We’re changing the culture of this country from one that has said, if it feels good, do it, and, if you’ve got a problem, blame somebody else, to one in which each of us understands that we are responsible for the decisions we make. — President George W. Bush October 15, 2003
Inspiring words.
I don’t really know what to think about all this but I do have to marvel at, as Avorosis puts it:
“This is the same White House that ran for office on a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. While they are surrounded by gay hookers?”
I personally have no problems with the Bush White House needing to blow off some consensual adult steam. It’s a stressful job. If gay hookers are going to help them relax then who am I to argue? I’m a liberal. I have nothing against gays or hookers.
But for a moment let me think as a Republican would, if the shoe were on the other foot:
So many questions so few answers. Just why did JimJeff get such special treatment? It’s not like they didn’t already have a bunch of ready made shills to ask softball questions. Les Kinsolving’s been throwing partisan bombs for years. They certainly didn’t need JimJeff to transcribe RNC talking points when they have the Beltway Boys to do it on national television.
Scotty said that the president called on JimJeff of his own volition. A coincidence? Or did someone request that JimJeff get a special treat that day?
And has it ever been logical that this nobody from a vanity web site would get access to the Plame story? Why him? JimJeff claims that he never actually saw the Plame memo, yet he clearly knew of it. Could it have been pillow talk?
I don’t have a clue. But, I do know that if this were 1998, we’d be knee deep in congressional investigations into the gay hooker ring in the White House. Every news crew in the DC area would be camped out on JimJeff’s front lawn. A wild-eyed Victoria Toensing and panting Kelly Ann Fitzpatrick would be crawling up on the Hardball desk rending their silk teddies and speaking in tongues while Matthews’exploding head spun around on his shoulders.
But, it isn’t 1998 and it will probably not even be mentioned. And I’m not a Republican so I don’t think, as they would, that it’s necessary to dig into every single White House staffer’s sex life to find out who leaked a confidential memo to a gay hooker.
As a Democrat, however, if gay hookers are running around the White House I do find it somewhat frustrating that we have to put up with this shock and horror bullshit from the right wing about average Joe and Jane gay person wanting to get married and have a family. Please.
And yes, I do think that Patrick Fitzgerald’s boys will probably be paying JimJeff another visit. Sadly, I think it’s entirely likely that they didn’t know about this until today. It is impossible to believe that the secret service and the FBI would allow a known prostitute to have access to the White House after 9/11. If they did, then our national security is in very deep shit. Come to think of it, it’s also pretty scary that they didn’t know. What’s up with that?
Don’t wanna be an American idiot. Don’t want a nation under the new media. And can you hear the sound of hysteria? The subliminal mindfuck America.
Welcome to a new kind of tension. All across the alien nation. Everything isn’t meant to be okay. Television dreams of tomorrow. We’re not the ones who’re meant to follow. Well that’s enough to argue.
Well maybe I’m the faggot America. I’m not a part of a redneck agenda. Now everybody do the propaganda. And sing along in the age of paranoia.
Welcome to a new kind of tension. All across the alien nation. Everything isn’t meant to be okay. Television dreams of tomorrow. We’re not the ones who’re meant to follow. Well that’s enough to argue.
Don’t wanna be an American idiot. One nation controlled by the media. Information nation of hysteria. It’s going out to idiot America.
Welcome to a new kind of tension. All across the alien nation. Everything isn’t meant to be okay. Television dreams of tomorrow. We’re not the ones who’re meant to follow
I see via TalkLeft that Instapundit believes that left wing bloggers have gone too far with this delving into the personal life of JD Guckert:
…it was the stuff about Gannon’s personal life that led to his resignation, and that there’s something rather sleazy about that. Backstage or not, targeting parts of people’s lives that don’t have to do with the story — like, say, Eason Jordan’s love life — seems inappropriate to me, and likely to lend support to the bloggers-as-lynch-mob caricature.
We don’t know that the reason Guckert “resigned” was because of the personal stuff. It’s just as likely he was asked to leave because he had brought attention to himself and embarrassed the White House. Who knows?
But I think we all can agree that publicly discussing people’s sex lives, really should be out of bounds. Sexual witch hunts are wrong. I just don’t know what’s come over people.
Of course it’s possible that some people came across this and just got inspired:
According to Ms. Lewinsky, she and the President had ten sexual encounters, eight while she worked at the White House and two thereafter.(35) The sexual encounters generally occurred in or near the private study off the Oval Office — most often in the windowless hallway outside the study.(36) During many of their sexual encounters, the President stood leaning against the doorway of the bathroom across from the study, which, he told Ms. Lewinsky, eased his sore back.(37)
Ms. Lewinsky testified that her physical relationship with the President included oral sex but not sexual intercourse.(38) According to Ms. Lewinsky, she performed oral sex on the President; he never performed oral sex on her.(39) Initially, according to Ms. Lewinsky, the President would not let her perform oral sex to completion. In Ms. Lewinsky’s understanding, his refusal was related to “trust and not knowing me well enough.”(40) During their last two sexual encounters, both in 1997, he did ejaculate.(41)
According to Ms. Lewinsky, she performed oral sex on the President on nine occasions. On all nine of those occasions, the President fondled and kissed her bare breasts. He touched her genitals, both through her underwear and directly, bringing her to orgasm on two occasions. On one occasion, the President inserted a cigar into her vagina. On another occasion, she and the President had brief genital-to-genital contact.(42)
Of course, that was an official government document so it was ok to disseminate those details to the entire world. And, remember it wasn’t about the sex, it was about the lying. Not like an evil liberal blogger lynch mob linking to underwear pics that someone who was writing under an alias for unknown reasons had plastered all over the internet. You simply can’t compare the two. Not at all. I don’t know what I was thinking.
Orcinus points to a lengthy list of rightwing academics who would be ripe for a Churchilling if there existed a left wing machine capable of doing it.
But even if we could, it would be self defeating to demand that they lose their jobs. Academic freedom demands that scholars with repugnant views be allowed to make their arguments so that an intellectual debate can take place. I think that the Right is making a mistake if they think that they’ll be able to hang on to power if they shut people up. One of the reasons they’ve been successful in selling their ideas is that they spent years honing their arguments. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger and all that.
I’m fascinated by the fact that Eason Jordan was driven from his job for making a remark about the US targeting journalists when it seems clear that many on the right think that targeting journalists is actually a good idea. Why all the self-righteous Claude Rainsing about this? If you write or say publicly that it’s a good idea to kill journalists and someone else says we ARE killing journalists I don’t see why that person is considered a traitor.
The Pink Flamingo Bar Grill thinks the US Military should at least be able to target “enemy” journalists when we invade a foreign country. They aren’t really free anyway; unlike our journalists they are part of their government’s propaganda efforts and can, therefore, be considered part of the enemy force. Can we win this war (that “we are further away from winning than we are losing”) with our hands tied behind our backs? We are, after all, “at war with possibly the worst enemy we have ever faced.” We have to ask ourselves if we are prepared to do whatever it takes.
Apparently a BBC journalist by the name of Nik Gowing contributed a chapter to a book called Dying To Tell The Story in which he says that our military has already made that decision:(pdf)
There is evidence that media activity in the midst of real-time war fighting is now regarded by commanders as having ‘military significance’ which justifies a firm military response to remove or at least neutralise it. From the media’s perspective, the core guiding principles of reporting must remain accuracy, impartiality, objectivity and balance in a time of armed conflict.Yet if some worst case fears are shown to be justified, then on the political and military side some senior officials seem to view our 24 hour/7 day-a-week presence as a real-time military threat that on some occasions justifies our removal by the application of deadly force. Despite expressions of sympathy, the fact that journalists and technicians are killed or injured appears to be of barely marginal concern.
Captain’s Quarters goes to great lengths to debunk various charges in this book. But it gets a bit thick when they charge Gowing with using intemperate rhetoric (like that above) and say that CNN is now a “faith-based organization instead of a fact-finding media outlet” because its executives are under the sway of a writer whose work doesn’t stand up under scrutiny.
Kevin is right that scalp collecting benefits the right, but it has nothing to do with bloggers or liberals’ willingness to engage in the game. It has to do with the fact that character assasination has been the political combat weapon of choice on the right for a long, long time. Hounding people from their jobs is one of their favorite tools of intimidation.
Remember Webb Hubbel, Bernie Nussbaum, Mike Espy, Henry Cisneros, Roger Altman blah, blah, blah? And let’s not forget that they spent 70 million taxpayer dollars trying to hound Clinton out of office. He just refused to go. The only difference now is that the target is the long-hated liberal media and bloggers have joined the assassination squad.
If liberal bloggers’ record of scalps is Trent Lott losing the leadership post that Bush wanted him out of anyway then we aren’t even in the same league. The Right Wing Noise machine is a group seasoned professionals made up of bloggers, newspapers, FOX, talk radio, and a direct pipeline to powerful Republicans in the government. We are Kos and Atrios et al. We are not equivalent.
Update: Kevin expands on his earlier post here and I think he makes some good points. Frankly, I think the left blogosphere probably isn’t going to prosper through right wing style character assassination because we don’t have the megaphone to really make it work or a compliant media or the legislative clout to create psuedo scandals and investigations.
The left blogosphere, on the other hand, has already shown that it can effect change by bringing to bear the financial clout of the consumer. Sinclair. That’s the paradigm of lefty new media clout. It’s all we’ve got folks, but it’s a lot.
Ted Barlow takes notice of the increasingly, shall we say, fevered notion by our right wing blogospheric brethren that the Left is no longer objectively pro-terrorist. We are plain old, straight up pro terrorist.
He points to this post:
This newly ever-growing Western left, not only in Europe, but in Latin America and even in the US itself, has a clear goal: the destruction of the country and society that vanquished its dreams fifteen years ago. But it does not have, as in the old days of the Soviet Union, the hard power to accomplish this by itself. Thanks to this, all our leftist friends’ bets are now on radical Islam. What can they do to help it? Answer: tie down America’s superior strength with a million Liliputian ropes: legal ones, political ones, with propaganda and disinformation etc. Anything and everything will do.
Nelson Ascher is directly stating that “all our leftist friends” are actively supporting terrorists, by any means possible, in order to achieve our dream of the destruction of the United States. The mechanisms by which terrorists could destroy the United States are left unstated. (I’m reminded of Eddie Izzard’s recounting of Imperial Japan’s strategy in WWII: “First, we’ll bomb one of their bases, and then… we’ll win.”) And Reynolds is shaking his head in rueful agreement, more in sorrow than anger.
I’m embarassed to admit that this washed over me as so much typical right-wing boilerplate until I saw Jack O’Toole’s reaction. Much like Thomas Sowell’s charming column titled “Fourth Estate or Fifth Column?” Or Jonah Goldberg’s taunt, after proposing a bet with Juan Cole, that “He can give it to the al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade or whatever his favorite charity is.” Too many mainstream conservatives have adopted accusations of treason into their regular toolbox, and I guess I’m sort of getting used to it.
I especially enjoy this accusation of the libertine, decadent elitist left being in cahoots with the gay hating, women oppressing Islamic fundamentalists. Because when you think about it, isn’t it much more likely that there are those on the Right who find common cause with religious radicals?
Oh my gosh, they did.
It’s time for another edition of “Dana’s Got A Secret!”
Federal documents reviewed by the Weekly show that Rohrabacher maintained a cordial, behind-the-scenes relationship with Osama bin Laden’s associates in the Middle East—even while he mouthed his most severe anti-Taliban comments at public forums across the U.S. There’s worse: despite the federal Logan Act ban on unauthorized individual attempts to conduct American foreign policy, the congressman dangerously acted as a self-appointed secretary of state, constructing what foreign-affairs experts call a “dual tract” policy with the Taliban.
A veteran U.S. foreign-policy expert told the Weekly, “If Dana’s right-wing fans knew the truth about his actual, working relationship with the Taliban and its representatives in the Middle East and in the United States, they wouldn’t be so happy.”
[…]
A November/December 1996 article in Washington Report on Middle East Affairs reported, “The potential rise of power of the Taliban does not alarm Rohrabacher” because the congressman believes the “Taliban could provide stability in an area where chaos was creating a real threat to the U.S.” Later in the article, Rohrabacher claimed that:
•Taliban leaders are “not terrorists or revolutionaries.”
•Media reports documenting the Taliban’s harsh, radical beliefs were “nonsense.”
•The Taliban would develop a “disciplined, moral society” that did not harbor terrorists.
•The Taliban posed no threat to the U.S.
[…]
Evidence of Rohrabacher’s attempts to conduct his own foreign policy became public on April 10, 2001, not in the U.S., but in the Middle East. On that day, ignoring his own lack of official authority, Rohrabacher opened negotiations with the Taliban at the Sheraton Hotel in Doha, Qatar, ostensibly for a “Free Markets and Democracy” conference. There, Rohrabacher secretly met with Taliban Foreign Minister Mullah Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, an advisor to Mullah Omar. Diplomatic sources claim Muttawakil sought the congressman’s assistance in increasing U.S. aid—already more than $100 million annually—to Afghanistan and indicated that the Taliban would not hand over bin Laden, wanted by the Clinton administration for the fatal bombings of two American embassies in Africa and the USS Cole. For his part, Rohrabacher handed Muttawakil his unsolicited plans for war-torn Afghanistan. “We examined a peace plan,” he laconically told reporters in Qatar.
[…]
After Taliban-related terrorists attacked the U.S. last September, Rohrabacher associates worked hard to downplay the Qatar meeting. Republican strategist Grover Norquist told a reporter that the congressman had accidentally encountered the Taliban official in a hotel hallway.
But that preposterous assertion is contradicted by much evidence:
Yes. The chief visionary of the modern conservative movement, Grover Norquist, was also in up to his ample hips with this crew. Here’s a little something from everybody’s favorite apostate’s Front Page:
…Since then, Saffuri and Norquist have helped set up meetings in the Oval Office with the president for AMC and CAIR leaders. White House officials have acknowledged that Alamoudi attended at least one of these sessions with the president.
Saffuri and Norquist have also set up meetings for leaders of radical Muslim groups with FBI Director Robert Mueller and with Attorney General John Ashcroft, to urge the Bush administration to abandon the USA Patriot Act.
[…]
Rohrabacher friends and colleagues believe that Norquist initially introduced Rohrabacher to Saffuri. They point to the Congressman’s long-standing ties to Norquist, which go back at least as early as the mid-1980s, when they worked together to build support for anti-Communist insurgencies in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia and Nicaragua.
“Grover has led a lot of people astray in recent years,” one Rohrabacher colleague said. “Saffuri would always call Dana’s office whenever he was doing an event, just as any lobbyist would do. He was well-schooled by Grover on how to be a politician’s buddy.”
Sadly, being plagued with some incurable need for intellectual honesty, I can’t find it in me to claim with a straight face that Dana Rohrabacher and Grover Norquist are really in cahoots with terrorists. But if one were to rely on actual evidence rather than the wild, unsupported halluciations we see breaking out in the right blogsphere as they routinely accuse the Left of supporting terrorism, it’s clear that one could quite seriously make a case that one of the most powerful Republican members of congress and the single most powerful Republican activist are literally working with terrorists.
These right wingers should probably watch their steps. Their glass houses are lying in very sharp shards right under their feet.
The Poor Man has more on this topic. It’s getting very strange in the blogosphere. I cannot for the life of me figure out why the right is so angry when they just won the whole thing.
“…what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly – done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated – we must place ourselves avowedly with them.”
It’s not enough that they own the entire political landscape. Apparently, their frustration that we refuse to agree with them is so strong that they are having some sort of emotional collapse. We must place ourselves avowedly with them.
Well, people in hell want ice water, too. It’s not going to happen.
Awesome! I think it’s pretty clear that the White House won’t be needing any petty little softball pitchers from the Talon team going forward. The MSM knows now that they need to bend over and take their caning like the scared little boys they are. Brian Williams, are you listening? Chrissie? Timmie? Leslie? Watch your mouths.
Now here’s a conundrum. What do you do about this:
LAWRENCE KUDLOW (host): We got a couple of seconds before the break when you guys are all going to come back, but, Ann, I just want to give you first whack at this. Eason Jordan, top news executive at CNN — I mean, to me, this is absolutely incredible — this guy says at a big conference in Davos that the U.S. military is deliberately targeting and assassinating American journalists. Huh? He still has a job, huh? You got a take on that?
COULTER: Would that it were so!
KUDLOW: Would what were so?
COULTER: That the American military were targeting journalists.
KUDLOW: Oh, no! Don’t go there.
COULTER: No, but, I mean, he immediately — it was just an incredibly cowardly thing to do. He says it, he immediately backs down to — from the statement that it is official government policy to be targeting journalists to, ‘Oh, it’s just a rumor I’ve heard,’ and it might just be a few random individuals about which he has no facts. So it’s a story that’s not only implausible but not particularly interesting to what he has backed down to. And I agree with you, he shouldn’t have a job.
Answer: You do nothing! There is nothing wrong with wanting the military to target and kill journalists. This is a fine distinction that only Republicans understand. No need to worry your pretty little Democratic heads about it.
Frank Luntz already had CNN firmly on the reservation but they won’t be making any criticism of the administration’s Iraq policy in any way shape or form ever again. And I have little doubt that all journalists will take the proper lesson from this and dive headfirst into the tank and just stay on bottom bubbling up what Hugh Hinderocket and InstaFootball tell them to say. Hooray for the new media! If you say the military should murder journalists it’s kewl. If you say the military has murdered journalists (and apologized) you’ll be run out of town on a rail. Got that? Oh, and if you are a Democrat you can just STFU and give mistress Coulter what she needs.
I’m reminded that everyone was warned about all this long ago. Susan Sontag didn’t listen. Ward Churchill didn’t listen. Eason Jordan didn’t listen.
Q: As Commander-In-Chief, what was the President’s reaction to television’s Bill Maher, in his announcement that members of our Armed Forces who deal with missiles are cowards, while the armed terrorists who killed 6,000 unarmed are not cowards, for which Maher was briefly moved off a Washington television station?
A: I have not discussed it with the President, one. I have—
Q: Surely, as a—
A: I’m getting there.
Q: Surely as Commander, he was enraged at that, wasn’t he?
A: I’m getting there, Les.
Q: Okay.
A: I’m aware of the press reports about what he said. I have not seen the actual transcript of the show itself. But assuming the press reports are right, it’s a terrible thing to say, and it unfortunate. And that’s why—there was an earlier question about has the President said anything to people in his own party—they’re reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do. This is not a time for remarks like that; there never is.
I wouldn’t be surprised if JD Guckert believes that he can read his Dear Leader’s mind, but it seems a little more likely that somebody whispered the following in his ear:
To: LowCountryJoe
You are right. It was very difficult to keep from jumping up and cheering.
W’s plan tonight was to reassure the country, which he did, connect all the dots, which he also did, and then allowed the liberal media to expose themselves to the American people in prime time, which it did.
7 posted on 04/13/2004 7:38:16 PM PDT by Jeff Gannon (Listen to my radio show “Jeff Gannon’s Washington” on www.RIGHTALK.com
This is a fella who knows something about exposing himself to the American people, that’s for sure. I do wonder how “Jeff” knew what the president’s plan for the the press conference was, though.
For some real fun you should read the original entry that closes with the following (sincere!) advice:
“…in a nutshell, be a simpleton, be repetitive, be a pain in their backsides, and be a freedom loving winner. The last time I checked, the winners are not the losers!”
People who pick up the book “Blog” are likely to think that it’s about blogs. For the most part, it’s not about the Internet phenomenon of blogging, the term for individual or group Web-based chronicling and instant publishing. Rather, this book is a sustained effort of partisan hackery aimed at further eroding trust in what the author Hugh Hewitt calls “mainstream liberal media,” which for him means anything to the left of Rush Limbaugh. This regurgitated mantra, in the hands of skilled marketers, can be applied to the latest hot brand — in this case anything to do with blogs.
Hewitt, a professor of law at Chapman University Law School, has his own nationally syndicated (and Limbaugh- esque) radio show as well as one of the most popular blogs. As of September 2004, his blog was getting about 75,000 hits a day. He blogged the 2004 Democratic and Republican national conventions as an independent, a sort of right-wing Robin Hood stealing from the rich liberal mainstream media and giving back the correct information to the hinterlands.
Hewitt has chosen the Protestant Reformation as a mirror on how blogging is leading a reformation against the mainstream media. He focuses largely on the case of “Rathergate” at CBS and how blogs were the first to point out the discrepancies in the documents CBS anchor Dan Rather said alleged that President Bush received preferential treatment during his National Guard service.
Hewitt never shies away from celebrity name bashing, dropping every right-wing pundit’s favorite punching bag — Barbra Streisand — into the mix. He also fawns on Fox News, Limbaugh and a bevy of rightist blogs when given the opportunity to do so. Hewitt considers the blog revolution in an America-centric fashion that ignores the fact that the Internet is not the sole property of Americans alone. The only “foreign” references he makes are comments on how Al Qaeda and other Islamic fundamentalist groups have been using the Internet to spread their messages.
[…]
In a Jan. 15 entry on his blog (HughHewitt.com), Hewitt is a bit more forthcoming about the ethical dilemma faced among the top tier of political bloggers who may or may not get paid to advocate for causes, saying “bloggers should disclose — prominently and repeatedly — when they are receiving payments from individuals or organizations about whom or which they are blogging.” But in the book, Hewitt describes how blogs should be used by opinion makers to get their points across through directly influencing the most prominent bloggers.
Hewitt ponders a “dozen blogs I would launch” and imagines a central blog that would cover the publishing world, link to Amazon and generate buzz. It would be one that causes book sales to soar when the author of this hypothetical blog praises a book, or plummet when given a fervent thumbs down.
What Hewitt fails to see is that there already is a growing infrastructure of litblogs available that are independent, not beholden to a single publisher and not taking payola to promote or trash competitors’ books.
Hewitt fails to see a lot of things. To read his book, practically the only political blogs out there are his, Instapundit and Powerline. He doesn’t get out much.
Really, if you haven’t bought this book …. don’t spend the money. Go to the bookstore and skim it. It’ll only take a minute and a half. I do feel sorry for the poor suckers who bought the book in the airport bookstore who think they are getting a book about blogs when they are actually getting a typical piece of right wing rubbish.
Hewitt is carving himself quite a nice little niche in the right wing blogosphere as a hitman. He was the impetus behind the Christmas In Cambodia navel gazing (which he inexplicably insists was some sort of defining moment) and is now leading the charge against Eason Jordan. (Dan Rather was more of a mob action.) All in a days work. And to think I used to watch him play Tucker Carlson on the local PBS roundtable. He was such a cute lil’ conservative pup in those days. He’s a big boy now.
Update: Crooks and Liars reviewed the book already. Here’s something you’ll all be interested in, I’m sure.
To say that Mr. Hewitt has a huge right wing agenda is to simplify the issue, but here goes a few examples:
Pg. 108: on Atrios, Hugh says: Hard left, incoherent, actually. But big traffic.
On Daily Kos: (brief history)…. He is also an off the wall lefty, willing to say anything.
Pg. 113: A final word on ideology and the blogosphere: there is currently a talent gap. The political left is seriously behind in the promotion and development of bloggers with insight and good humor. It maybe that the early entrants such as DailyKos, Atrios, and Joshua Micah Marshall’s Talking Points Memo have set a tone of self importance combined with coarseness that has repelled would-be bloggers, or that Peter Principle bloggers with energy but not enough talent have taken up valuable shelf space.
