Demographically Correct
Is it just me or is it a little bit odd that the allegedly liberal Washington Post is advertising on this conservative DC blog and not advertising on this liberal DC blog?
It seems particularly odd considering that the conservative blog gets only 1/6th the weekly traffic that the liberal blog gets.
That damned liberal media sure is biased.
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White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove did not disclose that he had ever discussed CIA officer Valerie Plame with Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper during Rove’s first interview with the FBI, according to legal sources with firsthand knowledge of the matter.
The omission by Rove created doubt for federal investigators, almost from the inception of their criminal probe into who leaked Plame’s name to columnist Robert Novak, as to whether Rove was withholding crucial information from them, and perhaps even misleading or lying to them, the sources said.
Also leading to the early skepticism of Rove’s accounts was the claim that although he first heard that Plame worked for the CIA from a journalist, he said could not recall the name of the journalist. Later, the sources said, Rove wavered even further, saying he was not sure at all where he first heard the information.
Martha knitted a lovely poncho and lost 25 pounds. Do you think Karl will make such good use of his time?
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GOP Creature
My initial take on reading around the web on Roberts is that he’s a purely political choice — a Republican die-hard to the bone. This means that even if he isn’t seen as “ideological” in theory, he’s ideological in practice. They all are.
He’s spent his entire adult life in Washington. He’s been a judge for only two years. Before that he represented corporations and worked for Republican administrations. That’s it. He’s not a scholar or a prosecutor or someone who has ever worked in the trenches. He’s a creature of the radical right GOP establishment.
Good choice for Bush. He’ll take care of his friends. And he knows exactly what he’s supposed to deliver.
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The Suspense Is Killing Me
CNN has already announced who the new Supreme Court nominee will be. Yet the president is still going to go live at 9pm est to give us this “news.”
And right now, 29 minutes before the big “announcement” CNN is discussing the nominee while a clock ticks down in the corner of the screen telling us how long we have to wait until the president tells us what we already know.
Reason #4672 why the cable news networks are completely worthless.
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John Roberts
So what do the shrieking wingnuts think of him? Is he pure enough? Does he speak in tongues, handle snakes, speak directly to Jesus and James Madison about original intent? Fill me in.
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Scotus With The Mostest
I think Clement is going to sail through — unless the far-right has a temper tantrum. So the question is, how do we get as much political advantage from this as possible?
Would it be best to try to bait the far right into blowing it by saying that we think Clement may be the kind of “Sandra Day O’Connor, David Souter” centrist that we can live with? You know how they feel about that.
Or do we use the opportunity to ram home all the principles and ideals that we feel are in jeopardy with Republicans in power choosing who gets lifetime appointments?
As I said, she’s in. The Gang of 14 are not going to disband over this one. So, how do we get the most out of it?
I’m thinking it might be a good play to rile up the wingnuts while Karl is on the hotseat. Karl probably made this decision, after all. How could he betray them this way?
Update: What? A one day trial balloon? Whatever. We’ll know in a couple of hours…
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Clueless
Gawd help us. Apparently Jon Meacham has spent so much time praying with Monsignor Tim lately that he hasn’t had time to bone up on the basic facts of the Plame case. It hasn’t stopped him from talking about it, though. According to The Daily Howler, he actually said on Don Imus that Wilson was dispatched after the war had started. For real:
How completely clueless was Meacham? This clueless—he actually thought that Wilson’s trip had been commissioned in the spring of 2003, after the war in Iraq was over. He had seemed to imply this at the two-minute mark, bringing our analysts out of their chairs; discussing the political fall-out in the spring 2003 as the WMD failed to turn up, Meacham said that Wilson had “undertaken a mission to go to Niger and discover if these 16 words were true.” Since Wilson’s trip occurred a full year before those 16 words were spoken, it seemed that Meacham was working from a bogus chronology—but even we couldn’t quite believe that the parson could be this clueless. But later, as he gave that brilliant “best guess,” his confusion became all too clear:
MEACHAM: My best guess is that it did come out of the bureaucracy of the CIA, and it may have, it could have originated with the wife.
IMUS: Who asked them to do it, the CIA?
MEACHAM: Well, they were trying—remember, everything was falling apart. So they’ve got to—now, one would hope that they would have undertaken this, done their homework before we had begun a war based partly on this. But things were beginning to very explicitly disintegrate and these documents were—it turned out they’d been faxed through Italy, remember this?—on the uranium. So I think it came out—it probably came out of the CIA, which is supposed to vet all of this.
But this should not surprise us. Meacham proved to us some time back that he has a rather odd notion of reality when he wrote this:
The uniqueness—one could say oddity, or implausibility—of the story of Jesus’ resurrection argues that the tradition is more likely historical than theological.
The uniqueness, one could say oddity, of big time celebrity “reporters” who don’t know their asses from holes in the ground argues that mainstream journalism is more likely moribund than relevant.
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Reading the Wingnuts So We Don’t Have To
The Daou Report has a very helpful special page up featuring the musing of both right and left on the Plame Affair. If you want the overview of how both sides of the blogosphere are dealing with the issue this is a great place to go.
Today on the left we are talking about the Iraq lies, parsing the evidence and calling for Rove’s head for leaking. On the right they are saying Clinton was worse and the whole thing is boring. It’s fun, check it out.
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The Cup is Empty
If you have an extra buck or two, my friend Joe Vecchio, who runs Cup ‘O Joe “the blog of the working unemployed man,” could use a little scratch while his wife’s in the hospital.
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Bad Advice
If anyone is still in the dark about what is wrong with the Democratic Party, look no further than this:
I just got off the boat. For the past week my family and I have been guests on the R Family Vacations cruise created by Rosie and Kelli O’Donnell. Along with 2000 other people – gay, straight and lots of kids – we sailed to Halifax, Nova Scotia and back down to NYC through Boston and Cape Cod. And I was a cynic. Truth is, since I get both claustrophobic and seasick, I had to be brought kicking and screaming on this trip. I just wasn’t in the mood for an onslaught of gayness.
I was wrong. It was a magical vacation…But sailing in international waters gave me a different perspective to the news of the moment. The distance I felt from the hype was much akin to the everyday attitude of a majority of Americans.
Over and over people on the ship asked me why the Democrats are focusing so much attention on Karl Rove and not, instead, providing a better alternative story for the American people to hear. It is a good question.
Karl Rove won’t resign no matter how many blog posts, front page stories or speeches from the floor of Congress take place…So why are Democrats wasting the chance to talk to people about what they really care about? As long as the political conversation is about Karl Rove, the Republicans win. Sure, the President’s current allegiance to Rove is damaging but the White House has obviously made a calculation that it is better to keep Karl around than to get rid of him and have the subject changed. That alone should give Dems a clue as to how important it is for us to change the subject.
It is no sure thing that Democrats will be able to get people to focus on politics at all during these few weeks. But our only hope is to talk about something more relevant. Summer vacation is family time. It is also a time for anxiety for parents. Because instead of worrying about our jobs, on vacation, most parents worry about their kids.
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(And lest anyone doubt that the gay and lesbian parents on our cruise have all the same anxieties and commitment to their children as straight parents, rest your concern. In fact, the normalcy of the conversations was soothing.)
Democrats have more answers to the problems faced by families in America today. Now is a good time to try and dominate the conversation with those concerns. When people across the country feel certain that the Democratic political leadership cares more about these issues than scoring political points, we will finally benefit from the President’s dropping approval ratings.
Hold on to your hats folks. This person is a Democratic political consultant. In other words, Democrats pay her for political advice. I’m not kidding.
First of all, her attitudes toward gay people seems to be something closer to an anthropologist finding the lost tribe of Borneo. She wasn’t ready for an “onslaught of gayness” but was eventually soothed to learn that gay people are normal. Good for her.
But, of course, the other huge sin is this fucking insane, deranged, bass-akwards, idiotic advice that we should stop talking about Karl Rove so we can swing the conversation toward child care. She actually said that as long we are talking about Karl Rove, the Republicans win.
Oh yes, by all means let’s drop this hot potato and schedule a press conference about parental anxiety. The cable shows and the papers are clamoring for that kind of copy. They can’t get enough of it. Perhaps we can get all the elected Democrats to stand on the steps of congress and sing “I’m a little teapot, short and stout” for the evening news. Meanwhile, let’s just let the criminals in the White House blow up the world. After they’re done, we’ll have a helluva parental leave policy to enact. Unfortunately we won’t have a country.
Seriously, as long as we have this white house off balance, not controlling the message and the agenda, the Republicans lose. Really. The Democrats can’t “win,” you see, because we have no power to legislate or mandate fuck-all. Our only job is to stop the Republicans from destroying the country any more than they already have and lay the groundwork for winning elections. Taking on Republicans is a vital part of that job.
I’m sure that Rosen had a lovely time with the liberals on the ship who all were parroting the conventional wisdom “but the Democrats don’t have any ideas!” or “nobody knows what the Democrats stand for” which Rosen, the professional political consultant, took for some sort of homespun wisdom. If she thinks being on a cruise with 2000 people who can afford to spend a week with Rosie O’Donnell and her family is like being an average American she needs her head examined.
Here’s a clue for the professionals who hear this shit at cocktail parties: people say this because they don’t have anything else to say. These mantras are conversational elevator music, things that people say in social situations that are uncontroversial, genteel and guaranteed to result in agreement. These political platitudes are conversational filler that are often used to obscure the fact that the speaker isn’t really conversant with the details or because they really, really don’t want to get into an argument. And it’s exactly the type of bullshit that you see among super liberals who feel they have to temper their overwhelming feelings of shadenfreude with public tut-tutting about the terrible waste of it all in light of all the real problems in the world.
I don’t understand how anyone can become a political consultant without having some instinct for the manners of even her own social class. Ms Rosen should probably re-read her copy of Pride and Prejudice and concentrate on something besides Mr Darcy this time. She’d learn something about human nature.
There is no way we will ever again be in a position to help families or do anything else as long as our politicians are being advised by people like this.
Update: I’ve been reliably informed that Hilary Rosen is gay. It’s good to know that she discovered on her trip that other gay people are normal. She must be so relieved.
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