Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

We Weren’t Born Yesterday

** Updated below **

by digby

Josh Marshall writes about the Washington Press corps’ thin-skin today, saying:

There’s a lot on the web that it is crude, cruel, coarse, even hateful. And that’s without even taking Hugh Hewitt into account.

It’s certainly not for the faint of heart.

But when I hear this argument from journalists (or more often folks speaking on behalf of journalists) it’s freely conceded that little has changed in terms of criticism from the right. There was talk radio before the Internet, the various right-wing media watchdog outfits, Fox News, etc. What’s changed is that journalists now often feel besieged from the left as well. They’re getting from both sides. There’s nowhere to turn. (Believe me, I’ve had this conversation many times.

That’s exactly right and it’s exactly the point. I wrote about this a few months ago in response to Franklin Foer’s article in The New Republic in which he worried that the left was making a mistake in undermining the credibility of the mainstream press because it would ultimately be bad for the country:

Back when The NY Times was relentlessly flogging Whitewater, I agreed with Franklin Foer that it would be a bad idea to help discredit the mainstream press because their reputations would be so sullied that eventually they’d have no clout to protect sources and tell the truth.

I thought when the Washington Post took every self-serving leak from the Starr investigation and put it on the front page like it was VE Day that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to vilify their obvious slavishness to GOP operatives because it would be bad when we need the media to have credibility on other major issues.

I was angry about the fact that more than 60 newpapers, including the NY Times editorialized (“until the Starr investigation, ‘no citizen … could have grasped the completeness of President Clinton’s mendacity or the magnitude of his recklessness.'”) that Clinton should resign because of a personal indiscretion. But I didn’t rail against the press for jumping on this Republican manufactured bandwagon because I thought that it was important not to paint mainstream journalism with a broad brush just because they were being absurdly obtuse in this particular case.

When the media treated Al Gore like a circus clown and overlooked the fact that George W. Bush was a gibbering idiot (and admitted openly that they did it for fun) I held in my intemperate remarks because I thought it would harm the party in the long run if we attacked the press as the Republicans do. When they reported the election controversy as if it would create a constitutional crisis if the nation had to wait more than a month to find out whether they had the right president I kept my own counsel. After all, who would defend democracy when something truly serious happened?

After 9/11 when they helped the president promote the idea that the country was at “war” (with what we didn’t exactly know) I knew it was a terrible mistake and would lead to a distorted foreign policy and twisted domestic politics. But I didn’t blame the media because it was very difficult to fight that at the time. They’re human, after all.

And when they helped the government make their case for this misbegotten war in Iraq, I assumed that they knew what they were talking about. After all, I had been defending their credibility for years now, in spite of everything I’ve mentioned. If they would screw up something like this, then for what was I holding back my criticism? This was the most serious issue this country had faced in many a decade.

When no WMD were found and I was informed that the NY Times had assigned a neocon shill to report the story, and then defended her when she was implicated in a white house smear to cover up its lies going into Iraq, I no longer saw any need to defend them or any other mainstream media outlet who had rah-rahed the country into Iraq because of promises of embedded glory on the battlefield and in the ratings.

This is fifteen long years of watching the Times and the rest of the mainstream media buckle under the pressure of GOP accusations that they are biased, repeatedly take bogus GOP manufactured scandals and run with them like kids with a brand new kite, treat our elections like they are entertainment vehicles for bored reporters and generally kowtow to the Republican establishment as the path of least resistence. I waited for years for them to recognise what was happening and fight back for their own integrity. It didn’t happen. And I began to see that the only way to get the press to work properly was to apply equal pressure from the opposite direction. It’s a tug of war. They were not strong enough to resist being dragged off to the right all by themselves. They needed some flamethrowers from our side pulling in the opposite direction to make it possible for them to avoid being pulled all the way over.

So, it is with great respect and reverence for the press, which I consider to be indispensible to democracy, that I have become a rabid critic. It did this country no good to allow the Republicans to perpetuate their permanent “mau-mau the media” campaign for 25 years. And it does the press no good to be defended by liberals when they succumb to the mau-mauing. Indeed, history shows that their reaction is to lean even more closely to the GOP to show they are not liberal themselves.

I will no longer defend the press unconditionally. They have proved that they can’t resist the powerful pull of rightwing intimidation and seduction without some counterbalance on the left and I’m more than willing to call a spade a spade to do that. It has not served my politics or my country well to quietly support the media so that they could maintain crediblity. I honestly don’t see that we have anything more to lose when presidents are being impeached for trivial reasons, elections are being stolen and wars are being waged on lies. Just how bad would it have to get to justify criticizing the press for its complicity in those things?

Sorry to re-post my old stuff, but there’s a reason for it. Today, Mike McCurry, Bill Clinton’s former press secretary is a lobbyist (working for telco companies apparently) who wants the congress to reject the concept of net neutrality and he has gotten into a heated blog war over the issue, taking the blogosphere to task for, among other things, failing to stand up for the first amendment because we allegedly didn’t support journalists who were trying to expose the WMD lies.

I’m not sure what he’s going on about with that, but I can’t help but be a little saddened that McCurry is the guy writing this. Reading my piece, you can see that I was the staunchest of Clinton supporters when it came to the destructive, rightwing character assassination campaign. I saw it for what it was and had there been a blogosphere at the time I would have been fighting Drudge and the talk radio screamers and the screeching harpies with everything I had. Citizens around the country were radicalized when Mike McCurry and Joe Lockhart had to appear every day before a prurient, sophomoric press corps who were slavering over details spoonfed to them by rightwing operatives for maximum tittilation and scandalous insinuation.

One of the most important catalysts for the emergence of a left online community was the Clinton and Gore character assassination campaigns. We just could not remain quiet anymore — particularly since the mainstream press seemed to writhe around in the muck with the same pleasure as the GOP operatives who plied them with tabloid trivia. The technology merely gave voice to what millions of us out here in Americaland had been screaming in our minds for years.

You’d think that Mike McCurry, of all people, would see that it is necessary to have some sort of counter balance to a sophisticated righwing noise machine that is powerful enough to co-opt the mainstream press and hijack the national agenda. Having watched the modern Republican party operate as I have for the past quarter century, I can guarantee you that should the Democrats assume power again, they are going to be subject to an even more outraged and wounded GOP attack operation than existed under Clinton. It is what they do and they do it well. After watching what went down during the Clinton and Bush years many of us quite rightly have no faith that the mainstream media will be able to resist either the lure or the indimidation of the GOP’s well oiled propaganda operation.

We will have the Democrats’ backs this time, whether the Washington insider establishment finds us distasteful or not. It’s our party, and our country, too.

Update: Haha. I see that Chris Bowers has accurately, in my view, characterized the beltway mentality about blogs as “adults vs teenagers,” which is funny considering the title I gave this post. At my age, being called a teen-ager is a compliment, although it’s hardly believable.

(Where have I heard crowing about how “the grown-ups are back in charge” recently? I seem to remember that didn’t work out so well. And pardon me for thinking that the late 90’s political establishment’s obsession with the taped girly confessionals of the youthful Monica was just a tad immature.)

But beyond all that, this is probably a fairly accurate analysis of how the blogosphere is perceived and those who believe it miss the point. I have been following politics for a long while and, believe it or not, by temperament I’m fairly low key. (Some might say I’m dead inside.) I was a fervent 70’s reformer and a strong anti-Reaganite, but even then I can’t say that I was particularly rabid in my beliefs. It was never my personal style to be a bombthrower.

I suspect that many others who are engaged in the netroots like me became radicalized in their 30’s and 40’s by a Republican Party that started to behave as an openly undemocratic institution. Why so many of these establishment Democrats and insider press corps aren’t exercised by this after what we’ve seen, I can’t imagine. Perhaps they just can’t see the forest for the trees. This past decade has not been business as usual.

History has many examples of societies that enabled radical political factions to dominate, through inertia, cynicism or plain intimidation. It happened in Europe in the 25 years before I was born and almost destroyed the whole planet. I know it’s unfashionably hysterical to be concerned about such things, but I have never believed that America was so “exceptional” that it couldn’t happen here.

The stakes are incredibly high. Without the cold war polarity, the US has bigger responsibilities than ever. And instead of behaving like a mature democracy and world leader, we have been alternating from adolescent tabloid obsessives to playground bullies. This is serious business.

The center-left blogosphere may sound overwrought, but in fact it is a rational, clear-headed response to what has been happening — and continues to happen as this country’s political establishemt fiddles and fulminates about civility.

Update II: Atrios is absolutely right that this new paradigm means that contra whatever nonsense McCurry is on about with respect to WMD’s, we will always support accurate reporting.

I’ve got to say, though, that in the Clinton years I could count the reporters on one hand who actually did that. Waas, Lyons, Conason and maybe a few more. The rest were like a pack of 12 year old girls at an N Sync concert.

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Gold Links

by digby

For your Codpiece Day reading pleasure:

Mission Accomplished! Again. I mean it this time. We’ve turned the corner.

If the Republicans have lost Kaye Grogan, they have lost the heartland.

Science in the meatgrinder. How your FDA turned into Hannity and Colmes.

Which old friend of the administration is Iran’s newest power broker? (His name rhymes with Falabi.)

Wingnuts taking over the Episcopal Church. For political reasons. Imagine that.

Uncle TBOGG wants YOU for Operation Micturition. Do it for the children.

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The Funniest Wingnut In The Land

by digby

This is really too much. Jane tells me that Captain “Special” Ed says:

There were two problems with Colbert’s act. The first is that it wasn’t funny, and the second was that it didn’t keep with the spirit of the evening.

Well, he should know what’s funny and what isn’t. Why, just last Friday, he wrote the funniest headline I’ve ever read:

Movie Review: United 93 ** Spoilers **

For. Real.

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No Turkey

by digby

Via Buzzflash and A liberal Dose, I see that it’s being reported that Turkey has denied the US access to its bases for an air attack on Iran, even though the US promised to provide the Turks with their own nuclear reactor:

Turkey’s refusal to comply with the US request was another indication of the growing tension between the two nations, which, according to Gul, have not “seen a single day of positive stability since the Islamic party was elected to power [in 2002].”

The tensions, you’ll remember, were caused by this (from Josh Marshall, March 2003🙂

As we’ve noted here several times before, the administration thought muscling the Turks would pay off for the United States — a strategy that backfired terribly. I don’t even think I imagined, however, they’d be this clumsy. Buried in the last graf of this article in Saturday’s Washington Post comes this …

But one senior U.S. official acknowledged that U.S. pressure in recent months has backfired, saying that at one point Pentagon officials insinuated to Turkish politicians that they could get the Turkish military to back the request for U.S. troop deployments in Turkey. “It was stupid stuff. These are proud people,” he said. “Speaking loudly and carrying a big stick wins you tactical victories from time to time, but not a strategic victory.”

The backdrop here is that the military pushed out an Islamist government only a few years back. Going over the civilians’ heads to the Turkish General Staff would inevitably raise the spectre of a repeat of those events.

It’s the sort of tough guy tactics that’s worked for the Bushies at home but failed miserably abroad.

It hasn’t been working so well at home lately either.

If this article today from the Jerusalem Post is correct, the Bush administration tried to buy the Turks off this time, and didn’t get any better result.

You can see why the administration wanted a middle eastern country with airbases of its very own. You just can’t trust these anybody these days to allow you to use them as a launching pad for attacking their neighbors. Tsk, tsk, tsk.

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The Way We Make Anti-War

by digby

I suspect that this article about the administration’s propaganda campaign will get wide circulation. It connects many of the dots we’ve all been following the blogosphere for years, from the OSI to the Iraq Group and beyond. I urge you to read it.

I first wrote back in March of 2004 about Sam Gardiner’s work cataloging 50 false stories that he believed had been planted in the press by the administration. By this time the number of examples are legion.

This is a conscious, concerted effort on the part of the administration. But it is important to remember that this goes back to Rumsfeld’s (and Newtie’s) Toffler-inspired vision of 21st century Information Warfare:

The target of information warfare, then, is the human mind, especially those minds that make the key decisions of war or peace and, from the military perspective, those minds that make the key decisions on if, when, and how to employ the assets and capabilities embedded in their strategic structures.

… or as the Toffler’s put it:

“The way we make war reflects the way we make wealth and the way we make anti-war must reflect the way we make war.”

Do we still have any doubts about why this Iraq operation has been a complete cock-up?

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May Day Amnesia

by digby

Real journalist Eric Boehlert is subbing for Eric Alterman this week and reminds us that Codpiece Day represents more than one embarrassing moment strutting across the deck of an aircraft carrier like a Chippendale’s dancer. It was also one year ago today that the Downing Street Memos were published. And, like the speech that shall not be mentioned, it wasn’t covered by the mainstream media.

Boehlert’s new book “Lapdogs” (which I can’t wait to read) apparently discusses this odd moment of journalistic paralysis at some length:

Like a newborn placed in a roomful of bachelors, the Downing Street Memo was greeted with befuddled stares; a hard-to-figure puzzle that was better left for somebody else to solve. And that’s what was so striking —how uniform the MSM response was. Why, in the face of the clearly newsworthy memo did senior editors and producers at virtually every major American news outlets fail to do the most rudimentary reporting —the who, what, where, why, and how of the Downing Street Memo? Instead, journalists looked at the document and instinctively knew it was not a news story. Journalists didn’t simply fail to embrace or investigate the Downing Street Memo story, they actively ignored it.

The document the press didn’t know how to report said this:

SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL – UK EYES ONLY

DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002
S 195 /02

cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell

IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER’S MEETING, 23 JULY

Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.

This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.

John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam’s regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.

C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action…

Michael Kinsley is perhaps the most famous pundit to opine as to the worthlessness of that document, but he wasn’t the only one. It simply wasn’t considered newsworthy that we had documentary proof of our leaders’ lies and manipulation leading up to the war. Kinsley said that the report reflected DC conventional wisdom and didn’t really prove the president had decided to go to war. I’ve always thought that was an interesting interpretation. It lends credence to the idea that the insiders all knew that Bush had decided to invade Iraq come hell or high water and yet raised no objections to the president’s outright lies to the nation and the world in which he repeatedly said the opposite. Now why was that?

Kinsley seems to be operating from a position of world-weary cynicism on this one. But for most of the media it was something else entirely:

An American soldier was writhing on the ground, his right hand holding a bloody stump. Screams echoed like shock waves through the hot zone that frigid December morning.

Four nervous reporters rushed to the fallen infantryman, offering frantic words of comfort as they worked to stop the bleeding. John Burnett of National Public Radio was part of the group faced with administering first aid until a medic arrived. He later reported on the exercise on “All Things Considered,” with a background of gunfire and anguished cries.

Fortunately, this was merely a simulated combat wound, part of an unprecedented military boot camp designed by the Pentagon to help journalists prepare to cover modern warfare as a showdown with Iraqi President Saddam Hussein loomed.

Lethal biological agents, brutal urban combat and the noxious fumes of scorched oil fields could become reality for Burnett and hundreds of others on round-the-clock standby for Gulf War II.

[…]

Back home, editors waited and worried over the Pentagon’s final decision on which media outlets would win the embedding game.

Sandy Johnson, the Associated Press’ Washington bureau chief, laid out the best-case scenario: “The big pro would be that you’d get lucky and wind up with a unit that sees real action…that you would be the first Western journalist with the U.S. military” during a march into Baghdad.

The media had wanted the war as much as the administration did. Raising a ruckus about the Downing Street Memo would have been turning the light on themselves, too.

Now a year later, almost to the day, Steven Colbert went before the administration and its enablers in the press corps and skewered them to their faces on their lies and omissions with a scathing satire. And like the Downing Street memos, the press is simply not bothering to report it.

The establishment media supported Bush almost from the moment he announced his intention to run for president, much of it fueled by their frustration that they misjudged the public’s opinion of Clinton. After 9/11, they became part of the administration for quite some time. There were, of course, notable exceptions. But all in all it has been a very ugly chapter in American journalism.

Three years ago today, the media celebrated a cynical staged photo-op as if the president were a super-hero, come to save the world. Two years later they ignored the documents that exposed the administration’s lies and their own complicity. This year they continue to pretend that nobody has noticed, even when they are confronted to their faces.

Perhaps when they find out that the administration has been tapping their phones and reading their emails, they will understand which side their bread is buttered on. Maybe. They do look hot in those safari jackets.

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Happy Codpiece Day Everyone

by digby

It seems like only yesterday that the country was enthralled with the president in his sexy flightsuit. Women were swooning, manly GOP men were commenting enviously on his package. But there were none so awestruck by the sheer, testosterone glory of Bush’s codpiece as Tweety:

MATTHEWS: Let’s go to this sub–what happened to this week, which was to me was astounding as a student of politics, like all of us. Lights, camera, action. This week the president landed the best photo op in a very long time. Other great visuals: Ronald Reagan at the D-Day cemetery in Normandy, Bill Clinton on horseback in Wyoming. Nothing compared to this, I’ve got to say.

Katty, for visual, the president of the United States arriving in an F-18, looking like he flew it in himself. The GIs, the women on–onboard that ship loved this guy.

Ms. KAY: He looked great. Look, I’m not a Bush man. I mean, he doesn’t do it for me personally, especially not when he’s in a suit, but he arrived there…

MATTHEWS: No one would call you a Bush man, by the way.

Ms. KAY: …he arrived there in his flight suit, in a jumpsuit. He should wear that all the time. Why doesn’t he do all his campaign speeches in that jumpsuit? He just looks so great.

MATTHEWS: I want him to wa–I want to see him debate somebody like John Kerry or Lieberman or somebody wearing that jumpsuit.

Mr. DOBBS: Well, it was just–I can’t think of any, any stunt by the White House–and I’ll call it a stunt–that has come close. I mean, this is not only a home run; the ball is still flying out beyond the park.

MATTHEWS: Well, you know what, it was like throwing that strike in Yankee Stadium a while back after 9/11. It’s not a stunt if it works and it’s real. And I felt the faces of those guys–I thought most of our guys were looking up like they were looking at Bob Hope and John Wayne combined on that ship.

Mr. GIGOT: The reason it works is because of–the reason it works is because Bush looks authentic and he felt that he–you could feel the connection with the troops. He looked like he was sincere. People trust him. That’s what he has going for him.

MATTHEWS: Fareed, you’re watching that from–say you were over in the Middle East watching the president of the United States on this humongous aircraft carrier. It looks like it could take down Syria just one boat, right, and the president of the United States is pointing a finger and saying, `You people with the weapons of mass destruction, you people backing terrorism, look out. We’re coming.’ Do you think that picture mattered over there?

Mr. ZAKARIA: Oh yeah. Look, this is a part of the war where we have not–we’ve allowed a lot of states to do some very nasty stuff, traffic with nasty people and nasty material, and I think it’s time to tell them, you know what, `You’re going to be help accountable for this.’

MATTHEWS: Well, it was a powerful statement and picture as well.

A Cod-piece can fool them all
Make them think you’re large
Even if you’re small
Just be sure you don’t fool yourself
For it’s still just imagination
And to be sure it works like a lure
And will raise a wench’s expectations
But have a care you have something there
Or the night will end in frustration

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Quia peccavi nimis cogitatione, verbo et opere

by digby

Oh fewgawd’s sake. Last week Joe Klein said:

Klein: And, by the way, we’re very much well liked among the young, educated Iranians. But this is not Iraq we’re dealing with here. This is an ancient country, a very strong country, and a very proud country. And so, yeah, by all means, we should talk to them, but, on the other hand, we should not take any option, including the use of nuclea-….tactical nuclear weapons off the table.

Stephanopoulos: Keep that on the table?

Klein: It’s absolutely stupid not to.

Stephanopoulos: That’s insane.

Klein: Well I don’t think we should ever use tac-…I think that…

Stephanopoulos: Well, then why should they be on the table?

Klein: Why?

Stephanopoulos: Why do we want that specter of crossing that line?

Klein: Because we don’t know what the options on the other side…what their options are on the table.

Stephanopoulos: Well we know that they’ve got 40,000 possible suicide bombers but I also think that line is one that we have to be very, very careful to cross.

Klein: Listen. I don’t think. I think the use of force here would be counterproductive. But I think that when you’re dealing in a negotiation you can’t take stuff off the table before it starts.

In this week’s TIME magazine Klein writes A Mea Culpa, Sorta:

A few weeks ago, I made a mistake while bloviating on the Sunday morning television program This Week With George Stephanopoulos. I said that all military options, including the use of tactical nuclear weapons, should remain on the table in our future dealings with Iran. I was wrong on three counts.

First, my words were a technical violation of a long-standing protocol: A diplomat friend tells me that while it is appropriate to say, “All options should remain on the table,” the direct mention of nukes — especially any hint of the first use of nukes — is, as Stephanopoulos correctly said, “crossing a line.” If George had asked, “What about nukes?” the diplomatic protocol would have been to tapdance: “I can’t imagine ever having to use nuclear weapons,” or some such, leaving the nuclear door open, but never saying so specifically.

In truth, I was trying to make the same point, undiplomatically — which comes easy for me: If the Iranians persist in crazy talk about wiping Israel, or New York, off the face of the earth, it isn’t a bad idea if we hint that we can get crazy, too.

One can easily imagine the unthinkable: a suitcase nuclear weapon, acquired from the former Soviet Union by Iranian agents, detonated in New York, London or Tel Aviv. A nuclear response certainly would have to be on the table then — and the military would be negligent if it weren’t studying all possible nuclear scenarios.

No, he was not making the same point as his diplomat friend, undiplomatically or otherwise. The friend said that one should say “I can’t imagine ever having to use nuclear weapons.” That is the oppsite of hinting that we are going to “act crazy.”

Now, not explicitly ruling out nuclear retaliation against a nuclear attack is not “crazy.” It’s called “deterrence.” It’s worked for decades.

But Klein is still talking about a tactical nuclear first strike:

But I can’t imagine a first use of nukes, and certainly not the unilateral use of nuclear weapons — or military force of any kind — against Iran by the Bush administration now. This was the second level on which I was mistaken: I failed to give the proper context for my remarks. I should have said, “Look, I believe the President has squandered our credibility in the world, and it would be disastrous for us to act unilaterally, given our unwarranted — and tragically incompetent — invasion of Iraq.” (I did get around to saying something like that a few sentences later.)

One can only assume by this statement that he believes that a more credible president could launch a first strike with tactical nuclear weapons. But then, doing that would actually be crazy, so that makes no sense either. That would make the invasion of Iraq look like child’s play.

(He does go on to write, “As a general principle, I’m opposed to the unilateral first use of U.S. force in all but the most extraordinary circumstances.” That’s reassuring.)

Here comes the “sorta”:

Let me give credit where it’s due: I probably would not be writing this were it not for all the left-wing screeching. The Stephanopoulos moment came and went ephemerally, as TV moments do, leaving a slight, queasy residue — I knew that I hadn’t explained myself adequately, but that happens a lot on television. So thanks, frothing bloggers, for calling me on my mistake. You can, at times, be a valuable corrective.

How touching. And a nice place to end this. But no:

At other times, though, your vitriol just seems uninformed, malicious and disproportionate. You seem to believe that since I’m not a lock-step liberal — and we can talk about what a liberal actually is some other time — I’m some sort of creepy, covert conservative. Of course, most conservatives consider me a liberal. I call myself a moderate — a radical or flaming moderate, take your pick — because in this witlessly overheated political environment, you’ve got to call yourself something. But the conservatives do have a point: I disagree with Ronald Reagan’s famous formulation, “Government is part of the problem, not part of the solution.” I believe that government action can, when judiciously applied, make life better for people — and that we, as a society, have a responsibility to provide equal opportunity for all. I’ve had some problems with the methods liberals use to accomplish those goals, especially when they do not recognize the corrosive effects of entrenched bureaucracies and special interests, like the public employees unions, on the lives of the poor. I’ve also had problems with the reflexive tendency of Democrats to oppose the use of U.S. military power, even when that power has been sanctioned by the UN or NATO; I have absolutely no patience for those who believe the United States is a malignant or immoral force in the world.

Ok. Let’s take this one step at a time.

Creepy, covert conservative? Why ever would we think that:

Hugh Hewitt: Joe, as I was reading the credits, because I love credits, and it seems that you don’t know any Republicans, but I love the credits anyway. You single out as your pals…

Joe Klein: (laughing) You think I don’t know very many Republicans?

HH: (laughing) Well, we got Elaine Kamarck, William Galston, Mandy Grunwald, Adam Walinksy, Richard Holbrooke, Leslie Gelb. They get the first paragraph. I said wow, you run in that East side circle that you talk about in here.

JK: Well, you know, I also run in the kind of faith based circle. In fact, one of Bush’s nicknames for me is Mr. Faith Based.

HH: Well, that’s good.

JK: And at the very end of the book, I acknowledge Bill Bennett as giving the best advice on how to judge a presidential candidate.

HH: At a Christian Coalition meeting. Yeah, it’s a great anecdote.

JK: And Bill’s a good friend of mine. But I’ve kind of got to give these guys cover.

You don’t want to be praised by what you call a traditional liberal, do you?

Traditional liberal? He writes in TIME:

I call myself a moderate — a radical or flaming moderate, take your pick — because in this witlessly overheated political environment, you’ve got to call yourself something.

“Radical” or “flaming” moderate is is a cute little appellation that means nothing. Moderate, by definition cannot be radical — or flaming. It is a perfectly respectable political position, but Klein doesn’t seem to be one. Moderates don’t support privatising social security, as Klein does. Nor do they hate public employee unions. Social conservatives, which Klein calls himself, are certainly not moderates.

When people say they don’t understand what Democrats stand for, it’s Joe Klein they are thinking of. Sadly, he and others like him speak for us in the media. That’s what’s killing us.

And I don’t actually see what Klein finds objectionable about Reagan’s famous dictum of the government being the problem. It’s boilerplate GOP bullshit and the same boilerplate GOP bullshit he spews all the time. For instance:

The Great Society was an utter failure because it helped to contribute to social irresponsibility at the very bottom.

Klein has “problems” with the methods liberals use to accomplish their goals, especially when “they do not recognize the corrosive effects of entrenched bureaucracies and special interests, like the public employees unions, on the lives of the poor.” Yet, the Great Society which lifted vast numbers of Americans out of poverty was a failure. (But hey, it makes for great cocktail party chatter by a “liberal” doesn’t it?)

I don’t know what this pernicious effect the public employee unions are having on the poor is, but I’ve read his critique of bureaucracies and it’s completely incomprehensible. He wrote:

In the Information Age, Clinton knew that the paradigm was the computer, that the government had to be more decentralized, that bureaucracies had to become more flexible, and that our social safety net had to reflect that–the fact that people had more information and have to have more choices about where they get their health care, where their money for their retirement is held, and so on.

Klein has never explained why the social safety net has to reflect the fact that people have “more information and more choices” about where their money is held for retirement or where they get their health care. You can use medicare anywhere, and most people are very happy to have part of their retirment income secured by the full faith and credit of the US treasury. It gives them some ability to take some chances with the rest of their money. Klein simply makes assertions that he seems to have formulated sometime around 1994 and never revisited after the tech bubble burst.

I have absolutely no patience for those who believe the United States is a malignant or immoral force in the world

I have to say that when the US starts “acting crazy” and torturing people and threatening to launch a nuclear first strike it is very hard to argue that it’s not becoming a malignant force.

Civilized people don’t talk about torture and nuclear war like they’re just another form of muscle flexing. That’s Dr Strangelove shit and the fact that gasbags like Klein throw this stuff around like it’s yesterday’s news is a big fat clue that this country has taken a wrong turn somewhere.

Are we a malignant force? Sometimes. Nobody’s perfect, not even the great USA. It’s not unpatriotic to admit that. Indeed, it’s necessary if we aren’t to be taken in by hucksters and despots like the Bush administration and their enablers in the press.

Klein winds up with a typical mushy centrist’s arrogant assertion that his politics are the only way anything ever gets done, which is total nonsense.

George W. Bush has proven that governing from the right can’t work; but governing from the left won’t work either. The only way that real change — a universal health-care system (along the lines enacted by Mitt Romney in Massachusetts), a real alternative energy plan, progressivity in taxation and entitlement reform, a cooperative non-toxic foreign policy—will come is through coalitions built from the center out.

Here’s the “real change” that Klein envisions:

You know, I’m pretty much a social conservative on a lot of stuff. I’m certainly opposed to late term abortion, and I think the deal to be made is morning after pill is legal, anything after that probably shouldn’t be…in the past year, I’ve stood for the following things. I’ve taken the following positions. I agreed with the President on social security reform. I supported his two Supreme Court nominees, and I support, even though I opposed this war, I support staying the course in Iraq, and doing whatever we have to do in order to stabilize the region.

Klein and his ilk have been hanging around the far right so long that it looks like the center to them now.

“one of the problems that I have with being called a liberal by someone like you is that there are all these people on the left in the Democratic Party who are claiming to be liberals, and I don’t want to be associated with them.”

That goes both ways. Guys like Klein give liberalism a bad name in my mind — meaningless, mushy, split-the-baby dreck with no intellectual consistency except an arrogant belief that those who muddy their hands in the daily dog-eat-dog of a partisan era we didn’t create are uncouth for fighting to survive. Klein’s ineffectual political style hasn’t been relevant for quite some time; it’s just that nobody’s called him on it until now.

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Constitutional Crisis

by digby

President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office, asserting that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution.

[…]

Legal scholars say the scope and aggression of Bush’s assertions that he can bypass laws represent a concerted effort to expand his power at the expense of Congress, upsetting the balance between the branches of government. The Constitution is clear in assigning to Congress the power to write the laws and to the president a duty ”to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” Bush, however, has repeatedly declared that he does not need to ”execute” a law he believes is unconstitutional.

[…]

Far more than any predecessor, Bush has been aggressive about declaring his right to ignore vast swaths of laws — many of which he says infringe on power he believes the Constitution assigns to him alone as the head of the executive branch or the commander in chief of the military.

Many legal scholars say they believe that Bush’s theory about his own powers goes too far and that he is seizing for himself some of the law-making role of Congress and the Constitution-interpreting role of the courts.

Phillip Cooper, a Portland State University law professor who has studied the executive power claims Bush made during his first term, said Bush and his legal team have spent the past five years quietly working to concentrate ever more governmental power into the White House.

”There is no question that this administration has been involved in a very carefully thought-out, systematic process of expanding presidential power at the expense of the other branches of government,” Cooper said. ”This is really big, very expansive, and very significant.”

For the first five years of Bush’s presidency, his legal claims attracted little attention in Congress or the media. Then, twice in recent months, Bush drew scrutiny after challenging new laws: a torture ban and a requirement that he give detailed reports to Congress about how he is using the Patriot Act.

[…]

…Bush is according himself the ultimate interpretation of the Constitution. And he is quietly exercising that authority to a degree that is unprecedented in US history.

Bush is the first president in modern history who has never vetoed a bill, giving Congress no chance to override his judgments. Instead, he has signed every bill that reached his desk, often inviting the legislation’s sponsors to signing ceremonies at which he lavishes praise upon their work.

Then, after the media and the lawmakers have left the White House, Bush quietly files ”signing statements” — official documents in which a president lays out his legal interpretation of a bill for the federal bureaucracy to follow when implementing the new law. The statements are recorded in the federal register.

In his signing statements, Bush has repeatedly asserted that the Constitution gives him the right to ignore numerous sections of the bills — sometimes including provisions that were the subject of negotiations with Congress in order to get lawmakers to pass the bill. He has appended such statements to more than one of every 10 bills he has signed.

”He agrees to a compromise with members of Congress, and all of them are there for a public bill-signing ceremony, but then he takes back those compromises — and more often than not, without the Congress or the press or the public knowing what has happened,” said Christopher Kelley, a Miami University of Ohio political science professor who studies executive power.

At what point does this country begin to recognise that we are in the midst of a constitutional crisis?

Somebody asked Howard Dean the other day whether he thought Bush should be impeached and I wished that he had answered by pointing out that the Republicans lowered the bar so low that it’s difficult to see how he could NOT be impeached. Let’s take a trip down memory lane, shall we, and revisit what House Manager and head of the judiciary committee, Henry Hyde, had to say about the “rule of law” just eight years ago:

The rule of law is no pious aspiration from a civics textbook. The rule of law is what stands between us and the arbitrary exercise of power by the state. The rule of law is the safeguard of our liberties. The rule of law is what allows us to live our freedom in ways that honor the freedom of others while strengthening the common good.

[…]

Senators, the trial is being watched around the world. Some of those watching, thinking themselves superior in their cynicism, wonder what it’s all about.

But others know, political prisoners know, that this is about the rule of law, the great alternative to arbitrary and unchecked state powers. The families of executed dissidents know that this is about the rule of law, the great alternative to the lethal abuse of power by the state. Those yearning for freedom know this about the rule of law — the hard, one structure by which men and women can live by their God-given dignity and secure their God-give rights in ways that serve the common good.

Unless, of course, the president is a Republican who is creating a new constitutional theory of presidential infallibility. Henry doesn’t seem to have a problem with that. But then, he pretty much said it then:

Senators, as men and women with a serious experience of public affairs, we can all imagine a situation in which a president might shade the truth when a great issue of national interest or national security is at stake. We’ve been all over that terrain.

We know the thin ice on which any of us skates when blurring the edges of the truth for what we consider a compelling, demanding public purpose.

Morally serious men and women can imagine the circumstances at the far edge of the morally permissible when, with the gravest matters of national interest at stake, a president could shade the truth in order to serve the common good.

But under oath for a private pleasure?

That is what the leadership of the GOP believes. We are watching it in action. A president can be impeached for lying about a private sexual matter but “morally serious men and women” understand that a president could “shade the truth” in order to serve the common good.

Are we all clear on how this works now? Lying about fellatio leads to lethal abuse of power by the state. Flatly refusing to obey the laws he signed and lying about national security serves the common good. This is your modern Republican party in a nutshell: A dictatorship of puritanical busybodies.

As I watched the White House Correspondents dinner this morning, I couldn’t help thinking about all those shrieking harpies and stone faced journalists who spent months pursuing an impeachable crime in president Clinton’s pants. It was one of the most hallucinatory events in modern history — shocking, freakish and bizarre. They believed along with Henry Hyde that this was the most serious of offenses — so serious that it merited removal from office.

Here’s an example of how the White House press corps functioned during the 90’s when confronted with purported lawlessness on the part of the president:

According to Starr himself, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke on Jan. 21, 1998, Starr’s top deputy, Jackie Bennett, spent the day talking “extensively” with a handful of reporters, including ABC’s Judd, the one TV reporter on the shortlist at Starr’s office…On Jan. 25, 1998, Judd appeared on ABC’s “This Week” and reported, “Several sources have told us that in the spring of 1996, the president and Lewinsky were caught in an intimate encounter in a private area of the White House.” The revelation set off a month’s worth of cable TV chatter, but the report that Clinton and Lewinsky were found out proved to be fictitious.

Or how about Michael Isikoff who wrote:

“I was convinced Clinton was a far more psychologically disturbed individual than the public ever imagined.”

This one was particularly good:

MATTHEWS: And also I’m told today that one of the reasons Republicans are voting for impeachment is that they know more than we do. There’s more in this report that’s over at the Ford Building on Capitol Hill that contains dirty stuff about this president that for whatever reason wasn’t formally released but is apparently infecting the thinking of a lot of Republicans and a lot of the borderline guys are gonna vote for impeachment tomorrow because of what they’ve read

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That was then. This is now:

MATTHEWS: Bob, can you promise that if the Democrats win the majority of House seats this fall, they get to the 218 magic number, that they will not use the subpoena power to go after the president?

Something is very wrong with our political system. And part of what is wrong is the political press corpse who are so insular and socially embedded with the players that they can’t see how this looks to us rubes outside the beltway.

I’m grateful that at least some reporters are coming around on this story. It’s long overdue (although I suspect that the administration’s antipathy for unapproved leaks might have something to do with it) But you really have to wonder why they were so rabidly and openly anti-Clinton, to the point of trying to affirmatively help the Republicans drive him from office, while this time trying to extract promises that the Democrats won’t hold Bush accountable for anything he has done.

Today we are in a real constitutional crisis and it seems the press are only belatedly beginning to focus. And, once again, the American people are way ahead of these elitist snobs who always seem to misjudge what they really care about.

Glenn Greenwald has more on this.

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Heavens To Betsy

by digby

… I think Stephen Colbert forgot his place.

At last year’s White House Correspondent’s dinner, you’ll remember that when the president joshed and giggled about not finding the weapons of mass destruction, the press laughed and laughed. They just love it when the president makes fun of himself. It reminds them of why they love him — and why they are better than he is.

I sorry to report that this year, in an alarming lack of decorum, Stephen Colbert went way over the line — he lampooned the press corps itself in such a way as to make it seem as if they might be partly responsible for why 70% of the nation feels the country is on the wrong track. Making fun of politicians is one thing. They are a slightly lower life form. But the press itself? Implying they are complicit in all this unpleasantness with war and what not? Well, that simply isn’t done.

I’m sure Joe Klein was appalled. Colbert, with his horrible little parody was no better than a left wing blogger from the fever swamp who doesn’t respect his betters. He even had the temerity to ask the question that dare not be asked in polite circles:

Why did we invade Iraq?

That will not do. Why if anyone asks that question the public might notice that the White House press corps behaved like bunch of lovelorn eunuchs until about 20 minutes ago — at which point their hilarious, down-home moron of a president began to threaten to throw them in jail.

All hail Stephen Colbert — the man who coined the word for what the Washington press have been feeding us for the last decade. The truthiness hurts, doesn’t it kids?

Crooks and Liars has the video. I think it may be one of the most revealing moments I’ve ever seen in American politics.

Peter Daou has some thoughts and recommends Eric Boehlert’s book “Lapdogs” which I’m sure is as popular as Stephen Colbert’s video with Helen Thomas — the only person with guts in a whole room filled with pearl clutching little old ladies.

Update: Atrios checks into the “Why did we invade Iraq?” question and finds that Bill Kristol’s answer to Colbert last week was truthiness. I’m stunned.

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