Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Ezra’s new (Type)Pad

It appears that Ezra Klein of Pandagon has taken up residence at a new address. He and Jesse were probably getting a little old for roommates anyway. And from what I can tell, Jesse’s doing just fine carrying on on his own. Man, that youthful energy is just amazing.

When I look at these guys’ output I wonder what in the hell I did with my time when I was their age? Well, I was awfully busy. It was the 70’s sexual revolution and all that.

(Who’m I kidding? But weed was cheap…)

In my humble opinion, Ezra’s one of the best bloggers around. He’s a very smart writer, but what I really like about him is that he’s a moderate with a heart. You don’t find those around Ye Olde Blogopheyre too often. There are plenty of moderates, of course, but they tend to be technocrats and wonks. Ezra’s politics combine centrist instincts with emotional exhiliration and idealism. I find that very intriguing. Check it out.

PoMo Politics

Matthew Yglesias understands how the game needs to be played. I hope that the Democrats in Washington are listening because this is very important. Regarding this clumsy “reframing” that Luntz and his fellow propagandists are doing with “personal accounts” it should be clear by now to all Democrats that relying on the media to “see though” these gambits if only we present them with the facts is a fools game. This is postmodern media we’re dealing with here. We must present an alternate reality, which they can then use as our version of the truth. Only then they can be manipulated into using the correct frame-up:

This calls, basically, for someone at the DNC (or DSCC or AFL-CIO or MoveOn or wherever) to hire someone to do some focus groups and come up with a serviceable term that focus groups even worse than private accounts. Then you send around a memo getting all Democrats to start calling them “X accounts” while the White House calls them “personal accounts.” Then “private accounts” will look like a decent compromise and it may well get back in the stories.

It’s insane, yes, that the very term invented by proponents of private accounts is now considered to be off-limits. But that’s the game. If you want to work the refs, you’ve got to work the refs. “Forced savings accounts” strikes me intuitively as something that focus groups won’t like, but actual research should be done.

I’m sorry it has to be this way. But I’m even sorrier that we still don’t seem to get that we have to modernize our strategy in this fundamental way.

It doesn’t really matter if the The New York Times understands that the Republicans are changing their marketing slogans. I’m sure it’s very edifying to know that some smart people in the press are not impervious to

reason at least some of the time. What really matters, however, is that they use the marketing slogans we want them use.

Once again, the Republicans left us a very useful blueprint for how to derail a major initiative like this. The Clinton Health Care Plan. Their frame was “government run health care”, “they want to choose your doctor” “they’ll make going to the doctor like going to the DMV or the post office.” The took their favorite boogeyman and used it to completely distort the plan in a simple, creepy way.

Is there any reason that we shouldn’t use similar scare tactics about taking your guaranteed retirement money and letting Wall Street to play with it? Nope. And once we do that, the press will be obliged by its he said/she said “objectivity” to not only choose the term “private accounts” to split the difference between what the two parties want, they will also be obliged to report our demagoguery along side Bush’s demagoguery. Let the best scare tactic win.

Reason, logic and objectivity are required for good governance. In the current environment they are antithetical to good politics. They take up too much time. They lack the sensation and visceral knee jerk identification that’s needed to capture the public’s attention. We need to be able to explain our positions but we have to be operating on other more subjective levels if we expect to win these things.

Social Security seems to be going our way but I am far from sanguine that we’ve got it in the bag. Rove is very good at pushing past people’s instincts and creating a new reality. He does it by manipulating the media with relentless pressure and exerting a masterful command over the presentation. He succeeds by wearing down both the media and his opponents and tying them up in knots with a cacophany of noise while competing and illogical assumptions are set forth with visual clarity. He knows his optics.

Yesterday he composed a ridiculous but compelling tableau in which Bush was seen showing his compasionate conservatism by illustrating that private accounts would benefit African Americans because they have shorter life spans. Now, anybody with a brain knows that this life span data is based upon the fact that blacks have higher infant mortality and young deaths due to violent causes. In fact, African Americans who reach 65 can be expected to live very close to the same life span as whites. But, who’s going to listen to that except a bunch of political junkies who are already convinced? All that mattered was that there was a big picture in the Times this morning showing Bush sitting at a table with a group of black leaders talking about social security. He’s reaching out to “the other side.”

But it’s not blacks he’s trying to reach. It’s whites who like the idea that privatization is good for poor people but haven’t quite found a good argument that supports it. This pitch allows Bush supporters to hoist liberals with their own petard by saying they are racists who want to keep blacks from getting their fair share. This kind of sophisticated obfuscation comes as second nature to Republicans these days. We are seeing it in both the Gonzales and Rice debates on Capital Hill right now.

Dave Johnson wrote a fascinating must read piece today called “How Republicans Win” that addresses some of this:

The Republicans win because the modern Right has developed around the core idea of persuading people to support their ideology, which then leads to support for their issues and candidates. In other words: marketing. The Right developed this persuasion capability in reaction to the dominance of the existing “liberal establishment.” Because of this, most of their organizations are designed as advocacy and communications organizations, with the mission of reaching the general public and explaining what right-wing ideas are and why they are better for people. Today’s Progressives, on the other hand, think there already is a public consensus supporting their ideals and values, so they have not developed a culture that is oriented around persuading people, and their organizations are not designed at their core to persuade the public to support them.

For example, everyone used to think that it is moral to help the poor or protect the environment, so there are organizations that are designed to do that. Then along comes the right, funding organizations designed to convince people it is wrong to do these things. The result today is that on one side you have organizations trying to help the poor, protect the environment, etc. On the other you have organizations telling people what those organizations are doing is wrong. But now you have no one explaining to people that it is GOOD to help the poor and protect the environment so over time support for helping the poor obviously will erode and eventually the organizations that help the poor will be in trouble and have little public support.

I agree that this is the process and the end result, but I would argue that the right has done this not by persuading people to their ideology but by persuading them that Republican ideology is the one they already have.

They tell people that they are helping the poor more by bleeding government programs. (Remember, faith based programs arebetter at helping those in need because they offer the spiritual dimension.) They call their anti-environmental programs “healthy skies” and they refuse to do more than literally phone in bromides about a “culture of life” to their anti-choice base. This was a lesson they learned during the Gingrich years when they precipitously lost favor when they were honest about their agenda. With Bush, they learned the lesson that they needed to couch their ideas in liberal rhetoric in order to win. I believe this is born out by the fact that the polls show not only that Republican voters have a completely different set of priorities than the president for whom they voted, but they actually believe that the president holds their views even though he clearly doesn’t.

The most recent PIPA poll confirms this:

Bush supporters also have numerous misperceptions about Bush’s international policy positions. Majorities incorrectly assume that Bush supports multilateral approaches to various international issues–the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (69%), the treaty banning land mines (72%)–and for addressing the problem of global warming: 51% incorrectly assume he favors US participation in the Kyoto treaty. After he denounced the International Criminal Court in the debates, the perception that he favored it dropped from 66%, but still 53% continue to believe that he favors it. An overwhelming 74% incorrectly assumes that he favors including labor and environmental standards in trade agreements. In all these cases, majorities of Bush supporters favor the positions they impute to Bush. Kerry supporters are much more accurate in their perceptions of his positions on these issues.

That takes nothing away from Johnson’s larger point about the Republican success at marketing. In fact, it confirms it. The Republicans are so good at this that they’ve been able to convince large numbers of people that they are something they’re not, even in the face of absolute facts that refute it.

This is a masterful use of marketing and it’s one that we need to recognise and begin to use ourselves. The good news is that the liberal consensus remains intact (if somewhat tattered) and if we are smart enough to expose the other side for the hucksters they are and reaffirm our committment to the values we and most of the country hold dear it shouldn’t be too hard a sell.

We’ll have to get past the media, however, and takes us back to Yglesias’ point. We won’t get there by refusing to play the game. We have to get better at manipulating the press and that means understanding the pressure they are under from the right and giving them something to use as a counterpoint so they can say they are “objective.”

Personal Accounts vs Mandatory Gambling = privatization.

Hello, Hello, I’m At A Place Called Vertigo

Thanks to all who wrote in concerned about my 10 day hiatus, but all is well. A slight glitch in the real life, nothing terribly serious, just time consuming. I’ll be back in force just as soon as I catch up with the blogdrama of the day.

Until then, can we all agree that Commander Codpiece’s Sermon on The Steps was just a teensy weensy bit silly? I occurs to me that the neocons are a lethal combination of the worst traits of both sides of the political spectrum — starry-eyed kumbaya idealists who think the best way to make the world see things their way is by kicking the shit out of it. It figures. The original neocons were a bunch of embarrassed ex-communists who eventually left the Democratic party because the party refused to start WWIII so they could prove their manhood. Now, in their dotage, they are getting their wish. They shoudda had a Viagra.

Flyboy

I’m given to understand that Junior wears these silly costumes as a courtesy because they are the uniforms of individual military units and they inscribe them with “Commander In Chief” and the presidential seal and all kinds of filligreed decorations over which he has absolutely no control (being only the commander in chief and all.) It’s kind of like that “Mission Accomplished” sign. The troops just get overzealous and embarrass the president over and over again with their devotion.

So, does the flight crew of Air Force One also have a special uniform that somebody in the crew (maybe the flight attendant?) designed especially for the president?

Or is it possible that Karen Hughes sewed this one up her very own self? I’d be curious to know.

The Heart Of The Democratic Party

I posted this speech once before but I think it’s worth a rerun. In the summer of 1998 Bill Clinton was slowly being assassinated by the death of a thousand cuts. The press was as bloodthirsty as I’ve ever seen it. It’s hard to remember now, but the feeding frenzy was overwhelming. I can still see the looks on their faces as night after night the media held their witchburning tribunal, cackling madly as they picked over the “evidence” with prurient delight. It was a very sick time.

On the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have A Dream Speech” Bill Clinton gave the following unprepared speech. It was the most heartfelt speech I ever heard him give.

August 28, 1998

The summer of 1963 was a very eventful one for me: the summer I turned 17.

What most people know about it now is the famous picture of me shaking hands with President Kennedy in July. It was a great moment. But I think the moment we commemorate today, a moment I experienced all alone, had a more profound impact on my life.

Most of us who are old enough remember exactly where we were on Aug. 28, 1963. I was in my living room in Hot Springs, Ark.

I remember the chair I was sitting in. I remember exactly where it was in the room. I remember exactly the position of the chair when I sat and watched on national television the great March on Washington unfold.

I remember weeping uncontrollably during Martin Luther King’s speech. And I remember thinking, when it was over, my country would never be the same and neither would I.

There are people all across this country who made a more intense commitment to the idea of racial equality and justice that day than they had ever made before. And so in very personal ways, all of us became better and bigger because of the work of those who brought that great day about. There are millions of people who John Lewis will never meet who are better and bigger because of what that day meant.

And the words continue to echo down to the present day, spoken to us today by children who were not even alive then. And, God willing, their grandchildren will also be inspired and moved and become better and bigger because of what happened on that increasingly distant summer day.

What I’d like to ask you to think about a little today, and to share with you — and I’ll try to do it without taking my spectacles out, but I don’t write very well and I don’t read too well as I get older — is what I think this means for us today. I was trying to think about what John and Dr. King and others did and how they did it, and how it informs what I do and how I think about other things today.

And I want to ask, you all need to think about three things . . . .

No. 1, Dr. King used to speak about how we were all bound together in a web of mutuality, which was an elegant way of saying, whether we like it or not, we’re all in this life together. We are interdependent. Well, what does that mean? Well, let me give you a specific example: We had some good news today. Incomes in America went up 5 percent last year. That’s a big bump in a year. We have got the best economy in a generation. That’s the good news.

But we are mutually interdependent with people far beyond our borders. Yesterday, there was some more news that was troubling out of Russia, some rumor, some fact about the decline in the economy. Our stock market dropped over 350 points. And in Latin America, our most fast-growing market for American exports, all the markets went down even though, as far as we know, most of those countries are doing everything right. Why? Because we’re in a tighter and tighter and tighter web of mutuality.

Asia has these economic troubles. So even though we have got the best economy in a generation, our farm exports to Asia are down 30 percent from last year. And we have states in this country where farmers, the hardest-working people in this country, can’t make their mortgage payments because of things that happened half a world away they didn’t have any direct influence on at all. This world is being bound together more closely.

So what is the lesson from that? Well, I should go to Russia because, as John said, anybody can come see you when you’re doing well. I should go there.

And we should tell them that if they’ll be strong and do the disciplined, hard things they have to do to reform their country, their economy, and get through this dark night, that we’ll stick with them. . . .

The second thing.

Even if you’re not a pacifist, whenever possible, peace and nonviolence is always the right thing to do.

I remember so vividly in 1994 . . .I was trying to pass this crime bill, and all of the opposition to the crime bill that was in the newspapers, all the intense opposition was coming from the N.R.A. and the others that did not want us to ban assault weapons, didn’t believe that we ought to have more community policemen walking the streets, and conservatives who thought we should just punish people more and not spend more money trying to keep kids out of trouble in the first place. And it was a huge fight.

And so they came to see me, and he said, “Well, John Lewis is not going to vote for this bill.” And I said, “Why?” and they said, “Because it increases the number of crimes subject to the Federal death penalty and he’s not for it. And he’s not in bed with all those other people, he thinks they’re wrong, but he can’t vote for it.” And I said, “Well, let him alone. There’s no point in calling him” because he’s lived a lifetime dedicated to an idea and while I may not be a pacifist, whenever possible, it’s always the right thing to do to try to be peaceable and nonviolent.

What does that mean for today? Well, there’s a lot of good news. It’s like the economy: the crime rate’s at a 25-year low, juvenile crime’s finally coming down. . . .

Half a world away, terrorists trying to hurt Americans blow up two embassies in Africa, and they killed some of our people, some of our best people — of, I might add, very many different racial and ethnic backgrounds, American citizens, including a distinguished career African-American diplomat and his son — but they also killed almost 300 Africans and wounded 5,000 others.

We see their pictures in the morning paper, two of them who did that. We were bringing them home. And they look like active, confident young people. What happened inside them that made them feel so much hatred toward us that they could justify not only an act of violence against innocent diplomats and other public servants, but the collateral consequences to Africans whom they would never know? They had children, too.

So it is always best to remember that we have to try to work for peace in the Middle East, for peace in Northern Ireland, for an end to terrorism, for protections against biological and chemical weapons being used in the first place.

The night before we took action against the terrorist operations in Afghanistan and Sudan, I was here on this island up till 2:30 in the morning trying to make absolutely sure that at that chemical plant there was no night shift. I believed I had to take the action I did, but I didn’t want some person who was a nobody to me, but who may have a family to feed and a life to live, and probably had no earthly idea what else was going on there, to die needlessly. I learned that, and it’s another reason we ought to pay our debt to the United Nations, because if we can work together, together we can find more peaceful solutions. Now I didn’t learn that when I became President; I learned it from John Lewis and the civil rights movement a long time ago.

And the last thing I learned from them on which all these other things depend, without which we cannot build a world of peace or one America in an increasingly peaceful world bound together in this web of mutuality, is that you can’t get there unless you’re willing to forgive your enemies. I never will forget one of the most — I don’t think I have ever spoken about this in public before — but one of the most meaningful personal moments I have had as President was a conversation I had with Nelson Mandela.

And I said to him — I said: “You know, I have read your book, and I have heard you speak.

And you spent time with my wife and daughter, and you have talked about inviting your jailers to your inauguration.” And I said, “It’s very moving.” And I said: “You’re a shrewd as well as a great man. But come on now, how did you really do that? You can’t make me believe you didn’t hate those people who did that to you for 27 years?”

He said, “I did hate them for quite a long time. After all, they abused me physically and emotionally. They separated me from my wife, and it eventually broke my family up. They kept me from seeing my children grow up.” He said, “For quite a long time, I hated them.”

And then he said: “I realized one day, breaking rocks, that they could take everything away from me, everything, but my mind and heart. Now, those things I would have to give away, and I simply decided I would not give them away.”

So as you look around the world, you see — how do you explain these three children who were killed in Ireland or all the people who were killed in the square when the people were told to leave the City Hall, there was a bomb there, and then they walked out toward the bomb?

What about all those families in Africa? I don’t know. I can’t pick up the telephone and call them and say, “I am so sorry this happened.” How do we find that spirit?

All of you know I’m having to become quite an expert in this business of asking for forgiveness. And I —-. It gets a little easier the more you do it. And if you have a family, an Administration, a Congress and a whole country to ask, you’re going to get a lot of practice.

But I have to tell that in these last days it has come home to me again, something I first learned as President, but it wasn’t burned in my bones — and that is that in order to get it, you have to be willing to give it. And all of us — the anger, the resentment, the bitterness, the desire for recrimination against people you believe have wronged you — they harden the heart and deaden the spirit and lead to self-inflicted wounds.

And so it is important that we are able to forgive those we believe have wronged us, even as we ask for forgiveness from people we have wronged.

And I heard that first — first — in the civil rights movement. “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”

I never doubted Clinton’s sincere committment to racial justice, but that speech illuminated something for me that I’d never quite understood before. The Democratic party is dysfunctional in so many ways, and it makes me crazy with its lack of discipline. (Just as Clinton did.) But, considering this country’s sordid racial history, being the party of African Americans is the heart of what we stand for. It’s what gives us our soul.

We like to think that we are about reason and rationality while the other side is all hot emotionality. But, we are all humans blesssed with the full spectrum of human attributes. The difference, it seems to me, is which human qualities lead us and where they take us.

The civil rights movement gives us the perfect window. Democrats led with their hearts on that issue. Although they knew it was politically dangerous they did it anyway because they were moved as human beings to do the right thing against their own political best interests. Immediately, the Republicans coolly and methodically set out to take advantage of the opening. The party of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had no personal stake in the issue of racial justice. The Republican party had, since Lincoln, been the African Americans’ home. Both of those men were from California, so they also had no regional attachment to the “southern culture” that would have made them nostalgic for the old ways. Their Southern Strategy was pure, cold political calculation and it served them very well. A look at the 2004 electoral map confirms it.

We led with our hearts on civil rights and they led with their heads. And we were right. I believed Bill Clinton when he said that he’d cried when he heard the “I have A Dream Speech.” Many, many people did. That moment symbolized the crucible of American culture. It challenged us to rise above the original sin of slavery and do the right thing. The people who heard that call were the people who formed the heart of the Modern Democratic Party.

And when we hear some of our own complain about the Congressional Black Caucus “mau-mauing” somebody or say derisively that the African American constituency should be less race based and more class based, we need to remember that the congressional black caucus is also the fighting liberal caucus. (They were the first and loudest to protest the bogus impeachment, a fact which Clinton knew that day very well.) They are Democrats because the Democratic Party invited them in and asked them to sit at the table when it was politically difficult to do. They knew that Bill Clinton, for all his foibles, understood that and appreciated what that meant. And they stood by him when he was being persecuted by the other side. If there is today a more reliable constituency of authentic courageous liberal Democrats, I don’t know what it is.

Martin Luther King was murdered before his dream could be realized. But it’s getting better slowly but surely. There will be no going back. It’s an enormous achievement for a screwed up country like ours that we’ve finally managed to make progress in spite of the huge cultural obstacles that were virtually built into our political system from the very beginning.

Democrats led the way on that and paid a huge political price. For all the talk of spinelessness and weakness that you hear out there, when the chips were down, the Democratic Party showed that it would stand up for what was right. There is no doubt which party Martin Luther King would choose today.

I’m not evolved enough, I’m afraid, to be forgiving for what the Republicans have done to this country these last few years. I’ll need some time to come to that. But, I appreciate the notion that we can’t let them sour us and turn inward. Nothing will ever change if we do that. And I figure as long as African Americans are in our party fighting the good fight, the least I can do is stand beside them.

A Long Time Coming

Frank Rich writes one of his typically interesting pieces today on the Armstrong Williams scandal and illustrates one of the reasons we are in such poor shape in the media wars.

[T]he Jan. 7 edition of CNN’s signature show can stand as an exceptionally ripe paradigm of what is happening to the free flow of information in a country in which a timid news media, the fierce (and often covert) Bush administration propaganda machine, lax and sometimes corrupt journalistic practices, and a celebrity culture all combine to keep the public at many more than six degrees of separation from anything that might resemble the truth.

[…]

That he[Novak] and Mr. Begala would be allowed to lob softballs at a man who may have been a cog in illegal government wrongdoing, on a show produced by television’s self-proclaimed “most trusted” news network, is bad enough. That almost no one would notice, let alone protest, is a snapshot of our cultural moment, in which hidden agendas in the presentation of “news” metastasize daily into a Kafkaesque hall of mirrors that could drive even the most earnest American into abject cynicism. But the ugly bigger picture reaches well beyond “Crossfire” and CNN.

[…]

[P]erhaps the most fascinating Williams TV appearance took place in December 2003, the same month that he was first contracted by the government to receive his payoffs. At a time when no one in television news could get an interview with Dick Cheney, Mr. Williams, of all “journalists,” was rewarded with an extended sit-down with the vice president for the Sinclair Broadcast Group, a nationwide owner of local stations affiliated with all the major networks. In that chat, Mr. Cheney criticized the press for its coverage of Halliburton and denounced “cheap shot journalism” in which “the press portray themselves as objective observers of the passing scene, when they obviously are not objective.”

This is a scenario out of “The Manchurian Candidate.” Here we find Mr. Cheney criticizing the press for a sin his own government was at that same moment signing up Mr. Williams to commit. The interview is broadcast by the same company that would later order its ABC affiliates to ban Ted Koppel’s “Nightline” recitation of American casualties in Iraq and then propose showing an anti-Kerry documentary, “Stolen Honor,” under the rubric of “news” in prime time just before Election Day. (After fierce criticism, Sinclair retreated from that plan.) Thus the Williams interview with the vice president, implicitly presented as an example of the kind of “objective” news Mr. Cheney endorses, was in reality a completely subjective, bought-and-paid-for fake news event for a broadcast company that barely bothers to fake objectivity and both of whose chief executives were major contributors to the Bush-Cheney campaign. The Soviets couldn’t have constructed a more ingenious or insidious plot to bamboozle the citizenry.

The Leninists of the conservative movement morphed into Stalinists sometime during the Clinton administration and have been becoming more and more open about their totalitarian bent. But this has been brewing for a long, long time. In fact, it was the red-baiter of red-baiters, Richard Nixon, who set the whole thing in motion. That should serve as a vivid reminder that those who preach the gospel with the most evangelical fervor are the ones most likely to be sinners. The most zealous anti-communists developed a very inhealthy appetite for the tactics of their enemies. (Or maybe it was that fascination rather than any real philosophical objection that led them to become obsessed in the first place.)

As we live here in America, basking in the golden glow of conservatism’s apotheosis, Dan Rather’s “retirement” represents the completion of another piece of the American Soviet project.

This is just sad:

According to a Broadcasting & Cable source in Washington, D.C., CBS News president Andrew Heyward, along with Washington bureau chief Janet Leissner, recently met with White House communications director Dan Bartlett, in part to repair chilly relations with the Bush administration.

CBS News’ popularity at the White House-never high to begin with-plunged further in the wake of Dan Rather’s discredited 60 Minutes story on George Bush’s National Guard service.

An incentive for making nice is the impending report from the two-member panel investigating CBS’s use of now-infamous documents for the 60 Minutes piece.

Heyward was -working overtime to convince Bartlett that neither CBS News nor Rather had a vendetta against the White House,- our source says, – and from here on out would do everything it could to be fair and balanced. – CBS declined to comment.

That had to have been a sweet victory. Seeing CBS tugging its metaphorical forelock in deference to the Republican White House was the culmination of more than thirty years of cultural indoctrination into Nixon’s dark paranoid fantasy of the liberal media. But then the modern GOP is nothing if not the party of Richard Nixon.

From “The President and the Press” by David Wise in the Atlantic (sorry, subscription req’d):

In April of 1971, John Ehrlichman, the President’s chief assistant for domestic affairs, complained in person to Richard S. Salant, the president of CBS News, about Dan Rather, the network’s White House correspondent. Ehrlichman was in New York to appear on the CBS Morning News with correspondent John Hart. Afterwards Hart and Ehrlichman adjourned for breakfast at the Edwardian Room of the Plaza, where they were joined by Salant. The President’s assistant brought up the subject of CBS’s White House reporter.

“Rather has been jobbing us,” Ehrlichman said. Salant, seeking to inject a lighter note into the conversation, told how Rather had been hired by CBS in 1962 after he had saved the life of a horse, an act of heroism that resulted in considerable publicity and brought him to the attention of the network. It was then that Rather went to work for CBS News as chief of its Southwest bureau in Dallas. When President Kennedy was assassinated in that city, Rather went on the air for the network, and his cool, poised coverage of the tragedy gained him national recognition. After Dallas, Salant explained to Ehrlichman, CBS brought Rather to Washington, in part because the new President, Lyndon Johnson, was a fellow Texan.

“Aren’t you going to open a bureau in Austin where Dan could have a job?” Ehrlichman asked Salant. He then accused Rather of never coming to see him in the White House, and he suggested it might be beneficial if Rather took a year’s vacation.

[…]

Walter Cronkite believes the Nixon Administration attacked the news media “to raise the credibility of the Administration. It’s like a first-year physics experiment with two tubes of water–you put pressure on one side and it makes the other side go up or down.” He added: “I have charged that this is a ‘conspiracy.’ I don’t regret my use of that word.”

By applying constant pressure, in ways seen and unseen, the leaders of the government have attempted to shape the news to resemble the images seen through the prism of their own power. The Administration’s attacks, Richard Salant acknowledged, have “made us all edgy. We’ve thought about things we shouldn’t think about.”

That article was written in 1973. And it was before they set the second part of their plan in motion. While diligently working the refs for the last 30 years they were simultaneously building an alternative media to push from the competitive side and drive the discourse to the right.

Today, that dream of control is fully realized. Republicans routinely bully any reporter or organization that doesn’t play ball while they feed lots of juicy propaganda to their bought and paid for media like FOX, Rush, Drudge and The NY Post knowing that the story will work its way into the mainstream anyway. They created an entertainment model for news in which entertainment values superceded civic values and it attracted a different kind of person to the field. Over time, fewer and fewer reporters wouldn’t play ball because those that refused were weeded out in a form of (un)natural selection. In the end, the survivors don’t even know they are biased. They are so enmeshed in this system of celebrity punishment and rewards that their own self esteem is now drawn from their acceptability to the (Republican) establishment. And each and every day the partisan right wing media pushes the discourse a few inches further to the right.

So just this week we find out that Armstrong Williams is being paid by the taxpayers to promote the President’s political agenda and the social security administration employees are being required to disseminate Republican talking points to the public during a major policy battle. There are undoubtedly many more examples of the literal merging of state and party.

But the media has long since been corrupted by a far more sophisticated, legal system of payola and influence peddling. It makes little difference now whether there are more Armstrong Williamses because there are many, many people who will happily perform his function while taking a check from a right wing foundation or think tank.

The right wing noise machine works like a single organism, relentlessly attacking any threat to the Republican party, unquestioningly advancing anything their leadership directs. It’s just plain greed that led them to use taxpayer money when there is so much special interest money to be used for the exact same purpose.

In a just world this Armstrong Williams scandal would get at least the exposure the “selling” of the Lincoln Bedroom tale got in the Clinton administration. At the time there were endless stories about abusing the public trust and and forcing the taxpayers to foot the bill for partisan activity. There were months of handwringing and hankie clutching and “how will we ever sleep again knowing that political activity took place in the People’s House!”

Anybody want to lay a bet that tthis scandal produces anything like that? Are any Democrats prepared to go on television and perform a soap opera prosecution featuring phony pathos and crocodile tears about “sending a message to the children?” Are we prepared to boost ratings and give the media reason to defy the White House and the right wing message behemoth with a show they can’t resist? (Certainly, when given the chance our hard boiled political operative Paul Begala didn’t even nick Armstrong with a ball point pen, much less stick the shiv in as Novak would have been so delighted to do if the shoe were on the other foot.)

I’m not holding my breath. The fact that no WMD in Iraq is causing nary a peep from anybody tells me that even body bags and billions can’t shake the machine. I’m not sure anything will except total economic meltdown. Sadly, we may just get our wish.

Innocent As A Newborn Babe

Political campaigns and consultants are becoming increasingly skillful at manipulating the mainstream press by planting stories in the blogosphere. Despite this, the mainstream press remains credulous about blogging. During South Dakota’s U.S. Senate race between Tom Daschle and John Thune, the Thune campaign put two local political bloggers on its payroll. One got $27,000, the other $8,000. Their anti-Daschle reports trickled up into South Dakota newspapers.

The lesson for a campaign is obvious: Got a story you can’t convince a mainstream reporter to run? Leak it anonymously to a blog on your payroll. Then get a local reporter to write a story on the controversial, gossipy, local political blog. Soon everyone in town will be talking about the story you leaked to the blog. Voila! Eventually a mainstream news organization will run a story on the rumor that “everyone is talking about.” Or they’ll do a “what people are buzzing about on the Internet” piece. And no one will know that the blog post was a paid placement until after the election.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Whew! Excuse me, I have to dry my eyes. That was a good one.

Uh, Chris Suellentrop. I’d like to introduce you to a guy named Matt Drudge? I don’t know if anyone’s ever mentioned it to you, but Matt’s been known to slip an item or two into the mainstream on behalf of Republicans in just the way you outline for almost a decade now. (It’s pretty clear that he’s slipped in an item or two on behalf of the mainstream media, too, hasn’t he, Chris? It makes it so much easier to “report” these delicious gossipy lies once they’re “out there.”)

He doesn’t get paid directly by the Republican national committee or any specific candidate for this so he doesn’t have to disclose anything. Instead, Republicans launder great piles of cash through speaking fees and book deals and radio shows and “fellowships” to give them a couple of degreees of separation from Drudge’s slime machine. They’ve been “feeding” stories to the mainstream press through him for almost eight years this way. He invented the practise. I’m very surprised you just noticed. Welcome to the world, little guy.

And here’s a news flash for you. In this election they expanded that operation throughout the internets with stories like this:

It was amazing Thursday to watch the documents story go from FreeRepublic.com, a bastion of right-wing lunacy, to Drudge to the mainstream media in less than 12 hours,” said Jim Jordan, a strategist for independent Democratic groups opposed to Bush.

“That’s not to say the documents didn’t deserve examination. But apparently the entire thing was cooked up by a couple of amateurs on Free Republic. The speed with which it moved was breathtaking.”

By Friday, articles in the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and other news outlets were quoting some analysts raising questions about the CBS documents, and others saying it was impossible to judge the memos’ authenticity without seeing the originals.

Yes indeed. It was “cooked up by an amateur” who was later revealed to be involved at very high levels in the GOP legal infrastructure. Let’s talk about transparency some more, shall we?

At other times you had that unctuous twit Hugh Hewitt exhorting the same Freepers on his radio show and on his blog to flog the Christmas In Cambodia story — a flaky wingnut obsession that never really took off, but kept the Swift Boat story in the right wing news way after the credibility of O’Neill and Corsi had been completely destroyed.

The New York Post hired the Powerline guys (and Claremont “fellows”) along with Captain Ed at Captain’s Quarters to write a smear on Kerry’s Vietnam record for the op-ed page at the behst, apparently, of John Podhoretz and Deborah Orin. One does wonder why they didn’t want to get their hands dirty with such a story themselves.

There are endless examples of the Republican Noise Machine working in concert with the blogosphere — how directly is anybody’s guess. But, it’s clear that they did it and regardless of who signs the checks, the money is coming from the same source. Please spare me the lectures about integrity. On the right side of the aisle there hasn’t been any sign of it in eons.

Yet, just last night we saw the perfect examples of two of these upstanding rightwing Scaife/Regnery/Murdoch whore suck-ups looking down their patrician noses at the left bloggers who openly supported Democratic politicians and disclosed that they were consulting for them:

HUGH HEWITT [AUTHOR]: No, Bill. In fact, the idea of payola is very dangerous. Bloggers on the take are very bad for the business of blogging. Blogging of real journalists, and people like Power Line and like InstaPundit and myself, we don’t like it when Daily Kos shows up on the take of the Howard Dean campaign. Now Daily Kos says, this is one of the bloggers from the left, says he disclosed it, but not to the satisfaction of anyone who watches him. I didn’t know.

O’REILLY: Aw, this is bunk. This is bull. Nobody knew about this.

HEWITT: That’s right.

What a fetid, pietistic pile of nonsense.

The only effect of this controversy is to make it impossible for Democratic bloggers to make money writing about politics unless they are employed by one of the three or four liberal magazines.

The major right wing bloggers, meanwhile, will always be well compensated for backing Republican politicians, never worry. They have an entire institutional machine set up to do just that. Kos and other entrepreneurial activist Dems, on the other hand, will be be emasculated with cramped rules and codes and a requirement for purity (as opposed to transparency) while the other side continues to stealthily professionalize their online operation and use it to dominate the discourse.

Suellentrop’s take on this shows once again that just as the Right Wing Noise Machine is the Democrats’ enemy, the SCLM is our enemy too. Indeed, they are mutually dependent. They play ball to get their stories and their gossip and their access (and their promotions from their Republican bosses.) They are not looking out for our best interests and we should not get defensive about our honesty or our integrity. After all, look at how well they’ve protected the political system from being polluted with years and years of Republican lies and propaganda.

It just makes me laugh to see them get high and mighty about the blogosphere being shills for politicans. At least we aren’t willing, credulous tools who play court jester for the Republicans as they insult and berate us for doing exactly what they want us to do. That would be something to be ashamed of.

Update to the post below:



I’ve received about 30 pieces of e-mail on this subject from dean supporters who think that I’m playing into the right wing’s hands for taking Zephyr Teachout’s word that they hired Jerome and Kos in the hope that they’d stay on the team. I didn’t realize that Teachout had been consigned to the ninth circle of hell long before this and that her characterization of what happened simply doesn’t square with any reality as we know it. I take it all back, I didn’t know what I was talking about. I’m an idiot. I wish I hadn’t written about the implications within the Dean campaign at all because it obscured the real point I wanted to make about this little tempest. It never pays to get Dean supporters upset unless you have a really good reason.

I don’t want to make more out of this than necessary, but with the “blogging and ethics” conference in which they invited no partisan lefty bloggers (unless Teachout was suposed to fill that role, god help us), the handwringing in the press and the phony sanctimony I’m seeing on the right, I think this actually adds up to more than just a convenient equivalence argument for the Williams payola scandal. I think that at a time when Democratic politicians are just becoming cognisant of the power of the internet (beyond fundraising) this trumped up controversy about “blogger ethics” could set us back quite seriously.

Update II: Crooks and Liars has the video of the High Priest of Blogging and his little dog Bill slandering Kos last night. (Scroll down.)

Those Who Can, Blog; Those Who Can’t, Teachout

Well now, it appears that “Zonkette” is causing quite a brouhaha. Atrios and others have more than adequately explained the fact that Jerome and Kos disclosed everything they needed to disclose and any comparison with Armstrong Williams accepting a quarter of a million taxpayer dollars under the table is some kind of cosmic joke. But the damage is done.

Here we are in the midst of a huge ethical scandal in the right wing noise machine, and out marches Zephyr Teachout, goddess of the left blogosphere, with a salvo virtually designed to provide the SCLM with one of their patented false equivalence arguments. And, lucky for us, it serves to marginalize the left blogosphere at the very moment that the righties are being feted like princes in the salons of the Mighty Wurlitzer as right wing heroes! What excellent timing.

However, I think that the most disappointing thing about her post is the fact that the Dean campaign thought they were buying Jerome and Kos’ loyalty by signing them on. The Dean campaign was supposed to be the new paradigm of grassroots activism being brought into the process on a national level and working for the common good instead of their own tired careerist aims. (Indeed, I thought this was actually the raison d’etre of the campaign and why Dean was running for DNC chair.) I don’t know Kos or Jerome personally, but I certainly know their writings quite intimately and I would stake my life that they were deeply and personally committed to the Dean candidacy and would have walked on hot coals to get him elected regardless of any renumeration. But, if they had had a serious disagreement with the campaign, I would also bet my life that any contract they signed for technical advice would not have stopped them from leaving. It’s called personal integrity and I thought that’s what the Dean campaign was supposed to be all about.

The idea that the insiders quietly thought that could keep them in line with a few bucks is so seriously insulting that I’m having to reevaluate my endorsement of Dean for DNC. It shows absolutely no understanding of how the netroots works and if they actually used this crass Republican-style formula to deal with sincere activists like Kos and Jerome then there is zero hope that they can reform the party when faced with jaded lifetime political careerists in DC.

The larger question of blogger ethics in and of itself is a red herring. It’s suddenly a “concern” of the SCLM and by extension the halls of academe, because they are taking heat from us — and people are listening — and they don’t like it. Sadly, the only bloggers who are going to be restrained by these concerns are on the left. The right wing bloggers are now a fully accepted part of the Right Wing Noise Machine — positioned in the dumb mainstream media’s collective lizard brain as fearless wild west mavericks defying the establishment. Their “ethics” are the same as any other right wing media — non-existent.

So the left blogosphere will be the focus of this crusade for online ethics. We don’t have institutions like the Claremont Institute who can hire us on as “fellows” — and launder Republican money through it to pay us. We aren’t going to get our marching orders and talking points through the coordinated “left wing” media because there is no coordinated left wing media. We are out here on our own, and when or if we say or do something controversial, there is no institutional defense of us because there is no institution. Certainly, we aren’t going to get paid big bucks to be a member of the team.

So fuck a “code of ethics.” It will only serve to marginalize us.

All we really have, and ever had, is our credibility with our readers as opinion writers and committed activists. We shall have to measure all of our decisions based upon personal integrity and issue a blanket call of caveat emptor. It’s all there is. And, frankly it’s all we need. Because despite what some people seem to believe, there is no code of ethics to explain Judith Miller or Lisa Myers. The PR Flack “professional” organization stood up for Armstrong Williams. Even such things as the military code of honor has been stood on its head by aging Naval Officers and deviant interrogators just this past year.

Please tell me what these “codes of ethics” really mean because I’ve got to tell you, the minute I see one these days, I have to laugh out loud.

Update: It seems that my remarks about the Dean campaign have stirred the troops in defense. I just got three e-mails saying that I was a fool to abandon Dean for DNC because of this. Some commenters have said something like it as well.

This is why I endorsed Dean in the first place (last June!) for DNC. The loyalty he inspires among the grassroots is a powerful force for good in the party. So, ok, as if it matters at all, I am still for him. However, I would certainly hope that his devoted followers hold his feet to the fire on these matters. I don’t hold him personally responsible for Teachout’s apostasy, but he should be aware that this kind of attitude is a killer in the netroots. Bloggers aren’t whores, they’re partisans. It’s a huge difference.

Update II: Responding to a commenter, my comment about the “PR Flack” organization standing up for Williams was wrong. The PR Agency organization stood up for Ketchum, the agency that paid Williams under the table. A different PR organization thoroughly condemned Armstrong. Here’s the story, from the NY Times:

Yesterday, in a rare rebuke, Judith T. Phair, the president and chief executive of the Public Relations Society of America for 2005, condemned the decision by Mr. Williams to, as she put it, promote the law “without revealing that his comments were paid for by a public relations agency under contract to the government.”

“As public relations professionals, we are disheartened by this type of tactic,” Ms. Phair said in a statement on the Web site of the organization (www.prsa.org), which represents 20,000 people working in public relations, public affairs and corporate communications.

“Any paid endorsement that is not fully disclosed as such and is presented as objective news coverage,” Ms. Phair said, is a violation of the group’s code of ethics, “which requires that public relations professionals engage in open, honest communications and fully disclose sponsors or financial interests involved in any paid communications activities.”

[…]

The group’s members are individuals who work in public relations and related fields rather than the agencies themselves.

The agencies’ trade association, the Council of Public Relations Firms in New York, also has an ethics code, but Ketchum did not violate it, the council president, Kathy Cripps, said.

“Public relations needs to express total accuracy and truthfulness,” Ms. Cripps said. However, she added, referring to Mr. Williams, “it was the spokesperson’s responsibility to disclose the affiliation” rather than Ketchum’s.

When He’s Right He’s Right

Moral Clarity, Courage Needed, Bush Aide Says:

President Bush’s chief political adviser told graduates of Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University on Saturday to judge leaders on the basis of character.

America needs people who have “the moral clarity and courage to do what’s right, regardless of consequence, fashion or fad,'”Karl Rove said.

“You either have values ingrained in your heart and soul that will not change with the wind, or you don’t,” he said.

He’s right. This is their message and it’s on the money. Of course they are faking it in every possible way with their vacuous brand name in a suit prancing around on aircraft carriers and such. But that’s because they only pretend to have “values” when what they really have are political instincts. They are not the same thing.

If either party could give them the real thing instead of an ersatz, superficial rendering of smarmy religiosity, they would gain the support of a large majority of this country. You have to give Rove credit. He has done a lot with what he has to work with. Sexual priggishness, vengeance and racism are very difficult concepts upon which to build a positice values argument, but they’ve managed to create the illusion that they have “moral clarity” by garbing their narrow vision in religious and patriotic terms — and because we have failed to stand up for our universal values of liberty, justice and equality. They win by default.

Under The Radar

John at STF says something I think is very interesting about the role of the blogosphere and why the SCLM is so hostile to it:

Two things are happening here. First, there is no middle any more. This is mostly because the hard right is trying to take over the country by any means necessary, and destroying moderates (including Republican moderates) is part of their game. They have many plants in the media itself — especially at the relatively-anonymous high levels, including ownership – and rightwing activists outside the media have learned that if they complain all the time about everything, often they’ll get their way. (This accounts for a supposed paradox: why do both liberals and conservatives hate the media? It’s because the conservatives are faking it. They know as well as liberals do that Dan Rather wasn’t really a liberal, but they can win by lying and smearing, so they do it.)

This has actually been well documented.

“William Kristol, without a doubt the most influential Republican/neoconservative publicist in America today, has come clean on this issue. “I admit it,” he told a reporter. “The liberal media were never that powerful, and the whole thing was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.

There is no liberal media. There is a partisan Republican media and an establishment media and since the establishment is conservative there is only conservative media.

John continues:

The second thing is more positive. Faceless copyeditors and other behind-the-scenes pros try to control the spin of news by highlighting some stories, downplaying others, and hardening or softening the main point. Various tricks can be used to suppress a story: putting it on page 16 with a small, misleading headline and burying the point of the story in the 9th paragraph sum up the most common ones.

With the internet, this arbiter function is lost. Every man can be his own I.F. Stone now. Stone used to say that you could always find the truth in the newspapers, but it would often be in a short paragraph on page sixteen. Most of the damage that bloggers do to the established media doesn’t come from independent reporting, but from displacing the copy editors by highlighting stories the editors wanted to downplay.

This is quite correct, but it really only applies to our side. We on the left are sorting out the political spin and trying to get the establishment media to focus on issues and stories we think are important. And we don’t get especially good results. Our success has been with grassroots organizing, not message pushing. This can be attributed to the political and media establishment’s reluctance to deal with us (as we can see with the “liberal” media and the “liberal” academia represented at this conference.)We are out there, hundreds of thousand readers are reading us and yet we exist under the radar of all the liberal institutions while the right wing bloggers are “handled” by rightwing PR outfits and pushed into rightwing media and eventually into the mainstream.

On the right, the blogosphere has been incorporated into their message machine. (Indeed, the political blogosphere was really invented by a guy named Drudge, wasn’t it?) They feed and are fed, without explicit direction. They know what they are supposed to say and it filters up down and around talk radio, cable news and into the mainstream. We all know how it works. This is why only a right wing freelance political blogger was invited to the conference — the mainstream of both political parties are really only aware of the bloggers who have been pushed to the forefront by the Mighty Wurlitzer. Just as they are only aware of … so many things that have been pushed to the forefront by the Mighty Wurlitzer. It’s the essence of our political weakness.

Corrected to reflect John Emerson as the poster on STF.