The Incubator
by digby
In response to my question about how the new Muslim Apostate meme got started, Gavin at Sadly No emailed with this link to Jihad Watch from David Horowitz’s FrontPage magazine. This makes sense. After all, David Horowitz has made his career out of being an apostate so it figures his project would be behind the propagation of this nonsense. It’s his thing.
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Are We Clear?
by digby
If John McCain goes ballistic every time he’s mildly criticized by Barack Obama, this is going to be a much more interesting campaign than I thought. Yesterday Obama said this:
I respect Sen. John McCain’s service to our country. He is one of those heroes of which I speak. But I can’t understand why he would line up behind the president in his opposition to this GI bill. I can’t believe why he believes it is too generous to our veterans. I could not disagree with him and the president more on this issue. There are many issues that lend themselves to partisan posturing, but giving our veterans the chance to go to college should not be one of them.
Wow, that was shockingly below the belt, don’t you think? No? Well, McCain apparently did:
It is typical, but no less offensive that Senator Obama uses the Senate floor to take cheap shots at an opponent and easy advantage of an issue he has less than zero understanding of. Let me say first in response to Senator Obama, running for President is different than serving as President. The office comes with responsibilities so serious that the occupant can’t always take the politically easy route without hurting the country he is sworn to defend. Unlike Senator Obama, my admiration, respect and deep gratitude for America’s veterans is something more than a convenient campaign pledge. I think I have earned the right to make that claim…I know that my friend and fellow veteran, Senator Jim Webb, an honorable man who takes his responsibility to veterans very seriously, has offered legislation with very generous benefits. I respect and admire his position, and I would never suggest that he has anything other than the best of intentions to honor the service of deserving veterans. Both Senator Webb and I are united in our deep appreciation for the men and women who risk their lives so that the rest of us may be secure in our freedom. And I take a backseat to no one in my affection, respect and devotion to veterans. And I will not accept from Senator Obama, who did not feel it was his responsibility to serve our country in uniform, any lectures on my regard for those who did…Perhaps, if Senator Obama would take the time and trouble to understand this issue he would learn to debate an honest disagreement respectfully. But, as he always does, he prefers impugning the motives of his opponent, and exploiting a thoughtful difference of opinion to advance his own ambitions. If that is how he would behave as President, the country would regret his election.
(He went on to say “You can’t handle the truth! You fucked with wrong POW!”)
It’s well known that McCain has a temper. He is commonly despised by people he works with. But I don’t agree with Kevin here that this is just an intemperate blast that shows he’s too hot-headed to be president (although he certainly is.) It is to establish his dominance on military issues and the war. As much as he’s a mean man for real, he is also a ruthless politician who is positioning himself as the older Alpha Dog against the “disrespectful” upstart. This is some primitive stuff unfolding here.
McCain is also playing rather crudely into the developing theme that Obama isn’t patriotic or quite a “real American.” You would think that it would be ridiculous to claim such a thing when Obama is voting for a GI Bill and McCain isn’t, but when you really look at what McCain does in his statement (you can read it in full, here) he goes out of his way to juxtapose his family’s long history in the US military with claims about Obama only supporting veterans out of political convenience. It’s really quite insidious.
I have no doubt that McCain really was pissed off. But this statement is also a political document, vetted by the campaign, and they aren’t idiots. They released it for a reason. We all think this makes McCain look like a crazed ho head and that people will reject him for it. But keep in mind that this kind of thing also plays into McCain’s carefully crafted persona of being a “straight shooter” who doesn’t calculate his every word for public consumption. Losing his cool is part of what a lot of people like about him. They see it as a sign of authenticity.
It’s a rather audacious shot across the bow to Obama, who came back with a measured and reasonable response:
I am proud to stand with Senator Webb and a bipartisan coalition to give our veterans the support and opportunity they deserve. It’s disappointing that Senator McCain and his campaign used this issue to launch yet another lengthy personal, political attack instead of debating an honest policy difference. He should know that this is not about John McCain or Barack Obama — it’s about giving our veterans a real chance to afford four years of college without harming retention. Senator Webb’s bipartisan bill will do this, and the bill that John McCain supports would not. These endless diatribes and schoolyard taunts from the McCain campaign do nothing to advance the debate about what matters to the American people
I find that convincing, of course. The idea of that macho freak McCain at the helm makes visions of Cheney and Rumselfeld dance in my head. But I don’t honestly know if everyone sees it my way. This guy has made a career out of pretending that he answers to no authority and is afraid of no one. I’m not sure that there aren’t quite a few people out there who see a man like that as the kind of president that’s needed to bring real change to Washington. It fits into a certain archetypal groove. I’m not sure calling such comments “disappointing” is going to be enough over the long haul.
Liberal Pundits Offer Unprecedented Apology
by digby
That got your attention, didn’t it? Click the link.
“No one could have anticipated the breach of the party,” said Jonathan Chait, senior editor of the New Republic. “But Lieberman’s recent op-ed, calling the Democratic Party insufficiently pro-American, is just sheer barking lunacy. I could never have seen this coming two years ago when I was calling Lieberman’s critics ‘a pack of crazed, ignorant ideological cannibals,’ and I’m deeply sorry. It looks like I turned out to be the truly ignorant one in the end.”
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“We don’t know what we got.”
by tristero
Good morning! Are you sitting down?
In one case, according to documents displayed by Pentagon auditors at the hearing before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, a cash payment of $320.8 million in Iraqi money was authorized on the basis of a single signature and the words “Iraqi Salary Payment” on an invoice. In another, $11.1 million of taxpayer money was paid to IAP, an American contractor, on the basis of a voucher with no indication of what was delivered…
The disclosure that $1.8 billion in Iraqi assets was mishandled comes on top of an earlier finding by an independent federal oversight agency, the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, that United States occupation authorities early in the conflict could not account for the disbursement of $8.8 billion in Iraqi oil money and seized assets.
A billion here, a billion there…
And then check this out:
The mysterious payments, whose amounts had not been publicly disclosed, included $68.2 million to the United Kingdom, $45.3 million to Poland and $21.3 million to South Korea. Despite repeated requests, Pentagon auditors said they were unable to determine why the payments were made.
“It sounds like the coalition of the willing is the coalition of the paid — they’re willing to be paid,” said Mr. Waxman
And some more details:
In one instance, a United States Treasury check for $5,674,075.00 was written to pay a company called Al Kasid Specialized Vehicles Trading Company in Baghdad for items that a voucher does not even describe.
In another case, $6,268,320.07 went to the contractor Combat Support Associates with even less explanation. And a scrawl on another piece of paper says only that $8 million had been paid out as “Funds for the Benefit of the Iraqi People.”
But perhaps the masterpiece of elliptic paperwork is the document identified at the top as a “Public Voucher for Purchases and Services Other Than Personal.” It indicates that $320.8 million went for “Iraqi Salary Payment,” with no explanation of what the Iraqis were paid to do.
Whatever it was, the document suggests, each of those Iraqis was handsomely compensated. Under the “quantity” column is the number 1,000, presumably indicating the number of people who were to be paid — to the tune of $320,800 apiece — if the paperwork is to be trusted.
“…if the paperwork is to be trusted.” Now that’s funny. But the joke’s on us.
Sistani’s Veto Power
by dday
We have the potential for a major problem in Iraq. As Shiites jockey for power, the most prestigious cleric in the country is sensing the value among the population of fighting the US-led occupation, and very quietly permitting the targeting of US troops. It may have as much to do with internal politics as anything else, but it makes Iraq incredibly dangerous for any American, and reinforces the need to take our men and women off the front lines and out of gun sights and back home where they belong.
The AP story, based on information from Shiite officials, suggests that the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who has been out of the spotlight of late, is issuing under-the-radar fatwas to his followers:
Iraq’s most influential Shiite cleric has been quietly issuing religious edicts declaring that armed resistance against U.S.-led foreign troops is permissible – a potentially significant shift by a key supporter of the Washington-backed government in Baghdad.
The edicts, or fatwas, by Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani suggest he seeks to sharpen his long-held opposition to American troops and counter the populist appeal of his main rivals, firebrand Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia.
So far, al-Sistani’s fatwas have been limited to a handful of people. They also were issued verbally and in private – rather than a blanket proclamation to the general Shiite population – according to three prominent Shiite officials in regular contact with al-Sistani as well as two followers who received the edicts in Najaf.
There is a lot at work here.
• Sistani is ill and has been out of the public spotlight for many years. In the meantime, popular resistance to the occupation from the Shiite community has been led by Muqtada al-Sadr. So there may be some reassertion of control here in the wake of attacks on Sadrist strongholds in Basra and Sadr City. However, Sadr and Sistani are essentially on the same side here, and this may be a signal to top deputies of the Sadrist movement that Sistani is behind them and just waiting for the right moment to call for, as Sadr put it, “open war.”
• It would be hard for Prime Minister Maliki to continue to legitimately work with the US government if such a fatwa were made more public. After the 2006 sectarian violence it was Sistani who was most instrumental in keeping order and turning the situation around from the Shiite perspective. It would be hard for US troops to maintain safe havens inside Iraq under a Sistani edict to leave, and much harder for them to have any kind of visible role in maintaining security. This is already being shown to be the case – in the Sadr City offensive, US troops were put to the sidelines and even the Sadrists appreciated it. This begs the question of how, in such an environment, there could possibly be a role for US troops at all.
• However, this could be more like a “sense of the Senate” resolution than a call to murder – essentially putting a nail in the coffin of the idea that any permanent bases would be tolerated by the Iraqi population. I think this is ultimately about the SOFA agreement that Iraq and the US are currently negotiating. Today Barbara Lee (D-CA) got her amendment demanding Congressional authorization over any agreement passed the House, and basically Sistani just vetoed the whole thing.
• Maliki is acknowledging, through aides, that there’s nothing he can do about this, and in the end he’ll side with the will of the Iraq people:
A senior aide to the prime minister, al-Maliki, said he was not aware of the fatwas, but added that the “rejection of the occupation is a legal and religious principle” and that top Shiite clerics were free to make their own decisions. The aide also spoke on condition of anonymity.
As Cernig says, “Sadr now has a free hand from Sistani as long as he plays nice with Maliki. He won’t shoot himself in the foot by openly opposing Sadr.” Conservative gasbags may be gloating about Sadr’s imminent demise, but he still holds all the cards and the support of a substantial part of the Shiite community. Maliki knows this and will not get in the way of resistance against Americans. That’s because he understands that the occupation is massively unpopular and opposing resistance to it would be a death sentence.
This makes me extremely uneasy. I feel like there’s a Beirut bombing in the future if we don’t start planning an exit. We don’t have much time:
“(Al-Sistani) rejects the American presence,” he told the AP, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to comment to media. “He believes they (the Americans) will at the end pay a heavy price for the damage they inflicted on Iraq.”
Juan Cole, a U.S. expert on Shiites in the Middle East, speculated that “al-Sistani clearly will give a fatwa against the occupation by a year or two.” But he said it would be “premature” for the cleric to do so now […]
“Changing the tyrannical (Saddam Hussein) regime by invasion and occupation was not what we wished for because of the many tragedies they have created,” al-Sistani said in reply to a question on his Web site.
“We are extremely worried about their intentions,” he wrote in response to another question on his views about the U.S. military presence.
Matthew Duss, Eric Martin and Kevin Drum have more. The occupation has always been unsustainable. But Sistani’s rulings appear to make that even more obvious. If he acts soon, our troops could be in a horrible situation over there. And I certainly don’t think the White House is paying nearly enough attention to this growing crisis.
P.S. Pushing elections as the answer to all of our problems is really a mistake. Maliki’s operations in Basra and Sadr City were political in nature – he wanted to crush the Sadrists and make it easier for his groups to win the elections – but it’s taking too long, and elections already have been postponed until after our Election Day in November, we learned today in Senate hearings. If Bush pushes them to coincide with our political cycle, the Sadrists will win. The only way they don’t is if Maliki rigs the election, and the result of that would be chaos.
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Apostate Lines
by digby
I must admit that even with my dark and unrelenting cynicism toward the media I’m a little bit shocked to see op-ed pieces appear in quick succession in two of the nation’s most prestigious newspapers calling Barack Obama a “Muslim Apostate.” They don’t make the assertion that Obama is a Muslim, which he certainly isn’t, only that Osama bin Laden and other Islamic fundamentalists consider him one since his father was “born a Muslim.” This apparently means that bin Laden will be able to rally the Muslim world against America because Obama has abandoned the true faith.
I’m sure I don’t need to explain how silly this is. The last I heard bin Laden wasn’t exactly enamored of any of us Murkins, so I find it hard to believe that this news will make him even more hostile than he already is. It’s absurd on its face. So why are the Christian Science Monitor and the NY Times printing similar op-eds on the topic? I don’t know.
The problem, of course, is that this feeds directly into one of the most jaw droppingly audacious smear campaigns I’ve ever seen in American politics:
The main obstacle standing between Barack Obama and the White House was distilled into five words by a local television correspondent in South Charleston, W.Va., earlier this month.
Prefacing a question about the challenges of winning over white, blue-collar voters, the reporter offered this observation: “They think you are un-American,” he said.
Such questions, asked by reporters and plainly on the minds of voters in Appalachia and elsewhere, are the fruits of an unprecedented, subterranean e-mail campaign.
What began as a demonstrably false attempt to cast Obama as a Muslim has now metastasized into something far more threatening to the likely Democratic nominee. The spurious claims about his faith have spiraled into a broader assault that questions his patriotism and citizenship and generally portrays him as a threat to mainstream, white America.
Chris Hayes at The Nation did the best sleuthing on how this came about and it ends up being quite the perfect ratfuck, even featuring one of the main wingnuts who created the John Kerry Swift boat smears:
[E]ven if the identity of the e-mail’s author was unrecoverable, it was still possible to trace back the roots of its content. The origin proved even more bizarre than I could have guessed.
On August 10, 2004, just two weeks after Obama had given his much-heralded keynote speech at the DNC in Boston, a perennial Republican Senate candidate and self-described “independent contrarian columnist” named Andy Martin issued a press release. In it, he announced a press conference in which he would expose Obama for having “lied to the American people” and “misrepresent[ed] his own heritage.”
Martin raised all kinds of strange allegations about Obama but focused on him attempting to hide his Muslim past. “It may well be that his concealment is meant to endanger Israel,” read Martin’s statement. “His Muslim religion would obviously raise serious questions in many Jewish circles where Obama now enjoys support.”
A quick word about Andy Martin. During a 1983 bankruptcy case he referred to a federal judge as a “crooked, slimy Jew, who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.” Martin, who in the past was known as Anthony Martin-Trigona, is one of the most notorious litigants in the history of the United States. He’s filed hundreds, possibly thousands, of lawsuits, often directed at judges who have ruled against him, or media outlets that cover him unfavorably. A 1993 opinion by the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, in Atlanta, described these lawsuits as “a cruel and effective weapon against his enemies,” and called Martin a “notoriously vexatious and vindictive litigator who has long abused the American legal system.” He once even attempted to intervene in the divorce proceedings of a judge who’d ruled against him, petitioning the state court to be appointed as the guardian of the judge’s children.
When I asked Martin for the source of his allegations about Obama’s past, he told me they came from “people in London, among other places.” Why London, I asked? “I started talking to them about Kenyan law. Every little morsel led me a little farther along.”
Within a few days of Martin’s press conference, the conservative site Free Republic had picked it up, attracting a long comment thread, but after that small blip the specious “questions” about Obama’s background disappeared. Then, in the fall of 2006, as word got out that Obama was considering a presidential run, murmurs on the Internet resumed. In October a conservative blog called Infidel Bloggers Alliance reposted the Andy Martin press release under the title “Is Barack Obama Lying About His Life Story?” A few days later the online RumorMillNews also reposted the Andy Martin press release in response to a reader’s inquiry about whether Obama was a Muslim. Then in December fringe right-wing activist Ted Sampley posted a column on the web raising the possibility that Obama was a secret Muslim. Sampley, who co-founded Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry and once accused John McCain of having been a KGB asset, quoted heavily from Martin’s original press release. “When Obama was six,” Sampley wrote, “his mother, an atheist, married Lolo Soetoro, an Indonesian Muslim, and moved to Jakarta, Indonesia…. Soetoro enrolled his stepson in one of Jakarta’s Muslim Wahabbi schools. Wahabbism is the radical teaching that created the Muslim terrorists who are now waging Jihad on the rest of the world.”
On December 29, 2006, the very same day that Sampley posted his column, Snopes received its first copy of the e-mail forward, which contains an identical charge in strikingly similar language. Given the timing, it seems likely that it was a distillation of Sampley’s work.
Now, most people, even on the right, reject this stupid story about Obama being a Muslim (although they are picking up little pieces of it in interesting ways.) But this new twist is quite clever. It suggests that while Obama may not practice Islam, in the eyes of bloodthirsty terrorists he is a Muslim who has forsaken the religion and, therefore, is loathed even more than your average infidel.
So, for the email rubes, he is just a straight-up Muslim in league with terrorists. For the elites who read the Times and the Monitor, he’s not a Muslim per se, but terrorists think he is and so they’re going to unleash Armageddon on us and who needs that? Either way, that Muslim heritage is just a little bit too different for for us to be able to fully trust this man in these troubled times. We don’t need someone who’s got “special problems” with the Muslim world. Why take chances?
It is completely believable to me that these two papers are too stupid to know that they are propagating a Nixonian dirty trick. But we shouldn’t be. This is a highly sophisticated campaign to make Obama just a little bit too exotic for the folks. The question is just how much the press is going to help them. I wouldn’t have thought they’d help them at all, it’s so bizarre, but here are two highly respected papers publishing this drivel as if it’s perfectly normal.
By the way, the Times piece was written by Edward Luttwak, who is, from what I gather, something of an eccentric intellectual. The other was written by an associate professor whose only claim to fame is writing this article. Perhaps it’s coincidence that they both came out at the same time. Perhaps the second was commissioned to follow the first. But it doesn’t matter. It’s “out there.”
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Unleashing Hell
by digby
So I hear that Tim Griffin has abandoned his quest to become a fearless crime fighting lawman to go back to being the nasty dirty trickster he was born to be:
The Republican National Committee is hiring one of the party’s toughest oppo-researchers — former Karl Rove protege Tim Griffin, who was also at the center of the U.S. Attorney scandal — to dig into Barack Obama’s past and unearth info to damage his general election candidacy, a senior Republican operative confirms to me.
Griffin played a lead role in the GOP oppo operation during the 2004 campaign, unearthing info that damaged John Kerry’s presidential bid. According to the senior GOP operative, who’s familiar with Griffin’s past work, he was instrumental in unearthing a videotape of a 1971 interview that Kerry did in which he appeared to confirm that he renounced his medals to protest the Vietnam War.
The video was subsequently used in an ad by the Swift Boat Vets, whose work was renounced by McCain. The McCain campaign — and the RNC — declined to comment on Griffin’s hiring.
“Griffin is basically going to consult for the Republican National Committee on working out Obama’s vulnerabilities,” the senior Republican said, somewhat euphemistically. “The hope is to do to Obama what folks successfully did with John Kerry.”
If you want to see Griffin in action, you can watch Digging the Dirt the BBC documentary on oppo-research from the 2000 election. Here’s an article about the movie from Time magazine about it:
[T]he overwhelming coup of the film is the insight it brings to the Republican version of Carville’s War Room – the seething boiler room at RNC headquarters in D.C. where GOP Head of Research Barbara Comstock and Deputy-Head Tim Griffin ply a rough trade that has probably cost Gore the election.
The nasty secret of the 2000 elections is undoubtedly the enormous growth in the past four years of the people who “do oppo” the nickname for the innocuously titled “Opposition Research” departments in each campaign.
That both sides maintain teams dedicated to unearthing material on the other side is not new. What IS new is the intensity of the digging, the sheer breadth and depth of the search – and most of all the now seamless and instant deployment of the results through the spin meisters directly into the mass media.
In fact, the film reveals how much the media has come to depend on the Oppo research teams for material.
Where newspaper journalists and TV producers once conducted independent research of charges made by a campaign – that has now dwindled. That is because the media has become aware that the research offered by both sides is so intensively fact-checked and triple-checked that it can safely accept the word if offered by the oppo experts.
In the film we see RNC glee as AP accepts their oppo research on a Gore misstatement during the first debate. During their months of filming BBC producers also observed producers for NBC’s Tim Russert among others calling to enquire if the team had any new material. This was apparently normal trading on both sides.
RNC researcher Griffin comments in the film: “It’s an amazing thing when you have topline producers and reporters calling you and saying ‘we trust you…. we need your stuff.'”
The instances where such research – by either side – has proven to be false are very few in number. [really???] The backfire effect on the campaign that issues the material would be far too devastating. It is this that presumably gives the media its comfort zone.
So one might say that if the oppo research of both sides is so accurate – where is the harm in them disseminating and the media accepting the information?
The problem lies not in the veracity of the information per se – but in the significance and disproportionate magnification that is then placed on the information – and how its disbursement reinforces other themes in the campaign gameplans.
[…]
The program established its bona fides with the Bush campaign early in the year. Being a ‘foreign’ film crew from the impeccable BBC was the irresistible blandishment. Obviously without a dog in the race – the BBC were granted the sort of access that American journalists dream of.
But even more remarkable is the way the subjects react in front of the camera. They KNOW they’re being filmed. They KNOW that what they’re doing might appear sly and devious. And yet they can’t resist the lens. Like a team of art thieves in the Louvre heisting the Mona Lisa. Even though the snap might be incriminating – they can’t quite resist the lure of posing for a quick vacation Polaroid. “Me and Chuck heisting some old painting in Paris, France.”
And so – on the night of the first debate – we see a pumped-up Tim Griffin (deputy head of RNC Research) barking orders to his large team of “oppos.” Lehrer tosses Gore the question about him having cast doubt on whether Bush has sufficient experience to lead. Gore demurs and parses his response. Griffin leaps into loud action. Within minutes his team have tracked down an obscure Gore quote buried within the transcript of a lengthy speech. Gotcha! “It directly contradicts what he just said in the debate! He just lied!” crows Griffin. Seconds later Griffin has fed the contradiction to the Associated Press. This is beyond post-debate spin. This is play-by-play impeachment. And incredibly effective.
Moments later the topic is the Balkans. Gore speaks of how the First World War started there and says “my uncle was a victim of poison gas there.” The RNC oppo staff giggles at this and Griffin bellows: “This family stuff is killing me… let’s check his uncle! Let’s see if it’s Witt Lafont. He’s under investigation for drug-trafficking…” There is a flurry of activity and history books being consulted – and then palpable disappointment that Gore’s uncle really was a gas victim. “OK so that is not a lie…” Griffin grimaces and phones the bad news to a waiting colleague: “Hey… we confirmed the uncle tear-gas story….”
But when Gore makes what turns out to be his misstatement about visiting Texan fire sites with James Lee Witt (Director of FEMA) – Griffin senses blood. “Have Jeanette take a look at that!” he cries. And his hunch is right. Gore has transposed dates or people. And that gives Griffin another opportunity.
The BBC cameras catch him on the phone exulting to a colleague: “You know what this would be perfect for is… Get one of these AP reporters or somebody on it for the next few days and then we get a lie out of it… and roll a few days with a new lie!”
And “LIE” was what they got. The New York Post trumpets LIAR LIAR on its front page – and the post-debate spin cycle becomes about Gore’s perceived chronic character flaw. And so it has gone every week since the debates. The image is enshrined.
Was the fact that Gore DID visit Texan firesites – but on that occasion with another FEMA executive relevant? Did it matter that he had made other visits to Texas with James Lee Witt? Were Gore’s words a misstatement or a lie? What would have been the benefit in intentionally lying about such a trivial fact? Was it important either way?
To Griffin it is all very simple:
“If there’s something really good that we can attack on then we will… Research is a fundamental point. We think of ourselves as the creators of the ammunition in a war. Research digs up the ammunition.. We make the bullets.”
The enduring legacy of the 1992 campaign was the large sign in Carville’s War Room – bearing a phrase that subsequently entered the political lexicon. “It’s the economy, stupid.”
Behind Tim Griffin in the RNC Oppo Room, the BBC camera captures a large sign he has erected. “On my command – unleash hell on Al.”
I think that any of you who’ve read Somerby over the years know very well what a pernicious meme the “Gore lies” turned out to be — a character assassination of disparate “facts” to create a totally inaccurate narrative. There is no margin in thinking that just because your candidate is clean or has little history that he will not be subject to this treatment.
The press has been fairly friendly to Obama during the campaign, but I am convinced that it is only due to their pre-existing hostility toward Clinton and the permission they gave themselves to be sexist jackasses. But nonetheless, we certainly have seen some hints of what they are capable of: the Reverend Wright feeding frenzy puts us all on notice about how eagerly they will jump on any story they find sexy or stimulating.
They also eagerly fell back on the musty old “elite liberal” story line* with their silly attention to bowling and orange juice and the like. I have every reason to believe that Tim Griffin and the Party will come up with a dandy new anti-Obama narrative that the media will fall in love with.
It would be really great if, for once, the Democrats could do the same thing. Obama has a lot going for him on the positive side that will do much to mitigate whatever they come up with. And the GOP’s fear tactics are so tired and worn out that I really doubt they will have the same punch. The new media also dilutes the intensity of these story lines quite a bit.
But it’s a mistake to underestimate how good the Republicans are at this and how powerful a strong narrative can be. The press is torn this time out because they have been focused on their loathing of Clinton and have always worshiped McCain. But soon Pied Pipers like Griffin will be unleashing hell on Barack and the media kewl kidz will likely be following right behind him. In any case, it is better to be prepared for it than pretend it can’t happen.
*I hereby proclaim for all to see that yes, I did think that Clinton played into that “elite liberal” stereotype and I wish she hadn’t. I also thought Obama did similar things at different points. With a few exceptions (such as when I vociferously defended Obama on Wright) I stopped writing about campaign stuff last January. I decided to stick to the media critique and have, for the most part, done that.
And yes, to the person who keeps asking, I think Ferraro’s comments were racist. I do not, however, believe the campaign dispatched her to make these remarks to a Torrance, California advertising shopper hoping they would play well to racists in Ohio and Pennsylvania. And I also understand why it would be difficult for any campaign to cut loose someone who has been a Democratic party icon for two decades.
There are many things I have failed to address in this campaign on this blog. It does not automatically follow that I condone them. I still don’t believe that either campaign’s behavior has been beyond the pale, so I guess I’ll continue being accused of acting in bad faith. There’s nothing I can do about it short of lying and I can’t quite convince myself that lying on my own blog makes a lot of sense.
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Buh-Bye PsychoPastor Hagee
by tristero
We hardly knew ye, but that was enough to know you’re insane:
Republican John McCain has rejected the endorsement of an influential Texas televangelist criticized for his anti-Catholic views.
But here’s the best part:
Hagee also issued a statement saying he was tired of baseless attacks and he was removing himself from any active role in the 2008 campaign.
Good idea. Memo to all christianists:
Go thou and do likewise.
Secret Health Data News Dump Of The Week
by dday
John McCain wants to pretend he’s being forthright about his medical condition, while dumping the data on the Friday before Memorial Day and controlling who gets to see them. That’s straight talk.
Senator John McCain is set to release 400 pages of medical records, including documents related to his melanoma surgery in August 2000, to a tightly controlled group of reporters on the Friday before Memorial Day weekend […]
On Friday, the campaign will allow a small pool of reporters access to the records from 7 a.m. to 10 a.m. Pacific time in a conference room at the Copper Wind Resort in Phoenix, near the Mayo Clinic Scottsdale. The reporters will be allowed to take notes but not remove or photocopy the records. Campaign officials said they were imposing the restrictions to prevent the actual records from wide dissemination.
Around the same time, campaign officials said, they will post medical summaries of each year from 2000 to 2008 on the campaign Web site. The summaries will not include doctors’ notes in the actual records.
The news organizations in the pool, selected by the campaign, include ABC News, The Arizona Republic, The Associated Press, Bloomberg, CBS News, CNN, Fox News, NBC News, Reuters, The Washington Post and, possibly, a newsmagazine.
Each organization is allowed two representatives and is expected to file a “pool report” for other reporters detailing the information in the records.
It’s completely unclear to me why any respectable media organization would agree to this, other than it’s coming from John McCain and he makes sweet, sweet barbecue. Even the most experienced reporter isn’t entirely equipped to make judgments on medical reports based on three hours of browsing through records without discussing them with doctors or experts. This makes a mockery of journalism and they just lay down and take it.
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See You In September
by dday
Are people really going to fall for this again?
Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in the war in Iraq, said that he expects this fall to recommend additional cuts in U.S. troop levels there.
He said that he plans to make an assessment by September, when he would move to take over the U.S. Central Command, if he is confirmed for that position, as is expected.
“My sense is I will be able to make a recommendation at that time for further reductions,” Petraeus told the Senate Armed Services Committee today in a hearing to confirm him for the Centcom post. He said he didn’t know how large those cuts might be.
Yes, just wait until September again. Why are you people so impatient? Five and 1/2 years is a perfectly respectable time to downshift into a commitment of 100,000-plus troops occupying a foreign country.
Anyone who believes this will be at all meaningful and not just a stunt is out of their minds. This has been a constant refrain since the beginning of the war.
p.s. Other interesting bits from this hearing included Petraeus arguing for negotiation and diplomacy with Iran like an appeaser from the Chamberlain school, admitting that the real danger spot in the world is the Afghan-Pakistan border, and his potential successor in Iraq, Raymond Odierno, describing the desired end state in the country and admitting that there would then be no need for US troops. I did a roundup at my site.
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