Month: November 2013

Wankeriffic column ‘o the week

by digby

From the original wanker himself, Richard Cohen:

Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde.

People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.

Right. Nothing racist or bigoted about that. It’s just that they want to throw up at the sight of interracial marriage and biracial kids, especially when one of the negroes in question is a deviant. And can you blame them? Their world is changing and it’s upsetting to them. Look at their president. He’s one of them. It’s enough to make them projectile vomit just thinking about it. What could be more conventional than that?

We should feel sorry for them. Back in the good old days we had Operation Wetback and Jim Crow and we made little children to participate in religious ceremonies for their own good. This was before Big Government decided that the “avant-garde” had all kinds of special rights. They’re understandably upset because there are only so many rights to go around and every “right” assumed by these other people is a right that’s taken away from conventional people who deserve them. Why they hardly have any rights left at all.

Thank goodness we have compassionate, understanding liberals like Richard Cohen out there explaining their needs and wants to the avant-garde (even though they hate him too.) Where would they be without friends like him?

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Look at Haiyan, carbon emitters. This is your future, too. It’s time to act.

by David Atkins

You would think that with all the global money being spent on stopping a few religious conservative miscreants from killing small numbers of people with bombs, someone would do something about climate change which will certainly kill millions:

The Philippines government has firmly connected the super typhoon Haiyan with climate change, and urged governments meeting in Poland on Monday to take emergency action to resolve the deadlocked climate talks.

“We cannot sit and stay helpless staring at this international climate stalemate. It is now time to take action. We need an emergency climate pathway,” said Yeb Sano, head of the government’s delegation to the UN climate talks, in an article for the Guardian, in which he challenged climate sceptics to “get off their ivory towers” to see the impacts of climate change firsthand.

Sano, whose family comes from the devastated town of Tacloban where the typhoon Haiyan made landfall on Friday, said that countries such as the Philippines did not have time to wait for an international climate deal, which countries have agreed to reach in Paris in 2015.

“What my country is going through as a result of this extreme climate event is madness,” he told delagates from 190 countries, as UN climate negotiations get underway for a fortnight today in Warsaw. “The climate crisis is madness. We can stop this madness. Right here in Warsaw. Typhoons such as Haiyan and its impacts represent a sobering reminder to the international community that we cannot afford to procrastinate on climate action..

“Science tells us that simply, climate change will mean more intense tropical storms. As the Earth warms up, that would include the oceans. The energy that is stored in the waters off the Philippines will increase the intensity of typhoons and the trend we now see is that more destructive storms will be the new norm.”.

Sano dared anyone who doubted man-made climate change to visit his country: “To anyone who continues to deny the reality that is climate change, I dare them to go to the islands of the Pacific, the islands of the Caribbean and the islands of the Indian ocean and see the impacts of rising sea levels; to the mountainous regions of the Himalayas and the Andes to see communities confronting glacial floods, to the Arctic where communities grapple with the fast dwindling polar ice caps, to the large deltas of the Mekong, the Ganges, the Amazon, and the Nile where lives and livelihoods are drowned, to the hills of Central America that confronts similar monstrous hurricanes, to the vast savannas of Africa where climate change has likewise become a matter of life and death as food and water becomes scarce.

“Not to forget the massive hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico and the eastern seaboard of North America. And if that is not enough, they may want to pay a visit to the Philippines right now.”

He said that even the most ambitious carbon emissions reductions by developed countries would not be enough to avert catastrophe. “Developed country emissions reductions targets are dangerously low and must be raised immediately, but even if they were in line with the demand of reducing 40-50% below 1990 levels, we would still have locked-in climate change and would still need to address the issue of loss and damage.”

He was agonising over the fate of his relatives, and while his brother had survived, he had spent the last two days gathering the bodies of the dead “with his own two hands.”

The UN climate chief said on Monday that typhoon Haiyan served as a backdrop of “sobering reality” to the fortnight-long negotiations, which are being held in a football stadium in Warsaw.

The worst part is that, as I and many others have noted, the world is facing not only a climate crisis, but an unemployment crisis as well. Those two crises are perfectly fitted to solve one another. If most of the world’s industrialized nations came together in a concerted effort to immediately transition from a fossil fuel economy into a renewable energy economy, it would be a truly massive undertaking. It would be expensive in the short term, but it would also be incredibly economically stimulative at a time when the world desperately needs Keynesian stimulus. The number of workers who could be employed productively in research and implementation of renewable energy and conservation policies would number in the tens if not hundreds of millions worldwide.

And in the end, not only would we have a chance to avert the climate disaster, but we would live in a cleaner, more stable, more bio diverse and healthier planet.

The only downside is that the world’s tiny sliver of its richest people would be somewhat poorer in the short term.

It’s a total no-brainer. The fact that we haven’t done it yet is proof that we have a very long way to go as a species.

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The purple prose of Dylandavies/Morganjones

by digby

Mother Jones has excerpts of the Dylan Davies/Morgan Jones book about his Benghazi exploits. He describes how he was visited after the fact by three FBI agents, a State Department staffer, and “a lady in her late fifties who introduced herself as a head prosecutor from New York”. They asked his opinion of security at the embassy:

“Where d’you want me to start? We had fucking loads of concerns. We—or rather the RSOs [Regional Security Officers]—detailed those concerns in numerous emails to the State Department. Nothing was ever done.” I paused. “And you know what— I feel guilty as fuck because we failed to get the security sorted, and because on the day of the race I let the RSOs down…”

The woman prosecutor stepped in now. “No, no, no—let’s be clear on one thing: you let no one down.” “Dead right,” the FBI guy added. “Without you we’d have no information at all right now. Since the attack no one has been on the ground in that compound apart from you, and we cannot thank you enough for all those photos.” “I still feel guilty that I didn’t make it over the wall the first time I tried.” I went to make them all another coffee. The lady prosecutor came into the kitchen. “Hey, you know, Morgan— you did a good thing,” she volunteered. “You did the right thing. Do not beat yourself up over this, okay? You’re a good man. A good man, you hear me?” I was tearing up. She was the motherly, kindly figure that I needed right now, and it was good of her to say those words. She stayed with me as I made the coffees, but in the background I could hear the guys firing questions back and forth at each other in hushed voices. You ask him…No, you ask him…

I took them in the tray of drinks. “Guys: Listen up. I heard you whispering. I heard you saying ask him this; ask him that. You have something you want to ask me, or that you think might upset me or is insensitive—just ask. Let’s get it out there. I will not be offended.” “No, no, man, everything is okay,” the FBI guy who’d led the questioning reassured me. “And hey, thanks for the coffees…”

It was time for the team to leave. They thanked me for all that I had done in Benghazi…They told me they’d need me to fly to the United States at some point, to give my side of the story in full. I said I’d be happy to go. Whatever it would take to try to right the wrongs perpetrated on that hellish night, and to ensure the lessons would be learned. The lead FBI agent gave me his card: “You ever need anything ever, you just call me.” The guy who was the most choked-up among them embraced me. The lady prosecutor gave me a hug as well. “You did the right thing,” she told me again. “You did the right thing.”

You can see why he had the whole 60 Minutes crew so fooled. I’m sure FBI agents and prosecutors always treat their witnesses with such reverence when they’re in the field. And everybody knows they’re a weepy bunch. There’s nothing in that story to set off any alarm bells with professional journalists.

Here’s how Lara Logan describes her own skill at cutting through lies:

LARA LOGAN: And I can’t stand interviewing people who lie to you all the time, or wrap what they have to say in so much diplomatic speak that you spend hours just trying to work out what the hell they just told you. I prefer people that are straight talking.

MARVIN KALB: Do you think the military people when they talk to you are straight talkers?

LARA LOGAN: Not always, not always. But I’ve become very adept at sorting out the talking points from what’s real. And over the years, I’ve acquired a reputation for having some depth of knowledge, so they’re a little more nervous about serving me up a plate of– this is recorded, right?

That man, who described himself in laughably heroic terms, scaling walls in the dark, taking on the terrorists mano a mano, apparently sounded “real” to her. To me, he sounded like Glenn Beck’s hero in his “don’t tease the panther” novel (which could be Dylandaviesmorganjones’ inspiration, now that I think of it.)

Chris Hayes had an excellent discussion of the story tonight, well worth watching if you want to catch up.

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Single payer under Obamacare? You betcha!

by digby

This is why I supported Obamacare:

Today it’s a few hundred thousand people. By next year, it will be at least a few million. Their health insurance status is changing dramatically: What they have in 2014 and beyond will look nothing like what they had in 2013 and before. For many of these people, the difference will be hundreds or even thousands of dollars a year. In a few cases, it may be the difference between life and death.

You probably think I’m talking about the people getting cancellation notices about their private insurance policies. I’m not. I’m talking about the people getting Medicaid. Both stories are consequences of the Affordable Care Act. But one is getting way, way more attention than the other.

No, we didn’t get universal single payer, which is what we all wanted. We got a Rube Goldberg contraption that’s going to take some time to get working and extreme vigilence to keep working. But millions of our fellow Americans did get single payer in Obamacare. It’s called Medicaid and it’s expansion is the most progressive piece of legislation we’ve seen in decades.

Read the whole article by Jonathan Cohn. It will make your progressive heart feel a little bit better about this whole thing.

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“I would have made a different decision had I known that Jim and Eric were tugging on a thread that led to a whole tapestry”

by digby

I’ve been meaning to comment on this fascinating piece by the New York Times ombudsman Margaret Sullivan for a few days. It’s about the NY Times decision not to publish James Risen and Eric Lichtblau’s piece about a secret Bush administration program to eavesdrop on Americans without warrants back in 2004.

The 13-month delay in publishing the article, a period that spanned a presidential election, continues to bother these readers. Why did The Times, at the urgent request of the administration, wait so long? What does that say about the relationship between the government and the press? Would the same thing happen today? I hear about it often in email and online comments. It crops up in newspaper columns, on Twitter, in journalism reviews.

Now, in light of the huge leak of classified information on government surveillance from Edward J. Snowden, the former contractor for the National Security Agency, the episode has a renewed currency.

When the former ombudsman asked about this episode he was ignored. Sullivan is more persistent and gets answers. Here’s just a little piece of what she found, which I thought was terribly interesting:

What if he knew then everything he knows now, in light of the Snowden revelations? “I would have made a different decision had I known that Jim and Eric were tugging on a thread that led to a whole tapestry,” Mr. Taubman said.

Given the law of unintended consequences, and a fair helping of irony, the publication of the warrantless eavesdropping story resonates now in quite another way: The furor it caused prompted the Bush administration to push hard for changes in the laws governing surveillance.

“Our story set in motion the process of making all this stuff legal,” Mr. Lichtblau said. “Now it’s all encoded in law. Bush got everything he wanted on his way out of office.”

There may be public outrage over the latest wave of surveillance revelations, but the government has a helpful defense: Hey, it’s legal.

I think about that often — this process we seem to have developed in which the government does something in secret (or secret from the public anyway) that is clearly illegal and when revealed, the response is simply to legalize it. When these practices continue the story is old and irrelevant because, “hey, it’s legal.”

Presumably, these sorts of contentious issue would wend their way through the courts to see if they are in keeping with constitutional principles, but they’ve found novel ways of roadblocking that process as well, through the use of classification and state secrets and simple secrecy which makes it impossible to even know if you’ve been victimized and have standing to challenge the law. It’s all very underhanded. But you can’t honestly say it’s undemocratic since these practices are so often legalized (as the warrantless wiretapping program was legalized back in 2008 — and voted for by then Senator Obama.)

It’s a neat trick of slowly changing the norms one revelation at a time.

The whole article is well worth reading if only for the recognition from some of the players that the paper, like the government, lost its bearings after 9/11 and basically failed in its duty. It’s not something you see every day.

Also, along these same lines, read this wonderful piece from Robert Kuttner thanking Edward Snowden for doing what he did. Kuttner is largely alone among his liberal peers in seeing Snowden as a whistleblower and not a criminal (which is still shocking to me) and it’s very admirable of him to write in such plain terms about how badly Snowden has been treated and how important his work has been. You’d think that editors of the New York Times now wishing they’d been more bold in “pulling on the string” they discovered back in 2004 would persuade most liberal journalists and analysts to to bold enough to admit that Snowden didn’t commit espionage and shouldn’t have to face living in an inhumane super max prison for the rest of his life for simply telling the people what they always had a right to know. That’s supposed to be the basic function of journalism. But I don’t see a lot of evidence they’ve changed their minds.

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Logan: “I would give up a toilet and a hot meal and a bed any day for a story that’s real”

by digby

I think we may be getting past he point where anyone can say that CBS didn’t know that Logan is a major hawk. Here she is at the National Press Club talking to Marvin Kalb.

Here she tells it like it is on Afghanistan in her inimitable way:

LARA LOGAN: What it means, what we originally– go back to your original aims when you invade– well, it wasn’t an invasion. The Afghans are very quick to point out that they were actually the ones that toppled the Taliban with U.S. help. There were less than several hundred U.S. personnel on the ground at the time. But the original aim was to defeat al-Qaeda and the Taliban and to insure that they were never able to threaten the national security interests of the United States ever again. That clearly is not the case.

And when you’re sitting down and you’re avoiding the hypocrisy of not putting the Taliban on the terror list because you want to preserve the right to sit down and negotiate with them and they’ll bring out every academic in Washington that they can find who will tell you that every insurgency in history has been won through negotiation and settlement, you don’t win it on the battlefield. Well, tell that to the Sri Lankans. I believe they just won their insurgency on the battlefield.

So, I mean for me, if you’re not– people think when I say this, that I’m advocating for war, I’m not advocating for war. I think if you’re going to go to war, you better go to war and you better win. But if you’re not, if you’re just going to loiter on the battlefield and mesaround with one disastrous political strategy after another, then get the hell out because you have no right to ask people to go and fight in your name because you’re lying to them.

The best analogy I can give you, what you’re doing to your U.S. troops on the ground, line up all hundred thousand or so of those troops, handcuff them behind their backs, give them a shove, send them straight into the Taliban guns. Because that’s effectively what you’re doing. The enemy is not in Afghanistan. The low hanging fruit, the expendable people, are in Afghanistan. The real enemy is across the border in Pakistan, and I’m not advocating for war in Pakistan. But there are a thousand things you could do to address that. As long as you are not going after the command and control and the true source of the enemy– and by the way, we have the capacity and the information to do that and we have not because of our foreign policy towards Pakistan– then you have no business being in the fight.

And when people say Karzai is not a strategic partner and he’s corrupt, really? So 30, 40 guys will strap on suicide bombs and they’ll go and blow themselves up in an attack on a U.S. base because they’re pissed off that the government’s corrupt? Give me a break. This is not about corruption. This is not about whether Karzai is a reliable strategic partner. That’s an excuse. That’s all it is.

MARVIN KALB: Cut it down to the chase. What do you think is really at the heart of the American effort now in Afghanistan?

LARA LOGAN: Get the hell out. That’s all we care about. It’s costing too much. We don’t want to pay for it, we don’t think the Afghans are worth a fight, it’s their problem and we want to get out of here.

MARVIN KALB: And at this particular point, if the U.S. were to work out a way of getting out without having accomplished its original purpose, then it sounds to me that you think it’s just been a waste?

LARA LOGAN: Yeah, it has, it’s been a waste. I mean, you have the locations. The Quetta Shura runs the Afghan war from the city of Quetta inside Pakistan.

MARVIN KALB: But to go in there, you’re crossing a national border.

LARA LOGAN: You don’t have to go in there, there’s plenty of ways. If you’ve got their phone numbers, as I know we have had for years, you don’t need to go across the border.

MARVIN KALB: What do you do?

LARA LOGAN: You take them out the same way you took out al-Loki and Nek Muhammad and all the others that have been killed that way.

MARVIN KALB: Well.

LARA LOGAN: And you do it, you target not just the Quetta Shura, you target the Miran Shah Shura, the Peshawar Shura, the Haqqani Network. You take 24 to 48 hours out of your day where you target all the people who you know where they are and you send a message to the Pakistanis that putting American bodies in Arlington Cemetery is not an acceptable form of foreign policy.

I’ve spent several hours now perusing her comments in various forums. And her worldview is eccentric. She’s not political at least in partisan terms. What she is, is contemptuous of all academics, politicians and diplomats in the way I have often observed the military brass to be contemptuous of their civilian leadership. That’s who she seems to identify with most closely. (At least certain members of the military — she’s critical of Petraeus.) And frankly at least half of what she says sounds like utter bullshit although she offers it up with such conviction I can see why people might back off questioning her.

But she is ideological, there’s no doubt about it. In fact, she’s right out of the cartoon Frank Gaffney school of Muslim fearmongering:

When I say an American perspective, I really mean from a western perspective because the world has been quick to divide this fight into American and non-American. And I don’t believe in that division. I think the division is between western and non-western. I don’t want to put simply a religious name on it. It’s for people who believe in the way of life that we believe in, and people who believe in an alternative way of life that goes back centuries to what I call a very dark time.

She also believes there are white hats in the middle east but it’s hard to tell if they change places or if she has an idiosyncratic way of identifying them. One thing is quite clear, she believes that we could “defeat” the Taliban, al Qaeda (and apparently Pakistan) if we had the will to do it with the only kind of ultra violence they can understand. We just haven’t killed enough of them (and attached enough cheap movie dialog threats to go with them) to get our message across.

I think my biggest takeaway from all this is just how insufferably arrogant and conceited this person is, with a flair for drama that would make even Clair Danes in Homeland blush with embarrassment if asked to deliver these lines without laughing:

MARVIN KALB: How do you see that yourself? Do you find yourself more comfortable doing the war than the summit?

LARA LOGAN: Yes, without question, and more invested in it. It requires more of you, it asks you to find out who you are and it asks you what’s truly important. I would give up a toilet and a hot meal and a bed any day for a story that’s real. I can’t stand to dabble in things that are not real. They don’t mean anything. I mean, politics is critically important, but it doesn’t burn that fire in the way it does to be out there in the most impossible situation doing something that is truly the difference between life and death.

Oy …

Lara Logan is obviously a very brave person. She likes being in dangerous situations and she’s good on TV. So I get why she’s so successful. But from what I’ve been seeing and reading these past few days I think she’s probably always been a pretty mediocre journalist with an ego the size of Jupiter. She’s not the first “foreign correspondent” to fall in love with herself and be convinced that  time in the war zone gives her unique strategic insight. (It doesn’t.) But her little “error” on the Benghazi story should make everyone go back and reevaluate her work.

It’s interesting that while she compliments Richard Engel for his work she says she disagrees with his analysis. I’ve always thought Engel was one of the best of the TV guys. I’d be curious to know exactly what they disagreed about. And she thinks Dexter Filkins is great, which is true. But honestly, I don’t Logan can hold a candle to either one of those reporters. She’s not nearly as good as she thinks she is and probably never has been.

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QOTD: grifters gotta grift

by digby

Palin’s out making speeches and selling her new book about the war on Christmas. She warns of slavery by the yellow peril but explains that it’s totally not racist:

“This free stuff, so seductive. Why do you think marketers use free stuff to bring people in? Free stuff is such a strong marketing ploy. But didn’t you all learn too in Econ 101 there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch? Our free stuff today is being paid for by taking money from our children and borrowing from China. When that note comes due — and this isn’t racist.. but it’s going to be like slavery when that note is due. We are going to be beholden to a foreign master. Because there is no plan coming out of Washington, D.C. to stop the incurrence of debt.”

Interestingly, that wasn’t what brought the crowd to its feet cheering wildly. It was this:

“Remember their promise that they would do everything in their power to fight against socialized medicine, against Obamacare? When it came time to stand and defund it, they waived the white flag of surrender and they threw under the bus the good guys who did stand up and fight.”

They really thought their shutdown stunt could work.

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Should veterans have to sacrifice even more?

by digby

Since everyone in government today is ostentatiously thanking our veterans for their service, perhaps we should remind them of this before they go back to Washington and take up their obsession with slashing the budget:

Several veterans’ organizations have come out against the [Chained-CPI] measure, including Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW), Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), AMVETs and the Blinded Veterans Association. These groups say that a chained CPI doesn’t take into account the fact that most disabled veterans spend their benefits on medical care and necessities like food and gas — costs that have not substantially dropped in recent years.

These veterans could have one or more disabling injuries, such as chronic pain, an amputated limb, or post-traumatic stress disorder. “They’re not living the high life,” Raymond Kelley, legislative director for Veterans of Foreign Wars, told me.

Among those who would see a reduction in VA benefits with a chained CPI are 3.2 million disabled veterans, 310,000 low-income veterans who receive a pension and 350,000 surviving spouses and children.

In addition, said Kelley, some veterans receive both Social Security and VA benefits and would be hit twice by chained CPI.

One estimate forecasts that a veteran who began receiving disability benefits at 30 — presumably as a result of service in Iraq or Afghanistan — would see a reduction in benefits of $1,400 at 45 and $3,200 by 65.

Here is a film about some of the veterans these deficit fetishists want to have more “skin in the game.”

Don’t worry, cutting their already meager benefits may make their miserable lives even more miserable but the Democrats promise they won’t do it unless we temporarily close some accounting loopholes so millionaires will “sacrifice” too. I’m sure that will make them feel much better as they’re digging through garbage cans for their dinner.

After all the flamboyant jingoism and chauvinism of this past decade, a time in which our culture has exalted the military to heights not seen in … well, ever … the idea that we would then cut vital benefits for the men and women who answered that call is beyond belief.  What kind of a country would do that?

Update:

ARLINGTON, Va. (AP) — President Barack Obama on Monday paid tribute to those who have served in the nation’s military, including one of the nation’s oldest veterans, 107-year-old Richard Overton.

“This is the life of one American veteran, living proud and strong in the land he helped keep free,” Obama said during a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery.

Overton rose slowly and stood to loud applause when Obama mentioned his name, then stood a second time at the president’s request and drew more applause.

He was among hundreds attending the outdoor ceremony on a crisp, sun-splashed Veteran’s Day. Earlier Monday, Overton and other veterans attended a breakfast at the White House.

Obama used his remarks to remind the nation that thousands of service members are still at war in Afghanistan. The war is expected to formally conclude at the end of next year, though the U.S. may keep a small footprint in the country.

Soon, “the longest war in America’s history will end,” Obama declared.

As the 12-year-old war draws down, Obama said the nation has a responsibility to ensure that the returning troops are the “best cared-for and best respected veterans in the world.” The country’s obligations to those who served “endure long after the battle ends,” he said.

As president, Obama said wanted to see the “best cared-for and best respected veterans in the world.”

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“The outcome of our work is not about what our political masters want”

by digby

If only that were true …

In light of last week’s catastrophic typhoon, this plea last year from The Phillippines’ lead negotiator at the climate change conference at Doha is unbelievably poignant:

“I appeal to all, please, no more delays, no more excuses. Please, let Doha be remembered as the place where we found the political will to turn things around…

The outcome of our work is not about what our political masters want. It is about what is demanded of us by 7 billion people…

I ask of all of us here, if not us, then who? If not now, then when? If not here, then where?”

That was 2012, after the last devastating typhoon hit his country.

Here’s the latest from NBC.  It’s just awful:

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

h/t to @jarais

CBS goes Fox

by digby

This is how 60 Minutes lamely dealt with its shocking hoax:

Here’s a reminder of how Lara Logan saw the Benghazi story one month after the event in 2012,  long before she was so “misled” by her source.

I wrote out my thoughts on Logan’s bias in this piece yesterday and posted a full length version of her speech about journalism and the scary terrorists who are all coming to kill us in our beds. As I wrote there, I think it’s fine that she’s an unreconstructed war hawk who believes that the US should exact revenge for Benghazi, but she should be upfront about her worldview and 60 Minutes should be extra careful in vetting any “scoops” she comes up with that sound too good to be true.

Clearly, they feel they can get away with this without anyone having to pay a price. This, despite the fact that unlike the old Bush National Guard story that got Dan Rather fired, Benghazi is a contemporary story and it’s having an effect on policy and politics in real time. But perhaps the difference really is that when Rather fell for a hoax, the entire Republican establishment went into high gear to ensure that his career was destroyed. The significance of the old and gossipy Guard story was negligible compared to this, but Logan is not widely considered to be a partisan (she isn’t a Republican — she’s a hardcore military hawk, which isn’t necessarily the same thing) and so the Democratic Party does not seem inclined to declare itself in this matter. Fox and the Republicans are successfully portraying this as some sort of Media Matters plot and dismissing it as a blip in the ongoing Benghazi! scandal which they see as one of their aces in the hole against Clinton. So, 60 Minutes obviously feels they can ride this out.

And sadly, they probably can. Logan is not only their up and coming super-star reporter, she’s a sympathetic figure because of the horrifying sexual assault she suffered in Egypt. I do not see any career ramifications for her and probably not for her bosses, who she herself admits knew of her propensity to try to prove her pre-conceived narrative and yet did nothing to rein her in on this story.

For the rest of us it signals that 60 Minutes has become a conservative news program (and that’s not based on this story alone.)It should be branded that way and seen in that light by the public at large. And that’s fine. Considering that the president of CBS News spent his entire career at Fox News and Bloomberg prior to his current job, I’d say that becoming an openly conservative network was a conscious decision by CBS. (A process that started with Rather’s firing.)

And sadly, speaking of Rather, even as Lara Logan is presumably allowed to continue her advocacy journalism without disclosing her advocacy, there’s this:

Dan Rather says he’d hoped CBS News would ask him to be part of its coverage of the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy‘s assassination. As Deadline reported two weeks ago, CBS News announced plans for coverages of the historic event without mentioning Rather, who was the CBS News guy assigned to the region, and who reported on the assassination in Dallas. Rather who is one of few journalists who covered the event who’s still around and working in the biz, will be included in CBS News coverage, but only in archival material in the news division’s 48 Hours special.

Because CBS doesn’t want to be associated with his shoddy journalism.

Here are some good pieces on this mess by Greg Mitchell, Jay Rosen and Michael Calderone.

Update: More reporting from Craig Silverman at Poynter who compares the Rather and Logan constroversies.  Dylan Byers has more on what’s happening at CBS News.

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