Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Journalistic Venereal Disease

by digby

Glenn has another great post up today in which he throws down the gauntlet to the right wing bloggers like the Old Perfesser who are all quick to require that Democrat purge the party of radicals while they cheer and applaud the eliminationist fascists in their own midst.

Republicans have been playing this game for years. They wildly inflate the importance of fringe, extremist figures and then — every time one of those individuals makes an intemperate remark or comment that can be wrenched out-of-context and depicted as some sort of demented evil — they demand that Democrats ritualistically parade before the cameras and either condemn those individuals or be branded as someone who is insufficiently willing to stand up to the extremists “in their party.”

I’ve written dozens of posts on this topic myself and it never fails to amaze me how deeply the right believes in its own righteousness. We on the left are not perfect, but by God, when leftist radicals start talking wistfully about killing Republicans we don’t make them into best selling authors and cheer them like rock stars.

But I think there is another dimension to Glenn’s observation and one that lets the right wing bloggers off the hook just a little. You can’t really hold them responsible for Ann Coulter when the woman is profiled on the cover of TIME magazine and characterized as some sort of kicky, ascerbic comic. The writer of that article said:

“the officialdom of punditry, so full of phonies and dullards, would suffer without her humor and fire.”

Here are a few more choice quotes from that article, (gathered by the incomparable Howler🙂

CLOUD: Coulter’s speech was part right-wing stand-up routine—she called Senator Edward Kennedy “the human dirigible”—and part bloodcurdling agitprop. “Liberals like to scream and howl about McCarthyism,” she concluded. “I say, let’s give them some. They’ve had intellectual terror on the campus for years … It’s time for a new McCarthyism.” Curtain.

CLOUD: [S]he told me several times that, as she put it in an e-mail, “most of what I say, I say to amuse myself and amuse my friends. I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about anything beyond that.”

CLOUD: So which is it? Is she a brave warrior or a shallow hack? Or is Ann Coulter that most unlikely of conservative subspecies: a hard-right ironist?

CLOUD: [A]s Coulter herself points out in Is It True What They Say About Ann?, “I think the way to convert people is to make them laugh or to make them enraged … Even if I could be convinced that if I had gone through 17 on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hands, I might convince one more liberal out there, I think I’d still write the way I write, because it gives me laughs.” Coulter told me that when her editor suggests cutting a line from a column to save space, “I’ll ask him, ‘But is it funny?’ And if he says it’s funny, I’ll cut an actual fact [instead].”

CLOUD: People say that Jon Stewart has blurred the line between news and humor, but his Daily Show airs on a comedy channel. Coulter goes on actual news programs and deploys so much sarcasm and hyperbole that she sounds more like Dennis Miller than Limbaugh.

CLOUD: One theory about Coulter is that she is less Joe McCarthy and more a right-wing Ali G, acting out a character who utters what the rest of us won’t.

Why Coulter is just a female Ali G! Hilarious!

When Eric Alterman had the temerity to call Cloud on this utter swill, the author fell back on journalism’s tedious false equivalency crutch:

Eric Alterman calls my piece on Ann Coulter a “moral, professional, and intellectual abomination” as well as, redundantly, a “moral and intellectual scandal.” He says Time has “a journalistic venereal disease.” This is the left-wing equivalent of an Ann Coulter attack: callous and intended to create as much friction as possible (words I use to describe Coulter in my alleged puff piece). But that’s really what my story was about–the kind of take-no-prisoners dialogue that Coulter has helped create and popularize. Now Alterman, it would seem, is trying to out-Coulter Coulter.

[…]

What Alterman wants is for people to ignore Coulter, to pretend as though she doesn’t exist and isn’t one of the most loved–and hated–figures on the public scene. I would rather engage her, examine her ideas and her popularity, and challenge her. My story does all of those things. It’s true that I don’t list every single mistake Ann Coulter has ever made, although I do print some new ones. My job was not to fact-check all of Coulter’s 1,000 columns, the 1,300-odd pages of her books and the hundreds of TV appearances; it was to profile her. Nonetheless, I do list several Coulter errors and also correct the record on some mistakes by others who have written about her–including Alterman. In his book on the media, Alterman asserts that Coulter said to a Vietnam vet, “People like you caused us to lose that war.” She did not. In fact, the vet had just gotten his facts wrong, and Coulter responded sarcastically, “No wonder you guys lost.” Harsh words, yes–sort of like saying Time has a venereal disease–but Alterman got the quote wrong.

Yes the phrase “TIME has journalistic venereal disease” (meaning that this rhetoric is passed along through intimate contact) is equivalent to “my only regret is that he [McVeigh]didn’t blow up the NY Times building. Right. Exactly the same.

I wrote about this nonsense last spring when the Coulter profile was published:

Ann Coulter is not, as Howie Kurtz asserts today, the equivalent of Michael Moore. Michael Moore is is not advocating the murder of conservatives. He just isn’t. For instance, he doesn’t say that Eric Rudolph should be killed so that other conservatives will learn that they can be killed too. He doesn’t say that he wishes that Tim McVeigh had blown up the Washington Times Bldg. He doesn’t say that conservatives routinely commit the capital offense of treason. He certainly doesn’t put up pictures of the fucking snoopy dance because one of his political opponents was killed. He doesn’t, in other words, issue calls for violence and repression against his political enemies. That is what Ann Coulter does, in the most coarse, vulgar, reprehensible way possible.

Moore says conservatives are liars and they are corrupt and they are wrong. But he is not saying that they should die. There is a distinction. And it’s a distinction that Time magazine and Howard Kurtz apparently cannot see.

I have long felt that it was important not to minimize the impact of this sick shit. For years my friends and others in the online communities would say that it was a waste of time to worry about Rush because there are real issues to worry about. Likewise Coulter. Everytime I write something about her there is always someone chastizing me for wasting their time. Yet, here she is, being given the impramatur of a mainstream publication of record in a whitwash of epic proportions. Slowly, slowly the water is heating up.

It’s kind of funny that I and others spent last week arguing whether Democrats ought to be encouraging Hollywood to stop selling sex, (which even David Brooks agrees doesn’t seem to correlate to any real negative change in the way kids behave.) But, here we have a real problem, a real coarsening of the discourse which has resulted in our politics becoming so polarized and rhetorically violent that it’s as if we live on two different planets.

While Ann Coulter makes the cover of Time for writing that liberals have a “preternatural gift for striking a position on the side of treason,” her followers actually side with Iraqi insurgents against an American charity worker. At freeperland and elsewhere they laughed and clapped and enjoyed the fruits of the enemy’s labor. This is because if you listen to Ann and Rush and Sean and Savage and all the rest of these people you know that there is no greater enemy on the planet than the American liberal. That’s what Ann Coulter and her ilk are selling and that is what Time magazine celebrated with their cover girl this week.

Ann Coulter and her violent, racist eliminationist rhetoric is considered funny and mainstream by the Washington post and TIME magazine. Considering that, why should the right wing bloggers believe they have any responsibility to hold themseloves to the standard to which they hold liberals with an outlying provocateur like Ward Churchill? In thier view, and most of the poltiical establishment, Ann Coulter is perfectly respectable.

I ended this post on the same subject with this comment from the racist website RedState:

Ann Coulter doesn’t go on television ranting and raving like the liberals do. Remember Lawrence O’Donnell? Paul Begala? James Carville? Try Maureen Dowd. Ann is nothing like these losers but she does have a sharp wit and biting tongue and knows how to dish it out. These conspiracy theory wingnuts deserve nothing less.

That is the problem with Republicans. They don’t know how to go for the throat while the Democrats are pros at aiming for the head.

I hope Ann keeps it up and never gives an inch. She is a strength for us conservatives, not something to be ashamed of.

Here’s a cute little quote from that fun little minx’s biting tongue:

“Liberals hate America, they hate flagwavers, they hate abortion opponents. They hate all religions except Islam post 9/11. Even Islamic terrorists don’t hate America like liberals do; they don’t have the energy; if they had that much energy they’d have indoor plumbing by now.”

Adorable.

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He Stands Ready To Assist

by digby

Yesterday McClellan kept saying that the vice president and his staff couldn’t get all the facts together because they were concentrating so hard on making sure Whittington was ok. The implication was that Cheney must have been intimately involved, pressing down on an artery or administering CPR for hours since he didn’t bother to even call Bush until much later.

MR. McCLELLAN: Well, I think that the first priority was making sure that Harry Whittington, Mr. Whittington was getting the medical care that he needed, and I think that’s where everybody’s attention should have been focused and was focused when the hunting accident took place. And in terms of here in Washington, there was information that we were continuing to learn about throughout the course of that evening and into early Sunday morning. The initial report that we received was that there had been a hunting accident. We didn’t know who all was involved, but a member of his party was involved in that hunting accident. And then additional details continued to come in overnight.

And it’s important always to work to make sure you get information out like this as quickly as possible, but it’s also important to make sure that the first priority is focused where it should be, and that is making sure that Mr. Whittington has the care that he needs. And the Vice President went to the hospital yesterday to visit him. The Vice President was pleased to see that he was doing well and in good spirits. And the President is, as well.

Today,post heart attack, they are again saying the the Veep is standing by (waiting to be called into the operating room to monitor his vital signs orsomething.)

A statement from Cheney’s office said, “The vice president said that he stood ready to assist. Mr. Whittington’s spirits were good, but obviously his situation deserves the careful monitoring that his doctors are providing.”

The funny thing about all this is that during the long night that Cheney was supposed to have been rolling bandages and mopping Whittington’s fevered brow, he was actually “focused” on having his dinner:

She said Cheney stayed “close but cool” while the agents and medical personnel treated Whittington, then took him by ambulance to the hospital. Later, the hunting group sat down for dinner while Whittington was being treated, receiving updates from a family member at the hospital. Armstrong described Cheney’s demeanor during dinner as “very worried” about Whittington.

“Man I hope that old bastard doesn’t kick. Can you pass the butter?”

I have to say that judging from the cable gasbags today, this is the first scandal I’ve seen handled by the press like the Lewinsky scandal — with everyone sitting around breathlessly speculating about what really happened and “what it all means.” I suspect it’s because it fits a larger narrative, as this diary on Kos, only partly tongue in cheek, shows. In fact, I just heard Bob Shrum say on Hardball that this story is a metaphor for the entire Bush administration: the gang that couldn’t shoot straight.

But, seriously. What in the hell are they hiding? What?

Update: Ok. I think something very serious is happening behind the scenes. There is simply no way that a normally functioning white house would let their most powerful propaganda voice say this:

“Would you rather go hunting with Dick Cheney or riding in a car over a bridge with Ted Kennedy?” Limbaugh asked. “At least Cheney takes you to the hospital.”

Is that really where they want to go with this? Yow.

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Laziness Doesn’t Begin To Explain It.

by tristero

Dear Kevin, You’re wrong. I was there. I remember.

Laziness doesn’t explain why George Stephanopoulos failed to mention on the proceeding Sunday show in February that millions of people in the United States marched the day before to oppose Bush’s insane plans for war. Oh he mentioned Europe but not a word about the US marches. That’s right, Kevin: Stephanopoulus failed to mention what was almost certainly the largest US demonstration in history the day after it happened. That wasn’t laziness. And it’s not laziness that the February and March ’03 marches been all but eliminated from the official memories of 2002/2003. (Except to bring up ANSWER’s involvement in organizing them and dismiss all those millions of mothers, fathers, and kids as green-haired goofballs.)

Kevin, I read somewhere that at least one of the networks began planning a year before the invasion to cover it (I’ll try to look it up if you don’t believe me). Meanwhile the voices opposed to war – and there were millions – were systematically excluded. Think about it. “Fuck, Saddam. We’re taking him out,” Bush joked (haha) a year before. It was in no one’s interest in the media to include serious dissent to rush to war. Not only on Sunday bloviations, but throughout the week, the token representatives of opposition to Bush that were permitted on the major shows were ridiculed and smeared. Hey remember Scott Ritter, that shrill, hysterical, obnoxious guy who seemed slightly crazed? Laziness doesn’t explain why Ritter’s personal problems suddenly followed him whenever he confidently asserted that Saddam couldn’t possibly have wmd – problems that, while no doubt truly ugly, didn’t in any way disqualify his expertise. Remember when a liberal meant Michael Moore and only Michael Moore, a comic filmmaker who voted for Nader? The genuine major voices opposed to war weren’t permitted anywhere near an effective microphone, but they were known. When Jessica Mathews of Carnegie Endowment – as sober an American as one could ask for and certainly known within the media – started to make a convincing case on NPR that democracy by invasion was a crazy pipe dream, even that relatively unimportant network was too big. William Kristol personally called up and horned in on her time with ludicrous assertions designed to prevent the conversation from touching upon the substantive issues at stake.

Hey, do you remember the Turkey angle, Kevin? Boy, I do. By that time, I was trying full time to understand why my country had gone insane. In the months before invasion, the press in the US was reporting a “coalition” attack – i.e. US – from Turkey was a done deal. But I smelled a rat. I asked friends for translations of articles overseas, including from Turkey. My, my what a different picture one got of that done deal! We were lied to and laziness doesn’t explain that. It couldn’t possibly happen given some 95% of the country was opposed to the US invading from Turkey. We were lied to. The press lied to the American people.

That is the truth. Oh yes, the press was, and is lazy. In booking guests on Sunday or reporting the news from Turkey. But that was hardly what uniquely characterized 2002/2003. What happened was that the press became an active collaborator in the single worst decision ever made by a United States president. Ever. A decision my 9 year old daughter will have to endure the consequences of, in ways large and small, every day for the rest of her life.

Laziness excluded anti-war voices on Sunday shows? After what we’ve all seen of the Bush/Cheney obsession with information control? Laziness? Please, Kevin. You’re smarter than that. And you know you’re smarter than that, as your half-hearted attempt to make nice all-but-concedes.

Before Bush/Iraq, it may have seemed cleverly political – cute – to take your tack, to not blame the press but ever so gently suggest they are getting bored with the same tired faces. It lets them save face after all and accomplishes the same thing. But after Bush/Iraq, it’s gonna take a lot more than kind gentle suggestion to make sure that the US press never, ever deliberately abandons its gadfly role out of fear of retaliation from any presidency whose lust for power and control is well-nigh psychotic. As the current presidency is. And was particularly successful at enforcing in the prelude to disaster… sorry, I meant the war.

It’s going to take an angry, assertive polis fully prepared to take on the establishment press and hold both its lazy foot AND its sycophantic foot to the fire. And do whatever it takes – even if it leads to resignations and reorganizations – to ensure the American people get the information it must have to govern itself.

Laziness. Yeah, right.

Love,

tristero

{Update: Kevin examines whether ratings tipped the balance in the run up to war}. Why does the name Howard Beale come to mind when I hear this argument? And why do phrases like, “we’re talking about war, goddammit not a popularity contest” keep going throught my head? As for blaming Democrats for being boring, that is NOT what happened. That is NOT what makes the run up to war one of American journalism’s most shameful period. What happened, what is still happening, is that voices that were right about Iraq in 2002 are still systematically excluded. They were/are not excluded because they are boring, but because they are unwanted. There’s a difference.]

Cheney’s Victim Has Heart Attack.

by tristero

Okay, the official reports – which only a fool would believe are telling us how badly Whittington was shot or what actually happened – are getting less and less funny. Let’s just hope he recovers and Cheney’s weapons are confiscated.

Oooooh Baby

by digby

The Poorman spends Valentine’s day with the ladies of Wingnuttia. He knows what they need and gives it to them.

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A Difficult Public Face

by digby

Via Kevin and Atrios I see that Media Matters has released more data today about the cable news networks’ partisan imbalance:

* The balance between Democrats/progressives and Republicans/conservatives was roughly equal during Clinton’s second term, with a slight edge toward Republicans/conservatives: 52 percent of the ideologically identifiable guests were from the right, and 48 percent were from the left. But in Bush’s first term, Republicans/ conservatives held a dramatic advantage, outnumbering Democrats/progressives by 58 percent to 42 percent. In 2005, the figures were an identical 58 percent to 42 percent.

* Counting only elected officials and administration representatives, Democrats had a small advantage during Clinton’s second term: 53 percent to 45 percent. In Bush’s first term, however, the Republican advantage was 61 percent to 39 percent — nearly three times as large.

* In both the Clinton and Bush administrations, conservative journalists were far more likely to appear on the Sunday shows than were progressive journalists. In Clinton’s second term, 61 percent of the ideologically identifiable journalists were conservative; in Bush’s first term, that figure rose to 69 percent.

* In 1997 and 1998, the shows conducted more solo interviews with Democrats/progressives than with Republicans/conservatives. But in every year since, there have been more solo interviews with Republicans/conservatives.

* The most frequent Sunday show guest during this nine-year period is Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who has appeared 124 times. Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) has been the most frequent guest since 2003.

* In every year examined by the study — 1997 – 2005 — more panels tilted right (a greater number of Republicans/conservatives than Democrats/progressives) than tilted left. In some years, there were two, three, or even four times as many righttitled panels as left-tilted panels.

* Congressional opponents of the Iraq war were largely absent from the Sunday shows, particularly during the period just before the war began.

Again, none of this is surprising to those of us who have been watching this stuff from our side of the aisle for the last decade or so.

Kevin and Atrios both focus on the interesting fact that there was a total lack of anti-war voices in the run-up to the war. Kevin says:

Why did the anti-war side get shunned so badly by the talk shows?

I suspect the chart on the right contains the answer. Aside from documenting the insane love affair that Sunday hosts have with John McCain, it shows that eight of the ten most popular Sunday talkers were senators and every single one of them voted for the war resolution. The reason that anti-war senators didn’t get much air time was just simple laziness: the talk show bookers kept booking their favorites regardless of what was happening in the outside world and regardless of whether that meant they were shortchanging their viewers. They were on autopilot.

Actually, it was not just laziness at all. We have evidence that this was a conscious decision on the part of the news networks:

While “Donahue” does badly trail both O’Reilly and CNN’s Connie Chung in the ratings, those numbers have improved in recent weeks. So much so that the program is the top-rated show on MSNBC, beating even the highly promoted “Hardball With Chris Matthews.”

Although Donahue didn’t know it at the time, his fate was sealed a number of weeks ago after NBC News executives received the results of a study commissioned to provide guidance on the future of the news channel.

That report–shared with me by an NBC news insider–gives an excruciatingly painful assessment of the channel and its programming. Some of recommendations, such as dropping the “America’s News Channel,” have already been implemented. But the harshest criticism was leveled at Donahue, whom the authors of the study described as “a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace.”

The study went on to claim that Donahue presented a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war……He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The report went on to outline a possible nightmare scenario where the show becomes “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”

And wave it they did. Just as a refresher, let’s recall how the networks actually ended up covering the war:

Networks quickly scrambled to give names to their war coverage, with corresponding graphic logos that swooshed and gleamed in 3D colors accompanied by mood-inducing soundtracks. CBS chose “America at War.” CNN went with “Strike on Iraq.” CNBC was “The Price of War,” while NBC and MSNBC both went with “Target: Iraq”—a choice that changed quickly as MSNBC joined Fox in using the Pentagon’s own code name for the war—“Operation Iraqi Freedom.” The logos featured fluttering American flags or motifs involving red, white and blue. On Fox, martial drumbeats accompanied regularly scheduled updates. Promo ads for MSNBC featured a photo montage of soldiers accompanied by a piano rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner.” All of the networks peppered their broadcasts with statements such as, “CNN’s live coverage of Operation Iraqi Freedom will continue, right after this short break.” Every time this phrase came out of a reporter’s mouth or appeared in the corner of the screen, the stations implicitly endorsed White House claims about the motives for war.

The networks also went to pains to identify with and praise the troops. Fox routinely referred to U.S. troops as “we” and “us” and “our folks.” MSNBC featured a recurring segment called “America’s Bravest,” featuring photographs of soldiers in the field. Regular features on Fox included “The Ultimate Sacrifice,” featuring mug shots of fallen U.S. soldiers, and “The Heart of War,” offering personal profiles of military personnel.

Much of the coverage looked like a primetime patriotism extravaganza, with inspiring theme music and emotional collages of war photos used liberally at transitions between live reporting and advertising breaks. Bombing raids appeared on the screen as big red fireballs, interspersed with “gun-cam” shots, animated maps, charts and graphics showcasing military maneuvers and weapons technology. Inside the studios, networks provided large, game-board floor maps where ex-generals walked around with pointers, moving around little blue and red jet fighters and tanks.

“Have we made war glamorous?” asked MSNBC anchor Lester Holt during a March 26 exchange with former Navy Seal and professional wrestler turned politician Jesse Ventura, whom it had hired as an expert commentator.

“It reminds me a lot of the Super Bowl,” Ventura replied.

Never mind all the dead people and the hundreds of billions of dollars flushed down the toilet.

This article has more about NBC’s directives in the run up to the war. Disgusting.

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The Times Gets Off One Of Its Knees

by tristero

The NY Times coverage of “intelligent design” creationism is improving somewhat from the days when Jodi Wilgoren (who has since changed her name to Rudoren) cheerfully fellated Christian Reconstructionists – the folks behind “intelligent design” – as they, along with other wackos, pursued the Wedge Strategy to inflict their racist, theocratic trash on the rest of us.

Today, Neela Banerjee and Anne Berryman turn in a good article on church celebrations of Darwin’s 197th birthday:

The event, called Evolution Sunday, is an outgrowth of the Clergy Letter Project, started by academics and ministers in Wisconsin in early 2005 as a response to efforts, most notably in Dover, Pa., to discredit the teaching of evolutionary theory in public schools.

“There was a growing need to demonstrate that the loud, shrill voices of fundamentalists claiming that Christians had to choose between modern science and religion were presenting a false dichotomy,” said Michael Zimmerman, dean of the College of Letters and Sciences at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and the major organizer of the letter project.

Mr. Zimmerman said more than 10,000 ministers had signed the letter, which states, in part, that the theory of evolution is “a foundational scientific truth.” To reject it, the letter continues, “is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.”

“We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator,” the letter says.

There are nuances in the descriptions a scientist might quibble over, but the article’s approach is quite reasonable.

And this morning, Rudoren herself has a mediocre article on the rapid collapse of “intelligent design”, mere mediocrity being quite an improvement for her. Rudoren does a pretty good job summarizing how quickly “intelligent design” is collapsing:

A majority of members on the Board of Education of Ohio, the first state to single out evolution for “critical analysis” in science classes more than three years ago, are expected on Tuesday to challenge a model biology lesson plan they consider an excuse to teach the tenets of the disputed theory of intelligent design.

A reversal in Ohio would be the most significant in a series of developments signaling a sea change across the country against intelligent design — which posits that life is too complex to be explained by evolution alone — since a federal judge’s ruling in December that teaching the theory in the public schools of Dover, Pa., was unconstitutional.

A small rural school district in California last month quickly scuttled plans for a philosophy elective on intelligent design after being challenged by lawyers involved in the Pennsylvania case. Also last month, an Indiana lawmaker who said in November that he would introduce legislation to mandate teaching of intelligent design instead offered a watered-down bill requiring only “accuracy in textbooks.” And just last week, two Democrats in Wisconsin proposed a ban on schools’ teaching intelligent design as science, the first such proposal in the country.

Unfortunately, Rudoren wastes space, and the reader’s time, passing on a stupid quote from the Christian Reconstructionist beard group, the Discovery Institute, without correction or comment. This is just one of several faux-balance quotes that maintain the fraud that there actually is a legitimate controversy over “intelligent design.”

Still, it’s something of an improvement from her Grand Canyon days.

If It Ain’t Broke

by digby

Three former associates of Jack Abramoff said Monday that the now-disgraced lobbyist frequently told them during his lobbying work he had strong ties to the White House through presidential confidant Karl Rove.

The White House said Monday that Rove remembers meeting Abramoff at a 1990s political meeting and considered the lobbyist a “casual acquaintance” since President Bush took office in 2001.

[…]

Abramoff was a $100,000 fundraiser for Bush and lobbying records obtained by the AP show his lobbying team logged nearly 200 meetings with the administration during its first 10 months in office on behalf of one of his clients, the Northern Mariana Islands.

The contacts between Abramoff’s team and the administration included meetings with Attorney General John Ashcroft and policy advisers to Vice President Dick Cheney, the AP reported last year.

Abramoff’s former assistant, Susan Ralston, went to work for Rove in 2001. Abramoff’s legal team declined comment Monday night.

[…]

Asked about the three former Abramoff associates’ account, the White House said Rove shared a common past with Abramoff as leaders of a young Republicans group decades ago.

“Mr. Rove remembers they had met at a political event in the 1990s,” White House spokeswoman Erin Healy said. “Since then, he would describe him as a casual acquaintance.”

I can’t quite put my finger on it, but that reminds me of something. Darn it. I hate when that happens.

Oh well. In other news, I see that Kennyboy Lay’s trial proceeds apace.

Oh right:

When Governor Bush—now President Bush—decided to run for the governor’s spot, [there was] a little difficult situation—I’d worked very closely with Ann Richards also, the four years she was governor. But I was very close to George W. and had a lot of respect for him, had watched him over the years, particularly with reference to dealing with his father when his father was in the White House and some of the things he did to work for his father, and so did support him.”

—Interview with Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay for Frontline’s 2001 documentary, “Blackout: What Caused the Power Crisis in California? And Who’s Profiting?”

[…]

“I got to know Ken Lay when he was the head of the—what they call the Governor’s Business Council in Texas. He was a supporter of Ann Richards in my run in 1994 … And she had named him the head of the Governor’s Business Council. And I decided to leave him in place, just for the sake of continuity. And that’s when I first got to know Ken. …”

—President George W. Bush, answering reporters’ questions in the Oval Office Jan. 10.

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What A Shame

by digby

I didn’t have a dog in the Hackett Brown fight, but I can’t help but be disappointed that Hackett is checking out. That man has the shinin’ and we have precious little of that in Democratic circles. I have to think that the powers that be may have failed to comprehend that some people have to be dealt with differently than your average pol. That’s why they call them “authentic” and it’s important to handle them like the thoroughbreds they are. They are always high maintenance, like most stars, but they are very, very useful in projecting an appealing national image for the party. Ask the best bet to be the Republican nominee in 2008: John McCain.

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Dispatches From The Fever Swamp

by digby

Jason Zengerle over at the Plank gives Mickey Kaus props for being wrong and then discusses every Joementum Democrat’s favorite new theme: the “fever swamp” of the liberal blogosphere. He quotes Kaus:

Much of Democratic politics seems to now consist of embracing and fanning similarly comforting, but ultimately deceptive, liberal memes. Enron has fatally damaged Bush, Abu Ghraib has fatally damaged Bush, Katrina has fatally damaged Bush, Abramoff has fatally damaged Bush, the Plame investigation will fatally damage Bush–you can catch the latest allegedly devastating issue every day on Huffington Post or Daily Kos (and frequently in the NYT).

And then adds:

I’d add a few other suspects to that last. But I think Kaus is on to something here. The drip-drip-drip of scandals and screw-ups should, collectively, take a toll on the Bush administration. But liberal bloggers have too often viewed and hyped each individual scandal as a silver bullet; and when that bullet misses–picking off, say, Scooter Libby instead of Karl Rove–they inevitably experience a letdown, and simply move onto the next supposed silver bullet, failing to capitalize on what, were it not for their unrealistically inflated expectations, would have been considered a significant scandal.

That is a very interesting observation and it makes me quite proud to be part of the liberal blogosphere. It means we are doing our jobs. The president’s approval rating is stuck at around 40% and I think it’s pretty clear that it isn’t the reporting in the mainstream media or by the “reasonable” Democrats at the New Republican that brought that about. If left up to them the Republicans would be coasting to another easy re-election.

I don’t say this because I think that liberal blogs are taking over the world and have changed the face of politics as we know it. I say it because I know that without us there would have been virtually no critical voices during the long period between 2001 and the presidential primary campaign during 2003. We were it. The media were overt, enthusiastic Bush boosters for well over two years and created an environment in which Democratic dissent (never welcome) was non-existent to the average American viewer. In fact, it took Bush’s approval rating falling to below 40% before they would admit that he was in trouble.

I believe that if it had not been for the constant underground drumbeat from the fever swamps over the past five years, when the incompetence, malfeasance and corruption finally hit critical mass last summer with the bad news from Iraq, oil prices and Katrina, Bush would not have sunk as precipitously as he did and stayed there. It literally took two catasprophes of epic proportions to break the media from its narrative of Bush’s powerful leadership. And this after two extremely close elections —- and the lack of any WMD in Iraq.

Kevin Drum and Atrios both have featured posts today highlighting new data about about the dearth of liberal voices in the mainstream media. From Paul Waldman’s article in the Washington Monthly:

This ideological imbalance isn’t only evident in the “official” sources that are interviewed: the elected officials, candidates, and administration officials who make up most of the shows’ guests. It is even clearer in the roundtable discussions with featured journalists, [where] it has been a frequent practice for a roundtable to consist of a right-wing columnist or two supposedly “balanced” by journalists from major newspapers.

….The consequence of all this is that in every year since 1997, conservative journalists have dramatically outnumbered liberal journalists, in some years by two-to-one or more. Why would the producers of the shows believe that a William Safire (56 appearances since 1997) or Bob Novak (37 appearances) is somehow “balanced” by a Gwen Ifill (27) or Dan Balz (22)? It suggests that some may have internalized the conservative critique of the media, which assumes that daily journalists are “liberal” almost by definition, and thus can provide a counterpoint to highly partisan conservative pundits.

Yes, it does suggest that. We in the fever swamps have observed this phenomenon for many years so it comes as no surprise to us. The liberal point of view has pretty much disappeared from the mainstream discourse. And yet, if one were to poll the grassroots, one would find that their views are not out of the mainstream at all. Indeed, on many more issues than not, we are in line with the vast majority of Americans.

And as much as we are unsurprised to see that the statistics bear out our observations that liberals aren’t represented on news programs, neither are we surprised that right wing talk radio, right wing publishing and right wing cable news dominate the media and that we have nothing like it on our side. This is why we shake our heads in wonder when David Brooks says there are more “nuts” on our side or that we insist upon “Stalinist” discipline. (Ask Bruce Bartlett about Stalinist discipline.)

Rush Limbaugh gets paid 25 million dollars a year to say things like this:

OK, folks, I think I got enough information here to tell you about the contents of this fax that I got. Brace yourselves. This fax contains information that I have just been told will appear in a newsletter to Morgan Stanley sales personnel this afternoon…. What it is is a bit of news which says…there’s a Washington consulting firm that has scheduled the release of a report that will appear, it will be published, that claims that Vince Foster was murdered in an apartment owned by Hillary Clinton, and the body was then taken to Fort Marcy Park.

This is, of course, the same Rush Limbaugh who interviews the Vice President on his show.

And while it is true that the producers of news programs may have internalized the “liberal” media meme and therefore book journalists who are required to be as objective as possible to spar with overt Republlican partisans, the greater problem is that the journalists themselves internalize the criticism and go out of their way to avoid being called liberal. This also explains journalists’ somewhat overheated hostility to liberal bloggers: they have a target to prove to conservatives that they aren’t liberals after all.

I actually think this is a good thing. We bloggers can take it. We’re openly partisan and extremely aggressive. We aren’t right wingers so we don’t have their natural gift for organized top-down character assassination, but we have our own methods and we are learning. The mainstream media are, for the first time in memory, being pulled by both sides of the ideological spectrum. And maybe, just maybe, we might just save them in spite of themselves.

I have written before about this and made it clear that I do not wish to destroy the mainstream media. I do not believe that this country can do without a credible press. But after waiting in vain for more than a decade for the press to shake off its torpor and exert its perogatives as the fourth estate, I reluctantly came to the conclusion that our (and their) only hope was to join the fray and pull as hard as we can on the opposite end of the rope.

I see that the press does not know what to make of this. And I see that many Joementum Democrats don’t get it either. They remain convinced that the country will wake up one day and see that our arguments are superior. They are wrong. This political era will be remembered for its brutal partisanship and sophisticated media manipulation in a 50/50 political environment. Democrats have been at a huge disadvantage because of the Republican message infrastructure and the strange servility of the mainstream press. So, we are pushing back with the one tough, aggressive partisan communication tool we have: the blogosphere.

The mainstream press is going to have to get used to us because we aren’t going anywhere. I suspect they are actually somewhat relieved that somebody on our side has stepped up to take the slings and arrows of the vast right wing conspiracy and provide them with some cover. (No need to thank us. Just report the truth.)

Joementum Dems, on the other hand, need to recognize that we are in a partisan time and that requires a partisan strategy. We are going to hit them hard every time they repeat Republican talking points and otherwise enable the opposition to dominate the media discourse. There is no more room for bipartisan gestures that only benefit the GOP side of the equation. David Gergen said yesterday on This Weak that Republicans are much better at message than Democrats but they aren’t so good at governing. Nobody knows this better than those of in the grassroots who have been forced to watch this trainwreck from the sidelines for more than a decade. It’s why Bush is at 39% today and yet there is no guarantee that Democrats will win in the fall or any sense in the media that the Republican Party has failed. We cannot afford any more Democratic complicity with Republican memes and we are going to work against those who do it.

It’s a new day. We angry denizens of the fever swamps have emerged from the slime to fight back. We couldn’t wait any longer for the professionals to get the job done. At the rate they’re going we’d be extinct within the decade.

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