I know I'm late to the party with this one, but Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize this morning. Thousands of columns and posts have already been written detailing why Obama does or does not deserve this honor, or how it portends the End Times.
My question is, rather, why not? The President has done much in his first months in office to repair the White House's relationships with governments around the world, and has, through the art of speech-making and state-craft, done perhaps even more to improve public perception of the United States as a whole world-wide. He has pushed aggressively for nuclear non-proliferation and disarmament, begun the process of closing down the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, soundly rejected Bush Administration's policies that institutionalized torture and systematic violation of civil liberties, and has begun the process of ending a bloody, unjust war in Iraq.
Perhaps it still seems intuitively premature to award a sitting President the prize only months into his first term, but I fail to see who would have been a 'better' choice this year. Not only is Obama an internationally recognized symbol for the end of a thankfully brief period of 21st century neo-conservative imperialism, he is actively working to rectify the damage done over the last eight years.
Friday, October 9, 2009
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Everybody's a critic
I was disappointed by this immature article that appeared at Salon. I will ignore the repeated, non substantive whining about Olbermann's tone and affect, and focus on the objections that implied some legitimate argument.
The author's criticisms of Olbermann's Wed., Oct. 7, special comment are honestly bizarre. He begins by complaining that while Olbermann could have, "taken on the myths against (health care reform or specific health care bills/proposals) -- instead he spent his time making solemn pronouncements."
I don't expect Mike Madden, the writer, to watch every episode of Countdown, but even a superficial knowledge of the show or a half hour dedicated to researching his highly critical posting would reveal a relentless effort by Olbermann to "take on the myths" weighing down the health care debate. In about five minutes I found Olbermann contradicting the death panel claims, Joe Wilson and the illegal immigrant whopper, and the socialism canard. These are just a few examples I found quickly on YouTube, hardly a comprehensive representation of the actual time he devoted to the issue (Here he is calling out congressmen for accepting campaign contributions from the health care industry, and here he deals with industry profits).
Were I Olbermann, having spent basically the last six months dealing with the health care issue on a nightly basis, I would be insulted by such a misguided complaint. The special comment was meant to be special. He spends every night doing what Madden thought was omitted. Olbermann attempted to deal with the issue from a more personal perspective. It's fair to criticize the effort, or say it fell short, but it's hardly reasonable to chastise the person who, along with his colleague Rachel Maddow, has spent exponentially more time debunking health care myths than anyone else on television.
Which leads to Madden's second point of contention: "...Olbermann's sudden sense of wonder at a broken system seemed misplaced somehow. The problem isn't that people don't know how messed up things are; the problem is that a handful of lawmakers appear to be afraid to do anything about it." Bolding mine.
Er, that isn't the problem, but it's certainly a large one. The Republican approach to health care, essentially the competing "plan," is the status quo--no change. They have bolstered this point by time and time again, with varying degrees of sanity, proclaiming that there is no crisis and America has the best health care system in the world.
There are at least two basic ways to strengthen an argument: add additional supporting information or undermine the opponent's stance. Olbermann wasn't expressing a "sudden sense of wonder," that's just a baseless, snarky insult, he was attempting, like Micheal Moore with Sicko, to express a debate that involves billion dollar deficits, projections of exploding costs decades into the future, and complicated tax structures, at its most basic level: how it effects people's health. When constucting an argument, that type of anecdotal evidence serves as a powerful instantiation of broader data, which Olbermann included.
The article has plenty more objectionable material, but the line that beautifully summed up the complete vapidity of the criticism was in this passage, quoted in length for comedic effect:
"The "Special Comment" took on all sorts of issues that didn't appear to have much to do with the healthcare debate. Olbermann engaged in a rhetorical battle with Winston Churchill, who had opposed national health insurance in Britain after World War II (and, Olbermann said, lost his government for it). He won the fight, for what it was worth, by digging up a Churchill quote from the 1930s where the former British prime minister insisted government had a right to provide for people's well-being. But what was the point? Churchill is dead; the healthcare reform plan isn't remotely modeled on Britain's National Health Service; the only people who think it is are the conservative opponents of reform."
It's almost impossible to write about something like that without resorting to the basest of sarcasm. I will try to avoid such. For the most part, the problems with that passage are obvious and don't require detailed explanation. I would just point out that Madden's argument, to the extent it could be dubbed such, applies to any historical reference. He seems to be advancing the idea that only events comparable in exact detail are useful for edification and analogy.
Studying the social and political battles other nations waged to achieve universal coverage is so obviously relevant that it's hard to understand what Madden was thinking when he made the comment bolded above. I can only speculate why Madden wrote as he did and why the editors of Salon read the piece and thought it was worthy of heading up their daily list of articles, but it has the feel of criticism for criticism's sake.
In the spirit of fairness, I will close by agreeing with Madden on one point. Olbermann's complaint about the term "public option" was not a particularly strong point. From Madden's article:
"Take the public option. Its trouble, Olbermann insisted, is its name. "Political speak," Olbermann said. "It is legalese. It is the ego of the informed strutting down the street and saying, 'Look at me, I talk smart.'" (Perhaps not the most cutting insult, coming in the middle of an hour-long monologue.) Instead, Democrats should have called it "Medicare for all," he said."
Madden was quite right to conclude, "Calling the public option Medicare for all "might not be literally true, but instead of terrifying, it would be reassuring," (Olbermann) said. Explaining how it would work -- or why the Senate Finance Committee is resisting putting it in the bill -- might have been a more productive use of his time."
Again, Olbermann has done the explaining on many previous occasions, but demanding that proponents of health care reform start calling the public option something it clearly isn't for PR purposes was by far the weakest element of Olbermann's comment.
The author's criticisms of Olbermann's Wed., Oct. 7, special comment are honestly bizarre. He begins by complaining that while Olbermann could have, "taken on the myths against (health care reform or specific health care bills/proposals) -- instead he spent his time making solemn pronouncements."
I don't expect Mike Madden, the writer, to watch every episode of Countdown, but even a superficial knowledge of the show or a half hour dedicated to researching his highly critical posting would reveal a relentless effort by Olbermann to "take on the myths" weighing down the health care debate. In about five minutes I found Olbermann contradicting the death panel claims, Joe Wilson and the illegal immigrant whopper, and the socialism canard. These are just a few examples I found quickly on YouTube, hardly a comprehensive representation of the actual time he devoted to the issue (Here he is calling out congressmen for accepting campaign contributions from the health care industry, and here he deals with industry profits).
Were I Olbermann, having spent basically the last six months dealing with the health care issue on a nightly basis, I would be insulted by such a misguided complaint. The special comment was meant to be special. He spends every night doing what Madden thought was omitted. Olbermann attempted to deal with the issue from a more personal perspective. It's fair to criticize the effort, or say it fell short, but it's hardly reasonable to chastise the person who, along with his colleague Rachel Maddow, has spent exponentially more time debunking health care myths than anyone else on television.
Which leads to Madden's second point of contention: "...Olbermann's sudden sense of wonder at a broken system seemed misplaced somehow. The problem isn't that people don't know how messed up things are; the problem is that a handful of lawmakers appear to be afraid to do anything about it." Bolding mine.
Er, that isn't the problem, but it's certainly a large one. The Republican approach to health care, essentially the competing "plan," is the status quo--no change. They have bolstered this point by time and time again, with varying degrees of sanity, proclaiming that there is no crisis and America has the best health care system in the world.
There are at least two basic ways to strengthen an argument: add additional supporting information or undermine the opponent's stance. Olbermann wasn't expressing a "sudden sense of wonder," that's just a baseless, snarky insult, he was attempting, like Micheal Moore with Sicko, to express a debate that involves billion dollar deficits, projections of exploding costs decades into the future, and complicated tax structures, at its most basic level: how it effects people's health. When constucting an argument, that type of anecdotal evidence serves as a powerful instantiation of broader data, which Olbermann included.
The article has plenty more objectionable material, but the line that beautifully summed up the complete vapidity of the criticism was in this passage, quoted in length for comedic effect:
"The "Special Comment" took on all sorts of issues that didn't appear to have much to do with the healthcare debate. Olbermann engaged in a rhetorical battle with Winston Churchill, who had opposed national health insurance in Britain after World War II (and, Olbermann said, lost his government for it). He won the fight, for what it was worth, by digging up a Churchill quote from the 1930s where the former British prime minister insisted government had a right to provide for people's well-being. But what was the point? Churchill is dead; the healthcare reform plan isn't remotely modeled on Britain's National Health Service; the only people who think it is are the conservative opponents of reform."
It's almost impossible to write about something like that without resorting to the basest of sarcasm. I will try to avoid such. For the most part, the problems with that passage are obvious and don't require detailed explanation. I would just point out that Madden's argument, to the extent it could be dubbed such, applies to any historical reference. He seems to be advancing the idea that only events comparable in exact detail are useful for edification and analogy.
Studying the social and political battles other nations waged to achieve universal coverage is so obviously relevant that it's hard to understand what Madden was thinking when he made the comment bolded above. I can only speculate why Madden wrote as he did and why the editors of Salon read the piece and thought it was worthy of heading up their daily list of articles, but it has the feel of criticism for criticism's sake.
In the spirit of fairness, I will close by agreeing with Madden on one point. Olbermann's complaint about the term "public option" was not a particularly strong point. From Madden's article:
"Take the public option. Its trouble, Olbermann insisted, is its name. "Political speak," Olbermann said. "It is legalese. It is the ego of the informed strutting down the street and saying, 'Look at me, I talk smart.'" (Perhaps not the most cutting insult, coming in the middle of an hour-long monologue.) Instead, Democrats should have called it "Medicare for all," he said."
Madden was quite right to conclude, "Calling the public option Medicare for all "might not be literally true, but instead of terrifying, it would be reassuring," (Olbermann) said. Explaining how it would work -- or why the Senate Finance Committee is resisting putting it in the bill -- might have been a more productive use of his time."
Again, Olbermann has done the explaining on many previous occasions, but demanding that proponents of health care reform start calling the public option something it clearly isn't for PR purposes was by far the weakest element of Olbermann's comment.
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