Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Oh Maggie, I Wish I’d Never Seen Your Face

Thanks again to Kathy G, here’s some more from traditional morals maven, Maggie Gallagher:

(Via Lexis-Nexis) August 10, 1998, Monday

AN UNWED TEEN MOM’S DILEMMA

BY: MAGGIE GALLAGHER

SUPPOSE you’re an intelligent 17-year-old single girl who has just had a baby. Suppose you’re even smart enough to know that, as one such young unwed mom named Chasity told The New York Times, “I made a mistake … I’m not recommending this.” Now suppose your local school’s chapter of the National Honor Society, worried about sending a message that an unwed teen parent is a good role model, turns you down for membership, despite your high G.P.A.

What do you do?

If you are Chasity Glass, or her friend Somer Chipman, two 17-year- old students at Grant County High School in Kentucky, you agree to become poster girls for a new national legal campaign by the ACLU to establish unwed motherhood as the right of minor children everywhere.

Not that I blame Somer and Chasity so much. They’re teen-agers after all, and teens are notoriously obsessed with their own feelings and rights. That’s one of the reasons that youngsters shouldn’t be parents, especially outside of marriage. But what’s the ACLU’s excuse?

Gender equality, intones ACLU lawyer Sara Mandelbaum self-righteously, as if the natural first step to raising women’s status is to confer on teen-age girls a right to have babies. There is no social attitude or law on the books that is as big an obstacle to career achievement for women as having babies outside of wedlock, especially before adulthood.

And, incidentally, research shows that becoming an unwed mom is an equally large obstacle to eventually building a successful marriage; not only is it harder to find a good mate, but having a child with a man who is not your husband makes divorce more likely. All the way around these two girls have taken a step that may injure their own and, more important, their babies’ chances in life for years to come. I wish them luck.

Yeah, a mother fighting for the right to an honor that she already earned because screeching moralists like Maggie Gallagher are worried “the message” it sends is sure to harm their babies’ chances in life for years to come. I’m just sure of it. it must be true. She’s an expert.

Maggie waited until she was 21 before she got knocked up by her kid’s father whom she didn’t bother to marry. By her own standards she was too selfish to marry for the next ten years. But she always finds others to castigate for their immorality and selfishness, rarely copping to what she would call a decadent lifestyle if another woman lived it. Her story remains vague and unknown to most people who read her material. Her close friends, the right wing think tankers and pundits in Manhattan and DC don’t see anything amiss, however. (Falafels and strip poker anyone?)

The timeline suggests, although I don’t have proof, that she may have been in a delicate condition while she was at Yale. I wonder what kind of message Maggie would think it sends for a pregnant college student to be allowed to receive a diploma when she is unwed. But, we needn’t worry about that. If Maggie (being the paragon of honesty that she is) were pregnant at the time of her graduation from college she undoubtedly would have stayed home from the ceremony because it would set such a bad example for others.

You have to give her credit, though. She became a hypocritical wingnut harpy lecturing others about their mistakes right out of the box. That’s the way it’s done girls. Get with the “do as I say, not as I do” party and make some big bucks. Even an “illegitimate” child and really bad haircut won’t hold you back.

Here are some more of those anti-feminist traditional values that sell so well:

…amazingly, deep within the bowels Title IX regulations (mostly used

heretofore to encourage women’s sports), the federal government does define unwed pregnancy as a young girl’s gender rights.

The intentions of Title IX were no doubt good: encouraging pregnant teens to stay in school. But time has proved even a high school diploma does not magically eliminate the enormous hardship that out-of-wedlock childbearing imposes. The ACLU’s misguided campaign will not advance women’s equality; it will no doubt encourage at least a few more immature teens to think about motherhood in terms of their own desires rather than their child’s needs.

Like a lying apple cheeked Yalie mom who forgot to get married for ten years while she created a “career” as a “marriage expert.”

But perhaps they might take a cue from another single young woman from Chasity and Somer’s high school, who had a child a few years back. She too had good grades and she too was denied entry into the National Honor Society. But unlike Somer and Chasity, Krissy Ford decided it was not worth making a federal case of it: “I had no hard feelings at all,” Krissy Ford told the Lexington (Ky.) Herald-Leader last May. “It’s something that’s not worth dragging your school down. … It’s a mistake I made.”

Krissy respects the decision the two younger unwed moms made, but recalls, “My focus was on my child.”

If only the rest of us could be so mature.

Oh my yes. There is no doubt in my mind that the world would be a better place if Maggie had been mature enough to “focus” on her child instead of helping to create a multi-million dollar industry devoted to indoctrinating “the people” in backward bourgeois values (at which they themselves scoff) for political gain and financial profit.

In light of Maggie’s love-child, I wonder how all of her fellow up-tighty righties explain the strange advice to fellow travellers (from February 1999) such as “If you are going on the moral attack, wash your own hands first,” and “those of us who see clearly the connection between the privatization of morality(especially sexual morality) and the public squalor we must all live in have to be in the business not of rallying troops but of making conversions,” in light of the fact that she stands accused of not only greed, avarice and mendacity in taking payola from the government, but she’s also obviously someone who lived a secret life as an elitist libertine while making a living chastizing young girls for being as immoral as she is?

(Oh, what am I saying? They will resort to their usual sophistry and say that Gallagher never explicitly condemned unwed motherhood for dark haired women who graduated from Yale and besides keeping it a quasi secret is the right thing to do because she was trying to set an example. Next?)

Maggie Gallagher believes that unwed motherhood is the scourge of modern American life. In one of the self-serving screeds in which she failed to disclose that she was on the take from the Bush administration, she wrote:

But $300 million is a tiny fraction of what we spend to deal with the social problems created by high rates of illegitimacy and divorce. You know what really costs big bucks? Having one-third of our babies born outside of marriage. These children, through no fault of their own, are more likely to be poor,

welfare-dependent, to need special education, to get physically ill (Medicaid

dollars), to become substance abusers, experience mental illness, commit acts of

juvenile delinquency and become adult criminals, drop out of high school, be

held back a grade, and to go onto become young unwed mothers and fathers

themselves, perpetuating an expensive cycle of downward mobility.

Well, yes. Unless one is a high paid GOP shill who works as a “marriage expert” in no less than three of the bogus GOP propaganda front groups that call themselves “think tanks.” Then you can fuck to your hearts content, get knocked up, stay unmarried for ten years while you pursue your elitist career as a “scholor” and “columnist” and still be able to hector the rest of the country about traditional morality.

Man, oh man, The right is really where the money is. I’m beginning to feel a little bit foolish for not taking advantage of it. If you can cast off all personal integrity and can bear to kiss the asses of people like James Dobson, they don’t care what kind of a freak you are. What a great scam.

Update: Media Matters has all the data of the GOP front groups our gal Maggie has been sucking from for her entire “career” as a “marriage expert.” (I was going to say “who do you have to blow to get some of that action” and then I realized…ohmydeargawd)

Correction: I misspelled Kathy G’s name. It has been fixed in this post and the one below.

Charles Pierce

Did I just hear Richard Perle on Nightline say that the biggest mistake we made in Iraq was not handing the country over to Ahmad Chalabi three years ago? Yes, and the biggest flaw in our national economy is that we haven’t turned the Federal Reserve over to Ken Lay. Yes, and the biggest mistake I am likely to make in trying to understand this Festival of Fruitcakes is failing to have laid in enough mushrooms to get me through the State of the Union. To be fair, Perle tap-danced all around the name until Koppel finally brought it up, and then he said “Ahmad Chalabi” the way most people say, “trichinosis.” Still, sweet storebought Jeebus.

What do you suppose it would take to get Pierce to write these pithy gems more often than once a week?

Maggie Was A Bad Girl

Commenting on Eschaton yesterday, reader Kathy G let Maggie’s cat out of the bag:

Gallagher just looooves to rant about “family values” and how important it is that “elites” set an example (presumably so the lower orders remain properly deferential).

By any definition, Gallagher herself must be considered a member of the elite class – she went to Yale, after all. And her explanation about why she never went public about taking taxpayer money to ho for Bush – that she “forgot” about the $20,000 – kind of speaks for itself. Man, I sure as hell wish *I* could “forget” about $20,000.

Which brings us to this: Gallagher is yet another member of the wingnut “do as I say, not as I do” family values crowd. It turns out that, once upon a time, Ms. Gallagher was – gasp! horrors! – an UNWED MOTHER.

Apparently, as a young and lusty college-age lass, Maggie enjoyed her fun a little too much, and got knocked up. (Undoubtedly, the dastardly perpetrator of this deed was one of them Ivy League libruls, who did it solely with the plan of crediting our virtuous heroine).

How do I know this? Gallagher has written about it – though only in the context of a pious wingnut column about the horrors of abortion.

Anyway, she had the kid but, to my knowledge, did NOT marry the father. She didn’t meet and marry the present Mr. Gallagher (or whoever) until later.

I wish I had access to Lexis-Nexis right now, because I’m sure I could pin this story down if her old columns for the NY Post are up there. Hopefully Atrios or one of you other Eschatons can find it and broadcast it throughout the land. Maggie, you shameless hussy, you!

Of course, NOW Gallagher is unctuously, properly remorseful about her “sin.” But that didn’t prevent her from having her fun when she wanted it. It never does with these guys and gals. They want to be able to do anything they damn please, but then they turn around and with hell’s own fury castigate anyone else who wants to do the same.

Especially if, you know, they’re “not the right class, dear.” Or are the wrong color.

Frankly, I’m shocked. How unlike a wingnut to be so hypocritical.

Now, I know all of you Maggie defenders out there will probably say this is just some kind of Desperate Housewives catfight. Mags would never mislead her readers this way. But, you would be wrong. Maggie herself has written about it, rarely to be sure, and mostly a long time ago, but it’s not a complete secret. Just a little something she doesn’t advertise.

Maggie has been telling everyone who will listen, ad nauseum, that she has been a “marriage expert” for twenty years. But for ten of those years, fully half of her career, she was an unwed mother. That’s quite a CV.

Kathy Grier was kind enough to send along some links to a few of the rare Maggie writings in which she admits to her little moral boo-boo.

Here’s the evidence. (I know it’s early in the day, but you should pour yourself a stiff drink before you read it. You’re going to need it. Wow.)

And here’s an interview with the hedonistic San Francisco liberal mag, Salon, in which she says “I was an unwed mother for ten years.”

Let’s just say that there isn’t a paper trail showing that quote amongst her voluminous writings for right wing publications. She certainly doesn’t mention it when she’s hectoring girls about sex out of wedlock or decrying the husbandless home.

One can understand how difficult it is to find a mate and all, but if you believe so strongly that children should not be raised without both parents, ten years seems like quite a long time to wait to find a father for your child. There are matchmaking services on the Right that could have found Maggie a nice Christian man from Ardmore,Oklahoma who needed a mother for his five children. Maggie believes that any father is better than no father (unless he’s gay, of course) so the proper thing to have done would be for her to sacrifice her “career” as a “marriage expert” and you know, actually get married to any man who would have her in order to provide a proper home for her son. Otherwise she’s just another liberal feminazi putting her own need to live where she wanted and put her education to work and find a man she loved before the needs of her child. What will we tell the children?

This is an epidemic on the right. Gallagher reminds me of Susan Carpenter McMillan anti-abortion zealot (and Paula Jones stylist) who was revealed to have had two abortions to which she had never admitted.

I’m beginning to feel sorry for the poor sincere red state schmucks who believe in all this traditional values stuff. A bunch of slick, elitist, wingnut hucksters are taking them to the cleaners.

Calling Hollywood. Time for a remake of “Elmer Gantry.”

Spongebob Goes To Church

Via Amy at Political Animal, I see that it is possible for church leaders to have a sense of humor. This is funny.

You have to give it to the UCC. They are taking action. I like ’em.

High Level Diplomacy

I’m awfully glad that taxpayers are paying for the highest caliber of diplomats — intelligent, restrained, sophisticated. And with a wit that is just breathtaking. People who write things like this:

A friend of The Diplomad has provided us this letter which he “swears it’s real.” Of course, he also thought PanAm was a good investment . . . but, we can dream, eh?

Dear Concerned Citizen:

Thank you for your recent letter roundly criticizing our treatment of the Taliban and Al Qaeda detainees currently being held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Our administration takes these matters seriously, and your opinion was heard loud and clear in Washington.You’ll be pleased to learn that thanks to concerned citizens like you, we are creating a new division of the Terrorist Retraining Program, to be called the “Liberals Accept Responsibility for Killers” program, or LARK for short. In accordance with the guidelines of this new program, we have decided to place one terrorist under your personal care.

[…]

Although Ahmed is sociopathic and extremely violent, we hope that your sensitivity to what you described as his “attitudinal problem” will help him overcome these character flaws.

Perhaps you are correct in describing these problems as mere cultural differences. He will bite you, given the chance. We understand that you plan to offer counseling and home schooling. Your adopted terrorist is extremely proficient in hand-to-hand combat and can extinguish human life with such simple items as a pencil or nail clippers. We do not suggest that you ask him to demonstrate these skills at your next yoga group He is also expert at making a wide variety of explosive devices from common household products, so you may wish to keep those items locked up, unless (in your opinion) this might offend him.

Ahmed will not wish to interact with your wife or daughters (except sexually) since he views females as a subhuman form of property. This is a particularly sensitive subject for him, and he has been known to show violent tendencies around women who fail to comply with the new dress code that Ahmed will recommend as more appropriate attire. I’m sure the women in your household will come to enjoy the anonymity offered by the bhurka – over time. Just remind them that it is all part of “respecting his culture and his religious beliefs” – wasn’t that how you put it?

Thanks again for your letter. We truly appreciate it when folks like you, who know so much, keep us informed of the proper way to do our job.

You take good care of Ahmed – and remember…we’ll be watching. Good luck!

Cordially…

Your Buddy,

Don Rumsfeld

How many of you vote that the first LARK letter go to Teddy Kennedy followed by one to Michael Moore? Kenneth Roth, Executive Director of Human Rights Watch, has certainly earned himself the right to participate in LARK, too.

Man is that some hilarious material, or what? I’m proud to pay his salary, I can tell you that. Especially in light of this:

Female interrogators tried to break Muslim detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay by sexual touching, wearing a miniskirt and thong underwear and in one case smearing a Saudi man’s face with fake menstrual blood, according to an insider’s written account.

[…]

In November, in response to an AP request, the military described an April 2003 incident in which a female interrogator took off her uniform top, exposed her brown T-shirt, ran her fingers through a detainee’s hair and sat on his lap. That session was immediately ended by a supervisor and that interrogator received a written reprimand and additional training, the military said.

In another incident, the military reported that in early 2003 a different female interrogator “wiped dye from red magic marker on detainees’ shirt after detainee spit (cq) on her,” telling the detainee it was blood. She was verbally reprimanded, the military said.

Sexual tactics used by female interrogators have been criticized by the FBI (news – web sites), which complained in a letter obtained by AP last month that U.S. defense officials hadn’t acted on complaints by FBI observers of “highly aggressive” interrogation techniques, including one in which a female interrogator grabbed a detainee’s genitals.

Yeah, it’s some kind of a wonderful free society when female interrogators are used as dominatrix whores to humiliate a bunch of unlucky putzes who were sold for 5 grand by an Afghan warlord who’s still laughing his ass off at how easy it was to get rid of his hated brother-in-law.

I’m awfully impressed with all these kinky sexual interrogation techniques they are using against Muslim males. Clearly, this stuff wasn’t thought up by a single group of fucked up prison guards from West Virginia. In fact, we know where it came from — the fascinatingly stupid neocon bible called “The Arab Mind”, a cartoon anthropological guidebook that says things like “the Arab view [is] that masturbation is far more shameful than visiting prostitutes”.

The frightening thing is that presumably smart people actually believed that hard core terrorists would be so upset by masturbation and sexual humiliation that they’d crack like little bitty babies. The men and women in charge of our security are obviously puerile adolescents who think that “arabs” are so fundamentally different from us that they are a lesser species.

I think we might actually lose this thing. Thong panties and menstrual blood interrogation is so disturbingly on the wrong track that I think more Americans are going to die. These people are just too stupid, racist and deluded to understand what it’s going to take to win.

DNC Dance

For what it’s worth (which is nothing) I endorsed Dean for DNC chair many months ago. I felt that it was very important that Dean’s followers join the Democratic party with their full hearts because I thought the party needed them. I have long believed that the constant harping about hating the DNC and Democratic politicians by those of us on the left is doing almost as much harm to the party as what the Republicans have done. Indeed, it seems to me that those two forces have worked together in some ways to make it very difficult for some swing voters to vote for us. I believed that Dean as DNC chair might give people a reason to strongly defend the party for a change.

I have to say, however, that I’d be just as happy with Simon Rosenberg. His Plan sounds right on the money to me. If he does not become the chair, I certainly hope that he will remain influential in the party. These ideas are very thoughtful, forward looking and innovative. Whoever wins, I hope that this kind of thinking will lead the way.

Popular Kulturkampf

I missed this yesterday, but apparently the little mice in The Corner believe that lefties should be as dumb as the wingnuts who are embarrassing themselves with nonsensical cries of “liberal bias” because “The Passion” didn’t get nominated for Best Picture. The fact is that people who follow politics and popular culture (and don’t live in a right wing prayer group telephone tree) know how these things work and don’t pitch fits when the world works in thoroughly predictable ways.

For instance, people who read know that Michael Moore declined to submit “F9/11” for the “Best Documentary” category (in which he was the odds on favorite to win another Oscar) back in September because he was hoping to get a TV airing prior to the presidential election. The rules specify that you can’t air a documentary within nine months of it’s theatrical release to contend for a Best Documentary Oscar. Therefore, the only category for which his film could qualify was Best Picture, an extreme long shot.

The Academy can vote en masse for documentaries and it’s highly unlikely that the highest grossing documentary of all time would have been overlooked in that category. It is highly likely that he would have won that award. Therefore, it was actually quite a sacrifice on Moore’s part. Winning Oscars is no small thing and any filmmaker would love to have a couple of them on his mantle. He gave up what he knew was his best shot at winning — and getting a chance to make a big speech that would be heard around the world — in order to try to get his film seen by more people before the election.

He certainly has my gratitude for doing that, and for all he did during the campaign. I believe that he and many other representatives of popular culture helped our turn out. And for those who think we should distance ourselves from Hollywood, I can only laugh. Popular culture is our single most potent weapon in the post modern political world in which we live. It continues to prove day in and day out that the liberal consensus still exists in this country and that the way people actually live (as opposed to how they think they are supposed to say they live) is tolerant, progressive and as far from the cramped, hypocritical Republican worldview as can be.

But, we’ve barely scratched the surface of how to use it for partisan purposes. Any thoughts that we should leave Democratic politics completely in the hands of dry, boring wonks and political junkies is about the most obvious recipe for ongoing disaster I can see. In a world of millions of competing voices, we’d better find a better more hueristic way of translating the liberal consensus into political action or before we know it, the other side will have completely cowed the public into believed that up is down and wrong is right.

The other side has created its own blatantly partisan politico-entertainment sector with talk radio and FOX News. But they are a bunch of angry, ugly wankers. We can do much better than that if we put our minds to it. In fact, we must.

Do the Democrats have guys like these working for them? Do they think in these terms?

Mr. Schriefer said he and a team of White House big shots transformed Madison Square Garden into a giant TV studio, “stealing” elements from network TV newsmagazines, awards shows, David Letterman and Saturday Night Live. Mr. Bush’s intimate podium-in-the-round was designed by Joe Stewart, who has created set pieces for magician David Copperfield and Comedy Central’s The Man Show. The giant movie screen used for broadcasting video shorts and Reagan requiems was ripped directly from the Academy Awards. “We realized the big screen actually became a character in the whole thing,” said Mr. Schriefer.

[…]

“We live in a time when there’s a real cross-pollination between politics and pop culture,” he said. “As Republicans, we’re often thought of as behind the curve in popular culture, and we don’t have to be, and we can certainly compete on that level just as well as the Democrats can.”

[…]

“If you think about what images you have in your head from the Kennedy years, it’s really not video — except one awful piece of video,” he continued. “It’s stills. They deliberately modeled the West Wing intro after that; they’ve modeled it after these famous photos of Kennedy, standing by the window and stuff like that. They clearly studied this. These are the images you have of the Presidency. So in that sense, if you’re trying to elicit an emotion more than tell a linear narrative, stills can work — with great words.”

The movie also used “rotoscoping,” the technique used in the Robert Evans documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture, that allows moving 3-D elements to be added to still photos. For instance, in the images from Yankee Stadium, they made the flash bulbs flash. They also used natural sound, “like a radio play,” said Mr. Stevens, “like an NPR story, so you’d hear these live sounds. You hear their breath and their footsteps. We wanted to get the other voices of the people in there — the firefighter. Those are obviously their real voices.”

Sure, Spielberg comes in and makes a nice film for Kerry, but he isn’t devoting his entire life to putting on the Democratic Show like these guys are. He doesn’t create a seamless road show from lighting to backdrop to sound to music that follows the campaign everywhere it goes that fellows like Stuart Stevens do. We are all aware of how they compose the shot to make Bush look more presidential and how they put the words they want people to absorb in a backdrop, but did anyone ever notice how they compress the sound at a Bush rally to sound as if the roar of approval builds to a frenzy? They are into all these details of presentation that we just seem to overlook. Our campaigns look old fashioned and ragged by comparison. Our TV pundits are tired and haplessly unprepared. We have no sense of drama as a party, as a movement. (This was, in my opinion, one of Clinton’s great gifts. For better or for worse, he was interesting.)

I’m hearing a little rumbling though that sounds promising and its coming from our own little corner of the political world. When an establishment expert like Stuart Rothenberg feels that it’s worth making derisive comments about you by calling you “clueless” and having an “exaggerated sense of your own importance,” you know that an upstart revolution is taking place.

Somebody isn’t being boring and that’s an excellent step in the right direction. Right now the left blogosphere is a nascent rag tag grassroots reform story that shows incredible energy and some long needed idealism. If Dean (or Rosenberg for that matter) becomes the chairman of the DNC, that’s the image this party is most likely to have going forward. I’d love to see a Democratic Stuart Stevens start working with this right now to market that energy and idealism to the public. We’re using media in a new way that’s fresh and exciting and it’s making the old guard nervous. Now that’s something we can work with. There’s a new revolutionary narrative emerging and if the Democrats are smart enough to see it, they’ll begin to build a popular culture presence right now to go with the substance of the reformation of the party. That’s how smart politics are played these days; you work on several different levels — it’s all part of the same thing.

And while Michael Moore is a flame throwing polemicist who serves a very particular function in this whole thing, he’s probably got some very good contacts in Hollywood who’d be more than interested in helping with this project. I would hope that any part of the Democratic establishment, new or old, that gets approached by people who know something about this stuff will listen. It’s one of the keys to our future.

Here’s another interesting article about how the two parties handle advertising. Very illuminating.

Update: To those who have written to me complaining that I have mischaracterized Michael Moore’s withholding his admission to the Academy Awards, here are the rules for submission to the Best Documentary Awards.

And as for your complaints that “F911” would not qualify as a documentary because it is not factual, bite me.

With Friends Like These

Nathan Newman and Atrios point to today’s NY Times analysis of Chile’s privatization scheme. It’s a very interesting article and one that will come as a huge surprise to anyone who was listening to NPR’s “The World” with Lisa Mullins on Monday afternoon and heard the glowing report on Chile’s program which then segued into an interview with an analyst/scholor Matt Moore from the “non-partisan” National Center For Policy Analysis who proceeded to say that privatization was working wonderfully well in the countries where it’s been tried. They provide some excellent lessons to be learned about how to properly privatize our system.

I, like most Americans, am not an expert on social security privatization schemes around the world and were it not for the fact that this is a hot topic on blogs and liberal news sites, I would not know that the benign sounding National Center For Policy Analysis was a group devoted to private sector solutions to everything under the sun. I urge you to check out it’s web site, particularly the social security page,linked above. This think tank’s spiel is one of the most dishonest I’ve yet come across in the Right Wing Noise Machine. It goes out of its way to advertise itself as being devoted to debating both sides of the issue and then it proceeds to egregiously propagandize for Republican policies.

Apparently, the leftist socialist NPR (and BBC) didn’t bother to investigate what their neutral non-partisan guest has ever written, because he was presented as a neutral policy analyst and his views went completely unchallenged. (He does sound like such a nice boy.)

Here’s the link to the program (scroll down to the “Other Models Interview 5:00”).

This is the type of thing that’s going to kill us if we don’t deal with it. This guy sounded completely reasonable. The lead in story about Chile’s wonderful privatization scheme sounded completely reasonable. But, it was completely bullshit and it was on NPR, not Limbaugh or Fox. We should scream bloody murder that they would use this obviously agenda driven think tank for “non-partisan” analysis.

We are all agog at the Maggie Gallagher and Armstrong Williams payola scandals. And it is outrageous (but not surprising) that the Republicans have become so greedy that they are dipping into taxpayer funds to propagandize. It’s not like they don’t have enough millionaire GOP money floating around for just that purpose.

But the idea that these pundits’ failure to disclose is the real problem is to swat ineffectually at flies. The real problem is that guys like this Matt Moore routinely fail to disclose that they are working for a Republican Policy Shop and that the so called liberal media is either too stupid or too lazy or too sympathtic to disclose it themselves. All you have to do is google the name of the think tank and you come up with this from the People For The American Way, which should at least make a journalist sit up and do some investigating if nothing else:

National Center for Policy Analysis

12655 North Central Expressway, Suite 720

Dallas, TX 75243-1739

www.ncpa.org

Established: 1983

President/Executive Director: John C. Goodman

Finances: $5,237,217 (total expenditures in 2001)

Employees: 22

Affiliations: NCPA is a member of the State Policy Network, a network of national and local right-wing think tanks, and of townhall.com, a right-wing internet portal created by the Heritage Foundation.

Publications: NCPA sponsors two of its own syndicated columnists: Pete du Pont (Scripps Howard) and Bruce Bartlett (Creators Syndicate). Bartlett’s column appears under contract twice a week in the Washington Times and in the Detroit News.

NCPA’s Principal Issues:

# A right wing think tank with programs devoted to privatization in the following issue areas: taxes, Social Security and Medicare, health care, criminal justice, environment, education, and welfare.

# NCPA describes its close working relationship with Congress, saying it “has managed to have more than a dozen studies released by members of Congress – a rare event for a think tank – and frequently members of Congress appear at the NCPA’s Capitol Hill briefings for congressional aides.”

# Right-wing foundations funding includes: Bradley, Scaife, Koch, Olin, Earhart, Castle Rock, and JM Foundations

# In the early 90s, NCPA created the Center for Tax Studies. NCPA’s website describes the inspiration for the Center: “Very few think tank studies are released by members of Congress.”

Does that sound non-partisan to anyone? Are these “studies” considered to be non-partisan?

This is happening all over television and radio. Those of us who are sophisticated in these matters know how to peg guys like this Moore based upon his pitch. But if you are average Joe Democrat last Monday afternoon listening on NPR, your trusted source of non-right wing news, you would have no way of knowing that this guy was completely in the tank.

This is our problem folks. This crap is seeping out of the right wing echo chamber and it’s infecting people who don’t believe in their philosophy. That’s the percentage we are losing in these close elections.

I suppose the miracle is that we are able to keep 49% in this environment. It’s a testimony to the tenacity and intelligence of busy American liberals that they continue to be able to sort through this mess. But, we have got to start cleaning it up. This bought and paid for right wing media and their dishonest shills are the single most dangerous thing we face going forward.

Let Sleeping Dogs Lie

Just in case there’s anyone out there who holds with the ridiculous notion that Daniel Patrick Moynihan was anything other than an incoherent, self-serving (drunken) twit in his later years as the Lion of The Senate, read this.

He gave more aid and comfort to the enemy over the years than Joementum could ever dream of giving. It’s not surprising that they would exhume him now to serve his usual role as facilitator of GOP criminal ravishment. It’s what he specialized in.

Bizarre Reaction

James Wolcott points out that Chatty Kathy Lopez at The Corner thought Junior was in an especially good mood today. I agree. He seemed downright jovial. Wolcott also notes that this joviality was just a tad inappropriate since it was only hours since we’d heard that 31 American soldiers had been killed in a helicopter crash. (But then, Bush has always had a macabre bent. After all, he thought mocking Karla Faye Tucker was a real laugh riot.)

Wolcott notices something about Bush that I haven’t seen anyone else mention and it’s something that drives me completely nuts.

When Bush did address the soldiers’ deaths, he said that we “weep and mourn” when Americans die, but as he was saying it his hand was flatly smacking downwards for emphasis, as if he were pounding the table during the business meeting, refusing to pay a lot for a muffler. The steady beat of his hand was at odds with the sentiments he was expressing–he didn’t look or sound the least bit mournful or sombre.

Somebody, somewhere (Karen?) told Junior that he would sound authoritative if he said…each…word…in….a…sentence…with…equal…emphasis. Unfortunately, he does it all the time and it makes him look like a halfwit with a wierd anger management problem. Actually, now that I think about it, it’s probably the way he talks naturally.

And listen, the story today is going to be very discouraging to the American people. I understand that. We value life. And we weep and mourn when soldiers lose their life. And — but it is the long-term objective that is vital, and that is to spread freedom. Otherwise, the Middle East will be — will continue to be a cauldron of resentment and hate, a recruiting ground for those who have this vision of the world that is the exact opposite of ours.

Hand slapping on podium for emphasis, words clipped and distinct, pissed demeanor, impatient tone. “Have you got that you little bastards? Now go clean your rooms.”

He’s the Dad who is always mad. So when the press brought up the fact that today had the highest single daily death toll in Iraq thus far, he was irritated. He told America to stop that crying or he’d give them something to cry about, damn it.

He was in a good mood all right. If he could have kicked the dog he would have been walking on air.