Dear Gawd. I didn’t think it was possible to drag down the quality of Hardball any further, but the addition of Rita Cosby is a new low. I’m sure she’s a very good tabloid crime reporter. People seem to like her. But her take on politics is so shallow she is making Tweety and Tucker look like intellectual heavyweights. She clearly spent too much time at FOXNews not entirely paying attention. The result is a lethal combination of knee-jerk wingnutism and tabloid silliness. I guess this is an MSNBC attempt to boost her profile, but it’s cringe worthy even by “making a drunken fool of yourself at a dinner party” standards.
Update: I take it all back. Matthews is just as silly and stupid as she is. (Why did Americans like Hugh Grant playing the prime minister in “Love Actually” rather than Billy Bob Thornton’s creepy American president? Because we all love Tony Blair, that’s why! Jayzuz….)
Atrios linked today to a very insightful post by the man who wrote “What Liberal Media?” I urge you to read the whole thing if you are interested in the cozy, insider nature of political reporting you see coming out of Washington. Nobody gets it better than Alterman.
Alterman wrote a similarly insightful column last week in which he took mushy triangulator Joe Klein to task for his insulting mischaracterization of liberals and the facts, even as he plays a “liberal” columnist on TV and in the pages of TIME:
Among the most egregious offenders against journalistic standards and simple honesty for the purpose of abusing liberals is Time’s Joe Klein, who is, amazingly, the most liberal commentator currently employed by America’s highest-circulation newsweekly. (Klein’s animus toward liberals coupled with his cavalier treatment of inconvenient facts could hardly be in greater contrast to that of Newsweek’s high-profile liberal columnist Jonathan Alter, whose solid reporting and tempered idealism serves as a kind of remnant and reminder of the long-defunct liberal Establishment.)
To take just one recent example, a Klein column posted January 8 accused Democrats of “playing too fast and too loose with issues of war and peace.” Now look who’s talking:
Klein writes, “The latest version of the absolutely necessary Patriot Act, which updates the laws regulating the war on terrorism and contains civil-liberties improvements over the first edition, was nearly killed by a stampede of Senate Democrats.” In fact, this “stampede” was led by four Republicans.
Klein writes, “A strong majority would favor the NSA program…if its details were declassified and made known.” In fact, when an Associated Press poll asked Americans if the Bush Administration should be required to get a warrant before wiretapping, 56 percent answered affirmatively.
Klein writes, “Until the Democrats make clear that they will err on the side of aggressiveness in the war against al-Qaeda, they will probably not regain the majority in Congress or the country.” This statement ignores that the Bush Administration diverted resources from capturing bin Laden and destroying Al Qaeda to send them to Iraq, where no such threat existed but where one has since been created. It also ignores the fact that Republicans received a minority of the Congressional vote in 2004, as well as in the presidential votes of 2000, 1996 and 1992.
Joe Klein is everything that is wrong with the allegedly liberal punditocrisy. His anachronistic establishment politics are wrongly seen by many, including many elected Democrats, as the “reasonable” middle ground for which we must strive in order to attract some ephemeral centrist voter who exists only in their imaginations. He is the embodiment of the now wholly irrelevant DLC experiment. With none of the down home common touch of Clinton or the earnest idealism of Gore, he is nothing but a big bowl of warmed over 90’s centrist hype in a time where battles lines are by necessity, sharply drawn. He’s the political equivalent of reruns of “Mad About You.”
Every time he is seen as representing any form of winning liberalism, we lose. He obviously hates real Democrats, the vast majority of whom do not agree with anything he has to say, and his hostility to what we believe contributes mightily to the disdain and fear that the Democratic establishment feels toward the grassroots. He represents nothing but the clubby little world of highly paid poltical pundits who have as much in common with average Americans as Madonna does.
And he is a thin-skinned prick. Here’s is his response to Altermann’s criticisms, via Alternet:
“Eric Alterman is simply not a serious person — and I’m writing about a very serious issue,” says Time columnist Joe Klein, in response to Eric Alterman’s recent ad hominem attack in The Nation, wherein he dubs Klein one of the mainstream media’s “most egregious offenders against journalistic standards and simple honesty.”
“I don’t want to address Eric’s remarks because they’re not worth addressing,” Klein says. “This guy just spews opinions without having any information or doing any reporting. You just did something Alterman has never done, for example, actually calling me to do some reporting!”
In the course of generally noting, “The punditocracy’s ignore-except-to-attack attitude toward liberals,” Alterman dissected a recent Klein column that Alterman claimed “accused Democrats” of playing too fast and too loose with issues of war and peace. He then criticized Klein for his perceived “animus toward liberals coupled with his cavalier treatment of inconvenient facts.”
“That’s typical of his essential narcissistic laziness,” Klein responds. “Alterman has been personally attacking me for years. It’s what he does instead of working … He’s so peripheral, I forget he’s in the business until someone calls or emails me his latest attack!”
[…]
“I’m not nearly as smart as Eric, to have opinions without bothering to report first,” Klein counters. “Instead let me react by speaking to the facts. After all, I’ve lived my life by seeking out facts and then reporting them. One advantage I think I have over other columnists is that I do reporting.”
Klein says he will “have a lot more to say on this (NSA) issue next week — but first I have to learn more about it.”
Asked for an example, Klein says, “The notion of calling it wiretapping is questionable, I think, although I’m still not entirely sure.
“People like me who favor this program don’t yet know enough about it yet,” he says, “Those opposed to it know even less — and certainly less than I do.”
According to Klein, the NSA employs a “powerful front-end computer program that can scan computers and cell phones and access all previous communications.” Then, he says, analysts look for patterns in the calls and emails.
“Once they’ve gone through that process,” he explains, “Then they go to the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) special court.”
In Klein’s analysis, “the liberals are reacting to this issue in their usual reflexive way. Meanwhile, George Bush and others in his administration are being very cynical.”
The political flap over the NSA actions, Klein says, could be easily resolved. “All that’s needed is an updating of the FISA Act or the Patriot Act.” But this is unlikely to happen, Klein believes, “because George Bush is spoiling for and creating a fight on this issue, since he thinks it’s a fight he will win in the court of public opinion.”
As for his fight with Eric Alterman, Klein’s willing to forfeit. “Who cares, really?” he concluded. “He’s written lots of inaccurate, foolish stuff about me before. It’s just silly. If it were someone who actually KNOWS stuff or caught me in an inaccuracy, then I’d be concerned. But Eric? He can say what he wants.”
Yes, well, there is no need for Klein to be concerned because he holds a very important perch as a faux liberal in the punditocrisy, a highly paid profession that specializes in pushing the “liberals are icky” meme that serves the Republicans so well. He’s a good lapdog “liberal” and he and all his lickspittle cohorts are killing us.
It Would Be A Cakewalk. After All, More Soldiers Speak Spanish Than Persian, Right?
by tristero
To hell with Tehran. Real men covet Caracas. Doesn’t it seem like the Bush administration is deliberately being as obnoxious as possible so they can start a war somewhere, anywhere, it doesn’t matter, just as long as there’s some bang bang? Where do you find people like Donald Rumsfeld?
“I mean, we’ve got Chavez in Venezuela with a lot of oil money,” Rumsfeld added. “He’s a person who was elected legally _ just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally _ and then consolidated power and now is, of course, working closely with Fidel Castro and Mr. Morales and others.”
There have been increasing signs of hostility between Washington and Caracas, and on Monday Chavez said Venezuela’s intelligence agencies have “infiltrated” a group of military officials from the U.S. Embassy who were allegedly involved in espionage.
Venezuelan authorities, including the vice president, have accused officials at the U.S. Embassy of involvement in a spying case in which Venezuelan naval officers allegedly passed sensitive information to the Pentagon.
It was not the first such charge by Chavez.
I have a favor to ask. Occasionally, I’ve tried to understand Chavez but can’t. The mainstream press in the US has been worthless (worse than usual and that is not a good sign, frankly). There were a few interesting articles in the New York Review of Books – no fans of the Bush administration – from which I took away the impression that Chavez must have been born in Macondo. It sounded like he was completely nuts but that somehow, through a thicket of immense corruption, life for some poor people in Venezuela were marginally improved under Chavez for the first time.
If anyone has any suggestions about a knowledgeable article or book to read on Chavez, please drop the reference in comments.
In any event, when I start to agree with commentators about how vicious and uncivilized it is to use rhetoric that reminds people that Nazi admirers have no business in the US government and that anything in their past is fair game to humiliate them and get them out of it, i just have to read something like these remarks from a high Bush official to recall precisely the nature of the fight we’re in. Bush’s vicious discourse cannot be ignored, minimized, deflected or muted. It must be met head on. Always.
As Zappa sez, The meek inherit nothing.
(By the way, I’m gonna predict 10 comments or less.)
With the United States beginning its February presidency of the Security Council, John R. Bolton, the American ambassador, reported the failure of his first effort from the chair, to get the 15 Council members to begin meetings promptly at 10 a.m. “Starting on time is a form of discipline,” he said. “I brought the gavel down at 10. I was the only one in the room, though.”
[E]ven tough debates can be conducted in a civil tone, and our differences cannot be allowed to harden into anger. To confront the great issues before us, we must act in a spirit of good will…
Given that you only listen to what fellow Republicans have to say, I can only quote the immortal words of your Vice-President, Richard Cheney:
My friend Peter Swales is one of the most important historians of psychoanalysis in the world (I must return his calls). Among his greatest recent achievements is research into the real Sybil, the publication of whose case (but NOT her real problems) eventually spawned an epidemic of Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD) diagnoses about 10 or 12 years ago, a travesty that seriously wronged a lot of emotionally vulnerable people.
Oh, come on, Friedman, get real! The president throws a few paragraphs your way and you go all weak in the knees. Show some spine, man! You need to trash this thing. You know these guys are not serious. This is a president who once called for putting a man on Mars and then just dropped it. You assumed they were going to do the Iraq war right — remember? Look where that got you, you moron. You should have listened to your wife!
Yeah, I know all that. But here’s what else I know: Mr. Bush is going to be president for the next three years. We do not have three years to lose — not on climate change, energy efficiency or improving math/science education. I am not going to sit around for the next three years just trashing these guys and praying that some Democrat gets elected and does all the right things. We don’t have time, you moron!
[snip]
There’s no pain-free solution. Remember how President Kennedy ended his May 25, 1961, State of the Union speech calling for a moon shot? He said: “I have not asked for a single program which did not cause one or all Americans some inconvenience, or some hardship, or some sacrifice.”
Pigs will fly before Bush says that.
You may be right. And if he fails to carry through with this energy initiative, I’ll be the first to rip him for it. In the meantime, I prefer to give him a new reputation to live up to. You never know. … And by the way, pal, you got a better horse to ride right now? [Emphasis added.]
If you think I’m gonna enter an argument between two Tom Friedmans, you must think Mama Tristero raised a fool. But I do want to point out that little phrase I boldified:
You never know. …
Hmm…Didn’t I hear that like a few years ago? Didn’t a guy named Packer or something just say exactly that to excuse his inexcusable naivete?
Vice President Cheney and his then-Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby were personally informed in June 2003 that the CIA no longer considered credible the allegations that Saddam Hussein had attempted to procure uranium from the African nation of Niger, according to government records and interviews with current and former officials. The new CIA assessment came just as Libby and other senior administration officials were embarking on an effort to discredit an administration critic who had also been saying that the allegations were untrue.
CIA analysts wrote then-CIA Director George Tenet in a highly classified memo on June 17, 2003, “We no longer believe there is sufficient” credible information to “conclude that Iraq pursued uranium from abroad.” The memo was titled: “In Response to Your Questions for Our Current Assessment and Additional Details on Iraq’s Alleged Pursuits of Uranium From Abroad.”
Despite the CIA’s findings, Libby attempted to discredit former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, who had been sent on a CIA-sponsored mission to Niger the previous year to investigate the claims, which he concluded were baseless.
I guess that blows ole patriotic whistleblower Karl Rove’s excuse out of the water, too. Remember how all the wingnuts said he was just warning the press off a bad story when he spoke to Matt Cooper?
For Mr. Rove is turning out to be the real “whistleblower” in this whole sorry pseudo-scandal. He’s the one who warned Time’s Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson’s credibility.
“not only the genesis of the trip is flawed an[d] suspect but so is the report. he [Rove] implied strongly there’s still plenty to implicate iraqi interest in acquiring uranium fro[m] Niger … “
I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked. Karl Rove lied. But that is no reason for reporters not to believe him now, of course. It was just the one time.
So the House Republicans tried to rig their own election. It just doesn’t get any better than that, does it?
But, after all, it’s what they are trained to do from the time they join the Party:
Everyone who watched this summer’s race for College Republican National Committee (crnc) chair with any detachment has a favorite moment of chutzpah they admire in spite of themselves. Leading the count are the following: speaking sotto voce of your opponent’s “homosexuality”; rigging the delegate count so that states that support your candidate have twice as many votes as those that don’t; and using a sitting congressman to threaten the careers of undecided voters. I can understand the perverse appeal of each of these incidents. But I cast my vote for the forged letter.
It’s so much a part of their make-up that it’s hardly even remarked upon. Their friends in the media don’t seem to find it worthy of mention either. Republicans believe that stealing elections is perfectly moral and right. They do not believe in democracy. That’s why they talk about it all the time.
These missing Cheney e-mails are very intriguing. This is particularly so because we went though a similar event during the Clinton administration and the Republicans went completely apeshit over it. In 2000, it was revealed (through the machinations of Judicial Watch) that some emails had not been properly archived and it was suspected that some of Monica Lewinsky’s had not been turned over as a result. Dan Burton held hearings and the Independent Counsel, Robert Ray, was assigned to look into it.
Judicial Watch ended up filing an ethics complaint against Ray for declining to follow it up but it was clear from the get that it was another bogus witch hunt, as all the Clinton scandals were. But in the course of it we all found out what kind of an archiving system the White House has for maintaining emails:
… whenever a White House staffer clicks “send,” a message reminds them that a copy of their missive is being sent to records management.
When it comes to saving e-mails, the White House is held to a higher standard than the private sector, and even Congress.
Companies that have a policy of saving e-mails usually do so only for three to six months, according to records-management consultants. Many companies consider them the same as phone calls, and don’t archive them unless they are equal in weight to a written communication.
But the White House is different. It saves its records for posterity. After President Clinton vacates his office next January, at least 30 million stored e-mails will be deposited with the National Archives, an unfathomable mountain of data ranging from “how about lunch?” to speech drafts, to perhaps more juicy communications.
We have learned that not all email of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system.
And here I thought the grown-ups from the private sector with their fancy pants ways were going to fix all those technical problems.
Whatever the case, there is ample precedent for a full-on congressional hissy fit and a thorough special counsel investigation. The Republicans held fiery hearings on this matter just months before Clinton left office, so great was the urgency, and there was absolutely no evidence that any emails of the president were involved. But because there might have been an email from Monica to the president that said “I wuv you” that hadn’t turned up yet, they grilled the entire White House counsel’s office for days.
There can be no complaints from the Republicans about Fitzgerald investigating this. None. The precedent was set just five and half years ago — by them.
Democrats should drive him into personal bankruptcy and revisit in lurid detail all those nasty personal issues Schwarzenegger deflected when he was campaigning the first time. They should start right now and not stop, even after he’s been driven from office and he’s sold his last Hummer.