Month: March 2013

These damned Republicans just aren’t conservative enough

by digby

Bless her heart:

Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly bashed on Saturday former — and failed — Republican presidential nominees Bob Dole, John McCain and Mitt Romney, calling them establishment candidates who moved to the center based on advice from consultants rather than embracing conservative values.

“We’ve had the establishment pick another loser for us,” she said of Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee, at CPAC. “The fight we have, and the fight I want you to engage in, is the establishment against the grassroots. The establishment has given us a whole series of losers. Bob Dole and John McCain. Mitt Romney.”

But don’t worry, there’s a silver lining. Here’s Richard Viguerie explaining the logic back in 2006:

Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail guru who helped fuel the Reagan revolution of 1980, asserts that Bush’s inconsistency as a conservative has alarmed many of the most active members of the party – the donors, fundraisers, and grass-roots activists who drive turnout on election day. A recent online poll by Mr. Viguerie of more than 1,000 conservative activists found that 67 percent say Bush is not governing as a conservative, and 64 percent give him a D or an F on government spending.

Even though Bush won’t be on the ballot, conservative disappointment in him could hurt the Republican Party in this November’s midterm elections, he says.

“The party has been hijacked by big-government Republicans,” says Viguerie, hinting that it might be good for the party to lose congressional power later this year. “The importance of losing elections is greatly underrated,” he adds. “There’s not any way Ronald Reagan would have been elected in 1980 if [Gerald] Ford had been elected in ’76.”

And no matter what,win or lose, there’s a money making opportunity for the professional right winger.

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When Jake met Stephen

by digby

Jake Tapper recalls his first meeting with Colbert. And here’s a clip of Colbert telling the story:

This is one of my all time favorite Colbert clips when he was a Daily Show correspondent. From the 2004 Democratic Convention:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,The Daily Show on Facebook

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The health care costs are too damned high

by digby

This is a little bit late to the party, but on the off chance you didn’t read Steven Brill’s piece for Time Magazine on our insane health care system, if you have some time to spend with a long read, worthwhile.

The Hillman Foundation gave this piece a Sidney award this month:

The 24,105-word feature, the longest the magazine has ever published, explains the bewildering world of hospital billing. Brill spent seven months decoding the medical bills of real patients in an attempt to understand what Americans get for the estimated $2.8 trillion we will spend this year on health care.

Brill found hospitals charging $1.50 for a single generic Tylenol, $32 for the rental of a reusable blanket, and $13,702 for a drug that cost the hospital only $400. It’s all part of a three-tiered system that offers deep discounts to Medicare and lesser breaks to private insurers but charges uninsured individuals the full internally listed price.

Many ostensibly non-profit hospitals are raking in even larger profits than their for-profit counterparts. These profits get reinvested in bigger buildings and more medical equipment, which encourage doctors to order even more tests, which generate even more profit for the hospitals.

“Bitter Pill explains how the medical industry subverts the free market by billing ordinary consumers exorbitant fees for whatever services the doctor says they need with no leverage to negotiate the price,” said Sidney judge Lindsay Beyerstein. “The patient is truly at the mercy of the industry.”

This is a quote from Brill from an earlier interview:

I always tell the students in a journalism seminar I teach at Yale that the best stories come from what you’re most curious about. Because I’m interested in business (as well as legal and political issues), questions about business and money often are what make me most curious, sometimes to the point of idiosyncrasy. […]

Similarly, during the long debate over President Barack Obama’s health insurance reform proposals, a question kept nagging at me: Everyone on all sides seemed to accept as a given that healthcare was wildly expensive, and the only debate seemed to be over who should pay for it. I wondered: Well, why is it so expensive in the first place?

As those who have read the article or heard about it now know, I found that all my initial suspicions were wrong. By following the money, I discovered that our health care prices are out of whack for a reason that was hiding in plain sight – a reason that should be obvious to anyone who has ever been a health care consumer, which means all of us: There is no such thing as a free market in healthcare, if one defines a free market as a place where there is some balance of power between the buyer and the seller. Instead, health care is – except when Medicare is the buyer – a lopsided seller’s market. That became clear at both ends of the money trails I followed – from the patients’ lack of any knowledge of what they were buying or its prices, much less any leverage to bargain over it, to the sellers’ ability and willingness to charge absurdly high prices on everything from gauze pads to ambulance services to cancer wonder drugs.

Many health care experts have studied this for years and Brill very ably synthesizes their work along with his own reporting. But honestly, isn’t this just common sense? Of course there cannot be a free market in health care — the buyer is incapable of making an informed choice and has no idea what the value of what she’s buying. This doesn’t seem confusing to me, but most people seem to find it extremely complicated requiring study after study. It’s quite clear we must do — set prices. I know that an insult to the Market Gods, and I’m sure I’ll be struck dead any minute for even thinking it. But that’s what has to happen.

Brill doesn’t come right out an say that we should have a single payer system, but it’s hard to come up with any other conclusion.

Anyway, read the piece if you have the time. It’s nothing your intelligent intuition didn’t already tell you but it’s well put together and interesting.

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“A last-resort desperation move, born of an unholy combination of procrastination, blackmail, and sleep-deprived gamesmanship”


by digby

Following up on David’s post earlier about the Cypriot insanity, I noticed that Atrios put this up last night and I think it’s apt:

Felix Salmon explains why:

I stuck my neck out in January, saying that Cyprus was “certain” to default. After all, the Europeans weren’t willing to come up with the €17 billion needed to bail the country out, and EU economics commissioner Olli Rehn told the WSJ’s Stephen Fidler that Cyprus would have to restructure its debt. But now the bailout has arrived, and — in something of a shocker — there’s no default. Instead, €5.8 billion of the bailout is going to come directly from depositors in Cyprus’s banks, in the form of what the EU is calling an “upfront one-off stability levy”. 

Don’t for a minute believe that this decision is part of some deeply-considered long-term strategy which was worked out in constructive consultations between the EU, the IMF, and the new Cypriot government. Instead, it’s a last-resort desperation move, born of an unholy combination of procrastination, blackmail, and sleep-deprived gamesmanship. 

The details aren’t entirely clear yet: we’re told that deposits of more than €100,000 are going to have to pay a tax of 9.9%, for instance, but it’s not obvious whether that applies to all of the large deposit or just to the amount over €100,000. And there’s still a real chance that the Cypriot parliament could scupper the whole deal. But for the time being, everybody’s going on the assumption that the deal will go through, that Cyprus will get its €10 billion bailout from the EU, and that everybody with a Cypriot bank account in Cyprus (a group which includes members of the UK military) will see their accounts taxed by at least 6.75%. 

In January, I said this wouldn’t happen:

The last thing that Cyprus or any other country needs is a bank run, which will leave the national balance sheet in the classic pinch where “on the left, nothing’s right, and on the right, nothing’s left”. What’s more, in many ways the precedent of forcing depositors to take a haircut would be even more damaging than the precedent of imposing a haircut on Greek bondholders: at that point there would be really no reason at all to have deposits in any Mediterranean country.

It might seem a little bit like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted, but the lines in front of broken ATMs certainly suggest that there will indeed be a substantial bank run out of Cypriot banks when they reopen on Tuesday morning.

If they can do it there, they can do it anywhere:

And of course it’s not only Cyprus where a bank run is a very real fear. If bank deposits can be seized in Cyprus, they can be seized in other EU countries as well. Ed Conway has a fantastic post explaining exactly why this is a horrible idea:

Given that this policy was not merely rubber-stamped but engineered by Eurozone finance ministers and the IMF (indeed, the IMF wanted an even deeper cut of deposits), it sends a disquieting message to anyone with deposits in a euro area bank. Although the ministers were quick to insist that this is a one-off and is “exceptional”, anyone even vaguely acquainted with the initial Greek bail-outs will remember precisely how long such exceptions last.

“The best the rest of the world can hope for,” says Neil Irwin, “is that Cyprus’s case is sufficiently unique that it won’t spark panic in Athens and Madrid (or in Lisbon, Dublin and Rome).” But his post is headlined “Why today’s Cyprus bailout could be the start of the next financial crisis”, which gives a reasonably good idea of how optimistic he is that any bank run in Cyprus will be contained.

Fasten your seatbelts.  It might be a bumpy week.

“Shoot! It’s just pop …”

by digby

Chris Hayes and his guests talked a little bit about the Bloomberg Big Gulp ban yesterday and it’s interesting to see just how difficult this topic is:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

As someone who gave up sugar a while back and feels amazingly better for it (and a whole lot lighter) I can personally attest to to the fact that it is a major problem. In fact, to me it acts like a drug. I think it has that effect on a lot of people. Anyway, I’m not going to say that Bloomberg’s plan makes much sense on its own but there is a problem here that we are going to have to grapple with. A friend of mine teaches 6 year olds and the majority of them are obese. That’s just heartbreaking.

 I’ve been sending this article from the NY Times magazine called “The extraordinary science of addictive junk food” around to people I know because it just blew my mind. The similarities between what the tobacco companies did to get people hooked on cigarettes and what these food manufacturers are doing to addict kids to sugar and processed food is eerie. It is creating untold amounts of suffering and heartache — not to mention money. And yet it’s terribly difficult to talk about. Who wants to be a food Nazi?

One thing is clear. A certain number of our brethren consider even talking about this to be an infringement on their personal freedom. Apparently, even little children must be granted the individual liberty to be addicted to junk food. Here’s mother of the year expressing it as only she can:

Halfway through her speech, while describing exchanging guns with her husband Todd for Christmas, the former Alaska governor pulled out a Big Gulp from behind the podium, smirked, took several sips, and remarked, “Oh Bloomberg is not around, our Big Gulp is safe! We’re cool. Shoot, it’s just pop!”

Yeah, it’s just pop. Just like water only really, really unhealthy. You know, these people want to go back to the good old days, but I remember them well and back then the norm was for moms to want their kids to eat vegetables and pop wasn’t one of the major food groups. I guess the village raising our kids today has other ideas. Too bad for the kids — and the adults they’re going to be.

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The new face of austerity: account holder seizures in Cyprus

by David Atkins

The U.S. is largely ignoring it, but there’s a terrifying new wrinkle in the austerity business: in exchange for another bailout for Cyprus, the E.U. is directly seizing funds from the accounts of regular people with money in Cypriot banks. No, that’s not a joke.

Cypriots reacted with shock that turned to panic on Saturday after a 10% one-off levy on savings was forced on them as part of an extraordinary 10bn euro (£8.7bn) bailout agreed in Brussels.

People rushed to banks and queued at cash machines that refused to release cash as resentment quickly set in. The savers, half of whom are thought to be non-resident Russians, will raise almost €6bn thanks to a deal reached by European partners and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). It is the first time a bailout has included such a measure and Cyprus is the fifth country after Greece, the Republic of Ireland, Portugal and Spain to turn to the eurozone for financial help during the region’s debt crisis. The move in the eurozone’s third smallest economy could have repercussions for financially overstretched bigger economies such as Spain and Italy.

People with less than 100,000 euros in their accounts will have to pay a one-time tax of 6.75%, Eurozone officials said, while those with greater sums will lose 9.9%. Without a rescue, president Nicos Anastasiades said Cyprus would default and threaten to unravel investor confidence in the eurozone. The Cypriot leader, who was elected last month on a promise to tackle the country’s debt crisis, will make a statement to the nation on Sunday.

This policy of directly punishing the middle class and poor for the sins of the banking establishment by simply stealing their money is a new and striking development. How creating a run on banks is supposed to help the Cypriot economy out of recession is anybody’s guess.

This is a global insanity. One day the world will look back and wonder how any of it happened, and why no one listened to the Keynesians. But when that day comes, we’ll just be on to the next insanity. Progressives are only ever allowed to be right, grudgingly, in retrospect.

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A recent Attorney General dives deep into the fever swamp

by digby

Chuck Schumer once suggested this man for a seat on the Supreme Court and was backed up by the Alliance for Justice:

“You may not be interested in Islamism, but Islamism is interested in you,” warned former Attorney General Michael Mukasey at a Saturday CPAC panel of activists so fringy that they were not technically invited to the conference.

“I want to thank CPAC for making this panel necessary,” said the Bush-era attorney general, taking a sarcastic swipe at the organization for frowning on the panelists. “And thank Breitbart.com for making this panel possible.”

The “Uninvited” panel, organized by Breitbart media, brought together anti-Muslim activists like Pam Geller and Robert Spencer, and Mukasey fit right in.

“The vast majority of the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims adhere to a view of their religion that agrees on the need to impose Sharia, or Islamic law, on the world,” he said.
[…]
Outside, as I sat at a table to file this report, Mukasey held court with admirers. A reporter from Breitbart media asked Mukasey to repeat his endorsement of the conservative media empire into a camera, which he did with gusto, expounding extemporaneously about the value of the conservative news site. He told another fan that he reads Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin “all the time.”

In a bizarre “only at CPAC” moment, Brandon Darby came to introduce himself to Mukasey. Darby was a radical leftist activist who became an FBI informant under Mukasey and now works for Breitbart. He thanked the former for all the help the Department of Justice provided to him as an informant.

For some reason this just depressed the hell out of me. It’s not because I ever had any love for Mukasey — in fact my instincts always warned me against him. But a very recent Attorney General of the United States consorting with the likes of Breitbart and blabbering on about Sharia law? WTH?

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QOTD: Gene Sperling

by digby

Actually this is from a couple of days ago during his Reddit chat:

On “The West Wing” — I always have answered that it is pretty realistic, except that we are not as funny, don’t walk as fast and most of us are not as good looking. The West Wing show aimed for reality, except that they often have to condense a 9 month process to 60 minutes. When President Obama asked me how life in the first six months of his administration during the financial crisis compared to normal times — I gave the same reply: that we were being forced to do 9 months of policy work in what seemed like 60 minutes.

What I liked most about The West Wing — and what was most realistic to me — was that instead of portraying people in Washington as either cynical or naive, our boss, Aaron Sorkin did a great job at portraying serious and deeply committed and well-intentioned people trying to do good things in what is a very difficult, complex and political environment. That is how I think most of us — on both sides of the aisle — see our efforts. The West Wing captured that and I think it has inspired many young people to go into public service.

Finally, for me the best thing about 4 years of consulting and part-time writing for the West Wing is that it is how I met my wife Allison Abner. She was a writer on the show, and I met her the first day in my interview.

Ok.. that was a fun one, now back to the real West Wing issues…..

My oh my, these people do think highly of themselves don’t they?

The West Wing was a sappy television show about a fictional White House. It was a formulaic as they come, except it had some good snappy dialog. It’s nice that it portrayed the government as being filled with “deeply committed and well-intentioned people trying to do good things in a very difficult, complex and political environment.” I’m sure everyone enjoyed believing that. But it is not real, and any sense among these people in the White House that they are the heroes of our national political drama is just plain puerile. And kind of dangerous, to be honest. That kind of over-weening self-regard doesn’t exactly lend itself to the questioning of one’s assumptions. (Like whether or not we need to keep pursuing the White Whale of a Grand Bargain no matter what the circumstances.)

A little humility among our leading lights would be so refreshing right now. After all, it’s not as if things aren’t monumentally fucked up in nearly every way.

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The states’ rights scab covering the wound that will not heal

by digby

There’s a lot of chit-chat today about that bizarre panel on race relations at CPAC I wrote about yesterday. This piece by Benjy Sarlin is particularly colorful.

Here’s a little reminder of part of what went down:

Scott Terry of North Carolina, accompanied by a Confederate-flag-clad attendee, Matthew Heimbach, rose to say he took offense to the event’s take on slavery. (Heimbach founded the White Students Union at Towson University and is described as a “white nationalist” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.)

“It seems to be that you’re reaching out to voters at the expense of young white Southern males,” Terry said, adding he “came to love my people and culture” who were “being systematically disenfranchised.”

Smith responded that Douglass forgave his slavemaster.

“For giving him shelter? And food?” Terry said.

Lovely. The participants were very angry with … a black reporter who asked questions at this panel. This fine fellow is presumably still wandering the halls.

As it happens I was just reading this piece over at Salon about the endurance of the confederate myth, which gives us a little important reminder about this story:

The Civil War is like a mountain range that guards all roads into the South: you can’t go there without encountering it. Specifically, you can’t go there without addressing a question that may seem as if it shouldn’t even be a question—to wit: what caused the war? One hundred and fifty years after the event, Americans—at least the vast majority who toil outside academia—still can’t agree. Evidence of this crops up all the time, often in the form of a legal dispute over a display of the Confederate flag. (As I write, there are two such cases pending—one in Oregon and the other in Florida, making this an average news week.) Another common forum is the classroom. But it’s not always about the Stars and Bars. In 2010, for instance, Texas school officials made the news by insisting that Jefferson Davis’s inaugural address be given equal prominence with Abraham Lincoln’s in that state’s social studies curriculum. The following year, Virginia school officials were chagrined to learn that one of their state-adopted textbooks was teaching fourth graders that thousands of loyal slaves took up arms for the confederacy.

At the bottom of all of these is one basic question: was the Civil War about slavery, or states’ rights?

Popular opinion favors the latter theory. In the spring of 2011, in recognition of the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, pollsters at the Pew Research Center asked: “What is your impression of the main cause of the Civil War?” Thirty-eight percent of the respondents said the main cause was the South’s defense of an economic system based on slavery, while nearly half—48 percent—said the nation sacrificed some 650,000 of its fathers, sons, and brothers over a difference of interpretation in constitutional law. White non-Southerners believed this in roughly the same proportion as white Southerners, which was interesting; even more fascinating was the fact that 39 percent of the black respondents, many of them presumably the descendants of slaves, did, too.

We pause here to note that wars are complex events whose causes can never be adequately summed up in a phrase, that they can start out as one thing and evolve into another, and that what people think they are fighting for isn’t always the cause history will record. Yet, as Lincoln noted in his second inaugural address, there was never any doubt that the billions of dollars in property represented by the South’s roughly four million slaves was somehow at the root of everything, and on this point scholars who don’t agree about much of anything else have long found common ground. “No respected historian has argued for decades that the Civil War was fought over tariffs, that abolitionists were mere hypocrites, or that only constitutional concerns drove secessionists,” writes University of Virginia historian Edward Ayers. Yet there’s a vast chasm between this long-established scholarly consensus and the views of millions of presumably educated Americans, who hold to a theory that relegates slavery to, at best, incidental status. How did this happen?

One reason boils down to simple convenience—for white people, that is. In his 2002 book “Race and Reunion,” Yale historian David Blight describes a national fervor for “reconciliation” that began in the 1880s and lasted through the end of World War I, fueled in large part by the South’s desire to attract industry, Northern investors’ desire to make money, and the desire of white people everywhere to push “the Negro question” aside. In the process, the real causes of the war were swept under the rug, the better to facilitate economic partnerships and sentimental reunions of Civil War veterans.

But an equally important reason was a vigorous, sustained effort by Southerners to literally rewrite history—and among the most ardent revisionists were a group of respectable white Southern matrons known as the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

That white supremacist at the panel yesterday (and yes, he is the real thing) going on about how slaves should be grateful they were given food and shelter didn’t get the memo. Slavery is supposed to be irrelevant. The Civil War was about freeeeeeedom.

I know why so many Americans believe this, at least those of a certain age. I went to the 8th grade here in California and we spent the entire year on the Civil War. (My particular project was about the Lincoln-Douglas debates.) The teacher was emphatic that the “war between the states” was about states’ rights. We talked about slavery — I’m pretty sure someone did their project on the subject along with subjects such as the Monitor and the Merrimac and Matthew Brady. But it certainly was not the focus of the year-long study nor was it ever considered as the reason for the war. I suspect I’m not the only one whose earliest and, for many, their most comprehensive lesson about the civil war was that one.

This wasn’t the South, it was the San Francisco bay area in the 1970s. Hopefully things have changed and the standard curriculum for school kids everywhere is more balanced. But that’s what a whole lot of us learned at a young age for a very long time in this country. It seems crazy to me now, but I was just a kid. I assumed they were telling me the truth. Lucky for me I learned otherwise from different teachers but I wonder how many other people just learned this in school and that was that.

This belief in “states’ rights” undergirds much of the modern conservative project, mostly as a result of the redrawing of partisan lines in the wake of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. But it’s more than that isn’t it? It’s the scab that keeps getting picked by people like that creepy racist at CPAC and the wound just never heals.

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10 years on: the press reconsiders

by digby

If he’s a cowboy, he’s the reluctant warrior, the Shane in the movie, strapping on the guns as the last resort because he has to, to protect his family, drawing on the emotions of 9/11, tying them to Saddam Hussein, using the possible or likely rejection vote from the U.N. as a badge of honor. — Howard Fineman 3/6/03

That’s probably his most famous quote. But it wasn’t the only one extolling the virtues of our manly president. One of the most notorious pieces of the Iraq run-up for me was this one in TIME, which epitomized the press’s fawning crush on George W. Bush:

FINEMAN (11/27/01): So who are the Bushes, really? Well, they’re the people who produced the fellow who sat with me and my Newsweek colleague, Martha Brant, for his first interview since 9/11. We saw, among other things, a leader who is utterly comfortable in his role. Bush envelops himself in the trappings of office. Maybe that’s because he’s seen it from the inside since his dad served as Reagan’s vice president in the ‘80s. The presidency is a family business.

Dubyah loves to wear the uniform—whatever the correct one happens to be for a particular moment. I counted no fewer than four changes of attire during the day trip we took to Fort Campbell in Kentucky and back. He arrived for our interview in a dark blue Air Force One flight jacket. When he greeted the members of Congress on board, he wore an open-necked shirt. When he had lunch with the troops, he wore a blue blazer. And when he addressed the troops, it was in the flight jacket of the 101st Airborne. He’s a boomer product of the ‘60s—but doesn’t mind ermine robes.

Today Fineman writes about that interview and the media’s failure after 9/11:

The conference room on Air Force One looks like any other conference room, except that the chairs at the big oak table slide on tracks and have seat belts.

On Thanksgiving 2001, I was sitting in one of those chairs across from President George W. Bush. Operation Enduring Freedom, the U.S.-led assault on the Taliban in Afghanistan, was going well, and the president was on his way to Fort Campbell in Kentucky to share a Thanksgiving meal with the members of the 101st Airborne.

It was his first major interview after 9/11. He had talked about “evil” and “evildoers,” so in my role then as a Newsweek reporter, I asked him if Saddam Hussein, longtime ruler of Iraq, was “evil.” He glanced at his aides around the table and said nothing.

But after a minute, after we’d moved on to another topic, he decided to blurt out an answer. “Saddam Hussein is evil,” he said, with the air of a student talking out of turn. “He’s evil.”[…]

In his latest effort to defend the war, Cheney declared to filmmaker R.J. Cutler that the Iraq War was justified because the U.S. eliminated a regime that might have at some future time posed a threat.
How did we allow that warped vision to drive us into war?

When I say “we,” I mean the decision-making machinery of Washington, including elected lawmakers, appointed officials and the national media. Too few questions were asked, too many assumptions were allowed to go unchallenged, too many voices of doubt were muffled or rejected in a toxic atmosphere of patriotism, ignorance and political fear.

I can speak from my own experience of what was not so much a “rush” but a steady, inexorable march.

It began with fear and, for some journalists including me, misguided patriotism. Washington and New York, the centers of the American media, had been attacked on 9/11. We all knew, or knew of, people who had been killed. We had only one president, and as incurious and unprepared as he was, there was a natural desire to see him somehow grow in office to meet the moment.

Of course for journalists, the most patriotic thing we can do is our jobs — which meant that we all should have doubled down on skepticism and tough questions. Some did. I wish I could say that I was one of them.

He certainly wasn’t one of them. Indeed, he was a very reliable, enthusiastic mouthpiece for the administration:

The Bush White House, as reporters Michael Isikoff and David Corn so ably documented in their book Hubris, relentlessly and cynically sold the phony details of Saddam’s “weapons of mass destruction.” Even Gen. Colin Powell, then secretary of state and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was taken in.[even Colin Powell was “taken in!”]

Yes, it is true that when a government decides to lie and does it systematically, it isn’t easy to pull back the curtain. And yet too many people in and out of government believed what they wanted to believe or felt it convenient to believe.

Many of the naysayers moved within the orbit of the CIA, which was denounced by the Bush-Cheney neoconservatives as an agency full of incompetent weaklings. Members of the press with vast experience and deep CIA contacts became some of the loudest critics of the idea of attacking Iraq, yet many were ignored precisely because of their sources.

Indeed. And some reporters happily did the administration’s dirty work for them. Here’s a little quote from Fineman from 2003:

I am told by what I regard as a very reliable source inside the White House that aides there did, in fact, try to peddle the identity of Joe Wilson’s wife to several reporters. But the motive wasn’t revenge or intimidation so much as a desire to explain why, in their view, Wilson wasn’t a neutral investigator, but, a member of the CIA’s leave-Saddam-in-place team.

It actually makes you yearn for he said/she said, doesn’t it? At least the other side would be represented. The good news is that he’s learned something from all this:

As for me, I could say that I was covering politics, not war, and that it wasn’t my job to try to pierce the veil of lies and “precog” justifications of the Bush-Cheney-neocon axis.

But the war was politics. It was a new battle for the president to be seen fighting as he headed toward a reelection run. I should have known more, studied more, asked more questions and been more skeptical.

I hope I am wiser now. I hope we all are.

Well, I don’t travel in the corridors of power like Fineman, so I suppose I had the advantage of not needing to flatter the men and women who will feed me information to uncritically regurgitate. But, to me, it didn’t take a professional journalist to see that George W. Bush and the Cheney cabal were warmongering liars. After all, they’d signaled their intentions for years. It was even on the internet.

I hope he’s wiser too, but I’m not getting my hopes up:

Among his other attributes, Jay Carney is a cool dancer. I know that because I saw him and his wife, Claire Shipman, getting down on the tented dance floor of a fancy Georgetown wedding years ago. Jay Carney, who went to Yale and was a foreign correspondent in Moscow, is — besides being smart, savvy, loyal and well-connected with the right sort — suave.

Why bring this up? Because by choosing him as his new press secretary, President Barack Obama has completed his swift and thorough transition from crusading outsider to shrewd insider as he prepares to deal with the wild folk of the Tea Party, Karl Rove and the Republican kneecappers, and an electorate still fearful that the world is spinning out of control.

Say this about Obama: He is adaptable, he is a survivor and he has a supreme desire to win.

He is setting up his reelection campaign back in Chicago, but that is an expensive piece of window dressing unlikely to convince people that he is somehow still, if he ever was, a guy from the heartland. David Axelrod and the gang will be back in the Windy City, but the operation will be run by a Chicagoan-cum-Washingtonian with national and even global ties — Bill Daley — and a cadre of the best and the brightest of the Clinton administration who came to the city to do good and stayed to do well.

Obama came to the White House in the manner of Jimmy Carter, with whom he was, early on, mistakenly compared. But while Carter never expanded his circle beyond the “Georgians,” Obama has, with stunning swiftness, retooled his administration to play hardball in the D.C. League.

At least he doesn’t have him wearing epauletts and ermine. Baby steps.

And lest you think that’s just a harmless little beat sweetener, fear no more. He’s right there, once again, with the party line:

FINEMAN: “And if we’re going to be cutting Medicare at some point, which I think most voters understand, I think right now looking at these alternatives they’d rather have a Democrat they know than a Republican who never supported the program to begin with.”

Those are White House talking points. The one thing you can say for Fineman is that he’s no partisan. He faithfully transcribes whatever the powerful people in Washington tell him and presents it as his own view. That’s useful, actually. As long as you don’t confuse it with journalism.

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