Thanks
by digby
Columnist and author Gene Lyons, a man who knows something about how the mainstream media works, has written a very insightful (and complimentary) piece today about the blogosphere.
Thank you Gene. Coming from you that means a lot.
If you haven’t read it, this is the definitive book on how the NY Times was hoodwinked on Whitewater. It should have been a cautionary tale. Instead, the same thing happened again on Iraq — only this time, people died.
.
Rolling Yourself In Mud
by digby
This is really getting bizarre:
Something fishy is going on in New Hampshire and Iowa. Voters in the two early primary states have recently been getting phone calls raising questions about the Mormon faith and military deferments of presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, R-MA. The implication is that a rival candidate – with emphasis on Sen. John McCain, R-AZ, whose Vietnam service in referenced positively in these calls – is behind the dirty tricks, seeking to influence the minds of potential voters.
But a far more conspiratorial take is gaining steam in the blogosphere. The theory is that Romney’s campaign orchestrated the scheme, in hopes that the fallout would taint GOP rivals as character assassins.
If you read through the whole article it really appears that the people who did these calls have very close ties to Romney so it’s entirely reasonable to suspect that he’s manufactured this controversy to make his rivals look bad.
That’s a very risky thing to do because in order to make it work you also have to publicize the “smear” itself. Public relations 101 says that you never repeat your rivals’ attacks. Maybe Romney thinks he’s inoculating himself on the Mormon thing and maybe it will work. By casting his rivals as hitting below the belt perhaps he thinks those voters who are concerned about his Mormanism will recoil in horror. (But do people who really care about such things actually recoil in horror at the idea of a smear campaign? It seems like they relish them.)
What a weird campaign tactic.
Update: This pretty much clinches it, in my book.
.
Disaster Advisor
by digby
I speculated some time back that the Bush machine had anointed Giuliani and I think this pretty much proves it:
On October 30, Joseph Allbaugh was named Senior Advisor to Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign. According to a Giuliani campaign press release, Allbaugh “will advise the campaign on general strategy and homeland security.”
“Rudy Giuliani is the only candidate who will keep America on offense in the Terrorists’ War on Us,” the press release quoted Allbaugh as saying. “The leadership he showed after 9/11 was an inspiration not only to New Yorkers but to the country. He knows what it takes to keep America safe, and as President, he will ensure that our country never goes back on defense in this war.”
Giuliani said that the two of them had “worked closely together in the aftermath of 9/11 to ensure that everything possible was being done to help victims and their families. He has significant experience in emergency management and I will look to him for sound advice and expertise.”
The Politico reported that “The endorsement is valuable … because it gives the former New York mayor additional entrée to the Bush-Cheney organization. Allbaugh was one-third of the ‘Iron Triangle’ of Allbaugh, Karl Rove and Karen Hughes, the powers-that-be in the president’s original Austin-based presidential campaign.”
You remember Allbaugh’s most recent claim to fame, don’t you?
He was not there to hand out food or water; he was not there to participate in the rescue effort; and he was certainly not there to apologize for bringing the grossly incompetent Michael Brown to FEMA during his reign at the agency. On Wednesday, September 9, when Joseph Allbaugh, the former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), showed up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to survey the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina, he was there for one thing: to stir up business for his corporate clients.
Allbaugh had been to Louisiana, in his official FEMA capacity, after a number of other disasters including tropical storms Allison and Isidore and Hurricane Lili. Now, he was there as the head of the Allbaugh Company — a firm he co-founded with his wife, Diane, which specializes in advising companies how to get in on lucrative disaster relief projects. He was, the Washington Post reported, “helping his clients get business from perhaps the worst natural disaster in the nation’s history.”
Allbaugh told the newspaper that he was there “just trying to lend my shoulder to the wheel, trying to coordinate some private-sector support that the government always asks for.” The “shoulder to the wheel” mantra was repeated by Allbaugh’s spokesperson, Patti Giglio, who told The Hill “He is putting his shoulder to the wheel to mobilize the private sector, getting stuff in, getting what needs to be done done.” Giglio claimed that Allbaugh was not here to help his clients secure government contracts. “The first thing he says when he sits down with a client is, ‘Don’t hire me if you’re looking for a government contract.'”
Then why on earth would they hire him?
Those of you who have read The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Allbaugh is now among dozens of Giuliani advisors who are intent upon making as much war as possible and, in his case at least, pillaging the territory after American taxpayers have paid to have it razed and ready. And hey, if a natural disaster or terrorist attack comes along that they can use an excuse to pillage American territory, they’ll be happy to get in on that action, too. (It sure puts their denial of global warming in a different light, doesn’t it?)
Giuliani is Cheney’s natural successor. He’s a dark, Hobbesian, authoritarian creep, just like Uncle Dick, except he’s also an egomaniac with severe emotional problems. Anybody who thinks he’s a moderate is out of his or her mind. It’s time for the Democrats to start taking him on at least as hard as they’re taking on each other.
.
The Liberals Made Them Do It
by digby
Just in case any of you have the mistaken impression that the housing meltdown (what Atrios refers to as “Big Shitpile”) has anything to do with rapacious lenders and a bunch of greedheads who made sick profits using complicated financial instruments that even they didn’t understand, think again. Guess whose fault it is?
Last week’s 360-point drop in the Dow was fueled by the announcement of NYAG Andrew Cuomo that he is subpoenaing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for information on all mortgages they had bought from Washington Mutual as part of a general investigation into mortgage loans. Fannie Mae stocks fell 10 percent, Freddie Mac 8.6 percent, and Washington Mutual a whopping 17 percent, turning what was already a bad day into the worst drop in over a year. Cuomo has decided that the reason for the mortgage meltdown is — you guessed it — big-time fraud.
All this is just a search for scapegoats. The reason we’re in a mortgage meltdown is this. For years the federal government and everyone else has done everything possible to encourage people to buy their own homes. One of the biggest liberal criticisms of the market was that low-income people — particularly blacks and Hispanics — were excluded from ownership through “blackballing,” “red-lining,” and other forms of discrimination.
So the banks and mortgage markets responded. They invented “sub-prime” loans for high-risk customers and tried to spread the risk by bundling them into broader financial instruments. Eventually the market became overextended and we’re all suffering the consequences. Only demagogues like Andrew Cuomo think this has anything to do with legerdemain.
See? The banks and mortgage markets were just trying to help out the blacks and the Mexicans like the liberals kept telling them to and this is the thanks they get for it. Now everybody’s blaming them when the lazy blacks and Mexicans refuse to pay their bills … as usual. (Try to do someone a favor…)
This is why we need to deport all the illegal immigrants and get “tough on crime” like the Republicans are urging us to. This crass exploitation of the poor banking and mortgage industry has got to stop. It’s costing real Americans their homes!
Update: I was just reminded of the biggest bastard liberal of them all:
WASHINGTON — Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said Monday that Americans’ preference for long-term, fixed-rate mortgages means many are paying more than necessary for their homes and suggested consumers would benefit if lenders offered more alternatives.
In a standing-room-only speech to the Credit Union National Association meeting here, Greenspan also said U.S. household finances appeared generally sound, despite rising debt levels and bankruptcy filings. Low interest rates and surging home prices have given consumers flexibility to manage debt, he said.
“Overall, the household sector seems to be in good shape,” Greenspan said…
“American consumers might benefit if lenders provided greater mortgage product alternatives to the traditional fixed-rate mortgage,” Greenspan said.
h/t to Stephanie
.
Kids On Trial
by digby
The New York Times had an interesting editorial this morning about juveniles in the Justice system. It pointed out that since the 1990’s the government has been rolling back reforms of the juvenile justice system and putting younger and younger kids behind bars and trying more of them as adults.
But until I read this editorial, I didn’t realize that kids were not only being tried as adults, they are being sent into our shameful and violent adult prison system as well:
As incredible as it seems, many states regard a child as young as 10 as competent to stand trial in juvenile court. More than 40 states regard children as young as 14 as “of age” and old enough to stand trial in adult court. The scope of the problem is laid out in a new report entitled Jailing Juveniles from the Campaign for Youth Justice, an advocacy group based in Washington. Statistics are notoriously hard to get, but perhaps as many as 150,000 young people under the age of 18 are incarcerated in adult jails in any given year.
As many as half of the young people who are transferred to the adult system are never convicted as adults. Many are never convicted at all. By the time the process has run its course, however, one in five of these young people will have spent more than six months in adult jails.
Some jails try to protect young inmates by placing them in isolation, where they are locked in small cells for 23 hours a day. This worsens mental disorders. The study says that young people are 36 times more likely to commit suicide in an adult jail than in a juvenile facility. Young people who survive adult jail too often return home as damaged and dangerous people. Studies show that they are far more likely to commit violent crimes — and to end up back inside — than those who are handled through the juvenile courts.
It’s been true throughout history that some kids commit awful crimes. Not long ago they were treated barbarically (in some places they still are)but in recent decades, decent people came to understand that childhood itself was a mitigating factor in the commission of a crime and even more recently science has proven that the brains of children and teen-agers simply don’t work the same way adults’ do. Kids are not just tiny grown-ups. It’s true that some may turn out to be sociopaths, with no hope of redemption, but there’s really no way of knowing that at the time. It may be mental illness or childish lack of impulse control or something else entirely. But, one thing we do know is that putting kids into the adult system and in adult jails pretty much guarantees that if they weren’t fatally screwed up, they will be.
Nobody thinks these crimes should be brushed off. If a child is dangerous society has to protect itself from him. But the idea of revenge or “sending a message” by punishing small children as adults is immoral, if not simply bizarre.
“Never in my 20-plus years of law enforcement have I conceived of something like this,” Police Chief Michael Wilkie of Acworth, Georgia, told CNN.
Clad in blue jumpsuits, the two 9-year-olds and one 8-year-old appeared in court in Cobb County, north of Atlanta, on Monday afternoon and were ordered to remain in custody until a further hearing. Family members were in court for their appearance, which was closed to reporters.
Wilkie said the girl told investigators she was raped Thursday evening. She was examined by doctors after her family reported the allegation late Saturday, and investigators questioned her extensively on Sunday, he said.
The father of one of the boys told The Associated Press that no force was used against the girl, and said the allegations have been leveled because the accuser “didn’t want to get in trouble with her parents.”
But Wilkie said children that young cannot legally consent to sex, “so we have to go with the charges we have.”
I do not have any doubt that it’s possible that these boys “raped” this girl. The legal definition doesn’t require penetration (and for all I know maybe that happened too.) If they did it, then they need to be dealt with in the juvenile system and given intense psychological counseling.
But what if it was “consensual” in the sense that the kids were all playing a game or the boys thought they were, or any number of other possible scenarios? Remember, we are talking about 8 and 9 year olds. They’re all hardly more than babies. No matter what it was, it cannot, by definition, be legally equivalent to a gang rape by adults or even teen-agers.
But this police chief says that even if it was a game or there were some other mitigating factors, the girl cannot, under the law, consent. Again, I’m not saying that it couldn’t have happened just as this little girl said it did. But it’s obvious to me that if an 8 year old can’t consent to sex — which I agree, she can’t — it’s equally clear that 8 and 9 year old boys cannot “rape” in the legal sense.
American culture has always been violent and somewhat backwards in these ways, at least compared to other first world countries. But in the last couple of decades we seem to be nurturing it to the extent we have lost all common sense and certainly any sense of proportion. Arresting little boys on charges of felony rape is not only ridiculous on it’s face, it demeans the entire justice system.
There is such a thing as prosecutorial discretion, something that is in very short supply in the Georgia legal system, apparently. If past is prologue, they will also charge these second graders with child molestation.
Update: I see that the article now says that the charges will be referred to juvenile court where the boys could receive five years. It will be very interesting to see if they still uphold the charges under the statutory rape statute even if it turns out that these kids were up to some sort of game or if the girl really did “consent.” Either way, the whole thing is repulsive. All of these kids should be in serious counseling, not the justice system and certainly not splashed all over the press.
.
Mission Accomplished
by digby
Man, Novak is certainly getting his revenge — and probably a big check — for throwing that little unsourced pile of used kitty litter into the Democratic primary. Congratulations, Bob, for a job well done.
It just doesn’t get any better for the Village Ladies press Club and Circle Jerk Society than this afternoon’s Hardball. David Shuster ran down the story straight, pointing out that Novak has subsequently said that he allegedly heard his little nugget of defamation about both Clinton and Obama from some Democrat who isn’t part of the Clinton campaign, but who knows someone or has heard from somebody who says it’s true. That’s apparently good enough for Chris Matthews anyway, and he’s running with it as fast as his little legs can carry him.
This is what ensued:
CM: Thank you David.
Roger Simon of the Politico web site and Jim Warren of the Chicago Tribune.
You know both you fellas … I’ve been thinking for a while that the one way Obama can beat Hillary is if he can trap her into an attack on him. And here he is accusing her of slime politics. Is that the game here? To call a foul and make Hillary look bad, Roger.
RS: I think it is. I think it’s also designed to change the conversation away from a pretty poor debate performance in Las Vegas. Get reporters off that storyline, get reporters not writing about immigration and driver’s licenses, get them writing about Hillary Clinton being a mud thrower and a hypocrite.
CM: The word “slime” politics, Jim, is pretty strong.
JW: Yeah, but I’m not sure the motive is so much tied as Roger suggests to a not a sterling debate performance. I think there really is the shadow of the Kerry campaign looming all over this and the belief, at least the conventional wisdom that in this internet age, you must react instantly to any stuff like this. Now that said, obviously, up to now, Obama’s benefited from what’s been a bit of a choir boy image. If you look at a biography by my colleague David Mendell, and you look at his state legislature days, there’s a very interesting tale about a regular poker game he had and one night a lobbyist showed up with a drunk woman not his wife and Obama was actually very, very upset. And with all the investigating we’ve done into him here in Chicago, both the Tribune and the Sun Times, what one has is really only one very unsavory connection, one bad business deal involving his south side mansion and that involves his relationship to a guy who gave him a fair amount of money and who was a patron of sorts and now who is an indicted businessman named Tony Resco.
CM: Well you with … as a competitor to Bob Novak, who is at a different paper, he’s at the Sun Times. I’ve watched the guy over the years, you don’t have to love the guy to know that he’s a journalist and he does rely on sources and they do exist, whether it’s Richard Armitage, whoever it is, they turn out to be true. And he has a prominent Democrat who told him that somebody in the Clinton campaign is pushing slime.
Now let’s go there from that fact. One, doesn’t that tell you that that’s a strategy on the part of the Clinton people or that somebody’s out there had a few belts at some bar and starts talking out of school?
JW: It’s hard to believe necessarily that’s a conscious strategy, although I have to quote a prominent American political analyst, named Roger Simon, who once remembered telling me there was a University of Illinois fellow alum, was a partner in a column that some cynics called” Evans and NoFacts.” There was a belief that…
CM: I know that … Errors and No-Facts, it was called.
JW: Yeah, Bob at times was a little thin on the attributions, certainly this attribution was one that a lot of us in moth eaten mainstream journalism would stay away from. But that said, your point about Valerie Plame was a good one, and now that we know the relationship of Novak and Richard Armitage, so of course, sure, I don’t doubt that there is some guy who told him that and some guy who heard something from the Clinton campaign. But were they thinking of this like some great billiard player and thinking a couple of shots ahead and this would play out this way? I’m not sure because I think in the sort term this rebounds to Obama’s favor.
CM: It’s quite a bank shot. Let me ask you Roger… you know what it reminds me of, we all remember a peculiar thing we all remember back from 88. The rumor that Mike Dukakis had gotten psychological counseling. I remember the Washington Times jumped on that, a conservative paper, not an especially responsible paper, put at the top of the front page and then all of a sudden Ronald Reagan comes out and says, “I don’t want to talk about a man who’s sick.” You know, they really played that baby.
RS: Sure. But the danger in responding to everything … this reminds me of WWI and the guns of August. You go to war not because there’s a need to go to war but because you’re prepared to go to war. Both staffs have huge operations research arms, both have huge rapid response teams, and the tendency is to always use them. To always put them into battle. But there’s a danger here. This item might have been dismissed as just another Robert Novak item about Democrats. But Obama ratcheted it up instantly by announcing it himself. He didn’t use a staffer. He released the response under his own name. A certain number of people are always gonna say, “where there’s smoke there’s fire.” A certain number of people are going to say, “he protests too much.” And then you get another problem. It leads to ripples in the pond. Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic Monthly has a story in the issue in the stand now that he was in Iowa — Ambinder is a highly respected journalist — an Obama aid sat down next to him and said, “when are you gonna start investigating Bill Clinton’s post presidential sex life?” Now how is that different than the Novak thing. In fact it’s worse. It mentions sex life.
CM: Yeah..
Simon: Novak just says this “unnamed scandal.” There’s a problem with riding a high horse down the low road. If you’re going to accuse Hillary Clinton of doing this, you’d better be sure your campaign isn’t doing it.
CM: yeah… But of course, the question is .. let’s be honest about facts here. Does the Clinton campaign have something on Obama? Is there something out there on Bill Clinton if you’re Obama’s guy? Speculation, but is it accusation as well? You’re saying that Obama, according to this reporrter from the Atlantic Monthly, accused Bill Clinton of messing around.
Simon: An Obama aide said to a reporter “when are you gonna start investigating Bill Clinton’s post presidential sex life?”
CM: An Obama aide…
Simon: But how is that any different than just scandal mongering?
Jim Warren: it’s funny, Roger and Chris. I’ve been at a dinner table in Chicago a couple of months ago with some prominent pols and who just threw out the same notion. Did they have any facts? “Oh you better check into Bill Clinton in London and that woman?” And I mean, that was out there. But there’s a difference between dinner table chat and then sticking something in the Chicago Tribune or on Politico.com [Can you believe it? He said this right after he shared his “dinner table chat” on national television! — ed] And when one speaks of ripples in the pond as Roger did, there’s also the possibility that even if it’s something inadvertently emanating from the Clinton camp, conceivably play and enlarge a notion among some Democrats on the fence about ruthless expedience of the Clinton camp in a negative way.
CM: I’ve got a news bulletin here on the Iowa’s vote. We’ve long been told that the Iowa voters are very averse to any kind of slime campaigning, and here it is, a new ABC Washington post poll just out this moment shows Barack Obama leading in Iowa now 30% for him among likely caucus voters, Hillary down to 26 and Edwards at 22. And so you’ve got a jump of 4 points for Obama since July, Jim Warren, your thoughts. Obama is ahead in Iowa…
He wound up with, “It sure looks like Obama had a good week-end.”
This exchange is one of the most perfect examples of everything that’s wrong with journalism today. What information did we learn?
First, we learned about the Bob Novak blind item that accuses Hillary Clinton of “slime” politics and Barack Obama of having some skeletons in his closet that nobody knows about. We then learned that even though his nickname has long been “No-facts” for his lack of attribution in his columns, Bob Novak must be telling the truth now because he proved that he had a real source in Richard Armitage when he outed a CIA agent. Therefore, we can fully trust that the Clinton campaign was behind the story. We also learned about some guy who supported Obama financially who turned out to be a crook and we learned that “it’s out there” that Bill Clinton has been schtupping other women, perhaps in London, and that Obama’s staff is pimping that around.
Is any of that considered professional journalism? Is any of it remotely necessary for voters to know? Because it reminds me of a boozy lunch with a bunch of bored rich divorcees only less interesting and far more consequential.
Chris Matthews is an imbecile and a scumbag with an obscure personal agenda. Everything he says in that exchange should disqualify him from having a news show. He obviously gets titillated at the notion that Bill Clinton is playing around. We already know he loathes Hillary on a visceral level. Therefore, he finds Nofacts credible when he accuses the Clinton campaign of engaging in “slime politics” but is only interested in whether the alleged gossip planted by the Obama staffer might be true.
The other two, while making some excellent points about the campaigns’ hair trigger on their rapid response teams and overuse of their oppo teams, piously lecture about how wrong it is to scandal monger, and repeat all the Village gossip on television as a way of proving it!
Matthews didn’t stop at just that one interminable segment. There was more. He asked Chuck Todd and Michael Crowley and they all essentially agreed that this is very, very good for Obama. Whether any of it is true, wasn’t even brought up.
Crowley made the point that the rapid responses of the two campaigns are speaking to the Democratic voters who are traumatized by what they see as a media circus that killed off Al Gore and John Kerry in the last two election and want their candidates to show they can fight back hard.
Matthews replies angrily:
Michael, Michael, there’s a big difference between what happened to Al Gore and John Kerry. john Kerry got hit unfairly by the Swift Boats attacking his service to his country. They conflated his opposition to the war when he came back which we can all argue about, and his service to his country which is not really arguable. They trashed him.
But in terms of Al Gore, he’s the one who said he created the internet, he’s the one who put out the word that he’s the subject or the role model for Love Story, that he pointed the country’s attention to Love Canal. He stuck himself into that story.
And when Marty Peretz’s daughter wrote that story in Vanity Fair a couple of months ago, I’m sorry, she didn’t make the case. Gore got himself in those problem areas by vanity and showing off an trying to make himself cool. But John Kerry got unfair treatment. I think it’s a big difference guys.
Crowley: that may be so, but it’s not how many Democrats feel.
CM: Well, why would expect a partisan to think anything more than partisan? That’s what partisans think? Of course they think they were rooked. Everyone who loses an election thinks they were rooked and they blame it on the umpire.
Crowley: That’s the audience they’re speaking to.
CM: Yeah, well how about getting into the land of truth and understanding?
Yes, he actually said that, and with a smug self-satisfied grin on his face too.
I’m sure I don’t have to tell you all that the three specific stories that Matthews relayed about Gore are lies and have been debunked over and over again. I’ll leave it to the Daily Howler to provide chapter and verse on that. Matthews made Novak look like a responsible journalist with that little tirade. And he made an utter fool of himself to people who know the facts. It was embarrassing. (not that anyone bothered to correct him.)
As far as Kerry is concerned, the Swift Boaters spent very little money in the great scheme of things. They just appeared over and over again, for free, on shows like Hardball, where Matthews gave them a respectful hearing and validated their premise.
Now if anyone thinks after reading that drivel that it is a good idea to validate Robert Novak’s gossip in this cycle, please raise your hands. I guarantee that if all the story lines of this nature aren’t being written by Republicans they are certainly going to be exploited by them. Before anyone sets their oppo or rapid response teams on anything they need to stop and ask one simple question: Cui bono — who benefits?
As friendly as Chris Matthews may be right now toward Obama or Edwards, he’ll be right in there helping the Republicans do it, along with all his fellow members of the Ladies Circle Jerk society who seem to have some problems differentiating between facts, gossip and dirty tricks and so just blurt it all out while daintily dabbing at the drool on their chins and decrying “slime politics.”
This was a reprehensible and shameful show this afternoon and it’s only the first of many to come. I’m very worried about the campaigns at this point. This looks like the worst circular firing squad I’ve seen in years and it’s the worst time to do it. We desperately need to win this one.
Update: Ryan Lizza was on the later edition of the show and said that Obama has decided to use the Clinton War Room tactics of going nuclear to prove he is tough enough. I don’t remember the Clintons using them against other Democrats, but I could be wrong. In any case, it’s a very dicey tactic this time out. If Whether or not the Republicans planted this story they will still use “those rumors” against him in a Chicago minute. (After all, it’s “out there.”)
After all, Matthews proved with his comments about the Gore campaign that if they come up with some bogus scandal about Obama, he will have no compunction about using them and believing them. He is not alone. It will come back to bite any Democrat in the ass.
Update II: Marc Ambinder points to John Fund identifying the supposedly horrible smear the Clinton campaign is supposedly holding back (it’s nothing) and wonders why these Republican columnists all have such better sources among Democrats. That’s an excellent question.
He adds something very important to consider, however:
For the record, the Obama and Clinton campaigns try to plant negative stories about each other all the time. Felonious fundraisers, issue positions, legislative records, the occasional guilt-by-association catches — those are fair game.
Other stuff seems to be off-limits.
Earlier this year, Obama donor David Geffen mouthed off to Maureen Dowd about the verbotten subject of the Clintons’ private life, triggering an intense bout of jockeying between the Clinton and Obama campaigns. Then — silence.
Except for the isolated occurrance — an Obama aide plopped down next to me at a campaign event and wondered when reporters would begin to look into Clinton’s postpresidential sex life – not a single rumor about the subject has eminated from the Obama world.
Some aides been gotten dressed down for talking about the subject, even in private, with other campaign staffers.
Likewise, no one in the Clinton universe has ever tried to convince me to look into something scandalous about Obama’s past — all the bad stuff — cocaine use, hard-knuckle Chicago political tactics — is out there already.
[…]
So if campaigns don’t traffic in these rumors, who does?
Supporters do — it’s true that reporters in Iowa and New Hampshire are accosted by Democrats who don’t like Hillary Clinton and wonder why the press doesn’t ask her about her husband’s fidelity.
Donors do — think of Gossip Girl set in a Georgetown salon.
Opposition parties do — everyone tends to assume that negative stuff against Hillary Clinton is being sent around by her Democratic opponents. Not always true.
And reporters do — we can’t help it.
Right, you can’t help it. But at the very least can we agree that “reporters” shouldn’t put these rumors in their newspapers or go on Chris Matthews to dish all the dirt they’ve heard on the campaign trail?
It’s not like any of the candidates are CIA agents who deserve to be publicly outed or anything.
slightly revised for clarity
Deviants On Parade
by digby
I have a new piece up over at The Big Con about right wing moral depravity. And it has nothing to do with wide stances or wet suits.
.
Born Yesterday
by digby
Robert Novak has thrown a bomb (a twofer) into the Democratic primary and is getting the predictable result.
I think this is probably a good juncture to take an important little trip down memory lane. It’s 1972, and Richard Nixon has surveyed the field and wants to run against the so-called peacenik George McGovern. Edmund Muskie of Maine is leading the pack in the primaries, until one day he melts down his entire campaign on the steps of the Manchester Union Leader.
There have been many interesting recountings of this episode, most notably in “All The president’s Men” but none so revealing as the one by David Broder in 1987, called “The Story That Still Nags Me.”
The human factor is always the least predictable element in covering politics. That is why the beat is so fascinating. Under the pressure of campaigns for high office, people react in ways that are always revealing and often unexpected. In this case, Muskie’s strategists wanted him to show indignation and righteous wrath to regain the offensive in what they saw as an eroding effort to hold off the challenge of his major rival, Senator George McGovern. They focused on the impact of two Union Leader editorials: one concerned an alleged derogatory comment by Muskie about the important French-Canadian voting bloc, the other impugned the behavior and character of the candidate’s wife.
I described Muskie’s dramatic reaction:
“With tears streaming down his face and his voice choked with emotion, Senator Edmund S. Muskie (D-Maine) stood in the snow outside the Manchester Union Leader this morning and accused its publisher of making vicious attacks on him and his wife, Jane.”
The Democratic presidential candidate called publisher William Loeb “a gutless coward’ for involving Mrs. Muskie in the campaign and said four times that Loeb had lied in charging that Muskie had condoned a slur on Americans of French-Canadian descent.
In defending his wife, Muskie broke down three times in as many minutes– uttering a few words and then standing silent in the near blizzard, rubbing at his face, his shoulders heaving, while he attempted to regain his composure sufficiently to speak.
[…]
Within 24 hours, Muskie’s weeping became the focus of political talk, not just in New Hampshire, but everywhere the pattern of the developing presidential race was discussed. His tears were generally described as one of the contributing causes of his disappointing showing in the March 7 primary…
In retrospect, though, there were a few problems with the Muskie story. First, it is unclear whether Muskie did cry. He insists he never shed the tears we thought we saw. Melting snow from his hatless head filled his eyes, he said, and made him wipe his face. While admitting that exhaustion and emotion got the better of him that morning, the senator believes that he was damaged more by the press and television coverage of the event than by his own actions.
Second, it is now clear that the incident should have been placed in a different context: Muskie was victimized by the classic dirty trick that had been engineered by agents of the distent and detached President Nixon. The Loeb editorial that had brought Muskie out in the snowstorm had been based on a letter forged by a White House staff member intent on destroying Muskie’s credibility. But we didn’t know that and we didn’t work hard enough to find out.
He goes on to explain that part of the reason was that he had already come to the conclusion that Muskie was an unstable hot head who may have been unsuited to be president.
What does a political reporter do with this kind of insight? As in this instance, it is rarely written as a hard news story the first time the thought arises. Most reporters have a healthy reluctance to play amateur psychiatrist. Often, the incidents are trivial in themselves. Sometimes, as with the poker game, they occur in semiprivate settings, which many reporters–myself included– feel uncomfortable in exploiting directly for journalistic purposes.
What we tend to do is to store such incidents in our minds and then use them to interpret major incidents when they occur.
So, when Muskie got angry on the steps that day, Broder and the rest of the press corps described him as having a sort of breakdown. But when Broder thought about it later in 1987, he realized he couldn’t actually be sure that what he saw was crying.
And it was certainly the “crying” that did Muskie in. (Much as the press characterizing certain behaviors as “screaming” and “sighing” have done-in others.)
Broder writes, “as far as I can recall, there was no internal questioning of the accuracy of the story then, or later, at the Post. Still, it nags at me as few other stories I have written.”
That’s very big of him considering the full extent of what he learned a short time later:
Systematic sabotage
What Muskie did not know, and what I certainly did not know at the time, was that there was another set of facts that would have put the incident into a very different context. Those facts related to a series of actions, ordered and coordinated by the Nixon White House and designed to harass, to vex, and to embarrass the front running Democrat who was judged a serious threat to Nixon’s re-election. The “Canuck letter’ was part of that plot.
Had those facts been known, I might have described Muskie in different terms: not as a victim of his over-ambitious campaign strategy and his too-human temperament, but as the victim of a fraud, managed by operatives of a frightened and unscrupulous president. That story surely would have had a different impact.
Given Loeb’s history, there was ample reason for skepticism about the origins of the “Canuck letter.’ Indeed, in my story about the Manchester incident, I devoted seven paragraphs to that subject, noting that “the Deerfield Beach telephone company does not list a Paul Morrison among the 15 Morrisons in its directory,’ and noting that Loeb, while promising “a very interesting followup’ on the letter, had not yet produced the author.
The story also quoted at length the denials of the senator and others who were with him in Florida that any such thing happened. But regrettably, none of us reporting the story pursued the mystery of authorship. We were in New Hampshire, tracking the candidates through the final week of the primary campaign. Paul Morrison, if he existed, was one thousand miles to the south. And the story, in our eyes, was not the provocation but the reaction.
It was not until seven months later, when Nixonwas sailing toward a landslide victory over McGovern and Muskie was back tending to his Senate business, that the mystery began to unravel. Marilyn Berger, then a colleague at the Post, told me that Ken W. Clawson, a former Post reporter who had gone to work at the White House as deputy director of information, had told her that he was the author of “the Canuck letter.’
[…]
The coverage of the incident shows that when a reporter’s information is incomplete, there is a great risk of misleading the reader. I put the Manchester speech into the context–accurately, I believe–of a campaign and a personality that were accessible to journalistic view. I did not put it into the context of campaign sabotage.
Unwittingly, I did my part in the work of the Nixon operatives in helping destroy the credibility of the Muskie candidacy.
Well, he can take some comfort that he wasn’t alone, but it’s not like it was the last time it happened. They may have been slightly chastened for a time, but the modern conservative movement’s political arm comes directly out of the Nixon school. Bill Clinton and Al Gore were nearly destroyed by the same tactics, a bit more refined. But by that point the press shamelessly worked hand in glove with Republicans, often in the open, fully aware that they were helping them — Broder included.
After years of this sort of politics, from Atwater to Rove, from Willie Horton to Swift Boats, it would be nice to think the mainstream media have learned from the past and will ensure that things like this are adequately examined within the context of history and not just the heat of the moment. But that’s clearly too much to hope for.
Robert Novak was once a real journalist but after the events of the past few years, it’s safe to say that he no longer can be considered anything but a Republican operative, specifically a Rove acolyte who basically works for him. He has more than proven his loyalty. This rumor, especially coming from him, should never have seen the light of day. MSNBC is running with the story like it’s 9/11. It remains to be seen if it has any legs among the rest of the mainstream press. But I think it’s fair to say that they will, at the very least, “store such incidents in [their] minds and then use them to interpret major incidents when they occur.”
We don’t know exactly what happened here,of course, but Democratic campaigns should know better that to ever use Robert Novak to try to score points either way. His item, (just like Rove’s from earlier in the week) was a twofer, virtually designed to make both candidates look bad — and, frankly, both of their responses only reaffirmed that impression.
The Democratic campaigns need to remember that they are battling not only the Republicans but the entire Village press. This little episode was badly handled and I would hope they get smart very quickly or they are going to making it much worse for themselves — and the country.
.
Same Old Moustache
by digby
Mr. Obama’s gift for outreach would be so much more effective with a Dick Cheney standing over his right shoulder, quietly pounding a baseball bat into his palm.
No, the axis-of-evil idea isn’t thought through — but that’s what I like about it. It says to these countries and their terrorist pals: ”We know what you’re cooking in your bathtubs. We don’t know exactly what we’re going to do about it, but if you think we are going to just sit back and take another dose from you, you’re wrong. Meet Don Rumsfeld — he’s even crazier than you are.”
Friedman is considered a sophisticated foreign policy pundit, why again?
Update: Ooops. Glenn got there first and far more thoroughly.
.
The Twofer
by digby
Karl Rove is smiling this morning. Wolf Blitzer just used a clip from Rove’s appearance on C-SPAN last week in which he said that Barack Obama looked weak because he failed to confront Hillary Clinton on the fact that she and her husband could release all their records with a phone call and they refuse.
We’ve been over this. He’s a liar and he’s simply tickling an ear worm they developed four years ago when they accused John Kerry of not “releasing his records.” The claim is bullshit, and FactCheck.org has the explanation right here. The whole phony issue (which Tim Russert happily ran with on the previous debate) is a manufactured GOP smear featured prominently on the RNC website.
But notice how Rove does it. He not only makes the Clintons look they’re hiding something, he does it by claiming that Obama is weak. It’s a twofer.
Naturally, neither Blitzer, Bash, Malveaux or Crowley (“the best political team on television”) bothered to correct Rove’s facts. They didn’t have time what with all the sophisticated “well, Obama needed to hit it out of the park but he couldn’t get it over the goal line and failed to score from mid court like he needed to,” analysis. Rove got exactly what he wanted: if you saw that whole segment you came away with the impression that Obama’s a wimp and Hillary’s corrupt. Match point!
The Republicans are already fully engaged in the destruction of all three of the top Democratic candidates and the media are helping them as usual. One would think that the very fluid, close, unprecedented open primary on the Republican side, where the party is threatening to fracture along religious and regional lines and the personalities are outsized and eccentric, would be far more exciting to cover right now. But the nearly obsessive coverage of Clinton vs Obama shows that they are once again in thrall to the Village agenda. (Talk about a couple of interlopers threatening to trash the place — why neither one of the front runners are even white men! Mercy!)
.