Month: August 2013

“This ain’t reality TV”

by digby

So Whitey Bulger was found guilty today. No surprise there, I suppose:

James “Whitey” Bulger played the criminal game for generations, played it better than most, played it as well as anyone in the last 50 years, played it for so long that he surely knew how it would all turn out. Will he speak at his sentencing in a way that gives comfort to all those whose lives he cruelly touched? Don’t bet on it. He’s far more likely to go down true to his career, to his horrific choices and to his conscience. That’s surely no consolation to the family and friends of his victims who showed up in court every day. But of course that was the whole point of this remarkable life of crime.

I think the more interesting story surrounding Bulger is actually this one about the FBI agent who used him (and was used) as a confidential informant for years. His tale is chilling in more ways than one:

He developed and handled two secret informants: Irish mobster James “Whitey” Bulger and Bulger’s partner, Stephen “the Rifleman” Flemmi. In May 2002, a federal jury convicted Connolly of racketeering and obstruction of justice—of being part of Bulger’s mob—and of tipping Bulger and Flemmi to their secret indictment in 1994. (Flemmi claims he and Bulger gave Connolly $235,000 for his services, all told.)

Bulger fled Boston before the cops came with arrest warrants. Flemmi didn’t get out in time. When it became clear that no one in the FBI or Justice Department could protect him, Flemmi finally agreed to talk in 2003. But Connolly never has. And because he didn’t cut a deal—like so many mobsters who testified against him in exchange for lighter sentences—because he “refused to lie,” he says, as the Justice Department wanted him to, Connolly is serving a maximum sentence of 10 years.

“The Department of Justice threw him under the bus,” says Bob Fitzpatrick, the commander of the FBI’s organized-crime squad and Connolly’s former boss.
The charges he was convicted of, however, pale in comparison with those he faces today. This month Connolly is scheduled for trial on a claim that in 1982 he plotted and committed murder in the first degree, by telling the Bulger mob that if a potential witness sang they were all going to prison.

At Connolly’s last pretrial hearing in July, the black hair had gone gray, the face was puffy, and the once-flashy wardrobe was reduced to a rumpled red jumpsuit. Under the judge’s questions, he showed none of his trademark arrogance or the anger he lets slip during collect calls. Connolly instead nearly entreated the judge to see things his way. “I’m innocent. I’m pleading not guilty.”

Connolly says he’s being framed by the same justice system that once commended his work, which is also the same justice system that failed to prosecute the misdeeds of his fellow agents. This trial, like the last, will hinge upon one corrupt supervisor, but also career criminals who have dealt themselves out of the death penalty or long prison sentences by agreeing to testify. If convicted, Connolly is likely to spend the rest of his life in prison. And yet the mobsters who’ve become partners in his prosecution collectively account for about five dozen murders and are, with one exception, out on the street or headed there soon. It appears John Connolly must atone for the sins of everyone: the mobsters, the Justice Department, and the FBI.

There’s something very creepy about this whole thing. I hold no brief for authorities who do this sort of thing — anyone with integrity would have said no. But there’s something wrong with the fact that this guy is going to spend more time in prison than actual murderers. (On the other hand, that happens all the time doesn’t it? It’s just that the lower level types who take the fall usually aren’t former FBI agents.)

Anyway, it’s an interesting story. From Bulger’s behavior in court it would appear that the horrifying Jack Nicholson character in The Departed, which was modeled on him, was pretty true to life:

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A good day for criminal justice in America

by digby

Some good news this morning on the criminal justice front: Eric Holder announces some reforms that could make a difference — if they’re actually implemented:

As we come together this morning, this same promise must lead us all to acknowledge that – although incarceration has a significant role to play in our justice system – widespread incarceration at the federal, state, and local levels is both ineffective and unsustainable. It imposes a significant economic burden – totaling $80 billion in 2010 alone – and it comes with human and moral costs that are impossible to calculate.

As a nation, we are coldly efficient in our incarceration efforts. While the entire U.S. population has increased by about a third since 1980, the federal prison population has grown at an astonishing rate – by almost 800 percent. It’s still growing – despite the fact that federal prisons are operating at nearly 40 percent above capacity. Even though this country comprises just 5 percent of the world’s population, we incarcerate almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. More than 219,000 federal inmates are currently behind bars. Almost half of them are serving time for drug-related crimes, and many have substance use disorders. Nine to 10 million more people cycle through America’s local jails each year. And roughly 40 percent of former federal prisoners – and more than 60 percent of former state prisoners – are rearrested or have their supervision revoked within three years after their release, at great cost to American taxpayers and often for technical or minor violations of the terms of their release.

As a society, we pay much too high a price whenever our system fails to deliver outcomes that deter and punish crime, keep us safe, and ensure that those who have paid their debts have the chance to become productive citizens. Right now, unwarranted disparities are far too common. As President Obama said last month, it’s time to ask tough questions about how we can strengthen our communities, support young people, and address the fact that young black and Latino men are disproportionately likely to become involved in our criminal justice system – as victims as well as perpetrators.

We also must confront the reality that – once they’re in that system – people of color often face harsher punishments than their peers. One deeply troubling report, released in February, indicates that – in recent years – black male offenders have received sentences nearly 20 percent longer than those imposed on white males convicted of similar crimes. This isn’t just unacceptable – it is shameful. It’s unworthy of our great country, and our great legal tradition. And in response, I have today directed a group of U.S. Attorneys to examine sentencing disparities, and to develop recommendations on how we can address them.

In this area and many others – in ways both large and small – we, as a country, must resolve to do better. The President and I agree that it’s time to take a pragmatic approach. And that’s why I am proud to announce today that the Justice Department will take a series of significant actions to recalibrate America’s federal criminal justice system.

We will start by fundamentally rethinking the notion of mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related crimes. Some statutes that mandate inflexible sentences – regardless of the individual conduct at issue in a particular case – reduce the discretion available to prosecutors, judges, and juries. Because they oftentimes generate unfairly long sentences, they breed disrespect for the system. When applied indiscriminately, they do not serve public safety. They – and some of the enforcement priorities we have set – have had a destabilizing effect on particular communities, largely poor and of color. And, applied inappropriately, they are ultimately counterproductive.

This is why I have today mandated a modification of the Justice Department’s charging policies so that certain low-level, nonviolent drug offenders who have no ties to large-scale organizations, gangs, or cartels will no longer be charged with offenses that impose draconian mandatory minimum sentences. They now will be charged with offenses for which the accompanying sentences are better suited to their individual conduct, rather than excessive prison terms more appropriate for violent criminals or drug kingpins. By reserving the most severe penalties for serious, high-level, or violent drug traffickers, we can better promote public safety, deterrence, and rehabilitation – while making our expenditures smarter and more productive. We’ve seen that this approach has bipartisan support in Congress – where a number of leaders, including Senators Dick Durbin, Patrick Leahy, Mike Lee, and Rand Paul have introduced what I think is promising legislation aimed at giving federal judges more discretion in applying mandatory minimums to certain drug offenders. Such legislation will ultimately save our country billions of dollars while keeping us safe. And the President and I look forward to working with members of both parties to refine and advance these proposals.

Secondly, the Department has now updated its framework for considering compassionate release for inmates facing extraordinary or compelling circumstances – and who pose no threat to the public. In late April, the Bureau of Prisons expanded the criteria which will be considered for inmates seeking compassionate release for medical reasons. Today, I can announce additional expansions to our policy – including revised criteria for elderly inmates who did not commit violent crimes and who have served significant portions of their sentences. Of course, as our primary responsibility, we must ensure that the American public is protected from anyone who may pose a danger to the community. But considering the applications of nonviolent offenders – through a careful review process that ultimately allows judges to consider whether release is warranted – is the fair thing to do. And it is the smart thing to do as well, because it will enable us to use our limited resources to house those who pose the greatest threat.

Finally, my colleagues and I are taking steps to identify and share best practices for enhancing the use of diversion programs – such as drug treatment and community service initiatives – that can serve as effective alternatives to incarceration.

Our U.S. Attorneys are leading the way in this regard – working alongside the judiciary to meet safety imperatives while avoiding incarceration in certain cases. In South Dakota, a joint federal-tribal program has helped to prevent at-risk young people from getting involved in the federal prison system – thereby improving lives, saving taxpayer resources, and keeping communities safer. This is exactly the kind of proven innovation that federal policymakers, and state and tribal leaders, should emulate. And it’s why the Justice Department is working – through a program called the Justice Reinvestment Initiative – to bring state leaders, local stakeholders, private partners, and federal officials together to comprehensively reform corrections and criminal justice practices.

Now if the president can order the DEA to let up on federal enforcement of stupid drug laws, especially in states which have legalized marijuana to one degree or another, we will begin to see a very welcome change in policy and practice.

In other news, a district court judge ruled today that New York’s notorious “stop and frisk” policy is discriminatory. As was obvious. The much beloved (by way too many liberals) Mayor Bloomberg vociferously disagreed:

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

As did potential Homeland Security chief Ray Kelly:

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

Government officials keep telling us that certain things that are obviously happening cannot
happen because they are illegal and the people who are being accused are trustworthy people.
It’s the old “you can believe us or you can believe your lying eyes” theory of democracy. I didn’t like it under George W. Bush and I’m not crazy about it now.

Holder, at least, was refreshing in his candor about America’s obscene incarceration rate. That’s unusual in a time when leaders like Bloomberg basically tell us that it’s necessary to roust, arrest and imprison huge numbers of people, mostly racial and ethnic minorities (totally random, dontcha know) so that we can “feel safe.” He’s proud of it.

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A Village full of activists

by digby

Glenn Greenwald asks a good question:

Since we first began reporting on NSA stories, there has been much debate over who is and is not a “journalist” and whether being a journalist requires “objectivity” (i.e., a pretense to not having opinions). Under this metric, does Bob Schieffer qualify?
[…]

I know eleven people who died or lost a member of their family on 9/11. My younger daughter lived in Manhattan then. It was six hours before we knew she was safe. I’m not interested in going through that again. I don’t know yet if the government has over-reached since 9/11 to reinforce our defenses, and we need to find out. What I do know, though, is that these procedures were put in place and are being overseen by officials we elected and we should hold them accountable.

“I think what we have in Edward Snowden is just a narcissistic young man who has decided he is smarter than the rest of us. I don’t know what he is beyond that, but he is no hero. If he has a valid point — and I’m not even sure he does — he would greatly help his cause by voluntarily coming home to face the consequences.”

How come you’re allowed to have that opinion and be an “objective journalist”? How come none of the people so very upset that those who are reporting on the NSA stories have opinions are objecting to any of that or calling the TV host an “activist”?

He answers his own question and it’s obvious: journalists are allowed to voice opinions that agree with the power structure. Indeed, they don’t even voice them in their own words — “narcissistic”, “no hero”, “come home and face the consequences” has been the mantra of the power elite in Washington ever since the Snowden revelations. The machinery of the political establishment and the government is being put to the task of making Americans “comfortable” with living under secret surveillance and marginalizing those who object. (That was certainly the upshot of the president’s comments last Friday.) And the political press is largely not questioning this notion — they are abetting it.

Much of the political press corps and nearly all of the professional commentariat has proven itself to be highly opinionated and “activist” — on behalf of the government.

*Read Greenwald’s piece. It’s about the Strangelovian creep Michael Hayden and his celebrity status among the Villagers. The fact that he’s making millions of dollars from making Americans feel “comfortable” about giving up their civil liberties (by scaring the pants off them repeatedly) is rarely disclosed. But why would it need to be? The Villagers all vouch for him like he’s a brother.

And anyway, could you really trust a man who doesn’t leverage his national security contacts and celebrity status to make himself a millionaire? What red-blooded American patriot wouldn’t?

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Ticking time bomb in New Jersey

by digby

Ari Melber wrote up a nice concise piece last week about why New Jersey voters should be concerned about Corey Booker’s “extracurricular” business ventures. The rap on them has been that he should have been more transparent and that it presents conflict of interest. Melber points out that while Booker failed to disclose his ties to the company in any official way, he’s been tweeting about it and talking about it to the press so some interpret that be be transparent enough. (I think there’s something very suspect about failing to note the huge sums of money your allegedly highly public business venture brought you on your financial disclosure forms, but maybe that’s just me.)

The conflict of interest charges are something else. There is just no doubt that this is a problem:

Let’s start with why we have rules for campaigns. Donations to campaigns have a huge impact on politicians’ careers, so they are legally limited to reduce the risk of corruption.

It’s illegal to give a candidate $100,000 for his campaign, for example, because that much direct cash could make the candidate overly indebted to one person – or risk appearing too indebted. (The legal standard for this line is “appearance of impropriety,” the idea that politicians and institutions lose legitimacy if a conflict looks shady to the public, even if it’s only an appearance.)

Likewise, it’s illegal to give most politicians large gifts. You can buy a U.S. senator a T-shirt, if you’re not a lobbyist or foreign agent, but not a suit. (The gift cap is $50.)
But what about “giving” a candidate a large “investment” in his company?

The same concerns apply – the large amount of money can corrupt the candidate, with far more personal impact than campaign cash, or it could simply feed a public perception of corruption.

Depending on the company, the politician might garner “investments” because of his power in government, not actual interest in the company. Those “investments” might look more like gifts – a backdoor for people who want to get around rules on gifts and campaign donations. And those investor/donors could wield special influence over the candidate.
Booker’s bottom line

Do any of these concerns apply to Booker?

That partly depends what you think of Waywire. After reviewing its business model, reporter Tim Fernholz concludes that it probably didn’t “attract investments from Silicon Valley’s brightest on its own merits,” raising the prospect that Booker used his power “to raise money for himself.”

Plenty of financiers would object, however, that few ventures raise money on a pure “merit” test, sans rolodex. Especially for start-ups, investments can represent a bet on the people launching an idea as much as a bet on the idea itself. (That’s how Jay-Z explains his profitable brand: “I’m not a businessman – I’m a business, man!)

Still, that defense is less available to Booker, who stresses that he doesn’t run the company. In political terms, Booker was never Waywire’s campaign manager — he was its fundraising director.

Perhaps this could be overlooked if it weren’t for this example of his public servility to the big money boyz what brung him:

As political readers will remember, because it was a huge deal at the time, Booker went on Meet The Press and defended private equity investors against criticism from the Obama campaign. Many politicos were mystified at why a top Obama surrogate would pick that moment to strongly defend Bain Capital. Booker said the president’s attack on private equity was “nauseating,” and equated criticism of its business practices on the Left to conservative attacks on Jeremiah Wright. The White House was livid, as was the Democratic base.

No one can read Booker’s mind, and to be fair, he’s not exactly the first politician who can be challenged for prioritizing the priorities of the donor class. But it’s fair to ask whether, faced with a democracy that already gives huge influence to political donors, we want politicians to dream up new ways to connect with elite investors, especially if it’s unclear what exactly they want to invest in.

Let’s just say that someone with this record and a willingness to publicly buck his own president and the Democratic Party in a hard fought campaign sounds like Wall Street’s buying itself its own Joe Lieberman.

It will not surprise me if there’s more trouble brewing along these lines. He has no shame when it comes to courting the 1% and who knows what sort of deals have been made? (It was just reported that he failed to disclose long term payouts from his former law firm as well.) What else is out there? And even if it’s all strictly legal, it sure looks like Booker doesn’t care much about the appearance of being crooked which doesn’t bode well for a US Senate candidate. It’s not impossible that the Democrats’ worst nightmare could come true and another big shoe could drop before the general election, allowing the Republican nightmare candidate to take this seat by default. He’s a ticking time bomb.

And that sad thing is that New Jersey has real honest and progressive candidates for this seat who would do justice to Frank Lautenberg’s legacy. And none more than Congressman Rush Holt.

Update:  Susie Madrak at Crooks and Liars has the full bill of indictment against Booker.  It’s worse than I thought.

Mrs Obama and the wonderdog

by digby

Is he cute or what??? (She’s pretty cute too …)

Join the First Lady & help @NatGeo reach a Guinness World Record for the largest #animal photo album. #GreatNature pic.twitter.com/3zGQjnYshJ— FLOTUS (@FLOTUS) August 10, 2013

I hear Drudge is having his usual August hissy fit because they transported Bo for the First Family vacation. Fuck him.

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Prepping us for the next boogeyman

by digby

Marcy Wheeler has been speculating for a very long time that the real purpose of all this NSA collection isn’t terrorism, it’s hacking. These comments last week from Michael Hayden lend a lot of credence to that theory in my eyes:

“If and when our government grabs Edward Snowden, and brings him back here to the United States for trial, what does this group do?” said retired air force general Michael Hayden, who from 1999 to 2009 ran the NSA and then the CIA, referring to “nihilists, anarchists, activists, Lulzsec, Anonymous, twentysomethings who haven’t talked to the opposite sex in five or six years”.

“They may want to come after the US government, but frankly, you know, the dot-mil stuff is about the hardest target in the United States,” Hayden said, using a shorthand for US military networks. “So if they can’t create great harm to dot-mil, who are they going after? Who for them are the World Trade Centers? The World Trade Centers, as they were for al-Qaida.”

That’s just a tiny bit overwrought for an allegedly serious expert, don’t you think? In fact, it sounds like the kind of thing we heard from various members of the Bush administration during the early days after 9/11. And it certainly indicates, as Wheeler has been speculating, that the government is stretching the terrorism laws to include hacking. They certainly are using the same histrionic language to describe it.

Under Hayden, the NSA began to collect, among other things, the phone records and internet data of Americans without warrants after 9/11, a drastic departure from its traditional mission of collecting foreign intelligence. A variety of technically sophisticated collection and analysis programs, codenamed Stellar Wind, were the genesis of several of the NSA efforts that Snowden disclosed to the Guardian and the Washington Post.

Hayden said that the loose coalition of hacker groups and activists were “less capable” of inflicting actual harm on either US networks or physical infrastructure, but they grow technologically more sophisticated. Echoing years of rhetoric that has described terrorists, Hayden added that their “demands may be unsatisfiable”.

I had a feeling that “terrorism” was growing a little stale as an all purpose boogeyman. It’s important to keep the paranoia fresh and exciting in this fast paced modern world.

Nonetheless it’s always rather startling to hear an esteemed national security expert talking like a member of the Soprano family in public. Perhaps the president should have a chat with some of these people since he’s so concerned about the fact that the public doesn’t have “confidence” in the efficacy and necessity of being spied upon. When the people who designed the programs sound like cheap thugs it tends to undermine their credibility just a little bit.

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The good news is that race had nothing to do with it

by digby

You remember this guy right? The guy who was all over TV for the past year as a “commentator” on the case?

In April 2012, two days before George Zimmerman was arrested for the shooting death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, he huddled with a fellow neighborhood watch volunteer, Frank Taaffe. According to Taaffe, who disclosed the meeting on Fox News, Zimmerman asked him to share “several talking points” with the media. Taaffe obliged. Indeed, as Zimmerman’s legal drama unfolded over the next year and a half, Taaffe emerged as his most visible and outspoken defender. He gave hundreds of interviews to media outlets, ranging from the New York Times to Fox News to CNN, and made near-daily appearances on cable news shows during Zimmerman’s trial.

Taaffe used this platform to cast Martin as a drug-addled hoodlum and Zimmerman as a community-minded do-gooder (“the best neighbor you would want to have”) who had every reason to suspect the black teen was up to mischief. He also railed against Zimmerman’s critics, whom he accused of staging a witch hunt. “It’s really sad that he has already been convicted in the public media and has already been sentenced to the gas chamber,” he lamented in an interview with NBC’s Miami affiliate last year.

Taaffe was hardly the ideal person to be weighing in on a case suffused with racial angst—or commenting on criminal-justice matters, period. A Mother Jones investigation has found that the 56-year-old New York native has a lengthy criminal record that includes charges of domestic violence and burglary, and a history of airing virulently racist views. Just last Sunday, he appeared on The White Voice, a weekly podcast hosted by a man named Joe Adams, who has deep, long-standing ties to white-power groups and has authored a manual called Save The White People Handbook. (Sample quote: “A mutt makes a great pet and a mulatto makes a great slave.”)

During a previous White Voice appearance, on July 27, Taaffe argued that whites and blacks have no business mingling. (“They don’t want to be with us and we don’t want to be with them.”) Taaffe also opined that if Zimmerman had racially profiled Martin, he was justified in doing so because “young black males” had burglarized homes in their neighborhood. “What if I—a middle-aged white man—wore a hoodie and went through Trayvon Martin’s neighborhood?” he asked defiantly. Adams replied that “no sane white person” would dare walk down their “local Marcus Garvey Boulevard.”

“I’d only be there for one or two things,” Taaffe shot back. “And I’m sure the vice squad would want to be interested in that.”

“This trial is waking up white America, man,” Taaffe told The White Voice.

Later, Taaffe accused African Americans of committing “self-genocide” by failing to address the “ills and diseases that are festering” in the black community—especially the absence of black fathers, which “leaves young black males growing up without direction.” And he bemoaned the fact that some white women choose to date black men, saying that they invariably end up becoming single mothers. “Guess who winds up paying the tab on that? You and me and the rest of America,” Taaffe grumbled. “It’s called entitlement, man. It’s called food stamps. It’s called welfare.”

George has some lovely friends.

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The Looney Tune from Newport Beach

by digby

Good grief:

ROHRBACHER: Just so you know, global warming is a total fraud and it is being designed by—what you’ve got is you’ve got liberals who get elected at the local level want state government to do the work and let them make the decisions. Then, at the state level, they want the federal government to do it. And at the federal government, they want to create global government to control all of our lives. That’s what the game plan is. It’s step by step by step, more and bigger control over our lives by higher levels of government. And global warming is that strategy in spades.… Our freedom to make our choices on transportation and everything else? No, that’s gotta be done by a government official who, by the way, probably comes from Nigeria because he’s a UN government official, not a US government official.

Lee Fang reports:

Rohrabacher also argued that government-funded scientists have received “so much money” for research that “they have used it to intimidate people who disagree with their attempt to frighten all of us into changing our lives and giving up our freedoms to make choices.” The sinister role of scientists, he claimed, is akin to the military industrial complex described by President Dwight Eisenhower in his farewell address. The conspiracy to destroy freedom is apparently very vast.

You cannot just blame this nonsense on the South or fundamentalist religion. This guy is from Newport Beach California.  That is not to say that Newport Beach is necessarily liberal but it is most certainly not culturally conservative.

This man has an ideology and the people who vote for him, no matter where they are, are just as nuts as those who who visit creationist museums and host purity balls.

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RIP Eydie

by digby

When I was a kid Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme were ubiquitous on TV. (Those were the days of ubiquitous variety shows.) I always liked them. They were slightly hokey but easily made fun of themselves. And she especially had a very fine voice.

Here they are at the height of their powers. (If you’re in the mood to watch, be sure to stick with it long enough to see the creepy commercials in the middle.) It’s a real Man Men time capsule (1967).

Here they are with the Chairman of the board a few years later:

And here they are doing a slightly demented yet oddly moving version of Soundgarden’s  “Black Hole Sun” (cleverly set to the original video)

Never say they weren’t versatile in their own way.

RIP Eydie. You were an under appreciated vocal talent.

Update: (This unfortunately unembeddable Youtube, had Steve and Eydie doing a medley of hits circa 1970. Classic.) And this was her big hit.

QOTD: Maureen Dowd

by digby

[W]e can’t hear ourselves think here this summer over the roar of the Clinton machine — and the buzzing back to life of old Clinton enemies.

Led by Maureen herself, of course, a writer who comes to life only when she’s got a gender stereotype to exploit and a sharp ax to grind. And nothing gets her poison juices flowing like Bill and Hillary Clinton. It’s painfully depressing to think about what she’s going to do over the next few years if Hillary does decide to run and then win. I think there’s a good chance I could wind up a broken down alcoholic from trying to deal with her columns alone.

I’ve been writing about Dowd’s toxic ouvre  for a very long time.  But she outdid herself during 2008. Here’s a recap from this blog I wrote just as the primary was coming to a close:

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Twisted Modo

by digby

The NYT public editor Clark Hoyt takes Maureen Dowd to task in today’s paper:

SOME supporters of Hillary Clinton believe that sexism colored news coverage of her presidential campaign. The Times reported in a front-page article on June 13 that many are proposing boycotts of cable news networks and that a “Media Hall of Shame” has been created by the National Organization for Women. 

The Times itself, however, was barely mentioned, even though two of its Op-Ed columnists, Maureen Dowd and William Kristol, were named in the Hall of Shame. 

Peggy Aulisio of South Dartmouth, Mass., said, “A real review of your own stories and columns is warranted.” I think so too. And I think a fair reading suggests that The Times did a reasonably good job in its news articles. But Dowd’s columns about Clinton’s campaign were so loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband that they could easily have been listed in that Times article on sexism, right along with the comments of Chris Matthews, Mike Barnicle, Tucker Carlson or, for that matter, Kristol, who made the Hall of Shame for a comment on Fox News, not for his Times work.

First of all, it isn’t just some Clinton supporters who think there was sexism involved in the primary season. There are plenty of Obama primary supporters who saw it too, and others, like me, who weren’t backing either candidate. This isn’t some sour grapes campaign and it irks me that people who talk about it continue to frame the issue this way.

Having said that, Hoyt’s criticism of Maureen Down is a welcome development. She has been polluting national political coverage with her gender caricatures for a couple of decades now and it’s time somebody from the paper said something. 

The amazing thing is that she’s so incredibly arrogant and insular that she doesn’t even realize what she’s done:

“I’ve been twisting gender stereotypes around for 24 years,” Dowd responded. She said nobody had objected to her use of similar images about men over seven presidential campaigns. She often refers to Barack Obama as “Obambi” and has said he has a “feminine” management style. But the relentless nature of her gender-laden assault on Clinton — in 28 of 44 columns since Jan. 1 — left many readers with the strong feeling that an impermissible line had been crossed, even though, as Dowd noted, she is a columnist who is paid not to be objective.

Maureen needs to read something written by other than her own personal friends once in a while. Plenty of people have objected to her “genderfication” of American politics for years, and I’m one of them. Her “twisting of gender stereotypes” has turned every Democrat into a mincing ponce or a blubbering mama’s boy and every Republican into a macho, scotch drinking throwback or an arrogant jock. You tell me which of those are classic leadership archetypes?

It took putting an actual female in the race to make anyone notice just how offensive her sexist caricatures really were. But they’ve always been offensive — and they’ve always been right in lock step with that stupid “mommy party/daddy party” crapola the wingnuts put to good use whenever they want to make Democrats look weak.

Seriously, tell me why this (via Batocchio), from right winger Michael Ramirez, is any different than what she writes every week-end?

Hoyt continues:

Andrew Rosenthal, the editor of the editorial page, said it was unfair to hold a columnist accountable for perceptions of bias in news coverage. A columnist is supposed to present strong opinions, he said, and “a thorough reading of Maureen’s work shows that she does that without regard to gender, partisanship or ideology.”

Utter nonsense. These negative “feminine” stereotypes not only perpetuate noxious myths about female and gay leadership abilities in the culture at large, they consistently favor the right wing authoritarian philosophy. Dowd always says she’s speaking truth to power, but her obsession with “playing with gender” actually serves power very, very well. She and her editors may be so dazzled by puerile cutsiness like “Obama is like an anorexic starlet,” to even know that she’s being partisan, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t. It plays perfectly into the way Republicans have run elections since Reagan. If she and her editors don’t know she’s doing this then they are too stupid to be working for the paper of record.

“From the time I began writing about politics,” Dowd said, “I have always played with gender stereotypes and mined them and twisted them to force the reader to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes.” Now, she said, “you are asking me to treat Hillary differently than I’ve treated the male candidates all these years, with kid gloves.” 

Aulisio, the reader who wanted a review of Times coverage, asked if a man could have gotten away with writing what Dowd wrote. Rosenthal said that if the man had written everything Dowd had written over the years and established himself as a sardonic commentator on the sexes, “I’d say the answer is yes.”
Of course, there is no such man, and I do not think another one could have used Dowd’s language. Even she, I think, by assailing Clinton in gender-heavy terms in column after column, went over the top this election season.

Again, the question isn’t whether she should have treated Clinton any differently. It’s that her entire worldview is toxic, both culturally and politically. She uses explicitly sexist and homophobic imagery that favors traditional authoritarian leadership to explain politics. She gets away with it because she has a rapier wit and is a physically beautiful person, thus insulating herself from the kind of criticism others would receive for writing this crud. But in truth she’s a walking anachronism, more like a character in Mad Men than a modern sophisticate.

She is considered by many to be the top political columnist in the country (and her columns are often the most emailed articles in the Times.) Certainly she is Village Royalty. And that is undoubtedly one reason why people like Chris Matthews and Tucker Carlson felt that it was perfectly acceptable to say the things they said during this campaign. She’s their misogymuse.

It’s long past time Dowd was called on this by someone other than filthy bloggers like me. This is a decent start, but until people realize that her “twisting of gender” is anything but benign good fun, we’re going to be stuck battling this nonsense back no matter what kind of appendages the candidates might (or might not) be sporting.

digby 6/22/2008 01:00:00 PM

Today’s column shows she learned absolutely nothing from that. She’s clearly planning to reanimate her patented venomous portrait of Clinton as a a witchy old Madame DeFarge without missing a beat. In the first 6 months of 2008 out of 44 columns 28 were stereotypical, gender specific assaults on Hillary Clinton.  It looks like she’s starting early this time.  Apparently, she wants to beat that record.

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