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As someone who never tired of railing at copy editors sucking the life — the precious bodily fluids — out of my copy, I realize this blogging thing has the downside of requiring me to re-re-read my own stuff. Brutal. But I’ll do my best to keep the corrections coming, promptly.

“Par” Ridder. Not Parr.

Is it me or has the eulogizing of Gerry Ford now gone on longer than his presidency? Let enough be enough or at least let someone on the air who attempts to put Ford in some kind of rational perspective. By the 24 hour mark after his death, I was maxing out on the “decency” of the old guy and how many times he was credited with saving the Republic, the flag, Michigan apples and football from the throes of Watergate. And that from well-paid professionals like Charlie Gibson, Katie Couric and Brian Williams who were alive and allegedly conscious when Ford did his thankfully brief, unelected stint in the White House. Come on.

I’m not a fan of the journalistic impulse to play unsolicted national eulogizer. Most of the time it feels like self-importance has trumped journalistic sense. Yes, yes, Ford was President and we/they (the networks) must, of course, show excessive respect for the office, at least at the moment of passing. But here’s a thought, if only for, you know, a little competitive differtiation. How about seizing the opportunity to put history in context and deliver a quick, clear-eyed analysis of what Ford did and didn’t do, based on the 30 years that have passed and how much clearer it all is now?

Somewhere in 24/7 newsland maybe someone got in a word about the way Ford — with his “Midwest decency” — carried water for just about every viperous twist of statecraft that played during his long career in D.C. And yeah, that willingness to question little while agreeing to much probably is why Nixon tapped him to replace Spiro Agnew.

Christopher Hitchens is an acquired taste — often like swallowing curdled milk — but in the Slate.com column attached below he nails perfectly the press’s refusal to apply realpolitik journalism to the endless Ford remembrances.

What’s more, with Ford’s funeral and burial, you can bet he and any further analysis of his role in stage-setting the world he have today will be forgotten quicker than last year’s “Project Runway” losers.

Our Short National Nightmare
How President Ford managed to go soft on Iraqi Baathists, Indonesian fascists, Soviet Communists, and the shah … in just two years.
By Christopher Hitchens
Posted Friday, Dec. 29, 2006, at 2:08 PM ET

One expects a certain amount of piety and hypocrisy when retired statesmen give up the ghost, but this doesn’t excuse the astonishing number of omissions and misstatements that have characterized the sickly national farewell to Gerald Ford. One could graze for hours on the great slopes of the massive obituaries and never guess that during his mercifully brief occupation of the White House, this president had:

1.
Disgraced the United States in Iraq and inaugurated a long period of calamitous misjudgment of that country.
2.
Colluded with the Indonesian dictatorship in a gross violation of international law that led to a near-genocide in East Timor.
3.
Delivered a resounding snub to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn at the time when the Soviet dissident movement was in the greatest need of solidarity.

Instead, there was endless talk about “healing,” and of the “courage” that it had taken for Ford to excuse his former boss from the consequences of his law-breaking. You may choose, if you wish, to parrot the line that Watergate was a “long national nightmare,” but some of us found it rather exhilarating to see a criminal president successfully investigated and exposed and discredited. And we do not think it in the least bit nightmarish that the Constitution says that such a man is not above the law. Ford’s ignominious pardon of this felonious thug meant, first, that only the lesser fry had to go to jail. It meant, second, that we still do not even know why the burglars were originally sent into the offices of the Democratic National Committee. In this respect, the famous pardon is not unlike the Warren Commission: another establishment exercise in damage control and pseudo-reassurance (of which Ford was also a member) that actually raised more questions than it answered. The fact is that serious trials and fearless investigations often are the cause of great division, and rightly so. But by the standards of “healing” celebrated this week, one could argue that O.J. Simpson should have been spared indictment lest the vexing questions of race be unleashed to trouble us again, or that the Tower Commission did us all a favor by trying to bury the implications of the Iran-Contra scandal. Fine, if you don’t mind living in a banana republic.

To enlarge on the points that I touched upon above: Bob Woodward has gone into print this week with the news that Ford opposed the Bush administration’s intervention in Iraq. But Ford’s own interference in the life of that country has gone unmentioned. During his tenure, and while Henry Kissinger was secretary of state, the United States secretly armed and financed a Kurdish rebellion against Saddam Hussein. This was done in collusion with the Shah of Iran, who was then considered in Washington a man who could do no wrong. So that when the shah signed a separate peace with Saddam in 1975, and abandoned his opportunist support for the Kurds, the United States shamefacedly followed his lead and knifed the Kurds in the back. The congressional inquiry led by Rep. Otis Pike was later to describe this betrayal as one of the most cynical acts of statecraft on record.

In December 1975, Ford was actually in the same room as Gen. Suharto of Indonesia when the latter asked for American permission to impose Indonesian military occupation on East Timor. Despite many denials and evasions, we now possess the conclusive evidence that Ford (and his deputy Kissinger) did more than simply nod assent to this outrageous proposition. They also undertook to defend it from criticism in the United States Congress and elsewhere. From that time forward, the Indonesian dictatorship knew that it would not lack for armaments or excuses, both of these lavishly supplied from Washington. The figures for civilian deaths in this shameful business have never been properly calculated, but may well amount to several hundred thousand and thus more than a quarter of East Timor’s population.

Ford’s refusal to meet with Solzhenitsyn, when the great dissident historian came to America, was consistent with his general style of making excuses for power. As Timothy Noah has suggested lately, there seems to have been a confusion in Ford’s mind as to whether the Helsinki Treaty was intended to stabilize, recognize, or challenge the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. However that may be, the great moral component of the Helsinki agreement—that it placed the United States on the side of the repressed populations—was ridiculed by Ford’s repudiation of Solzhenitsyn, as well as by his later fatuities on the nature of Soviet domination. To have been soft on Republican crime, soft on Baathism, soft on the shah, soft on Indonesian fascism, and soft on Communism, all in one brief and transient presidency, argues for the sort of sportsmanlike Midwestern geniality that we do not ever need to see again.

Finally to the Mayaguez. Ford did not dispatch forces to “rescue” the vessel, as so many of his obituarists have claimed. He ordered an attack on the Cambodian island of Koh Tang, several hours after the crew of the ship had actually been released. A subsequent congressional inquiry discovered that he, and Henry Kissinger, could have discovered as much by monitoring Cambodian radio and contacting foreign diplomats. Eighteen Marines and 23 USAF men were killed in this pointless exercise in bravado, as were many Cambodians. The American names appear on the Vietnam memorial in Washington, even though their lives were lost long after the undeclared war was officially “over.” The Ford epoch did not banish a nightmare. It ended a dream—the ideal of equal justice under the law that would extend to a crooked and venal president. And in Iraq and Indonesia and Indochina, it either protracted existing nightmares or gave birth to new ones.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2156400/

The surprise sale of the Star Tribune to a recently-formed private equity partnership has left reporters and other mid-level employees in a full churn of speculation, almost none of it good. There just isn’t handy model for these things improving the service to community or the professional/personal lives of working stiff journalists.

Nick Coleman got a round of “atta boys” from Strib colleagues for his column ripping McClatchy management for pretty much bailing on all the noble promises it made to the staff and community. It was ballsy stuff. Its refreshing to read someone brave enough to bite off the hand that fed him. My understanding is Coleman’s fill-in, holiday week editor, Nancy Barnes, took heat from McClatchy suits in Sacramento, but, bottom line, supported the column.

If you want to play cockeyed optimist, (i.e. delusional sap), here are a couple speculations floating in the aftermath of the Strib sale.

1: Avista, the private equity gang, may well have bought in strictly because the paper came available at such a startling fire sale price, roughly 40% of what McClatchy paid less than a decade ago, (and that because dumping the Star Tribune was McClatchy’s easiest, fastest, one-step move to avoid a brutal capital gains tax bill). Avista may have figured that at a price like that they can flip the thing in three-four years and see a profit … at which point … perhaps … maybe … a truly private and possibly LOCAL ownership offer … might … be feasible.

At $1.2 billion, (McClatchy’s buying price), there isn’t anyone in Minnesota with the means to take the paper over. Certainly not with every major revenue indicator pointing downward. BUT … at $530, plus Avista’s profit/carrying charge, there might be three or four.

Those three or four will take great interest in what becomes of the Los Angeles Times, where billionaire David Geffen, perhaps with one or two other tycoons, may take that paper private, and out of the grinding, reductive profit demands of Wall St.

“Private” doesn’t guarantee a commitment to full staffing and adequate resources to cover the 14th largest media market, but “LOCAL private ownership”, under the kind of “benign despot” model, holds out a glimmer of a dream whereby the one person responsible for any naked gutting of a high profile institution like a daily newspaper, would be available around town and have to submit to the kind of terse, country club bar confrontations that have an influence far larger than the mutterings of a couple hundred $60k/year reporters.

2. The other speculation is a win/lose proposition for local newspaper employees. Avista COULD decide that one way to goose profits would be to make a concerted effort to truly control the entire Twin Cities market.

The St. Paul Pioneer Press of today is competition in name only. Gutted first by Knight-Ridder’s private equity investors, hollowed out again by Media News this past Thanksgiving, and facing the very high likelihood that Media News will continue to devour it for profits via next summer’s Guild contract negotiations (or lack thereof), the Pioneer Press is in no position to suppress a full Star Tribune “surge” across the east metro. (It hasn’t been for years.)

Pioneer Press publisher, Parr Ridder, came to town talking the generic line of being a geographical alternative to the Star Tribune. The gaping hole in that logic being that the the Strib can be found everywhere the Pioneer Press is, while the Pioneer Press hasn’t ventured west of the Mississippi since Herbert Hoover. The two papers often sit side by side each other east of the river. One twice the size of the other, with indisputably broader coverage of the entire Twin Cities “community”.

Point being the Pioneer Press’s lunch is there for the taking … assuming Avista “invests” in the cost of expanded circulation and east metro staffing … not something a quick-turn equity crowd is expected to do. BUT, if they begin and show progress devaluing the Pioneer Press to east side shopper status, Avista’s successors might let that inform their judgment.

But for the foreseeable future world class skeptics will be asessing Avista’s every move for the first indication of business-as-usual profit-by-decontenting.

According to conventional mythology a new blog is born every second, each with an average readership of … one. I hope to do better than that, if only for the sake of Rake publisher, Tom Bartel, who, after months of brutal negotiations has finally consented to attach my idle, crackpot meanderings to his otherwise sober-minded publication … and who also owns a lot of guns.

My primary concern here is much the same as it was for the 15 years I played media reporter/critic at the St. Paul Pioneer Press. At its’ most basic it is this: Who is manipulating who, how and why? Not only is the influence of media pervasive and inescapable in modern America, it is in

a state of furious flux. Much of the so-called mainstream media, TV networks, daily newspapers and radio empires is suffering from their Faustian bargain with their investors. They’ve diminished the integrity and relevancy of their products, substituting — in my humble opinion — a lot of knucklehead pandering, also known as bullshit — for truth, accuracy and information useful to sustaining better lives and common culture. Very ironically, a lot of this heavily researched “entertainment” and “news” is also humorless and ponderously self-important. Come on folks, there is a happier medium, somewhere between giddy celebrity worship and homogenized, risk-averse corporate-speak.

In case you wonder, I owe the title of this blog, “Lambert to the Slaughter”, to local media luminary, Tim Sherno, whose name, (as I read the notarized memo he sent), “is synonomous in the Twin Cities market with Edward R. Murrow, William O. Douglas and John C. Holmes.”

The implications of sale of the Star Tribune, the new found reverence for the wisdom of Gerald Ford, and the visuals of the last minutes of Saddam Hussein are all topics I’ll get to before the banks open again on Tuesday.