Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Fighting Blitzkrieg With A Wet Noodle

by tristero

UPDATED

The Obama-is–gonna-turn-our-kids-commie story that both Digby and I have blogged about was front page above the fold in the NY Times this morning.. Here’s the lede:

President Obama’s plan to deliver a speech to public school students on Tuesday has set off a revolt among conservative parents, who have accused the president of trying to indoctrinate their children with socialist ideas and are asking school officials to excuse the children from listening.

Here’s grafs 4 and 5 (graf 4 begins on page one):

“The thing that concerned me most about it was it seemed like a direct channel from the president of the United States into the classroom, to my child,” said Brett Curtiss, an engineer from Pearland, Tex., who said he would keep his three children home.

In short, the entire front page exposure of the story in the NY Times was a repetition of totally screwy far-right paranoia. And it’s inaccurate: nothing on the front page of the Times gives the reader the slightest clue that this paranoia was fomented by Republican party leaders in Florida and the usual GOP enablers in rightwing media.

Now, there are obvious, dignified, and appropriate ways to respond to this trash. For example:

“Highly-paid Republican operatives are behind the ludicrous accusation that the President of the United States intends to indoctrinate America’s children in socialism when he talks to them on Tuesday about the importance of working hard in school. In their ridiculous efforts to bamboozle Americans, Republicans once again are perpetuating the dangerously divisive and unserious politics of the last Republican presidency, a presidency marked by a nearly perfect storm of disasters – from an unnecessary war in Iraq to a financial meltdown to the Republican administration’s thoroughly incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina. “

How does the Obama administration actually respond? Here you it is, in Graf 7 – deep inside the paper, of course, where few will actually read it:

“This isn’t a policy speech,” said Sandra Abrevaya, a spokeswoman for the Department of Education. “It’s designed to encourage kids to stay in school. The choice on whether to show the speech to students is entirely in the hands of each school. This is absolutely voluntary.”

O…kay…

For the sake of argument only, let’s agree that both Obama’s personality and his political instincts to personally avoid this kind of cynical posturing are both admirable and politically astute. Let’s also concede – even if we do so with tremendous reluctance and reservation – that when his administration also refuses to treat Republican dead-enders with the contempt they so obviously deserve, they are behaving the way the executive branch should behave if our discourse were healthy. Even granting all of that, which is granting one helluva lot:

Where the fuck are the Democrats?

Democrats should be all over this. Republicans have just lobbed the most perfect softball their way – telling kids to study in school is a message Republicans don’t want schoolchildren to hear??? Democrats should let them have it with both barrels. And the counter-attack should come at exactly the same level – state leadership, if not higher.

If you’re serious about 21st Century American politics, you don’t let the insane charge that the President of the United States is trying to corrupt the Youth of America go unanswered when it’s being made at the highest levels of the Republican party. Why?

Because if you refuse to fight back, it creates the distinct impression that there’s some truth to it. These aren’t merely deranged talkshow hosts accusing the President of fomenting subversion; these are leaders of a major political party. They cannot be ignored. So again:

Where the fuck are the Democrats?

[UPDATE: BarbinMD of Daily Kos finds out that Republicans practice the indoctrination of schoolchildren they preach against:

RESIDENT REAGAN: Well, thank you very much. Please, be seated. You know, this is a real treat for me, having you here, and to have in a little while the chance to answer some of your questions. Let me also offer a special hello to those of you who are watching on C-Span, or the Instructional Television Network. Thank you for inviting us into your home or your school today …

And that is a vision that goes beyond economics and politics, it’s also a moral vision, grounded in the reverence and faith of those who believe that with God’s help, they could create a free and democratic nation …

Because you see, the taxes can be such a penalty on people that there’s no incentive for them to prosper and to earn more and so forth because they have to give so much to the government …

There was talk about having a gun ban in California. It didn’t go through. But I got a letter from a man in San Quentin Prison. And from the prison he wrote me the letter to tell me he was in there for burglary, he was a burglar. And he said, “I just want you to know that if that law goes through, here in San Quentin there will be celebrating throughout the day and night by all the burglars who are in prison.”]

Four Years Ago Today

by digby

Sad, funny … and true:

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This Could Change Everything

by digby

It’s hard for me to believe that discredited, wingnut quack David Bossie of Citizens United is still out there causing trouble, but this time he may have done something that is truly catastrophic:

You’ve probably heard by now that next week the Supreme Court will break up its summer recess to hear argument, for the second time, in Citizens United v. FEC. You may have the sense that this doesn’t happen often and that something important is going on. If so, you’re right and then some.

The case involves a film, Hillary: The Movie, that was produced by Citizens United, a conservative, non-profit corporation, to coincide with the 2008 presidential primary season. The case began as a fairly sleepy challenge to the Federal Election Commission’s (FEC’s) decision to treat the film’s production and release as corporate electioneering subject to campaign finance regulations, but was transformed by an order issued by the Supreme Court on June 29th. Here are five reasons why Citizens United is now a truly momentous case:

1. President Palin, Courtesy of Chevron: Let’s start with the biggest and most obvious reason this is a momentous case. Citizens United is arguing that expenditures by corporations in elections should be treated identically to those of individuals. If the Court accepts this argument, it would do away with a distinction that has been in place in our Constitution since the Founding and our statutory law since the Tillman Act of 1907 (as explained in the brief CAC filed in Citizens United), and allow corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money in elections. To appreciate how scary this change would be, consider that, according to the FEC, the Republican and Democratic parties combined spent slightly more than $1.5 billion between January 1, 2007, and December 31, 2008, while Fortune Magazine reports that the 10 most profitable companies during the same period earned combined profits of over $350 billion. This contrast reveals that unleashing even a tiny fraction of corporate profits – from just a handful of companies – could overwhelm the campaign system with money that represents the narrowest interests of private, profit-driven entities.

2. A Reargued Case in September is like a Snowstorm in July: This case is loaded with Supreme Court rarities, starting with the fact that the Supreme Court failed to decide this case the first time it was heard last Term. Also rare is that the Justices have decided to come back from summer vacation a month early for a pre-Term special session in order to rehear the case, and have specifically asked the parties to brief the question of whether they should overturn not one, but two prior rulings (Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, and the parts of McConnell v. FEC that uphold regulation of corporate spending in candidate elections). Ironically, the last time the Court interrupted its summer recess for a special session was to hear one of those cases, McConnell v. FEC, six years ago. Before McConnell, the Court hadn’t returned to DC for a pre-Term summer session since 1974, when in United States v. Nixon it ordered President Richard M. Nixon to surrender his secret Watergate tapes.

3. A Cast of a Thousand Stars (and a lawyer’s trick you should not try at home): Citizens United will be a scene of debut performances and veteran stars of the Supreme Court. It will be the first case to come before Justice Sonia Sotomayor and the first case argued before the Supreme Court by Obama’s Solicitor General Elena Kagan, who will argue on behalf of the FEC. The remaining line-up of participants in this case include the most experienced Supreme Court practitioners alive today – former G.W. Bush Solicitor General Ted Olson (representing Citizens United), former Clinton Solicitor General Seth Waxman (representing Sen. John McCain and other backers of the 2002 McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, or BCRA) and preeminent First Amendment litigator Floyd Abrams (representing Sen. Mitch McConnell and others who opposed BCRA). Olson will be attempting the lawyer’s equivalent of a quadruple lutz: getting the Supreme Court to overrule case law he successfully convinced the justices to make just six years earlier. (As Solicitor General for President Bush, Olson defended BCRA in McConnell.)

4. The Alito Court: A lot of attention has focused in recent months on whether and how new Justice Sotomayor will change the Supreme Court. But oral arguments in Citizens United on September 9th should snap our focus back to a far more momentous change in the Court’s make-up: the 2006 replacement of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor with Justice Samuel Alito. It is only over time that we are seeing how significantly that change moved the Court’s center of gravity rightward. As in so many areas, Justice O’Connor emerged during her tenure as the Court’s critical swing vote in campaign finance cases and in McConnell in 2003 she provided the fifth vote necessary to uphold key portions of BCRA. In Citizens United, the Court has asked the parties to brief whether important parts of Justice O’Connor’s and Justice Stevens’ joint opinion for the Court in McConnell should be overruled.

5. The Roberts Court and Stare Decisis: In a 2007 campaign finance case, FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life, Inc., the Court’s five conservatives mostly agreed on the merits, but clashed angrily about whether to overrule prior rulings of the Court including Austin and McConnell, with Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Alito joining together on the controlling opinion, which limits these cases without overruling them. This prompted Justice Scalia to unleash his famously acerbic pen on his new Chief, saying at one point that Roberts’s “faux judicial restraint is judicial obfuscation.” Citizens United will help answer a profoundly important question about whether there is in fact a meaningful difference of opinion among the conservative justices on the question of what justifies overturning prior rulings of the Supreme Court. The answer to this question will go a long way toward determining whether the Court’s shift to the right will be gradual or sharp in the coming years.

Anybody want to take bets on whether or not the Roberts Court is going to move sharply to the right?

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Calling Rick Perlstein

by digby

Ok, I consider myself a pretty decent observer and interpreter of the right wing. I grew up in a right wing family and have followed the right closely over they years. I usually get why certain issues and events grab their imagination.

But I confess that this one caught me by surprise:

“As the father of four children, I am absolutely appalled that taxpayer dollars are being used to spread President Obama’s socialist ideology. The idea that school children across our nation will be forced to watch the President justify his plans for government-run health care, banks, and automobile companies, increasing taxes on those who create jobs, and racking up more debt than any other President, is not only infuriating, but goes against beliefs of the majority of Americans, while bypassing American parents through an invasive abuse of power.

“While I support educating our children to respect both the office of the American President and the value of community service, I do not support using our children as tools to spread liberal propaganda. The address scheduled for September 8, 2009, does not allow for healthy debate on the President’s agenda, but rather obligates the youngest children in our public school system to agree with our President’s initiatives or be ostracized by their teachers and classmates.

“Public schools can’t teach children to speak out in support of the sanctity of human life or traditional marriage. President Obama and the Democrats wouldn’t dream of allowing prayer in school. Christmas Parties are now Holiday Parties. But, the Democrats have no problem going against the majority of American people and usurping the rights of parents by sending Pied Piper Obama into the American classroom.

The Democrats have clearly lost the battle to maintain control of the message this summer, so now that school is back in session, President Obama has turned to American’s children to spread his liberal lies, indoctrinating American’s youngest children before they have a chance to decide for themselves.”

This is all over talk radio and the dittoheads are getting all feverish. But I don’t really get it. Is this just another crude attempt to delegitimize the president? A furtherance of their goal to destroy the public school system by having people remove their kids and homeschool them?

It’s hard to believe really think that Americans in general find it inappropriate or unusual for a president to speak to kids. It’s so common for them to do it during campaigns and presidential visits, it’s almost like they are more school board president than U.S. president. Remember this?

What is it about Obama speaking to schoolchildren that has them all excited? They’re so stimulated you’d think he was a child molester. (Maybe that’s where they’re going with this …)

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Self-Preservation Strategy

by dday

House liberals will not go quietly, Mr. Emanuel.

In a letter delivered to the White House moments ago, the two leaders of the bloc of House progressives bluntly told President Obama that they will not support any health care plan without a public option in it — and demanded a meeting to inform him face to face.

The not-yet-released letter — the first joint statement from progressives since news emerged that Obama might not address the public option in next week’s speech — is their sharpest challenge yet to the president, given the extraordinary sensitivity of this political moment. The letter urges him to mention the public option in his speech.

“Any bill that does not provide, at a minimum, a public option built on the Medicare provider system and with reimbursement based on Mediare rates — not negotiated rates — is unacceptable,” reads the letter, which was sent over by a source. It was signed by Reps. Lynn Woolsey and Raul Grijalva, the two leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

They’re buttressed by the Speaker of the House, quoted again as saying that a bill without a public option cannot pass the House and that its elimination would be a major victory for insurance companies. Not much room to climb down from those remarks.

Some chin-scratchers are wondering why the public option, the so-called “sliver” of the legislation but not its entirety, has taken on such prominent significance. I think this gets at part of it.

To help understand, I think it’s useful to read past the sarcastic opening to this Chris Bowers post and read him lay out the strategic thinking in detail. I think what you’ll see is that while the movement on behalf of the public option certainly wants a public option and believes the public option is important, the larger goal is to “to try and make the federal government more responsive to progressives in the long-term” by engaging in a form of inside-outside organizing and legislative brinksmanship that’s aimed at enhancing the level of clout small-p progressives in general and the big-p Progressive Caucus in particular enjoy on Capitol Hill.

That requires, arguably, some tactical extremism. If you become known as the guys who are always willing to be reasonable and fold while the Blue Dogs are the guys who are happy to let the world burn unless someone kisses your ring, then in the short-term your reasonableness will let some things get done but over the long-term you’ll get squeezed out. And it also requires you to pick winnable fights, which may mean blowing the specific stakes in the fight a bit out of proportion in the service of the larger goal.

There’s more to it than that, however. First of all, whatever the state of the public option on offer – and I don’t think it’s sufficient – can be improved upon if it just gets past the post and into circulation. I cannot believe that Ezra Klein would think that something like a public option could be introduced as an add-on later, as long as the “basic structure” of universality gets enacted now. A government-administered insurance plan is not a minor fix; getting one installed for Medicare or Medicaid took a number of years and tough battles, and we still leave out everyone under 65 who isn’t impoverished. Adding it later would not be a “relatively simple matter,” as he says. We get a crack at this now, or we create a forced market through an individual mandate that makes it a crime not to buy private health insurance. Given our crack regulatory structure in the US of A, that won’t hold, the insurance companies won’t live up to their end of the bargain, and costs for everyone will continue to soar. And if the subsidies are too low, this won’t even get out of the gate – both parties would be clamoring to repeal it. Adding the public option offers far more opportunities to improve upon the system, rather than not having that option and having to do a supreme lift to get it. I agree that the coverage subsidies and the design of the exchanges are important, but the public option stands with those as a pillar of the plan.

And I know that because none other than Max Baucus told me so in his original white paper on the subject.

Tell me how this sounds for a health care reform plan.

• A national health care exchange
• Buy-in to Medicare at age 55
• No discrimination against those with pre-existing conditions
• No waiting period for Medicare for disabled
• CHIP covers up to 250% of poverty level
• Credits for small businesses and individuals to make health care affordable

Oh, and don’t forget this bit:

• A public option

Now, it may surprise you to learn this. But the architect of this program is none other than Max Baucus–the guy who has been pushing against a public option since the insurers were allowed to drive this debate. Here’s the language from his white paper–dated November 12, 2008–on the public option:

The Exchange would also include a new public plan option, similar to Medicare. This option would abide by the same rules as private insurance plans participating in the Exchange (e.g., offer the same levels of benefits and set the premiums the same way). Rates paid to health care providers by this option would be determined by balancing the goals of increasing competition and ensuring access for patients to high-quality health care.

There was a time (known familiarly as “last year”) when conservative Democrats tried to determine how to best deliver a quality health care bill, and some dumb-as-a-stick bloggers and activists went ahead and looked at the proposals and actually agreed with them. Silly rabbits!

And contrary to popular opinion, Blue Dogs actually need health care reform far more than progressives. Sure, they want to do it in such a way that preserves corporate profits. But progressives can see the desire to pass something and exploit that for their own ends, which is approximately how politics works, basically.

The reason I disagree with Klein is fairly simple: if no health care legislation passes, and Democrats lose seats as a result, Blue Dogs are the people who will lose the seats, not Progressives. Even if Klein is correct and Democrats lose a bunch of seats because Progressives blocked it, Blue Dogs are actually the ones who will bear the brunt of those losses. As such, Blue Dogs have more to lose if health care fails to pass than Progressives […]

If we feel that we have to protect Blue Dogs at all costs, then of course it will be impossible for Progressives to have as much leverage as Blue Dogs. However, as soon as we make it clear that we don’t feel much of a need to protect Blue Dogs, then they are the ones who have a lot more reason to cave into our demands. If another Republican wave really is coming, Blue Dogs will be the first Democrats to lose.

I see nothing wrong with a maximalist strategy, which also corresponds to the stated goal of cutting health care costs and helping people get coverage. It does have an importance for future fights. But it also has an importance for right now. A health care reform that forces people to buy private insurance will destroy the party that builds it. And because of the emphasis placed on the public option, which is really out of the control of Washington at this point, a failure to incorporate it into the final legislation will dispirit the base and lead to a slaughter in 2010. In addition to being smart politics, the progressive revolt is a self-preservation strategy for the Democratic Party.

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“Young Guys, Fresh From The Military”

by digby

As Limbaugh famously said, these guys probably just need a release:

Private security guards at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul were pressured to participate in naked pool parties and perform sex acts to gain promotions or assignment to preferable shifts, according to one of 12 guards who have gone public with their complaints. Click here to see the slideshow. In an interview with ABC News for broadcast tonight on the “World News with Charles Gibson,” the guard, a U.S. military veteran, said top supervisors of the ArmorGroup were not only aware of the “deviant sexual acts” but helped to organize them. “It was mostly the young guys fresh from the military who were told they had to participate,” said the guard, who talked on a phone hook-up arranged by the Project on Government Oversight, which first revealed photographs of the parties. “They were not gay but they knew what it took to get promoted,” said the guard, spoke on condition that ABC News not publish his name. The State Department said it was investigating the allegations and the circumstances surrounding the photographs which show naked and barely clothed men fondling one another. The guard who spoke with ABC News said the drunken parties had been held regularly for at least a year and a half.

What’s with all the homoerotic hazing rituals?

If this is the way men bond in these all male environments, I guess I understand why so many of them are against lifting Don’t Ask Don’t Tell in the military. Once you remove the taboo a whole lot of them will have to deal with their own urges without the cover of coercion and humiliation. I can see why they’d be afraid, but really, these men should just admit that they like this sort of thing and leave those who don’t alone. They’d feel a lot better and so would the men who are forced to participate in order to be accepted into the pack.

Once again we see projection at work. Many of these men obviously have gay feelings and act upon them in this predatory, coercive manner. So they assume that out gay men are doing the same thing. Of course they’re not because they can be with people who consent and wouldn’t need or want to force anyone, as do most sexually healthy people.

I’d feel sorry for these guys if they weren’t such creeps.

Gary Farber has much, much more on our reliance on these wonderful guys in Afghanistan:

Worried about the war in Afghanistan being a quagmire, with more troops being asked for, for a decade-plus committment, to support a corrupt, incompletent, government that few in Afghanistan see as legitimate?

Don’t worry, be happy! The Pentagon has got more private “contractors” there than troops!

read on …

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Batten Down The Hatches

by digby

…prepare for possible category five Hissy Fit:

ABC’s Teddy Davis reports: An already ugly health-care debate got even uglier on Wednesday evening when a 65-year old opponent of Democratic reform proposals had his finger bitten off at a vigil organized by MoveOn.org in Thousand Oaks, Calif. “My understanding is that it was a supporter of health care reform who got into a confrontation with a non-supporter and the non-supporter got his finger bit off,” Capt. Bruce Norris of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department told ABC News. “My understanding is that the event was organized by MoveOn.org.”

They way they keep referring to Move-On, you’d think they were the Klan. Of course, nobody actually knows who the perpetrator was or what actually happened, but one can be forgiven for assuming based upon the reporting and that police officer that any affiliation with Move-On is considered very, very significant.

Look for Move-On to shortly be characterized as a domestic terrorist group.

Update: Mark Steyn, filling in for Limbaugh says it’s the work of Nazis, which I guess is so much more 2009.

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If Accountability Is The Standard

by dday

The Dean rides to the rescue of that poor Mr. Cheney in the most predictable way possible. He’s been at this forever. I’m surprised he wasn’t a John Edwards fan, since he clearly believes in Two Americas, one for the Village and one for everyone else. In 1974, Broderella wrote enthusiastically about the prospect of Nixon beating the impeachment rap and Republicans surging in the midterms. While he lies about that in today’s piece, he does admit that he supported Nixon’s pardon. He’s been covering for Republicans for so long he must feel like an umbrella.

But there’s something very interesting, if unintentionally so, in what he says today:

Looming beyond the publicized cases of these relatively low-level operatives is the fundamental accountability question: What about those who approved of their actions? If accountability is the standard, then it should apply to the policymakers and not just to the underlings. Ultimately, do we want to see Cheney, who backed these actions and still does, standing in the dock?

“If accountability is the standard.” Nice.

Broder, of course, takes the wrong lesson from this, arguing that the country couldn’t take such an assault on cherished criminals like Dick Cheney, and as long as everybody promises to never, ever do it again, we need to bind up our wounds and move forward. But he’s giving voice to what many of us have been saying – that low-level interrogators are not ultimately responsible for an illegal policy, and that criminal culpability demands a response from the justice system. That Attorney General Holder has indemnified anyone who got a legal scribbling authorizing torture, in effect privileging the legal memos as legal regardless of what they say, is completely outrageous. Accountability should indeed apply to the policymakers. Hey, Dean Broder, don’t bogart our argument!

That isn’t just wrong, it’s outrageous. It ratifies the most toxic aspect of the whole legal war on terror: that anything becomes permissible if it’s served up with a side of memo. Paper your misconduct with footnotes and justifications—even after the fact—and you can do as you please. Prosecution of those who strayed beyond the new rules, without considering the culpability of those who strayed in creating the new rules, would mean that in America, a law degree amounts to a defense. Rep Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., put it this way earlier this month when he warned that it makes no sense to prosecute the guy who used 8 ounces of water to water-board but not the lawyer who said it was OK to water-board someone with 3 ounces of water. We must either look into both sides of the post-9/11 legal breakdown or neither. The alternative is the same kind of scapegoating that occurred after Abu Ghraib […]

The American legal system isn’t just about crime and punishment. It’s a set of guideposts to direct us in the future and to send a message about our values to the rest of the world. This proposed Holder-Durham regime of semi-accountability—we’re sorry for that whole torture thing but not sorry enough to investigate seriously how it happened in the first place—serves the dangerous dual purpose of allowing us to reinstate the Bush-era torture rationales, should they be necessary again in the future, and advising our allies and enemies that under desperate circumstances, they can plausibly do the same. Opting to be only halfway responsible means that torture is, going forward, only halfway reprehensible. Ta-Nehisi Coates says, “I really have no doubt that we could—indeed would—start torturing again, in the event of another terrorist attack.” If we don’t dismantle the foundations of the torture regime, he’ll be right.

It’s a pretty good rule of thumb that, if Alberto Gonzales supports your torture investigation, it’s not a very good torture investigation.

This would be the reason that the prescription should not be just to “fix” everything and move forward, without providing accountability – full accountability – for those who thought they could get a permission slip to violate federal and international law and get useful idiots like David Broder to hold them harmless. The very real threat to the country lies in the breakdown of the rule of law, not the restoration of it. And it might make the authorizers and the CIA sad and gloomy, and lower their morale, but that’s precisely the point. In general people ought to be deterred from breaking the law; that’s what makes them think twice about doing it. If investigating and prosecuting torture has a chilling effect, that’s probably because it’s supposed to. Kind of the basis of the entire criminal justice system, but if you want to dismantle that for everybody, at least shoplifters and petty thieves would be on a level playing field with those who murdered prisoners in custody.

At least Broder isn’t quite the monster of his “liberal” colleague Richard Cohen, who follows up his “only a fool, or a Frenchman” classic with a robust defense of torture, including a note of how Judith Miller’s imprisonment was “a wee bit of torture” and closing with the image of the smoldering World Trade Center. Pitted against that shamefulness, Dean Broder’s practically a civil liberties absolutist.

…my 1,000-odd words, Tom Tomorrow’s six panels. He wins.

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If It Screams, It Leads

by dday

I’ve attended a couple town halls out here in Southern California, and I found them all to be teabag-free. They were also invisible in the national debate. I wondered about, in those higher-profile cases of teabaggery, the utility of a random sample of screamers showing up at a meeting on a weeknight in terms of public opinion at large. Now, E.J. Dionne tells us that it was a sample within a sample – that the cable nets were looking for some action, and we all went right along with them.

Health-care reform is said to be in trouble partly because of those raucous August town-hall meetings in which Democratic members of Congress were besieged by shouters opposed to change.

But what if our media-created impression of the meetings is wrong? What if the highly publicized screamers represented only a fraction of public opinion? What if most of the town halls were populated by citizens who respectfully but firmly expressed a mixture of support, concern and doubt?

There is an overwhelming case that the electronic media went out of their way to cover the noise and ignored the calmer (and from television’s point of view “boring”) encounters between elected representatives and their constituents.

I figured this to be the case, but confess to not being vocal enough about it. Dionne actually finds the smoking gun here:

Over the past week, I’ve spoken with Democratic House members, most from highly contested districts, about what happened in their town halls. None would deny polls showing that the health-reform cause lost ground last month, but little of the probing civility that characterized so many of their forums was ever seen on television […]

Rep. Frank Kratovil hails from a very conservative district that includes Maryland’s Eastern Shore and says it didn’t bother him that he was hung in effigy in July by a right-wing group. “As a former prosecutor, I consider that to be mild,” he said with a chuckle. The episode, he added, was not at all typical of his town-hall meetings, where “most of the people were there to express legitimate concerns about the bill, wondering about how it was going to impact them” and wanting “to know the truth about some of the things that were being said about the bill.”

The most disturbing account came from Rep. David Price of North Carolina, who spoke with a stringer for one of the television networks at a large town-hall meeting he held in Durham.

The stringer said he was one of 10 people around the country assigned to watch such encounters. Price said he was told flatly: “Your meeting doesn’t get covered unless it blows up.” As it happens, the Durham audience was broadly sympathetic to reform efforts. No “news” there. (emphasis mine)

Dammit, dammit, dammit. And too much of the blogosphere fell for this, by the way.

Covering conflict is basically what cable news does, whether it’s two talking heads in the studio or footage of a car chase. Their job is to sensationalize and titillate and draw eyeballs. In this case, they told a false narrative about a nation rising up against health care, and it led to a general impression that health care reform was becoming unpopular, which led to… polls showing reform becoming less popular. Keep this in mind when you hear the story about the bitten finger today on an endless loop.

The media will of course tell you they’re bystanders, documenters, observers. Dionne’s column puts the lie to that. They wrote a story for the month of August and then found the footage to justify it. And then people not engaged with the process watch a few selected soundbites from town hall meetings and figure something must be wrong with the policy if it inspires so much hatred.

Your liberal media. Watch the health industry ads skyrocket as a token of thanks for their attempt to kill health care reform.

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