Spencer Critchley

Spencer Critchley

I get that bigots aren’t ashamed of being bigots — but why aren’t they ashamed of being cowards?

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Donald Trump photo by Michael Vadon [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia CommonsDonald Trump believes we should have a “total and complete* shutdown” of all U.S. immigration by Muslims. And the idea got him a standing ovation at a rally today.

OK, I get that bigots feel no shame over being bigots.

But how is it they feel no shame over being cowards?

Obviously, they are cowards — bigotry is born of fear plus ignorance.

But one thing cowards fear most is being seen as cowards. That’s why cowards tend to be such blowhards — blowhards like Donald J. Trump.

And yet here we have thousands of people at rallies, and presumably millions across the country, just fine with trumpeting (Trumpeting?) the sad fact:

“We’re cowards!”

I don’t get it.

*And redundant.

Photo: By Michael Vadon [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Our Embarrassing Press Corps: President Obama’s ISIS Q&A at the G20

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One trivial question after another, ignoring one substantive answer after another.

Obama & Putin at the G20 in Antalya, Turkey
Photo by Pete Souza, The White House

In the near aftermath of what’s been called France’s 9/11, all the U.S. press corps in Antalya wanted to know about was whether President Obama thought he had looked tough enough, or whether he somehow had not considered a bonehead-obvious idea. You can see the whole embarrassing spectacle here (Q&A begins at 5:43).

And after Obama patiently explained how grownups think about difficult issues, they’d ask the same childish questions again.

Why?

  1. Because those are the questions that uninformed people ask
  2. A lot of uninformed people are watching
  3. So we should ask the questions they want asked.

And that’s how far too many reporters, who I’m sure are convinced they’re only serving the public, have made it their job to keep the public uninformed.

That’ll Do, Pig: If You Care About Excellence, Stop Over-Praising

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Also published at Huffington Post. In a meeting of nonprofit leaders the other day, I heard an executive praise some recent work done by his staff as “amazing” and “incredible”.

I hear this kind of thing so often that, normally, it hardly registers — it’s become the equivalent of someone saying “thank you”.

But this time it hit me: it is the equivalent of saying “thank you”. What these staffers had done wasn’t amazing or incredible at all. It was their job.

How did “amazing and incredible” come to mean “doing your job”?

I thought back to the highest-performing organizations I’ve worked with, in entertainment, media, technology or politics: no one talked like this. Among the very best of those organizations was Obama for America. At OFA, superlative performance wasn’t amazing or incredible. It was described simply as “gettin’ it done”.

At mediocre organizations, on the other hand, people get a gold star for finding their way to the office.

Of course, we should recognize good work. Skillful managers catch people doing things right, as Ken Blanchard taught us long ago.

But there’s a long way from there to here. In the years since we discovered positive reinforcement, a kind of praise inflation has taken over. Like monetary inflation, praise inflation reduces the value of the underlying currency.

It’s a formula for mediocrity. If you praise people to the skies for simply meeting your expectations, what does that say about your expectations?

I myself wrestle with the temptation to over-praise. After all, it feels like what a kind, supportive boss would do.

But I’ve realized that over-praise is the opposite of supportive: it tells people is that their work isn’t worth much.

The result? High performers feel that their work is unrecognized, and low performers feel encouraged to get away with even less — after all, “adequate” has now been deemed “amazing”.

Research backs this up. Intrinsic motivation — satisfaction in one’s work — yields better results than does extrinsic motivation — external rewards or punishments. Extrinsic motivation is not only weaker than intrinsic motivation, it undermines it.

It might be better to take a lesson from another model of excellence, the 1995 movie Babe. Farmer Hoggett is the “boss” of Babe, the world’s highest-achieving pig. Babe has learned to do the job of a top sheepdog, and against all odds (spoiler alert), he wins a sheep-herding championship.

Here’s how Farmer Hoggett praises his hard-working genius:

Narrator: And though every single human in the stands or in the commentary boxes was at a complete loss for words, the man who in his life had uttered fewer words than any of them knew exactly what to say.

Farmer Hoggett: That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.

And Babe beams with pride.

Bill O’Reilly and I Killed Bin Laden — But the Liberal Media Doesn’t Want You to Know

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Originally published at the Huffington Post: We were right there with Seal Team Six, Bill and me.

Please, don’t call us heroes. We were just two patriotic Americans, doing our jobs.

And our job was to crash land the chopper, hustle up the stairs, and — BAM! Send America’s greatest foe on his way to a date with the Devil.

Now, if you looked around that compound in Abbottabad — if you turned it inside out— you think you’d find any zealots from the left wing media there?

You think they’d have the stones?

Please.

They’d be back the hotel, ordering room service.

But now, these same cowards are saying I wasn’t there either, and neither was Bill.

Surprised? Don’t be. These people aren’t going to tell you the truth — they hate the truth. Because truth gets in the way of tearing America down — and of tearing down our troops.

Folks, here’s the truth — and you’ll only get it here. I saw the photos of the Seal Team Six raid. And so did Bill, with his own eyes. Hell, we both saw the movie.

And we didn’t turn away.

Could have stepped out for another Coke, or a Snickers.

Didn’t.

But they don’t want you to know that. They want you to think we’re the liars.

They’re running an orchestrated campaign, a hit job. They want you to think we said we were actually there with Seal Team Six.

As if that’s what the words, “Right there with Seal Team Six,” mean.

Unbelievable.

What part of, “We saw pictures,” don’t these pinheads understand?

What we meant is perfectly clear — no matter how much the liberal media wants to twist it, or how much they want to apologize to our enemies for the brave actions of our troops.

I’m done talking about this. And so is Bill. And so is the management of Fox News — the highest rated channel in cable, bar none.

But do you think that’ll stop the also-rans and bottom-rungers? Of course not.

Just wait. They’re going to come after us again. You heard it here first.

The next thing you know, they’re going to claim that Bill and I didn’t win World War Two.

World War Two! The war that saved civilization from the Nazis!

You think they won’t? Mark my words.

Because these people?

They have no shame.

– The O’Reilly tapes: Phone recordings raise new questions about JFK story

– Bill O’Reilly forced to clarify remarks about murdered nuns

– Bill O’Reilly’s LA riots ‘bombardment’ stories disputed by former colleagues

– Former Colleagues Dispute O’Reilly’s Account of Falklands War Coverage

– Bill O’Reilly Ratings Rise During Controversy

Obama’s Real Crime: Treating Americans Like Adults

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Originally published at the Huffington Post: There are obvious explanations for Rudy Giuliani turning himself into a Donald Trump-scale joke this week by attacking President Obama’s patriotism.

#1: A craving for attention, in someone who had fallen out of the spotlight.

#2: Racism, just the latest example of the right’s “othering” of Obama. Giuliani denies he’s a racist, of course, but like Trump, he’s obviously comfortable with exploitingracism, and at that point, sorry, it’s racism.

But, obvious though these explanations may be, I find them unsatisfying — there’s something more going on here, as well as in the failure of Republican leaders (apart from Marco Rubio) to repudiate Giuliani.

Giuliani and others like him can’t possibly believe their own claims that Obama never shows patriotic fervor. Patriotism has defined this president since he first gained national attention with his “No Red America, No Blue America” speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention.

But they do seem genuinely angry about this: that Obama will now and then grant that, even as it strives to be “a more perfect union,” America has flaws.

Surely only a child would believe that if you love something, you must never criticize it in any way.

Aha.

Here’s what really gets Giuliani and the others. Obama is breaking the unwritten law of modern conservative politics:

At all times, you must treat Americans like children.

Look at the enormous investment in reassurance that seems to go into every GOP event. There aren’t just flags, there are flags everywhere, and on everything. Speakers don’t just express patriotism, they battle to declaim, loudest and longest, that America is the greatest country in the history of the world.

When you’re the greatest country in the history of the world, you might expect that would mean a little less anxiety — as Jerry Seinfeld once asked, how many billions did McDonald’s need to serve before they finally accepted that they were doing OK?

But no. Apparently we’re to believe that the people of the greatest country in the history of the world can’t bear to hear anything but unalloyed praise.

They must never be exposed to the complicated truths of the adult world.

And there goes Obama, saying that America is the greatest country ever known, andsometimes we fall short of our own ideals. Outrage!

Why?

I blame marketing.

At least since the Nixon-Humphrey presidential campaign of 1968, our politics have been dominated by marketing. This has been especially so on the right, whence we get the postmodern, post-reality politics of pioneers like Nixon veteran and Fox News head Roger Ailes, which makes marketing not just the vehicle but the point. Freedom means the free market, and the free market is never wrong. What’s right is what people buy.

Marketing has useful, economy-growing effects, but — here’s another complicated, adult truth — it also has some negative ones, chief among them its tendency to infantilize us. What do we hear from marketers all day long? “You deserve this.” It’s the underlying theme of every ad you see.

And it’s become the underlying theme of GOP politics: you deserve everything you want (wealth, safety), and nothing you don’t (taxes, the consequences of wars). It’s ironic, given that there was a time when Republicans prided themselves on being the grown-ups.

From the marketing-dominant perspective, the charge that Obama is unpatriotic — and the apparently real anger behind that charge — finally makes sense.

In the reality-based world, yes, it’s ridiculous and, as noted, makes a joke of the person behind it. But what if you think America and marketing are more or less the same thing? That this should be a land of child-consumers, swaddled in comforting fictions?

Then yeah, I guess Obama isn’t very patriotic towards that.

And when he shows it, when he acts like he thinks we’re capable of something more, you can see how some would express not feigned, but genuine outrage at the threat to their debased version of American greatness.

After all, there’s money at stake.