Gone zales

[womzilla]

The Sparrow (Charles Sperling, who is still not on LJ, but we're working on wearing him down) invited me out last Sunday to the Film Forum's Spring Member's Brunch. We had free coffee and juice (with added sparkly alcohol in his case--I teetotal, but he doesn't) and decent but uninspired pastries and then watched a set of short subjects and a Harold Lloyd feature. The opening piece was "Mr. BB", a Harold Nicholas-led dance number from 1944's Carolina Blues, followed by a vaudeville short by Shawn & Lee, and then the second annual trivia competition, which had some very nice bits. (The best was finding the common link among Toshiro Mifune in Grand Prix, Tony Curtis in Some Like It Hot, and Boris Badanov in The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show*.) The Lloyd feature was Hot Water, a rambling but still quite clever film featuring a new car, a live turkey, and a dead mother-in-law.

Anyway, it's always fun to spend time with Charles, and we talked about a lot of things--Narnia, Middle-Earth, neoconservative politics, and other bizarre fantasies. One of the most interesting bits, for me, was he asked whether I thought Alberto Gonzales (aka "The poor man's John Mitchell") was going to resign. I pondered this; the recent statements from the White House--that Bush is completely satisfied with Gonzales--indicates that they're digging in their heels. I was trying to figure out why they would do so, and came up with three possible answers.

First, they (by which I mean the planners--Bush himself, and Rove and Cheney and Gonzales hisself too) have never learned how to plan for defeat. So, it will just not happen. Alternately, they are expecting to lose eventually, but want to make the battle as prolonged as possible in the hopes that their enemies will give up.

But the conception of the battle that makes the most sense is that they're trying to make the fight completely about Gonzales. There are several very strong (and lazy) tendencies in the US news media that they're counting on: reporters simplify stories, and they personalize them, and whenever possible they cast them as A versus B. Bush/Rove/Cheney and possibly even Gonzales himself want the question of "When will Gonzales resign" to become the entirety of the discussion, so that when he eventually does, the press will decide the entire US Attorneys scandal is properly resolved, done, nothing to see here, oh that's so last week.

Gonzales isn't the story. The transformation of the Department of Justice into a wing of the Republican National Committee, and the US Attorneys into dirty tricks operatives, is the story. Gonzales is just the amanuensis for storyteller Rove.

And you can count on the national press focusing, as it always does, on the finger instead of the moon.

*All three were voiced by Paul Frees--Mifune never learned English, and Curtis's falsetto was, apparently, painfully bad.

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Paul Frees is Da Man.

I suspect you're right about Gonzales and the press. They focus on the finger instead of the nose.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes (I say casually) the crucial point isn't whether Gonzales did it (either actively or by not paying attention to one of the most important aspects of his job) -- although that would be interesting -- it's "Who directed it to be done?". The mainstream media aren't going to investigate (or, mostly, even mention) that because it would be (*ghasp*) Controversial, even Divisive, and few of the media outlets nowadays approve of making overt distinctions between "good" and "bad". Sheesh! I like goat-meat as well as the next carnivore does, but am getting kinda tired of this steady diet of Scapegoat day after day.