This may be one of the earliest times on record for a presidential campaign in the U.S. to turn so ugly and it is happening at almost lightening speed.

Presumptive Republican nominee John McCain is saying Barack Obama is playing the race card while at the same time releasing commercials that suggest Obama is more celebrity flash than presidential substance.

Responding to the McCain ad which says Obama is a media “star” like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton but not nearly ready to live in the Oval Office, Obama said that McCain was trying to frighten potential voters by pointing out he had ” a funny name, and he doesn’t look like all the presidents on the dollar bills and the five dollar bills,” according to Reuters.

It didn’t take very long for McCain’s people to shoot back, “Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck. It’s divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.”

This was supposed to be the race where both candidates stayed on the high road. Instead, it seems as if each believes the low road is the faster one to the White House!

Don’t count on this getting any better as the summer goes on. In fact, brace for what I predict will turn out to  be one of the most brutal presidential campaigns in recent–and not so recent–U.S. history.

Although our book “No Time To Think” will be published shortly, based on comments Barack Obama reportedly made to Britain’s Tory leader, David Cameron, the presumptive U.S. Democratic Party presidential candidate would no doubt embrace what the book is talking about: that today’s 24/7 world of nearly instant communications, replete with the requirement that politicians respond to even the silliest of rumors in rapid fashion, leaves very little time, if any, to actually think about what a proper response or course of action ought to be.

An Associated Press dispatch out of London -Obama on Vacationing and Time To Think-quotes an exchange between Obama and Cameron that apparently neither knew was being overheard by a live microphone.

The British politico reportedly advises Obama that he should take a break–”be on the beach”–just to keep his “head together.”

Obama tells Cameron that he has not had time as yet to vacation but plans to do so next month.

“…I agree with you that somebody, somebody who had worked in the White House who-not Clinton himself-but somebody who had been close to the process-said that should we be successful, that actually the most important thing you need to do is to have big chunks of time during the day when all you’re doing is thinking…” Obama tells Cameron.

Perhaps Sen. Obama will be so kind as to provide a blurb for our book? Then again, perhaps he already has!

A New York Times article today states an incredible fact about the never ending war in Iraq: “…After five years and more than 4,000 American combat deaths, searches and interviews turned up fewer than a half dozen graphic photographs of dead American soldiers,” says Michael Kamber and Tim Arango in a front page article.

Essentially, the article is about how the U.S. military has been severly restricting–censoring–disturbing images of the war as documented by journalists who are supposed to be embedded with the troops.

Military officials come up with all sorts of reasons for their behavior–which they don’t really deny. They argue that the pictures tell the enemy too much about the effectiveness of their attacks and that the photos would be disturbing to the families back home.

This is all nonsense. And, the article does a good job knocking down these straw men.

Other Wars

Somehow, Americans managed not to be too damaged by horrible images out of World War Two or the Korean conflict or Vietnam. Have we gotten less sophisticated now?

The real answer, I think, is that the military and policy makers in Washington learned from the Vietnam experience just how powerful certain images can be and have decided not to repeat what they view as a mistake again.

The amazing thing is, just how much they have apparently gotten away with this!

Although the august New York Times is trying hard to justify its decision to reject an op-ed piece penned by Republican John McCain, the excuses sound like just that–excuses.

The Times apparently wants McCain to be more specific about his plans and intentions for bringing the Iraq war to a close.

Where was the Times the past eight years’ of the Bush administration? How come it didn’t hold Bush’s feet to the journalistic fire the way it is now holding McCain’s?

Barack Obama just had his op-ed article published by the Times, so it seems only fair to now give McCain his say.

A clear plan

According to the Associated Press, an op-ed editor of the Times sent an email to McCain’s campaign people saying the paper would be happy to look at another version, but that that version would “have to lay out a clear plan for achieving victory–with troops levels, timetables and measures for compelling the Iraqis to cooperate.”

Great! Now, how about demanding the same direct answers from the Bush White House?

Talk about a rush job.

Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic Party presidential nominee, has arrived in Afghanistan where, in a matter of days, if not hours, he is supposed to get a good picture about what is really going on over there. Afghanistan, Obama believes, is where the U.S. needs to fight the war on terrorism and not  Iraq.

Fair enough. But can a short trip such as this–which includes trips to Iraq and to some European nations-really be anything more than political theatre designed to create the impression that he is fit to appear on the same stage as other, far more established and experienced world leaders?

And, can the world leaders really have enough time to take the true measure of the man?

Smoke and mirrors

The fact of the matter is, trips such as these are mostly about providing photo opportunities. Obama gets to have his picture taken with some pretty well known and powerful types, and they get to have their pictures taken with him, which, considering Obama’s apparent popularity overseas, will no doubt pay off in dividends for them.

Of course, there is a real danger to such a trip–for someone such as Obama. Because he is a new actor on the world stage, John McCain gets to play the role of chief theatre critic. Even the smallest slip of the tongue by Obama will surely be picked up by McCain and his supporters and magnified by the news media beyond all proportion.

And what do we all do? We have the easy part. We are the audience. We get to watch.

If you doubt that the U.S. in inhabited by too many idiots, check some of the online responses to a Los Angeles Times obit (latimes.com) for former George Bush spokesman Tony Snow. Then check the responses to the responses. Arrrrrggggggh!

Before Snow signed on as official translator and defender of Bush policies, he was a member of the media–columnist, Fox commentator–with a strong conservative bent. It was his Bush connection, however, that especially angered his critics, most notably those who pelted him with epithets shortly after he was cranked into the ground. It’s one thing to question and reject someone’s beliefs in a calm, reasoned way–that’s a welcome contrast to the myopic hero worship featured in many artificially inflated eulogies–but quite another to use the occasion of Snow’s recent death to launch nasty, mean-spirited personal attacks. That’s what many Times e-mailers did.

Can it, already, huh?

Same goes for the cynical opportunists whose online comments to the Times answered Snow’s attackers by accusing them of being representative of the left. As if the left were a mindless monolith–with no gradations and shadings–that acted as a single unit when someone at the top snapped his or her fingers. Speaking as a left member in reasonably good standing, that ain’t the case.

The death of Tony Snow? Add rational discussion to that terminal list.

Jesse Jackson mutters into a hot mic that Barack Obama is “talking down to black people,” and that, consequently, he’d like to “cut his nuts off.” Former Sen. Phil Gramm, a highly vocal John McCain acolyte, says while addressing the economy that the U.S. is in “mental recession” and has become a “nation of whiners.”

Oh the horror!

In the great pantheon of news, neither statement should have sustained longer than a day, if that. Each was trivial in the wider context of the Obama-McCain presidential contest. Neither said anything about how Obama or McCain would carry out his duties as president.

In the great pantheon of sound bites, nonetheless, Jackson’s and Gramm’s words were swept up in a whirlwind of Chicken Little rhetoric that spewed from bloggers and TV and radio talkers, the sheer tonnage of their verbiage making it appear that the sky was falling.

How pathetic that so many who report, interpret and publicly gab about news gleefully pounce on every word or misstatement, however arcane, that they can twist into faux controversy. How onerous that these news carnivores–ever sniffing for fresh meat–inflate minor disputes into phony conflicts of blimpish proportion, and then use the buzz their excess has created as justification for continuing to talk about them endlessly, diverting our attention from issues that matter.

So with cameras rolling, McCain felt compelled to, in effect, disavow and even ridicule Gramm, as Jackson delivered a million mea culpas related to Obama’s anatomy. Even though we know that McCain probably agrees with Gramm (whose intended message was distorted somewhat when brutally sound bitten) and Jackson surely meant what he said about Obama’s nuts.

Why do these charades endure year after year after year? Because it’s the media, stupid. To say nothing of politics.

So the case against JonBenet Ramsey’s family is finally buried. But not the case against those in the media who implicated the Ramseys with their swift predatory coverage, and drastically overplayed and feasted and fixated on this story through the years.

Prosecutors this week officially cleared the Ramseys and said they have the DNA profile of the person (identity unknown) who murdered six-year-old JonBenet in her Boulder, Colo. home nearly 11 1/2 years ago. There’s been no question about the identities of the media perpetrators, though. They’re the tabloid shows and 24-hour news networks that cranked up coverage of this tragedy gratuitously and relentlessly, often to the exclusion of everything else. For awhile, “Who Killed JonBenet Ramsey?” became almost a weekly panel discussion on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”

The bigger question: Who killed media judgement and sense of priorities?

The sheer weight of this attention paid to JonBenet appeared to indict her father and now-deceased mother, along with her older brother, who was nine at the time of the murder. It was a level of coverage denied most other young victims.

So here’s the issue: Why do media–especially TV cameras–make arbitrary choices that appear to value one life over another? Children go missing and are murdered all the time, and each of these cases is newsworthy. Yet why is coverage lavished on one and not the other?

Here’s one opinion: Much of the media dwelt obsessively on the unsolved slaying of JonBenet because she was white, her parents were rich and there was footage of her as a rouged-up beauty pageant cowgirl that could be played endlessly. White and wealthy also applied to Elizabeth Smart, the 14-year-old who was abducted in 2002 but later found alive.

All right, so the Ramseys didn’t murder JonBenet. But this may not let them off the hook. How do we know they didn’t murder someone else? Fodder for Larry King?

Stay tuned.

Two items flashing across my computer screen highlight just some of the issues Howard and I talk about in our forthcoming book, No Time To Think.

One, is the story of the apparently fake tornado picture; the other, the story of the apparently very real remarks made by Jesse Jackson about Barack Obama.

Twister? What Twister?

The A.P., as well as video services owned by both NBC and CBS, were forced to yank video given their clients of what was supposed to be a tornado in Nebraska.

Questions have now been raised about whether the picture is a fake.

But this was after the Associated Press had already sent the video to some 2,000 web sites that buy its video service. NBC and CBS had also distributed it to their clients.

The problem here is two fold: “News” footage provided by a “citizen journalist”–combined with the speed at which all three news organizations rushed the material to their customers before having a chance to make sure the footage was the real thing.

Jackson

Jesse Jackson’s aside to a fellow guest Sunday on the Fox News Channel about Barack Obama is a different matter–in this case, a perfect illustration of just how fast comments, even unintended ones, can circulate on the Web.

For those who don’t know the story, Jackson complained that Obama was “talking down to black people” and added that : “I want to cut his nuts out.”

It didn’t take very long for those off the cuff and supposedly off the record remarks to be shot out to media outlets all around the world forcing Jackson, who is a supporter of Obama, to apologize to the Democratic candidate.

I wonder how long it is going to take before people in the public eye understand that in our crazy, 24/7 cable and Internet word, there really is no such thing anymore as “off the record” and no remarks or deed that won’t be racing to people’s computer and cell phone screens faster than the speed of thought.

The globalization of the securities market, the speed at which one market can impact another’s performance,is leading U.S. officials to consider adopting the accounting regulations used by other countries that some critics contend will expose American investors to more potential accounting abuses.

The New York Times quotes Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Christopher Cox as having said in a speech, ” It is no longer possible for the S.E.C to do its work in the United States without a truly global strategy–because, in large measure due to today’s instant communications and technology, what goes on in other markets and jurisdictions is now intimately bound up with what happens here.”

Scheme To Dilute The Rules?

The Times points out that critics of the proposed changes feel this is a move on the part of the current administration to “dilute securities rules passed after the collapse of Enron…”

The proposals, Michigan Democratic Senator Carl Levin told the Times, would “weaken the pressure for credible oversight” of the various markets.

Says the Times story, written by Stephen Labaton, “…the track record of foreign enforcement authorities indicates that they are generally less aggressive than their counterparts in the United States, and that even the most vigorous ones bring fewer cases and impose significantly lower penalties.”

Once again, then, we are seeing how speed is impacting almost every aspect of our political and financial lives: For some concerns, there is little to be gained and, perhaps, lots to loose, by giving us all time to think about what is going on!

Parts of CNN are looking more and more like the worst of local news.

Take the nightly “Anderson Cooper 360,” which yields about 120 degrees of actual news, 240 degrees of Cooper. That includes an on-going, self-serving segment in which he and bantering sub-anchor Erica Hill invite viewers to come up with a photo caption better than one contributed by a member of the staff. The winner gets a T-shirt emblazened with the “360″ logo, which is always displayed on screen.

Hill: “I love the T-shirt.”

Cooper: “The graphics on it are so good.”

He means the graphics that promote him and his show. Arrrrrrgh!

Nor does it end there. Cooper opened his Tuesday night newscast with headlines that included this one behind a grainy freeze frame of a hospital waiting room: “Left to die! A woman collapsing in a hospital waiting room, and what happened next, nothing. People just sat there looking at her or ignoring her. Almost everything that did happen will make your blood boil. We’re keepin’ ‘em honest.”

He repeated essentially the same promo in his usual fastspeak (Has anyone ever timed this guy? His mouth must travel faster than the speed of light) five times during the hour with the same visual–each time leaving the impression the story was iminent–before actually reporting it 51 minutes into the newscast.

And he was right. My blood was boiling. Talk about newscast deception. The story appeared in a regular segment titled “Keeping Them Honest.” Very admirable. But who’s keeping Cooper and CNN honest?

At the risk of milking the title of the book, it is apt in describing what is apparently now happening to the publishing world–an echo of what is occurring in the world of print, television and Internet journalism.  There seems to be no time to think about the kind of books being published because the trick is to publish as many books as possible in the hopes that a few will resonant with what is left of the reading public.

An op-ed article by Jonathan Karp written for the Washington Post was forwarded to me for consideration. Indeed, what Howard Rosenberg and I have documented in the journalistic world, Karp has taken note of in the world of publishing

“I can’t prove it empirically, but when I talk to literary agents and fellow publishers, ” Karp writes, ” they acknowledge an unarticulated truth about our business ( Karp is publisher and editor-in chief of one of the imprints of the Hachette Book Group)–Fewer authors are devoting more than two years to their projects. The system demands more, faster.”

Karp goes on to write that popular novelists are now often expected to churn out as many as two novels each year! While writers of non-fiction books seldom get compensated enough to spend more than a couple of years at most on their books.

Sad.