Hatoyama’s Resignation and My 176 Seconds of Fame

Here, in related videos, I’m talking just after the news broke on NHK that Hatoyama had announced his intent to step down. They posted the second half only (and only an excerpt at that), which is a good thing actually; I was in the usual storytelling mode in the first half so I got cut off in mid-paragraph every time that I tried to answer a question. I went off for a few minutes while they delivered more news, during which the producer told me to try to make to brief. It worked, as I hope the clip shows. “Don’t bury the lead”—it’s even truer in the electronic media.

At the time, the media did not know that Ozawa was also going to step down, and I thought that I responded adequately to a follow-up question on that point in the second half. Note that they’ve edited this out and otherwise clipped the interview (the question to my first point doesn’t appear in the clip) so that the excerpt will lose its freshness as slowly as possible.

I learned many things in just that one experience. Like I’ve really, really aged. I also think that I enjoyed myself too much. That gave me a little insight on what got into the heads of those liberal wusses who show up on the O’Reilly Show for their 15 minutes of ignominy.

Back to work.

Misairu? You must be kidding

I expressed my displeasure over BBC’s headline jazzing up the Japanese response to the North Korean launch. It is only fair then, to mention that the Japanese media have been leaning in the other direction with its reference to the North Korean (dando) misairu, or (ballistic) missile. Every definition of “missile” tags it as a weapons system. Now the North Korean authorities have no business spending time and money launching a “satellite” while they go around begging and cajoling the international community for food; and yes, their military objective is hard not to see. Still, technically, this one is a (ballistic) projectile, not a missile, until shown otherwise. So it is with delight to see that today’s hardcopy evening version of the Yomiuri (though not the online version) put misairu in quotation marks in the headline and referred to it as hasshatai, or “projectile”, in the text itself.


I realize it may trivial, but these things bug me, okay?

Interviewed for Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio

Jonathan Gadir interviewed me today for ABC Radio. I hope that I managed to make the following points:

1) The differences within the LDP and the DPJ are much wider than the differences between the two. There are no powerfully compelling political issues that split the nation into ideologically opposed camps of significance.
2) The DPJ in the Ozawa era has disappointed me by moving away from a fiscally responsible position purely for tactical reasons. The media reports this political opportunism and blames it on Mr. Ozawa. The DPJ suffers in the polls for this, even as the LDP flounders.
3) Having said that, competition is a good thing in itself. Moreover, the DPJ, with fewer ties to the vested interests that have accumulated during more than 50 years of mostly LDP rule, may be a better agent of change.
4) A Prime Minister Taro Aso improves the ruling coalition’s chances for victory (which depends, of course, on how you define victory). We’ll see a bump in the opinion polls, which will help it in a early snap election. And as poorly as the LDP is doing in the polls, it still can put its votes together with the New Komeito’s 12-14 percentage point Sokagakkai votes in the 300 single-seat districts.
5) Take your mind off Mr. Aso’s bark and take a better look at his bite. You’ll find that his positions/statements on Yasukuni, the touchstone for Japan-China relations; the Northern Territories, the remaining obstacle to completing the normalization of Japan-Russia relations; and the refueling operations in the Indian Ocean, one of the two keystones in the projection of Japanese self-defense capabilities on the global stage, have been remarkably moderate. In any event, what passes for Japanese conservatism is often milquetoast by international standards.
6) Mr. Aso has insufficient gravitas for the Prime Minister’s job. He claims, rightly, economic credentials as a businessman. But a businessman’s perspective is not necessarily the right one for statecraft. Moreover, his policy preferences appear to lean more toward traditional remedies.
6) As for Yuriko Koike (the only other candidate that I was asked to comment on), her main interests were, are, international relations and national security. She has a substantial environment portfolio, but I suspect that it’s an acquired expertise, rather than something that comes from the heart.

I say “hope” because, frankly, I think it came out more like the incoherent ramblings of a couch-potato blogger. I’m not going to listen to it myself; I’m too self-conscious for that. But, in keeping in line with my past actions, I’ll post the link when it comes online in a few days, if only so that you can see if I actually did manage to make those points.

Finally, I offer my humble apology to Mr. Aso for claiming that he has insufficient gravitas for the Prime Minister’s job because he tends to think out loud. Imagine what he would say about my performance.

Another Meta-Report on Chinese Transparency, from CNN

If you’re interested in this side issue, you’ve probably read this. Like the NYT report, it misses the political implications of the heavy spin from the authorities domestic media. The normally pro-China Yomiuri is showing much better journalistic instincts here.

My guess is, Western journalists can’t read anything that’s printed in Chinese (whereas Japanese reporters can). You sense that in some of the reporting on Japan as well.

NYT Seconds My China-Bizarro China Assessment…oops?

The New York Times chimes in with A Rescue in China, Uncensored, a very favorable “news analysis” (NYT’s own words) on the Chinese government’s response to the earthquake and its public communications efforts, complete with a brief comparison with the Myanmar authorities.

I now have to rethink my own assessment a little, though. Today’s hardcopy Yomiuri carries an article that explains the heavy hand of the Chinese authorities behind the intensive domestic reporting. A near-translation of the passage carrying the salient facts follows:

On May 12, Li Zhangchun, fifth ranked member of the Communist Party Politburo Standing Committee [ed. more importantly, “Propaganda Chief”] chaired an emergency meeting and issued the guideline for reporting on the earthquake, namely: “Firmly maintain stability and solidarity and focus on positive reporting”. The following day, the government issued an emergency directive to the media, urging them to “guide (public opinion) in a positive direction”, communicate the Party and the government’s “considerateness” to the victims, and calm the public. According to a Chinese newspaper report, the major newspapers adopted a decision to emphasize the Party center and the government’s focus on the lives of the people, expeditious rescue operations, the military and police who do not shirk self-sacrifice, etc.

The Yomiuri’s own assessment is summed up by the article’s headline and subtitle: (headline) Stability Top Priority (subtitle) Chinese Government—Strict Control over Reporting.

Now we know why we’re getting so much footage and photos of a caring Prime Minister Wen from Shinhwa. Yes, all governments try to game the system, manipulate the press. You got to see a lot of President Bush after Hurricane Katrina (some of which he must have regretted). But in liberal democracies, the authorities can’t issue directives, and newspaper associations won’t oblige. The silver lining is that it’s being done openly, and we get to see it.

The foreign media still appear to be operating freely, though, and survivors are talking to them. The articles show growing despair and anger, and even some civil disobedience, including sporadic reports of locals assaulting and looting supply vehicles and fighting over water supplies. This contrasts strongly with Burma, where the BBC correspondent (native English speaker) must hide his identity to report. To the extent that information comes out (and it does), it’s an oversight. The Myanmar authorities’ indifference, incompetence and corruption conspire to produce evidence to refute their bland reassurances.

In sum, I think that NYT and I should have given more qualified descriptions of the situation in China.

More Content Online than Hardcopy? Depends on Where You Are

A reminder: I'm now augmenting the daily column with one-liners available only on the Sun-Times' Web site. Go to suntimes.com and click on my column to learn how you can sign up for text-message updates.
—footnote in Richard Roeper column, Chicago Sun-Times, 2008 May 12

Very casually, one of my favorite columnists is reminding me that in this neck of the MSM woods, I can now get more information from the non-subscription web version than the pay-to-read hardcopy version. Maybe they should just sell the classified ads.

I don’t think that it’s just the Sun-Times either. But the picture is very different in Japan, where only a fraction appears on the websites, mostly in highly truncated form. And an archive’s lifespan is measured in weeks and months, not years. Sankei is the only Japanese MSM outlet going in the other direction, through its visually clunky but bounteous website in collaboration with MSN. You know, you should do a story about this. Yes, you. I know you’re reading this…

Post Mortem on the Late-Term Elderly Medical Care Insurance Rollout

I’ll have to alter my assessment of the political impact slightly, now that we’re seeing some serious coverage. I don’t see the deduction issue having a serious impact, but more broadly, the rollout reports feed into the now-familiar incompetence issue adding to the image of a bumbling, indecisive administration. However, that’s an already well-established trope, and these latest troubles are a temporary blip compared to the other far more serious problems of the coalition and more specifically the Fukuda administration.
--Me

MK kindly reminds me that even after I altered my assessment of the impact of the Late-Term Elderly Medical Care Insurance System, I still didn’t see the deduction issue having a serious impact. So true. I guess that’s why I’m not a political strategist. And speaking of political strategist, where was the LDP strategist who failed to make the following points and push them relentlessly through the media before the rollout?

1) The new insurance system is designed to ensure the viability of the national healthcare system.
2) On average, low income households will pay a little less, while high income households will pay a little more.
3) We’re leveling costs across municipalities, so some households will see their bills go up, while others go down. We’re taking measures to alleviate the hit.
4) We’re deducting the monthly payments from pension payments for your convenience and to cut costs.
5) Our local and national offices will be on call to answer any questions and solve any problems that you may encounter.
6) For details of the makeover, here’s the url, or call or visit our representatives at…

The message should have preceded the rollout, initiated by a series of informal talkfests-by-invitation (complete with box lunches/cake-and-coffee and dog-and-pony shows) between matched members of the administration (Prime Minister; the Minister of Health, Welfare and Labor; and top MHWL bureaucrats) and the media (editorial writers and reporters on the MHWL beat, i.e. MHWL kisha club members), accompanied by a print-and-broadcast PR blitz that emphasized these points. That way, they could have formed the basic contours of the narrative, which would have put the grumbling and bumbling in context. In the event, the grumbling and bumbling became the context.

A well-designed and well-executed might not have stopped losses altogether, but it certainly would have stemmed the tide. Most importantly, it would have given the Fukuda administration a boost in the competence department, where its biggest deficits lie. The DPJ is not making much headway here either, indicating that the political battle here is not so much over substance as over form.

I am not making it up. This is how it’s done. The government typically has six months to one year to design and implement the public relations campaign between the Diet vote and the actual rollout. The Koizumi-Abe-Fukuda administrations had two years to prepare after the Diet voted to do the makeover. So what happened?

I really don’t know. I’ve written before about problems in the kantei, and it certainly was the job of people in the Prime Minister’s Office to keep tabs on this issue (among many others) and coordinate public communication efforts. But the MHWL should have been doing it on their own initiative in the first place. Incompetence? Loss of will? Both? Your guess is as good as mine.

So much for Monday morning quarterbacking. Now, back to work.

The Prime Minister Sets Out to Charm the Press. Hey, It worked for President Bush…

"It's also fun to meet young people like this, right? For now..."
- Yasuo Fukuda, Asahi, 26 September 2007

The Prime Minister agreed to return to the traditional twice-a-day, burasagari, ask-the-PM-on-the-move format that Shinzo Abe had tried so hard to cut in half, and threw a kiss at the media butt for good measure, finishing it off with a dash of that (Fukuda-family) rarity among other Japanese politicians - irony. You could just see the reporters lapping it up.

All will not always be well. But when things go bad, the good-will cultivated with the media could spell the difference between victory and defeat. Just ask George Bush and Al Gore.

There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, it is the measure of a true leader of The Third Chimp. Mr. Fukuda is showing us how he had charmed the entire Kantei press into longing for his triumphant return.

Klieglight-shy, humorless Ichiro Ozawa needs to understand that he's up against a Chance the Gardener with some brains.

Has Someone Already Written the Book on Racial Balance in the Visual Media?

Has someone already written the book on racial balance in the visual media? Anybody? If no one has and you want to take a crack at it, the ad in frame 5 of 13 of the slideshow in this Slate article would be a good place to start.

It's a Volkswagen ad highlighting safety. The four young people in the auto are a black couple in front with the male in the driver's seat and a white male and Asian female in the back. The images are a perfectly pitched rendition of the racial and gender dynamics of the times. Compared to this, those ads with babies/children of every color in the appropriate proportions are a snap. (Just to be on the safe side, the ad avoids any romantic overtones, so the couples could just be friends for all the viewer knows.)

The first Die Hard (1988) managed to sustain such a balance over an entire movie, and threw in class conflict and geopolitics into the mix. Every death is painstakingly calibrated not to offend, while maximizing customer satisfaction, starting with Takagi, the Japanese business executive (the only decent character to die; remember, we're talking about 1988) and finishing up with Karl, the superhuman terrorist in the anticlimax, including a couple of arrogant (yes, black and white) FBI agents along the way.

---

And remember, that's Takagi, not Tad, not Dan, not any of those names Japanese businessmen routinely adopt to work with Americans, if you catch my drift.

How Media Figures Make Use of Nominally Hostile Mediums and What This Means

dunno, actually.

---

Here and here, Andrew Sullivan thinks he sees Ms. Coulter "wither and flinch" and "melt". Not so. The discomfort is palpable only in the context of the coolly calculating M.s. Coulter, and she does a workman's job of running out the clock by shamelessly repeating the sound bites that she knows will go down well with her constituency. And you know that she will go back to her turf and tell her fans that she went into the lion's lair (never mind Chris Matthews' bipartisan bark and bite) and faced those hypocrites down, and she knows that they will applaud. Mission accomplished. BIll Kristol repeating on The Daily Show is similar. It's all media jujitsu.

To be fair, you only have to remember the third-tier liberal academics who used to appear on The O'Reilly Show (do they still do that?) for their fifteen minutes of fame in exchange for being for being eaten alive like the Christians in the Forum to know that this phenomenon is not limited to the right.

Even the most serious of politics is spectacle. And those who entertain are rewarded, always handsomely, sometimes disproportionately. (Remember comedian Yukio Aoshima, the comedian and writer winning the Tokyo governorship without campaigning?) I have wondered for at least a couple of years how this can benefit us in the evolutionary sense. Perhaps we have not yet had the time to evolve from the prototypical humanoid who usually spent his/her whole life in a small roaming band of people who come into close contact with each other very day and thus did not have to worry about being fooled by people whose intimacy exists only in our imagination.

America: It's Entertainment!

If you don't believe me, go google the video clips yourself, but the very liberal Jon Stewart has a soft spot for the staunchly conservative John McCain. In his multiple appearances on The Daily Show, Mr. McCain is unfailingly treated with respect, and his sincerity is never doubted. Had a bad case of malsoundbitis lately? No problem. Do the wry chuckle here, wry chuckle there rope-a-dope for Mr. Stewart and his audience, and he'll make sure that he and the audience will laugh at the latest from that crazy but harmless uncle. Disapproving, yes, but with affection. All is forgiven.

Now you may say; sure, but Mr. McCain is the liberal's favorite conservative, and the conservative the right-wing loves to hate. (Is there something about having walked the walk and the sense of proportion that the experience it gave Mr. McCain that unnerves armchair conservatives? But I digress.) But what then to make of William Kristol, who also has scored multiple appearances on The Daily Show, and is none the worse for it? Surely there must be few neo-cons short of, say, Richard Perle or Bill Bennett, more capable of raising liberal rancor than this die-hard neo-con propagandist?

But Mr. Kristol is also an engaging guest. He may write awful things and cast doubt on the moral probity of all who dares to disagree with him. But he is always entertaining. That must be it, it's entertainment.

It would only be fair to point out that liberals do not have a monopoly on this game. One of right-wing bully Bill O'Reilly's staple acts is to bring on a loopy, hapless liberal academic eager for his 15 minutes, for the sole purpose of tearing him apart and feeding him to the lions. But he can and does treat a Ralph Nader with great deference. Again, entertainment.

But then, Mr. O'Reilly has an excuse; he works for Fox News, and they are up front about it. Let's face it, if people you don't know come into your living room and say they'll put it all out for you, "fair and balanced", you better know they're just kidding, or you deserve every bit of what you get.

But the Daily Show? I mean, if you can't trust fake news, who are you going to trust? Me?

Japan: Yoshiko Sakurai Is Always on Top of the Facts

This BBC website article headlined New Proof of Japan Sex Slaves has prompted me to resurrect some ideas that has been sitting on my hard disk for some time..

Woe betide the (usually) man who dares to argue with Yoshiko Sakurai; for Ms. Sakurai has an unparalleled command of the facts, which she can coolly roll out one after another at a moment's notice. Couple this to her deep convictions, steely resolve and calm eloquence, and you have one of the most formidable debating machines, as well as investigative journalists, in Japan. However, even the great Ms. Sakurai can have her problems when it comes to connecting the dots. That is, in weaving a truth, out of the facts.

Early this year, as the comfort women issue flared up again over Congressman Honda's crusade, Soichiro Tawara's Sunday Project took it up, and the testimony of three women, one South Korean, one Taiwanese, and one Dutch (but none from mainland China) became the focus of the debate. When the Dutch case came up and it was pointed out that some Japanese figures were tried and convicted after the War for forcing Dutch women in Indonesia to have sex with Japanese soldiers, Ms. Sakurai retorted that this proved, to the contrary, that the Japanese government was not involved. To back this claim, she told us that the facilities existed only for a short time (I think she mentioned the number of months) and that the authorities back home ordered it dismantled when they got wind of it.

Now it is probably safe to assume that the Japanese authorities did not punish the military personnel who had been responsible in setting it up. After all, given her encyclopedic knowledge, Ms. Sakurai would surely have mentioned it if they had. And it is also safe to assume that Japanese military personnel were the authorities. Indeed, what government is not responsible for its actions, merely because the deed had not been sanctioned at its highest levels? More seriously, is she willing to accept the moral, as well as legal, authority of the war tribunal that convicted the Japanese military personnel in question?

I've wondered since then if Ms. Sakurai might have been pleading a more modest defense, namely that there was no overriding decision to coerce women into sexual slavery, and that therefore Tokyo and the Class-A War Criminals should not have been called to task. Indeed, from what little I know of the War, it seems that the ways the Japanese military treated everyone from its own soldiers to enemy soldiers, from its own civilians to the locals and Western internees, varied widely with time and locale. There was no overarching Japanese decision or concerted, sustained effort to render harm (other than the fact of war, and the decision to invade that led to them, of course) that triggered the atrocities that are now part of our global collective consciousness. But that would betray notions of the nobility of the Japanese military. I don't think Ms. Sakurai wants to countenance that possibility.

As for the current Japanese government, the latest BBC article does seem to elide over the much of what Shinzo Abe has said since then. To put it another way, by paraphrasing Ben Bot's words, Mr. Abe has surely expressed his "profound regret for all that suffering" and certainly must think that we were "on the wrong side of history". So perhaps he should be forgiven if he feels that "[w]e should not go into semantics".

For Mr. Abe must remember how his attempts to parse the word "coerce" was used to move the case to the forefront.

Japan: "Okinawa-gate: The Unknown Scandal"? Give Me a Break.

I know it won't help my social life any to admit that I was old enough (in fact, already in college) in 1972 to remember quite well the Nishiyama incident (read this if you understand Japanese). This TIME article employs this incident to demonstrate that Japan did indeed deserve its ranking "in last year's Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index than Ghana or Bosnia account. And I quote:

"Freedom of the press is a constitutionally guaranteed right in Japan — as long as you stick to what the authorities want you to write. How does a developed democratic country manage to rank lower in last year's Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom index than Ghana or Bosnia? Just ask Takichi Nishiyama, whose promising career as a star political journalist at a national daily ended in 1971, when he came across what should have been a career-making scoop — official documents revealing that the Japanese government had gone around a deal approved by Japan's legislature and secretly paid the U.S. $4 million to ends its occupation of Okinawa in 1972…"

Now I do not dispute that TIME did get the facts right, as far as I could discern. Mr. Nishiyama did receive the purported document from his MOFA paramour, and they both (Mr. Nishiyama in particular) were excoriated in the court of public opinion, including the entire mass media except Mr., Nishiyama's employer Mainchi Shinbun, and wound up being convicted of violating the Civil Servants Law. 35 years after the handover, Okinawa does continue to bear the burden of the US presence in Japan. Reporters Without Borders does rank Japan behind Ghana and Bosnia, 51st to be exact, only two places ahead of that bastion of oppression, the United States of America. (My condolences to the oppressed masses at TIME HQ. Aren't you lucky you are based in Tokyo, B.W.?) And I would not be surprised to learn that there had indeed been a secret deal to foot the US bill for the turnover, then some. It was not a done deal, in fact, a feat so unprecedented in human history that Eisaku Sato, the prime minister who engineered the transfer on the Japanese side, received a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

But the TIME account omits a fact that was crucial to the unfolding of the incident. Mr. Nishiyama, instead of using the documents to expose the secret deal, decided to hand them over to two opposition Diet members, who used them to attack the government in Diet questioning. MOFA had no choice but to conduct an internal investigation to find the source of the leak, whereupon the paramour, who, according to her own account, had never intended the documents to be made public, fessed up. In other words, Mr. Nishiyama had crossed the line between a professional journalist and a political operator. It is no wonder that the media rightly attacked Mr. Nishiyama's actions, if the sex scandal (she was married at the time) did give it more legs than it perhaps merited. To imply that they did so because they only wanted to print "what the authorities want you to write" is a serious charge. Is TIME willing to back up this claim? Or will it issue an apology to the journalists working for Japanese publications?

Why then, does Japan merit such a low rating? If TIME had bothered to take a look at the Reporters Without Borders website, it would have seen that "[r]ising nationalism and the system of exclusive press clubs (kishas) threatened democratic gains in Japan, which fell 14 places to 51st. The newspaper Nihon Keizai was firebombed and several journalists physically [sic] attacked by far-right activists (uyoku)." Now the kisha clubs (not "kishas", which is the plural of Japanese for "reporter") are basically institution-specific, self-administered media cartels. There's one for each ministry, the stock exchange, Keidanren, and what have you. Membership gets you a desk and a telephone line on the premises and access to regular press briefings. In return, you must respect press embargoes. Any sanctions are imposed and enforced by the kishaclub. I don't know how oppressive they are, but they did open their doors to foreign correspondents in the early nineties. However, other than wire services, they generally find the upkeep too expensive.In any case, kisha clubs have been around for ages, so they cannot be the reason for the 2006 fall. As for the Nikkei firebombing, I'll have to look at the full report to see if it really merited a 14-spot downgrading, but it certainly can't have anything to do with sticking "to what the authorities want you to write".

That the Japanese government continues to deny the existence of a secret deal is no surprise; it's a government, for heaven's sake! And it is the job of the media to go and dig up the facts. We have our own version of the Freedom of Information Act, which has its own version of a national security clause, with which the Japanese government will surely deny disclosure of any documents pertaining to such a deal, particularly since they will have to claim that such document do not exist, since there was no deal in the first place, n'est-ce pas? For such are governments, and that is why we have journalists. Why, then, don't journalists care about this one? A secret deal with the government? Because "[a]dmitting to the secret pacts would be to admit that the U.S.-Japan alliance strategy was built on illegitimate grounds, and call for closer scrutiny of the current relationship"? As silly as it is to get into this conjecture game, I would have to conclude that getting back Okinawa (which the overwhelming majority of the people of Okinawa wanted) was much harder than the public had realized at the time. A secret ransom may be reason for embarrassment, but it certainly would not have rendered better terms for the people of Okinawa had it not been paid. I'm inclined to believe they don't care because it's old, and now irrelevant to current events, so they're happy to let historians take a crack at it.

TIME concludes: "In a recent press conference, the veteran scribe rounded on his colleagues who 'committed journalistic suicide' when they chose to do their muckraking in his bedroom rather than in the corridors of power. 'The defenders of democracy continue to suck up to power instead of fighting it.' Nishiyama would agree with Reporters Without Borders, which insists Japan still has a thing or two to learn from Panama and Montenegro about the free press."

Who knows, maybe Reporters Without Borders is right. But just because Mr. Nishiyama is still sore after all these years, it doesn't mean he has a case here. And TIME is wrong to publish an article that is constructed on insinuations, shoddy fact-checking, and denial of an inconvenient truth. I only hope that it's not in the hard copy version; people pay real money for that.

P.S. And Okinawa-gate? Lame-o. "Unknown Scandal"? On which planet? TIME, you need a copy editor.

America: Swampland, the TIME Political Blog Illuminates the Uneasy Relationship between the Mainstream Media and the Blogosphere

Swampland is worth reading for its own sake, with the vivid, penetrating Joe Klein; the biting, racy Anan Marie Cox; and the calm, collected, and insightful Karen Tumulty, except when she's not allowed to be.

Honestly though, they have my respect; they answer to a large readership, and take a lot of lumps. There's no way they can avoid responsibility except by going dark, and they know it. But speaking of going dark, the other blogger and TIME Washington bureau chief Jay Carney, after two very badly handled mishaps, has been very quiet of late. Way to go, Katie.

France: Left? Right? Depends on Where You're Standing, I Suppose.

A friend who had read this post came up to me and asked why I liked Nicholas Sarkozy. I think he must have been kidding, because he's normally very perceptive. However, it is interesting that my point, which was to wonder whether the asymmetry in calling Sarkozy right-wing while consistently labeling Royale as socialist could be betraying any political biases, could so easily be interpreted, if only in jest, as an expression of my own ideological preference.

Now today, I came across The Demonization of Sarkozy, written by someone who would likely pee in his pants if Mr. Sarkozy so much as looked at him. And sure enough, as early as the second sentence comes this journalistic gem:

"Ms Royal, the left-wing candidate who is about four points behind the conservative Mr. Sarkozy in polls, denounced her opponent for the 'great violence' and 'brutality' of a campaign that she maintained was frightening away voters".

America: TIME Scores an Exclusive Interview with George Tenet. The Price? Go figure.

No comment.

America: Ex-CIA Officials Speak Out over George Tenet's New Book, and THEY ARE FURIOUS.

Was it Charles Barkley who said of his autobiography when questioned about a typically outrageous quote, I don't know, I haven't read the book?

Read this. It's an open letter from ex-CIA officials taking George Tenet to task for betraying CIA officers and analysts and failing to meet his obligations to the people of the United States and urging him "to return the Medal of Freedom you received from President George Bush [I didn't say that, they did] and "dedicate a significant percentage of the royalties from your book to the U.S. soldiers and their families who have been killed and wounded in Iraq." (But not to Iraqis... I know, it's none of my business)

People seem to be uniformly furious about this. A friend of mine who works in Washington brought it up the other day unbidden, told me he'd never been so angry like this before, and wanted to know what I thought. To save time, I asked him to read my blog.

Harder to fathom, though, is why George Tenet decided to do this in the first place. This is not an O.J. Simpson, or an Apprentice flameout we are talking about here. Is destroying your reputation and cutting your ties to your former colleagues and everybody else that you want to have come to your funeral worth the million dollars, give or take a few (million)? Is he going through a rough divorce? Did he borrow money and put it all on Enron?

And if he blames in on his book agent, tell him there's a couple of bridges in Nigeria I'd like to sell him.

For those of you who get your news exclusively from this blog, I lifted it off this CNN post.

France: Does the English Language MSM Consistently Label Sarkozy a Right-Winger or What?

Does the English language MSM consistently label Nicolas Sarkozy a right-winger, while it unfailingly calls Segolene Royal a socialist? But is Sarkozy a nativist? Is he going to abolish social welfare? And is Royal suggesting nationalizing core industries and collectivizing agriculture?

Given the existence of Jean-Marie Le Pen as the "far-right" candidate, "right-wing" seems to be the more sinister moniker of the two.

The two Japanese Upper House elections being held today do not excite me. The DPJ seems poised to win in Fukushima, while the Okinawa seat remains up in the air, and the outcome will obviously affect the numbers game in the July election. However, it will not otherwise impact the dynamics; what happens in Okinawa stays in Okinawa.

A DPJ victory, particularly with party leader Ozawa tacking to the left, certainly won't help the realignment of US bases there. But then, things there will not be moving any time soon anyway.