The New Republic kicks off the magazine report this week with a look at the life and times of Senator George Allen of Virginia — and comes up with a whopper.
Allen, who is mulling a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, has long banked on his “regular-guy” image and his Southern charm. In fact, he has made being Southern a key part of his appeal. Only problem is, he grew up a wealthy kid in California, “in a palatial home with sweeping views of downtown Los Angeles and the Santa Monica basin,” and didn’t move to the South until he went to college. TNR‘s Ryan Lizza writes that at one campaign stop, Allen, clad in cowboy boots and with a wad of tobacco in his mouth, “resembles a froufrou version of Toby Keith.” But the shtick continues full force, and when Allen almost hits a woman standing nearby when he spits a mouthful of tobacco juice, his communications director roars “That’s just authenticity!”
Well, it’s something. But the real meat of the piece comes when Lizza looks at Allen’s past, including his penchant, as a wealthy young jock in California, for wearing Confederate flag lapel pins and his sketchy record on race relations as governor of Virginia. “In 1994, he said he would accept an honorary membership at a Richmond social club with a well-known history of discrimination — an invitation that the three previous governors had refused. After an outcry, Allen rejected the offer. … He issued a proclamation drafted by the Sons of Confederate Veterans declaring April Confederate History and Heritage Month. The text celebrated Dixie’s ‘four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights.’ There was no mention of slavery.”
Before becoming governor, Allen served in the Virginia legislature where “he was one of 27 House members to vote against a state holiday commemorating Martin Luther King, Jr. … bothered by the fact that the proposed holiday would fall on the day set aside in Virginia to honor Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.”
There’s plenty more here, and the piece is well worth reading.
Speaking of the rich and the spoiled in California, Vanity Fair‘s June issue drops the bomb on the ongoing Anthony Pellicano story which is roiling Hollywood. Pellicano, a private eye to Hollywood’s rich and powerful, was caught in a massive wiretapping scandal that has engulfed some of the entertainment industry’s big shots. He’s also threatened several journalists who have tried to cover the story (even issuing threats from jail), including John Connolly, co-author of the excellent VF piece, which tells you everything you ever wanted to know about this strange case.
In the May issue of Reason magazine, Tim Cavanaugh steps from the confines of his office cubicle to take a shot at those weak-spined reporters populating war zones and disaster areas, asking, “Is there any more cowardly class of Americans than journalists? From the Green Zone in Iraq, where they brave lengthy press releases to conclude that the war effort is either doomed or going swimmingly, to the outskirts of New Orleans, where they passed along wild claims of massacres and sniping without venturing into the city’s ghoul-infested interior to verify the story … the nation’s media professionals have lately demonstrated a kind of courage rarely seen outside a hamster cage.”
We don’t know how many more times someone needs to call out simpering desk jockeys like Cavanaugh for criticism of this sort, but as a reporter who has been to both Iraq and New Orleans, I’m challenging him on all counts. In New Orleans — yes, in the city itself — I saw many reporters sleeping on floors, in their cars or wherever else they could, in order to get the story. Were reports of violence inflated by both public officials and the press? Clearly, but for a few days we all believed them — yet reporters continued to rush into the city.
As far as Iraq goes, Cavanaugh gets it just as wrong. Very few reporters live in the Green Zone, preferring to stay in a few hotel complexes in Baghdad itself, away from the protection of the American military, and their lives are in danger every second they spend in that country, embedded or not. They have volunteered to go into harm’s way, a fact Cavanaugh might know if he actually paid attention to news reports, or if he had bothered to leave his computer monitor long enough to show those cowardly reporters how it’s done in the field.
Speaking of Iraq, in this week’s New Yorker, George Packer, who has spent many months there, muses about America’s lack of an exit strategy from that country. “The government is in a strange and prolonged state of paralysis. Many officials in the administration now admit, privately, and after years of willful blindness, that the war … is going badly and shows no prospect of a quick turnaround. Asked why the president doesn’t take this or that step to try to salvage what will become his legacy — fire his secretary of defense, for example — they drop their heads, as if to say: We know, he should, but it’s not going to happen. At the same time, they can’t quite bring themselves to abandon hope for a miracle.”
Despite the apparent impotence of the government, Packer says, “The choice in Iraq should not be between the administration’s failed eschatology and the growing eagerness of most politicians to be rid of the problem. Both moral obligation and self-interest require that Americans accept the consequences of the war and, if the administration will not, imagine new ways to resolve it.”
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.