The Republicans really hate this shooting story. Hate it. The future ex Mrs Rush Limbaugh looks like she just sucked a lemon as she reported that Cheney went postal over the week-end. It isn’t easy being a gargantuan right wing gasbag’s girlfriend and having to pretend that you are unbiased. Sometimes it’s impossible. She appeared to be barely able to keep her disgust in check contemplating what the comedians are going to say tonight.
So get your jokes on, moonbats. Let’s torture us some wingnuts.
Then again, they aren’t really quick enough to know a joke when they see one. I wrote this yesterday and Hilzoy over at Obsidion Wings did a fine riff on it last night. Sadly, it was a little bit too subtle for the folks apparently. I won’t say it…
“This all happened pretty quickly,” Ms. Armstrong said in a telephone interview from her ranch. Mr. Whittington, she said, “did not announce — which would be protocol — ‘Hey, it’s me, I’m coming up,’ ” she said.
“He didn’t do what he was supposed to do,” she added, referring to Mr. Whittington. “So when a bird flushed and the vice president swung in to shoot it, Harry was where the bird was.”
Mr. Whittington was “sprayed — peppered, is what we call it — on his right side, on part of his face, neck, shoulder and rib cage,” she said, noting that she, too, had been sprayed on her leg in a hunting accident.
“A shotgun sprays a bunch of little bitty pellets; it’s not a bullet involved,”
Must news reporters always exaggerate and say Vice President Cheney “shot” someone? That’s just not true!
It’s not as if he actually fired a big bad bullet. Just little bitty pellets. Couldn’t harm a fly. And, good heavens, Harry wasn’t even “sprayed” with little bitty pellets. He was just peppered. You ever pepper steak tartare? Oh, dear, that wasn’t in good taste, was it? Tee hee!
Now run along like a good little girl and don’t you dare go talking to anyone else who was there. Just do what you’re supposed to do, write what I said, and you won’t get hurt. Like Harry.
Besides, my child, it was his own fault, now, wasn’t it?
There was a good Jack and a bad Jack. Most people today only know the bad Jack. I didn’t know that man at all. The Jack I knew was funny engaging and after hours he was decent and true to his beliefs. Apparently he had some misguided impression of how to influence government.
There is something terribly wrong with our nation’s capital.
It was awfully good to see Jim Brady finally come forth with the scholarly, meditative disquisition about the effects of blogging on modern media for which we’ve all been waiting. We were in desperate need of some lucid, unimpassioned analysis of what happened in the Deborah Howell affair.
My career as a nitwitted, emasculated fascist began the afternoon of Jan. 19 when, as executive editor of the Post’s Web site, washingtonpost.com, I closed down the comments area of one of our many blogs, one called post.blog. Created primarily to announce new features on the Web site, the blog had become ground zero for angry readers complaining about a column by Post ombudsman Deborah Howell on the newspaper’s coverage of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal. If I had let them, they would have obliterated any semblance of civil, genuine discussion.
As it was, things got pretty ugly, and it’s worth figuring out why. In her Jan. 15 column, Howell erred in saying that Abramoff gave campaign donations to Democrats as well as Republicans. In fact, Abramoff directed clients to give to members of both parties, but he had donated his own personal funds only to Republicans.
Howell’s inadvertent error prompted a handful of bloggers to urge their readers to go to post.blog to vent their discontent, and in the subsequent four days we received more than a thousand comments in our public forum. Only, the word “comments” doesn’t convey the obscene, vituperative tone of a lot of the postings, which were the sort of things you might find carved on the door of a public toilet stall. About a hundred of them had to be removed for violating the Post site’s standards, which don’t allow profanity or personal attacks.
To my dismay, matters only got worse on Jan. 19 after Howell posted a clarification on washingtonpost.com. Instead of mollifying angry readers, the clarification prompted more than 400 additional comments over the next five hours, many of them so crude as to be unprintable in a family newspaper. Soon the number of comments that violated our standards of Web civility overwhelmed our ability to get rid of them; only then did we decide to shut down comments on the blog.
So was I suppressing free speech? Protecting the Bush administration? That’s what you’d think, judging by the swift and acid reaction to my move. They couldn’t get to post.blog, but they sure let me have it elsewhere in the blogosphere. I was honored as “Wanker of the Day” on one left-wing blog. Another site dissected my biography in order to prove that I was part of The Post’s vast right-wing conspiracy.
It’s so refreshing, isn’t it, to see real journalism in action instead of the snide, snippy attitude displayed so often by sophomoric bloggers?
Now contrast that dry piece of expository writing with this wild, insane drivel written by one of the bloggers Brady so justifiably takes to task in his article: (From Alternet, naturally.)
When Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell published the false claim on Jan. 15 that Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff gave money to Democrats, the paper got a loud, swift and public lesson in the new realities of online interactivity and instant accountability. It was like watching a woolly mammoth being hauled shrieking and dripping with ice-age detritus into the 21stt century.
This lesson came in large part from the blogosphere, in the form of comments made on the newspaper’s website and in posts made to political weblogs, such as DailyKos, Eschaton, and my own blog, Firedoglake. The collective daily readership of the largest political blogs now runs in the millions. We are news and politics junkies, instantly able to recite the last six jobs of Senate staffers and the names of reporters who cover every beat. We follow politics in real time and have zero tolerance for the kind of sloppy mistake Howell made. Hundreds of us swarmed to the site and immediately made our feelings known.
The paper’s insistence on remaining silent in the wake of this was a clear indication that management did not understand that the days of one-way “we speak, you listen” information flow are over. It is no longer possible for a newspaper to simply publish erroneous information and then stonewall critics as they wait for everything to blow over.
Mercy! Can’t someone put a muzzle on that crazy shrew? Can she not control her acid tongue and name calling even for a minute to explain her position? Apparently not. (Wooly Mammoths!!!? My God. Has she no decency? )
Unlike the wise, level-headed analysis you see in the first piece, here we have a writer who is so angry and hysterical she can’t even begin to explain her position.
In these two pieces we have seen the contrast: crazed, hysterical demagoguery based purely on one’s personal, emotional reaction to a story vs a sober, rational explanation of the events at hand. This is what separates “journalism” from “blogging.” Perhaps someone would like to invite Mr Brady to the next blogger ethics panel to show us how it’s done.
Regardless, obviously Cheney just can’t be trusted with the responsiblity of handling firearms. For God’s sakes, confiscate the sumbitch’s guns. Now. Before he kills someone.
We’ve got some ballistic tests to do. This doesn’t pass the smell test:
The shooting was first reported by the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. The vice president’s office did not disclose the accident until nearly 24 hours after it happened.
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 this shooting took place in an apartment owned by Lynn Cheney, and the body was then taken to the ranch.
This needs to be looked into. And if it’s determined to be an accident it needs to be looked into again. And again.
Way back in November of 2000, people were chattering online about government overreach, specifically the rubber stamp FISA court:
“Franz Kafka would have judged this to wild to fictionalize. But for us – it’s real”
—
“As quietly as possible (although it sometimes breaks out into the open, usually with the sound of gunfire and the death of innocents), a “shadow government” has been set up all around us my friend. It’s foundation is not the constitution, but Executive Orders, Presidential Procalamations, Secret Acts, and Emergency Powers.
It has all the tools to be an absolute tyranny and those behind it (on both sides of the aisle) who crave power and their form of “governance” continue to move towards it while we are distracted by so many other goings on.”
—
“The article strives to make it clear that the targets of the Kafka Kourt are foreign nationals, but then it also reveals that once a “target” is “approved” all of his or her contacts are also investigated.
[…]
Outlandish? Yes. But then, so is this whole Kafka Kourt outlandish.”
—
“This is one of those ideas that has a valid purpose behind it, but is wide open to terrible abuse. And there’s no way to check to see if it is abused.
Like all things that don’t have the light of day shining on them, you can be sure that it is being twisted to suit the purposes of those who hold the power.”
—
“The targets need not be under suspicion of committing a crime, but may be investigated when probable cause results solely from their associations or status: for example, belonging to, or aiding and abetting organizations deemed to pose a threat to U.S. national security.
This was discussed previously on FreeRepublic along with a Justice Department list of organizations to target. I saved it but unfortunately have lost it.. there were a lot of pro-life and pro-2nd Amendment groups on the list if I recall correctly. One group they targeted was a pro-life organization run by Catholic priests!”
Yes, that was from a Free Republic thread. It would appear that 9/11 changed the liberty loving, bill of rights supporting, self-sufficient freepers into a gaggle of snivelling little babies who were so traumatized by the terrorists that they now think this jack-booted FISA court is too much oversight and the president actually has the power to spy on any damned citizen he wants to. (Or they are partisan robots, you be the judge.)
I got that link from a great post by Glenn Greenwald about the new authoritarian cult conservatives (reminding me of my own little bon mot: “Conservative” is a magic word that applies to those who are in other conservatives’ good graces. Until they aren’t. At which point they are liberals.”)
He writes:
Now, in order to be considered a “liberal,” only one thing is required – a failure to pledge blind loyalty to George W. Bush. The minute one criticizes him is the minute that one becomes a “liberal,” regardless of the ground on which the criticism is based. And the more one criticizes him, by definition, the more “liberal” one is. Whether one is a “liberal” — or, for that matter, a “conservative” — is now no longer a function of one’s actual political views, but is a function purely of one’s personal loyalty to George Bush.
I think the cult of Bush is actually representative of something else. A few months ago Rick Perlstein gave a talk about Barry Goldwater at a gathering of conservative intellectuals on the subject of The Conservative Movement: Its Past, Present and Future. To a room filled with the biggest thinkers on the right he said:
As an unabashed ideological liberal in the depths of the age of Clintonian triangulation, I found the recollections of the risks you all took for a cause absolutely inspiring.
In a sense, I considered you political role models.
The name that came up over and over in my interviews with these veterans of Young Americans for Freedom was “Richard Nixon.” They came to the 1960 Republican National Convention determined to draft Barry Goldwater for vice president. They left after making a breathtaking ad hoc run at drafting Goldwater for president instead, and taking down the presumptive nominee as an unprincipled sellout.
Richard Nixon once instructed a new staffer, Richard Whalen, “Flexibility is the first principle of politics.” The conservative movement has understood itself to be the people who unflaggingly answered back to Nixon: “Principle rises above politics.” That’s a quote from Alf Regnery, in a profile of him this fall in the Washington Post. In the same article, David Keene related his answer to someone who criticized the ACU for attacking congressional spending, because Republicans were the ones in charge of it: “Well, that’s too bad.” The man here to my right, Lee Edwards, got the money quote: “What we have here is the principled conservatives vs. the pragmatic conservatives.”
[…]
What to make of the fact that some of the names who pioneered this anti-Nixonian movement of principle showed up in the dankest recesses of the Nixon administration? People like Douglas Caddy, of course, the co-founder of the effort to draft Goldwater for vice-president in 1960 and YAF’s first president, who was the man the White House called on to represent the Watergate burglars in 1972. And people like the guy inaugurated as YAF’s chair in the 1965 with those stirring words about truth: Tom Charles Huston–who, as the author of the first extra-legal espionage and sabotage plan in the Nixon White House, can fairly be called an architect of Watergate.
It is a thread one finds throughout the annals of the Nixon presidency. The notion that what they were doing was moral, the eggs that need be broken in the act of redeeming a crumbling West. Jeb Magruder told the Senate Watergate Committee: “Although I was aware they were illegal we had become somewhat inured to using some activities that would help us in accomplishing what we thought was a cause.” That message came straight from the top. “Just remember you’re doing the right thing,” the president told Bob Haldeman on Easter Sunday, 1973. “That’s what I used to think when I killed some innocent children in Hanoi.” Then he briefed him on how to suborn perjury from an aide concerning the blackmailing of the Watergate burglars.
I would argue that the lawlessness of the Reagan administration was similarly couched in moral terms. Yes, the congress may have explicitly prohibited the president from aiding the Nicaraguan contras, but helping the contras was an act of redeeming a crumbling west (saving the world from communism), so more eggs had to be broken. I don’t think I need to point out the huge fluffy omelette this administration is cooking up — to redeem the crumbling…well, you know the drill.
So, it isn’t precisely a cult of George W. Bush. It’s a cult of Republican power. We know this because when a Democratic president last sat in the oval office, there was non-stop hysteria about presidential power and overreach. Every possible tool to emasculate the executive branch was brought ot bear, including the nuclear option, impeachment. Now we are told that the “Presidency” is virtually infallible. The only difference between now and then is that a Republican is the executive instead of a Democrat.
This must be a function of psychology more than ideology. David Gergen said this morning on This Weak, that the Republicans are much better at “messaging” than the Democrats, but that they aren’t good at governing. This is true. They win by selling a fantasy of freedom and riches —- and govern as despots. You can see from the examples cited above that there is no real conservative ideology. If they can jettison their most cherished ideals (small government, balanced budgets, checks and balances, states’ rights, individual liberty etc.) whenever a Republican holds office, it is quite clear that what they care about is the power, not the “message” on which they ran.
Today I read that Bob Barr, a man who made his bones by calling for Clinton’s impeachment even before the Lewinsky scandal broke, is now being booed by a room full of arch-conservatives for suggesting that the president saying “trust me” is not adequate. We know very well that if the president were a Democrat, everyone in that room would not find it adequate.
Perlstein ended his speech with this:
For the stations of the cross of a conservatism in power include not merely Sharon, Connecticut, but Saipan, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands; not merely Mont Pelerin, but the competing Indian casinos whose money was laundered by conservative groups on Jack Abramoff’s behalf. Barry Goldwater ran against Lyndon Johnson’s ties to Bobby Baker. Now Republicans have made Bobby Baker their majority leader. His K Street Project is a lineal descendant of the attitudes and actions that constituted Watergate: Richard Nixon calling for the heads of Democratic donors and howling, “We have all this power and we’re not using it.” The American Conservative Union has made defending him to the death a point of conservative honor.
Ask yourself, What would Barry Goldwater say?
I believe now that Goldwaterism was nothing more than public relations and the “conservative movement” that sprang from his failed presidential campaign was nothing more than an elaborate con job. Throughout all the years that they decried Stalinism, it wasn’t an idealistic belief in human rights and democracy that drove them. It was quite the opposite, in fact. It was envy. All that control over other people. The huge police and military apparatus. The forced conformity. The only thing they genuinely hated about the Soviet Union was its economic philosophy. The totalitarian system, not so much. When you read about the “conservative movement” you find over and over again that the anti-communists immersed themselves in Stalinism and modeled their organizational style on it, often quite openly admiring its efficient application of power. And as we know, one of totalitarianism’s most obvious features is the cult of personality that always grows up within it.
The modern Republicans do show all the hallmarks of an authoritarian cult. But I believe that the metaphorical statue of George W. Bush will be toppled very shortly after he leaves office after an “election” based on a message of “reform.” They must restore the fantasy. His statue will be replaced, of course, with another infallible leader. That’s how it works.
The Princeton Symposium is now available online. Check out the whole line-up of thinkers on the Right. Perlstein really went into the belly of the beast.
Update: Kevin coincidentally finds a very nice illustration of what I’m talking about. .
I am going to be out most of the day so I want to leave you all with some good reading from around the blogosphere:
This article by Arthur Silber about the inevitability of action in Iran is spot on. We are not dealing with rational actors. And he’s not talking about the Iranians.
This post by Pastordan at Street Prophets about heresy in the Evangelical church is quite instructive. As usual the media gets it wrong.
Eric at Wampum answers my question about how the Democrats should answer the Republicans on national security with a fascinating reminder that there are still sharks in the blue water.
Assparrot (apparently still hungover) holds a “Digby nailed it …” contest.
Oh, and in case you have been in a coma for the last four decades, this article in the Washington Post may help you understand that you are not crazy for noticing that all the racists are now Republicans.
Uhm, would anybody care to speculate about why William Donohue, president of the Catholic league is so obsessed with incest and sodomy? Yesterday he said:
DONOHUE: Well, look, there are people in Hollywood, not all of them, but there are some people who are nothing more than harlots. They will do anything for the buck. They wouldn’t care. If you asked them to sodomize their own mother in a movie, they would do so, and they would do it with a smile on their face. You know, it’s such a cop-out to talk about freedom of expression.
My he has quite an imagination doesn’t he? Don’t blame Hollywood. I don’t think they’ve been making any movies featuring such scenes. I don’t even think the porno industry has been making movies featuring such scenes. That lovely image came right out of that sick fuck’s twisted subconscious.
(In case you didn’t catch the show, Donohue was talking about Muslim intolerance, by the way.)
After all, 15-year-olds, they go to abortionists. They get their babies killed without parental consent. The new Puritans [those criticizing The Passion of the Christ] don’t seem to worry about that. They like gay sex. They like [the film] The Dreamers, a brother and sister who bathe together and stuff like that. The same people in The New York Times who say this movie, I don’t think it’s not really right for kids, they have no problems when it comes to sodomy. It’s smoking they don’t like and Catholicism. [MSNBC, Scarborough Country, 2/25/04]
Mothers, brothers, sisters. (What, no dear old Dad?) Yeah, it’s Hollywood that’s got a problem.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. President George W. Bush disclosed new details on Thursday of a thwarted al Qaeda plot to use shoe bombs to hijack a plane and fly it into a Los Angeles building, as he sought to justify his tactics in fighting terrorism.
With critics questioning the legality of his authorization of a domestic spying program, Bush used newly declassified details of a previously revealed plot to show that the threat of terrorism has not abated.
“America remains at risk, so we must remain vigilant,” Bush said.
He said that in early 2002 the United States and its allies disrupted a plot to use bombs hidden in shoes to breach the cockpit door of an airplane and fly it into the tallest building in Los Angeles.
But he got the name of the building wrong, saying the “intended target was Liberty Tower.” He meant Library Tower, now the US Bank Tower, that at 1,017 feet (310 metres) high is the tallest building in the United States west of the Mississippi River.
It seems Bush wasn’t the only one confused by the name of the tower. This shocking leaked NSA intercept of two of the shoe-bombers shows even the terrorists were confused:
AQ#1: Have you received our target yet?
AQ#2: Yes. The Literary tower in Los Angeles.
#1: The Literary Tower?
#2: Yes. You know, the really tall one.
#1: Fool, you mean the LIBERTY Tower, not the…
#2: No no no, the Literary Tower, I remember specifically. That’s the big one. With all their books.
#1: Their books?? Who cares about the infidel’s books? The plan is to strike down their liberty. That makes our target the Liberty Tower, not the Literary tower. Are you sure we’re talking about the same tower? Do you have a map? We are talking about Los Angeles, aren’t we?
[paper shuffling]
#2: Um… uh… I can’t figure this out. Oh, who cares what it’s called. It’s the tallest one. How many tallest buildings can there be in Los Angeles, anyway?
#1: Three? Four?
#2: …Well, it doesn’t matter. Any one of them will do. Do you have the information on our weapons?
#1: Yes, I am told we will hide high explosives in our shoes, and then…
#2: Uh, say that again? It sounded like you said “high explosives” and “shoes.”
#1: Yes. Explosives. In our shoes. We’ll use them to gain access to the cockpit…
#2: Uh, Mohammed?
#1: Yes Mohammed?
#2: Something, um, doesn’t sound right. Are you quite sure…
#1: Of course I’m sure. It says right here [sounds of more paper shuffling] that we are to use high explosives to gain access to the cockpit, where we then threaten to blow up the rest of plane if they don’t fly it into the Liberty…
#2: Literary…
#1: Liberty, Literary… I don’t… [sighs] Look, just tell the pilot “The tall one.” I’m quite sure they’ll know which building you’re talking about. Just tell them that if they don’t immediately fly the plane into the tallest building in Los Angeles, you’ll blow them up with your Sneakers of Mass Destruction. They won’t want that, I can assure you.
#2: Uh… there’s something I don’t understand.
#1: Yes?
#2: How do we explode our way into the cockpit and still threaten to blow up the plane?
#1: Fool, that’s why we hide the explosives in our shoes. Just use one shoe on the cockpit door. That way we still have the other shoe to threaten to blow up the rest of the plane with.
#2: Ooooh. That makes sense. Sort of. [long pause] We get to take them off first, right?
#1: I assume. Let me check [paper shuffling]. Well, I don’t see where it says we can’t. So I suppose it should be okay. [pause] Wait. Did you hear that?
#2: Yes, I did. Is there somebody else on the line? You don’t have a party line, do you? Please tell me you paid for a private line…
#1: Yes, of course this is a private line. Now shut your hookah-hole, I’m trying to listen. [“if you’d like to continue this wiretap for another –ten– minutes, please insert an additional –75– cents”] ACK! I think this line is being tapped!
#2: Do Americans have such technologies?
#1: Damn. I once read where they did, but I completely forgot about that.
