Digby's Hullabaloo Posts

Dancing As fast As They Can

On FAUX News, Hume just tried to make the argument that the missing explosives proves that Saddam had WMD. Kondrake and Liasson politely point out that while this is undoubtedly true, these weapons actually don’t fit the traditional definition of WMD. Hume appears to roll his eyes derisively. Krauthamer adds that it’s all the IAEA’s fault for not destroying the stuff as they were required to do in 1991. (They weren’t.)

Everyone agrees that it’s all a dirty trick by the New York Times, and they should have had “all the facts” before they put this on the front page. If only they’d sourced it to Ahmad Chalabi as they usually do, the Beltway Boyz would have had no room to complain.

Update: I missed the first part of the broadcast so I didn’t know what had made the panel look so sour and unhappy:

Fox News’ “Special Report” with Brit Hume

Brit Hume: As you saw earlier, when the 101st airborne division stopped overnight at that weapons facility south of Baghdad, there was an NBC news embedded reporting team with them, including correspondent Dana Lewis, who is now with fox news in Moscow, where he joins me now. Dana, tell me what happened. Now, this was the day after Baghdad had fallen. You were with the 101st. You were making your way up the spine of Iraq toward Baghdad. How did you come to stop there, and what happened?

Dana Lewis: Well, Britt, I mean, you know, put it into context of what was going on at that moment. The fighting wasn’t over. There was chaos everywhere on the roads, and we were with the 101st as it was pushing north to take the southern suburbs of Baghdad. And as we were driving up the road I can remember seeing this amazing wall that just seemed to go on forever. This thing was about 10 feet tall and it went on for at least a mile or two. I’ve never seen such a big compound in Iraq since I’ve been there for two years now. It was a tremendous compound. The 101st was ordered to go into the compound and spend the night there. They were not ordered to search that compound there. They simply used it as a pit stop so that they could then continue their mission on to Baghdad. In fact, I can tell you I was with the colonel of the strike brigade, the second brigade, Colonel Joe Anderson. He was frustrated they had to spend the night there because they wanted to get on to their mission in Baghdad.

BH: So you got inside this facility. I suppose some members of the unit might have heard of the place. What did you see when you got in there?

DL: Sure, they may have had information on what may have been in there, because they generally had that kind of information. It was a tremendously large facility. You got in and saw all sorts of bunkers inside. And, Britt, because we spent 24 hours there, I had the chance to walk that facility and I took it. It was a long walk as we went from bunker to bunker with me and my camera man. Most of the bunkers were locked at that point. You could not get inside. Some of them, though, appeared to have been hit by air strikes and we were told by some of the soldiers on the ground that they had been hit by bombs. So some of the concrete was split open and you could see munitions in a few of the bunkers. And then at one end of the facility I can remember seeing hangars full of rockets. I’ve never seen so many rockets in one place. It looked like that facility had also been bombed from the air and most of those rockets were bent out of shape and inoperable.

BH: Right. Now, we have seen pictures of these seals that the international atomic energy agency and the weapons inspectors used to

identify and to close off the bunkers where some of these heavy explosives were believed to have been kept. Did you see any of those seals on any of the facilities as you were walking through there?

DL: I’ve had those seals described to me, and I can tell you that as we went from the bunkers, certainly there were wires and there were locks. But I don’t recall ever seeing an IAEA stamp on any of them. It doesn’t mean that there weren’t any of them.

BH: I got you. Now, in addition to — you saw evidence of bombing, obviously. Was there any sign that this facility had been looted that

you could see?

DL: I would say at that point, no, Brit. I mean, as we went north, you could certainly see looting in Baghdad. And I know what looting looks like. Hundreds of kids and hundreds of people everywhere. This facility was basically abandoned at that point. There were lots of Russian tanks that had abandoned on the road around it. But it looked like it had been well guarded right up until the point that the army got in there. But I don’t know what happened between the point that the Iraqi army left that facility and then the US Army came in there. There would have been a gap. And who knows what would have gone on in there? But when I was there, we didn’t see any looting. And that’s not to say there couldn’t have been looting after we left, either.

BH: Right. Well, after you left, describe if you can – I mean obviously, we’re talking about a fairly large amount of explosives. The IAEA says it was 380 tons, that would be, we estimate, about 38 truckloads. That’s quite a lot. Was the situation that you witnessed around the facility such that it would have been easy for somebody to spirit 38 tons of explosives, or 38 tons of anything else out there, undetected by US Forces in the area?

DL: I think it would have been pretty tough. I mean, the roads for the most part were closed down. Not very many people were driving those roads, because there was still some shooting going on and people were worried about getting caught in the crossfire. It would have been hard to move trucks in there right under the army’s nose. But at the same time certainly there were vehicles moving on the roads as we got closer to Baghdad. But at that moment I certainly didn’t see any lines of trucks heading for that facility. And remember, who would have been ordering those trucks down there? For all intents and purposes, the regime had fled.

BH: So it would have taken an operation of some size, if the stuff was still there, to get it out of there. And you didn’t see, at least any

indications at the time you were there, that such a thing could easily have been done.

DL: We didn’t see any sign of that when we were there, no.

BH: Dana Lewis, glad to have you. Thanks very much for staying up late in Moscow to be with me. Thank you very much.

Oooops.

Here’s the video

Marshalling The Youth Vote

Kevin at Catch has all the info on Eminem’s new video (and a bunch of links if you want to see it.) It would appear that Marshall has pulled no punches and it also appears that MTV is airing it this afternoon. That in itself is amazing.

From Salon’s review:

…the just-released video for his new anti-Bush song “Mosh,” makes “Fahrenheit 9/11” look like a GOP campaign spot, and it will almost certainly reach an audience that wouldn’t think of shelling out for a documentary.

The beautifully animated video, which is directed by Ian Inaba, opens with a classroom. At the front is a man in a blue suit, his face buried in an upside down children’s book that says “My Pet,” with a picture of a bush. Just as the man is revealed to be Eminem, the scene changes, and we see the singer taping up newspaper stories to a wall — “Sick Wounded Troops Held in Squalor,” says one. “Civil Liberties at Stake,” says another. “Bush Knew,” says a third.

In five minutes, Eminem manages a furious indictment of the administration that will likely resonate among many troops in Iraq as well as disaffected kids here at home. In one scene, a smiling soldier returns home from Baghdad, only to be handed a notice announcing that he has to go back. As Eminem sings, “fuck Bush,” the soldier mouths the words.

Then we see a woman walking home in the rain, carrying groceries and an envelope. Inside is an eviction notice. As she reads it, we hear Eminem saying, “Maybe this is God just saying we’re responsible for this monster, this coward that we have empowered.” The woman looks at her TV, where Bush is speaking over a banner that says “Tax Cuts.” She looks at her terrified children, then back at the screen, which says, “Breaking News…Terror Alert.”

It all ends amazingly earnestly, with Eminem leading a black-clad army to the voting booth. Once again, Bush proves he really does have wonder working powers — by behaving even more callously and irresponsibly than the most outrageous rapper, he’s turned music’s foremost enfant terrible into a role model of civic engagement.

I don’t know how much impact something like this has, but it’s a big mistake to underestimate the pull of popular culture. Eminem is an icon for a large swathe of young disaffected men, some of whom, as the review mentions, are in Iraq getting shot at as we speak.

One of the reasons that we may expect a nice uptick in voters this year, particularly young voters, is the extent to which the election has found its way into the cultural zeitgeist. It’s not confined to its usual little corner of the media universe — it’s everywhere. It is culturally significant to people who are usually uninterested (meaning non-fundies) and it has insinuated itself into the media in such a way as to take on Big Event proportions.

We’ve had high hopes before in this regard and were sorely disappointed. 1972 is a compelling example. However, the media did not have the kind of pervasive influence it now has and people were not connected the way they are now. It was a political time, to be sure, but the strongest energy among young people went to cultural and lifestyle revolution. Politics was as much a matter of style as substance. Indeed, one of the stongest strains in American youth culture encouraged people to drop out entirely. There is nothing like that happening now.

The current culture war is not generational, it’s mostly urban vs rural. And popular culture is omnipresent and dominating — the internet bringing an entirely unprecedented new wrinkle. The conditions for a high turnout among people who don’t usually tune in to politics but who’ve been drawn by the buzz into the conversation has never been higher. This could be the election that merges the general “audience” with the electorate and makes it one.

From the way it looks a week out, we may actually have the culture warriors a little bit on the run for the first time in many years. I may have my problems with Eminem, but I’ve got to be honest. I consider him to be far less dangerous than the leadership of the modern Republican Party. If he can help get out new voters, I welcome his help.

A Votre Sante!

Dr. Vino has compiled the all important electoral guide for wine lovers.

Not exactly a surprise — Kerry wins.

Reading about the politics of wine reminded me of a legendary appearance on Crossfire by Justin Vaisse, during the pathetic “freedom-fries” era:

CARLSON: But just, honestly, just correct the misperception here. This is not simply an effort by the administration to beat up on France. This is coming — there’s a deep wellspring of anti-French feeling in this country, and it’s going to have consequences. This is a bottle of French wine. This is a bottom [sic] of American wine.

(SCORNFUL SILENCE)

VAISSE: It is bigger.

CARLSON: And it’s bigger. That’s exactly right. More forceful. There will be Americans who boycott French products. This in the end is really going to hurt France, isn’t it?

VAISSE: No, I think it is going hurt wine lovers.

Wine lovers have long memories. We will vote en masse for a fromage and pate-loving, Chardonnay-swilling liberal. Fuck that PB&J ‘n milk bullshit. Voting, like so many good things in life, is for adults.

Forgive Us, World

Via TBOGG I see that the amount of lead in our environment has finally reached critical mass.

Kimberly Parmer, 33, who works as a human resources manager in western Michigan, said the emphasis on national security issues had distorted the campaign.

“I don’t think terrorism is as big a threat as everyone is making it out to be,” Ms. Parmer said. “Yes, we have had a couple of incidents, but other countries have hundreds every year. Iraq is important, but so are things like Social Security and Medicare. Neither one has really touched on those subjects because no one is going to be happy, no matter what you do.”

Ms. Parmer, who said she is firmly planted in “the very low middle class,” also saw the Bush tax cut as poorly timed. She normally votes for Democrats, she said, but is not sure this time.

“One is too polished; the other one, I think to be honest, I don’t know how he ever got to be president,” Ms. Parmer said. “I am really surprised he has gotten as far as he has in life. I do think he’s honest.”

Even so, Ms. Parmer said, she thought she might vote for Mr. Bush. “If you actually look at him, and he stands up next to Kerry, you just kind of feel sorry for him,” she said. “I feel he’s more of an underdog, he’s had a hard go of it in the last four years.”

As we all sit here pondering how it can possibly be that Commander Codpiece is even in the running, this explains it. I think that what gets me the most about people like this is that they obviously pay a certain amount of attention, they know what the issues are yet they see the world as if it’s a TV soap opera.

I’ll bet this woman will vote for Bush. Here’s why. According to the LA Times Poll today:

In its final days, the race is blurring some of the electorate’s familiar divides but emphatically deepening others, according to the poll.

Much smaller than in recent presidential elections is the gender gap, in which the majority of men usually vote Republican, and women usually lean Democratic.

Bush’s message, which stresses his national security record and his commitment to conservative cultural values, is helping him gain ground among lower middle-income and less-educated voters ambivalent about his economic record. Conversely, the message is costing him with more affluent and better-educated families that have historically supported Republicans.

Strikingly, Bush leads Kerry in the poll among lower- and middle-income white voters, but trails his rival among whites earning at least $100,000 per year.

Bush also runs best among voters without college degrees, whereas Kerry leads not only among college-educated women (a traditional Democratic constituency), but among college-educated men — usually one of the electorate’s most reliably Republican groups in the electorate.

This tracks with the PIPA Survey which said:

As the nation prepares to watch the presidential candidates debate foreign policy issues, a new PIPA-Knowledge Networks poll finds that Americans who plan to vote for President Bush have many incorrect assumptions about his foreign policy positions. Kerry supporters, on the other hand, are largely accurate in their assessments. The uncommitted also tend to misperceive Bush’s positions, though to a smaller extent than Bush supporters, and to perceive Kerry’s positions correctly. Steven Kull, director of PIPA, comments: “What is striking is that even after nearly four years President Bush’s foreign policy positions are so widely misread, while Senator Kerry, who is relatively new to the public and reputed to be unclear about his positions, is read correctly.”

When the inevitable forums and roundtables of beltway “intellectuals” chewing over the election coverage and results take place over the next few months, I would very much like to see somebody ask William Kristol and his buds over at the Weakly Standard and AEI how they square their grand global vision with the fact that the vast number of their followers are total morons. Indeed, the country seems to have divided up rather neatly into the dumbshits vs. everybody else and they represent the dumbshits. Do the cosmopolitan neocon elite believe that a country run on behalf of people like this can actually run the world? If they do, then all the hoo-hah about their Straussian allegiance was true.

Explosive Mistake

Ok, folks. Here’s what Jim Miklaszewski said yesterday:

“April 10, 2003, only three weeks into the war, NBC News was embedded with troops from the Army’s 101st Airborne as they temporarily take over the Al Qaqaa weapons installation south of Baghdad. But these troops never found the nearly 380 tons of some of the most powerful conventional explosives, called HMX and RDX, which is now missing.”

“The U.S. troops did find large stockpiles of more conventional weapons, but no HMX or RDX, so powerful less than a pound brought down Pan Am 103 in 1988, and can be used to trigger a nuclear weapon.”

He has now been contradicted by the NBC embed herself:

Here’s the video. And, here’s the relevant transcript:

Amy Robach: And it’s still unclear exactly when those explosives disappeared. Here to help shed some light on that question is Lai Ling. She was part of an NBC news crew that traveled to that facility with the 101st Airborne Division back in April of 2003. Lai Ling, can you set the stage for us? What was the situation like when you went into the area?

Lai Ling Jew: When we went into the area, we were actually leaving Karbala and we were initially heading to Baghdad with the 101st Airborne, Second Brigade. The situation in Baghdad, the Third Infantry Division had taken over Baghdad and so they were trying to carve up the area that the 101st Airborne Division would be in charge of. As a result, they had trouble figuring out who was going to take up what piece of Baghdad. They sent us over to this area in Iskanderia. We didn’t know it as the Qaqaa facility at that point but when they did bring us over there we stayed there for quite a while. We stayed overnight, almost 24 hours. And we walked around, we saw the bunkers that had been bombed, and that exposed all of the ordinances that just lied dormant on the desert.

AR: Was there a search at all underway or did a search ensue for explosives once you got there during that 24-hour period?

LLJ: No. There wasn’t a search. The mission that the brigade had was to get to Baghdad. That was more of a pit stop there for us. And, you know, the searching, I mean certainly some of the soldiers head off on their own, looked through the bunkers just to look at the vast amount of ordnance lying around. But as far as we could tell, there was no move to secure the weapons, nothing to keep looters away. But there was — at that point the roads were shut off. So it would have been very difficult, I believe, for the looters to get there.

AR: And there was no talk of securing the area after you left. There was no discussion of that?

LLJ: Not for the 101st Airborne, Second Brigade. They were — once they were in Baghdad, it was all about Baghdad, you know, and then they ended up moving north to Mosul. Once we left the area, that was the last that the brigade had anything to do with the area.

AR: Well, Lai Ling Jew, thank you so much for shedding some light into that situation. We appreciate it.

LLJ: Thank you.

NBC has cleared up this little “misunderstanding” but we need to ensure that they emphasize their clarification on the evening news and on all the gasbag shows on MSNBC.

Once again, I think that the Rove machine has lost a ball bearing or two. It is not in their interest to be fighting this story with such fervor in the waning days of the campaign, particularly relying on a news organization’s preliminary reporting to justify its position. They would have been far better off using one of those infuriating Codpiece tautologies and called it a day — “of course we didn’t know anything about this because if we had we would have done something about it. Since we didn’t do anything about it, we couldn’t have known.” Instead they’ve called in the full force of the mighty Wurlitzer which gets the mainstream press all quivering with excitement — and forces NBC to work the story even harder since they are now part of it.

Still, it might just be helpful to ensure that NBC knows that you are aware of the Lai Ling Jew clarification and also that you are aware that Drudge and the wing-nuts are using their story to pass on bad information to the voters. Karl Rove is said to have thought so highly of the NBC story that he planned to use it in a mass e-mail.

If NBC and MSNBC have any journalistic integrity they might want to take extra measures to ensure that they don’t get used as Karl’s love slave this close to an election.

MSNBC

www.msnbc.com

world@msnbc.com

One MSNBC Plaza

Secaucus, NJ 07094

Phone: (201) 583-5000

Fax: (201) 583-5453

NBC News

www.nbc.com

30 Rockefeller Plaza

New York, NY 10112

Phone: (212) 664-5900

Fax: (212) 664-2914

Nightly@NBC.com

viewerservices@msnbc.com

hardball@msnbc.com

countdown@msnbc.com

abramsreport@msnbc.com

norville@msnbc.com

Lesterholt@msnbc.com

joe@msnbc.com

MTP@NBC.com

JMiklaszewski @NBC.com

DShuster@msnbc.com

JTrippi@msnbc.com

DBellone@msnbc.com (Hardball producer)

AMitchell@msnbc.com

For the full backround on this story, Josh Marshall is the resident blogospheric expert.

Update: Marshall has posted a subsequent clarification by Miklaszewski. I just heard even CNN finally drop the earlier NBC version of events and also reveal that the wing-nuts have been inundating them with e-mail flogging the NBC story.

The Dinner Guest From Hell

Apparently, David Brooks just went to a family gathering somewhere on his home planet where he bored the living shit out of every single person in the room. In fact, there is little doubt in my mind that there was at least one suicide, right there at the dinner table.

I used to think that at least he was an interesting guy, but it’s clear that even his imaginary friends are pompous bores.

This Land Is Your Land

Ezra pointed me to this Paul Waldman piece in The Gadflyer that hits on something that’s been getting me angrier and angrier during the last few years — the constant refrain by Republicans (and accepted without comment by the mediawhores) that blue state America is somehow unamerican. It’s offensive and I’m tired of it:

Fantasyland, October 25, 2004 – Today John Kerry opened up a new line of attack on President Bush, charging that his policies and positions are a product of Texas, a state whose political culture lies far outside the American mainstream. “The former governor of Texas has governed like, well, like a former governor of Texas,” said Kerry to the laughs and hoots of the crowd. “He’s so far out on the right wing, he fell off the plane.”

Kerry also brought up Tom DeLay, the ultra-conservative congressman from the Lone Star state. “George Bush makes Tom DeLay look like a Texas moderate!”

The new line of attack came as an independent liberal group began airing a new ad in which an elderly couple says, “George Bush should take his NASCAR-loving, tobacco-chewing, trailer-park-living, redneck freak show back to Texas, where it belongs.”

Of course, we’ve never seen a story like this one – like all Democrats, John Kerry knows that if he criticized one state or one region of the country, the press and the Republicans would come down on him like a ton of bricks, charging him with being a Northeastern elitist who doesn’t want to be the president of all Americans.

But the rules are different on the other side of the aisle. In today’s politics, it is acceptable for Republicans to traffic in ugly stereotypes and assert outright that people who come from some areas of America are not really American. Some might remember the ad to which I referred, aired by the conservative Club for Growth, which said, “Howard Dean should take his tax-hiking, government-expanding, latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving, left-wing freak show back to Vermont, where it belongs.”

[…]

Bush is hardly the first Republican to use this attack; when the DNC decided to hold its convention in Boston, former House Majority Leader Dick Armey said, “If I were a Democrat, I suspect I’d feel a heck of a lot more comfortable in Boston than, say, America.”

[…]

Why does Bush get away with this? Because the press corps buys the Republican argument that the areas of the country where there are lots of Republicans are “really” American, and the areas of the country where there are lots of Democrats aren’t. So they never asked whether the fact that Bush was a “Texas conservative” would hurt him, while they constantly wonder about how damaging it is that Kerry is a “Massachusetts liberal.” Disparage Texas – or Alabama, or Mississippi, or Kansas – and you’re in for a heap of trouble. Throw insults at Massachusetts or California or New York, and the press will laugh right along.

If Kerry wins this election, it is highly likely it will be without the South. And maybe then people are going to realize that catering entirely to one regional culture and insulting the others may not be the way to build a permanent majority. If that happens it’s not going to be us blue-staters from Taxachusetts or Hollywood who have the problem.

Great News!

Dick Morris just said on FAUX that Bush is “surging in the polls” and it’s because of the puppies ad. In fact, he believes that ad is going to go down as one of the greatest political ads in history.

The rule of thumb for everything in life is that if Dick Morris says it, the opposite must be true. Therefore, Bush is slipping and the puppies ad is going down as the biggest political joke in history.

I feel good!

What Is News?

Here’s a little quiz for everyone. Which of these two stories will dominate the news tomorrow?:

To review the essential facts, prior to the war, Iraq’s Al Qa Qaa bunker and weapons complex had roughly 350 tons of high explosives under IAEA seal. After the war, for whatever reason, the complex was either not guarded at all or inadequately guarded. And all those explosives (primarily RDX and HMX) were carted away.

What we’re talking about here isn’t just a bunch of dynamite. This encyclopedia entry says RDX “is considered the most powerful and brisant of the military high explosives.” And not 350 pounds, 350 tons.

It is apparently widely believed within the US government that those looted explosives are what in many, perhaps most, cases is being used in car bombs and suicide attacks against US troops. That is, according to TPM sources and sources quoted in this evening’s Nelson Report, where the story first broke.

One administration official told Nelson, “This is the stuff the bad guys have been using to kill our troops, so you can’t ignore the political implications of this, and you would be correct to suspect that politics, or the fear of politics, played a major role in delaying the release of this information.”

or this one:

U.N. ambassadors from several nations are disputing assertions by Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry that he met for hours with all members of the U.N. Security Council just a week before voting in October 2002 to authorize the use of force in Iraq.

An investigation by The Washington Times reveals that while the candidate did talk for an unspecified period to at least a few members of the panel, no such meeting, as described by Mr. Kerry on a number of occasions over the past year, ever occurred.

FAUX News will be flogging the latter like crazy. But, the former is above the fold on the front page of the NY Times.

Anybody want to lay down a bet?

Now’s The Time

Memo to the press corpse: In light of this new information about Junior’s lies regarding Project P.U.L.L., it’s now perfectly legitimate to ask that One Simple Question.

In fact, it’s your job. Consider the bounty your bonus.