To the Extent They're Paying Attention, Americans Are Unnerved by Foreign Affairs

Today on NRO

CHARLES C.W. COOKE: Neil deGrasse Tyson and America's nerd problem. Smarter than Thou.

ANDREW C. MCCARTHY: The point is to revive impeachment as a credible threat — and restrain presidential lawlessness. Against Premature Impeachment.

JONAH GOLDBERG: Far more than the GOP, it's the Democrats who love talking about impeachment. Exploiting the I-Word.

GEORGE WILL: We should chart a course between Obama's flaccid and Bush's grandiose approach to the world. A Middle Course on Foreign Policy.

SLIDESHOW: Israel's Arsenal.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

July 30, 2014

To the Extent They're Paying Attention, Americans Are Unnerved by Foreign Affairs

ABC News and the Washington Post offer some reassuring poll numbers today:

Americans are wary of granting refugee status to children crossing the U.S. border to flee strife-torn countries in Central America, and most in an Associated Press-GfK poll say the U.S. does not have a moral obligation to accept asylum seekers generally.

Don't Miss the Conservative Event of 2014!

The new poll found 53 percent of Americans believe the United States has no moral obligation to offer asylum to people who escape violence or political persecution, while 44 percent believe it has that responsibility.

And more than half, 52 percent, say children who say they are fleeing gang violence in Central America should not be treated as refugees, while 46 percent say they should.

When you think of the wording of the question — "children" "fleeing gang violence" it's kind of amazing that anyone would say "no," much less a majority. As for you 46 percent who said, "come on in," they'll be moving into your house.

Elsewhere that survey finds: "Just 39 percent of Americans approve of Obama's handling of the situation in Israel and the Gaza Strip, while more than half, 52 percent, disapprove."

Here's a good indicator of how much "noise" to expect in a foreign-policy poll: "Obama's approval rating for handling international affairs overall, at 46 percent, is up by 5 percentage points from his career low last month. But 50 percent still disapprove, unchanged." Is the world in any better shape than it was last month? Nah. But about five percent who weren't sure what they felt last week were a bit feeling better about the world this month. Maybe they're Cleveland Cavaliers fans.

Hollywood Takes on 'Rathergate'

Megan McArdle spits hot fury over the news that Mythology Entertainment is making a movie about the Rathergate memo scandal . . . based upon the book of CBS producer Mary Mapes, who contended that the story was true that those bloggers in pajamas who kept proving it wrong — including, ahem, me — are all mean and liars and right-wing maniacs and so on.

Mapes will be played by Cate Blanchett. Robert Redford is playing the man who reported the story on air, CBS News anchor Dan Rather.

I'll give you a moment to process that.

As I noted, by playing Dan Rather, this will mark the second time Redford has played a character who was secretly a member of Hydra.

Above: Robert Redford, standing beside a decorative artwork in his office.

I should be outraged by this. As I mentioned in Raleigh, this is a good example for young journalists of how you can work hard, get your big break, help expose a lie, reveal the truth, and have a small role in changing the way people look at the world and powerful people . . . and then watch Hollywood stars glamorize the liars and make you the bad guy. (I'm guessing they'll cast Jerry O'Connell to play some guy in little elephant pajamas.)

But I suppose that I shrug and dismiss this as sort of liberal cosplay. They really enjoy having glamorous actors put on costumes and make-up and reenact recent events, emphasizing the heroism of the people they like and often ludicrously caricaturing those they don't like. You may recall Valerie Plame, whose identity as a CIA officer was leaked to columnist Robert Novak by Colin Powell's-right hand man, Richard Armitage. She had her life turned into an action thriller . . . with car chases and explosions . . . where a sinister conspiracy at the heart of the Bush administration leaks her name . . . and Richard Armitage is never mentioned.

The Washington Post editorial board felt compelled to call out the myth-making:

In fact, "Fair Game," based on books by Mr. Wilson and his wife, is full of distortions — not to mention outright inventions. To start with the most sensational: The movie portrays Ms. Plame as having cultivated a group of Iraqi scientists and arranged for them to leave the country, and it suggests that once her cover was blown, the operation was aborted and the scientists were abandoned. This is simply false.

There's practically a whole branch of HBO devoted to this sort of instant revisionism and dramatization: Recount, Game Change, Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom, where Sorkin basically rewrote news events and coverage of Obama's early presidency as the way he thought it should have gone.

What the hell is with these smug revisionist historians, who take facts, take their own imagination, mix them together, slip in some cameo appearances by big-name political figures and think they can create a memorable, vivid, dramatic story that will influence the public's viewpoint and memories of recent events…

What's that?

Oh. Yeah. That.

I guess I shrug because this is just the latest in Robert Redford's series of exercises in moral inversion. His recent self-directed film The Company You Keep tried to argue that the 1960s radicals who planted bombs weren't such bad guys . . . by making the convenient plot change that the wanted 1960s radical played by Redford didn't actually commit the crime. Gee, that kind of changes things, doesn't it? William Ayers doesn't have the excuse of blaming the one-armed man.

And trying to rewrite Rathergate so that Rather and Mapes are the heroes is, I suspect, too much of a moral inversion for audiences to accept, in a story that will have no car chases, sex scenes, fistfights, gun-fights, or aliens. (I mean, as far as I know.) They'll have to argue that the famous network news anchor, with the giant network backing him, is the plucky heroic underdog, and that the bloggers — bloggers! — are the powerful, sinister villains.

When Robert Redford is pulling off a sting, running from the Bolivian police, hitting a baseball, whispering to a horse, or offering a million dollars to sleep with Demi Moore, everybody loves him. When he gets preachy, the work is usually insufferable. Lions for Lambs flopped. Come to think of it, so did Fair Game, and The Newsroom is in its final season. The appetite for making these instant revisionist-history pieces is significantly larger than the appetite for watching them.

So that's why I'm not that worried about the Rathergate movie.

What the Heck Is the NFL Thinking?

This is a five-alarm mess to start the NFL season:

ESPN has suspended commentator Stephen A. Smith for a week after he made some controversial remarks about domestic violence (that he apologized for yesterday)…

Smith was discussing Ray Rice hitting his fiancé (resulting in a two-game suspension), and argued that a woman should never provoke a man into hitting her in the first place. He defended himself and apologized in the past few days.

Two weeks for Rice? Two weeks?

Here's the NFL's justification:

On Monday, NFL senior vice president of labor policy Adolpho Birch went on ESPN's "Mike and Mike" radio show to defend Rice's punishment. It did not go well.

"Listen, I think if you are any player and you think that based on this decision that it's OK to go out and commit that kind of conduct, I think that is something that I would suggest to you that no player is going to go out and do that," Birch said. "So in terms of sending a message about what the league stands for, we've done that. We can talk about the degree of discipline, we can talk about whether or not third parties need to be involved. I would suggest to you that a third party has been involved in this matter and that was the court that reviewed it, the prosecutor that reviewed it."

"On balance, we reviewed all the materials, listened to the persons we listened to, took the input of the Players Association. When we looked on balance at all of that, we believe that discipline we issued is appropriate. It is multiple games and hundreds of thousands of dollars. I think that's fair to say that doesn't reflect that you condone the behavior. I think we can put that to rest."

On a separate note, this is why I love "Mike and Mike":

Meanwhile, co-host Mike Greenburg was so unimpressed with Birch's response that he addressed his listeners after the interview.

"I'm a little taken aback by the conversation, to be honest with you," Greenburg said, via PFT. "The reaction is overwhelming and no one seems to think that he did a particularly good job of answering the questions. I do not feel that most people listening to that discussion feel they got an adequate explanation of how they arrived at two games."

Greenburg said that of the thousands of responses the show received in the minutes after the interview concluded — via Twitter and email — that "I can't find a single one of them that said, 'Well, that explained it for me.' Literally not a single one."

ESPN has a huge financial deal to cover Monday Night Football, and Greenie is calling out the NFL VP. He's a regular Edison Carter.

On Twitter the other day, a few folks argued that we as a society don't want employers — i.e., the NFL — taking out extrajudicial punishment after the legal system has made its judgment.

I don't know. Isn't that a factor in "at will" employment already? How many public figures would stay employed after they took a deal with prosecutors after videotaped evidence of them knocking out their wives? Remember, this isn't an allegation or an unsupported claim. There's video of him dragging his wife's unconscious body from an elevator.

Here's Stephen A. Smith, usually a wise, thought-provoking, outspoken sports analyst, apologizing for suggesting a woman could somehow justifiably provoke violence against her.

So Smith ends up with half the suspension that Rice does?

Smith will miss five shows. Rice will miss two games.

ADDENDA: Over on NRO's homepage, the latest overall assessment from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction… and basically, it's a mess. Our troops did their jobs, our diplomats, our aid workers, and our contractors too… the Afghans just don't seem to be up to the task.

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