Month: April 2007

Bulletproof?

by digby

I hear from John at Crooks and Liars that old Rush is feeling some heat for his Minstrel Show. Apparently some people have had it up to here with rich, white jackasses making millions on the radio demeaning black folks for the amusement of their white neanderthal audience. Perhaps 2007 will be the year that we finally wring that remnant of Jim Crow out of the culture.

Rush is not some misunderstood schlub who just made a few slightly off-color jokes and doesn’t understand why it bothers some people.He’s not even a nasty old racist/misogynist creep like Imus who just thought he could demean anybody he felt like and make big money doing it. Rush Limbaugh a professional cog in the GOP machine who has been helping to set the political agenda in this country for more than a decade. He knows exactly what he’s doing when he plays on racist stereotypes and it isn’t just for the laughs.

Yet in 2000 NBC hired him to do election commentary. ESPN later hired him to do sports. The Republican party defends even the most disgusting of his antics. The president himself appeared on his show just days before last fall’s election. But no matter how much lipstick they smear on his big million dollar mouth, Rush is still a pig. Until recently, nobody was keeping track of the disgusing swill he spews. They are now.

Amato writes:

I’ve anonymously confirmed that stations around the country who carry the show are having concerns expressed by listeners and even their own workers of color about the Obama parody, and the ensuing controversy in the media, and that respective managements are considering ways to address the matter with as little Imus-like backlash as possible,..This is starting to boil over…

He also has links to a phone call from a listener today that has Rush sounding … tense. Here’s the exchange:

Caller: I’m in full panic mode here. I’ve heard three times today a disclaimer on the 760 WGIR, blah, blah ,blah. What’s going on? Are they trying to take you off 760? If they do I’ll never listen again.

Rush: Oh no no… If they are it won’t happen until after next Thursday because I’ve got a personal appearance there … no they’re not going to do that…

Caller: It’s censorship!

Rush: No, they’re not censoring anything. They’re just saying that whatever I say…

Caller; yeah, but why all of a sudden? I’ve been listening for two years … I’ve been converted to conservatism. And if I don’t get my Rush, I will be cranky.

Rush: You will. You might be cranky, but you will get your Rush…I don’t know what’s behind this. This happened when the program first started, first started back in 1988…it was controversial in its day. I did the disclaimer myself as a means of protecting the radio station…nobody’s felt the need to disclaim the show until WJR, started today, we got a phone call earlier from a guy who souldn’t go on the air, said he heard it like you did. Beyond that, I don’t know what it’s about.

Caller: …IneedmyrushoriwilldieIloveyouIloveyouIloveyou…

Rush: If the worst possible thing happened you would be able to get it on the internet… everything’s fine…as long as they make it known up there that whatever I say they don’t agree with, then everything will be cool and nothing will happen.

Rush relegated to the internet? Be still my heart.

In case you missed Rush’s minstrel show, there’s a full rundown over at The Horses Mouth. Here’s the YouTube compilation of Rush’s “parody” songs and bits, voiced, of course, by a white jerk who thinks it’s hilarious to portray “Al Sharpton” as an ebonics practitioner:

But, that’s just fine, I’m sure. For some people, Rush can do no wrong:

Rush’s angry, frustrated critics discount how hard it is to make an outrageous charge against him stick. But, we listeners have spent years with him, we know him, and trust him. Rush is one of those rare acquaintances who can be defended against an assault challenging his character without ever knowing the “facts.” We trust his good judgment, his unerring decency, and his fierce loyalty to the country he loves and to the courageous young Americans who defend her. For millions of us, David Brock is firing blanks against a bulletproof target.

— Kate O’Beirne is Washington Editor for National Review.

We certainly do not discount how hard it is to make a charge against him stick. As Rush himself points out to the caller above, his repulsive bile hasn’t even been considered controversial for years. The Republican establishment and their friends and enablers in the media have treated talk radio’s vicious racism and misogyny as if it was all in good fun, and Limbaugh was their king. They validated this ugly crud because it kept their racist base happy, made big bucks for their corporate owners — and apparently amused them at Washington cocktail parties.

A lot of American people didn’t know that this swill was out there and thought that if the Republicans and the mainstream political media thought these guys were ok, they must be ok. But they are being awakened to what is going on by the alternative media — and a reurgent progressive movement that is organizing to bring attention to it.

I don’t think Rush should be censored by the government and there is no movement to do such a thing. But if corporate radio can destroy the careers of the Dixie Chicks because one of them once said onstage that she was ashamed that Bush was from Texas, they can fire this noxious SOB for being a stone cold racist, misogynist ass on their airwaves for the past 20 years. That seems more than fair to me.

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You Can’t Win

by digby

This is just ridiculous. From Cliff Schecter:

In a column that can only be described as hysterical (in every sense of the word), Roger Simon over at Drudge Jr. (that’s The Politico) criticizes John Edwards for mentioning Christ in his prayer. Yeah, we all know how the Democrats are constantly using Christ in their politics, using the Bible as a reason to push forward certain political causes.

Here’s what Simon wrote;

Does John Edwards include Jews in his prayers? Or Muslims? Or Hindus? Or any other non-Christians?

He didn’t the other day. The other day, in order to commemorate those killed at Virginia Tech, Edwards led a prayer “in Christ’s name” at Ryman Auditorium, which bills itself as “Nashville’s Premier Performance Hall.”

Edwards has a perfect right to pray publicly or privately any way he wants to. But people who are not Christians often feel left out of prayers like his.

So after years and years of being told that they must appeal to the vast numbers of Christians who would vote for Democrats if only they weren’t so hostile to their faith, the new rule is that the godless Democrats must not emphasize their own Christian faith or risk being called intolerant. Meanwhile, if they include other religions in their speeches, holiday greetings and prayers, they are said to be waging a war on Christians. Why, if I didn’t know better, I’d think that Democrats just can’t win with these people.

Once again, this proves that Democrats are completely wasting their time ever responding to beltway insider CW. Their game is rigged and the only way to make people trust government is to stop. listening. to. the. pundits.

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Long Term Strategery

by digby

Rick Perlstein has done a little bit of research on the Republican party as most of you know. Today, he reminds us just how deeply the GOP obsession with voter fraud in embedded in the GOP DNA:

Let me show you. Read this report from 1964, running down all the ways how Barry Goldwater’s Republican Party was working overtime to keep minorities from voting. The document can be found in the LBJ Library, where I researched my book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus:

John M Baley, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, charged today that “under the guise of setting up an apparatus to protect the sanctity of the ballot, the Republicans are actually creating the machinery for a carefully organized campaign to intimidate voters and to frighten members of minority groups from casing their ballots on November 3rd.

“‘Let’s get this straight,’ Bailey added, ‘the Democratic Party is just as much opposed to vote frauds as is the Republican party. We will settle for giving all legally registered voters an opportunity to make their choice on November 3rd. We have enough faith in our Party to be confident that the outcome will be a vote of confience in President Johnson and a mandate for the President and his running mate, Hubert Humphrey, to continue the programs of the Johnson-Kennedy Administration.

“‘But we have evidence that the Republican program is not really what it purports to be. it is an organized effort to prevent the foreign born, to prevent Negroes, to prevent members of ethnic minorities from casting their votes by frightening and intimidating them at the polling place.

“‘We intend to see to it that the rights of these people are protected. We will have our people at the polling places–not to frighten or threaten anyone–but to protect the right of any eligible voter to cast a secret ballot without threats or intimidation.’

From the moment that the Voting Rights Act passed the Republicans have been working overtime to put roadblocks in front of it. Why they feel they cannot win without cheating is anybody’s guess. My personal theory is that they just believe they should do anything and everything, including cheating and stealing, to ensure that they keep their privileges and prerogatives in American society. That’s the glue that holds the racists, the businessmen and the conservative Christians together.

Read the rest of the post here. The more things change…

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Truth’s Consequences

by digby

Since the Moyers show, I have been thinking of many things that happened during that intense period in 2002 and 2003 when the political and media establishment seemed to lose its collective mind (again) and took this country into an inexplicable and unnecessary war. As tristero notes below, the story is long and complicated and it will take years to put it all together, if it ever happens.

I was reminded of one episod, after the invasion, that came as big surprise to me because it came from an unexpected source. And it was one of those stories that was clearly a cautionary tale for any up and coming members of the media who valued their jobs.

On 9/11 those of us who were lucky enough not to be in Manhattan sat glued to our television sets and watched a star being born. Here’s how the Wikipedia described it:

On September 11, 2001, Ashleigh Banfield was reporting from the streets of Manhattan, where she was nearly suffocated from the debris cloud from the collapsing World Trade Center. Banfield continued reporting, even as she rescued a NYPD officer, and with him, fled to safety into a streetside shop. After the initial reporting of the tragedy had ended, Banfield received a promotion, as MSNBC sent her around the world as the producer of a new program, A Region in Conflict.

A Region in Conflict was broadcast mainly from Pakistan and Afghanistan, generally considered locations unfriendly to Westerners. To report day-to-day local stories in that area of the world, she sometimes used her Canadian citizenship to provide access where Americans might not be welcome. She would read viewer e-mails on-air, sometimes without reviewing them beforehand, to avoid bias.

During the conflict in Afghanistan, Banfield interviewed Taliban prisoners, and visited a hospital in Kabul. Later entries covered her travels from Jalalabad to Kabul, as well as other experiences in Afghanistan. In Pakistan, she interviewed Father Gregory Rice, a Catholic priest in Pakistan, and an Iraqi woman aiding refugees. While in Afghanistan, Banfield darkened her blonde hair in order to be less obviously a foreigner.

I made terrible fun of Banfield. She seemed to me to be the personification of the infotainment industrial complex, a reporter better known for her stylish spectacles and blond highlights than her journalistic skills. She was their girl hero, a Jessica Lynch of TV news, constructed out of whole cloth in the marketing department of MSNBC. But I was wrong about her. It’s true that she was a cable news star who was created out of the rubble of 9/11, but her reporting that day really was pretty riveting. Her stories from Afghanistan were often shallow, but no more than any of the other blow dried hunks they dispatched over there, and they were sometimes better. Still, she symbolized for me the media exploitation of 9/11 and the War on Terror Show and I was unforgiving.

But very shortly after the invasion of Iraq — even before Codpiece Day — Banfield delivered a speech that destroyed her career. She was instantly demoted by MSNBC and fired less than a year later.

Do you remember what she said?

Ashleigh Banfield Landon Lecture
Kansas State University
Manhattan, Kansas
April 24, 2003

…I suppose you watch enough television to know that the big TV show is over and that the war is now over essentially — the major combat operations are over anyway, according to the Pentagon and defense officials — but there is so much that is left behind. And I’m not just talking about the most important thing, which is, of course, the leadership of a Middle Eastern country that could possibly become an enormous foothold for American and foreign interests. But also what Americans find themselves deciding upon when it comes to news, and when it comes to coverage, and when it comes to war, and when it comes to what’s appropriate and what’s not appropriate any longer.

I think we all were very excited about the beginnings of this conflict in terms of what we could see for the first time on television. The embedded process, which I’ll get into a little bit more in a few moments, was something that we’ve never experienced before, neither as reporters nor as viewers. The kinds of pictures that we were able to see from the front lines in real time on a video phone, and sometimes by a real satellite link-up, was something we’d never seen before and were witness to for the first time.

And there are all sorts of good things that come from that, and there are all sorts of terrible things that come from that. The good things are the obvious. This is one more perspective that we all got when it comes to warfare, how it’s fought and how tough these soldiers are, what the conditions are like and what it really looks like when they’re firing those M-16s rapidly across a river, or across a bridge, or into a building.

[…]

So for that element alone it was a wonderful new arm of access that journalists got to warfare. Perhaps not that new, because we all knew what it looked like at Vietnam and what a disaster that was for the government, but this did put us in a very, very close line of sight to the unfolding disasters.

That said, what didn’t you see? You didn’t see where those bullets landed. You didn’t see what happened when the mortar landed. A puff of smoke is not what a mortar looks like when it explodes, believe me. There are horrors that were completely left out of this war. So was this journalism or was this coverage-? There is a grand difference between journalism and coverage, and getting access does not mean you’re getting the story, it just means you’re getting one more arm or leg of the story. And that’s what we got, and it was a glorious, wonderful picture that had a lot of people watching and a lot of advertisers excited about cable news. But it wasn’t journalism, because I’m not so sure that we in America are hesitant to do this again, to fight another war, because it looked like a glorious and courageous and so successful terrific endeavor, and we got rid oaf horrible leader: We got rid of a dictator, we got rid of a monster, but we didn’t see what it took to do that.

I can’t tell you how bad the civilian casualties were. I saw a couple of pictures. I saw French television pictures, I saw a few things here and there, but to truly understand what war is all about you’ve got to be on both sides. You’ve got to be a unilateral, someone who’s able to cover from outside of both front lines, which, by the way, is the most dangerous way to cover a war, which is the way most of us covered Afghanistan. There were no front lines, they were all over the place. They were caves, they were mountains, they were cobbled, they were everything. But we really don’t know from this latest adventure from the American military what this thing looked like and why perhaps we should never do it again. The other thing is that so many voices were silent in this war. We all know what happened to Susan Sarandon for speaking out, and her husband, and we all know that this is not the way Americans truly want to be. Free speech is a wonderful thing, it’s what we fight for, but the minute it’s unpalatable we fight against it for some reason.

That just seems to be a trend of late, and l am worried that it may be a reflection of what the news was and how the news coverage was coming across. This was a success, it was a charge it took only three weeks. We did wonderful things and we freed the Iraqi people, many of them by the way, who are quite thankless about this. There’s got to be a reason for that. And the reason for it is because we don’t have a very good image right now overseas, and a lot of Americans aren’t quite sure why, given the fact that we sacrificed over a hundred soldiers to give them freedom.

[…]

All they know is that we’re crusaders. All they know is that we’re imperialists. All they know is that we want their oil. They don’t know otherwise. And I’ll tell you, a lot of the people I spoke with in Afghanistan had never heard of the Twin Towers and most of them couldn’t recognize a picture of George Bush.

[…]

That will be a very interesting story to follow in the coming weeks and months, as to how this vacuum is filled and how we go about presenting a democracy to these people when — if we give them democracy they probably will ask us to get out, which is exactly what many of them want.

[…]

As a journalist I’m often ostracized just for saying these messages, just for going on television and saying, “Here’s what the leaders of Hezbullah are telling me and here’s what the Lebanese are telling me and here’s what the Syrians have said about Hezbullah. Here’s what they have to say about the Golan Heights.” Like it or lump it, don’t shoot the messenger, but invariably the messenger gets shot.

We hired somebody on MSNBC recently named Michael Savage. Some of you may know his name already from his radio program. He was so taken aback by my dare to speak with Al -Aqsa Martyrs Brigade about why they do what they do, why they’re prepared to sacrifice themselves for what they call a freedom fight and we call terrorism. He was so taken aback that he chose to label me as a slut on the air. And that’s not all, as a porn star. And that’s not all, as an accomplice to the murder of Jewish children. So these are the ramifications for simply being the messenger in the Arab world.

How can you discuss, how can you solve anything when attacks from a mere radio flak is what America hears on a regular basis, let alone at the government level? I mean, if this kind of attitude is prevailing, forget discussion, forget diplomacy, diplomacy is becoming a bad word.

[..]

When I said the war was over I kind of mean that in the sense that cards are being pulled from this famous deck now of the 55 most wanted, and they’re sort of falling out of the deck as quickly as the numbers are falling off the rating chart for the cable news stations. We have plummeted into the basement in the last week. We went from millions of viewers to just a few hundred thousand in the course of a couple of days.

Did our broadcasting change? Did we get boring? Did we all a sudden lose our flair? Did we start using language that people didn’t want to hear? No, I think you’ve just had enough. I think you’ve seen the story, you’ve’ seen how it ended, it ended pretty well in most American’s view; it’s time to move on.

What’s the next big story? Is it Laci Peterson? Because Laci Peterson got a whole lot more minutes’ worth of coverage on the cable news channels in the last week than we’d have ever expected just a few days after a regime fell, like Saddam Hussein.

I don’t want to suggest for a minute that we are shallow people, we Americans. At times we are, but I do think that the phenomenon of our attention deficit disorder when it comes to watching television news and watching stories and then just being finished with them, I think it might come from the saturation that you have nowadays. You cannot walk by an airport monitor, you can’t walk by most televisions in offices these days, in the public, without it being on a cable news channel. And if you’re not in front of a TV you’re probably in front of your monitor, where there is Internet news available as well.

You have had more minutes of news on the Iraq war in just the three-week campaign than you likely ever got in the years and years of network news coverage of Vietnam. You were forced to wait for it till six o’clock every night and the likelihood that you got more than about eight minutes of coverage in that half hour show, you probably didn’t get a whole lot more than that, and it was about two weeks old, some of that footage, having been shipped back. Now it’s real time and it is blanketed to the extent that we could see this one arm of the advance, but not where the bullets landed.

But I think the saturation point is reached faster because you just get so much so fast, so absolutely in real time that it is time to move on. And that makes our job very difficult, because we tend to leave behind these vacuums that are left uncovered. When was the last time you saw a story about Afghanistan? It’s only been a year, you know. Only since the major combat ended, you were still in Operation Anaconda in not much more than 11 or 12 months ago, and here we are not touching Afghanistan at all on cable news.

There was just a memorandum that came through saying we’re closing the Kabul bureau. The Kabul bureau has only been staffed by one person for the last several months, Maria Fasal, she’s Afghan and she wanted to be there, otherwise I don’t think anyone would have taken that assignment. There’s just been no allotment of TV minutes for Afghanistan.

And I am very concerned that the same thing is about to happen with Iraq, because we’re going to have another Gary Condit, and we’re going to have another Chandra Levy and we’re going to have another Jon Benet, and we’re going to have another Elizabeth Smart, and here we are in Laci Peterson, and these stories will dominate. They’re easy to cover, they’re cheap, they’re fast, you don’t have to send somebody overseas, you don’t have to put them up in a hotel that’s expensive overseas, and you don’t have to set up satellite time overseas. Very cheap to cover domestic news. Domestic news is music news to directors’ ears.

But is that what you need to know? Don’t you need to know what our personality is overseas and what the ramifications of these campaigns are? Because we went to Iraq, according to the President, to make sure that we were going to be safe from weapons of mass destruction, that no one would attack us. Well, did everything all of a sudden change? The terror alert went down. All of a sudden everything seems to be better, but I can tell you from living over there, it’s not.

[…]

There was a reporter in the New York Times a couple days ago at the Pentagon. It was a report on the ground in Iraq that the Americans were going to have four bases that they would continue to use possibly on a permanent basis inside Iraq, kind of in a star formation, the north, the south, Baghdad and out west. Nobody was able to actually say what these bases would be used for, whether it was forward operations, whether it was simple access, but it did speak volumes to the Arab world who said, “You see, we told you the Americans were coming for their imperialistic need. They needed a foothold, they needed to control something in central and west Asia to make sure that we all next door come into line.”

And these reports about Syria, well, they may have been breezed over fairly quickly here, but they are ringing loud still over there. Syria’s next. And then Lebanon. And look out lran.

So whether we think it’s plausible or whether the government even has any designs like that, the Arabs all think it’s happening and they think it’s for religious purposes for the most part.

[…]

I think there were a lot of dissenting voices before this war about the horrors of war, but I’m very concerned about this three-week TV show and how it may have changed people’s opinions. It was very sanitized.

It had a very brief respite from the sanitation when Terry Lloyd was killed, the ITN, and when David Bloom was killed and when Michael Kelley was killed. We all sort of sat back for a moment and realized, “God, this is ugly. This is hitting us at home now. This is hitting the noncombatants.” But that went away quickly too.

This TV show that we just gave you was extraordinarily entertaining, and I really hope that the legacy that it leaves behind is not one that shows war as glorious, because there’s nothing more dangerous than a democracy that thinks this is a glorious thing to do.

War is ugly and it’s dangerous, and in this world the way we are discussed on the Arab street, it feeds and fuels their hatred and their desire to kill themselves to take out Americans. It’s a dangerous thing to propagate.

[…]

There is another whole phenomenon that’s come about from this war. Many talk about it as the Fox effect, the Fox news effect. I know everyone of you has watched it. It’s not a dirty little secret. A lot of people describe Fox as having streamers and banners coming out of the television as you’re watching it cover a war. But the Fox effect is very concerning to me.

I’m a journalist and I like to be able to tell the story as I see it, and I hate it when someone tells me I’m one-sided. It’s the worst I can hear. Fox has taken so many viewers away from CNN and MSNBC because of their agenda and because of their targeting the market of cable news viewership, that I’m afraid there’s not a really big place in cable for news. Cable is for entertainment, as it’s turning out, but not news.

I’m hoping that I will have a future in news in cable, but not the way some cable news operators wrap themselves in the American flag and patriotism and go after a certain target demographic, which is very lucrative. You can already see the effects, you can already see the big hires on other networks, right wing hires to chase after this effect, and you can already see that flag waving in the corners of those cable news stations where they have exciting American music to go along with their war coverage.

Well, all of this has to do with what you’ve seen on Fox and its successes. So I do urge you to be very discerning as you continue to watch the development of cable news, and it is changing like lightning. Be very discerning because it behooves you like it never did before to watch with a grain of salt and to choose responsibly, and to demand what you should know.

That’s it. I know that there’s probably a couple questions. No one’s allowed to ask about my hair color, okay? I’m kidding, if you want to ask you can. It’s a pretty boring story. But I just wanted to say thank you, and let’s all pray and hope in any way that you pray or hope for peace and for democracy around the world, and for more rain this summer in Manhattan. Thank you all.

She may have been hoping for a future in able news, but you can’t help but feel she knew she wouldn’t after delivering those remarks. (Read the whole thing at the link if you’re interested in a further scathing critique of the government.)

Perhaps someone with more stature than Banfield could have gotten away with that speech and maybe it might have even been taken seriously, who knows? But the object lesson could not have been missed by any of the ambitious up and comers in the news business. If a TV journalist publicly spoke the truth anywhere about war, the news, even their competitors — and Banfield spoke the truth in that speech — their career was dead in the water. Even the girl hero of 9/11 (maybe especially the girl hero of 9/11) could not get away with breaking the CW code of omerta and she had to pay.

She’s now a co-anchor on a Court TV show.

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Buying The War

by tristero

Shamefully, the New York Times, and presumably other media outlets have refused to highlight Bill Moyers expose of the American press during 2002 and 2003. Of course, that hasn’t stopped liberal bloggers from talking it up, not only Digby here, but Glenn Greenwald and many others. And well they should.

Moyers’ show is an excellent introduction to some of what happened and you really should see it and tell your friends to see it as well. Like Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower, “Buying the War” helps sketch out a narrative for an exceedingly complex tale. Eventually, multi-volume academic treatises will be written on the media cave-in of 2002/2003 with titles like “The Misused Analogy of the Cuban Missile Crisis in Bush Administration Propaganda for Invading Iraq.” Or “The Missing Millions: Press Coverage of the Feb 20, 2003 Antiwar Demonstrations.” Or “What Happened to Turkey? How American Media Misreported the Bush Administration’s Failure to Launch An Assault From the North. “And so on. But like “The Looming Tower,” the Moyers documentary is a great place to start.

Dont’ get me wrong, please! I’m not criticizing Moyers, my God, the show is terrific and long overdue. Let’s just not forget that “Buying the War,” despite presenting evidence of an overwhelming amount of failure and cowardice by the American media in the runup to what is among the the stupidest and most avoidable mistakes ever made by an American president – if not the absolute worst – provides only a small crossection of how poorly the American press behaved. As damning as the documentary is – and it is very damning – in reality, the way the press reported on the Bush administration and its critics in the run-up to war was far, far worse.

Waiting For Sistah Soljah

by digby

Chris Matthews:

Did we see a profile in courage tonight? Did any of the candidates stand up to the special interests in the Democratic party?

This is another perfect example of skewed beltway CW. A Democrat can only be “courageous” if he bucks Democrats. Can you see Chris Matthews asking if any of the Republican candidates were profiles in courage for bucking the Republican party’s special interests? I’ll be very surprised if he does it.

*Scarborough says that the Democrats are getting killed on abortion in this country and uses the example of an alleged Donna Brazile op-ed in which she said she was sick and tired of having to explain to her relatives why she belongs to a party that supports abortion. Everyone on the panel nodded and sighed in agreement. I’m not sure why a former Republican congressman is considered an authority on this, but apparently everyone in DC agrees. Good to know.

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Embedded Ambition

by digby

With all the discussion about the media’s malfeasance leading up to the war, I think one aspect of it has been overlooked: the thrill of embedding.

Here’s a taste of what we all saw during the first few days of the war from CNN:

BROWN: Again, down in the corner of your screen, what you are seeing is the 7th Cavalry on its way to Baghdad. How quickly and what it will encounter as it gets there, we do not know. But we know what has happened so far because CNN’s Walt Rodgers has been riding with them. Walt, tell us — you don’t need to tell us location. But tell us what you can about what you have encountered to date.

WALTER RODGERS, CNN SR. INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: The pictures you’re seeing are absolutely phenomenal. These are live pictures of the 7th Cavalry racing across the deserts in southern Iraq. They will — it will be days before they get to Baghdad, but you’ve never seen battlefield pictures like these before.

Immediately in front of our cameras, an M1-A1 Abrams tank. We’re sitting about 30 meters, now about 40 meters off the back of that tank. You can see that they’ve got water bottles stacked on board. That’s how close we are.

The orange cover on the back is called a VF-17. That’s a visual identification marker for allied aircraft in the air to let them know this is the 7th Cavalry, these are friendly units, we are rolling through the desert. Speed here, probably 40 to 50 kilometers an hour. That’s been our speed most of the time.

A short while ago, perhaps 30 minutes ago, this unit took some incoming fire. It never came within more than half a kilometer of the 7th Cavalry. But there you can see these tanks rolling along. The Army says these are the most lethal killing machines on the earth. And when you see those 120-millimeter guns go off, there’s no doubt about it.

There he’s swinging the turret. That constant swinging of the turret is to maintain a state of alertness. As you look at the soldiers atop the tank, the one nearest us on the left side of the tank is the loader. He is responsible for loading the 120-millimeter shells, gun shells into the tank when it engages in hostile combat. That has not occurred. That is, the tanks have not fired, to the best of our knowledge, so far today.

The other soldier on the right side of the turret, his head sticking up too, is the commander of the tank. You have to realize, they’ve been riding along, bouncing along in these tanks for probably six or more hours now. Those two on top are standing. The driver is — if you can look on the left front side, the driver is in a reclining position by that slash (ph) 91 figure. He’s in a two-thirds reclined position.

And then deeper inside the tank, and if you ride inside that tank, it is like riding in the bowels of a dragon. They roar. They screech. You can see them slowing now. We’ve got to be careful not to get in front of them. But what you’re watching here…

BROWN: Wow, look at that shot.

RODGERS: … is truly historic television and journalism. This is live pictures of the 7th U.S. Cavalry headed for Iraq. This is actual time. What you are witnessing now is what is happening here in the Iraqi desert as the 7th Cavalry, part of the 3rd Infantry Division, is moving northward through the Iraqi desert.

I remember that story vividly — the sunburned, khaki-clad Rogers standing up in the back of the vehicle with the sand blowing in his face looking for all the world like some sort of JC Penney version of TE Lawrence going on about the total awesomeness of his own awesome reporting of the awesome march across the awesome desert. I’m sure that the Pentagon was extremely pleased that day at the success of their war marketing.

One of the things that cannot be discounted is the fact that the news organizations and reporters themselves were beside themselves at the prospect of being able to cover “the war.” Their childlike excitement was palpable and the government used the enticement of “embedding” reporters on the front lines with access to that totally awesome coverage as Rodgers shows in the clip above. It’s not that I blame reporters for being thrilled to be a part of this operation — it was the obvious Walter Mitty warrior fantasy that made me queasy.

This was set up in a very systematic way by the Pentagon. In a very slick maneuver, they held a media “boot-camp” months before the war began (and while they were insisting that they were not preparing for war.) They got the reporters all hot and bothered about the exciting story they would be able to cover. Who wanted all those unpleasant old facts refuting the casus belli to get in the way of that?

December 11, 2002

With all eyes on a possible war with Iraq, many journalists are wondering how the current Republican administration, known for its strict control of information, will allow the media to cover the battle for Baghdad.

A few clues were given in November, when the Pentagon held the first in a series of week-long training seminars for journalists at a marine corps base in Quantico, Virginia. Over fifty members of various news organizations attended the course, which included staged hostile environment scenarios and instruction on chemical weapons protection.

Participants say they came away with a better understanding and respect for the military, but they’re no closer to understanding how embedding–the proposed practice of attaching a journalist to a military unit–will work. If anything, the course raised as many questions as answers about objectivity, safety and access.

Getty News staff photographer Spencer Platt, one of the particpants in the first media boot camp, says photographers embedded with the military will have to give up some of their independence.

“When you’re with the military, you’re extremely restricted,” Platt says. “The military will tell you point-blank they’ll censor what you shoot and what you write, and they have that right. You have to understand that.”

On the plus side, Platt says embedded journalists will have a better insight into the everyday lives of soldiers, which could lead to better stories. Still, he says, journalists have to keep some separation between themselves and their subjects.

“We do not want to be seen [as fulfilling] a military role,” Platt says. “When you’re with the military you’re much more of a target than independent journalists.”

At the November boot camp, finding that separation wasn’t easy. Upon arrival, journalists received military issue equipment such as backpacks, helmets, flack-jackets and NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) suits, which they then used in training exercises. Washington Times staff photographer Gerald Herbert says at first they enjoyed getting their hands on the new “toys,” but a few of the journalists quickly realized the dangers of donning all the military gear.

After a demonstration on weaponry, one of the participating photographers took a picture of UPI reporter Pam Hess wearing full battle fatigues and holding an M-16 while a marine at her side gave instructions. When the picture ran in The International Herald Tribune the next day, some boot campers began to worry about how they were being perceived by the outside world.

Some feared the picture would fuel suspicions that American journalists are working in concert with the American military, a danger made all the more real by the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl last year in Pakistan.

“I don’t think in any sense we should wear anything that confuses us as members of the military,” Platt says. “This is a new war and journalists are targets. If the concept gets out there that we’re working for the military, it’s going to make our jobs much more difficult.”

On the final night of boot camp the journalists learned they were about to become the subjects in a massive photo-op organized by the military. The thought of marching five miles in full gear with still and TV cameras documenting their every move spooked many of the journalists there. So before the big event, many decided to present themselves in more of an independent light when the time came for their pictures to be taken.

“All of a sudden the media was trying to spin the media,” says Herbert. “That question was nagging me all week long and came to a head that day: at what point are we observing and at what point are we participating?”

Herbert says some of the journalists used white tape and black markers to designate themselves as press, while others wore jeans and one guy even drew a peace symbol on his shirt.

This issue of what to wear was obviously quite a problem for the press as I recall laughing at some of the embeds’ quasi-military get-ups. Many of them were very sharp, like this one:

Yep, that’s Judy Miller on the left.

I’m not suggesting that the journalists were wrong to embed themselves or that they shouldn’t have been trained to do so. But from November of 2002, the Pentagon was enticing a whole bunch of war correspondent newbies with a chance to go and report an “historic” invasion and I can’t help but believe that it affected their ability to be objective about the reasons for the war in the first place. Just as the anchors back in the booth were waving flags and enjoying the huge ratings that war porn brings to the usually flat cable news networks, the reporters in the field were getting fitted for Prada camo-fatigue safari gear for their war epic. By the beginning of January 2003, the news networks were literally selling the war.(“See full coverage of The War, here on CNN…”)

They were played for breathless fools by the Pentagon with enticements of historic, unprecedented footage of their intrepid reporters with sand in their faces, standing on the back of a jeep in the middle of the desert as the American forces raced to Baghdad. From that moment on the press had a dog of their own in the fight.

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Behind Enemy Lines

by digby

One of Rick Perlstein’s missions in writing his blog “The Big Con” is to try to persuade some of the conservatives out there that the Republican line has been dishonest. It’s hard to get a guage on that when the only people who read the blog are liberals and progressives like us. So, he is asking for some help:

Are you a liberal? Here’s a homework assignment. Read through the posts so far on The Big Con. Pick your favorite. Send it to your conservative friends, relatives, or coworkers. Write back in the comments about their response.

I sent the “E.Coli Conservatives” series to my wingnuts. So far, no response. Their usual line these days is that the Republicans are bad but the Democrats would be even worse. So I’m expecting a note back telling me that when “that woman” takes over to destroy the country she will be actively putting botulism in the baby formula and anyway, people should cook their food.

Until they get sick personally, in which case there will be hell to pay — by the Democrats who failed to make sure that the food supply wasn’t tainted.

We’ll see.

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Why Didn’t They Call Me?

by digby

A little highlight from the Moyers show — here’s the King of the Kewl Kids going all Sergeant Shultz when asked to explain how he got used and discarded like a wet kleenex by Dick Cheney:

BILL MOYERS: Was it just a coincidence in your mind that Cheney came on your show and others went on the other Sunday shows, the very morning that that story appeared?

TIM RUSSERT: I don’t know. The NEW YORK TIMES is a better judge of that than I am.

BILL MOYERS: No one tipped you that it was going to happen?

TIM RUSSERT: No, no. I mean-

BILL MOYERS: The– the Cheney– office didn’t make any– didn’t leak to you that there’s gonna be a big story?

TIM RUSSERT: No. No. I mean, I don’t– I don’t have the– this is, you know, on MEET THE PRESS, people come on and there are no ground rules. We can ask any question we want. I did not know about the aluminum-tube story until I read it in the NEW YORK TIMES.

BILL MOYERS: Critics point to September eight, 2002 and to your show in particular, as the classic case of how the press and the government became inseparable.

Someone in the administration plants a dramatic story in the NEW YORK TIMES And then the Vice President comes on your show and points to the NEW YORK TIMES. It’s a circular, self-confirming leak.

TIM RUSSERT: I don’t know how Judith Miller and Michael Gordon reported that story, who their sources were. It was a front-page story of the NEW YORK TIMES. When Secretary Rice and Vice President Cheney and others came up that Sunday morning on all the Sunday shows, they did exactly that.

TIM RUSSERT: What my concern was, is that there were concerns expressed by other government officials. And to this day, I wish my phone had rung, or I had access to them.

But lest you think that Russert is some sort of prima donna who waits for the phone to ring, he later said:

TIM RUSSERT: I– look, I’m a blue-collar guy from Buffalo. I know who my sources are. I work ’em very hard. It’s the mid-level people that tell you the truth. Now-

BILL MOYERS: They’re the ones who know the story?

TIM RUSSERT: Well, they’re working on the problem. And they understand the detail much better than a lotta the so-called policy makers and– and– and political officials.

BILL MOYERS: But they don’t get on the Sunday talk shows–

TIM RUSSERT: No. You– I mean– they don’t want to be, trust me. I mean, they can lose their jobs, and they know it. But they’re– they can provide information which can help in me challenging or trying to draw out– sometimes their bosses and other public officials.

Well, he would have worked them hard if only they’d have picked up the phone and called him. Isn’t there a yellow pages on Nantucket for gawd’s sake?

BRADY (8/03): [Tim] Russert is part of the Nantucket NBC crowd, one of the cliques that fuels the isle’s social engine. It was Jack Welch, the story goes, the 20-year chairman and CEO of NBC’s parent company, General Electric, who drew network folk to Nantucket.

Russert and his wife, Vanity Fair writer Maureen Orth, began summering on Nantucket in 1992. Russert has said he can go days without leaving his house except for a bike ride to get the newspapers. Then he’ll sit in his rocking chair and watch the grass blow in the breeze….

Russert’s boss, NBC CEO Bob Wright, is also on the scene. Add to the cocktail chatter the latest tidbits from the Oval Office, care of White House correspondent David Gregory, who was married on Nantucket and returns with his wife, Beth, for vacations.

Russert’s insistence that he is just a “blue collar guy” is reminiscent of many of these millionaire news celebrities who like to play the part of some sort of middle American everyman (or everywoman)for their audience. Maureen Dowd is one of the worst, as well as the unctuous Cokie Roberts and the 1950’s sit-com Dad wannabe, Chris Matthews. In fact, it is an extremely common trait among the DC courtiers. They truly seem to believe they are just regular guys — and therefore, their concerns are the same as regular Americans. Only, you know, they aren’t.

Somerby has been discussing this this week (which is where I got the Nantucket item) as it relates to the recent absurdity of Maureen Dowd condemning Edwards for his expensive haircut because her cop-Dad used to get his cut by a barber — as if the rich celebrity Dowd is just a working class gal herself.

But it’s a long standing phenomenon that was best exemplified by the famous Sally Quinn article in which she quoted a long list of media personalities pretending to be small town rubes or crusty working class dudes who were appalled by the slick, aristocratic behavior of the man from Arkansas. All this despite the fact that Versailles on the Potomac, like all imperial cities filled with power and intrigue, is thoroughly worldly and certainly vastly wealthy. At least the media cognoscenti are. They apparently believed they could sell themselves as just regular folks like your average office clerk, construction worker or small business owner and Claud Rains themselves into a frenzy over extra-marital sex and the rest of the country would believe them. It didn’t.

It’s certainly not a problem for rich people to advocate for the poor or the middle class as Edwards, Kennedy, Roosevelt and millions of other wealthy progressives have done in our history. But trying to pretend that you are poor or middle class yourself (“just a blue collar guy from Buffalo”) from the podia of your own TV shows (or your fabulous summer home in Nantucket)is just plain insulting.

And it makes them unable to do their jobs, as Russert plainly shows. He apparently believes that the concerns of the people with whom he hob-nobs are the concerns of the average American — because he thinks his rich friends are average Americans, just like him. His obvious confusion about “working” his mid-level sources “hard” — by waiting for the phone to ring — makes that clear. The only people who can get Tim Russert on the phone are other people like Tim Russert.

Political journalism in America has mostly become an elaborate kabuki dance. Blogs may not be the answer, but they are at least an antidote for those of us who have been watching this show for the past decade or more and are simply desperate for some assurance from others that we aren’t crazy — those guys with the black and white make-ep are performing some sort of ritual, not doing journalism. Moyers went a long way toward putting that together for the non-blog reading news junkies last night. Maybe now it will begin to sink in.

Update: David Sirota says the beltway media elite are in total freak out mode because of Moyer’s piece. Good.

Update II: Jane also notes that the beltway elite are gathering around the King of the Kewl Kidz today, pledging fealty and passing out head shots.

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The F Word

by tristero

Naomi Wolf. Very close to my own views on this. Fascism in the US has accrued little by little and it hasn’t come via brown shirts or right wing riots (although let’s not forget that we did have the “white collar riot” down in West Palm Beach Miami-Dade County over the recount in 2000, directed, apparently, by John Bolton). Wolf gives 10 steps towards American fascism and then concludes:

Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini’s march on Rome or Hitler’s roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.

Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.

It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere – while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: “dogs go on with their doggy life … How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster.”

As Americans turn away quite leisurely, keeping tuned to internet shopping and American Idol, the foundations of democracy are being fatally corroded. Something has changed profoundly that weakens us unprecedentedly: our democratic traditions, independent judiciary and free press do their work today in a context in which we are “at war” in a “long war” – a war without end, on a battlefield described as the globe, in a context that gives the president – without US citizens realising it yet – the power over US citizens of freedom or long solitary incarceration, on his say-so alone.

That means a hollowness has been expanding under the foundation of all these still- free-looking institutions – and this foundation can give way under certain kinds of pressure. To prevent such an outcome, we have to think about the “what ifs”.

What if, in a year and a half, there is another attack – say, God forbid, a dirty bomb? The executive can declare a state of emergency. History shows that any leader, of any party, will be tempted to maintain emergency powers after the crisis has passed. With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani – because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise.

What if the publisher of a major US newspaper were charged with treason or espionage, as a rightwing effort seemed to threaten Keller with last year? What if he or she got 10 years in jail? What would the newspapers look like the next day? Judging from history, they would not cease publishing; but they would suddenly be very polite.

Right now, only a handful of patriots are trying to hold back the tide of tyranny for the rest of us – staff at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who faced death threats for representing the detainees yet persisted all the way to the Supreme Court; activists at the American Civil Liberties Union; and prominent conservatives trying to roll back the corrosive new laws, under the banner of a new group called the American Freedom Agenda. This small, disparate collection of people needs everybody’s help, including that of Europeans and others internationally who are willing to put pressure on the administration because they can see what a US unrestrained by real democracy at home can mean for the rest of the world.

[UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald has an interview with Charlie Savage, the Boston Globe reporter who first reported on Bush’s use of signing statements to ignore any laws he didn’t like. Savage writes:

I believe that the Bush administration’s systematic effort to expand presidential power is among the most interesting and defining themes of this era in Washington — one that unites and explains many different policy controversies which are too often discussed in isolation from one another or without reference to the larger pattern.

The main point being that the larger pattern is often missed when you focus on one abuse and not take into account the sheer ubiquity of the Bush assault on democracy.

Call America’s national government and dominant media whatever you will; it’s pointless to quibble over labels. Except in one instance. This is no longer a democracy. The best case spin on things is that Bush and his henchmen believe that they represent only those who voted for them in 2004 and no one else. And that, of course, is the very definition of the term “tyranny of the majority.”]