Snagged from tumblr: 24-hour News

 So the other day I said a thing about how I felt like a line could be drawn between antis, and the rise of 24-hour news networks. I’ve given that thought some time to bubble to see what, exactly, my brain meant by that statement, and here’s what I’ve got:

When I was a kid (back in Ye Olde 1990s), we had three major news stations in my town: Channel 12, Channel 24, and Channel 35. These corresponded to NBC, ABC, and CBS, but I don’t remember which one was which so don’t ask me. Anyway–you had a half hour of news at 8 or 9 am (depending on which station you watched), an hourlong program at noon in which half the program was stuff like “here are today’s beach closures and some recipes and also if you’re looking for stuff to do with the kids this weekend here are local promotions,” and half an hour at either 5, 5:30, or 6 (again, depending on which channel you watched). One of the three stations also did a half-hour capper at 10pm. So unless you were watching all three stations, and picking the news every single time, the max amount of news you were going to get was like an hour and a half. If you wanted more news than that, you read the newspaper. When my mom was a kid (back in Ye Olde 1960s), this would have seemed like an inordinate amount of news–for her, it was half an hour at 6pm and ten minutes at 10pm and then the station (there was only one station that did the news) played the National Anthem and went off the air until 6am, at which time you might get like … the weather and a traffic report.

For anything else, you read the newspaper.

Now with only half an hour to present a whole lot of news, what are you going to do? You are going to stick to the facts. You don’t have a choice. You have a very short time to fit a whole lot of information. “Notre Dame cathedral caught on fire today. French firefighters are working to get the flames under control, and authorities in charge of the cathedral are doing their best to remove relics, paintings, and other holy objects while it’s still possible. French President Mr. Somebody addressed the nation and stated every attempt to save the building, and to rebuild the damage, will be made. In local news … “ And that’s it! If you want more information, you’ve got to wait for the newspaper in the morning, and you’re going to have to get a copy of the New York Times or USA Today, because the local paper will only have a blurb, and that blurb will mostly cover what you just heard!

But then the news changed.

By the time I was a teenager, the non-cable news looked like this: All three channels had a morning show that started at 5 or 6 am (depending on your station) and ran until 8 or 9 (depending on your station). The station that ended at 8am then had a half-hour morning news show. The mid-day news at 11 or 12 was still an hour. Channel 35 did a half-hour news segment at 5 and another at 5:30, back to back. The other two stations simply did an hourlong segment. And then one station did half an hour at 10:30, and the other two did hourlong segments at 10pm.

What do you do with that much time? Well, you expand. Yes, you can fit more news, but you can also fit more about the news. “Notre Dame cathedral in Paris went up in flames today. The fire began in the famous historic bell tower, and spread to the roof. At this time, portions of the roof appear to have caved in, and there are concerns about the integrity of the medieval stonework in the cathedral walls. French firefighters have been working since 8am Paris time to get the flames under control, and authorities in charge of the cathedral are doing their best to remove relics, paintings, and other holy objects while it’s still possible. Some firefighters are also helping with this project, as portions of the building have become too unsafe to enter. French President Mr. Somebody addressed the nation late this evening and stated every attempt to save the building, and to rebuild the damage, will be made. Of the cathedral itself, Somebody said, ‘Our Lady has weathered worse troubles than this. Paris as a city, and France as a nation, will overcome.’ In local news … ”

Still facts, but a few more facts. At this point the internet as a public thing is just past its infancy, and in theory you could go look up some stuff on, like, AOL, maybe, about what was happening.

(Nina, you were talking about antis … ?)

(Yes, I was. Bear with me.)

But at this point you also saw the rise of Fox News and CNN.

Now up to this point, I could trust the news. That is important to know. “Nina, American news is full of propaganda–” Listen, you’re not wrong, but the point is, if Scott Brennan told me Notre Dame cathedral was on fire and priests were trying to remove the holy relics, I could safely assume Notre Dame cathedral was on fire and priests were trying to remove the holy relics. If Channel 24 told me “the blizzard of the century” had occurred the night before, I could look out the window of my snowed-in house and go “yeah, that seems legit.”

I grew up, in other words, in a world in which facts were facts. We didn’t waffle or wring our hands over whether or not Notre Dame was on fire. And this allowed me to take a similar approach to fiction: it is a fact that murder is wrong, and knowing this, I can read a book in which someone commits murder for very good reasons, but still know they did something wrong.

But now you have 24 hours of news to fill.

No matter how you pad it, no matter how many voice clips you play or retrospectives you do, you cannot find enough news in the world to fill 24 hours, seven days a week, 365 days a year. You just can’t.

So they started adding “opinion pieces.”

Notre Dame is on fire–is it worth saving? Notre Dame is on fire–but is it as big a catastrophe as it’s made out to be? Notre Dame is on fire–but France has been steadily calling themselves a secular nation, so is this the punishment of G-d? Notre Dame is on fire–

–wait, what was that?

Yep. You saw it, I saw it, we all saw it. But as the “opinion pieces” slowly took over the regular news and stopped being called “opinion pieces” and started being called “programs,” it became less and less clear what was and wasn’t fact.

Now obviously Notre Dame is on fire. But now we have to ask ourselves: is it worth it to save it or not? Is the financial cost outweighed by the history? Will those answers change depending on how bad the damage becomes? And you, lonely elderly person in your chair whose predominant socialization these days is at church, how does this make you feel about French people? These are questions that once would have been asked of the church caretakers and the French government. Now every single person is being asked to think about them, without being provided all of the context that is available to the church caretakers and the French government. And along the way, you get these nice, nasty little bits of prejudice and slanted thinking and bias sneaked in.

I told you I’d come back to antis. And here we are.

The vast majority of antis are very young. They grew up in a world where those “programs” were the norm. They were not provided with a cultural basis of “these are the facts.” They were provided a basis of “here is what I think about the facts.” They were provided a basis of, as Mr. Banks said in Mary Poppins, “kindly do not cloud the matter with facts.”

There are no facts! Who fucking cares! An anti who’s 15 years old today was eleven years old when we were introduced to “alternative facts”! Is it wrong for a 27-year-old man to pursue a relationship with a 13-year-old girl? Depends on which news channel, and which presenter, you ask!

They literally grew up in a world in which critical thinking was discouraged. Once upon a time, you would have seen on TV that Notre Dame was on fire, and at dinner–or whatever your family did for together time–you might say things like “going to be expensive to fix that, I wonder what they’ll do,” but you wouldn’t have been hit with six presenters telling you exactly why Notre Dame should/shouldn’t be rebuilt. And don’t forget–even if you, personally, do not watch the news (or read it on the internet, which is just as bad, because everybody’s after those elusive advertising clicks, everybody needs the “scoop” two seconds before it happens), you know people who do. You hear their opinions and their hot takes and their retellings all around you. And those  opinions and hot takes and retellings will be colored by which “program” that person saw first.

Watch the first thirty seconds of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn2RjahTi3M

Walter Cronkite, a legendary news anchor, giving his opinion on Vietnam. You will notice that he states, very clearly: “it seems very clear to this reporter.” This is Cronkite’s opinion, nothing more, and he makes it clear that he is speaking only for himself.

Now skip to approximately 1:05, and watch him report the Kennedy assassination. You can see he’s emotional, but also keeping it under wraps as best he can because he has An Important Job To Do, and that job is twofold: to deliver the news accurately and concisely, and to keep the American public calm (you can see this when he hurriedly says Johnson is probably taking the oath to become President; a missing VP would be a crisis at this moment). This is a man who’s just found out the most beloved president in modern times is dead. And not just dead–murdered. It’s not like Kennedy had a heart attack, his damn head was blown off. This news is still coming in so quickly that you can see him glancing off the screen to get fresh reports. He’s one of the first to receive this absolute blow–and he’s still holding it together, barely wavering. (When I was a kid, this role would go to Dan Rather. He was no Cronkite, but he tried.)

Where is that kind of rock for today’s teens? Imagine–heaven forbid, in the state our country’s in right now–that tomorrow we get the news Biden was shot.

How would we get that message?

Would it be delivered by an even-keeled, just-the-facts reporter like Cronkite? Or would we get it from a bunch of half-hysterical articles and crisismongering “programs”? And would it be delivered to us straight, like Cronkite did, or would it be buried in three days’ worth of opinions on his “legacy” and policies and What This Means For America?

Now: how are you supposed to build any kind of strong convictions and moral compass on a world like that? Where anything can be true if enough people have an “opinion” on it? Where the facts get immediately buried in a wave of bullshit?

Antis are reacting to a world of “opinions” and “programs” being thrown at them 24/7 by trying to create a world they can control, where there are in fact things that are true, in a world that has actively refused them the opportunity to learn how to parse and process facts. And so what they’ve come up with is this grossly distorted version of facts, because gross distortions of facts are all they know. It’s all they’ve ever seen. They’re perpetuating a system they don’t even realize they’re part of, because they never experienced life before it existed.

They’re not lying when they say they were heavily influenced by fiction because the bounds between fact and fiction have been actively erased. On purpose. And it’s difficult to grok that, if you grew up in a world where you didn’t have to go seek out photographic evidence to be absolutely certain that Notre Dame was, indeed, on fire.

So what we need to be doing, first and foremost, is rebuilding that wall of facts, that line of truth. Otherwise, what we’re going to see is more of this, but getting worse daily.

We set them up for this, and now we’re paying the price for it.

--prismatic-bell on tumblr

Snagged from tumblr: Antifa

 A reminder that antifacism is a thing you DO, not an organisation you JOIN.

Calling a hotel and telling them a KKK chapter rented their ballroom for a meeting is antifa action

Pulling down posters promoting hate groups is antifa action (and if you do, use your keys, not your hands. Some groups put razor blades behind their postings to hurt anyone who takes them down)

Addressing local tensions in your community by participating in food drives and supporting disempowered folks can be antifacist, as facist groups will use community fears to stir up hate and gain power.

Going to an event where a figure whom fascists tend to align with and peacefully protesting is antifa action, whether that speaker thinks they’re fascist or not.

It’s not a club, religion, or organization. You don’t pay dues. Being antifa means actively trying to prevent fascism from being built, usually in local ways that respond to immediate community needs. If you see ANYTHING that talks about officially joining a group or organization, it is SUSPECT.

String on the Bulletin Board

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” ~~Isaac Asimov (1980)

Three separate things popped up in my Facebook feed one day last week, all from different sources, and on completely different topics, yet in my mind they were connected by one common thread: the failure of sources of news and information to adequately inform the public about serious issues of the day, and the failure of the public to be curious enough to actually find out what's going on.

The first thing that came up was David Corn's article in Mother Jones about the Russia investigation.  In it he observed that

The media coverage of the Trump-Russia scandal … has yielded a flood of revelations. Yet the news reporting tends to focus on specific components of an unwieldy and ever-expanding story... It is hard to hold on to all these pieces and place them into one big picture. These revelations do not emerge in chronological or thematic order. They arrive as part of the fusillade known as the daily news cycle... Attempting to track this whole damn thing … can make one feel like Carrie Mathison on Homeland. Do you even have enough string or enough space on the bulletin board?

I don't get a lot of news from TV.  I don't have cable, and the only broadcast news I really watch is PBS, and that only occasionally.  But I do watch the online version of The Rachel Maddow Show during my lunch break -- she does her research -- and she's been covering this story from the beginning. Watching long term has made me feel I have a general grasp on the story.  I can pretty well see how the pieces fit, and I'm not confused when a new piece is dropped in. But, I can't say I could explain it all to a 5th grader. It's pretty complex. Still, I believe the key to understanding this (and anything, really) is, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, to be curious without judgement. I don't have a problem with an editorial point of view, but at least try to get your facts straight.

I don't know if it's true or not, I heard the story years ago that the Secret Service combats counterfeiting by becoming intensely familiar with real money, not by examining counterfeit money.  The story goes that they are put in a vault where they count large sums of money incessantly for days. When they are done, they know what real money looks like, what it feels like, and how it smells. Knowing real money that intimately, they can spot a counterfeit bill a mile off. I'm never going to know about anything in the news as thoroughly as that because I'm not involved in it day in and day out, but I can at least try to understand basics. I appreciate Mr. Corn's article because it lays out the basic core of the story, and warns us against the pointless distractions.

I had a pastor years ago who pointed out that if someone gets up during the service and leaves the room, our mind doesn't just say, "Oh, someone is leaving the room."  Our mind says, "Why is that person leaving the room?" and then tries to answer itself. I think that that's where conspiracy theories come from: gaps in our knowledge and understanding get filled in with information from uninformed/misinformed sources. And as David Corn once wrote,

"The problem with these contrived conspiracy theories is that they obscure the facts...

Or, as Mrs. Iselin said to her husband in The Manchurian Candidate, "Are they saying, 'are there any Communists in the Defense Department?' Of course not. They're saying, 'how many Communists are there in the Defense Department.'"

The next thing that came up was this little item of twitterature from my friend Allen, which he not only posted on his wall, but also in a private message to me:

Now, at first I just took this as a rhetorical question.  I mean, after all, if I owe Allen five dollars, and he owes Agnes five dollars, and she owes Lilianna five dollars, and Lilianna owes me five dollars, then collectively we owe twenty dollars, even though that debt doesn't increase or decrease any of our assets. But OH-EM-GEE the comments.
  Joshua says:

Rothschild and their chronies (sic) print paper and use it to pay us to be slaves to gather up all the resources and knowledge for them. Then when it all collapses and we’re killing each other because of some political agenda the rich will sit in their golden 100 acre size bunkers and laugh and ride out the storm they created while we depopulate. 

I could show more, but it seemed they were all like that. Yes, income inequality is a severe problem in this country and elsewhere, but our own economic history shows us that  it has to do with tax policy, banking regulations, and campaign finance laws, and not with nefarious Jewish dynasties printing paper money.

The last thing that came up has been around forever (and debunked innumerable times.)  It's a video of the late John Coleman, a long time meteorologist, and a co-founder of The Weather Channel discussing his views on climate change. Mr. Coleman has no background in climate science, nor has he ever published a scientific paper on that or any other topic. Yet he is considered credible, via his (short) relationship to The Weather Channel, even though meteorology is to climatology what psychology is to brain surgery.

Now, I've written about the basics of climate change science before, but I think it's necessary to repeat it here.

Our atmosphere is made up of mostly nitrogen, a lot of oxygen, and other gases in smaller amounts.  Most radiation from the sun passes right through our atmosphere because it has a short wavelength.  The radiation heats the ground and then is emitted as long wave radiation.  This is the same kind of heat you feel from a hot sidewalk.  Water vapor, carbon dioxide, and methane  molecules in the atmosphere absorb long wave radiation, which causes them to vibrate.  The vibration produces heat, which is then radiated throughout the atmosphere.  

     Water vapor, carbon dioxide and methane are referred to as greenhouse gases (even though the physics behind greenhouses is quite different,) and they are what keeps our planet warm.  Without them, the radiation from the sun would bounce right back into space, and Earth would be a much colder place.  The opposite is also true, which is what we're concerned about today.

   All of this is just basic physics, and has been known since the 1850s.  Starting in 1859, an Irish physicist by the name of John Tyndall started publishing papers describing long wave radiation absorption by certain gases, and for a long time he was believed to be the original discoverer of the phenomenon.  But recently it was discovered that an American scientist named Eunice Foote had published a paper to that effect in 1856.  Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius postulated in 1896 that a significant increase in carbon dioxide could cause global temperatures to rise, but it wasn't until the 1950s that scientists started getting concerned enough to start monitoring temperatures around the world.  By the 1970s, US Department of Energy started getting concerned that increased industrialization would produce global warming, although at the same time, there was also a small group of scientists who believed that the pollution in the atmosphere (aerosols) would reflect the sun's radiation out into space, thereby causing global cooling.  But by the 1980s, temperature data showed that cooling was not happening, and the 1980s wound up being the warmest decade on record.  By 1997, it was determined that there was enough evidence that action needed to be taken.

Mr. Coleman, in this video, is asserting that there is no consensus among scientists on global warming, that the Democrats are in charge of funding science research and they only give money to scientists who support the Democrats' hypothesis on global warming, that 31,000 scientists signed a petition that invalidates global warming. He says that he's a scientist and that the science is on his

side. There is no significant man made global warming, and no reason to expect any in the future. Climate change is not happening.

What Mr. Coleman does not explain (though maybe he does elsewhere) how the Democrats got control over scientific funding in other countries, or how long they've had control of a branch of science that has been around for more than a century. Or why he thinks the Democrats would pay more for bad research than, say, an oil company. Or why there were only 39 actual climate scientists among the fictional and historical characters and Spice Girls on the petition he mentioned.

In the video, Brian Stelter, the host, asked David Kenny, the CEO of The Weather Channel's parent company, whether he was concerned that Mr Coleman was "using his title as cofounder to try to give attention to something that is misleading, that's inaccurate?" I do, and I think it's working. He wants us to believe, as Youtuber Potholer54 put it, that scientists are

...faking millions of points of data in thousands of scientific papers in dozens of different scientific fields and cross-matching them so that they all tell a story that is 180° opposed to reality AND making sure no one blabs about it.

And because of his status, people believe him.

We should all be mature enough to want to understand what's happening in nature, in politics, in economics, and acknowledge when something is right and when it's wrong. Isaac Asimov spoke of the "cult of ignorance" winding through politics and culture. That cult is enabled by unclear reporting, bogus information, and, honestly, just pure laziness. But true information is out there, and it's easier to find than it ever was before. We just need enough string.

First Reaction: Background Checks

Well sure.  That's easy.  The second part is entirely untrue.

Fact-check Challenge

Sometimes a friend spouts a fact that seems fake, sounds fake, and is fake. The following facts however seem fake, but are actually real.

1. Mammoths were alive when the Great Pyramid was being built.

2. Betty White is older than sliced bread.

3. From the time it was discovered to the time it was stripped of its status as a planet, Pluto hadn't made a full trip around the Sun.

4. The lighter was invented before the match.

5. Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr. were born in the same year.

6. France last used a guillotine to execute someone after Star Wars premiered.

7. Harvard University was founded before Calculus existed.

8. If you have 23 people in a room, there is a 50% chance that 2 of them have the same birthday.

9. It’s never said that Humpty Dumpty was an egg in the nursery rhyme.

10. The water in Lake Superior could cover all of North and South America in a foot of water.

11. North Korea and Finland both border the same country; Russia.

12. When you get a kidney transplant, they usually just leave your original kidneys in your body and put the 3rd kidney in your pelvis.

13. Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire.

14. National animal of Scotland is a Unicorn.

15. The Ottoman Empire still existed the last time the Chicago Cubs won the World Series.

16. The lighter the roast of coffee, the more caffeine it has.

17. A speck of dust is halfway in size between a subatomic particle and the Earth.

18. If the timeline of earth was compressed into one year, humans wouldn't show up until December 31 at 11:58 p.m.

19. If you were able to dig a hole to the center of the earth, and drop something down it, it would take 42 minutes for the object to get there.

20. We went to the moon before we thought to put wheels on suitcases.

21. A human could swim through the arteries of a blue whale.

22. If you could fold a piece of paper in half 42 times, the combined thickness would reach the moon.

23. On both Saturn and Jupiter, it rains diamonds.

24. Saudi Arabia imports camels from Australia.

25. You can line up all 8 planets in our solar system directly next to each other and it would fit in the space between Earth and the Moon.

26. The youngest known mother was 5 years old.

27. The Earth is smoother than a billiard ball, if both were of the same size.

28. Nintendo was founded in 1889.

29. If you take all the molecules in a teaspoon of water and lined them up end to end in a single file line, they would stretch ~30 billion miles.

30. In Australia, there was a war called the emu war. The emus won.

Tickld.com

"Abe Lincoln" Got It Wrong

Well, it's July 4th.  Time for the dominionists and nationalists to start flooding Facebook with their versions of American history, which, of course, will include lots of memes with supposed quotes from Founding Fathers and such.  And we know they are true quotes, because there's a picture of said Founding Father next to the quote, right?



Well, Abe that's not exactly true.  Most people have, on their computers, access to something called "Google," which should enable them to look stuff up and find out the real story, even if thy have to wade through a lot of crap to do it.  Quotes are one of the easiest things to fact check, because there are organizations out there that are devoted to the writings of individual historical figures, and they frequently provide information about fake quotes as well.  Beyond that, we have wikiquotes, Brainyquote, and just plain old fact checking sites like Politifact and Factcheck.org.  So if you're posting a fake quote, you really have no excuse.

So, this popped up in my newsfeed today.  I had checked the top and bottom quotes before, so I already knew the were "spurious," as they say.  But I don't just call bullshit; I think it's important to source my info.  So I went to Google and typed in "quote Patrick Henry founded religionists," and came up with several search results, and the very first one was Fake Quotations: Patrick Henry on “Religionists” « Fake History.  The webpage not only gave the origins of the quote, it explained the linguistic problems as well.  And, of course, you cant have a fake quote about religion without the obligatory reference to David Barton.
    For the Jefferson quote, I googled "quote Thomas Jefferson God who gave us life."  Among the results was this one from a website called "The Constitutional Principle," which explored more than one fake quote.  What was interesting about this particular quote is that it was actually comprised of portions of three different real quotes.  And again, at the bottom of the page, another reference to David Barton, this time with a link.  (For those of you who aren't familiar with him, David Barton is a man who makes his living by peddling dominionist history and fake Founders' quotes.)

Before I could get to the third item, second on the meme list, my friend who posted the meme commented, "Just cause you find some clever website in the Internet does not make something true. I could find articles right now that say scientifically the that the sky truly is not blue. These quotes came from history books not the Internet."
    There was no way to answer that without getting into some silly side argument, so I just encouraged him to do his own research.  "Fact checking is not that hard," I said.

But, as it turned out, that wasn't necessarily true.  There doesn't seem to be any actual information regarding James Madison's thoughts on Isaiah 33:22.  There are lots of sites that state as a matter of fact that the verse was his inspiration for the three branches of Government, but they provide no references to his writings to verify it.  Nor do the websites that document his writings even mention the concept.  There are reasons to doubt: the fact that he was a STRONG proponent of the separation of church and state is heavily documented.  But I didn't find anything pro or con on the subject I was researching.  I don't want to get into a Russell's teapot argument, so if any of you readers out there can find proof one way or the other, I'm interested.
On a side note, I really didn't have to go to all the "clever websites" to find the info on the other two; as it turns out, I could have just gone to Snopes.

There is a principle of logic that says that you cannot prove logic with illogic. It is this principle that makes us understand that the question "can God create a rock so big he can't lift it?" is a stupid question.  But I think there should be a similar adage governing the use of false information.  In our court system, witnesses swear to tell the truth, because it is understood that the presentation of false testimony leads to injustice.  So why is it okay to use demonstrably false information to support one's version of truth?  If something is truly good or bad, desirable or undesirable, why is it necessary to make up stuff to prove it?  If something is true, shouldn't the real data support it?

But if the lie supports our beliefs, do we even care?

The Methodology of Brad DeLong

"In general, when I embark on an understanding-and-critique task, I find myself in one of four situations. Sometimes the people I am reading are not as smart as I am and have not done their homework: they are my lawful prey. Sometimes the people are smarter than I am but have not done their homework: I critique them by doing yet more homework. Sometimes the people have done their homework but are not as smart as I am: I critique them by working hard to be smart.
"And sometimes the people are smarter than I am and done their homework. Then I have a very hard task indeed--and readers should understand that for them to bet on the correctness of my conclusions would not be to maximize expected value."
--Brad DeLong

Having Withdrawals

Fact Check: Did Obama Withdraw From Iraq Too Soon, Allowing ISIS To Grow?

It was President George W. Bush who signed the Status of Forces agreement in 2008, which planned for all American troops to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011.
"The agreement lays out a framework for the withdrawal of American forces in Iraq — a withdrawal that is possible because of the success of the surge," he said in a joint press conference with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki at the time.
Moments later, an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at the president. It is important to remember most Iraqis saw the Americans as occupiers and blame them for civilian deaths.
Maliki summed up the sentiment at the time, thus:

"The incomplete sovereignty and the presence of foreign troops are the most dangerous, most complicated and most burdensome legacy we have faced since the time of dictatorship. Iraq should get rid of them to protect its young democratic experiment."

Thousands of American troops had died, and by the time Obama announced the withdrawal, fully three-quarters of Americans supported the withdrawal (though a majority of Republicans did not).
Still, many had real concerns al Qaeda wasn't done for. And there were some, including U.S. senators, saying the troops should stay just in case things went downhill. They say Obama should have sold the idea, hard, to Maliki.
...
The State Department's lawyers said troops couldn't stay in Iraq unless the Iraqi parliament authorized them to do so, including granting them immunity from Iraqi law. The Iraqi parliamentarians would never OK such a decision, with Iraqi popular opinion staunchly against U.S. troops staying.
[Iraq analyst Kirk] Sowell saw State's decision as a deliberately insurmountable obstacle.
"It was a barrier that was very high," he said, "and there was no way it was going to be jumped over."

But, does Obama bear responsibility for the timing of the troop withdrawal? On balance, no.
He was following through on an agreement made by Bush and abiding by the will of the Iraqi and American people.

Iraq rejects US request to maintain bases after troop withdrawal

The US suffered a major diplomatic and military rebuff on Friday when Iraq finally rejected its pleas to maintain bases in the country beyond this year.
Barack Obama announced at a White House press conference that all American troops will leave Iraq by the end of December, a decision forced by the final collapse of lengthy talks between the US and the Iraqi government on the issue....
Obama attempted to make the most of it by presenting the withdrawal as the fulfilment of one of his election promises.
"Today I can report that, as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. After nearly nine years, America's war in Iraq will be over," he told reporters.

But he had already announced this earlier this year, and the real significance today was in the failure of Obama, in spite of the cost to the US in dollars and deaths, to persuade the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki to allow one or more American bases to be kept in the country.

Obama was formally told of Maliki's final decision on Friday morning in a video conference.
Speaking later to reporters, Obama glossed over the rejection, describing it as Iraq shaping its own future.
He told reporters that the "tide of war is receding", not only in Iraq but in Afghanistan and in Libya.
"The United States is moving forward to a position of strength. The long war in Iraq will come to an end by the end of this year. The transition in Afghanistan is moving forward and our troops are finally coming home," he said.