauled in they will mention at all, or with any consistency, that one of the most respected political magazines in the United States reported just weeks ago on the pressure the administration has been placing on the Pakistanis to serve up an al Qaida bad guy on this day.
Will they make the obvious connection? Or will they just ignore it?
This is just the latest, but perhaps the most blatant, example of how this administration has placed politics and, really, political dirty tricks above national security itself, and along the way persisted in defining political deviance down until tactics we used to associate with banana republics start to seem commonplace here.
And while we’re at it, this is yet another example of how truly important it is that we democratize the Middle East. Because once we have, some of them will be able to come back here and redemocratize us.
Actually, apropos of the previous post, the real sucker on this one seems to be MSNBC rather than CNN. At least thus far. As of 5:43, the Ghailani capture is the headline on the MSNBC website, while it gets lesser billing on CNN. MSNBC is even blaring it more than Fox News (oh the infamy!).
As with the earlier post, I’d be much obliged if anyone can tell me whether any of the MSNBC talking heads note the earlier published report in one of America’s most respected political magazines (see previous post) about the White House’s pressure on Pakistan to produce an al Qaida bad guy during the Dem convention.
Finally, right now I’m watching Wolf Blitzer on his little CNN news perch right off the convention floor doing a live shot. If he’s talking up the al Qaida story, why not have on Peter Beinart, editor of The New Republic, to talk about their above-mentioned story? I’m sure Peter would be happy to come on. And I just saw him here in the Fleet Center not more than twenty minutes ago.
For the last four days, this convention hall has always been in motion — people milling on and off the floor, in and out of the stands, the ever-present floor ushers — the only real extremists in the whole place — hustling people out of the aisles. But, now, like it is at the tail end of every national party convention, everyone is stationed in their place.
No one is moving from their seats. No one is leaving the floor, because if you do, you can’t go back down. I’m sitting just up and back to the side of the podium and looking out over the crowd, it — or they — look like nothing so much as a vast carpet of people, all watching intently, no floor to be seen anywhere.
The crowd was certainly more roused in Barack Obama’s speech; but not at any other time has their attention been more rapt.
Cleland just introduced Kerry. More later …
“I want an America that relies on its own ingenuity and innovation – not the Saudi royal family.”
Paging Adel Al-Jubeir …
Not a stem-winder — and Kerry would have been foolish to try. But a solid speech. And I thought he hit all the right points — with the right emotional tenor. In a way, sitting in the hall and watching the back of Kerry’s head most of the time is no way to judge how it appeared on TV. But that’s my snap judgment.
A brief note or follow-up on the Kerry speech.
A number of readers have written in to say they were wowed by the speech and ask why I led off saying that it wasn’t a ‘stem-winder’.
To me there’s no contradiction. The term ‘stem-winder’ isn’t simply an evaluation of the quality of a speech, but also — and more so — a description of a certain kind of performance. I thought this speech was very impressive, about at the top of the guy’s form. To say it wasn’t a stem-winder is simply to say that it wasn’t like Barack Obama’s speech a few nights back, or Clinton’s, or even Clark’s or Sharpton’s for that matter.
But I don’t think that’s the kind of public speaker Kerry is. And he was wise not to try to be something he’s not. He didn’t try to be a master of rhetoric or tear into the crowd like those others. This was a well-written, powerfully delivered speech. And what occurred to me as I listened to it was how well the convention planners had used the earlier evenings events and speeches to tee the moment up for him.
I mean that not just in the sense that there’s an effort to build excitement for the main event or talk up the candidate –that’s a given. I thought they did a good job at playing Kerry up as a forceful and decisive leader. And that allowed him to suit his strengths as a speaker to the moment, to slide his speech-making right into that path they’d carved for him when his moment came.
Of course, I still haven’t seen the video of the actual TV-version of the speech. I’m still going on what I saw in the hall, watching the back of his head as he delivered. So perhaps my opinions are still premature.
And a final point, for what it’s worth. I talked to numerous reporters in the minutes and hours after the speech. And I think it would be fair to say that every person I spoke to told me that Kerry had exceeded their expectations.
Another good take on the speech is Will Saletan’s in Slate. I remember looking out into the audience at various of those moments of thunderous, almost defeaning response that Will mentions and thinking, they sowed the wind.
The reference to CNN last night was to their running live on-air the panicked reactions of the convention director as the balloons failed to drop precisely on schedule. Originally it may have been a glitch. But they seemed to keep it running long after they could have rectified the problem.
In the Boston Globe this morning, Tom Oliphant, no foe of Mr. Kerry, says the nominee “essentially blew an opportunity he may not get again until the debates with Bush this fall” and “muffed an opportunity to hone great material into a powerful address.”
I know what he’s referring to: Kerry’s sometimes rushed delivery. But this seems like a needlessly harsh appraisal and a distorted impression of the speech itself.
From the start of Kerry’s speech I could tell that he kept talking into rising applause — something like the rhetorical equivalent of spitting into the wind. He would nail a good applause line and then rush into the next verse of the speech.
In many cases I wondered or worried that some of those lines couldn’t be heard over the din, though I suspected that television microphones would do a better job keeping Kerry’s voice audible over the crowd.
At the time this struck me as a function of Kerry’s lack of expertise as a public speaker. A master like a Clinton or an Obama can make magic of those moments, half-heartedly trying to talk over the crowd, only to let them again and again beat him back with their cheers. Kerry mowed right through them, though perhaps it was simply that Kerry had a speech he could only get through if he took few or no breaks for sustained applause.
In any case, I really didn’t think it was nearly so big a deal as Oliphant did. But I’d be curious to hear others’ opinions.