Month: April 2007

Coda

by digby

I missed this one, from Friday:

HOWARD KURTZ: Over the years, Imus made fun of blacks, Jews, gays, politicians. He called them lying weasels. This was part of his charm…

This is the media critic for the Washington Post and CNN. Do you think maybe Howie has been spending a little too much time around the wrong people lately?

Gwen Ifill was good this morning on Meet The Press. It’s very clear that to me from watching it that part of the problem is, as Jesse Jackson pointed out frequently this past week, that guys like Tim Russert rarely have to face black people on the air who will confront their billionaire boys club assumptions. I doubt that Russert sees himself as an intolerant, racist sexist frat boy jerk. And in most interactions he probably doesn’t behave that way in the least. But he also didn’t see that Imus was feeding a very nasty American Id with his comments, (it was “part of his charm” after all) and since he did it to everyone, it was no harm no foul. Looking Gwen Ifill, his colleague and respected female African American journalist, right in the eye, and having to answer to her concerns is something that could have made a difference long ago.

I believe the head of MSNBC when he said that it was the (shockingly small) cadre of African American journalists, broadcast personalities — and other employees — standing up that really opened his eyes to the issue. He doesn’t like to think of himself as an insensitive creep. Only the true Rush Limbaugh ditto-head embraces such a self-image. So, when confronted directly by one of his high profile employees saying publicly what he’d been thinking privately for years, it made a difference. (Needless to say, it was the corporate advertiser pull-out that was the final straw…)

I have a few quibbles with what she said about the “Culture of Meanness”, however, which I fear will be interpreted as “being rude.” On the McLaughlin Report last night Tony Blankley repeatedly brought up the fact that “liberals” say horrible things about President Bush and Dick Cheney as a corollary to the Imus matter. To any sentient person, this is ridiculous, and Blankley is a total partisan so his views are tainted. But I don’t think it will stop with him. You have to remember that we are talking about the elite political media, which reflexively seeks an equivalency between both sides as a way of appearing impartial. There is probably going to be a concerted effort among many of these embarrassed media types to find “intolerant” language on the left to show that “both sides do it”, even as the right works desperately to hang Imus on us, despite the fact that it makes no sense. Liberals called out the elite media for consorting with jackasses and they aren’t going to forgive us for it any time soon. Just a word of warning…

The truth is that while everybody insults other people (it’s human nature and it’s not confined to any particular group) there is a substantial difference between the political insults that come from the left and those that come from the right: the left tends to take on powerful people and institutions while the right goes after those who have been historically left out of the party. It may not be strictly political — Imus seems to be one of those vaunted “independents” who votes for whichever candidate’s personality pissed him off the least for entirely personal reasons — but it tends to manifest itself along the left/right axis in American politics.

I think this is part of the reason the right embraces victimization by some phantom liberal elite. On some level they know there is something distasteful about their fear and loathing of those who carry the weight of historical discrimination so they have to turn themselves into victims of oppression themselves in order to rationalize their behavior. So, we see incredibly rich, white males like Rush Limbaugh railing against “liberals” (which forms a nice rhetorical umbrella for hatred toward all the historically disenfranchised) even at a time when the entire US government and the media were dominated by conservatives. It’s why they were reduced to creating a laughably absurd “War on Christmas.”

I suspect it’s actually emotionally uncomfortable for them to have too much power. They have a much harder time finding ways to rationalize their loathing of the other when they are running everything. I think they’d hoped that the GWOT would allow them to really get their hate on, but American society just didn’t rise to the bait the way it used to. (The “Mexican invasion” may work where that didn’t, but I’m hopeful that it won’t either.) They are in a bind, with a society that is still human and therefore suceptible to this kind of lizard brain thinking but which is also evolving well beyond the point when a powerful white male can get away with being a rank racist in public, no matter how “charming” Howie Kurtz thinks it is or how “even handed” his jokes are. I expect that the epic failure of Republican rule is going to let loose a very angry conservative beast. They hate to lose but they love to be victims. It’s a powerfully frustrating combination.

One final thought on the Imus matter and then I’m going to put it to bed. The blatant racism of Imus’s comments was the straw that broke the camels back. Everyone recognized immediately just how wrong that was. But, we have a long way to go with the sexism issue, which was never really dealt with openly in this thing and which is so pervasive in talk radio that it’s hard to know where to start.

Listen to any radio talk show discuss Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi or Rosie O’Donnell and tell me if they can stick to substantive disagreements with what they say for more than 30 seconds before they launch into an attack against their looks, their voice, their sexuality— whatever. I dare you. When the Republican party’s cleverest issue framer comes out with a shocking rhetorical clunker like this, you know that there is a serious problem:

FRANK LUNTZ: I always use the line for Nancy Pelosi, “You get one shot at a facelift. If it doesn’t work the first time, let it go.”

It’s stupid, sexist and ultimately self-defeating. It’s a recipe for a political backlash and shows just how out of touch many of our culture’s most powerful men are on this issue.

But rightwing male idiocy aside, let me just say this: I would hope that no decent person of either party would ever, ever think it was ok to appear on a show where someone says things like this:

“Ain’t gonna be so beautiful when the bitch got a bald head and one titty.”

That wasn’t some obscure rap lyric (and I’m not sure I’ve ever heard a rap lyric quite a horrible as that, and some of them are truly horrible.) That comment about an unnamed famous woman who had announced she had breast cancer (I think it might be Sheryl Crow) was made just two years ago by Imus sidekick Sid Rosenberg and it was recounted in Vanity Fair in January of 2006. I’m pretty sure that all his fans in the media knew all about it — the piece featured all of them, after all. I find it completely stunning that anyone could find that “charming” or funny or entertaining, who doesn’t have a real hatred for women in his or her soul. That is the very definition of misogyny. (And you can throw in a despicable loathing toward the sick and disabled too.) I’m not sure it can go any lower than that.

So, when you get into a discussion with a rightwinger about liberal hatred, and they try to pin Imus and his boys club on us, throw that one out there. I guarantee you that it will be a litmus test of what kind of person you are talking to. I can’t believe that people would associate with a man who made his millions saying things like that, no matter how many good deeds he did in his private life to assuage his well deserved guilt. I wish Gwen Ifill had asked old Tim about it today. I’m sure he’d never admit that he knew about it — but he did. They all did. Of course they did.

This isn’t about being “mean.” You can be mean and sharp and edgy and even horribly insulting and still have human decency. That indecently sexist comment said everything I ever needed to know about whether Don Imus was a decent person. The kewl kidz just thought it was their pal Don crossing a line (again) and that says a lot about them too. Some things are simply unforgiveable. I still don’t get the sense that they understand that.

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Saturday Night At The Movies

Of Prose and Cons

By Dennis Hartley

One of my favorite movie lines of all time is from Rob Reiner’s “The Princess Bride”. If I am paraphrasing, forgive me, but the gist of it is: “Life is pain. Anyone who tells you otherwise has something to sell.” (Alas-if we could only remember that sage advice before writing our phone number on a cocktail napkin, signing on a dotted line, dropping coins into a collection plate or punching out a voting chad.) Indeed, the art of the con is at least as ancient as the snake in the Garden of Eden (er-if you believe in that sort of thing).

Hollywood loves con artists (see endless list below), probably because movie audiences never appear to tire of watching yet one more poor sucker being bamboozled and swindled. It makes us feel superior-“Oh, I’d never fall for THAT bullshit!” (Yeah, right.).

Director Lasse Hallstrom has delivered a smashing entry in the genre with his new movie, “The Hoax”. The film is based on the story of Clifford Irving, a struggling writer who toiled in relative obscurity until he stumbled onto an idea for “the most important book of the 20th century”-the “Autobiography of Howard Hughes”. The book was the most hyped literary event of 1972, and would assure Irving the notoriety he craved. Hell, he even made the cover of Time. Unfortunately, his Time portrait was slugged with “Con Man of the Year”, because as it turned out, the “autobiography” was a bit of a surprise to Mr. Hughes, because, you see, Mr. Irving made the whole thing up (oops). The books were unceremoniously yanked from the shelves soon after their debut.

Richard Gere tears through the lead role with an intensity we haven’t seen from him in quite a while (his best work since “Internal Affairs”, IMHO). His Clifford Irving is a charlatan and a compulsive liar, to be sure, but Gere makes him sympathetic in a carefully measured portrayal and never stoops to audience pandering.. Even as he digs himself into an ever deepening hole, and you cover your eyes because you know the other shoe is going to drop at any time, you’ve just gotta love this guy’s pure chutzpah. In retrospect, when compared to some other mass public deceptions that were brewing at the time (the Irving scandal was soon to be eclipsed in the headlines by Watergate), Irving’s fraud trial almost seems like malicious prosecution (he did end up doing jail time).

Hallstrom does an excellent job at capturing the 70’s milieu; especially the insidious paranoia of the Nixon era (almost by accident, Irving uncovered documents that implicated Nixon family members and associates in defense contract bribery scams involving Hughes Corporation while Nixon was VP in 1956. It is suggested in the film that the 1972 Nixon White House was tipped off to the existence of the documents, and that it may have been an impetus for the Watergate break in. Hey-who knows?)

The cast includes Alfred Molina (in an Oscar-caliber turn as Irving’s researcher DavidRichard Susskind), Marcia Gay Harden (sporting a Streep-worthy accent as Irving’s Eurotrash wife), and true chameleon Hope Davis (looking very Mary Richards as Irving’s agent). Also with Stanley Tucci, Julie Delpy and a memorable cameo from Eli Wallach.

Another noteworthy new film examining the art of the con is Brian W. Cook’s “Color Me Kubrick: A True…ish Story” (concurrently on DVD and in theatres). John Malkovich gives a typically hammy, gleefully giddy performance as real-life con man Alan Conway, who flitted about England in the early 90’s, posing as the notoriously reclusive director Stanley Kubrick.

The irresistible hook in Conway’s story is the fact that he had virtually no idea what Kubrick was about, aside from the fact that he was a famous director. What is even more amazing is that he got away with it for as long as he did, scamming sex, money and accommodations with his hijacked nom de plume (ironically, had he actually bothered to watch Kubrick’s films, he could have picked up some pointers from fictional con men Barry Lyndon and Clare Quilty) His victims ranged from easy marks (aspiring actors, screenwriters and musicians) to those who should have known better (film critics!). His luck ran out when a NY Times columnist was tipped to his shenanigans and wrote an exposé.

Malkovich chews major scenery as he minces his way through the role, utilizing a variety of ridiculously funny accents and affectations. Director Cook worked with the late Kubrick, and ladles on the in-jokes with a nod and a wink (Kubrick aficionados should have a blast playing “spot the homage”). Good supporting performances, particularly from comedian Jim Davidson (one of Conway’s real life victims). Two notable cameos to watch for: Honor Blackman (Pussy Galore!) and director Ken Russell, who pops up as a mental patient (not such a stretch, if you are familiar with his work). Not for all tastes; but destined for cult status.

Flimflam flix: F for Fake, Melvin and Howard, Shattered Glass, Six Degrees of Separation, Anastasia (1956), The Great Imposter, Catch Me If You Can, Nothing Sacred, Elmer Gantry, Marjoe , The Last Big Thing, The Producers, Sunday, Happy, Texas, The Music Man, Paper Moon, Glengarry Glen Ross, Salesman, Used Cars, The Sting, House of Games, Traveller (1981), King of the Gypsies, The Grifters , The Freshman (1990), The Skin Game, The Flimflam Man, The Hustler, The Ladykillers (1955),Nine Queens, After Dark, My Sweet, The Usual Suspects, Croupier, Hard Eight, The Fortune, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, The Lady Eve , Purple Noon, The Honeymoon Killers,The Servant, No Way to Treat a Lady, Sleuth, Nightmare Alley,Family Plot.

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“A highly questionable, obfuscation-laden enterprise”

by digby

When Bush was elected in 2004 and he swaggered all over Washington proclaiming that he had political capital and knew how to use it, the administration was busily turning the government of the most powerful nation on earth into a second rate used car dealership.

Read this fascinating, candid interview with a former career attorney in the Justice Department in which he tells the sordid story of what happened when Alberto Gonzales took over the DOJ and all the little Bushies ran around furiously padding their resumes.

When you read this, it pays to keep in mind that during the last six years Bush and all of his cronies have been telling us non-stop that we are engaged in the War of the Worlds in which the greatest threat mankind has ever known is upon us. And this is what they did:

Q: You began in the Justice Department during the Watergate years. How would you rank Alberto Gonzales in terms of politicization of the department in comparison to the other AGs you have worked for?

A: Actually, I began earlier, in the first Nixon administration, as a college intern in 1971. But I was there again in the Watergate era, when I worked in part of the Attorney General’s Office during my first year of law school in 1973-1974, and then continuously as a trial attorney and office director for nearly 30 years. That adds up to more than a dozen attorneys general, including Ed Meese as well as John Mitchell, and I used to think that they had politicized the department more than anyone could or should. But nothing compares to the past two years under Alberto Gonzales.

To be sure, he continued a trend of career/noncareer separation that began under John Ashcroft, yet even Ashcroft brought in political aides who in large measure were experienced in government functioning. Ashcroft’s Justice Department appointees, with few exceptions, were not the type of people who caused you to wonder what they were doing there. They might not have been firm believers in the importance of government, but generally speaking, there was a very respectable level of competence (in some instances even exceptionally so) and a relatively strong dedication to quality government, as far as I could see.

Under Gonzales, though, almost immediately from the time of his arrival in February 2005, this changed quite noticeably. First, there was extraordinary turnover in the political ranks, including the majority of even Justice’s highest-level appointees. It was reminiscent of the turnover from the second Reagan administration to the first Bush administration in 1989, only more so. Second, the atmosphere was palpably different, in ways both large and small. One need not have had to be terribly sophisticated to notice that when Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey left the department in August 2005 his departure was quite abrupt, and that his large farewell party was attended by neither Gonzales nor (as best as could be seen) anyone else on the AG’s personal staff.

Third, and most significantly for present purposes, there was an almost immediate influx of young political aides beginning in the first half of 2005 (e.g., counsels to the AG, associate deputy attorneys general, deputy associate attorneys general, and deputy assistant attorneys general) whose inexperience in the processes of government was surpassed only by their evident disdain for it.

Having seen this firsthand in a range of different situations for nearly two years before I retired, I found it not at all surprising that the recent U.S. Attorney problems arose in the first place and then were so badly mishandled once they did.

I have probably not given enough thought to the fact that all these young Pat Robertson U grads were using their government service as a resume builder for the lucrative business and wingnut welfare careers ahead of them. After all, Republican values have nothing really to do with families (unless you come from an important one.)They are all about value$$. So, it stands to reason that there was an element of playing in the DOJ sandbox for these people that at least explains why they are so very childlike and unsophisticated. (The interview goes into some depth about this “consensus” buck passing style and I found it quite amazing. It’s the sort of thing you often find in companies that are on their way down.)

Although the interview doesn’t go into it, it also is quite obvious that the good little Bushies that Gonzales empowered had no problem doing Karl Rove’s bidding. In 2005, if you assumed that you were building a long term career in GOP politics, you would do what Rove told you to do. He was God.

This is a very interesting read. It’s nearly impossible to believe that Gonzales can keep his job, but Bush is famously “resolute” as I’m sure you’ll remember, so I’d say it’s at least 60/40 that he’d rather see the entire US Department of Justice go down in flames than force his pal out.

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Priorities

by digby

As we all naturally bless George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for keeping us safe from terrorism and street crime we must be sure to add this to the list of important things the small government conservatives have spent your tax dollars doing:

Federal prosecutors said today they would retry marijuana grower Ed Rosenthal on cultivation charges, even after a federal judge urged them to drop the case and chastised the government for lodging charges solely to punish the self-proclaimed “guru of ganja.”

U.S. District Court Judge Charles Breyer demanded to know who in the Department of Justice made the decision to continue pursuing Rosenthal, who had his original conviction overturned last year.

Rosenthal can’t be sentenced to prison even if he is convicted because the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the one-day prison sentence ordered by Breyer in 2003.

Newly appointed U.S. Attorney Scott Schools made the decision, said Assistant U.S. Attorney George Bevan, but he was not sure if Department of Justice officials in Washington were involved.

The judge said the government’s position to go forward left him no choice but to hold a trial, which he scheduled for May 14.

“This isn’t a criminal case, this is a political case,” said Rosenthal, who appeared in court dressed in a blue wizard’s robe with a golden marijuana leaf emblazoned over the breast. “I may as well get my money’s worth and have a trial.”

Rosenthal has written numerous books with titles such as “The Big Book of Buds” and “Ask Ed: Marijuana Law. Don’t Get Busted.” He also wrote an “Ask Ed” column for High Times magazine.

Rosenthal was convicted of three felonies in 2003 for growing hundreds of plants for a city of Oakland medical marijuana program. Breyer sentenced him to one day in prison on grounds that Rosenthal reasonably believed he was immune from prosecution because he was acting on behalf of Oakland city officials.

A federal appeals court overturned his conviction last year because of misconduct by a juror who consulted an attorney on how to decide the case. The appeals court also ruled against the government and said that the one-day prison sentence was fair, which means Rosenthal doesn’t face any more prison time even if he is convicted again.

When federal prosecutors indicted Rosenthal again on three growing charges in October over the same marijuana operation, they also added four counts of money laundering and five counts of filing false tax returns.

But Breyer tossed out those additional charges last month, saying they were solely to punish Rosenthal for winning his appeal to overturn his initial conviction. Prosecutors said Friday they wouldn’t appeal the judge’s decision to toss out those charges.

California has legalized medical marijuana. The citizens of the state have expressly said that they do not believe it should be a crime and many jurisdictions have voted to put it at the very lowest priority for law enforcement, even when there is no prescription. But the Pat Robertson U alumni of the US Department of Justice are still on the case, saving all America from the scourge of the ganja.

Meanwhile:

Thousands of white-collar criminals across the country are no longer being prosecuted in federal court — and, in many cases, not at all — leaving a trail of frustrated victims and potentially billions of dollars in fraud and theft losses.

It is the untold story of the Bush administration’s massive restructuring of the FBI after the terrorism attacks of 9/11.

Five-and-a-half years later, the White House and the Justice Department have failed to replace at least 2,400 agents transferred to counterterrorism squads, leaving far fewer agents on the trail of identity thieves, con artists, hatemongers and other criminals.

Two successive attorneys general have rejected the FBI’s pleas for reinforcements behind closed doors.

[…]

Among the findings of a six-month Seattle P-I investigation, analyzing more than a quarter-million cases touched by FBI agents and federal prosecutors before and after 9/11:

* Overall, the number of criminal cases investigated by the FBI nationally has steadily declined. In 2005, the bureau brought slightly more than 20,000 cases to federal prosecutors, compared with about 31,000 in 2000 — a 34 percent drop.

* White-collar crime investigations by the bureau have plummeted in recent years. In 2005, the FBI sent prosecutors 3,500 cases — a fraction of the more than 10,000 cases assigned to agents in 2000.

In Western Washington, the drop has been even more dramatic. Records show that the FBI sent 28 white-collar cases to prosecutors in 2005, down 90 percent from five years earlier.

* Civil rights investigations, which include hate crimes and police abuse, have continued a steady decline since the late 1990s. FBI agents pursued 65 percent fewer cases in 2005 than they did in 2000.

* Already hit hard by the shift of agents to terrorism duties, Washington state’s FBI offices suffer from staffing levels that are significantly below the national average.

Considering all that, you can see why it’s so important to prosecute someone over and over again for crimes the state they live in don’t even consider criminal. What an excellent use of scant federal resources.

But I suppose it does send a powerful message to criminals: stay away from sick people unless you are committing fraud against them or stealing their identities, in which case the government can’t be bothered. And if you want to discriminate against them, that’s ok too. But grow medical marijuana and we will harrass you until you have nothing left and no federal judge or state law will stop us.

In almost every possible way, the Bush years have been a lesson in sheer irrationality.

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A Real Bind

by digby

I can hardly believe it. McJoan catches Joe Lieberman’s advisor, the civility commissar Dan Gerstein, defending Imus out of a grave concern for the ramifications to the Democratic party.

“This is a real bind for Democrats,” said Dan Gerstein, an advisor to one of Imus’ favorite regulars, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). “Talk radio has become primarily the province of the right, and the blogosphere is largely the province of the left. If Imus loses his microphone, there aren’t many other venues like it around.”

I guess Imus was speaking to that great middle that Gerstein and Lieberman think they represent:

What these liberal bloggers fail to appreciate is that this petty, polarizing approach is not how you ultimately win in politics – especially in an era when most average voters outside the ideological extremes are fed up with the shrill, reflexive partisanship that dominates Washington, and when the fastest growing party in America is no party.

The blogger bomb-throwing may be good for inflaming the activist base, and, as they demonstrated in the 2006 Lieberman-Lamont Senate primary race in Connecticut, for occasionally blowing up the opposition. It’s not bad for bullying your friends, either, as the liberal blogosphere did last week in pressuring Edwards to not fire the two bloggers who penned the offensive anti-religious posts.

But the typical blog mix of insults and incitements is just not an effective strategy for persuading people outside of your circle of belief – be they moderate Democrats, moderate Republicans, or the swelling number of independents – to join your cause. In fact, it’s far more likely to alienate than propagate them.

He is so right. All that vitriol is so wrong for our culture. This is what we need more of if we want Democrats to win:

“I remember when I first had ’em on a few years ago,” Imus said. “The Jewish management at, whoever we work for, CBS, were bitchin’ at me about it.” WFAN is a subsidiary of WCBS radio.

“We had a meeting in my office,” Imus continued. “They were furious, but of course I don’t care what they say and never have.”

At this point, the show’s executive producer, Bernard McGuirk, a regular on-air presence, said of the Blind Boys, “Even if you wear a beanie, how can you not love these guys?”

“I tried to put it in terms that these money-grubbing bastards could understand,” Imus replied. “I said: ‘They’re handicapped, they’re black and they’re blind. How do we lose here?’ And then a light bulb went off over their scummy little heads.”

Imus co-host Larry Kenney, an impressionist who appeared earlier in the program as the Rev. Jerry Falwell, then said: “They probably were trying to push a more Semitic group on you. I don’t know, maybe the Paralyzed Putzes of Poland, or something like that.”

“You can’t believe what goes on behind the scenes, at least with me with these people,” Imus said. “And fortunately, I don’t care.”

No he didn’t and neither did Mr Morality, Joe Lieberman. But then, Joe also loves him some Sean Hannity, which I assume is also outreach to that vast non-partisan middle. He’s right at home there. And I have no doubt that Beck, Savage and Limbaugh will be thrilled to welcome him to their shows too.

And anyway, the Independent Lieberman and his minions needn’t worry their pretty little heads about Democrats anymore. They’ll do just fine without Don Imus’s megaphone. The only people “in the middle” who were listening to Imus were Washington insiders like Gerstein anyway and they are about as relevant as the vast hordes of Mugwumps who voted in the last election.

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Every Last One Of Them

by digby

World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz admitted on Thursday he made a mistake and apologized for his handling of the promotion and pay increase of his girlfriend and staffer Shaha Riza. “I proposed to the board that they establish some mechanism to judge whether the agreement reached was a reasonable outcome,” Wolfowitz said in a statement he read at a news conference before upcoming meetings of finance ministers in Washington this weekend. “I will accept any remedies they propose,” he added. Wolfowitz defended his actions to send Riza on an external assignment to the U.S. State Department soon after he joined the bank in 2005, saying he was in “uncharted waters” in his new job. “In hindsight, I wish I had trusted my original instincts and kept myself out of the negotiations. I made a mistake, for which I am sorry,” he said. The bank’s board, which includes government representatives from the bank’s 185 member countries, was meeting on the matter on Thursday. After an adjournment, the board resumed their meeting focusing on whether Wolfowitz bent the rules on Riza’s promotion and violated staff rules. But the World Bank’s employee representative group called for Wolfowitz to resign during a staff meeting at the bank. “The president must acknowledge that his conduct has compromised the integrity and effectiveness of the World Bank Group and has destroyed the staff’s trust in his leadership,” according to written remarks presented at the meeting by staff association chair Alison Cave and obtained by Reuters. “He must act honorably and resign,” she said. Cave said it seemed impossible for the institution, whose mission is to fight global poverty, to move forward “with any sense of purpose under the present leadership.” WOLFOWITZ AT STAFF MEETING Witnesses said Wolfowitz came to the meeting and tried to defend his actions. The controversy spilled into the open last week when the staff association questioned the promotion and pay increase of Riza, prompting an investigation by the board. Wolfowitz, who was nominated by President George W. Bush, joined the bank after serving as deputy defense secretary at the Pentagon, where he was one of the chief architects of the U.S. war strategy in Iraq. Lingering distrust among many staff members and resentment over his close ties to the Bush administration and his role in the Iraq war has overshadowed his first two years at the bank. “For those people who disagree with the things that they associate me with in my previous job — I’m not in my previous job,” Wolfowitz said. “I’m not working for the U.S. government.”

Maybe he should have stopped acting like a corrupt Republican then.

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Blackberry Machiavelli

by digby

Oh Goody. Donald Robert Luskin is spinning like a top for Rove again:

Karl Rove’s lawyer on Friday dismissed the notion that President Bush’s chief political adviser intentionally deleted his own e-mails from a Republican-sponsored computer system.

The attorney said Rove believed the communications were being preserved in accordance with the law.

The issue arose because the White House and Republican National Committee have said they may have lost e-mails from Rove and other administration officials. Democratically chaired congressional committees want those e-mails for their probe of the firings of eight federal prosecutors.

“His understanding starting very, very early in the administration was that those e-mails were being archived,” Rove’s attorney, Robert Luskin, said.

The prosecutor probing the Valerie Plame spy case saw and copied all of Rove’s e-mails from his various accounts after searching Rove’s laptop, his home computer, and the handheld computer devices he used for both the White House and Republican National Committee, Luskin said.

The prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald, subpoenaed the e-mails from the White House, the RNC and Bush’s re-election campaign, he added.

“There’s never been any suggestion that Fitzgerald had anything less than a complete record,” Luskin said.

Any e-mails Rove deleted were the type of routine deletions people make to keep their inboxes orderly, Luskin said. He said Rove had no idea the e-mails were being deleted from the server, a central computer that managed the e-mail.

There’s no word on why that apparent lunatic from the RNC claimed that they had to take special precautions to keep Rove from deleting his messages.

It’s all very odd. I’ll be looking forward to reading Jane’s take on this. Luskin is her beat and she can read his spin better than anyone. (“There’s never been any suggestion….”)

Stay tuned. This is getting good.

Oh, and on another note, it looks like Gonzales may have cooked his goose. And the DOJ didn’t even bother to clumsily redact it as they usually do.

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Score One For The Other Team

by digby

EJ Dionne has written a good column today about the significance of the Fox Debates debate that I think gets it right:

What Ailes knows is that the campaign to block Fox from sponsoring Democratic debates is the most effective liberal push-back against the network that stars Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity since its debut on Oct. 7, 1996.

Ailes has been brilliant at having it both ways, insisting that his network is “fair and balanced” even as its right-tilting programming built a devoted conservative following that helped it bury CNN and MSNBC in the ratings.

While Ailes knew precisely what he was doing, his competitors flailed. They dumped one format after another, sometimes trying to lure conservative viewers from Fox by offering their own right-leaning programs. Loyal conservatives preferred the real thing and stuck with Fox.

My hunch is that Ailes, one of the toughest and smartest in a generation of Republican political consultants, sees his adversaries as playing the kind of political hardball he respects. It’s why he’s angry. The anti-Fox squad won a second round on Monday when Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton joined John Edwards in announcing that they would not appear at a debate to be sponsored by Fox and the Congressional Black Caucus in September.

The Fox debate saga is amusing, but it’s more than that. It marks a transformation on the left driven by the rise of Internet voices and the frustration of liberals at the success of conservatives in using a combination of talk radio, Fox and the Web to propagate anti-liberal, anti-Democratic messages.

From the late 1960s until the past few years, media criticism was dominated by conservatives railing against a supposedly “liberal media.” Hearing mostly from this one side, editors, publishers and producers looked constantly over their right shoulders, rarely imagining they could be biased against the left or too accommodating to Republican presidents. This was a great conservative victory.

The Bush years have changed that. Aggressive media criticism is now the rule across the liberal blogs, and new monitoring organizations such as Media Matters for America police news reports for signs of Republican bias, often debunking charges against Democrats. When you combine liberal and conservative media criticism you get a result that is more or less fair and balanced. Score a net gain for liberals.

Dionne is right that the conservatives were very successful at cowing the press into leaning right. It’s one of the ways it kept its momentum. By the time of the dreadful coverage of the Clinton impeachement and the 2000 election, some of us on the left had become actively hostile toward it, and rightfully so, I believe.

As Dionne writes, Fox has been allowed to pretend that it is “non-partisan” with a wink and a nod for more than a decade now. It has never actually fooled anyone, least of all its owners and certainly not liberals, who rarely watch unless they are masochists or media observers like me. They very cleverly used a few greedy Democratic operatives and a lot of timorous pols to build their phony “fair and balanced” network and it worked for them. But live by the sword and die by the sword. As their patron, the Republican party, goes down, they can’t expect that they can call all the shots anymore.

I don’t know that liberal blogs or other internet entities can take credit for forcing the media to look over its left shoulder as well as its right, but we certainly have been screaming in a rather unpleasant manner for the last few years because it has been extremely difficult to get their attention. They were immersed in rightwing cant to such a degree that they simply couldn’t hear anything that wasn’t processed through that filter. (I remember watching Chris Matthews sometime in 2004 insisting that “the liberals” ran everything in Washington.) And as the Imus affair illustrated, the insularity of the elite DC press still hasn’t been fully penetrated.

I don’t particularly want to be a media critic. I like media and I respect the talent of most of those who do it professionally. I never wanted to be some crank carping at the television set — I’m interested in politics. But there was simply no choice. Since the 80’s the right systematically set out to convert the political press into their friendly collaborators even if they didn’t know it. They had lots of cash and knew how to show everyone a good time. And they mau-mau’d them to death. It worked beautifully.

And while they did that, they set about creating an alternate media that could feed the wingnut base directly while feeding the mainstream more discretely. It came into full bloom during the late 90’s and ushered in this presidency. And predictably, a nation softened up by years of rightwing propaganda was ready to put him on a pedestal when the country was attacked on 9/11 — even though his actual performance at that time was laughably inept. Iraq was the result.

That was when the whole operation jumped the shark. Liberals of all stripes, bloggers and others, were by that time unanimously appalled by the GOP, Fox, talk radio and the mainstream press and began to fight back. We shall see if we have the staying power to keep it up.

I have long had a rather simplistic belief that American political power was properly seen as a tug-of-war rather than a pendulum. For decades, the left was sort of holding on to the rope with one hand, checking out the scenery, enjoying the fruits of the New Deal and tolerant social change and forgetting that they had to put all their weight into the game or the other side would pull them completely over the center line. The 1994 Republican Revolution jerked me awake and I watched in horror for the next decade. Over that period many more liberals woke up to the fact that we were no longer standing firmly on our side of the line anymore. I realized that the “third way” stance the Democrats had taken during the late 80’s had been a brief tactical success, but a long term strategic mistake. In the tug of war, you simply can’t rely on the other side, particularly when its infused with revolutionary fervor, to stop pulling once you reach the “middle.”

Marginalizing Fox is an important step in the process but it’s going to take a sustained effort. I’ve been watching the right for too long to believe they are doing anything but taking a breather right now. It is a very, very big mistake to ever let up on the rope. The Bush administration has been a massive laboratory experiment in what goes wrong when the Democrats make a huge strategic error and the media completely fails in its duty. We really can’t let this happen again.

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Fifth Rate

by digby

Can someone please explain to me why this should be necessary?

Gonzales, meanwhile, has been preparing for a pivotal appearance on Tuesday before the committee, including mock testimony sessions lasting up to five hours a day, officials said.

Newsweek had more a couple days ago:

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has virtually wiped his public schedule clean to bone up for his long-awaited April 17 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee–a session widely seen as a crucial test as to whether he will survive the U.S. attorney mess. But even his own closest advisers are nervous about whether he is up to the task. At a recent “prep” for a prospective Sunday talk-show interview, Gonzales’s performance was so poor that top aides scrapped any live appearances. During the March 23 session in the A.G.’s conference room, Gonzales was grilled by a team of top aides and advisers–including former Republican National Committee chair Ed Gillespie and former White House lawyer Tim Flanigan–about what he knew about the plan to fire seven U.S. attorneys last fall. But Gonzales kept contradicting himself and “getting his timeline confused,” said one participant who asked not to be identified talking about a private meeting. His advisers finally got “exasperated” with him, the source added. “He’s not ready,” Tasia Scolinos, Gonzales’s public-affairs chief, told the A.G.’s top aides after the session was over, said the source. Asked for comment, Scolinos told NEWSWEEK: “This was the first session of this kind that we’d done.”

I can hardly believe that this isn’t either a national joke or a scandal. The Attorney General of the United States should not have rehearse for five hours a day to truthfully answer questions from the US congress. It’s ludicrous. Just how stupid is this guy, anyway?

I’m telling you if we ever have to endure another presidency like this because the press thought the food was better on one of the campaign planes and they thought the other candidate was, like, so totally icky, my head will explode.

Just as the nation wanted a “fun” president, George W. Bush also surrounded himself with guys he’d like to have a beer with — and naturally those guys are halfwits just like he is. I guess we should be thankful that he wasn’t allowed to put Gonzales or Miers on the Supreme Court.

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L’État, c’est Goper

by digby

I figured they would do it, but it’s still hard to believe they’d go this far:

“As I stated in my earlier letter to the Republican National Committee today, the Judiciary Committee intends to obtain the relevant emails directly from the RNC,” Conyers said in reaction to the Fielding letter. “The White House position seems to be that executive privilege not only applies in the Oval Office, but to the RNC as well. There is absolutely no basis in law or fact for such a claim.”

We know that MC Rove and the Mayberry Machiavellis have been running the world as though it were a crooked race for a seat on the Dallas schoolboard, but the idea that executive privilege extends to the Republican National Committee seems a tad excessive even for them.

We shall see if all these strict constructionists on the federal bench agree.

Update: The NY Times writes:

It also exposed the dual electronic lives led by Mr. Rove and 21 other White House officials who maintain separate e-mail accounts for government business and work on political campaigns — and raised serious questions, in the eyes of Democrats, about whether political accounts were used to conduct official work without leaving a paper trail.

Is it really necessary to frame that as a partisan thing? It’s quite obviously legitimate to ask questions about this, whether Democrat or Republican:

The committee appears to have changed its e-mail retention policies twice, possibly in response to the investigation by a special prosecutor, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, into the leak of the name of a C.I.A. officer. When that inquiry began, in early 2004, the committee’s practice was to purge all e-mail from its servers after 30 days.

But in August of that year, according to the Republican official, the committee decided that e-mail sent by White House officials would be kept on the server. Still, the change did not prevent White House officials from manually deleting their e-mail, and some, including Mr. Rove, apparently did. So in 2005, the committee took steps to prevent Mr. Rove from doing so.

“Mr. Kelner did not provide many details about why this special policy was adopted for Mr. Rove,” Mr. Waxman wrote. “But he did indicate that one factor was the presence of investigative or discovery requests or other legal concerns.”

I know the press doesn’t think its job is to “raise questions” that some Democrat hasn’t put out in a press release, but this is ridiculous. This doesn’t look bad just in the eyes of those dastardly partisan Dems. Anyone with a functioning brain, including even writers and editors at the NY Times, can surely see that something looks fishy about Karl Rove systematically deleting all his emails and the RNC later making a special policy to prevent him from doing it.

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