Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

It’s What They Do

by digby

Or what Karl Rove does anyway. John Emerson reports on the Franken Coleman recount:

But Coleman is a Rovian. Even though he hasn’t won yet, legally speaking, he’s already declared victory three times. He’s proposed that Franken waive the “unnecessary” recount. He’s blamed Franken for the cost of the recount required by law. He’s smeared Secretary of State Ritchey. He’s smeared several local election boards. He’s made a stink about the 32 votes (which were never lost and were never in the trunk of a car), and about the routine correction of a hundred-vote mistranscription, and about the next-morning report of one county’s votes, and so on ad nauseum. Whenever the count has turned against him, he has immediately, without checking, insinuated the possibility of fraud. (In this he has been joined by Minnesota’s labile, amnesiac Congresswoman Michele Bachmann . Michele may not bother to get her facts right, but “she knows her heart is right”). The Coleman allegations have been refuted in Minnesota, but they’re still alive and well nationally. The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, MSNBC, and other outlets have succeeded in convincing millions of people that Franken is trying to steal the election. Even the New York Times has relayed erroneous Coleman charges. Some Republicans — and many media people — are even hinting that Minnesota is Florida all over again, with Secretary of State Ritchie as the Katherine Harris figure. (Are the Republicans really finally admitting that the 2000 election was stolen?)

Emerson wonders what Coleman hopes to get out of this except a totally poisoned atmosphere since he is likely to hold on to a slim lead and end up winning. The fact is that in close elections, the Rove method is very explicit. This is Republican election stealing 101:

Newspaper coverage on November 9, the morning after the election, focused on the Republican Fob James’s upset of the Democratic Governor Jim Folsom. But another drama was rapidly unfolding. In the race for chief justice, which had been neck and neck the evening before, Hooper awoke to discover himself trailing by 698 votes. Throughout the day ballots trickled in from remote corners of the state, until at last an unofficial tally showed that Rove’s client had lost—by 304 votes. Hornsby’s campaign declared victory. Rove had other plans, and immediately moved for a recount. “Karl called the next morning,” says a former Rove staffer. “He said, ‘We came real close. You guys did a great job. But now we really need to rally around Perry Hooper. We’ve got a real good shot at this, but we need to win over the people of Alabama.'” Rove explained how this was to be done. “Our role was to try to keep people motivated about Perry Hooper’s election,” the staffer continued, “and then to undermine the other side’s support by casting them as liars, cheaters, stealers, immoral—all of that.” (Rove did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.) The campaign quickly obtained a restraining order to preserve the ballots. Then the tactical battle began. Rather than focus on a handful of Republican counties that might yield extra votes, Rove dispatched campaign staffers and hired investigators to every county to observe the counting and turn up evidence of fraud. In one county a probate judge was discovered to have erroneously excluded 100 votes for Hooper. Voting machines in two others had failed to count all the returns. Mindful of public opinion, according to staffers, the campaign spread tales of poll watchers threatened with arrest; probate judges locking themselves in their offices and refusing to admit campaign workers; votes being cast in absentia for comatose nursing-home patients; and Democrats caught in a cemetery writing down the names of the dead in order to put them on absentee ballots. As the recount progressed, the margin continued to narrow. Three days after the election Hooper held a press conference to drive home the idea that the election was being stolen. He declared, “We have endured lies in this campaign, but I’ll be damned if I will accept outright thievery.” The recount stretched on, and Hooper’s campaign continued to chip away at Hornsby’s lead. By November 21 one tally had it at nine votes. The race came down to a dispute over absentee ballots. Hornsby’s campaign fought to include approximately 2,000 late-arriving ballots that had been excluded because they weren’t notarized or witnessed, as required by law. Also mindful of public relations, the Hornsby campaign brought forward a man who claimed that the absentee ballot of his son, overseas in the military, was in danger of being disallowed. The matter wound up in court. “The last marching order we had from Karl,” says a former employee, “was ‘Make sure you continue to talk this up. The only way we’re going to be successful is if the Alabama public continues to care about it.'” Initially, things looked grim for Hooper. A circuit-court judge ruled that the absentee ballots should be counted, reasoning that voters’ intent was the issue, and that by merely signing them, those who had cast them had “substantially complied” with the law. Hooper’s lawyers appealed to a federal court. By Thanksgiving his campaign believed he was ahead—but also believed that the disputed absentee ballots, from heavily Democratic counties, would cost him the election. The campaign went so far as to sue every probate judge, circuit clerk, and sheriff in the state, alleging discrimination. Hooper continued to hold rallies throughout it all. On his behalf the business community bought ads in newspapers across the state that said, “They steal elections they don’t like.” Public opinion began tilting toward him. The recount stretched into the following year. On Inauguration Day both candidates appeared for the ceremonies. By March the all-Democratic Alabama Supreme Court had ordered that the absentee ballots be counted. By April the matter was before the Eleventh Federal Circuit Court. The byzantine legal maneuvering continued for months. In mid-October a federal appeals-court judge finally ruled that the ballots could not be counted, and ordered the secretary of state to certify Hooper as the winner—only to have Hornsby’s legal team appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which temporarily stayed the case. By now the recount had dragged on for almost a year. When I went to visit Hooper, not long ago, we sat in the parlor of his Montgomery home as he described the denouement of Karl Rove’s closest race. “On the afternoon of October the nineteenth,” Hooper recalled, “I was in the back yard planting five hundred pink sweet Williams in my wife’s garden, and she hollered out the back door, ‘Your secretary just called—the Supreme Court just made a ruling that you’re the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court!'” In the final tally he had prevailed by just 262 votes. Hooper smiled broadly and handed me a large photo of his swearing-in ceremony the next day. “That Karl Rove was a very impressive fellow,” he said.

If you haven’t read the article that’s excerpted from, take the time, especially if you’re tempted to start feeling warm and fuzzy about these Republicans who are becoming born again Obamaphiles. All of those people, from Colin Powell on down, benefited for years from tactics like these — they knew about it, we all did, and they said nothing. If you want to trust people like that, be my guest. I never will.

Clinging To Their Reality

by digby

From David Sirota:

When I wrote my first column about the “center-right nation” and subsequently launched the “Center-Right Nation Watch” series on this blog I predicted that the news media would actually increase its usage of this term after Obama won. I did a Lexis-Nexis search of the term, and was the first to note the trend and make the prediction that “if Obama wins, expect more frantic talk from the fringe about how electing a black man billed as an Islamic Karl Marx obviously means our country is more conservative than ever.” Feeling like I was out on a limb (and remember, this was almost 2 weeks before a group of major progressive pundits belatedly started writing about the trend), I asked a friend out here in Denver who works with a company called Trendrr to officially track whether my prediction was right – and you can see from the results above, it was – more so than I ever expected. As the graph shows, the use of the exact term “center-right nation” spiked immediately after election day (point “0” is the day my column published, point “1” is election day). While it’s true – this trend study doesn’t tell us how many of the “center-right nation” references are saying this is “not a center-right nation.” But a look through Lexis-Nexis shows it’s safe to assume that the vast majority of these references are asserting this is a “center-right nation.”

Meanwhile back on planet earth:

I don’t know if the term “center-right” just spontaneously burst forth from the media after the election in a whiplash reaction to the shocking possibility that the American people might have voted for something other than mushy, faux provincial, conservatism. Perhaps it was a sort of mass delusion. But I suspect it was something a little bit more conscious than that, don’t you?

This has actually been an article of faith among the gasbags for a very long time, it’s just that until recently, what they proclaimed (without qualification) was that this was a “conservative country.” The election of a Democrat with a popular mandate required them to change their rhetoric. But it hasn’t changed their belief.

Here’s historian and highly respected thought leader Jon Meachum just before theelection:

It is easy—for some, even tempting—to detect the dawn of a new progressive era in the autumn of Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency … But history, as John Adams once said of facts, is a stubborn thing, and it tells us that Democratic presidents from FDR to JFK to LBJ to Carter to Clinton usually wind up moving farther right than they thought they ever would, or they pay for their continued liberalism at the polls. Should Obama win, he will have to govern a nation that is more instinctively conservative than it is liberal—a perennial reality that past Democratic presidents have ignored at their peril. A party founded by Andrew Jackson on the principle that “the majority is to govern” has long found itself flummoxed by the failure of that majority to see the virtues of the Democrats and the vices of the Republicans.

He goes on to cherry pick facts about Democratic presidents to show that they were all failures — even Roosevelt!

This is an article of faith among the political establishment. In fact, it’s one of the greatest successes of the conservative movement to persuade these villagers that Democratic presidents are doomed to failure before they even begin.

So, this “center-right” trope is just their way of preserving their belief system in the face of a repudiation by the people. It’s not a problem in and of itself, except to those of us who actually identify as liberals and progressives and feel that it’s useful to take political credit for policies that actually help humans. The problem is that Democrats take them seriously.

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Half The Battle Is Showing Up

By digby

Following up on my post earlier, here’s a video from yesterday: when asked why the congress was avoiding its responsibility and kicking the can down the road on the crisis in the auto industry, Harry Reid said:

What kind of a message are we sending the American people by having a bunch of failed votes here? We do not have the votes. What happened here this week in Washington has not been good for the auto industry. I know it wasn’t planned but these guys landing here in their corporate jets does not send a good message to people in Searchlight Nevada or Las Vegas or Reno or anyplace else in this country.

Oh please. We’re not going to figure out a way to forestall the horrifying meltdown of the auto industry and potentially throw millions of people out of work because of some trumped up PR problem? Fine — structure a deal where the CEOs all have to march through the streets of Detroit in their underwear singing “Whistle While You Work,” whatever. But don’t say that you have to throw in the towel because you don’t have the votes over some trivial bullshit when the fact is that you and the white house are at loggerheads about what account the money should be withdrawn from. Here’s a clue — that’s paper work. Nobody cares about that — it’s all taxpayer money, no matter which little designated pile it comes from.

But people are going to care quite a bit if the country goes into a depression. This is fiddling while Detroit burns.

And by the way, here’s how people who listen to talk radio are going to think about this:

Rush’s Advice for the Big Three, Dems Who Caused Dow Crash

RUSH: I have some questions. You know, Pelosi, Reid, that crowd, they sent the auto execs home yesterday and they said, “You come back with a plan. We don’t have the votes and you’re not going to make us look bad. It sends a bad signal to the American people. We don’t have the votes. So you come back with a plan. You tell us what you want for the $25 billion.” Okay, I have some questions for the people like Pelosi and Reid and these other liberal hacks, just tough questions for you to ponder. With gasoline prices now under two bucks in most places and dropping, and the price of oil (I checked it right before the program) below $50 now ($49 a barrel it was earlier today.) So with the gas price under two bucks and oil plummeting, what would you say, Pelosi and Reid, if the car companies could become profitable by selling SUVs or go broke by turning out the green cars that you’re going to demand they make? What would you say, Pelosi and Reid, if the best auto executive in the world could come in and fix the Detroit problem but he demands a hundred million dollars a year in income? Would you insist that they hire somebody who has no clue what they’re doing and earns less than $400,000?

If the auto executives came back to you and say that they can turn profits if they tear up all existing labor — this is what I wish they’d do, I wish Nardelli and Wagoner and Mulally would come back and say, “You want our idea? You want know to know what we need to succeed? Fine. We need to tear up all our existing labor contracts. We need to eliminate all these CAFE standards that you placed on manufacturing. That’s what we need; that’s what we need to do. We can turn this business around if you get the shackles off of us.” What would they say? You know damn well what they would say. They’d say, “Screw you, because we’re going to run the auto business now.” Barney Frank is going to say it — and I have another question for these liberals. You’ve been attacking the Big Three auto companies all of your political careers. Why are you defending them now? You’ve been attacking them, you have been making them out to be the enemy just like Wal-Mart’s the enemy, just like Big Drug is the enemy. Big Oil is the enemy. Anything big corporate has been the enemy of Ted Kennedy on down. Now, all of a sudden, you find a need after you’ve had your role — and let’s make no mistake about this. Congress has had a role in destroying these companies, or harming them greatly, and now all of a sudden you want to defend ’em? Why? Why are you defending these companies that you told everybody else were evil?

There is no point in avoiding fights over important things. There will always be people like Rush out there with big microphones who will tell the American people incoherent nonsense like this and sway many of them, no matter what you do. The right wing, including the ghost administration that now resides in the white house, wants the Big Three to fail and they want it to fail because they hate unions, they hate environmental laws and they hate safety regulations and they are eager to blame all the pain to come on those things. They will happily put millions of people out of work if that’s what it takes to “prove” their point.

The Democrats need to realize right now that they do not have partners in dealing with this economic crisis. And they are going to have a lot of trouble keeping the American people on board with all the things that have to be done because it goes against everything they’ve heard for the last 30 years. And while the right won’t help solve any problems, it will continue to hammer home its soothing, familiar lies over and over again to counter everything the Democrats need to do. There is a lot of work to be done right now — political work and governing work. They can’t just sit on the sidelines waiting for Obama to wave his magic wand and make it all magically go away.

Reid is wrong. The message they would be sending to the American people if they stayed on the job and fought this out, even if they had failed vote after failed vote, would be that they take this situation seriously and are trying to fix it. They go home and the only people talking about this are Rush and his army of evil yakkers.

Scarecrow over at FDL wrote this earlier:

Dean Baker, whose earlier excellent post provides a compelling argument for a bridge loan to the auto industry, reminds us (via TPM) that the economy needs much more to keep a likely deep recession from becoming another depression. Baker’s plea joins those we’ve seen from Paul Krugman and Nouriel Roubini (video at right — h/t Stoller) as well as 375 other economists signing a letter organized by the Center for Economic Policy Research. From Dean Baker:

We know how to keep the economy from collapsing. We didn’t have this information 80 years ago. The secret is to spend money, lots of it. CEPR just circulated a letter that garnered 375 economists’ signatures arguing for a stimulus between $300 billion and $450 billion. This might be too small given all the bad news that we are seeing. We may need to spend $500 billion or $600 billion a year to get the economy back on its feet, possibly more. The key point is that we can get the economy back on its feet; we just have to spend the money to do it.

So where are Congress and the Administration? Despite the growing economist consensus on what needs to be done, Thursday Congress was able only to pass a narrow bill extending unemployment benefits a few more weeks. The President says he’ll sign the bill. That’s good, but this effort, while undoubtedly worthwhile, is trivial compared to what the country needs.

no kidding.

I get the feeling that a lot of people (not Scarecrow obviously) still don’t quite get just what serious deep shit we are in right now. Here’s Roubini, who is not known for his sunny outlook to be sure, but who has also called this one down the line:

Our congress can’t kick the can down the road. Some of this stuff can’t wait until after we have a new president and people have a right to expect that their government is at least showing up to work. What are they thinking?”

The Guy Has Some Stones

by dday

I seriously hope that nobody is trying to rehabilitate Roger Stone as he attempts to repent over what he helped impose on the world. The guy was actively pushing the ‘Whitey’ tape as recently as this year’s Republican convention, for crying out loud.

The capstone of Stone’s career, at least in terms of results, was the “Brooks Brothers riot” of the 2000 election recount. This was when a Stone-led squad of pro-Bush protestors stormed the Miami-Dade County election board, stopping the recount and advancing then-Governor George W. Bush one step closer to the White House. Though he is quick to rebut GOP operatives who seek to minimize his role in the recount, Stone lately has been having second thoughts about what happened in Florida.

“There have been many times I’ve regretted it,” Stone told me over pizza at Grand Central Station. “When I look at those double-page New York Times spreads of all the individual pictures of people who have been killed [in Iraq], I got to think, ‘Maybe there wouldn’t have been a war if I hadn’t gone to Miami-Dade. Maybe there hadn’t have been, in my view, an unjustified war if Bush hadn’t become president.’ It’s very disturbing to me.”

He doesn’t regret crap. He’s looking to disappear Bush like the rest of the GOP. Stone saw the opportunity to increase his power as a prize GOP ratfucker and fixer and he took it. Now their golden boy, the man the party establishment plucked from the Governor’s mansion in Austin and lined up behind en masse for years, revealed himself to be an incompetent dullard with a knack for ruining everything he gets his hands on. And we’re supposed to let that stain, the blot on the records of all these willing dupes who backed him, to be washed out? Hell no.

Stone voted for Bush in 2004 as well (“John Kerry was an elitist buffoon”) but he pulled no punches in his assessment of the last eight years. Stone’s own political philosophy is libertarian, and he says it conflicts with Bush’s penchant for expanded executive power.

“I think across the board he’s led the party to its current position, which means losing both houses of congress and now the White House,” Stone said. “How can you be conservative and justify wiretapping people without a warrant? We’re supposed to be the party of personal freedom and civil liberties. Big brother listening in on your phone calls—I got a problem with that.”

Give me a break. Not one Republican member of the House or Senate raised an objection to the illegal wiretapping program ever. Not one time. And neither did scummy operatives like Stone. Hell, Stone bragged about doing his own surveillance during the Brooks Brothers riot:

“We set up a Winnebago trailer, right over here,” Stone said when we got out of the Jaguar and walked about a block away from the Clark center, on First Street. “I set up my command center there. I had walkie-talkies and cell phones, and I was in touch with our people in the building. Our whole idea was to shut the recount down. That was why we were there. We had the frequency to the Democrats’ walkie-talkies and were listening to their communications, but they were so disorganized that we didn’t learn much that was useful.”

Oh, by the way, Stone was apparently a reluctant warrior in the recount fight. He was just paying off debts:

That Stone joins Matthew Dowd, Scott McClellan, and Colin Powell in the group of disaffected ex-Bushies shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. Stone advised Donald Trump on his prospective bid for the presidency in 2000. According to Stone, he didn’t even want to get involved in the 2000 race at all until the GOP’s recount head, James Baker III, called him up and asked him for his help. Stone said that Baker had helped him out in 1981 by getting Reagan and Bush to lend support to New Jersey Governor Tom Kean, whose campaign Stone ran. He owed him a favor.

“In this business, if you don’t pay your debts you’re finished,” Stone said.

This is horseshit. And really dangerous horseshit besides. These people are running away as fast as they can from a legacy they helped create, and there is absolutely no reason to allow them to do so. Those dead American soldiers and Iraq children are YOUR children, Mr. Stone. You helped cause them, you helped send them to their deaths, and there is no way anyone should allow you to airbrush your own conscience. And in 5 or 10 or 15 years when you and the whole dirty cabal is back with some other empty suit, the REAL vessel of conservatism, we’re all going to remember who you backed the last time. George W. Bush is yours. You bought him and you own him. And you can’t take him to the return window.

…here’s Karl Rove terribly concerned about illegal political activities inside the Obama White House, extreme use of executive power, replacing US Attorneys like Patrick Fitzgerald (!) and overly political Administration appointments.

Karl Rove is concerned about that.

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Vulgar Randism

by digby

It’s heating up. Get a load of this:

Personally, I tend to bristle at extortion attempts and that is exactly what this amounts to; “buy our lousy cars and subsidize our worthless industry, or you’ll get hurt”. Hey, I’m sure that kind of thing works great at UAW meetings, but it does not work with honest people who earn their money through ingenuity and effort.

Apparently, people who earn their living in manufacturing plants aren’t honest — and they don’t earn their money through ingenuity and effort (like brilliant hedge fund managers.)

I particularly liked this comment:

The Makers are not incompetant and that is a stupid comment. They deserve to fail but frankly that business has been REGULATED AND TAXED TO ITS DEATH BED. No management team can rescue this ship because between the Unions, the EPA, the State Gov.ts and Congress they bled them dry.

The cult of John Galt is stronger than ever.
Here’s one example — Bob Nardelli former CEO of GE, which is like being Business Jesus. Then, despite having no retail experience, he went to Home Depot, where the stock price stayed flat despite a bull market and :

… his $240 million compensation eventually earned the ire of investors. His blunt, critical and autocratic management style turned off employees and the public. While the board strongly stood by him for most of his tenure, questions about his leadership mounted in 2006, and in an ominous portent of the near future, he was the only director present at the annual meeting; he only allowed shareholders to speak for a minute each. When the board reportedly ousted him in January 2007, Nardelli’s severance package was estimated at $210 million.

Naturally, Chrysler immediately hired him.

This is the culture that has brought the economy to the brink — vastly overvalued masters of the universe, swallowing fire hoses of money as they failed up over and over again. And now that the system if finally crushing under the weight of all this profligacy and bad management, the brainwashed conservative Randians are blaming the “parasites” for the failure, just as they’ve been programmed to do.

I don’t believe in banning books or censoring curriculum, but just because Atlas Shrugged is a nauseatingly puerile exercise in hot capitalist fantasy doesn’t mean it doesn’t contain some dangerous and powerful ideas that need to be taken seriously and countered systematically. It’s very bad for our culture for that piece of trash to be so influential. The Randians are donating millions of books to high schools and endowing chairs at universities to sell this pernicious protection racket for the malefactors of great wealth. Far more people have been exposed to this received conservative wisdom than have even a bare knowledge of Karl Marx (or Adam Smith.) It’s not just another bad romance novel.

Interregnum Interruptus

by digby

Krugman brings up something this morning that I was coincidentally chatting about over dinner with a friend last night — what are the ramifications of having the lamest of lame ducks visibly uninterested and engaged at this moment of economic crisis, (not to mention a congress that has time to laud convicted felons in their midst but can’t seem to stick around to deal with this huge problem developing in Detroit?) I vaguely recalled something similar in 1932 but couldn’t remember the details.

Krugman fills in the blanks:

There is, however, another and more disturbing parallel between 2008 and 1932 — namely, the emergence of a power vacuum at the height of the crisis. The interregnum of 1932-1933, the long stretch between the election and the actual transfer of power, was disastrous for the U.S. economy, at least in part because the outgoing administration had no credibility, the incoming administration had no authority and the ideological chasm between the two sides was too great to allow concerted action. And the same thing is happening now. It’s true that the interregnum will be shorter this time: F.D.R. wasn’t inaugurated until March; Barack Obama will move into the White House on Jan. 20. But crises move faster these days. How much can go wrong in the two months before Mr. Obama takes the oath of office? The answer, unfortunately, is: a lot. Consider how much darker the economic picture has grown since the failure of Lehman Brothers, which took place just over two months ago. And the pace of deterioration seems to be accelerating. Most obviously, we’re in the midst of the worst stock market crash since the Great Depression: the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index has now fallen more than 50 percent from its peak. Other indicators are arguably even more disturbing: unemployment claims are surging, manufacturing production is plunging, interest rates on corporate bonds — which reflect investor fears of default — are soaring, which will almost surely lead to a sharp fall in business spending. The prospects for the economy look much grimmer now than they did as little as a week or two ago. Yet economic policy, rather than responding to the threat, seems to have gone on vacation. In particular, panic has returned to the credit markets, yet no new rescue plan is in sight. On the contrary, Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary, has announced that he won’t even go back to Congress for the second half of the $700 billion already approved for financial bailouts. And financial aid for the beleaguered auto industry is being stalled by a political standoff. How much should we worry about what looks like two months of policy drift? At minimum, the next two months will inflict serious pain on hundreds of thousands of Americans, who will lose their jobs, their homes, or both. What’s really troubling, however, is the possibility that some of the damage being done right now will be irreversible. I’m concerned, in particular, about the two D’s: deflation and Detroit.

Irreversible things happening over the course of the next two months should scare the hell out of us and yet sometimes I watch what’s happening with the sense that we’re all speaking underwater. Maybe that’s how it always is when you’re in the middle of a complicated, unfolding crisis. But it would certainly be reassuring to know that those who are in charge were putting everything they had into dealing with it. Holding their breath until the new president can take the reins has no actual effect on events.

Guilty Participants

by digby

David Sirota makes note of the media being among those members of the political establishment who pretend to be “innocent bystanders”

As anyone who has read my columns, blog posts or book knows, I have a mild obsession with the Innocent Bystander Fable – the one whereby political actors pretend they have no power or even minor role in the arenas they are elected or hired to participate in. This fable has been most prevalent in the Democratic Party’s posture toward the Iraq War and the bailout – they claim, rather idiotically, they have no power to stop the war or fix the bailout. But now, as I am three-quarters of the way through Newsweek’s 7-part story on the gossip, innuendo and palace dramas behind the presidential campaign, I see that this Innocent Bystander Fable may be just as powerful inside the media itself. If you read the piece, you might have noticed that the Newsweek reporting team is constantly referring to “reporters” and “the press” and “the media” – as if Newsweek reporters aren’t a part (and a leading part) of those things – as if they are innocent bystanders. More broadly, the way they portray it, candidates and political operatives are larger than life heroes or villains who make Big Decisions and Face Consequences, while the media is a herd of lobotomized automatons that are so mindless and innocent and pure, that they cannot be held culpable for anything at all. Indeed, according to Newsweek, the entire political media is an innocent bystander to politics.

We’ve talked about this before, perhaps most famously in terms of the Scooter Libby scandal in which members of the media who were intimately involved with the case, even when they were star witnesses and players, talked about the case as if they knew nothing more than the average dolt catching a few headlines on the way to work. They openly speculated about things they knew to be untrue and kept their public in the dark long after it was known that their sources lied and they had no requirement from the prosecutors to keep quiet. It was a shocking display.

But we are seeing another, even more egregious example of it playing out right now. The press is beside itself concern trolling the Obama administration about how the “Clinton Circus” will ruin him, replete with hand wringing and despair about how unfair it all is. But if it is a circus, it’s because the media make it one.

As Eric Boehlert wrote earlier:

We’ve said it before, but we fear we’re going to have to make this point many more times in the coming weeks. It’s now clear that a portion of the opinion press viewed the historic 2008 campaign through the extremely narrow lens of getting rid of the Clintons; of driving them off the national stage and humiliating the highest profile Democrats of the last 15 years. That’s what the campaign was about for them. Not politics or policy or the future of the country. It was about them not liking the Clintons. The campaign represented some sort of deliverance from them. But now that it’s becoming clear that the new Obama team does not necessarily share that deep-seated disdain, and now that it’s clear that the media’s CDS is not being embraced by a new generation of Democratic Party leaders, some afflicted pundits are very, very angry. What was the point of that election, they demand. On Hardball this week Matthews appeared visibly annoyed at the idea of Clinton becoming Secretary of State. More to the point he was confused about Obama’s overture to her: “Why does he want drama”? Matthews demanded. So far, according to news reports, Obama has made an overture to Clinton about being SOS. In a few days we will likely find out if she accepts. Where exactly is the drama? Answer: The drama, has mostly been man-made, it’s been manufactured, by the press which loves the “soap opera” storyline. There was a great diary posted at Daily Kos recently, about the media’s, and especially cable TV’s, naked attempt to gin up the “drama” surrounding the Clinton story. Not because it’s newsworthy and not because it’s accurate. But because that’s what the Beltway press wants to do. That will be worth keeping in mind in coming days and weeks. UPDATE: We just found this quote that Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, gave during the pimary season [emphasis added]: “The press hates Hillary. There’s a real glee over the prospect of being done with the Clintons.”

Whether or not you love or hate the Clintons this behavior should be upsetting. (I will remind everyone that there was a time when the media loved them some Clinton too — until they turned.) But there is something truly sick about a political system in which the press plays a key role as insiders while pretending to be innocent bystanders — and uses its power to create scandals and gin up controversies about politicians it doesn’t like and then blames the politicians for the terrible coverage.

There are real problems to write about — too many to even begin to truly inform the public about. People really don’t care who Bill Clinton’s foundation took money from to fund HIV and global warming programs. (Where’s the controversy there, anyway? That these bad actors will influence SOS Hillary to start a war so that Bill can fund more AIDs research? I don’t get it.) But, it doesn’t matter. The whole point is for all of them (the greatest lunatic, by far, being the very, very emotionally ill Maureen Dowd) to chatter like a bunch of robotic magpies about the Clintons and then solemnly denounce them for being a distraction . Truly, these people need a 12 step program.

Tone Deaf

by digby

I’m as excited as the next person about the change and hope we can expect in this new epoch, but I do think the national politicians should be a little bit more cognizant of just what jackasses they look like when they do stuff like this during a time of great insecurity and fear among the populace.

I know the impulse to let bygones be bygones is strong among the old boys club. And it’s very hard to see an older guy of 85 get taken down at the end of his life. (I was a softie who thought that Ford should pardon Nixon, so I’m sympathetic. But I learned…)

However, just today the congress decided that they can’t do anything about the auto industry until next year, unemployment is the worst in 16 years, and the stock market completely tanked. And they spend over an hour lauding this convicted felon as a hero on the floor of the Senate?

What were they thinking?

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Back to The Future

by digby

Bill Bennett just said that he thought the new president would have his biggest fights with Henry Waxman and said that he himself would side with the president. That’s very interesting and it tracks with my ongoing observation that village is airbrushing Bush out of history and the last eight years never happened. In fact, they are in the process of disappearing McCain too.

Christopher Hitchens said it directly last night on Larry King:

The Clinton era is over. That’s why we voted for Obama.

Ok.

Actually I completely understand why Hitchens would want to pretend that’s true. After all, he has written some of the most embarrassing garbage it’s possible for any quasi sober person to write over the last eight years. If I were he, I’d want a mulligan too.

Here’s one of my favorites, featuring Hitchens at his most superciliously fatuous:

A War to Be Proud Of

The case for overthrowing Saddam was unimpeachable. Why, then, is the administration tongue-tied?

by Christopher Hitchens

09/05/2005,

THERE IS, first, the problem of humorless and pseudo-legalistic literalism. In Saki’s short story The Lumber Room, the naughty but clever child Nicholas, who has actually placed a frog in his morning bread-and-milk, rejoices in his triumph over the adults who don’t credit this excuse for not eating his healthful dish:

“You said there couldn’t possibly be a frog in my bread-and-milk; there was a frog in my bread-and-milk,” he repeated, with the insistence of a skilled tactician who does not intend to shift from favorable ground.

Childishness is one thing–those of us who grew up on this wonderful Edwardian author were always happy to see the grown-ups and governesses discomfited. But puerility in adults is quite another thing, and considerably less charming. “You said there were WMDs in Iraq and that Saddam had friends in al Qaeda. . . . Blah, blah, pants on fire.” I have had many opportunities to tire of this mantra. It takes ten seconds to intone the said mantra. It would take me, on my most eloquent C-SPAN day, at the very least five minutes to say that Abdul Rahman Yasin, who mixed the chemicals for the World Trade Center attack in 1993, subsequently sought and found refuge in Baghdad; that Dr. Mahdi Obeidi, Saddam’s senior physicist, was able to lead American soldiers to nuclear centrifuge parts and a blueprint for a complete centrifuge (the crown jewel of nuclear physics) buried on the orders of Qusay Hussein; that Saddam’s agents were in Damascus as late as February 2003, negotiating to purchase missiles off the shelf from North Korea; or that Rolf Ekeus, the great Swedish socialist who founded the inspection process in Iraq after 1991, has told me for the record that he was offered a $2 million bribe in a face-to-face meeting with Tariq Aziz. And these eye-catching examples would by no means exhaust my repertoire, or empty my quiver. Yes, it must be admitted that Bush and Blair made a hash of a good case, largely because they preferred to scare people rather than enlighten them or reason with them. Still, the only real strategy of deception has come from those who believe, or pretend, that Saddam Hussein was no problem.

Empty quiver indeed.

After all that, he’s back to clucking hysterically about the “immoral” Clintons just like every other Bush supporter and sophomoric media drone trying to make everyone forget how epically wrong they were during the past eight years.

Sorry, fellas, I don’t think we’re going to be able to let that happen. The political system may not be interested in accountability, so they will live to fight another day. But we do have memory — and they will never be able to get away with disappearing their criminal stupidity.

I’ve lived long enough now that I’ve seen the zombie conservatives rise more than once. They aren’t dead, I guarantee it.

Deep Thinkers

by dday

Just to add to my assessment of the pervasive influence of know-nothing Dominionism on the right, here’s Daniel Henninger, a columnist paid money by the Wall Street Journal, a working writer for a newspaper with an economic focus, blaming the financial crisis on greeters who don’t say “Merry Christmas” at shopping malls:

This year we celebrate the desacralized “holidays” amid what is for many unprecedented economic ruin — fortunes halved, jobs lost, homes foreclosed. People wonder, What happened? One man’s theory: A nation whose people can’t say “Merry Christmas” is a nation capable of ruining its own economy.

One had better explain that.

Yes, one had.

It has been my view that the steady secularizing and insistent effort at dereligioning America has been dangerous. That danger flashed red in the fall into subprime personal behavior by borrowers and bankers, who after all are just people. Northerners and atheists who vilify Southern evangelicals are throwing out nurturers of useful virtue with the bathwater of obnoxious political opinions.

The point for a healthy society of commerce and politics is not that religion saves, but that it keeps most of the players inside the chalk lines. We are erasing the chalk lines.

Feel free: Banish Merry Christmas. Get ready for Mad Max.

Got that, secular progressives? Deregulation, predatory lending and corporate greed had nothing to do with this. It’s you and your atheist friends who are promoting anarchy and the destruction of morals. If there were only crosses on top of Wall Street skyscrapers, the investment bankers and hedge fund managers inside wouldn’t have given in to the temptation of greed. Your 401 (k) might have been saved if you practiced Lent this year.

Thanks a lot, heathens. Good luck heating your home with those Bibles you like to burn.

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