Month: April 2007

Losin’ It

by digby

Via Oliver Willis, I see that Bill O’Reilly did a full-on Howard Beale tonight with Geraldo of all people.

In the entire, dark, black history of Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor, this is probably the craziest clip ever. A young girl was tragically killed by a drunk driver. But this was not enough for O’Reilly. Instead, because the criminal was an illegal alien he added this incident to his ongoing crusade against the brown people. Luckily Geraldo was on the show and he – to his credit – called out O’Reilly’s xenophobia for exactly what it was. This drove Bill O’Reilly insane. I was almost certain he was going to reach across the table and hit Geraldo.

It’s quite a show. (But then both these guys are clowns, aren’t they?) My money is on Geraldo, not only because he’s right, but because he’s had so much practice getting into physical fights on TV. O’Reilly’s a typical bully — lots of bluster, glass jaw.

Paddy Chayevsky is somewhere laughing and laughing and laughing.

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Polarized Elites

by digby

Here’s an interesting article in the new Democratic Strategist discussing “polarization.” According to the authors, there do seem to be some signs that the nation is a bit at odds but the causes remain obscure and it seems the people themselves are just as centrist as David Broder. (And anyway, we aren’t in a civil war so how bad can the polarization be?)

They quote heavily from a study that found that while the country may appear to be divided, it is actually the elites and the extremists like you and I who are making the Real Americans more polarized:

Badly in need of a reality check, popularized renditions of the polarization narrative were subjected to a more systematic assessment a couple of years ago in a book provocatively titled Culture War? The Myth of a Polarized America. In this intriguing study, rich with survey data, Stanford’s Fiorina and his associates reaffirmed the oft-obscured fundamental fact that most Americans have remained centrists, sharing a mixture of liberal and conservative views on a variety of presumably divisive social questions. Ideologues of the left or right–that is, persons with a Weltanschauung, or whose politics consistently form an overarching world view that tilts to extremes–are conspicuous on the fringes of the two parties and among political elites, but scarcely among the public at large. Indeed, sentiments there appear to be moderating, not polarizing, on various hot-button issues.

Moreover, the authors argued, the moderate consensus seems almost ubiquitous. The inhabitants of red states and blue states differ little on matters such as gender equity, fair treatment of blacks in employment, capital punishment, and the merits of environmental protection.7 Majorities in both places appear to oppose outlawing abortion completely or permitting it under all circumstances, and their opinions have changed little over the past thirty years.

No knowledgeable observer doubts that the American public is less divided than the political agitators and vocal elective office-seekers who claim to represent it. The interesting question, though, is, how substantial are the portions of the electorate that heed their opinion leaders, and thus might be hardening their political positions? Here, as best we can tell, the tectonic plates of the nation’s electoral politics appear to be shifting more than Fiorina and his coauthors were willing to concede.

Yes, it does seem that something odd is happening, what with the huge, unbridgeable differences of opinion on the issues of the day among Democrats and Republicans and all. But the authors also lay this at the feet of the “elites” who are sending their followers down the garden path:

What has happened in the electorate has much to do with how sharply political elites have separated along their respective philosophical and party lines. That separation is not in doubt. In the 1970s, the ideological orientations of many Democratic and Republican members of Congress overlapped. Today, the congruence has nearly vanished. By the end of the 1990s, almost every Republican in the House was more conservative than every Democrat. And increasingly, their leaders leaned to extremes more than the backbenchers have. Outside Congress, activists in the political parties have diverged sharply from one another in recent decades. Meanwhile, interest groups, particularly those concerned with cultural issues, have proliferated and now ritually line up with one party or the other to enforce the party creed. Likewise, the news media, increasingly partitioned through politicized talk-radio programs, cable news channels, and Internet sites, amplify party differences.

These changes, the reality of which hardly anyone contests, raise an important scholarly question with profound practical implications: what are the effects of elite polarization on the mass electorate? One possibility raised by Fiorina and others is that the people as a whole are not shifting their ideological or policy preferences much. Rather, they are being presented with increasingly polarized choices, which force voters to change their political behavior in ways that analysts mistake for shifts in underlying preferences.26 A plausible inference is that if both parties nominated relatively moderate, nonpolarizing candidates, as they did in 1960 and again in 1976, voters’ behavior might revert significantly toward previous patterns. Another possibility is that changes at the elite level have communicated new information about parties, ideology, and policies to many voters, leading to changes of attitudes and preferences that will be hard to reverse, even in less polarized circumstances.

That certainly sounds frightening. What if we scruffy political know-nothings out here in the hinterlands can’t shake off our partisan brainwashing even if our guiding lights in both parties give us some nice moderate candidates to choose from? I shudder to think of the consequences.

They authors conclude with this very unnerving thought:

It would be a mistake, however, to see only one-way causality in the relation between changes at the elite and mass levels. History supports Jacobson’s contention that political elites in search of a winning formula anticipate voters’ potential responses to changed positions on the issues and are therefore constrained to some extent by that assessment…

A feedback loop that mutually reinforces polarized comportment up and down the political food chain has at least a couple of important implications. For one, the idea that self-inspired extremists are simply foisting polar choices on the wider public, while the latter holds its nose, does not quite capture what is going on. While it is possible to distinguish conceptually between polarization and sorting, the evidence suggests that over the past three decades these two phenomena cannot be entirely decoupled. Polarized politics are partly here, so to speak, by popular demand. And inasmuch as that is the case, undoing it may prove especially difficult–and perhaps not wholly appropriate.

Inappropriate? I don’t think so. No knowledgeable person would contest the idea that you simply cannot let the rabble dictate politics in a democracy. Uber-centrist Ellen Tauscher understands that:

Finally one person got to the point and asked the right question. He wanted a united Democratic platform that was simple and easy for Americans to understand, one similar to the Republican’s Contract with America which helped them win in 1994. Tauscher paused a moment and then asked the man if he was a professional activist or politician. The man smiled, shook his head, and responded that he was a doctor. Tauscher promptly replied that she doesn’t plan on performing surgery just because she saw it on TV.

I hope the Democratic elites who have been leading the wee-citizens astray these past few years will come to understand, as centrist Ellen Tauscher has, that they must stop all the polarizing behavior they’ve been exhibiting and start moderating and compromising with the rightwing Republicans if they want to win the hearts and minds of the polloi. That’s truly the only way we can ever get our reasonable, moderate country back.

That is how its done, isn’t it?

And one more thing. The assumption is that this is solely about the “culture war” which is evidently considered some sort of lesser constellation of issues than the ones on which an earlier liberal hero quite pointedly and consciously polarized the nation:

Here is another important distinction: “polarization” is not synonymous with “culture war.” Intense political conflict can occur along many different dimensions, of which cultural issues form only one. When Franklin D. Roosevelt took dead aim at “economic royalists” at the height of the New Deal, his politics polarized American society. But an economic crisis, not a cultural one, was at the root of the polarization.

I’m not sure at whom that comment is aimed. Is there anyone who believes that polarization can only occur around the “culture war?” But it does bear thinking about why Roosevelt went head on at “economic royalists” when he was trying to pass his New Deal programs: it was politically useful to him. I suspect the Republicans who created the “culture war” had a similar idea.

While there is a lot of talk in the article about “elites” and “activists” as the purveryors of polarization, nobody actually comes out and says who created (and named) this thing called “the culture war.” They were elites, all right. Elites of the Republican party. I find it a bit amazing that this isn’t discussed in an article about our current polarized climate. Maybe they’ve never heard of Rush Limbaugh, but he and his various conservative clones are the ones who’ve been making a handsome profit selling culture war, not the Democrats. We became polarized because since 1980 they consciously polarized us.

I’m not trying to be obnoxious, really. This is an academic paper and not a political document. But it is written in a magazine called Democratic Strategist and it worries me that our elites still believe that there is some parity in the causation of this current polarized political scene. I simply don’t see how we can move forward, even to take advantage of this underlying consensus these scientists purport to see, if the party won’t admit how the attitudes and hyper-partisanship of the last fifteen years came to be. It wasn’t Democrats pushing from the fringe that caused this situation — Democrats consistently moved to the middle for nearly the entire time. And the Republicans just kept moving the center ever rightward.

And it is even more obvious that if the Democrats are now calling a halt to this rightward shift, it’s because their voters finally hit the wall. If Democrats are now fighting to regain some ground it is at the behest of their constituents not the other way around.

This rightward move has slowed for the moment, mostly as a result of the most disasterous presidency in modern memory. But there are no guarantees. Reagan was elected just six years after Nixon was run out of town. It is foolish to believe that the Republicans will not regroup nor is it reasonable to believe that they have learned anything from all this. (Remember: conservatism can never fail. It can only be failed.)

I certainly hope that the Democrats have, however. We have been in a conservative political era for more than a quarter century. They have had ample opportunity to try out every crackpot, rightwing think tank scheme they ever hatched and it has been a disaster up and down the line. We are overdue for a major course correction. But this country is a very, very big ship and it takes a lot of energy to stop its momentum and get it to turn in another direction. I think polarization may be necessary to effect that — when the ship is going hard to starboard, you’ve got to pull like hell to port if you want to straighten it out.

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Ganders Excepted

by digby

This week, the right went completely ape over Pelosi wearing a scarf in a mosque. No matter what the local custom or religious requirement, they said, no American leader should stoop to such behavior.

Oddly, they seem to have no problems with this:

One could point out that Bush is kissing and holding hands with the leader of the country from which came fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers and that makes him little better than a terrorist himself, but that would be what a stupid rightwinger would say if Bush were a Democrat. I’ll just point out that both Bush and the King have oil on their hands and leave it at that.

H/T to NTODD who made exactly this point the last time the goofy wingnuts went into a frenzy over an American in a scarf. They never learn.
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Bill’s Big Love

by digby

Julia wonders where Big Bill Donohue is now that his favorite candidate has reiterated his support for publicly funded abortions. That’s right, Donohue has been strangely silent about any of the contentious issues where Rudy Giuliani seems to come out on the side of the liberals but he loves writing about how wonderful Rudy is.

In fact:

It appears as if the only thing Mr. Giuliani’s done that’s offended Mr. Dononue enough to write about it is appear in a Saturday Night Live sketch where catholic schoolgirls talk about necking. Odd, that, when Mr. Giuliani as mayor instituted government-paid partnership benefits for gay couples, and Mr. Donohue feels pretty strongly about that.

Julia points out that despite Donohue’s reticence to criticize Giuliani’s positions on social issues, Donohue has found time recently to excoriate Mrs Clinton for “courting the homosexual vote” by not appearing in New York’s St Patrick’s Day parade. His “good friend” Rudy was also slated to skip the parade (FOF — fear of firefighters) until Donohue turned skipping the parade into a pander to gays.

Rudy, you see, doesn’t have to worry about such things. When it comes to “courting the homosexual vote,” nobody does it like Rudy:

I guess as long as he doesn’t cover himself in chocolate, Donohue doesn’t have a problem with it.

Baby steps.

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Oh No He Di-unt

by digby

Not only has former neocon pin-up boy Frances Fukuyama abandoned all of his former fans, he’s gone and rubbed their noses in the dirt in the worst possible way:

The End of History was never linked to a specifically American model of social or political organisation. Following Alexandre Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher who inspired my original argument, I believe that the European Union more accurately reflects what the world will look like at the end of history than the contemporary United States. The EU’s attempt to transcend sovereignty and traditional power politics by establishing a transnational rule of law is much more in line with a “post-historical” world than the Americans’ continuing belief in God, national sovereignty, and their military.

Finally, I never linked the global emergence of democracy to American agency, and particularly not to the exercise of American military power. Democratic transitions need to be driven by societies that want democracy, and since the latter requires institutions, it is usually a fairly long and drawn out process.

Outside powers like the US can often help in this process by the example they set as politically and economically successful societies. They can also provide funding, advice, technical assistance, and yes, occasionally military force to help the process along. But coercive regime change was never the key to democratic transition.

Oh dear. Somebody bring Kristol and Perle a freedom fry and some smelling salts.

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Knee Jerk Jerk

by digby

I am getting really, really tired of this:

BARNICLE: And now you have Speaker Pelosi in Syria. You know, I think if she were Speaker Nancy Pelosi from Birmingham, Alabama, or Pensacola, Florida, or Chicago, Illinois, even, it might play a little better politically in Washington than it has been. But she‘s from San Francisco.

This is Mike “I promise not to plagiarize anymore” Barnicle from Taxachusetts saying this. He goes on to say that it doesn’t matter what Nancy does, but he apparently felt he had to bond with the macho gasbags on Scarborough by gratuitously taking a shot at San Francisco. I wish these people would just stop it. It’s chauvanistic, outdated and stupid.

(I know that I will get a flurry of well meaning readers telling me how it’s ridiculous to complain because liberals are always trashing the south, and I’m sure it must be true, but I don’t see it on television, nor do I ever hear analysts casually saying that an issue is tainted by a southerner’s affiliation with it. Bashing liberal cities as being outside the mainstream is considered a free shot, however, and it’s time to put a stop to it.)

But it does explain one thing — why nobody said a damned word when Denny Hastert was traipsing all over South America telling leaders that they should ignore the Clinton White House and negotiate directly with the Republican congress:

In 1997, Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) led a delegation to Colombia at a time when U.S. officials were trying to attach human rights conditions to U.S. security assistance programs. Hastert specifically encouraged Colombian military officials to “bypass” President Clinton and “communicate directly with Congress.”

…a congressional delegation led by Rep. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) which met with Colombian military officials, promising to “remove conditions on assistance” and complaining about “leftist-dominated” U.S. congresses of years past that “used human rights as an excuse to aid the left in other countries.” Hastert said he would to correct this situation and expedite aid to countries allied in the war on drugs and also encouraged Colombian military officials to “bypass the U.S. executive branch and communicate directly with Congress.”

Subsequently, U.S. Ambassador to Colombia Myles Frechette sent a cable complaining that Hastert’s actions had undermined his leverage with the Colombian military leadership. In other instances, Hastert actually guided congressional staff to unilaterally reach deals with Colombian officials:

House Foreign Affairs Committee staff, at the direction of the Hastert group, would fly to Colombia, meet with the nation’s anti-narcotics police and negotiate the levels and terms of assistance, the scope of the program and the kinds of equipment that would be needed. Rarely were the U.S. diplomatic personnel in our embassy in Bogata consulted about the “U.S.” position in these negotiations, and in a number of instances they were excluded from or not even made aware of the meetings.

Before I heard Barnicle I thought it was hypocritical that Republicans said nothing when Denny Hastert did this. Now I know that it’s because Hastert is from Chicago, Illinois (even!) so it “played better politically” in Washington. This must be why Barnicle gets the big bucks and I don’t.

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Put A Scarf On Your Empty Soul

by digby

You’ve probably heard about the moronic rightwing tizzy of the day criticizing Nancy Pelosi for wearing a scarf on her head in a mosque, when the internet is filled with pictures of Laura Bush and Condi Rice doing the same thing. You’d think they would have thought of this, but then hypocrisy or just plain idiocy isn’t really a concern for them. Another day another rightwing fool…

But it made me recall some of their truly stomach churning commentary about reporter Jill Carroll when she was held hostage. You’ll remember this, I’m sure:

MCGUIRK: She strikes me as the kind of woman who would wear one of those suicide vests. You know, walk into the — try and sneak into the Green Zone.

IMUS: Oh, no. No, no, no, no.

MCCORD: Just because she always appears in traditional Arab garb and wearing a burka.

MCGUIRK: Yeah, what’s with the head gear? Take it off. Let’s see.

MCCORD: Exactly. She cooked with them, lived with them.

IMUS: This is not helping.

MCGUIRK: She may be carrying Habib’s baby at this point.

IMUS: She could. It’s not like she was representing the insurgents or the terrorists or those people.

MCCORD: Well, there’s no evidence directly of that –

IMUS: Oh, gosh, you better shut up!

MCGUIRK: She’s like the Taliban Johnny or something.

And that was just the tip of the iceberg. Here’s that horrible cretin Deb Schlussel with one of the most insane rants I’ve ever read, (not that it disqualified her from appearing on television chatting amiably with Jill Carroll’s journalistic colleagues.)And there was much more. All of these disgusting piles of rancid rightwing swill made the reflexive assumption that because she was a reporter, (and a woman) Carroll was sympathetic with terrorists and they wished on her the most horrible of fates.

When Carroll was finally released she explained that she had been forced to do everything she had done and that she was in no way sympathetic to her captors. She was scared to death and tried to do what she could to survive long enough to get out of there. It was a story of amazing bravery and integrity.

It was also a low point among low points for the damaged lizard brains of the right and if they are actually religous (which I seriously doubt) they will burn in hell for what they said about her.

Which leads us to today and round 322 of hollow, inhumane wingnut idiocy:

On April 4, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced at a 7:30 a.m. ET news conference in Tehran that the 15 British sailors and marines would be released. While Ahmadinejad maintained that all of the captives had admitted to trespassing in Iranian waters and that Iran had “every right” to put them on trial, he said that it was “a unilateral decision” to release the captives. He added that the decision was, in part, a “gift” to honor both the upcoming Easter holiday and the Muslim commemoration of the Prophet Muhammad’s birth. He said the captives would be taken to the Tehran airport immediately following his remarks.

In his April 3 Post column — headlined “Where’s Winston?” — Peters called the captives “wankers” and asserted that they “wimped out in a matter of days and acquiesced in propaganda broadcasts for their captors,” a reference to videos aired on Iranian television in which several of the captives said that they had entered Iranian territory. Peters continued: “Jingoism aside, I can’t imagine any squad of U.S. Marines behaving in such a shabby, cowardly fashion. Our Marines would have fought to begin with. Taken captive by force, they would’ve resisted collaboration. To the last man and woman.” He went on to write that the “once-proud” British military has “collapsed to a sorry state.”

In an April 3 post on National Review Online’s weblog The Corner titled “Brit Wimps,” Derbyshire linked to Peters’ column and stated, “Once again, it’s me and Ralph Peters on the same wavelength, deploring the cowardice of the British sailors and marines kidnapped by Iran.” Derbyshire further wrote: “When it happened, I said I hoped the ones who’d shamed their country would be court-martialed on return to Blighty, and given dishonorable discharges after a couple years breaking rocks in the Outer Hebrides.” Derbyshire added: “And in any case, there was no evidence of torture or mistreatment in any of the filmed cases I have seen. They look just fine. You can’t fake that. The girl sailor had that headscarf on within hours. From what I’ve heard of torture, even weaker cases can hold out for a few days.”

Don’t you just love these meatheads having the gall to criticize the behavior of the military in circumstances that would make them foul their trousers in the first five seconds? I had expected the criticism’s of Blair,and wrote about it earlier, but he’s a politician and that’s part of the game. To actually blame the sailors for surviving is unbelievable to me.

The rightwing is filled with these flatulent armchair warriors, ready to condemn everyone from intrepid reporters to the professional military for cowardice when they are captured by the enemy and fail to behave in what they consider a properly Rambo-esque manner. They seem to think these people should die rather than be taken alive or some other such puerile nonsense. (I guess it explains their hostility to John McCain — better to be a rich, coke sniffing draft dodger than survive five years in a POW camp.)

These are empty, cruel little boys and girls with serious deficiencies in their characters. They are lost souls, walking this earth without ever learning the meaning of decency, empathy or morality. I suppose this is understandable on some level. The only “lives” they truly value exist only in a womb or a petrie dish. And apparently that’s because these wingnuts relate to them — they are just about as fully human as frozen blastocysts themselves.

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Can’t Find His Bullhorn With Both Hands

by digby

Gene Lyons, writing his great column from outside the beltway, sees something that everyone else missed:

Here’s a puzzle: If President Bush really thinks he’s holding all the cards in his impending showdown with congressional Democrats over Iraq funding, why bother with a veto ? On previous occasions when Congress passed laws Bush found irksome, he’s quietly issued “signing statements” declaring in essence that the president is a law unto himself. Statutes Bush doesn’t like, he vows to ignore. He’s done it scores of times.

This issue would seem to be tailor made for such a signing statement, don’t you think? All that stuff about executive power to wage war and commander in chief, blah, blah, blah? As Lyons says:

He did it with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, granting himself the authority to indulge in warrantless wiretaps. He did it again with the 2006 Patriot Act, signing a bill mandating reports to Congress about the FBI’s use of national security letters, but asserting that the president needn’t comply. It’s no coincidence that the Justice Department’s inspector-general later found widespread FBI abuses of privacy rights. So why not just issue another signing statement saying Congress can pass all the resolutions it wants, but U. S. troops won’t be leaving Iraq until the Decider gives the order?

Lyons believes it’s because this is too high profile for him to get away with, but also that some Republicans believe that this is a political winner for them and so are anxious for the “showdown.” They seem to think that the Democrats are on the run. Lyons points out that the data says otherwise:

GOP glee is contradicted not only by 2006 election results, but also by every extant opinion poll. A March 29 Pew survey asked whether “Democratic leaders in Congress are going too far… in challenging George W. Bush’s policies in Iraq.” Exactly 23 percent said “too far,” 30 percent answered “about right” and 40 percent “not far enough.”

The Post’s own poll shows that 56 percent favor pulling U. S. forces out of Iraq “even if that means civil order is not restored there.”

The public’s far ahead of the Beltway opinion elite. This president is no longer trusted. Once people make that fundamental decision, they rarely change their minds. They’ve pretty much had it with Bush, Dick Cheney and their far-fetched World War II analogies. They understand that Iraq’s not a war, it’s a military occupation, and a catastrophically bungled one.

When as relentless a hawk as former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger says, as he did recently in Tokyo, that “a ‘military victory’ in the sense of total control over the whole territory, imposed on the entire population, is not possible,” Americans no longer believe that any conceivable Iraqi government is worth the cost in lives and treasure. They recognize the childishness of basing U. S. policy on al-Qa’ida taunts, as Bush and Cheney have done repeatedly.

I understand why the political establishment is convinced it’s incredibly risky for the Democrats to face down the president on this. As they always do, they are fighting the last war (and half a dozen before that.) They remember that the loathesome Newt Gingrich failed when he faced off against Clinton, so the “rule” must be that the congress always loses in a face-off with the president. But as Media Matters illustrated in this article on the subject, they forget that it was the exceedingly unpopular substance of what Gingrich was trying to do (rape medicare) that the public didn’t like:

Regarding the budget issue, The New York Times noted in a November 11, 1995, article:

The most recent NBC News-Wall Street Journal Poll shows a continuing erosion of public support for their [the Republicans’ budget] program. … [I]n October, only 35 percent were supporters and 45 percent were opposed.

Similarly, Newsday noted on November 11, 1995, that a “USA Today/CNN poll released yesterday suggested Americans by wide margins have soured on the Republican agenda, with 60 percent saying he [Clinton] should veto the budget bill and 33 percent saying he should sign it.”

This did not happen in an environment of media friendliness to Bill Clinton, by the way. He was being harrassed and derided at every turn by the Republicans and the press for dozens of disparate small bore, tabloid scandals. The people, for whatever reasons, were able to see through that to the core of the issue, which was that the Republicans were trying to pass a heinous budget and were willing to shut down the government even though they knew the public wasn’t with them. (Gingrich made that mistake over and over again.)

Republicans have the most dangerous habit in the world: they believe their own hype. And it gets them into trouble again and again. Having a president that has been hovering for many, many months at around 30% approval rating is a weakness so huge that it can’t be overcome with a swagger and a sneer. I do not know how this “showdown” will turn out. It’s a very fluid situation and anything can happen. But in this case, as in the earlier case, the Democrats are working on behalf of the majority of Americans and the Republicans are not. That is far more likely to govern the outcome than some miraculous return of the mythic man with the bullhorn.

If Bush really believes what he’s been saying about executive power and the need to fund the troops by the middle of April then he can sign the supplemental and then issue a signing statement that says he can ignore the withdrawal dates. But he won’t. And he won’t issue that signing statement because it would cause a national uproar and possible constitutional crisis, which it would. He’s not doing it because crazy men are telling him that this confrontation is the way to bounce back — the same crazy men that advised him to invade Iraq and told him that he didn’t need to respond to the worst national disaster in American history.

So have at it George. The Democrats will take their chances. Your track record wouldn’t scare a seven year old girl.

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Tiny Tim’s Inflated Past

by digby

Oh my goodness. It looks like our little friend Timothy Griffin, character assassin, dirty trickster and Karl Rove houseboy, may have embellished his resume. In fact, it would appear that Tiny Tim only prosecuted three cases as an assistant before he was installed in Hillary Clinton’s backyard as a Patriot Act midnight appointee to be Arkansas US Attorney.

Little Rock’s interim U.S. Attorney J. Timothy Griffin – already at the center of a firestorm over whether the White House has put politics ahead of prosecutorial integrity – made claims about his experience as an Army lawyer that have been put in doubt by military records.
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The 38-year-old Griffin claims on his official Web site that he prosecuted 40 criminal cases while at Ft. Campbell, where he was stationed from September 2005 to May 2006. But Army authorities say Ft. Campbell’s records show Griffin only serving as assistant trial counsel on three cases, none of which went to trial.

Do read the whole thing. The article outlines the career of a young dirty trickster from his earliest years cutting his teeth on the longest running special counsel investigation ever: the earthshattering Henry Cisneros scandal. You remember that one don’t you?

In March 1995, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno secured the appointment of an Independent Counsel, David Barrett to investigate allegations that Cisneros had lied to FBI investigators during background checks prior to being named Secretary of HUD. He had been asked about payments that he had made to former mistress Linda Medlar, also known as Linda Jones. The affair had been ‘public knowledge’ for a number of years – during the 1992 presidential campaign, U.S. Treasurer Catalina Vasquez Villalpando publicly referred to Cisneros and candidate Clinton as “two skirt-chasers” – but Cisneros lied about the amount of money he had paid to Medlar.

[…]

In September, 1999, Cisneros negotiated a plea agreement, under which he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of lying to the FBI, and was fined $10,000. He did not receive jail-time or probation. He was pardoned by President Bill Clinton in January 2001 ( See: List of people pardoned by Bill Clinton). The independent counsel investigation continued after the pardon focusing on alleged obstruction of justice. In May 2005, Senator Dorgan (D-ND) proposed ending funding for the investigation; negotiators refused to include the provision in a bill funding military operations in Afghanistan. The funding at that point for the investigation totaled $21 million.

When they finally closed up shop, the prosecutors were very upset that the judge overseeing the case would not allow them to air all the dirty suspicions to the public — suspicions they spent 21 million dollars and over ten years investigating and were never able to get an indictment beyond Cisneros’s misdemeanor and his mistress’s unrelated scam. (Compare and contrast that with Patrick Fitzgerald’s ethical position.)

This was the culture of the Clinton scandals, and it’s what we will go back to if the democrat win the presidency and once GOP crooks like Tiny Tim have gotten tanned and rested and finish counting up all the money they looted from the taxpayers during their reign of error.

On a related note: Griffin pretty much embellishes everything, apparently, (which is really rich considering he was one of the prime movers behind the “Gore exaggerates” smear.) He was caught by local Arkansas media saying in one of those e-mails that his high school girlfriend worked in Senator Blanche Lincoln’s office. The woman evidently didn’t remember it that way at all.

They lie as easily as they breathe.

H/T to BB

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Internal Combustion

by digby

Can you hear all the heads exploding on the right this evening? How hard it must be for them to reconcile their knee-jerk assumptions in a world more complicated than their little games of Risk and super-hero comics prepared them for.

You’ll all recall, I’m sure, that the wingnuts have been whining for days about CNN correspondent Michael Ware’s comments about John McCain being in Neverland when he implied that Bagdad was as safe as a summer’s day at Epcot center. And you also know by now that subsequently Drudge got punk’d by somebody who said that Ware heckled McCain at the press conference following his little Bagdad shopping trip with Huckelberry Graham (and 100 soldiers and 5 or six helicopters) over the week-end. The wingnuts went wild:

Here’s an example of the outrage from our friends at Powerline:

Maybe Ware was drunk; that would be consistent with his own description of how he spends his time in Baghdad. But he is an extreme manifestation of an all too common phenomenon–the journalist as advocate rather than neutral observer. One of the many problems with a reporter who becomes an activist, agitating for a particular side of a public issue, is that he loses any hope of objectivity. Having publicly committed himself to the proposition that everything that happens in Iraq is a disaster, having publicly ridiculed those who pointed to optimistic developments, how can anyone trust that Ware’s future reporting is giving us anything like the straight story from Iraq? And what does his conduct say about his employer, CNN? How much confidence can we have in their reporting from Baghdad, or anywhere else?

It’s just terrible that such a cut ‘n run liberal pants wetter is even employed, isn’t it?

After it was revealed that Drudge’s story was a fiction, Powerline posted this:

As Scott notes in his post below, CNN’s Michael Ware has denied heckling Sen. McCain during a press conference (he doesn’t say whether or not he laughed at McCain). However, Ware’s appearance with Soledad O’Brien, as quoted by Scott, is enough to condemn him as unfit to cover the war….

Unfit. One wonders how can the wingnut brigade can account for what he said today?

Malveaux: And as we look at what impact this war funds battle might have on the troops, what effect might it have on the efforts to calm Iraq’s cauldron of violence?

Moments ago, I spoke with CNN’s Michael Ware.

He’s in Baghdad.

He’s covered this war since the very beginning.

Thanks for joining us, Michael.

Now, obviously Congress, as well as the administration, they’re at loggerheads over whether or not the troops should withdraw, whether or not they should withdraw funds, as well.

And we’ve heard from — from the vice president, Cheney, and President Bush, saying look, this emboldens the insurgents here.

Do they pay any attention to this at all? Is that even true?

MICHAEL WARE, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, what I can tell you from the outset, Suzanne, is that, say, for example, by some bizarre political miracle, Congress was able to impose a real time line, a real deadline on the U.S. presence here or on the funding for the war here. Now that absolutely would play completely into the hands of America’s identified enemies, al Qaeda in Iran. That would be handing the entire advantage to them. That’s why that can never really happen.

But in terms of the broader debate, in terms of, you know, taking the temperature of the American mood, of the American public, adhering to what’s going on in Congress, looking at the Congressional elections, absolutely do the insurgents, do al Qaeda and does Iran and its proxy organizations in Iraq pay attention?

Yes, for sure. I mean they know that the most certain way to strike at their enemy is to strike at his support back home. And, indeed, they monitor these things. They know that, you know, what’s happening in D.C. doesn’t really relate to the ground. This is just political artifice.

Nonetheless, it does tell them about the pressure points to apply. And we saw from 2003 the Baathist insurgents saying from the beginning this war will not be won on the battlefield, it will be won on that — pointing to a TV screen.

That’s where this war will be won — Suzanne.

MALVEAUX: Do you think the president, as well as the vice president, then, are actually correct — they’re accurate — when they describe to the American people, saying, look, all of this infighting is weakening our position overseas, specifically in Baghdad?

WARE: Oh, absolutely. I mean it’s very clear — it’s been evident since the mid-term elections that America is in a period of strategic malaise. Essentially, America does not have one rock solid strategy. There’s no one clear way forward to U.S. victory.

There is a lot of infighting. There’s a lot of debate. Now in a pluralist democracy, that’s seen as a healthy thing.

But when you’re fighting a war, you want a clear and concise direction. You want everyone on the same page and you want your enemy to know that you shalt not falter.

Now, that’s precisely the opposite message that America is sending to its opponents here in the region. And, quite frankly, that’s why America’s rivals in the Middle East are becoming so much stronger and the concept of American empire or American presence is becoming so much weaker.

MALVEAUX: Thank you very much, Michael Ware, from Baghdad.

If the wingnuts watched something other than Fox they would know that Michael Ware is not their enemy. In fact, he’s been saying this for months. He even said it in the same report in which he said that McCain is in Neverland, (which I pointed out in my post that very day. )

So, what to make of this? My assumption is that Ware personally buys into the rightwing strategic view of the occupation, but that he reports the facts on the ground straight. Is that fair enough?

I don’t require that reporters hold my political opinions. I just require that they report the facts as best they can without imposing their political spin on the story. Ware seems to be a reporter who does that. I have no complaints about him even though I think his views on strategy are cracked.

The wingnuts, on the other hand, who don’t even like John McCain and mostly want to see him lose, just can’t deal with the idea that any reporter would contradict GOP spin, no matter how thoroughly ridiculous it is. In fact, they go so far as to just make stuff up to counter him.

The wingnuts are confused, I’m sure, if they saw today’s exchange. Here you have a reporter who says (as he’s always said) that the Democratic proposals to withdraw from Iraq will play into the hands of al Qaeda and yet he is the number one enemy of the rightwing that felt the need to jump to the defense of an addled, factually challenged candidate they don’t even like, simply out of reflexive tribal loyalty. It’s quite an illustration of why these people can’t properly govern.

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