The media is the central nervous system of the body politic. It carries information, emotions, pain, feedback from voter to voter, voter to leader, leader to voter, from extremity to extremity. Theoretically, as far as biology textbooks are concerned anyway, the central nervous system includes the brain but many modern media seem to be bypassing that altogether. Or instead, they are just heading for its lower bits where reflexive reactions, fear, greed, lust, and everything else connected to ratings lurk.  

As we have seen this week, while the information revolution has brought much good to the world -- Angry Birds and Wii Tennis come to mind -- it really hasn't done that much for the information business. (FP's slammin' new iPad app notwithstanding.)

In just the course of a few days, we have seen several more examples about the nature of the changes brought on by that revolution. Few have been that encouraging. While the openness and transparency and inclusiveness that have been celebrated by-products of new technologies are still fresh in our minds from the days of the Twitter revolution in Tahrir Square and the positive elements (and there are some) of grassroots journalism and wikilytics (collaborative massaging of information to produce new insights), this week has also reminded us of the darker consequences of the onset of the Info Age and the ethical and political challenges associated with a world of rapidly proliferating, intersecting, instantaneous, hard-to-police, massive, information flows.

The News of the World scandal is not only the most odious of this week's cases, it is also the most ironic. The notion that a scandal rag goes down in scandal is too elegant for an enterprise that has been devoid of elegance throughout most of its century and a half long history. That this irony is compounded by having the crusading so-called journalists and media mongrels at the helm of this slimy outfit now claiming the same "I was clueless" defense they have throughout their careers so derided in so many political leaders would be droll were the offenses in this instance not so repulsive.  

But this scandal -- about illegal phone taps and using new technologies to snoop around to grab juicy story bits wherever they could be found, legally or otherwise --doesn't really introduce anything new to the media. Rather, it just underscores that one of the key characteristics of the information revolution is that it primarily takes what was previously there and amplifies and accelerates it. In this respect, it's like cocaine, really. Sleazy journalists become more sleazy. The impact of their sleazy journalism is broader. It happens faster. There are fewer effective filters.

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This morning's New York Times contains an article quoting various "regional experts" as saying that the current upheaval in the region is playing into the hands of Iran. This is a flawed analysis on several levels.

First, we are so early in this process that it is premature to say who will benefit from or be damaged by it. It is still too early to know how many states will be affected or what the effects of the revolutions will be. Several scenarios are plausible. In one, prolonged upheaval, Iran may benefit as the alliance that existed against it is compromised. In another, a shift to democracy, Iran may or may not benefit depending on the orientation of the government, but in all likelihood it would be damaged as more democratic governments are likely to be both more open to the rest of the world and an inspiration to the repressed people of Iran. In a third, a new generation of strongmen emerges, you could theoretically have pro-Iranian Islamic states take hold, but the reality is, given the long-term history of Iran within the region, old anti-Iranian alliances would recoalesce. This is especially true because new regimes would likely have large military components comprising experienced officers who have been in anti-Iranian stance throughout their careers.

Iran is certainly working to take advantage of the current uncertainty, using Hezbollah, Hamas, and related networks to promote both the instability it seeks and voices that it considers friendly. But Iran is not, and cannot ever be, "of" the Arab world. The cultural and historic barriers are too great. And therefore, the notion of it somehow creating an enduring network of states aligned to it is far-fetched.

This point about Iran however, does bring into focus a bigger point about the nature and future of the remarkable wave of revolutions currently sweeping across the region. Just as Iran is in the Middle East without being, in the minds of its Arab neighbors, a real part of their world, so too has the great problem of the Middle East at large been that for a variety of historical, political, and cultural reasons it has been in the world without having been of it.

The cultural disposition of the region has been to set itself apart, to create barriers to integration to the rest of the world, and in fact, to view integration with the rest of the world as a threat. This is a generalization, of course. There are hugely sophisticated global business leaders from the region, and there are cosmopolitan pockets within each of the countries of the Middle East. But for intentional and unintentional reasons -- education, religious views, political ideologies, social stratification, deliberate policy choices made by ruling regimes -- the benefits of integrating into the global economy have not been as available to people from the region as they have been to others in the Americas, Europe, or Asia.

The regional experts assessing the situation in the New York Times article are viewing what is happening purely in terms of old paradigms and politics. But one of the most important questions raised by the current situation is whether we are not seeing merely the latest round of political musical chairs, but rather we are seeing something deeper and more profound that could alter historical patterns. This is not, by the way, just an abstract question. It has very practical strategic implications for how the world outside the region handles the remainder of this period of change.

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I'm not sure what bugs me more-that Congressman Eric Cantor's Washington Post op-ed today "Obama's 32 Czars" plagiarizes a piece I wrote months ago or that it was a bozo like Cantor who felt compelled to plagiarize me.

No. I know. It's the latter.

OK, I'll admit it, whenever I see an article that picks up on something that I've written here days, weeks, or months before, I glow with a kind of smug self-satisfaction that would be odious in anyone else. (The smugness of others is repellant. One's own smugness is just like a warm hug that we deserved but never got.) For example, this week's New York Times ran an op-ed discussing deteriorating Israeli attitudes toward Barack Obama and citing a June Jerusalem Post poll, I was quietly pleased that I got there almost two weeks before. It happens every so often. It makes up for the ridiculously low stipends ... it's more like a transit allowance or beer money actually ... that FP pays its bloggers.

But Cantor's piece crossed a line. Not only did he rehash an idea that was first broached in my April 16th post "It's official: Obama creates more czars than the Romanovs" but he did something worse: he stole the punch line. Lift an idea from one of my pieces and I feel influential. Zei gesund, I say, which is Yiddish for "It's OK, I know that in the policy community imitation is often the sincerest form of thinking." But snatch a joke and you've crossed a line. 

Now if my post was only on some backwater Web site, I'd just write it up to a misunderstanding. But first of all, FP is no backwater site. Why just yesterday a guy in an elevator mentioned it to me ... and ... and um, and then there's my mother, who every few days sends an email saying "nice blog...but stop beating up on that nice Joe Biden..." But more importantly, the "More czars than the Romanovs" piece got picked up widely across the web and even led to an appearance by yours truly on the Fox Television -- which is known to be the main intellectual teat at which Eric Cantor suckles.

So he … or rather the 22-year-old staffer who actually wrote the piece … should have known better. I mean yes, in my post which is now apparently so classic that it has passed out of copyright protection, I said that Obama had "passed the Romanov dynasty in the production of czars" and Cantor built his entire piece around the line "the administration has more czars than imperial Russia." While this is not a verbatim lift, the DNA is mine. I'm the father. And while Cantor may use the "sampling" defense that was pioneered by his intellectual predecessor Vanilla Ice during his precedent-setting "Ice, Ice Baby" controversy, let's call a spade a fucking shovel here folks. Dude stole my wry worldview.

Worse still, Cantor stole the idea and then misinterpreted it. He used the now practically immortal concept ... which will be soon be known in literature as the Romanov gambit or better, the Rothkopf gambit, which would be a nice twist given how the Romanov's treated my shtetl-dwelling relatives a few decades back ... to argue that by having so many czars, Obama was pre-empting the power of Congress. While given their current shenanigans the term "power of Congress" seems destined to join the long list of Washington oxymorons (also covered here in an earlier blog posting... but when I cite myself it's not plagiarism, it's just narcissism), Cantor fails to recognize that having lots of czars actually diminishes the power of Obama. It makes it hard to get things done and it inevitably creates turf wars between officials who once had the mandate to do what the czars are supposed to and the czars themselves. Sometimes it even creates jealousy between czars who seek greater territory. 

Cantor argues that putting authority in the hands of people who aren't vetted by Congress undercuts vital checks and balances. First, there is the small fact that there are roughly 4,000 political appointees in the executive branch and "only" 1,100 of these require Senate approval. Second, there is the fact that this number of 1,100 would almost certainly be seen by the framers of the Constitution as grotesquely bloated and evidence of a congressional power grab. Third, many of the most influential positions in the U.S. government do not require congressional approval (the national security advisor and the head of the National Economic Council come to mind but there are scores of other such vital positions) precisely because the chief executive is entitled to some prerogative in choosing his advisors.  And finally, look how screwed up the congressional approval process is. As noted earlier this week in my post on Senator Grassley, the right individual senators have arrogated to block approval of presidential nominees is regularly abused for wholly self-serving, shallow, special-interest driven (which is to say, typical for Congress) reasons.

Given that he is this wrong on so many levels, you have to ask where does Cantor's sense of entitlement to appropriate my joke come from? Well, first of course, if you spent all your time standing next to John Boehner, you'd feel pretty special too. (Listen to Boehner. He makes George W. Bush sound like Blaise Pascal by comparison.) But at a more basic level, appropriating ... recklessly, without regard for right or consequence ... is what members of Congress do. And when they don't have the resources they need, their natural impulse is to borrow them. 

So, perhaps he can't help himself. As a result, I forgive you Eric Cantor. If you need more ideas, feel free to graze here. In fact, I encourage it. It'll almost certainly contribute to your political evolution and help you fulfill your destiny to be the bottom half of the Romney for president ticket in 2012. But please, give credit where it's due ... and even if you can't do that, try to get your analysis right. Plagiarism is one thing ... but making me feel partially responsible for your tortured misinterpretations of the facts is just too much to bear.

Update: Glenn Thrush of Politico has followed up on this story. He says he has found evidence that David Brooks said something about Obama and czars and Russia on the Charlie Rose Show a couple of months before my FP post on the subject. In my defense, I don't watch Charlie Rose because a.) I have no trouble falling asleep and don't require outside assistance and b.) I prefer Chelsea Handler.

Also, there is a big distinction between Brooks comment and mine because while he said "there are more czars than in the history of Russia", this was just a wild assertion. And at the time he made it was not actually true. I counted. My piece was based on a careful review of Romanov family tree. In fact, I limited myself to Romanovs. So while he made a colorful statement, I was reporting real (or at least amusingly contrived) news: the Obama administration had actually moved into the lead. And while this is no place to debate whether or not to include Grand Princes of Moscow or the Rurik Dynasty in our list, there is a bigger point: Cantor lifted the line. And I at least deserve a thank-you note. And if he wants to send one to David Brooks too, that's fine with me.

Update No. 2:

Glenn Thrush, doing some really good leg work for Politico, has discovered that prior even to my article noting the appointment that nudged Obama into the lead in the czarist league tables over the Romanovs … and prior to David Brooks apparently even earlier observation that Obama had more czars than Russia…other people had also made the connection between Russia and czars. In fact, rather improbably, he has someone making the observation even prior to Obama taking office as president which, I would argue, undermines the point somewhat. In fact, the article he is citing was from the Winter Palace Daily Dictat and is dated 1915. In it, a reporter with the unlikely name of Thrushovsky wrote, "You hear a lot of whining these days about Nicholas II this and Alexandra that and how little Anastasia beat up a serf on her elementary school playground. There's all this talk about how we have had so many czars and that's the root of the current blini shortage. Well, it’s very easy for me to imagine a time when even in America they will appoint czars to take care of every little problem in that backwards wasteland and they'll end up with more than us and we’ll look back on all our wonderful Faberge eggs and infrequent yet colorful pogroms and say, 'those were the days.'"

I'm unable to read the original Russian so I can't vouch for the authenticity of the quote. But I get the point. I was not the first person to make the connection between czars and Russia. However, I was the person to officially note the moment Obama moved ahead of the Romanovs. (No hyperbole for me, boys and girls. Not ever. I'm the least hyperbolic man America has ever seen.) And secondly, while I cling to that slim distinction to maintain my contribution to this important … if apparently beaten to death … metaphor, I think it can safely be said that Eric Cantor is way at the end of the line. And, as was the more important point of my playful little diatribe yesterday, Cantor came to all the wrong conclusions about the problems caused by Obama's czarism. (Although one has to note his press secretary, commenting on this major issue in Politico, handled it with considerable grace and humor … as did Thrush.) So I say zei gesund to all of them.

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